Always and Forever (9 page)

They’d sold

buckets of them in the shop, though. Daisy’s style might waver when it came to dressing herself, but her instinct was spot on when it came to her job.

‘How do you do it?’ asked people, fascinated at how she knew the shop’s customers would buy the clothes she bought at the fashion fairs six months in advance of stocking them. ‘You pick clothes in January and then when summer comes, you hope they’re in fashion and that women here buy them?’ was the usual question when Daisy explained what being the fashion buyer for Georgia’s Tiara meant. ‘How do you know they’l like them?’

‘I don’t,’ Daisy would say pleasantly. ‘I’ve been doing it for years and it’s a combination of experience, skil and, wel

… you’ve got to have an eye for it.’

‘Ah.’ That answer pleased most of the crowd because an eye was the same thing as luck: you either had it or you didn’t. They could not be blamed for not having an eye, and therefore not having the apparent good fortune of Daisy Farrel . A nice apartment in the restored old mil in the centre of Carrickwel , a lovely red sporty car, two decent holidays a year, not to mention al that flying to fashion fairs in Germany and London, having champagne in club class, and a man like Alex Kenny. Some women had al the luck.

‘Don’t tel them that it’s just down to having an eye for fashion. You make it sound too simple,’ Alex chided. ‘Tel fashion. You make it sound too simple,’ Alex chided. ‘Tel them it’s bloody hard work and there’s no guarantee you’l sel a single thing you buy.’

Alex worked in investment banking in Dublin city, a job where it was mandatory to blow your own trumpet. Even after fourteen years with Daisy, Alex stil couldn’t understand her natural reticence. She was bril iant at what she did - what was wrong with tel ing people? And Daisy, safe in the love of the one person in the world who made her feel good about herself, laughed and said that being a fashion buyer was impossible to explain to the uninitiated. It was like wearing Prada and looking effortlessly cool, so effortlessly cool that nobody would ever guess al the hard work that went into the whole outfit. Besides, Daisy, like al people who doubted their worth, had a horror of boring other people. She felt she’d bore everyone rigid if she told them about the years of fol owing fashion from the sidelines and of how she’d tried to make clothes from odd scraps of fabric almost before she was old enough to sew. Daisy might have been blessed with an eye for fashion, but her lengthy apprenticeship had sharpened it.

‘It’s a female thing,’ she added. ‘Women don’t like showing off.’

‘It’s a Daisy thing,’ Alex replied. ‘My office is ful of women who have no qualms about tel ing people how talented they are.

‘Only because they’re trying to impress you,’ Daisy laughed. And it was true. At thirty-six, Alex stil had the physique of the col ege rower he’d once been. Long and lean, he looked good in his office suits, even better out of them, and his glossy wolf’s pelt hair and strong, intel igent face meant that women noticed him. One of the many, many things Daisy loved about him was that Alex didn’t notice them back.

It never occurred to her that he might ever have to worry about men noticing her. Daisy had no il usions about her own beauty. A person didn’t grow up overhearing their mother cal them an ugly duckling, like Daisy’s mother did, without drawing their own conclusions. But she had style, fabulous shoes, and Alex, the man she’d adored since their first meeting in a dingy col ege pub a lifetime ago.

Her beloved Alex was linked to the three questions that Daisy real y hated. First up was, ‘Are you and Alex ever going to get married, Daisy?’

Short answer: ‘Perhaps,’ delivered with a little smile that hinted at plans for something elegant on a far-flung beach where the party could pick exotic blooms to hang behind their ears as they stood, barefoot, in the sand. A Vera Wang dress, privately

designed rings, and a select beachside party for their smal group of friends, fol owed by a relaxed gathering in a restaurant when! they got home from the honeymoon.

Daisy’s real answer was: ‘I’d love to but Alex’s not interested, we’ve talked about it but he’s not real y into marriage. Why fix what’s not broken,’ he says.’ She’d said it to Mary Dil on, her partner in the shop.

That’s such a man thing to say,’ remarked Mary, who was just divorced and stil inhabiting the al -men-are-pigs zone.

Mary had started Georgia’s Tiara ten years before, and Daisy had § come on board shortly afterwards. Together, they made a great team.

‘Getting married isn’t about not fixing anything. It’s a bigger commitment, that’s al ,’ Mary went on. ‘It’s Alex saying he wants the world to know he’s going to be with you for ever.

Living with someone can’t do that. Mind you,’ she added gloomily, ‘if I’d just lived with Bart instead of being stupid enough to marry him, we mightn’t have ended up paying the lawyers so much.

Every time I see my lawyer in his new Porsche, I feel like saying I own an eighth of that car, so when can I borrow it?’

‘Yes …’ said Daisy, wishing she hadn’t started this. Mary was not the sort of woman to cal a spade a metal digging implement and Daisy had just broken her own steadfast rule about couple loyalty. Never speak about your loved one in a negative way. Anything else was too like what she’d grown up with. ‘I suppose I can see Alex’s point,’ Daisy went on untruthful y, backtracking out of guilt. It had been a private conversation with Alex. What on earth had made her spil it al out to Mary? ‘We are happy as we are. I must be premenstrual, that’s it. Ignore me.’

The only plus about not having plans to get married meant that Daisy didn’t have to think about the dilemma of inviting both her parents to the wedding. It had been years since Daisy’s mother had tolerated being in the same town as her father, much less the same room. Nan Farrel had insisted that her husband move out of Carrickwel years ago so she could pretend - to herself, at least - that she was stil a person of consequence in the town. Daisy’s father had drifted in and out of her life for years. He lived in San Francisco now and seemed perfectly happy to send and receive nothing more than a Christmas card.

Whenever Vogue had a feature on beautiful brides, Daisy contented herself with the knowledge that she had commitment without the need for an intricate seating plan to keep al her family happy. Her family had been a bit of a non-family al her life. And surely, she reasoned, it was more modern to live with a loved one than rush up the aisle just for the sake of it?

Her second most hated question was even more personal.

‘How did you lose al the weight?’ interrogated al the people who hadn’t seen her for years and who remembered Daisy as the rounded creature she would always remain in her head. Ignoring the rudeness of the question - weight was a terribly personal matter and yet so many recklessly demanded to know what you ate for breakfast if it would help them lose a few pounds - Daisy would say that she hadn’t done a thing.

Honestly.

For al his charming sociability, Alex was incredibly private and hated anyone knowing he’d been sick, so she couldn’t say that the sheer worry she’d gone through over the two years of his mystery il ness meant the weight, three stones of it, had just melted away.

‘Not Weight Watchers, not the Atkins?’ people would then say suspiciously, clearly convinced she was lying through her teeth, lived on nothing but cabbage soup and probably had terrible problems with bad breath.

‘Not a thing,’ Daisy replied, privately wondering was there an opening in the book world for the Epstein Barr Virus Diet. Alex looked great now. Thanks to the last year as a patient of the fabulous Dr Verdan, he was glowing with health and brimming with his old energy. He was taking enough health

supplements to open his own shop, but they al seemed to be’ working. She hoped the ones she’d begged him to ask Dr Verdan for were helping.

Which led on to the third question, the one that wasn’t asked quite as often. Apparently, people were more aware of the delicacy of asking it these days, so that when a woman reached a certain age and no children had appeared, only the bumbling lumbered in and asked: ‘What about kids? Don’t you want them?’ Unfortunately, there were lots of bumblers out there, people who thought it was perfectly acceptable to ask a healthy thirty-five-year-old woman with a long-term partner if she’d ever considered the notion of children.

Hel , no, Daisy wanted to yel at them. ‘We thought about it but we’ve heard that a child costs 30,000 euro in its first five years, so we’re going to the Bahamas instead.’ Only an answer so flippant could disguise the genuine physical pain she felt when asked such a question.

Because Daisy didn’t want children. She craved them, yearned for them, cried for them in her sleep.

When she was thirty, she’d stopped taking the pil . ‘It’l be fun making babies,’ Alex had said at the time. And it had been. Making love and hoping to get pregnant instead of the reverse was very sexy.

‘The mother of my children,’ Alex liked to murmur when he lay above her, his naked body moulded perfectly against her soft lush one.

Daisy had no particular love for her body. It was so defiantly different from what she’d have liked it to be, with rounded everything and fat that spil ed out over her size fourteen waistbands, making her move miserably on to size sixteen.

But when Alex was holding her gently, and her strawberry-blonde hair streamed around her, creamy skin pil owed out below him as they tried to conceive their child, that was the only time when she felt that she was almost beautiful.

Making babies didn’t work out to be as straightforward as they’d thought, however. It was as if simply deciding to have one, instead of trying hard not to, had suddenly made pregnancy very difficult to achieve.

Magazines were ful of miserable stories about declining fertility and how women were leaving it too late to conceive.

Daisy hated those articles ever since the day she’d grasped the horrific news that women were born with al the eggs they were ever going to have and it was al downhil from then on. ‘You mean, we don’t make new eggs al the time?’ she asked Paula, who worked in the shop and was addicted to health websites. ‘I thought everything in the human body got replaced every seven years. I read that, I know I did,’ Daisy added anxiously.

‘No,’ said Paula cheerily. ‘You’ve got your lot, I’m afraid.

When you’re thirty, so are your eggs.’

Daisy blanched at the thought of her then thirty-year-old eggs and al the things her body had been through.

Could too much alcohol affect your eggs? Think of al those mad nights in her twenties when she’d had so much to drink that she’d almost drunk herself sober. Or drugs. Remember Werner, the Austrian student friend of Alex’s who’d been very keen on smoking dope and who’d encouraged a disapproving Daisy to have a joint with the rest of them on that holiday. She’d never done drugs before, she disapproved of drugs, for heaven’s sake, but she’d been stupid and said yes, and she knew that would come back to haunt her. Stupid cow, how could she not have known about her eggs?

Paula, who was younger than Daisy, didn’t seem too worried about the state of her ovaries and the fact that she hadn’t hatched anything, so to speak.

‘Ah, sure, what’l be wil be,’ she said optimistical y. ‘Life is not a Doris Day song,’ a little voice inside Daisy’s head raged bitterly. Aloud she said: ‘You’re dead right, Paula. It’s crazy to obsess over these things. We’re only young, after al , and there’s loads of things they can do now to help you have children.’

That thought, the thought of experiments at the cutting edge of science where people would be able to have babies without even being on the same continent as each other, kept her going. Cutting back on caffeine didn’t kickstart Daisy’s reproductive system. Neither did eating al the socal ed superfoods. The vegetable basket looked almost alive with al the green stuff in it, and Daisy did her best to cut down the glasses of wine at the weekend. But her periods came with a regularity she’d sworn wasn’t there in the days when she hadn’t wanted to get pregnant. Stil , there was time on their side, she counsel ed herself. They were young, healthy, successful in everything they touched.

Georgia’s Tiara became more and more prosperous. Mary gave Daisy a share in the shop.

‘I can sel ice to the Eskimos but I wouldn’t be able to sel it unless you got the right ice,’ Mary said firmly. ‘You’ve put so much effort and energy into this business, you deserve to be a partner.’

Daisy had covered her mouth with her hands like a child.

‘Mary, I can’t believe it. You’re so good to me.’ ‘Nonsense.’

Brisk was Mary’s middle name. ‘You’re so good to me, and for the shop. Running a business is second nature to me but I could spend a month of Sundays trying to learn what you do, and I’d stil never manage it.’

Buoyed up by this - even her mother would have to say she was doing wel - Daisy decided that she wasn’t pregnant because the time wasn’t right. It was like that old Buddhist saying: when the student is ready, the master wil appear.

She obviously wasn’t ready. Career women had so much trouble balancing kids and work that it was probably easier at this point in her life not to have a child. Then, after a year of baby making, Alex became sick. It seemed incredible that it had taken so long to get a diagnosis and they had gone through the seven val eys of hel before they’d found out what it was. Even now, Daisy quaked at the thought of what it could have been. She and Alex had suspected leukaemia. Now, she always put money in col ection tins that had anything to do with cancer as if to ward off the evil.

But the bugbear had been Epstein Barr, an autoimmune disorder that turned normal y energetic people into wrecks.

Hard to detect and even harder to cure, the il ness had taken its tol on both Alex and Daisy. Baby-making had not been on the agenda then, but it was at the back of Daisy’s mind constantly, the sense of time passing slowly and of her elderly eggs getting even older. She also worried, although she would never say it, that Alex’s il ness was part of the problem. And now they’d come out of the fire, together. For the past two years, Alex had been healthy and said he felt great. She felt great. She was going to get pregnant. It was her time, time to find out why she wasn’t conceiving, if there was a problem with Alex’s sperm due to the Epstein Barr, and to do something about it. The student was ready.