‘Not exactly. I mean, when I decided I wanted him for the father of my child, I made most of the running, you could say. Then I thought—Hey, this guy is also something else; he can give you goosebumps just by looking at you, let alone the rest of it, so…’ She paused with an uplifted expression on her face that Lydia felt answered her question better than words might. ‘So,’ Daisy went on, ‘then I thought, Perhaps I should hang on to him but, put simply, Lyd, he’s not that easy to hang on to.’
Daisy’s eyes were a true violet. She wasn’t tall, she had a perfect oval face, a lovely figure, she was exquisitely groomed, even for a dinner at home, and she looked every inch a sophisticated twenty-nine-year-old. Nor did her just uttered sentiments belie this—unless you knew her well enough to know that of the two of them she was the much more naive.
‘Does he have other women?’ Lydia asked, packing her shorts and reaching for a blouse.
‘I don’t think so. But the fact of the matter is he hasn’t had much of me lately. He’s losing interest, I would say.’
Thank heavens, Lydia thought. She said bracingly, ‘Then he’s not worth it, Daisy. Besides, you could end up with a moody kid!’
‘All the same, there’s something about him—’
‘Listen, Daisy.’ Lydia was suddenly serious. ‘I went along with this when I thought you were theorizing as opposed to actually doing it, because you’re a lot like Dad. Once he gets an idea into his mind nothing can change it until he gets it out of his system.’
‘Thank you,’ Daisy said gravely.
‘But now it’s time for straight talking,’ Lydia went on pointedly. ‘If you love Joe Jordan and he loves you and wants to marry you, you have my blessing. Otherwise it’s a dangerous game you’re playing—don’t do this to yourself. You’re worth much more than a life of seducing men so you can have a baby.’
Daisy turned the brush over in her hands. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, Lyd,’ she said slowly. ‘You fell in love once and it worked out perfectly—well, until Brad died, of course. But it never works perfectly for me.’ She brushed away a tear.
‘Could you be…could you be a shade too generous, Daisy?’ Lydia suggested, picking her words with care. ‘Why don’t you play hard to get for a change?’
Daisy lifted her head as if struck by inspiration. ‘Oh. Maybe Joe would respond to that!’
‘Forget Joe Jordan—’ Lydia broke off and bit her lip.
‘Why?’
‘Uh—you told me yourself that he’s very clever and that he can be moody and sarcastic. That’s always hard to live with unless you’re clever in the same way. What you need is someone musical, someone who could share the area where you’re really sensitive and creative.’
Daisy stared reflectively into the distance. ‘There is a new oboe player who’s just joined the orchestra. He’s rather sweet, and I can tell he’s interested, but, no, it wouldn’t work.’
‘It’s probably far too early to tell whether it would work,’ Lydia commented practically, ‘but how can you be so sure it wouldn’t?’
‘He’s younger.’
‘Younger… How much?’
‘He’s about your age, I guess.’
Lydia was struck silent for a long moment, struck by the irony of her sister plotting to have some man’s child to bring up on her own yet unable to contemplate a normal relationship with a man because he was a little younger…
She said, at length, ‘Three years—that’s nothing, really.’
‘Oh, yes, it is. When I’m thirty he’ll still be in his twenties. More importantly, when I’m fifty, he’ll still be in his forties. I’m sure it should be the other way around because men tend to age better than women, don’t you think?’
But Lydia was suddenly gripped by the feeling that a younger man could be just what Daisy needed. Might it not bring out a so far latent streak of maturity in her? As well as getting her over Joe Jordan, of course. Then she sighed and decided she’d done enough interfering in her sister’s life for one day.
‘Why don’t you just wait and see what happens?’ she murmured, and reached for the silver-framed photo of Brad on the dressing table. She stared down at it, blinked a couple of times, then laid it gently face down on top of her clothes in the suitcase.
Daisy was on her feet in a flash, and she knelt in front of Lydia and took her hands. ‘Do you still miss him so much, darling? I had hoped it was getting easier.’
‘It is, mostly,’ Lydia said tremulously. ‘Just sometimes it’s actually harder. I don’t know why. Unless it’s because I’m afraid I’ll forget.’
‘You know,’ her sister said, ‘you worry an awful lot about me, but I can tell you that Brad loved you so much he would not want you to be unhappy for ever. And it’s been five years now. Time to stop living a half-life. Time to have no guilt about finding someone else.’
Lydia smiled painfully. ‘The problem is, I couldn’t care less if I never did find anyone else. Men don’t seem to interest me much, apart from—’ She stopped abruptly as it surfaced in her mind that Joe Jordan was the first interesting man she’d met for a long time. To make matters worse, she’d been just about to say it.
‘So there is someone?’ Daisy said eagerly.
‘No!’ Lydia denied hastily.
‘But you said—“apart from…”?’
‘Um—the ones you can’t have,’ Lydia improvised madly, then thought, Well, that wasn’t so far from the truth either.
‘Still, that could be a start!’ Daisy frowned. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘No. No—’
‘Is he married?’ Daisy asked, with both understanding and sympathy. ‘A lot of the best ones are.’
‘You’re right—was that Chattie calling?’ Their aunt Charlotte was universally known as Chattie Kelso, and she still lived with them in the big old house at Bronte, a beachside suburb of Sydney where both Daisy and Lydia had grown up.
Daisy rose. ‘She’s cooked roast pork,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘You know how paranoid she is about getting the crackling crisp. We’d better not keep her waiting.’
James Kelso, who was renowned for his bush ballads and poetry written under the name of Kelso James, as well as renowned for always wearing a bush shirt and jeans, raised his glass and cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to propose several toasts. First to you, my dear Chattie, for the crispest crackling you’ve ever produced.’
Chattie, a spinster in her fifties, with Lydia’s colouring and build although her hair was sprinkled with grey now, looked gratified. She raised her glass in return and her fine eyes glinted with mischief. ‘Thought so myself, although I didn’t like to say it.’
‘And to you, my dear Daisy—’ James inclined his head towards his elder daughter ‘—for looking sensational, as usual. No one would think you were a day over nineteen.’
Daisy smiled fondly at him. ‘Dad, you’re sweet, but you tell awful lies!’
‘May one enquire how your love life is going at present?’
‘One may—it’s going, but it’s at a critical stage, you could say.’
‘Hmm. Dangerous age, twenty-nine. Would you agree, Chattie?’
‘No. They can all be dangerous. I consider myself at my most dangerous when I was seventeen, closely followed by thirty-nine. At seventeen I would have