The Snow Globe (25 page)

The waitress brought them their tea. He placed his arms on the table and leaned forward, toward her. She lowered her gaze to the steaming cup, blowing on it, wishing she had gone back to the shop and not come for a cup of tea that was too hot to be drunk in the few minutes she had left.

“So lunching with Mr. Gifford, eh?” he began again. “It's rather a long way for him to come for lunch . . . he must be frightfully keen.”

Daisy said nothing.

“You're not going to go and get yourself hitched to him, are you?”

“If I was, I'm not sure I'd tell you.”

He narrowed his eyes, tilted his head, watching her. “Don't do it. Don't end up with that buffoon.”

“He's not a buffoon, and I happen to like him . . . more than like him,” she added, feeling she should in view of the circumstances. “Anyway, you don't know him. He's a very decent sort . . . I could do a lot worse.”

“A lot worse? Is that your criterion for suitors?”

“Why are you asking all this, Val? Forgive me, but it's really none of your business,” she added with a smile.

“I'm asking because . . . because we're concerned.”

“We?” she repeated. “I'm not interested in what you think, and I'd prefer my sister talk to me about her concerns and not go about gossiping with other people.”

“Am I
other people
?” he asked, smiling. “Because I happen to know that Iris has only mentioned it to me. You see, dear Daisy, we're just a tad worried about your Mr. Gifford and his motives.”

Daisy snatched up her bag. “I'm awfully sorry, but I really do need to get back.”

“Daisy . . . I only say this because I don't want you to make a mistake—a mistake which could alter the course of your life.”

She stared back at him. “Perhaps it's a question you should be asking yourself. Are you in love with Aurelia? Are you
really
in love with her, Val? Because you might be about to make a mistake which will alter the course of your life—and you only have a few weeks left to think about it.”

“I know this,” he said, frowning.

“I must go . . . Sorry about the tea.”

“If I don't see you before, see you at the party,” he said.

“The party?”

“Your parents' wedding anniversary celebration?”

She had forgotten about that. “Ah yes, see you then.”

Iris had told Daisy, after her last visit home, that Howard's big project, sole project, was the silver wedding anniversary party he was planning for shortly after Mabel's return. All he wanted to speak about, ask Iris about, were menus and guest lists, to seek her advice on the precise wording of the invitation, which he'd drafted numerous times. But the party her father was planning struck Daisy as expensive hypocrisy, nothing more.

Later that day, when the nearby church clock chimed five and, seconds later, the cuckoo clock on the wall of the shop chimed, too, Daisy pulled down the blinds, picked up her hat and her bag and turned the sign on the door to
CLOSED
.

The sky had turned to a paler blue. Golden-edged clouds floated high above the old trees heavy with leaves, and the air was filled with their rich sweetness. But the sweetness of the air did not marry with her thoughts, and turning into Sydney Street, Daisy felt irked once more by Valentine's words.

How dare Val allude to other motives . . . Was he implying that Ben was marrying her for money?
Hardworking and honest
: Ben had always been described as such by Howard. And in view of Howard's finances—which neither Iris nor Val had any idea about—it was quite clearly not the case: risible, Daisy thought.

And she had said yes to Ben because . . . because she cared for him. Not in a passionate, all-consuming way; it wasn't like that. She cared for him in a considered and respectful way. The way one
should
love the person one intends to spend one's life with. She wasn't like Iris: She
did
want to get married, have a family, a home. And becoming engaged—belonging to someone outside that coterie of hedonism—felt like grabbing hold of a life raft. It meant she would survive; it meant she had a future. No, Ben Gifford could never be described as wild or passionate, but he was a good man, as good a man as she was ever likely to meet, Daisy thought, marching on.

Mabel, in an uncharacteristically candid moment, had once told Daisy that passion was all well and good, but to build a life with someone, there had to be something more sustainable than passion—because it gets spent very quickly. And in a way, Iris had backed this up when she'd said that she wouldn't marry because all marriages ended up utterly passionless. And look what had happened with Howard and his scattered passions. A man such as her father was not the sort of man one should marry; far better to marry a man who was honest and trustworthy. And as for money, the only things it had bought her mother were a philandering husband and a large house with a Japanese garden in which to sit on her own. Daisy would
not
make the same mistake as her mother, she thought, climbing the steps to the front door and pulling out her key.

Iris was sitting in her red silk kimono. She was on the telephone and already holding what looked like a pink gin in her hand. She blew Daisy a kiss and then ended the call and told Daisy that she'd let Mrs. Wintrip go early. “The woman does go on so . . . I'm utterly fagged!”

“But it's not like you to be here at this time of day. Are you not well?” Daisy asked.

“I think my age is catching up with me.”

“You're twenty-four, Iris,” said Daisy, sitting down opposite her sister.

“Oh, darling, please . . . don't remind me.”

“Who was on the telephone?”

“Your father,” Iris replied, as though he wasn't hers.

“And? . . . Is Mummy back yet?”

“No, but Stephen is . . . Well, not back, as such, because he never actually went away, not to New Zealand . . . Apparently, he's here in London and has been since”—she raised her hands—“whenever. He has a publishing contract for a book,” she added, throwing a bare leg over the arm of her chair and reaching in the other direction for her cigarettes.

“
Stephen?
He's writing a book?”

“I know. Exactly what I said. Apparently, he's been writing about natural history for years. Charting falling leaves and seasons and birdsong, penning poetry and that sort of thing . . . Oh, but he also has a job,” she went on, “ferrying rich tourists about the city in a Rolls, and a flat above some swanky garage showroom.”

Daisy smiled. “Yes, that makes sense,” she said. “He's always been clever with words, always had an eye, seen everything.”

“Clever with words
and
everything else, I rather think.”

“I wonder what his first book's about.”

Iris flicked her lighter. “A guide to the highways and byways of the Surrey Hills!” she said dramatically and then laughed. “Apparently, he's been contracted to do quite a few. Not just motoring guides, but also walking guides . . . You know how some people like to walk? According to your father, he has the opportunity to write
more, and not just in England . . . No doubt the battlefields of France”—she paused and feigned a yawn—“as if they haven't been done enough already.”

“And Howard told you all of this?”

Iris nodded.

“But how does he know?”

Iris shrugged. “Mrs. J, I suppose.”

“Did you say anything?” Daisy asked. “Did you mention anything to Howard about . . . about Stephen's birth?”

“No!” yelled Iris.

“I'm pleased for him,” said Daisy after a moment or two. “I'm pleased he's here and doing something different.”

“
Different?
Darling, everyone knows writing pays peanuts.”

“Oh, and have you told Val this?”

Iris snorted and shook her head. “To be honest, I think Stephen would have been far better off going to New Zealand.”

Iris was being disingenuous. And she was perhaps irked that someone called Stephen Jessop had beaten another called Valentine Vincent. Like the unexpected outsider, Stephen had come from nowhere and would have his name in print long before Val, who was still working on his novel,
Spotlight
.

“We must tell Val,” said Daisy, trying not to smile and picking up a magazine lying on the shawl-covered sofa next to her. “After all, Stephen might be able to give him some advice.”

Aurelia was waiting outside the tube station, as arranged.

“Sorry I'm late,” said Daisy. “Mr. Laverty always seems to forget I have Saturday afternoons off. What time are we meant to be there?”

“Soon!” said Aurelia, grabbing her arm. “But I think I know the way.”

Aurelia had heard of the palm reader through a friend and had persuaded Daisy to come along, too, saying, “After all, we're both at the same place in our lives, and it'll be interesting . . . or, at the very least, a bit of fun.”

A few years older than Daisy, Aurelia worked as a teacher at an infant school in Pimlico, and her and Daisy's mutual love of literature—their admiration for and interest in a number of new, emerging women writers—had drawn them to each other and
cemented their friendship. It was a friendship in which Daisy, with few friends in London, had taken comfort.

“Her name is Mrs. Larkin,” Aurelia said, her arm still linked through Daisy's as they approached a cottage standing on its own on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Two roads crossed in front of the small dwelling, where a post box and leaning signpost stood on a grassy triangle beneath an ancient chestnut tree. “We're a little late, but I'm sure it won't matter. The woman said in her note to me ‘two o'clock or
thereabouts
.'”

A graying picket fence encircled the overgrown shrubbery, which screened the cottage's dusty windows from the road, and the garden gate hung open on broken hinges.

“Ready?” Aurelia asked as they stood in front of the door.

Daisy nodded. Aurelia knocked.

The woman was tiny, smaller than Daisy, and had a front tooth missing from her smile. She took them into a parlor crammed with furniture, where streamers of dust hung from the beams of the low ceiling and a parrot perched on a stand behind an old wingback chair. At first, Daisy thought the bird was stuffed, until it suddenly called out in a fine baritone English voice, “This is London calling . . . this is London calling . . .”

“Be quiet, Roger! Come in, girls. Take no notice of
him
.”

The woman sat down in the wingback chair, and Daisy noticed now that her jet black hair was in fact a wig, which seemed to have slipped forward a little, and from which tufts of white hair sprung out over her ears. Her lobes were long, stretched by years and the weight of her heavy, dangling earrings. The room smelled of stale
food and sour breath, and a tarnished silver vase containing a few dead chrysanthemums stood on the mantelpiece, where a clock ticked loudly.

Mrs. Larkin asked them about their journey and how long it had taken them, as though they had traveled a great distance. She had never been on a tube train in her life, she said, and would never travel anywhere beneath the earth or in the sky.

“And you found the place all right?” she asked.

“Yes, your directions were very good,” said Aurelia. “As soon as we came to the crossroads and I saw the leaning signpost, I knew.”

The leaning of the signpost was the result of a great storm some years before the war, Mrs. Larkin said, pushing her wig back in place.

The room was uncomfortably warm, the window next to Daisy sealed tightly shut, with a multitude of dead flies lying among withered tomatoes on its sill. Beyond the glass Daisy could see a thistle-strewn field, perhaps once a lawn, she thought, and beyond that, in the distance, the murky London skyline.

“Now, who's to go first?” the woman asked.

Aurelia insisted that Daisy go first. And so Aurelia and the woman swapped places, and the woman took hold of Daisy's hand, spreading the palm out with her rough thumbs.

“Hmm, interesting,” Mrs. Larkin began. “Artistic, intelligent . . . home loving, nature loving and sensitive, too . . . you feel things deeply.”

Daisy glanced to Aurelia, who smiled back at her.

“A long lifeline . . . very long . . . ,” Mrs. Larkin continued, “but there're breaks—conflict—in the heart line, and possibly more
than one marriage. There's great honesty, here . . . but also some recklessness and perhaps too much passion,” she added, glancing up at Daisy and winking. “And I see stubbornness, much conviction. You'll need to watch that,” she said. She turned Daisy's hand over, folding the fingers, curling and uncurling them. She saw two children, she said, definitely two, and maybe a third. She folded Daisy's hand once more. It was difficult to say about that third one.

“You will learn from your mistakes . . . and you
will
know great love.”

The woman smiled up at Daisy. That seemed to be it. But it wasn't enough, not nearly enough.

“Mistakes? How can I know?”

Mrs. Larkin gazed down at the palm in her lap once more. She ran her finger over the soft flesh of Daisy's hand, then closed her eyes and breathed deeply. And with her eyes shut, the woman said, “An older man, a charlatan . . . you must beware of him; you must beware of the charlatan.” She opened her eyes. “That is all.”

Now it was Aurelia's turn, and Daisy and she swapped places.

Mrs. Larkin sighed as she took hold of Aurelia's hand, stretching open the palm, tilting her head from side to side, moving Aurelia's hand this way and that. But there were no breaks or “conflict” in Aurelia's heart line; it was long and unswerving, Mrs. Larkin said. She would have a long and happy marriage.

“Just the one?” Aurelia asked.

“Just the one.”

There would be four children, and the fourth was not a
maybe
—like Daisy's third. And there was no mention of any mistakes, or having to learn from them, and no mention of any charlatan.
Aurelia's life was going to be a settled, happy affair by comparison to her own, Daisy thought as she listened.

After Daisy and Aurelia had paid the woman and left the cottage, they walked back to the tube, to head into town and to Fortnum & Mason for tea.

“Conflicts . . . ,” said Daisy again as they entered the station.

“Four children . . .”

“Mistakes . . .”

“
Four
children.”

“A charlatan!”

On board the train, they giggled about their excursion, the woman's wig and her parrot, and whether it had been worth the shilling.

“Conflicts,” Daisy said again. “You know, I really don't like that word.”

“But she also said passion . . .”

“And recklessness.”

“And a great love . . .”

Daisy shook her head. “And more than one marriage. I don't want more than one marriage!”

“
Possibly
more than one marriage,” Aurelia corrected her. “She said possibly.”

“It must mean divorce . . .”

“You might be widowed.”

“I don't want to be widowed either.”

“But is Ben your great love, do you think? Or is it someone else . . . ?”

Daisy stared back at her. “I don't think so. No, it can't be him. Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“Unless my feelings for him change, and grow into something more than they are now.”

“Or unless the great love is to be your
second
husband.”

“Oh God, Aurelia . . . I wish we hadn't gone to the woman now. My life is going to be all reckless passion and mistakes . . . mistakes I'm going to have to learn from. And yours, yours is going to be bound up with Val in an unswerving love . . .”

“And I wonder, who is the charlatan?” Aurelia asked.

“Oh, that's easy. That's my father.”

“Hmm . . . I don't see you as reckless, not in any way. Iris maybe, but not you. Old Larkin got
that
wrong. In fact, I rather think she got it all wrong. And it doesn't really mean anything anyway, dear . . . It was just a bit of fun.”

“You don't know that. It might all be true.”

“I do know it.”

Daisy turned to her. “How? How can you know?”

Aurelia took a deep breath. “Because I know I'm not going to marry Val,” she said, and smiled.

They had reached Fortnum & Mason by the time Aurelia finished telling Daisy the story of her and Valentine, how they had first met—in a central London library; how flattered she had been by his attention, his kindness and manners; and how, caught up in a moment, she had said yes to him. She explained to Daisy that she'd known for some time that she did not love him, not the way
she should, or could, and that she now suspected he was in love with Iris.

“But when are you going to tell him?” Daisy asked as they were led to a table in the tearoom.

“Soon. Probably when I next see him.”

“But that'll be next weekend—at the party at Eden Hall,” Daisy said as she sat down.

Aurelia shrugged. “Iris will be there to pick up the pieces . . . though I very much doubt there'll be any. Other than injured pride, perhaps, I think he'll feel rather relieved to have me off his hands.”

Daisy leaned forward, took hold of Aurelia's hand. “I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be sorry, please. Be happy for me. I could have made a huge mistake . . . and then I really would need your sympathy. As it is, I'm content to remain unmarried, quite content to be a spinster”—she feigned a little shudder—“for a while longer.”

Daisy said nothing. She felt uncomfortable thinking about Iris and Valentine, whom she knew were out together that day.

And then, as though reading her thoughts, Aurelia said, “It's not Iris's fault. It could have been anyone. In fact, I'm rather grateful to your sister—for showing me the extent of Val's love for me and mine for him. She's done me a huge favor. Truly, she has.”

“I need to tell you something,” said Daisy. “And the only reason I haven't told you before now is because it meant nothing, absolutely nothing, and because I didn't want to hurt you . . .”

“Yes?”

“Last Christmas, when Valentine and his mother came to Eden Hall, when I found out about my father and Margot . . .”

“Yes . . . What is it, dear?”

“Valentine kissed me.”

Aurelia laughed. “Oh, thank heavens for that. I thought you were about to tell me something awful.”

“Doesn't it bother you?”

“No, but I imagine it would if I loved him. And to be honest, I don't blame him,” she added, pressing her hand upon Daisy's.

Daisy was relieved. Unburdened, she felt her confession had deepened the friendship. She said, “Now we're like sisters, you and I. And we will have no secrets.”

“If we are to have no secrets, then tell me, why are you marrying Ben Gifford?”

Daisy thought for a moment. She wanted to say
love
,
its possibilities
. She said, “We're not yet”—and then stumbled over the word
officially
, and having to say it again. “Engaged,” she added.

“Officially or unofficially”—Aurelia giggled—“you agreed to marry him.” She handed Daisy the menu. “Don't tell me you're in love with him, because I know you're not, and you admitted as much earlier. So what is it? I'm intrigued . . . I know Val and Iris think—”

“Oh, please don't repeat what they think. Can we leave them out of this?”

“Yes, all right, but tell me. You can tell me . . . Why did you say yes? Why did you agree to marry him if you don't love him?”

Daisy put down the menu. “Because,” she said, and then paused. “He asked me. Oh, don't look at me like that. I know it sounds pathetic . . . but he's a decent man, and he claims he loves me. And he'd asked me so many times, Aurelia, I had to say yes, eventually . . . But I wish I hadn't.”

“It's not too late . . . It's never too late.”

The girls ordered their tea, scones and cake. “A Saturday afternoon treat,” Aurelia said, rubbing her hands together. She giggled again about Mrs. Larkin's wig, winced at the remembrance of the malodorous reek of the cottage and then, watching Daisy's face, told her to dismiss everything they had been told. “We shall be mistresses of our own destiny,” she said, raising her china teacup into the air.

But Daisy didn't feel mistress of her own destiny, and she felt weighted by all the things she hadn't told her friend or anyone else.

“What is it?” Aurelia asked. “There's something bothering you . . . I can tell.”

Daisy nodded. “Yes, and I need to tell you . . . need to tell someone.”

Aurelia stared back at her. “You're making me nervous.”

And so once more Daisy revisited last Christmas, this time including Stephen's note and declaration of love. When Aurelia clapped her hands to her mouth, Daisy said, “But wait, there's more.” She then told Aurelia what she had heard from Mrs. Wintrip,
and
what she had overheard in the kitchen the previous Christmas. When she'd finished, the girls sat in silence for a moment or two. Then Daisy said, “So there you have it. Stephen is in all likelihood my brother . . . and I think I might have been in love with him.”