“I’ll never forget, watching it sail out of the harbor. He said I should wave a towel from the balcony of my B&B.”
“Did you?” asked Lorna.
“I waved a yellow sundress. The towels were ratty. And part of me really believed I’d never see him again. But he called, just as he promised, when he was back in London and—well, in the end, we were together for a year.”
“Wow.”
“He wasn’t your typical boring banker. He was a baby quant. A maths guy who looked for secret patterns in the way the markets moved. He liked classical music! And art! He could talk for hours about how bloody enormous the universe is. How the earth is an apple pip in London and the sun is a watermelon in Rome! I met his parents; his father, right!? His father was a High Court judge! They had a socking great ruin in Oxfordshire with smelly dogs and chipped plates and moldy curtains and howling drafts and his mother wore a headscarf like the Queen and…”
She trailed off and sighed. The big Daisy sigh I have come to know so well. The one signaling powerlessness in the face of an indifferent (and, as we’ve heard, enormous) cosmos.
“It ended. He dumped me. You knew that was coming, right?”
“Daft cunt.” (Lorna.)
“And then he started going out with someone called Romilly. Her parents owned half of Cheshire. And she played like Grade Zillion violin. I forget who told me.”
“Darling, don’t.”
“Oh, it’s fine. I can talk about it all now. Anyway, he was a Nicky. No one ever called him Nick. Or Nicholas. He always made me think of that bit in Cymbeline. Fear no more the heat of the sun… Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney sweepers, come to dust. That was Nicky. He was such a golden boy.”
There was a respectful silence during which I restarted my compressor.
“What happened to him?” asked Antoni.
“Living on benefits in Falkirk? Twelve kids?”
“Dunno,” said Daisy. “I’m not even tempted to find out. Who’s for pudding?”
This last statement—about not being tempted—I knew to be a fib. In idle moments at work, Daisy had googled his name. But there are thousands of people in the world called Nicholas Bell and her answer suggested she hadn’t yet identified the Golden Nicky.
I made a mental note to see if I could do any better.
Why?
Because I am curious.
If one possesses a fridge-freezer that doesn’t do curiosity, perhaps one should consider upgrading to a smart model.
Commercial ends.
Well, now she’s drunk half a bottle of wine and the blinis have all gone. She’s left two messages on his mobile:
A friendly one, “Hi, just wondering where you are!”
And a more irritable communication, “Hey, your dinner’s getting cold! Can you let me know when I can expect you?” A long pause while she tries to come up with another line… and fails. Hangs up.
It’s eight minutes past nine. Allowing for the statutory ten minutes of lateness that human society apparently considers not just acceptable, but actually polite to leave—what a system!—you have almost an hour and counting of what the footballers call added time.
She is just reaching for the mobile, doubtless to leave a third message, when it produces the chirp of an incoming text.
“Here we go,” says the telly.
“I’d be absolutely furious,” says the microwave. And it generates a string of pings to emphasize the point.
“Not good,” says Daisy’s phone as it shares Whittle’s message.
Sorry, Daze. Can’t come over tonight. Big flap on at work. Will explain all another time. I’ll make it up to you promise. S XXX
Something a little heartbreaking about the expression on Daisy’s face, lying as it does, in the sweet spot of the three overlapping circles labeled Abandonment, Rage and Regret.
“Cockpuffins,” she mumbles. But her heart isn’t in it.
To enable you fully to appreciate the blackness that lies in his evil heart, I want to paint a richer picture of the lying dog turd that is Dean Stuart Whittle. Some weeks previously, Whittle took Daisy to a Greek restaurant near her flat; we join the scene as he recounted some of the events of a busy day in London property.
“So it’s mainly tiny shitty places, right. One-bedders, no bedders. Open-plan kitchen bollocks, squeezing in and out of the internal bathroom like human fucking origami. Six hundred square feet for knocking on half a million. Insane, but I don’t make the market, do I?”
He paused to wipe some hummus from its dish with a piece of torn pita. Took a long swallow of Cypriot beer.
“Anyway. I’m showing this couple a few places. Lovely people, cash buyers, getting married next year, moving in together, first step on the ladder. So we’re in this crappy one-bedder on the first floor. Grandstand view of the Holloway Road, fucking bus stand bang outside, the 259 rattling and snorting on your doorstep morning, noon and fucking night, idiots on the top deck gawping straight in through the windows of what they laughingly call the generously proportioned living room slash open-plan kitchen.”
A small, silent, belch.
“So I’m bigging up the brilliant public transport links—flipping the negatives into positives—showing them the”—he did satirical fingers—“ergonomically designed kitchen when I open one of the cabinets and the fucking door comes off in my hand.”
“No!”
“Well, it’s hard to flip anything positive out of that.”
“Look how easily the doors come off, for when you want to clean them?”
“Only one thing to do in those circumstances.”
“Laugh it off?”
“Get angry. Not in an angry way; that would be scary. But get angry on their behalf. No, I’m sorry. This just isn’t good enough. You shouldn’t be looking at rubbish like this. Come on, we’re leaving. We can do a lot better. And now I’m their hero. Their champion. In the car I’m saying, We shouldn’t even be marketing that dump. I’m going to refuse to show it. And the next place we see—always leave the best for last—they offer on it right then and there!”
“You’re awful.”
“Psychology.”
And then Whittle did something a bit
