Windfallen

by Moyes, Jojo

  “No,” said Daisy, and she began to walk out into the light.

  There was a short delay as Jones realized she was not waiting for him.

  “Are you upset about something?” He was half a pace behind her, half reaching for her elbow.

  Daisy stopped and turned. “Why should I be?”

  “Ah, don’t do that. Don’t do that female thing. I haven’t got the time to play twenty questions guessing what the matter might be.”

  Daisy felt herself go pink with fury, made worse by the suspicion that what she was really feeling might actually sound slightly ridiculous. “Forget it, then.” She carried on walking, a lump rising inexplicably to her throat.

  “Forget what?”

  She wasn’t, she realized, entirely sure.

  “Ah, c’mon, Daisy. . . .”

  She turned to face him, livid. “Look, Jones, I didn’t have to come here today, you know? I could have stayed at the house in the sun and worked and played with my daughter and had a nice time. You’re the one telling me I haven’t got time to spare, after all. But I thought we were going to have a good buying session and a nice lunch. I thought it might be . . . useful for both of us. I didn’t think I’d spend my day stuck in an overheated scrap yard listening to the rantings of an ignorant pig with Tourette’s.”

  It was fair to say it hadn’t sounded quite that harsh in her head.

  There was a brief silence.

  Daisy examined her feet while contemplating the temporarily obscured fact that he was actually her boss.

  “So. Daisy . . .” He stood squarely in front of her. “Still trying to spare my feelings, then?”

  She looked up at him.

  “Truce? If I turn my phone off?”

  She was not a girl to hold a grudge. Not usually anyway. “You don’t have another hidden in your jacket?”

  “What kind of man do you take me for?” He paused, then reached into his inside pocket and pulled out another mobile telephone. Which he turned off.

  “Bloody Welsh,” she said, looking steadily at him.

  “Bloody women,” he said, and held out his arm.

  SHE WAS NOT ENTIRELY SURE WHAT IT WAS, BUT FROM then on Jones’s mood lightened considerably, elevating her own with it. He became increasingly relaxed and gave his full attention to her suggestions, offering little resistance to even her more fanciful choices and proffering his credit card with gratifying frequency.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind spending all this?” she said as he agreed to buy an obviously overpriced pharmacy cabinet for her to put in one of the bathrooms. “It’s not the cheapest yard.”

  “Let’s just say I’m enjoying today more than I expected to,” he said. He didn’t ask the time again.

  Shortly before they left, perhaps infected by Jones’s own apparent carelessness with his credit card, Daisy made a decision about the stained-glass window. It was too expensive. She didn’t even have a house to put it in. But she wanted it, knew that if she didn’t buy it, it would haunt her for months afterward. (In the same regretful manner that friends reminisced about lost boyfriends, she still thought back to a Venetian chandelier she had lost at auction.)

  She walked over to Jones, who was settling up at the payment cubicle and organizing delivery. “I’ll just be five minutes,” she said, pointing toward the shed. “I just want to get something for myself.”

  She nearly cried when they said it had sold. She should have known to buy it as soon as she saw it, she berated herself; anything that was good should be pinned down immediately. If your eye couldn’t see its worth clearly enough to make a decision, then you didn’t deserve it. She stared at the cherub, wanting it more keenly now that there was no chance of its becoming hers.

  She had rescued a sofa once, had managed to locate the dealer who’d bought it from under her nose while she perused a junk shop and offered to buy it from him. He charged her almost double the original price, and although she hadn’t cared at the time, had just been desperate to have it, as the months went on she realized that its price had somehow spoiled it for her. That when she looked at it, she saw no longer a hard-won antique but an inflated sum she’d been shoehorned into paying.

  “You okay?” said Jones, standing by a stack of unstripped doors. “Get what you want?”

  “No,” said Daisy, leaning casually against one with frosted-glass panels. She was determined not to whinge. She could keep things in perspective now. “Missed my moment,” she said.

  And then yelped and collapsed sideways as, with a huge crack, the glass went straight through.

  They spent two hours and forty minutes at emergency room, where she received twelve stitches, a gauze sling, and several cups of sweetened machine tea. “I don’t think we’ll make lunch,” said Jones as he helped her to the car afterward. “But I think a couple of stiff drinks are probably in order.”

  He placed a packet of painkillers in her good hand. “And, yes, you can drink with these. First thing I checked.”

  Daisy sat silently in the passenger seat of Jones’s car, her new outfit splattered with blood, feeling hopeless and chaotic and rather more shaken up than she cared to admit. Jones had been surprisingly good about the whole thing, had sat patiently with her in a succession of waiting rooms as triage nurses and then on-duty doctors had mopped her up and restored her arm to something not dissimilar to that of a patchwork doll. He had left twice, to make telephone calls outside. One of which, he said in the car, had been to Lottie, to tell her that Daisy would be home later than expected.

  “Is she cross?” said Daisy, looking in horror at the browning bloodstains on his pale leather interior.

  “Not remotely. Baby’s fine. Mrs. Bernard says she’s going to take her home with her, as she’s promised a meal with her husband tonight. And you won’t be able to drive.”

  “Mr. Bernard’ll be pleased, then.”

  “Look, it’s an accident. People have them. Don’t worry about it.”

  He’d been like that all afternoon—mellow, reassuring, as if he had all the time and none of the cares of the world. It had been curiously intimate, having to lean on him, having him wrap her arm and sit beside her on the plastic chairs of the hospital corridor. He’d begun lowering and softening his voice to talk to her, as if she were sick as well as injured. She wondered, periodically, whether he was even the same person who had picked her up from Liverpool Street Station that morning.

  “Have I ruined your day?”

  He laughed at that and, his eyes on the road in front, slowly shook his head.

  Daisy, trying to ignore the throbbing in her arm, stopped talking.

  His mood hardened slightly when they reached the Red Rooms, partly because there was no one on the front desk when they walked in, a sackable offense, he said later, when she tentatively asked why it should be a problem. “Everyone who comes in here should be greeted like an old friend. I pay my staff to know the names, the faces. I don’t pay them to be upstairs taking a late lunch.”

  He’d held her good arm as she made her way up the many flights of wooden steps, past bars where people sat around under whirring fans, surreptitiously craning their necks at new arrivals who might turn out to be more notable than themselves, waving or exclaiming their too-hearty greetings in Jones’s direction. Once she might have thought that a bit of rubbernecking was fun. But she’d been relieved when he said he’d arranged for them to have a table on a terrace outside his office, fearful at the thought that her bloodied clothes, her sling would be exposed to the sharp, assessing eyes of London’s bar crowds.

  Because suddenly being back felt overwhelming. She felt intimidated by the thudding roar of Soho’s traffic, its reverberating roadworks, its braying, shouting people. She felt hemmed in by the height of the buildings, had forgotten how to walk through a crowd, and found herself hesitating, ducking the wrong way. She felt a sudden, unanticipated ache for her child, a deep discomfort when she calculated the number of miles that now separated them. Worse, she kept
seeing men who looked like Daniel and found her heart clenching, an uncomfortable, reflexive action.

  Jones had begged five minutes “to take care of some business.” The girl who served Daisy a drink, an Amazonian beauty with a deep tan and long black hair scraped artistically back into a knot, had eyed her speculatively.

  “Fell through a door,” explained Daisy, mustering a smile.

  “Oh,” said the girl uninterestedly, and then she sauntered off, leaving Daisy feeling stupid for saying anything at all.

  “Jones, I’m really sorry, but I think I’d like to go home,” she said when he finally reemerged onto the terrace. “Could you give me a lift to Liverpool Street?”

  He frowned, sitting slowly opposite her. “Not feeling good?”

  “Just a bit wobbly. Think I’d be better back at—” she stopped, realizing how she had referred to the hotel.

  “Have something to eat first. You’ve eaten nothing all day. Probably why you’re feeling shaky.” It was an instruction.

  She raised a half smile, holding her hand up to shield her eyes against the light. “Whatever.”

  Without thinking, she had ordered a piece of steak and had to sit, uncomfortably, as he took her plate from her and sliced it into pieces that she could pick up one-handed.

  “I feel like an idiot,” she said periodically.

  “Just eat something,” he said. “You’ll feel better.” He had not eaten. Muttered something, a little embarrassed, about trying to shed a few pounds. “Spend my whole life entertaining, you see,” he said, glancing down at his stomach. “Don’t seem to burn it off like I once did.”

  “It’s your age,” said Daisy, downing her second spritzer.

  “You’re feeling better, then,” he said, and sighed.

  They talked about the mural and the faces that Hal had painstakingly and meticulously brought forth into the light. Lottie, Daisy told him, was still not happy about having it restored. But having recognized that she was not going to get her way, she’d started, albeit gracelessly, to identify some of the figures. One of them, Stephen Meeker, lived a few miles along the coast in a hut on the shingle. (They were not friends, but he had been very sweet to her when she’d come home with Camille.) The day previously she had shown Daisy which was Adeline, and Daisy had stood in front of her marveling at this woman staring at what looked like a doll, feeling the decades strip away, making scandalous the behavior that was now considered the norm. She had identified Frances, too. But Frances’s face had been partially rubbed away. Daisy wondered whether they might try to find a picture of her somewhere, from some artists’ archive perhaps, to restore her to the pictorial bosom of her friends. “It doesn’t seem fair that she, of all people, should be absent from it,” she said now to Jones.

  “Perhaps she wanted to be absent from it,” he said.

  She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she didn’t tell him about the previous evening, how she’d glanced out the window to catch Lottie standing very still in front of the mural, lost in something unseen. Or how the old woman had slowly reached out her hand, as if to touch something on it and then, abruptly, as if she were scolding herself, how she had turned and walked stiffly away.

  He told her about his plans for the opening of the hotel, showed her several files with details and photographs of previous openings he’d held. (In nearly all, she noted, he was flanked by tall and glamorous women.) “I want to do something a bit different with this, something that reflects the house. But I can’t think what,” he said.

  “Will it be a celebrity bash?” said Daisy, feeling suddenly, curiously, invaded.

  “There’ll be a few faces,” he said. “But I don’t really want your standard canapé do. The whole point about the hotel is that it’s meant to be different. It’s meant to be a bit above all that, if you like,” he said, looking embarrassed even as he said it.

  “I wonder if any of them are alive,” said Daisy, staring at the folder.

  “Who?”

  “The people. On Frances’s mural. I mean, we know Frances and Adeline aren’t. But if it was painted in the fifties, there’s a good chance that a lot of them are still alive.”

  “So?”

  “So we find them. And get them together. At your hotel. For the opening. Don’t you think that would be a fantastic publicity stunt? If these people were the enfants terribles of their age, as Lottie says, it would mean fantastic press. You’ve got the image there, of the mural . . . I think it would be great.”

  “If they’re still alive.”

  “I’m hardly going to invite them otherwise. But it might mollify the locals a bit as well, a reference to their history.”

  “I suppose it could work. I’ll get Carol onto it.”

  Daisy looked up from her drink.

  “Carol who?”

  “She’s my party planner. Runs a PR company and organizes all my dos.” He frowned at Daisy. “What’s the problem?”

  Daisy stared at her glass and then took a good swig.

  “I suppose . . . I suppose I’d like to do it.”

  “You?”

  “Well, it was my idea. And I did—we did find the mural. I feel sort of attached to it.”

  “But how are you going to find the time?”

  “It’s only a few phone calls. Look, Jones”—almost unconsciously, she reached a hand across the table—“I think this mural is really special. It might even be important. Don’t you think it’s the kind of thing that would be best kept a secret, for now at least? You’d get more coverage if it doesn’t leak out in dribs and drabs. And you know what PR people are like—they can’t keep their mouths shut. I mean, I’m sure your Carol is very good and all, but if we just kept the mural itself between us for now, just till the painting is finished . . . well, the impact would be greater when it finally came out.”

  She had thought he had black eyes. But they were in fact a really, really dark blue.

  “If you think it’s not too much extra work,” he said. “By all means. Tell them I’ll put them up, pay for their transport, whatever. But don’t get your hopes up. Some of them may be too frail or sick—or senile.”

  “They’re not much older than Lottie.”

  “Yessss.”

  They smiled at each other then. An unguarded, complicit smile. And halfway through it Daisy realized she felt much better. So she stopped, because somehow she felt like she shouldn’t.

  HE WAS GOING TO DRIVE HER BACK TO MERHAM. NO ARGUMENTS, he said. It would take him only an hour or two now that the rush hour was over, and besides, he wanted to see the mural.

  “But it’ll be dark,” said Daisy, who’d drunk so much that her arm had stopped hurting. “You won’t see a lot.”

  “So we’ll turn all the lights on,” he said, disappearing into his office. “Give me two minutes.”

  Daisy sat on the illuminated terrace, her cardigan around her shoulders, listening to the distant sounds of revelry and traffic below. She didn’t feel so out of place now. She no longer felt awkward around Jones, as if she were constantly trying to prove something to him, to convince him that he was just not seeing the best side of her. And it was different here, seeing him in his own environment, moving easily through a sea of deferential, eager faces. Awful how power made people more attractive, she observed, at the same time fighting a covert sense of anticipation at the idea that the two of them would again be alone in the house together.

  She pulled her mobile phone from her bag to check on Ellie and swore softly when she saw that the battery was low. She hardly used it at Merham—it had probably been low for weeks.

  “You all finished, then?” The waitress began collecting the empty plates and glasses from her table.

  “Yes, thank you.” It might have been the alcohol, or Jones’s attentions, but Daisy felt less awed by her now.

  “Jones said to tell you he’ll be another five minutes. Got caught on the phone.”

  Daisy nodded understandingly, wondering if, when he was finished, she
could borrow it to call Lottie.

  “Meal all right?”

  “Lovely, thanks.” Daisy reached forward and pinched a final piece of chocolate torte from her pudding plate.

  “Jones looks better anyway. God, he was in a filthy mood this morning.” The girl was stacking plates with the swift, expert touch of someone to whom it had become second nature. She popped used napkins in glasses and balanced them on top. “It’s good that he found a distraction for today.”

  “What? Why?”

  “His wife. His ex-wife, sorry. Got remarried today—midday, I think. He didn’t know what to do with himself.”

  The chocolate torte had somehow got stuck to the roof of Daisy’s mouth.

  “Oh, sorry. You’re not going out with him, are you?”

  Daisy forced herself to swallow. Smiled up at the girl’s concerned face.

  “No. God, no. Just doing the decor on his new place.”

  “The one at the seaside? Lovely. Can’t wait to see that. Just as well anyway.” The girl stooped low, glancing in the direction of the door. “We all love him to death, bless him, but he’s a complete slag. I reckon he must have slept with at least half the girls in this place.”

  JONES STOPPED TRYING TO MAKE CONVERSATION SOMEWHERE past Colchester. Asked Daisy if she was tired and, when she said yes, said he’d leave her to sleep if she liked. Daisy turned her face away from him and gazed out at the sodium-lit roads speeding past, wondering how she could accommodate so many conflicting emotions in one small, rather worn-out frame.

  She liked him. She’d probably known it from the moment he picked her up and infuriated her by failing to pay her any attention. She’d begun to admit it to herself when he was so uncharacteristically tender and solicitous when she cut her arm. He’d looked quite white when he saw how much she was bleeding, and the urgency with which he shouted at the yard staff and rushed her to the hospital had made her feel protected in a way that she hadn’t since Daniel left.

  But it had hit her with the force of a sledgehammer when that waitress mentioned the remarriage. She’d felt jealous. Jealous of the ex-wife for having been married to him, jealous of anyone who could still get him that rattled.