Always and Forever (12 page)

‘It’s desperate,’ she confided. ‘When I think of how hard it was to get on the course, and now I’m here I can see that it’s a mistake.’ She could picture her mother’s face when she heard. Her mother had pushed for Daisy to do a secretarial course in Carrickwel so she’d always have a steady income. In one of the few battles she’d attempted with her mother, Daisy had said no. She’d been the best in her class at school at art and had dreamed of design col ege since she knew such a thing existed. There weren’t many of Daisy’s dreams within reach - being beautiful, thin, adored by her mother - she couldn’t let this vaguely achievable one escape.

‘Real y, Denise, you disappoint me,’ her mother had said in deeply betrayed tones. Her mother tended to cal her Denise, rarely Daisy. It was her father who’d cal ed her ‘my little Daisy’, the nickname that had somehow stuck. ‘After al we’ve been through surely you’d see the need for a sensible job, not a rackety one like your father had. I thought I’d taught you that

at least. But do what you want. Don’t think about what I want.’

Nan Farrel , as thin as the long cigarettes she chain-smoked, took out her cigarette case and flicked it open. It was silver and engraved, the one good thing she had left from her previous life as part of the Carrickwel elite. That life had ended when she’d got pregnant with Daisy - as she never ceased to remind her daughter - and had hit the real world with an almighty bang, married to a man who loved to enjoy himself and wasn’t interested in either roots or hard work.

‘It’s not as if my opinion has ever mattered to you.’

If only, Daisy thought. Her mother’s opinion was like the pyramids in relation to Cairo - huge, unyielding and no matter where you stood, you could stil feel their presence, even if you couldn’t see them.

The memory of the row and the glacier that stil existed between herself and her mother took away the happy glow Daisy had been experiencing from talking to Alex.

Forgetting for an instant that Alex was a gorgeous man and that she should have been puce with embarrassment just to be talking to him, Daisy leaned her head on her hands on the scratched pub table in the Shaman’s. ‘How can you have messed up your whole career when you’re twenty?’

she mumbled.

‘Al the best people do,’ Alex said, patting her arm. He let his fingers roam to the back of her neck where he touched her gently, stroking the soft caramel curls that had escaped from her ponytail. It felt gorgeous, so sexy. Daisy gulped and sat up, forcing Alex to move his hand. She could have stayed there for ever but a man’s attentions, the sort of thing that regularly happened to the likes of Jules and Fay, were not what she was equipped to deal with.

He didn’t appear to notice her jitteriness.

‘At least you know what you wanted to do. I didn’t, stil don’t,’ he said. ‘A business degree was the obvious choice for me but it doesn’t light my fire. It’s not on kids’ top-ten lists of

bril iant jobs, is it? What do you want to be when you grow%

up, son? Oh, Dad, I want to sit behind a desk and toil through spreadsheets for ever.’

He told her that he often felt like giving up col ege if it weren’t for the fact that his course guaranteed a good job at the end of it al . Money was important to him. Daisy got the impression, never voiced, that there hadn’t been much spare cash in the Kenny household. She could empathise with that. There hadn’t been much money in her house either. She and her mother lived in a smal terraced house in the centre of Carrickwel , not physical y far from the big house where her mother had grown up, but miles away social y. Daisy had been raised not to discuss money.

Nobody was to know that the gas heater was to be used sparingly, or that Sunday’s meat could be made to last until Wednesday if enough imagination was involved.

‘We’ve got our pride,’ Nan insisted.

Despite this, Daisy didn’t believe that money made you happy. Her mother had come from money and there was no proof anywhere that she’d ever had a happy family life, although she was probably more miserable without it than she had been with it.

Love, Daisy felt, was what mattered in life. Not money.

When Alex went to the bar in the Shaman’s to get her a drink, Daisy watched him and knew she must look like a spaniel trailing sad eyes after a departing master. Being aware of how others saw her was Daisy’s biggest failing.

She couldn’t walk into a room without wondering if people thought she looked like a whale in whatever she was wearing, and when she spoke during classes, she measured her words as careful y as she measured silk when she was cutting a pattern. Today, though, she wasn’t measuring her words or angling her thighs on the seat so that she looked thinner. That was the effect Alex had upon her.

And so they began to go out. They appeared an unlikely couple: the handsome, popular Alex, who could have hooked up with any girl he wanted, and Daisy, who was sweet and pretty certainly, but why didn’t she do something about her weight?

Other people didn’t see that gentle loving Daisy gave Alex security. Steady, warm, like hot tea in front of a fire, Daisy made the dynamic Alex Kenny feel as if he’d come home.

Daisy tried the Tiffany necklace on. Silver suited her. Gold could make redheads look brassy, she knew. Her mother, who had genuine blonde hair, had warned her so often enough. ‘It’s beautiful,’ breathed Daisy, turning to hug Alex again. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ he said woodenly, sitting down wearily on the end of the bed.

‘Oh, love, don’t be like that,’ said Daisy. ‘I know you’re nervous, I am too, but this is so important to us.’ ‘Daisy -‘ he began.

‘We can do it,’ she interrupted. For so long she’d hidden just how important a child was to her; now she had to convince him. ‘Alex, I want a baby so badly. I don’t talk about it but it haunts me.’ She sat down on the bed beside him and held his hands in hers. ‘When I go into work and Paula’s there, pregnant and so happy, it hurts me so much.

Not that I begrudge her a moment of her happiness, but I want that for me, for us. There are babies everywhere you look, did you know that?’ She squeezed his hand for support. ‘In the shop, on the streets, in Mo’s Diner sitting in highchairs staring around with big eyes. I never thought I’d feel this broodiness because it’s not as if I was madly into babies or eager to babysit al the time when I was growing up.’ Daisy’s words were tumbling out now. ‘If I’d had brothers or sisters, I’d maybe have had experience with younger children but I didn’t, so I didn’t think I was that maternal, but then whomp! It hit me.’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘Alex, I think about having a baby al the time. Every month, I feel I’ve failed when my period comes. We’ve been trying to

have a baby for five years now, that’s over sixty times of feeling! I’ve failed. I feel …’ she searched for the right word,

‘I feel! empty, not quite a proper woman. Only half a person.

It’s so lonely and sad, and I look at pregnant women or women with children and I feel I’m from another planet. That they’re part of this wonderful earth cycle of love and motherhood and I’m not. I’m different, excluded. They don’t have a clue that I want my own baby, they probably think I hate kids! But I want my own child so much it hurts. God, it hurts.’

She stopped, aware that he had said nothing al this time.

He was probably astonished at what she’d said. Daisy never quite told anybody everything, not even Alex. She thought it might be being an only child and not used to sharing confidences. She envied people who could tel their innermost feelings easily. But now that she’d done it, she’d found it was liberating and scary at the same time to reveal so much.

‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ he mumbled, not looking at her. ‘Why didn’t you tel me?’

‘We were trying to get pregnant,’ Daisy said lightly. ‘I sort of thought you’d know how much I wanted a child.’ Al this time, Daisy had been crossing her fingers and praying every time her period was due, even during the years when Alex had been sick and their lovemaking had been curtailed. How could he not have known?

‘I didn’t.’

‘It’s only an appointment,’ she begged. ‘It can’t hurt to go and see what they say. Please, Alex. For me. We’ve been through so much the past few years, with doctors and tests.

I know you hate al that.’ So had she. For every blood sample he’d given, Daisy wished she could have proffered her arm. And she’d been there with him through al of it.

Couldn’t it be her turn now? Alex looked as if he was under enormous strain but he nodded tightly. ‘We can go,’ he said final y. ‘If that’s real y what you want.’

Mel wished she’d had more time to make an effort for the Lorimar charity bal at the end of February. A black-tie event which al senior staff were expected to turn up at upon pain of death, it had been the subject of much discussion in the office for the past month.

One Lorimar contingent - a Samantha from Sex and the City lookalike from marketing, three executive assistants and the head of telesales - planned to go al out for Sex and the City glamour, with perilous heels, just-left-the-Elizabeth-Arden counter make-up and wildly contemporary outfits.

‘Lots of red lippy is the key,’ said the woman from marketing, who had spent hours on the party preparations, a mammoth task, which also involved ensuring that hundreds of red Lorimar bal oons would fal from the bal room ceiling when Edmund Moriarty announced a special Lorimar donation of 100,000 to the charity, a heart surgery research foundation. Edmund would go bal istic if his big moment was ruined, so most of marketing and a fair part of publicity were deployed on charity detail.

Another group of female staff were planning to get themselves fake-tanned to a decent colour, go to the hairdresser’s,

then dig out their reliable old black dresses, because nobody wanted to splash out on a new outfit for a mere office do. Vanessa had borrowed a red satin knock-out evening gown from her sister and said she was ful y expecting Hilary to go into cardiac arrest when she saw it.

‘Although there wil be lots of cardiologists on hand if she?

does,’ Vanessa said cheerful y.

And Mel … Mel had planned a bit of personal grooming!

time so she’d look her best on this important occasion. A new; dress, perhaps. Or a trendy haircut. Something to show the world, and the top people at Lorimar, that Mel Redmond had her finger on the pulse.

Yet somehow, with fifteen minutes to go before she and Adrian had to leave the house on the Saturday night in question, Mel was upstairs frantical y trying to revive her limp hair with a blast of hairspray. Her maquil age consisted of a faded bit of eyeliner that had original y been plastered on at nine that morning, and her skin tone was more Wet Weekend in Greenland than the delicious shade of Malibu Bronze most of the other Lorimar women were aiming for. Adrian was recovering from the flu and Mel realised miserably that even he looked better than she did.

Feeling worn out after a hectic day and an even more hectic month, al she wanted to do was lie down on the bed and sleep. Her diary had been black with dates for the whole of February. The second Friday of the month had whole of February. The second Friday of the month had been Adrian’s younger brother, Eddie’s, fortieth birthday and the landmark party had involved a big meal for the extended family in his favourite restaurant.

‘My kid brother, forty …’ Adrian kept remarking in an astonished way. ‘It seems so old. I can remember us talking about what it would be like to be forty.’

‘It was like being a mil ion years old,’ reflected Eddie. ‘It seemed so far away. I sort of hoped I’d be forty before you because I was fed up with being two years younger and you got to do everything first.’

‘For you to be forty first, Adrian would have had to have died,’ said their mother, Lynda.

‘Just as wel it didn’t happen then,’ Eddie said gravely,

‘although I came close to kil ing you often enough, big bro.’

The fol owing weekend, Mel’s aunt and uncle celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary and their children organised a big lunch party in a Dublin hotel, complete with a band playing Jim Reeves songs, and enlarged photos on the wal s of the happy couple during their married life.

Arrangements of pale pink roses decorated the tables, and to recreate the whole wedding effect, which had original y been low key because of a lack of funds, there was a blessing by the parish priest, champagne toasts and speeches.

‘It’s such an emotional event, isn’t it?’ said one of the guests dreamily to Mel after Uncle Dermot reduced the whole room to floods of tears by tel ing them how he didn’t want to cope a single day without his Angela.

‘Er, yes, very emotional,’ replied Mel, sweat ruining her hair as she rushed off after Carrie, who’d run rampant as soon as she realised that the hotel was the perfect place for escaping her mother. So far, Carrie had hidden in a stal in the women’s loos, under the draped tablecloth where the anniversary cake stood in state, and behind the swing door into the kitchen. ‘Sit down and rest and I’l take care of Carrie,’ said Mel’s mum, as Mel sprinted past.

Mel stopped and thought of how her high-heeled party sandals were kil ing her and how the people who organised these events and invited children never seemed to plan anything specifical y for them. ‘Children welcome!’ meant nothing when it didn’t include a special child-friendly room where parents could alternate care while round-the-clock Barney’s Great Adventure/One Hundred and One Dalmatians played on the video. Or else on-demand tranquil isers for the parents. Those glasses of red wine sitting invitingly at the edges of the tables were like a magnet for a child of Carrie’s age.

‘You’re tired, Mel. Have a sit-down with Adrian. Get yourself a piece of the cake, go on. I’l keep an eye on her.’ Karen got up from her seat and began to head off after the lilac-clad whirlwind that was Carrie.

‘No, Mum, it’s OK. You do enough,’ Mel said firmly. If her feet hurt, she’d just take her shoes off. Who’d notice? ‘Next thing, Carrie wil think you’re her mother and not me!’ The brittle laugh that accompanied this comment didn’t escape either of them.