The Mysterious Miss Mayhew (26 page)

‘You’re right,’ he said, still wanting to kiss her, ‘that is complete gibberish. Neither of us is in shadow – the sun doesn’t disappear until it goes behind that conifer.’

‘I know.’ She shook her head in that way she had when agreeing that she was really hopeless. ‘But, Tom, when the timing is right, it
will
make perfect sense.’ She looked towards the house, and he realised that he even liked her profile – that slight lift to the end of her nose. ‘What you have to remember,’ she carried on, ‘is that it’s not a case of “Let’s never have this conversation again.” It’s “Let’s not have it right now.”’

Her smile suggested that was all sorted. ‘Right, on to other matters—’

‘No, Fran—’

‘Yes, Tom,’ she said, firmly. The look she was now giving him did not encourage him to try to persuade her. It would have been like throwing a load of bubbles at a cactus.

‘So, moving along …’ she said, talking quickly. ‘I want very much to do you a kindness in return for sending your mother to help me.’

He didn’t think in a million years that the kindness she had in mind was the one he wanted from her.

‘It’s about the people who work for you, Tom. You really need to pay more attention to what’s going on.’

Was she telling him off now?

‘Victoria is … Well, she’s not as squeaky clean or even as nice as she makes out. Kelvin is completely barking up
the wrong tree. And Monty. Now he’s the one I’m really worried about.’

That, at least, stirred him to speak. ‘Monty? But he’s a changed man.’

She smiled, sympathetically. ‘Tom. There’s trouble ahead there. Oh! Goodness! You took a long time to find that jam.’

Hattie was coming towards them. He guessed that Rob and Kath had been unable to keep her in the kitchen any longer.

He still had a few more seconds of Fran standing beside him and he willed himself to ignore everything she’d said and try again to tell her how he felt.

Too late. Hattie had dropped a couple of scones and Fran was setting off to retrieve them. He watched her move, watched her bend. He couldn’t stop watching her.

Rob and Kath were coming out of the back door and Fran was replacing the scones on the plate and smiling down at Hattie – another of those smiles that was merely an approximation of happiness.

Hattie must have picked up on that too, because she said, ‘I’m sorry I dropped the scones. You don’t have to eat them.’

‘Oh I don’t mind a bit of dirt and some grass clippings.’

‘You sure? ’Cos you looked a bit sad when you put them back on the plate.’

‘No, no. It wasn’t the scones that were making me sad, Hattie. I’m just not feeling myself at the moment.’

‘That’s good,’ Hattie said, looking up at her. ‘We’ve got a boy in our class – Neale Sutton – he’s always feeling himself.  Mrs Tucker, our teacher, keeps sending him out to wash his hands.’

*

The phone was ringing. Which was weird as both he and Fran were naked in the garden and he didn’t have his mobile on him. Where, after all, would he have put it?

And then he was blinking in the darkness, pushing up from his dream and realising it was the phone in his bedroom that was ringing.

He grabbed at it.

‘You’re a complete shit.’

Even in his half-awake state he knew who that was.

‘Thanks for that, Steph.’ He looked at the time on the bedside clock. 03:09 the cheerful red figures said.

‘A complete and utter shit.’

‘Guessing you’ve rediscovered your ability to open envelopes. What did you think of the photos? I particularly liked the one where—’

‘Don’t try and make small talk with me. It would kill you, would it, to let her come out on her own for Christmas? You always have to muscle in on the act. Well, if you think
I’m going to agree to a quick visit from her and then it’s “Bye-bye, Steph, we’re off skiing”, you’re stupider than I thought.’

Tom waited for her to take a breath, but on she went. ‘You know what I’m going to do when I put down this phone? I am going to tear up your letter. If you want me to restart divorce proceedings, you send Hattie out here in December. On her own.’

Tom was waiting for his anger to kick in, but it wasn’t coming. He couldn’t even be bothered to sit up and rearrange the pillows to make himself comfortable. The clock changed to 03:13 at the same time as a moment of clarity arrived – he didn’t care if Steph rang off.

‘Know what, Steph?’ he said. ‘Tear up the letter. Burn it if you want. Eighteen months’ time, more or less, and it will be five years since we split up. The divorce can just slide through on a nod. I’m fed up with trying to keep you happy on the vague chance that you might play ball and put Hattie first.’

He stopped to check on his anger levels. Rising but not spiking. ‘I’m fed up of being your PR person. Next time you let Hattie down, I’m not making excuses for you. She’s getting to an age where she doesn’t really believe what I’m saying anyway, she just
wants
to. Do you even think about how heart-breaking that is?’

As Tom had been talking, he had started to think of Fran in the garden, the way she had said, ‘It’s not a case of “let’s never have this conversation again” …’

Steph’s silence seemed different than usual. As if she didn’t know what to say.

‘Are you drunk?’ she asked eventually.

‘No. I’ve fallen for someone else. Hattie likes her too. So sod you.’

And this time, it was him who put the phone down.

CHAPTER 38

Tuesday 10 June

Yes, I know I threw this book into a corner of the room and said, dramatically, ‘What is the point in filling it in? I’ve learned nothing.’

But I’ve calmed down a little since then. And I’ve missed sorting out in ten points or less, what has been important.

So, since my last entry on Sunday, I have learned:

1) Beating cake mix is a very effective way of getting rid of the urge to beat a person.

2) This feeling only lasts for a while – then the urge to lay about Edward Mawson with a wooden spoon resurfaces with a vengeance.

3) Being patted on the back while someone says ‘There, there’ is no substitute for having him put his arms around you and letting you cry all over his shirt.

4) Tom’s mother, Mrs Howard, is very knowledgeable
about baking and an extremely patient teacher. She may also have an ‘interesting’ private life. When she was putting her apron on and rearranging the collar of her blouse, I saw a love bite.

5) Kath is all those things I thought she was. She also seems like good fun. She is not, however, very subtle about getting a small child from a garden to a kitchen.

6) Tom will not only hurtle into a house if he feels your honour is being threatened, he will also go and fight dragons in their own home.

7) Hattie is as tactless as I am. Which would be a comfort, were she not only five.

8) Tom has no trouble asking questions or spotting things in stairwells, but has failed to see that I am not being one hundred per cent honest about my relationship with Jamie.

9) Tom has also failed to spot that I am not being anywhere near honest about what I feel for him.

10) Points 8 and 9 are beginning to keep me awake at nights. That and the ‘other’ noises in this bungalow.

CHAPTER 39

He didn’t exactly dump Hattie in the playground, but it was one of his quickest goodbyes ever and then he was off like a heat-seeking missile. Sod work and all the little thorns scattered on the floor there – whether to tell everyone that Fran was off the team, having to find someone to replace her, Jamie even existing – he was on a trajectory that led only to Fran’s bungalow.

His conversation with her the previous evening seemed unreal. Why had he just stood there and let her stop him talking? Well, this morning he wasn’t going to be put off. He parked his car by the hedge and fumbled pressing the button to lock it.

While he was confident enough to think he stood a chance with Fran, he wasn’t so sure of himself that he could imagine what might happen next. In his imagination, he’d only got as far as taking her face between his hands and kissing her.

He didn’t even bother with the front door today, and as
he rounded the side of the bungalow, he rehearsed in his head how he might begin: ‘I know you said yesterday about not having the conversation right now, but is twelve hours later, later enough for you?’

He guessed at this time of the morning, she’d be in the kitchen. Or maybe she wouldn’t even be up yet. If so, she might come to the door in whatever she slept in.

He prayed she slept in nothing.

He glanced towards the kitchen window as he walked and stopped so abruptly he felt a jolt as the momentum in the top half of his body carried on. Jamie Mawson was there, just turning away from the sink, a glass of water in his hand. A bare-chested Jamie Mawson.

Tom could see that he had on a pair of striped pyjama bottoms. The first leaden feeling of unease reached his stomach.

Realising his hand was raised to knock on the door, he lowered it and side-stepped out of view. But he could still see anyone who came to the window in the kitchen and here was Jamie again to re-fill his glass. His hair was messed up as if he’d not long raised his head off the pillow.

Tom watched Jamie drink and then roll first one shoulder and then the other. There was not an ounce of bloody fat on him.

Tom felt as if someone had put their hand round his windpipe.

It’s all right; Fran might not even be in
.

And here was Fran. She had on a nightdress, white with thin shoulder straps and her hair was loose. Tom thought how wonderful life would be if that was his first sight every morning, before the hand round his windpipe tightened.

He wanted to call out to her, ‘Don’t touch him – if you don’t, I can still pretend he’s just a friend who’s staying over.’

Fran gave one of Jamie’s shoulders a pat and Jamie grinned and bent forward and dropped a kiss on the top of her head before peeling away from the window. Almost immediately, Fran was gone too.

He had no doubt where they were both heading.

In addition to the hand around the windpipe, someone had taken a small knife, inserted it between his ribs and twisted it to get to his heart. He slipped away and, by the time he reached the car, he felt breathless as well, as though Fran’s duplicity had winded him.

He had trouble getting the car unlocked, before he drove up the track as fast as possible. Half a mile further on, he stopped in a lay-by. Now his breathing sounded like the forerunner of something more emotional and he slammed both hands on the steering wheel.  She was a liar. All that
crap about timing. All that crap about having nothing to fear from her relationship with Jamie. She’d played him.

But why? Was it all part of the Mawson thing? Get Tom on her side for whatever she was doing here, but don’t let him get too hands-on?

A welter of horrible suspicions took hold of him. She’d seemed so honest, so unworldly. All that over-the-top enthusiasm. Yet she was exactly like Steph. How did he do it, pick them like this?

From Peeping Tom to Tom Fool.

He should have trusted what his eyes had seen on the stairs at work.

Well, he trusted them now. That scene in the kitchen came back more vividly than when he was standing just feet away watching it – the fresh-from-bed nature of the pair of them. Her skin on his. That kiss.

He called her a bitch then, out loud. A word he hated for a woman he had come to love. A woman who didn’t exist – another idealised version of the real thing.

His phone rang and he ignored it. He remembered with an extra lick of bitterness, how he’d tried to defend Fran against the Mawsons.  Well, maybe they were more astute than he was.

A part of Tom knew he was running off into paranoia and self-pity, but this betrayal felt visceral.

The phone rang again. Again he ignored it.

Maybe he’d been spotted and it was Fran. ‘Oh, Tom. Jamie just popped round to mend the tap and it’s so hot in here he had to strip off …’

It was like the plot of a very bad porn film.

The phone had started up again and the word
Kath
managed to shoehorn its way through his bitterness and he checked the screen. Liz. The need to shout at someone reared up and he took the call.

‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a crisis here!’

‘Oh really? What, we’re out of photocopier paper? Someone hasn’t watered the plants? So you thought, let’s dump it all on Tom. His shoulders are bloody broad.’

Tom could almost feel the outrage in the silence that followed and then Liz let fly with, ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? What’s your problem?’

How could he answer that?

‘Oh, you’ve gone quiet now, have you? Well, just listen, then. I’m at the Tap & Badger.  Monty is here in a bad way. He’s drunk and disturbing the guests. The manager’s cutting him some slack, but his patience is going.’

‘And what am I meant to do about that?’ Tom snapped. The thought of facing anyone seemed beyond him.

‘What are you meant to do? Help me drag him out, that’s bloody what. If we don’t, the police will have to be
called and I don’t care how pissed off you are with whatever you’re pissed off with, I don’t want to see Monty in the papers, perhaps in court and definitely in Mrs Mawson’s bad books.’

‘I don’t need this right now,’ Tom said.

It was the sound Liz made that brought him to his senses, a cross between a growl and an exasperated sigh. ‘Listen, pal. Unless you’re actually sitting in A&E with Hattie … or Kath, you need to come here now.  Or does poor Monty not qualify for help on account of him not being in his twenties with grey-blonde hair?’

*

Tom found Monty in the lounge of the Tap & Badger – it wasn’t hard, he just followed the noise.

Among the wood-panelling and guests having coffee, he was clinging to the back of a sofa demanding a drink. Liz didn’t even turn to look at Tom when he arrived.