Windfallen (35 page)

He had enclosed a check for five hundred pounds. It was signed off his mother’s account.

It was all about him. All about his trauma, his struggle. There wasn’t a single question mark in it. How was his daughter? Was she eating solids yet? Sleeping through the night? Holding things in her little pink fingers? How was
she
coping? His only reference to Ellie was in his own confusion. His selfishness, Daisy thought, was matched only by his lack of self-awareness. I wanted you to have a father, she told her daughter silently. I wanted for you the paternal adoration that should have been a right. And instead you got a self-obsessed jellyfish.

And yet in his written words was an echo of the way he spoke, a ghostly echo of that emotional urgency that she’d loved for so long. And an honesty that she wasn’t sure she was ready to feel. He hadn’t known if he was ready for a baby. He’d been quite frank about that for some time. “When the business is up and running, babe,” he’d say. Or “When we’ve got a bit of money behind us.” He had, she suspected, been furious when she told him she was pregnant, although he’d hidden it well. He’d been outwardly supportive, gone to all the classes and scans, said the right things. It wasn’t her fault, he’d told her more than once. They were in this together. “It takes two to tango,” Julia had added.

But it didn’t always, did it?

Daisy sat on the grass and for the first time guiltily allowed herself to think back. Not to Ellie. To a pill packet, glanced at and discarded. To fourteen months before.

“T
HEY’VE FINISHED THE TWO FRONT ROOMS
. W
ANT TO
take a look?”

Mrs. Bernard lifted the newly awake Ellie from her stroller as Daisy returned, closing the big white door behind her. “The beds are coming tomorrow, so they’ll start to look almost done. And that man rang about the blinds—he’s going to ring back this afternoon.”

Daisy, chilled and tired, peeled off her coat and laid it over what would become their reception desk. It was a 1930s piece she’d found in Camden, which she had kept in its protective bubble wrap since its delivery last week. She wanted to show Jones, but they hadn’t spoken directly in the ten days since they’d last met. Mrs. Bernard, looking uncommonly cheerful, motioned Daisy along behind her. “And look. They’ve started doing the gardens. I was going to ring you, but I thought you’d be back soon enough.”

Daisy looked down at the stepped terraces, where a selection of trees and shrubs were being dug into freshly composted earth. Some of the more overgrown plants, the lilac and wisteria, had been cut back diplomatically so that the hint of wildness and magic remained. But the terraces, scrubbed and repaired, now stood stark and clean against the organic forms around them, the smell of sage and thyme from the new herb garden mixing with the lilac, whose spindly limbs were now bowed with heavy heads of blooms.

“Makes a difference, doesn’t it?” Mrs. Bernard was beaming, pointing things out to Ellie. She liked to do that, Daisy had noticed. She supposed, with a pang, that she hadn’t been able to with Camille.

“It’s coming on,” said Daisy, gazing around, a rare sense of achievement and pleasure germinating inside her, displacing the black hole that seemed to suck out everything that was good. It was starting to come together. They were still behind schedule, but it was starting to come together.

The rooms that needed to be knocked through were open and bright, while a newly installed electronic shutter allowed light to come in through the oversize skylight when required, while saving them from the blinding heat of midday. At least three of the bedrooms were now awaiting only their furniture, their replastered walls giving off an intoxicating smell of new paint while freshly waxed herringbone floors settled under a layer of builder’s dust that wouldn’t disappear until the builders did. The banks of stainless-steel units had been installed in the kitchens, along with the industrial-size fridges and freezers, and all but one of the bathrooms had their fixtures. The basics done, Daisy was able to start thinking about the details. For it was the details that Daisy had always done best, happily spending hours researching a single piece of antique fabric or looking through reference books to see exactly how pictures were hung or books stored. Next week, she told herself, she would sit down with Mrs. Bernard’s promised albums of the place. They were a treasure she had not allowed herself until “Daniel’s” side of the work, as she saw it, had been completed.

“Oh. I meant to tell you. They’re ripping out that corner seat. Apparently the wood has rotted too far. But the carpenter reckons he can make you one just like it. I didn’t think it was worth troubling the listings people about. And that jasmine up the side is going to need to come out, as it’s strangling the guttering. But I said that was okay. I put that one in myself when Camille was small.” She paused, then explained. “The smell, you see. She liked things that smelled nice.”

Daisy frowned at the older woman. “Don’t you mind?”

“Mind what?”

“All this ripping out. This was your house for years, and now I’m demolishing it and remaking it as I see it. It’s not going to be anything like it was.”

Mrs. Bernard’s expression closed over. “Why should I mind?” she said, her irritated tone at odds with her elaborate shrugging. “No point looking backward, is there? No point hanging on to things that aren’t there.”

“But it’s your history.”

“Would you rather I was upset? Sniveling around, telling you, ‘Oh, it wasn’t like this in my day.’”

“Of course not, it’s just—”

“It’s just that old people are meant to be forever harping on about the past. Well, I don’t have a blue rinse or a bus pass, and I couldn’t give a stuff whether you paint the walls yellow with blue spots—so you do what you want, as I keep telling you. And stop looking for everyone’s approval.”

Daisy knew when a conversation was closed. She bit her lip, turned, and walked back into the house to make tea. Aidan, the foreman, was already in the kitchen, the tinny sounds of a radio burbling behind him.

“She told you about the meeting, has she?”

He was squeezing the tea bag out with his fingers, his gaunt face speckled with pale turquoise Farrow & Ball paint.

“What meeting?”

“Your woman down in the hotel there. She’s calling a meeting about this place. Wants the council to stop your works.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“I kid you not.” He tipped the bag into the plastic carrier that doubled as a rubbish bin and leaned back against the new stainless-steel units. “You’d better get down there tonight. I’d get the auld boss along as well. You know what they’re like in these sorts of places. Those women can be terrifying.”

“She frightened the pants off of me.” Trevor, the plumber, stuck his head in searching for biscuits. “About fiftyish with a dog attached, right? Buttonholed me down at the newsagents when I was buying some fags and started having a right old go. Told me I didn’t know what I was doing and that I was opening some Pandora’s box or something.”

“It’s the bar,” said Aidan. “They don’t want a bar.”

“But how can you have a hotel without a bar?”

“Don’t ask me, love. I’m just telling you what they’re all whining about.”

“Oh, hell. What are we going to do now?” Daisy’s fractured sense of self-possession, barely netted together, was now disintegrating again.

“What do you mean,
do?”

Mrs. Bernard stood in the door, Ellie balanced on her hip. “There’s nothing
to
do. You’ll go down there, listen to what she has to say, and then stand up and tell them they’re all a load of backward-looking fools.”

“That’ll go down well,” said Trevor.

“So tell them what it’s really like. Win them over.”

“Speak in public?” Daisy’s eyes had widened. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, get Jones up here. Get him to do it.”

Daisy thought back to the two conversations they’d had since he left. He had resurrected his previous opinion of her, she could tell. The one that thought she was flaky, overemotional, not to be trusted with anything. His manner, when talking to her, was cautious and dismissive. He ended telephone calls prematurely and abruptly. When Daisy, still feeling stupid about her outburst, had asked him, in what she thought was a conciliatory manner, when he would be coming up again, he had asked why. Didn’t she think she could handle it by herself?

“No,” she said now, furiously. “I don’t want to get him up here.”

“Sounds like he’d handle it better than you could.”

“We won’t go. We’ll leave the hotel to speak for itself.”

“Oh, that’s brave. Give Sylvia Rowan a clear way to bad-mouth you to everyone.”

There was something profoundly irritating about Mrs. Bernard’s scornful tone. Daisy felt she had heard it slightly too often.

“Look, I don’t do speaking in public.”

“That’s stupid.”

“What?”

“You won’t speak up for your own work. You won’t ring Jones because you made a fool of yourself with him. So you’ll sit here and let everyone walk all over you. That’s stupid.”

Daisy had had enough. “Oh, and I suppose you never did anything wrong in your life, did you? You married a decent man, had your family, grew up to be an upstanding member of the community. Never suffered a moment’s self-doubt. Well, bully for you, Mrs. Bernard.”

“Which shows how much you know. I’m just saying, in your circumstances, you need to stick up for yourself a bit more.”

“My circumstances? My circumstances? I don’t wear a bloody scarlet letter on my forehead, Mrs. Bernard. Outside Stepfordwivesville there are people bringing children up on their own, who aren’t considered to have ‘circumstances,’ as you put it.”

“I am quite well aware—”

“I never chose this, you know? I thought I was creating a family. I didn’t think I was making myself a single parent. You think that was on my life plan? Be a single parent? Spend my life living in a building site with a five-month-old baby whose father doesn’t know what she looks like anymore? With a load of disapproving bloody battle-axes? You think that’s what I wanted?”

Trevor and Aidan exchanged glances.

“There is no need to get hysterical.”

“Well, stop bloody getting at me.”

“Don’t be so sensitive.”

There was a brief pause.

“And what do you mean I made a fool of myself with Jones?”

Mrs. Bernard glanced at the men. “I’m not sure I should say.”

“Say what?”

“Oh, don’t mind us.” Aidan settled back against the units, mug of tea in hand.

For the first time Mrs. Bernard looked unbalanced.

“Well. You probably thought you were doing the right thing . . . moving on. . . .”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“You and him. The other morning.”

Daisy frowned, waited.

The men were very still, listening.

“I suppose young people are different nowadays . . . things are different.”

“Oh, God, you think I slept with him, don’t you? You think I slept with Jones. Oh, I don’t believe it.” Daisy turned and rubbed at her forehead, laughing joylessly.

Mrs. Bernard walked past her and began to point out something of intense interest to Ellie through the window.

“For your information, Mrs. Bernard, not that it is any of your bloody business, Mr. Jones and I have not laid a bloody hand on each other. He stayed here because you took his car keys, no other reason.”

“He’s a lovely man, though,” interjected Trevor.

“Lovely.
I’d
go out with him. If I was a girl.” Aidan grinned.

Mrs. Bernard turned and walked past them all. “I never said anything of the sort,” she said abruptly. “I just thought you shouldn’t have been drunk around him, that’s all. Him being your boss and all. But I won’t offer my opinion if you don’t want it.”

“I
don’t
want it. In fact, I just want to be left alone.”

“Well, that’s easy enough. Here, take the baby. I’ve got to go and do some shopping.” She pushed past Daisy, and, thrusting her daughter at her, left the house.

“D
AISY
? I
S EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT
?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I just needed to hear a friendly voice.”

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“Oh, you know. Just house hassles.” She waited, traced the receiver with her finger. “And Daniel wrote.”

“That’s a shame. I was hoping he was dead. To say what?”

“That he’s confused. Not very happy.”

“Oh, poor Daniel. Well, that’s big of him. So what’s he going to do now?”

Julia, Daisy realized, was possibly not the best person she could have rung.

“Nothing. He’s . . . he’s sorting himself out.”

“Which leaves you where, exactly?”

“Forget it, Ju. Let’s not talk about it. Anyway. Ellie’s fine. She’s really doing well with her solids, and she can almost sit up by herself. She’s getting a real seaside glow in her cheeks. When things aren’t so busy and it’s warmed up a little, I’m going to take her for a paddle.”

“Bless . . . shall I come up and see you both? I miss my little babycakes.”

It really was the most irritating word.

“Let me get past this week. I’ll ring you.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know, Daise. You can come home to us. Anytime you like. Don’s told me I shouldn’t have let you go up there on your own.”

“I’m fine.”

“But you’ll think about it. If it all gets too much. I don’t want you feeling you’re on your own.”

“I’ll think about it, Ju. I will.”

“Besides, Daise, it’s
Essex.
”

T
HE
A
LDERMAN
K
ENNETH
E
LLIOTT
C
OMMUNITY
C
ENTER
had canceled its regular bingo night, and the few pensioners who had arrived for their game were not best consoled by the prospect of a planning meeting. Some stood outside exclaiming disconsolately at one another over their handbags, as if unsure now whether to stay or return home, while several others sat inside on their molded plastic chairs, their cards at the ready, just in case. The bingo caller, a former DJ who was hoping to make his way onto the cruise-ship circuit, stood outside smoking furiously and thinking of the fifteen pounds that would now not be his. All of which might have gone some way toward explaining the prematurely bad-tempered mood among those of Merham’s inhabitants who had braved the sudden showers—and missed the Wimbledon semifinals on the telly—to come.