Father Unknown (43 page)

‘Oh, I don’t mean I don’t want to meet them at all. Maybe a meal in a restaurant or something like that, something formal on neutral ground,’ Ellen said quickly. ‘You see, I don’t know that I could cope with all the many reminders of what I lost by giving you up, not if I came to your house. I’d really rather we had a relationship that was separate, and special, where we can make a future together without all the trappings of the past.’

In the last two days Daisy had pondered on how it would work if Ellen came to Bedford Park. While she was dying to see Dad’s and the twins’ reaction to such a beautiful woman, she could see it might be awkward and strange for them, and it could possibly set her apart from them again.

‘I think that’s the perfect solution,’ Daisy said eagerly. ‘I am so glad I did find you. You are better than my wildest dreams.’

Ellen smiled. ‘Bless you, darling. That’s the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.’

Chapter Twenty-one

Joel sat in an armchair, staring at but not seeing the ironing board littered with the remains of the previous night’s takeaway. The whole flat was in much the same state. Since he’d fallen out with Daisy he had no interest in cleaning up, or doing anything else for that matter.

It was four weeks ago that Daisy had put the phone down on him while she was in Cornwall. He could kick himself now for not calling round to Bedford Park over Easter when she got home to talk it out with her.

He understood perfectly why she wanted to find her mother, and he wasn’t against it at all. But he had maintained right from the beginning that she should go through one of the agencies who specialized in finding birth mothers. That way there would be a mediator on hand to smooth out any potential problems.

It was when Daisy had said she thought Ellen might have had a nervous breakdown following the fire at the farm that he became worried. In his opinion, the last thing Daisy needed in her life so soon after Lorna’s death was involvement with someone unstable. She had been so strong for Lorna and John, but she could easily start to bend if someone else began to lean on her. Maybe he should have been more diplomatic, he also supposed he didn’t need to refuse to use his work connections to help in the search. But her wild exuberance caught him short.

The next time he phoned Daisy, he tried really hard to be diplomatic. But she seemed so irritable, everything he asked her appeared to annoy her further. He still couldn’t see what was wrong with saying ‘Don’t be silly.’ It wasn’t meant to be offensive. But he supposed she’d have flown off the handle whatever he’d said. So he’d left her alone, thinking that time would bring her round.

Another mistake! She didn’t phone him or call round. He was left in limbo, not knowing whether she considered him persona non grata or if she was waiting for a gesture from him.

He loved Daisy. From the first night he met her in the wine bar, he knew she was the only girl for him. He could remember how, as he helped her pick up the contents of her handbag from the floor, she tossed back that glorious hair, and beneath it were those forget-me-not-blue eyes. If she hadn’t agreed to go out with him that night, he thought he would have prowled around that area forever, just looking for her.

He’d never felt that way about any woman before.

She was dizzy, but in the best possible way. She fizzed like lemonade, she made every occasion a special one. He wanted her to be his wife, the mother of his children. The only reason he didn’t ask her within just a few months of knowing her was because her mother was so ill. He wished he’d told her now how great he thought she was while she was nursing Lorna. For it was then that he saw her true strengths, capable, kind, unflustered, keeping the whole family together with her humour and warmth.

He’d finally phoned John at his office a couple of weeks before. They had always got on well, and he wanted John’s advice as to whether Daisy would welcome a reconciliation. Before he could even broach the subject, John told him Daisy had already found and met Ellen and she was, in his words, ‘walking on air’.

It seemed John wasn’t entirely happy though. Daisy had made no attempt to find a job, she seemed to be living from one meeting with Ellen to the next, with no thought to her own future. John was quick to say he had no doubts that Ellen was an admirable woman, for Daisy had raved about her shop, her home, her elegance and beauty. Yet at the same time he did seem concerned that Ellen might be turning Daisy’s head by giving her expensive clothes and drawing her away from her family.

‘You know what she can be like,’ John said at one point. ‘She’s an all-or-nothing type. Right now it’s all Ellen this and Ellen that. We don’t get a look in.’

‘So I haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of getting a look in either then?’ Joel said, keeping his tone light.

John sighed. ‘I have to just wait till it’s run its course. But there’s no reason why you should, Joel. I can’t advise you, I really don’t know what’s going on in her head any more.’

Joel sent Daisy some flowers the day after, with a little note saying he missed her. But it drew no response, not even a phone call to thank him, so he could only conclude that she’d lost interest in him entirely.

It was as though all the light had gone out of his life. He woke each morning feeling as if he had lead weights lying inside him. Without her there didn’t seem to be any point to anything.

He loved Daisy, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. And he had believed that she’d felt the same way too. He wondered what she could be thinking of, to let something so good just slip away.

Daisy was thinking about Ellen. She had thought of little else since she found her. But on this occasion she wasn’t just hugging herself with glee that she’d turned out to have such an interesting and beautiful mother, but considering what she could do to bring them closer.

They had met eight times now, several times at Ellen’s flat. They’d had a couple of meals out, and drinks in the wine bar near her shop. Yet even though Ellen had bought her several presents, including that lovely green sweater from her shop, Daisy felt she was still holding back.

It didn’t matter that she said she still wasn’t ready to meet Daisy’s family, Daisy didn’t think that was really important. But it did bother her a bit that Ellen still didn’t want to talk about her past. Daisy’s conception, birth and the subsequent adoption was something she dismissed as being too sad to talk about. Daisy was burning to hear about it, and she thought they were crucial issues that needed airing. But then Ellen didn’t talk about her life in Bristol either, what her friends were like, or her work. Mostly when she spoke of the past it was only about her childhood.

It seemed to Daisy as she listened to amusing tales about the awful clothes she and Josie had to wear, how hard her father was, and how slatternly and vicious Violet could be, that Ellen was trying to trivialize her loss. She remembered that she and the rest of her family had been like that when Toby, the dog they had before Fred, died. Had they talked about all their best memories of him, they would have got terribly upset. So they only ever spoke of the things he had destroyed, the holes he dug in the lawn, and his constant barking at nothing.

It seemed to her that Ellen still carried a burden of guilt about Josie, though why she didn’t know. Perhaps Ellen felt she hadn’t tried hard enough to stop her downward spiral, or that she should have tried to get her sister out of London to start a new career.

The more Daisy mulled over things about Ellen, the more she thought that if she were to go back to Cornwall, or to have some contact with her past there, she could really put it all behind her. She didn’t dare suggest this, knowing Ellen would snap at her. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She also hadn’t dared tell Ellen that she had telephoned Mavis almost immediately after their second meeting and told her everything there was to tell. Mavis had wanted to come up to London right then and see Ellen, but Daisy had explained things and said it might spoil the relationship if she went against Ellen’s wishes.

But now, a few weeks later, Daisy felt sure that it would be better in the long run to bring everything out in the open. Ellen did appear to have some friends in London, she did mention the odd supper or drinks parties. Yet she had no man in her life, and it looked as if she was alone for much of her spare time. She might say she liked her life the way it was, but Daisy suspected that was just bravado and she was in fact lonely.

Mavis wanted to see Ellen so badly that she was prepared to risk possible rejection. Daisy didn’t believe for one moment that Ellen would reject her, why should she? The rift between them had only been caused by grief. Once Ellen had got over that first hurdle, maybe she’d open up fully. She might start to contact her old friends in Bristol and begin living again, rather than just putting all her energies into her shop.

Daisy knew too that she should be putting her own house in order, whether that was moving away to work or finding a job in London. Tom and Lucy were revising for their final exams and planning a trip around the world afterwards. In one unusually generous moment Lucy had suggested Daisy came with them too. But since she found Ellen she had been preoccupied by her to the exclusion of everything else.

Then there was Joel. She was ashamed she hadn’t thanked him for the flowers or had the grace to tell him whether it really was over, even though he still came into her mind with monotonous regularity.

She missed a great many things about him, sometimes so much that it hurt. Love-making was one. Finding a mother was wonderful, but not quite in the same league as hot sex! Sometimes she would take out his front-door key and imagine going round to his flat when he was on night duty, to wait in his bed till he got home. Just the thought of it made her quiver.

Then there was his sense of humour. She missed that, it seemed ages since she’d had a good laugh. She also missed that feeling of being looked after. It had always been Joel who organized taxis, booked tables in restaurants, thought up new things to do on his weekends off. She felt ashamed now that she’d told her father Joel was a control freak. He wasn’t, he was just far better at arranging things than she was.

Yet if she did phone him and things started up again between them, wasn’t he likely to be funny about her seeing Ellen so much? And how could she fit a chef’s job in around him and Ellen? So she was doing what she always did when she couldn’t see a way forward – nothing.

It was that knowledge that finally made her phone Mavis and hatch up a plot for her to meet Ellen. She was taking action, even if Joel, and possibly her father too, would see it as meddling in other people’s lives. Tim’s sister Harriet, Mavis’s granddaughter, lived in Finchley; Mavis could come up and stay with her for a long weekend, and on the Saturday afternoon Daisy would take her to see Ellen in the shop.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Mavis said doubtfully when Daisy put it to her. ‘Of course I want to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. But it is a bit of an intrusion.’

‘It was even more of one when I walked in and announced myself,’ Daisy said with utter confidence. ‘Look how well that turned out! Let’s be reckless.’

The weather was glorious on the Friday evening in the middle of May when Mavis rang to say she’d arrived safely in Finchley. She was very excited about spending a few days in London with Harriet and seeing Daisy again, but most of all about looking up Ellen.

‘I’ll pick you up at twelve tomorrow,’ Daisy said. ‘We’ll have some lunch, then go to Hampstead in the afternoon.’

‘What are you up to?’ John said curiously at eleven on Saturday morning. He had heard Daisy go out early with Fred, then she had come home to shower and wash her hair. Just the way she was bustling around, all spruced up with a wide grin on her face, made him suspicious. ‘Have you made it up with Joel?’ he added hopefully.

‘No, but I might try to if things go well today.’ Her grin grew ever wider. ‘I do miss him.’

‘So what is it, a job interview?’ He looked her up and down and thought that the new pale blue dress and little jacket she was wearing were very attractive, but hardly suitable for an interview.

She giggled and put one finger to her nose. ‘Keep that out,’ she said. ‘Until I’m ready to tell you.’

John was looking out of the bedroom window later, admiring the cherry trees which were in full bloom and almost forming an arch over the road, when Daisy left the house. He watched her walk down to her car; she had a bounce in her step and she looked so pretty with the sun shimmering on her curls. She had looked that way when she first met Joel and he really hoped they could make it up.

Pleased as he was that she’d found Ellen, he was finding her preoccupation with the woman a little tedious. From the day Daisy visited the solicitors, she hadn’t been herself at all. There seemed to be something a bit furtive about it all too. Daisy hadn’t shown him the letter she got back from Ellen, just announced she’d got one a couple of weeks later, and rushed off to meet her.

She kept saying she wanted to arrange a meal in a restaurant so he and the twins could meet her, but that hadn’t happened yet either. Was he suffering from jealousy?

‘This was a bit of luck,’ Daisy exclaimed when she found a parking space in Haverstock Hill, right around the corner from Heath Street. She had been worried about Mavis walking – she might be fit enough to walk some distance on the flat, but hills were different.

‘I love Hampstead,’ Mavis said, looking all around her. Frank and I always came here when we were in London. We’d have afternoon tea somewhere, then he’d insist on buying me a present. I bet I’ve been in Ellen’s shop before, there was a lovely handbag shop in Heath Street. Frank once bought me the most beautiful beaded evening bag in there. I hardly ever had an occasion to use it, but I loved it.’

Daisy smiled. Mavis had been reminiscing a lot since they left Finchley, about lunch with Frank in The Spaniards, walks on the Heath, and even swimming in one of the ponds. It was clear the pair of them had remained in love until his death.