When I Was Otherwise Read online

  “What shall we do?” he asked. “I suppose we could get them to divide it?”

  He looked around, with an equal lack of enthusiasm, at all the other cakes on display.

  “Nonsense. You take that back to Erica. The pair of you can enjoy it together. Forget about me! As if it makes a ha’p’orth of difference!”

  He felt touched. “I think I’ve found the solution.”

  “Inspiration from on high?”

  “Yes. You’ll have to share it with us. You must come to tea this afternoon.”

  “You’re one in a million, dear, but Erica might not like it. I mean, she may have other things to do.”

  “No, I’m sure not. I’ll give her a ring.”

  “Besides, I don’t quite know what I’d do with myself until teatime. I think it mightn’t be worth my while going home, you see.”

  “Then, Daisy,” he exclaimed, “you must come to lunch, as well!”

  He was, essentially, a very simple young man.

  4

  They had had a small party to celebrate: Marsha and Dan and Daisy. The latter had insisted on going out to an off-licence for a bottle of Johnny Walker. She’d also bought some peanuts and a bag of crisps. They had now finished their dinner but were still sitting at the table over coffee (instant). “And later we can eat the rest of the cake,” said Daisy. They had begun it—again at Daisy’s insistence—to accompany the tinned fruit and long-life cream which Marsha had provided for dessert.

  “But Daisy, you extravagant mortal, that cake could do beautifully for tomorrow. There’s a good three pieces left.”

  “I don’t want it for tomorrow. I want it for tonight. Tomorrow let the cupboard be bare. Tonight—while there is lemon-iced Madeira—let us eat, drink, and make the rafters ring! Let us banish all thought of frugality, my fine rollicking fellows! Not to mention stinginess,” she added to herself.

  “Daisy, I may be careful, but I am not stingy.”

  “Dear heaven! Who ever said you were? Instant death to such a preacher of sedition!” She drew forth her flashing rapier and scanned her surroundings, glaringly, for this calumnious rogue. “Daisy the swashbuckler! A true son of Robin Hood.”

  “And rather merry into the bargain,” laughed her sister-in-law, but still with a trace of disapproval.

  “What! On just a spoonful or two of pineapple juice and a bit of cream?” Somewhat atypically she made no mention of what she herself had provided. “No, but it was very nice, dear, very nice indeed. You were always a first-rate little cook. Me, I never had the patience to slave before a stove. There was always something more exciting I wanted to get on with.”

  Which wasn’t wholly accurate. She had not merely kept house for her father during his last few years but at one other period, both later and longer, had again done most of the cooking and had again, by and large, enjoyed it.

  Marsha said, “It might have been very different, of course, if only Henry hadn’t died.”

  “Ah, yes,” murmured Dan, who always grew more than usually sentimental on spirits—and more than usually red-complexioned. “Poor Henry. Poor Henry. Just what year was it, Daisy, that you got married?” The first part and the second were not consciously connected.

  “1933,” supplied Marsha, immediately.

  “Was it as long ago as that?” he marvelled.

  “Yes. I’d have been eighteen and you, Dan—let’s see—”

  “I was five years older than Henry.”

  Daisy said to Dan: “Oh, I remember the way you and he got the giggles in front of that sour-faced old clergyman—for all the world, like a couple of silly schoolgirls!” She chuckled. “It’s about the only thing I do remember of that day.”

  “Well, Henry should never have picked me as his best man. He should have known! We always set each other off.”

  “Yes, I remember that, and I remember the way in which I did not get on with Florence—of course, that wasn’t just the wedding day. Why did she have this abominable fixation over everybody’s age? As though it ever mattered! Well, let’s simply say that while Henry was alive she and I observed a truce—and afterwards we simply kept out of one another’s way. Terrible woman! I don’t mean to be rude; I forget she was your mother.”

  Marsha didn’t look pleased.

  “It was a quiet wedding,” Dan interjected quickly—then contradicted what he’d said before. “There couldn’t have been any other best man. That’s why you had to have me.”

  He smiled.

  It didn’t work.

  “It all seems so immensely long ago,” said Daisy, “so wholly unrelated to anything that happens now.” She sat back, let her eyes travel round the dining room, as though seeking for something in it to admire. “And I daresay she was really very nice… If you ever got to know her properly, I mean.” She shook her head, pondering life’s impossibilities.

  “The trouble was,” said Marsha—and didn’t see Dan now mutely appeal to her across the table—“the trouble was, Henry was very young. Very impressionable. I know Mother believed you had him too much under your thumb.”

  “Ha!” muttered Daisy. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!” But her mutter was rendered inaudible by Dan, who spoke simultaneously.

  “In 1933? He must have been twenty-eight by then.”

  “Yet very young for twenty-eight,” persisted Marsha. “Though I’m sure that what really exasperated Mother—one can talk about it now, can’t one, Daisy?—was never being able to find out.” Quite suddenly, her look had grown puckish. “We none of us could ever find out!”

  “But who wants to talk about it now?” cried Daisy. “I certainly don’t! Find out what?” she asked, suspiciously.

  “Why, how many years you had deducted, that time you were obliged to give your age! Obliged, that is, by law. We made bets. We laid snares. Of course, I can’t think why none of us ever went along to—”

  Abruptly, the hearing aid let out one of its more piercing screeches, then finally settled for a lower, steadier note. When peace had been restored, Daisy apologized for having missed the whole of Marsha’s answer.

  “No matter,” she went on, “I don’t suppose it was important. But…what were we saying? I think I met your mother last in 1945. That was the year of your divorce, wasn’t it? I was coming out of a film, I remember. It was called The Wicked Lady. And there, slap bang on the pavement, was Florence.”

  This was hardly the road to conciliation.

  “Surely there don’t need to be any secrets between us now, Daisy? Not when we’ve all of us grown ancient?”

  “Oh, at Shangri-La one never grows ancient,” asserted Dan, with apparent joviality. “Didn’t you know?” But he looked at Marsha quite beseechingly and this time she could scarcely fail to notice. She remembered then her obligations; and became a different woman.

  “You mean,” she said, “we’ll get to be three hundred and still look just like girls?”

  Her remorse was distilled from the same malt and barley as her questioning—Daisy had insisted on tumblers, not sherry glasses, for the measures she had poured—and her recollection of what she owed her brother now made her speak much faster.

  “Oh, I’m all for that, aren’t you, Daisy? Do you remember the picture? I saw it six times. I used to think Ronald Colman such a heart-throb. But what will happen, Dan, when we set foot outside the house? Will we start to age quite horribly? Look all of thirty-nine? Oh, how tragic! How grotesque!”

  It was unbelievable, thought Daisy, sitting there tight-lipped, that in view of Marsha’s education—or lack of it—she should have happened to hit so exactly on the right word. ‘Grotesque’ described the whole thing down to a tee. This present performance, of course…let alone any which was still to come.

  But Dan was very much relieved. “Then we’ll just have to keep ourselves all safe and snug indoors.”

  “Well, that suits me,” said Marsha. “The older I get the less I want to venture forth. I don’t even like the thought of holid
ays any more. I don’t know why. I think I feel afraid.”

  Daisy felt afraid too—she always had—but as she had once said to Henry she would never have owned up to it. No, she hadn’t said that, had she? But she would have done if it hadn’t involved owning up to it.

  Dan was anxious to draw her back into the conversation.

  “What do you think about it, Daisy?”

  “I’d take a dose,” she said. “That’s what I’d do. I’d take a dose if I believed I’d ever positively choose to stay indoors!” She mimed the glass of poison to her lips; tipped back her head to swallow the stuff down. “I’ll tell you this: it’s only the thought of the club which has prevented me from doing that at least a hundred times over! Five hundred, more like!”

  “So you still go to the club? I thought it was extinct.”

  “Extinct? What a very curious word! Even from a Stormont! Why should it be extinct?”

  “No reason. You still go there, anyway?”

  “Let anyone try to stop me! Not only is it somewhere to escape to in the evenings—and one can’t just sit at home, night after night, like a Brussels sprout—some can, I can’t, no. It’s also the last bastion of civilization around these parts. Not that it is around these parts, thank God—at least Regent Street still has a bit of dignity to it, a small remnant of the old days, not much. London isn’t what it used to be. No.” She gazed at them in displeasure, as though the charge could be laid squarely at their own door.

  “But what do you do at the club, Daisy?” asked Marsha. “Do you simply sit around and discuss things? That sounds very intellectual.”

  “Who said anything about discussing things? Yes, of course we do discuss things; the people there have minds. Some of them. The ones who aren’t just silly asses like everybody else. And what a relief that is: to find people who can talk, who don’t just worry about the laundry and making the beds and what little Johnny did at school today. But one doesn’t have to talk. Most of the time I jump about and play the giddy goat. I don’t suppose you’d recognize me.”

  “Are you so different, then?”

  “I’m alive—that’s how I’m different. I dance. I sing. I flirt. I do everything. Outrageously. ‘Daisy,’ they shout, ‘our mascot! The crest on our coat of arms! The life and soul of every party!’ ‘What, little me?’ I cry. ‘But, yes, you’re right, I am!’”

  Dan burped, discreetly. “What kind of songs do you sing?”

  “All kinds!”

  “I used to have a party piece once,” said Marsha.

  “Of course, the one they’re forever asking for—no originality, that’s what I tell ’em!—is ‘Daisy, Daisy’. It’s my theme song. My sort of national anthem.”

  She had pushed herself up from the table as she spoke and now faced her audience like a diva about to lead the promenaders into the final chorus on the final night.

  Her present audience felt more constrained than most of those promenaders; seemed reluctant to take part in quite the full-throated way demanded of them.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!

  I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet

  Upon the seat

  Of a bicycle made for two.”

  Daisy’s voice was gravelly but it contained a certain lilt and she undeniably had stage presence: as she sang she took up appropriate stances, assumed the correct expressions, pirouetted round the furniture and gracefully waved her arms about. The joints of her hands were swollen with arthritis and her legs, despite their look of sturdiness, were really far from steady—quite soon, in fact, she would definitely require a stick—but as she told them now, and told them too on many a subsequent occasion, “There’s life in the old dog yet! Life in the old dog yet!”

  Undoubtedly, though, this was the only way in which she ever used that adjective aloud, in reference to herself.

  5

  They settled down into their new way of life. Spring had come. The nearby park was filled with blossom. Daisy acquired a favourite bench. Every day, while the weather held, it was a pleasure to sit and watch the young men and women in their fresh white shorts and sweaters bouncing merrily about on the tennis courts. Gradually she got to know them. There were two in particular to whom she always cried “Good luck!” as they walked past her bench; and although for the first few days they only smiled at her, a little shyly, on the fourth or fifth they actually began to speak. The first one was Homayoun and he was very dark and handsome and he came from Iran—although she preferred to use its real name and refer to it as Persia. The other was called Félix, a tall, blond Swiss boy with a charming smile and proper, muscular thighs. They were studying at a language school across the road and liked to come for exercise during their lunchtime break. “How did you know to wear white, dear?” she asked Homayoun, after patting the bench a little for him and Félix to sit beside her. “Oh, I daresay it’s a custom where you come from too, isn’t it?—yes, very nice.” And the two boys smiled and nodded happily, so they were then well away.

  They were both extremely nice young men: they obviously came from very good families; that was something you could always tell despite their colour or their lack of any decent language in which to communicate. They themselves didn’t smoke—“and quite right, dears, you’re very sensible, I wish I was!”—but they brought her cigarettes when they discovered that she did; brought them, would you believe, on only the second day they’d stopped to have a chat! And on the next day they introduced three friends, all from the same class, and suggested she should join the five of them for coffee. They took her to a snack bar, and with their coffee they had baked beans and fried bread followed by apple turnovers, and they wouldn’t let her pay for a thing, not a thing, no matter how she tried. And they bought her more cigarettes when she attempted to get up and buy some for herself. It was quite unheard of. So she did her best to be as entertaining as she could and at the same time to help them with their English—an act which you could see they thoroughly appreciated.

  She began by telling them she used to be a physiotherapist and she got this across—amidst oceans of hilarity—by massaging Félix’s shoulders.

  “But, oh, how I miss it! You know what my patients used to say? When I massaged them? That my touch was like the touch of angels’ wings! Just like the touch of angels’ wings brushing across them. And it was! They all said it. But I used to work too hard—look!—see how my poor muscles are all wasted away.”

  And, to show them, she slipped one arm out of her overcoat and jacket.

  “Yes, I used to put too much of myself into my work. Far too much. I pummelled and punched and pulled, and great big hulking fellows some of them were too—just like you, dear,” to Félix, “only bigger—they weighed six times as much as I did; I was always a little shrimp. But a tough little shrimp, naturally! Wiry! Yet in the end I simply wore myself out. Well, you can’t be surprised at it, can you? And now I feel useless. Useless!” She pursed her lips. “Utterly useless! Thrown out onto the scrap heap. I’d better come and be a teacher, though. Do you think they’d have me?” She ended on a chuckle. “An old reprobate like me? I mean ‘old’ in the sense of…well, of its having nothing to do with age.”

  “You—teacher,” they said. They laughed, then nodded vigorously. “Good teacher. Very good teacher.” It was amazing, the amount they seemed to understand.

  “Oh, my word, yes, the stories I could tell!” She lifted both her hands and brought them down expressively on the table. “About some of my patients, for instance. Mostly celebrities of one sort or another: stage or society or something of that kind. There’s one little anecdote you really must hear. I’m sure you don’t have anything like this at home!” Then she told them her story about Fruity Metcalf and how he had met his comeuppance at the hands of Lord Oswestry and they grinned and roared at the outrageousness of it just the same as she did. �
�And it’s true!” she concluded earnestly. “Every last word of it. All perfectly true. And that tells you something about the state of the English aristocracy between the wars, doesn’t it?”

  It was the happiest lunchtime imaginable: oh, how she galvanized that sleepy little place! And the only tiny damper on the proceedings was the thought that this was Friday and she wouldn’t see Homayoun or Félix or any of their nice jolly friends until Monday. She remembered how it had already been bad enough the previous Friday and that was before the two young men had spoken to her and she’d grown used to having company. Even Helga, the only female in the group, seemed a pleasant sort of girl, although a little puddingy perhaps, both in manner and appearance, and in no way worthy of the others… however, she had a broad, good-natured smile. Daisy conceived the sudden bright notion of inviting them all to lunch. To lunch on Sunday.

  “I must repay your hospitality,” she declared. “And you’ll see then how a normal English family conducts itself on the Sabbath after its return from church—also very good for your education!”

  “Like you!” they said. Honestly, weren’t they just coming along in leaps and bounds!

  She beamed. She wrote down her name and address on a smoothed-out paper napkin. Marsha would be pleased; she so much enjoyed the cooking. And she herself would contribute a Swiss roll (another little lesson for Félix!) or a block of ice-cream; maybe a flagon or two of cider. Devon cider.

  After she’d thought about this, she told them:

  “Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come.

  (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)

  Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,

  An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe…”

  Yes, it might be a nice idea, as well, to teach them a bit of real English. She liked Sir Henry Newbolt. Full of guts and passion. Kipling, too. (“Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again!”) Later, as she sat on alone in the snack bar, over the final cup of coffee which kind Homayoun had bought her, she made a mental list of some of the other poets she might introduce them to, and reflected that—despite everything—life, on occasion, could still have its moments; its small rewards and compensations.