A Place for Us (22 page)

Martha

August 2008

M
ARTHA HAD ONLY
realized how bad things were when it was too late.

The day after Bill and Karen’s marriage, Daisy said she didn’t feel well. David had gone off in a taxi first thing for his long-awaited knee operation, the first return to normality after the half-romance of the peculiarly rigid wedding day.

“Don’t let her push you around,” he’d said as Martha had helped him into the car. “See you tomorrow. Okay?”

She’d kissed him. “I won’t. She doesn’t do that anymore, David, honestly.”

He’d sighed and smiled. “You always let her play you, darling. Don’t do it. Be Martha. Be strong.”

Martha had brought Daisy a cup of tea, up to the old bedroom that had been first hers, then Cat’s, and, since Cat had left first thing that morning, back to Paris and her new life, Daisy’s once more. She had heard their awkward good-bye. “It was good to see you again, Catherine. . . . If you’re ever in India, come and stay with me!” Daisy had said, and Cat, halfway to the car where Florence was waiting to drive her to London, had turned back.

“Oh, gosh.” She took a step forward, and Martha’s stomach lurched. “Really? I’d love to,” Cat had said, her mouth opening into a smile, her eyes shining. “When can I come? Will I stay with you? Will we ride on some elephants?” Daisy looked at her, bemused, incredulous, a lazy half smile playing on her face. Then, flushing with anger, Cat had shaken her head. “I’m joking. You know, that’s a very strange thing to say.” Her face was ugly. “I’m not going to go to India to see you. You must know that by now, surely. That’s all you have to say to me? You don’t once ask
me how I am or what my life’s like? Don’t you care?” She shrugged her slim shoulders, as if the simplicity of the question was too painful for an answer. “Doesn’t matter. Good-bye, Daisy.” She looked up at the house, festooned with wisteria like a wedding garland. “Bye, house.” Martha felt then that she was saying good-bye forever, and she was worried about Cat; and then, later, the moment was lost, after everything else, wasn’t lodged in her mind. A rare slip, when she prided herself on always knowing when they needed her.

•   •   •

“You’re the only person in this family I don’t think I’ve tried to kill,” Daisy said to her mother after Cat had left. She was sitting in bed with the cup of tea. Martha sat down on the bed.

“You do say some silly things,” she said carefully, because Daisy never got hysterical. When she was born, she hadn’t cried. A mewl as she came out, and then—nothing. The cottage hospital thought the baby might be ill, at first. Martha knew she wasn’t, though. Just calm, taking it all in. Her daughter had stared up at Martha, her eyes dark pools like liquid mercury, open from the start, not like Bill. She was always calm on the surface, and you never knew what was coming next or what in particular had triggered it. One summer in Dorset, after she kicked over the sand castle he’d spent hours on the beach making, normally gentle Bill had hit her really hard,
smack
in the face. Of course, Martha and David had punished him, but not too severely. Daisy had done it deliberately, for no other reason than that he’d been praised by passersby, who’d admired its four towers and handcrafted crenellations, and he had—unusually for Bill—enjoyed basking in the limelight, just this once. After the smack, and Bill’s being sent to bed with no supper, Martha was on edge for the rest of the summer. What would Daisy do to him? Because she knew by now that Daisy wasn’t like Bill, who blustered and cried, or Florence, who became hysterical and clingy. She was different. She was . . . not like the rest of them, and that was all there was to it. She would sit very quietly and then leave, and you never knew what was going on behind those now moss-colored eyes, in that curious head of hers.

At first, they made something of a joke of it. “Daisy? Oh, she’ll either kill us or become Queen,” David used to say. But there were little things, little things Martha noticed about her daughter that started to make
sense; and the more they made sense, the more Daisy frightened her. Florence, caught in her bedroom for ten minutes with the wasps’ nest and the door apparently swollen shut with summer heat, and David running the chain saw, so that no one heard Florence’s screams. And Florence’s hysteria, the crazy things she’d said afterward, the lies about Daisy. It wasn’t true! The cuts and bruises on her arms that Florence whined about to Martha, who, wanting Florence to grow up, wanting Daisy not to be bad, told her not to fuss about them. The Girl Guides’ bring-and-buy sale where the money vanished, and then Daisy was expelled from school for smoking pot, four months later. Martha still thought she was the only one who’d connected the two. Because Daisy took her time, she knew it by then. Just before the Christmas after the sand castle incident, Bill slipped on the floor of the bathroom on some Johnson’s baby oil and broke his ankle.

And it was then Martha realized she was too afraid to talk to David about it, in case he confirmed her worst fears. She didn’t know if he felt the same way. Every morning as the Winters sat at the breakfast table eating porridge or toast, Florence singing Latin verbs in the background and swinging her stockinged legs as she told everyone cheerfully what her day at school held, Bill carefully explaining the principle behind the latest Apollo mission by drawing careful sketches on the table for his father, Martha would watch Daisy in the middle of it all, eating carefully, watching, listening, but never betraying what she thought. A black hole in the heart of the family. Afterward, clearing breakfast away, Martha would shake herself and laugh at her own dramatic tendencies. Ridiculous!

Only she had made her daughter, and when she looked at her, as she did that day in August, she knew her heart. She knew Daisy so well, because she’d seen her a few seconds after she was born, when they handed her to Martha, and the same expression was on her face then as it was now, forty-seven years later. Calm, like Martha—everyone said she was like Martha—but something else too. “She’s a cool customer, this one,” the sister had said, looking at Daisy, tightly swaddled in her mother’s arms. “I’ve never seen a baby that didn’t cry before.”

•   •   •

“What’s wrong, pet?” Martha said to Daisy now. It was nearly lunchtime. She wondered whether Daisy would eat lunch or stay up here.

“I need to talk to you about something,” Daisy said. She fingered the blancmange-colored tassels of the tattered bedspread. “You won’t like it.”

Martha tensed her shoulders, just slightly. “Go on.”

“I’ve not been very happy lately, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Martha said. “What’s up? Something’s up, I can tell.”

Daisy shook her hair out of her face. Dark rings hung below her eyes. “I can’t speak for long.”

“Why?”

She swallowed. “Just can’t.” She put her hand on her mother’s. “Look. I got fired last month. I’m back for good.”

“Fired?” Martha was appalled. “Darling, how come?”

Daisy rubbed her eyes. “Long story. I stole some money. That’s what they said, anyway. That’s what they’ll say if you ask them. But it’s not true. I just borrowed bits from different bits. I’m the only one who knew where everything was. You see? It’s fine.” She pinched the tip of her nose. “But, yeah, it was for drugs. And—well, drugs.”

Martha kept quite still, not knowing how to react. She sensed this was the truth. “Is that all?”

Daisy nodded. “Yep. I’ve screwed up again. It’s a real shame, because it was the one thing I did. In my life. You know.” She sounded almost cheerful. “That’s how it is, I guess. Only got myself to blame. It’s just I wish I could swap myself for someone else sometimes. Just . . .
be
someone else, sometimes.”

A cloud passed over the window and Daisy looked up at her mother.
She’s getting old
. Martha realized it then: her daughter was a middle-aged woman. Not a cruel, fascinating, beautiful little girl. She was past the age when anything she did could be put down to youth or inexperience, and it struck Martha like an arrow piercing her heart. She had made her like this. Hadn’t she?

So she said what she’d always said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

“You’re a clever, talented girl,” Martha said. “I’m so proud of you. You’ll find something else, you can—”

“No,” Daisy broke in, her voice harsh for once. “No. Look, I need your help.”

“All right,” said Martha cautiously. It was usually money. Historically it would be a situation with a teacher at school, and once it had been
picking her up from a police station in Bristol, where she’d been found wandering the streets after forty-eight hours absent from home. But usually, these days, it was money.

“I’ve been up all night, thinking about it,” Daisy said.

“I’m sure you have, darling. Are you sure you can’t appeal? Go back and find—”

But she was cut off again. “Ma, it’s too late for that. It’s too late. They don’t want me back.”

“Can’t you just try—”

“God, I hoped you’d understand. Listen. I’ll probably be arrested if I go back to India, don’t you realize that?”

“Oh.” Martha closed her eyes briefly. “I see.”

“I just need your help, one more time. I didn’t sleep at all last night, going over it all. Can I have a couple of Southpaw’s pills, the ones in the bathroom cabinet?”

David had been prescribed sleeping pills and painkillers to help with his knee, which had been causing him more and more pain in the run-up to the operation. “No, Daisy,” Martha said firmly. “Absolutely not. I said last time was the final time. They’re too strong.”

“Okay, fine,” Daisy said. She took another sip of tea, then lay back and closed her eyes. Martha’s hand reached out to Daisy’s wrist, and she encircled it with her brown fingers. She was hot to the touch. “I might have a sleep. Thanks, Ma. I won’t want any lunch. Just leave me now.”

She seemed to be almost asleep, even then. Martha went out, shutting the door behind her, and stood on the landing outside her daughter’s room for a moment, listening to the quiet, hoping Daisy would find some peace. She knew she’d found the wedding tough. Martha knew that seeing Cat was hard on Daisy, much as she pretended it wasn’t.

Martha shook her head, swallowing back tears, and, picking up the laundry basket outside Daisy’s room, started folding up towels. She found herself humming a tune from
The Mikado
under her breath; it had been on the Proms the previous night as they were clearing up after the (modest) wedding breakfast. It had been a strange wedding, she thought; and her mind wandered. Thinking things over, trying to work out what was going on so she could act for the best. Karen’s mother seemed nice—should they invite her down for the weekend in the autumn? Cat’s life in
Paris troubled her somehow—did she need to talk to her about it? Florence’s behavior was a little strange, but she seemed happy. Something was on her mind, something nestling there.

When Martha went to the bathroom five minutes later, she wondered if she’d hear Daisy snoring, as she was wont to. She even smiled at herself in the mirror while washing her hands. Perhaps Daisy was mellowing in her old age.

The prickling, uncertain feeling she could never entirely get rid of, that was what was bothering her, not her hip, not those headaches. . . . And suddenly, with a small cry Martha flung open the bathroom cabinet. But she knew what she’d see even before that. The sleeping pills were open, and the bottle was empty.

Martha pushed open the bathroom door, kicking the towels and sheets out of the way, stumbling as her foot caught on a pillowcase. She fell to the floor, crying out, and then she remembered she was alone: Florence had taken Cat to London, David was gone. Gone. She staggered toward Daisy’s bedroom.

She knew before she opened the door what she would see. Daisy was lying on the bed, head pulled back, but she wasn’t snoring. Her eyes were half-open, just like when she was a baby. Martha leaned over, her heart pounding so hard she couldn’t hear anything else. She cried out her daughter’s name, over and over. She shook her, but she didn’t move.

Then she saw the note, in Daisy’s neat, tiny handwriting, splashed with tea.

Dearest Ma,

Don’t be sad. I’d already taken the pills when you came in. I’m glad I got to talk to you before I started to go to sleep. I have only done what I wanted to do. I know how to do it, too, I’ve been planning it for a while. One of the reasons the charity sacked me was drugs—heroin. Heroin, yes, I know. Some kind guy from an NGO got me hooked on the stuff a few years ago. You’d expect better from a charity worker, wouldn’t you? But it’s a good way to kill yourself if you know how to mix it, and with what. I’ve picked up a few things along the way, haven’t I?

I’d run out of things to do, and I wasn’t any good at any of the things I did do. Never was, we all know it, don’t we. And I hate being back here. Dad’s a fake, it reminds me every time what a fake he is. You know I hate how he’s lied about everything. Where he comes from. Where Florence comes from. She’s his bastard, isn’t she? I know she isn’t yours. I remember that summer you went away, and you came back with a baby, and we were supposed to believe it. He had an affair, didn’t he? He lied to you. I know she’s his, he loves her more than me, more than Bill, you can see it.

I get these bits of rage when I can’t see straight and I want to—I don’t know. Kill something, I suppose. I always felt I didn’t belong here. But then, not anywhere. I tried so many places and I went as far away as I could and it’s just I don’t belong anywhere.

I can hear you singing “The Sun Whose Rays” as I write this, and I wish you sang more. You used to all the time and now I think you’re sad. Thank you for saying you wouldn’t give me the pills. It makes it much clearer, doesn’t it?

Ma, can you bury me here, next to Wilbur? In the garden. Wilbur was my friend, and he was my idea.

Tired now. Please make sure Catherine okay? She

There it ended.

She stood in the hot bedroom and looked down at her daughter, face slack, limbs heavy, at rest at last.