Windfallen

by Moyes, Jojo

  Camille slowly, reluctantly, also peeled herself away, feeling the beginnings of perspiration where their bodies had welded themselves firmly together.

  “Still want to hit the shops?” Hal squeezed her hand, as if unwilling to completely relinquish his hold of her.

  Camille lifted a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  “No. Drive me to Arcadia, Hal. I’ve had just about enough of this.”

  DAISY CHECKED OFF THE WALLS AND FLOOR OF THE MAIN lounge, the bar area, the bedroom suites, and the kitchen. Then she checked every set of curtains, that they were hung correctly and that their folds fell evenly and without creases, and the light fittings, to see that they all worked and that every bulb was in place. Then she drew up a list of those jobs that had not yet been completed, those that had been completed wrongly, those items delivered and those that needed to be returned. She worked quietly, methodically, enjoying the cool of the fans (they had decided against air-conditioning) and the breeze that flowed freely through the many open windows. There was a kind of internal peace to be found in order, in routine. It made her understand a little better Daniel’s fierce need for things to be balanced and harmonious around him.

  He had made her a mug of tea, and they’d been civil with each other, managing to discuss Ellie’s preference for white over brown bread and the best method of peeling her grapes without any reference to their earlier exchange. He had taken his daughter into town, managing without prompting to remember her diaper bag, her water, some rusks in a plastic bag, and to slather her in sunblock. Ellie had squealed at him and gnawed voraciously on a wooden stick with bells on it, and he had chatted comfortably to her while crouching down and deftly fastening her into her pram.

  They’re building a relationship, thought Daisy, watching from the door. And wondering why her happiness in it felt so complicated.

  “Where’s he taking her?” Lottie was apparently finding it less easy relinquishing her charge.

  “Just to town.”

  “He doesn’t want to take her through the park. There’s dogs everywhere.”

  “Daniel will look after her.”

  “It’s stupid, people letting them run around without leashes like that. Not when there’s so many children about. I don’t know why people want to bring their dogs on holiday.”

  She had not been herself these last few days. She had snapped at Daisy when Daisy had asked her about her image on the mural, interested to know about the symbolism of their clothes, what they were holding. Daisy didn’t tell her what Stephen Meeker had said about temptation and the Old Testament. That he said the imagery had all been quite fitting when you knew that Lottie had tried to seduce the father of the family she was evacuated to. Or that among his old photographs was one of a young Lottie, heavily pregnant, sleeping half naked on a stone floor.

  “You wanted some of these old pictures and things for framing.” Lottie held out the box she’d been carrying under her arm.

  “Well, only ones you’re happy to let go. I don’t want any that have emotional significance for you . . .”

  Lottie shrugged, as if that were an alien concept. “I’ll sort them upstairs. Where it’s quiet.”

  She had tucked the box back under her arm and made her way briskly upstairs.

  Daisy stood watching her, listening to her footsteps echo along the corridor.

  Then turned at the sound of Aidan, yelling her name from the lobby.

  “Someone to see you,” he said, two nails sticking out of the corner of his mouth, his hands thrust deep in his suede apron. As she passed him, he raised an eyebrow, and she fought a sudden internal lurch at the prospect of Jones.

  Almost unconsciously she lifted a hand to her hair, attempting to smooth it away from her face.

  But it wasn’t Jones.

  Sylvia Rowan stood on the doorstep, her brightly colored jacket and leg warmers dominating the pale space around her. By her feet, drooling unpleasantly, sat her blank-eyed dog.

  “I’ve told your man there he might want to stop,” she said, smiling in the manner of a duchess waving at crowds.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Daisy.

  “Your builders. They need to stop.”

  “I think I’ll be the judge of—” Daisy was halted by Sylvia Rowan’s brandishing of a piece of paper. A little too close to her face.

  “Building Preservation Notice. Your hotel is now spot-listed and subject to an emergency listing. That means you are effectively a listed building for the next six months, so any building work has to be halted.”

  “What?”

  “It’s to stop you spoiling the building any more than you already have. It’s legally binding.”

  “But the work is practically finished.”

  “Well, you’ll have to apply for retrospective planning permission for it all. And reinstate anything that the planning people aren’t happy with. The odd wall perhaps. Or perhaps some of those windows.”

  Daisy thought in horror of the guests already lined up to stay. About the prospect of their unloading their bags to the sound of demolition work.

  “But I haven’t applied for listed status. Nor has Jones. The fact that it didn’t have any was one of its attractions.”

  “Anyone can apply for a spot listing, dear. In fact, it was you who gave me the idea, when you stood up and said what you were doing to the place. Still, it’s in all our interests to preserve our architectural heritage, isn’t it? Here’s your paperwork, and I suggest you ring your boss and tell him that he might as well postpone his opening.” She eyed Daisy’s bandaged arm. “I might ring the health and safety while I’m at it.”

  “Vindictive auld cow,” said Aidan. “I’m surprised she didn’t eat your baby, too.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Daisy, reading her way through the myriad clauses and subclauses of the paper in front of her. “Oh, hell. Look, Aidan. Do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Ring Jones. Tell him I’m out or something. But you tell him for me.”

  “Ah, come on, Daisy. That’s not my job.”

  “Please.” She tried to look endearing.

  Aidan raised an eyebrow. “Lover’s tiff, eh?”

  She needed it too badly to swear at him.

  LOTTIE HADN’T LOOKED AT THESE SINCE ADELINE HAD died. The fact that she’d stared at the top of the box for almost ten minutes suggested a certain reluctance to do so now. Stirring everything up again. Wasn’t that what Joe had called it? Memories of Arcadia, of her summer there, like the others, bright sparks turning in an orbit around a peacock-feathered sun.

  Easier not to look, thought Lottie, sighing, her hand resting on the lid. Easier not to awaken old feelings that had long been better buried. She’d proven very good at keeping things buried. But now Daisy wanted to bring everything out in the open, just as she’d uncovered the mural. And in a moment of weakness, when she’d been distracted by Camille and Hal or by her thoughts of cruises and how to avoid them, Lottie had said she would get the damn things out. Daisy wanted to make a wall of photographs. To frame as many photographs and sketches as they could and line the wall opposite the bar with them, a pictorial reminder that guests here were once part of the great tradition of an artistic retreat.

  Artistic retreat, thought Lottie wryly, opening the box. Apart from Frances there had been hardly an artist among them. No, she chided herself, remembering Ada Clayton. The artistry had been in their reinvention of themselves. In camouflage and cleverness, and in creating people they were not.

  Lottie stared at the open box, marveling that the simple act of taking a lid off a box could make her feel as giddy as if she were standing on a precipice. Ridiculous old woman, she told herself. They’re only pictures.

  But her hand, as she reached in, was shaking.

  On the top, now slightly sepia-tinted with age, stood Adeline, dressed as the raja of Rajasthan, her eyes glittering from under a turban, her boyish figure bound in a man’s silk jacket. Frances sa
t beside her, calm, but a slight knowingness around her eyes perhaps betraying some awful knowledge of her destiny even then. Lottie laid it on the newly buffed wooden floor. Next to it was one of Adeline and Julian laughing at something, followed by Stephen and some unnamed man she didn’t recognize.

  A charcoal drawing, probably by Frances, of an upturned dinghy.

  Another, cracked and yellowed where it had been folded, of George, asleep on some grass. They, and the others, were laid out in neat rows on the floor. A painting of her own, of the French house. She had been so heavily pregnant at the time that she’d been able to balance her paint box on top of her stomach.

  Then Lottie. Her eyes looking sideways up from under a sheet of dark hair, lightly sprinkled, as if she were some edible delicacy, with rosebuds.

  Lottie sat staring at her young self, feeling an indelible sadness, like a wave, wash over her. She paused, lifting her head toward the window, blinking back the tears before she returned to the box.

  And quickly shut it. Too late to have missed the lithe, strong limbs, the too-long chestnut hair granted a metallic sheen by the sun.

  She rested her hands on the lid, listening to the irregular sound of her heartbeat, her gaze averted from the box as if even looking at it could reimprint on her the image she had not wanted to see.

  There were no thoughts in her head.

  Just images, as random and snapshot as those in the box.

  She sat, motionless and silent. Then, eventually, like someone emerging from a dream, she placed the box on the floor beside her and stared at the photographs laid out on the wooden floor. She would give the whole thing to Daisy. Let her do what she wanted with them.

  After next week she wouldn’t be coming back, after all.

  Lottie had got used to the population of builders and decorators who popped up without warning in different parts of the house. So she barely looked up when the door opened. She had got down on her knees, ready to start gathering the pictures and putting them back in the box.

  “Mum?”

  Lottie glanced up to be met by the delighted face of Rollo.

  “Hello, love.” She sniffed, wiping at her face. “Just give me a chance to get up, will you?” She leaned forward stiffly, in order to lever herself upright on the arm of the chair.

  “What did you think you were doing, Mum?”

  Lottie had been about to rise but instead sat back heavily on her heels. Her daughter’s face was rigid, taut with some awful internal effort.

  “Camille?”

  “The money, Mum. What on earth did you think you were doing?”

  Camille stepped forward, so that one foot was unknowingly standing on two of the photographs. Lottie’s protest lodged in her throat—Camille’s hand was visibly shaking at the end of her dog leash.

  “I’ve never argued with you, Mum. You know I’ve always been grateful for everything you’ve done, with Katie and all. But it’s too much now, okay? This money thing—it’s too much.”

  “I was going to tell you, love.”

  Camille’s tone was glacial. “But you didn’t. You just steamed right in and tried to organize my life, like you always do.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Fair? True? You know what? You want to talk about truth? You’ve spent my whole life telling me I can do anything by myself—anything that a sighted person could do—and all the while you never actually believed it, all the while you were just planning safety nets for me.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with your sight.”

  “The hell it hasn’t.”

  “Any mother would do the same.”

  “No, Mum. No.” Camille stepped forward, leaving Rollo anxiously eyeing the photographs under her feet. “Any mother might make a provision in her will. Any mother might speak to the family. She wouldn’t go secretly siphoning off money because she thinks she’s the only one who can look after me.”

  “Oh, so what if I just want to make sure that you’d be okay, if . . . if Hal doesn’t stick around?”

  Camille’s frustration exploded. “Hal is around.”

  “Just.”

  “We’re all right, Mum. We’re making it work. At least we were until you stuck your oar in. How do you think this is supposed to make him feel? He thought I was planning on leaving him again, did you know that? He thought I was planning on leaving him, and he nearly left me first.”

  She breathed out hard, shaking her head. “God, you know, if you paid half as much attention to your own relationship as you do to everyone else’s, this family would all be so much happier. Why can’t you just focus on Pops for a change, huh? Instead of acting like he doesn’t bloody exist?”

  Lottie’s face sank into her hands. When she spoke, her words emerged half muffled, through her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I just wanted to make sure you were looked after. I just want you to be independent.”

  “In case Hal left me. Exactly. Because even though I was the one to have the affair, I was the one who put our marriage in danger, you still don’t trust him to stick around.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  Camille breathed out hard. “Because somewhere, deep inside you, Mum, you don’t believe that I’m worth sticking around for.”

  “No.” Lottie’s head shot up.

  “You can’t believe that anyone would want a blind woman as a partner. That eventually even Hal is going to get fed up.”

  “No.”

  “So how is it, Mum?”

  “Camille darling, all I ever wanted for you was a bit of independence.”

  “How the hell is your giving me money making me independent?”

  “It gives you freedom.”

  “And what if I don’t want freedom? What’s so wrong with being married, Mum? What’s so wrong with that?”

  Lottie looked up and directly at her daughter. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with being married. As long as you”—she paused, struggling for words—“as long as you do it for love.”

  DAISY SAT BESIDE THE TELEPHONE, CONSCIOUS OF Daniel’s brooding presence upstairs. He had not come down for food but sat listening to the radio in his room, telling Daisy politely that he just fancied some time to himself. She suspected he needed a break from it all, from the magnified atmosphere of the house, from the tinderbox of emotions that was their rekindled relationship. She didn’t object—she needed a break from it, too.

  Daisy had never thought of herself as someone for whom work could provide an escape. But she sat working her way through the list of names that Stephen had given her, grateful for the distraction. It was not a very long list. Two dead, one gaga, several more unavailable. It was not going to be quite the reunion she had originally anticipated.

  George Bern had made his apologies but said through his secretary that he and his wife were already booked that weekend. The artist Minette Charlerois, a divorcée called Irene Darling, and Stephen had all agreed to come. And, through Minette, several other artists of the age who did not appear on the mural but had apparently visited the house in its 1950s heyday.

  She had not told Lottie, having heard Lottie exclaim that she didn’t like parties anyway, so there was only one person on the mural now unaccounted for.

  Daisy lit a cigarette, swearing to herself that she would give up after the opening, and then choked slightly when, despite the international connection, the phone was answered more speedily than she’d expected.

  “Hola?” she said, and breathed out when she heard a British accent. She identified that he was the right person and went into her now well-rehearsed spiel about the celebratory party to mark the new hotel.

  The gentleman was very polite. He waited until she’d finished before he said he was flattered to be remembered but didn’t think he’d be able to come. “That . . . that was a very small part of my life.”

  “But you married someone from Merham, didn’t you?” said Lottie, scanning her notes. “That makes you an important part of this. We’ve unc
overed this mural, you see, and you’re on it.”

  “What?”

  “A mural. Painted by Frances Delahaye. You knew her?”

  He paused. “Yes, yes. I remember Frances.”

  Daisy pressed her ear closer to the receiver, gesturing into the air. “You must see it again. It’s been restored, and it’s going to be the key feature of the party, and it will be so wonderful to get all its subjects together again. Please. I’ll send transport and everything. You can bring your wife and children. They’d probably love it, too. Hell, bring your grandchildren! We’ll pay for them as well.” I’ll square it with Jones afterward, she thought, wincing. “Go on, Mr. Bancroft. It’s one day out of your life. One day.”

  There was a lengthy silence.

  “I’ll think about it. But it would just be me, Miss Parsons. My wife, Celia, passed away some time ago.” He paused, cleared his throat quietly. “And we never had children.”

  NINETEEN

  On the seventh day before the opening of Arcadia House as a hotel, Camille and Hal made the decision to put their house on the market. It was a big house, they told each other, too big for a family of three, and they were unlikely to have more children (although it wouldn’t be a disaster, said Hal, squeezing his wife). They began looking for something smaller, close to Katie’s school, but perhaps with workshops or a double garage so that while Hal took on another job, he could still pursue his restoration business until the economic climate meant he could try again. They made an appointment with an estate agent (tacitly avoiding that which employed Michael Bryant). They told Katie she would be allowed to choose all the furnishings for her new room and that, yes, of course there would still be room for Rollo. Then they instructed the bank to close the account opened by Lottie and return the money to her.

  Lottie rang twice. Both times Camille allowed the answering machine to pick up the message.

  On the sixth day before the opening of Arcadia, the planning people from the Department of National Heritage came to review the building’s emergency listing. Jones, who had been warned of this, arrived with his lawyer and an application for a Certificate of Immunity from Listing, which, he said, had been sent off to the secretary of state during the purchasing process and which, he had been assured by his best sources, would go through, thereby protecting them from the financial damage caused by an emergency listing. Despite that, the lawyer said, they were happy for the Department of National Heritage to take a close look at the work that had taken place, to arrange a possible time scale for any repairs that they might consider needed, and to speak at length to Daisy, who had in her possession all the relevant information and documentation relating to both the restorations and the condition of the building before those restorations had taken place.