When I Was Otherwise (11 page)

Daisy sat down on the stool which Marsha, despite saying, “I'm not really sure if I feel like this any longer,” had just pointed out.

“Well, that's perfectly fine by me,” answered Daisy. “If you like we can simply chatter. What on earth are all these jars for?” She looked at them with apparent interest. “And how in the name of sweet St Antony do you ever manage to keep track? Naturally, I mean of Padua, not of Egypt.”

Daisy enjoyed this little conceit. Presumably the father of monasticism would not have been much interested in ladies' aids to beauty, whereas the restorer of mislaid property might have felt far more concerned at the passing of soft skin; the vanishing bloom of youth; lost roses in the cheek.

“My mother always talked about the saints,” she said. “I can't think where she supposed her path and theirs would ever cross!”

Marsha began to explain the purpose of each pot and tube. At first she sounded apathetic yet as she handled different items her enthusiasm grew. “Now let me just look at you,” she said.

Daisy was relieved the evenings were drawing in and that such a scrutiny was being conducted by lamplight. But even so she hoped to distract Marsha at least minimally from what she might be scrutinizing.

“Ah, this is better, dear. I'd have said a few minutes ago you seemed just a shade lackadaisical. But of all the things you may be lacking it certainly isn't one of
those
!”

She chuckled softly, and Marsha smiled politely, having no idea what Daisy was on about.

“Why do you always run yourself down so?”

“I thought I only ran other people down.”

“You usually talk as if you were ugly.”

“When in fact I'm a raving beauty? No. I usually say I've got a
funny
face.”

“You have a very good bone structure. That's what you do have. And it expresses a lot of character.”

“But not beauty?”

Daisy's tongue was firmly in her cheek yet Marsha didn't realize.

“Yes, it
does
! In a way.” She suddenly looked not one day older than her nineteen years—Daisy was a little touched. They gazed at one another in the mirror. Pensive and unsmiling.

They could never have stared like that directly.

“But it is true: you don't really make the most of yourself. You're happy to allow me a free hand?”

“Submit to your tender mercies?”

“I feel a little nervous.”

“How do you think
I
feel?”

They were talking as though a tattoo gun lay on the table.

“Your hair should be a little longer,” said Marsha. “You've got nice hair, you know. But it would look much softer if you'd let it grow.”

“Like yours, you mean?”

“Yes, possibly. I think this style suits any age.”

Unaware she'd made a gaffe Marsha embarked upon her treatment. As she smoothed in the foundation cream she lost all hesitancy and worked with instinctive, gifted fingers. But some echo of that last remark lingered in her own head as surely as it did in Daisy's. She thought: Daisy's mother died five years ago and I know now that she was seventy-two. Assume that she was forty, then, at the time of Daisy's birth. Surely a charitable assumption? Marsha herself had been a late baby, an ‘afterthought', but her mother had still been quite comfortably under forty.

Thirty-seven? Was Daisy thirty-seven? She had a fairly good complexion and if up to now she had never bothered with it…?

But give her the benefit of the doubt. Say thirty-five. It was a tidy figure and Marsha hankered after tidiness. In that at least she and Andrew were well suited.

Thirty-five.

She smiled.

“What suddenly made you think about makeup, Daisy? I mean, since the notion of it obviously wasn't with you from the time you were a child, like it was with me?”

Marsha recalled her own mother having recommended it to Daisy a week or so before Daisy's wedding. Her mother had got remarkably short shrift, however: just another in their long list of skirmishes, not exactly pitched battles, thank goodness. Henry himself hadn't seemed to care one way or the other; would merely have agreed good-naturedly with whichever argument he'd happened to hear last. Marsha had loved him, of course. She knew he'd been more like his father, mentally, than his mother—perhaps it was the same with her and Dan—and even realized she herself wasn't dissimilar to Henry. But she would never have wanted to marry him! She had often wondered why Daisy had, and just as often why Henry had wanted to marry
her
. She had never felt the same perplexity regarding Erica and Dan.

But it had just occurred to her that Daisy might have met somebody else, who
had
shown a preference for makeup. Marsha felt full of happy expectation. Not for nothing had her schoolfriends called her a matchmaker. She liked a romance almost as much in real life as she did on the silver screen.

Yet she was about to be disappointed, even though Daisy, under the soothing influence of gentle fingers, was prepared to overlook—this once—the
faux pas
that Marsha didn't even know she had committed.

“Oh, the receptionist I get in Harrow Road (I practise there on Mondays and Thursdays, you know) also suggested I could make a bit more of myself. She was nervous about saying it, didn't like to be personal but felt strongly impelled, even directed, to tell me. At least, that's the way she put it. And one could hardly take offence.”

“No, of course not,” said Marsha. As much as disappointment, she felt surprise.

“A pleasant sort of woman. A good sort of woman. Religious too—but without that awful cant which frequently goes with it. In no way mealy-mouthed. Her name is Marie. She has a flat in the Fortune Green Road,” she added, as if that somehow might explain it.

“Ah? Not too far from here then?”

“Almost on the doorstep. I'll have to introduce you. And what a perfectly shameful waste it is, too! She's sixty-five or so—I only mention this to save you asking!—and unmarried and where on earth is the sense in that? There's just no sense in it at all.”

Marsha felt she must have missed something.

Daisy continued to look indignant.

“This world is teeming with rotten wives and rotten mothers! And then you meet someone like her who would have made a marvellous wife and a marvellous mother, and yet no fool has ever asked her. Where's the sense in that, I'd like to know.”

“But surely, Daisy, there's more to life than just being married,” said Marsha, who didn't really believe it for one moment—at least, not if you were married to the right man. Her feeling of surprise was increasing every second. She hadn't expected to hear on Daisy's lips, ever, such gentle words about another woman.

“Well, it's very easy for someone who
is
married,” answered Daisy, “to trot out such a platitude. Yet there's no denying the fact that children are important to most women, even if a husband isn't—even if they'd give their eye-teeth, sometimes, to be shot of him!” She emitted her brief chuckle.

She started thinking about Henry.

“Anyway, Daisy, don't talk now. It's time for the lipstick.”

16

She remembered when she'd first seen him. He'd had a pale and interesting air, an almost ethereal quality. He'd been sitting on his own, reading. Daisy approved of that. There weren't many people you saw at the club who sat lost in a good book, oblivious to the world. She made a beeline for him.

“Well done!” she said. “The perfect way to spend a wet Saturday afternoon!”

“What?” He looked up with a start, thin-nosed and sandy-haired, his voice a little piping.

“Furthermore, you add a touch of class. Tone. An air of intellectuality. And this place could certainly do with that.” She laughed. “My word, yes. The things which can't be told!”

He struggled to get up. For some reason his umbrella stood between his knees. His mackintosh was folded on the small table that almost pinned him to the wall.

“I wish I'd brought my own book now, you're quite an inspiration. But everybody here just
talks
. Jabber, jabber, jabber! It never
occurs
to them they may be interrupting. No, don't get up.” He had just managed to do so. “I'll sit down.” She sat across from him. “There! Descended to your level.” She noticed that he didn't smile as he descended back to it himself, but young men with ethereal qualities could hardly be expected to have an earthbound sense of humour. “Rupert Brooke, I presume?” It would clearly be her own duty to try to introduce one.

“Oh, no.” He looked at his book and held it up so she could see its name. “
If Winter Comes
.”

“Which it has with a vengeance; you'd better delete those first two letters! Ah, no, but there's a word to conjure with, to weave into your daydreams; the only syllable in all of English, I sometimes feel, which has the power to keep us going. One's every hope is fashioned out of it. On second thoughts you'd better leave it well and truly alone!”

He looked at her in a friendly but not altogether comprehending manner.

“Don't worry. I haven't gone completely gaga. Contrary to popular belief! But I really meant
you
—not what you were reading. You reminded me of Rupert Brooke.”

Now he did smile. “Well, I only wish I were.”

“But why? Then you'd be dead and we shouldn't be holding this most intelligent conversation. Of course, I suppose you mightn't set
that
down as being such a terrible drawback?”

“Actually, it's funny you should say that.”

“What?” She was nearly as startled as he himself had sounded earlier.

“About my looking like a poet. It's my greatest ambition, you see, to be able to write poetry.” His tone was proud and shy and defiant, all at once.

“Well done!” repeated Daisy. “I quite take off my hat to you! But I could tell, you know, the moment I arrived. I could see that you were different.
Rupert Brooke
. It was emblazoned on your forehead!”

“Could you
really
tell?” Modesty and gratification warred.

She nodded.

“Perhaps you've got a sixth sense?”

“I'll tell you what I have got. A raging thirst. It's all this looking at my crystal ball that does it!” She glanced towards the counter at the far end of the room and made the motions of being about to stand up.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. “How rude of me. What would you like?” They were immensely pleased with one another. “Coffee?”

“I can't let a stranger buy me coffee,” she protested. “We don't even know each other's name!” But fortunately they stumbled on the remedy for that. “Later, of course, they're licensed to serve alcohol,” she said.

When he returned she had hung up his hat and his raincoat and put the brolly in a stand. “We do have
some
facilities, you know. Your things were all quite damp, you'll give yourself rheumatism. Poets especially should look after themselves,” she told him sternly. “Are your trousers dry? I'm sure that thing was dripping in your turnups.” She didn't suggest what should be done, though, if such a fear were justified. “Oh, thank you
very
much for this. That's extremely sweet of you; you really shouldn't have bothered. And such filthy muck as well! But never mind, it hits the spot. Besides being a poet you're obviously an angel! Why haven't I seen you here before?”

“Well, I suppose one reason might be,” he said quietly, “just might be…that I haven't been here before.”

She was delighted by his answer.

“So that's why you were reading your book with such absorption? It was simply you were shy. I thought as much from the start. How lucky that I came along!”

She waited for him to agree. He gave a smile and a nod.

“You need someone who knows the ropes,” she told him.

“Yes.”

“When this place fills up I'll introduce you to everyone worthy of being introduced to.”

“Thank you. But—”

“We'll lay down the red carpet.”

“I'm not sure that—”

“We'll say you're Mr Henry Stormont the famous poet. Don't worry. Nobody will know the difference. Not here. If anyone asks you what you've written just tell them, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck…' or ‘She walks in beauty like the night…' What's the matter, dear? You're not still shy, are you? Not now you've got someone like me standing mutely at your side and prepared to swing cudgels in your defence? Or milk bottles. Or wine bottles.”

“Perhaps a little.”

“And very understandable, too. My goodness, don't think I don't know what it's like to be shy. I do, I do! Always. Every day of my life. The abyss; the great yawning gulf. I'm terrified. But the trick is—not to show it. You have to play the giddy goat. You have to say: I don't care, I couldn't give a damn. You have to cling tight to your guardian angel and never doubt his presence. Who introduced you to the club?”

“I know Mr John slightly. Augustus John. He's one of the members here.”

“Oh, you don't have to tell
me
that!” Daisy sounded more impatient than impressed, despite the opposite being true. “You know, of course, he means to paint my portrait?” There was a faint implication that this was his motive for having sought membership in the first place. “Is he coming here tonight?” There was a further suggestion that, if so, she might just spare him an odd few minutes for the initial sitting.

“Well, actually I thought he'd be here before this.”

“Excellent,” said Daisy. “Then the two of us shall await his coming together. No need to hide behind a book. We'll put the world to rights; we'll eat, drink and be merry, shall we? I can recommend the turkey sandwiches.”

She gave her merry and infectious chuckle. “I can recommend them—but I can't afford them!”