“Now, is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Chantal agreed with me that no great love story ever got off the launchpad without a booster rocket full of house white to escape Earth’s gravity.
At lunchtime, we were in Pret a Manger and I’d told her Dylan’s tale.
“In my head, I call him The Foetus,” I admitted.
“There is something larval about him,” she confirmed.
She said when she and The Sculptor finally made the transition from flirting to sealing the deal, they had been borne along on a river of Prosecco.
“How’s it all going with Pierre?”
“Phillippe.”
“I am such a nitwit.”
“Yeah, it’s great. He’s doing a bust of me.”
“Oh my God!”
“Quite hard to sit that still that long.”
“You’d be brilliant at it.”
She would. Chantal is one of those super-calm women. Her face is the glassy surface of a lake unperturbed by breeze, or ducks, or anything. Glassy-smart as opposed to glassy-thick as a plank.
“He’s had to wheel in a telly, so I can watch First Dates while he’s working.”
She circled her thumbs to mimic squishing the clay.
“Who’s Nicholas Bell?” she asked. “You left Google open when you used my PC.”
“An old boyfriend. First love, I suppose. I’ve been kind of looking for him for ages.”
“There was a Nicholas Bell in my year at school. He had jug ears. They used to call him Bellend.”
“Children are so cruel.”
“This was the teachers.”
“There are millions of effing Nicholas Bells. I’ll never find him.”
“I actually wish it was harder to find people,” said Chantal. “Now—unless they’re called something really common like Nicholas Bell—you just type in their names and bang, up they pop. With their posh jobs and their lovely holidays. There was a girl at my school I found myself thinking about the other day, Ottoline Squires.”
“Great name.”
“Totally poisonous. Utter beast. Other people couldn’t get past the façade of fake charm, but I could so easily imagine her as a murderer. Or one of those sick nurses who tamper with the drips. She knew that I could see behind the mask. There was almost a respect there, even though she understood I absolutely loathed her.”
“Jesus. What’s she doing? Wait! You’re going to tell me she’s running a flipping Footsy 500 company.”
“I hadn’t thought of her in years. So, tippetty-tap into Google.” Chantal’s fingernails performed an extract from Riverdance on the counter. “Guess.”
“I can’t! She’s in the Cabinet?!”
“I might have heard if that had happened.”
“Good point. In prison! On remand for murder.”
“She’s a farmer’s wife in New South Wales. Three kids. Triplets. Active member of an Aussie triplets forum. I imagined the darkest possible end for her, and it turns out she’s turned into Mother Earth. Even the dead-eyed smile has gone all gooey.”
“There’s still time for it all to end horribly. God, aren’t we awful?”
“You know who she married?”
“You said. A farmer.”
“I wouldn’t say I was obsessed, but I couldn’t stop googling about her. She married the nicest, sweetest guy; lifeguard, fireman, all-purpose hero. You can see a video of their wedding on bloody Facebook. I would so much rather have not known any of that. I massively preferred my fantasy life for her: the great unhappiness followed by the criminality followed by the long years in prison.”
“People can change, I guess. Though I don’t think I have.”
“They get smarter about concealing the ugly truth. The ugly ones do, if they’re at all smart.”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever find Nicky.”
“Don’t you have some guy with a beard in the frame?”
“That’s my mum’s doctor! He’s not in any frame. Though I do like him.”
“If you do discover Nicholas Bell, you might not like what you find out.”
“Who’s your long-lost first love?”
“Mine?” Chantal scanned the light fittings for his name. “Well, he’s not lost, and I’m not sure the word love is appropriate, but he was the first. You’ll like this. Baz Moonman.”
“You are fucking kidding me!”
“Baz wasn’t his real name, but Moonman was.”
“You lost your maidenhood to a Moonman?”
“I was delighted someone wanted to take it, in all honesty.”
“And Baz?”
“Baz is now Secretary-General of the United Nations.”
There was a long pause. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Yeah. He’s only Deputy Secretary.”
“What is he really?”
“He works in pesticides. In Newton-le-Willows. Honestly, Daisy, sometimes you’re better off not knowing.”
After the success of the expedition to Waitrose, I suggest to Chloe that we try a walk in the park.
We had just completed the last clue in the Daily Mail cryptic crossword—Ham is twice mistaken for fish dish (7). Answer: Sashimi—the sun was pouring in through the kitchen window and I was feeling perky in the glow of triumph that followed upon our unearthing of the elusive “Golden” N.
“It would do you good,” I say. “It would do us both good to get out of the house.”
Daisy’s mum stares at her fridge-freezer, no doubt struggling to make sense of my last statement.
“You could take some bread to feed to the birds,” I add.
It turns out to be a terrible suggestion.
“Let’s be clear about this, shall we?” she thunders. “I am not some sad old cow whose only friends are fucking pigeons.”
“My apologies.”
“Accepted. We shall stroll in the Swan Lane open space and then visit the supermarket for household essentials. Now, where is the device?”
“Charging by the toaster, madam.”
Confession: I like to see Mrs. Parsloe with a bit of fire in her belly. She seems most alive when, as the TV would put it, she’s got the raging hump about something!
We negotiate the route with no mishaps and soon we are wandering the paths of what Wikipedia tells us is the smallest of the sixteen “premier parks” to be found in the London Borough of Barnet. Camera coverage is poor; I request that Chloe keeps the mobile phone in her hand so I may view the world through its forward-facing lens (with the occasional glance backward!).
“We used to come here when Daisy was small,” she tells me. “She was such a clumsy little girl. She fell in this pond here on two occasions. The second time, we took
