Windfallen

by Moyes, Jojo

  “Will you at least talk to me?”

  “Love?” Hal’s tone was gentle, insistent. “Lottie’s really sorry. About everything.”

  “Go on, Camille,” said her father. A tone she remembered from her childhood. “Your mother’s been big enough to apologize. The least you can do is have the grace to hear her out.”

  Camille suspected she had been outmaneuvered. Her head was filled with the sound of chanting, with the chatter and clink of partying guests. “Walk me through these people to the house. We’ll find somewhere quiet. First I need to get Rollo a bowl of water.”

  Her mother, unusually, did not take her elbow. Instead she let her cool, dry hand slide into Camille’s own, as if she herself were seeking reassurance. Feeling inexplicably saddened by this gesture, Camille found herself squeezing it in response.

  Rollo moved forward tentatively under the harness, pausing as he tried to determine the most obstacle-free path through the moving throng of people. Camille felt his anxiety travel down the harness, and she called softly to him, trying to reassure him. He didn’t like parties, a little like Lottie herself. She closed her hands, aware that in some way she was having to reassure both. “Head for the kitchen,” she told her mother.

  Almost halfway across the terrace (it was hard to judge, with all these people) Camille was halted by a hand on her arm. A floral scent: Daisy.

  “I’m so hot I think I’m going to melt. I’ve had to send Ellie indoors with the bar staff.”

  “I’ll pick her up in a moment,” said Lottie, a little defensively. “I just wanted a word with Camille.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Daisy, who didn’t appear to be listening. “Can I just borrow you for five minutes, Lottie? There’s someone I want you to meet.” Camille felt them all moving forward. Daisy’s voice dipped diplomatically, so that Camille had to strain to make out what she said. “He says he’s a widower and he’s got no children, and I think he’s feeling a bit lonely. I don’t think he’s really enjoying himself.”

  “What makes you think I’ll be any good talking to him?” Her mother, Camille knew, wanted them to be alone.

  “Have you all got glasses?” A low voice, a woman’s. Someone Camille didn’t recognize. “Jones is going to do his speech in a minute.”

  “He’s one of the mural people,” said Daisy. “I don’t know, Lottie. I thought you might know each other.”

  Camille, who had been about to protest that Rollo really needed his drink, felt her mother stop abruptly in her tracks and a tiny, almost inaudible noise escape from the back of her throat. Her hand, in Camille’s, began to shake, first tremulously and then uncontrollably, so that Camille, shocked, dropped Rollo’s harness to take hold of it with both of her own.

  “Mum?”

  There was no reply.

  Camille, feeling panicked, her mother’s hand still shaking in hers, turned around.

  “Mum? . . . Mum? . . . Daisy? What’s happening?”

  She heard Daisy lean across her, an urgent whisper. Was Lottie all right?

  Still nothing.

  Camille heard the sound of footsteps approaching slowly. Her mother’s hand was shaking so hard.

  “Mum?”

  “Lottie?” A man’s voice, elderly.

  Her voice, when it came, was a bewildered whisper. “Guy?”

  KATIE HAD SPILLED ORANGE JUICE ALL OVER HER DRESS. Hal was stooped, trying to wipe it off with a paper napkin, telling her, as he had done a thousand times, that it was time she calmed down, took things a little more slowly, remembered she was in company, when some strange change in atmosphere gradually drew his attention to the far side of the terrace. It wasn’t the tiny gray cloud that had managed, in an endless blue sky, to direct its path over the sun, casting the proceedings into a temporary shade. It wasn’t the hubbub of conversation, gradually ebbing as Jones stood and prepared to make his speech. Several feet from the mural, with an uncertain Camille clutching at her arm, Lottie was standing directly in front of an elderly man. They were just staring at each other, unspeaking, their faces brimful of some emotion.

  Hal, perplexed by the tableau, stared for some minutes. He stared at the unfamiliar old man, at Camille beside him, unconsciously echoing his stiff-legged stance, and then, as if for the first time, at the stubby features of his father-in-law, who was watching, ashen-faced and silent, from the doorway of the drawing room, two drinks motionless in his hands.

  And then he saw it.

  And for the first time in his life, Hal thanked God his wife could not see. And realized that for all the counseling and relationship guidelines in the world, for all the saved couples and restored marriages, there were some times in a life when keeping a secret from one’s spouse was going to be entirely the right thing to do.

  DAISY HAD WATCHED THE TWO OLD PEOPLE AS THEY walked unobtrusively down the stone steps toward the beach. Barely touching, both as self-consciously erect as if they were waiting for some blow to fall, they walked cautiously and in perfect time, like veteran soldiers reunited after a long war. But as she turned, about to try to convey to Camille something of what she’d seen, something of the expressions on their faces, Hal had whisked her away, and Carol had thrust a glass into her hand. “Stay put, darling,” she commanded. “Jones is no doubt going to give you a mention, bless him.”

  And then Daisy had briefly forgotten them, had found her attention drawn to him, to his weatherbeaten face, to his oversize frame, which always made her think of one of those Russian bears, forced against their will to entertain. And listening to his commanding voice echo out across the early evening, the trace of the Valleys offsetting the gruffness with a melodic lilt, Daisy was overcome by a sudden fear that she had realized too late what it was she wanted. That she could no longer protect herself against it. That no matter how inappropriate, how hazardous, how ill timed, she would rather him be her mistake than someone else’s.

  She watched him gesturing toward the house, heard the polite laughter, heard the people on each side of her, smiling, wanting to approve, ready to admire. She stared at the house, at the building she knew better than her own self, and the view beyond it, the brilliant arc of blue. She heard her name mentioned and a polite smattering of applause. And then, finally, her eyes met his, and in that split second, as the cloud moved off the sun and reflooded the space with light, she tried to convey to him every single thing she had learned, everything she knew.

  As it finished, and the people turned away, back to their drinks, back to their broken conversation, she watched him step down from the stone wall and more slowly toward her, his eyes still on hers, as if in acknowledgment. And stopped, in horror, as Daniel launched himself out from behind the privet hedge and without warning, but with a terrible, strangulated war cry, punched Jones full in the face.

  TWENTY

  The noise of the radio filtered downward, passing through the bedroom door, floating down the stairs to where Camille and Hal stood, facing each other with indecision on their faces, the third time in as many hours that they’d done so.

  Joe had been there all evening, since returning home straight-shouldered and silent, accompanied by their feeble and muted inquiries as to whether he was all right and harder, unspoken ones about what they had just seen. He’d said he didn’t want any tea, thank you. Nor did he need any company. He was going upstairs to listen to the radio. Sorry if he sounded inhospitable, but there it was. (They were welcome to stay downstairs, if that was what they really wanted. Help themselves, of course.)

  And that had been it. For the best part of three hours. While they conversed in whispers, fielded questions from Katie, who, exhausted, was lying in front of the television with Rollo, and tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to track down his wife.

  “Is she going to leave him, Hal? Do you think that’s what it is? Is she going to leave Pops?” The relaxed, sunfilled aspect of Camille’s face had vanished, to be replaced by a dark anxiety. And somewhere in there, an anger.

  Hal smoothed
her hair back from her hot forehead, glanced up the stairs. “I don’t know, love.”

  He had told her most of what he knew, holding both her hands, like someone breaking bad news. That the man had looked like an older version of the one in the mural, that the briefest measure of the way they’d looked at each other had dispelled any lingering uncertainties Hal might have had about what that meant. He had struggled to convey how the old man had reached out and touched Lottie’s face, how she had not ducked away from the contact but stood, like someone waiting to be blessed. Camille had listened and wept and made him describe the mural to her again and again, dissecting it for symbolism, slowly building a picture of why her mother’s behavior, far from being inexplicable, was something they could have—perhaps should have—understood long ago.

  Several times Hal had cursed himself for the role he’d unwittingly played in uncovering Lottie’s history, in bringing it back to life. “I should have left that painting as it was,” he said, shaking his head. “If I hadn’t brought this whole thing back into the open, perhaps she wouldn’t have gone.”

  Camille’s response had been resigned, an unwilling acknowledgment. “She’s been gone for years.”

  At half past nine, when the dusky sky finally abdicated to an inky black, when Katie had finally fallen asleep on the sofa, when they had called everyone they knew, when they had tried Daisy’s mobile number for the seventeenth time (and considered, and decided against, calling the police), Camille had turned to her husband, her sightless eyes filled with a bitter zeal.

  “Go and find her, Hal. She’s done everything else to him. She at least owes him the decency to let him know.”

  DAISY WAITED FOR SEVERAL MINUTES FOR THE MACHINE to spit out her change and then, conscious of the bored gazes of those around her, gave up and tentatively carried the two plastic cups of coffee over to Jones.

  They had been in the emergency room almost three hours now, their speedy admission to a triage nurse falsely raising their hopes that they might be seen, bandaged, and leave. No, said the nurse, pointing them toward X-ray. They would need to get a picture of his nose first, as well as one of his head, and then Jones would have to wait for the consultant to realign the break. “We’d normally let you home. But it’s a bad one,” she said cheerfully, packing his bloodied nostrils with gauze strips and saline. “Don’t want any stray bits of cartilage floating around in there, do we?”

  “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.

  AT 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.

  HE LIVED IN SPAIN. HE HAD RETIRED THERE SEVERAL years ago, after allo
wing 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.”