Cathy Kelly - Always and Forever

Alex Kenny, long, lean, dark-eyed and with biceps of steel from being uncrowned king of the rowing club, didn’t avert his eyes.

‘You don’t wear mad stuff like the other design nuts,’ he said in amusement that first time they’d met. ‘You look normal.’ And he’d reached out and lazily twirled a tassel of her rose-pink vintage silk scarf, making Daisy turn exactly the same shade of pink.

They’d been sitting in the Shaman’s Armchair, the labyrinthine off-campus pub favoured by the rowing boys. Jules and Fay, classmates of Daisy’s, were keen on some of the Lazer rowing team and an impromptu outing to the pub had been organised for one Saturday after a race. Well, it was supposed to be impromptu but Daisy had seen first-hand how long Jules and Fay had taken to get ready. The just-thrown-together look took an awful lot of time to achieve.

Daisy hadn’t done much, make-up wise, but had gone to her usual enormous effort to look thin. Looking thin was her mission in life although she knew that she could never really manage it.

As Jules and Fay flirted happily in the pub, Daisy sat in a corner nursing her half-pint. She was stony-broke again. Her grant was almost gone and the pizza restaurant near the flat she shared with the girls didn’t need her for late night shifts. She watched the flirting ritual, thinking how nice it would be to be like Jules and Fay, confident and good with men. She was good with men if she was asking them if they wanted their pizza with extra mozzarella, but otherwise, forget it. And then Alex arrived, took in the seating arrangements, and very definitely sat down beside her. Alex Kenny, a man so fine that even Jules and Fay had never thought of setting their cap at him.

‘Did you make this?’ Alex asked, gesturing at her poncho, also black but with tiny jet beads dotting the hem.

Daisy laughed. ‘I’m as good at knitting as I am at rowing,’ she said. ‘But I sewed the beads on.’

‘Did you?’ He seemed astonished by this and pulled a chunk of poncho closer for further examination.

Daisy felt her heart flutter wildly at this intimacy.

‘But there’s millions of them,’ Alex added. ‘You’d be sewing for ever.’

‘Sewing is a part of the whole designing clothes thing,’ she informed him gravely.

Alex’s eyes – coffee brown or melting chocolate, Daisy couldn’t be sure – twinkled. ‘Are you making fun of me, Madame Designer? Do you think I’m a big hick from the rowing team who’s on a sports scholarship and has an IQ in double digits?’

‘ Double digits?’ she asked in mock astonishment. And then ruined it by saying, ‘Sorry, only joking…’ in case she’d upset him.

But Alex only grinned more broadly and wanted to know how long it would take to sew on that many beads.

‘I do it when I’m watching telly,’ Daisy explained.

‘How can you watch and sew? No,’ he added, ‘don’t tell me. It’s like how do you get to Carnegie Hall – practise.’

‘Like rowing,’ Daisy added, looking at his muscles, still very obvious despite the big porridgy sweater he was wearing.

‘I’m out of shape,’ Alex said ruefully. ‘Need to get back in for the season.’

‘And you practise a lot?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘I don’t know anything about rowing.’

‘Good. I hate rowing groupies. They discuss rowing with you like a pro but they’ve never put a foot in a scull in their life.’

And he rattled on, telling her about the hours of rowing and gym work, before weaving the conversation back to her and the sort of work it took to get into design college.

Daisy’s shyness evaporated. Naturally, Alex wasn’t interested in her in any romantic sense – nobody ever was – but he seemed to like talking to her, so that gave her an unaccustomed courage.

He wasn’t just being kind talking to the shy, chubby girl because he really fancied one of her friends, kooky Fay, or elegant Jules, who had that Grace Kelly thing going. He was one of those beautiful people who liked talking to everyone. Daisy had decided that some students in college had a scale they worked whereby they wouldn’t deign to talk to anyone below a certain rank. Daisy, no good at fashion design and pretty-ish but too big, was below the bar. The cool women ignored her and the cool men didn’t see her. But life’s gods, like Alex, were above rules and could bestow favour on any lesser mortal. Daisy was fairly sure that as soon as Fay and Jules drifted in Alex’s direction, he’d stop talking to her and turn that charming gaze away. But for now, he was hers: the aquiline nose above the sculpted mouth, the faint tan that spoke of some sort of exotic Christmas holiday outside Ireland, the lazy smile of the man who knows he doesn’t have to try too hard.

Saturday afternoon crept into Saturday evening and hunger hit. The pub did great traditional Irish potato crepes called boxty, so huge plates of boxty and more drink were ordered. The crowd swelled from the original three girls and four rowers to a big clatter of students. They took up a whole section of the Shaman’s, laughing and joking and swapping stories on how unprepared they were for the new term. Still Alex sat beside Daisy.

Warmed up by the two hot whiskys Alex had bought her when she finished her half-pint, she told him that she loved clothes but had come to the painful conclusion that she wasn’t much good at designing, something she’d only told Jules and Fay up to now.

‘It’s desperate,’ she confided. ‘When I think of how hard it was to get on the course, and now I’m here I can see that it’s a mistake.’ She could picture her mother’s face when she heard. Her mother had pushed for Daisy to do a secretarial course in Carrickwell so she’d always have a steady income. In one of the few battles she’d attempted with her mother, Daisy had said no. She’d been the best in her class at school at art and had dreamed of design college since she knew such a thing existed. There weren’t many of Daisy’s dreams within reach – being beautiful, thin, adored by her mother – she couldn’t let this vaguely achievable one escape.

‘Really, Denise, you disappoint me,’ her mother had said in deeply betrayed tones. Her mother tended to call her Denise, rarely Daisy. It was her father who’d called her ‘my little Daisy’, the nickname that had somehow stuck. ‘After all we’ve been through surely you’d see the need for a sensible job, not a rackety one like your father had. I thought I’d taught you that at least. But do what you want. Don’t think about what I want.’

Nan Farrell, as thin as the long cigarettes she chain-smoked, took out her cigarette case and flicked it open. It was silver and engraved, the one good thing she had left from her previous life as part of the Carrickwell élite. That life had ended when she’d got pregnant with Daisy – as she never ceased to remind her daughter – and had hit the real world with an almighty bang, married to a man who loved to enjoy himself and wasn’t interested in either roots or hard work.

‘It’s not as if my opinion has ever mattered to you.’

If only, Daisy thought. Her mother’s opinion was like the pyramids in relation to Cairo – huge, unyielding and no matter where you stood, you could still feel their presence, even if you couldn’t see them.

The memory of the row and the glacier that still existed between herself and her mother took away the happy glow Daisy had been experiencing from talking to Alex. Forgetting for an instant that Alex was a gorgeous man and that she should have been puce with embarrassment just to be talking to him, Daisy leaned her head on her hands on the scratched pub table in the Shaman’s. ‘How can you have messed up your whole career when you’re twenty?’ she mumbled.