Windfallen

by Moyes, Jojo

  “Okay,” she said, trying not to sound as guarded as she felt.

  “I think we need to really get everything out in the open before we can put the past behind us.”

  She said nothing, hearing his attempts at casualness fall flat and feeling the faintest sense of foreboding, like the distant whistle of an approaching train.

  “It’s about what happened while we were apart.”

  “Nothing happened,” said Daisy. Too quickly.

  He swallowed audibly. “That’s what you might want to believe. But it did.”

  “Says who?”

  It would be Lottie, of course. Daisy knew that Lottie didn’t think they should get back together.

  “It was just a kiss,” he said.

  Then paused.

  “Nothing major. It was when I was at rock bottom, when I didn’t know whether I was going to come back.”

  Daisy let go of his hand, pushed herself upright on one elbow. “What did you say?”

  “It was only a kiss, Daise. But I thought I should be honest about it.”

  “You kissed someone else?”

  “While we were apart.”

  “Hang on, you were supposed to be having a nervous breakdown about coping with a new baby. Not putting yourself about around north London.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Daise—”

  “Wasn’t like what? So there I was with your mother telling me you were practically throwing yourself under a bus, not even well enough to talk to me, and all the while you were spreading it around Britain. Who was she, Dan?”

  “Look, don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit? It was one kiss.”

  “No, I don’t.” She swept the duvet up around her and climbed out of the bed, unwilling to admit to herself that the ferocity of her response might have been linked in any way to her own buried sense of guilt. “I’m going to sleep in the other room. Don’t follow me, and don’t start padding around the corridors,” she hissed. “You’ll wake the baby.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The bungalow, clad in bleached white clapboard and surrounded by a little garden of rusting sculptures, stood on the shingle an unneighborly hundred or so feet away from its cluster of neighbors. “I like it like that,” said Stephen Meeker as they looked out the window at the unobstructed view of the shore. “People don’t have an excuse to just pop in. I do hate it when people feel they can just pop in. It’s as if, when you’re retired, you should be grateful for any interruption in your dreary old day.”

  They sat over two mugs of tea in the sparsely decorated living room, the walls of which were hung with paintings of a quality completely at odds with the furniture and upholstery around them. Outside, the sea, glinting under an August sky, was unpopulated, the families and holidaymakers tending to stay up the coast in Merham’s sandier stretch of water. It was the second time in a week that Daisy had interrupted his dreary old day, but she had been welcomed, partly for the selection of magazines she’d brought him as a gift and partly because the time she wanted to talk about was one of the few periods of his life, he said, during which he’d been truly happy. “Julian was rather a lot of fun, you see,” he said. “Terrifically naughty, especially when it came to finances, but he had this knack for collecting people, in much the same way as he collected art. He was like his wife in that way. A pair of magpies.”

  He had loved Julian forever, he said, with a rapture that sat oddly on a stiff old man. In the 1960s, when Julian and Adeline had finally divorced, Stephen and Julian had moved into a little place in Bayswater together. “We still told people we were brothers. I never minded. Julian always got much more worked up about that kind of thing than I did.” Several of the paintings on the wall were gifts from Julian; at least one was by Frances, who had achieved a belated notoriety after being “claimed” by a feminist art historian several years previously. Daisy, who had been privately taken aback when she saw the signatures on the other canvases, noted with dismay the stained corners, the paper curling into the salt air.

  “Shouldn’t they be . . . in a safe somewhere?” she asked tactfully.

  “No one to look at them there,” he said. “No, dear, they will stay in my little hut with me till I pop off. Sweet lady, Frances. Terrible shame, all that business.”

  He had become rather animated when she’d shown him the Polaroids of the nearly finished mural, wistfully admiring the beauty of his younger self and pointing out names of those people he could remember. Julian, he told her sadly, would not be available for the party. “There’s no use contacting him, dear. He lives in a home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Totally gaga.” Minette he had last heard of in a commune in Wiltshire, and George was “something eminent” in economics at Oxford. “Married some viscountess or other. Terribly posh. Oh, and there’s Lottie’s young man. Or perhaps it was her sister’s . . . I forget. ‘The prince of pineapple,’ George used to call him. I’ll remember his name if you bear with me.”

  Daisy had been shocked to see the exotic, longhaired goddess of the mural named as Lottie. “She was rather a looker in those days, in an unconventional way, of course. A bit of a temper, but then I think some men found that rather attractive. Between us, I don’t think anybody was particularly surprised when she got herself into trouble.” He put his cup down on the table and chuckled to himself. “Julian always said, ‘Elle pète plus haut que son cul.’ Do you know what that means?” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “She farts higher than her ass.”

  DAISY WALKED SLOWLY BACK ALONG THE BEACH TOWARD Arcadia, her bare head hot under the midday sun, her feet, like the waves, pulling back from their intended path. The morning had been a pleasant diversion from the increasingly tense atmosphere at Arcadia. The hotel was gearing up for its finish, its rooms restored to their original, stark grandeur, the new furnishings placed and replaced until their aesthetics satisfied. The building almost hummed now, as if itself anticipating new life, a blood system of new visitors.

  So, among its people, one might have expected there to be an air of excitement or of achievement as the work finally drew to a close, but Daisy had rarely felt more miserable. Daniel had hardly spoken to her in forty-eight hours. Hal had finished the mural and disappeared without a word. Lottie, meanwhile, had been jumpy and bad-tempered, like a dog listening for the unseen approach of a thunderstorm. And all the while, outside, came the distant rumblings of dissent from the village. The local paper had now promoted what it called the “Red Rooms Hotel Row” to its front pages, from where it had been picked up by several nationals and reprinted as a typical “plucky villagers fight against impending change” story, illustrated with pictures of scantily clad female Red Rooms members. Daisy had deflected several calls onto Jones’s office, half wishing, as she did so, that she’d been brave enough to speak to him herself.

  Not that Jones’s London clientele were necessarily helping matters. A few of his closest drinking buddies, two of them actors, had come up to “lend some support.” When they realized that not only was the hotel not yet ready to offer overnight accommodation but that Jones’s bar was not yet stocked, they had been directed by one of the decorators to the Riviera, where, several hours later, Sylvia Rowan had ejected them for what she described later in the newspapers as “lewd and disgraceful behavior” toward one of her waitresses. The waitress, who seemed somewhat less perturbed, later sold her story to one of the tabloids and promptly handed in her notice, saying she had made more off that than the Rowans paid her in a year.

  The same tabloid had printed a picture of Jones, at some bar opening in central London. The woman who stood next to him had her hand clamped over his arm, like a talon.

  Daisy paused for a breather, glancing out at the pale blue arc of the sea, realizing with a pang that it would soon be her view no longer. That she would have to return with her beautiful, bonny child to a city of fumes and fug, of noise and clatter. I haven’t missed it, she thought. Not as much as I expected to anyway.

  London still felt inextrica
bly tied up with foreboding and unhappiness, a skin she had almost shed. But a life in Merham? Already she could envisage a time when its sociable confines would become stifling, when the neighborly interest of its inhabitants would feel like an intrusion. Merham was still locked into its past, and she, Daisy, needed to look forward, to move forward.

  She thought suddenly of Lottie. And then turned back toward the house. She would, she decided, think about leaving after she had sorted out the party. It was a pretty efficient way of not having to think about what she would be returning to.

  SHE HAD FOUND DANIEL IN THE SITWELL BATHROOM with one of the builders. He was holding a tile up against the wall, with a piece of dark paper behind it. The builder, Nev, a young man with curls of titian hair, was gazing disconsolately at a pot of white grout.

  She stopped in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

  Daniel glanced up, smiled at her. “Oh, hi. They were putting white grout with these tiles. I told them it should be black.”

  “And why would you do that?”

  Daisy stood very still, as Nev glanced back and forth between them. Daniel straightened and placed a tile carefully behind him.

  “The original plans. These shaped tiles were going to have black grouting. We agreed that it looked better, if you remember.”

  Daisy felt her jaw clench. She had never disagreed with him, had always capitulated to his vision. “Those plans have long since been changed. And I think it would be better for everybody if you didn’t get involved with matters that no longer concern you, don’t you?”

  “I was just trying to help, Daise,” he said, glancing at the other man. “It’s stupid me sitting around day after day with nothing to do. I was just trying to lend a hand.”

  “Well, don’t,” Daisy snapped.

  “I thought we were supposed to be a partnership.”

  “Gosh. So did I.”

  Daniel’s expression was startled, Daisy’s second mutiny of the past few days visibly sweeping other certainties away.

  “I can’t keep apologizing. If we’re going to move this on, we need to separate what happened between us from what happens with the business.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh, come on, Daise. . . .”

  She took a deep breath. “The company you were part of no longer exists.”

  Daniel looked at her, frowning.

  “What?”

  “Wiener and Parsons. I wound it up when I took this job. It no longer exists.” She paused. “I’m a sole trader, Daniel.”

  There was a long silence. Nev began to whistle nervously, examining the dried paint on his hands. Outside, scaffolding was being dismantled, its poles periodically falling to the ground with a muffled crash.

  Daniel moved his head from side to side and finally looked at her, his mouth set into a grim line. Then he handed the tile to Nev and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “You know what, Daisy? I think you’ve made that perfectly clear.”

  CAMILLE SAT IN THE FRONT OF THE BATTERED OLD FORD, listening to the sounds of Merham in high summer filter through the passenger window, mingling with Katie’s only half-heard chatter in the back and the smells of fuel and warm asphalt rising in waves off the road. Rollo sat on the floor wedged between her knees, his preferred mode of transport, while beside her, Hal sat still enough to not make the old leather interior squeak, his silence burning into her bones.

  She was going to have to tell him about the job. Three more weeks, Kay had said, and less than a month’s money in payoff. No one had come forward to buy the business, and, sorry though Kay was, she was not sorry enough to keep the damn thing open.

  Camille felt the weight of it like a cold stone in the pit of her stomach. She could have coped with the idea that they were going to struggle; she’d find work eventually, as would he. Their meager savings, along with the mural money, would see them through. But he’d been so difficult lately, so locked into himself. Any innocent query was greeted by a fierce denial or some biting, sarcastic response, so that she was left feeling at best unhelpful, at worst stupid.

  Because she couldn’t understand what was going on. She knew what the business had meant to him, that it was always going to be hard for him to let it go. But she had thought, had hoped, that he would lean on her a little, that it would be something they could go through together. Instead he’d made her feel redundant, a feeling she had chafed against her whole life, from the years at school when she had sat on the sidelines embroidering numbers on jersies, because of Lottie’s insistence that she should be included in everything, to now, when she had to ask shop assistants whether the clothes Katie had chosen were suitable or, as they occasionally had been, for someone ten years older. With a nice sideline in “extras.”

  The car stopped. She heard Katie scramble for the door, then back, and a cool, hurried kiss was plastered on her cheek.

  “Bye, Mum.”

  Camille leaned back, touching it with her hand, too slow to catch her quicksilver daughter, who was already out and running up the garden path of her school friend.

  “Hello, Katie. Go on through. She’s in her room.” She heard Michelle at her door and then Hal’s impatient jangling of the keys as she came toward the car.

  “Hi, Camille. Thought I’d just say hello. Sorry I missed you at school last week—I’ve been away on a training course.” A light touch on her shoulder. Michelle’s voice came at Camille at head height; she must have been crouching by the car door. She smelled vaguely of vanilla.

  “Anywhere nice?”

  “Lake District. Rained every day. I couldn’t believe it when Dave said it had been beautiful here.”

  Camille smiled, acutely conscious that, beside her, Hal hadn’t said a word in greeting. She heard a question in Michelle’s silence and tried to fill it.

  “We’re just off to the shops.”

  “Anything nice?”

  “Just to get a new dress for this hotel opening. You know, Hal’s been working at the house, along with Mum . . .”

  “I can’t wait to see it. I can’t understand what everyone’s getting so worked up about. It’s not like half of them will ever set foot inside it anyway.” Michelle sniffed. “That said, Dave’s mum’s very anti. She says if we let the Londoners in, we’ll have the asylum seekers here next . . . silly old bat.”

  “They’ll get used to it. Eventually.”

  “You’re right. I’d better let you go, then. Aren’t you lucky! I could never get Dave to come shopping with me. . . .” Michelle’s voice tailed away with awkwardness as she remembered why Hal might be going, too.

  “Oh, Hal only does it under protest,” Camille joked. “I have to buy him lunch afterward. And grovel a lot.”

  They separated with arrangements to pick Katie up at six and a promise of coffee later in the week. Camille heard her voice as if from a long way away. She smiled as she heard Michelle’s footfall disappearing up the path, and then, as Hal restarted the engine, she reached out her hand and stilled his.

  “Okay,” she said into the silence. “I can’t do this anymore. Are you going to leave me?”

  She hadn’t meant to ask, hadn’t even known that it was the question.

  She felt him turn to face her. This time the seat squeaked.

  “Am I leaving you?”

  “I just can’t tiptoe around you anymore, Hal. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and I don’t know what’s wrong with you, and I can’t keep groveling. I can’t keep trying to make things all right.”

  “You’re trying to make things all right?”

  “Not very well, obviously. I just need you to talk to me. Whatever it is. We said we were past this, didn’t we? That we were going to be honest?”

  “So you’ll be perfectly honest?”

  Camille frowned. Withdrew her hand. “Of course I will.”

  “Even about your bank account?”

  “What bank account
?”

  He paused. “Your new bank account.”

  “I don’t have a new bank account. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  She waited for him to say something.

  “Oh for God’s sakes, Hal, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You see the printed copies of all my statements, for crying out loud. You know all my bank accounts. You’d be the first to know if I opened a bloody new account.”

  There was a different tenor to his silence somehow. Then, “Oh, Christ.”

  “Christ what? Hal, what is this?”

  “Lottie. It’s your mother.”

  “My mother what?”

  “She’s set up an account in your name. She’s given you two hundred thousand pounds.”

  Camille turned so dramatically she made Rollo yelp.

  “What?”

  “From the sale of Arcadia. She’s set up this account in your name, and I thought—oh, God, Camille, I thought . . .” He started to laugh. She felt him shaking with it, sending tiny, rhythmic vibrations through the car. It sounded almost like he was in tears.

  “Two hundred thousand pounds? But why hasn’t she told me?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She doesn’t think we’re going to last. She wanted to make sure you were secure, even while I went down the drain. The useless husband who can’t even keep his own business going—how’s he meant to look after her little girl?”

  He sounded so bitter. But it held a twisted kernel of truth.

  She shook her head, sunk into her hands, thinking of what he must have thought, realizing how close they had come.

  “But she . . . the money—Oh, God, Hal, I’m so sorry. . . .”

  Below her feet Rollo whined to be allowed out. Hal reached an arm around her. Pulled her close to him, his other arm reaching around to hold her. She felt his breath in her ear.

  “No, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have talked to you. I’ve been such an idiot. . . .”

  They sat like that for some time, both oblivious, for their different reasons, to the curious glances of the people walking by, of the inquisitive (and perhaps reassured) gaze of Katie and her friend Jennifer from the upstairs window, from where, eventually bored, they tore themselves away.