Page 3 of Dear Daisy

‘I helped you in the graveyard, didn’t I?’ Scarlet appealed to me, turning surprisingly adult-looking grey eyes to mine. ‘I’m useful, Granny. And I really hate the library. Mrs Cookson said I drew in the pony books.’

‘She can stay with me,’ I said, hoping that my expression implied that I had things to be doing and it had better not be an extended stay. ‘It’s fine.’

‘But your work . . .’ Of which, I knew, there was no conspicuous sign. My laptop was closed, the pictures were still in the camera and there wasn’t so much as a notebook to hint that I was actually doing any. In fact, apart from a couple of photographs and my pyjamas neatly folded on the end of the Spartan bed upstairs, I might not even be here. I gave an inward wince and made a mental note to tell Daisy that I was travelling so light these days that I seemed to have more mental baggage than physical.

‘Hurry up, Granny. I need to turn Light Bulb out soon!’ Scarlet had got up again and was looking at the framed pictures I’d propped up on the shelf above the gas fire. She stopped short of picking them up and squinting at them but I knew she wanted to. People always did, as though identical twins were an optical illusion.

‘Are you sure? She can be a bit of a handful.’ Margaret was backing out of the door, but slowly and dubiously. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes, the library is just over there, next to the little bistro, and I really ought to put these posters up for Alex, he’s hoping that the Old Mill can be turned into craft shops when he’s finished.’

‘We’ll be fine. Scarlet’s right, she’s been very useful.’ And I felt a bit sorry for her being described as ‘a handful’ in front of me. Surely parents, grandparents, should keep their opinions of their children to themselves? I knew mine always thought of me as the strong, capable, practical one while Daisy was the artistic one, but they never said as much to either of us, although my mother had said that we’d fallen into our chosen professions because of the sort of people we were, and that was the nearest she ever came to acknowledging our differences. But then, she’d been the one who’d tried to dress us alike until the incredible temper tantrum I’d thrown, now notorious in our family as ‘Frockgate’.

The door closed and Scarlet grinned at me. ‘Granny fusses,’ she said. ‘Why are there two of you?’

I jumped. The skin around my shoulders prickled as though I was being hugged by a frost. ‘What?’

She pointed at the picture. ‘Here. It’s you when you were little.’

Relief. Stupid relief, from a feeling that was just as stupid. I’d thought she’d meant that there was someone standing behind me. ‘It’s me and my sister Daisy. We’re twins.’

Scarlet picked up the other picture. ‘And this is you when you’re grown up.’

I took it from her. ‘No, that’s Daisy.’ Long wildly curly hair tied back, boyishly slender figure lightly tanned in a bikini. Blue-green eyes and wide mouth laughing at the camera.

‘Are you sure?’ Scarlet narrowed her eyes at me and I laughed.

‘Yes, I’m sure. It’s Daisy. She lives in Australia and she emailed me that picture last Christmas, to make me jealous. It was freezing here and she was having Christmas dinner on the beach.’

‘Looks exactly like you though.’ She lost interest and wandered into the tiny kitchen. ‘The bin liners must be in here. Granny keeps hers in the cupboard under the sink.’

‘That’s how identical twins work,’ I couldn’t let it go. ‘We are the same. Everything. Well, Daisy’s hair is a bit longer than mine, and she’s thinner than me, prettier . . .’ I tailed off. Cleared my throat. ‘But we’re very alike.’

‘Is she coming to see you?’ She had her head in the cupboard now, her voice muffled and the room full of the smell of drain-cleaner — my knowledge of childcare was limited, but just about everything I bought said ‘keep out of the reach of children’.

‘I’ll find them, don’t worry,’ I said, hastily. ‘Would you like a drink of . . . ?’ What did I have that I could offer to a child? Did I have anything that could be drunk by anyone under voting age? ‘Milk?’

‘Yes, please.’ Scarlet hitched herself up onto the square foot of work surface. This cottage was tiny, no wonder it was advertised as only suitable for one person. If that person had had a dog, even a small one, someone would have had to eat outside. ‘And a biscuit. Do you like horses, Winter?’

Her small, booted feet swung against the lower cupboards and I suddenly realised her rather eccentric clothing choices weren’t indiscriminate: her leggings, wellingtons and bike helmet were all approximations of riding clothes.

‘I used to ride, when I was younger. Daisy and I had a pony called Jack when we were growing up. We had to share but she was a lot keener than I was, so she rode him more than me.’

Scarlet’s face turned to me as I poured her a mug of milk. She had a rapt expression, as though her eyes had found me magical all of a sudden. ‘Really? What was he like? Have you got any pictures? Did you do gymkhanas?’

‘Er, no, but I did do a lot of falling off.’ I dredged through my memories of growing up. We’d lived in the countryside just outside London, small house but near enough to fields to make childhood a stretch of free running and kite flying, dam building and paddling. Never short of a playmate because Daisy and I did everything together, except riding Jack, when some of our most fierce arguments took place, one of us having to cycle alongside or sit on the fence and watch while the other got all the fun. I started telling Scarlet about it — about the time Daisy fell off and cried, about jumping bareback, about leaning against the barn eating an apple while my sister tried to make our small, fat pony do dressage in the lumpy grass of the orchard.

Her eyes grew rounder, as though I was letting her into the secrets of the universe, as she sipped at her milk and ate her biscuit, her rubber-heeled feet clonking against the cheap vinyl-covered cupboard door. ‘Alex and Granny won’t let me have riding lessons,’ she said, eventually, turning her gaze to her toes. ‘Mummy would have let me.’

I wanted to know. I wanted to know about Alex, all god-like shape and stone dust like a Michelangelo statue in a slut’s household, about her mother, now under that bland grave, about Light Bulb and his fabric face but I didn’t know how to go about asking, and before I got the chance to worm my way around the subject, there was another knock at the door and Scarlet slithered off the side, her upper lip masked with milk. ‘Granny’s back.’ She made her way through the maze of furniture. ‘Thankyouverymuchforhavingme.’

But it wasn’t Margaret out there in the bustling street. It was Alex. He’d got a shirt on now, a red T-shirt with a misshapen neck and splashes of something across the front, but his hair was still pomaded with fine sand. I smiled. ‘Hello.’

His mouth opened, then he saw Scarlet over my shoulder and shut it again.

‘Alex stammers,’ she said, squeezing past me in the doorway. It was very matter-of-fact, not defensive or ashamed. ‘So he doesn’t say much.’

Alex rolled his eyes. ‘I c—’ and the pause was longer than I’d expected. We’d had a boy at primary school who stammered and our teacher had told us not to interrupt him but give him time to speak, although, in the careless way of the young, we’d usually ended up talking over him, or not listening at all. But that had been then, and I hoped that the ways of the world had softened me a bit over the years, although Alex being six feet of gorgeous didn’t hurt either. ‘Came to fetch Sc—’ He didn’t seem frustrated by the stoppage of the words. More as though he was using their staccato delivery as time to formulate the rest of his sentence. ‘Scarlet.’

‘Did Granny tell you I was here?’

---