They drank the tea in silence and he chewed his way through a scone without saying how terrible it was, even though he wanted to pay her back for hitting a nerve with that damn single-parenting thing.
Hattie only nibbled a bit of her scone before it was back on the plate and Fran said, ‘Very wise, Hattie. They truly are dreadful. I should have tried the other recipe for cheese and … oh.’
‘Cheese and what?’ Hattie asked.
‘Chives,’ Fran said and he saw her mouth tremble afterwards. He glared at her and suddenly she said, ‘Oh for goodness sake,’ and she was picking up the scones remaining on the serving plate and throwing them. They skimmed past his hair and landed in the garden.
‘People make mistakes, Tom,’ she said, her eyes locked on to his. ‘They
just
make mistakes.’ She turned to talk to Hattie who was staring open-mouthed at the scones on the grass. ‘Shall I tell you one of mine, Hattie? Involving herbs? When I was about ten, my mother left me in charge of putting a whole load of chickens in to roast. All I had to do was turn the oven on and pop them in. But no, I thought what they needed was some herbs to make them more
tasty. So off I went and picked some rosemary – I’d seen my mother put it on lamb. And do you know what my mother did when she came back, just before they’d finished cooking?’
‘No,’ Hattie said, seriously hooked by the story.
Fran’s eyes were huge. ‘She did her own impression of a chicken with no head. Demanded to know if I’d eaten any of the rosemary and threw all the chickens away. Because, dear Hattie, I had not picked rosemary, I’d picked some yew. And yew is very poisonous. I mean rosemary grows in a bush and smells good and yew, well … yew is totally different. That chicken could have been a last supper for us all, which would have been apt as it was a religious community, but there you are you see—’
‘Fran, stop talking right now!’ Tom said sharply as he watched Hattie’s face crumpling.
‘Josh was sick!’ Hattie said with a cry. ‘Have I poisoned him?’ She was out of her chair and reaching for him and he had her on his lap. She sobbed into his shoulder and he said, ‘No. You have absolutely not poisoned him. All those herbs were ones you
do
use in cooking. Josh just ate too much. Shush now, shush now.’
‘Oh dear,’ Fran said, her hand going to her mouth, ‘I didn’t mean … That wasn’t the lesson … I …’
It was only when he had managed to get Hattie to a
stage where she was just sniffling, that he noticed Fran going into the house.
‘It’s all right,’ he said to Hattie, and kissed her on the nose and sensed that they were back in touch with each other. She looked up at him, her face tear-washed and gulped, ‘I’m really sorry,’ and he said he was too, he’d been too fierce, and then, just like that, he was laughing because Fran had reappeared wearing a large, white cone of a hat with a D drawn on the front.
Hattie looked round and stopped sniffing.
‘I don’t even know if you’re allowed to call people dunces any more,’ Fran explained, looking very crestfallen, ‘but that’s what I am. I was just trying to cheer you up, Hattie, by showing that everyone makes mistakes, but …’
‘Could I wear that?’ Hattie asked, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Well, I should wear it for the rest of the day, really, but here you are.’ Fran took it off and held it out. ‘And perhaps …’ she glanced at Tom, ‘if your father says it’s OK, you could come and have a look at some of the animals in my sitting room.’
Tom said she could and off they went and he got up slowly and put his hand on his shirt where it was wet from Hattie’s crying.
He thought of that first day and the llama spit. This
woman. This woman. She could take him from anger to sweetness in the course of a few minutes. Like a man sleep-walking, he followed them into the sitting room.
‘Look, it’s a kingfisher,’ Hattie was saying, pointing at a picture, ‘made of paper. All its feathers and everything.’ The dunce’s hat was too big for her and she kept having to push it up off her eyes.
‘I know,’ he said and he moved the squirrel box and sat down in the armchair and listened to Fran telling Hattie how she worked – first drawing the animal and then transferring it to the wrong side of the paper before cutting out the shape. And then, she said, it was a case of having a practice with tracing paper to see how all the different layers could fit together. There were lots of questions from Hattie, including one about the glue. Fran showed her all the different pots and tubes and said she was always searching for the perfect kind.
‘Anyone would think I was a glue-sniffer.’
‘What’s a glue-sniffer?’ Hattie asked.
Fran winced. ‘Ah. Moving on …’
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.