When I Was Otherwise (10 page)

“Believe it or not she was even resentful of the way he liked his work; of the escape it gave him from
her
and of the concern he used to lavish on his pupils. Once I heard her tell a neighbour there was something strange about his feelings for those little boys. I believe he hated the holidays. But at least he didn't have to suffer a long retirement; like Mr Chips he was allowed to go on. He lived for the school term and for his books and for his games of chess. And perhaps—I don't know—in his quiet and inexpressive way—even a little bit for yours truly. Poor fellow. But I could never give him much.”

When she'd finished there was a long and slightly awed silence. Marsha was suddenly aware of their grandfather clock in the hall.

She had never known Daisy to reveal so much. She wanted to set down her teacup and reach out and touch Daisy's hand. Yet she sensed that such a move could be disruptive—and, anyway, would probably annoy Andy. Maybe Daisy as well. But she was still the first of them to react.

“You must have given him a lot. After all, just the fact that you played chess with him…”

“Oh, yes, for what
that
was worth. Well, I was certainly the only one who ever did—at home. (My brother never did. He was too much the apple of his mother's eye; he trod too carefully in her footsteps.) But that's partly why my mother hated me. Oh, my word, the numbers of games that got upset—‘accidentally'. The number of pieces that got ‘lost'.”

“But you said your father tried to teach her!” Marsha was so indignant she spilled her tea. Her hand shook and the teacup rattled.

Daisy dunked her
langue-de-chat
as though she were holding her mother by the ankles.

“Well, if you cut off a branch to spite the tree, wouldn't
you
be peeved to find the tree did better for its pruning?”

“Poor Daisy. No wonder you disliked her.”

“Disliked her?” Her mother's head fell off. The rest was eaten and enjoyed. “I wouldn't have lowered my standards so much as simply to dislike her. I detested her. And still do. Now more than ever.”

“Even though she's dead?”

“What difference does that make?”

Marsha did her best not to sound shocked. Nor even to feel it. Yes, why should you forgive people just because they'd died?

“Well, at least you still had your father, Daisy. At least you still had somebody to love.”

Daisy considered this.

“Yes, you're probably right. I certainly felt sorry for him. Wanted to make up for things.” Her expression signified the hopelessness of such a wish, the stupidity of anyone who might entertain it.

“Of course you loved him!” said Marsha, ardently.

“I despised him too. After
she
died I went back to take care of him. But I felt so annoyed, in a way, at his contentment. He should have got clear of her while there was time! Seventy-six is hardly a good age to begin living!”

But she added after a bit: “Though better than nothing, I suppose! Yes, why not? What does the
age
of a person matter? To anyone, I mean, whose first name isn't Florence?”

“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?”