Windfallen (49 page)

“But why didn’t you say something? Why did you bottle it all up inside?”

“Because you didn’t look like you could bear it. You were barely coping yourself. How could you cope with hearing that your baby’s father had decided she was all a big mistake?”

“I could have coped with it a lot better than having my baby’s father disappear on me.”

They sat down on a sand dune, noting that Ellie had fallen asleep in her pram. Daniel bent forward and tucked her blanket more firmly under her chin.

“Well, I know that now. I know a lot of things now.”

He felt restored to her then, the ugly truth of what he was saying bringing forth a kind of sweetness in her. Because he loved Ellie now; that was apparent in everything he did.

“I need to know if we can try again,” he said, taking her hand. “I need to know if you’re going to let me in. If we can put it behind us. I really missed you, Daise. I missed her.”

Down on the sand, a shaggy black dog raced back and forth in overexcited circles, leaping and twisting into the air to catch pieces of driftwood thrown by its owner, leaving long and complicated patterns in the sand.

She leaned against Daniel, and he placed his arm around her.

“You still fit, then,” he said, into her ear. “In there.”

Daisy closed her eyes and burrowed in, trying to clear her head, trying to focus on the sensation of being close to him again. Trying not to listen to the complications.

“Let’s go home, Daisy,” he said.

J
ONES WATCHED THE COUPLE WITH THE PRAM STROLLING
back along the sea path, the man’s arm protectively over his girlfriend’s shoulder, their baby lost from view in slumber, the evening sun glinting off the wheels.

He sat for some minutes, waiting until they were out of sight, and then turned his car around. It was a two-hour drive back to London. Some might say he was mad to come all this way without even stretching his legs. But he had missed the meeting with Carol, he told himself, pulling past the driveway to Arcadia and back down toward the railway station, his eyes unblinking on the road ahead. There was no point hanging around. That was the only reason he had come, after all.

“I
T’S OFTEN DIFFICULT AFTER YOU HAVE A BABY
.”

“I suppose it’ll take time for us to get used to each other again.”

“Yes.”

They lay side by side, both awake, staring into the dark.

“We’re probably both a bit tense. I mean, it’s been a strange few days.” Daniel reached for her, and she rested her head on his chest.

“You know what, Dan? I don’t think we should even talk about it too much. It kind of makes it into an issue . . .”

“Oh. Okay.”

“But you’re right. I mean, I think I
am
a bit tense.”

He reached for her hand, and she lay there feeling his fingers entwined in her own, trying not to think too hard about the previous half hour. She would have liked to get a drink, but she knew that he needed the reassurance of her being there, that any attempt by her to move would be misinterpreted.

“Actually, Daise?”

“Yes.”

“There is something I need to talk to you about. Now that we’re being honest and everything.”

For some reason an image of Jones flashed into her head, as fragile and opaque as stained glass.

“Okay,” she said, trying not to sound as guarded as she felt.

“I think we need to really get everything out in the open before we can put the past behind us.”

She said nothing, hearing his attempts at casualness fall flat and feeling the faintest sense of foreboding, like the distant whistle of an approaching train.

“It’s about what happened while we were apart.”

“Nothing happened,” said Daisy. Too quickly.

He swallowed audibly. “That’s what you might want to believe. But it did.”

“Says who?”

It would be Lottie, of course. Daisy knew that Lottie didn’t think they should get back together.

“It was just a kiss,” he said.

Then paused.

“Nothing major. It was when I was at rock bottom, when I didn’t know whether I was going to come back.”

Daisy let go of his hand, pushed herself upright on one elbow. “What did you say?”

“It was only a kiss, Daise. But I thought I should be honest about it.”

“You kissed someone else?”

“While we were apart.”

“Hang on, you were supposed to be having a nervous breakdown about coping with a new baby. Not putting yourself about around north London.”

“It wasn’t like that, Daise—”

“Wasn’t like what? So there I was with your mother telling me you were practically throwing yourself under a bus, not even well enough to talk to me, and all the while you were spreading it around Britain. Who was she, Dan?”

“Look, don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit? It was one kiss.”

“No, I don’t.” She swept the duvet up around her and climbed out of the bed, unwilling to admit to herself that the ferocity of her response might have been linked in any way to her own buried sense of guilt. “I’m going to sleep in the other room. Don’t follow me, and don’t start padding around the corridors,” she hissed. “You’ll wake the baby.”

T
he bungalow, clad in bleached white clapboard and surrounded by a little garden of rusting sculptures, stood on the shingle an unneighborly hundred or so feet away from its cluster of neighbors. “I like it like that,” said Stephen Meeker as they looked out the window at the unobstructed view of the shore. “People don’t have an excuse to just pop in. I do hate it when people feel they can just pop in. It’s as if, when you’re retired, you should be grateful for any interruption in your dreary old day.”

They sat over two mugs of tea in the sparsely decorated living room, the walls of which were hung with paintings of a quality completely at odds with the furniture and upholstery around them. Outside, the sea, glinting under an August sky, was unpopulated, the families and holidaymakers tending to stay up the coast in Merham’s sandier stretch of water. It was the second time in a week that Daisy had interrupted his dreary old day, but she had been welcomed, partly for the selection of magazines she’d brought him as a gift and partly because the time she wanted to talk about was one of the few periods of his life, he said, during which he’d been truly happy. “Julian was rather a lot of fun, you see,” he said. “Terrifically naughty, especially when it came to finances, but he had this knack for collecting people, in much the same way as he collected art. He was like his wife in that way. A pair of magpies.”

He had loved Julian forever, he said, with a rapture that sat oddly on a stiff old man. In the 1960s, when Julian and Adeline had finally divorced, Stephen and Julian had moved into a little place in Bayswater together. “We still told people we were brothers. I never minded. Julian always got much more worked up about that kind of thing than I did.” Several of the paintings on the wall were gifts from Julian; at least one was by Frances, who had achieved a belated notoriety after being “claimed” by a feminist art historian several years previously. Daisy, who had been privately taken aback when she saw the signatures on the other canvases, noted with dismay the stained corners, the paper curling into the salt air.

“Shouldn’t they be . . . in a safe somewhere?” she asked tactfully.

“No one to look at them there,” he said. “No, dear, they will stay in my little hut with me till I pop off. Sweet lady, Frances. Terrible shame, all that business.”

He had become rather animated when she’d shown him the Polaroids of the nearly finished mural, wistfully admiring the beauty of his younger self and pointing out names of those people he could remember. Julian, he told her sadly, would not be available for the party. “There’s no use contacting him, dear. He lives in a home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Totally gaga.” Minette he had last heard of in a commune in Wiltshire, and George was “something eminent” in economics at Oxford. “Married some viscountess or other. Terribly posh. Oh, and there’s Lottie’s young man. Or perhaps it was her sister’s . . . I forget. ‘The prince of pineapple,’ George used to call him. I’ll remember his name if you bear with me.”

Daisy had been shocked to see the exotic, longhaired goddess of the mural named as Lottie. “She was rather a looker in those days, in an unconventional way, of course. A bit of a temper, but then I think some men found that rather attractive. Between us, I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised when she got herself into trouble.” He put his cup down on the table and chuckled to himself. “Julian always said,
‘Elle pète plus haut que son cul.’
Do you know what that means?” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “She farts higher than her ass.”

D
AISY WALKED SLOWLY BACK ALONG THE BEACH TOWARD
Arcadia, her bare head hot under the midday sun, her feet, like the waves, pulling back from their intended path. The morning had been a pleasant diversion from the increasingly tense atmosphere at Arcadia. The hotel was gearing up for its finish, its rooms restored to their original, stark grandeur, the new furnishings placed and replaced until their aesthetics satisfied. The building almost hummed now, as if itself anticipating new life, a blood system of new visitors.

So, among its people, one might have expected there to be an air of excitement or of achievement as the work finally drew to a close, but Daisy had rarely felt more miserable. Daniel had hardly spoken to her in forty-eight hours. Hal had finished the mural and disappeared without a word. Lottie, meanwhile, had been jumpy and bad-tempered, like a dog listening for the unseen approach of a thunderstorm. And all the while, outside, came the distant rumblings of dissent from the village. The local paper had now promoted what it called the “Red Rooms Hotel Row” to its front pages, from where it had been picked up by several nationals and reprinted as a typical “plucky villagers fight against impending change” story, illustrated with pictures of scantily clad female Red Rooms members. Daisy had deflected several calls onto Jones’s office, half wishing, as she did so, that she’d been brave enough to speak to him herself.

Not that Jones’s London clientele were necessarily helping matters. A few of his closest drinking buddies, two of them actors, had come up to “lend some support.” When they realized that not only was the hotel not yet ready to offer overnight accommodation but that Jones’s bar was not yet stocked, they had been directed by one of the decorators to the Riviera, where, several hours later, Sylvia Rowan had ejected them for what she described later in the newspapers as “lewd and disgraceful behavior” toward one of her waitresses. The waitress, who seemed somewhat less perturbed, later sold her story to one of the tabloids and promptly handed in her notice, saying she had made more off that than the Rowans paid her in a year.

The same tabloid had printed a picture of Jones, at some bar opening in central London. The woman who stood next to him had her hand clamped over his arm, like a talon.

Daisy paused for a breather, glancing out at the pale blue arc of the sea, realizing with a pang that it would soon be her view no longer. That she would have to return with her beautiful, bonny child to a city of fumes and fug, of noise and clatter. I haven’t missed it, she thought. Not as much as I expected to anyway.

London still felt inextricably tied up with foreboding and unhappiness, a skin she had almost shed. But a life in Merham? Already she could envisage a time when its sociable confines would become stifling, when the neighborly interest of its inhabitants would feel like an intrusion. Merham was still locked into its past, and she, Daisy, needed to look forward, to move forward.

She thought suddenly of Lottie. And then turned back toward the house. She would, she decided, think about leaving after she had sorted out the party. It was a pretty efficient way of not having to think about what she would be returning to.

S
HE HAD FOUND
D
ANIEL IN THE
S
ITWELL BATHROOM
with one of the builders. He was holding a tile up against the wall, with a piece of dark paper behind it. The builder, Nev, a young man with curls of titian hair, was gazing disconsolately at a pot of white grout.

She stopped in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

Daniel glanced up, smiled at her. “Oh, hi. They were putting white grout with these tiles. I told them it should be black.”

“And why would you do that?”

Daisy stood very still, as Nev glanced back and forth between them. Daniel straightened and placed a tile carefully behind him.

“The original plans. These shaped tiles were going to have black grouting. We agreed that it looked better, if you remember.”

Daisy felt her jaw clench. She had never disagreed with him, had always capitulated to his vision. “Those plans have long since been changed. And I think it would be better for everybody if you didn’t get involved with matters that no longer concern you, don’t you?”

“I was just trying to help, Daise,” he said, glancing at the other man. “It’s stupid me sitting around day after day with nothing to do. I was just trying to lend a hand.”

“Well, don’t,” Daisy snapped.

“I thought we were supposed to be a partnership.”

“Gosh. So did I.”

Daniel’s expression was startled, Daisy’s second mutiny of the past few days visibly sweeping other certainties away.

“I can’t keep apologizing. If we’re going to move this on, we need to separate what happened between us from what happens with the business.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Oh, come on, Daise. . . .”

She took a deep breath. “The company you were part of no longer exists.”

Daniel looked at her, frowning.

“What?”

“Wiener and Parsons. I wound it up when I took this job. It no longer exists.” She paused. “I’m a sole trader, Daniel.”

There was a long silence. Nev began to whistle nervously, examining the dried paint on his hands. Outside, scaffolding was being dismantled, its poles periodically falling to the ground with a muffled crash.