‘Really?’ said Alex blankly, but Daisy knew he must be grinning. Only someone who knew him well would hear the amusement over a crackly mobile and hundreds of miles.
‘Really. So hurry home. Me and the bedsocks miss you.’
‘You too. Better rush. We’ve got another meeting before dinner and it will probably be late, so I won’t phone again. See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes, can’t wait.’ She had so much to talk to him about. ‘I know you can’t talk, Alex,’ Daisy said quickly, ‘and you don’t have to reply but I love you.’
There was silence in her ear. He’d hung up.
Daisy made herself put the receiver back without slamming it into the cradle. How was it that women invariably wondered what was wrong, even when there was nothing wrong, and men never divined anything out of the ordinary when emotional war was about to be declared? She’d like to see how pleased Alex would be if she’d hung up on him when she was working away and when he was burning to tell her something.
She dismally surveyed the piles of clothes on the beige carpet. Everything in the apartment was decorated in subtle shades of beige and caramel, with dark brown accents. Alex loved modern minimalism.
Daisy had once wondered how their flat would cope with a small child in it. She loved planning new floor coverings and washable paintwork, or working out how to lay out the baby’s room. How sad was she?
That was it: her enthusiasm had vamoosed. She’d stack everything on her side of the room and do it during the week. There was a pepperoni pizza and oven chips in the freezer, a bottle of chilled wine in the fridge and probably some slushy romantic film on the movie channel. She could even give herself a manicure. And she’d put a conditioning treatment in her hair to bring it back to its glossy, strawberry-blonde glory. Her straightening irons and the colour played havoc with the split ends.
She’d look fabulous for when Alex saw her and he’d be flattened with both guilt and longing, and then she’d tell him what she’d really wanted to talk to him about.
Georgia’s Tiara had two windows looking out onto Delaney Row, a street of grand, three-storey houses on the northern side of Carrickwell, and both windows had the words ‘SALE’ emblazoned across in giant, art deco lettering. Decorated in proprietress Mary Dillon’s favourite lemon yellow, the shop was a clothes lover’s paradise and included a tiny accessory department that sold shoes, bags and costume jewellery, three large changing rooms and, most important of all, sympathetic mirrors.
Mary had most of her warpaint on and was on her second cup of hot water and lemon – awful, but great for the insides, she’d read – by the time Daisy got into the shop on Monday morning.
‘Sorry, traffic was brutal,’ Daisy said, which was pretty much what she always said. The snooze button was just so seductive in the morning. She’d always been able to identify with the Chinese mandarin who insisted on being woken at four every morning just so he had the luxury of knowing he didn’t have to get up yet. ‘And the roadworks on the bridge…shocking.’
‘Paula wanted fresh air so she went across to Mo’s Diner to get the lattes,’ Mary said, not even bothering to reply to the traffic story. The day Daisy arrived on time, Mary would know there was something seriously wrong. ‘Take the weight off the floor and catch your breath,’ Mary continued, handing over a bit of the newspaper.
Paula, who was now five and a half months pregnant with her first child, arrived with the lattes and three of Mo’s famous blueberry muffins, and for a few moments, there was the weekend catch-up as Daisy asked how Paula felt, had the baby been kicking and how many bottles of Gaviscon had she gone through?
‘Two,’ admitted Paula, shamefacedly. She was torn between joy at being pregnant and misery at having heartburn like the eruption of Krakatoa.
‘Only two?’ said Daisy cheerily. ‘You should have shares in the company.’ Today she could joke with Paula. Up to now, she’d found it hard although she did her level best not to show it because she loved Paula and wouldn’t have hurt her for the world. But today felt different. Now that Daisy had decided to take action, the pain had receded a little.
When everyone had their coffee – two lattes, and a decaf for the mother-to-be – blissful peace took over as the women flicked the pages of the tabloids, seeing who’d been wearing what at the weekend.
One of the shop’s best customers, a ladies-who-lunch type who had loads of money and the fashion sense of a Doberman, was pictured at a movie premiere wearing a spaghetti-strapped embroidered dress in midnight blue, a French blue cashmere shrug and string of tourmalines – an outfit that Daisy had put together specifically for her. The only defect was the flash of nude tights visible between the dress and the skinny navy suede boots.
‘You told her to wear black tights,’ groaned Paula.
‘The tights aren’t too bad,’ Daisy said. ‘If she’d done them on purpose, we’d all be saying it was brilliant.’
‘True,’ muttered Mary. There was a fine line in the fashion world between the genius of doing something different and the stupidity of wearing the wrong tights. Likewise, blue eyeshadow could be spectacular on the right person, and a hideous mistake on the wrong one.
The morning was taken up with phone calls about the whereabouts of a shipment of Italian silk print scarves. In between, Daisy lent a hand to a trio who were looking for a mother-of-the-bride outfit that would go with a cream brocade wedding gown, and a bridesmaid’s dress for the bride’s sister.
‘A dress that she can wear again, nothing with big flowers like a huge duvet cover,’ insisted the bride, with the bride’s sister nodding emphatically in the background. Once was quite enough to look like a refugee from the sofa factory – she was not wearing anything flowery and wildly frilly ever again.
Daisy quite liked the challenge of dressing bridal parties. Mary hated it because, in her current post-divorce state, she felt people weren’t being advised of what they were letting themselves in for.
‘There should be something more in the ceremony, something along the lines of a warning that it takes just one day to get married and five thousand days to work yourselves up to the divorce,’ she said darkly, out of range of the happy trio. ‘And bitterness…they never mention bitterness at weddings, do they? That’s the bit that lasts longest. You might have long since forgotten where you’ve put the wedding album, and the Waterford stemware might be scattered all around the house, but by God, you can lay your hands on a bit of bitterness at any time of the day or night.’
Daisy didn’t know what to say as they rummaged around at opposite ends of the storeroom, searching for a pale pink, beaded column dress with butterflies on the hem as well as a wool-silk mix dress with matching coat that would look good on a size sixteen at a winter wedding. It was odd that Mary could be so anti-marriage one minute, and pro-marriage the next. She’d raged at Daisy’s story of how Alex didn’t want to get married. Lately, Daisy had been censoring her conversation with Mary in case she rattled on too much about what she and Alex had done at the weekend, when she knew Mary was sitting at home on her own, worrying about cash flow or never having sex again.
‘I blame Richard Gere,’ Mary sniffed balefully. ‘I thought life was going to be like in An Officer and a Gentleman and look where that’s got me? Bloody nowhere. It’s the uniform that did it for me.’
As Bart had never worn a uniform, Daisy wasn’t quite sure what Mary was on about but she let her ramble.
‘Triumph of hope over dumb bloody stupidity,’ Mary said. ‘Why do we all think we have to get married? What’s wrong with