Last of the Great Romantics (31 page)

'You look like you could use a shoulder to drink on, what'll you have, big guy?' Simon asked Jasper sympathetically.

'Guinness, thanks. Here, let me give you a few quid.'

'Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate hospitality. It's a free bar.'

'Free drink? That's the worst kind.' Jasper honestly looked as though he was going to open a vein.

'And for you?' Simon smiled down at Daisy.

She was about to ask for a mineral water, given that she was driving Andrew's jeep, but just then she caught sight of the most fabulous-looking cosmopolitans being served to the bitches of Eastwick. What the hell, she figured, one couldn't hurt, could it? 'I'll have what they're having, thanks,' she said.

'And a little gin and tonic for me, thanks, angel,' chirruped Lucasta.

He winked. 'I love a woman that appreciates a free bar.'

'Oh, I never believe in going to the bar when there's a man in the company,' said Lucasta, settling into a party mood. 'All that bloody feminism malarkey ever meant for women was that they had to buy their own drinks and that men stopped offering them seats on trains. Thank Christ all that passed me by, that's all I can say. Saves me a fortune too.'

Simon raised his eyebrows a bit, as anyone would who wasn't used to her ladyship.

'You know, I say to Daisy, if some poor unfortunate hunchback with one eye and a comb-over is gobshite enough to ask you out on a date, you order a steak dinner and let baldy pay for the works. Men appreciate you all the more when they have to earn you, as it were. Before that awful Germaine Greer one came along, women weren't equal to men, they were superior and . . . By the way,' she interrupted herself, squinting at Simon as though she were seeing him for the very first time.

Then it came. The killer question.

'Are you single?'

'Let me give you a hand with those drinks,' said Daisy, squirming a bit, especially when she saw Simon turn bright red. OK, so he wasn't exactly her favourite person, but, she figured, would you wish Lucasta's sledgehammer matchmaking tactics on your worst enemy?

'So your mother was filling me in about your cousin Jasper on the drive here,' he said as they waited patiently at the bar. 'About his . . . background.'

'Yeah? It's an astonishing story, isn't it?'

'Unbelievable,' he laughed, looking very grateful to have been rescued. 'The long-lost cousin, returning to stake his claim to the ancestral home. Like something out of Dickens.'

'Or
The O.C.'

A few minutes later, they rejoined Lucasta and Jasper, plonking a trayful of drinks in the middle of the table.

'If I ever get my hands on Dave Gemell, I swear to you I won't be responsible,' Jasper was moaning.

'Who?'

'That useless, schizophrenic sad excuse for a goalie that we have.'

'Oh.'

Now the crowd's chant was starting to make sense to Daisy.

'Two Dave Gemells,
There's only two Dave Gemells . . .'

'So what's happening to the teams now?' Daisy asked innocently.

'With a bit of luck, they're getting the living lard kicked out of them by the manager. I've seen better performances from the prison warders annual under-elevens five-a-side.'

All Daisy wanted to do was enjoy her day out but Jasper's morbid depression was really beginning to drag her down.

'Could you believe it when Kerr took O'Sullivan off twenty minutes in?' Jasper went on whining. 'And sent on that useless sack of crap, Peter Daglish? I swear, the housekeeper at Davenport Hall would have made a better midfielder, so she would.'

Simon caught the bewildered look on Daisy's face and explained.

'This is where the team manager demonstrates his sense of humour by taking off a player that's doing great and replacing him with someone untried, at an international level. Wee bit like taking Michelangelo off the Sistine Chapel job and replacing him with a humble painter and decorator. Daft.'

Daisy laughed, although she was still not sure if it was his joke she was giggling at or the accent which automatically made everything sound funny. In what felt like no time, a raucous cheer from the pitch let them know that the teams were back on, so she gulped back her cosmopolitan, fervently hoping that Ireland's performance would improve in the second half, if only to make Jasper less of a moany hole to be around.

'You all go,' Lucasta commanded waving to the fast-emptying bar, 'I'll stay here, just to keep our seats.'

'It's all really moving, innit?' she overheard Falcon say to Shakira as they filed past them on their way back out.

'Yeah, but the most moving thing was when my Alessandro scored!' said Buffy and the three of them dissolved into tipsy cackles.

They walked past Daisy, ignoring her, leaving an untouched cosmopolitan behind. Shame to waste it, she thought, checking to see that no one was watching before she knocked it back.

'If I had the wings of a sparrow [
to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean'
]

If I had the arse of a cow,
I'd fly over Old Trafford tomorrow
And shit on the bastards below.
Shit on, shit on, oh shit on the bastards below, below . . .'

Daisy knew about as much about football as a fruit fly knows about pure maths but even she could tell that the Irish side had pulled their socks up considerably since half-time – or the interval as she kept calling it. Their game was far more offensive; they managed to keep play firmly around the English net; they kept their cool and then the gods smiled down on them. Mark Lloyd tripped up Ireland's key midfielder, Tony Duffy, and the ref awarded Ireland a penalty. For a split second, Ireland were back in the game and it fell to the eighteen-year-old Alan Heap to step up and take it. The English fans sang:

'Que será, será,
Whatever will be,
will be; You can't score a penalty,
Que será, será,'

But the teenager looked like an ice man as he bravely lined up to take the shot. Suddenly after all the noise and screaming and vicious chanting, the stadium went eerily quiet.

'I've heard young Alan wears his granny's miraculous medal whenever he's playing,' said Simon.

'I swear, I'll shove it down his throat if he misses this,' said Jasper.

It was as though everything was happening in slow motion as young Alan raced to kick the ball and sent it soaring . . . Twenty thousand pairs of eyes in the stadium followed its progress, half of them willing it in, half of them willing some act of God to let it go wide . . . Every spectator held their breath and then . . . the miracle . . . The ball hit off the post, the goalie dived for it but . . . it was too late . . . It passed over the line and Ireland scored. The cheer was the loudest yet as every tricolour in the stadium went ballistic and the chant went up:

'You're not singing,
You're not singing,
You're not singing any more!'

To which the English fans came back with:

'Who ate all the pies? [
to the tune of
'Knees Up, Mother Brown'
]
Who ate all the pies?
You fat bastard,
You fat bastard,
Heap ate all the pies'

This unsubtle dig at his puppy fat or even the cries of 'Get your tits out for the lads' did nothing to dampen Alan Heap's spirits. He danced cartwheels around the pitch and his team mates leapt on him in a human pile that left Daisy wondering if he'd broken any bones. 'You'd think we'd just won a war!' she exclaimed but Jasper was too busy sobbing like a big girl's Laura Ashley blouse even to put a coherent sentence together.

'I'll never forget this moment,' he gulped, 'not as long as I live. This is even better than Ray Houghton's equalizer in Stuttgart in eighty-eight.'

'Mightn't be the best penalty I've ever seen,' said Simon, equally impressed if a tad less emotional, 'but it's certainly one of the bravest.'

In spite of England's best efforts to get ahead, the final whistle was upon them in no time, with the scoreboard showing a very honourable 'England 1: Ireland 1'.

'You had joy, you had fun [
to the tune of 'Seasons in the Sun'
]
,
You had Ireland on the run,
But your joy didn't last Cos we ran too fucking fast.'

The Irish fans were as jubilant and ecstatic as if they'd just won the World Cup, an attitude summed up in Jasper's tearful comment as they made their way back to the Players' Lounge.

'Ah lads, I never thought I'd live to see the day that we'd beat England one-all.'

The corporate bar was like a cool, calm oasis of tranquillity compared with the scenes of sheer joyous madness on the stands and Daisy happily put in for another cosmopolitan. Jasper and Simon had rejoined Lucasta, probably the only person there who was oblivious to the fact that a) there had been a match in the first place and, more importantly, that b) Ireland had actually equalized.

They were all deep in conversation at the bar when a steward discreetly approached Daisy.

'Excuse me, are you Miss Daisy Davenport? I've a message for you,' he said, slipping an envelope into her hands.

She greedily ripped it open, delighted no one was around to quiz her.

So what did you think of the match then? Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed seeing you in the box. You and me have a lot to catch up on. How about you come to a small private party I'm having later on? In the Berkeley Court Hotel, at about eight.

We'll have a laugh.

Love,
Mark

PS. You should read and destroy this. The last time I sent someone a note, it ended up on eBay.

Yes! she thought, scrunching up the note and shoving it into her jeans pocket. Could this day get any better?

Chapter Twenty

Could this day get any worse?

Portia, a woman blessed with the patience of a Tibetan monk, had officially reached breaking point. It's sometimes the case in life that you can have ten thousand tiny, niggling bothersome things annoying you all at the same time, and you rise above them and just let them wash all over you. Inevitably, though, one more inconsequential trifle will come along and that one little thing is what will set you over the edge.

And thus it was with Susan de Courcey

By now, Portia had endured day after interminable day of Susan's snide comments towards her, her legendary rudeness and her blatant disregard for the fact that, like it or not, Portia was the woman her only son had chosen to be his wife. Susan's attitude to her daughter-in-law had barely changed one jot since she first met and married Andrew: Portia may have come from a landed family but was still an
arriviste
of the highest order, who by a stroke of pure luck had happened to worm her way into her son's affections and who now lived for no other purpose than to fritter away every penny of his hard-earned cash on herself and, worse, that monstrous pile in Kildare she'd inherited from her sodden old alcoholic of a father.

'And she's an appalling wife too,' Susan would chatter away on the phone in her bedroom to her great friend Nan Keane who lived on Vanderbilt Avenue and who also had a daughter-in-law she couldn't endure. Portia used to think it was almost like a contest between them, a really sick 'whose son married worst' competition, with tea and sympathy at the Palm Court as the glittering first prize.

'Hasn't got the first clue about how to look after a man,' Susan would say at the top of her voice, not caring, in fact probably hoping that Portia would happen to overhear. 'And so poor Andrew is forced to eat out night after night, when he's working all the hours God sends on the Globex case. It's the sort of case that makes or breaks a career, you know, and then what does he come home to? A Post-it note stuck on a filthy microwave saying: "I left you some quiche." Quiche! For a grown man! I really don't know how the poor exhausted darling puts up with it.'

Portia simply couldn't win. Susan had her at every turn. The quiche episode had happened once and once only, when, surprise surprise, Andrew was working late. Portia had nipped down to Cielo's deli, just half a block from the apartment, and had bought it for him, knowing that he'd love it, that he'd have eaten earlier and that all he'd want would be some small snack when he got in. But to listen to Susan go on, you'd think she'd tried to feed him barbecued dog poo on a skewer, marinated in a puddle of rat wee.

Three days later, Portia was still listening to her go on about it. She tried to explain to Susan that yes, she did of course occasionally cook for Andrew at home, but that seeing as how he was seldom back from the office before one a.m. these days, there seemed little point in her making elaborate meals for him.