‘She doesn’t mean it, do you, Daisy?’ and she winked at Daisy as she licked jam off her thumb.
I was cross with Daisy over it, and rather embarrassed – and one morning, during the third week of term, I apologized to Amina at the breakfast table, while Daisy glared at us over a slice of toast. So I could not understand why Daisy met every one of her kind overtures with a snub. I was determined to treat her kindly, for I knew how hard it was for anyone who did not look like the perfect English miss at Deepdean. And I liked Amina very much – she was funny and clever and bold. Oddly, this meant that we spent far more time with Clementine Delacroix than we ever had before and, to my astonishment, I discovered that she was not as bad as I had always assumed.
She waved at us in the corridors, she chattered to us at dinner and she waited so we could walk up to House together. I had thought that, after the events of the summer term, we had agreed to be friends with Amina – and Amina was certainly being friendly to us. She threw herself back into lacrosse, and riding, and working creative mistakes into her essays – and she threw herself, with a vengeance, back into our quarrel with the other dorm, especially Amina El Maghrabi.Īt first I was surprised at this. She was the only one of us who really did forget most of the time that Beanie even had a mother. Kitty had to bite off her complaining about her mother expecting a baby (‘It’ll be as dreadful as Binny! Worse, I expect!’) whenever Beanie came into the dorm, and Lavinia threw away the thoughtful notes accompanying the beautifully wrapped packets of sweets and cakes from her stepmother, Patricia, so that Beanie would not see them.ĭaisy, of course, was utterly Daisy about it all. We all had to be very careful where mothers were concerned. ‘Don’t LOOK at me like that!’ And so we all had to pretend that we did not see her becoming thinner and thinner until her big eyes stared out of her face like carriage lamps. ‘I don’t want you to pity me,’ said Beanie fiercely. We realized, once the initial shocking discovery in the summer term had passed, that there really are no words in the English language to explain how sorry you feel, and that grief, outside books, is far less dramatic and far more exhausting than you are led to expect. Our friend Beanie’s mother was still sickening by the day, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Our fellow Detective Society members were out of sorts, and it was not hard to see why. Daisy and I were fifth formers now, which sounds dreadfully grown-up and shiny with promise – only the reality was as misty and confusing as the English autumn weather.
I suppose it all began during the autumn term at Deepdean.
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