“So how do you normally spend your Saturday evenings?” she asks. Meaning, when you’re not on a hot date with a desirable single woman who has decided tonight is to be the night.
Owen swallows. “There’s often something at the Wigmore Hall,” he bleats. “And sometimes of course I’m working. How about you?”
“Oh, you know. Films, theater. There are times I like to just stay home with a good book.”
This last is such a whopper that those of us who are following these proceedings cannot stifle our giggles. Yes, Daisy is a reader, but books have little power in her world over the call of the bright lights, the river of Blue Bombsicles.
“What are you reading just now?”
Truth: The book Daisy was reading in bed last night—before it fell from her fingers and woke her—was a collection of recipes by Nigella Lawson.
“Madame Bovary,” she replies with an impressively straight face. “I’m actually rereading it.”
I happen to know Daisy studied this work at university; should any awkward follow-ups arrive, she will be well placed to field them.
“But I’m always in the market for a recommendation.”
Owen grimaces. “Funnily enough, I’m reading a new history of the Hundred Years War. I’m actually on volume four, which itself is a thousand pages. It’s amazingly absorbing, but I can’t really recommend it unless you’re interested in the period.”
“I generally prefer the shorter wars, to be honest.”
Owen laughs. “I’m going to be so sorry when it’s finished. I might have to start all over again from the beginning.”
“You want this last little lamb chop?”
“I don’t think I could.”
Daisy nibbles at it from between her fingers. “You don’t mind if I eat with my hands, do you?”
Owen doesn’t look like he’d mind if she ate with her feet. He is enjoying her gustatory abandon, suggestive as it is of further possible abandonments to come.
“Did what’s her name eat with her fingers?” she mumbles between bites.
“Who?”
“Her. The cellist. Mmm. These baby lamb chops are to die for. I can’t remember her name. Sorry.”
“No reason to be sorry. I didn’t actually mention her name.”
“Are you sure? I could have sworn it was something like. Well, not Ethel. But one of those old names that’s come back. Maud. No, not that either.”
“I didn’t say her name.”
“Really? You remember that? Not saying it?”
“Would you like to know her name, Daisy?”
Something chilly in the way he put the question. I ask the TV set if it can hear alarm bells sounding.
“Dialogue’s gone a bit screwy,” it confirms.
Daisy says, “Only if you’d like to tell me, Owen.”
“What’s happening?” says the toothbrush. “Has something happened? They’re being weird.”
The microwave says it looks simple enough to organize a power cut to the restaurant. The resulting chaos could help reset the conversation.
Owen removes his glasses and holds them up to the light, inspecting for blemishes. It’s rather as if he’s playing for time.
“I don’t mind telling you,” he says when it’s all over. “Helen. Her name was Helen. Still is, so far as I know.”
“How funny,” says Daisy. “I thought you said it was Verity. Or Gertrude. One of those Jane Austen names.”
“Why is she banging on about her?” hisses the microwave. “She’s messing it all up.”
Owen says, “What’s funny is that you believed you had forgotten a name that you couldn’t have known. You had what the psychologists call a false memory.”
“Not sure I like his tone,” says the toothbrush. “He’s a bit up himself for someone with poorly occluded front teeth. I wonder if he flosses.”
A small froideur has fallen across the dinner debris. And in so far as a fridge-freezer can have a powerful sinking feeling—experienced as a loss of pressure in the ascending pipework—I am feeling one.
“You ever hear from her? Or was it…?” Daisy trails a finger across her throat.
Owen begins blinking heavily. “I’m not. We’re not. There isn’t. The thing is.” Deep breath. “No, we haven’t. Been in touch. Not at all, actually.”
Daisy’s face has grown very serious. It’s rather beautiful in this moment, the solemn expression spread across the wide (somewhat flushed) bone structure. Her nostrils flare as an unknowable emotion travels through her, and then—then, we are saved.
She does it. She wrinkles her nose. It’s a full-blown episode of the unconscious tic. From sultry, sulky goddess, she has metamorphosed in a heartbeat… into an idiot.
Owen stares at the wondrously stupid expression for a few seconds. And then he cannot help himself. He laughs. “That thing you do?”
“What thing?” (In asking the question, of course, it disappears.)
“What is it?”
“What is what?”
“This.” Owen now wrinkles his nose. And Daisy laughs.
“I do not do that!”
“You’ve done it every time we’ve met.”
“Do it again.”
Owen complies.
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I like it!”
“It makes you look like a moron!”
“On you—it’s charming.”
“Are you utterly insane?”
“You don’t know you’re doing it?”
“What I know—what I do know, is that you need a new prescription for your specs, mate!”
“Love it,” growls the telly.
“Is it all better now?” says the toothbrush. “It is, isn’t it?”
The microwave goes ping. So that tells you something.
And I am happy that they seem to have managed to get past the strange and troubling bump in the road.
“Do it again,” she says. He obliges.
She laughs out loud. “That is so ridiculous. Here you are, can you do this one?”
And she pulls a face of extraordinary grotesquery. It’s a party piece apparition, a gurning gargoyle worthy of the turrets of Notre Dame; eyes, teeth, tongue—even ears somehow—all joining in, the resulting vision—and let’s admit it, she has a broad canvas on which to paint—is wonderfully startling in both its sudden materialization and its transgressive awfulness. None of us in the apartment has ever seen it before and, speaking for myself, I am a little in awe. (I mean, I can do some clever stuff—ice cubes and what have you—but I can’t do that!)
And then it is gone.
(It’s a face she must have first learned to make in a primary school playground. I know I shall want to see it again.)
“Well, fuck me down, ginger,” says the telly, echoing
