“Oh, nothing much, actually.”
“That’s no answer,” Daisy said. “I wish the two of you would stop treating me like an idiot child.”
“Well, Jim made some remark about your needing a tonic, perhaps, for your nerves. Oh, not that I think your nerves are bad or anything, but a tonic certainly wouldn’t do any harm, would it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll phone that nice new doctor at the clinic and ask him to prescribe something loaded with vitamins and minerals and whatever. Or perhaps protein would be better.”
“I don’t want any protein, vitamins, minerals, or anything else.”
“We’re just a mite irritable this morning, aren’t we?” Mrs. Fielding said with a cool little smile. “Mind if I have some coffee?”
“Go ahead.”
“Would you like some?”
“No.”
“No, thanks, if you don’t mind. Private problems don’t constitute an excuse for bad manners.” She poured some coffee from the electric percolator. “I take it there are private problems?”
“Jim told you everything, I suppose?”
“He mentioned something about a silly little dream you had which upset you. Poor Jim was very upset himself. Perhaps you shouldn’t worry him with trivial things. He’s terribly wrapped up in you, Daisy.”
“Wrapped up.” The words didn’t conjure up the picture they were intended to. All Daisy could see was a double mummy, two people long dead, wrapped together in a winding sheet. Death again. No matter which direction her mind turned, death was around the corner or the next bend in the road, like a shadow that always walked in front of her. “It wasn’t,” Daisy said, “a silly little dream. It was very real and very important.”
“It may seem so to you now while you’re still upset. Wait till you calm down and think about it objectively.”
“It’s quite difficult,” Daisy said dryly, “to be objective about one’s own death.”
“But you’re not dead. You’re here and alive and well, and, I thought, happy... You are happy, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
Prince, with the sensitivity of his breed to a troubled atmosphere, was standing in the doorway with his tail between his legs, watching the two women.
They were similar in appearance and perhaps had had, at one time, some similarity of temperament. But the circumstances of Mrs. Fielding’s life had forced her to discipline herself to a high degree of practicality. Mr. Fielding, a man of great charm, had proved a fainthearted and spasmodic breadwinner, and Daisy’s mother had been the main support of the family for many years. Mrs. Fielding seldom referred to her ex-husband, unless she was very angry, and she never heard from him at all. Daisy did, every now and then, always from a different address in a different city, but with the same message: Daisy baby, I wonder if you could spare a bit of cash. I’m a little low at the moment, just temporarily, I’m expecting something big any day now... Daisy, without informing her mother, answered all the letters.
“Daisy, listen. The maid will be here in ten minutes.” Mrs. Fielding never called Stella by name because she didn’t approve of her. “Now’s our chance to have a little private talk, the kind we always used to have.”
Daisy was aware that the private little talk would eventually become a rather exhaustive survey of her own faults: she was too emotional, weak-willed, selfish, too much like her father, in fact. Daisy’s weaknesses invariably turned out to be duplications of her father’s.
“We’ve always been so close,” Mrs. Fielding said, “because there were just the two of us together for so many years.”
“You talk as if I never had a father.”
“Of course you had a father. But...”
There was no need to go on. Daisy knew the rest of it: Father wasn’t around much, and he wasn’t much when he was around.
Silently Daisy turned and started to go into the next room. Prince saw her coming, but he didn’t budge from the doorway, and when she stepped over him, he let out a little snarl to indicate his disapproval of her mood and the way things were going in general. She reprimanded him, without conviction. She’d had the dog throughout the eight years of her marriage, and she sometimes thought Prince was more conscious of her real emotions than Jim or her mother or even herself. He followed her now into the living room, and when she sat down, he sat down, too, putting one paw in her lap, his brown eyes staring gravely into her face, his mouth open, ready to speak if it could: Come on, old girl, cheer up. The world’s not so bad. I’m in it.
Even when the maid arrived at the back door, usually an occasion for loud and boisterous conduct, Prince didn’t move.
Stella was a city girl. She didn’t like working in the country. Though Daisy had explained frequently and patiently that it took only ten minutes to drive from the house to the nearest supermarket, Stella was not convinced. She knew the country when she saw it, and this was it, and she didn’t like it one bit. All that nature around, it made her nervous. Wasps and hummingbirds coming at you, snails sneaking about, bees swarming in the eucalyptus trees, fleas breeding in the dry soil, every once in a while taking a sizable nip out of Stella’s ankles or wrists.
Stella and her current husband occupied a second-floor apartment in the lower end of town where all she had to cope with was the odd housefly. In the city, things were civilized, not a wasp or snail or bird in sight, just people: shoppers and shopkeepers by day, drunks and prostitutes at night. Sometimes they were arrested right below Stella’s front window, and occasionally there was a knife fight, very quick and quiet, among the Mexican nationals relaxing after a day of picking lemons or avocados. Stella enjoyed these excitements. They made her feel both alive (all those things happening) and virtuous (but not to her. No prostitute or drunk, she; just a couple of bucks on a horse, in the back room of the Sea Esta Café every morning before she came to work).
While the Harkers were still living in town, Stella was content enough with her job. They were nice people to work for, as people to work for went, never snippy or mean-spirited. But she couldn’t stand the country. The fresh air made her cough, and the quietness depressed her — no cars passing, or hardly ever, no radios turned on full blast, no people chattering.
Before entering the house, Stella stepped on three ants and squashed a snail. It was the least she could do on behalf of civilization. Those ants sure knew they was stepped on, she thought, and pushed her two hundred pounds through the kitchen door. Since neither Mrs. Harker nor the old lady was around, Stella began her day’s labors by making a fresh pot of coffee and eating five slices of bread and jam. One nice thing about the Harkers, they bought only the best victuals and plenty of.
“She’s eating,” Mrs. Fielding said in the living room. “Already. She hardly ever does anything else.”
“The last one was no prize either.”
“This one’s impossible. You should be firmer with her, Daisy, show her who’s boss.”
“I’m not sure I know who’s boss,” Daisy said, looking faintly puzzled.
“Of course you do. You are.”
“I don’t feel as if I am. Or want to be.”
“Well, you are, whether you want to be or not, and it’s up to you to exercise your authority and stop being willy-nilly about it. If you want her to do something or not to do something, say so. The woman’s not a mind reader, you know. She expects to be told things, to be ordered around.”
“I don’t think that would work with Stella.”
“At least try. This habit of yours — and it is a habit, not a personality defect as I used to believe — this habit of letting everything slide because you won’t take the trouble, because you can’t be bothered, it’s just like your—”