“Sorry,” said Daisy for the fifteenth time since they arrived, as they shuffled off to another part of the hospital. She didn’t know what else to say.
It had been easier when it initially happened, when she’d helped haul him off the ground, in shock at Daniel’s ranting, drunken state, and desperately attempted to mop up the blood that streamed down his shirt. Then she’d taken charge, grabbing Ellie’s supply of cotton balls, shouting for someone to move the cars, the protesters, so that she could get him to the hospital, fielding off Sylvia Rowan, who had descended like some malevolent old crone to crow that there, see? the drink-related violence had started already. “It won’t work,” the older woman had cried triumphantly. “I’ll have the magistrates revoke your license. I’ve got witnesses.”
“Oh, get lost, you old bat!” Daisy had shouted, pulling him into her car. He was dazed then, having possibly banged his head when he fell, and followed Daisy almost docilely, obeying her urgent instructions to sit, hold this, to stay awake, stay awake.
Now, however, he was possibly too awake, fueled by bad coffee and the disinfected atmosphere, his dark, headachey eyes glowering out over a surgical dressing, his splattered shirt a ruined reminder of her part in the day’s events.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, handing him his coffee. He looked almost worse when she came back to him.
“Stop apologizing.” His tone was exhausted.
“She won’t be able to, will she? Get your license revoked?”
“Sylvia Rowan? Least of my worries.” He grimaced as he sipped the coffee.
What does that mean? Daisy wanted to ask. But his demeanor, and the fact that he could hardly speak, made it difficult to glean anything else.
As they sat on their plastic chairs, under the fluorescent light, time had appeared to stall and then lose meaning altogether. Men with alcohol-related injuries, as they were described on the sheet, were evidently not a priority. They sat with the other Saturday-night casualties, interest transiently flickering as some new disaster limped through the swishing electronic doors, the daylight gardening punctures and do-it-yourself burns gradually giving way to the bloodied heads and knuckles of the darker hours. At around eight one of the bar staff had arrived with Ellie, apologizing but saying that they couldn’t find Lottie, and there was no one else available to stay with the baby. Daisy had taken her dozy, fractious daughter, not daring to meet Jones’s eye. Disturbed and discombobulated, Ellie had wailed and fought sleep, and it had taken Daisy endless circuits of the waiting area and fracture clinic to finally get her to nod off in her pram.
“Go home, Daisy,” Jones said, rubbing at the lump on his head.
“No,” she had said firmly. She couldn’t. It had been her fault, after all.
A
T A QUARTER PAST ELEVEN, JUST AS THE DIGITIZED
waiting-time screen told them that Jones would be seen almost half an hour ago, a clap of thunder announced the arrival of a huge storm. The noise jolted the waiting casualties from their reverie, the white flash of lightning causing a murmur, and after a brief pause, like an indrawn breath, the night sky pulled back and let its deluge pour down in sheets. The sound of it was audible through the glass doors; the water came in on the soles of people’s feet, making the shiny linoleum floor streaky with mixed mud and polish. Daisy, who had almost fallen asleep, watched, feeling something give at the change in atmosphere, wondering in her overtired state at the place that now held the surreal quality of a dream.
The effect of it was apparent almost twenty minutes later, when a male nurse came out to tell Jones that his waiting time was likely to be extended, as they were getting reports of a major pileup on the Colchester Road. The consultant was likely to be tied up for some time.
“So do I just go home?” said Jones, as intelligibly as he was able.
The nurse, a young man with the jaded air of someone who has swiftly had both idealism and innocence battered out of him, eyed Daisy and the baby.
“If you can bear it, you’d be better off waiting. If you can get it reset tonight, you’ve got much less chance of its being permanently bent out of shape.”
“S’already bent out of shape,” said Jones. But he said he would stay.
“You go,” he told Daisy again as the nurse walked off.
“No,” said Daisy.
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Daisy! It’s stupid, you and the baby sitting here all night. Go and take her home, and if you’re really concerned, I’ll give you a ring later, okay?”
He had not asked her why Daniel would want to hit him. But somehow Jones knew that it was because of her. His grand opening had descended into farce because of her. The ridiculous, vindictive Sylvia Rowan had had her spent weaponry reloaded by her. All that effort, all those months of work, undermined by a stupid misunderstanding.
Daisy was too tired. She looked at Jones’s exhausted, brooding face, the shadows cast into sharp relief by the unforgiving nature of the overhead lights, and felt her gritty eyes sting. Then she reached down and scooped up her bag and, standing, kicked the brake off the pram.
“I thought he’d gone, you know,” she said, barely conscious of what she was saying.
“What?”
“Daniel. He said he was going.”
“Going where?”
“Home.
” She heard her voice rising, a querulous quiver of frustration and grief. And before he could see her lose her composure, before she was reduced yet again to the girl she’d never wanted to be, Daisy turned and pushed her child out of the waiting area.
H
E LIVED IN
S
PAIN
. H
E HAD RETIRED THERE SEVERAL
years ago, after allowing the management of what had once been his father’s fruit-importing company to buy him out. He got out at the right time; the industry was increasingly taken over by one or two huge multinationals. There was little room for family operators like himself. He didn’t miss it.
He lived in a large white house, probably too large, but helped by a nice local girl who cleaned for him twice a week and occasionally brought her two sons, at his request, to swim in his pool. He didn’t think he would return to England. Too used to the sun.
His mother, he said, his voice lowering slightly, had died of cancer, quite young. His father had never really recovered and had been killed in a kitchen fire several years later. A stupid, mundane sort of death for a man like him. But he hadn’t been the type to cope by himself. Not like Guy. He was used to it. Sometimes he thought he even quite liked it.
He had no firm plans, but a lot of money. A handful of good friends. Not a bad place for a man to be. Not at his age.
Lottie listened to these details but heard few of them. She found herself unable to stop looking at him, translating the boy she’d known into this old man so swiftly that already she had trouble picturing his younger self. She registered the unfamiliar melancholy in his tone and suspected, knew, that it echoed her own.
It didn’t occur to her to feel conscious of her own appearance, of her grayed hair, her thickened waist, of the translucent, parchment skin on her hands. That had never been the point of it, after all.
He nodded behind them, toward the house, where the music had finally stopped and just the echoing sounds of tidying, of chairs being dragged across floors and industrial cleaners, echoed down into the bay.
“So that’s your daughter.”
There was a momentary pause, before Lottie replied. “Yes, that’s Camille.”
“Good man, Joe,” he said.
Lottie bit her lip. “Yes.”
“Sylvia wrote. She said you’d married him.”
“And then some, no doubt. Probably about him deserving better.”
They both smiled.
Lottie looked away, shook her head. “He did, you know.”
Guy’s face was questioning. She halted for a moment, startled that there could be familiarity in the way he raised an eyebrow, at the youth still visible in his expression. It made her unguarded.
“All these years I’ve resented him,” she said.
“Joe?”
“For not being you.” Her voice became a little hoarse.
He paused.
“I know. Celia couldn’t help it, but she—” He stopped, perhaps reluctant to be disloyal. He still had the white-blond hairs. They were harder to spot among the gray, but she could still just make them out.
“She wrote to you, you know. Several times. After you’d gone. Never sent them. I think she found it all . . . more of a strain than any of us realized. I don’t suppose I was terribly understanding.”
He turned to her. “I’ve still got them at home. I never opened them. I could send them to you, if you like.”
She couldn’t say. She didn’t know whether she was ready to hear Celia’s voice. Whether she ever would be.
“You never wrote,” she said.
“I thought you didn’t want me. I thought you’d changed your mind.”
“How could you ever think that?” She was a young girl again, her face flushed with the desperate unfairness of love.
He looked down. Out at the distant thunderclouds on the horizon. “Yes, well, I worked it all out afterward. I worked out a lot of things afterward.” He paused, looked at her again. “But by then I heard you’d married Joe.”
Several people trailed past, glowing under the lowering sun, their loose, pink limbs and contented weariness testament to the rare combination of heatwave and English beach.
Guy and Lottie sat beside each other, watching them in silence, looking out at the lengthening shadows, listening to the lap and draw of the waves on the shingle. In the distance, right on the horizon, a light glinted.
“What a mess, Guy. What a mess we’ve made of these years.”
He slowly reached out a hand. It rested on hers, enclosed it. The feel of it made her draw breath. When he spoke, it was without hesitation. “It’s never too late, Lottie.”
They stared unseeing at the sea for as long as it took the sun to finally disappear behind them, feeling the air of the evening turn chill, recognizing that there were too many questions, too few adequate answers. Old enough to know that some things don’t need spelling out.
Eventually Lottie turned to him, the face that she’d loved, the tracing of its lines telling her nearly everything she needed to know about love and loss.
“Is it true?” she whispered finally. “That you never had children?”
Afterward, at least one of the holidaymakers making their way slowly in small groups back along the sea path went home with the observation that it was not often you saw an old woman with her head in her hands, crying with the brokenhearted abandon of a young girl.
D
AISY DROVE
. S
HE DROVE FOR MILES UNDER THE DARK
sky, guided by the sodium lights of freeways and the little car’s headlights in winding country lanes, periodically, unthinkingly checking the rearview mirror at the sleeping baby behind her. She drove slowly, methodically because of the rain, but not thinking where she was going, stopping once for fuel and a cup of bitter, acrid coffee that burned her tongue and left her feeling jittery rather than refreshed.
She didn’t want to go back to Arcadia. It already felt like someone else’s place, would already be housing the first of its guests, echoing with other people’s noise and chatter and acquisitive footsteps. She did not want to go back there with her sleeping child and explain about Jones and Daniel and her part in the whole sorry mess. She wasn’t entirely sure where to be.
She wept a bit, too. Largely out of exhaustion—she had barely slept in thirty-six hours, from the anticlimactic feeling of the end of the party and the end of her time there and the delayed shock that any exposure to violence brings. And because the man who she’d realized meant most to her was lost to her again, his bloodied face, his unhappiness, the unintentional, farcical sabotage of his most important day conspiring against any chance she had of expressing her feelings.
Daisy stopped the car, steering it to a gentle halt on a gravelly turnout, listening to the sound of the rain on the roof and the squeaking drag of the wipers on the windshield. Below her, in the cobalt darkness, she could see the curve of the coastline and, far out to sea, the faintest glow of the dawn.
She laid her hands across the steering wheel and sank her head onto them, as if it were being pressed there by a great weight. They’d sat there all those hours and hardly spoken. She’d been close enough to feel him shift his weight beside her, for their hands to brush, for her head to unwittingly droop onto his shoulder during the one point when she’d almost fallen asleep. And yet they had not spoken, except to discuss their requirements of machine coffee and for him to tell her, again, to go home.
I was so close, she thought. Close enough to touch him. Close enough to hear him breathe. And now I’ll never be that close again.
Daisy sat for a moment, very still. She lifted her head, remembering something Camille had said.
Close enough to hear him breathe. To recognize the rapidity of a heartbeat quickening through want, through need.
Daisy let out a great gulp of something, and then, suddenly galvanized, she turned the key in the ignition, glanced behind her, and then wrenched the car around, its wet wheels spinning in the gravel.
T
HERE WERE THREE AMBULANCES OUTSIDE THE EMERGENCY
ward, parked haphazardly, surrounded by people in luminous vests who carefully jettisoned their charges onto wheelchairs, stretchers, walked them in, their heads bent low in consultation. A siren had been left on, and the noise it made was deafening, hardly muffled by the still-torrential rain or the sound of her engine. She maneuvered around them, trying to find a parking space, her gaze flickering into the mirror to check that her child did not stir. Ellie slept on, oblivious to the noise, exhausted by the day’s events.
And then, as she sat in the blue light, incapacitated by her inability to think straight and the fact that she’d come here at all, she glanced up through her blurred windshield and saw him, a tall, slightly stooped figure walking resolutely through the rain, toward the taxi rank.
Daisy waited for a split second, making sure. Then she threw open her car door, and heedless of the rain and the deafening din of the siren, began to run across the forecourt, half skidding, half stumbling, until she slid to a halt directly in his path.