“It was so beautiful. Little pomegranate seeds, like rubies, in the rice.”
Mr. Gupta had a very good trick where he could tell what newspaper you read from your shoes—he’d spent years perfecting it—and he was spot on when he did it on me saying, “I may be wrong, Daisy, but I strongly suspect a newspaper does not feature in your daily reading habits.”
He said Mummy had an even better trick where she could tell a person’s name just by looking at them. I said that was a new one on me, but he insisted she’d guessed he was Anil and utterly refused to tell him how it was done!
Mummy tapped her nose and said every good relationship contained mystery at its heart.
Mr. G nodded at her wisdom, visibly pleased, it seemed to me, to have their connection described as a “good relationship.”
Still warm but overcast, we sat on Brighton’s pebbly beach and Eggstain bought ice creams. We licked them and stared out to sea, Mr. Gupta saying he’d once seen the English Channel described as “like pewter.” We agreed it was definitely on the pewtery side of things today.
Eggstain said he was fond of the phrase “mackerel sky,” which posh authors liked to chuck in to suggest melancholia.
Mummy recalled a rhyme she’d learned at school and amazed everyone by reciting it perfectly:
“Whether the weather be fine
Or whether the weather be not
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot
We’ll weather the weather
Whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not.”
It’s reasonably well known that demented people can remember every detail of an event that took place fifty years ago, but nothing from earlier that morning. Nonetheless, I think we were all quite impressed. Mum smiled and said that Eggstain’s pills must be working. Pointing to her head, she said she’d inherited her own mother’s kidneys. We all laughed, but I’m not certain it was a joke. And now that it was my turn to say something about the sea or the clouds or whatever, I couldn’t think of a damn thing, overawed as I was by the brilliance of the intellectuals!
Maybe it was a sugar hit from the ice cream, but a curious sense of happiness stole over me, and my fingers folded into Eggstain’s. What a funny tableau we must have made: Mummy in her floral print dress from Dorothy Perkins; Mr. Gupta in his burgundy jacket and beige trousers; darling Eggstain in his tragic trainers. I wanted to remember this scene, but I knew if I asked someone to take a snap, the magic would be lost.
A middle-aged man with a buzzcut, Doc Martens and a French Mastiff like a baby rhino came crunching through the shingle in front of us.
“He is a Sun,” said Mr. Gupta. “I know it in my bones.”
“Quite correct,” said Mummy. “And his name is Marcel.”
We all looked at her.
“What? That’s his name! Ask him if you don’t believe me.”
Eggstain pretended to get up and go after him.
In that moment, it felt oddly like being in a family.
If it turns out to be a boy, I think we shall call him Marcel.
At one time Daisy and Eggstain had seriously considered holding their engagement party at Pete Purple’s on West End Lane, but in the end they decided to have it at her flat, and I’m relieved they did. I couldn’t have been there otherwise.
Tonight I am in the thick of things, my main chiller cabinet packed to the gunnels with Prosecco, beer, and soft drinks for the mother-to-be. Somewhat tricky to isolate individual conversations amid the hubbub, but with technical help from the TV, the toaster, the (new!) microwave and others, we are separating the sound and getting acceptable coverage.
Daisy is… well, the only word is blooming, I’m afraid.
If you didn’t know it from the subtle exaggeration in the convexity of her abdomen, you’d definitely tell from her face. She’s never looked more like a bowl of peaches and cream, and I don’t mean pale with orange bits hanging around in it.
Life has changed for all of us since we began Operation Daisy. Eggstain—I still can’t quite get used to calling him Mark—has gently brought his sensible doctorly influence to bear, and now my interior is regularly filled with fresh fish, green vegetables, salad ingredients, hummus, olives and—once, memorably—a microwaveable pouch of quinoa! On her part, for his fortieth birthday, Daisy went to a posh shop in Jermyn Street and bought him a beautiful pair of oxblood brogue boots which Eggstain simply adores. The tragic trainers lie at the bottom of the waste bin, a sad commentary on the fickleness of the human heart when it comes to (in this case, walking) technology; a theme I shall return to shortly. The couple continue to search the property websites for a house in their price range. Sometimes they get excited about an unmodernized terrace, five minutes’ walk from East Finchley Tube; at other times it’s a converted barn with outbuildings and an acre of land in a dismal village in Lincolnshire. (The repurposed military fortress in the Thames estuary was probably a red herring.) Will they take me with them to their new place when they finally settle upon somewhere suitable for themselves and their expanding family? Somehow, I doubt it. People don’t tend to schlep their fridge-freezers when they move, do they?
It’s okay. I’m cool with whatever they decide. The mission is complete, now I have bigger fish to fry—of which more shortly—and
