Page 35 of Dear Daisy

‘I don’t want to hear this.’ I broke the connection and ran up the stairs, leaving the soup still bubbling and the spoon slurred onto the work surface in a trail of monosodium glutamate.

Chapter Sixteen

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Not seen you in a bit.

Hi, long time no see!

I hope our little moment hasn’t put you off? I haven’t seen you around lately. But then, I’ve been pretty much ‘confined to barracks’ myself; we’re trying to get the final bit of the roof on before the weather turns (and the forecast is horrible, hope that doesn’t put a crimp in your weekend or anything). Mr Moore told me about your suggestion that you go into school to talk to the kids about writing — he seemed a bit half-hearted about it, which I really don’t understand, it’s not as if we’ve got people queueing up to visit. And Scarl is missing you a bit. She asked if she could come by tomorrow, just to say hello, if that’s okay with you? She knows you’re busy . . . All right, I’ll admit it, I sort of suggested that we pop in. I’m a bit worried about you. Mum told me that your ‘editor’ is B&Bing with her and, with what you told me about him, I just thought you might be hiding so you didn’t have to see him. Which, yes, I totally understand, I sometimes wonder if I don’t spend so much time working here just so that I don’t have to circulate in society, you know. Like I said before, it’s tough when everyone knows your business, and your family history, and having a stammer hasn’t rendered me deaf, I can hear them all whispering behind my back about my sister being a bit ‘warm under the pinny’ as they say around here. They mean she was a slapper. Free with her affections. Which is pure cobblers, of course. Ellen was just young and she got away from Great Leys, something most of them have never done. Round here, everyone is married to someone they were at school with, and El having got pregnant by a guy from somewhere further than fifty miles away — it’s as though she’d been sleeping with little green men from Alpha Centauri or something.

Sorry, sorry. And sorry that I’m sorry. I have no idea why I keep doing this, I start off writing an email just to check that you’re all right and I end up carrying on about my family and my problems, as if you don’t have your own with this ‘Dan’ bloke turning up. Anyway. Really meant to say, if it’s all right with you Scarlet and I will call in tomorrow, to say hello. I might bring buns.

Alex

From [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Thanks

. . . for talking sense into me. I should go for it, of course I should. What’s stopping me?

Al x

I tidied up before they arrived. While I didn’t think Alex would report back to his mother if he found me living in paper-strewn squalor, with half-empty soup mugs and cups of coffee marking the path I’d been stalking around the little house like dots on a map, I didn’t want him to find me doing a Howard Hughes behind drawn curtains.

I was working. I was. I’d uploaded most of the photographs of the churchyards onto my laptop and labelled them. I’d gone through the local history books that I’d got from the library and I’d made notes. Some notes, anyway. Proof was scattered around me, single pages torn from lined pads lay two or three deep like confetti from a giant’s wedding, biros with the ends chewed to stubs had rolled under most of the furniture and books with Post-it notes protruding from marked pages stood in a tottering pile on the table. I left those, they at least made it look as though something proactive was going on, but I stacked the sheets of paper into a file and washed up the collection of mugs and cups. Then I pulled up the most recently worked on page onto my laptop, shocked to see that I had to bring it down from a folder that hadn’t been opened for ten days. Really? That long? But then, I’ve been doing research, I’ll be writing it all up any day now. Ten days without looking at the book isn’t so bad, it means I’ll have perspective when I go back and re-read what I’ve done. Wouldn’t do to get over-familiar with the material.

There was a sharp tap on the front door and I had a quick glance around to make sure I hadn’t left any half-eaten biscuits on any surfaces, and went to open it. As soon as I saw the dark head on the other side of the glass panel my hand fell away from the lock. Dan. What’s he doing here?

‘I can see you there, Winter, so don’t try pretending that you’ve run away to join the circus,’ he said, and I could see his outline hunch, hands going into pockets. The wavy glass that kept my privacy from people wanting to peer in as they passed made all the solid lines of his body look broken and abstract, as though there was a Picasso painting standing on my doorstep. ‘Come on, kiddo, just wanting an update here, plus it’s bloody freezing. There’s a wind out here that’s already given me a shave and a haircut and I swear that it’s trying to file my nails as well.’

The wavering outline ghosted into a pose of huddling down into his coat and a pale blob of hand extended for another knock, so I opened the door with a sigh. ‘What is it?’

‘What it is, is about minus twenty.’ Dan didn’t exactly push past me, but he didn’t wait to be invited in either; he did a kind of polite charge that made me step back inside the living room, and kept on coming. ‘It’s like the Arctic with better retail.’

I slid myself round the tiny table. ‘I mean, what do you want?’ I took it as a good sign that my hands weren’t inadvertently trying to punch him, and that I wasn’t sweating, although my heart was causing a tidal surge of blood to my cheeks.

‘Thought I’d given you enough time to think about things.’ He swept further into the room and tried to throw himself nonchalantly onto one of the chairs. ‘Bloody hellfire, what’s this made out of? Hacksaw blades and teeth?’ Nonchalance reverted to a straight-backed wariness. ‘Maybe I could be the first bloke to bring cushions to Yorkshire. I can see the headlines now: “Southerner brings soft-furnishing relief to a million Northern backsides.” What?’

‘Nothing.’ I’d been staring at him, I knew it. Watching, because I couldn’t help it. There was something about Dan’s long body, the way his shoulders, broad in the embellished black of his coat, drew the eye. Something magnetic in his movements and the way his cheekbones broke dark stubble like plough blades in a night field.

‘Well, come on then. Spill. What’s been happening on the scribbling front? How are we looking on word count? And how the effing chuff do you manage to write anything sitting on these things?’ He tried to hook a leg up over the chair arm but the over-polished wood and lack of any protective padding sent him spiralling around until he only just prevented himself from crashing onto the floor by grabbing hold of the table. ‘This is not furniture, is it?’

‘Everything is okay.’ I flipped the laptop’s lid down. Although he wouldn’t have been able to tell how long it had been since I’d looked at the book, I didn’t want him to have any ammunition to fire at me. ‘Go away.’

To my surprise, Dan stood up. I thought, for one glorious moment, that he was going to do as I’d suggested, that he actually believed me when I said things were okay. But this was Daniel and I should have known better. He shucked off the big coat and folded it into a wedge, placed it back on the chair, then sat on it. ‘That’s better.’ And then, ‘Now what?’

‘It’s just you without your coat on. You’ve always got that coat on.’ Underneath, Dan was wearing a tight, black T-shirt, which made him look remarkably buff, and a pair of what looked like designer suit trousers. ‘And no wonder you’re cold. You should put a jumper on.’

‘You’ve seen me without the coat loads of times, Win.’ Almost as though he were pleased, he leaned back and raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Hell, you’ve seen me in nothing but a Durex, why so surprised suddenly?’

I shook my head and forced my eyes to look somewhere else. ‘Whenever I think of you, it’s always the whole’ — I waved my arms alongside my body to indicate a flowing garment — ‘thing.’

‘So you do think of me?’ His voice was very low and I was glad I was staring at the mantelpiece at that moment, not at his face. ‘It’s the image, Win. You know that. You, of all people, know you keep the image going because most people don’t look any further than that. I’m the bloke in the coat and the boots, and that’s all they need to see.’

---