Daisy's Wars (41 page)

‘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.’

‘Daisy,’ Dotty said gently, ‘you have no idea how you’ve lifted my guilt all these years. If you hadn’t been here as the daughter she wished she’d had I
wouldn’t have been able to live the way I wanted. You freed me, do you realise that? I’m so grateful to you for being Mar’s daughter, for caring for her the way I should have, and
she was right, Granny’s baubles are yours. I’d only sell them.’

‘She said that!’ Daisy laughed.

‘I’ll bet she did! You keep them, Daisy, hand them on to your daughter, that’s what Mar would’ve wanted.’

‘My girl is a revolutionary,’ Daisy giggled, thinking of Katie in diamonds. ‘She’d have me arrested for betraying whichever cause she currently believes in!’

‘Yes, well, we were all like that, Daisy,’ Dotty replied. ‘We all change as we get older, look at us!’

Two weeks later, just after New Year, with the family – minus Katie – still with them, Peter died.

He had insisted on taking everyone outside to see the snow-drops that he was always boasting came through earlier in his garden than anywhere else. And he just dropped to the
ground. Not a sound, no cry or sigh. A stroke, the doctor said, he hadn’t felt a thing, and he’d died with most of his family around him.

Katie came home for her father’s funeral, wearing a dress and torturing herself for not being there when he died. She knew he was old, but she’d expected him to go on forever, she
said, and she wished she hadn’t argued with him so much and that she’d come home oftener, unaware, as the young always are, that she was saying what every generation has always said and
always will on similar occasions.

David had received the message sent to him and made it home in time, looking taller, broader and more grown-up than Daisy expected; she wished his father could have seen him. She was surprised
by how weak she felt. She knew Peter had been getting on, she had been almost nursing him for the last ten years and had thought ahead to this moment more than once, but now it had come she felt so
much older than her fifty-four years. And alone; very alone.

Even so, she insisted that they all went back to their lives to leave her to come to terms with her new status. It had sounded so convincing, too. Not for the first time in her life she
surprised herself, but it was so hard to take in, so hard not to keep looking for him, listening for him, and the feeling in the night when she stretched her arm out and found that empty cold space
in their bed was too much to bear. She had refused to wash the pillowcase his head had lain on, so that she could have the smell of him still, and she could hug the pillow for the rest of the
night, crying and wondering if it was possible to go on with this pain.

The children were wonderful, of course, but there were things, shared little and big things between husband and wife, that children couldn’t and shouldn’t share. Things that
didn’t need words, only a glance, memories that were theirs alone. The nonsense when they had first met and she thought he was insane; their first time in the inn before they were married,
when they’d escaped from Mar and Par’s huge, noisy party; the moments immediately after David and Katie were born … and now there was no one to share them with. He had made her
into her own person, she had worked that out long ago. He had brought ‘the real Daisy’ back to life and allowed her to blossom under his care. She had so much to feel grateful for, so
much to miss.

It was a letter from Edith in reply to hers telling her of Peter’s death that saved her. They had kept in touch, meeting up on Edith’s three or four visits home in the last thirty
years, and they wrote, not weekly, not even monthly sometimes, but every now and again. Edith invited her to come out to Brisbane, saying the sun would do her much more good than a winter in
England.

At first she dismissed the idea. She didn’t think she could make such a long journey without Peter, and part of her didn’t want to leave him lying in the cemetery for so long on his
own, though she knew he would tell her that was illogical. It would also have made him laugh, she thought, and that’s what decided her to go.

She had done a lot of thinking in these last few months, events like this did that. She supposed it was a kind of filing system in the head, and now that something else had to be filed, too,
other thoughts were being jostled to the surface. Thoughts about the war years occupied her mind, and how they had all joined the WAAFs because of the flying, the idea of getting up, up and away,
escaping from their normal lives. A few of the girls did get into the air, though every WAAF and every pilot who took them up would’ve been on a charge if they’d been found out. There
was that one girl who’d persuaded a Fly Boy to take her for a spin in a fighter, if she remembered correctly, and it had crashed, killing both of them. Funny the things you had barely
registered originally that came into your mind at a time like this.