‘Look, Daisy, there’s one for you!’ It’s from Amelia, ‘I miss you’ picked out in painstaking letters and a picture of the two of them on a trampoline.
Daisy looks as if she might cry. ‘I miss Amelia,’ she says. ‘Why can’t she come?’
‘We have to be careful about germs, darling,’ Kate says, ‘for just a little bit longer. It’s best to make it only grown-ups.’ They’ve tried Skype calls, but the reception is too patchy in the enclosed hospital garden.
‘If you want to make a card for Amelia, I’ll take it for you.’ Daisy gives Spencer a bright smile – it’s good to see them coming back, although the wan half-watt efforts that marked Daisy’s first days of recovery were beacons at the time. Kate folds a sheet of A4 paper in half and gives it to Daisy, who sets to, drawing a cloud of butterflies. She sits on Spencer’s lap.
‘I was supposed to be going to graduation today,’ she says, idly.
‘Tomorrow,’ Spencer says.
‘Oh.’ Kate shakes her head. ‘I’ve lost all track of time. Is it Wednesday? I thought it was Thursday.’
‘Thursday’s definitely tomorrow. Because it’s PE day, and we’re going to have a go at throwing beanbags into hoops, heaven help me,’ Spencer says. ‘But that’s no concern of yours, Kate Micklethwaite, BA, first-class honours.’
‘Yes. And that is how I expect to be addressed from now on, please.’
‘But of course.’ Spencer laughs, then his face becomes serious. ‘I’m sorry you won’t be able to go.’
Once Daisy was out of danger, he and Richenda and Wendy had all tried to persuade Kate to take a day trip to attend her graduation – it was less than an hour away – but she was adamant. There was no way she was leaving Daisy in hospital.
‘Me too.’ She imagines herself in the dress she would have bought for the occasion, her hired cap and gown, the official photographs. She may not have had her Oxford career, but she’s found her way back. She’s not sure who she’s proving anything to, but ever since she got her result, she feels glad she has proved it.
*
And then Spencer has to go. When Kate goes to bed, she doesn’t fall into the deep, relieved sleep she’s been enjoying ever since the first day that Daisy opted to play on the trampoline in the garden rather than sit on the bench next to Kate. She hadn’t had anything like her usual bouncing energy, and she hadn’t gone for height or thrills the way she usually did; but she had beamed as she did a few wobbly jumps, and that had been enough for her mother. No, tonight Kate finds that her mind has moved to the future, and the decisions that she needs to make. She starts with excitement, but before long the logistics are defeating her tired brain: travel, work, and most of all, Daisy. Look at what happened when she tried to have one weekend away. And her weekends with Melissa always have consequences: Daisy becomes anxious, Kate feels guilty, everything is too much. She’s only managed this degree by doing it while Daisy slept, or while she was with her granny. And after this – she glances at Daisy, sleeping; the rattle of her breath breaks Kate’s heart with love and the fear of loss – can she really risk taking her eye off her daughter? Haven’t these last three weeks shown her that she needs to be a mother before everything? What might happen to her little girl if she doesn’t have Kate’s full attention? The other things Kate cares about – being a good role model, having a career that will help others, having a life (a love life) of her own – feel riskier now than they did before Daisy was admitted to hospital. She would say she was angry, if she didn’t fear some sort of karmic consequence.
Except that now there’s Spencer. Before this crisis, he told her that she wasn’t on her own; now, he’s shown her that he means it. These last weeks, there’s been no sex, no fun, no flirting, just sitting in too-small too-hot rooms and whispering their days to each other. But still he’s here. He says that she can trust him; she always believed it, but now he’s showing her that she can. What if she was to try to plan a future as half of a couple, instead of as a left-behind single parent? But she’s too tired and it all feels too big, too frightening. The world has shrunk to Daisy’s breath and Spencer’s arm around her shoulders and she cannot imagine how she will ever manage more.
It’s 3 a.m. before Kate sleeps, and 6 a.m. when hospital life begins again, so when that evening comes around and a surprise party in lieu of graduation arrives Kate almost wants to cry with tiredness. Blake comes first, with a tray of canapes and a bag of cocktail napkins and melamine champagne flutes. Richenda brings the fresh orange juice along with the champagne which Rufus has sent, with his love, and a promise to come back and see them soon. Then Wendy and Jilly arrive with a tray of cupcakes. Spencer, who had brought her long floral dress, the perfume from her bathroom cabinet, and a half-hour’s notice of the surprise to come says, ‘When we are out of here, I promise you a celebration for the two of us.’
‘How did you get all this past the nurses?’ Kate asks Richenda. Although the staff are kind, they are strict with visitors and steely about noise: quite often, at weekends, there’s what Spencer calls ‘Daisy tag’ as visitors wait in the café for someone to leave Daisy’s room and come to the café to send the next person down there, because the two-visitors-per-bed rule is broken only in the sort of dire circumstances that Kate can’t even contemplate.
‘Well, Spencer charmed them.’ Richenda’s voice is dry. ‘Wendy gave them cake, and I gave them a bottle of champagne for the next time they have a party.’
‘So,’ Spencer says when glasses are charged. ‘Here’s to you, our clever Kate.’
‘Kate!’ comes the echo. Jilly and Wendy are beaming, and Spencer has a tear in his eye. How strange, Kate thinks, that my life partner and two people well on the way to becoming real friends are people I hadn’t met until Daisy started school. Richenda’s face looks a little pinched. The hospital light does strange things to skin, though, Kate thinks; she had felt her worry about Daisy diminish by several sets of crows-feet the first time she had taken her outside and looked at her face in the puny February sunlight.
It looks as though Daisy will be able to go home next weekend, if the next chest X-ray continues to show improvement, and so they are celebrating that too. ‘What are you going to do next, Kate?’ Wendy asks.
‘I don’t really know, yet,’ Kate says. ‘Sleeping in my own bed is the extent of my ambition right now.’
Daisy, on the other hand, is eating prawns on sesame toasts as quickly as she can get them into her mouth, telling Jilly, ‘I like these pink ones best.’
And Kate sits down on her bed, hands her glass to Spencer, lies down, and closes her eyes. Tomorrow she will be able to manage it all better.
*
The Saturday after the party, and Daisy seems brighter still. Kate wishes she had been more gracious; she was just so tired. And it was strange, to celebrate like that, when she should have been amongst her student peers, many of whom would have understood – more, even, than Spencer and her mother could – exactly what it meant to achieve an Open University degree. Drinking champagne in a hospital room, where the extent of her intellectual activity had been helping Daisy with the letter sheets that Wendy had brought her, made the degree she worked so hard for feel close to meaningless.
But she should have made an effort. Her people are good and kind.
As if to prove it, Wendy and Jilly arrive mid-afternoon, and send Kate to take a walk. The hospital grounds are nothing special, but the sky is blue and the air still. Kate gets a takeaway coffee and walks to the far end of the car park and back, slowly, watching the toes of her old brown boots as they make their way across tarmac and pavement. Then she sits on a wall near the ticket machine, drinks her cool-enough-now coffee, and watches the people come and go. She looks at the rows of parked cars and she wonders how many people there are here, today, in the hospital, being given good news or bad, having babies or flexing new knees or counting down the minutes until the next painkillers are due. This building is the place where she first saw Daisy, a heart b
linking at her from the screen of an ultrasound monitor. Daisy was born here, calmly and naturally, in the birthing pool. Kate remembers sitting in the warm water with her squalling, squirming daughter in her arms, looking up at her mother, and saying, ‘she’s perfect.’ And she was. She is. Although Kate would give anything to fix Daisy’s lungs, her faulty pancreas, to make her life easier – she’s as perfect now as she was then. If only Kate were the perfect mother she had silently promised that baby she would be.
Wendy and Jilly said to take half an hour, but twenty minutes is as much as Kate can manage away from Daisy. The air in the hospital feels smothering after the moist February afternoon. Jilly and Wendy are sitting on either side of Daisy in the garden. Daisy runs up to meet her mother – she’s a little breathless with the effort, but it’s so good to see her run at all. Kate sits on the end of the other bench, at right angles to Jilly and Wendy. Daisy joins her, cuddling in.
‘You’re not bouncing?’ Kate asks.
‘I’ve bounced,’ Daisy says, ‘and now I’m tired.’
‘She has bounced,’ Wendy confirms, ‘very high. Are you OK?’
Kate shrugs. She has no answer to that one, even though people ask her all the time. Something like ‘Yes. No. For now,’ would probably be accurate. ‘This is lovely,’ she says, spreading her hands to indicate them all, ‘but Daisy’s obs are due at four, so one of us will get thrown out.’
Wendy smiles. ‘We’ve got permission to both be here, because we want to ask you something. Well, we want to ask Daisy, actually.’
‘Oh, OK,’ Kate says. Jilly and Wendy are smiling at each other, at her, at Daisy. They are holding hands, something that’s unusual for them: they don’t tend to go for public displays of affection. Kate imagines that if she had grown up gay in the 1980s she wouldn’t either.
‘Well,’ Jilly says, ‘you know we’re getting married?’
Kate nods, smiles. She can enjoy others’ romantic happiness better she finds, now she has some of her own.
‘We’ve just set a date for June,’ Wendy adds.
‘That’s great,’ Kate says, though from what she remembers of her mother and Blake’s small, understated wedding, it seems an ambitious target for all the things that need to be organised – wrapping chairs in hessian, collecting jam jars for flower arrangements, trying seventeen sorts of cake. ‘Have you got everything sorted out?’
Wendy and Jilly share a smile. ‘Almost everything,’ Jilly says.
‘In fact,’ Wendy adds, ‘the only thing we don’t have yet is a flower girl.’
‘Oh!’ and now Kate understands what this is all about. ‘Daisy, are you listening?’
Daisy is half dozing in the sunlight, eyelids drooping. Kate shakes her, gently enough to wake her if she’s wake-able but not so that she’ll disturb her if she really is asleep. Daisy sits up. Kate says, ‘Wendy and Jilly want to ask you something.’
Daisy turns her face to them, waiting. Wendy says, ‘Daisy, Jilly and I are going to have a wedding and we wondered if you would like to be our flower girl.’
Daisy looks confused. ‘I already am a flower girl. A daisy is a flower, too.’
‘Ah yes,’ Wendy says. ‘Maybe we should say, a bridesmaid. Would you like to be our bridesmaid?’
There’s a pause. ‘Who’s getting married?’ Daisy asks.
‘I’m getting married to Miss Orr,’ Jilly says.
‘Mummy says your job is not a teacher.’ Daisy sounds mildly accusatory as she looks at Jilly.
‘I’m a barrister. I help people when they have a problem,’ Jilly says. Kate – who has seen that Jilly is nowhere near as comfortable around children as Wendy is – warms to her for the way she has just explained her job so simply.
‘And’ – Daisy turns to look at Kate, who has a sense of what’s coming next – ‘you are both ladies. Mummy, can ladies marry each other?’
‘Women. Yes, they can.’
Daisy considers. ‘But usually, it’s a lady and a man.’
‘Well,’ Kate says, ‘it often is, but if people love each other in a special way, they can get married. So a woman and a man might get married, or a woman and a woman, like Wendy and Jilly; or a man and a man, like—’ She founders for a couple Daisy will know. Throckton is not overburdened with gay couples.
‘Bert and Ernie?’ Daisy asks. ‘If they were real people, not Sesame Street people.’
‘Exactly,’ Kate says.
Daisy looks at Wendy and Jilly. ‘Do you love each other in a special way?’ she asks.
‘Yes, we do.’ Wendy smiles.
‘Will you both wear a wedding dress?’
‘Yes, we will,’ Jilly says. ‘We’re going to choose them next Saturday.’
‘But not big white dresses.’ Wendy laughs. ‘We’re a bit old for that.’
Daisy’s expression becomes solemn. ‘But will the bridesmaid have a proper bridesmaid dress?’
‘Oh, of course.’ Wendy looks so serious in response that Kate could kiss her. ‘And flowers in her hair, and she will be in charge of carrying the wedding rings on a special cushion.’
‘I would expect that the bridesmaid would want to choose her own dress,’ Jilly adds.
Kate laughs. ‘In that case I expect that the brides would have to be ready for a lot of sparkle,’ she says. ‘Daisy, would you like to be bridesmaid for Jilly and Wendy?’
‘Yes I would.’ Daisy nods vigorously, beaming. Kate looks at her, an eyebrow raised, and she tries again: ‘Yes please, I would like to be your bridesmaid, thank you very much.’
‘Sorry about all of the questions,’ Kate says later, as they leave. ‘We have quite a small world, and I tend to explain things as they come up.’
‘No problem,’ Jilly answers. ‘I can think of a few people you could explain it to, for us.’
Wendy nods. ‘There won’t be a lot of invitations going out in the staffroom.’
‘I’m so sorry about that. It’s unforgiveable.’ Kate thinks of what Spencer has told her about the whispering and unpleasantness. If a male teacher is fair game then she can’t begin to imagine what kind of stick this wedding is getting.
The thought of Daisy being a bridesmaid – and the pleasure that Daisy will get from it – is already making Kate smile. Then something occurs to her, and before she’s thought it through, she says, ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
‘Not at all,’ Jilly says.
Kate takes a breath. ‘You asking Daisy to be a bridesmaid. It’s not because of ’ – she gestures round the room – ‘this?’
Jilly and Wendy look at each other, then Wendy says, ‘You mean because she’s been ill?’
‘Well, yes,’ Kate says. ‘Because of the CF.’
Jilly takes Kate by the upper arm, firmly. ‘We are not the Make-A-Wish Foundation,’ she says. ‘We want her to be a bridesmaid because you and Daisy and Spencer are part of our lives.’
‘Exactly,’ Wendy says.
‘Get over yourself.’ Jilly flashes her smile and kisses Kate on the cheek. Kate watches them walk down the corridor. There was a time when she would have been envious; now she recognises love when she sees it. She goes back to Daisy, who is already drawing bridesmaid dresses.
Chapter 16
Mid- to Late March
D
AISY MISSES FIVE FULL weeks of normal life, in the end: four weeks in hospital, then a week of taking it easy at home. Spencer – in his official capacity – tells Kate not to worry about schooling, and to do as much or as little of the worksheets that Wendy sends with him as Daisy feels up to. But Daisy’s mind is active before her body, and so the two of them spend time reading and writing, counting and sorting.
On the day Kate takes Daisy back to school – a Wednesday, so she doesn’t get tired by a full week to begin with – she’s stopped by Mrs Piper on her way out of the gate.
‘It’s so good to see that Daisy’s back.’ She’s one of the head-on-one-side brigade.
‘Yes,’ Kate says. ‘Thank yo
u for all of your support.’
‘Well’ – Mrs Piper smiles a smile-that-isn’t – ‘that’s really down to your Mr Swanson. He’s been very conscientious.’
Kate feels the involuntary clench of her jaw. ‘Miss Orr has been very good to us, too. Exceptionally so. The support from them both has been excellent.’
‘Well, I’m very glad.’ Mrs Piper nods. ‘And please feel you can speak to me if you and Daisy need help in any way at all. Or if you have any – concerns. I’ll always be happy to listen.’
‘I will, thank you,’ Kate says. Thinks, I bet you would like to hear my concerns. She takes deep breaths and puts the whole conversation out of her head.
Wendy and Spencer had been shown how to use the PICC line while Daisy was in hospital, so they can give the lunchtime dose of antibiotics at school, but Kate does the rest. Three hours should be enough time to give the flat a good clean and tidy up all of the piles of papers that are accruing. She has such a lot to think about, right now. Her future won’t sort itself out, and now that the crisis has passed, there’s more to her than being Daisy’s mother and Spencer’s partner. The idea of doing a physiotherapy Master’s keeps niggling at her, but there are so many things to weigh up: her trust fund won’t last forever, even if she gets a place on the course, if the psychology component of her degree is enough, and if she can work out not only the logistics of the travel but the implications of it. The weeks since Daisy was taken ill have made Kate even more anxious about letting her daughter out of her sight. Doctors, nurses, family and friends have all queued up to remind and reassure her, directly or indirectly, that pneumonia in Daisy was not evidence of failure on Kate’s part. Phrases like ‘it comes with the territory’, ‘these things are bound to happen’, ‘however well she is she’s always going to be vulnerable’ were spoken so often in the little hospital room that Kate felt as though she was breathing them in with the dry, hot air. But she knows that she shouldn’t have left Daisy to go away with Spencer. He says it doesn’t matter, that her mother got her to the hospital at least as quickly as Kate would have done, maybe faster, because when you’re a grandparent in loco parentis you’re bound to be more vigilant. When he talks like that, although Kate knows he’s right, she finds that she goes quiet, because it feels as though he is wrong. She should have been the one to see that Daisy was ill, to get her to hospital. She was neglectful.
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