As Lyons stomps back to his office, Daisy and her colleague Chantal exchange particular expressions, Daisy silently performing the lip movements necessary to articulate the word wanker.
But some of Lyons’ anxiety must have leached into her soul, because after turning on her PC—and checking half a dozen social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tinder—and gobbling three quarters of her Danish pastry—she finally dials a number she has stored in her mobile as “Marcus Nob.”
The Hon Marcus, when they are connected, tells Daisy that he hadn’t really “thought it all through.” It was the “living in Grimsby bit” that he was finding “problematical.” Neither, if he was honest, did the “fish-gutting thing” especially appeal. Also, there was the question of the “northern fellow” taking on the apartment in Eaton Square. “It’s in the most frightful mess at the moment with decorators and what have you.” When Daisy reminds him that they had talked all this over at considerable length—and more than once—he apologizes: “I know. It’s entirely my fault. You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“But we don’t have a program without you, Marcus,” she says in an uncharacteristically wheedling tone.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he says unhelpfully.
“What can we do for you?” she asks now. “How can we smooth away your, your doubts, shall we call them?”
Marcus says it’s not about the fee. It’s more—well, it’s Mummy, if he’s honest. Mummy lives in Monte Carlo and although she wouldn’t see the program, some of her friends might. And it could get back. So it’s probably not such a brilliant idea, but thanks so much for thinking of him.
That’s the thing about old Etonians, Daisy tells Chantal at lunchtime. They’ll think nothing of doing you up like a kipper, but their manners are impeccable.
The two women are eating sandwiches perched in the window of a branch of Pret a Manger two minutes’ walk from the office. Daisy (ham and cheese baguette) confesses to a rising sense of panic. Craig Lyons had told her she needed to “majorly think outside the box” when she brought him the news that the Hon M was not to be persuaded. He told her to “play with the idea”; that for someone a week gutting fish on Humberside would be a “fascinating glimpse into another culture.” Perhaps, he ventured, she should try “phone-bashing” academics, professors of sociology or whatever, for whom the experiment would be a “unique eye-opener into the reality of low-paid work in today’s Britain blah blah fucking blah.” Anyway, she had thirty-six hours to find someone before they would have to stand down the film crew, cancel the shoot, and take a long hard look at Daisy’s future within the Tangent Television structure going forward.
Daisy said she’d put in some calls and spent the rest of the morning being turned down by academics in the social sciences. A very senior figure at the London School of Economics actually told her to fuck off and stop wasting her time.
Chantal Wilks (line caught tuna wrap) squeezes Daisy’s hand and confirms her colleague’s view of things that their boss is a “mega-tosser.” She thinks Daisy’s new plan—to cab it round to Mayfair this afternoon and basically buttonhole posh twats in the street—is “kind of random, but also genius. Maybe.”
“I should have stuck with food,” says Daisy. (Her previous job was on a cookery show.) “Food doesn’t drop you in it. If you fry an egg, it stays fried. It doesn’t decide halfway through it would prefer not to be fried. It doesn’t start worrying what its mother would say. Actually, I’m sick of talking about all this. Tell me how it going with himself,” she says, referring to the newish man in Chantal’s life.
Chantal has to swallow some lunch to clear the way for a reply.
“Fan-fucking-tastic!”
“Brilliant!” Daisy grips her companion’s arm. “So exciting! Tell me everything!”
What follows is—to my way of thinking—an extended and highly graphic description of amatory congress. Chantal has sensibly lowered her voice (Daisy’s phone boosts the volume obligingly) and the tale she relates—I shall spare you the details—causes Daisy to giggle (six times), to gasp (twice), wince (once) and exclaim, “No! He didn’t! Blood. Dee. Hell!” (once).
Daisy takes a big bite from her baguette; her gaze seems to defocus as it falls upon the passing scene of Tottenham Court Road. In the close-up from the security camera across the street (thanks, btw) her eyeballs flick up and leftward, which I seem to recall suggests she is largely “in” the right-hand side of her brain, the non-verbal, primarily visual hemisphere. We shall never know what this thirty-four-year-old adult female is thinking right now; even if she knows it herself, it may be something that cannot be expressed in words. But were I a betting—I nearly said man!—I might venture a modest wager that Daisy’s imagination is processing what she has just heard; chewing over the sensational details; a cerebral analogue of what her teeth and soft mouth tissue are currently doing to the cheese and ham baguette. Her attention cuts back to Chantal and a smile spreads itself across her strikingly wide features. A final swallow.
“Wow.”
“I know,” says Chantal.
“I mean. Fuck.”
Chantal nods. “Yup.”
Daisy sighs. “Jesus!”
“So what about that man of
