All that cramming for nothing, she thought mournfully. Her brother had gone off to the War instead of to university, and all his maths had not saved him from death in the Flanders trenches.
Maths would not save her impatient fellow-resident, either, if he plumbed the depths of the lift shaft, as he seemed in imminent danger of doing. However, he pulled his head back safely. The lift arrived, piloted by a youth of fourteen or so, whose carroty hair and freckles proclaimed him to be Kevin, while his watering eyes and scarlet ear suggested misconduct chastised.
Nonetheless, he gave Daisy a cocky, snaggletoothed grin and enquired, “Going down, ma’am?”
Perhaps his words recalled the impatient man to a sense of common courtesy. He was already stepping forward, but he drew back and, with an ironical half bow, allowed Daisy to go first.
“Where can I get a pot of tea?” she asked the boy as the lift started down.
“In the lobby, m’lady.” He tipped his cap, the gesture of respect cheekily exaggerated. His native Irish was overlaid with nasal New York. “Stanley—that’s the bellhop, m’lady—’ll take your order to the dining room and a waiter’ll deliver, m’lady.”
His cheek was good-natured. Daisy laughed. “I’m English,” she admitted, “but not ‘my lady.’”
“We can’t all be bishops,” he commiserated. “It’s the real tay you want? You tell Stanley Kevin said to tell ’em make it good and strong, not the dishwater the yankees call tay.”
The man behind Daisy snorted. From the corner of her eye, she saw him take a flask from his pocket, uncap it, and swallow a hefty pull. She assumed it was neither tea nordishwater he had swigged, as his face turned an unbecoming purple.
Not that she was looking. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I’ll remember your advice,” she said to Kevin with a smile.
He winked. “I can get you the other stuff, too,” he whispered. “Not moonshine, gen-u-wine Irish whisky straight from the Emerald Isle.”
“No, thank you.”
“It’s safe enough. All the right people been paid off.”
“Paid off?” The man was suddenly sticking his long nose between Daisy and Kevin.
The lift boy gave him a wide-eyed, would-be innocent stare. “Musta misheard, mister. I was tellin’ the lady how me brother was laid off. Worked down on the waterfront, he did.”
It was obvious the man did not believe him. Daisy thought he might have pressed the issue if she had not been there. She did her best to look thoroughly respectable, and they reached the bottom with no further exchange. He strode off without a backward glance.
Stepping out, Daisy passed the untenanted reception desk and went on through to the lobby. The floor was patterned in white, grey, black, and dried-blood-coloured marble, and grey marble lined the walls to waist height. In every corner potted palms lurked unhappily, asde rigueurhere as in London. In this unlikely oasis, a fire flickered beneath a dark, ornately carved mantlepiece. Against the wall on either side stood a stiff, uninviting bench of the same dark carved wood, with red and ivory striped upholstery.
The stripes reappeared on two armchairs and a smallsofa arranged in front of the fireplace around a low glasstopped table. Matching stripes adorned the seats of the rather spindly wrought-iron chairs set out around several small, equally spindly tables. Two of these pushed together were surrounded by a group of earnest-looking women and rather long-haired men. Their clothes tended toward the flamboyant, the men with floppy, kaleidoscopic cravats in place of neckties, several of the women wearing corduroy trousers. Daisy felt positively staid in her powder blue costume.
She had seen virtually identical gatherings in Chelsea—the London suburb, not the hotel—where she had lived before she married. They were discussing either the future course of serious literature or the malevolence of editors.
In Chelsea, such a group would have scorned afternoon tea as too bourgeois for words (their preferred drinks were beer or cheap sherry, depending on their pretensions), but here they all held teacups. In fact Daisy saw teapots on the tables, all occupied, on both sides of the lobby.
One young man sat on his own, on one of the stiff benches against the wall. His teapot was perched on a side table, at an awkward height and distance, his cup and saucer balanced equally awkwardly in one hand, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. He was soberly dressed in a dark, businesslike suit, his fair hair cropped short above studious horn-rimmed spectacles. Three or four years younger than Daisy’s twenty-six, he appeared to be deliberately avoiding her eye.
Of course she would not have joined him even if invited, but she did wish she had someone to sit with.
She was a modern independent woman, she reminded herself. For years now she had looked after herself, havingconcluded that absolutely anything was preferable to living with her mother in the Dower House, after her father died in the ’19 influenza pandemic. Just because she was married now, had been married for awhole month, and her darling Alec was hundreds of miles away, it didn’t mean she could no longer take care of herself.
The only free place was the other bench, but as she resigned herself to it, a couple stood up to leave a table on the other side of the lobby, by the door to the little-used Ladies’ Sitting Room. Daisy was moving to take possession when a short, plump woman with untidy grey hair bustled up to her.
“Oh dear,” she said, “I do hope you don’t mind?” She looked up appealingly at Daisy over half-spectacles.
“Mind?” Daisy asked, bewildered.
The little lady waved the knitting she was carrying, a beautifully patterned baby’s jacket in pale yellow and white. The yellow and white yarn trailed behind her, Daisy noticed, back to the low table by the fire, on the far side of the lobby, where she had left her knitting bag.
“It’s my sister,” she confided. “Oh dear, soawkward,but she does like to know.”
“Know what?” Daisy asked cautiously.
“Oh dear, I’m muddling it as usual. My sister, Genevieve, insists on meeting everyone who comes to stay at the hotel. Do say you will?”
