Alex mimed holding a phone to his ear, the way he’d do to a fleeting acquaintance glimpsed across a crowded room to say he’d phone. ‘Awful gobshite,’ he’d mutter to Daisy, who’d giggle, ‘but he’s a useful contact. Got a finger in a lot of pies.’ She felt like the awful gobshite today: someone to be waved at and avoided.
‘Bye,’ he said, and strode off before she could reply. She sat numbly, busy lunchtime noise al around her, and hoped nobody would appear to say her taxi had come. She didn’t know if she’d be able to get to her feet and physical y walk out with everybody looking at her. Fear, like a giant lump, was back.
When she’d been a teenager, at her heaviest, Daisy had gone through a period where she hadn’t wanted to meet anyone. It had been the summer they’d moved to the cottage, so she didn’t see her old friends from town so much and it had been easy to slip into a type of agoraphobia.
She hid from the postman, who drove his van up to the cottage, keen to talk to the new inhabitants. She ducked into gateways of fields when cars passed as she walked to the local shop on errands for her mother, and when she got there, she crept into the shop, trying to take up as little space as possible, hoping people wouldn’t see her.
She hadn’t felt like that for years, since she’d met Alex, and now it came crashing into her head. Fear, loathing, self-hatred. The big girl’s best friends.
‘Taxi for Farrel !’ roared a voice.
Feeling as if every eye in the place was upon her, Daisy made it to the door and into the taxi. Every movement was like walking against a hurricane. Was this how it had felt for Alex when he’d had Epstein Barr, exhausted, unable to move without enormous effort?
The taxi dropped her in a speedy five minutes and Daisy got into her own car and sat staring at the dashboard as if she’d never seen it before. Her world had shifted from joy to horror in a matter of moments, and she felt utterly lost. Who was she without Alex? Nobody, that was who. He was her compass and her strength. She couldn’t cope without him.
Three days later, in a chic cream and teak hotel room in Diisseldorf, Daisy looked at the clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe and sighed. She didn’t speak Italian or Japanese, but she felt as if she did because everything she owned was Fendi, Miu Miu, Missoni, Yamamoto, Matsui, al rol ing off the tongue. She had the language of fashion down pat and was wildly inarticulate in the real world.
She had a choice of two suits for the day, both the inevitable black. Daisy chose the Comme des Garcons suit with supple suede boots in charcoal and the silvery grey pearls she’d picked up for a song in a market in Paris. In the mirror, a tal , elegant woman with a shock of strawberry-blonde hair stared back at her; the picture of urban sophistication. Daisy looked just right, but why, she wondered, did she feel so wrong? Was it the four mini-bar vodkas she’d consumed the night before after her flight got in, the Valium she’d poached from Mary’s supposedly secret stash at work, or was it merely because her life was crashing round her?
The people who wanted to know how Daisy bought clothes for the shop six months ahead of time would also ask if the shows were awash with champagne, cocaine and scary fashion editors with glued-on nails and glued-on sunglasses. Daisy would usual y laugh and say she’d never encountered cocaine but perhaps she simply didn’t know the right people. There occasional y was some champagne but the scary magazine editors only turned up at the international fashion weeks at London and Paris instead of the pret-a-porter shows where Daisy bought most of her stock. The London, Paris and Milan shows were fashion’s zenith, awash with fashion journalists from every sort of publication and models who normal y only stared down at the world from the covers of Vogue. Daisy loved the London and Paris fashion weeks but she didn’t go every year because it was expensive and if there was a designer she loved, she could buy their clothes from one of their agents.
She thought back to her first couture designer show years ago when her mentor, a fel ow redhead who had been one of Daisy’s guest lecturers at col ege and who always took the gingers under her wing just to annoy the blondes, told her that the number one rule was not to look impressed.
‘Even if the models are divine, the clothes exhibit the hand of God and you want to grab the designer and bang his brains out, don’t look impressed,’ said Diana. ‘Look as you do when you think you might have broken a nail minutes after you’ve shel ed out for a manicure - seriously underwhelmed. Only novices look impressed, sweetie.’
Diana’s words, available these days for $5.99 to readers of the celebrated fashion bible Et To, Beaute, were worth their weight in gold, and Daisy did her best. But it was hard. She loved clothes and got such a thril from the whole thing that it was hard not to look bowled over. Today’s pret show in Diisseldorf was vastly different from the theatrical perfection of a Gal iano fashion show.
For a start, it was very hard work rushing round trying to see everything and to order the right things. Buyers like Daisy trawled the huge conference hal s and looked at beautiful merchandise from round the world. Clothes, accessories, shoes,
hats, belts were al set out at hundreds of stands. Several times a day, there were fashion shows, where exquisite girls with concave stomachs and spines with sticking-out knobs like an abacus displayed the clothes for real. The difficulty was that an outfit you’d adored on the hanger or on a model might look hopeless on a less than perfectly proportioned human being and vice versa, meaning lots of chopping and changing of orders. Daisy’s job was to go to her regulars and buy what she felt would sel wel in Georgia’s Tiara. But she was also constantly searching out new labels that would appeal to her customers. There were buyers from every sort of outlet in the world and, with each show lasting a mere three to four days, there was no time to relax.
At couture shows, there were fabulous parties held by designers but there was no point going unless you had the very best passes to the VIP areas - otherwise, you were just mingling with the minging and were sure to spot someone you hated swanning ostentatiously past with a VIP pass.
The pret shows were more low key. Daisy knew a group of other buyers who went to the same shows every year, and together they went out each evening to gossip and compare notes.
This year, the Jazzy label was throwing a huge tenth anniversary party in a five-star hotel and it seemed like the best option for the evening. Jazzy had four lines: a glamorous plus-size label, a working woman range, pregnancy clothes and a trendy teen line.
In the back of a cab on the way to the party, Daisy sat squashed up against an exquisite dol -like buyer from Poland cal ed Beata.
Beata always looked as if she should be on the catwalk instead of in the buyers’ seats, and today she was wearing black accented with azure blue, which was fabulous against her blue-black hair. The bucket seats were occupied by two Scottish buyers who looked as though Coco Chanel herself had just dressed them two minutes ago, and on Daisy’s other side was a glamorous redhead from Cork who wore the most eccentric clothes - lime green, anybody? - and managed to make them look utterly incredible.
‘Daisy, you are so slim,’ announced Beata, taking Daisy’s hand to admire the bracelet that matched her necklace.
‘Dieting, yes? I put on two kilos last week. I am not eating a thing today.’ The cab’s inhabitants al laughed. Al -or-nothing diets were a daily part of their world.
‘You do look great, Daisy,’ added the Cork buyer, a slip of a woman cal ed Sorcha, warmly. ‘How are you?’
Daisy thought about tel ing the truth. My boyfriend wants time out from our relationship, and last night I slept only thanks to a Double Vee cocktail of Valium and vodka after eating al the chocolate in the mini-bar. She pictured the shock at such unvarnished truthfulness. Everybody would be stunned, although they’d hide it. She’d be the watchword for how not to do it.
‘Fantastic,’ she said, summoning up a smile. ‘The shop’s doing so wel and it’s just rush, rush, rush.’
Everyone smiled. Rush, rush, rush was something they were familiar with. It was business as usual. If Daisy kept her eyes open and focused on something familiar, like the pale blue Marc Jacobs handbag that sat expensively on the seat beside her, then she could almost believe the world was stil normal. Only when she closed her eyes, the nightmare returned. There was no Alex in her world. It was as if she was seventeen again, elephantine, scared to go out, scared to stay in. Scared and alone.
On her last morning in Diisseldorf, Daisy had breakfast early and got a cab to the airport. She marched resolutely past the duty free and sat in the lounge waiting for her flight.
Alex would be proud of her for not succumbing to the temptation of buying something.
Alex. As she waited alone in her hard seat, she closed her eyes and al owed herself the luxury of thinking about him.
During the past few days, she’d tried to blot out thoughts of him with alcohol, trying, and failing miserably, to convince herself that everything was normal, and if she kept believing that, it would be. On her way back to her real life, she had to face facts.
Alex wanted a separation and Daisy had come to the conclusion that it could only be over the whole infertility issue. The question was: what should she do?
During the wakeful nights in Diisseldorf, she’d done nothing else but think about this. They could put the whole infertility business off for a while. Time was on their side, sort of.
Perhaps that was what he’d hoped for al along - that Daisy would say, ‘Forget about the clinic and the tests,’ and then, they would be back where they’d started. Together.
Together but without a
baby.
That was what scared her. That she’d have to make that choice. If Alex was scared of having a baby ever, could she live with him knowing what she’d given up for his love?
Could she live with herself? Daisy searched around inside herself for the
answer.
In the distance, she could see an elderly man walking slowly to his departure gate. His bearing was upright but he needed to use a cane and he was having some difficulty pul ing his little suitcase on wheels. There was nobody helping him, nobody holding his arm. How horrible to be alone and lonely. Unloved. Daisy shuddered. It was the worst way to live.
Away from home, in the lonely limbo of the airport, Daisy made a decision. It would be better to have her darling Alex and no children than children and no Alex. He was her touchstone, her talisman, the one who made her life worthwhile. Not many people had such love. Not having kids wasn’t such a sacrifice in the face of such love.
The solution was simple, then. She would say, ‘Forget about the clinic’
Al she had to do was tel him and this horrible separation would be over.
The Dublin airport customs people must have thought Daisy was transporting something wildly toxic or il egal from the speed with which she ran through baggage and out past customs into the arrivals hal . Eagerness to see Alex, to talk to him and make up, was coursing through her veins.
If she explained it to him the way it had hit her - that they were meant to be together and that she understood how scared he was about having a baby - everything could be al right again. She loved him, that was al that mattered.
She couldn’t live without him, and if it was just going to be him and no baby, then that would be enough for her.
Thril ed that she had solved the problem, Daisy jumped into her car and sped along the motorway towards the city, singing her head off to the radio.
Daisy spotted Alex outside the bank’s imposing glass offices. He was walking across the road with Louise, his assistant, and they were talking animatedly, the way people did when they knew each other wel . Louise, a single mother with a ten-year-old son, was someone Daisy had enormous admiration for. Nobody had ever handed Louise anything on a plate. She’d worked hard for what she had.
As Alex said, she was the exact opposite of the typical bank assistant, as she answered back and had a finely tuned bul shit-ometer. But she got away with it, partly because she was so witty and sharp, and partly, Daisy reckoned, because she was so good-looking. There was definitely more leeway in life if you had a perfectly oval face, a ful -lipped smile, and long dark hair that looked like it had been washed in liquid silk. She didn’t seem interested in men, though. ‘I’ve got my son, I don’t need anyone else,’
she’d once said when Daisy was toying with the idea of setting Louise up with someone.
‘Yeah, Louise isn’t interested,’ Alex had said sharply.
He was probably right, Daisy had decided: there was nothing worse than wel -meaning pals setting you up with people they thought were fabulous but you thought were deranged lunatics. Knowing someone for years meant you stopped noticing the halitosis, the paunch and the predilection to talk non-stop about how much they earned.
Sometimes, people were single for a good reason.
‘Hi,’ cal ed Daisy, final y catching up with the pair of them outside the Coffee Bank Restaurant, which was where half the bank went at lunchtime.
Louise gasped and Daisy touched her on the sleeve, smiling apologetical y. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to creep up on you both. I just needed to see Alex.’ She beamed up at him, thinking that despite al the trial separation thing, he’d be pleased to see her. But he just looked as shocked as Louise.
‘Are you going to lunch?’ Daisy asked, unworried. She’d surprised him, that was al .
‘Yes,’ stammered Alex, as the three of them stood awkwardly on the pavement.
‘Is this lunch some high-level business meeting or can anyone join in?’ Daisy joked.
‘I have to go actual y,’ said Louise quickly, and she fled off down the street, without saying goodbye. Daisy watched her go in astonishment.
‘Listen, Daisy -‘ began Alex.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said automatical y. Why did so many of her conversations start with ‘I’m sorry’? ‘I should have phoned but I thought I’d come and see you as soon as my plane landed. I wanted to say let’s get married, Alex. Let’s do it.