‘Mmm – sorry.’ Daisy’s lids had drooped and she had fallen asleep. It had been a big day in every way, physically and emotionally. She opened them now and looked across the railway carriage towards her sister who looked very much awake and was obviously waiting for an answer to some question Daisy had missed.
‘Well, what did you think of Rosie? Do you remember her at all?’ Violet sounded as truculent as Daisy had come to expect.
‘I liked her. I can’t say I remember her, but even if I did, it would be a different Rosie. She would have been so young when I last saw her.’
‘About twenty, I suppose,’ Violet told her after a moment’s thought. ‘I remember her very well. She looked after me most of the time, not only up at the farm but later on when Mother brought us to the Sanders’s place. In fact, she is about the only person I can remember looking after me when I was small.’
Daisy thought this was a bit unfair on their mother but didn’t argue the point. It seemed all too easy to get at odds with her sister.
‘I guess Mother was lucky meeting up with her.’ She wasn’t really one hundred per cent sure about this in view of subsequent events. She frowned slightly as she took her mind back down the years. ‘I don’t really remember anything about … Dad, either,’ she admitted, hesitating slightly. ‘My early childhood memories really begin when Mother brought us to Bendigo. I remember the growing up years as pretty happy.’
‘Oh, they were,’ Violet agreed, ‘thanks to the Sanderses.’
‘You don’t give our mother credit for much, do you?’ Daisy was stung into retorting, wondering why her sister carried such a whopping great chip on her shoulder about Ella.
Violet shrugged. ‘I give credit where credit is due,’ she retorted cryptically.
Daisy sighed and closed her eyes, feigning weariness. When she opened them a short time later, it was to see that Violet really was dozing. With relief, she gave herself up to watching the scenery changing from suburbia to country as they drew away from Melbourne.
Daisy surprised herself by how much she liked Rosie, but it was the instant regard for a new acquaintance, not the renewed liking for an old friend. She smiled inwardly at the thought of the young Rosie and Ella whiling away the long hours on board ship with Rosie’s deck of tarot cards. She had not entirely believed Hazel when she had said that her cards had come from her grandmother, but now it seemed her daughter had spoken the truth. She could understand why her mother had kept quiet about them when she thought how they would have been received in middle-class English society; her own husband, Richard, would have reacted in exactly the same way as Hazel’s headmistress. In fact, he might well have been even more scandalized to discover what his daughter was dabbling in and she indubitably would have been blamed. It was a good thing he was not around to see Hazel expelled from school, she reflected, and the thought was immediately followed by guilt; one should never feel glad because a person was dead, whatever the circumstances and however long after they died.
By the time they arrived back at the house, Daisy was limp with exhaustion and her head was aching with a rhythmic thud. Pleading weariness, she excused herself and closed the door of her bedroom with a sigh of relief.
‘Have a cup of tea and a couple of aspirins,’ Violet suggested, not unkindly.
Gratefully, Daisy took her advice and smiled her thanks when her sister added several biscuits and a banana to the tray of tea. She was, she thought, well meaning; it was just that she seemed to have such a thing about their mother.
With her bare feet stretched out on the bed and her back propped up by a bank of pillows, Daisy reviewed the day. She had been annoyed with Violet for setting up the meeting with Rosie, yet in the end, she had enjoyed it. In all fairness, she was probably far more suited to Bill than her mother had been; she had schooled herself out of thinking of him as her father since she had learned the truth of her parentage.
Because the tea seemed to have done the trick and she hated taking any form of medication, she left the aspirins untouched but ate the biscuits and the banana and drained the small teapot. Stretching thoroughly then consciously relaxing, she closed her eyes and felt a pleasant lethargy overtaking her and her mind slipping into the dreamlike state that often precedes sleep. As she drifted off, she had the oddest feeling that James was in the room with her.
She woke a few hours later, surprised to find that she was fully clothed except for her feet, that it was dark and she was decidedly hungry. All trace of her headache had gone. Swinging herself off the bed, she pushed her feet into her slippers and opened her bedroom door. As she did so, the phone began to ring. Violet had gone to bed, so she hurried to answer it. ‘Hello, James.’
‘Daisy? How did you know it was me?’
‘I – I didn’t,’ Daisy lied, falling into a lifelong habit of denying any trace of the gift her mother had shown. ‘I was asleep when the phone rang,’ she added as if that explained everything. She was glad when James did not call her on it.
‘Sorry to be ringing you so late,’ was all he said, apologetically.
‘It’s not that late, only …’ Daisy glanced quickly at her watch, ‘just after ten.’
‘It’s late here – just after midnight.’
‘Ah, yes, I had forgotten you are a couple of hours ahead of us.’ She wondered what had prompted him to call at all. ‘Vi and I have been in Melbourne all day. I was whacked when we got back and went to bed almost straight away. I had just woken up, as a matter of fact, when the phone rang. There is no one about, so I guess Violet made an early night of it too and the young ones are probably out.’ She stopped abruptly, feeling she was gabbling and not giving James a space to speak, let alone explain his late night call. When he did not say anything, she spoke again, somewhat tentatively. ‘It’s good to hear your voice, James. What …’ her voice faded out uncertainly.
‘Nothing in particular.’ He answered her unspoken question as if she had voiced it. ‘I just felt a need to hear your voice, find out how you are, that sort of thing. I didn’t realize how late it was until I had got your number.’ The explanation sounded weak, even to him, but it was true for all that. He had just had this sudden urge to speak to Daisy. He had been annoyed with himself ever since the ship left Melbourne that he had let Daisy disembark with nothing settled between them. The excuse he gave himself was that it would be difficult to change his plans to meet his stepson in Auckland – James intended to spend the last week of his holiday with Christopher before heading off on the last leg of his journey back to Christchurch.
He tried to explain all this to Daisy, but it sounded more like a garbled excuse – for quite what, he wasn’t sure; not leaving the ship with her in Melbourne, perhaps. He wanted to tell her how much he wished she were with him but ended up by merely asking how she was. It was wishing they were together that had given rise to an irresistible urge to hear her voice.
‘I’m fine, thanks, James.’ Daisy tried to inject some warmth into her voice. She was afraid she sounded cool, even prim, in her desire not to gush and betray how very pleased she really was to hear his voice. ‘I’ve been meeting up with relatives and – things.’ Rosie, she thought, would not appreciate being called a thing.
‘How about adding a trip to New Zealand to your itinerary?’ James suggested. ‘While you are in this hemisphere.’
‘Yes, I’ll think about it,’ Daisy answered with a caution that irritated even herself, so she was not unduly surprised when James sounded impatient when he reminded her: ‘That’s what you said when I mentioned it on the ship’.
‘Yes, James.’ Daisy was appalled to hear herself murmuring this. Had nothing except the name changed from the years of saying, ‘Yes, Richard’?
‘Come on, Daisy. Thinking time is over. If you plan to come, you must do something about it.’
‘Yes, I suppose you are right. It is silly to go back without seeing New Zealand. I’ll make inquiries.’ God, she thought, I might be talking to a travel agent. Why couldn’t I tell him how much I want to see him again?
‘If time is important to you, fly over,’ James advised, unwittingly falling into the role she had assigned to him, but in reality anxious to get her committed while she sounded positive. He nearly added: ‘he who hesitates is lost’.
‘I’ll look into it,’ Daisy promised. ‘Perhaps Hazel would come with me. It would be fun to have her along.’
‘Yes, I would love to see little Nutmeg again.’ James thought that the unlikelihood of her allowing Daisy to change her mind would outweigh having a third person along and he would genuinely like to see the grown-up Hazel. By the time they wound up their conversation he was already planning to see if Christopher might have some holiday owing and could join up with them.
As Daisy replaced the receiver, Violet appeared in the doorway of her bedroom, hair tousled, looking somewhat bemused as she pulled the tie of her robe. ‘I thought I heard the phone ring. Who was it?’
‘It was for me, actually,’ Daisy hurried to explain. ‘A call from New Zealand.’
‘New Zealand! Who do you know there?’ She couldn’t have sounded more amazed if Daisy had said Mars.
‘It was James.’
‘James? James who?’
‘Mother’s stepson. Well, not really. I mean, he was Walter’s stepson. It’s a bit complicated. After Mother and Walter … parted … he eventually married someone else, a widow with a son, James. He was very fond of Mother and I saw quite a bit of him in England. He was wounded in the war – lost a leg, actually – and when it ended, he came out to New Zealand.’ Daisy stopped, almost breathless, painfully aware that once more she had been gabbling and probably confused Violet more than enlightened her. She hoped her sister meant it when she said ‘I see’ but guessed she was putting two and two together and adding them up to five.
‘What does he do?’ Violet asked.
‘He is a doctor – a specialist, actually, I believe.’ Daisy tilted her chin in an unconscious attitude that said: so there!
Violet merely raised her eyebrows in a gesture of surprise and tacit approval.
Daisy was relieved and at the same time annoyed with herself as she didn’t need her sister’s approval for anything she did. The childhood days when she had always striven to please Violet, who was not only four years her senior but bossy to whit, were long gone.
Violet dismissed the subject with a shrug and turned towards the kitchen. ‘I think the phone woke me, but now I am awake, I am ravenously hungry,’ she admitted. ‘Like you, I was too tired to bother with much to eat when we got home and I soon followed your example and went to bed. How does a midnight snack appeal?’
Daisy admitted it did and was about to protest that it wasn’t anywhere near midnight when she remembered that it was actually past the witching hour in New Zealand. With thoughts full of James, she followed Violet into the kitchen.