‘She didn’t want to go,’ he said quickly to her mother.
‘It wouldn’t matter, darling, if you did,’ said her mother, gently. ‘I mean, just sitting on a bench in the moonlight, just…’ You could see her thinking that one mustn’t be square and narrow-minded, things had changed these days. ‘Just doing a bit of necking, darling.’
Honestly, thought Daffy, they were so naive it was almost sickening. She said: ‘Oh, yes, I know, Mummy; but actually I was tired. I wanted to come home. And then he—he was so strange and insistent and then he started trying to kiss me and then—then…’
‘Oh, Daphne, he didn’t—?’ Her mother sat staring at her, one hand fisted against her mouth as though to plug in the little moaning, whimpering sounds that would force their way out. Her father was silent and his silence was worse than the whimpering.
Into that frightening silence, she began to gabble; and with the gabbling, memories came flooding back. ‘Then he… I fought and struggled…’ Real memories, genuinely terrifying, genuinely vile, the shock and horror of that onslaught by a man savage with drink, and frustration of a perverted passion. The earlier passages of her acquiescence were passed over: the rest, with genuine sobbings and bleatings, blurted out in a genuine sickness of frightened and disgusted recollection. The thin summer coat had all this time remained wrapped about her. Now she stood up and let it fall.
That slender white body like a lily, swaying within its ragged enfolding leaf of the little green dress: livid weals scoring the delicate skin, throat, arms, breast, great patches of red which tomorrow would be purple bruises, dried blood where filthy nails had scratched: marks of teeth on a soft round shoulder… The mother gave one horror-stricken glance and fell back, half fainting, into her corner of the sofa. The father said, in a high, harsh, scraping voice: ‘Daffy. You must answer. Did he? Did Simon—’
If any investigation arose, it could be proved all too surely that here was no dear little virgo intacta. She collapsed, sobbing afresh. ‘Oh, Daddy, please! Don’t ask me.’
But he repeated it, sick, dull, with that horrible grey-blue look on his face, though now, thanks to the medicine, the flush had died down. ‘I must ask you, Daffy. Did he…? Dear God!—Daffy, did Simon succeed in—raping you?’
She lifted her head and looked back into his face; the small flower-face looking back into the haggard thin face with that blue-grey, ash-grey skin. She bit on an already bleeding lip and turned away her head.
A simple man: with a serious heart condition, perhaps with but little time left to live. A man with one passion, with one hope, one idea, one total, blinding perfection of happiness in his life—so young, so fresh, untouched by the dirty world about her, so starry innocent—his golden girl, his golden Daffodil… A gentle man who for the rest of his life had retained the symbol of the hideous years of enforced ungentleness: his old Army revolver. He went to it now: went with a sort of automatism, turned back to that symbol of the red rage that had in those bad days consumed him at the sight of friends and comrades lying shattered into hideous stillness at the hands of the enemy; the red rage that then—as now again it must—had borne him on the only wings that would carry him to the duty that must be done: the wings of an unthinking, revengeful fury. Like an automaton, he loaded the gun with a single shot, left the house, walked the short distance to his brother’s home: stood in the darkness outside the white painted door and called out, sharp and harsh, hardly knowing that he lifted his voice: ‘Simon! Come out here!’
The front door opened. Framed in the light from the hall, still reeling a little, shocked, sickened by the memories which, with a terrifying clarity, were now returning, the boy stood there and looked out into the night. Looked out and saw where the stream of light caught the barrel of the revolver in a black gleam: and cried out: ‘It wasn’t my fault, Uncle John! She made me take her there.’
Like a man deaf and dumb, he lifted the gun, took aim at the boy’s left breast and fired; and stood quietly aside through the ensuing uproar till the police came to take him away.
And so the Golden Daffodil—the press had latched on to her pet name in one minute flat—was on all the front pages. Only, Mummy—true to form—had fought off the reporters and photographers and there was always the same photograph and it was an awful thing—taken quite early on the following morning when she was still drenched in tears about poor Simon being dead and poor Daddy being in prison; no make-up, hair in the most frightful mess because, of course, there’d been no time to go to Freesia’s to get it done; face patched with bruises, and still in one’s dressing-gown, though fortunately the lovely new one that had been Mummy’s last birthday present. And things were quite dicey. Policemen kept coming and asking her questions—or policewomen, rather: it was all so delicately handled that really it almost made Daffy giggle—though of course it was too awful about Daddy and Simon. Mummy made her stay in bed and she lay propped up on pillows and wanly lived again through the recital of Simon’s attack and Daddy’s reaction to what she had told him about it. That all went all right, went fine, and after all now at least Simon could never contradict her. But after that…