When I Was Otherwise Read online

  “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!”

  She said, more seriously, “Well, I ask you, dear: these days, who can?”

  Then, as they ate, she told him a lot about herself and wanted to hear a lot about him in return.

  “Now, how many volumes have you published?”

  He laughed—yes, it appeared it hadn’t been just a flash in the pan; he really did have a sense of humour. Well, if she couldn’t bring it out in a man, then who in the world could? (She really pitied anyone unable to laugh at the absurdity of it all. You had to. All the time. It was the only thing which kept you sane. No; it was the only thing which kept you alive.) She was glad he was enjoying himself.

  “You’d better ask me that in another twenty years,” he said.

  “Right! 1953. I’ll jot it down in my diary.”

  “So far I’ve written just a handful of poems. They’re not very good.”

  “Who says so? Well, just tell them in that case they’ll have Miss Daisy Todd-Ferrier to deal with!”

  “My family says so.”

  “Oh, yes, naturally. Your family! Well, frankly, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t.”

  “But you don’t even know my family.”

  “Nonsense, your family is just the same as mine and everybody else’s! Does a prophet ever find honour in his own country? No, of course not! That’s what Jesus said. What does your mother say?”

  “She says it makes a charming hobby.”

  “You see? Quite typical! They’re all the same. And that charming little hobby must never be allowed to interfere with something really important, like a career at Selfridge’s! Oh good gracious me no!”

  He was amazed at the indignation she showed on his behalf. He felt grateful but also a little frightened. No, not
frightened. Awestruck.

  “But… Why on earth did she want to put you into Selfridge’s? Selfridge’s!” She said it as she might have said the French Foreign Legion or the Women’s Prison Service. “No, don’t tell me! Security! That grinning little tinpot god Security! I wonder you didn’t just draw yourself up to your full height and proclaim ‘Phooey!’”

  “Phooey?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’d have done!”

  “Phooey? To my mother?”

  She nodded.

  “Besides,” he went on, with a loyalty Daisy at once recognized as grievously misplaced, “it was my own decision, too. My own decision just as much as hers.”

  But possibly this had now passed from being the burning issue of the day. “You give the impression nobody would ever think of saying phooey to your mother.”

  He looked amused.

  “Well, actually, I don’t know if they ever would. Perhaps it’s just not necessary.”

  He was assailed by a coughing fit but finished his thought the moment he’d recovered.

  “Perhaps she’s simply not the type.”

  Exactly ten weeks later Daisy was able to judge for herself really what type she was…although anyway she had known it from the beginning. She was invited to tea in New Cavendish Street. Not only was Henry’s mother there but his brother and sister and his brother’s wife, and his brother’s wife’s mother, over here on holiday from Germany—she was a Hamburger, and Hamburger was just about right, you could easily see what the daughter would become in some twenty years’ time. Daisy felt like a missionary being inspected by the cannibals, except that two of the cannibals would have been too amiable or soft or squeamish to actually take the first bite and would probably have turned their eyes away while the dish remained at all recognizable.

  But women! Maybe she didn’t count Henry’s sister, Marsha, who was a sweet and pretty nincompoop, but the other three most certainly put her in mind of Kipling, a man who, if anybody did, really knew about such things. “For the female of the species is more deadly than the male!” How she would love to meet him, shake him by the hand and say, “Well done, Mr Kipling!” She had sometimes thought he might appreciate a fan letter. Mrs Stormont in particular, the senior Mrs Stormont, was a she-bear whose husband must have been one of her cubs as unmistakably as any of her children—Daisy was only surprised she hadn’t bitten his head off, in a fashion other than purely figurative, long before he’d finally been passed as fit enough to comprise cannon fodder for his king and country. That had been in 1918, mere weeks before the ending of the war. Not quite such a poor fish, possibly, as Daisy had imagined. Well, that depended.

  Yet apart from a father’s absence—or perhaps these days because of it—this was the typical portrait of a family. And that was why she was here: to help young Henry escape. (Even on its own the very fact of his volition showed he was worthy of better things.) “Daisy,” he’d said, “sometimes I really feel the need to get away. I know you’re stronger than I am. You’ve got to help me do it.” Daisy, who liked nothing better than a cause and an underdog, so long as the underdog knew he was an underdog and didn’t mean to go on lying down, had assured him he’d found himself the proper champion and had brushed aside his protestations of gratitude and affection. “Oh, just listen to you! The fledgling poet! The first hot breath of freedom and what do you become? Lord Byron! Don Juan! Some silly ass like that. Extravagant and bold. And why shouldn’t you, indeed?”

  Tea itself was civilized but difficult. To do her justice Florence Stormont was the only one with anything to say and without her the others would probably have sat around like cushions: cushions surely lumpier than the two Daisy was leaning against, which—having a size and a smell and an old-fashioned grandeur redolent of the furnishings in general—were undoubtedly a minor aspect of what made the meeting civilized. The room was tasselled, tapestried and claustrophobic. But it was civilized.

  And so was Mrs Stormont’s bedroom.

  “Miss Todd-Ferrier,” had said her hostess, some time after the extremely proper maid had cleared away the extremely proper tea things, “how can we get to know each other while this great bunch of simpletons is observing us like sheep?” She then blew familial kisses and presumably hoped the Hamburg matron hadn’t understood. Daisy rather hoped she had. “Shall we adjourn to my bedroom, you and I, and there enjoy an atmosphere of peace and rarefied tranquillity?”

  Daisy had seen Henry’s expression and had felt her heartbeat quicken. She and the she-bear sat themselves on low, elegant chairs that faced one another—Daisy with her back to the stately single bed, luxuriously quilted, highly pillowed, that possibly explained why Mr Stormont had still walked around with his head on, prior to 1918. (Daisy was never afraid of mixing her metaphors.)

  “Henry tells me that there’s been some talk of marriage?” Mrs Stormont leaned forward with a gracious but slightly quizzical expression which suggested they were girls together and could smile without resentment at the dafter notions of the gutter press. “But of course you know very well it can’t be.”

  “Oh? What can’t, dear?”

  Working as a physiotherapist in the Harrow Road for two days a week, where obviously she treated the poorer section of the community (and for only what they could afford, too, which was usually next to nothing, although luckily this was counterbalanced by the richer section that came to Thayer Street); working in the Harrow Road she was frequently addressed as ‘dear’ by her patients and tended to talk back to them in the same manner. Eventually this would become a habit—and one which she’d be mainly unaware of, in Thayer Street as much as elsewhere—but for the present she could still catch herself saying it in situations which weren’t always appropriate, even when the term expressed affection.

  Yet today it wasn’t unintentional. Nor did it express affection.

  Mrs Stormont, however, appeared to see neither irony nor insult.

  “Your marriage,” she said. “I’m afraid there can’t be any question of its ever taking place. Please don’t regard that as anything personal.”

  “It isn’t personal?” asked Daisy.

  “Not at all,” smiled Mrs Stormont.

  “Phooey!” said Daisy.

  Even if she got in nothing else, she had been promising herself this. Just waiting for the opportunity.

  But the effect wasn’t entirely what she had expected. Mrs Stormont gave a dry smile. “Phooey yourself,” she returned equably. “Though I do hope that some of our conversation may rise to a higher level. You’re a little older than Henry, aren’t you?”

  Now this she had expected.

  “I don’t know that I am. And even if I were… What has age got to do with it?”

  “Not a great deal, I agree. Certainly five or six or seven years is by no means the end of the world.”

  “Three,” said Daisy. “Two-and-a-half.” The admission was forced out of her.

  “Personally, I’ve always found it most sensible to stay at twenty-one.”

  “Why? What does anybody know about life at twenty-one? A hundred and twenty-one—now, there, perhaps, I could see some point. At that age you might just be beginning to get interesting. It’s a moot point, though,” she added, looking up at the ceiling.

  “And one we shall sometime have to debate more fully,” said Florence. “But—for the moment—your being older than Henry naturally means you’re far more experienced than he is. You strike me as a woman of the world. And that does make me wonder, a little, what it is you see in someone so…so comparatively immature…”

  “Well, surely his own mother shouldn’t need to ask me that! I see a person who wants to make something of his life, who doesn’t want just to follow the common herd, a person who—”

  “Who will never be rich,” said Florence gently. “Knowing we lived in New Cavendish Street you may possibly have thought…”

  But it had truly never occurred to Daisy to conjecture. Henry would have to leave Selfridge’s, of course,
and to concentrate on his writing—that much was clear—so if she’d thought about it at all she had vaguely assumed she would support him until such time as he grew successful or until such time, anyway, as she started on a family—which, after all, was surely why most people got married: how lovely to produce another life, to have the care of it, the joy, the comfort, even the terror of it! And now she stared at her accuser in such a way that Florence’s previously speculative gaze proved untenable.

  “Well, never mind that! The last thing either of us wants is to quarrel.”

  Daisy wasn’t so sure. “Just say what you object to, please. Give me a chance to defend myself.”

  “Oh, my dear Miss Todd-Ferrier…!”

  In any case Daisy felt she already knew. It was simply the fact of her being another woman, or, rather, of her being another woman who had a mind and a will of her own. She wasn’t an extra cushion.

  “But I shall tell you,” added Florence, when she had finished with her gracefully uncomprehending arm and hand gestures, “why it is you can’t get married.”

  And the splendidly funny thing, thought Daisy, was that before this current interview she hadn’t been certain she even wanted to get married.

  “Yes, go on, dear. Tell me why you think it is. It’s time we had a little laugh.”

  Yet the possibility of their sharing a laugh of any kind was fast receding. Until this very moment Florence had preserved at least the suggestion of a smile.

  “Miss Todd-Ferrier,” she said, “perhaps this won’t strike you as quite so amusing! My son is a consumptive. He has tuberculosis. He happens to be dying.”

  Afterwards, Daisy hoped it hadn’t shown itself, the icy wave of shock that had swept through her.

  Previously what she had felt for Henry Stormont had not been love. But now she experienced a surge of compassion so overwhelming it might well have been that.

  And it was heightened by something else.

  Almost as ugly as the blow given by his mother’s words was the tone in which they had been uttered.

  My game, I think!

  And although there were times when Daisy would have conceded speech could come out sounding wrong this wasn’t one of them.