A Valentine for Daisy. Betty Neels
which made it impossible for her to stand on her own two feet. She knew that it was hard luck on Daisy, although they never discussed it, but she had the good sense to see that there was nothing much to be done about it. Daisy was a darling but she had never had a boyfriend and it had to be faced—she had no looks to speak of. Pamela, determined to get as many A levels as possible, go to college and take up the scientific career she had decided upon, none the less intended to marry someone rich who would solve all their problems. She had no doubts about this since she was a very pretty girl and knew exactly what she wanted from life.
Daisy wove her careful way through the fast-flowing traffic, past the emerging tourists from Wilton House, and turned left at the centre of the crossroads in the middle of the little town. Her father had worked in the offices of the Wilton estate and she had been born and lived all her life in the small cottage, the end one of a row backing the high walls surrounding the park, on the edge of the town. She wheeled her bike through the gate beside the house, parked it in the shed in the back garden and went indoors.
Her mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, stringing beans. She was small like Daisy, her hair still only faintly streaked with grey, her pretty face marred by a worried frown.
‘Darling, it’s lamb chops for supper but I forgot to buy them…’
Daisy dropped a kiss on her parent’s cheek. ‘I’ll go for them now, Mother, while you make the tea. Pam will lay the table when she gets in.’
She went back to the shed and got out her bike and cycled back to the crossroads again. The butcher was halfway down the row of shops on the other side but as she reached the traffic-lights they turned red and she put a foot down, impatient to get across. The traffic was heavy now and the light was tantalisingly slow. A car drew up beside her and she turned to look at it. A dark grey Rolls-Royce. She eyed it appreciatively, starting at the back and allowing her eyes to roam to its bonnet until she became aware of the driver watching her.
She stared back, feeling for some reason foolish, frowning a little at the thin smile on his handsome face. He appeared to be a big man, his hair as dark as his heavy-lidded eyes…it was a pity that the lights changed then and the big car had slid silently away before she was back in the saddle, leaving her with the feeling that something important to her had just happened. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said so loudly that a passer-by on the pavement looked at her oddly.
Pamela was home when she got back and together they set about preparing their supper before sitting down in the pleasant little sitting-room to drink the tea Mrs Pelham had made.
‘Been a nice day; have you enjoyed it?’ asked Pamela, gobbling biscuits.
‘It’s not been too bad. The new children seem all right. I’ve got four this term—that makes fifteen. Two of the new ones are twins, a girl and a boy, and I suspect that they’re going to be difficult…’
‘I thought Mrs Gower-Jones only took children from suitable families.’ Mrs Pelham smiled across at her daughter.
‘Oh, they’re suitable—their father’s a baronet or something,’ said Daisy vaguely. ‘They’re almost four years old and I think they’ll drive me mad by the end of the term.’
Pamela laughed. ‘And it’s only just begun…’
They talked about something else then and after supper Daisy sat down at the table, doling out the housekeeping money, school bus fares, pocket money, and then she put what was over—and there wasn’t much—into the old biscuit tin on the kitchen mantelpiece. They managed—just—on her wages and her mother’s pension; just for a while after her father’s death they had got into difficulties and her mother had appealed to her for help, and ever since then Daisy sat down every Friday evening, making a point of asking her mother’s advice about the spending of their income. Mrs Pelham always told her to do whatever was best, but all the same Daisy always asked. She loved her mother dearly, realising that she had had a sheltered girlhood and marriage and needed to be taken care of—something which she and Pamela did to the best of their ability, although Daisy was aware that within a few years Pamela would leave home for a university and almost certainly she would marry. About her own future Daisy didn’t allow herself to bother overmuch. She had friends, of course, but none of the young men she knew had evinced the slightest desire to fall in love with her and, studying her ordinary face in her dressing-table mirror, she wasn’t surprised. It was a pity she had no chance to train for something; her job was pleasant enough, not well paid but near her home and there were holidays when she could catch up on household chores and see to the garden.
She was a sensible girl, not given to discontent, although she dreamed of meeting a man who would fall in love with her, marry her and take over the small burdens of her life. He would need to have money, of course, and a pleasant house with a large garden where the children would be able to play. It was a dream she didn’t allow herself to dwell upon too often.
The weekend went far too quickly as it always did. She took her mother shopping and stopped for coffee in the little town while Pam stayed at home studying, and after lunch Daisy went into the quite big garden and grubbed up weeds, hindered by Razor the family cat, a dignified middle-aged beast who was as devoted to them all as they were to him. On Sunday they went to church and, since it was a sultry day, spent the rest of the day in the garden.
Daisy left home first on Monday morning; Mrs Gower-Jones liked her assistants to be ready and waiting when the first of the children arrived at half-past eight, which meant that Daisy had to leave home an hour earlier than that. The sultriness had given way to thundery rain and the roads were wet and slippery. She was rounding the corner by Wilton House when she skidded and a car braked to a sudden halt inches from her back wheel.
She put a foot to the ground to balance herself and looked over her shoulder. It was the Rolls-Royce, and the same man was driving it; in other circumstances she would have been delighted to see him again, for she had thought of him several times during the weekend, but now her feelings towards him were anything but friendly.
‘You are driving much too fast,’ she told him severely. ‘You might have killed me.’
‘Thirty miles an hour,’ he told her unsmilingly, ‘and you appear alive to me.’ His rather cool gaze flickered over her plastic mac with its unbecoming hood framing her ordinary features. She chose to ignore it.
‘Well, drive more carefully in future,’ she advised him in the voice she used to quell the more recalcitrant of the children at Mrs Gower-Jones’s.
She didn’t wait for his answer but got on her bike and set off once more, and when the big car slid gently past her she didn’t look at its driver, although she was sorely tempted to do so.
She was the first to arrive and Mrs Gower-Jones was already there, poking her rather sharp nose into the various rooms. As soon as she saw Daisy she started to speak. The play-rooms were a disgrace, she had found several broken crayons on the floor and there were splodges of Play-Doh under one of the tables. ‘And here it is, half-past eight, and all of you late again.’
‘I’m here,’ Daisy reminded her in a matter-of-fact voice, and, since her employer sounded rather more bad-tempered than usual, she added mendaciously, ‘and I passed Mandy and Joyce as I came along the road.’
‘It is a fortunate thing for you girls that I’m a tolerant employer,’ observed Mrs Gower-Jones peevishly. ‘I see that you’ll have to make the place fit to be seen before the children get here.’
She swept away to the nicely appointed room where she interviewed parents and spent a good deal of the day ‘doing the paperwork’, as she called it, but Daisy, going in hurriedly one day over some minor emergency, had been in time to see the Tatler lying open on the desk, and she was of the opinion that the paperwork didn’t amount to much.
The children started to arrive, a thin trickle at first with time to bid a leisurely goodbye to mothers or nannies and later, almost late, barely stopping to bid farewell to their guardians, running into the cloakroom, tossing their small garments and satchels all over the place and bickering with each other. Mondays were