When I Was Otherwise

by Stephen Benatar

  She gave her bark of mirthless laughter.

  “Fit for the Mardi Gras, I’d say! She could have led the parade in all those royal junketings last year…” She hesitated. “No, was it last year or the year before, that Silver Jubilee thing? Wait…the year before was the hot one, wasn’t it? How did anyone survive?”

  The Silver Jubilee had been in 1977. Now it was ’79. But they felt her mumblings were rhetorical. They thought she mightn’t appreciate comment.

  Daisy remained silent for a while.

  “Anyway, it was good of you both to accompany me,” she observed eventually, a little formally and still somewhat grudgingly.

  “We were glad to be able to do it.” The short respite had regenerated Malcolm and he said nothing about the inconvenience of his and Phoebe’s having to take the whole day off.

  “I’m only thankful that your mother and uncle didn’t come. Let alone your brother.”

  “Dan would have been perfectly willing to do so. And I’m sure Andrew doesn’t know the first thing about it.”

  “He soon will, I suppose.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Don’t you?” The silence hung, provocative. “No, I couldn’t have borne it. They’d probably have agreed with everything they heard. Oh, they mightn’t have said so, not to me, not right out, but… Well, you can always tell with those two.”

  It wasn’t so much that she had forgotten about Marsha’s older son as that she simply didn’t consider him worth bothering with.

  “Always bleating such darn fool things as, ‘Well, at our age, Daisy,’ or, ‘Anno Domini, you know. Plain Anno Domini…’” (She had put on her contemptuously falsetto voice.) “Why? That’s what I don’t understand. And why should I let myself be lumped together with that pair? Be made over into their image? Especially by your mother? ‘At our age, Daisy! At our age, Daisy!’ Unimaginative and blinkered and boring—that’s what it is. Besides, of course, being totally untrue.”

  Malcolm held his tongue. No wonder she was upset. The ignominy, in Daisy’s eyes, of hearing her age brought up in court. Not merely mentioned. Discussed.

  Bandied about.

  The ignominy. The irrelevance.

  Six years older than the century. And she had tried to claim—in a stricken, barely audible voice and in dogged refutation of the printed evidence—that she was twenty years younger than it.

  No wonder she had cried.

  But didn’t she realize that there were other forms of violation besides that? Malcolm smiled to himself, a little grimly—and postponed the ordeal of trying to educate her. “Well, here we are at last! Dear old Notting Hill.”

  “You can’t say dear old Hendon Central,” muttered his aunt, wanting to express something about their arrival in Notting Hill but certainly not pleasure nor even strong relief.

  “Dear old Hendon Central,” said Malcolm.

  “Ha! Central!” exclaimed Daisy. “I always enjoy a good joke, don’t you?” She added with deep scorn: “It’s so far off the map that even Columbus couldn’t have found it.”

  Malcolm laughed, with genuine amusement. “I do like the idea of Queen Isabella of Spain saying, ‘Go, Sir Christopher, discover Hendon Central!’ Perhaps that’s what he was really looking for when he stumbled across America and had to make do with that.”

  But Daisy was not to be diverted.

  “You’re very callow,” she remarked coldly. “You have no idea what it’s like having to drag your knees over all those pavements. I always said it was suburbia.”

  She paused a moment before adding the ultimate withering refinement.

  “These days I call it Lost Horizon.”

  19

  And this was more or less the refrain of the whole afternoon and evening. Not that Daisy didn’t enjoy herself. After a sandwich and three cups of generously laced tea she needed very little encouragement to put her feet up—on a pouffe—with her shoelaces undone and her coat now draped across her lap and thereby covering both ankles. Then, with her head lolling back against a wing of the chair and her Woman’s Own half-fallen from her grasp, she was almost instantly asleep, though this was something she would strenuously deny. “No, dear, I just had my eyes closed. It’s very soothing to the retinas.” (“Snoring must help them too,” whispered Phoebe to Malcolm.) Afterwards, they had their supper at a Spaghetti House and then went to the Electric, where they saw a reissue of The Great Gatsby. Daisy didn’t much care for the story but she enjoyed the dresses and the tunes of the twenties and several times started humming a raucous accompaniment, much to the annoyance of the audience and the embarrassment of her companions. What was amazing was the way she could apparently quite forget her troubles for fairly long periods, be chuckling and zestful and wholly caught up in the moment, and then revert to her grumbles with a disconcerting unaccountability—only to be whisked back into merriment some minutes later by an equally unexpected shift of the mercury. One instant she was sandwiched between them and nearly dancing along the pavement, “’The Great Gatsby’, did they call that? Well, give me ‘The Great Victor Herbert’ any day—la-da-da-da—da-da—da-da,” (trilling ‘The Blue Danube’ by Strauss), and the next, sitting over milky coffee in a Greek restaurant, was declaring, apropos of nothing that had just been said, “No, it’s no good. I shall simply have to get away from that place. My mind is totally made up.”

  “But, Daisy, you can’t! Where else would you go?”

  Malcolm was more horrified than Phoebe. He knew the performance at first hand, knew it because it was he who’d always had to see to the packing and unpacking, the placating of formerly benign, now shrilly indignant landladies, the dismal trek from one bed-and-breakfast place to another, a month here, six weeks there, sometimes merely a fortnight, have you got a room on the ground floor please, she’s not too good on stairs, oh yes perfectly all right in every other way, have you by any chance some slightly thicker curtains that won’t let in the early morning light? The smiles and sweetness and stoicism at the beginning, on both sides. The final vituperative exchanges.

  “You’re all right where you are,” he added slowly, trying to introduce some irresistibly hypnotic cadences.

  But of course she was never all right where she was. It was always the place where she’d been last, no matter what sort of hellhole she had termed it at the time, in which she’d felt at her most comfortable and contented. “I was well off then,” she would say. “I can’t think what ever persuaded me to move!”…the implication being—although she never actually put this into words—that it was you who’d chiefly wanted it.

  No good reminding her of biting draughts and noisy radio-playing neighbours and the foul and stinking lavatory—with puddles of urine stagnating round its base—and the bath she couldn’t get out of, and the light and heating which suddenly went off if she had forgotten to put more money in the meter, and the proprietress who kept knocking at her door to find out what in heaven she had meant by her latest uncalled-for comment in the hall: remarks made either on her way out or on her way in, and either to a passing tenant or to the bed-sit world in general… “Yes, dear,” she would say, “but in this life there will always be inconvenience! You have to smile on it as best you can, remember that God tests those he loves, and hope you’re managing to earn yourself a respectably high score.”

  Yet this didactic, sweetly forbearing turn towards philosophy was invariably retrospective, as it were. Never actual and of any help.

  However, if you said to her, “Well, Daisy, it certainly wasn’t me who wanted you to move,” she would reply at once, “No, dear, of course it wasn’t; did I ever say it was?” in the sort of humouring tone which intimated she was reluctant to apportion blame and anyway by now, with any luck, you might have learned your lesson.

  And the worst thing about this was: you never quite knew if she believed in her own little fantasy or not. You were inclined to think she did.

  Malcolm gave a sigh. He would have liked to ask how she felt she wa
s doing in her current set of examinations but he contented himself with something less contentious.

  “I thought you were happy living with Mother and Dan.”

  Indeed she had now been there for more than two years. It was amazing: the sort of staggering information you usually came across only in The Guinness Book of Records.

  “Oh—happy? Who looks for happiness these days? At best, a little pleasure here and there. While I had the car, perhaps, it was—almost—bearable.”

  “But you’ve got everything you need. It’s clean and comfortable and…well, knowing what Dan’s like, I don’t suppose it costs you very much. And Mother waits upon you hand and foot. There’s companionship whenever you want it. What more could you possibly ask for?”

  “A little life,” said Daisy, crushingly.

  “Good God, you can’t have everything!” said Malcolm, with impatience.

  Phoebe, being ten years younger than Malcolm, was always inclined to match her own approach to his. “You know what the only other answer would be, Daisy?”

  “A dose.”

  “No—don’t be silly. A home.”

  “That’s all I want: a real home, with laughter and talk and stimulation, where things go on. Like this one. I shouldn’t have thought it was such a lot to ask.”

  She seemed to have forgotten that for the moment they were sitting in a restaurant; and again it was hard to know whether she was willfully misunderstanding, making a poignant little bid for sympathy.

  “What I meant was,” said Phoebe, with conscious brutality, “a home for elderly people.” She couldn’t, even at that point, quite manage to say old.

  Daisy stared at her.

  Then slowly she turned her eyes on Malcolm. “Does that happen to be your viewpoint, too?”

  “I think you must learn to recognize when you’re well off.”

  “A home for elderly people?”

  “A home with your brother- and sister-in-law; who care for you and feel concerned.”

  “Pish!”

  “It’s true.”

  “Codswallop!”

  He smiled and attempted to put his hand upon hers but she wouldn’t let him. “It’s neither pish nor codswallop,” he said. “And you know very well it’s not.”

  “Is that your last word?”

  “My very last.”

  “Then if you won’t help me I shall have to find somebody who will.”

  She spoke with dignified simplicity; strong under the weight of disillusion, her faith in human nature by no means totally destroyed.

  “I used to think that you two were one in a million.” She smiled regretfully. “I’ve often told you so. But…,” with a sad though stoical shake of her head, “put not your trust in princes! Now I shall simply be obliged to search for some new friends.”

  And what’s more, thought Malcolm, she would certainly find them. She went into a milk bar and five minutes later a perfect stranger—usually male and usually young—was buying her coffee, offering her cigarettes, exclaiming at her reminiscences, being delighted by her vitality, bemoaning her misfortunes. At a first meeting, or even a second or third, Daisy could be charming…with the additional fascination of seeming far more sinned against than sinning. And because in her own words her victims (sic) always appeared to make a beeline towards her, Malcolm saw her as a sort of vampire bee, who thrived on youthful idealistic blood, a vampire bee he still couldn’t help but feel protective towards, even fond of, despite the many times he himself had been stung by it and suffered an accumulatively debilitating effect.

  The analogy was not perfect. The sting was retractable. Her victim was the sucker.

  She arose from the table. She picked up her shopping basket with the Daily Telegraph she’d found at the Spaghetti House now lying on top of it, concealing her handbag, letter-writing materials and library books. She also took her stick in hand and drew herself up to her full height—far more impressive than it ought to have been.

  “Thank you for your hospitality. Perhaps you would be kind enough to direct me to the bus stop?”

  “Madam, don’t be daft. Whatever you said, you couldn’t dissuade us from driving you home.” He had brought his own car, not hers.

  It was the quietest journey they had ever made in Daisy’s company. Occasionally she sniffed. She sometimes cleared her throat. If she was asked anything, she replied just briefly and in exceedingly clipped tones. Only once did she initiate a piece of information.

  “And I’ve got many other friends already. There’s Edgar and Vera. Bill. Countless students from the Hendon School of English.” (Descendants of Félix and Homayoun.) “Madge Fairweather. And I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned Mr Patrick. He’s the man who does my hair—the salt of the earth if ever anybody was—and I tell you this right now, quite openly and in all sincerity, he would do anything for me. Absolutely anything.”

  She added: “And then there’s your father. I’m sure he would be heartbroken—heartbroken—if news should ever reach his ears of my being cast off so very shabbily.” She elucidated. “Yes! Dumped like a mangled umbrella by the stony wayside.”

  Her elucidation wasn’t particularly helpful…when in some ways the preceding remark had been the most surprising, not simply of the evening, not simply of the whole day, but of all the forty years Malcolm had known her.

  20

  But she should never have given up the flat—large and inconvenient and uneconomic though it was. She could have taken in a lodger, couldn’t she? It was the biggest mistake of her life and they were fools who had counselled her. Sell up, find yourself a room, purchase an annuity! How could she ever have let herself be influenced?

  Yet, of course, she hadn’t. She had chosen to forget that. She had nearly always made her own decisions.

  No, the truth was—after Marie had died she could hardly wait to get away from Marie’s flat. Every inch of it was a reminder. How many occasions had there been, even during the brief period of her needing to arrange things, when she’d imagined she had heard a call from Marie’s bedroom? That weak, beloved call? How many occasions when she had actually been on the point of hurrying in?

  Why, there was even one time, she remembered—unawares, she had been sitting at the piano—when she’d suddenly turned her head, fully expecting Marie to be about to walk into the room…and this despite the fact that Marie had been bedridden for the previous twelve months; dependent on a wheelchair for several years before.

  There’d even been the start of a silly welcoming grin upon her face.

  People had often said to her that Marie should go into a hospital, that Daisy couldn’t be expected to look after an invalid old lady, day and night, without assistance and without a break. But Daisy didn’t look upon Marie as an old lady; merely as someone who’d been born about a quarter of a century earlier than herself and was therefore all the richer in wisdom and experience. Indeed, she hardly even looked upon her as an invalid, because the part of her that really mattered was just as lively and as loving as it had ever been, despite the limbs that now wouldn’t function, the lungs that increasingly gave trouble. Marie in a ward for geriatrics—it was unthinkable. She had dismissed all such advice impatiently; and it was now the greatest comfort of her life that she had.

  Even of those last times there were so many happy memories. For instance, she had frequently invited in a few close friends for a ‘party’, which had largely consisted of playing charades at Marie’s bedside. But in the final months this had got to be too tiring and gradually Daisy came to rely less and less on other people. She was ever thinking up fresh ways to entertain her. She prepared monologues in the manner of Ruth Draper. She taught herself some simple—and even not so simple—conjuring tricks; for one performance she actually acquired a live rabbit! She learned to do things with playing cards too. And Marie liked it when she mimed to the gramophone or danced an elaborate tango. For this Daisy bought a special string of beads and a cigarette holder; or sometimes held a rose between
her teeth.

  Her props were inventive. The tramp’s costume, for example, could almost have been loaned by the great Charlie himself—although it was not as Charlie that she scored perhaps her most popular and oft-repeated success; that was as Burlington Bertie, from Bow.

  Yet their entertainments were not always so rumbustious: piano-playing, with the doors kept open—board games—even simple flower-arranging.

  And it was certainly the one period in her life when Daisy became quite housewifely. Partly, this might have been in atonement for the few months of her marriage when, despite her husband’s own precarious health, she hadn’t really cared. She could have coped with sickness very well—but not with that unexpectedly weak-kneed mentality which had accompanied it. Now she read recipe books by the dozen and did everything she could to tempt a jaded appetite.

  Marie particularly liked a certain walnut layer-cake. Even towards the end, when such food was entirely out of the question, Daisy baked a fresh one every week—to have in the tin, “just in case”, she always told herself. She usually gave it to the cleaning woman to take home.

  A few weeks before she died Marie had a mild stroke and became senile; although, again, Daisy never referred to it as that. She had simply “withdrawn a little…to get ready”. Daisy tried to see it in the light of a retreat—with leafy, dappled, rosemary-scented walks—and she still vehemently insisted upon nursing her. She carried on with daily readings too: no longer Cranford or Daddy Long Legs or I Capture The Castle but now more often poetry: on the off chance that some of it might penetrate and—along with gentle images—bring gentle dreams. She also read aloud the Book of Common Prayer and she still played the piano: Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms: the more tranquil, tuneful, tender passages.

  Later, when she moved, she had the piano put into a furniture repository; that and several of the bigger pieces which she couldn’t take with her but which she couldn’t bear to sell. Afterwards she used to exasperate the men at John Bayes because she so often wished to look at her things. She would sometimes spend a whole afternoon in dusting and polishing or else in just sitting and remembering. Once she even arranged for old Mr Matthews to go there to tune the piano. But in the end her hands became too arthritic. Even if she found a place where she’d be allowed to have so large an instrument, she couldn’t believe she’d ever again be able to play it properly. Her attempted recitals at the repository grew weekly more frustrating and inept.