by Hazel Osmond
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.
‘I’ve been a patron of this hotel for years,’ Monty shouted. ‘I’ve written reviews for your crappy restaurant. If I were in Spain you’d give me a brandy with my morning coffee, so forget the bloody coffee and just bring me the brandy.’
It being England, everyone in the room pretended nothing was happening, while being covertly, deliciously, outraged.
The hotel manager had cut off Monty’s route from sofa to bar with a legs-apart stance and hands on hips. A teenage waiter with a white cloth over his arm had blocked Monty’s other possible route up the stairs to the bedrooms. The cloth made it seem as if Monty was an unusual dish and the waiter was trying to catch and serve him. If he was a dish, it was one that had been steeped in alcohol – Tom could smell it from where he was standing.
It was doubtful whether Monty had slept the previous night, the rims of his eyes were as red as his cheeks and there was an oily sheen to his skin. His shirt, his jacket, his trousers were all crumpled.
‘Tell them to give me a drink,’ Monty said when he spotted Tom. He lifted one hand from the sofa to make his point and had to swiftly put it back before he slipped to the floor.
‘See what I mean?’ Liz was still not looking at Tom.
Tom tried to remember how he had handled Hattie during the Tantrum Years. There had not been many – but they had been spectacular.
‘OK, Monty,’ he said, cheerily. ‘I’d rather drink in the Barleycorn. We can have one of their fried egg sandwiches. Come on, I’m paying.’
Tom called it the promise/distract approach. It worked on the theory that it was better to have the fight outside, away from an audience.
‘Yes. The Barleycorn,’ Monty shouted. ‘I’m taking my custom … elsewhere.’ Although it came out as: ‘YER, THEBARRYCOURT. EMTAKINGMYCOSTUME … ELSEWHIRR.’
With the waiter’s help, they got Monty outside and propped him against one of the picnic tables.
‘To the Barleycorn, mes amis,’ Monty shouted to the early-morning shoppers.
‘What the hell’s brought this on?’ Tom said.
‘Who knows?’ Liz shrugged. ‘Why do people just start shouting at other people?’
‘Liz, I’m sorry. You got me at a bad moment.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’ve been having one of them since 2007.’
‘All women are witches.’ Monty wagged his finger at Liz. ‘Even the ones who aren’t women.’
Tom wondered if his own earlier ranting had sounded as insane.
‘OK. I’m taking Monty to his flat,’ he said. ‘You want to keep an eye on him while I get the car?’
Liz already had her hand out for the keys. ‘No, I’ll go for the car. Then, as I’m putting your Mr Shouty turn down to temporary insanity – I’ll ring round his cronies, see if anyone can babysit him instead of you.’
He didn’t have time to thank her properly before she had stomped off.
‘OK, change of plan, Monty. I’ve got a bottle of Malt whisky in the boot,’ Tom lied. ‘I’m guessing you’ve had some romantic disaster? Snap! Let’s get you home and compare notes over a dram.’
‘Is it that wife of yours?’
Tom shook his head. ‘No, for once it isn’t.’
*
In the
fifteen minutes it took to drive to Monty’s flat in a converted agricultural barn, he became maudlin. ‘My whole life is a messhh. A big messhh. I’m a fat, old loser.’
Tom had to use all the skills learned on the rugby field to get him from the car into the flat and, on top of getting hammered, it looked as if poor Monty had been burgled. Books and CDs, newspapers and items of clothing were jumbled up on the sitting-room floor. It was only when Monty started to kick out at some of the things, that Tom realised he’d created the mess in the first place.
‘Get outa my way,’ Monty told a pile of cookery books as Tom lowered him on to the sofa. Once there, he assumed a classic head-in-hands pose.
‘My life, Tom. My bloody life. I’m pathetic, pathetic,’ he crooned.
It was a soundtrack that was maintained as Tom went to the kitchen to get water. He thought of Fran as he filled the jug. How had she seemed so open, yet wasn’t? A neat trick – a certain degree of eccentricity was useful cover for a lot of things. Look at Boris Johnson.
‘Drink up,’ Tom said, putting a glass of water in Monty’s hand when he got back to the sitting room. He expected Monty to say, ‘This isn’t whisky,’ but got instead, ‘Why did it happen?’ Monty was spilling a lot of the water. ‘She made me try harder. Oh God, Tom. She was lovely, lovely.’
Tom was beginning to wish he did have that whisky. Monty drank some water and shoved the glass back at Tom and scrabbled around in his jacket. Pulling out his wallet, he flipped it open and eased out a photograph. ‘So beautiful,’ he said.
The photograph was tilted towards Tom and he saw an Asian woman, who was indeed very beautiful. And very young. He wondered if this was what Monty had been showing Fran in the office.
‘Met her the last night of my holiday – Bangkok. We connected straight away and talked for hours, right up until I got on my flight.’
‘Monty, do you just want to drink some more—’
‘We’ve Skyped constantly since.’ Monty stopped tilting the photograph and looked down at it, sadly. ‘She was going to come over. I was going to be the man she needed. As hard-working as she is. I’ve tried, Tom.’
As Monty slurred to the end of his speech, he sobbed.
Tom did some consoling from a safe distance.
Eventually Monty said, ‘I’m a fool. Why did I think a young woman who looked like that would see anything in me?’
If Tom couldn’t have the whisky, he’d like one of Monty’s friends to arrive soon, please, so he didn’t have to listen to this version of his own misery.
The photograph was still clamped between Monty’s stubby thumb and forefinger.
‘Was it the age difference that finished it?’ Tom asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
Monty shook his head. ‘We could have coped with the age difference, but I can’t cope with her being a man. She told me last night. She didn’t want it to change anything, but how would that work?’
Tom found he had sat down next to Monty. How had Fran known there would be trouble ahead with him? Perhaps Monty was right about the witch thing.
‘It was the promise of a new start – I’ve lost that too,’ Monty said and Tom could only agree as Monty had another cry, more discreet this time, as though he was sobering up. When he seemed to have got through it, he said, ‘I’m going to pass on that bottle of whisky, Tom. Sleep, got to have a sleep.’
Tom went upstairs and brought down a duvet and a pillow and got Monty comfortable.
Monty was mumbling away. ‘Should have bloody known it would fall apart … I don’t ask for much … and then some arse like Charlie gets it all … a young woman mad about him and what does he do?’
Suddenly Tom was all attention. Was this the skeleton in the Mawsons’ cupboard? A young woman. Tom did some arithmetic concerning ages and dates, and factored in the way Mrs Mawson had gone on to high alert when Fran had paid her a visit.
Jeez, why had it taken him so long to see? Fran and Charlie. They must have had some kind of fling once – a massive age gap, but not unheard of. Then Fran turns up at the Mawsons’, threatens to spill the beans and perhaps asks for a little something to keep quiet.
Tom did another bit of arithmetic to see if he could square pumping a drunk, heart-broken man for information.
He found he could.
‘Sorry, Monty, I didn’t quite catch that … about Charlie?’
Monty gave a start as if he’d forgotten Tom was there. ‘What about him?’
‘You said, a woman? A young woman.’
Monty screwed up his mouth and frowned and when he opened it again it was to say, ‘Yes, the woman he had in Italy. He hated his wife, you know.’
‘I gathered that.’
Monty started to laugh, which turned into coughing and at one stage looked worryingly like it might become vomiting. When Tom had got him stabilised, Monty announced, ‘Charlie took off one day, with passport, destination unknown. Wife bloody furious and despatched someone to find him. Took them a bloody long time.’ Monty chuckled to himself and closed his eyes.
‘But they did find him, obviously?’
‘Oh yes. In Italy. Along with a young woman.’ There was a snort from Monty, during which some snot came out of his nose. He pulled a hand out from under the duvet and wiped it away. ‘A pregnant young woman.’
This was worse than Tom thought.
‘When was this?’ There was no reply and Tom saw that Monty was, as Natalie would say, ‘going off’.
‘Monty!’ Tom said, sharply, and Monty’s eyes opened.
‘What?’ he said.
‘This pregnant woman. When was this? And what happened to her?’
‘I’m very tired,’ Monty said, sulkily, putting his hand back under the duvet.
‘I know. Just a few more minutes and you can have a good snooze. So … what happened to the woman?’
Another snort from Monty, mercifully snot-free this time. ‘Charlie happened to her, that’s what. His wife had sent an ultimatum: come home or that’s it. Money cut off, whole family disowns you.’ Monty pulled the duvet further up around his neck and shifted his hips as if trying to get more comfortable. ‘He caved in. Walked out one morning to get bread, never went back. Trotted home, tail between legs.’
That would make you bitter.
Again Tom could feel Monty falling away from him, but he didn’t care. Getting down on his knees, he shook him gently.
‘The woman, Monty. What was her name?’
‘Bugger off, Tom. Sleepy. Never knew a name. Only know all this because Charlie thought he was dying one night, he’d taken something on top of drink. Confessed all, as they say.’
‘But the woman, she must have come looking for him?’
‘No, Charlie’s wife paid her off, or tried to. The cheque came back in pieces. Only thing after that … a postcard.’ Monty yawned elaborately and a wave of stale drink came Tom’s way.
‘Which said?’
Monty grumbled something and so Tom shook him less gently this time.
Monty peeled open his eyes. ‘What? What? Why don’t you leave me alone? It was just a postcard from San somewhere … Diego, that’s it. Baby born, blah de blah, may God forgive you.’ Monty’s eyes closed again. ‘Charlie got completely ratarsed that night, told everyone he was celebrating Nelson Mandela’s release.’
Tom stared at Monty’s mouth as his Fran/Charlie theory collapsed … and then another one started to take its place.
‘This happened in the late 1980s, 1990, then? When Charlie was allegedly in rehab?’
Monty grunted. ‘Rehab my backside.’
Tom sat back on his heels. He needed one more answer before Monty slipped under.
‘This baby?’ he asked. ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’
Monty didn’t respond, so Tom was ashamed to find himself dabbling his fingers in Monty’s glass and then flicking water at him. When there was no response, he cupped his hand, poured some water in it and chucked it at Monty.
He spluttered awa
ke.
‘Boy or girl, Monty?’
Tom barely recognised this bullying version of himself and it was a waste of time, anyway. Monty had drifted again, it was going to take a whole bucket of water to bring him round this time. Tom drew the line at that and stood up. And then, softly, as if Monty was dreaming them, he heard the words, ‘The pink kind. A girl.’
CHAPTER 40
There was no sign of life, not in the kitchen anyway, so Tom hammered on the back door. That would get them out of bed.
A black stew of emotions had brought him here – the need to tell Fran he knew who she was. Anger that she’d got him involved in whatever she was playing at – which he could only assume was revenge, considering the way she was sleeping with Jamie. And a deep desire to see her and tell her that he despised her.
He might not have been totally honest about that last emotion. It was actually heavier on the desire to see her bit than the despising her part.
She came to the kitchen window, checked who was knocking and then she was at the door. Over one of her dresses, she had on the jumper that she’d trapped in the boot of her car.
‘Oh, Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ll just come out.’
‘I’ll bet you will.’
She frowned but came out anyway, closing the door carefully behind her.
‘Good to see you dressed at last,’ he said, nastily. ‘What happened? Jamie run out of energy?’
When her expression was one of confusion, he was so irritated that he reached round her and pushed open the door again. There, hanging about between the kitchen and the sitting room, was Jamie. He was still bare-chested.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, isn’t it time you put some clothes on too?’ Tom shouted through to him.
Jamie looked as if he was trying to disappear by willpower alone. ‘Hi, Tom, yeah. Sorry. I had a dentist’s appointment … but it got cancelled, so I thought I’d … I mean …’ Jamie was pulling at the fingers on one hand with the thumb and finger of the other. ‘I was going to set off later, honestly. There was really no need to come and collect me.’
