When I Was Otherwise (15 page)

The analogy was not perfect. The sting was retractable. Her victim was the sucker.

She arose from the table. She picked up her shopping basket with the
Daily Telegraph
she'd found at the Spaghetti House now lying on top of it, concealing her handbag, letter-writing materials and library books. She also took her stick in hand and drew herself up to her full height—far more impressive than it ought to have been.

“Thank you for your hospitality. Perhaps you would be kind enough to direct me to the bus stop?”

“Madam, don't be daft. Whatever you said, you couldn't dissuade us from driving you home.” He had brought his own car, not hers.

It was the quietest journey they had ever made in Daisy's company. Occasionally she sniffed. She sometimes cleared her throat. If she was asked anything, she replied just briefly and in exceedingly clipped tones. Only once did she initiate a piece of information.

“And I've got many other friends already. There's Edgar and Vera. Bill. Countless students from the Hendon School of English.” (Descendants of Félix and Homayoun.) “Madge Fairweather. And I don't know if I've ever mentioned Mr Patrick. He's the man who does my hair—the salt of the earth if ever anybody was—and I tell you this right now, quite openly and in all sincerity,
he
would do anything for me. Absolutely anything.”

She added: “And then there's your father. I'm sure he would be heartbroken—heartbroken—if news should ever reach his ears of my being cast off so very shabbily.” She elucidated. “Yes! Dumped like a mangled umbrella by the stony wayside.”

Her elucidation wasn't particularly helpful…when in some ways the preceding remark had been the most surprising, not simply of the evening, not simply of the whole day, but of all the forty years Malcolm had known her.

20

But she should never have given up the flat—large and inconvenient and uneconomic though it was. She could have taken in a lodger, couldn't she? It was the biggest mistake of her life and they were fools who had counselled her. Sell up, find yourself a room, purchase an annuity! How could she ever have let herself be influenced?

Yet, of course, she
hadn't
. She had chosen to forget that. She had nearly always made her own decisions.

No, the truth was—after Marie had died she could hardly wait to get away from Marie's flat. Every inch of it was a reminder. How many occasions had there been, even during the brief period of her needing to arrange things, when she'd imagined she had heard a call from Marie's bedroom? That weak, beloved call? How many occasions when she had actually been on the point of hurrying in?

Why, there was even one time, she remembered—unawares, she had been sitting at the piano—when she'd suddenly turned her head, fully expecting Marie to be about to walk into the room…and this despite the fact that Marie had been bedridden for the previous twelve months; dependent on a wheelchair for several years before.

There'd even been the start of a silly welcoming grin upon her face.

People had often said to her that Marie should go into a hospital, that Daisy couldn't be expected to look after an invalid old lady, day and night, without assistance and without a break. But Daisy didn't look upon Marie as an old lady; merely as someone who'd been born about a quarter of a century earlier than herself and was therefore all the richer in wisdom and experience. Indeed, she hardly even looked upon her as an invalid, because the part of her that really mattered was just as lively and as loving as it had ever been, despite the limbs that now wouldn't function, the lungs that increasingly gave trouble. Marie in a ward for geriatrics—it was unthinkable. She had dismissed all such advice impatiently; and it was now the greatest comfort of her life that she had.

Even of those last times there were so many happy memories. For instance, she had frequently invited in a few close friends for a ‘party', which had largely consisted of playing charades at Marie's bedside. But in the final months this had got to be too tiring and gradually Daisy came to rely less and less on other people. She was ever thinking up fresh ways to entertain her. She prepared monologues in the manner of Ruth Draper. She taught herself some simple—and even not so simple—conjuring tricks; for one performance she actually acquired a live rabbit! She learned to do things with playing cards too. And Marie liked it when she mimed to the gramophone or danced an elaborate tango. For this Daisy bought a special string of beads and a cigarette holder; or sometimes held a rose between her teeth.

Her props were inventive. The tramp's costume, for example, could almost have been loaned by the great Charlie himself—although it was not as Charlie that she scored perhaps her most popular and oft-repeated success;
that
was as Burlington Bertie, from Bow.

Yet their entertainments were not always so rumbustious: piano-playing, with the doors kept open—board games—even simple flower-arranging.

And it was certainly the one period in her life when Daisy became quite housewifely. Partly, this might have been in atonement for the few months of her marriage when, despite her husband's own precarious health, she hadn't really
cared
. She could have coped with sickness very well—but not with that unexpectedly weak-kneed mentality which had accompanied it. Now she read recipe books by the dozen and did everything she could to tempt a jaded appetite.

Marie particularly liked a certain walnut layer-cake. Even towards the end, when such food was entirely out of the question, Daisy baked a fresh one every week—to have in the tin, “just in case”, she always told herself. She usually gave it to the cleaning woman to take home.

A few weeks before she died Marie had a mild stroke and became senile; although, again, Daisy never referred to it as that. She had simply “withdrawn a little…to get ready”. Daisy tried to see it in the light of a retreat—with leafy, dappled, rosemary-scented walks—and she still vehemently insisted upon nursing her. She carried on with daily readings too: no longer
Cranford
or
Daddy Long Legs
or
I Capture The Castle
but now more often poetry: on the off chance that some of it might penetrate and—along with gentle images—bring gentle dreams. She also read aloud the Book of Common Prayer and she still played the piano: Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms: the more tranquil, tuneful, tender passages.

Later, when she moved, she had the piano put into a furniture repository; that and several of the bigger pieces which she couldn't take with her but which she couldn't bear to sell. Afterwards she used to exasperate the men at John Bayes because she so often wished to look at her things. She would sometimes spend a whole afternoon in dusting and polishing or else in just sitting and remembering. Once she even arranged for old Mr Matthews to go there to tune the piano. But in the end her hands became too arthritic. Even if she found a place where she'd be allowed to have so large an instrument, she couldn't believe she'd ever again be able to play it properly. Her attempted recitals at the repository grew weekly more frustrating and inept.

Besides which, the cost of storage seemed to mount in an iniquitous fashion almost every few months.

So one day, in a fit of browned-off and devil-may-care spontaneity, she had everything transported to the auction rooms; and then realized, when it was too late, that even that string of beads and the tramp's outfit, together with a large box of photographs, nearly all the photographs that she possessed, had been included in the transfer.

But at least she gave the men at John Bayes half an hour of hell, which saved her feebly breaking down upon the spot.

And when some ten years later, in one of her innumerable moves, she lost the picture of Marie she always kept in a leather frame by her bedside, along with a couple of other almost equally precious snapshots tucked into the back of it, this was the one time she actually came nearest to performing the thing she would regularly mention, and even mime, but never seriously consider.

She thought it was an option only available to someone in acute physical pain—terminal, of course—or to someone both an ingrate and a moral coward.

21

“Shall I give you a hand, dear, with the washing up?”

“It's all right, thank you. I can manage.”

“I thought you looked a trifle peaked.”

“Yes, I don't feel at my best.”

“You try to do too much. They should have called you Martha—not Marsha. Shall I sit down and keep you company?”

“That's up to you.”

Daisy pulled out a stool and perched herself uncomfortably. She didn't feel her sister-in-law's reply had been precisely gracious but for some time now Marsha had been showing signs of irritability. The poor old thing was running down, thought Daisy.

Going flat. Losing fizz.

Fading.

Also, she'd noticed, Marsha was beginning to repeat herself. And Dan was starting to do it too—it must be infectious! Of course, they had so little, both of them, to occupy their minds. You only had to listen to one of their conversations; it didn't matter when. They were all identically pathetic.

“Forgive me for harping on it, dear, but you do appear a soupçon under par. Shall I go and get you some tonic? There's quite a nice man at Boots. I'm sure he'd recommend something.”

“No, thank you, Daisy; it will pass, I daresay. It's just that there doesn't seem a lot to look forward to any more.”

“Yes, you're right, dear. Oh, you're so right. We should make up a little theatre party one of these evenings. That's what we should do.”

“I can't believe there's anything worth seeing at the theatre. And it's all so expensive anyway.”

“I'm not sure I agree with the first part of that but I certainly do with the second. That's why I'm hoping to catch up with things in heaven—where you'll get the best seats and it will all be free; I think I told you once.”

Daisy decided she must try to jolly her up a bit. “Daisy, you're a tonic,” people had so often cried. “A real tonic!” They'd have been surprised, then, to hear her talking about buying some bottle of coloured water from Boots, when all she had to do was just pull out her own cork, up-end herself—and pour!

Yes. It wasn't like her to be nearly letting the side down.

“Well, we must come up with
something
we can all do, that's clear.”

But for the moment brainwaves seemed in short supply.

“In any case, Marsha, you've got to enjoy yourself!” she said firmly. “It's later than you think. It's later than anybody thinks—except anybody who
does
think! Tomorrow we could all be dead! That idiot Carter could have pressed the wrong button. That dolt in the Kremlin could have done the same thing. So before I walk out of here I'm going to make you laugh—somehow—if it's the very last thing I do. Would you like me to topple off my stool?”

“Not very much.”

“Well, thank God for small mercies! I could throw a custard pie.”

“There aren't any. And if there were you'd only make a mess.”

“All of life's a mess—what difference to anything could one poor little custard pie effect? But you shouldn't be afraid of mess. I'm not. I welcome it. I go out and dabble my hands in it and swirl it all about me.”

“That must be nice. I hope you wash them afterwards.”

Daisy said: “I know that was a joke, dear, but it's symptomatic. You're much too concerned with washing your hands. Not even Christ always washed his hands before breakfast, lunch and tea. And he knew something about the things that matter. Not pernicketiness—oh, dear me, no! Not washed floors which you're frightened to death somebody will walk across about six hours after they're done. Not rubbish tied up in neat little parcels which look good enough to give away for Christmas. No. Jesus Christ certainly wasn't an old maid. Never in ten thousand years!”

“Are you saying that I am?”

“No, dear. Why should you think that? You shouldn't be so ready to imagine criticism; it's a definite fault. Nobody's criticizing you.”

“Well, if you did say I was an old maid it would be perfectly true, anyway. I know that. But I can't help thinking things may have been a little easier in those days.”

“How? Easier?”

“Possibly you didn't have to worry so much. About maintaining standards.”

“Flying the flag?”

“I don't enjoy having to be an old maid.”

“Nobody
has
to be anything, you know,” said Daisy consolingly.

“Oh, yes, they do. Life just pushes you into things, without you're really noticing it's happened.” She paused. “I don't suppose that anyone ever
sets out
to be a nag.”

Yet she said this more to the washing-up water than to Daisy; and Daisy didn't hear.

“I haven't made you laugh yet, have I? At any rate, not properly.”

“But you're certainly right about one thing, Daisy. It
is
later than you think.”

“And I'm right about another: however late it is it's never
too
late.”

Marsha just proceeded, steadily, with the remainder of the lunch things. Daisy hated to see anyone unhappy.

“You can always turn over a new leaf.”

“What? At our age?”

“Oh, at any age! Any age! My giddy aunt! What has age got to do with it?”

She controlled herself with difficulty. And just as though she were being rewarded for this a piece of genuine inspiration occurred to her.

“In fact, the older you are, the more of an achievement! Anyone can do
anything
when they're young. The whole world belongs to the young, didn't you know that? We're always having it thrust down our throats and have done indeed since time immemorial! But when you're old you start collecting feathers in your cap. Real feathers. I know that I shall.”