Daisy Darker(10)
Dinner is a feast – roast chicken, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and lashings of gravy. But the gravy is hot chocolate sauce, because Nana thinks everything should be a sweet treat at Halloween. The carrots are coated in sugar, the puddings are really marshmallows, there are Smarties mixed in with the peas, and popping candy on the potatoes. What looks like bread sauce is actually melted vanilla ice cream. The food is both surprising and surprisingly good.
The pumpkins on the table are all different sizes, and each one has a scary hand-carved face. There are also pine cones, seashells and sweets scattered on the tablecloth. With the whole room bathed in candlelight, it looks beautiful but fun, just like our host. I feel guilty about my lack of appetite, but everyone else tucks in, until the last of the crispy roast popping potatoes have been eaten. Even Lily – who complains about everything and has never cooked anyone in this family a meal – seems satisfied. If my sister ever did invite us all for food, I suspect we’d be served a Pot Noodle for dinner and a Pop-Tart for dessert.
There are a lot of empty bottles as well as plates by the end of the bizarre banquet, and my divorced parents have definitely drunk more than their fair share of alcohol. My mother has always tried to dissolve my father’s words with wine. At one end of the table, Nancy looks like she can barely keep her eyes open, while at the other end, Dad is struggling to take his eyes off her. He treated her so badly when they were married, but I believe he loves her now just as much as he did then, possibly more. He collected regrets while she gathered resentment. Sometimes people don’t know they’re in love until they’re not.
The calm and quiet aura of Seaglass has been substituted with loud laughter, and the sort of repetitive storytelling that always occurs when tongues have been lubricated with nostalgia and wine. We’ve heard one another’s stories too many times before, but for the sake of getting along, we act as though we haven’t. The wall of clocks in the hall start to chime 9 p.m. All eighty of them – including one grandfather and five cuckoo clocks – so it’s impossible to hear a thing at the top of the hour. As soon as the din stops, Trixie speaks.
‘Nana, why did you only put Aunty Daisy in your books? Why not Mum, or Aunty Rose?’
Children always ask the most awkward of questions, but Trixie is old enough to know better. I feel as though the whole table turns to stare at me. My sisters and I haven’t really spoken for years because of what happened. Rose has refused to see me or speak to me at all for a very long time, but now isn’t the right moment to drag up the past. This is supposed to be a celebration. Unwanted thoughts clot inside my head and I can’t shift them. Thankfully, Nana answers so that I don’t have to.
‘Well, the story isn’t really about Aunty Daisy, I just borrowed her name is all. Why? Would you like me to use your name in a book one day?’
‘No thank you, Nana. I’m too old to be in a children’s book. I’d rather be in a murder mystery. I wish you wrote those instead.’
Nana was an artist for years, illustrating other people’s books for very modest sums of money in return. The year my heart defect was diagnosed, a well-known author was rude about her drawings. Nana was deeply hurt by the resulting upset and unkindness, and refused to work with the author ever again. Taking the moral high ground can be an expensive route, and private hospitals and second opinions do not come cheap. So Nana wrote her own children’s novel for the first time, filled with poems written while she was sitting in waiting rooms worrying about me. She illustrated the book with her own paintings, wrote her own words, got herself an agent, and found her own publisher, all to make a point. But after the success of Daisy Darker’s Little Secret, there was no going back.
‘I think most murder mysteries are overrated,’ Nana says. ‘There are much cleverer ways to end a person than killing them.’
Her words seem to make everyone around the table uncomfortable, except Rose, who has always been more at ease with death than the rest of us. Perhaps because she sees so much of it. Rose often works for free, which might be why her veterinary practice is in a spot of financial bother. She saves and rehomes as many animals as she can, working day and night to do so, but even she can’t save them all. It’s crazy and so very sad how many broken animals get dumped on a vet’s doorstep – pets that were once loved, now past their best-before dates. Rose even persuaded Nana to adopt a couple of abandoned hens years ago, and Amy and Ada have lived in a brightly painted coop at the back of Seaglass ever since.
‘There are also clever ways to kill someone without getting caught,’ Rose says, taking such a tiny sip of red wine, the effort required to lift the glass to her lips seems barely worth it.
‘Like how?’ Trixie asks.
Rose – who has never had a child-friendly filter – stares at our niece. ‘Well, my first choice would be insulin, injected between the toes, where people are unlikely to look. I have plenty of it at the practice and it’s simple enough to explain missing batches away – things get lost or broken all the time. It would be almost too easy and I doubt I’d get caught.’
Trixie stares at her. We all do.
‘I’d poison them with plants,’ says Nancy. ‘A bit of spotted hemlock or deadly nightshade. Morphine or cyanide if I was feeling fancy and had the time, both of which are derived from flowers and trees. It’s easy enough to find at least one deadly plant in most gardens, if you know what to look for. And it takes less than a second to slip a little something into someone’s drink.’