Daisy reached out and clasped both her daughter’s hands in her own. ‘Darling, did you hear me? Did you understand what I said? Aunt Violet telephoned me in the middle of the night to say that Grandma had died. It was very sudden. She had a heart attack and was gone – just like that.’
‘Yes, Mummy, of course I understand.’ She brushed at her tears with the back of her hand and, making a valiant attempt to smile, whispered, ‘I think she came to tell me. She looked lovely, really happy.’
Daisy smiled and hugged her daughter. It was a strange coincidence that Hazel should dream of her grandmother the very night she died; she didn’t want to think it was anything more.
It was a few weeks later when Hazel looked up from her homework and sniffed loudly. Daisy was about to ask if she had a handkerchief when she forestalled her by asking, ‘Can you smell that lovely scent, Mummy?’
Daisy shook her head. ‘No, I can’t smell anything. What sort of a lovely smell?’
‘Oh, flowers, perfume – lily of the valley, I think. Remember how Grandma loved them, said she couldn’t grow them in Australia – too hot and dry – so she had a big bed of them at her house to make up for it. I think it was her favourite scent. Mine too.’ She looked round the room with a rather vague expression, sniffed again then sighed contentedly. ‘I expect she was letting us know she was still around. What do you think?’
Daisy didn’t know what to think. She had smelt nothing out of the ordinary, but if it consoled her daughter to believe her grandmother was still around, she saw no reason to disillusion her. How like Ella she was becoming, in both looks and character. Her mother used to call her strange flashes ‘in-knowing’ and appeared to enjoy her gift although she never took it too seriously, or if she did, she didn’t flaunt it. Daisy, on the other hand, had hated it when her mother had made one of her pronouncements; it had scared her when she was young, mainly because they came true. On very rare occasions, Daisy had a dream that seemed to foretell forthcoming events and she had even had the odd intuitive flash which she could only explain as ‘just knowing’. She had kept these to herself, preferring to deny any so-called psychic sense she might possess; to acknowledge it was too scary. This no doubt explained why it was Hazel, not herself, whom her mother chose to approach.
As that thought slid into her mind, she hastily obliterated it. To accept the thought that her mother’s spirit was still around might have been comforting, but not the thought that Hazel had inherited her grandmother’s gift.
Looking up at her son – at seventeen, he was considerably taller than she was – the absurd thought crossed Daisy’s mind that he was so unlike herself that had she not been present at his birth, she would not have known he was her son. Now, as a young adult, he was more like his father than ever, ‘a real Dobbs’, people were apt to say. This went for his character too; he already seemed middle-aged and, Daisy thought, took life far too seriously.
He was talking to her now – lecturing, rather – as if he was her elder. She didn’t mind this so much as she was used to it. After all, both her children tended to look on her as the juvenile in the family, but today she thought that what he was saying was really none of his business.
‘Please give me that letter.’ She was pleased to hear the firm note in her voice. ‘Where did you get it from, anyway?’
‘It was on your desk.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that a letter on my desk was my business and not actually anything to do with you?’ She extended her hand for the envelope he was holding. He had removed it from its envelope to read so could not use the excuse that it was lying open and he ‘could not help but read it’.
‘It is about Hazel.’ Grudgingly, he extended his hand so that she could take the letter.
‘Ye-e-s?’ Daisy failed to see the reasoning behind his belief that because the letter was about his younger sister, it gave him the right to read it.
‘I wondered what you were going to do about it.’
‘I haven’t decided yet. I will talk to Nutmeg when she comes home this weekend.’
‘And that’s another thing, Mother. Isn’t it about time you dropped that ridiculous name and referred to her as Hazel?’
‘I shall do that when Nutmeg asks me to,’ Daisy retorted, stung by his stress on the words ‘ridiculous name’.
Giles’s response was a sigh. ‘Mother, you don’t seem to realize that Hazel is only fifteen, a child still, and you are her mother. It is up to you to deal with this properly.’
Giles’s patient voice sounded pompous to Daisy; it was also familiar. Richard had spoken to her in just such a voice, each time managing to sap a little bit more of her self-esteem during the years she was married to him. She surprised herself as well as Giles when she rapped back, ‘Please remember I am your mother too, and if you consider yourself an adult then Nutmeg certainly is too at fifteen, allowing for the fact that girls mature so much earlier than boys.’ Defiantly she used the nickname again.
Giles flushed, but the angry retort Daisy expected did not come. Minus the pompous bluster, he sounded tolerably pleasant and much more like a young man of seventeen. ‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘I have told you, Giles. I shall show Nutmeg the letter and see what she has to say. It is Thursday today, so she will be home tomorrow for the weekend.’ She pushed the letter into her pocket and turned to leave the room, throwing back over her shoulder as she reached the door, ‘I will keep you informed.’
She retreated to her own private sanctuary, the little room where she wrote her letters, sorted out accounts and paid bills, did her sewing and, as now, escaped to when things tended to overwhelm her. Mothering teenagers, she was discovering, was a very different ball game from coping with young children. One minute that was exactly what they were – children – the next they were disconcertingly adult. With a sigh, she pulled the letter out of her pocket and reread it. Her daughter, the headmistress wrote, had been ‘apprehended playing with an unsavoury pack of cards and it appeared money was involved’.
Daisy could not imagine what an ‘unsavoury’ pack of cards could be. Surely cards were cards, but as Nutmeg had always had a healthy financial sense, one of the few attributes inherited from her father, she was quite prepared to believe that money had been involved and no doubt to Nutmeg’s advantage. She pushed the letter back into its envelope and shoved it firmly into one of the pigeonholes on her desk. Tomorrow would be soon enough to seek answers. Whatever Giles said, she did not intend to do anything until she knew both sides of the story.
At 4 p.m. the following afternoon, Daisy was outside the school gates to collect Nutmeg for the weekend. Anxious to get things sorted out before Giles confronted her once more, she broached the subject as soon as the car drew away from the school.
‘I have had a letter from Miss Andersen,’ she began.
‘Oh, about the tarot cards.’ Nutmeg laughed. ‘She had no idea what they were. I think that was the crux of the problem.’
‘No doubt. She referred to them as “unsavoury” and suggested you were using them for financial gain.’
‘Wrong on both counts, Mother dear! There is nothing intrinsically bad about tarot cards. They are just a tool for tapping into the subconscious.’
‘Really?’ Daisy was afraid she was getting out of her depth.
‘I suppose you would call them a fortune-telling device.’
‘I suppose I would. And have your friends paid you to tell their fortunes?’
‘Well, yes and no. I have been doing readings for them, but no one has paid me – well, not in money anyway. They … er … well, they do me favours.’
‘Such as?’
‘Maths homework – you know how I hate that. Occasionally, just occasionally if there is nothing I really want doing, they pay me in kind – sweets, chocolate, that sort of thing.’
‘I see,’ Daisy repeated, not sure what else to say. She rather felt the headmistress had overreacted to a relatively innocent pastime. On the other hand, tarot cards….
‘How did you get … caught?’ she asked, adding as an afterthought, ‘and where did you get the cards from?’
‘Matron walked into the dormitory after lights out. We were doing it by torchlight and she must have seen the beam. She read the riot act and confiscated my cards. She must have gone straight to Miss Andersen because I was summoned to her office first thing the next morning and there they were, lying on her desk. I asked for them back, but she refused. Even when I told her my grandmother gave them to me.’
‘Your grandmother gave them to you? But Hazel, how could she? You haven’t seen her for years and … she is dead now.’
‘But she did – well, sort of.’
‘Sort of? Either she did or she didn’t.’
‘Well, to be absolutely truthful, I found them when I was with her in her room one day. They were a miniature deck, wrapped in a silk handkerchief and in a little wooden box. She said I could have them and told me to put them away and that when she came back home, she would teach me how to use them. I hid them in my drawer and forgot all about them till just recently when you made me tidy my room and I came across them.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘I remember smelling Grandma’s lovely lily of the valley scent when I found them, so I thought I must be meant to do something with them. I took them out, looked at them and somehow I knew what they meant and how to use them. So, I took them back to school and, well, you know the rest.’ She paused and then added, ‘Thing is, Mum, I want them back. They were a present from Grandma. That woman has no right to keep them.’
‘No, she hasn’t,’ Daisy murmured without much conviction, anticipating what her daughter was about to say.
‘She wouldn’t give them to me, so you will have to ask her for them.’
Daisy glanced sideways at her daughter who was staring straight ahead through the windscreen. Even so, she recognized the stubborn set of her jaw and knew she would have no alternative but to do as she asked. She had an uncomfortable feeling, but she refused to acknowledge it as premonition, feeling that somehow or other, this whole business would prove to be more than just a letter from a headmistress.
Daisy sighed. ‘I’ll telephone Miss Andersen and make an appointment to see her.’ She had no great desire to confront the formidable Miss Andersen and wondered if she would have the nerve to actually demand the return of the cards.
It was a wet weekend, and more to stop her daughter mooning about the house bemoaning the fact that it was too wet to do anything, Daisy asked if she would help her in some clearing out.
‘Gee, Mum, is that really the most exciting thing you can think of?’
‘To tell you the truth, it is, just at the moment,’ Daisy admitted.
Hazel slid off the wide seat in the bay window. The rain was coming down in relentless sheets from a leaden sky. Giles was swatting in his room – at least, that was what he said he was doing. She was bored with her book, and her newly discovered tarot cards were in the headmistress’s study. Sighing dramatically, she agreed with obvious reluctance. ‘OK, then. What have you in mind?’
‘Your clothes and my desk.’ Daisy had already decided what the biggest priorities were.
‘One condition then,’ Hazel bargained. ‘You don’t throw away any of my clothes unless I say so.’
‘Done!’ Daisy agreed. ‘But you mustn’t throw away anything out of my desk without letting me see it.’
They worked through the clothes first and when they had finished, Daisy was astonished to find that the reject pile was actually larger than the ‘to keep’ pile. A moment’s thought, however, told her that this was not really so surprising; the more clothes Hazel declared unwearable, for whatever reason, the more new ones Daisy would have to buy.
‘OK, Mum, now for your desk.’ Hazel grinned and rubbed her hands together in anticipation.
The wastepaper basket was overflowing with old and worthless scraps of paper, things long since dealt with, when Hazel pressed idly on a small panel below the numerous pigeonholes. To her surprise, it sprang forward, revealing a hidden drawer.
‘Hey, look at this, Mum. Did you know there was a secret drawer here?’
‘Yes, but I had forgotten all about it.’ Daisy’s admission was cut short by Hazel’s exclamation as she pulled out an envelope.
‘A letter! Addressed to you, Mum.’ She waved the envelope tantalizingly in front of Daisy. ‘A letter from a secret admirer, hidden away. How romantic!’ Her teasing note changed to puzzlement as she added, ‘It looks like Grandma’s handwriting.’ Turning it over in her hand, she looked to see who it was addressed to. ‘Marguerite Dobbs – Daisy,’ she read. ‘Only to be opened after my death.’ She stared at it for a moment before reluctantly placing it in her mother’s outstretched palm. ‘Go on, open it,’ she urged, but Daisy tucked it into her pocket.
This was the letter her mother had handed to her all those years ago. She had forgotten its existence till now, and if she had remembered, would not have known where it was. Her fingers closed protectively over the envelope and she shook her head. ‘I’ll open it later,’ she said and pushed it firmly down into the pocket of her skirt. Her gut feeling told her that whatever she had to say, it was for her eyes alone.