Daisy (17 page)

Bertie had launched into the opening lines of his song:

The Duke smiled down at her. “Remember, Daisy, that the soul of Pagliacci may beat beneath the boiled shirt of the most correct young Englishman.”

Bertie reached the end of his song:

Loud applause greeted his efforts and Bertie rushed immediately to Daisy’s side. “What did you think, Daisy? Was I all right?”

“Yes yes,” snapped Daisy in the manner of a mother whose child has tugged at her skirt for attention once too often. “Now you will be able to take off your hat and those terrible gloves.”

Bertie looked crestfallen. “Suppose I look a bit of a fool, what? Sorry, Daisy.”

“What for?” said Daisy cruelly. “What you do has nothing to do with me, Bertie Burke.”

The Duke had just wandered off with the Countess. Her dress flickered like a pale flame in the darkness and then disappeared under the trees.

Daisy had an overwhelming desire to spy on them. Bertie had shuffled off and no one else seemed to be looking at her. Not stopping to analyze her motive, she slipped off into the darkness. Angela was wearing a very heavy, musky perfume which wafted across on the still night air, mingling with the faint tang of salt from the sea. She was so intent on her pursuit that she nearly stumbled into them. Angela’s white arms were wound around the Duke’s neck and he was kissing her. Daisy gave a little cry and turned and ran off back to the dance.

She felt immeasurably hurt and could not understand why.
The Duke has no right to philander with a married woman
, she thought savagely. She had underrated the affections of poor Bertie. She would show the Duke of Oxenden that she did not care a rap. By the time he returned to the dance floor, Daisy was flirting outrageously with Bertie, who looked as if all his dreams had just come true. Daisy was just leaning forward to take a sip of wine from Bertie’s glass when she was suddenly jerked onto the dance floor by a strong arm.

She stared at the Duke’s waistcoat, breathless and shy, and aware of his eyes staring down at the top of her head. He began without preamble: “I have been kissed by Angela before and it means absolutely nothing to me. Or to her for that matter. But your case is different. I would advise you not to flirt so assiduously with that young man, unless you mean to marry him.”

“Marry! Marry
Bertie
,” laughed Daisy. “You must be mad.”

“Look, Daisy, I warn you…”

“You warn
me.
” Daisy broke away from him. “Let me tell you, my lord Duke, you are not my father and I shall do exactly as I please.”

Trembling with rage, she walked away from him and joined Bertie who threw the Duke a triumphant look. “Let’s get away from them for a bit, Daisy,” he said. “Let’s go for a stroll on the beach.”

Daisy gladly agreed. Anything to get away from the Duke’s angry stare and Angela’s mocking eyes.

They climbed up over the dunes and stood together for a moment, looking down on the beach. The water was still and quiet like black glass, with only a thin white line of foam moving on the empty beach. A long line of light from the lighthouse stabbed across the bay. Daisy stood silently, breathing in the peace of the night and idly counting the flashes of light.

“Let’s go down on the beach,” said Bertie.

“There’s something I must say.” Daisy smiled vaguely and moved slowly along beside him over the dunes, the stiff taffeta of her petticoats making a steady whish-whishing sound like the incoming tide. Probably Bertie wanted to discuss another of his many plans for her amusement.

They walked side by side to the edge of the water and stood looking down at the little waves curling gently over the sand. Daisy burst out laughing. “Whatever are you doing, Bertie, kneeling on the sand like that? You’ll ruin your trousers.”

Bertie stared up at her, his face glistening with sweat in the moonlight. “Daisy, will you marry me?”

Daisy stepped back in alarm. She had an absurd desire to say, “This is so sudden.” Instead she blurted out, “Oh, Bertie. Stop acting the fool and let’s get back to the party.”

“I mean it, Daisy,” said Bertie slowly and earnestly. “You’re the prettiest gel I’ve ever seen. Honest. I’m most awfully, terribly in love with you.”

Daisy shook her head slowly in a wondering way. This could not possibly be
Bertie
proposing to her.

He rose to his feet and flung his arms around her and tried to kiss her. His whole body was trembling, his breath smelled of wine and cigars, and she could feel his damp, cold hands on her shoulders. She wrenched her face away and found herself stammering, “P-please, B-Bertie. Leave me
alone
. I didn’t think you were serious.
Please
leave me alone. I can’t feel anything for you.”

“But you must. You
must
!” babbled Bertie. He sank to his knees again and buried his face in her skirts. She wrenched her dress away and he stayed, kneeling on the sands, his head bent. Bertie felt his heart break and Daisy felt as if some pet dog had suddenly gone into heat and started making love to her foot.

“I’m leaving, Bertie,” she said, starting to move away. “You’ve had a bit too much to drink, that’s it. You’ll see things quite differently in the morning.”

Bertie began to cry. Great, racking sobs shook his thin body and the ugly, choking sounds filled the still night air.

Daisy made a half move toward him and then abruptly turned and ran headlong up the beach. She did not stop running until she had reached the safety of her bedroom and poured the whole story into Amy’s ears.

“He must have been drunk, Amy,” she wailed.

Amy shook her head slowly. “He’s awfully keen on you, Daisy. I thought to warn you but then you seemed to like his company and went everywhere with him…well, be honest, Daisy. You did give the poor chap a lot of encouragement.”

“How—how was I to
know
,” cried Daisy.

“I think,” said Amy, “that you’re so keen on finding love for yourself, that you forget that someone might be falling in love with you. Where did you leave him?”

“On the beach.”

Amy wound a shawl around her blonde hair. “I’d better go and make sure he does nothing silly.”

“Silly!” cried Daisy. The weight of guilt within her seemed already too heavy to bear.

“There, there,” said Amy. “The damage is done and there is nothing more you can do. I’ll go.”

Daisy sat miserably by the window for a long time after Amy had left. Up till now, her life had seemed very unreal and the various people she met, merely players in it. There was no one else to blame but herself. Hot tears of shame began to burn down her cheeks. She had a longing to see the father she had never known. She would go to France. Nothing would stop her now.

Her white shawl flying about her shoulders like wings, Amy fled through the sleeping town of Brinton. The beach had been deserted, but heavy footprints had marked a stumbling path up and over the dunes to the shore road. The cobbles of the town shone in the moonlight, a stray cat made a sudden dash across the road, but apart from that, no other figures moved. Amy was just about to give up the search when she remembered the pier.

The long white sanded boards stretched out into the bay. The flags at the entrance hung motionless in the still air. The slot machines stood against the rail on their squat legs, like some fantastic army lined up for review. Amy ran lightly along the pier, her slippered feet making no sound on the boards, past the theater where the coming attraction of “Romeo and Juliet” featuring that well-known actor, Bertram Dufresne, was billed in large ornate letters, and out to the platform at the end.

Bertie Burke stood at the very edge, his forehead pressed against a post and his thin chest heaving with great sobs. Amy did not find Bertie in the least ridiculous. She was happily at home in the English caste system and Mr. Burke was a gentleman.

Moving gently so as not to frighten him, Amy said very quietly, “What are you doing out here, Mr. Burke?”

He turned around. Seen through a mist of tears, with her white shawl, and the moonlight shining on her blonde curls, Amy looked like a vision.

Then he blinked his eyes and registered that the vision was none other than Daisy’s maid. His humiliation was complete.

Pulling himself together with pathetic dignity, he said, “I’m about to make a great, big hole in the water.”

“You’d be very much missed,” said Amy, moving cautiously as close to him as she dared.

Bertie looked at her with contempt. “Who’d miss me? Daisy?”

“Well, now, I suppose she would. She ain’t in love with you. But she likes you a lot.”

Bertie began to cry again. He tried valiantly to stop, but seemed unable to.

“Then there’s all your friends,” said Amy. “Oh, I know they tease you a bit. But they’d miss you. Why, only the other day I heard his lordship, the Earl, say, ‘That Bertie always makes me laugh. He’s a jolly good sport.’”

Bertie wiped his weak eyes with a sodden handkerchief and looked at her suspiciously, but Amy went on, “You see, you’re always so merry and the life and soul of any party, that people don’t think you’ve got feelings same as them. Us cheery ones always get the sticky end. Take me now…I was walking out with a fellow and we had an understanding like. Then he starts on as how he wants to be a butler and how nobody recognizes his worth…on and on he’d go. I’d try to sympathize and say I understood and he’d sneer at me and say ‘How can you understand the feelings of a chap what wants to make his mark in the world? You’re always laughing. Always got a cheery word. You don’t know how to suffer.’ Well, maybe I don’t. But I don’t go around making everyone else miserable and taking myself too seriously, if that’s what he means by suffering.”

She had moved next to Bertie and now put a hand on his arm. “But you get it off your chest. Doesn’t do to suffer in silence. Just take it very quietly and tell Amy. There now.” She put a comforting arm around his narrow shoulders and held him until his sobbing ceased.

He gave a tired little hiccup and sigh like a small child, and began to speak: “Well, you see, it’s like this. I’m most awfully, terribly in love and she’s such a ripping girl…”

A little breeze began to wrinkle the water, the moon slid down the sky, and still the two figures stood at the end of the pier, the man talking earnestly and the blonde girl holding him as tightly as a mother holds an injured child.

The next morning the sun blazed down from a brassy sky and the air was heavy, still, and humid. The gardener weeding the flower beds was the only moving thing on the immediate horizon. The Earl and Countess of Nottenstone were breakfasting on the terrace. Their guests were still in bed although it was eleven in the morning. The heat was already suffocating and definitely un-English.

Angela threw down her fork and picked up her fan and started flapping it angrily.

“I’m bored, bored,
bored
,” she said petulantly. “Why did we have to come to this boring bourgeois place anyway? It positively reeks of aspidistras and Low Anglicans. Why didn’t we go to Trouville with everyone else?”

“I don’t know,” said the Earl sleepily. “You liked it well enough last year.”

The year before, the Earl and Countess had bought the villa at the height of one of their more dramatic reconciliations.

“Or Paris,” went on Angela. “Paris is
such
fun. Do you remember when the Comte de Leon was racing his carriage down the Avenue du Bois and knocked that silly little man over who started shouting ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ and the Comte simply took out one of those old-fashioned green-silk purses that ladies used to carry—absolutely weighted down with gold—and threw it in the fellow’s face? So
Balzacky
,” she sighed. “Now, there was a
man.
”

“Implying that I am not,” said the Earl icily, putting down his beer tankard.

“Don’t pout,” said his wife maddeningly, looking more cheerful now that she had succeeded in upsetting him.

“And furthermore,” snapped her husband, “the comte and the rest of them are degenerates, always fathering each other’s children and creeping around each other’s bedrooms and living in each other’s pockets.”

“You know, you really are a rather ghastly Victorian. The old Queen must have loved you. I’m sure Neddy thinks you’re a stuffed shirt.”

“Are you by any chance referring to the King in that familiar manner or do you mean Daisy Chatterton’s father?”

“That ghastly old tottering drip? No, my precious darling, I mean Kingie.”

“His Highness has always been all that is pleasant.”

“Exactly,” sneered his wife. “If Kingie didn’t think you were a stuffed shirt, he’d take you out roistering with him.”

“King Edward does not roister.”

“Hah!” remarked the Countess with Palmerstonian venom. “What
is
up with you, Davy? What little piece of merriment have you planned for us all today?”

The Earl gazed out over the oily sea. “The vicar and his wife are coming to tea.”

“The vicar and—oh, you can’t mean it. You’ve gone stark, raving mad. Have you started worrying about your immortal soul, my dear? Well, I agree with Mr. Darwin. We are all descended from chimps. But if you think I am going to stay home this afternoon listening to some dreary vicar’s wife giving me her recipe for cauliflower—oh gracious, you can think again.”

The Earl turned around in his high-backed cane chair and looked at her with eyes as flat and expressionless as the flat, summer sea. “You will stay to meet the vicar. You will do the pretty to Mrs. Vicar. I am weary of this racketing around. Oxenden was the last straw.”

“
Toby.
What has Toby got to do with it?”

“Oxenden breaks hearts whether he means to or not,” said the Earl. “He’s heavy stuff. Now, you will start behaving like the Countess of Nottenstone and not like some
demi-mondaine
, or you can pack your bags and get out.”