Daisy Darker(68)

Lily doesn’t disagree. I think all the fight has gone out of her because she doesn’t say a word. She and Trixie are huddled together on the sofa nearest the television, and I can tell that my niece has been crying again. An image of one of Nana’s birthdays here at Seaglass fills the screen, and I instantly remember that night sixteen years ago. It’s a night I’ve always wished I could forget.





Thirty-five



SEAGLASS – 1988

It was Halloween 1988. My mother had slowly withdrawn from the world after her break-up with Mr Kennedy – who seemed intent on drinking himself to death again – and there was a strange, melancholy mood at Seaglass that October. The sorrow and sadness seemed to seep out of the cracks in the walls. I remember walking into the room that evening and finding my family all there, sitting around the kitchen table, seated in their individually painted chairs.

Nancy was sitting in her tall, thin white chair, looking beautiful but uncomfortable as always. My dad, then fully recovered from his car accident, sat at the other end of the table, as far away from Nancy as possible. Just because she didn’t want to be with Mr Kennedy, it didn’t change the status of their relationship; Nancy didn’t want to be with Dad either. Not in that way. Not then. His chair seemed a little wider, and rounder, and darker than before, as though it had aged with him. Eighteen-year-old Rose sat in her red chair, next to Conor, who visited so often by then that Nana had painted him a chair of his own. It was sky blue with little white clouds, because she said he was a dreamer. Seventeen-year-old Lily looked sulky and jealous in her green chair.

She’d had an audition for a drama school in London the day before and didn’t get in. Lily couldn’t handle the knock-back, so gave up on her dreams of performing on stage after just one rejection. I guess they didn’t like her rendition of ‘Eternal Flame’. Even at thirteen, I understood that if you really wanted something, you had to fight for it. Always. But my mother, who had also dreamt of being an actress, did nothing to encourage Lily to try again. Almost as though she couldn’t stand the possibility of her daughter succeeding when she had failed. That thought might be unkind, but I think it might also be true. She spoilt Lily even more than before after that – unlike Rose and I – which only made matters worse. The problem with growing up with parents who say ‘yes’ to everything is that it doesn’t prepare you for the real world, which often says ‘no’. I’ve never known my sister to work hard for anything or anyone, not even herself. The reality of hard work being a prerequisite for success meant she was doomed to fail.

There was one other guest at the kitchen table that day, but he didn’t have a chair of his own. I’ve always presumed that Nana’s agent was roughly the same age as my father. When I was a child, anyone over thirty looked the same age to me: old. But staring at the screen now, and seeing Nana’s agent again for the first time in years, I notice he was surprisingly young. Early thirties at most. I remember that she was his first real client, and the success of Daisy Darker’s Little Secret launched his career as well as hers. She took a chance on him, he took a chance on her, and it paid off in a big way . . . until she stopped writing a few years ago. Nana’s agent was sitting next to her that night, on a dark blue chair covered in shooting stars reserved for special guests. My chair – decorated with hand-painted daisies – was next to his.

I hadn’t met him before. It sounded strange to my ears when she talked about having an agent – to me, she was always just my nana – but I was curious about this man who she was clearly rather fond of. Her birthday party was normally a family-only event. Nana said that she could count the people she trusted on one hand, and that she didn’t need all of her fingers to do it. Her agent was the person she trusted most. He wore a smart suit and a kind smile. I had always imagined him carrying books inside all of his pockets, but I couldn’t see any.

‘It’s such a pleasure to finally meet the real Daisy Darker,’ he said as I sat down at the table. He held out his hand for me to shake as though I were a grown-up, and that – along with his posh voice – made me smile. He pronounced all of his words properly, which made me want to do the same. I found myself imitating the way he spoke without meaning to. Nana’s agent was like a character in a book or a film, and I wasn’t entirely convinced he was real until I touched him. ‘That’s a good, firm handshake,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I replied, rather pleased with myself. As a slightly awkward thirteen-year-old, I took compliments wherever I could get them. ‘What do you mean, the real Daisy Darker?’

‘Well, I work with your nana. Her book Daisy Darker’s Little Secret was the first book we worked on together a few years ago, and it sold all over the world. Which means there are copies of a book with your name on it in bookshops in America, and Spain, Australia, Poland . . . even as far away as China. It’s quite a thrill to finally meet your nana’s muse.’ I didn’t know what a muse was, but didn’t want the nice man to think that I was stupid, so I nodded. I might be misremembering things – it was a long time ago now. There was a twinkle in his eyes as he spoke, and I wondered if the nice man was secretly made of stars. His chair was covered in them after all, and Nana was right about most things.

Every family is a fortress that few outsiders get to see inside. Especially ours. Sometimes people are invited in for a period of time, but they only ever get the public tour, they never really see behind the scene. ‘Access All Areas’ is a myth when it comes to human relationships; we can never really know another person because we rarely know ourselves. Knowing that Nana’s agent was one of the very few people on the planet who she trusted, I always wondered and wanted to know why. But whenever I asked her, she could never explain. Maybe she didn’t really understand it herself.