But they whispered: and the whispering grew and grew.
Such a long time ago…
Of course Simon should never have taken her there in the first place. But she’d begged and pleaded and he never could resist her. ‘You know I’d take you if I could, Daffy. I’d do anything for you, you know I would, I’d die for you…’
And so would they all, all the others, all the boys—they’d lie down and die for Daffy Jones. And not only the young ones. ‘My Pa,’ Daffy used to say, ‘he’d go out and get himself run over if it would do me any good. No, honestly he would—he’d die for me.’ His Daffodil, he called her, his Golden Daffodil.
Talk about daffy! Simon thought—but there it was, she did remind one of a daffodil, so slender and fresh in the little narrow green frocks she so often wore, with that bell of bright yellow hair.
‘All the same, Daffy, I couldn’t take you to the Blue Bar. It’s just what it says, it’s off-colour, it’s an awful place. I couldn’t.’
But it sounded thrilling and the other girls at school would have fits when they heard she’d been there. ‘Oh, Simon, don’t be so stuffy! Please.’
‘Honestly, I couldn’t. What would your father say? He’d have a heart attack.’
‘My father has heart attacks the whole time,’ she said.
‘Well, I don’t mean that. I mean he’d do hand-springs.’
‘If my father did hand-springs he’d have a heart attack,’ she said laughing, ‘so it comes to the same thing.’
‘I just meant that he wouldn’t like it. He’d murder me!’
Daffy was his cousin, her father was his Uncle John.
‘It’s a dreadful, sordid place, sailors and tarts and people like that, everybody drunk or hashed up, some of them even on the hard stuff.’
He had, in fact, been there only once himself, taken by two much older boys who had left school—his own school. He went to boarding school; not Daffy’s. It had shocked and scared him; scared him even more to think it might ever come out that he had been there.
And she recognised that. She was a fly one, little Daffy Jones.
She said: ‘But you go there,’ and added with the smallest slyest of meaningful glances, ‘what would your Pa say?’
So he took her. Never mind the threat implicit, he loved her, he had always loved her, always, since they’d been small children together: Daffy so fresh and dewy-eyed, Daffy irresistible.
‘Gosh!’ she said when they got there, ‘isn’t it frightful? Fancy you!’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, casually sophisticate, ‘one grows up.’
But when his neighbour on the close-packed bench against the greasy wall offered him a drag, he said at once: ‘No thanks.’
‘Oh, do!’ said Daffy. ‘I’d love to have a try.’ Not for nothing was she known at school, with double meaning, as the Sex-Pot, but he was not to know that. ‘Only I don’t like sharing,’ she said to the man.
‘Plenty more where that came from,’ said the man, producing a handful of ready-rolled untidy cigarettes. He suggested to Simon, ‘Only it’ll cost you bread, man, bread.’
Of all the phoneys! But poor Simon fell for it all like a ton of bricks and forked out twice as much for the stuff as Daffy could have got it for, any day, from the school gardener.
‘Do let me have a—a drag, do they call it?—Simon. I’d love to try it.’
The stuff takes you different ways. Simon it wafted into a beautiful dream, sitting huddled on the bench gazing before him into a brilliance where beautiful people danced and hugged and did beautiful things, right out there in the open before everyone. He awoke to the sound of her screeching. She was shaking him, screaming at him.
‘Look at me! Look what he did to me.’
She looked beautiful, he thought, standing there with her dress half ripped off her body, showing the lovely white nakedness underneath, her hair all torn and tousled, her eyes so strangely bright—she must have been having a beautiful, beautiful time.
‘You look beautiful, Daffy,’ he said. ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘Good? It was horrible. Look what he did to me!’
‘You shouldn’t have gone with him if you didn’t like it.’
But she had liked it. For most of the time. She had never before been with a real, grown-up man. But then…
‘He wanted it all wrong,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going mad. I didn’t know what he was up to.’ She went into details. ‘So I tried to make him stop because, after all, there are limits; and he went berserk—it was absolutely frightful.’