Daisy nodded, but she felt that Mary was avoiding the issue here: Daisy would have to see Alex again at some point, if only to finish it al in her mind. There were things she had to say to him and when she was strong enough to say them, she was determined to do it. She wasn’t sure when that was going to be, though. A person could only be brave a little bit at a time.
Baby Emma didn’t have Enrico’s huge ears or a squashed little face. She was perfect. She had Paula’s big blue eyes, her father’s cafe au kit skin, and wrapped in her cream christening shawl, she looked like a sleeping cherub.
‘Go on, you hold her,’ said Paula, thrusting out the little bundle to Daisy. ‘She’s so good, she’l go to anyone and she practical y never cries.’
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ cooed Mary.
‘Yes,’ agreed Daisy, and somehow she found herself holding Emma, who hadn’t woken up when the Holy Water had been poured on her head, or when she had been handed freely around between grannies and godparents, but who opened her tiny eyelids now. She looked up at Daisy with wise baby eyes and the rosebud mouth curled up at the corners.
‘Oh, she smiled, did you see that?’ said Daisy excitedly, feeling a lump in her throat.
‘I know,’ crooned Paula, waggling a finger at her beautiful daughter. ‘She keeps smiling at me too. Everyone else says she’s not smiling and that she’s got wind, but I know that she’s smiling at me because she knows I’m her mummy. And she knows that you’re going to be her friend, Auntie Daisy.’
‘Her eyelashes are so long,’ Daisy said, lost in contemplation of the tiny little girl. ‘I’ve never seen anything like them, and her hair is so dark.’
‘She is beautiful,’ agreed the besotted mother. ‘Enrico’s mother says she looks just like he did when he was a baby, apparently. Without the ears.’
They al laughed.
‘Do you want to hold her?’ Daisy said to Mary, stil cradling the baby close to her.
‘No,’ said Mary, ‘she’s happy with you. You’re a natural at it.’ ‘Yeah, isn’t she?’ agreed Paula.
Mary and Daisy exchanged a glance over the baby’s head.
A glance that said Daisy had been right to come after al .
Holding the baby felt wonderful. Daisy didn’t feel bereft, as she’d expected to - just peaceful and hopeful. Her day would surely come. She was so glad she hadn’t stayed at home and missed the christening. It wasn’t easy being generous and kindhearted when that heart was breaking, but it was worth it in the end. Paula’s mother, a vision in purple silk with matching feathers in her hair, appeared, hands held out for her beloved first grandchild. ‘Oh, isn’t she lovely,’ she cooed, ‘and she real y suits you, Daisy. Oh, you’l be next.’
Daisy gently kissed the baby’s forehead and handed her over to her grandmother. ‘Wel , I’d love to be next, Mrs O’Shea,’ she said, ‘but Alex and I split up a few months ago so it looks like I won’t be joining the motherhood club for quite a while now.
Mrs O’Shea refused to be put off by this lack of a man.
‘Nonsense,’ she said, happy on two glasses of cava.
‘You’re a gorgeous thing. I was only saying to Paula the other day that nobody wears clothes like you, and the bit of weight suits you. There’l be men queuing out the door any day soon. I never did like that Alex fel ow anyway,’ she added.
‘Mum!’ said Paula admonishingly.
‘Wel , I didn’t,’ said Mrs O’Shea. ‘Speak as you find, that’s what I do. He wasn’t good enough for our Daisy and she’l find someone who wil be good enough for her, you mark my words.’ Mrs O’Shea careful y took the baby from Daisy’s arms. ‘Thanks, Mrs O’Shea,’ said Daisy cheerful y.
‘Now my brother-in-law’s cousin’s son,’ said Mrs O’Shea, warming to the theme, ‘is a very handsome young man and he’s got over the divorce and they have no children. That’d be a perfect set-up for you. He has his own business and everything.’ Mary, Paula and Daisy laughed.
‘I’m off men for a while,’ Daisy said politely.
‘Ah, now,’ said Mrs O’Shea, knowingly, ‘you’d want to dip your foot back in the water, my dear. It’d be good for you.’
And off she went with her granddaughter.
‘Sorry,’ said Paula. ‘I hope Mum didn’t put her foot in it …’
‘No, she didn’t,’ said Daisy. ‘She said nothing wrong at al .
She was dead right: Alex wasn’t good enough for me.’
Mary sighed. ‘Hal elujah! You’re preaching to the converted,’ she said. ‘We’re glad you’ve final y seen sense.’ ‘Hel o, Daisy,’ said another voice, and Daisy turned around to see Mel Redmond, one little girl on her hip, another, older child holding on to her hand.
‘Hi, Mel,’ said Daisy with pleasure. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Enrico works with my husband, Adrian,’ Mel explained.
‘Carrickwel is a smal place, isn’t it?’ She kissed Paula.
‘Congratulations, I’ve just seen the baby. She is beautiful.’
Mel kissed Daisy too. ‘How are you holding up?’ she whispered, knowing this must be tough for Daisy.
Daisy gave her a firm smile. ‘Great,’ she said.
Faced with another mother, Paula was keen to talk mother talk about sleeping schedules, feeding and how you couldn’t die of sleep deprivation, though it felt like it.
Mel kept glancing anxiously at Daisy because this motherly conversation couldn’t be cheering her up, but Daisy shot her a brave smile in return and mouthed, ‘It’s OK.’
Daisy crouched down to talk to the little girl at Mel’s side.
‘Hel o,’ she said, ‘I’m Daisy. What’s your name?’ ‘Sarah,’
said the child, staring at Daisy with a grave little face. ‘I like your necklace.’
Daisy looked down. She was wearing a pendant she’d bought years ago on a trip abroad. ‘It’s amber,’ she said.
‘That’s a special type of stone made by resin which comes from trees being squashed over mil ions and mil ions of years and then it ends up like this, al shiny, golden and a bit see-through.’ ‘Mil ions of years?’ said the little girl curiously. ‘Like when there were dinosaurs?’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Daisy. ‘Here, try it on and see how it looks on you.’ She unhooked the pendant and put it around the little girl’s neck.
Sarah tried to look down at herself.
‘We ought to find a mirror,’ said Daisy. ‘We’re going to check out the pendant in a mirror,’ she said to Mel, standing up.
‘Great,’ said Mel. ‘I’m afraid Sarah’s been a bit bored.’
Daisy took Sarah’s hand. ‘Wel , she’s not going to be bored now,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s find a mirror. I bet Auntie Paula has a big one somewhere so she can admire herself in the morning! Do you admire yourself in the morning when you get dressed?’ ‘Yes,’ said Sarah thoughtful y, her tiny hand curled up in Daisy’s. ‘Mummy says you work in the shop with Paula, with pretty clothes. I like clothes.’
‘I’m afraid we only do grown-ups’ clothes,’ Daisy said, with regret. ‘But maybe we should have some children’s clothes too, for very pretty girls like you.’
‘That would be nice,’ said Sarah appreciatively. ‘I like you.’
It turned out to be a good day after al . Daisy had thought she’d stay half an hour and leave. Yet somehow, at half-seven in the evening, she, Mary, Mel and a few others were among the last in Paula and Enrico’s house. Baby Emma had been adored and minded al day, which had given her mother a rest, so Paula was happy. Mrs O’Shea had spent a lot of the day coming up with names for the find-Daisy-aman list and had amused everyone greatly by listing the qualities of these prospective suitors.
‘Tim, that guy with the smal farm, sounds the best of the lot,’ Daisy said when she, Paula, Mary and Mel were flopped out in the conservatory of Paula’s tiny house. ‘But the guy who’s into vinyl records and has three thousand catalogued by name … I don’t know, sounds a bit obsessional.’
Mel laughed. ‘That reminds me of a friend of mine from Lorimar - Vanessa. She’s a single parent and wow, but her mother was intent on finding her a man. You wouldn’t believe some of the guys she came up with! Al sons of her friends and I strangely single. Vanessa used to say she had enough trouble with the one man in her life, Conal. He’s thirteen now.’
‘Oh, they’re a handful at that age,’ said Mary knowingly.
Daisy sat back and tuned out, thinking that a couple of weeks ago she wouldn’t have been able to cope with this conversation. She would have felt so excluded - the only woman in a group of four who wasn’t a mother, who couldn’t join in, who wasn’t part of the secret sisterhood of being a parent. It would have hurt. It stil hurt, of course, but not as much. She was coming to terms with her childlessness. It didn’t have to be for ever.
Daisy knew she couldn’t blame Alex for everything. She couldn’t blame him because she wasn’t pregnant and Louise was. She could deal with al that herself. In her longing for a baby, she’d mistakenly thought a child was a Band-Aid that would make everything better. She was wiser now.
She tuned back into the conversation. Mel and Mary were talking about consumerism and how children wanted things they saw on the TV every day. ‘The adverts on the kids’
channel are unbelievable,’ Mel was saying. ‘No wonder the Christmas lists are longer than Gone With the Wind. There are so many new products every day. I mean, how do you say no when al their friends are getting them? We’ve had to cut back financial y because I’m not working any more and yet so many of Sarah’s friends seem to get everything they want. We can’t compete with that and I don’t want to!
It’s wrong for children to have every single thing they want.
That isn’t the way I was brought up.’
Paula looked anxious. ‘I worry about that too,’ she said. ‘I’d hate Emma to be spoiled.’
Mary grinned. ‘She’s only a few weeks old. They say you can’t spoil a baby, although you can spoil them when they get older, that’s for sure.’
‘I know, but how do you know if you are spoiling them and if you’re not spoiling them?’ went on Paula.
‘That’s the big problem,’ said Mel. ‘There’s no right and wrong way to do it, and you’re always convinced you’re doing it wrong.’
It was funny, Daisy reflected, she’d assumed that al mothers had this instant, instinctive knowledge and knew everything, and yet they didn’t, and they worried about what they did and they didn’t know. That was comforting. It seemed nobody had al the answers.
She got home to find a message on her answering machine from Claudia, one of the few friends she’d shared with Alex who’d kept in contact. Most of the others had clearly chosen Alex and Louise, instead of Daisy and Whoever. That had hurt. She thought of the times she and Alex had spent with those other couples - many nights out and even weekends away - and al the time they’d been his friends and not hers.
Claudia was one of the exceptions. Her husband, Andrew, had known Alex from school, so they went way back. But Claudia hadn’t let this affect her friendship with Daisy and had
kept in touch.
After such a sociable day, Daisy felt like more chat, so she phoned Claudia back.
Claudia was her usual voluble self, tel ing Daisy the trials and tribulations of work, and wasn’t it great that Michel e and Gerry were final y getting married?
‘Are you going to come to their wedding?’ Claudia asked Daisy gently. ‘You can come with Andrew and me, you know. You shouldn’t let the fact that you and Alex have split up stop you seeing old friends getting married.’
‘I haven’t been invited,’ Daisy said quietly. ‘I didn’t even know they were getting married.’
‘Shit, I didn’t mean to put my foot in it,’ Claudia groaned. ‘I assumed you’d be asked. You and Michel e were always so
close …’
‘Not that close, it seems.’ Daisy didn’t want to sound bitter, but it was hard not to.
‘Perhaps you didn’t get your invitation yet,’ said Claudia lamely. ‘Although it’s in a week and you would have, wouldn’t you?’
‘We’ve dressed so many wedding parties this summer,’
Daisy said lightly, ‘that I’m total y weddinged out, Claudia.
You can tel me al about it afterwards.’
Was it technical y stalking if you went to a wedding you weren’t invited to just so you could look at your ex and his new girlfriend? That question haunted Daisy al week. She was overcome with the desire to see Alex and Louise together, to get a mental picture of them as a couple in her head, and then she’d be able to move on.
But was it strange behaviour? Yes, it was stalking, she decided the night before Michel e and Gerry’s wedding.
She may as wel buy a bunny and boil up some water now.
She wouldn’t go. The next day Daisy unobtrusively joined the congregation at twenty past three, twenty minutes after the ceremony was due to have started. Michel e was clearly determined to be fashionably late, Daisy thought, as she moved cautiously up the side of the church. Normal y at weddings, she enjoyed noticing the clothes other people were wearing and she tried to catch her friends’ eyes, smiling at this person or that. Today, she didn’t want to be noticed and she tried not to look at either the clothes, the jewels or the hats.
She slid into a seat two-thirds of the way up the side aisle and kept her head down, hoping that people would think that she was a very devout person who had just dropped in on a Friday afternoon to discover a huge, glamorous wedding in progress. Of course they might think, in her big and unseasonable raincoat and her large-brimmed cream canvas hat, that she was one of those loony women who walked around pushing shopping trol eys and waving rosary beads. But either way, they wouldn’t notice her. People did their best not to notice those sort of women.
There was a buzz coming from the church, the buzz of people squealing ‘Hel o, lovely to see you, love the hat, the dress …’ whatever. At the top of the church, Daisy could see Gerry, standing looking slightly nervous, with the best man, who must be his brother.
She careful y scanned further back on the groom’s side of the church and then she spotted Alex. He was easy to see because he was so much tal er than everybody else, although Daisy would have noticed him in a crowd of a mil ion. Her heart felt that sudden ache at the sight of him.
He was wearing the grey suit that they had bought together in Paul Smith, the one he hadn’t wanted to buy, the one he said made him look too edgy, like a fashion victim. And now he was wearing it and he looked great.