by Sue Townsend
Mrs Daisy Fairfax-Lycett
D. Fairfax-Lycett
Daisy Fairfax-Lycett
Mrs Hugo Fairfax-Lycett
DFL
Diary, this can only mean one thing.
I searched for her diary but couldn’t find it. Sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall. Phoned Pandora but only got her answerphone.
Hello, you have reached the Right Honourable Pandora Braithwaite BA, MA, DPhil, MP. If you consider your call to be of sufficient importance, please leave a brief concise message, no longer than thirty seconds. If I concur that your call is worthy of a reply, I will ring you back.
I left a message saying that I had lost my hair, was confined to bed, had a painfully sore mouth and that I thought my wife was in love, possibly having an affair and was fantasizing about marriage to Hugo Fairfax-Lycett.
*
Pandora rang back half an hour later and said, ‘Aidy, you sound as though you’re wallowing in self-pity. Force yourself out of bed, have a shower and pull yourself together. Ask Daisy outright if she’s in love with that pea-brained wanker, Fairfax-Lycett.’
I did everything she said, until Daisy came home. Diary, perhaps if I had Latin or Mediterranean blood I might have found it easier to confront my wife and accuse her of adultery, but my pure English blood was of no help to me. I didn’t quite know how to tackle the subject. She was very kind to me during the evening and brought me some ice cubes for the ulcers in my mouth.
Monday 17th March
Chemo.
Woke with a feeling of dread, knowing that I would have to speak to Daisy about Hugo Fairfax-Lycett today. However, when Daisy brought me a cup of tea in bed she was dressed in her business suit and high heels and said that she would have to go into work ‘to finish the brochure’, which had to be at the printer’s in the morning. She said she was taking Gracie with her because Hugo’s girls from his first marriage were visiting and they had offered to take Gracie on a pony ride.
I said, ‘So you’ll be playing happy families, will you?’
Daisy said, ‘Certainly not, you know I hate card games.’
I said, ‘You know what I mean, Daisy.’ She looked as though she was about to say something, then appeared to change her mind and left without speaking.
When they had gone, my mother came round to ‘look after me’. I protested that I was perfectly able to look after myself but she stripped the bed and remade it with clean linen and helped me change my pyjamas. She washed my face and hands with a soapy flannel and was about to clean my teeth when I wrestled the toothbrush from her and did it myself. While she was tidying the bedroom, tut-tutting over Daisy’s discarded clothes, she kept shooting nervous glances at me.
I asked her what was wrong.
She said, in that unconvincing way that women have, ‘Nothing, nothing.’
After she had given several deep sighs, I tried again, saying, ‘Something is wrong, Mum. What is it?’
She said, ‘No, Aidy, don’t make me tell you.’
I tried yet again. I said, ‘I can see that you’re bursting to tell me whatever it is.’
She threw a pile of Daisy’s dirty underwear into the linen basket and said emotionally, ‘Don’t think it gives me any pleasure, Adrian. This is breaking my heart.’
‘This what?’ I asked.
‘This Daisy situation,’ she said. ‘The whole village is disgusted. Does Daisy think we’re all blind and deaf?’
I said, ‘I presume you’re talking about Daisy and Fairfax-Lycett?’
It was like a dam breaking. She told me that everybody had their own Daisy and Fairfax-Lycett story to tell. Wendy Wellbeck had seen them holding hands in his car outside the post office, Lawrence the hairdresser had witnessed a close embrace in a lay-by on the A6, a woman who cleans at Fairfax Hall had found Daisy’s NatWest debit card in his bed, and Tom Urquhart had heard him boasting in the lounge of The Bear about his ‘adorable half-Mexican firecracker’.
Bernard came to the bedroom door and said, ‘You’re not the first man to be cuckolded, my old flower. If you marry a bobby-dazzler like Daisy, it’s always a risk that some bounder will want to take her away from you.’
My mother defended me, saying, ‘Aidy was a good-looker, until he lost his hair.’
Bernard said, ‘The man is a complete bastard. He wants horsewhipping. He told me that he’s got a magnificent library. When I asked him about the collection, he said, “Oh, I know nothing about the books. I never read, but I do love my library.”’
When they’d gone, I lay back on my pillows. Any normal man would have been angry but all I felt was sadness and a dreadful apprehension. I got up in the afternoon and peeled some potatoes and carrots for dinner. I found a minced steak and shortcrust pastry pie in the freezer. I made some Oxo gravy. It was only when I poured the gravy into Daisy’s favourite little blue and white jug that I started to cry.
When my wife and daughter returned home, they were both flushed and happy. I sat on the lid of the lavatory and watched as Daisy bathed Gracie.
Gracie said that ‘Hugo’ had given her a pony ‘that is my very own’.
I said, ‘What? Fairfax-Lycett has given Gracie a pony? Isn’t that ridiculously generous?’
Daisy splodged L’Oréal No Tears on to Gracie’s wet hair and said, ‘Hugo has got half a dozen ponies hanging around doing nothing. He can easily afford to give one away.’
As part of the bathtime ritual Gracie threw herself backwards into the clear blue water so that her hair streamed out and the soapy bubbles floated away. When she was upright again, I asked her what the pony’s name was.
She said, ‘I’ve called him Daffodil.’
Daisy said, ‘You should see the daffodils at Fairfax Hall, Aidy. Talk about “beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze”.’
I continued, ‘“Continuous as the stars that shine, and twinkle on the Milky Way, they stretched in never-ending line, along the margin of a bay.”’
We exchanged a quick smile.
I left them and went to put the dinner on.
Gracie fell asleep before it was ready and was put to bed, and Daisy said that she couldn’t eat a thing. Hugo had provided lunch and afternoon tea. At 9 p.m. my mother rang and asked if I had confronted Daisy yet. I said no, put the phone down and went to bed.
Tuesday 18th March
My mother drove me to hospital this morning. After treatment I sought Sally out and told her that my wife was having an affair with the local landowner.
She said, ‘It sounds a bit like Emmerdale.’
I said, ‘No, it’s more Mills & Boon. Intellectual cancer-stricken husband betrayed by half-Mexican wife with fox-hunting floppy-haired lord of the manor.’
We both laughed, although I’m sure neither of us thought it was the slightest bit funny.
After dinner Glenn rang from Afghanistan to say that ‘it wasn’t him who was dead’. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said that he was the third in a convoy of vehicles and that the second vehicle had been blown up by a roadside bomb. One of his mates had been killed and another had had a leg amputated.
He said, ‘It’ll be on the news tonight, Dad. I didn’t want you to see it and think it was me what was dead.’
I said, ‘But, Glenn, you know the army always tells the next of kin before they announce it to the media.’
There was a long silence, then he said, ‘I just wanted to tell you, Dad.’
I said, ‘It must have been a horrible experience.’
He said, ‘It was, Dad. I get on with everybody at home, Dad. It ain’t nice being in a country where people hate you and want to kill you.’
We said our goodbyes and I was just about to discontinue the call when he said, ‘Quick, Dad, before you go, remind me, why are we fightin’ in Afghanistan? I keep forgettin’.’
I babbled something about democracy, freedom, women’s rights, defeating the Taliban and that, according to Gordon Brown, ‘Alky Aida�
�� were training their followers to attack us here in England.
Glenn said, ‘But ain’t they got training camps in other countries in the world, Dad?’
I had to agree with the boy that this was probably the case.
He said, ‘Thanks for that, Dad. Cheers.’
When Daisy returned home from work, she was very subdued. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had smudged. She looked as though she’d been crying for hours. I asked her what was wrong.
She said, ‘Nothing.’
She took a bottle of wine out of the fridge and fetched two glasses from the shelf. After she had poured the wine and lit a cigarette, she sat down and traced a pattern on the tablecloth with a fingernail.
My heart went out to her and I said, ‘It’s Hugo, isn’t it?’
She laid her head on the tablecloth and started to sob.
I said, ‘Are you in love with him, Daisy?’
She nodded her head, then she lifted her face and said, ‘It’s horrible being in love with him. I can’t enjoy it and neither can Hugo. We’re both so worried about you.’
I said sarcastically, ‘I’m sorry I’m spoiling your fun.’
She said, ‘Don’t be horrible, Aidy. We are genuinely worried about you. Hugo thinks the shock of finding out could kill you.’
I said, ‘Hugo probably hopes it could kill me.’
She said, ‘You’ve got him wrong, Aidy. He’s a very sensitive and caring person. We didn’t ask to fall in love.’
I said, ‘Are you sure he loves you?’
‘Oh yes!’ she said. ‘He’s never felt like this before. He loved me from the moment he saw me lighting a cigarette outside The Bear. He says that I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. He adores me. And we can talk to each other, Aidy. He admires my intellect.’
‘Well, he has very little of his own,’ I said.
‘Hugo is extremely clever in his own way.’ She said, ‘Can you skin a rabbit? Do you know how to drive a quad bike? Could you manage a staff of twenty-five? Just because he’s not got his head stuck in a book all day…’
I said, ‘I could tell you’d been crying when you got home.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve been crying in his arms. He’s asked me to live with him. I told him that I couldn’t possibly leave you. Not while you’re so ill.’
I said, quite calmly, Diary, ‘I don’t want you checking my pulse as soon as you wake up in the morning. You’d better go to him, Daisy. Why should my cancer keep you here against your will?’
I pleaded with her but she refused to leave. When she’d gone into the bathroom to repair her make-up, I took her mobile out of her bag and speed-dialled Fairfax-Lycett.
He answered immediately, ‘Darling.’
I said, ‘It’s not your darling, it’s your darling’s husband.’
He said, ‘Ah! Splendid! How are you, old chap?’
I said, ‘I know everything. I’m sending my wife over. You can keep her.’
He said, ‘Look, this is terribly decent of you, Mole. When my first wife left me for a National Hunt jockey, I went after the leprechaun with a riding whip. The bastard couldn’t sit on a horse for the rest of the season.’
I said, ‘We Moles bide our time, but when our wrath is directed at you its force is devastating. The woman in the Spar shop who short-changed my mother had to move to the next village.’
He wheedled, ‘Look, I think we should meet and talk about this man to man. May I come over?’
Diary, this was the last thing I wanted, a night of dramatic confrontations and hysterical declarations of love and tear-soaked protestations of guilt. But that’s what I got. When Fairfax-Lycett arrived, we greeted each other with icy politeness but the meeting soon deteriorated into a dissection of mine and Daisy’s marriage.
At one point Daisy accused me of causing her ‘mental anguish’ by ‘telling her things about politics’. She ranted, ‘I’m really not interested who said what on some parliamentary select committee. You must be the only person in the whole of Britain who watches BBC Parliament. You only watch it because you want to letch over that hard-faced slapper, Pandora soddin’ Braithwaite.’
Diary, this was only partly true. I actually enjoy being informed of the finer details of the Finance Bill.
She said, ‘When I first fell in love with you, I thought you were fashionably geeky, but I’ve since found out that you’re not fashionably anything, you’re just a geek!’
It was here I lost control and picked up her Tate Modern mug and threw it at the party wall. It shattered very satisfactorily.
Daisy screamed, ‘That mug was a precious link to my old life, you cruel bastard!’
Fairfax-Lycett mostly kept his mouth shut, but when my mother came round to find out what was going on and called him ‘an inbred twat-face with a chin like an illegal banana’, he roared, ‘I’m taking Daisy away from this low-life hellhole.’
Daisy turned to my mother and said, ‘Will you look after Adrian, Pauline?’
My mother said, ‘I’ve looked after him for almost forty years. I was thirty-six agonizing hours in labour for him because of his unusually big head. I’m hardly going to give up on him now, am I?’
Daisy went into our bedroom and I heard the suitcases being pulled down from the top of the wardrobe.
Bernard came in from ‘visiting a friend’ and found the kitchen table occupied by me, my mother and Fairfax-Lycett, none of us speaking to the others. He proceeded to cook himself eggs, bacon and toast and eventually ate his meal reading Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson, which he propped up against the fruit bowl. Bernard seemed to have a calming effect on us, and when Daisy came out of the bedroom carrying two obviously heavy suitcases, we all said our goodbyes courteously enough, though Bernard did say to Fairfax-Lycett, ‘I can remember a time when a man who stole another man’s wife would have to take her to one of our colonies. You are a disgrace, sir.’
After Daisy and Fairfax-Lycett had gone, my mother cried a little, saying, ‘I loved Daisy. She was the daughter I should have had.’
Bernard said, ‘I used to be in love with Princess Margaret. I wrote to her every day, had a standing order at Interflora to send her a dozen dark red roses every Thursday. I couldn’t bear it when she married that little fellow with the gammy leg, Antony Armstrong-Jones. I went to Beachy Head, wrote a last letter to Margaret and was about to chuck myself over the edge when it started to rain. So I walked back to the car and drove home.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ve still got me and your mother.’
So, Diary, the nightmare begins. My health and happiness are now in the hands of my mother, Bernard Hopkins and the National Health Service.
Wednesday 19th March
When I went into the kitchen early this morning, I found Daisy sitting at the table. She had made a large pot of coffee.
I said, ‘You’ve come back. I knew you would.’
She said, ‘We didn’t talk about Gracie. I want to take her with me. You can’t look after her, can you?’
I had a vision of Gracie riding Daffodil and shouting, ‘Daddy, look at me!’ to Fairfax-Lycett.
‘No,’ I said, ‘Gracie stays here, with me.’
Daisy poured me a cup of coffee and said, ‘Gracie won’t be happy without me. And quite honestly, Adrian, I don’t think you, your mother or Bernard Hopkins are fit for purpose. I’m going to wake her up in a few minutes, get her dressed and take her to school and it will be me who picks her up this afternoon.’
Thursday 20th March
I should have fought harder for her but I could hardly have dragged the kid out of Daisy’s arms, could I? I had to pretend to Gracie that she was going on a holiday to Fairfax Hall and was forced to smile as I waved her goodbye.
So it’s just me and Bernard Hopkins who inhabit this house now. How did it come to this?
Brett came round at lunchtime and offered to ‘take Fairfax-Lycett out’.
I said, ‘I take it that you don’t me
an “out” for a meal or “out” to the theatre?’
Bernard said, ‘It’s criminal parlance for murder, Adrian.’
I said, ‘I know what it means, I have read about the Kray brothers in some depth.’
Brett said, ‘I’m only trying to help, Bro.’
Bernard said, ‘As a matter of interest, how much would it cost to take somebody out?’
Brett said, ‘In the provinces? Frighteningly little.’
*
Later, as we were driving to the hospital, my mother said, ‘Daisy’ll soon get tired of living at Fairfax Hall with all those servants.’
After overtaking a tractor on a blind corner, she said, ‘And who wants to trek over to Paris to buy clothes, when you can buy stuff in Leicester that’s more or less the same?’
‘Paris?’ I queried.
‘Yes, he’s taking her for the weekend. He “wants her in Dior”.’
I said, ‘I liked her in Monsoon.’
My mother patted my hand and said, ‘I’d like to see his face when he walks into his bedroom and sees her haute couture thrown all over the floor.’
When I got home, I found a letter on the mat. It was an invitation to Nigel and Lance’s wedding. It was addressed to Mr Adrian and Mrs Daisy Mole. There was an RSVP so I wrote back:
Dear Nigel and Lance
Thank you for inviting myself and my wife to your wedding on 19th April. I will be delighted to attend. However, I cannot speak for my wife as she is now living with her lover, Hugo Fairfax-Lycett. Her new address is: Fairfax Hall, Mangold Parva, Leicestershire.
Yours sincerely,
Adrian
Daisy
It’s not your eyes I miss,
It’s not your hair.
Your lips I’d like to kiss,
But you’re not there.
It’s not your skin I need,
It’s not your face.
With every book I read,
I feel your grace.
I scan a newspaper,