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can’t be anything more important than that.’
    The police said that they would be making every effort to trace the young woman. But this didn’t satisfy Fred. He didn’t want Daisy traced, he wanted her found.

 
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PART TWO

8
Daisy
    Daisy lived in south London, where Stockwell turns into Brixton. She had always been used to there being too many people. The pavements, in fact, seemed too small to hold the houses’ inhabitants, so that they spilled into the gutters and stood there offering objects for sale—matches, penny toys made of lead or tin, almanacs, patent medicines, cage-birds and so on, until darkness fell and the last prospect vanished. Then the house doors opened and somehow took them all in, along with the day’s returning workers, the preachers from the gas-lit street-corners, the children, the drunks, all in and battened down at last. But south London, once you got away from the river and its warehouses, was built low, so that whenever the fog cleared, you saw an immense sky, moving at its own pace through sun and cloud, or over the net of the stars.
    Daisy grew up with the smells of vinegar, gin, coal smoke, paraffin, sulphur, horse-dung from backyard stables, chloride of lime from backstreet factories, and baking bread every morning. When she was quite young they had been very poor. That was bad, but on the other hand, the great city was almost as well adapted to serve the very poor as the very rich. The stalls in the markets were strictly arranged, with all the cheapest stuff at one end. The customers accepted, without pretensions, which end they belonged to. At the cheap end you could get cow-heel, which didn’t turn as quickly as most kinds of meat. The cow-heel simmered murkily at the back of the range for most of the day, until the broth, according to Mrs
Saunders, thickened of its own accord. After the long boil you took the bones out and pressed the glutinous grey mass under a plate weighed down by a flat iron on top of it. One of the glue factories down by the river came round collecting the bones, although they paid very little for used cow-heels.
    On quarter-days a hand-bill came through every letterbox:
Keep ahead of your landlord. Late night work not objected to
. These men would move your stuff in a barrow, which made less noise than a pony-cart. The Saunderses, mother and daughter, always circled round their home ground, never taking rooms twice in the same street. Daisy’s mother wanted to stay close to her job at the Falcon Brewery. Daisy minded babies. She had no brothers or sisters of her own, but that was an advantage, otherwise she’d have got sick and tired of babies by this time, Mrs Saunders said.
    It stood to reason that Daisy had had a father, but she couldn’t give a connected account of him. He was down on her birth certificate as a packer and handler. What had he ever packed or handled, where was he handling now? Neither mother nor daughter wanted to know this. Then came an unexpected, indeed inconceivable change of fortune when Mrs Saunders’ sister, never before referred to, left her a house, a small terrace house in Hastings. Solicitors wrote to say that they had been “directed” to tell her this, and “desired” to give her the particulars. ‘But I thought she was dead,’ Mrs Saunders said, again and again.
    â€˜Well, she is now,’ said Daisy, ‘so you can count yourself right.’
    â€˜And if she’d been alive I always thought she’d gone to live in New South Wales.’
    â€˜Don’t grieve,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re not as sorry as all that.’
    â€˜If I’d been given time I’d have been sorry,’ said Mrs Saunders.
    The news was not quite as inconceivable as it had seemed. The solicitor wrote again, desiring to correct the impression (which no-one but himself had given) that the house be
longed, or would ever belong, to Mrs