Father Unknown Read Online Free Page A

could remember envying them when they were tiny. Before they could speak properly they used a kind of secret language which she didn’t understand. They often slept in the same bed and they shared everything.
    Yet Mum had always been equally important to them. Wherever she went in the house, they followed. Even as twenty-year-olds this link had never really been severed – they had never wanted to go out at night as much as Daisy did at their age, they were just as happy at home.
    ‘Everything will be all right,’ she assured Tom. ‘We’ll still be a family, we’ll keep the house and garden up together. I’ll still be here.’
    ‘You aren’t going to move out then?’ he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Lucy said she reckoned you’d be off like a rocket.’
    ‘Now, why would she think that?’ Daisy asked.
    He shrugged. ‘I don’t know really. But she heard Mum and Dad talking a while back, you know, about how Dad was going to manage when Mum had gone. Dad said he thought he’d probably sell this house and get somewhere smaller and more manageable because he couldn’t expect you to stay and look after it forever.’
    Daisy thought about that for a minute. ‘I don’t suppose I would want to stay forever. I might get married, and so might you and Lucy. It would be more sensible for Dad to have somewhere smaller. But I can’t think why Lucy thinks I’d run off immediately.’
    ‘Because Mum’s left each of us some money,’ he said. ‘Lucy and I don’t get ours till we’re twenty-one, but you’ll get yours straight away.’
    Daisy felt a stab of anger towards her sister. She hadn’t known she was going to be left anything, and it should have been a nice surprise, but it was just like Lucy to use it as a weapon.
    ‘Well, Lucy’s wrong for once. I will not be off like a rocket, money or no money, so you can tell her that from me,’ Daisy said resolutely. ‘Mum would want me to stay here until everyone’s settled down again, and I shall. Now, we’d better go back to bed, there will be an awful lot to do later today.’
    It rained on the day of the funeral, the kind of soft rain Lorna had always liked because it nurtured her garden. A great many people came – relatives, many of them distant ones, old friends and neighbours – and the flowers filled the courtyard outside the crematorium.
    The service seemed so short to Daisy, and although the words the vicar spoke about Lorna were lovely, somehow he had seemed to miss the real gist of what she was all about. Perhaps Daisy shouldn’t have aired this view later back at the house, but many of the neighbours from the time when she and the twins were small had come back for a drink, and they were all discussing the things they loved most about Lorna.
    ‘I would have liked him to say how her greatest gift was to be able to chew the fat with people,’ Daisy said. ‘Do you know what I mean? She didn’t just advise people when they had a problem, she’d sit them down, give them a cup of tea, and talk the whole thing through with them.’
    Almost every one of Lorna’s closest friends of many years nodded in agreement. One of them went on to talk about how Lorna had supported and consoled her on a daily basis when her husband had left her. She said Lorna was far better than a trained counsellor, because she had the ability to make you laugh even when you were in the depths of despair.
    Another old friend, whom Daisy and the twins had always called Auntie Madge, a hearty woman of some sixteen stone who had called in at least once a week for as long as they could remember, spoke up then.
    ‘You’ve inherited that gift, Daisy,’ she said approvingly. ‘Don’t you ever lose it either, it’s a great talent to have.’
    Lucy, who was sitting on one of the couches with her best friend, Alice, hadn’t appeared to be listening to any of this conversation. Yet even though Daisy had her back to her, she felt her sister stiffen and a kind