Read Online When I Was Otherwise by Stephen Benatar - Free Book Online

surprised. Henry, too, was a very poor stick of a man. Oh, yes, a very poor stick indeed.” She was always forgetting the tiresome fact of their having been related—Henry and Marsha and Dan. “Thank you for telling me all that. You didn’t have to. But I’m very glad you did. You look a little peaky, dear; you really ought to go to bed. But… Just imagine his bringing in an alarm clock to speed the parting guest! What a lot you must have had to put up with! I never knew he had it in him! Yet I always liked that quiet dry sense of humour of his; that sharp ironic wit. It goes with such panache—I recognized it then. And he was certainly very handsome. You can forgive a man a lot, I always find, if he’s young and handsome and can make you laugh.”
    â€œWell, I’m not so sure,” responded Marsha.
    â€œWhat was that, dear? No, naturally you’re not! Why should you be? Handsome is as handsome does— that’s what I say. But…” She fiddled impatiently with her hearing aid. “You yourself always had the looks of the family, didn’t you, dear? I mean the Stormonts. Henry was all right— facially —but one has to admit that Dan didn’t come out of it too well. He looked just like a thin, gangly monkey when he was younger, with sleeked-down gingery hair, and he looks just like a slower, puffier version now, with hardly any hair at all to speak of, gingery or otherwise! Not that that matters, of course. He has a nice lazy easy-going sort of face to match his personality. Not much get-up-and-go, however—oh, well, you can’t have everything—none of you ever showed much of that! Of course, it usually works out in this life that it’s the brothers who get all the beauty and the sisters who are left to look like monkeys. So you, dear, did very well for yourself. I mean—in that respect. But… Why did your mother never encourage you to develop more resources? I’ve often wondered.”
    â€œI suppose in those days people just didn’t consider it important for women to be educated.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know, dear. I managed to scrape together an education of some kind. Of course, that wasn’t quite in those days, I grant you. Your mother herself was reasonably well-educated. In a way. According to her lights. I must say it seems very strange. And it wasn’t only you! To have let Dan go into hairnets and Henry into Selfridge’s… Didn’t your father ever have a say in it?”
    â€œYou’re forgetting, Daisy. When Father died Henry would only have been—what?—thirteen.”
    â€œYes, but Dan…he’d have been older. And he never went to university. So your father could still have had a say in it, couldn’t he? Those hairnets.”
    Marsha merely shrugged. “I really can’t remember.”
    Anyway, thought Daisy, Marsha’s father must have been a distinctly poor sort of a fish: you only had to look at the woman he’d chosen to marry! He’d clearly had the words There, there! inscribed all over him in indelible ink—luminous, too. And even the fact that he had finally marched off to war to make the supreme sacrifice…this couldn’t always be seen as enough of a gesture to exonerate him completely.
    And besides which, she already knew the answer to the main part of her question. The reason Marsha hadn’t been encouraged to develop more resources was simply this: Florence had wanted to keep her daughter thoroughly subservient. That was mainly why she had organized the divorce: to have an unpaid companion to dance grateful and admiring attendance in her final years. And how wonderfully she had succeeded!
    â€œI wonder what she’s doing now.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œYour mother.”
    Marsha stared at her. “But, Daisy, my mother is dead.”
    Daisy stared back at her a moment; suddenly appeared to give herself a