Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  Joel had been very sympathetic when she phoned him, but he was on duty and couldn’t come round. He said she mustn’t take anything to heart as most people behaved a little strangely when they were in shock.

  Now Daisy was alone in her room where reminders of her mother sprang painfully out at her: the many teddy-bears in leotards, one for every gymnastic competition she’d ever taken part in during her teens; the blue frilly dressing-gown Lorna’d made her last year hanging on the door; the beautifully arranged and framed montage of photographs which she had lovingly put together because she said she couldn’t stand any more sticky fixers spoiling the wallpaper.

  Had Mum known it was going to be like this once she was gone? Was it only Mum who had been holding everyone together as a family, knowing it would collapse without her? That seemed impossible, but then why had she been so anxious for Daisy to find her real mother?

  Daisy pulled Fred tighter into her arms, leaned her head against his fur and sobbed. At least he hadn’t deserted her.

  A soft tap on the bedroom door startled her. She sat up and quickly mopped her face. ‘Come in,’ she said, expecting it to be Tom as he often came in to talk to her late at night. But to her surprise it was her father.

  He stood in the doorway for a second just looking at her, perhaps noting her red-rimmed eyes. He was a consultant in a company of surveyors who specialized in ancient listed properties, and he often joked that he was becoming like one himself, for his brown hair was speckled with grey and his once lean body was getting flabby. But in fact he was still remarkably young-looking, and handsome for a man in his late fifties; he was fit because he still played badminton and went sailing when he could. But his brown eyes looked heavy now, and Daisy didn’t think she had ever seen him look so miserable or uncertain.

  ‘We should talk,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Dizzie, I was so wrapped up in myself earlier, I didn’t think what it must have been like for you.’

  The nickname had started with the twins when they were babies and couldn’t say Daisy properly, but it had remained in use because of her nature. Compared with her father and the twins, who were academically minded, Daisy was dizzy, she flitted from interest to interest, never mastering any of them. If she read a book it was always a light, racy one, and she liked comedy, dancing, skating and gymnastics, anything fast-moving and visual. Yet one of her greatest attributes was her ability to forgive and forget too, and as soon as she saw her father was hurting, she forgot her own bruised feelings.

  ‘It’s okay, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Come on in.’

  He perched on the edge of the bed and petted Fred as he asked her a few questions about what had happened. Daisy explained how Lorna had insisted she wasn’t to call him or the twins.

  ‘Just like her,’ he said sadly, fondling Fred’s ears. ‘I suppose I couldn’t have got back any quicker anyway. But I wasn’t prepared for it to be so sudden, Daisy. Last night she seemed so well.’

  ‘And she was fine when I helped her into the bath this morning,’ Daisy said, leaning against her father’s side. ‘She was talking about planting some new chrysanthemums for the autumn. I went in to see her later and I thought she was asleep, that’s when she said she thought it was the end and she wanted me to hold her hand.’

  Daisy broke down then, and her father pulled her into his arms. ‘She’s going to leave such a big hole in all our lives,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘We would have been married thirty years next month, and I always supposed we’d grow old together.’

  She felt better now he was holding her and behaving the way he normally did, and they talked for some little while about who they ought to tell right now, and who could wait until tomorrow.

  ‘I’m dreading having to repeat it again and again,’ he said wearily, running his fingers through his hair. ‘But as there’s no need for a post-mortem, the funeral can be quite soon.’

  ‘I could phone some people for you,’ Daisy offered.

  ‘No,’ he sighed, ‘I must do it. Her friends would be hurt to be told by anyone but me. But tell me, aisy, what did you two talk about before it happened?’

  She hadn’t intended to tell him about any of that, not for a while, but now she had no choice.

  Her father grimaced. ‘She had been saying that to me for some time,’ he said. ‘You know how she was, Daisy, she wanted to make everyone happy, tie up all the loose ends. You know her own mother died when she was only nine, and her father remarried a couple of years later. She didn’t get on with her stepmother and I think her father took the line of least resistance and refused to talk to Lorna about her mother. That left her with a lot of unanswered questions. I suppose she thought you felt the same.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Daisy said stoutly. ‘I’m not the least bit interested in my birth mother. I’ve got everything I want in this family, even if Lucy is nasty sometimes.’

  ‘She’s just a bit jealous of you,’ he said soothingly. ‘I think she has the idea that your mum favoured you. It will pass.’

  ‘I hope so, Daddy,’ Daisy said in a small voice. ‘She’s got Tom after all, they do everything together. I’m the one out on a limb.’

  ‘Neither of them will be going back to college until after the funeral, so we’ll all have time to talk and get things off our chests,’ he said as he got up off the bed. ‘But I’d better start making those phone calls, and I think maybe you should get into bed. It’s been a very harrowing day.’

  Daisy did fall asleep quite quickly, but she woke later and switched on the light to see it was only two in the morning. Unable to get back to sleep, she went downstairs to warm some milk.

  Daisy had left home many times in the past, to share a flat with friends, to live in a bed-sitter on her own, and once with a boy she wanted to marry, but however much she craved complete freedom, this house and her mother had always drawn her back. It was a spacious Victorian family house, with large bay windows, beautiful leaded lights and all the best features of that period. Lorna and John hadn’t changed it much. The dining-room floor had been stripped and varnished a few years ago, the kitchen had been extended and modernized, but as Lorna and John had always loved Victoriana, comfortable velvet couches, sumptuous William Morris prints and well-polished wood, it was probably very close to how the original designer had intended it to look.

  Most of their neighbours were wealthy people now, but it hadn’t been that way when Daisy was small. In those days Bedford Park was very much a middle-class family area and almost everyone had three or four children. They went in and out of each other’s houses, stayed overnight, played and went to school together. Their parents had all been friends too, and Lorna was the one who kept it all going, organizing coffee mornings, supper parties and events in the garden during the summer.

  But one by one the old friends left, their arms twisted by the ridiculously high offers for their properties. The new people had nannies for their children and sent them to private school. The women had no time for coffee mornings.

  Daisy went into the sitting-room and sat down at her mother’s writing desk. On it was the list of people her father had to phone. Judging by the ticks beside some of the names, he’d got about half-way through it.

  She turned in the chair, looking around her, and felt a pang of unbearable sadness that she would never again see Mum sitting here writing letters, sewing or reading. It was a cluttered room, with many books, pictures, photographs and ornaments – Lorna could never part with anything which had sentimental value. And everything had remained, from small glass animals bought by Daisy, Tom and Lucy for various birthdays or Mother’s Day, to an ugly elephant’s foot made into a stool which Lorna had been given by her grandfather. It was an awesome task to clean and dust this room alone, and Daisy really didn’t know how they would all manage when the time came for her to go back to work again.

  Part of Daisy’s problem with work was that she really preferred domestic work to anything else. She was sublimely happy cooking, cleaning and gardening; she did
n’t take kindly to office or shop work with the petty rules and regulations. This made her something of an oddity among her friends who were real Nineties yuppies, bent on making money and buying their own houses. She had no ambition or qualifications – she hadn’t done very well at school. All she really wanted was exactly what her parents had; a strong, loving marriage and a couple of children. But to admit that to anyone these days was like admitting to cannibalism.

  That too was part of the problem with Lucy. For today’s hostility was nothing new, she was always sniping at Daisy, saying she was aimless, dopey and out of touch with the real world. And in some ways Lucy was right. If Daisy was sent out to buy something, she often forgot what it was. Her love life had always been tangled and dramatic, she was emotional, generous, a spendthrift and very impulsive.

  Lucy, on the other hand, was very bright. She had nine GCSEs and three ‘A’ levels and was studying economics. She chose her boyfriends carefully, managed to live on her allowance, and never forgot anything. Yet oddly it was none of these things which had caused the rift between them. That had started through Daisy’s ability at gymnastics, and perhaps a bit of bad timing on her part showing it off. She had been something of a star in gymnastics at junior school, and won many competitions, but by the time she was fourteen she was tired of competing and only did it for fun.

  Lucy could play both the piano and clarinet very well, something Daisy deeply admired because she knew she would never have the patience to learn. One summer afternoon about six years ago, the whole family was sitting out in the garden, and Lucy was playing the piano in the dining-room with the French windows open so they could hear her.

  Daisy didn’t really know why she did it – perhaps, as Lucy said, it was because she hated her sister getting attention. As Lucy broke into a particularly stirring piece of music, Daisy went up to the kitchen door and proceeded to do a series of back-flips right down the garden, and came back up it again walking on her hands.

  Tom and her parents cheered, interrupting the piano recital. There was a loud clonk as Lucy angrily crashed the piano lid down and shouted out something like, ‘You’d better get a job in a circus, that’s all you’re good for’ before flouncing upstairs in a sulk.

  Daisy apologized later, but Lucy didn’t come round and it was as though that day set a kind of standard which could not be changed. Open warfare became the norm, and Lucy used any way she could find to discredit or belittle Daisy.

  It didn’t help that Lucy suddenly sprouted up to five feet nine, got more than her fair share of spots and had to wear size fourteen clothes. Daisy couldn’t help being slender, only five feet five and rarely bothered by spots, but Lucy behaved as if she thought a wicked fairy had cast a spell over her which was meant for Daisy.

  Time and again she accused Daisy of being anorexic. She would hide her favourite clothes and relentlessly point out how stupid she was. Daisy was aware that she had often made the situation worse by yelling abuse at Lucy, calling her a fat swot and offering her medicated facial cleansers for her spots, and she was ashamed of this now. But Lucy had worn her down, spying on her, going through her room when she was out and generally getting up her nose.

  When Daisy moved into her first bed-sitter, they did get on better when she came home on visits. But as soon as she moved back, it all started again. By this time she was twenty-one and a little more sympathetic, so she tried to win Lucy over by asking her to come to the pictures or go out shopping with her. Yet Lucy seemed set on being disagreeable, and more often than not these trips out ended in a slanging match.

  As Daisy wandered into the kitchen, Fred looked up from his basket and wagged his tail, clearly hoping he was going to be taken out for a walk. ‘No walkies,’ Daisy said, leaning down to pat him, ‘it’s the middle of the night.’ She poured herself some milk, wishing now that she’d confided in Mum about Lucy – perhaps she would have had some good advice on how to deal with her. But it had always been just a private thing between the two girls; they’d never let it show in front of their parents.

  ‘I just won’t rise to it in future,’ she said to herself, putting the mug of milk into the microwave and feeling guilty at the many fights they’d had when their parents weren’t around. ‘We have to be adults now.’

  It was a very warm night, and Daisy got her cigarettes from her handbag and went out into the garden to smoke one, Fred padding softly behind her.

  She had never smoked in front of her parents, it just didn’t seem right to as they were non-smokers. Mostly she only smoked when she went out with friends, but the garden was a place where she enjoyed having a cigarette, it felt deliciously illicit. Joel didn’t approve of smoking, and of course Lucy thought it was the pits. But Tom indulged, and they often had a cigarette together out here in the evenings.

  Daisy sat on the swing seat and Fred jumped up beside her. She lit a cigarette and gently swung to and fro in the darkness, thinking about Joel and wondering if he would be able to get time off for the funeral.

  Suddenly Fred let out a low growl, and Daisy looked round to see Tom coming down the garden in his pyjamas.

  ‘Hi!’ she whispered, not wanting to wake anyone else. ‘Couldn’t you sleep either?’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t really get my head round it, Dizzie. She seemed so well when I said goodbye in the morning.’

  Daisy gave him a cigarette, and he sat next to her on the swing. Despite being like Lucy in looks, Tom had a very different temperament. He was equally clever, but he liked to act dumb. He was far more thoughtful and considerate than his twin, and more generous with his time, affections and money. He was popular with both his tutors and the other students, he was good at sport, passionate about rock music, and he had a great sense of humour.

  They talked for a while about how they felt about their mother, and Tom began to cry. ‘I didn’t know it would hurt this much,’ he whispered. ‘I thought I’d be almost glad when it happened because she wouldn’t have any more pain. But I’m angry, Dizzie, I keep thinking, why her? Look at all the useless, pathetic people there are! Why don’t they get it?’

  Daisy instinctively knew he didn’t expect her to give him any answers, he was just getting it off his chest. So she held him and let him cry, suddenly aware that she would have to take her mother’s place in the family now, for he and Lucy were going to be lost for a while without Lorna.

  Neither of them had ever left home, they’d been in the same class since infants’ school, they’d chosen a college in West London rather than going away to university, and their closeness had sheltered them from loneliness, bullying and all the many other little things that affect other children. Daisy could remember envying them when they were tiny. Before they could speak properly they used a kind of secret language which she didn’t understand. They often slept in the same bed and they shared everything.

  Yet Mum had always been equally important to them. Wherever she went in the house, they followed. Even as twenty-year-olds this link had never really been severed – they had never wanted to go out at night as much as Daisy did at their age, they were just as happy at home.

  ‘Everything will be all right,’ she assured Tom. ‘We’ll still be a family, we’ll keep the house and garden up together. I’ll still be here.’

  ‘You aren’t going to move out then?’ he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Lucy said she reckoned you’d be off like a rocket.’

  ‘Now, why would she think that?’ Daisy asked.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know really. But she heard Mum and Dad talking a while back, you know, about how Dad was going to manage when Mum had gone. Dad said he thought he’d probably sell this house and get somewhere smaller and more manageable because he couldn’t expect you to stay and look after it forever.’

  Daisy thought about that for a minute. ‘I don’t suppose I would want to stay forever. I might get married, and so might you and Lucy. It would be more sensible for Dad to have somewhere smaller. But I can’t t
hink why Lucy thinks I’d run off immediately.’

  ‘Because Mum’s left each of us some money,’ he said. ‘Lucy and I don’t get ours till we’re twenty-one, but you’ll get yours straight away.’

  Daisy felt a stab of anger towards her sister. She hadn’t known she was going to be left anything, and it should have been a nice surprise, but it was just like Lucy to use it as a weapon.

  ‘Well, Lucy’s wrong for once. I will not be off like a rocket, money or no money, so you can tell her that from me,’ Daisy said resolutely. ‘Mum would want me to stay here until everyone’s settled down again, and I shall. Now, we’d better go back to bed, there will be an awful lot to do later today.’

  It rained on the day of the funeral, the kind of soft rain Lorna had always liked because it nurtured her garden. A great many people came – relatives, many of them distant ones, old friends and neighbours – and the flowers filled the courtyard outside the crematorium.

  The service seemed so short to Daisy, and although the words the vicar spoke about Lorna were lovely, somehow he had seemed to miss the real gist of what she was all about. Perhaps Daisy shouldn’t have aired this view later back at the house, but many of the neighbours from the time when she and the twins were small had come back for a drink, and they were all discussing the things they loved most about Lorna.

  ‘I would have liked him to say how her greatest gift was to be able to chew the fat with people,’ Daisy said. ‘Do you know what I mean? She didn’t just advise people when they had a problem, she’d sit them down, give them a cup of tea, and talk the whole thing through with them.’

  Almost every one of Lorna’s closest friends of many years nodded in agreement. One of them went on to talk about how Lorna had supported and consoled her on a daily basis when her husband had left her. She said Lorna was far better than a trained counsellor, because she had the ability to make you laugh even when you were in the depths of despair.