Later that day, she finds herself on Byres Road, on the way back to the flat, hauling two hessian bags of shopping with her. On impulse, she heads towards the corner where Island Antiques sits. It’s in a prime position with big shop windows on two sides, the door positioned diagonally on the corner with a shallow marble step. It’s a shop that she has always found daunting, and she can remember venturing into it only once before. Softly lit, the space is arranged into three rooms, with vastly expensive pieces of furniture and equally expensive artworks on the walls. Through the window, she notices a miniature bureau, with a detailed floral inlay, so desirable that it practically makes her salivate, an elegant chaise longue with a paisley shawl draped over the back, a proper straw Orkney chair with a drawer underneath the seat, and a very dark oak chest with naïve carving and the patina of five hundred years.
On her first and only previous visit, the briefest glance had told her that she wouldn’t be able to afford anything in the shop and now – even with her unexpected inheritance – another glance tells her that nothing has changed. It is all very beautiful, but it is way out of her league. She remembers when she was working in the big auction house, watching the price of a Gillows desk climb higher and higher until it reached £50,000. She remembers that it sold to ‘Island’. Everyone else seemed to know who that was, but she was too shy to ask at the time. She supposes that it finished up in this shop where presumably it was marked up even higher and sold on. Glasgow isn’t an obviously wealthy city, but there are certainly a great many rich people here, often living cheek by jowl with the extremely deprived. There are streets, especially here in the West End, where million-pound Georgian and Victorian houses at one end, built by those who made their money during the industrial revolution, give place to down-at-heel council estates at the other. It is not as pronounced as in London, but it is there, a fact of city life.
She takes a deep breath and goes in. The bell tinkles musically. The shop is very quiet, an oasis in this busy part of the city, although she can hear Mozart playing in the background. Everything seems perfect. There are glass cases with fine china and porcelain. On one wall, several stunning silk rugs are faultlessly displayed. The floor is polished wood. A cabinet, beside the mahogany counter, has a selection of jewellery and pretty silver items: a card case, a chatelaine, an art nouveau mirror. There are a couple of easels with subtle lighting above, displaying large canvases that she recognises as being by Cal’s father: bleak urban exteriors with not a single living soul to be seen. The shop smells sweet, of pot-pourri, lavender and roses.
A tall woman of about her own age sits at a desk, sleek head bent over a tablet. Everything about her matches the shop itself. She’s impossibly slender and glossy, from the tips of her designer shoes to the very top of her immaculate blonde head. It’s as though some fairy godmother has touched her with a magic wand and transformed everything about her, instantaneously. Her nails are long and palest pink. Her make-up is faultless. How does she do it, wonders Daisy, smiling at her, fighting the urge to ingratiate herself in some way. She just knows that beneath the devastatingly simple black dress – looks like linen, but with not a crease and how does she do that, too? – her underwear will be equally perfect. Minuscule but perfect. She probably wears a thong.
The woman looks up, briefly, from her tablet. Daisy would lay bets she is reading a novel, but she makes it look as though she is being interrupted in the middle of some vital piece of work.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks, only just disguising her boredom.
‘May I have a look around?’
‘Oh. Feel free.’ She spreads her hands, giving a very Gallic shrug, although she sounds posh Scottish. Kelvinside. She looks astonished at the very idea of somebody wanting to browse. ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’
‘Not really. I’d just like to ... look.’ For God’s sake, she thinks. It’s a shop, isn’t it?
The woman goes back to her reading. Daisy could swear that there is a barely audible ‘tut’. She feels trapped. What on earth is she doing in here? She thought she might be able to see Cal’s mother and father, satisfy a certain curiosity about them. But the repellent assistant seems to be in charge and now she’ll have to stay for a few minutes at least, save face, look around, uneasily aware of the blue eyes boring into the back of her head. Surely this can’t be Annabel, can it? The woman Cal talked about down at Carraig. Time will tell. I may have tried to squeeze into your pyjamas, she thinks. The idea makes her giggle, but she turns away to hide it.
She is making a good show of examining a Scottish lowland grandfather clock, brightly painted with female figures representing the four seasons, when the door opens and somebody positively erupts into the shop.
‘Jesus!’ says a husky voice. ‘I’ve spent half the fucking morning on the fucking phone to the fucking parcel company about that fucking pig, and I’m getting fucking nowhere!’
The paragon at the desk says nothing to this tirade of profanities, only opens her lovely eyes a little wider and looks from the incomer to Daisy and back again, with a meaningful gaze. The newcomer is an attractive if disorganised older woman, wearing a crumpled green linen dress, layered over a bright turquoise top. She has an embroidered bag slung over her shoulder and comfortable sandals on her feet but she looks hot and extremely bothered. Daisy, who is suppressing another overwhelming desire to laugh at the notion of the fucking pig, instinctively feels that here is somebody appealing. Also, she thinks, beautiful. When she was younger, this woman must have been absolutely stunning, but not in any glossy or artificial way. Not like Annabel. Even now, the newcomer has the uncompromising beauty of something slightly worn but no less precious. She has white hair coiled up on her head, but it is tumbling down, high cheekbones, porcelain pink and white cheeks with small lines. Craquelure, thinks Daisy: the network of fine cracks on an old painting. Over the years, her father’s friends have always included warm, slightly dishevelled women like this: musicians, artists, poets, occasionally prone to outbursts of swearing. The older woman’s hand flies to her mouth at the sight of Daisy.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I do apologise for my appalling language, but I’m at the end of my tether.’
Daisy smiles at her. ‘Don’t mind me. I’ve heard a lot worse. And I know all about some parcel companies, believe me. What did they do to the pig?’
‘They broke its fucking ear and glued it back on – with superglue, no less – and tried to pretend that it had been that way to begin with. I mean, do I look like I have the word mug tattooed across my forehead? Or pig for that matter? Don’t answer that, Annabel,’ she adds, glancing at the blonde, confirming Daisy’s suspicions. Cal, how could you? she thinks. All too easily, of course. What man wouldn’t? She and her father call glossy young women like this ‘wedding cakes’. But most men seem to appreciate them.
‘Was it a particularly good pig?’ Daisy asks.
She notices a scornful expression crossing Annabel’s face, but the newcomer understands and answers the question immediately. ‘Oh Lord, yes. A large Wemyss pig. Huge. Shamrocks. Fabulous.’
‘What a shame.’
‘I know. I always take these things quite personally. I shouldn’t but I do. My poor pig.’
‘They’ll pay up, Fi,’ says Annabel. She sounds bored with the whole thing. ‘They always do, you know. Get William to call them.’
Daisy realises that the dishevelled woman must be Cal’s mother. Her son doesn’t look very much like her, except for something about the clear hazel eyes, the floppy hair caught back from her face with an ornate leather clip. Cal is taller and more wiry.
She says, ‘Excuse me, but are you Fiona Galbraith?’
‘Yes, I am.’ She looks momentarily confused. ‘Should I know you?’ She seems genuinely worried that she might have met Daisy somewhere and forgotten her.
‘No. No, we’ve never met, I don’t think. But I met your son, briefly, last week, on Garve. He was… he was asked to value the contents of my house. Well, my grandmother’s house.’
‘Ah, yes!’ She breaks into a broad grin, shakes Daisy by the hand. ‘He mentioned it. You must be Viola Neilson’s long-lost granddaughter.’
‘That’s me. Daisy Graham.’
‘Good to meet you. We knew nothing about you. Viola was a clam. You could never prise anything out of her that she didn’t want you to know. Even my husband didn’t know that there was a granddaughter, although he knew about the daughter, Jessica. Everyone did. The elopement was a nine days’ wonder. With a travelling musician, no less!’ She stops, suddenly. ‘Oh my goodness, but that was your mother.’
‘And my father. They did marry, you know. But Mum died when she was very young. Dad took good care of me.’
‘I’m so sorry about your mother. And now you’ve got the house. Do you know what you’re going to do with it?’
‘I don’t have the foggiest notion. But I’m going to spend the summer there.’
‘How lovely!’ She looks momentarily elated, then sad. Daisy thinks that she has one of the most transparent faces she has ever seen. Fiona is clearly a woman who can’t disguise her emotions. Which must make life difficult for her at times. Daisy sees the scornful expression flit across Amanda’s pretty features again, quickly hidden.
‘Sea and sand,’ says the younger woman. ‘That sounds so exciting.’
‘Oh, but it’s so much more than that!’ Fiona shakes her head. ‘You must ask Cal to show you the sights while you’re there, Daisy. And our cottage. I used to love going there. My husband tired of it but I never did.’
‘Can’t you still go there? Even on your own?’ Daisy blurts it out before she can stop herself. She can’t imagine not being able to do something just because your husband objects, but that seems to be what this woman is saying.
‘I could, but I never seem to have the time these days. Too many broken pigs!’
‘Anyway,’ says Daisy, suddenly embarrassed. She doesn’t want to get into a conversation about the cottage, or the contents of her house. ‘Anyway, I should go. I have packing to do. I’m off to Garve tomorrow, in fact.’
‘Oh, I do envy you. Give my love to Cal if you see him. And Hector. Did you meet the dog? We all love Hector.’
Annabel shrugs minutely. She doesn’t love Hector at all, thinks Daisy.
‘Yes. I met Hector.’
‘And you will see Cal again while you’re there, I expect. It’s not such a huge place and Carraig isn’t all that far from Auchenblae.’
‘I thought he was meant to be on a buying trip in Argyll,’ says Annabel.
‘He is. He has been. And he’s good. You know that. He works hard. He can always ferret out a bargain.’
Indeed he can, thinks Daisy, but says nothing, fixing her smile to her face.
‘Oh yes. I suppose he is.’ Annabel yawns widely, showing sharp white teeth, like a cat.
‘But you’re right. He’ll always take a detour to Garve when he can. Cal and Hector both! And why not?’
‘Why not indeed? That’s what I’m about to do.’
She heads for the door. She has the distinct impression that Annabel isn’t as kindly disposed towards Cal as Cal seems to think. Perhaps the break-up wasn’t amicable at all. Men can be very obtuse about such things. Although it could be that she has a chronic grudge against anyone who doesn’t quite live up to her own high expectations. Fiona seems blissfully unaware of it or so used to it that she can safely ignore it. Daisy wouldn’t trust Annabel as far as she could throw her, as her granny used to say. ‘Fur coat and nae knickers,’ she would have said. Daisy smiles at the memory. Except that, of course, there will be expensive knickers as well. She’s a pretty woman, no doubt about it.
There’s a weird dynamic going on in the shop. Daisy finds herself wondering, with a certain amount of relish, what happens when Cal and his father are added to the mix. Then it occurs to her that it may be something as simple as jealousy. Perhaps Annabel would like to get back together with Cal and doesn’t like the fact that he seems to spend so much time away from Glasgow, in a tiny cottage with a dog. She has to admit they’d make a very handsome couple. Besides which, she gets the feeling they’d deserve each other.
‘I hope you sort out your pig,’ she says to Fiona, at the door. ‘It’s been nice meeting you.’
As she heads off down Byres Road, she realises that she meant it. It has been nice meeting Fiona Galbraith. She’d like to know her better. Which, given her son’s ability to be economical with the truth, doesn’t seem very likely now.