When I Was Otherwise (14 page)

Malcolm kept silent.

“Besides, she was too fat. You never saw such mounds of flesh. And if it hadn't been for all that weight…”

He couldn't keep silent any longer.

“Or perhaps if it hadn't been for your own gross inattention…
And
on a pedestrian crossing!”

In fact, it had been mentioned in the court how good Daisy had been with the woman, taking charge with sympathy and efficiency until the ambulance arrived, although she herself had obviously received a shock.

“What was that?” The aid gave its familiar piercing whistle. “What did you say?”

Phoebe had turned and pressed his arm. “Almost there now, Daisy. Have you ever seen such traffic? That's what Malcolm said.”

“Oh.” She slumped back against the seat and glanced without interest at some of the offending vehicles. “No. It's a disgrace. This wretched government should have cleared it up long ago! No guts, that's the trouble! In some ways, of course, I'm really better out of it.”

“Much.”

“Oh, but I don't know, dear. It's easy enough for
you
to say that…” She shook her head and pursed her lips. “No, I just don't know what I'm going to do from now on and that's the truth. Take a dose, I shouldn't wonder.”

“Or take a bus,” suggested Malcolm, whose sympathy was still a fraction dented.

“A bus!” said Daisy. “What—with
my
knees? That only shows how little
you
understand of it. If you don't mind my saying so.”

“Conductors are usually fine about helping people on and off.” Phoebe, too, could be tart on occasion.

“Yes, I know, dear. I know.” Daisy sounded weary but propitiating. “Even if most of them
are
as black as your hat.”

“The black ones are often the best.”

“Oh, I know that too, of course.” Daisy spent the next three minutes staring through the window. “My word! Just look at that creature over there! She must suppose she's on the beach at

San Tropez—did you ever in your life see anything like it?”

It was a June day and the woman, Phoebe noted, was wearing a perfectly respectable sundress.

“Pull over, why don't you? I'd better direct her to the Strand, if not somewhere in the Caribbean!”

She gave her bark of mirthless laughter.

“Fit for the Mardi Gras,
I'd
say! She could have led the parade in all those royal junketings last year…” She hesitated. “No, was it last year or the year before, that Silver Jubilee thing? Wait…the year
before
was the hot one, wasn't it? How did anyone survive?”

The Silver Jubilee had been in 1977. Now it was '79. But they felt her mumblings were rhetorical. They thought she mightn't appreciate comment.

Daisy remained silent for a while.

“Anyway, it was good of you both to accompany me,” she observed eventually, a little formally and still somewhat grudgingly.

“We were glad to be able to do it.” The short respite had regenerated Malcolm and he said nothing about the inconvenience of his and Phoebe's having to take the whole day off.

“I'm only thankful that your mother and uncle didn't come. Let alone your brother.”

“Dan would have been perfectly willing to do so. And I'm sure Andrew doesn't know the first thing about it.”

“He soon will, I suppose.”

“I don't see why.”

“Don't you?” The silence hung, provocative. “No, I couldn't have borne it. They'd probably have agreed with everything they heard. Oh, they mightn't have said so, not to me, not right out, but… Well, you can always tell with those two.”

It wasn't so much that she had forgotten about Marsha's older son as that she simply didn't consider him worth bothering with.

“Always bleating such darn fool things as, ‘Well, at our age, Daisy,' or, ‘
Anno Domini
, you know. Plain
Anno Domini
…'” (She had put on her contemptuously falsetto voice.) “
Why
? That's what I don't understand. And why should I let myself be lumped together with that pair? Be made over into
their
image? Especially by your mother? ‘At our age, Daisy! At our age, Daisy!' Unimaginative and blinkered and boring—that's what it is. Besides, of course, being totally untrue.”

Malcolm held his tongue. No wonder she was upset. The ignominy, in Daisy's eyes, of hearing her age brought up in court. Not merely mentioned.
Discussed
.

Bandied about.

The ignominy. The irrelevance.

Six years older than the century. And she had tried to claim—in a stricken, barely audible voice and in dogged refutation of the printed evidence—that she was twenty years younger than it.

No wonder she had cried.

But didn't she realize that there were other forms of violation besides that? Malcolm smiled to himself, a little grimly—and postponed the ordeal of trying to educate her. “Well, here we are at last! Dear old Notting Hill.”

“You can't say dear old Hendon Central,” muttered his aunt, wanting to express something about their arrival in Notting Hill but certainly not pleasure nor even strong relief.

“Dear old Hendon Central,” said Malcolm.

“Ha! Central!” exclaimed Daisy. “I always enjoy a good joke, don't you?” She added with deep scorn: “It's so far off the map that even Columbus couldn't have found it.”

Malcolm laughed, with genuine amusement. “I do like the idea of Queen Isabella of Spain saying, ‘Go, Sir Christopher, discover Hendon Central!' Perhaps that's what he was really looking for when he stumbled across America and had to make do with that.”

But Daisy was not to be diverted.

“You're very callow,” she remarked coldly. “You have no idea what it's like having to drag your knees over all those pavements. I always said it was suburbia.”

She paused a moment before adding the ultimate withering refinement.

“These days I call it Lost Horizon.”

19

And this was more or less the refrain of the whole afternoon and evening. Not that Daisy didn't enjoy herself. After a sandwich and three cups of generously laced tea she needed very little encouragement to put her feet up—on a pouffe—with her shoelaces undone and her coat now draped across her lap and thereby covering both ankles. Then, with her head lolling back against a wing of the chair and her
Woman's Own
half-fallen from her grasp, she was almost instantly asleep, though this was something she would strenuously deny. “No, dear, I just had my eyes closed. It's very soothing to the retinas.” (“Snoring must help them too,” whispered Phoebe to Malcolm.) Afterwards, they had their supper at a Spaghetti House and then went to the Electric, where they saw a reissue of
The Great Gatsby
. Daisy didn't much care for the story but she enjoyed the dresses and the tunes of the twenties and several times started humming a raucous accompaniment, much to the annoyance of the audience and the embarrassment of her companions. What was amazing was the way she could apparently quite forget her troubles for fairly long periods, be chuckling and zestful and wholly caught up in the moment, and then revert to her grumbles with a disconcerting unaccountability—only to be whisked back into merriment some minutes later by an equally unexpected shift of the mercury. One instant she was sandwiched between them and nearly dancing along the pavement, “'The Great Gatsby', did they call that? Well, give me ‘The Great Victor Herbert'
any
day—la-da-da-da—da-da—da-da,” (trilling ‘The Blue Danube' by Strauss), and the next, sitting over milky coffee in a Greek restaurant, was declaring, apropos of nothing that had just been said, “No, it's no good. I shall simply have to get away from that place. My mind is totally made up.”

“But, Daisy, you can't! Where else would you go?”

Malcolm was more horrified than Phoebe. He knew the performance at first hand, knew it because it was
he
who'd always had to see to the packing and unpacking, the placating of formerly benign, now shrilly indignant landladies, the dismal trek from one bed-and-breakfast place to another, a month here, six weeks there, sometimes merely a fortnight, have you got a room on the ground floor please, she's not too good on stairs, oh yes perfectly all right in every other way, have you by any chance some slightly thicker curtains that won't let in the early morning light? The smiles and sweetness and stoicism at the beginning, on both sides. The final vituperative exchanges.

“You're all right where you are,” he added slowly, trying to introduce some irresistibly hypnotic cadences.

But of course she was never all right where she was. It was always the place where she'd been last, no matter what sort of hellhole she had termed it at the time, in which she'd felt at her most comfortable and contented. “I was well off then,” she would say. “I can't think what ever persuaded me to move!”…the implication being—although she never actually put this into words—that it was
you
who'd chiefly wanted it.

No good reminding her of biting draughts and noisy radio-playing neighbours and the foul and stinking lavatory—with puddles of urine stagnating round its base—and the bath she couldn't get out of, and the light and heating which suddenly went off if she had forgotten to put more money in the meter, and the proprietress who kept knocking at her door to find out what in heaven she had
meant
by her latest uncalled-for comment in the hall: remarks made either on her way out or on her way in, and either to a passing tenant or to the bed-sit world in general… “Yes, dear,” she would say, “but in this life there will
always
be inconvenience! You have to smile on it as best you can, remember that God tests those he loves, and hope you're managing to earn yourself a respectably high score.”

Yet this didactic, sweetly forbearing turn towards philosophy was invariably retrospective, as it were. Never actual and of any help.

However, if you said to her, “Well, Daisy, it certainly wasn't
me
who wanted you to move,” she would reply at once, “No, dear, of course it wasn't; did I ever say it was?” in the sort of humouring tone which intimated she was reluctant to apportion blame and anyway by now, with any luck, you might have learned your lesson.

And the worst thing about this was: you never quite knew if she believed in her own little fantasy or not. You were inclined to think she did.

Malcolm gave a sigh. He would have liked to ask how she felt she was doing in her current set of examinations but he contented himself with something less contentious.

“I thought you were happy living with Mother and Dan.”

Indeed she had now been there for more than two years. It was amazing: the sort of staggering information you usually came across only in
The Guinness Book of Records
.

“Oh—
happy
? Who looks for
happiness
these days? At best, a little pleasure here and there. While I had the car, perhaps, it was—almost—bearable.”

“But you've got everything you need. It's clean and comfortable and…well, knowing what Dan's like, I don't suppose it costs you very much. And Mother waits upon you hand and foot. There's companionship whenever you want it. What more could you possibly ask for?”

“A little life,” said Daisy, crushingly.

“Good God, you can't have everything!” said Malcolm, with impatience.

Phoebe, being ten years younger than Malcolm, was always inclined to match her own approach to his. “You know what the only other answer would be, Daisy?”

“A dose.”

“No—don't be silly. A home.”

“That's all I want: a real home, with laughter and talk and stimulation, where things go
on
. Like this one. I shouldn't have thought it was
such
a lot to ask.”

She seemed to have forgotten that for the moment they were sitting in a restaurant; and again it was hard to know whether she was willfully misunderstanding, making a poignant little bid for sympathy.

“What I meant was,” said Phoebe, with conscious brutality, “a home for elderly people.” She couldn't, even at that point, quite manage to say old.

Daisy stared at her.

Then slowly she turned her eyes on Malcolm. “Does that happen to be your viewpoint, too?”

“I think you must learn to recognize when you're well off.”

“A home for elderly people?”

“A home with your brother- and sister-in-law; who care for you and feel concerned.”

“Pish!”

“It's true.”

“Codswallop!”

He smiled and attempted to put his hand upon hers but she wouldn't let him. “It's neither pish nor codswallop,” he said. “And you know very well it's not.”

“Is that your last word?”

“My very last.”

“Then if
you
won't help me I shall have to find somebody who will.”

She spoke with dignified simplicity; strong under the weight of disillusion, her faith in human nature by no means totally destroyed.

“I used to think that you two were one in a million.” She smiled regretfully. “I've often told you so. But…,” with a sad though stoical shake of her head, “put not your trust in princes! Now I shall simply be obliged to search for some new friends.”

And what's more, thought Malcolm, she would certainly find them. She went into a milk bar and five minutes later a perfect stranger—usually male and usually young—was buying her coffee, offering her cigarettes, exclaiming at her reminiscences, being delighted by her vitality, bemoaning her misfortunes. At a first meeting, or even a second or third, Daisy could be charming…with the additional fascination of seeming far more sinned against than sinning. And because in her own words her victims (sic) always appeared to make a beeline towards her, Malcolm saw her as a sort of vampire bee, who thrived on youthful idealistic blood, a vampire bee he still couldn't help but feel protective towards, even fond of, despite the many times he himself had been stung by it and suffered an accumulatively debilitating effect.