Бетти Нильс – A Valentine for Daisy (страница 2)

‘Been a nice day; have you enjoyed it?’ asked Pamela, gobbling biscuits.

‘It’s not been too bad. The new children seem all right. I’ve got four this term—that makes fifteen. Two of the new ones are twins, a girl and a boy, and I suspect that they’re going to be difficult…’

‘I thought Mrs Gower-Jones only took children from suitable families.’ Mrs Pelham smiled across at her daughter.

‘Oh, they’re suitable—their father’s a baronet or something,’ said Daisy vaguely. ‘They’re almost four years old and I think they’ll drive me mad by the end of the term.’

Pamela laughed. ‘And it’s only just begun…’

They talked about something else then and after supper Daisy sat down at the table, doling out the housekeeping money, school bus fares, pocket money, and then she put what was over—and there wasn’t much—into the old biscuit tin on the kitchen mantelpiece. They managed—just—on her wages and her mother’s pension; just for a while after her father’s death they had got into difficulties and her mother had appealed to her for help, and ever since then Daisy sat down every Friday evening, making a point of asking her mother’s advice about the spending of their income. Mrs Pelham always told her to do whatever was best, but all the same Daisy always asked. She loved her mother dearly, realising that she had had a sheltered girlhood and marriage and needed to be taken care of—something which she and Pamela did to the best of their ability, although Daisy was aware that within a few years Pamela would leave home for a university and almost certainly she would marry. About her own future Daisy didn’t allow herself to bother overmuch. She had friends, of course, but none of the young men she knew had evinced the slightest desire to fall in love with her and, studying her ordinary face in her dressing-table mirror, she wasn’t surprised. It was a pity she had no chance to train for something; her job was pleasant enough, not well paid but near her home and there were holidays when she could catch up on household chores and see to the garden.

She was a sensible girl, not given to discontent, although she dreamed of meeting a man who would fall in love with her, marry her and take over the small burdens of her life. He would need to have money, of course, and a pleasant house with a large garden where the children would be able to play. It was a dream she didn’t allow herself to dwell upon too often.

The weekend went far too quickly as it always did. She took her mother shopping and stopped for coffee in the little town while Pam stayed at home studying, and after lunch Daisy went into the quite big garden and grubbed up weeds, hindered by Razor the family cat, a dignified middle-aged beast who was as devoted to them all as they were to him. On Sunday they went to church and, since it was a sultry day, spent the rest of the day in the garden.

Daisy left home first on Monday morning; Mrs Gower-Jones liked her assistants to be ready and waiting when the first of the children arrived at half-past eight, which meant that Daisy had to leave home an hour earlier than that. The sultriness had given way to thundery rain and the roads were wet and slippery. She was rounding the corner by Wilton House when she skidded and a car braked to a sudden halt inches from her back wheel.

She put a foot to the ground to balance herself and looked over her shoulder. It was the Rolls-Royce, and the same man was driving it; in other circumstances she would have been delighted to see him again, for she had thought of him several times during the weekend, but now her feelings towards him were anything but friendly.

‘You are driving much too fast,’ she told him severely. ‘You might have killed me.’

‘Thirty miles an hour,’ he told her unsmilingly, ‘and you appear alive to me.’ His rather cool gaze flickered over her plastic mac with its unbecoming hood framing her ordinary features. She chose to ignore it.

‘Well, drive more carefully in future,’ she advised him in the voice she used to quell the more recalcitrant of the children at Mrs Gower-Jones’s.

She didn’t wait for his answer but got on her bike and set off once more, and when the big car slid gently past her she didn’t look at its driver, although she was sorely tempted to do so.

She was the first to arrive and Mrs Gower-Jones was already there, poking her rather sharp nose into the various rooms. As soon as she saw Daisy she started to speak. The play-rooms were a disgrace, she had found several broken crayons on the floor and there were splodges of Play-Doh under one of the tables. ‘And here it is, half-past eight, and all of you late again.’

‘I’m here,’ Daisy reminded her in a matter-of-fact voice, and, since her employer sounded rather more bad-tempered than usual, she added mendaciously, ‘and I passed Mandy and Joyce as I came along the road.’

‘It is a fortunate thing for you girls that I’m a tolerant employer,’ observed Mrs Gower-Jones peevishly. ‘I see that you’ll have to make the place fit to be seen before the children get here.’

She swept away to the nicely appointed room where she interviewed parents and spent a good deal of the day ‘doing the paperwork’, as she called it, but Daisy, going in hurriedly one day over some minor emergency, had been in time to see the Tatler lying open on the desk, and she was of the opinion that the paperwork didn’t amount to much.

The children started to arrive, a thin trickle at first with time to bid a leisurely goodbye to mothers or nannies and later, almost late, barely stopping to bid farewell to their guardians, running into the cloakroom, tossing their small garments and satchels all over the place and bickering with each other. Mondays were never good days, thought Daisy, coaxing a furious small boy to hand over an even smaller girl’s satchel.

The morning began badly and the day got worse. The cook, a local girl who saw to the dinners for the children, didn’t turn up. Instead her mother telephoned to say that she had appendicitis and was to go into hospital at once.

Daisy, patiently superintending the messy pleasures of Play-Doh, was surprised when Mrs Gower-Jones came unexpectedly through the door and demanded her attention.

‘Can you cook, Miss Pelham?’ she wanted to know urgently.

‘Well, yes—nothing fancy, though, Mrs Gower-Jones.’ Daisy removed a lump of dough from a small girl’s hair and returned it to the bowl.

‘Mandy and Joyce say they can’t,’ observed Mrs Gower-Jones, crossly, ‘so it will have to be you. The cook’s had to go to hospital—I must say it’s most inconsiderate of her. The children must have their dinners.’

‘You want me to cook it?’ asked Daisy calmly. ‘But who is to look after the children? I can’t be in two places at once.’

‘I’ll stay with them. For heaven’s sake go along to the kitchen and get started; the daily girl’s there, and she can do the potatoes and so on…’

Daisy reflected that if she were her employer she would very much prefer to cook the dinner than oversee a bunch of rather naughty children, but she didn’t voice her thought, merely handed Mrs Gower-Jones her apron, advised her that the children would need to be cleaned up before their dinners and took herself off to the kitchen.

Marlene, the daily help, was standing by the kitchen table, doing nothing. Daisy wished her good morning, suggested that she might put the kettle on and make a cup of tea and said that she had come to cook the dinner. Marlene, roused from daydreaming, did as she was asked, volunteered to peel the potatoes and the carrots and then observed that the minced meat had just been delivered.

‘Beefburgers,’ said Daisy; mince, offered as such, never went down well—perhaps the beefburgers would. Marlene, brought to life by a mug of tea, saw to the potatoes and carrots and began to collect cutlery ready to lay the tables. Daisy, her small nose in and out of store cupboards, added this and that to the mince, thumped it into shape, rolled it out and cut it into circles with one of Mrs Gower-Jones’s best wine glasses, since there was nothing else handy. She would have liked to do chips but there wasn’t time, so she puréed the potatoes with a generous dollop of butter and glazed the carrots. By half-past twelve she was ready to dish up.

Mrs Gower-Jones took over then, drawing hissing breaths at the nicely browned beefburgers and the mounds of buttery potatoes. ‘And really,’ she protested crossly, ‘there is no need to put parsley on the carrots, Miss Pelham.’

Which was all the thanks Daisy got.

There was a temporary cook the next day, an older woman who spoke little English, and who, in Daisy’s opinion, didn’t look quite clean. She served up fish fingers and chips with tinned peas. Daisy thought that she wasn’t a cook at all but probably all Mrs Gower-Jones could get at a moment’s notice.

When she went into the kitchen the next morning to fetch the children’s mid-morning milk the sight of the woman preparing dinner in a muddle of dirty saucepans, potato peelings and unwashed dishes made her glad that Mrs Gower-Jones’s meanness stipulated that her assistants should bring their own lunches. Unwilling to disparage a fellow worker, all the same she went in search of her employer.