Spider, for his part, was having to work.
Most people do not notice other people. Rosie’s mother did. She noticed everything. Now she sipped her hot water from a bone china cup. She knew that she had just lost a skirmish, even if she could not have told you how or what the battle was about. So she moved her next assault to higher ground.
“Charles, dear,” she said, “tell me about your cousin Daisy. I worry that your family is underrepresented. Would you like her to be given a larger role in the wedding party?”
“Who?”
“Daisy,” said Rosie’s mother, sweetly. “The young lady I met at your house the other morning, wandering around in her scanties. If she was your cousin, of course.”
“Mother! If Charlie says she was his cousin…”
“Let him talk for himself, Rosie,” said her mother, and she took another sip of hot water.
“Right,” said Spider. “Daisy,” said Spider.
He cast his mind back to the night of wine, women and song: he had brought the prettiest and funniest of the women back to the flat with them, after telling her that it was her idea, and then had needed her help in getting the semiconscious bulk of Fat Charlie up the stairs. Having already enjoyed the attentions of several of the other women during the course of the evening, he had brought the little funny one back with him rather as one might set aside an after-dinner mint, but he had found, on getting home and putting a cleaned-up Fat Charlie to bed, that he was no longer hungry. That one.
“Sweet little cousin Daisy,” he continued, without a pause. “I am certain that she would love to be involved in the wedding, should she be in the country. Alas, she’s a courier. Always traveling. One day she’s here, the next, she’s dropping off a confidential document in Murmansk.”
“You don’t have her address? Or her phone number?”
“We can look for her together, you and I,” agreed Spider. “Zooming around the world. She comes, she goes.”
“Then,” said Rosie’s mother, much as Alexander the Great might have ordered the sacking and pillaging of a little Persian village, “the next time she is in the country, you must invite her over. I thought she was such a pretty little thing, and I am sure that Rosie would just love to meet her.”
“Yes,” said Spider. “I must. I really must.”
EACH PERSON WHOEVER WAS OR IS OR WILL BE HAS A SONG. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.
Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which had been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits.
And that is, more or less, everything you need to know about Daisy. The rest is details.
Daisy’s father was born in Hong Kong. Her mother came from Ethiopia, of a family of wealthy carpet exporters: they owned a house in Addis Ababa, and another house and lands outside Nazret. Daisy’s parents met at Cambridge—he was studying computing before that was something that was seen as being a sensible career path, and she was devouring molecular chemistry and international law. They were two young people who were equally studious, naturally shy, and generally ill-at-ease. They were both homesick, but for very different things; however, they both played chess, and they met on a Wednesday afternoon, at the chess club. They were, as novices, encouraged to play together, and during their first game Daisy’s mother beat Daisy’s father with ease.
Daisy’s father was nettled by this, enough that he shyly asked for a rematch on the following Wednesday, and on every successive Wednesday after that (excluding vacations and public holidays) for the next two years.