The First Time I Saw Your Face (8 page)

As her mother settled down with Louise in her arms, Jennifer took off her jacket and wandered over to the cake tin. Coffee and walnut today, the icing thick and studded with nuts. ‘This looks good,’ she said, cutting a slice and bringing it over to the table.

‘You’ll not have bothered with lunch before you left, I suppose?’ her mother asked.

‘Did, but wished I hadn’t. Thought I’d give that new shop round the back of the hospital a go. Sandwich tasted a bit weird though, left a lot of it.’

Her mother screwed up her face. ‘Meant to tell you not to go there. You know Craig who helps with the silage?’

‘Craig with the long nails who keeps ferrets in his kitchen?’

Her mother nodded. ‘His daughter’s bought that shop.’

Jennifer almost spat her cake out. ‘Lovely, ferret-meat sandwiches.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said seriously. ‘You can’t eat ferret meat, it might even be illegal.’

Jennifer went back to eating her cake with slightly less gusto. As she chewed she watched Louise’s hand curl itself around one of her mother’s fingers and felt again that sense of peace she had experienced on the drive home, even if she couldn’t go so far as to call it contentment. Everything was safe and familiar here in the kitchen with the clock ticking, the Rayburn pumping
out the heat, the big wooden table solid with memories of family meals.

‘Alex rang again,’ her mother said and Jennifer’s sense of peace withered. There were all kinds of things lurking under her mother’s statement: the hint of disapproval that Jennifer had not returned his earlier call and, most gut-wrenching of all, the inference that she should get on the phone right now because Alex was obviously still keen on her and how much longer did she think she could leave the poor man dangling?

‘He mentioned something about a dinner with the Henshaws? Carlisle on Wednesday? Said he’d pick you up at seven.’ Jennifer couldn’t bear to see that awful optimism in her mother’s eyes.

‘Let’s have a look at the lamb-cam,’ she said, almost sprinting towards the small television perched on the worktop by the window and knowing her mother wouldn’t have been fooled by the unsubtle change of subject. Installed with great fanfare, the lamb-cam relayed images from the four CCTV cameras fitted in the lambing barns and enabled her father to see at a glance what was going on. With the sound turned right up, it was easy to hear the distinctive bleat and blare of a ewe about to give birth. Though it was rarely on during the day, at night it enabled her father to simply tumble out of bed at regular intervals and check what was going on rather than having to go out to the barn in the dark and cold.

Jennifer switched on the monitor, turned up the
volume and waited for the screen, split into four, to settle. Lambing had barely begun yet, and she did not expect to see much happening, but in one of the quarters she could see her father and brother bent over a ewe. She fiddled with the volume, but could not pick up what they were saying.

‘Hear the cottage next to Mr Armstrong is rented out,’ she said back over her shoulder, ‘Sonia mentioned something about a writer?’

She realised it was a mistake as soon as she’d said it. There was the lemon-drop look.

‘Just a writer, Mum, not a journalist,’ she said hurriedly, but her mother made a little ‘humph’ noise and Jennifer knew it would be a good idea to retrieve her jacket and pop out and see how Ray and Danny were doing.

In this mood her mother reminded her of a particularly ferocious lioness protecting her cubs.

Outside the light looked fragile and the cold hit her after the warmth of the kitchen, but inside the smallest of the rooms in the barn the lamps used to warm the lambs gave everything a comforting glow. The combined smell of sweet hay and warm sheep was one that reached down deep inside her to tell her everything here was safe, like when she was a child. The old Jennifer.

She had a quick look in a couple of pens and the knobbly-kneed lambs stared up at her and bleated; a high, thin noise. They had that shell-shocked look they all had at being born, and tottered about on their spindly legs, their wool still yellow from the afterbirth.

Her father and her brother were further down the barn, her father watching as Danny tried to push a tiny lamb under a ewe whose head was restrained in a wooden clamp. The ewe was becoming increasingly agitated about not being able to turn her head to see what was going on.

‘Hello, love,’ her dad said, with a quick smile. ‘You look nice.’

She saw her brother gently show the lamb where it was meant to be aiming while trying to stop the ewe from kicking out. It was a delicate operation and it always surprised her how her large, often clumsy brother, could exhibit such co-ordination when necessary. After a few false starts the lamb started to suckle, its tail wriggling excitedly, and the ewe gave one more indignant shuffle and then stood still. For the moment the ewe, which had lost its own lamb, was accepting this one as hers.

Danny straightened up and smiled, but it was a smile that morphed into something more mischievous and Jennifer knew that someone, some time today had been on the receiving end of a practical joke and Danny wanted to tell her about it. Ray had always been fond of a little gentle leg-pulling and Danny, the more robust variety. Jennifer took it as a sign of the rude, often extremely rude, good health of their relationship.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What was it this time?’

Ray frowned. ‘Not sure we should tell you, Jen.’

Danny grinned down at the straw.

‘I’ll just go and ask Mum then,’ she said pretending to
move away and heard her Dad’s quick, ‘Best keep it between the three of us.’

‘It’s about Mrs Chambers, see,’ Danny added.

Jennifer felt her curiosity sharpen. Mrs Chambers was fantastically efficient, like some particularly virulent weed-killer – no piece of church brass was polished, no jumble sale hosted, without her being there to keep everyone right. Her behaviour as chair of the Luncheon Club made Jen’s mother and the rest of the committee feel as if they had been serving up swill to the local OAPs before she’d arrived.

‘Mum was hosting the Luncheon-Club meeting, see,’ Danny said, ‘so I’d kept out of the way until all the cars had gone and then nipped in to get a handful of biscuits. Turns out Mrs Chambers was still waiting for one of those daft sons of hers to pick her up. I just did a quick in-and-out, like, but not before I heard Wifey lecturing Mum on the proper way to cook beef. Should have seen the way Mum was pleating the edge of the tablecloth. Then I noticed the monitor for the lamb-cam was on.’

‘I’d been looking at it over breakfast with the sound down. Forgot to switch it off,’ Ray added helpfully.

‘She had her back to it, Mrs Chambers, and Mum was busy with the tablecloth,’ Danny’s eyes were twinkling at the memory, ‘so I came back out here and—’

‘He …’ Ray could not finish the sentence for laughing.

‘What? What?’ Jennifer said.

‘I mooned her.’ Danny was looking very pleased with himself.

‘Buttock-naked,’ Ray confirmed.

Jennifer felt the laughter bubble up through her.

‘More a half moon really,’ Danny said in all seriousness, ‘it was that quick.’

This set Ray off again and he had to go and sit on a straw bale.

Their laughter had just died away again when there was a commotion at the door of the shed and Jennifer’s mother appeared, eyes blazing and a wide-awake Louise on her hip.

Ray stood up abruptly.

‘Hello, pet. Jen didn’t say Louise was here.’ He tentatively raised his hand and waved at the little girl.

‘Never you mind Louise,’ Jennifer’s mother snapped, shifting her gaze to Danny and then back to Ray. ‘It’s very interesting what you can pick up on that lamb-cam.’

‘Oh bugger,’ Danny said, ‘the monitor’s on in the kitchen again, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is, and the volume was up nice and loud too.’

‘That was me,’ Jennifer said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Now, Bren,’ her father started, ‘it was just a bit of fun, no harm done.’

‘No harm done? She could have had you both for sexual harassment.’

They were all waiting for the lemon-drop look, but it didn’t come. What came was laughter, quiet at first and then louder and more wholehearted. It set them all off again, even Louise.

Jen wanted this moment of laughter and new lambs to
go on forever. ‘You should be really grateful Mrs Chambers didn’t turn around,’ she said to Danny. ‘She was bound to have found fault with your buns.’

‘Aye,’ Danny agreed, just managing to get the words out, ‘but I’d have got a winner’s rosette for me sausage roll.’

CHAPTER 6

As Mack struggled to stand upright in the wind, clinging on to the door of a taxi, he found it hard to recall that thrill-of-the-chase moment he’d had on the train.

‘This is it,’ he asked, looking around, ‘the whole of Brindley?’

‘Divvn’t be soft,’ the taxi driver replied. ‘The opera house is down that hill and the casino’s round the corner.’

Mack didn’t laugh, but even if he had, it would have been torn away in the wind. There were no streetlights, but he could just make out a row of squat, stone cottages which he supposed was Brindley Villas. Turning his head to the left, he saw a couple of larger, detached houses, also built in stone. He looked off to the right. Nothing, just a signpost. He guessed it would say ‘Civilisation: 350 miles this way’.

He knew the North would be like this. Bring on the cloth caps and rickets.

As the taxi driver struggled round to the boot and started to get out his case and rucksack, Mack turned to see what
delights lay behind him. A low tin hut, a couple of cottages and what might be the shop.

He registered that there was also a play area with some swings being bullied by the wind and a well-worn slide.

‘You all right there?’ the taxi driver asked.

No, put my stuff back in the boot and drive away like a bat out of Hell.

‘Yes, lovely place. Away from everything; just how I like it. No distractions from thinking and writing. Looks like there’s plenty of good walking to be had.’ He waved his hand towards the black nothingness.

‘Not a great walker myself,’ the taxi driver said, starting to close the boot and then stopping. ‘Hey, I keep a shovel in here, do you want a lend of it?’

‘For any snow that’s on its way?’ Mack squinted at the sky in what he hoped was a knowledgeable, country manner.

‘Why no, to beat off the locals.’ The taxi driver shut the boot and walked towards Mack with his arms outstretched as if he were a zombie. ‘Saw some of these curtains twitching when we pulled up. Best watch yourself.’

‘Ah, yes. Funny, very funny,’ Mack agreed, wishing he could club the man with his own shovel, if only to stop the incessant flow of humour. It had started when he got into the taxi at Tyneforth, after a jarring, bouncy ride on the little train out from Newcastle where he’d morosely watched the view out of the window get greener and greener with every mile. He wasn’t even going to think about the earlier, shabby little meeting with the so-called
Third Party in Newcastle Station. Even now it made him want to wash his hands.

The taxi driver’s merry chatter had been kept up as they’d driven out of Tyneforth on the dual carriageway and then along little roads that wound past streams and down into valleys and through villages until for a long while there was nothing and then there was Brindley.

‘How much do I owe you?’ Mack shouted into the wind once the zombie impersonation was over.

‘Forty-five pounds. Want a receipt?’

Mack paid and acted as a windbreak while the taxi driver struggled to write out the receipt and then, because it was O’Dowd’s money, he handed over a large tip.

He regretted it when the taxi driver raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Last time I got a tip like that it was one of them journalists. Could charge the silly buggers anything you liked. They’ll have your knadgers off round here if they think you’re one of them.’

‘Do you really think I’m a journalist dressed like this?’ Mack kept his voice level and his delivery slow despite the surge of adrenalin he’d just received.

‘Aye, crackers idea,’ the taxi driver said looking him up and down and hastily pocketing the money.

After executing a showy three-point turn he was gone, and Mack stood in the road and wondered whether he should just wait for the four-times-a-week bus service to run him over. The wind was trying to tear off his fleece, and even with one of his new jumpers on, he felt chilled. Little pricks of ice in the wind were numbing his face.

‘So, let me guess,’ he said, walking towards the cottages, ‘which one of these delightful residences is mine?’

Each of the four cottages in front of him had a gently sloping front garden bordered by a path, which culminated in a run of little steps, at the bottom of which was a decorative wrought-iron gate set in a low stone wall. Only one had an overgrown garden, a door faded to a faecal brown and a dry-looking creeper hanging on to the stonework for grim death.

‘Ah, that’ll be mine, then,’ Mack said and that fact was confirmed as he drew nearer to the gate and saw a battered number ‘3’. On his journey to the front door he tried to look as if he was not trudging in case he was being watched. Retrieving the keys from his pocket, he opened the door.

A smell of damp dog, or possibly dead dog, came out to greet him and another gust of wind propelled him through the door. He was standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, in a cramped space only just bigger than he was. To make enough room to close the front door, he had to balance his suitcase on the end of the banister, with the rucksack on top, and, steadying both with one hand, reach behind him and give the door an almighty slam. Alone at last, he lowered his head, let the luggage fall where it could and ripped into the world, Northumberland, O’Dowd and Phyllida using every swear word he knew. If he hadn’t, some valve or artery would have spontaneously burst. He finished with a venomous, ‘And there isn’t even a sodding pub. That’s because it’s
not a village, it’s a hamlet. And we all know what a bloody depressing play that is.’