Windfallen (30 page)

She paused awhile at the fruit-and-veg stall, loading up with carrots to mash for Ellie and fruit for herself. You didn’t have to cook fruit.

It was as she collected her change that she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Are you the girl at the actress’s house?”

“Sorry?” Daisy turned from her organic reverie to find a middle-aged woman, sporting the kind of quilted green jacket favored by horse owners and a burgundy felt hat pulled low over her head. Less conventionally, on her lower legs, she wore dark red leg warmers and a pair of stout walking shoes. She was also, like her rather fleabitten Alsatian, standing slightly too close.

“Are you the girl at Arcadia House? The one who’s ripping it all to bits?”

Her tone was aggressive enough to draw the attention of several passersby. They turned, curious, their intended purchases still in their hands.

“I’m not ‘ripping it to bits,’ as you say, no. But, yes, I am the designer who’s working on Arcadia House.”

“And is it true you’re going to put a public bar in? To attract all sorts of London types?”

“There is going to be a bar, yes. I can’t say who the clientele are likely to be, because I’m only in charge of the decor.”

The woman’s face was getting steadily more pink. Her voice carried in the manner of someone who liked having her opinions heard. Her dog, apparently unnoticed, was meanwhile edging its nose uncomfortably close to Daisy’s crotch. She made a tiny move as if to shoo it away, but it just looked steadily at her from blank yellow eyes and moved its nose slowly nearer.

“I am Sylvia Rowan. I own the Riviera. And I feel obliged to tell you, we don’t want another hotel around here. Especially not one that’s going to attract all sorts of undesirables.”

“I hardly think—”

“Because it’s not that kind of town. You wouldn’t know, but we’ve worked jolly hard to keep this town special.”

“It may be special, but I hardly think you’re ring-fencing the Vatican.”

There were at least four other faces drawing closer now, waiting for the next chapter in the exchange. Daisy felt vulnerable with her daughter in front of her, and it made her unusually aggressive in return.

“Anything we’re doing at the hotel we’re doing with planning permission. And any bar will no doubt have the approval of the appropriate licensing authorities. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“You don’t understand, do you?”

Sylvia Rowan planted herself firmly in front of Ellie’s pram, so that Daisy would have to either steer around her into the growing crowd of onlookers or run her over. The dog stood eyeing her crotch with something that could have been either enthusiasm or malevolence. It was hard to tell.

“I have lived in this town all my life, and we have all fought hard to maintain certain standards here,” Sylvia Rowan brayed, pointing her wallet toward Daisy’s chest. “This includes stopping endless bars and cafés from cluttering up the seafront, unlike so many other seaside towns. That way it is still a pleasant place for its residents to live and a desirable place for visitors to come and stay.”

“And nothing to do with the fact that your hotel runs one of the bars.”

“That has nothing to do with it. I have lived here all my life.”

“Which is why you probably can’t see how run-down it’s got.”

“Look, Miss . . . whoever you are. We don’t want lowlife here. And we don’t want to be swamped with Soho’s drunken overflow. It’s not that kind of town.”

“And Arcadia House is not going to be that kind of hotel. For your information, the clientele are going to be very upmarket, the kinds of people happy to pay two or three hundred pounds a night for a room. And those kinds of people expect taste, decorum, and a lot of bloody peace and quiet. So why don’t you just get your facts straight and leave me alone to do my job.”

Daisy wheeled her pram around, ignoring the potatoes that toppled out of the top of her shopping bag, and began to walk briskly back across the market square, blinking furiously. She turned, shouting on the wind, “And you should train your dog better! It is incredibly rude.”

“You can tell your boss, young lady. You haven’t heard the last of this!” Sylvia Rowan’s voice carried across the square.
“We are the people of England . . . and we have not spoken yet.”

“Oh, bog off, you horrible old bag,” Daisy muttered, and then, safely out of sight of onlookers, stopped her pram, lit her fifth cigarette of the day, and inhaled deeply. And burst into tears.

D
aisy Parsons had grown up the kind of young woman about whom older people murmur approvingly, “Lovely girl.” And she was lovely; she was a sweet child, with the ringleted blond locks of a Miss Pears model, a ready smile, and a desire to please. She was educated privately, liked by everyone at her school, and worked industriously to pass exams in architecture, art, and design, in which, her tutors said, she had “a good eye.” Into her teens, apart from a brief, unsuccessful experiment with vegetable hair dye, she had done nothing to frighten her parents or leave them sleepless and frantic in the early hours of the morning. Her boyfriends had been few, selective, and generally nice. She had let them go regretfully, usually with some apologetic tears, so that nearly all looked back on her without rancor and most usually as “the one that got away.”

And then Daniel had come: tall, dark, handsome Daniel with his respectable parents (both accountants), Protestant work ethic, and exacting style. The kind of man that made other girls immediately dissatisfied with their own. Daniel had come to protect her just at a time when she was starting to weary of having to look after herself, and both had adapted to their respective roles within the relationship with the contented shimmying of a chicken settling down to roost. Daniel was the driving force in the business, the strong, forthright one. The protector. This freed Daisy up to become her perfect version of herself: beautiful, sweet, sexy, confident in his adoration. A lovely girl. Both saw the perfect vision of themselves reflected in the other’s eyes, and liked it. They rarely argued; there was little need. Besides, neither of them liked the emotional messiness of argument, unless they knew it to be the snappings of foreplay.

Which was why nothing had prepared Daisy for this new life, thrust permanently into a spotlight of disapproval and almost incessantly in dispute—with builders, townspeople, Daniel’s parents—all at a time when she felt most vulnerable and without even her traditional armor of loveliness to fall back on. The plumbers, apparently oblivious to her pleadings, had gone off to work on another job, because they couldn’t start installing the bathrooms until the builders had finished laying the surface over the new septic tank. The builders couldn’t lay the surface, as they were waiting for parts. The suppliers had apparently emigrated. Sylvia Rowan, according to talk, was planning a public meeting to object to the desecration of Arcadia House and the risk to the standards, morals, and general well-being of Merham’s citizens if the work was allowed to continue.

Jones, meanwhile, had called in a cold fury the day after her confrontation in the marketplace and unleashed a verbal torrent on the various ways in which she had already failed to come up to scratch. He could not believe they were already running behind schedule. He could not understand why the supporting beam, when it finally arrived, was the wrong width. He had little faith that they were going to be able to open, as planned, in August. And, to be frank, he was very much starting to doubt whether Daisy was committed and possessed the ability to complete the job to his satisfaction.

“You’re not giving me a chance,” said Daisy, biting back tears.

“You have no idea how much of a chance I’m giving you,” he said, and rang off.

Mrs. Bernard had appeared in the doorway with Ellie. “You don’t want to start crying,” she said, nodding toward the terrace. “They’re not taking you seriously as it is. You start blubbering everywhere, they’ll have you down as all hair and hormones.”

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Bernard. That’s really helpful.”

“I’m just saying, you don’t want them walking all over you.”

“And
I’m
just saying, when I want your bloody opinion, I’ll bloody ask for it.”

Daisy had swept a folder of papers off the table and marched outside to finally lose her temper with the builders, only the second time she’d lost her temper in her life (the first had been when Daniel admitted he’d consigned Mr. Rabbit to the dustbin on the grounds that he lowered the tone of their bedroom). This time she shouted so loudly that her voice could be heard as far as the church, as could a choice selection of threats and expletives filtering through air more used to the cry of gulls and guillemots. The radio, meanwhile, was seen on a rapid trajectory through the air above the cliff path before shattering down onto the rocks below. It was followed by a lengthy silence and then the muttering and slow shuffling of feet as six recalcitrant builders finally found other ways to occupy themselves.

Daisy reemerged into the house, hands on hips as if resting on a holster, fired up, as the builders would later mutter, and ready to blow again.

This time she was met with silence. Mrs. Bernard and Ellie, smiles on both their faces, had disappeared back into the kitchen.

“S
O HOW’S IT GOING UP THERE
?”

Camille folded the plastic layer over the perfumed cream and then placed her mother’s hands in the heated mitts. It was the only treatment she’d agree to, a weekly manicure. Facials, body wraps—they were all a waste of time, but her hands she had always taken care of. She had decided a long time ago: If touch was one of the main means by which she would be communicating with her daughter, then that touch should always be a pleasant one.

“It’s going.”

“Are you finding it difficult?”

“Me?” Her mother sniffed. “No. Doesn’t make any difference to me what they do to it. But I think the poor girl’s struggling a bit.”

“Why?” Camille moved across to the door to shout for a cup of tea. “Tess said she heard she was on her own with a baby.”

“She is on her own. And a face like a wet weekend half the time. The workmen think she’s a joke.”

“Do you think she’ll cope?”

“On current form? Probably not. She finds it hard to say boo to a goose. I can’t see how she’s going to renovate a hotel. She’s only got till August.”

“Poor girl.”

Camille came and sat down, facing her mother. “We should go up there. To see her. She’s probably lonely.” She reached behind her and, without fumbling, located cream, which she began to apply to her own hands.

“I go all the time.”

“You go for the baby. Even I know that.”

“She doesn’t want you blundering in. It’ll look like I’ve been talking about her.”

“You
have
been talking about her. Come on, we’ll make it a day out. Katie would love it. She hasn’t been in there for years.”

“Shouldn’t Hal be working?”

“Hal is entitled to take a weekend, Mum, just like the rest of us.”

Her mother sniffed.

“Look, you don’t want her to get too miserable, Mum. If she goes, we’ll get some idiot up wanting to install gold pedestals and Jacuzzis and what have you. Oh, hello, Tess. White no sugar when you’re ready. You’ll have satellite dishes off the side of it and executive conferences there every weekend.”

“You okay, Mrs. Bernard?”

“Fine thanks, Tess. This daughter of mine is trying to stick her nose in up at Arcadia.”

Tess shook her head, grinning. “Ooh, Camille, you don’t want to go getting involved with that little lot. You know there’s going to be a battle over that hotel. Sylvia Rowan has been in here shouting the odds all morning. ‘It wouldn’t have happened in the old days of the Guest House Association,’” she mimicked.

Camille placed the cream behind her back on the shelf and shut a cupboard door. “All the more reason to show the girl a friendly face or two. God knows what she thinks she’s let herself in for.”

Mrs. Bernard shook her head irritably. “Oh, all right. We’ll go up Sunday. I’ll tell the girl to prepare for an invasion.”

“Good. But you’ve got to bring Pops as well. He’s actually quite interested in seeing what she’s doing.”

“Yes, well, he would be.”

“What?”

“He thinks that now that the house is gone I’ll be spending all my time at home with him.”

T
HEY ALL CAME, IN THE END
. A
BERNARD FAMILY OUTING
, as Camille’s father jovially put it, offloading everyone from his beloved Jaguar onto the gravel drive. “I tell you what, chaps. I can’t remember the last time we all went out together.”

Daisy, standing at the door in her one good shirt, Ellie on her hip, eyed this Mr. Bernard with interest. Mrs. Bernard had seemed a solitary character, so that it was quite hard now to reconcile her with this bluff, gentle man with apologetic eyes and hands the size of hams. He was wearing a shirt and tie, the kind of man who always did on weekends, and highly polished shoes. You could tell a lot about a man from the shine on his shoes, he told her later. The first time he had met Hal and his brown suede numbers, he thought he must be a communist. Or a fairy.

“Katie’s christening,” called Camille, who was holding the back door as Katie and Rollo poured out of the car. She waved in the general direction of the house. “Hello. Camille Hatton.”

“That doesn’t count,” said Hal. “Hardly an outing.”

“And I don’t remember it,” said Katie.

“Mother’s Day three years ago. When we took you and Camille to that restaurant over at Halstead . . . what was it?”

“Overrated.”

“Thank you, Mother-in-law. French, wasn’t it?”

“The only thing French about that place was the smell off the drains. I’ve brought some cakes. Didn’t want you to go to any trouble.” Mrs. Bernard handed Daisy the box that she’d held on her lap, then, in exchange, reached out and took the compliant Ellie from her mother.

“How lovely,” said Daisy, who was beginning to feel invisible. “Thank you.”

“We had a grand time,” said Mr. Bernard, shaking Daisy’s hand warmly. “I had steak au poivre. I still remember it. And Katie had seafood, didn’t you, love?”