Daphne
Daphne
Daphne stared at the woman on her doorstep in horror. This was exactly why she should never have let herself get involved. A friend in need was a friend to be avoided.
She hadn’t invited anyone over her threshold since she’d moved in, in 2008. Except for the occasional, necessary workman. And in those instances, she’d spent several hours removing all of her more personal memorabilia from display beforehand.
But she could hardly leave a grown woman weeping on her doorstep. Apart from anything else, what would the neighbors think? Before long, she’d be the subject of all the building gossip, which she’d so carefully swerved for all this time.
Daphne sighed. She’d broken so many of her rules recently that one more would hardly make a great deal of difference. And besides, she’d grown almost to like Lydia, despite her being such a wimp, as all this crying clearly demonstrated.
She ushered Lydia into her open-plan apartment, with its floor-to-ceiling Crittall windows, exposed brick walls, polished oak parquet floor, concrete pillars, and vast crystal chandeliers which refracted hundreds of tiny shards of light around the huge space, like giant disco balls. Maggie Thatcher had already settled herself into her favorite spot on the huge, battered leather Chesterfield sofa, covered in jewel-colored velvet cushions, in the middle of the living area.
“Down, Margaret!” she said. “You know you’re not allowed on the furniture. It’s in the rules, remember.”
Maggie Thatcher got down slowly, shooting Daphne a baleful look which Daphne read as, You and I both know that’s not the case, but I’ll go along with the ridiculous charade anyway, since I love you the most .
“Did you just call her Margaret?” said Lydia as she sniffed and wiped her face with her sleeve.
“Slip of the tongue,” said Daphne, wondering how she could surreptitiously remove the organic, grilled, and sliced duck breast she’d left in Margaret’s bowl as a coming-home present, before Lydia spotted it.
“Wow, this is amazing,” said Lydia, staring around Daphne’s treasures with her mouth open, like a goldfish exploring a new tank. “It’s like a museum of the sixties and seventies. No, it’s too cool for that. More like an art gallery. Or an installation.”
“What were you expecting? Lace doilies, swirly wall-to-wall carpets and a dusty collection of china figurines on a mantelpiece?” said Daphne. “It’s incredible how everyone always typecasts the elderly.”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” said Lydia. She was blushing furiously, which rather suggested Daphne had hit the nail on the head, but at least gave her haggard face some color. “It’s just I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Actually, Daphne was more than a little chuffed with Lydia’s art gallery analogy. She had spent an enormous amount of time curating her home—displaying her favorite fashions from her favorite decades on artfully arranged mannequins, photographs of personal friends and admired icons, who were sometimes one and the same, and memorabilia from extraordinary places she’d been to. She’d figured that if she was going to spend her life under what felt much like voluntary house arrest, she might as well ensure that that house was spectacular. And if her future looked entirely bleak, she could at least immerse herself in a past which had been so extraordinarily colorful.
Lydia was staring at the huge, framed sepia photograph of Hopesbury House, with its circular drive, beautiful Georgian proportions, wings, and stables.
“Is this where you grew up?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Daphne.
“Wow,” said Lydia.
“It’s not what you think,” said Daphne. Lydia laying all her emotions out on display so overtly seemed to have triggered an unfamiliar urge to be honest. “I was the illegitimate daughter of the housekeeper. My mother died when I was just seven years old, and the family fostered me.”
Daphne reached over to the photo of her childhood home and tilted it upward slightly on one side, then stood back to check if it was straight. She then moved on to the surrounding pictures, adjusting them by a millimeter here and there—not because they looked crooked to any regular viewer, but in order to avoid eye contact. Her confessions could only slide out unobserved.
“I think they assumed that my father must have been one of the family, or one of their house guests,” she continued. “My role was to be the physical proof of their boundless benevolence. So I grew up surrounded by all of that wealth and breeding, but being constantly reminded that I was an interloper. The charity case.”
“That must have been hard,” said Lydia, reaching for Daphne’s hand. Daphne fought the urge to snatch it away, and discovered that she found the unaccustomed warmth of skin against skin comforting.
“I grew up in an ordinary middle-class semi, but with a happy, supportive, safe nuclear family. We even had the requisite Labrador. All I ever wanted was to re-create all of that,” said Lydia. “My favorite board game was The Game of Life. I loved adding a little blue peg next to my pink peg in the front of my miniature plastic car, then pegs in the back seat for two children. And until recently, that’s what I thought I had: the perfect family.”
“I was far more demanding than you. I wanted everything I’d been taught to admire but never allowed to own,” said Daphne. “The clothes, the jewelry, the art, the respect, the notoriety. All of it.”
As Daphne spoke the truth out loud, a question nudged at her, becoming increasingly insistent on being heard, like one of the nursery children with their hand raised, saying, Me! Me! Over here! Listen to me!
The thing she’d really been missing as a child wasn’t all the material belongings and social standing; it was what Lydia had had. Genuine friends and a loving family. Yet she’d spent most of her adult life focusing on a career which, while thrilling and demanding, had rather precluded forming close relationships, and the last fifteen years in almost total isolation. Had she got her priorities entirely wrong? Would she have been happier with a life like Lydia’s? An ordinary life.
Daphne stared at Lydia, blotchy from all the weeping, and diminished from years of playing second fiddle, and thought not. But there must be a happy medium—a perfect life, somewhere between hers and Lydia’s.
Daphne left Lydia exploring her apartment while she made a pot of tea. She replaced Margaret’s duck with the dried kibble authorized by Lydia. She’d make it up to her later. They were having fillet steak for dinner, with a béarnaise sauce and dauphinoise potatoes. After years of eating alone, Daphne was making the most of having a regular dinner guest.
Knowing that Lydia was picking her way through Daphne’s past made her feel like the skin was being stripped from her bones, layer by layer. And, at her age, skin was thin and fragile, the bones close to the surface. At least she’d had the presence of mind to clear the whiteboard before she’d opened the door, just in case. Old habits died hard.
Daphne tried to ignore the discomfort but was hugely relieved when she could pull Lydia away from her treasure trove and onto the sofa with a mug of tea. Margaret watched them both from her barely used bed on the floor, a mutinous expression on her face.
“So, I presume all these…” Daphne waved her hand around vaguely while searching for the correct expression. Histrionics? Melodramatics? She eventually settled on “waterworks.” Less judgmental.
“So, I presume all these waterworks are the result of those unfortunate photographs at the nativity the other day?” she said.
“Oh, Daphne,” said Lydia, weeping again. It made Daphne feel extremely awkward. Was she supposed to hug her ? Daphne wasn’t a hugger. She passed her a dusty box of tissues. “She’s so young and beautiful. How am I ever supposed to compete? I’m sure Jeremy’s going to leave me, and my daughters will be devastated. I don’t know what to do.”
“You’re hardly old yourself, dear. You can’t be a day over sixty,” said Daphne.
“I’M FIFTY-THREE!” wailed Lydia, weeping harder than ever.
Honestly! When Daphne was Lydia’s age, not long before she’d moved here, she was…Best not to think about that but, needless to say, she wasn’t pretending to run a doomed social club and letting her husband treat her like a doormat.
“Maybe some sugar might help? It usually does, I find,” said Daphne. She walked over to the kitchen area and opened the lid of the rice cooker, which she’d bought on a whim and now used to store her emergency chocolate. Was this a Twix kind of situation, or a Curly Wurly? No, this particular emergency required a Cadbury Flake, she decided.
“You’re looking at this whole situation from the wrong angle, Lydia,” she said, handing her the chocolate. “You’re only thinking about what Jeremy wants and what your daughters need. How old are they, anyway?”
“Nineteen and twenty-one,” said Lydia with a sniff, pulling the wrapper off the Flake and eating half of it in one bite.
“Well, exactly. They’re adults. The question you should really be asking is: What do you want? And as for the husband, do you love him? Like him, even?”
Lydia looked nonplussed and, for a moment, even stopped crying. “I guess so,” she said, without sounding entirely convinced.
“Well, I have no idea why,” said Daphne. “He’s clearly utterly vain and foolish. Whereas you are one of the loveliest, kindest women I’ve met in years.”
This set Lydia off again. Daphne, of course, had met only a handful of women over the past fifteen years but, regardless, the compliment was entirely genuine, even if it had taken her until right this minute to realize it. You couldn’t not like Lydia. It would be like taking against a homeless, helpless puppy.
“Anyhow,” said Daphne, “as far as your daughters are concerned, you need to make sure they learn that you should never let a man treat you the way Jeremy does. You wouldn’t want them to have a relationship like yours, would you?”
“But it’s not all his fault, Daphne. It’s just as much mine. I’ve been a terrible wife. I’ve not prioritized our marriage. I’ve spent years focusing almost entirely on the girls. It’s no wonder he ended up looking elsewhere,” said Lydia.
“Good God, what utter tosh,” said Daphne. “That’s all just more evidence that you’re a much nicer person than he is. Do you think he feels any guilt? Do you think Jeremy prioritized your marriage? Even if there were a modicum of truth to your reading of the situation, he could have talked to you about it, rather than deciding to shag an adolescent.”
Lydia blanched. Rein it in a little, Daphne , she told herself.
“The problem as I see it, Lydia,” continued Daphne, more gently, “is that you don’t actually like yourself. You’ve spent so long worrying about everyone else that you’ve completely lost sight of who you are and what you need. Am I right?”
Lydia sniffed and nodded, then tipped the remaining Flake crumbs into her mouth.
“The perfect place to start, I generally find, is with a makeover. Just wait until you see my wardrobes and my spectacular costume jewelry collection,” said Daphne, feeling a prickle of excitement. This might actually be fun. Giving a girlfriend a makeover was exactly the kind of thing the Kardashians did.
“William tells me you’ve been dating,” said Lydia as they walked toward Daphne’s dressing area. “How’s it going?”
“It was a complete disaster,” said Daphne, employing a generous dose of understatement. “But I met a chap yesterday. Sidney. He was definitely the best of the bunch. And he seems quite keen.”
Sidney had, in fact, been bombarding Daphne with messages, which, despite herself, she found rather flattering. He’d even invited her to spend Christmas Day with him in a local bistro. Daphne hadn’t shared Christmas with anyone since she’d moved here. Was it all going too fast? She supposed that, at her age, it had to. Taking one’s time was a luxury they couldn’t afford.
“I met my husband on the internet,” said Lydia. “Internet dating was really new back then, and my friends dared me to give it a go. The very first date I went on was with Jeremy.”
“Well, that didn’t turn out too well, did it?” said Daphne, regretting the words the second they fell out of her mouth. Not because she didn’t mean them, but because Lydia, predictably, started wailing again.
“What do I do about Jeremy?” she said, between sobs. “Do you think a makeover might make him love me again?”
“I couldn’t give two hoots about what that man thinks or doesn’t think. The thing that matters is whether we can make you love yourself again,” said Daphne.
Lydia sighed, then carried on weeping, making it quite clear what an uphill struggle that was going to be.
“Are you familiar with the lovely Michelle Obama?” said Daphne.
“Oh, yes! Becoming is one of my all-time favorite books,” said Lydia. “So inspiring.”
“Well, then, you’ll know what Michelle says about what to do when ‘they go low’?” said Daphne. Lydia nodded.
“When they go low…we get revenge,” said Daphne, with a flourish.
Lydia frowned. “I don’t think that’s what she said at all, Daphne,” she said. “In fact, I know it’s not.”
“Well, she should have done,” said Daphne. “See, not even Michelle Obama is infallible. Now, let’s explore these wardrobes and discuss strategies.”