Long Shadows

When Daisy Morell disappeared, a hundred and fifty years ago, no one
was very much surprised. Mostly they assumed she had run off with one
of the sailors who came in and out of the town like the tides. Or
perhaps she had run away to the city on the arm of a fancy man like she
always said she would. Pretty girl like that, all modest flirtation and
long looks, and quick-witted too. She was the sort of girl that was
going somewhere and no one was really much surprised when she went,
leaving all her clothes behind, one night. In the end it was the kinder
people in the town who said she had fallen in love with some handsome
man and been swept away to a life of luxury,

It was my grandfather who told me this story when I was very young and
he was dying. I remember this old man, rattled by death, telling all
the stories he knew, giving all of the last of himself. I didn't know
that at the time of course, in fact it is only in these last few years
that I have begun to understand why my parents spent so much time with
him in that dark room. This is the story he saved for me, and which I
have saved for you.

Daisy, Miss Morell to you, was fourteen years old when she turned up in
the town, long legs and bare feet. "Come from the country," she said
coquettishly when asked, "'aint not none of your business anyway." And
that was that.

She was installed, first of all in the local baths and then in the home
of the Right Honorable Mr. Tobias Sinker, under the tutelage of his
good lady, Mrs. Edna Sinker n3/4 Morell. No one knew why the Sinker's
had so immediately taken to the girl and though the usual rumours went
round, it was Daisy herself who did most to deny the truth of them. She
never understood herself she would say, she just found herself
loved.

So it was a sad day when, 3 years later, Tobias was shot dead by the
King's Guards for attempting an assassination on the monarch himself.
No one could understand that either, Tobias, after all, was an elderly
man, beloved by the town, how was it possible? They could not know,
like Daisy and Edna and Dr Mimwick, the town physician, that Tobias
fought terrible demons in his head.

I suppose these days we would call it paranoid schizophrenia but over
the course of a year, Tobias had become increasingly possessed of the
idea that the King was an imposter. The ladies of the household had no
idea how to deal with the once placid Tobias who, suddenly half-crazed
and suspicious, had locked himself in the cellar of the house and only
accepted his meals through a hole he had knocked in the wall. Only very
occasionally did he become calm enough so that his wife and adopted
daughter dared to approach him. They would gently take him upstairs,
bathe him and put him to bed only to wake up the next day and find him
locked in the cellar again, cowering from the light and catatonically
rocking backwards and forwards.

After Tobias died, the Sinker Estate came into disrepair and then fell
into the hands of Reginald Quavery, an unscrupulous solicitor who sold
it for a fraction of its worth. Edna Sinker reverted to her maiden name
and Daisy adopted it as well. Time and the experience of looking after
Tobias then, afterwards, being questioned at the inquest, had brought
the two women closer than ever. Edna looked upon the beautiful young
women in her care with great affection and pride and Daisy, in her
turn, loved the old widow with a fierce loyalty which she reserved only
for her closest friends.

Now the thing you need to know is that it was my grandfather's
grandfather's father, Jim, who tended the gardens at Selly Cottage
where the Morells had settled after the Estate was sold. Down in the
dip between the valleys, opposite the ford and surrounded by thick
hedgerows, the cottage was a fine retreat for the older woman who was
tired of the stares and questions from the townspeople. For Daisy,
though, who was naturally sociable and loved the sea, the cottage was
rather quiet and she deliberately took a job in the Milliners which sat
above the tailors on the High Street, so that she could spend time with
other people and also watch the sea.

From her seat in the window of the shop, Daisy could see down the hill
and across the whole bay, over a broad expanse of sky and sea and
headland which stretched as far as her imagination would take her. With
peacock feathers in one hand and a simple piece of ribbon in the other,
she would find herself picnicking in the shadow of pyramids, riding
elephants in the Exotic East or sailing down an African river, watching
the crocodiles on the banks.

Sociable though she was, many of the young ladies in the town refused
to see Daisy and called her common though in fact she had by far the
best Education of any of them. Edna has not only taught her the living
languages of the continent but also the dead ones, and Tobias, before
he was mad, had taught her all he knew of science and geology and
mathematics. But nothing of this seemed to matter to society at large,
concerned as it was primarily with the appearance of sophistication and
wealth, of which Daisy had little. Subject to the daily catcalls and
snubs of the dandified youths and the elegant set who gathered in the
square, Daisy instead made friends with the older women, the sailors
and the children of the town. The latter would cluster about her as she
sat reading The Iliad or Paradise Lost on the tide wall of the harbour.
She would tell them stories of heroes and princesses in faraway lands
till the light began to fade and they would run home to their baths and
beds, their heads sparkling with adventures.

This was about the time that Jim, my grandfather's grandfather's
father, fell hard in love with Daisy. He had been apprenticed to the
rather gruff and decidedly lazy Albert Selwick and since Albert
suffered terribly from the gout, it fell to young Jim to make the
weekly journey out of town to Selly Cottage.

He must have been about 17 when he was first distracted by Daisy.
Bending low over a particularly stubborn root, he caught sight of her
through the kitchen window and found himself gazing so hard he fell
backwards with a crash as the root came away in his hands. Daisy must
have heard because she looked up and then rushed out to find Jim,
flustered, clutching the root with a muddy patch on his cheek. Daisy
laughed heartily for a moment when she saw him and then, realizing how
embarrassed he was, held out her hand and said, "Give me a hand boy,
I'll help you up."

The two became firm friends that summer, the older girl taking it upon
herself to teach the scruffy boy to read, and the boy, more and more
firmly besotted, telling her everything he had learned about gardening
as an apprentice. I don't know if she ever noticed the long looks he
would give her as she lay reading aloud on the lawn and he pruned back
the bushes or leaned on his shovel, resting. History doesn't record
exactly what she thought of him at all, the remains were Jim's stilted,
half-penned, un-sent love-letters my grandfather told me, halting poems
which told the stories of those afternoons, painted in the rosy haze of
adolescent love.

I have no desire to see those letters and poems now, though I know
where they are and know I should and will read them one day. As it is I
am more content with these half-remembered secrets, half-remembered. I
have discovered that the light of information is a harsh one, tending
to diffuse and fragment and cast long shadows.

It was the following year, when Daisy turned 20 and Jim ,18 that there
was a tragedy and a surprise, everything changed forever. After a short
illness that left her bedridden and coughing blood for several weeks,
the old lady Edna finally followed her husband and passed away quietly
in the night. Daisy was inconsolable, of course, but busied herself
with arranging the funeral and setting the old lady's affairs in order.
Mr. Bung, the other solicitor in town, explained to Daisy that she had
been the sole beneficiary in the will and as a result what little there
was would pass to her. This was no comfort at all to Daisy who kept a
silent vigil by the body for the next 3 or 4 days before the funeral
and wore black for a whole year afterwards.

She was surprised when so many of the townspeople attended the funeral.
At that point, however, Mr. Bung had not had a chance to speak to her
so she had not heard the news, like everyone else in the packed and
sobbing church. That morning the County Court had found the former
solicitor, Mr. Reginald Quavery, Guilty! Of attempting to defraud the
state, it transpired, the church, the council and numerous individuals
of large quantities of money. Quavery was sent to the tower and ordered
to repay large amounts in compensation to the various people he had
stolen from, including Daisy. In the case of the Sinker Estate, the
frowning judge had commanded, the properties and income should be
returned in full to the family.

And that was how Daisy became wealthy again. Though she kept the little
cottage with its beautiful garden, she moved back into town with her
few things and was suddenly being courted by all the fops and ladies
who, only a year before, had wolf-whistled her or simply cut her dead
in the street. She was forgiving though and irresistibly drawn to the
social whirlygig, entertaining as often as she could, bringing in the
children or the sailors as often as she did high-society, something
which raised eyebrows but little more than a murmur against her
new-found respectability.

The only person who didn't like this turn of events was Jim. He knew he
had lost her, even though she asked him to tend her new garden and even
bought him some fine clothes so that he could attend the elegant
parties she threw. It was never going to work, though, the young man
simply didn't fit in with the 'smart-set' who still couldn't lose their
prejudices enough to accept a farm-boy in their midst. They would tease
him unrestrainedly when Daisy wasn't watching and he would storm out of
the house, tearing the stiff tie from his throat and leaving Daisy
confused and unnerved.

Worse than the smart set, Jim thought, were the sailors of whom he
disapproved the most. There was something distinctly unsavory about
them, he felt, in spite of their gleaming buttons and shiny leather
boots, they were never far from the muck of the ocean and he had heard
them, foul-mouthed, in the public houses with their stories of whores
and whiskey.

So it is that I come to the saddest part of my Grandfather's story. A
story, he explained in his finally cracked and tragic voice, which had
been passed from Grandfather to Grandson, always skipping a generation,
for no real reason than to give the family some respite from history,
some peace.

Jim's world ended one night as he was trimming the elaborate hedges in
the new garden. From his hidden vantage point he saw a tall and
handsome young sailor step up to the house, knock briskly on the door
and then find himself smothered in the arms of the beautiful Daisy, who
was kissing and stroking his cheeks like a long lost lover. Jim waited
outside all night, watching the silhouettes that occasionally flickered
in the drawing room window but the handsome sailor never emerged and
morning arrived.

All night Jim had howled silently at the moon, breaking up I imagine,
falling apart - fragmented by the inescapable information. When the
sailor finally left at midday, Jim posted a short note through the wide
letterbox and set off home where he took a bath and fell asleep,
strangely calm now that he knew what to do.

I suppose when he first told this story to his grandson, Grandfather
Jim may have found it too hard to relate the details of the awful
climax. Whatever really happened when the two of them met secretly at
the old cottage that night, no one knows, the end is the same however
you paint the specifics. Daisy was dead, thrown down a well and Jim
lived for the rest of his life with the secret knowledge he had killed
her.

How he lived I am not sure. After the initial furore of her
'disappearance' had died down, a young sailor who claimed to be her
brother turned up out of the blue and occupied the old house. Waiting
for her this time, he used to say, with tears in his eyes...