The Daisy Picker (17 page)

‘I certainly do; thanks.’ Joe sits down opposite her, takes a biscuit and dips it into his tea. ‘Well, how did your first day go?’

‘Fine.’ And it did; she had no trouble with the till, thanks to O’Gorman’s. The customers were friendly – she already knew most of them to see. All the prices were
written up. If it hadn’t been for Charlie, the morning would have been perfect.

The shop door opened at half eleven, and Lizzie looked up to see him standing in front of her.

‘Hello.’ With an effort, she arranged her face into a smile.

‘Joe here?’ No introductions, no niceties. He sounded like someone from
EastEnders
.

She cocked her head towards the back. ‘In there.’ If he wasn’t going to waste his breath on conversation, neither was she.

Charlie went out to the back without a word. After a minute or so, Joe came in, went to the cash register and took out some notes. Lizzie pretended to be too busy arranging the apples in a
Ferrero Rocher triangle to notice him. The money would probably go straight into Dignam’s till; poor Joe.

Charlie walked out shortly afterwards. He winked at Lizzie – ‘See you’ – and was gone.

She looked after him as he walked down the street. Why on earth was he there? Had he some kind of hold over Joe? Then she shook her head – it was none of her business. And he was family;
Joe felt an obligation, that was all. It was a pity he wasn’t more friendly, though.

Walking home from Ripe, Lizzie hopes to God Charlie isn’t planning to stay much longer with Joe. That afternoon she asks Angela about him again.

‘When did he come here?’

‘It was after I stopped the lunches,’ Angela pauses, her knife poised over the chicken pieces on the chopping-board, ‘so it must have been October, or maybe early November. It
was a while before Christmas, anyway.’

‘And you don’t know why he suddenly appeared?’

Angela shakes her head and starts to chop again. ‘Couldn’t find out. I did my level best, but Joe wasn’t giving anything away. For all his cod-acting, he’s actually a
very private person; when he doesn’t want you to know something, believe me, you don’t. Even Maggie didn’t have a clue, and that’s not like her.’

‘How are Joe and Charlie related again?’

Angela considers. ‘Charlie must be Tom’s son, since he came from London. Tom is Joe’s older brother – he left here when I was still a child and he hasn’t been home
for years, not since the parents died. Joe has two sisters, too, but they’re both living in Ireland. I think one is in Cork, and the other . . . Clonmel, maybe?’

She dips the pieces of chicken into a bowl of spices and places them onto the hot pan. Then she says, ‘You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if that Charlie was on the run. I always
think he’s got the look of a criminal about him – those shifty eyes of his.’ She shakes the pan, and the chicken leaps and sizzles. The spicy smell starts to drift around the
kitchen.

Lizzie laughs, ‘Ah, here, Angela, I think you’re getting a bit carried away there. Just because he’s not full of charm like his uncle, that’s no reason to suspect him of
robbing banks.’ She divides her dough in half and reaches for the rolling pin.

For once, Angela doesn’t joke back. She shakes her head and pokes the chicken around the pan with a wooden spoon. ‘I hope I’m wrong, for Joe’s sake, but I wouldn’t
be surprised, that’s all.’

And that’s that. For whatever reason, Charlie moved in, bag and baggage, with his uncle.

And just a few months later – a few weeks, really – Lizzie O’Grady arrived in Merway and fell headlong for Uncle Joe.

Well done,
God. Great timing.

‘You’re getting on well at Ripe, are you, Lizzie?’

Lizzie smiles to herself. She figured it was only a matter of time before Maggie would be on the hunt for a bit of gossip.

‘Grand, Maggie. I enjoy the work.’
Not to mention the company.

‘And yourself and Joe get on well together, by the looks of it.’ It’s not a question, but Lizzie is pretty sure she expects an answer.

‘Fine; but I don’t really see that much of him. He spends his time working on his carvings. That’s why he took me on – so he could get away.’
No need to mention
that ‘away’ is still near enough for us to share a radio. Or that it’s only taken a few weeks for our tea break to stretch from ten minutes to nearer thirty
. And the fact
that they never stop talking, once they sit down, is certainly none of Maggie’s business. Sometimes Lizzie is amazed at the amount of conversation that flows back and forth between the two of
them. They can talk about anything.

‘. . . You should never eat a banana till the skin is spotty; that’s when they’re perfectly ripe. Most people eat them before they’re ready – and then they wonder
why bananas are supposed to be hard to digest. My favourite sandwich is mashed banana and peanut butter . . . What are you laughing at? . . .’

‘. . . The first cake I baked was a disaster – I read the oven temperature wrong, and it came out weighing a ton and hard as a rock. Daddy ate three slices, the creature. I’d
say he was up half the night with indigestion . . .’

‘. . . I thought I was going to bleed to death – the chisel nearly took the top off my thumb. I had to wear one of those lovely leather thumb-covers for a month. Lucky I wasn’t
my brother – everyone would have called me Tom Thumb. Look, you can just about see the scar . . .’

She just about managed to resist the urge to stroke it.

‘ . . . Jones got into the kitchen once when my mother had left half a salmon on the table – we were having visitors that night, and she had just poached it and left it out to cool.
He didn’t eat again for almost two days, and every time she laid eyes on him she grabbed the broom . . .’

‘. . . My first pet was a bee. I caught him in a jam jar and called him Buzzer and put him beside my bed when I went to sleep. In the middle of the night I knocked over the jar, and Buzzer
flew out and stung me . . .’

‘. . . I’ve always wanted to go to Greece – ever since I saw
Shirley Valentine.
I had no idea Tom Conti wasn’t Greek; I’d never seen him in anything else.
When I spotted him on telly in a car ad years later, I was dead impressed with his Welsh accent . . .’

‘. . . My sister Bridget called me “Doe” when she was small; she couldn’t manage “Joe”. Tom changed it to “Dodo”, and it stuck, until I was about
eight. Then I put my foot down . . .’

‘. . . For my confirmation I wore a lime-green suit and a matching straw hat. I looked like an American tourist on the way to the St Patrick’s Day parade. I came across photos, years
later, and begged my mother to let me burn them, but she wouldn’t . . .’

‘. . . Extra-cold Guinness is the invention of the devil – never let anyone talk you into it. It kills the taste; Arthur would turn over in his grave if he knew. The only thing worse
was that Guinness Light stuff – what the hell were they thinking of? . . .’

‘. . . Angela told some Austrian tourists that she was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Henry VIII. She said he really wanted to be a priest but was refused permission by the pope,
so he married all those women to spite him. If you heard half the stories she makes up for the tourists – and they swallow every word, God help us . . .’

No, Maggie definitely doesn’t need to know about the tea breaks. Or the crossword races, or the dimple in Joe’s right cheek when he smiles. Or his habit of stretching his long legs
out under the little square table and planting them on either side of Lizzie’s while they have tea. Does he even know he’s doing it? She feels deliciously trapped.

And so it goes. Three hours a day, three mornings a week, and tea and home-baked biscuits and talk, talk, talk around the small table in the back of Ripe. Sometimes she thinks:
This is
enough; this can go on forever and I won’t mind if nothing more happens.
Other times she wonders if he’s forgotten the night of the party and the way they looked at each other, and
she tries to calculate how long it’ll be before she just has to knock back a few more glasses of wine and throw herself at him.

The only topic that never comes up is Charlie. Joe never mentions him, and Lizzie never asks about him. He wanders into the shop occasionally; he always goes straight into the back room, barely
looking at her. She reminds God that Charlie has been scrounging from his uncle for well over six months now, and maybe it would be a good time for him to think about going back to London, if God
wouldn’t mind just planting the idea in his head.

And then three things happen that change everything.

‘Angela, hi. I’m just off – see you about one. Can I get you anything on my way home?’

Angela is standing at the sink, her hands in the water. She turns and looks blankly at Lizzie.

Something’s wrong. Lizzie goes over to her. ‘Angela?’ Her face is paler than usual; her eyes look empty. ‘What’s up?’

Angela takes her hands out of the water and wipes them on a towel. ‘I got a letter.’ Her voice is wobbly.

‘A letter? Who from?’ But she knows.

Angela goes to the table and sits down, leaning heavily against it as she does.

‘He wants to come back.’ She spreads her fingers on the table and stares down at them.

Lizzie sits down beside her. ‘Hang on.’ She takes her new mobile from her bag and dials Joe’s number. ‘Joe? It’s Lizzie. I’ll be a bit late today – can
you hold the fort for a while?’

Joe doesn’t ask any questions, and she blesses him for his sensitivity. Angela sits without moving, looking down at her hands. Her calmness – her blankness – is
frightening.

Lizzie puts her phone back in her bag and takes Angela’s hands in hers; they’re warm from the washing-up, but they’re trembling slightly. ‘Now, what did he
say?’

‘He says . . . he realises he made a terrible mistake . . . and he wants to come back. And he hopes I’ll have him.’ Her voice is completely without expression – she could
be reciting words in a foreign language that mean nothing to her. She is still looking down at her hands, limp and shaking in Lizzie’s.

‘Angela –’ Is she in shock? ‘Hang on.’ Lizzie gets the brandy from Angela’s press and pours a dollop into a glass. ‘Here, take a bit of that –
just a sip.’

Angela lifts the glass with both shaking hands, and gulps and splutters, and sets the glass down. But it seems to bring her back a bit.

‘Thanks.’ She takes a deep, shaky breath. ‘Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?’

Lizzie hardly knows what to say. ‘Had you no idea at all that this was coming?’

Angela shakes her head, and picks up the brandy glass again. ‘None.’ She takes another, smaller sip. ‘The birthday card was a shock, but I just thought it must have been
Dee’s idea, or something . . . This was a complete surprise.’ She shakes her head again.

Lizzie says nothing, just waits. After a few minutes Angela says, in a low voice, ‘When he left . . . I was – it was worse than him dying, you know?’ Lizzie nods.
‘Knowing that he was with someone else, that he’d chosen her over me, that she was –’

Angela bites her lip, takes another long, ragged breath and finishes the brandy. ‘I had to carry on, for Dee’s sake. She was distraught; she couldn’t understand why he’d
left, although we both, separately, tried to explain to her that he still loved her, that that would never change . . .’ She looks down into the empty glass. ‘It took six months before
I could think about him without crying.’

The colour is slowly coming back to her cheeks. ‘The first few times he came to see Dee, I couldn’t talk to him – I just pretended I was too busy, told her to run out to him on
her own . . . I did a bloody good job of hiding my feelings; I’m sure everyone around here thought I was wonderful, how I recovered, turned everything around and got over him.’ She
sighs deeply. ‘If they only knew how many nights I didn’t close my eyes, how many times I cursed the ground he walked on . . . and in the next breath wished to God he’d just come
back to us.’

She smiles faintly. ‘I suppose, in a way, it made me more determined to make a go of this place. I wanted to show him that I could do it, that he couldn’t destroy me.’ She
twirls the glass around and around by its stem. ‘I hated him, even while I still loved him . . . I’d never realised it was possible to do that – love someone and hate them at the
same time.’