Daisy next drew in cobalt blue what she maintained was a donkey, but could easily have been any animal that had five sticks for legs and no ears. Under it she wrote FAR AND AWAY I WISH DO KNOK AND ENTER. She had evidently lost her original train of thought halfway, and this was agreed to be the most obscure of her motifs, particularly taken in conjunction with the drawing. Even Jack sometimes found himself looking at it and wondering what it meant.
The last and, in Aunt Celia’s judgement, most interesting thought, was in livid orange, and was simply ALL THE BEES ARE DED. Aunt Celia hugged and kissed Daisy when she read this.
“I shall never ask her what it means,” she told them all. “It is a thought that lies too deep for words.”
When Mr Bagthorpe saw Daisy’s preliminary decorations of the sitting-room his thoughts were evidently too deep for words as well, because it was some time before he got anything coherent out. Mrs Bagthorpe tried to soothe him by saying that she had intended to have the sitting-room as well as the burnt-out dining-room decorated before Christmas.
“No real damage has been done,” she said, to which Mr Bagthorpe replied that considerable damage would be done to Uncle Parker’s pocket, because the entire bill would be presented to him.
Most of the Bagthorpes had now collected to look at Daisy’s handiwork, and they all set up arguing what would be a fair proportion to charge Uncle Parker, taking into account how many years it had been since last the sitting-room had been decorated, and how much longer it could reasonably have been expected to last. William and Rosie both started doing complicated mental arithmetic, and Jack loudly maintained that Uncle Parker was innocent anyway, because he didn’t like Daisy writing her thoughts on walls, either. Jack thought Aunt Celia should pay the bill.
Had Rosie not been so eager to demonstrate her mathematical powers, she might have noticed that in the general confusion her charge had disappeared.
The murals in the sitting-room had, it seemed, been only in the nature of an introduction to a series of similar ones all over the house. Daisy, with the battle raging below her, must have gone up the stairs backwards on her bottom, sitting on each and writing a thought or drawing or diagram at each stage of her ascent. Aunt Celia later said that these were symbolic and progressive, but nobody else could see it.
Mrs Bagthorpe found Daisy working her way along the landing, and gently persuaded her to go into Rosie’s room, where she was to sleep.
“You can play with any of the toys, dear,” she told her, “and I hope you will be very happy with us.”
She then went down to warn her husband about the stairs and landing, and sent Rosie up to keep an eye on Daisy.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Mr Bagthorpe told her. “We’ve only got Russell’s word for it that she’s stopped lighting fires.”
When Daisy next emerged she had her hair in little pigtails tied with large bows of pink ribbon. Rosie showed her round the family.
“Doesn’t she look sweet?” she asked everybody, but no one could agree with any enthusiasm. It was already clear that Daisy, with or without pigtails, was dynamite.
What rendered the situation even more explosive was an amazing volte-face, later in the day, on the part of Grandma. She had been up in her room brooding while the row over Daisy’s murals had been going on, and did not see them until teatime.
Of her three children, Henry had always been Grandma’s favourite, though she would not have admitted this even under torture. Claud, her other son, was a very gentle man who took after Grandpa and hated arguments. Aunt Celia took after neither. She was, as Mr Bagthorpe and Uncle Parker both agreed (though in a very different spirit in each case), something on her own. She had then gone and unaccountably married Uncle Parker, who had committed the unforgivable crime of running over Thomas in his own drive.
Grandma had tended to lump Daisy in with her mother and father, and had never taken much notice of her as an individual. Grandma was not a very grandmotherly sort of person and had never spoiled her grandchildren as she should have done. She had never cooed over anybody in her life (unless, perhaps, it had been the cantankerous and undeserving Thomas).
When Grandma came down the rest of the Bagthorpes were already at table in the kitchen. They were not talking about the defacement of the walls, on Mrs Bagthorpe’s express instructions.
“Just don’t refer to it,” she told them. “She may not do it any more. And she is our guest, and only four, and must on no account be upset.”
She had told this to the fuming Mrs Fosdyke too.
“There’s no joy in doing this house any more,” Mrs Fosdyke told her. “What’s the use of me sweeping and dusting and polishing and cooking, and the dining-room burnt to cinders and horrible scribbles everywhere you look and millions of tins you don’t know what are?”
“By Christmas the whole place will be like new,” Mrs Bagthorpe promised her. In this she was right. By the end of Daisy’s stay practically the whole house needed redecorating.
“And at Christmas there’ll be a party, and crackers, and the whole thing’ll start over again,” said Mrs Fosdyke fatalistically.
“History,” Mrs Bagthorpe told her inaccurately, “never repeats itself, Mrs Fosdyke.”
“If it did,” she replied, “I should have to consider giving my notice.”
While the Bagthorpes were having tea Mrs Fosdyke was relieving her pent-up emotions by making a considerable rattle. Her temper had not improved when Tess, whose turn it was to Shake Tins, had been asked for salmon and had produced a jam sponge pudding that Mrs Fosdyke kept by for an emergency should she not be able to make her own.
“That’ll go nice with the cucumber in the sandwiches,” she had told Tess witheringly.
The Bagthorpes were now eating cucumber sandwiches to be followed by cold jam sponge pudding. Mrs Fosdyke had declined to heat it up and make custard. There was not nearly enough to go round, and of course no question of opening another, because by the law of averages as many as fifty tins would probably have to be opened before finding such a pudding.
Grandma immediately scented excitement, and perked up accordingly.
“Is something wrong?” she enquired through a mouthful of her first sandwich. “Have I missed something?”
“No, dear,” replied Mrs Bagthorpe, “nothing at all is wrong.”
Mrs Fosdyke upped her clatter by several decibels and Grandma accurately received the signal. She looked round the table for clues and her eye lit on Daisy.
“Who is that?” she demanded.
“It’s Daisy, Grandma,” cried Rosie delightedly. “You see – you didn’t even recognise her – I knew she’d look even sweeter with pigtails!”
“Hmmm.” Grandma was noncommittal. She looked at her son. “You look bad-tempered, Henry,” she told him. “Are you in a bad temper?”
“You should know by now that I am seldom given the opportunity to be anything else,” he returned.
Grandma moved her gaze thoughtfully back to Daisy. She was putting two and two together.
“What has she done?” she asked point-blank.
“Nothing,” said the Bagthorpes in unison.
“We aren’t allowed to talk about it,” said Mr Bagthorpe. “We are to pretend that nothing at all has happened. Are you, by any chance, going blind?”
“Why?” Grandma was startled by the enquiry.
“You came down along the landing,” he told her, “and down the stairs, and you ask what has happened.”
Daisy then piped up.
“Come with me, Grandma Bag,” she said. “I’ll show you what I did. I did some really nice things. It’s just like home now.”
Mr Bagthorpe winced but held his peace.
“Finish your tea first, dear,” Mrs Bagthorpe told Daisy.
“I have finished, thank you, Auntie Bag,” replied Daisy primly. “Sank you very much it was very nice of you to have me. Come on, Gramma.”
Grandma got up and followed Daisy from the room while th
e other Bagthorpes made various facial contortions at one another. Daisy and Grandma were gone a long time, and in the end Mrs Bagthorpe instructed Mrs Fosdyke to put some food aside for Grandma, and told the others they could leave the table. As a man they made for the door. They all went into the sitting-room together. Daisy turned.
“Look!” she said happily. “Look what Grandma Bag’s doing!”
What Grandma was doing was writing her thoughts on the wall with felt tips borrowed, presumably, from Daisy, as she was not known to possess any of her own.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Mr Bagthorpe. “I don’t believe it!”
“What’s she written?” William pushed his way past the others.
What Grandma had written was:
Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore
So do our moments hasten to their ends.
This was one of her favourite sayings when in one of her dark moods, and she had made a fair stab at drawing an orange skull underneath it.
She looked up. They stood together, she and Daisy, staring back at the rest of the Bagthorpes, looking suddenly and uncannily alike. There was not a hint of guilt about either of them – if anything, they each wore a look of unusual and unsullied innocence.
“I like doing that,” announced Grandma at last.
She and Daisy exchanged looks. That moment marked the beginning of what was to become known, in course of time, and not without just cause, as The Unholy Alliance.
Chapter Six
Grandma turned out to be the only Bagthorpe who got any real pleasure out of Daisy’s visit. She had, the moment she took the trouble to notice her properly, at once recognised her as a kindred spirit.
“Daisy is a true Bagthorpe,” she told the others. “She reminds me of my own grandmother.”
“Which one?” enquired Mr Bagthorpe. “The one who ran off with the Welsh grocer, or the one that went mad?”
“She did not go mad,” returned Grandma coldly. “She was merely eccentric. As I hope I am myself.”
“Oh, you’re that all right,” he told her. “And getting more so by the day. Dangerously more so.”
Grandma, having once crossed the frontier of doing the unthinkable, i.e. writing a thought in felt tip on the sitting-room wall, was unstoppable. She wrote her thoughts in the spaces left by Daisy. Some of her thoughts were lines from Methodist hymns inaccurately remembered from childhood, such as:
From trials unexempted
Thy dearest children are
So let us lot be tempted
Above what we can bear.
Others were short and telling:
HENRY IS AN INSUFFERABLE SHOW-OFF
and:
AGE IS WISDOM.
She was pleased with this last, which she thought placed her in an invincible position in the household, since only Grandpa was older than she, and he did not wish to run things anyway.
Mr Bagthorpe, when he came across this, struck it out and wrote BILGE at the side of it, so Grandma went and wrote it in several other places and in the end he gave up and let it stand. He was incensed by Grandma’s new hobby, not only because he was afraid she might start writing on walls in other places when she went out, but also because it fogged the issue of what percentage of the redecorating costs Uncle Parker would have to pay.
Once Daisy had got the place looking more like home, she lost interest in writing on walls and cast round for another outlet. Poor Rosie could do nothing at all with her. Daisy would only let her plait her hair in return for a sweet, and demanded a whole bar of chocolate in return for allowing Rosie the privilege of pushing her about the garden in an old pushchair. She refused to be sung nursery rhymes to, turned down all suggestions of a Teddy Bear’s Picnic in the meadow, and put her hands over her ears if Rosie tried to read her a fairy tale. She declined, in short, to be sweet and cuddly and adoring, and the devoted Rosie was sorely tried, though she never, as a Bagthorpe, gave up.
On the fourth day of her stay Daisy left Grandma happily writing thoughts on the landing walls, and set off in search of something Disparate to Reconcile. It was very unlucky that on this particular day Mr Bagthorpe had gone out into the garden and omitted to lock his study door behind him. (He had taken to doing this since Daisy first arrived. He said that he did not want her thoughts on his walls, and furthermore he felt her vibrations alone would be sufficient to stop his creativity dead in its tracks for weeks, if not months.)
Daisy had a full hour in the study and was very happy and occupied during this time. When she came out she even allowed Rosie to take her by the hand into the garden and push her on the swing. They softly sang together, and Mrs Bagthorpe, who was cutting flowers for an arrangement, looked fondly at them from a distance and thought what an idyllic picture they made.
Idylls, however, are made to be shattered, and Mr Bagthorpe shattered this one very rudely. On his return to his study he realised at once his oversight and hardly dared look at his desk. When he did, his worst fears were realised. He had left lying on his desk his latest script, typed in rough, and beside it the loose pages of the original manuscript. Both were missing. Also on the desk had been a buff envelope, stamped but not yet addressed, in which Mr Bagthorpe had intended to send off his typed draft.
No one but Daisy knew the details of what had happened during that happy and creative hour spent in the study, but repeated cross-examinations did produce some kind of picture.
Daisy, it appeared, had never seen loose typewritten pages before, and what Mr Bagthorpe’s typescript had looked like to her, had been pages missing out of books. As two of the study walls were lined with shelves it had seemed reasonable to Daisy to assume that on them were the books with the missing pages. She discovered, however, that Mr Bagthorpe’s paper was too large for most of the books, and had found a pair of scissors, and adjusted this discrepancy, though being careful in each case not to cut off the number at the top of the pages because she would need this when she started fitting them into books. Mr Bagthorpe’s carpet was accordingly littered with long strips of paper with one or two words typed on each.
Once she had the pages cut to size, Daisy set about the arduous task of inserting them into various books from the shelves. She chose these books quite at random, sometimes because she liked the cover, sometimes because she liked the title. She soon discovered that none of these books had pages missing as she had expected, but this she soon remedied by simply tearing them out anyway. Mr Bagthorpe’s wastebin was filled with shredded pages from books, each numbered from one to eighty, but each from a different book.
Daisy had then turned her attention to the manuscript itself. This, being handwritten, had looked to her like a very long, untidily written letter. She had therefore placed it in the buff envelope. She did not fail to note that it had not been addressed, and knew that it should be, so she made up what sounded an interesting name and address, and wrote it in large capitals. She looked about her, could see nothing else urgently in need of attention, and went off in search of someone to post the letter. It so happened that Mrs Fosdyke was about to go to the village for groceries, and she stuffed the envelope into her bag with ill grace, and went off.
When this later emerged, Mr Bagthorpe put her in the same category as Daisy, and stated that he considered her equally to blame.
“Where in the name of heaven did you think that accursed infant got a stamp for thirty pence from?” he demanded.
“I did not look at the stamp, Mr Bagthorpe,” replied Mrs Fosdyke stonily. “It has never been part of my duties to look at stamps.”
“What was the address, then, for crying out loud?” he yelled.
“Don’t shout, Henry, dear,” interposed his wife.
“I don’t look at addresses, neither,” returned Mrs Fosdyke virtuously.
“Was it England, for God’s sake?” shouted Mr Bagthorpe. “Was it Leeds, Brighton, Rome, Timbuctoo, Japan—”
“It’s no use your asking,” she interrupted. “I never even looked.”
“Gone,” he said. “An original manuscript. Irreplaceable.”
“It is a terrible thing to have happened,” agreed Mrs Bagthorpe sympathetically. “Have a cup of tea.”
“And to crown all,” he continued, “this had just arrived.”
He flung down a brightly coloured postcard with an exotic stamp. It was from Uncle Parker, somewhere in the Caribbean.
“Lovely!” cried Mrs Bagthorpe, snatching it up.
She read aloud:
“‘Celia and I are in Paradise. We wish you were here, especially Henry. There are enough ideas on this cruise to keep him going for a year. Has he won a yacht yet? We like Paradise so much we may even stay on longer at our own expense.’ Oh, isn’t that lovely!”
“Lovely?” shouted Mr Bagthorpe. “If he’s staying on out there, that delinquent daughter of his can be sent after him.”
“Why are you shouting, Henry?” asked Grandma, entering at this juncture. She looked calmer and happier since she had taken to writing her thoughts on walls than she had ever done during her Breathing Period.
“Tell her, Laura.” Mr Bagthorpe threw himself into a chair and buried his head in his hands.
“The child is a true Bagthorpe,” said Grandma when she had heard the story. “There is not another child on earth whose mind would have worked like that.”
“Amen to that,” said Mr Bagthorpe grimly. “And what about my script? I refuse to commit suicide, though I am tempted to.”
“Eventually, Henry,” his wife told him sensibly, “your script will be returned to you with NOT KNOWN on the envelope. It may take a day or two, or even longer, but it will be sent back. You must be patient.”
“Sent back, will it?” said Mr Bagthorpe. “The GPO maintain a resident clairvoyant, do they?”
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