He Loves Me Not...He Loves Me

by Claudia Carroll

  ‘Darling, shall we go into dinner?’ Daisy said, linking her arm with Steve’s and steering him towards the Dining Room. ‘I know that sounded dreadful, Steve,’ she whispered to him as they left the Long Gallery, ‘but sometimes you just have to be cruel to be kind.’

  Paddy stayed rooted to the spot, staring down at the bunch of carnations he never even got to give her. Serge and Montana, who were standing by the mantelpiece, drifted over to him.

  ‘You know what I always say, honey,’ said Serge, chirpily. ‘In with anger and out with love.’

  ‘Sorry, lads, I’m just a bit . . . ya know . . . emotional . . .’ he said. ‘I think I need to go and express me feelings of rejection through song.’

  ‘Or you could try to have a good night and come with us?’ said Montana hopefully. ‘You can even sit by me if you want.’

  It was well after five a.m. before the party finally broke up. This was early by Davenport Hall’s normal standards (where a good knees-up could last for anything up to three days, depending on both the amount of alcohol available and the mood of the hostess). However, Lucasta was in unusually subdued form all evening and even refused to sing when asked, much to everyone’s surprise. And relief in some cases. (Guy had threatened to smash the stained-glass windows piece by piece if she as much as opened her mouth.)

  Daisy had dutifully sat by Steve all night playing the role of devoted girlfriend and surprised herself by having a lot more fun than she thought she would. He might not have Guy’s looks or glamour but at least he was normal, not sad and obsessive like poor old Paddy. And after what she’d been through, there was a lot to be said for normality. He’d been sweet to her all night, lovely to talk to and just . . . easy. There was something so warm and comfortable and reassuring about being in his company, he was almost like the human equivalent of hangover food.

  She walked him across the gravelled forecourt to his Jeep just as first light was dawning and a gentle mist was lifting from the fields around the Hall. The moon was still high, and bathed the Hall in a silvery glow, making it loom out of the darkness like a magnificent stately ghost ship.

  ‘Dear old Davenport,’ he said, taking in the stark beauty of it all at that unearthly hour. ‘I’m going to miss it every bit as much as you.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it, I’ll start crying again. Do you know, it’s only now that we’re losing it that I’ve realized how much it means to me?’ Daisy had started to shiver in the cold early-morning air and, without even thinking, he took off his jacket and gently covered her bare shoulders with it.

  ‘Thanks for everything tonight, Steve.’

  ‘Anytime.’

  An awkward moment passed between them, a ‘will we, won’t we’ moment, with both of them getting more and more embarrassed. Eventually, he broke away, muttering something about having an early start. She found herself following him to his car, surprised that he hadn’t tried to kiss her. Surprised and a bit disappointed.

  ‘Goodnight, Daisy Davenport,’ he said, turning the key in the ignition and revving up the engine.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, won’t I?’ she called after him as his Jeep sped off down the driveway.

  But it was too late. He was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  FOR THE FIRST time in ages, Shamie Nolan thought himself fortunate that there were film stars in residence at Davenport Hall, for the simple reason that press attention was deflected from him, if only temporarily. Mind you, it didn’t stop his mobile phone from ringing every five minutes, with various reporters, radio stations and news programmes all asking the same question over and over again. ‘Now that you’ve finally resigned your seat in the Dáil, Mr Nolan, have you any comment to make about the upcoming Tribunal of inquiry into your various business dealings? Chief Justice Michael de Courcey has indicated that no stone will be left unturned, that no paper trail will be ignored and that any hint of irregularities in planning practices will be dealt with by the full force of the law.’

  Exhaustively coached by his legal team, Shamie gave the same standard reply to all comers. ‘Ah now, lads, far from dreading the Tribunal, sure I’m actually looking forward to it. I welcome the chance to clear me good name, which has been so vilified by the media in recent weeks.’ Then, checking to make sure his mobile phone was switched off, he rejoined the crisis meeting taking place around his kitchen table.

  ‘Who was it this time?’ asked his barrister, Harry Smith, as he produced yet another mountain of files from his briefcase.

  ‘Ah, that fecking shower from Channel Six. I swear to Jaysus, when all of this shite is over, I’m going to sort out their Director General like ya wouldn’t believe. By the time I’m finished with that leftie prick, he won’t be able to get a job as the fecking social diarist on the Tallaght Tribune. And when I think of all the handouts I’ve thrown at his TV station over the years!’

  ‘Mr Nolan, that’s exactly the type of comment that will most emphatically not go down well at the Tribunal,’ replied Harry coolly. ‘Now, if we could just get back to what we were discussing about damage limitation?’

  ‘Right, so,’ said Shamie, sitting down, ‘you think there’s no other way around it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Bridie’ll hit the ceiling when she hears this—’ Shamie broke off, interrupted by the woman herself, who burst through the kitchen door laden down with armloads of shopping bags.

  ‘Shamie Nolan, I’m after saving you a feckin’ fortune!’ she exclaimed, her standard greeting whenever her shopping sprees had run into four-figure sums, which they frequently did. ‘Howaya, Harry? Did ya get a cup of tea?’ she asked, bending down to rummage in the first of many bags.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ he answered politely before she bulldozed over him.

  ‘Take a look at this!’ she squealed, producing what surely must have been one of the most garish outfits ever seen since Marc Bolan was top of the pops at the height of the glam rock era. Even a master of overstatement like Gianni Versace would have baulked at its fluorescent green hue and bat-wing sleeves with every square inch covered in giant diamanté insects. She proudly held it up to her and pranced around the kitchen saying, ‘Well, are yer eyes out on stilts or what, lads?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Harry, an expert liar. ‘Very, emm, Brazilian rainforest.’

  ‘I thought it would be fabulous to wear on the first day of the Tribunal,’ she went on. ‘Do ya remember the way at Jeffrey Archer’s trial the judge took one look at his fragrant wife and let him off? Well, wait till Michael de Courcey sees me in this! And ya know, it’ll do grand for all the entertaining we’ll be doing once we move into the Hall . . .’

  ‘Yes, Davenport Hall,’ replied Harry, relieved that she was the one to have brought up the unpleasant subject. ‘Your husband and I were just discussing that.’

  * * *

  In all fairness, Portia had to admit that even she never really appreciated exactly how much work Mrs Flanagan did until now, when it was too late. She and Daisy had spent the morning cleaning up after the previous night’s revelries – not an easy task.

  ‘Can you believe the amount of wine we got through?’ said Daisy, yawning as she loaded up yet another trayload of empties to cart down to the kitchen.

  ‘I know, thank God Mummy has abandoned all her ideas to go global with Eau de Davenport, or else she’d kill us for throwing all those bottles out.’ (Lucasta was a great one for enthusiastically ramming her business scams down people’s throats ad nauseam, and then, just as suddenly, dropping them the minute she got bored.)

  ‘Where is she anyway?’ asked Portia, emptying yet another half-drunk gin and tonic into a slops bucket.

  ‘Still in bed. She’s lying in state today and refuses to budge; she’s communing with the other side to ask for a solution to all our problems. She told me she’s in touch with a spirit guide who says he’ll kick Shamie Nolan’s arse for us.’

  ‘Just out of curiosity, I’d love to know who the spirit guide
is. Al Capone maybe?’

  Daisy giggled.

  ‘You’re chirpy this morning, missy,’ said Portia. ‘Any reason why?’

  ‘No reason,’ she replied, tipping the contents of a stuffed ashtray into the bin.

  ‘Right,’ said Portia, taking charge, ‘I need to go into Ballyroan to collect the car from Mrs Flanagan, do you fancy walking there with me?’

  ‘You go, I’ll stay here and keep on cleaning. And be sure to tell her how desperately we all miss her, won’t you? And how much we need her back? Was I born so beautiful to spend my days emptying fag butts into bins?’ she asked melodramatically.

  Portia playfully threw a tea towel at her and ran upstairs to grab her tweed jacket from her room. As she walked down the upper corridor, she was just in time to hear chanting, or rather screeching coming from her mother’s bedroom. The door was open and Lucasta, still in her long, grey nightie, was pacing up and down, as though in a trance-like state.

  ‘I implore thee, I beseech thee, O benign one, in this our hour of direst need, to come to our aid and cleanse this house of the dark forces which are threatening us at this moment.’

  ‘Need anything in town, Mummy?’ Portia called, sticking her head around the door.

  ‘Dark and evil spirits are clouding around me and only your intervention can save us now!’ she went on, ignoring Portia. ‘I call on you to take us from out of the darkness and into the light and GET TONIC WATER IN SPAR, WE’RE OUT OF MIXERS,’ she screamed after Portia, not coming out of her trance for a second.

  It was a cold, damp, miserable morning and Portia didn’t envy the film crew who were scheduled to film in the Yellow Drawing Room all day. Technically it was an indoor scene, but given the arctic cold in that room and the way temperatures would plummet whenever the north wind whistled through the gaping holes in the wall, they may as well have been shooting outside. Thank God it’s not raining, she thought, banging the front door behind her, the ceiling in there leaks so badly, they’d have thought they were filming in Niagara Falls.

  She was looking forward to a good, long, solitary walk (it was virtually impossible to get a moment’s peace in the Hall these days) and was surprised to have only got as far as the stables when Daisy breathlessly caught up with her.

  ‘I changed my mind, I’m coming with you,’ she said, panting. ‘I need to get out of there. Christ! When will this film ever be finished?’

  ‘What’s up now?’ asked Portia.

  ‘There I was, scrubbing for Ireland, when bloody Paddy creeps up behind me, like a fucking slithery bastard, nearly makes me leap six feet into the air and then shoves this at me,’ she said, taking a handwritten poem from the pocket of her wax jacket.

  Portia glanced down at it and saw that it was titled ‘O Most Pernicious Woman’.

  ‘Go on, you can read it,’ said Daisy. ‘If nothing else in your life makes you glad to be single, this will.’

  Portia saw at a glance that it was every bit as long as Paradise Lost but maybe not quite as poetic. One verse, which caught her eye, went:

  You’re nothing but a slag,

  You’re nothing but a tart,

  You stupid bloody bitch,

  You broke my fucking heart.

  I thought you were my girlfriend,

  I thought you were all right,

  I thought you were a lady,

  What a load of shite.

  ‘Well, I don’t think he’ll ever be appointed Poet Laureate, but he certainly gets his point across, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I’m telling you, he’s unhinged. He’s a male bunny boiler. I’ll go home and he’ll have shredded all my underwear,’ Daisy ranted, waving the wad of paper dramatically in front of her, looking like Neville Chamberlain in 1939. ‘This, this, this is the kind of thing that . . . that . . .’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘That makes you appreciate the normal guys. Like, emm . . . Steve, for instance. Just, oh, you know, just off the top of my head . . .’ she trailed off meekly.

  Portia would have burst out laughing, given how dismissive bordering on cruel she’d been to him in the past, except that by now they’d arrived at the main entrance gates.

  Ordinarily there’d be a handful of reporters standing around, moaning at each other and looking miserable. In the past few weeks, the Davenports had become almost friendly with the press, they were such an integral part of their daily lives by now. Inwardly, Portia would marvel at the information they managed to wheedle out about what was going on at the Hall. For instance, how did they know for certain that Ella Hepburn used Hellmann’s mayonnaise on her hair as a conditioner, or that she had a chemical peel applied to her face and neck every other day? (THERE’S MORE OF ELLA’S SKIN IN THE BIN THAN ON HER FACE, the headline had run.) They even seemed to know the most intimate personal details of Montana’s menstrual cycle (HORMONAL MONTANA’S AT THE CHOCOLATE AGAIN, had been another one). Portia’s own personal theory was that they were going through the bins. But how they were capable of gleaning so much from so little was beyond her. Their talents were totally wasted in the field of journalism, she used to think, they’d be put to far better use in the Secret Service, or as weapons inspectors in the Middle East.

  But the media’s favourite character by far in the ongoing soap opera they’d manufactured was Lucasta herself, whom they portrayed as a lovable cross between Barbara Cartland and Joyce Grenfell. Indeed, she was so regularly featured in the papers these days that she’d become a minor celebrity of sorts, with pictures of her bottle-feeding kittens making all the gossip pages. In recent days, the press had even turned the Nolans’ purchase of the Hall into a cause célèbre, running photos of Lucasta and Bridie Nolan side by side beneath headlines like: WHOM DO YOU WANT DAVENPORT HALL TO BELONG TO? THE LADY OR THE TRAMP? Given that six months ago most people would have been hard pressed even to tell you where Davenport Hall was, all this media attention had really put it on the map. So much so that Portia often thought about how impossible it would be for Andrew not to know what was going on. Which could only lead back to the inevitable conclusion that he wasn’t interested and didn’t care.

  The girls passed through the huge, rusting entrance gates and paused for a chat with the journalists.

  ‘Simon, how’s your cold?’ asked Daisy, addressing one of them. ‘Did the potion Mummy send down to you make a difference?’

  ‘Much better, thanks,’ he replied. ‘Ladies, could we ask you one quick question please?’

  Portia and Daisy exchanged puzzled glances. ‘Of course,’ said Portia, ‘unless it’s personal!’

  All of a sudden, there seemed to be cameras pointing at them from every direction, microphones thrust in their faces and sound booms wobbling over their heads. Bright lights shone right at them, temporarily startling them both. ‘So this is what it feels like to be one of the Beckhams,’ joked Daisy, but no one laughed. Bloody hell, thought Portia, wondering what was up and inwardly bracing herself for a curt ‘no comment’. Daisy didn’t even have time to fix her hair before Simon posed the question.

  ‘Would you care to comment on the impending sale of Davenport Hall?’

  They visibly relaxed as Portia answered for both of them.

  ‘Naturally, we’re devastated to have to leave our family home, but, whether we like it or not, the Nolans take possession at the end of August, as soon as the film has wrapped.’ Even though the cameras were making her a little nervous, it did flash through her mind that this was hardly hot news. After all, they’d bought the Hall weeks ago.

  Simon paused to rephrase the question.

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard. An announcement has just been made by Shamie Nolan’s solicitors. Given the contentious nature of his purchase of the Hall and mindful of the fact that his legal fees could run into seven-figure sums, he has announced, with regret, his decision to sell. Immediately. As of now, Davenport Hall is back on the market.’

  Edwina’s morning had started out badly and got progressively worse. ‘Are you lea
rning impaired?’ she snarled at the unfortunate seamstress charged with the task of pinning her dress in at the waist. ‘I lose a few pounds and you can’t even take the dress in without losing the whole line of it? This isn’t brain surgery, you know, I’m not asking you to build the Channel Tunnel here.’

  Kate Egan, her wedding planner, discreetly stepped forward, knowing that nervous brides-to-be were usually snappy and irritable like this. Especially in the final run-up to the big day. Particularly for a huge wedding like this one. She instinctively knew that all that was required was for a few ruffled feathers to be smoothed down a bit. ‘Oh Edwina,’ she gushed professionally, ‘you look divine! Yes, you have lost a little weight, but the tiniest tweak along this seam here will sort that out. He’s a very lucky man, you know,’ she added for good measure. Not for nothing did her services command six-figure fees each year.

  Edwina stepped down from the dais she’d been standing on in the middle of the designer’s studio, being ultra careful not to trip over her ten-foot train.

  ‘I need a word with you,’ she whispered threateningly to Kate. ‘Now, I’m trying my best to remain calm, but do you see what I’m seeing?’ She nodded over to the far end of the studio, where her two teenage nieces were being fitted for their bridesmaids’ dresses.

  ‘Aren’t they adorable?’ was the best comment Kate could muster.

  ‘Kate, I need to be absolutely clear about one thing,’ Edwina replied imperiously. ‘When I chose them to be my bridesmaids, I did so in the full knowledge that neither of them was ever likely to win a beauty pageant. I was willing to overlook their imperfections, because I knew they could only make me look better. But, for Christ’s sake, look at them!’

  Kate dutifully shot a glance down to the opposite end of the studio. They did indeed look horrific. The coral colour of their Bo-Peep style dresses only brought out the pus on their acne-covered faces and the designer’s carefully concealed foundation garments did absolutely nothing to secure their sagging breasts and prevent them from wobbling as they moved. Harland and Wolff would have been hard pressed to manufacture underwear that would hold them in place.