Windfallen, Page 38

  She stopped in the doorway.

  "What are you doing?" she said, as neutrally as she could manage.

  Daniel glanced up, smiled at her. "Oh, hi. They were putting white grout with these tiles. I told them it should be black."

  "And why would you do that?"

  Daisy stood very still, as Nev glanced back and forth between them. Daniel straightened and placed a tile carefully behind him.

  "The original plans. These shaped tiles were going to have black grouting. We agreed that it looked better, if you remember."

  Daisy felt her jaw clench. She had never disagreed with him, had always capitulated to his vision. "Those plans have long since been changed. And I think it would be better for everybody if you didn't get involved with matters that no longer concern you, don't you?"

  "I was just trying to help, Daise," he said, glancing at the other man. "It's stupid me sitting around day after day with nothing to do. I was just trying to lend a hand."

  "Well, don't," Daisy snapped.

  "I thought we were supposed to be a partnership."

  "Gosh. So did I."

  Daniel's expression was startled, Daisy's second mutiny of the past few days visibly sweeping other certainties away.

  "I can't keep apologizing. If we're going to move this on, we need to separate what happened between us from what happens with the business."

  "It's not that simple."

  "Oh, come on, Daise. . . ."

  She took a deep breath. "The company you were part of no longer exists."

  Daniel looked at her, frowning.

  "What?"

  "Wiener and Parsons. I wound it up when I took this job. It no longer exists." She paused. "I'm a sole trader, Daniel."

  There was a long silence. Nev began to whistle nervously, examining the dried paint on his hands. Outside, scaffolding was being dismantled, its poles periodically falling to the ground with a muffled crash.

  Daniel moved his head from side to side and finally looked at her, his mouth set into a grim line. Then he handed the tile to Nev and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  "You know what, Daisy? I think you've made that perfectly clear."

  CAMILLE SAT IN THE FRONT OF THE BATTERED OLD FORD, listening to the sounds of Merham in high summer filter through the passenger window, mingling with Katie's only half-heard chatter in the back and the smells of fuel and warm asphalt rising in waves off the road. Rollo sat on the floor wedged between her knees, his preferred mode of transport, while beside her, Hal sat still enough to not make the old leather interior squeak, his silence burning into her bones.

  She was going to have to tell him about the job. Three more weeks, Kay had said, and less than a month's money in payoff. No one had come forward to buy the business, and, sorry though Kay was, she was not sorry enough to keep the damn thing open.

  Camille felt the weight of it like a cold stone in the pit of her stomach. She could have coped with the idea that they were going to struggle; she'd find work eventually, as would he. Their meager savings, along with the mural money, would see them through. But he'd been so difficult lately, so locked into himself. Any innocent query was greeted by a fierce denial or some biting, sarcastic response, so that she was left feeling at best unhelpful, at worst stupid.

  Because she couldn't understand what was going on. She knew what the business had meant to him, that it was always going to be hard for him to let it go. But she had thought, had hoped, that he would lean on her a little, that it would be something they could go through together. Instead he'd made her feel redundant, a feeling she had chafed against her whole life, from the years at school when she had sat on the sidelines embroidering numbers on jersies, because of Lottie's insistence that she should be included in everything, to now, when she had to ask shop assistants whether the clothes Katie had chosen were suitable or, as they occasionally had been, for someone ten years older. With a nice sideline in "extras."

  The car stopped. She heard Katie scramble for the door, then back, and a cool, hurried kiss was plastered on her cheek.

  "Bye, Mum."

  Camille leaned back, touching it with her hand, too slow to catch her quicksilver daughter, who was already out and running up the garden path of her school friend.

  "Hello, Katie. Go on through. She's in her room." She heard Michelle at her door and then Hal's impatient jangling of the keys as she came toward the car.

  "Hi, Camille. Thought I'd just say hello. Sorry I missed you at school last week--I've been away on a training course." A light touch on her shoulder. Michelle's voice came at Camille at head height; she must have been crouching by the car door. She smelled vaguely of vanilla.

  "Anywhere nice?"

  "Lake District. Rained every day. I couldn't believe it when Dave said it had been beautiful here."

  Camille smiled, acutely conscious that, beside her, Hal hadn't said a word in greeting. She heard a question in Michelle's silence and tried to fill it.

  "We're just off to the shops."

  "Anything nice?"

  "Just to get a new dress for this hotel opening. You know, Hal's been working at the house, along with Mum . . ."

  "I can't wait to see it. I can't understand what everyone's getting so worked up about. It's not like half of them will ever set foot inside it anyway." Michelle sniffed. "That said, Dave's mum's very anti. She says if we let the Londoners in, we'll have the asylum seekers here next . . . silly old bat."

  "They'll get used to it. Eventually."

  "You're right. I'd better let you go, then. Aren't you lucky! I could never get Dave to come shopping with me. . . ." Michelle's voice tailed away with awkwardness as she remembered why Hal might be going, too.

  "Oh, Hal only does it under protest," Camille joked. "I have to buy him lunch afterward. And grovel a lot."

  They separated with arrangements to pick Katie up at six and a promise of coffee later in the week. Camille heard her voice as if from a long way away. She smiled as she heard Michelle's footfall disappearing up the path, and then, as Hal restarted the engine, she reached out her hand and stilled his.

  "Okay," she said into the silence. "I can't do this anymore. Are you going to leave me?"

  She hadn't meant to ask, hadn't even known that it was the question.

  She felt him turn to face her. This time the seat squeaked.

  "Am I leaving you?"

  "I just can't tiptoe around you anymore, Hal. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and I don't know what's wrong with you, and I can't keep groveling. I can't keep trying to make things all right."

  "You're trying to make things all right?"

  "Not very well, obviously. I just need you to talk to me. Whatever it is. We said we were past this, didn't we? That we were going to be honest?"

  "So you'll be perfectly honest?"

  Camille frowned. Withdrew her hand. "Of course I will."

  "Even about your bank account?"

  "What bank account?"

  He paused. "Your new bank account."

  "I don't have a new bank account. What's that got to do with anything?"

  She waited for him to say something.

  "Oh for God's sakes, Hal, I don't know what you're talking about. You see the printed copies of all my statements, for crying out loud. You know all my bank accounts. You'd be the first to know if I opened a bloody new account."

  There was a different tenor to his silence somehow. Then, "Oh, Christ."

  "Christ what? Hal, what is this?"

  "Lottie. It's your mother."

  "My mother what?"

  "She's set up an account in your name. She's given you two hundred thousand pounds."

  Camille turned so dramatically she made Rollo yelp.

  "What?"

  "From the sale of Arcadia. She's set up this account in your name, and I thought--oh, God, Camille, I thought . . ." He started to laugh. She felt him shaking with it, sending tiny, rhythmic vibrations through the car. It sounded almost like he was in tears.

>   "Two hundred thousand pounds? But why hasn't she told me?"

  "It's obvious, isn't it? She doesn't think we're going to last. She wanted to make sure you were secure, even while I went down the drain. The useless husband who can't even keep his own business going--how's he meant to look after her little girl?"

  He sounded so bitter. But it held a twisted kernel of truth.

  She shook her head, sunk into her hands, thinking of what he must have thought, realizing how close they had come.

  "But she . . . the money--Oh, God, Hal, I'm so sorry. . . ."

  Below her feet Rollo whined to be allowed out. Hal reached an arm around her. Pulled her close to him, his other arm reaching around to hold her. She felt his breath in her ear.

  "No, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have talked to you. I've been such an idiot. . . ."

  They sat like that for some time, both oblivious, for their different reasons, to the curious glances of the people walking by, of the inquisitive (and perhaps reassured) gaze of Katie and her friend Jennifer from the upstairs window, from where, eventually bored, they tore themselves away.

  Camille slowly, reluctantly, also peeled herself away, feeling the beginnings of perspiration where their bodies had welded themselves firmly together.

  "Still want to hit the shops?" Hal squeezed her hand, as if unwilling to completely relinquish his hold of her.

  Camille lifted a strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  "No. Drive me to Arcadia, Hal. I've had just about enough of this."

  DAISY CHECKED OFF THE WALLS AND FLOOR OF THE MAIN lounge, the bar area, the bedroom suites, and the kitchen. Then she checked every set of curtains, that they were hung correctly and that their folds fell evenly and without creases, and the light fittings, to see that they all worked and that every bulb was in place. Then she drew up a list of those jobs that had not yet been completed, those that had been completed wrongly, those items delivered and those that needed to be returned. She worked quietly, methodically, enjoying the cool of the fans (they had decided against air-conditioning) and the breeze that flowed freely through the many open windows. There was a kind of internal peace to be found in order, in routine. It made her understand a little better Daniel's fierce need for things to be balanced and harmonious around him.

  He had made her a mug of tea, and they'd been civil with each other, managing to discuss Ellie's preference for white over brown bread and the best method of peeling her grapes without any reference to their earlier exchange. He had taken his daughter into town, managing without prompting to remember her diaper bag, her water, some rusks in a plastic bag, and to slather her in sunblock. Ellie had squealed at him and gnawed voraciously on a wooden stick with bells on it, and he had chatted comfortably to her while crouching down and deftly fastening her into her pram.

  They're building a relationship, thought Daisy, watching from the door. And wondering why her happiness in it felt so complicated.

  "Where's he taking her?" Lottie was apparently finding it less easy relinquishing her charge.

  "Just to town."

  "He doesn't want to take her through the park. There's dogs everywhere."

  "Daniel will look after her."

  "It's stupid, people letting them run around without leashes like that. Not when there's so many children about. I don't know why people want to bring their dogs on holiday."

  She had not been herself these last few days. She had snapped at Daisy when Daisy had asked her about her image on the mural, interested to know about the symbolism of their clothes, what they were holding. Daisy didn't tell her what Stephen Meeker had said about temptation and the Old Testament. That he said the imagery had all been quite fitting when you knew that Lottie had tried to seduce the father of the family she was evacuated to. Or that among his old photographs was one of a young Lottie, heavily pregnant, sleeping half naked on a stone floor.

  "You wanted some of these old pictures and things for framing." Lottie held out the box she'd been carrying under her arm.

  "Well, only ones you're happy to let go. I don't want any that have emotional significance for you . . ."

  Lottie shrugged, as if that were an alien concept. "I'll sort them upstairs. Where it's quiet."

  She had tucked the box back under her arm and made her way briskly upstairs.

  Daisy stood watching her, listening to her footsteps echo along the corridor.

  Then turned at the sound of Aidan, yelling her name from the lobby.

  "Someone to see you," he said, two nails sticking out of the corner of his mouth, his hands thrust deep in his suede apron. As she passed him, he raised an eyebrow, and she fought a sudden internal lurch at the prospect of Jones.

  Almost unconsciously she lifted a hand to her hair, attempting to smooth it away from her face.

  But it wasn't Jones.

  Sylvia Rowan stood on the doorstep, her brightly colored jacket and leg warmers dominating the pale space around her. By her feet, drooling unpleasantly, sat her blank-eyed dog.

  "I've told your man there he might want to stop," she said, smiling in the manner of a duchess waving at crowds.

  "I beg your pardon?" said Daisy.

  "Your builders. They need to stop."

  "I think I'll be the judge of--" Daisy was halted by Sylvia Rowan's brandishing of a piece of paper. A little too close to her face.

  "Building Preservation Notice. Your hotel is now spot-listed and subject to an emergency listing. That means you are effectively a listed building for the next six months, so any building work has to be halted."

  "What?"

  "It's to stop you spoiling the building any more than you already have. It's legally binding."

  "But the work is practically finished."

  "Well, you'll have to apply for retrospective planning permission for it all. And reinstate anything that the planning people aren't happy with. The odd wall perhaps. Or perhaps some of those windows."

  Daisy thought in horror of the guests already lined up to stay. About the prospect of their unloading their bags to the sound of demolition work.

  "But I haven't applied for listed status. Nor has Jones. The fact that it didn't have any was one of its attractions."

  "Anyone can apply for a spot listing, dear. In fact, it was you who gave me the idea, when you stood up and said what you were doing to the place. Still, it's in all our interests to preserve our architectural heritage, isn't it? Here's your paperwork, and I suggest you ring your boss and tell him that he might as well postpone his opening." She eyed Daisy's bandaged arm. "I might ring the health and safety while I'm at it."

  "Vindictive auld cow," said Aidan. "I'm surprised she didn't eat your baby, too."

  "Oh, hell," said Daisy, reading her way through the myriad clauses and subclauses of the paper in front of her. "Oh, hell. Look, Aidan. Do me a favor."

  "What?"

  "Ring Jones. Tell him I'm out or something. But you tell him for me."

  "Ah, come on, Daisy. That's not my job."

  "Please." She tried to look endearing.

  Aidan raised an eyebrow. "Lover's tiff, eh?"

  She needed it too badly to swear at him.

  LOTTIE HADN'T LOOKED AT THESE SINCE ADELINE HAD died. The fact that she'd stared at the top of the box for almost ten minutes suggested a certain reluctance to do so now. Stirring everything up again. Wasn't that what Joe had called it? Memories of Arcadia, of her summer there, like the others, bright sparks turning in an orbit around a peacock-feathered sun.

  Easier not to look, thought Lottie, sighing, her hand resting on the lid. Easier not to awaken old feelings that had long been better buried. She'd proven very good at keeping things buried. But now Daisy wanted to bring everything out in the open, just as she'd uncovered the mural. And in a moment of weakness, when she'd been distracted by Camille and Hal or by her thoughts of cruises and how to avoid them, Lottie had said she would get the damn things out. Daisy wanted to make a wall of photog
raphs. To frame as many photographs and sketches as they could and line the wall opposite the bar with them, a pictorial reminder that guests here were once part of the great tradition of an artistic retreat.

  Artistic retreat, thought Lottie wryly, opening the box. Apart from Frances there had been hardly an artist among them. No, she chided herself, remembering Ada Clayton. The artistry had been in their reinvention of themselves. In camouflage and cleverness, and in creating people they were not.

  Lottie stared at the open box, marveling that the simple act of taking a lid off a box could make her feel as giddy as if she were standing on a precipice. Ridiculous old woman, she told herself. They're only pictures.

  But her hand, as she reached in, was shaking.

  On the top, now slightly sepia-tinted with age, stood Adeline, dressed as the raja of Rajasthan, her eyes glittering from under a turban, her boyish figure bound in a man's silk jacket. Frances sat beside her, calm, but a slight knowingness around her eyes perhaps betraying some awful knowledge of her destiny even then. Lottie laid it on the newly buffed wooden floor. Next to it was one of Adeline and Julian laughing at something, followed by Stephen and some unnamed man she didn't recognize.

  A charcoal drawing, probably by Frances, of an upturned dinghy.

  Another, cracked and yellowed where it had been folded, of George, asleep on some grass. They, and the others, were laid out in neat rows on the floor. A painting of her own, of the French house. She had been so heavily pregnant at the time that she'd been able to balance her paint box on top of her stomach.

  Then Lottie. Her eyes looking sideways up from under a sheet of dark hair, lightly sprinkled, as if she were some edible delicacy, with rosebuds.

  Lottie sat staring at her young self, feeling an indelible sadness, like a wave, wash over her. She paused, lifting her head toward the window, blinking back the tears before she returned to the box.

  And quickly shut it. Too late to have missed the lithe, strong limbs, the too-long chestnut hair granted a metallic sheen by the sun.

  She rested her hands on the lid, listening to the irregular sound of her heartbeat, her gaze averted from the box as if even looking at it could reimprint on her the image she had not wanted to see.

  There were no thoughts in her head.

  Just images, as random and snapshot as those in the box.