Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  Another old friend, whom Daisy and the twins had always called Auntie Madge, a hearty woman of some sixteen stone who had called in at least once a week for as long as they could remember, spoke up then.

  ‘You’ve inherited that gift, Daisy,’ she said approvingly. ‘Don’t you ever lose it either, it’s a great talent to have.’

  Lucy, who was sitting on one of the couches with her best friend, Alice, hadn’t appeared to be listening to any of this conversation. Yet even though Daisy had her back to her, she felt her sister stiffen and a kind of chill come into the room.

  Later, after all the visitors had gone, Daisy was emptying out the dishwasher to reload it with more dirty crockery and glasses, when Lucy came into the kitchen, stood by the door and folded her arms. She was wearing a very crumpled long black dress and a pair of Doc Marten boots. It was her usual style; Lucy professed to be a feminist and believed that women who dressed up in glamorous clothes and made up their faces were air-heads. Yet Lorna had hated those boots more than anything, and even Tom had urged her to look pretty and conventional for this one special day, because it would have pleased her mother. Lucy had taken no notice, and John, who was very shaky this morning, hadn’t taken her to task about it when perhaps he should have.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Daisy inquired. Tom had gone upstairs with Dad to sort out some papers, and the house was very quiet.

  ‘You haven’t inherited anything from Mum, how could you when you aren’t her flesh and blood?’ Lucy said, her voice tight with anger.

  Daisy wanted to say something nasty in reply, but knew that today wasn’t the right day for a row. ‘Auntie Madge was only using it as a figure of speech,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Everyone in the room today knew perfectly well I was adopted, but you do also inherit things from people through being around them so long.’

  ‘So how come you haven’t picked up any brains then?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lucy,’ Daisy said impatiently. ‘Don’t be nasty today of all days. I might be tempted to ask why you haven’t inherited any of our mother’s sense of timing or diplomacy.’

  She thought that would be enough for her sister to flounce off to her room, but instead Lucy flew at Daisy, clasped a handful of her hair, and hit her right in the face with her fist.

  ‘How’s that for timing?’ she shrieked like a madwoman. ‘I’ve been watching you all day, sucking up to all those boring old neighbours. Letting them know that you looked after Mum, like you were the only one in the family that cared. The only reason you were here was because you got the sack from your last job.’

  Daisy’s nose felt as if it was on fire, and blood spurted down her face and dripped on to her dress. She was too stunned to attempt to hit Lucy back, and besides, she knew she was no match for her younger sister when she was this angry.

  ‘I didn’t suck up to anyone,’ she said, trying not to cry. ‘I was just being polite because they were Mum’s friends and many of them had come a long way today. And for your information I got the sack from that last job because I kept having to take time off work when Mum was so ill. I don’t remember you ever offering to drive her to the hospital for her checkups, or to help her have a bath, or anything if it comes to that.’

  Lucy took another menacing step towards her, so Daisy picked up a French cook’s knife, which was lying on the work surface. ‘Touch me again and I’ll stick this in you,’ she hissed at her.

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off and shack up with your pig boyfriend?’ Lucy snarled at her, but keeping her distance. ‘You aren’t wanted here. Mum might have put up with you, but that was only because she felt she had to. Dad, Tom and I all despise you. All you are is the cuckoo in the nest.’

  ‘Better a cuckoo than an old crow,’ Daisy retorted. ‘Look at the state of you, like an advert for War on Want! You keep telling me how brainy you are, but only a complete idiot would dress like that for her mother’s funeral. How do you think Dad felt seeing you looking like that? If he despised anyone today, it was you.’

  She went to walk past her sister, still holding the knife in her hand, but as she brushed against her in the doorway, Lucy grabbed her hair again and tipped her head back. The knife was in Daisy’s right hand, and as she moved to defend herself it caught Lucy’s arm.

  Bellowing like a stuck pig, Lucy let go of Daisy and went rushing out into the hall and up the stairs. ‘She stabbed me, she stabbed me,’ she screamed at the top of her voice. ‘Dad, come quickly, Daisy’s freaked out.’

  Daisy grabbed a wad of kitchen paper to try to stop the blood flowing from her nose all over her and on to the floor. Then she heard Dad and Tom clattering down the stairs, demanding to know what was going on. The bottom of the stairway wasn’t visible from the kitchen as the hallway was L-shaped, so as Daisy held the kitchen roll to her nose, she couldn’t see her father and Tom with Lucy who was hysterical, shrieking as if she’d been the victim of an entirely unprovoked attack. Daisy was just about to make her way out there and say her piece when she suddenly felt faint and slumped down on to a kitchen chair.

  ‘Stop screaming and sit down,’ Dad said to Lucy, but his voice grew fainter as he led Lucy into the sitting-room to examine her arm.

  Tom came out into the kitchen. He stopped short when he saw Daisy with blood all over her. ‘What’s been going on?’ he asked.

  ‘She punched me for nothing,’ Daisy said weakly. ‘Have I really stabbed her? I didn’t mean to, I only picked up the knife because she was going to hit me again. She grabbed me by the hair as I walked past her.’

  ‘Dad’s looking at it now,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you two? Isn’t it enough that Mum’s dead without this?’

  It was unusual for Tom to be critical, normally everything washed over him. He was a calm person, who liked to take a back seat.

  ‘She started it,’ Daisy insisted. ‘If she walked into the knife then it serves her right, she told me to fuck off and shack up with Joel, she said you all despise me.’

  ‘I’m going to have to take Lucy to the hospital to get this wound looked at,’ Dad shouted from the hall. ‘I’ll talk to you when I get back, Daisy,’ he added ominously, and the front door slammed as he left.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her.’ Daisy looked up at Tom, pleading to be believed. ‘She’s such a bitch, Tom. I bet she’s telling Dad a whole load of lies right now.’

  It wasn’t clear if Tom believed her or not, but he got some ice from the fridge and held it against Daisy’s nose until the bleeding stopped.

  As Daisy sat there she told him exactly what had happened and why, but Tom still seemed to think she was mainly to blame. ‘Why didn’t you just refuse to get into an argument?’ he said, his normally sunny face contorted with anxiety. ‘You know what she can be like.’

  ‘I can’t take insults like that and say nothing,’ Daisy said wearily. ‘Nobody could. Can’t you imagine how hurtful it is to be told I’m a cuckoo in the nest here? Am I, Tom? Is it true what she said, that you and Dad despise me?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Lucy was just jealous because you were in the limelight today, everyone admiring the cakes and flans you made, saying how nice you’d kept the house and what a comfort it must have been to Mum to have you looking after her. She was hurt that she didn’t get any compliments.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t do anything to get them,’ Daisy retorted. ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to do it all alone. She wouldn’t help me, if you remember. I’m every bit as upset as anyone else at losing Mum, but I couldn’t stay moping in my room, someone had to prepare things.’

  Tom gave her the same despairing look she’d often seen on her father’s face. Dad was a person who didn’t like confrontation, or being asked to take sides. ‘Your nose is badly swollen,’ he said, and it sounded like a pretext to get off the subject of his sister. ‘I’ll get you some brandy, and maybe you’d better go to bed.’

  There was nothing Daisy wanted more than to sleep. She’d been up since six that mo
rning preparing the food and she was totally drained now. ‘Okay, but will you explain my side of it to Dad when they get back?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘Perhaps it would be best if I moved out,’ she said.

  He looked at her for a moment without replying.

  ‘You think that’s the answer, don’t you?’ she said, tears starting up again.

  ‘I don’t know, Daisy,’ he said wearily, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. ‘But I know I’m sick of being piggy-in-the-middle.’

  Chapter Two

  Daisy woke as Fred jumped on to her bed to lick her face.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said sleepily, pulling the duvet up to cover herself. But Fred burrowed his nose under it to find her, and she was suddenly wide awake and remembering the events of the night before.

  She had heard Dad and Lucy come back from the hospital at about half past ten, but they went into the sitting-room with Tom and shut the door behind them. Someone must have come up later to see if she was asleep, otherwise Fred wouldn’t have been able to get into her room this morning, but she hadn’t heard them. She wondered if it had been her father wanting to get to the bottom of what happened with the knife.

  She touched her nose gingerly. It felt very sore, so she reached out for a mirror on her bedside table, at the same time noticing it was only seven o’clock.

  Her nose was badly swollen, and there was bruising under both her eyes, but although it made her look gross, at least it was evidence that Lucy wasn’t blameless. Joel had said he was going to come round in the evening and take her out for a quiet meal, but she didn’t think they’d be going anywhere now, not with her looking as if she’d been in a road accident.

  She lay down again and tried to get back to sleep, but her mind kept churning over the previous day’s events. She was ashamed that such an important day had been trivialized by her and Lucy fighting, wishing she’d walked away and ignored her sister when she started the argument. If Joel hadn’t had to return to work straight after the funeral, she doubted anything would have happened. Lucy was never nasty in front of him.

  Yet she’d called him a pig. Was that just to rile Daisy, or did she secretly hate him too?

  Daisy sighed deeply. One of the things she liked best about Joel was the fact that he got on with everyone. After so many years of having boyfriends no one approved off, it felt good to be with someone who was admired and respected. Trust Lucy to undermine the one thing Daisy was sure of.

  She closed her eyes and remembered when she first met Joel at a wine bar in Hammersmith over a year ago. She had noticed the big man wearing a tight black tee-shirt and jeans sitting at the next table to her and her girlfriends. In fact she’d whispered to them that he looked like a sex bomb. After a few drinks she’d knocked her handbag on to the floor, and the contents, much of it embarrassing, had spilled all over the place. He’d leapt up to help her pick everything up and had teased her about having a spanner and a screw-driver, asking her if they were burglary tools.

  At the time she was sharing a flat with some girlfriends just across the road from the wine bar and she’d often voiced her opinion that it was impossible to find a man who was solvent, kind, reliable, trustworthy and sexy Yet Joel turned out to be all those things and more. He made her laugh, he was strong and fit, and he was charmingly old-fashioned too.

  Joel believed in real courtship. He bought her flowers the first time he took her out, and didn’t try to get her into bed until their third date. Yet once they did go to bed, they were never out of it. In all her relationships with men she’d never known such utter bliss.

  Maybe it was as well that they had all that wild passion then, because it had come to a somewhat abrupt end. First Joel got accepted by Hendon Police Academy, then she’d moved home again because her mum was ill, and they’d had precious few opportunities lately for anything more than a quick snog.

  ‘Do you want to marry him?’ she asked herself, recalling how her mother had said she must be absolutely sure. A year ago she would have had no hesitation in answering yes to that question, but Joel’s new career and Mum’s illness had changed the relationship. She loved him just as much, but they never had time for fun any more. They were almost like an old married couple, meeting for a chat and a cup of tea, except even old married couples lived together and had opportunities for sex.

  Of course, she was jumping the gun anyway. Joel talked loosely about getting married in a vague, well-into-the-future sort of way, but he’d never actually proposed. She supposed that if she asked him if she could move into his flat with him he’d agree, but did she really want that?

  She just didn’t know. He worked such long, odd hours, she hadn’t even got a job, and leaving here just because of Lucy could be a serious mistake. But then she was an expert on serious mistakes, she seemed to have made them all. Looking back, she could see she had lived her life as though she was a piece of driftwood, being tossed this way and that by the boyfriends she’d had, never really making decisions for herself.

  She should have gone into catering or hotel management work when she left school at sixteen, because she had a flair for cooking and was good with people. But the boyfriend she had at the time didn’t want her to work unsocial hours. Looking back, that was a joke because he didn’t work at all, and all they ever did was stay in his grubby bed-sitter, watching TV and making love. To add insult to injury, he ditched her for a nurse, and nurses’ hours couldn’t be more unsocial.

  Daisy’s next serious love affair was with a car parts salesman. He lived in Leicester, and she stayed with him in his hotel room whenever he was in London overnight. As she always had to make herself available for him, she couldn’t start a night-school course then. Later she discovered he was married with three children, and it took her a long time to get over that betrayal.

  So it went on. Work was just something she did for money, her main concern was pleasing the current man in her life. There had been quite lengthy periods without a man, of course, but then her mind was always full of where to find the next one, never thinking she should take some time out and discover what she really wanted for herself.

  Daisy compared herself to some of her friends for a moment. Cathy was in computers, Sarah was a financial adviser, and Trudy worked for a travel agent. What was it about each of them that made them so ambitious and hard-working?

  It was true they’d all done better than her at school and had furthered their education with various training courses, yet the one thing which the other three shared, which she realized she had overlooked before, was that they didn’t come from backgrounds like hers.

  She suddenly understood why they often teased her. Trudy came from a council flat in Hammersmith, the other two were estranged from their parents and had been living alone since they were eighteen. None of them had ever had either the material things Daisy had or the benefits of intelligent, loving and supporting parents. So it wasn’t really surprising that they were hungry for the good things in life, and unlike Daisy knew the only way they were going to get them was through their own hard work.

  Ashamed of herself, she got up and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt to take Fred out. As she walked down towards Turnham Green with Fred pulling on the lead to get to the grass, her thoughts turned from herself to Lucy. She wondered how badly cut her sister’s arm was, and if they could make it up today.

  The sky was a sullen grey and it looked as though it was going to rain later. But walking with Fred lifted her spirits slightly, for the way he ran around enthusiastically sniffing every last tree, post or seat was amusing. He too had been very confused for the last few days. He kept going up to her parents’ bedroom and looking through the door as if he expected to see Mum there. While Lorna had been in bed during the day, he’d got into the habit of going up there to keep her company, even though prior to her illness the bedrooms were out of bounds. Now Dad kept chasing him off downstairs again, and poor Fred must be wondering what they’d done with Mu
m, Daisy thought, for he’d been very much her dog.

  That was another problem: what would they do about Fred when Daisy went back to work? It was hardly fair on him to be shut indoors alone all day when he wasn’t used to it.

  Daisy was out much longer than usual as Fred kept running off when she tried to put him back on the lead. As she opened the front door her father was coming down the stairs, already dressed in casual trousers and a sweat-shirt.

  He frowned when he saw her. ‘I think we’d better talk,’ he said sharply.

  Daisy put the kettle on and began laying the kitchen table for breakfast. ‘Don’t bother with that,’ he said impatiently. ‘I want to know what on earth you thought you were doing sticking a knife in Lucy.’

  ‘I didn’t stick it in her,’ she said indignantly, and went on to explain that Lucy had only herself to blame as she’d grabbed hold of her hair.

  ‘I know all that,’ he said impatiently. ‘Tom told me. But how could you even think of threatening your sister with a knife?’

  ‘Because she did this to me for no reason whatsoever,’ Daisy said, tapping her nose. ‘She was like a madwoman. I picked up the knife so she’d back off. You should have heard the things she said!’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ he insisted. ‘Lucy had just been to her mother’s funeral, for God’s sake, she was upset. Surely you could have seen she couldn’t be rational?’

  ‘It was my mother’s funeral too, and so was I upset.’ Daisy’s voice rose high with hurt. ‘It seems to me you share Lucy’s opinion that I’m just a cuckoo in the nest and have no rights or feelings,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Of course I don’t, but you are five years older than her and I expect some restraint from you,’ he said, his face flushed with irritation. ‘I can’t be doing with any more fireworks between you two.’

  Daisy didn’t have restraint, she tended to be bullheaded, charging in when she should have stopped to think. She was so hurt because Dad seemed to be putting all the blame on to her that she struck out, ‘Well, thanks a bunch, Dad, for taking into consideration that it was me who took care of Mum for all these weeks. Lucy didn’t care enough for her when she was alive to even wash her hair for her. It was me too who got everything together in the last few days, with no help from Lucy.’ She paused to take a breath and saw no sympathy on her father’s face, only irritation.