Page 6 of Dear Daisy

Very carefully, and with great deliberation, I deleted the email from Dan. Even so, my hand shook slightly, as though even an electronic message could carry some element of him through to Great Leys. It’s no business of yours where I am, Daniel. I’ll write the book because I have to, because I said I would, and whatever else you may say about me, whatever nasty little lies you may tell to anyone who will listen, I keep my promises. Yeah, great, you think you were right, ’course you do. You ALWAYS think you’re right, Dan. I tried to tell you, tried to explain about the whole ‘twin’ thing but you just couldn’t get it, couldn’t understand that what Daisy and I have between us is . . . I can be certain of her. Whatever I do, whatever I am, she will be there for me. You may try, Dan, you may have given me promises, assurances, but they would never be the absolutes that I have with my sister. You could leave, after all, isn’t that what you did? Didn’t you just prove my case?

Go to hell.

I wished I could have written all that. Put it in an email and sent it back, imagined the look on his face when he opened it, his dark eyes widening, maybe a hand rumpling distractedly through hair already frantic in its own right. But I couldn’t. To communicate with Dan would be like forgiving him, and that was never going to happen.

I uploaded the pictures I’d taken for safekeeping. I’d once had a camera die on me and eat the memory card as a last meal, so now I was rigid about backing everything up, keeping a copy, not letting things vanish. Then I sat back, the hard wood of the chair digging into my spine. I know the room’s a bit small but an armchair would fit in. If you cut the arms off. And probably the back. So, a stool, a comfy stool, is that too much to ask for?

But the cottage was cheap. At this back end of the year, in this tiny town with its lack of attractions and so small that it couldn’t even be called a romantic hideaway, unless you were actually hiding from the object of the romance, and even then there wasn’t a lot of room for concealment unless you got under the bed. And even then you’d need to be under five feet tall and really skinny.

Outside the window the bustle of the High Street was dulled a little by a thick mist which had come down from the moors. They overhung the town and loomed like a visit from an opinionated relative to the south, while the north was a river plain which stretched to Newcastle. Great Leys was the last picturesque place before the countryside degenerated into factories and refineries and was therefore a really great location to be studying grave fashions, as the eighteenth century’s version of the nouveau riche had moved out of the unhealthy cities and into the countryside, bringing their modern fashions with their dead bodies. It also made a great centre for travelling to the counterpoint graveyards up on those moors, where farming families had lived for generations and engraved their headstones in the same traditional ways as they always had. Fashion didn’t apply when you were trying to scratch a living from a six-week summer and sheep and believed caps to be essential wear.

I went back to the churchyard, walking through the mist which decorated my sleeves and my hair like a hit-and-run beading fanatic. The shops were opening for Monday business and a knot of children in brand-new uniforms waiting for the school bus turned to watch me, but then it can’t be every day that you see someone go into a churchyard with a laptop. Maybe they thought I was going to conduct a very high-tech seance.

In fact, I was going to write. The text to go with the photographs would hopefully come a lot more easily when written in situ, when I could see the decorative calligraphy in daylight. Beatrice Churchill had clearly had a loving family who had seen fit to not only carve her name and dates in a gothic style which took over most of the stone, but also a nice little homily in English style text, and then to beswag any available clear surfaces with the kind of decorative edging more usually seen as piping around cushions. It was a bit of a dog’s dinner as far as tombstone lettering went, but it gave me a lot to say.

I sat cross-legged on the damp grass, closed my eyes, and tried to feel my way around the emotions of those who’d had the stone erected — it was this ‘speculative’ angle that had given my previous book the edge that had made it the best-seller it had been, rather than the dry, scholarly tone of many books on such subjects. I’d tried to put myself in the mindset of these long-gone people, tried to put their voices across, collated from such disparate sources as the position in the graveyard, the condition of the graves, lettering style and any general family research that I could dig up. And, with the current fashion for genealogy, readers lapped it up.

Beatrice Churchill had had a notable father. One with no taste whatsoever, apparently, but someone about whom I could write. I opened my notes as a separate document and began to type, slowly, slowly putting myself back into the head of the man who’d lost his only daughter at the age of twenty-nine.

Ping.

I had an email. How could I have an email? Who turns a churchyard into a wireless hotspot? And, more to the point, why? I wriggled my shoulders to loosen them and only now felt the damp that had seeped through my jeans while I’d been working. Two hours? How had that happened? And not many words to show for it, either.

Ping.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: You probably won’t even read this but . . .

Okay. Okay. I get it. You don’t want anything to do with me and I guess it’s pointless for me to plead my case. But, Winter, you must have seen how it was for me, how I couldn’t think straight after . . . shit. I just said it was pointless and yet, here I am, trying to make you see my side of the story. And that’s all I want, y’know? To tell you how it looks from my perspective. I mean, I know what I did was wrong. I know I hurt you. The whole Daisy thing, I shouldn’t have got involved . . . yeah, doing it again, guess that’s my mindset for you, pleading that whole pointless case. But you and me, we were good, Win, we were strong, we were that thing that everyone wants, a unit. We were tight. Remember that day in Rouen? With the drunk guy coming on to you, and I offered to punch him out for you and then he floored me and you had to call the police? Guess this email is my equivalent of that, my attempt to punch out the drunk.

Please don’t call the police.

Dan

I had to put the laptop down on the grass because my hands were shaking so hard I was worried I’d drop it. Dan. For a moment I thought that the mist was back, blurring the lines of the stones in front of me, but then I felt the damp touch of tears against my cheek and realised I was crying. Crying? Over Dan? No. No more tears shed over him, he doesn’t deserve them. He shouldn’t be able to affect me like this, not now. Six months is too long to keep that ragged cutting edge of sorrow sharp enough to slice through memories. Enough.

Enough.

I sniffed, wiped my eyes on the back of my hand and bent to pick up the laptop.

‘Winter? Oh, I’m sorry, are you working? I was just, well, it’s a shortcut through here and I was going to pop in and see Alex, such a shame he can’t use a mobile but well, he’s a little impaired with the spoken word so it’s difficult. Did you find the bin liners? If you miss the bin men they only do domestic every other week and it builds up, you know.’

Margaret Hill, wearing something startlingly pink, approached me down the churchyard path. She stopped short of stepping on the still-damp grass and sort of hovered around the edge of the path, almost vibrating with something. Curiosity, possibly, given my damp crotch and sniffing, although it was possible that she’d reached such a stage of fuchsia that the earth was rejecting her physical presence.

I was so shaken by the email from Dan that I seized upon her as though she was my long-lost best friend. ‘Oh, hello. Yes, I was working, but my battery is pretty nearly flat now so I was just going to go.’ As I spoke I walked to the path, uncomfortably aware of my moistness. ‘Where can I get a really good cup of coffee in Great Leys?’

‘Well, there’s the Costa, but they’re a bit corporate for my liking. There’s a little independent coffee shop down near the river but they don’t open on Mondays. Are you writing a book about inscriptions then? Because, if you’re interested, you could talk to Alex, he does some stone carving, he’s done the entranceway to the Old Mill with the poem on it. He’s been working on that place for years now. Do you know he used to be a stonemason? Did very well but now he just does the odd commission.’

Wow, a conversation with Margaret was like playing Twister with a pipe cleaner. ‘Maybe,’ I began, cautiously, in case she was about to launch into rhyming couplets on the subject of Spam or something, ‘I could come and talk to Alex? I could have a coffee at the same time.’

She was suddenly still. Her grey eyes, so like her son and her granddaughter, were shrewd. ‘Alex has a stammer,’ she said. ‘Ever since Ellen,’ and her voice tripped over the name, ‘since his sister died, he’s had problems communicating. It’s called psychogenic stammering, they think it might have been brought on by the trauma.’ Now her speech had lost the twists and turns, it was straightforward and her voice was sad. I wondered if the butterfly attention span she’d so far displayed was a protective thing, to keep her from thinking too deeply.

‘Yes. We’ve met and chatted.’

She smiled a tight smile. ‘He feels guilty, that’s what it is, I’m afraid. Ellen died when a delivery of stone fell, and Alex blames himself for not warning her, for not making her stay away; she was only popping by to drop in some milk; she was bringing Scarlet over to me after school one day and she got out of the car and . . .’ a flick of fingers. ‘I’m sorry. I have no idea why I’m telling you this.’ And now her words were slow, anchored by tears.

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