The Mysterious Miss Mayhew

by Hazel Osmond

  Hattie’s questions kept on coming and Fran kept on answering, and when Tom looked at them together he imagined them like that the night before. Hattie said they’d had a long talk, but he hadn’t been able to get much out of her this morning about what was discussed – apart from that Fran had lived on an island. But not one with palm trees. A boring island where it was always windy. And a Japanese man had taught her maths and chemistry and fighting. Fran had lived in hot places too. Italy, France and a bit of America.

  He should ask Fran about all that. And what had she said earlier? ‘A religious community’?

  ‘Fran …’ he began, but Hattie cut across with, ‘So could I help you fold some paper?’ and the look she gave Fran was so endearing that Tom decided to shut up for now.

  He went back to picturing Fran in his house, sitting in the low chair next to Hattie’s bed and reading to her, and wondered if she’d come back up the stairs later, as he always did, to check she was asleep. He felt the stillness of the bedroom, that sense of being privy to something pure that settled on you when you watched a child deep in sleep. He saw the grave look on Fran’s face.

  Grave. A good word because that was what was different about her. When she wasn’t being overenthusiastic or toe-curlingly tactless, she had a grave stillness about her that made you want to watch her face to see the moment that expression broke.

  He was feeling a bit misty-eyed thinking about all that, but then Fran shifted position and he found himself imagining again what she had on under that dress. He wasn’t proud of that, what with Hattie being in the room, but there it was.

  He might have stayed in that pleasant day-dream, if he hadn’t remembered he still needed to ring Kath. He left Fran and Hattie exploring the difference between folding a piece of paper and scoring it, and wandered around the garden with the phone.

  Kath said all the right things about the herb incident and when he asked if she and Rob were still going to join them for tea the next day she said, ‘Course. Be good to see your mum. She sounded really tired on the phone this morning. I think she’s doing too much.’

  No. She’s doing the vicar.

  He rang Josh’s mother next.

  ‘Just checking Josh is all right. Heard he’d been sick.’

  There was a snigger. ‘Serves him right. Basil overdose. And this from the boy who removes anything that remotely looks like a herb when he’s at home. Did you get a good telling-off from the head, too?’

  He stumbled over something in the grass and saw it was one of the scones. ‘Well, it was done politely, but yeah, she’s definitely disappointed in me.’

  ‘I felt so guilty, I made a contribution towards some new plants.’

  ‘Damn you,’ he said, kicking at the scone and noticing it didn’t even crumble. ‘Wish I’d thought of that.’

  There was another laugh and then, ‘Oh, and sorry to add to the bad news, but while you’re on the phone I’d better tell you that Josh has got head lice yet again.’

  Walking back into the house, he figured he’d have to tell Fran about the lice. She’d had her head right up close to Hattie’s today and who knew about when she’d babysat? Have to tell Natalie too, although she’d said she’d had them enough times to be immune. Great, weeks of lathering on the hair conditioner and combing the little sods out.

  He thought of Fran washing her hair, it wet on her bare shoulders.

  ‘That’s right, Hattie. Gently does it.’ He could hear her now, showing Hattie something. He wondered if she’d ever done a sculpture of a head louse.

  ‘Do I have to press harder?’ Hattie was saying.

  ‘No,’ came Fran’s reply, ‘the scalpel blade is extraordinarily sharp, it’ll make a nice, clean cut with only a bit of pressure. Control is the thing, so you can get …’

  He didn’t hear the rest because his brain was zoning in on ‘blade’, ‘sharp’ and ‘cut’. He moved quickly towards the sitting-room door and his worst fears were confirmed. Hattie, minus dunce’s hat, was holding a scalpel with Fran leaning over her.

  A scalpel! In a five-year-old’s hand!

  This woman wasn’t right, she was out of her tree. What was he thinking of leaving her alone with Hattie? What was he thinking of, lusting after her?

  All these thoughts travelled through his mind as his body hurtled into the sitting room, shouting and grabbing at the scalpel. He only realised as he did so that it was actually being held between Fran’s fingers – Hattie was just resting her hand lightly on top of Fran’s, feeling the movement of cutting without any of the danger.

  Ah.

  He fumbled with the scalpel and dropped it. Which was when he felt a stabbing pain in his thigh. Literally. The scalpel was stuck there and he heard himself shriek, more from shock than pain, before he pulled it out and put his hand over the cut in his trousers.

  There was a lot of noise, what with Hattie leaping around and Fran telling him to stay still and him trying to assure everyone he was fine, although blood was seeping between his fingers.

  ‘Will Daddy be all right?’ Hattie asked and he noticed she seemed less worried than when she thought she had poisoned Josh.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Fran said, her voice calm. ‘These cuts bleed a lot, but they’re not deep. I’ve done the same thing loads of times. Look at my hands.’ She held them up in front of Hattie’s face. ‘I’ve got lots of little scars. Oh, and a lump on my finger where the scalpel rests. See?’ She turned to him with her hands still held out for Hattie to inspect. ‘If you just sit down and take off your trousers, Tom, I can have a look at the damage. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, that material is quite thick.’

  Tom knew if he took his trousers off now, he was going to die of embarrassment rather than loss of blood. Which was weird because earlier he’d been quite happy to fantasise about Fran and taking his trousers off. Now he felt like some terrified adolescent.

  ‘I can look myself,’ he said. ‘I’ll go in the bathroom and do it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Fran seemed doubtful. ‘We don’t want you fainting in there, do we, Hattie?’

  Hattie agreed, but Tom was already backing out of the room.

  Fran was following him. ‘Tom,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘this is ridiculous. I’m sure there’s nothing in your trousers that I haven’t seen before.’

  At that he turned and speeded up like a sprinting Quasimodo.

  He shut the bathroom door and took his trousers right off. Bloody ruined.

  ‘Don’t forget to raise your leg,’ Fran said outside the door. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  He perched on the bath and put his leg up on the sink.

  Fran was right, the cut didn’t seem deep, but it was bleeding a lot. He dabbed at it with dry toilet paper and then ran some water into the sink and tried with some wet stuff.

  Fran was back. ‘How is it?’ she asked.

  ‘OK, I think. Bloody sore though.’

  ‘Oh don’t be a baby. One of the girls on my course sliced off the tip of her finger and we had to take it to the hospital in a bag of ice to have it sewn back on. Never even whimpered.’

  ‘Thanks for that. What’s Hattie doing?’

  ‘Playing in the knife drawer, obviously, while waiting for you to do some of that fantastic scalpel juggling of yours.’

  ‘All right, all right. I thought she was holding it.’

  ‘I said I was a dunce, but even I know you don’t give a five-year-old a knife. Well, unless you’re running a street gang. Hattie is actually outside eating strawberries and cream. No herbs.’ He imagined her laughing on the other side of the door. ‘So, is the bleeding slowing down? Or will you need stitches?’

  ‘I thought you said it would be OK?’

  ‘Oh that was for Hattie’s benefit. If it’s in a place which gets a lot of movement, you might need a stitch to stop it breaking open. How does it look?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  When she didn’t answer, he thought she’d gone, but the bathroom
door was opening.

  ‘You’re hopeless, Tom,’ she said when she saw the toilet paper in his hand and on the floor. ‘There’s cotton wool in the cabinet.’

  She was all briskness, getting it for him and tearing off a handful. She wet it and said, ‘Come on, lift up your shirt.’

  What was he scared of? That he’d have a sudden erection and poke out her eye? This was not how his fantasy involving her and his trousers had played out.

  She peered and dabbed at the cut and pronounced it fine and unlikely to need stitches.

  ‘This will sting though,’ she said with a sympathetic smile as she reached for the TCP.

  She was right, but he didn’t mind. As he watched her leaning over his leg, her hair falling forward, he began to feel choked up – the closeness of her, the way she was looking after him. It had been a long time since someone had shown that amount of care over him. He knew he was getting maudlin and hoped she wouldn’t be able to read his expression when she looked up.

  ‘Seems nice and clean,’ she said, with one last wipe, ‘but if you haven’t had a tetanus injection recently, you should trot along to A&E.’

  He checked his watch. The timetable for delivery of the squirrel to Derek had taken a knock. Nope. He didn’t care about that either.

  She was getting a pack of plasters out of the cabinet and selecting a large one.

  ‘Here, I can do that,’ he said and took it from her and as he put it on, he told her about the head lice. It should have been embarrassing, but wasn’t. He supposed that when you’d stabbed yourself in the thigh and shown someone who worked for you your underpants, your concept of what was embarrassing shifted.

  ‘Goodness, haven’t had those for a while,’ Fran said. ‘They call them pediculosi del capo in Italy. Sounds much more exotic. Right. I’ll check on Hattie.’ She was nearly at the door when she stopped, looking self-conscious. ‘Sorry about throwing the scones earlier. You just got me so exasperated.’

  ‘Don’t apologise. I was being an arse.’

  ‘Yes you were.’ She smiled. ‘But I wasn’t trying to hit you, just bring you to your senses.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ he said when she’d gone.

  CHAPTER 29

  Friday 30 May

  1) The middle classes can be quite draconian when it comes to herbs. Not enough and you’re a philistine. Too many and your parents have to be summoned. In Italy they’d give you a medal for eating that much basil in one sitting.

  2) There is obviously a force field around this ‘cottage’ that means Tom and Hattie never arrive on my doorstep looking normal. This time Tom was a thundercloud and Hattie a sad ape.

  3) Tom is something of an expert on baked goods, yet he could not tell the difference between a scone and a biscuit. This suggests that with my cooking, there is actually no difference.

  4) It is not easy to know the right thing to say to a child. For future reference, suggesting that they may have poisoned their best friend is not it.

  5) Hattie reminds me of someone. It came to me today when she asked all those questions and was so determined to have a go at cutting a piece of paper. That someone is me.

  6) All you need to know about how protective parents feel towards their children can be learned by watching a man’s face as he rushes to remove a scalpel he believes is in his daughter’s hand.

  7) Point six has made me revisit all those times I felt my own mother was being smothering. Too late to tell her I understand her now, of course.

  8) For an ex-rugby player, Tom is surprisingly modest. I thought rugby players were always leaping naked into the bath with each other? I think he may be self-conscious about his legs. He has no need to be.

  9) Tom obviously does not have the same problem with his underpants as with his socks. They were not on inside out. I checked.

  10) Smells can be very evocative. A whiff of TCP will always make me think of Tom in my bathroom, leg up on the sink while I dabbed at his thigh and he studied me as if he feared I would inflict further pain on him.

  CHAPTER 30

  Fran’s work had obviously inspired everyone. The three-page spread Tom was looking at would not have been out of place in a colour supplement for a national newspaper.

  ‘Makes the rest of the mag look a bit provincial,’ Felix said, following up with a sharp laugh. ‘You’re showing us all up, Fran.’

  ‘No, no.’ She looked pained. ‘Please don’t say that. It’s Derek’s wonderful photography and your imaginative design that make it so impressive.’

  Tom felt a swirl of pride in her skills and her modesty. Ridiculous – there was no connection between them other than the one in his head.

  ‘Do you think it needs …?’ Derek started and Fran said, ‘No, I really don’t think people want to see a photo of my weird face as part of the feature, it’ll detract from the wildlife.’

  ‘How did you know he was going to say that?’ Felix asked, looking from Fran to Derek. ‘Are you telepathically linked?’

  Derek seemed as if he might be giving that question serious consideration, but Fran merely smiled politely before saying to Tom, ‘Are you happy with it? You haven’t said much.’

  Such a lovely face. And so much younger than yours.

  ‘Haven’t I?’ He bent forward to study some of the finer details of the squirrel and immediately pictured Fran’s hands smoothing out the paper and that squinty frown she had when concentrating, which shouldn’t have been attractive but …

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ he said, gruffly, straightening back up again. ‘Especially considering the time constraints. How’s the copy going?’

  ‘Getting there,’ she said, not looking at him any more, ‘I’d better crack on.’

  He walked back down the stairs with her and as he did so, found himself operating on so many different levels under the conversation they were having, that it absolutely refuted the claim that men couldn’t multi-task. Some of the things he was doing he wasn’t proud of, and he blamed them on his sex drive, but that made it sound as if he was an automatic car and wasn’t responsible for his own gear changes. Right now he was registering that the dress she had on did great things for her breasts.

  And her collarbones. Collarbones! Yeah, he had it bad.

  He lied to himself that he wasn’t doing full-on leering, but processing snippets of information about how the dress fitted her and the way that the downy hairs on her arm were very sun-bleached. And how her lips sometimes hiked into a little smile at the end of what she was saying.

  Would he have noticed the bump on her middle finger if she hadn’t pointed it out to Hattie? Yep, he thought he would today – he was like a lovesick scanning machine.

  ‘So where are you off to, now?’ he asked, still imagining running his hand down that straight back.

  ‘To buy a sandwich.’

  Her back was naked now against his chest. Also naked.

  Thinking like that made him feel ashamed and just a little turned on – which made him feel more ashamed.

  ‘Well,’ he did an awkward flourish with his hand, ‘have a great sandwich then.’

  ‘Yes, yes I will … And Hattie? No ill effects from the herbs?’

  ‘No. Har-har-har. She’s absolutely fine.’

  ‘Good. Well, I’ll see you later.’

  He watched her down the remaining stairs until she went into the main office.

  Have a good sandwich? Har-har-har. Good God.

  He tried not to be too hard on himself – it was tricky talking in a relaxed way when you were pulling in your stomach.

  Completely baffling, this ‘first you don’t see it, now you do’ kind of sexual attraction. At least with love at first sight you were reacting to someone fresh and unknown.

  Was it a chemical reaction that just needed time to brew like a proper pot of tea?

  He thought of Steph. How he’d felt the hook go in the first time he’d seen her chatting at a party. How the loveliness of her face and that air of glamour that hung
about her had made him blind to reality and he had, as lovers did, filled in the blanks of what he knew about her with some idyllic creation. He’d given her a beautiful personality to match her face. Who wouldn’t?

  From the start, it felt like falling from a height into something exciting and more exotic than he was.

  But this thing with Fran? It felt like a stumble against his better judgement via a series of misunderstandings and fights. He counted out all the reasons, once again, why he couldn’t fall for someone like her – too young, too strange, too tactless, too earnest, not even his type.

  So why was he remembering her crawling around in the cemetery, the black of her dress against her skin, and wishing he had placed his lips over the marks her tears had left on her face and kissed them away?

  Tom stopped thinking of salt on his lips as he pushed open the door into the main office, because he could almost feel the panic level rising. The usual glitches and log-jams were surfacing. Heads were bent towards screens.

  He aimed for a nonchalant walk past Fran’s desk, but it came out like a saunter. Good God, he’d be wearing a panama hat next and a cravat.

  He went to his office and barely raised his own head for the rest of the day, but when he did, he saw that Jamie had pulled up the empty chair that was next to Fran’s desk and was chatting to her.

  Was Tom imagining that the besotted look Fran reserved for Jamie had intensified?

  ‘She ought to move that chair,’ Liz said, as she came in. ‘It’s a magnet for time-wasters. Particularly the spawn of Mawson. By God, he loves that chair. Right … another load of proofs for you to cast your eagle eye over. Lot more in hand, usual culprits dragging their feet.’

  Putting the proofs down, she flipped open her notebook and started to update him, with relish, on the list of potential disasters. ‘Also …’ There was one of her rare, wide smiles. ‘Stan has got himself another entry into the “File of Shame” with a totally made-up word. Manslack.’

  Liz took a moment to snigger. ‘He says it’s the perfect description for summer trousers. I say it sounds like something that stops you getting an erection.’ She raised her hand and moved it from left to right as through indicating a headline: ‘Manslack – the trousers that don’t come in any colours.’