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Daisy had not been well named.
The name Daisy speaks of summer. Daisy is a little girl running through a field, laughing. Daisy is a young woman on a bike on a May morning on her way to college. Daisy is a warm afternoon, birds singing, small clouds of anonymous insects hovering a few feet above the grass. Daisy is light and clarity, energy and warmth.
Daisy Pitt’s fifty-one years had so far passed without being blessed by a single summer. Sunny days did not happen in Daisy Pitt’s life. Sunny days were too hot, just as rainy days were too wet, cloudy days too grey, windy days too blowy, frosty days too cold.
A psychiatrist might have enjoyed himself trying to establish whether Daisy had been born insecure, or whether she’d had insecurity thrust upon her. But she was not the type to give herself to the medical profession unnecessarily; she did not open up to anyone.
Her parents had not been unhappy, but they’d had little pleasure. They had married at a time when it was what people did, when there had still been a formality to it. Love and freedom of choice had been secondary to post-war necessity. They had to wait over ten years for their one child, and ten years later Daisy’s father had died of cancer. She had lived with her mother ever since.
No man is black or white, all good or all bad. They are all shades of grey, and Daisy’s father had been as complex and shadowed as anyone. By turns happy and melancholic, trapped and free, caring and angry. However, not long after his death, the bad memories began to drift away, so that all Daisy remembered were the good times, the loving moments. The smiles and the hugs, the presents and the small cakes secretly given behind her mother’s back. She forgot the times he’d ignored her, the times he’d been too busy, the times he’d scolded her because he’d been unhappy rather than for what Daisy had done.
And in the end all she had were the happy memories, and a mother who was bitter at being left to raise a child on her own.
Her mother had retreated into criticism and over-analysis. Every aspect of Daisy’s life picked apart; praise rarely awarded, disapproval given gladly. Daisy had not thrived. Her mother had only a talent for dragging her daughter down into her own wretched world.
*
Mrs Cromwell was washing dishes; some of which Daisy had already washed.
‘I thought you were going to get someone in?’ said Mrs Cromwell.
‘I will,’ said Daisy.
Daisy was four different people. Timid and insecure with her mother; bitter and insecure with her husband; wary and insecure with everyone else; on her own, lost.
‘How long are you going to say that?’
Daisy did not reply. She was looking in cupboards, writing a list of seasonal vegetables and tinned fruit.
Daisy didn’t want anyone else around the house; she didn’t want to be responsible for them, she didn’t want to have to manage them. If they came in and swept through the house with energy, competence and a sense of duty, her mother would relish the improvement, revelling in every second of telling Daisy how much better things had become since she’d removed herself from the only responsibility she’d had. If the hired help was awful and disinterested, her mother would sneer and Daisy would be forced into a confrontation with the under-achieving new member of staff.
‘You ought to get someone for the summer,’ said Mrs Cromwell. She placed the plates in the rack with a clatter, as if the noise emphasised her place in the room. She was the noise. She was in charge in her daughter’s house. ‘You can never cope in the summer. I’m too old to always be clearing up after you. I’ll not always be here.’
Daisy never dreamed of the freedom that might bring. It was too late for freedom. She was going to be trapped, even after her mother was gone.
‘I’ll get someone,’ said Daisy.
‘You’ve said that before,’ said Mrs Cromwell, a knife dropped in amongst the other cutlery. ‘Maybe you’ll actually do it this time.’
Later that day, when Daisy returned with the shopping, her mother thankfully taking an afternoon nap, she realised her list had been incomplete and that she’d have to go back out.
She forgot things, even when she tried to concentrate. Head filled with injustice. On this occasion, blamed her mother for the distraction.
On her return to the supermarket, she stopped to look at the message board.
*
Daisy certainly did not know what it was to be happy, but she did know fear and insecurity, bitterness and boredom, and it was these unattractive qualities that now led her to bring Yuan Ju to the house.
When her mother was not there, she complained about housework – ironing and cleaning and dirty marks on windows. Mostly, however, she complained about cooking. She complained to her friends and to the men who worked on the vines; occasionally she complained to her husband. When Pitt was drawn to discuss the subject, he would tell her to employ a cook, and Daisy would prevaricate and mutter and change the subject, although not for long. She never complained to her mother, but Mrs Cromwell recognised the doubt and the bitterness.
The truth was that Daisy did not want another woman in the house. (She did not even contemplate the notion of a male cook.) Having her mother there was enough. She feared the comparison. She feared the extra opinion. She feared her husband falling in love with the other woman.
One day, they’d be sitting in uncomfortable silence at the kitchen table. He would stare at his mug of tea, and he would tell her that he loved the cook, and that Daisy and her mother would have to leave. Bald and bold and blunt and unfeeling.
That was some days. Other days, Daisy feared that her cooking was so bad and so unimaginative, that the main duty which she was required to fulfil for her husband was so poorly executed, that he would become fed up with her, even without the temptation of another woman, and would ask her to leave.
As with most anxiety, this inner concern created barriers between them that would not have been there had she not been consumed by self-doubt in the first place – the self-fulfilling prophecy of insecurity. Yet Pitt was going nowhere, and neither was Daisy. They seemed trapped, until such time as one of them died.
*
She stood near the exit of the Co-Operative, looking at the small ads. She glanced over her shoulder, worried that people might be looking at her, wondering what it was she needed. Was it written all over her? Needs Help At Home. Can’t Cope.
She thought about taking the card down, quickly thrusting it into her handbag, but she worried that someone would notice her. She typed the number into her mobile phone, and put it hurriedly back into her bag. She would call later, when she was alone in the kitchen and there was no chance of her mother walking in on her.
She drove home wondering what Pitt would think of her employing a cook. She wasn’t sure that she really knew how her husband felt about anything. They never talked. Perhaps occasionally one of them might talk at the other one, usually with Daisy doing the talking; but they never had a conversation. They never exchanged ideas or discussed anything. They never started at a point and talked something through in order to get to another point.
She wondered if she would be able to specify who the employment agency would send to her home. She needed someone younger, someone who had yet to formulate her own ideas, someone without the confidence to judge her.
Later that afternoon, when her mother was in front of the television, she made the call. Alone in the kitchen, shoulders hunched with the phone pressed tightly to her ear, as if phoning in a noisy and busy airport terminal; constant glances over her shoulder and through the window.