Maximum Exposure (16 page)

Chapter Three

Dear Lizzie,

Nice is very nice. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s an old joke but still, it’s true.

Did you hear about Shagger? She got engaged to Sir Cosmo Fleming! Guess it was something he’d been trying to predict for ages. Which meant she didn’t come here with me. Unexpected, huh? But I decided to come anyway and boy, am I glad I did because guess what? I’ve been offered a job already!

Yup. Photographer-general at a new museum of objects. Don’t know how long I’ll stay – the summer, at least. So I’m afraid I’ll have to give you notice on the room in the cottage because I can’t afford to keep it and pay the rent here too. Sorry. Truly. But time to move on anyway, wouldn’t you say? I’ve asked Mum if she can drop by for my things sometime in the next few days – she’ll give you a ring first to make sure you’ll be in.

Hope life’s a dream. Take care of Ben, have fun,

Lots of love,

Daisy xxx

Daisy sealed the letter to Lizzie after three drafts. Achieving a natural tone had been the big challenge and she had to take care with the words.

The last week had been a whirl of activity – meeting
la directrice
at the museum and, apparently passing some sort of interview; delightedly checking out of the hotel and into L’Hirondelle, a small
pension
; buying a whole new set of clothes on her wilting credit card; starting work.

It was a big step. She was more alone than she had ever been, but she had surprised herself in a hundred ways. For a start, her French was better than she could possibly have anticipated. Five years of schooling had not been completely wasted. She found the local accent difficult and her efforts weren’t helped by everyone wanting to speak English with her, but hearing the language all around her, watching television, reading the local newspapers all helped to bring the lessons back.

She started her job. The work could not have been more different from life at
The Herald
. Instead of days filled by rushing from shoot to shoot or snatching quick people shots, she had all the time in the world to set up an object, light it, get the image precisely and absolutely right. Perfection was what was needed and the change of pace, far from being tedious, was balm to her bruised soul.

She settled into her new accommodation. The room was small, but bright and self-contained, having its own tiny kitchen, a small en suite bathroom, and – delight of delights – a balcony, from which she could just see the sea above the rooftops of old Nice. Three floors below was the narrow street, not on the tourist radar but full of small shops where locals bought their bread, fruit, and wine and all the makings of the delicious meals that were the hallmark of French life. From the street below, Daisy could already smell the delicious aroma of garlic frying. Soon it would be time to make her own supper.

She smiled. First she had to complete her break with the past. The next letter was easy.

Dear Jay,

I was so pleased to hear about the new job. Back on the telly again, huh? That’s where you belong and I’m sure the fashion-for-men show will be the first of many great contracts to follow.

I’m so glad you and Amelia are back together. It was very kind of you to invite me to stay at your riverside warehouse conversion if I’m in London – it sounds fab! In the meantime, though, I have taken a job in the south of France, photographing wonderful objects for a new museum in Nice. Quite a change from dashing around East Lothian!

I just wanted to thank you for everything. You did a great job at
The Herald
, don’t think you didn’t. The closure just reflects the whole newspaper industry at the moment.

Just wanted to say thanks for everything – and good luck.

All best,

Daisy

Now for Sharon. Sharon, who had bossed her around for years. Sharon, who’d thrown Tiny Ted in the river. Sharon, who’d let her down by abandoning her at the airport.

Sharon who had been lonely and who had found love.

Dear Sharon,

Congrats on your engagement. Cosmo must be seeing stars! (ha ha). But he’s the right man for you, I’m sure of it.

You really missed yourself here – Nice is just the best. The sea is a blue to die for, the sun never fails, and the food and wine are tops. So good, in fact, I’ve decided to stay.

Look after Cosmo, won’t you, he’s such a dear.

All best,

Daisy

Photographe-general, La Musée Jaune, Nice

She liked that one. Short and simple. Adding her new job title as a sign-off was a great touch. What would Sharon make of that? She’d love to see her face when she read it. But Sharon would be very good at Fleming House. She was energetic and organised. She’d find a way of managing Lady Fleming – years of practice as a journalist meant that she knew how to get what she wanted out of people. As for Cosmo, he’d blossom under Sharon’s touch.

She laid down her pen and wandered inside for some water. The bottle in the fridge was delightfully cold. She sipped from it greedily.

Should she write to Jack? She still felt a dark hole inside her whenever she thought of him, but the feelings that had dominated her emotional life for the past eighteen months were changing. They were less raw. A scab was growing over the wound. From time to time she still felt compelled to scratch it, but like all healthy scabs, the crust round the edge was beginning to drop away and the remnant was getting smaller. Thoughtfully, Daisy picked up her pen. She was closing doors. She needed to close this one as well.

Dear Jack and Iris,

Not sure when I’ll see you both again but hope the wedding goes well. I’m planning on staying in France for a bit – got a new job. Say thanks to your friend Carol, Iris, and sorry about squashing your bedding plants.

Daisy

No kisses this time.

Jack and Iris. He’d swapped one flower for another, she realised suddenly, and laughed out loud. That was funny. On the balcony next door, a dark head turned at the sound and she was aware of a face of great beauty, of olive-brown skin and dark eyes and a smile of infectious brilliance. She smiled in return. The sense of emerging from a dark place into sunshine intensified. Jack and Iris. So be it.

One final card and she was done. It was the hardest of all to write. But it was another door that had to be closed.

Hi Ben,

I liked it so much in Nice I decided to stay! Have been offered a job too good to resist. And anyway, the vino is better and cheaper than anything in Hailesbank. What can I say? Hope you find a job soon – sure you will.

Be happy.

Daisy x

Like the letter to Lizzie, this one took her three drafts. She had to get the tone and the message right. She had to wrap things up, she couldn’t just disappear.

Be happy.

Daisy

She pondered for a long time on the question of whether to add the final kiss. Her pen hovered over the space for a long time, then she laid it down again. Finally, she snatched it up, added the ‘x’ impetuously, sealed it in the envelope, stuck a stamp on, and put the letter with the others to post, before she could change her mind. He could read into it what he wanted. Nothing probably. What did it matter? She’d blown it with Ben and that was that. Now she was half a continent away and that part of her life was well and truly over. A new existence was opening up in front of her.

Chapter Four

Ben got Daisy’s card three days later.

Hi Ben,

I liked it so much in Nice I decided to stay! … been offered a job … Be happy.

Daisy x

He studied the final kiss for some time.

Daisy x

Daisy kiss. Kiss Daisy. If only he could. If only he had. Maybe
if
he had, his life would be very different now. He should have been bolder, seized the opportunity when he’d had it, told her how he felt, even if it risked being rebuffed. But then, she’d been stuck on Jack Hedderwick.

‘Did I fuck it up completely, Nefertiti?’ he asked the dummy. For some reason she was wearing a feather arrangement on the back of her head. ‘A fascinator’ his mother called it. Road kill, thought Ben. Nef was beginning to get on his nerves – and besides, it was time he left. He hadn’t been gainfully employed since
The Hailesbank Herald
had been closed, nearly a month ago now. What’s more, since Daisy had left for Nice, his relationship with Lizzie had seemed increasingly meaningless.

Nefertiti’s blue eyes stared at him accusingly.

‘Really?’ Ben asked. ‘You think I should have said something that night I picked her up from Jack Hedderwick’s?’

Boy, Daisy had been in a state. She looked as though she’d been fighting with the prize pansies. What the hell had happened? He unclasped his hands from behind his head, uncrossed his legs, stood up, and stretched. Then he walked across to the bay window where Nefertiti Gillies stood, picked her up, and waltzed across the room with her.

‘Are you dancing?’

‘Are you asking?’

‘I’m asking.’

‘Then I’m dancing.’

Fuck it Daisy x.

She had no idea what she had done to him.

The drive to Lizzie’s cottage from Ben’s parents’ house necessitated stopping at three sets of traffic lights, negotiating one roundabout, and navigating a short one-way system. As luck would have it, Ben was held up at every point along the route, so Nefertiti had her day in the sun.

‘Nice one!’ A man in a luminous vest and hard hat stuck his thumbs up and grinned.

‘Phwoar!’ ‘Grab an eyeful of that!’ and ‘Shagtastic!’ were the only comments he could pick out from a gaggle of lads clustered round the crossing at the end of town. Two women pushing prams did a double take, then laughed. And a whole crocodile of schoolchildren, spotting Nef in the front seat, giggled, pointed, and squealed. Ben grinned. That was the great thing about Nef – she’d always been an attention grabber. She was a burden too, though. You couldn’t stick Nef in a cupboard, it would be insulting. You had to dress her and talk to her. It was like having a wife, though the good thing was, she never answered back. She deserved to be loved. And he knew just who would give her the love she needed now.

‘Hello, Ben,’ Lizzie answered the door, her arms full of some fancy printed fabric. Her hair was scooped up at the back and her black cardigan, buttoned with tiny gleaming pearls to just above her cleavage, seemed to have a dozen or more dressmaking pins criss-crossed near the shoulder, put there, he supposed, for ease of access and safe keeping rather than as a barrier to an embrace. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning.’

‘I wasn’t planning on coming.’ He bent and kissed not the lips that were offered, but her cheek.

‘Are you coming in?’

‘I brought you a gift.’

‘Yeah?’ Lizzie glanced at his hands, which were empty.

‘She’s in the car.’

‘She?’

Ben turned and went back to where the car was parked. Behind him, he was aware of Lizzie, standing puzzled in the doorway. He hadn’t rehearsed this. He hadn’t even thought about it until this morning, when the course of action he had to take had suddenly become clear. He stood for a second in the warmth of the summer sunshine. From the trees above the cottage, he could hear the melodic calls of a dozen small birds and out of the corner of his eye, he sensed their flittering movement. The wild roses by the gate were in full bloom and the warmth was bringing out their scent. It was sweet and richly perfumed, heady. The slightest of breezes ruffled his hair. He liked it here. He’d always liked this place. For a second he wavered. Was he doing the right thing?

‘Need any help?’ Lizzie’s voice reached him, breaking the spell.

‘No, no, I’ll be there in a sec.’ He wrenched open the car door and began to manoeuvre Nefertiti out into the garden.

Lizzie was laughing. ‘What the heck have you got there, Ben?’

The last trailing leg was released by the sill and she was out. He’d relieved her of the fascinator, dressed her in his old joggers and sweatshirt, and topped her off with a baseball cap. His present to Lizzie. A memento.
A farewell gift.

‘May I introduce Nefertiti Gillies?’ He made the dummy bow. ‘Or, perhaps I should say, Nefertiti Little. Of course, you may want to rename her completely and if so, please feel free.’ He frogmarched Nef back to the cottage and held her out to Lizzie.

‘For me?’ Lizzie was laughing. ‘Is this the dummy Daisy told me about? The one you brought all the way from London?’

‘Can I put her in your room? I thought you might like her for your fabrics. Or to hang your scarves on. Or to model your hats. I dunno, Lizzie, she just seems exactly
you
somehow.’ He turned to her, his face serious. ‘Thing is, Lizzie, I’m moving on. I hoped you’d take care of her for me.’

Lizzie, reaching up to embrace him, froze in shock. Her arms dropped, her mouth slackened, her eyes opened wide. ‘Right,’ she said, her tone expressionless. She stood back a step and crossed her arms in one of the swiftest changes from loving to defensive he’d ever seen. ‘Just like that.’

‘No ties. No promises. No seeing other people while we see each other. And no tears when it’s time to move on.’ He quoted back at her the agreement she had insisted on when they had started out.

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, swinging away from him, her face unreadable.

‘Come on, Lizzie. You were the one who laid down the rules.’

‘Yeah. I know. It’s funny though,’ she turned back and paused, reaching up to let her hair down. For a minute there was silence as her words hung in the air and she twirled it round her fingers, let it hang loose again, then twirled it up and stuck the pin back in with a savage movement, ‘funny because for the first time ever, I don’t want to let a lover go.’

He hadn’t anticipated that. For him, Lizzie had always been an interlude. A delightful one, it had to be admitted, but no more than that. And he’d expected that she would feel the same way.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

He could see her small breasts moving up and down as her breath quickened. Poetry in motion. Her body was a kind of poetry, perfectly symmetrical, beautifully shaped, with its own rhythms and form. Beautiful – but for him, in the end, empty verse, lines without resonance.

‘Is it because of Daisy?’ she asked.

He couldn’t look at her. He turned away and pressed his face to the window. You couldn’t describe the space outside as a garden. It was more of a wilderness on which some small semblance of order had been imposed. There was grass you could walk on, but it was more like a meadow than a lawn. There was a border, of sorts, with bushes that someone, in the cottage’s past, had planted with care, but they had grown unkempt and ragged. In the corner a large clump of a pretty, wispy red flower with long, thick leaves like iris leaves, dominated the space. It looked as if it had colonised a large part of the rest of the garden too. Some things had to be controlled.

Is it because of Daisy?

If he changed the focal length of his vision, Ben could see his own reflection in the window. The sun, streaming into the kitchen, was catching the reddish brown of his hair. It looked rough. Maybe he’d forgotten to brush it this morning. Once it had come to him what he had to do, he’d acted on it with all speed.

Is it because of Daisy?

‘I don’t know, Lizzie, that’s the honest truth. I think I’ve lost her.’

He heard the sound of a nose being blown, then Lizzie’s voice came again, more controlled now. ‘You could try again, Ben. She’s over Jack now.’

He turned quickly. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘She’s run away, hasn’t she?’

‘Maybe she’s angry. Maybe she’s confused. Maybe she’s hurt. But I do know that it’s finally got into her sweet, obstinate brain that Jack is no longer available.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘And I would put money on it that you could find a way to reach her.’

Ben glanced at her. She was standing very tall and erect, her shoulders square, her head tilted back, her chin up, as though she was fighting her own inner battle. But her voice, when it came, was very gentle. ‘Reach her heart, I mean, Ben.’

The generosity of it nearly broke him.