Do You Have A Daughter?

By David Pearce

From the moment she arrives Isabel is a disappointment. She is not the daughter she was supposed to be and she becomes worse with every passing day. This is not altogether surprising. She has a model father but her mother spoils her. She becomes fat and aggressive not only to her father but to other children. No wonder they call her The Blob. To her father she is the cuckoo as she tries every feminine trick in the book to shoulder him out of the family nest. Then one day, in mid-France, her mother insists on leaving her in his sole charge. Her father is horrified. For an entire day! How old is she now? Her father does his best to remember how long he has endured, and why does she insist on being taken to Oradour-sur-Glane, village-martyr, scene of an appalling World War Two massacre. What her father wanted was a willowy, dark eyed, affectionate Chiara, not this belligerent challenge to fatherhood as we know it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Pearce
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463539477

David Pearce

Long past my sell-by date but doing all I can to keep fit with daily exercise and a healthy breakfast I spend most of my time writing and listening to the radio with occasional excursions in the local countryside on my electric-assist bike. I live alone in southern France close to the river Rhone and possibly on borrowed time as there is a large nuclear plant close by.

Book preview

DO YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER?

or

THE BEST INTENTIONS

David R Pearce

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

Chapter One Chiara

ChapterTwo Plans

Chapter Three Awry

Chapter Four Finzi

Chapter Five Loons and obsessives

Chapter Six Adoration

Chapter Seven School

Chapter Eight The Blob

Chapter Nine Symbols of success

Chapter Ten Reinvention

Chapter Eleven Research

Chapter Twelve Influences

Chapter Thirteen The turn of worms

Chapter Fourteen Old nick names

Chapter Fifteen Balls for breakfast

Chapter Sixteen Coincidence

Chapter Seventeen Mine for the day

Chapter Eighteen Le soleil!

Chapter Nineteen Men of straw

Chapter Twenty I lay waste

Chapter Twenty One Premonition

Chapter Twenty Two Bombshell

Chapter Twenty Three North

Epilogue

A note

About me

Other masterpearces

Connect

Chapter One - Chiara

Do you have a daughter? Should I have a daughter? This was the question. I suppose the idea appeals to most men at some time or other, or a son, perhaps both. I suppose most men favour a son at first because of those masculine skills to be passed on; keeping a straight bat, lighting fires, drinking pints, barbequing, chasing daughters. I thought it would be fun to have a daughter, a worthwhile objective, something to which every father should aspire. I began to think that it would be fun to have a daughter in Italy, on a camp-site when I met and spent some time with an Italian couple who had one. She was, like her mother, enchanting and I suppose, about twenty years younger. I don’t know how old her mother was exactly but Chiara was ten. She doted on her father. It would be nice to be doted on.

This was a holiday romance. On the fourth day I thanked them for their delightful company, packed my tent and headed for Sicily. Chiara and her mum and dad had another couple of days, then it was back to Milan for mum and dad to earn a living and Chiara to go back to school. How Italian boys concentrate on anything other than Italian girls in the classroom I shall never know.

I have copied the above paragraphs from the diary that I kept of my gap year travels. Now that I have a moment in which to review what I wrote I realise that you may find them rather frivolous and inappropriate. Even at age eighteen on a crowded train that was on its way to Paris I was aware that you have to take a serious attitude to daughters, besides which you need one in order to manufacture another but I was optimistic, I had university to look forward to and I believe I read somewhere that the population of universities at that time was composed of forty per cent daughters. I could not wait. There must be droves from which to choose and, happily, this proved to be the case. I met a wide variety in all shapes and sizes but I was patient and for the first two years I watched and waited, taking notes and making best use of every opportunity for practical experience. Most appeared to be far more interested in discussing their plans for future careers than giving any thought to maternity and I have to admit that as memories of my gap year, great though they were, receded so did my thoughts of fatherhood.

This was not true when it came to the usual male preoccupation with the methods of production which appeared to grow in intensity with every month that passed. A number of close encounters flamed, smoked and shrivelled and I began to entertain notions of eschewing the idea of a settled relationship and living the life of a playboy. I would be a killer, my path through life slippery with the blood of broken hearts - two months and off to go, a week in which to recuperate then back to the hunting grounds. If this narrative were illustrated you would appreciate why I disabused myself of this fantasy within the first week or two of my final year. I am a reasonably presentable brute, I shower every morning, dress nicely and brush my shoes, but a lady-killer I am not. I lack the heart for it, besides which I had my eye on Lilian. She was to become my daughter’s mother.

From early on in her university career she had been active in the production of a literary review and was now its editor. At the time I was under the illusion that I had poetry within. I made tentative efforts to have my effusions published. Mercifully my efforts were declined but at the time it was clear to me that this was not because my work lacked literary merit, on the contrary, what was missing was the discernment that would recognize the emotional depth and clarity of vision contained within these modern and experimental (some might say eccentric) metres. I had decided to cloak my identity in mystery and it took me a long time to appreciate that this might not have been one of my better ideas. It had not occurred to me that before publication an editor might consult the register of students and that this was one reason why my work had been so comprehensively ignored – not so much as a rejection slip!

By this time I had come to the conclusion that the only route to success in this, as in most other fields, is networking. I understood this to mean getting to know everyone who might pursue a career in publishing or the BBC. Whether or not this is true my ambition did not live long enough to prove but I did give the idea a modest trial by wangling an invitation to the literary review party held early in our final year.

"Oh, so you are Alfred Lord Chaucer!" I would hear someone say.

Eyes would light up, broad smiles of recognition would be exchanged as I let slip the information that I had so coyly concealed.

How truly awfully fascinating!

I would deal modestly with the adulation and do my best to cope with the queue of girls who would beg to share my bed that evening or when I next had a vacancy.

It was not love at first sight. She was waving a very short sausage on a pointed stick. The only word that emerged loud and clear from the conversation she was having with two other girls and a man, who I later learned was a hard-drinking Cornish poet who wrote in Cornish and was subsequently translated, was Lampard. The conversation was becoming heated and the woman who had attracted my attention appeared to me to be about to use the pointed stick (she was now in the process of eating the sausage) for an aggressive purpose. My experience of life up to this point had been limited but even I knew that no matter how weedy he may appear it is unwise to upset a Cornish poet, especially by threatening him with a pointed stick, whether the subject be anything pertaining to the Cornish nation or, as in this case, football. My first reaction was to head for the exit before glasses began to break but at that moment Lilian broke free and, in turning, cannoned into me, narrowly avoiding spearing me with her pointed stick.

She said, Damn bloody sodding stupid poets don’t know a damn bloody sodding thing about football.

I don’t know whether this was true about her Cornishman but it certainly was about me. She began to pat those parts of me that had absorbed her spilled drink and then delivered the first of a number of the astonishing statements I would hear in the course of the following years.

Lilian said, Oh, hullo. So you are Alfred Lord Chaucer.

I stuttered and stammered and confessed, partly because I felt that it was advisable to start with a clean slate and partly because I found it preferable to my own name which is Greasley Percipient: a name which was the result of my father’s black and twisted sense of humour and his refusal to allow my mother to interfere or modify anything in any circumstance no matter how gruesome. It is a cross I have to bear.

I still felt an inclination to cut and run. The poet appeared to me to show increasing signs of becoming dangerous but there was Lilian’s hand at my elbow guiding me to safety.

She said, Fascinating!

Who could she mean? Her eyes were upon me. My mind riffled through a lifetime’s worth of comments and the (very) occasional compliment but fascinating was not among them. I was entranced. Clearly here was a woman of discrimination, insight even. I ought to get to know her better. The poet was off in search of someone else with whom to quarrel and ultimately and inevitably, punch. The room was crowded and noisy but here was I alone in what felt like a bubble of adulation.

The path led inexorably from this moment to marriage and fatherhood but I had discoveries to make along the way. You will think I am being rude and denigratory if I compare her to a horse but that is not intended to belittle her, in spite of what has happened in the intervening years, on the contrary. It was more a matter of temperament. Perhaps I should have said racehorse: what I mean is that I became increasingly aware that she was clever, a thoroughbred, spirited and liable to shy unpredictably. I was far from sure that I would be capable of handling her in traffic. To my relief I discovered that she had no knowledge of and not the slightest interest in football.

But she thought that I was clever on my own account; an opinion she would live to modify but when I began to make my modest mark in journalism she was moderately impressed; she was more impressed to discover that in addition to my spin bowling, fire-making and burger basting skills I had been house trained by my feminist mother, was not averse to washing up and no mean hand with a vacuum cleaner.

She had also discovered a powerful urge to have a baby of her own though she expressed no preference for one sex or the other provided it had the appropriate number of everything and that they were all in the right place. This came as a surprise to me as I was under the impression that this sort of thing does not happen to women until they are thirty, at which point the words biological clock appears in their conversation with increasing frequency and they begin to wear a desperate look.

Lilian was plump. I had always thought that I preferred elfin; this she was not but I became very fond of her face. It was round and motherly and I had kissed a number of lips before I encountered hers but these were beyond comparison the most generous, warm and welcoming. I loved her hair too. It was the one feature that she lavished attention on and it shone but without any of those sprays and colourings that make so many women appear to be wearing artificial wigs. You would hardly expect her to have Italian eyes but hers were nice, they were the sort of grey eyes that melt anger and I am aware that that sounds fanciful but I have seen it happen and if I were not afraid of the accusation I would go on to describe them as motherly. Enough! I enjoyed looking into them and so, I thought, would daughters. I am conscious of overdoing the daughter dimension and I suspect that at the time I would hardly have given the matter a second thought.

We celebrated her twentieth birthday towards the end of that term, we being almost the entire contents of the college and a large contingent from the wider world, many of them singers. I had set myself the target of sleeping with her that night but this was my first encounter with folk singers and I had hopelessly underestimated their stamina. By the time I stretchered myself off they showed every sign of having only just begun. Better, I thought, to withdraw to live to fight another day, besides had I succeeded in snatching her from the scene even temporarily I can confidently assert that I would have been lynched.

Motherly, popular, a singer of folk songs, what more could a man of modest pretensions expect and desire in the woman who might bear his daughter?

But there was more. She had extraordinary abilities. I first came across the most obvious of them at the expense of my poor father who protested and threatened to have her forcibly ejected from the family home forthwith unless...I forget now what she had to do by way of reparation but I remember the crime.

My father was a neat man who was rarely able to complete the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle. He cut them out and clipped them to a board that hung behind the door in the downstairs lavatory. Had she used the one upstairs next to her (the guest) bedroom all would have been well but she was not one to climb stairs unless it was necessary, neither did it occur to her that she might ask permission before completing all five crosswords on the board in one sitting. We all knew that she had not spent long in the loo and that the top crossword had had only three or four words filled in.

My father was humiliated; I was impressed. But there were other less explicable accomplishments. She made nothing of them and she seemed not to think of them in that context, but the one that I found most astonishing might have remained unknown had it not been for Rain Man. Apart from crosswords, I had become aware that she had an ability to soak up and remember information that would put the average sponge to shame but this was different. A friend had beaten us in a race to see the film and she had set out to include as many spoilers as she could cram into over a cup of coffee between seminars. As she told us some of Dustin Hoffman’s accomplishments my fiancée made what I thought at first was a little boast.

Lillian said, I can do that.

She looked puzzled and the way she spoke you could have imagined that she was surprised that she was the only one in the room who could not upset a box of matches and then...

Not the matches.

She was back-pedalling, blushing...that was something I forgot to mention earlier – her skin. That cliché about English roses might have originated from her and she didn’t blush like a fire-engine but her cheeks became pink and that was happening now and it was obvious that she wanted everyone to go on chatting and pretend she had never spoken. I just wanted to kiss her cheeks but Jonny insisted that she prove something if not the matches what could she do?

She said, Well, days, I know about days.

She could not have imagined that she could get away with blushing and knowing about days so she told us what day of the week it would be on our birthday in any year we cared to nominate. This is the sort of information that computers were evolved for so we decided that we could afford to skip the seminar in the interests of scientific investigation, made for the tech.centre and put her to the test. The result was unnerving.

Jonny said, See, told you she’s a psycho. I’m well shot of her.

Sour grapes! Jonny had been the first amongst us to put her virginity to a stress test and in spite of his protestations to the contrary I knew that her resistance had proved equal to the occasion.

But it was too late for me, I was infatuated and impressed by mounting evidence of her singularity besides, I had convinced myself that I was in love and that although I had not yet achieved the ultimate triumph, she had made it obvious that there were riches in store but that I must be patient.

Why? I was touchingly naive. The world had by this time evolved a mature attitude to sex and our world, that of students, the young, the educated, was at the vanguard of the revolution, the greatest enthusiasts the world had ever known. The idea of sex as bait now seemed reprehensible yet pockets of such below-the-belt exploitation remained. Lillian was one of the last practitioners and I was one of the last of the exploited.

Chapter Two - Plans

We married and planned our family. They would arrive at carefully regulated intervals but the whole business would be over within five years. They would be allocated time enough to see them through university after which they would be on their own - tolerated but not provided for. We would be young enough and fit enough to live happily ever after and during our working lives we would ensure that we saved the funds to enjoy a rich and well funded retirement.

In spite of the quirky habits that I had begun to accept and get used to in my choice of wife, some of which made me suspect that she would not be in the very top rank of mothers; I was to be a paragon amongst fathers. Women’s groups and interested males would arrange coach trips to attend demonstrations to see how it should be done. I would be kindly and generous, infinitely patient, endlessly understanding. I would allocate long periods of quality time to my offspring that would be devoted to reading and bodily contact; together, that is my wife and I, we would consider and evaluate baby massage, later yoga, even home education, though I was careful to conceal that notion from my parents and I am not sure whether she ever floated the idea past hers.

It goes without saying that I attended pre-natal classes and discussed the merits of birthing pools with women who were already so huge and round that I checked myself for sharp objects before entering their presence. I was aware that there are no precautions for adoration and that I was susceptible to large, round, dark (that is black) eyes. Nevertheless, boy or girl, there is no excuse for spoiling a child and the merits of picking up a crying baby or taking steps not to establish a link between yells and attention were so solemnly and endlessly discussed that I cannot remember what conclusion, if any, was reached. I have to admit that I prevaricated, hedging my bets on this aspect of child rearing. It did occur to me at the time that Lillian’s attention to such matters was brief and that she was easily distracted but I became famous for my serious and committed attitude. I ought, it was suggested, to set up a consultancy. I was generous with advice.

I applied a hand and even from time to time ventured an ear to the burgeoning bump and gasped in admiration at the sensations that revealed the presence of squirming contents. It was a girl, of this I was convinced, curled in the amniotic fluid, attached by that space walk cord and kicking when required. I had no doubt that the home delivery would be safe and hygienic. I was the proud possessor of a ticket for a ring-side seat and I had already begun to dream of a Chiara of my own. I knew that it was not advisable to dream of long thin limbs attached to a skinny body, all lightly tanned, of jet black hair and deep expressive eyes but I was clear that this was the ideal to aim for.

She arrived as expected. There is nothing to compare with the drama of the arrival of a baby no matter how calm the midwife and I was not to be fobbed off with demands for hot water. I was with her all the way bearing up manfully and offering advice when it was called for. There was pain and effort and blood and we were all relieved when the mess was tidied away, the infant inspected, found free of defects and