Windfallen

  The shouting woke the baby, who began to cry, eyes screwed shut against whatever disturbance had interrupted her dreams.

  "Oh, now see what you've done." Daisy unstrapped the baby from the seat and pulled her to her chest.

  "No need to get hysterical, darling. Someone has to be practical. Has he agreed to pay the rent?"

  Daisy's voice was icy. "We didn't exactly get as far as that discussion."

  "And what about the business? What about that big project you said you were taking on?"

  Daisy settled Ellie onto her breast, turning slightly away from the door. She had forgotten about the hotel. "I don't know. I can't think about that now, Ju. It's all I can do to get through each day in one piece."

  "Well. I think it's time I came home with you and got you sorted out. Then we can have a sit-down and work out what we're going to do about your and my little niece's future. And in the meantime I think I'll give Marjorie Wiener a call and tell her exactly what I think of her precious son."

  Daisy held on to her baby daughter, feeling the familiar waves of weariness sweep over her. As Ellie finished, pushing Daisy's nipple rudely out of her mouth, Daisy stood and pulled her jumper down.

  Her sister stood staring at her.

  "Gosh, you are having problems getting that baby fat off, aren't you, darling? I tell you what, when we've sorted you out at home, I'll enroll you in one of those slimmer's courses. My treat. If you look a bit more together, you'll feel so much better, I promise."

  DANIEL WIENER AND DAISY PARSONS HAD LIVED TOGETHER in their one-bedroom flat in Primrose Hill for almost five years, during which time the area had become almost unbearably trendy and their rent had risen accordingly unbearably. Daisy would have been quite happy to leave; as their fledgling interior design business grew, she hankered after tall ceilings and French windows, utility rooms and pantries. A back garden. But Daniel had insisted they stay in Primrose Hill; the address was better for clients than some more spacious address in Hackney or Islington. Look at their quality of life, he argued. The elegant Georgian houses, the "gastropubs" and restaurants, Primrose Hill itself for picnics in the summer. And their flat was beautiful; based above a designer shoe shop, it had a huge Regency-style living room and a bedroom with a tiny balcony that looked out over everyone else's walled and snail-ridden gardens. They had made clever modifications: a washing machine wedged into a cupboard, a shower fitted into a corner alcove. A tiny, minimalist kitchen with a chic minirange cooker and oversize extractor hood. In the summer they had often squeezed two chairs onto the balcony and sipped at their wine, congratulating themselves on where they were, how far they had come, bathed in the evening sun and the idea that their home and its surroundings were a reflection of themselves.

  Then Ellie had arrived. And somehow that charm had ebbed away as the flat had gradually shrunk, its walls closing in, the remaining space increasingly cluttered with piles of damp stretchies, half-empty packets of baby wipes, soft toys in garish colors. It had begun with the flowers, bouquet after bouquet, arriving relentlessly, filling up all the shelf space until they had run out of vases and had to put them in the bath. The blooms became oppressive, the stale stink of their water permeating the flat, Daisy too exhausted and too overwhelmed to address them. And then, slowly, creepingly, there was less and less room to move; they waded around the flat, picking their way over piles of unironed clothes or shrink-wrapped boulders of diapers. The high chair that her cousins had sent stood unused in its box, taking up what they had thought of as the library corner; a plastic baby bath stood propped against the wall in the hall, leaning against the baby buggy that never quite folded enough, while Ellie's crib sat flush next to their bed, pushed up against the wall so that if Daisy wanted to go to the loo in the night, she had to either climb over Daniel or slide down toward the foot of the bed. And then, invariably, the sound of the flush would wake Ellie, and Daniel would bury his head under the pillow and rail against the unfairness of his life.

  She hadn't cleaned since he'd gone. She'd meant to, but somehow the days and nights had all melded together, and she seemed to have spent most of them pinned to their once pristine beige linen sofa, Ellie feeding in her arms, staring unseeing at the vacuous daytime television or weeping at the picture of them all, entwined, on the mantelpiece. And slowly, without Daniel to wash up in the evening or take out the rubbish (how was she meant to carry a trash bag and a baby down two flights of steep stairs?), it had all gradually built up around her, and the piles of pooed-upon white undershirts and soft, stained dungarees had taken on a kind of unapproachable quality, had become something altogether too big to confront. And the detritus had begun to take over, to become part of the furnishings as it enclosed her, so that she started not even to see it. And faced with this chaos she had worn the same pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt every day, because they were slung over the chair and therefore visible, and she had eaten crisps or packets of chocolate-covered biscuits from the convenience store, because actually cooking something would have meant she had to wash up first.

  "Okay. Now I'm worried."

  Her sister had stood, shaking her head in disbelief, the cool smell of her Anais Anais almost drowned out by the pungent, unsanitary one of used diapers, several of which lay on the floor where they had been removed, their contents exposed to the air.

  "Gracious, Daisy, what have you done? How have you let this get so bad?"

  Daisy didn't know. It felt like someone else's home.

  "Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness."

  The three of them stood inside the front door, Ellie jiggled in her mother's arms, refreshed and looking around.

  "I'll have to phone Don. Tell him I'm staying over. I can't leave you like this." She began to move swiftly around the room, collecting up soiled dishes, tossing baby clothes into a pile by the coffee table. "I told him I was only coming in to buy a couple of new duvet sets for the barn."

  "Don't tell him, Ju."

  Her sister stopped, looked at her directly.

  "Don's knowing is not going to make this go away, sweetheart. It seems to me there's been far too much not facing up to things around here."

  SHE HAD SENT DAISY OUT IN THE END, TO WALK ELLIE around the park. When she'd said Daisy was just "getting under her feet," she'd known it to be not just a figure of speech. It had given her a little time to breathe; it was as if it were the first time she'd known what she was doing in weeks. Not that that helped particularly; the pain just became more acute. Please let him come home, she begged silently, murmuring the words so that passersby looked sharply and surreptitiously up at her. Just let him come home. By the time she returned, her sister had somehow magicked the flat into order, even filling a vase with fresh flowers and placing it on the mantelpiece.

  "If he does return to his senses," Julia said in explanation, "you want him to think you're doing fine by yourself. You want to look like you're together." She paused. "Little shit."

  But I'm not together, Daisy wanted to scream. I can't eat, I can't sleep. I can't even watch television because I'm too busy looking out the window in case he happens to walk by. I don't know who I'm meant to be without him. But there was little one could tell Julia Warren about pulling oneself together. After her first husband had died, she had observed a decent period of mourning, then thrown herself into a selection of dating clubs (intimate dinners a specialty), and after a couple of false starts, she had cultivated and won Don Warren, a Weybridge businessman with his own detached house, a successful printed-label business, and a head of thick, dark hair and a trim waistline that, in Julia's view, had made him something of a catch among ladies of a certain age. ("They're all bald, by that age, you see, sweetheart. Or with half a ton of blubber hanging over their belts. And I can't be doing with all that.") And the then Julia Bartlett was something of a catch herself: independently well-off, perennially well turned out (she had never been seen without her makeup, she liked to say. With both husbands she had risen twenty minutes before them to ensure
she looked "done"), and a bed-and-breakfast business in her barn that she refused to relinquish, despite not needing the money, because one never knew apparently. One just never knew.

  As had just been proven by her sister.

  "I've been looking through your bank statements, Daise. And you're really going to have to get something sorted out."

  "You did what? You had no right. They're private."

  "If they're private, darling, they should have been filed away, and not left sitting on your coffee table where anyone could see them. Anyway. With your outgoings I think you've got about another three weeks before you're eating into your savings. And I took the liberty of opening a couple of these letters, and I'm afraid your landlord--who frankly sounds like a bit of a moneygrubber to me--is going to raise your rent in May. So you're going to have to think about whether you can really afford to keep this place on. It seems frightfully expensive for what it is, I have to say."

  Daisy handed Ellie to her sister, the fight ebbed out of her. "That's Primrose Hill."

  "Well, you're going to have to think about cutting your cloth. Or else get in touch with that Child Support thingy. The one where they get people to cough up."

  Daisy shook her head. "I don't think it's come to that, Ju."

  "Well, how else are you going to support yourself? The Wieners are loaded. They aren't going to miss a few thou, are they?" She sat down, brushing imaginary crumbs from the sofa and gazing adoringly at her niece.

  "Look, darling, I've been having a think while you were out. And I think if Daniel doesn't come back within another week, then we should really bring you home. I'll give you the little self-contained flat in the barn for nothing, just until you're up on your feet, and then you've got your privacy. But Don and I will be just at the other end of the garden. And there are lots of interior decorators in Weybridge--I'm sure Don can ask some of his business associates to see if anyone's got an opening for you."

  Weybridge. Daisy suddenly pictured herself consigned forever to pelmeted swags and mock-Tudor executive homes for comedians in golfing shoes.

  "It's not really me, Ju. My inspiration is a bit more . . . urban."

  "Your inspiration is more Dumpster at the moment, Daisy. Well. The offer is there. Now, I'm going to catch the train back tonight after all, as we've got a dinner. But I'm coming back down in the morning, and I'll take little Ellie off you for a couple of hours. There's a nice man in that hairdresser's across the road who's agreed to fit you in tomorrow for a cut and blow-dry. We'll have you smartened up in no time."

  She turned to look at Daisy as she knotted her scarf, ready to go. "You've got to face up to this, darling. I know it's painful. But it's not just about you anymore."

  A FRIEND OF HERS HAD ONCE DESCRIBED IT AS LIKE waking up with your mother's body. Staring at her postbaby figure in the long mirror, Daisy thought longingly of what she remembered of her mother's neatly contained shape. I'm just spilling out all over, she thought miserably, eyeing the saddlebags of flesh on her thighs, the newly creepy skin clinging unenthusiastically to her stomach. I went to bed and woke up with my grandmother's body.

  He had told her once that the moment he saw her he knew he wouldn't be able to relax again until he had her. She'd liked that "had," with its intimations of sex and possession. But that had been when she'd dressed her size-eight figure in skintight leathers, in fitted tops that showed off her sculpted waist and high breasts. That was when she was blond and golden and carefree, back when she despised any woman over a size twelve for her lack of self-control. Now those pert breasts managed to look swollen and collapsed at the same time, blue-veined and apologetic, occasionally and inappropriately leaking milk. Her eyes were small pink punctuation points at the top of smudged blue shadows. She couldn't sleep; she hadn't slept more than two hours at a time since Ellie was born, and now she lay restlessly awake even when her daughter slept. Her hair was greasy, scraped back into an old toweling band so that a good two inches of darker roots showed through. Her pores were so open she was surprised she couldn't hear the wind whistling through them.

  She regarded herself coldly, with her sister's assessing gaze. It was no wonder he hadn't wanted her. Daisy let a hot, fat tear squeeze its way out and trail a salty path down her cheek. You were supposed to get back in shape quickly after having a baby. Pull in your pelvic floor at traffic lights, run up and down stairs to retone your thighs. It was the rules. She thought back, as she had done several thousand times, to the few occasions he had made advances toward her since Ellie's birth, and to her exhausted, tearful refusals. He'd made her feel like a piece of meat, she had told him crossly on one occasion. There was Ellie pawing at her all day, and now he wanted to do the same. She thought of the shock and hurt on his face and wished she could rewind the clock. I just want my Daisy back, he'd said, sadly. She'd wanted her, too. She still did, torn between the fierce, overwhelming love for her child and a desperate hankering for the girl she used to be, for the life she used to have.

  For Daniel.

  She flinched as the telephone rang in the living room, her very being tensed toward anything that might wake the baby. She grabbed a cardigan and threw it around herself, just making the phone before the answering machine cut in.

  "Mr. Wiener?" asked the voice in the other end.

  It wasn't him. She let out a small breath of disappointment, bracing herself for another conversation. "No. He's not here."

  "Is that Daisy Parsons? Jones here. From the Red Rooms. We met a few weeks ago about my hotel? Well, I met your partner anyway."

  "Oh. Yes."

  "It's just that you were going to put a start date in writing for me. And I don't seem to have had anything."

  "Oh."

  There was a short pause.

  "Have I called at a bad time?" His voice was gruff, aged by spirits or tobacco.

  "No. Sorry . . ." She took a long gulp of air. "I--It's been a difficult day."

  "Yes. Well. Can you give me a start date in writing?"

  "For the hotel?"

  He sounded impatient now. "Yessss. The one you quoted for."

  Daisy closed her eyes. "It's just--Things have changed a little since we last spoke."

  "I've told you. That price was my absolute limit."

  "No--no, not the costings. Er . . ." She wondered if she was going to be able to say it without crying. She took a long, slow breath. "It's just that my partner . . . well, he . . . he's left."

  There was a silence.

  "I see. Well, what does this mean? Are you still in business? Are you honoring contracts?"

  "Yes." She'd said it on automatic pilot. He didn't know he'd been their only one.

  He thought for a minute. "Well, if you can still guarantee me the same job, I can live with that. You ran through your plans pretty comprehensively. . . ." He paused. "Had a partner walk out on me once, when I was starting out. Never realized till he was gone, but it was the making of me."

  He paused again, as if uncomfortable with revelation.

  "Anyway. You've still got the job if you want it. I liked what you had planned."

  Daisy started to interrupt him, then stopped herself. She stared around her, at the flat that no longer felt like home. At the home that might not be hers for much longer anyway.

  "Miss Parsons?"

  "Yes," she said slowly. "Yes, I do."

  "Good."

  "There was just one thing."

  "What?"

  "We--I mean, I like to live on-site while I'm working. Would that be a problem?"

  "It's pretty basic . . . but, no, I guess I've got no problem with that. You've just had a baby, haven't you?"

  "Yes."

  "You might want to make sure the heating's working first. It can still be a bit bracing up there. For another month or so."

  "I'll also need a retainer. Would five percent be acceptable to you?"

  "I can live with that."

  "Mr. Jones, I'll put something in the post tonight."

  "J
ones. It's just Jones. I'll see you on-site."

  Daisy stared at the telephone receiver in her hand, marveling at the insanity of what she'd just done. She thought of Hammersmith Bridge, and Weybridge, and of Don's friends, glad-handing her with patronizing eyes. Poor old Daisy. Mind you, not too surprising when you looked at how she'd let herself go. She thought of her sister, "just popping in" to the barn, to make sure she wasn't comfort-eating her way through another packet of biscuits. She thought of the unnamed seaside town, and salt air and clear skies, and not having to wake up every morning in what had been their shared bed. A chance to breathe, away from mess and history. She didn't think how she was actually going to manage the job single-handedly. It felt like the least of her problems.

  In the next room Ellie began to cry again, her thin wail swiftly building to a crescendo. But as she went to her, Daisy didn't flinch. For the first time in weeks, she felt something close to relief.

  TEN

  You know, I'd never seen underwear like it in my life. Hardly anything to it, just little whispers of lace, it was. Well. If I put that on, I thought, it wouldn't be mutton dressed as lamb--it would be mutton tied up in a string bag." Evie Newcomb started to laugh, and Camille paused, not wanting to get any cream in her eyes.

  "You should see some of the stuff they have in these catalogs. I tell you what, Camille love, you wouldn't want to be wearing it on a cold day. And it's not even the fabric--although you know I used to work in the rag trade, and frankly the quality left a little something to be desired--it's the ruddy holes they put in everywhere! Holes in places you wouldn't believe. Well. There was one pair of drawers I looked at, and I couldn't have told you which holes you put your legs in, that's for sure."

  Camille smoothed Evie's hair back under the white cotton hair band and began sweeping her hands gently across her forehead.

  "As for the accessories, or whatever you call them . . . well, I looked and looked, but I couldn't work out what half of them were for. And you wouldn't want to be doing the wrong thing with them, would you? I mean, you wouldn't want to end up down the hospital explaining that little lot to a doctor. No, I left them well alone."