Daisy's Wars (40 page)

What surprised Daisy even more was that she gave birth to a son. Once again she had it in her mind that Sheridan women only had girls, probably because she never actually saw her sister’s
son, she thought sadly. When she’d been informed that she had been safely delivered of a healthy boy she had almost asked, ‘Are you sure?’

Peter was mesmerised by the child and by the change in his life. He had been married to Elizabeth for twenty years and they had considered their family complete with the arrival of Libby. If
anything they were thinking of the years in the not-too-far distant future when their daughters would be off their hands and they could please themselves once again. When Elizabeth was killed
he’d thought his life was over. He had only just managed to keep going because of the girls, and then he had spotted ‘this comely young wench’, and here he was, living a new and
happy life – and with a son!

He blustered a bit when it was suggested by his now married daughters that he had always secretly wanted a son. Certainly not, and how could they say such a thing, he had adored his daughters
and there hadn’t been the slightest thought in his mind that a son would have been nice. He was lying of course, and everyone knew it; all men wanted sons, even when they lied and denied
it.

The child was called David, after Peter’s father, and he was the handsomest child ever seen. And not just because Peter said so, for everyone he asked told him so, and his daughters and
his wife laughed.

David was golden-haired and blue-eyed, as both his father and grandfather had been, and he laughed a lot, mainly because his father made it his business to make him laugh a lot. Peter took David
with him as often as he was allowed, and on any excuse: to give his mother a rest, to show him some unforgettable sight that he would remember for the rest of his life, to show him off, really.
Being an older father he had made his fortune, he wasn’t striving to establish himself as he had been when Laura and Libby were children, and so he had more time to spend with his second
family. Daisy would watch them together, endlessly talking about some treasure the little boy had discovered, a nicely patterned stone, a branch, a bird flying overhead, and feel incredibly happy
that she had been able to give this man, who was so full of love and good humour, the one thing he lacked: a son.

Three years after that, when Peter was sixty years old, Daisy had a daughter. All Peter’s male friends teased him and he loved it, telling them that it really was nothing
to do with him this time, he had been cuckolded as they had all once told him he would be, because the little girl had red hair and no one in his family had ever had red hair. Daisy was shocked
when she saw the baby for the first time. There was red hair in her family, but again, for some inexplicable reason it hadn’t occurred to her that any child of hers could inherit the
gene.

When Peter came to see his daughter he found Daisy holding her, looking into her tiny face and crying.

‘She looks like my mother,’ she said, ‘and my sister, Kay.’

‘And that’s what she shall be called,’ he said, putting his arm around Daisy and kissing her hair. ‘Hello, little Kathleen,’ he said to his daughter.

‘And Elizabeth?’ Daisy suggested.

‘Kathleen Elizabeth,’ Peter agreed.

In a very short time Katie proved to be a musical child. Peter didn’t notice it, but Daisy did; Daisy had been here before. Any instrument Katie picked up she could quickly learn to play,
fast outgrowing musical toys and throwing them at the walls in frustration. At school she was given a recorder, and after exhausting its abilities in a few minutes was deeply insulted at being
offered something so silly. She had a beautiful voice, but was plagued by having perfect pitch, which meant she was never satisfied with any sound she made, though she was worse with any sound
anyone else made. If her father whistled or her mother sang she would hold her ears and beg them to stop, because they were out of tune, which just made her father whistle even louder and
considerably less in tune. As a teacher at her school struggled to get the choir to reach a note, Kathleen could bear it no more and ran to the music room, hit the right note on the piano
repeatedly and shouted at the children, ‘Listen! Listen!’

So it became clear that though she had inherited the ability of her grandmother and her aunt, she had a very different personality from either. Katie Bradley was strong-willed; she knew her own
mind and would argue with her own shadow, and she had a temper as red as her hair. David, on the other hand, was a good-natured, easy-going boy, and he was the only one who could handle his sister
when she was in one of her prima-donna strops, and he did it by making her laugh, just as his father did.

Unlike his father, though, David was very clever academically, and scored so highly on his IQ tests at school that they did them twice more to make sure, then they brought in student teachers to
witness the third series of tests. The only thing that impressed David about the exercise was that he was loaded with sweets for his troubles.

Peter was delighted, but bemused. Compared to him David was a genius.

‘But I mean,’ he said to Daisy, ‘where does he get it from?’

‘Well, sometimes a musical gift goes with maths, sometimes it’s art,’ Daisy explained, teasing him. ‘So even though he’s missed my family’s musical gift,
he’s got the maths that can go with it.’

‘So what you’re saying,’ he said archly, ‘is that they get nothing at all from me?’

She put her arms around his neck and pulled his head down level with hers. ‘Wanna try again?’ she asked seductively.

‘Why, Daisy Bradley!’ he said in mock shocked tones. ‘You hussy! But seriously, Daisy, what are we going to do with them?’

‘What do you mean – “do with them”?’

‘Well, they’re both bright in different ways. What do we do about schools?’

‘I think schools are pretty well set up to cope with academically bright children,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s the ones who aren’t bright they have trouble with. David will
be fine, it’s Katie who’s the problem.’

‘I don’t see that she has a problem at all. It’s David I’m thinking about really. I don’t want him to grow into one of those serious-minded eggheads who can’t
laugh or enjoy life.’

‘Peter, he hasn’t a chance of that, even if it’s what he wants. He can be clever at school, but he comes home to this idiot father who was born minus a serious muscle in his
body!’

‘Well, I wouldn’t agree with that, though we’ll leave it till later, but surely all we have to do with Katie is make sure she has the music lessons she needs,’ Peter
replied.

‘No, that’s what we don’t do, Peter. We have to let her decide.’

Daisy was remembering her sister, Kay, who had a voice like an angel, as everyone always said, and who spent her life going to one class after another, as long as the family could afford it.
She’d had singing lessons, dancing lessons, piano lessons, but she’d had no real life of her own. Just because she’d had that wonderful voice, Daisy used to think, was no reason
why she shouldn’t have a choice about whether she should use it. The family, her mother mainly, made the decision that Kay could sing, so she had to sing, and there was never the slightest
sign that Daisy ever saw that Kay got any enjoyment from it. There wasn’t enough money to help her to use all of her musical talent, something that wouldn’t trouble Katie.

Perhaps that was the root of Kay’s problems, that she wasn’t able to explore all of her gifts fully, but only skimmed across each one. Her singing was settled on because it was the
cheapest, there were no expensive instruments to buy, and maybe dancing co-ordination was beyond her but all she had to do with her voice was let it out. She had never developed in any other way
that Daisy could see, though. She was just a voice all her life, no opinions, no happiness or sadness, except when it came to childbirth, of course.

Maybe that was what Kay’s childhood of being trained to continue her mother’s aborted ambitions had done to her. It made her only able to react to basic things, like pain, or hot and
cold. It had troubled Daisy all her life. She had never known if there had been something wrong with Kay since before birth, some mental defect, or if she had been conditioned to be the way she was
by their mother’s failed ambitions. She just stood where she was told to and sang as instructed, but whose fault was that, if anyone’s?

It really made Daisy think. All her sister had lacked were the funds to help her reach whatever musical goal she had, but there had to be many thousands of children out there like Kay, who had
ability but would never get the chance to follow their dreams.

So Daisy used Peter’s business contacts, bled them dry, he said, to raise funds to help musically gifted children, and she called it Kay’s Musical Trust. It became her third baby,
though she had to keep repeating the argument that they weren’t aiming to churn out superbly trained musicians, geniuses and stars who were emotionally stunted, but individuals who could take
their gift wherever they wanted to take it. If they didn’t want to become household names, well that was fine, too. It was all about letting them stretch and develop a talent they had been
born with, and then they could make their own decisions about what they did next.

Meanwhile, it was agreed that Katie would have whatever music lessons she wanted, as long as she stopped throwing things at the walls, and would be allowed to make her own choices, too. Daisy,
Peter and David lived through the piano period, the violin, viola, cello and harp octaves, followed by the trumpet, saxophone and bassoon experiments, before Katie took up art and that was that.
She was by far the most boisterous of the two children all through their lives, so when she left home for Art School it was natural that the house seemed very quiet.

David withstood it all with his usual good humour, went to Cambridge, studied the classics, got a very good honours degree and immediately took off to see the world as if he was going two stops
on the tube.

Peter never got over his bemusement. His younger children both amazed and delighted him, but they were a puzzle to him also.

‘They’re so beautiful, aren’t they?’ he asked, every inch the proud father. ‘David’s handsome and clever and I really like him; he’s a fine chap, you
know? And as for that daughter of yours—’

‘Mine?’

‘Yours and the milkman’s,’ Peter said. ‘No one in my family had red hair or was ever that … that … I don’t know—’

‘Argumentative, highly strung, annoying?’

‘Well yes, all of that, but she is such a beauty, isn’t she? I can get drunk on her faster than I can on champagne. But those clothes she wears!’ he grimaced.

‘She’s an art student,’ Daisy said. ‘It’s the uniform.’

‘Would be nice to see her in a dress, though, wouldn’t it?’

‘My advice is never to say that to her,’ Daisy laughed. ‘She’d organise one of her Women’s Lib demos against you outside the gates.’

‘I suppose I just don’t understand them. Must be old age,’ he sighed.

‘You don’t have to understand them,’ Daisy teased him, ‘you only have to accept them as they are.’

‘But do
you
understand them?’

‘Of course I do,’ she teased him, ‘but I’m from a different generation!’

25

So with both their children off their hands, Daisy for the first and Peter for the second time, they began to think about retiring to warmer climes. Mainly for Peter’s
sake because he was feeling the cold more and more, though Daisy didn’t say that. He was still odd; age hadn’t brought a great deal of sense to his character.

One day he announced that he was going out to buy a coat.

‘But you’ve got a coat,’ Daisy said.

‘No I haven’t, not a warm one anyway.’

‘You have,’ she insisted, ‘you only bought that nice cashmere one a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Oh, that’s gone,’ he said dismissively, ‘which is why I need a new coat. You never listen to a word I say, Daisy.’

‘That’s my problem, I
do
!’ she replied. ‘If I didn’t life would be much easier. So what happened to your coat?’

‘What coat? I haven’t got one.’

In anyone else she would have suspected senility, but Peter had always been like this, exasperating.

‘The cashmere one.’

‘Oh, I told you, it’s gone.’

She felt she had been trapped in this conversation forever. ‘Where has it gone?’ she shouted at him.

‘Well, I came across this little man in the street playing an accordion,’ he explained, ‘and he looked terribly cold, Daisy, so I gave him my coat.’

‘You couldn’t just have given him a couple of bob?’ she asked.

‘Well, a couple of bob wouldn’t have kept him warm, now, would it?’

Daisy shook her head. ‘So now you’re going out to buy another one?’

‘It’s that or freeze,’ he replied. ‘Thought I might have a look in that second-hand place in town.’

‘You can’t buy a second-hand coat, Peter!’

‘Well I’m not buying a new one! What if I meet another little man in the street playing an accordion and I have to give it to him? I mean, you obviously disapprove of my giving him a
new one. You have no logic, Daisy, I’ve always said it, women have no logic.’

‘I swear to God,’ she said to Mar later, ‘living with him is sometimes like living in a music-hall double-act.’

‘He’s been like that as long as I’ve known him,’ Mar said admiringly. ‘Has he told you about Professor Theodore Quibbe?’

Daisy looked at her, puzzled.

‘And the local Flower Show?’ Par joined in, then he and Mar laughed loud enough to burst a normal person’s eardrums. ‘Can’t believe you don’t know about
that!’

‘Well, tell me!’

‘You do know he enters the Flower Show every year, don’t you?’ Mar giggled.

‘Yes, in the summer our life revolves around it. He’s always sneaking about, having sly looks at other gardens.’

Mar and Par looked at each other and the usual peal of laughter rang out. Daisy waited.

‘Started years ago, during the war. He said he was worried that the show was dying off, so he’d snoop around gardens and pick out plants he reckoned should be entered, then
he’d sneak back again when there was no one about and nick them.’