Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

  ‘I don’t see that she has a problem at all. It’s David I’m thinking about really. I don’t want him to grow into one of those serious-minded eggheads who can’t laugh or enjoy life.’

  ‘Peter, he hasn’t a chance of that, even if it’s what he wants. He can be clever at school, but he comes home to this idiot father who was born minus a serious muscle in his body!’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t agree with that, though we’ll leave it till later, but surely all we have to do with Katie is make sure she has the music lessons she needs,’ Peter replied.

  ‘No, that’s what we don’t do, Peter. We have to let her decide.’

  Daisy was remembering her sister, Kay, who had a voice like an angel, as everyone always said, and who spent her life going to one class after another, as long as the family could afford it. She’d had singing lessons, dancing lessons, piano lessons, but she’d had no real life of her own. Just because she’d had that wonderful voice, Daisy used to think, was no reason why she shouldn’t have a choice about whether she should use it. The family, her mother mainly, made the decision that Kay could sing, so she had to sing, and there was never the slightest sign that Daisy ever saw that Kay got any enjoyment from it. There wasn’t enough money to help her to use all of her musical talent, something that wouldn’t trouble Katie.

  Perhaps that was the root of Kay’s problems, that she wasn’t able to explore all of her gifts fully, but only skimmed across each one. Her singing was settled on because it was the cheapest, there were no expensive instruments to buy, and maybe dancing co-ordination was beyond her but all she had to do with her voice was let it out. She had never developed in any other way that Daisy could see, though. She was just a voice all her life, no opinions, no happiness or sadness, except when it came to childbirth, of course.

  Maybe that was what Kay’s childhood of being trained to continue her mother’s aborted ambitions had done to her. It made her only able to react to basic things, like pain, or hot and cold. It had troubled Daisy all her life. She had never known if there had been something wrong with Kay since before birth, some mental defect, or if she had been conditioned to be the way she was by their mother’s failed ambitions. She just stood where she was told to and sang as instructed, but whose fault was that, if anyone’s?

  It really made Daisy think. All her sister had lacked were the funds to help her reach whatever musical goal she had, but there had to be many thousands of children out there like Kay, who had ability but would never get the chance to follow their dreams.

  So Daisy used Peter’s business contacts, bled them dry, he said, to raise funds to help musically gifted children, and she called it Kay’s Musical Trust. It became her third baby, though she had to keep repeating the argument that they weren’t aiming to churn out superbly trained musicians, geniuses and stars who were emotionally stunted, but individuals who could take their gift wherever they wanted to take it. If they didn’t want to become household names, well that was fine, too. It was all about letting them stretch and develop a talent they had been born with, and then they could make their own decisions about what they did next.

  Meanwhile, it was agreed that Katie would have whatever music lessons she wanted, as long as she stopped throwing things at the walls, and would be allowed to make her own choices, too. Daisy, Peter and David lived through the piano period, the violin, viola, cello and harp octaves, followed by the trumpet, saxophone and bassoon experiments, before Katie took up art and that was that. She was by far the most boisterous of the two children all through their lives, so when she left home for Art School it was natural that the house seemed very quiet.

  David withstood it all with his usual good humour, went to Cambridge, studied the classics, got a very good honours degree and immediately took off to see the world as if he was going two stops on the tube.

  Peter never got over his bemusement. His younger children both amazed and delighted him, but they were a puzzle to him also.

  ‘They’re so beautiful, aren’t they?’ he asked, every inch the proud father. ‘David’s handsome and clever and I really like him; he’s a fine chap, you know? And as for that daughter of yours—’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Yours and the milkman’s,’ Peter said. ‘No one in my family had red hair or was ever that … that … I don’t know—’

  ‘Argumentative, highly strung, annoying?’

  ‘Well yes, all of that, but she is such a beauty, isn’t she? I can get drunk on her faster than I can on champagne. But those clothes she wears!’ he grimaced.

  ‘She’s an art student,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s the uniform.’

  ‘Would be nice to see her in a dress, though, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘My advice is never to say that to her,’ Daisy laughed. ‘She’d organise one of her Women’s Lib demos against you outside the gates.’

  ‘I suppose I just don’t understand them. Must be old age,’ he sighed.

  ‘You don’t have to understand them,’ Daisy teased him, ‘you only have to accept them as they are.’

  ‘But do you understand them?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she teased him, ‘but I’m from a different generation!’

  25

  So with both their children off their hands, Daisy for the first and Peter for the second time, they began to think about retiring to warmer climes. Mainly for Peter’s sake because he was feeling the cold more and more, though Daisy didn’t say that. He was still odd; age hadn’t brought a great deal of sense to his character.

  One day he announced that he was going out to buy a coat.

  ‘But you’ve got a coat,’ Daisy said.

  ‘No I haven’t, not a warm one anyway.’

  ‘You have,’ she insisted, ‘you only bought that nice cashmere one a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh, that’s gone,’ he said dismissively, ‘which is why I need a new coat. You never listen to a word I say, Daisy.’

  ‘That’s my problem, I do!’ she replied. ‘If I didn’t life would be much easier. So what happened to your coat?’

  ‘What coat? I haven’t got one.’

  In anyone else she would have suspected senility, but Peter had always been like this, exasperating.

  ‘The cashmere one.’

  ‘Oh, I told you, it’s gone.’

  She felt she had been trapped in this conversation forever. ‘Where has it gone?’ she shouted at him.

  ‘Well, I came across this little man in the street playing an accordion,’ he explained, ‘and he looked terribly cold, Daisy, so I gave him my coat.’

  ‘You couldn’t just have given him a couple of bob?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, a couple of bob wouldn’t have kept him warm, now, would it?’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘So now you’re going out to buy another one?’

  ‘It’s that or freeze,’ he replied. ‘Thought I might have a look in that second-hand place in town.’

  ‘You can’t buy a second-hand coat, Peter!’

  ‘Well I’m not buying a new one! What if I meet another little man in the street playing an accordion and I have to give it to him? I mean, you obviously disapprove of my giving him a new one. You have no logic, Daisy, I’ve always said it, women have no logic.’

  ‘I swear to God,’ she said to Mar later, ‘living with him is sometimes like living in a music-hall double-act.’

  ‘He’s been like that as long as I’ve known him,’ Mar said admiringly. ‘Has he told you about Professor Theodore Quibbe?’

  Daisy looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘And the local Flower Show?’ Par joined in, then he and Mar laughed loud enough to burst a normal person’s eardrums. ‘Can’t believe you don’t know about that!’

  ‘Well, tell me!’

  ‘You do know he enters the Flower Show every year, don’t you?’ Mar giggled.

  ‘Yes, in the summer our life revolves around it. He’s always sneaking about, having sly looks at other gardens.’

  Mar and Par looked at
each other and the usual peal of laughter rang out. Daisy waited.

  ‘Started years ago, during the war. He said he was worried that the show was dying off, so he’d snoop around gardens and pick out plants he reckoned should be entered, then he’d sneak back again when there was no one about and nick them.’

  ‘He’d steal from other people’s gardens?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘He still does!’ Mar shrieked.

  ‘But that’s terrible; what if he’s caught?’

  ‘Well he doesn’t actually steal them,’ Par explained. ‘He enters them under the name of Professor Theodore Quibbe, an old and dear friend.’

  ‘Who doesn’t actually exist!’ Mar yelled, clapping her hands.

  ‘The trouble started,’ Par continued, ‘when Professor Quibbe’s entries began winning and Peter was forced to accept the prizes on his behalf, because, unfortunately, Professor Quibbe couldn’t be there.’

  ‘The Flower Show people have been dying to meet Professor Quibbe ever since, but so far he’s failed to turn up. Work of national importance, Peter tells them, a particularly painful attack of gout, that sort of thing. I gather they took to sending him Get Well cards via Peter. God alone knows how he’ll ever get out of that one!’

  Mar and Par fell about in a mutual paroxysm of mirth. ‘Wonderful man, Peter,’ Mar boomed. ‘You couldn’t have done better, Daisy darling!’

  When Daisy got home that evening she asked after Peter’s good friend the Professor.

  ‘Why?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, he’s your friend. One of the Flower Show organisers asked me today if I thought he’d be well enough to attend the next show.’ Daisy looked at him steadily. ‘I said I’d ask you.’

  ‘Well, he may be,’ he said shiftily. ‘Time will tell.’

  ‘Peter! I know all about Professor Quibbe and his floral triumphs!’ she shouted at him. ‘You can’t go on stealing flowers from gardens!’

  ‘Keep your voice down, you’ll frighten the dog,’ he reproved her.

  ‘Bugger the dog!’

  He leaned forward and covered Buster’s ears with his hands, tutting at her. ‘I’m sorry, Daisy,’ he said loftily, ‘if you’re going to use that kind of language in front of Buster I’ll have to take him out. We’ll have to continue this conversation at a later date.’

  With that he got up and departed, Buster at his heels.

  ‘And if you should see the odd bloom on your walk,’ she shouted after him, ‘don’t bring it home!’

  Then one day came news that would finally set Daisy free. It was a tiny piece in a newspaper about a fire in a Newcastle pub that had killed three people, one of them Mr Desmond Doyle, whose wife and two children had died in a raid during the war. Apparently no relatives could be found and the authorities were using the newspaper to appeal for someone to claim the body – and pay for the funeral, of course.

  Daisy stared at the paragraph, reading it over and over again. Dessie dead, now there was something, and no one to do the honours. As far as she could remember there had only been him and his mother, but there must be other relatives. He was Irish, for heaven’s sake, a fact that had doubtless prompted the newspaper appeal. She showed it to Peter.

  ‘Good riddance, I say,’ Peter said quietly.

  ‘I agree,’ Daisy replied.

  ‘And you’re thinking what, exactly?’

  ‘That I’d like to be sure, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, well, I can see your point, after that big disappointment over Father Christmas not being true one always questions everything.’

  ‘Could we pay for his funeral?’ she asked.

  Peter looked at her. ‘Have you gone mad, Daisy?’ he whispered. ‘Do you want to dress up as chief mourner as well?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’d like to be absolutely sure, that’s all.’

  ‘I should think being burned alive would do it, Daisy, you should know that better than anyone, surely?’

  ‘Yes, but … well I can’t explain it really. I know he’s dead, but dead and buried has a more final ring to it.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he smiled, hugging her. ‘Dead and gone and all that?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ he smiled. ‘But I think cremation rather than burial. What do you think? Do the job properly?’

  ‘Yes, that would do the job properly,’ she said quietly.

  So now she was free, finally free, and as Dessie could no longer appear on her doorstep he stopped appearing in her dreams, too.

  When he was eighty years old, Peter let it be known he wasn’t getting old, it was the weather that was changing. He had read somewhere that Oxford was entering into another ice age. Maybe Spain after all, he told the family at the christening of Peter, his first great-grandchild. They were letting all sorts of criminals into Spain in the 1970s, he said, and he’d always fancied himself as a master safe-blower.

  Not all of the family were there. David was in Brazil and Katie was in London, from where she had called the day before to say she would not be coming home. Christenings were bourgeois and she would have nothing to do with such antiquated notions and obvious social strictures, and anyway, there was a demo about something, and though she didn’t know what, it was her duty to support her comrades. Oh, and tell Pop thanks for the cash.

  Daisy had told him when he came in from playing golf the day before.

  He nodded. ‘Still a Communist, then?’ he asked, taking his jacket off.

  ‘Seems so,’ Daisy smiled.

  ‘Your one, that one,’ he grinned. ‘I’ve always said it and I always will – your one, that one.’

  ‘That’s unfair!’

  ‘It’s true, though!’ he retorted. ‘Never been any red hair in my family.’

  ‘That comes from my family.’

  ‘There you are, then, told you. Yours that one,’ Peter said, adding, as he always did, ‘yours and the milkman’s.’

  One day Mar called Daisy, yelling cheerfully down the phone. She needed to see Daisy and now. Everything was like that with Mar, it had to be now. Par had died the year before and Mar had been devastated. She had never thought of it happening, apparently. ‘I mean, he wasn’t like other people, was he?’ she’d demanded at the funeral. ‘Par wasn’t one to die, the thing ain’t right.’ Then she had looked around and bellowed, ‘The place is so quiet now, ain’t it?’ which made everyone turn away to hide their laughter.

  Ever since she had been preparing to go herself, as though Par had gone on a journey leaving her behind and now she was getting ready to catch up with him.

  ‘Been thinking about Granny’s diamonds, Daisy, darling,’ she said when Daisy arrived. ‘You know, the ones you wore at your wedding.’

  Daisy nodded. How could she ever forget them?

  ‘Decided you must have them.’

  Daisy almost choked on her tea. ‘You can’t do that!’ she said, shocked. ‘Apart from anything else, there’s Dotty to consider. She’d be very hurt, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well that’s the thing, you see. I know she and Bertie are doing so much good work that they’re assured of sainthoods already – they’re with the UN now, did I tell you?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘Wherever there’s someone suffering a bit, there you’ll find our Dotty suffering along with them,’ she sighed.

  ‘Mar! That’s awful!’

  ‘True, though, ain’t it? I blame myself, you know, I think I overwhelmed her with the good things, turned her the other way.’

  ‘I think that was the war,’ Daisy said, ‘and we’ve had this conversation before, Mar. The war changed all of us. With Dotty it was finding a talent she didn’t know she had and meeting all those different people and finding out how unequal the world is. She just decided to try to even things up a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘But I never see her and when she does come home she seems ashamed of me in some way, as though
I’m to blame for all that inequality. Surely I can only have contributed a little bit?’ and her laughter rang out around the room. Mar was right, though, without Par duetting with her the place did seem strangely quiet. ‘She would only sell Granny’s diamonds to help the suffering if I left them to her. Even if she had children I know she wouldn’t pass them on.’ She glanced at Daisy. ‘Yes, I know, all that good work,’ she grimaced, ‘wonderful thing to do and all that, but someone somewhere would still be wearing them and she wouldn’t be family, that’s my point. So I’ve decided you must have them. Every time I look at them I see you on your wedding day.’

  ‘But what about Freddy’s wife? And they have children.’

  ‘Oh, bugger them, they’re all boys anyway, and these things should go to the female side, that’s the tradition, and I’m a traditional old mare, as you know. The estate will go to Freddy, and Granny’s diamonds to my other daughter, to you, Daisy,’ Mar said.

  Daisy didn’t know what to say. ‘But shouldn’t you at least ask Dotty?’ she suggested.

  ‘Already have, darling. She wrote back telling me I could do whatever I wanted with them, that she didn’t want them, all but suggested where I could put them, which I thought was a bit rum for a saint!’

  Mar, died that Christmas. ‘Just like Mar to go when there’s a party looming,’ Peter said. ‘She had style, the old mare.’

  Dotty came home for the funeral while Bertie worked on, and Daisy took her to one side.

  ‘Dotty, she made me take Granny’s diamonds a while back, did you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dotty said, ‘she wrote to me.’

  ‘But they’re really yours,’ Daisy said. ‘I took them because she wanted me to, but I decided to hold on to them to please her. I always intended giving them to you.’

  ‘But I don’t want them!’ Dotty said, aghast. ‘Didn’t she tell you that?’

  ‘Yes, but now that she’s finally gone I thought you’d change your mind. They really belong with you.’