When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  “Oh, yes, exactly!” agreed Marsha, overlooking the last part of this sentence and still swept along by her romantic fervour. “How old was your mother when she died?”

  Daisy gave her a look.

  “Seventy-two,” she snapped.

  “And then how many years did your father have…?” She had meant to say ‘of peace’ but found it difficult.

  “Of peace? Despite the fact that he had me looking after him?” Daisy chuckled briefly before lapsing back into austerity. “Not even two. But count your blessings. One has to be thankful that God had the clemency to take the woman first. I’d never in a million years have gone back to look after her! Nor would that good-for-nothing brother of mine—her precious blue-eyed boy—himself now hag-ridden and buried somewhere in the wilds of Ireland with a teeming brood of daughters. Well, good luck to him! Serves him right!”

  She laughed again.

  “And good riddance! That’s what I say.”

  Neither Marsha nor Andrew could think of a response.

  “Yes, he’s turned out to be a poor fish, too. Well, that’s what comes of kowtowing to a domineering woman. He should have done what I did. They should both have done what I did. Stood up to her! Even at the price of a few pitched battles—well, say a couple of thousand! I learnt at an early age, you see, how to conduct myself on the battlefield.”

  She paused.

  “But good heavens! Have I been up on my soapbox again? Better pull me off it, someone—if anybody considers he’s man enough to do it! Cram another cake in my mouth and hope I’ll sit there silent. Like a stuffed pig!”

  Marsha smiled. “Nobody wants to shut you up, Daisy.”

  “Then they must be crackers! All of them! It’s the only explanation! But… Well, I don’t know”—she accepted her third cup of tea—“sometimes I look about me and I think that an awful lot of men are just poor fish and that an awful lot of women are just… What’s the one I mean? I’m always forgetting what it’s called.”

  Looking at their faces must have told her some additional clue might be necessary.

  “The one that bites off its mate’s head as soon as he’s finished performing his vital function?”

  “A praying mantis,” said Andrew. It was the first thing he’d said for a while but Marsha was sure he’d been listening and hadn’t simply fallen into one of his moods. She would have been hard pressed to say how she was so sure: on the whole his face was not a revealing one. But, anyway, didn’t his naming of this horrid creature prove it?

  “Yes. Nailed in one! But then I thought you’d know. Well, in my view it’s a pretty depressing situation. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Marsha giggled. “Oh, I would! It does seem a bit of a cheeky thing to do.”

  “What does?” asked Andrew.

  “Well, you know—after they’ve just—after he’s just—Oh, Andy! I do believe I’ve found a most effective way to keep you up to scratch!”

  But if only, she thought, if only she could have felt as relaxed as this when some of her friends had been to visit! Good old Daisy! She was better than a tonic, or a glass of champagne! Yet at the same time she couldn’t help but acknowledge a distinct pang. And she so much hoped—if ever she were brave enough to ask them—that those same friends might be prevailed upon to come again.

  She meant, of course, when Andrew was at home.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” offered Daisy.

  “Yes? What?”

  “That good-looking husband of yours—dour, crabby, earnest individual though he well may be—you know, he could do with a spot more liveliness; we’ll have to see what we can think of—anyway, with him in mind, at least I can make one prophecy with some assurance. He’ll never be a poor fish. He may be the bane of your existence; but he’ll never be a poor fish!”

  Marsha laughed. “Oh, precious bane!” she said happily.

  “Did you ever read that?” asked Daisy.

  “No. And I never read The Card either.” Then she looked down at her lap with carefully suppressed pride. “But I heard of both of them.”

  When she raised her eyes she was surprised to see that Andrew was smiling; very nearly grinning. Had she said something silly? But she didn’t care—oh, not at all! She would have to call him precious bane again. Perhaps ‘Bane’ could get to be a nickname and in the end might even encourage him to discover one for her. Actually she had several times suggested the odd possibility—just very casually, of course—trying not to let him see what she was up to. But it hadn’t worked.

  She would have to borrow Andrew’s dictionary without his knowing and find out what ‘bane’ meant.

  She smiled back at him. Sadly, she didn’t think he saw.

  “I’ll tell you what, Daisy. I’ll have a game of chess with you if you like.” His tone grew even more expansive. “The best of three! And then we’ll see which of us is really the poor fish! And which is the praying mantis.”

  15

  But first there was the business with the makeup; Marsha insisted on that. Daisy indulgently complied—“She wants to use me as a guinea pig, is determined not to let me escape!”—but Andrew shrugged with some annoyance at the frivolity of it all.

  “For the love of Mike!” he exclaimed. “What’s wrong with her as she is? At least she doesn’t spend half of her life in front of a mirror endlessly prinking and preening!”

  Daisy considered this, with her head a little to one side. “Will somebody tell me, please, if I’ve just received a compliment? It doesn’t happen often and I’d like to know.”

  “No,” said Andrew. “I don’t picture you as the type of person whose life can only be sustained by compliments.”

  “Not like some that we could mention!” said Marsha, almost before she’d realized she had any intention of saying it.

  “Meaning?”

  But now that she had started, it seemed easier to go on than to back off. And certainly their guest ought to approve. To judge from what she had been saying Daisy wouldn’t have backed off.

  “Meaning that those in glass houses oughtn’t to throw stones, because I too may have seen people prinking and preening in front of a mirror when they thought nobody was watching. Though naturally I should never dream of naming names.”

  It occurred to her that he hadn’t actually named names either.

  “Or doesn’t posing in front of the wardrobe door just before you have your bath, or just after you’ve had it, or both—doesn’t that happen to count for some reason? I’m very sorry if I thought it did.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Marsha!” He looked at her as though he couldn’t at all understand what accounted for this. “Have you gone clean out of your mind? Have you forgotten that we have a visitor?”

  “Oh, pay no attention to me,” said Daisy—who, for once in her life, really wished that people wouldn’t. “I’m still trying to work out whether, on aggregate, I come out of this with a fiercely swollen head or just my usual hangdog expression. In any case, Marsha, I do admire a man who wants to keep himself in trim. Don’t you?”

  But this seemed to please neither of her hosts.

  “No, Andy, I had not forgotten that we had a visitor! Perhaps it was our visitor who was inspiring me.”

  Then she said a little more placatingly, “Anyway, I thought you had some work you wanted to get on with.”

  “So now I suppose it’s not enough that I slog at the office all week? I’m not even allowed to relax on a Saturday afternoon?”

  “Why don’t you just drink another cup of tea and then set out the chessmen?” put in Daisy, who had suddenly remembered that blessed are the peacemakers—and conveniently forgotten that she herself had drunk the last drop of tea. “I don’t imagine we’ll be long.” She smiled, beatifically.

  “Well, just make sure you’re not.”

  She decided—though it was something she had known from the beginning, anyhow—that she was being complimented; only rather more subtly than merely through the lips. Because
he was obviously extremely impatient to play chess with her.

  So she made up her mind she would protract their interlude upstairs for as long as she decently could. She turned to Marsha with a merry injunction and a pointing finger.

  “Lead on, Macduff!”

  Marsha—not quite so merrily—led on.

  “Like a lamb to the slaughter!” said Daisy, briefly turning her eyes back to Andrew. If she was supposed to be referring to herself the simile lacked conviction. “When you see me next I hope I shall look like Greta Garbo. Do you think I might look like Greta Garbo?” She threw out her arms and slunk out with a supposedly long-legged stride and moodily sinuous grace.

  Upstairs Marsha led her into the bedroom she shared with Andrew—“the master bedroom!” she sometimes coquettishly called it and not just to her husband. Daisy glanced about her with interest. It wasn’t often you had a look into people’s bedrooms. The room itself was only ordinary but that was the wardrobe door, presumably, before which he posed naked. Threw out his chest, no doubt, and flexed his muscles. Daisy found the thought unsavoury but not unstimulating. Henry had never stood in front of a mirror and flexed his muscles—at least, never to her knowledge—during the short duration of their marriage. Moreover, he wouldn’t have cut a very dashing figure if he had: like his brother Dan—just a bag of skin and bone, and of very white skin at that. Besides, she had neither encouraged nudity in him nor indulged in it herself. Despite her long years as a nurse and a physiotherapist she still thought there was something faintly disgusting about all that. More than faintly disgusting, even. And yet at the same time…

  And there, too, was the bed in which, if he failed to come up to scratch, Marsha had threatened to bite off his head. Once he’d performed his vital function.

  Well, he’d done that by now, hadn’t he? Marsha—who wasn’t yet even twenty—was already pregnant. Daisy quickly turned her face away and experienced an extension of that feeling of disdain, almost of revulsion. In some ways it would certainly be a cleaner world if Nature had provided women with the jaws and the digestive system of a praying mantis.

  Though cleaner, perhaps, wasn’t entirely the right word. No, definitely it wasn’t! Daisy considered all that dripping gore and all the problems of disposal. It would be simpler, she thought more cheerily, if they were to eat their way straight down to the toenails. Far more practical. And besides. How it would save on the meat bills!

  “And that must be the reason why it prays, of course… ‘Oh, please relieve me of these hiccups!’”

  “What?”

  Daisy sat down on the stool which Marsha, despite saying, “I’m not really sure if I feel like this any longer,” had just pointed out.

  “Well, that’s perfectly fine by me,” answered Daisy. “If you like we can simply chatter. What on earth are all these jars for?” She looked at them with apparent interest. “And how in the name of sweet St Antony do you ever manage to keep track? Naturally, I mean of Padua, not of Egypt.”

  Daisy enjoyed this little conceit. Presumably the father of monasticism would not have been much interested in ladies’ aids to beauty, whereas the restorer of mislaid property might have felt far more concerned at the passing of soft skin; the vanishing bloom of youth; lost roses in the cheek.

  “My mother always talked about the saints,” she said. “I can’t think where she supposed her path and theirs would ever cross!”

  Marsha began to explain the purpose of each pot and tube. At first she sounded apathetic yet as she handled different items her enthusiasm grew. “Now let me just look at you,” she said.

  Daisy was relieved the evenings were drawing in and that such a scrutiny was being conducted by lamplight. But even so she hoped to distract Marsha at least minimally from what she might be scrutinizing.

  “Ah, this is better, dear. I’d have said a few minutes ago you seemed just a shade lackadaisical. But of all the things you may be lacking it certainly isn’t one of those!”

  She chuckled softly, and Marsha smiled politely, having no idea what Daisy was on about.

  “Why do you always run yourself down so?”

  “I thought I only ran other people down.”

  “You usually talk as if you were ugly.”

  “When in fact I’m a raving beauty? No. I usually say I’ve got a funny face.”

  “You have a very good bone structure. That’s what you do have. And it expresses a lot of character.”

  “But not beauty?”

  Daisy’s tongue was firmly in her cheek yet Marsha didn’t realize.

  “Yes, it does! In a way.” She suddenly looked not one day older than her nineteen years—Daisy was a little touched. They gazed at one another in the mirror. Pensive and unsmiling.

  They could never have stared like that directly.

  “But it is true: you don’t really make the most of yourself. You’re happy to allow me a free hand?”

  “Submit to your tender mercies?”

  “I feel a little nervous.”

  “How do you think I feel?”

  They were talking as though a tattoo gun lay on the table.

  “Your hair should be a little longer,” said Marsha. “You’ve got nice hair, you know. But it would look much softer if you’d let it grow.”

  “Like yours, you mean?”

  “Yes, possibly. I think this style suits any age.”

  Unaware she’d made a gaffe Marsha embarked upon her treatment. As she smoothed in the foundation cream she lost all hesitancy and worked with instinctive, gifted fingers. But some echo of that last remark lingered in her own head as surely as it did in Daisy’s. She thought: Daisy’s mother died five years ago and I know now that she was seventy-two. Assume that she was forty, then, at the time of Daisy’s birth. Surely a charitable assumption? Marsha herself had been a late baby, an ‘afterthought’, but her mother had still been quite comfortably under forty.

  Thirty-seven? Was Daisy thirty-seven? She had a fairly good complexion and if up to now she had never bothered with it…?

  But give her the benefit of the doubt. Say thirty-five. It was a tidy figure and Marsha hankered after tidiness. In that at least she and Andrew were well suited.

  Thirty-five.

  She smiled.

  “What suddenly made you think about makeup, Daisy? I mean, since the notion of it obviously wasn’t with you from the time you were a child, like it was with me?”

  Marsha recalled her own mother having recommended it to Daisy a week or so before Daisy’s wedding. Her mother had got remarkably short shrift, however: just another in their long list of skirmishes, not exactly pitched battles, thank goodness. Henry himself hadn’t seemed to care one way or the other; would merely have agreed good-naturedly with whichever argument he’d happened to hear last. Marsha had loved him, of course. She knew he’d been more like his father, mentally, than his mother—perhaps it was the same with her and Dan—and even realized she herself wasn’t dissimilar to Henry. But she would never have wanted to marry him! She had often wondered why Daisy had, and just as often why Henry had wanted to marry her. She had never felt the same perplexity regarding Erica and Dan.

  But it had just occurred to her that Daisy might have met somebody else, who had shown a preference for makeup. Marsha felt full of happy expectation. Not for nothing had her schoolfriends called her a matchmaker. She liked a romance almost as much in real life as she did on the silver screen.

  Yet she was about to be disappointed, even though Daisy, under the soothing influence of gentle fingers, was prepared to overlook—this once—the faux pas that Marsha didn’t even know she had committed.

  “Oh, the receptionist I get in Harrow Road (I practise there on Mondays and Thursdays, you know) also suggested I could make a bit more of myself. She was nervous about saying it, didn’t like to be personal but felt strongly impelled, even directed, to tell me. At least, that’s the way she put it. And one could hardly take offence.”

  “No, of course not,” said
Marsha. As much as disappointment, she felt surprise.

  “A pleasant sort of woman. A good sort of woman. Religious too—but without that awful cant which frequently goes with it. In no way mealy-mouthed. Her name is Marie. She has a flat in the Fortune Green Road,” she added, as if that somehow might explain it.

  “Ah? Not too far from here then?”

  “Almost on the doorstep. I’ll have to introduce you. And what a perfectly shameful waste it is, too! She’s sixty-five or so—I only mention this to save you asking!—and unmarried and where on earth is the sense in that? There’s just no sense in it at all.”

  Marsha felt she must have missed something.

  Daisy continued to look indignant.

  “This world is teeming with rotten wives and rotten mothers! And then you meet someone like her who would have made a marvellous wife and a marvellous mother, and yet no fool has ever asked her. Where’s the sense in that, I’d like to know.”

  “But surely, Daisy, there’s more to life than just being married,” said Marsha, who didn’t really believe it for one moment—at least, not if you were married to the right man. Her feeling of surprise was increasing every second. She hadn’t expected to hear on Daisy’s lips, ever, such gentle words about another woman.

  “Well, it’s very easy for someone who is married,” answered Daisy, “to trot out such a platitude. Yet there’s no denying the fact that children are important to most women, even if a husband isn’t—even if they’d give their eye-teeth, sometimes, to be shot of him!” She emitted her brief chuckle.

  She started thinking about Henry.

  “Anyway, Daisy, don’t talk now. It’s time for the lipstick.”

  16

  She remembered when she’d first seen him. He’d had a pale and interesting air, an almost ethereal quality. He’d been sitting on his own, reading. Daisy approved of that. There weren’t many people you saw at the club who sat lost in a good book, oblivious to the world. She made a beeline for him.

  “Well done!” she said. “The perfect way to spend a wet Saturday afternoon!”