Always and Forever

She’d kept some of her ‘fat’ clothes for when she was pregnant. That silky sweater from Italy, the flowing Pucci shirt, they’d look lovely over a pregnant belly. Daisy had such plans for being a fashionable pregnant woman and now, faced with these clothes and no use for them in sight, her heart ached.

By five on Sunday afternoon, as she turned the bedroom lights on, Daisy realised she’d like nothing better than an early dinner in front of the box, but she still had to put away loads of clothes. At least fifty per cent of everything she owned was in heaps on the floor.

She was holding up a sweater – black, and expensive, so how could she get rid of it, even though it didn’t really suit her? – when the phone rang.

‘Alex, hello.’ Daisy sank onto his side of the bed, cradling the phone into her shoulder, her voice softening with love. ‘How are you? Miss you, you know.’

‘I know, Daisy. But I’ll be home tomorrow evening.’ From his businesslike tone, it was clear that he wasn’t alone.

‘Can’t talk, huh? No problem. How’s it going?’ she asked, suppressing the slightest tinge of irritation that he hadn’t slipped away from the group for a moment to phone her privately. He was on his mobile, it seemed, and she hated those brusque ‘All fine here, how are you?’ conversations.

‘All fine here,’ said Alex, right on cue. ‘And at your end?’

Daisy laughed and did her best to let the irritation slip away. She could hardly have said, ‘Let’s do something about why I’m not getting pregnant,’ over the phone, could she? ‘My end is great but it’s lonely because it doesn’t have your end to snuggle up against in bed. It was freezing here last night,’ she added. ‘I had to resort to my fleece pyjamas and my bedsocks as I didn’t have you to warm me.’ She couldn’t resist the joke. He hated her bedsocks.

‘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 women’s brains that we feel we’re not connected with the world unless we have a man to connect us with it? Men – who needs them?’

Mary’s bedtime reading was currently of the women-who-love-bastards variety. She’d lent Daisy some of her books and Daisy had accepted them out of guilt, but they were still in the back of her car in their plastic bag, necessitating even more guilt. What if Mary saw them, patently unread, and realised that while she was unhappy, not everyone else was?

‘Come on, Mary,’ said Daisy now, feeling that some sort of cheering-up was in order. ‘You’re over Bart, you know you are.’

‘Am I?’ demanded Mary. ‘Because I’m not, you know. I’m sad and depressed and I don’t think I’ll ever feel right again. That’s what marriage does for you, Daisy, and don’t you forget it.’

The lustre had gone out of dressing the wedding party for Daisy. She felt a bit headachey, so as soon as they had gone she nipped out for some painkillers and, on the spur of the moment, decided that a bottle of wine might cheer Mary up.

They closed at six and Daisy cracked open the bottle.

‘Just one glass,’ Mary warned. ‘The kids have a friend over for dinner and I don’t want to get a reputation as the divorced lush. That would give them something to talk about at the school gates. Alone and alcoholic isn’t the sort of thing you want to advertise. Nearly as bad as lonely and desperate for sex.’

‘None for me,’ added Paula, holding up a hand in refusal. ‘If I look at a drink, the baby will emerge phoning the child protection agency and my mother will be scandalised. She’s never got over my sister-in-law having that glass of champagne at our wedding when she was pregnant. She still talks about the irresponsibility of it all.’

Daisy did a quick bottle/person calculation. She never drank more than one glass when she drove.

Mary edged off her shoes, put her feet up on the wicker bin behind the counter, and sighed. ‘Don’t know why I wear those blinking shoes,’ she said, wiggling her toes luxuriously. ‘They ruin my feet. I’ll have bunions soon.’

‘The girl today who was getting married was going to have the full works done in a beautician’s just before the day,’ Paula said. ‘Manicure, pedicure, you name it.’

They all sighed at the thought.

‘I’ve never had a professional pedicure,’ Daisy said. ‘I feel embarrassed enough about having a manicure, my nails are always such a mess, but my feet…ugh. That would be worse. I think they’d need industrial sanding equipment to get the hard skin off my feet and then the beautician would look at me and think I was a right old hick. No, I can’t face it. I’d prefer to do it badly myself.’