Windfallen

by Moyes, Jojo

  “I’d rather you did it for me,” said Frances. “It takes you about a tenth of the time.”

  “No problem,” said Guy.

  As Lottie watched him carefully slit the shimmering belly from throat to tail, she found she had begun to weep. She wasn’t entirely sure why.

  They had tea, which Lottie made, out on the terrace. Frances really was hopeless at domestic tasks. She had forgotten to strain the first pot she made, so that the milk was speckled with black tea leaves. The second time she forgot to add the tea altogether and had looked as if she were about to cry when this was gently pointed out. Adeline had thought it amusing and offered them wine instead. But Lottie, anxious that Guy not think ill of them, had declined and taken charge of the tea making. She was glad of the time to herself. She felt as if she had started to fizz with electricity, unable to control the direction of its current.

  When she emerged carrying the tray and its odd assortment of crockery, Adeline was showing Guy the beginnings of their mural. In the time since Lottie had last visited, strange lines had begun to appear on the white surface, silhouettes nudging each other along the wall. Guy, his back to her, was tracing one of the lines with a square-tipped finger. His open collar had dropped back slightly from his neck, revealing a deeply tanned nape.

  “You’re here, Lottie. Look, I put you far away from George, as I didn’t want you to be offended by him. He is a thoughtless man.” Adeline smiled at Guy. “His brain is full of the Russian economy and suchlike. It seems to leave little room for sensitivity.”

  It had little blond hairs all over it, as fine as the down on a butterfly wing. Lottie could see every single one.

  “I want to have you carrying something, Lottie. Maybe a basket. Because tipping you slightly will show that sinuous quality of yours. And I want to have your hair hanging loose, in a sheet.” Frances was staring at the sketchy image, as if it were nothing really to do with the real Lottie.

  “And we will dress you in exotic colors. Something bright. Very un-English.”

  “Something like a sari,” said Frances.

  “The girls here dress in much more drab colors than those where I grew up,” said Guy, turning slightly to include her in conversation. “Here everyone seems to wear brown or black. When we lived in the Caribbean, everyone wore red or bright blue or yellow. Even me.” He grinned. “My favorite shirt had a bright yellow sun on the back. Huge, it was, with rays stretching right up to my shoulders.” He stretched his arms across his chest, as if pointing them out.

  Lottie placed the tray carefully on the table, to try to stop the crockery from rattling.

  “I think we should dress Lottie in red. Or perhaps emerald,” said Adeline. “She is so exquisite, our little Lottie, and always hiding herself. Always making herself invisible. I am on a mission,” she confided to Guy, breathing almost intimately into his ear, “to show this town that Lottie is one of its most precious jewels.”

  Lottie found herself flushing furiously. She felt a searing anger at Adeline, the prickling suspicion that she was being mocked.

  But nobody appeared to be laughing.

  Guy didn’t even seem perturbed by Adeline’s behavior. He grinned back at Adeline and then slowly turned to look at Lottie. He really looked at her then, as if seeing her properly. The two faces, his and Adeline’s, staring intently at her, unbalanced Lottie to the point where she could no longer contain herself.

  “No wonder you can’t get any staff. This place is a tip! You need to tidy it! No one will come if you don’t tidy it.” She leaped up and began moving empty wine bottles and newspapers across the terrace, gathering up long-empty wineglasses, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “Lottie!” She heard Adeline’s soft exclamation.

  “You don’t have to do that, Lottie,” said Frances. “Sit down, dearest. You’ve just made the tea.”

  Lottie swept past her, pushing at her outstretched hand. “But it’s dirty. In some places it’s actually dirty. Look, you need some carbolic. Or something.” The words were tumbling over themselves. She moved inside, became manic, sweeping piles of papers off tables, pulling at drapes. “You won’t get a new housekeeper otherwise. No one will come. You can’t live like this. You can’t live like this!”

  Her voice broke on the last words, and suddenly she found herself running down the corridor and out the front door into the bright afternoon sunlight, heedless of the bemused cries of the people behind her.

  GUY FOUND HER IN THE GARDEN. SHE WAS SITTING BY the little pond, miserably throwing tiny pieces of bread into its murky waters, her back to the weathered brick of the house. On his approach she glanced around, groaned, and buried her face in her too-tanned arms.

  But he didn’t say anything. Wordlessly, he sat down beside her, handed her a plate, and, as she sat looking furtively up at him from under her hair, pulled a large, blushing fruit from the crook of his arm. As she stared at its unfamiliar shape, her curiosity battening down her embarrassment, he pulled a penknife from his pocket and began to peel it, scoring its flesh lengthways. Absorbed in his task, he peeled away the four regular sections of skin, forcing the knife down carefully along the fruit’s innards, levering the flesh away from the stone.

  “Mango,” he said, handing her a piece. “Came today. Try it.”

  She looked up at him, then down at the moist, glowing flesh in front of her. “Where’s Celia?”

  “Still at the hairdresser.”

  Upstairs Freddie was crying. They could hear his angry, childish sobs, punctuated by muffled protests.

  She paused, studied his face. “What’s it taste of?”

  He smiled. She could smell the fruit on his fingers. “Good things.” He lifted a piece from the plate. Held it toward her lips. “Go on.”

  She paused. Realized her mouth was already open.

  The flesh was smooth and sweet. It tasted perfumed. She closed her mouth cautiously around it, then let it melt slowly on her tongue, losing herself in the succulence of it, shutting her eyes to better imagine warm, foreign climes, places where people wore red and yellow and bright blue, places where they carried the sun on their backs.

  When she opened her eyes, he was still looking at her.

  He had stopped smiling. “I liked them,” he said eventually.

  Lottie was the first to break their gaze. It took some time. She stood, straightening her skirt. Then she turned and walked back toward the house, feeling deep within her the first easing of a long-endured storm.

  She turned before she got to the back door. “I knew you would.”

  FIVE

  It may simply have been a way of keeping some semblance of sanity. But Lottie preferred to believe there was a kind of inevitability to it from then on. Like she knew that after she discovered the Merham “salon” invite unopened still in her pocket, that it would be Guy who suggested they return, on the pretext that there was a gentleman there who wanted to talk about his father’s business. (Mrs. Holden would never dare object to anything concerned with business, after all.) Like she had known, too, that Guy would somehow choose a time when Celia had gone off on some other beautifying mission: to look at shoes in Colchester or new stockings in Manningtree—the kind of jobs a man, even a fiancé, couldn’t possibly be expected to attend. Like she knew that he now saw her differently. She might not be wearing emerald, but she had at least taken on some of the qualities of Adeline’s precious jewel, and in return she glowed from within and drew his eye, like a brilliant catching the light.

  None of this was acknowledged, of course. In the same way that Lottie had found means of avoiding Guy, now she simply found him walking alongside her toward the municipal park. Or that it was his arms holding the washing basket as she pegged up the sheets. Or that he had already volunteered to walk Mr. Beans as she left for some errand down at the Parade.

  And more quickly than she could have predicted, Lottie lost her shyness around Guy, found the exquisite pain of being near him replaced by a flickering anticipa
tion, an uncharacteristic desire to talk, a welling belief that she was in the place where she was always meant to be. (“She’s dropped some of that moodiness. Less mulish,” Mrs. Holden observed. “Susan, it’ll be in the family,” said Mrs. Chilton. “I’ll lay money the mother is a Grade-A sourpuss.”) She tried not to think about Celia. It was easy when she was with him; then she felt enclosed by invisible walls, sheltered by her belief that it was her right to be there. It was when she was alone with Celia that she felt naked, her actions exposed to a distinctly murky light.

  Because she couldn’t look at Celia in the same way. Where once she had seen an ally, now she saw a rival. Celia wasn’t Celia anymore; she was an amalgam of elements against which Lottie had to compare herself: a helmet of stylishly cut blond hair against Lottie’s straight, dark, schoolgirl plait; a glowing, peachy complexion against her own honeyed skin; long, chorus-girl legs against her own. Were they shorter? Dumpier? Somehow less shapely?

  And then there was the guilt; at night she blocked her ears to the sound of Celia’s breathing, wept silent tears at her desperate desire to betray the girl she thought of as her sister. No one had been closer to her. No one had been kinder to her. And this wretched sense of duplicity made her resent Celia even more.

  Occasionally she got a glimpse of their old relationship, like clouds parting to reveal a stretch of endless blue, but then they regathered and Lottie couldn’t view her without reference to Guy. If Celia blew him a kiss, Lottie fought the urge to throw herself irrationally between them—a human block against his receiving it; a casual arm draped across his shoulder filled her with thoughts little short of murderous. She swung between guilt and a raging jealousy, the pendulum most often settling at a low depression somewhere in the middle.

  Celia didn’t seem to notice. Mrs. Holden, now in a frenzy about the prospective nuptials, had decided that none of her daughter’s clothes were worthy of her impending position in society and was determined to buy her a whole new wardrobe. Celia, after confiding to Lottie that she was sure she’d be able to sneak something new for her, too, had thrown herself into the task with only the faintest backward glance at her less well dressed “sister.” “I’m going to pick up some brochures this afternoon for the honeymoon,” she said. “I think a cruise would be just perfect. Don’t you think a cruise would be perfect, Lottie? Can you imagine sitting up on deck in one of those bikinis? Guy is desperate to see me in a bikini—he thinks I’ll look simply marvelous. All the Hollywood stars go on cruises these days. I heard in London—Lots? Oh, sorry, Lots. Thoughtless of me. Hey, look, I’m sure when you get married you’ll go on a cruise, too. I’ll even keep the brochures for you if you like.”

  But Lottie didn’t feel envious; she was just grateful for the extra time with Guy. And tried to imagine, as they strolled apparently coincidentally down the road again to Arcadia, that Guy felt that little swell of gratitude, too.

  THE CHILDREN SAW JOE BEFORE HE SAW THEM. IT wouldn’t have been hard; he was thrust deep under the bonnet of an Austin Healey, wrestling with a distributor cap. Frederick, walking past on his way back from picking up groceries with Sylvia and Virginia, ran up behind him and thrust a hand still sticky with some unidentified sweet up under Joe’s shirt.

  “Celia’s going to have a baby!”

  Joe emerged, rubbing his head where it had hit on the underside of the hood.

  “Frederick!” Virginia, casting an anxious look out onto the road, dived into the open-fronted garage and began hauling her charge away.

  “She is! I heard her and Mummy talking about how to make one last night. And Mummy said she’s got to get Guy to take care of his matters and then she won’t have to have a new baby every year.”

  “Frederick. I’ll tell your mother you’ve been spouting nonsense! Sorry,” Virginia mouthed at Joe as Frederick wriggled free of her usually iron grasp.

  “Why don’t you come anymore?” Sylvia stood in front of him, her head tilted to one side. “You were going to show me how to do Monopoly, and you didn’t come the next day like you said.”

  Joe rubbed at his hands with a rag. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been a bit busy.”

  “Lottie says it’s because you’re cross with her.”

  Joe stopped rubbing. “Is that what she says?”

  “She says you stopped coming because she’s going out with Tommy Steele.”

  Joe found himself smiling despite himself.

  “Is Lottie having a baby, too?” Frederick was peering into the engine, reaching in an exploratory plump pink arm.

  “Sylvia. Freddie. Come on.”

  “If Lottie has a baby, will you teach it how to play Monopoly?”

  “If you have an eraser, you only have to have one baby.”

  Joe, retrieving Frederick’s hand, had begun to shake his head. Virginia, beside him, started to laugh despite herself.

  Freddie, sensing their mirth, began to gather pace. “Lottie is having a baby with Tommy Steele.”

  “You want to watch what you’re saying, Freddie. Someone might believe you.” She turned to Joe, giggling. She liked Joe. He was obviously wasting his time mooning over Lottie. The silly girl thought she was too good for him by the looks of it, too important, seeing as how she lived with the Holdens as one of their own. But she wasn’t any better than Virginia. She had just got lucky.

  “It’ll be Elvis Presley she’s stepping out with next, according to these two.” She smoothed her hair back, wishing she had worn a bit of lipstick this morning, like she’d intended.

  But Joe didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t even seem to think Elvis Presley was funny. He’d gone all serious again.

  “You out much lately, then, Joe? Been over to Clacton at all?” Virginia moved a little closer to him, positioning herself so that her slim legs were directly in his view.

  Joe looked down, and shifted a bit on his feet.

  “No. Been kind of busy.”

  “Freddie’s right. We haven’t seen you around much.”

  “No. Well.”

  “I got a thumbnail. Look.” Frederick thrust his hand at Joe.

  “A hangnail, Freddie. I told you. And it’ll go soon. Stop waving it around at people.”

  “I can make a hydrogen bomb. You can buy hydrogen at the chemist. I heard Mr. Ansty say.”

  Joe glanced over at the clock, as if waiting for them to go. But Virginia pressed on.

  “He means hydrogen peroxide. Look, Joe, there’s a few of us going to the new dance hall over on Colchester Road on Saturday. If you wanted to come, I’m sure we could get you a ticket.” She paused. “There’s this band from London. They’re meant to be really good. They do all the rock and roll numbers. We’d have a laugh.”

  Joe looked at her, blushed, and wrung at his rag.

  “Think about it, then.”

  “Thanks, Virginia. Thanks. I’ll . . . I’ll, er, let you know.”

  IN THE YEAR 1870 AN AMERICAN SEA CAPTAIN CALLED Lorenzo Dow Baker docked at Port Antonio, Jamaica, and, on taking a leisurely stroll through one of the local markets, discovered that the natives were particularly fond of eating a strangely shaped yellow fruit. Captain Baker, an enterprising soul, thought the fruits looked and smelled inviting. He bought 160 bunches of them for a shilling each and stored them down in the hold of his ship. When he returned to port in New Jersey, the United States of America, eleven days later, the local fruit merchants leaped upon the fruit, paying him the grand sum of two dollars a bunch.

  “Not a bad profit,” said Julian Armand.

  “For a few bananas. The locals went mad for the new fruit. Those that could see past the strangeness to the sweetness . . . they were the ones who got the reward. And that was really the start of the fruit-importing industry. Old Baker became the Boston Fruit Company. And the company that grew from that company is one of the biggest exporters today. Dad used to tell me that as a bedtime story.” He paused, grinning at Lottie. “He doesn’t like telling it anymore, as the company is so much bigger tha
n his.”

  “A competitive man,” said Julian, who was sitting with his bare feet up on a stack of books. He had a pile of lithographs on his lap and was sorting them into two smaller piles, one on each side of him on the sofa cushions. Beside him Stephen, a pale, freckled young man who never seemed to speak, picked up those Julian had discarded and examined them closely, too, as if it were a matter of courtesy. He was, apparently, a playwright. Lottie had added the “apparently,” in the manner of Mrs. Holden, as it had recently occurred to her that none of them, except Frances, seemed to do anything at all.

  “And his business is successful?”

  “It is now. I mean, I don’t know how much money he makes or anything, but I do know that since I was a boy our houses have got bigger. And our cars.”

  “Competitiveness has its rewards. And your father sounds very determined.”

  “Can’t bear to lose at anything. Even to me.”

  “Do you play chess, Guy?”

  “I haven’t in a while. Do you fancy a game, Mr. Armand?”

  “No, not I. Useless, I am, as a tactical thinker. No, if you are any good, you should play George. George’s mind is pure mathematics,” said Adeline. “Pure logic. I often think he is half man, half machine.”

  “You mean he’s cold.”

  “Not cold, exactly. George can be terrifically kind. But not a man to love.” The apparently gentle conversation belied the fact that there was an edge to the air that afternoon that had little to do with the imminent onset of autumn. Lottie had not sensed it at first, a barely perceptible vibration between the people in the room, a charge. Adeline paused, lifting a strand of Lottie’s hair. “No, not a man to fall in love with.”

  Lottie sat silently at Adeline’s feet, trying not to blush at Adeline’s use of the word, roused from a reverie of cargo ships and exotic fruits. Adeline was dressing her hair with tiny embroidered roses that she had rediscovered in a cushioned box. “I had them sewn on my wedding dress,” she said. Lottie had been horrified. “It was just a dress, Lottie. I like to keep only the best of the past.”