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‘Then why?’ he interrupted. ‘And how come you use your maiden name?’
Lydia stood up. ‘My husband’s name was also Kelso, although we were not related at all. It was one of those strange coincidences because it’s not very common. As to why I told you—it was to establish my credibility, I guess. This is not sour grapes, and I do have some experience in these matters.’
‘So what do you suggest I do?’ He lay back and eyed her narrowly.
‘I’ll leave that up to you, Mr Jordan. But if you do what I think you intend to—let her down lightly, please.’
‘I gather you’ll be there to pick up any pieces?’
Lydia hesitated briefly. ‘I’m just about to start a position on a cattle station. It’s only temporary—I’m filling in for a friend while he takes leave—so, no. However, my father and my aunt are in residence at present. Now, my father,’ she said, with a faint smile touching her mouth, ‘may not be quite as civilised as I’ve been should Daisy be inconsolable.’
Joe Jordan stood up with disbelief written in every line of his face. ‘Is that a threat?’
‘Oh, I don’t think he’d do you any bodily harm. But he might come and harangue you, that kind of thing.’
‘I don’t believe this!’ He thumped his fist on the desk, then doubled up in pain clutching his shoulder.
Lydia blinked, then moved around the desk with her boyish stride. ‘Can I help?’
‘No, you can’t! I’m a human being. Why would I need a bloody vet?’
Of course it was surprise, he figured out, that had allowed him to be overpowered by a woman. Mind you, he told himself, she was quite strong, even unusually strong, because he’d ended up back in his chair with her long, capable hands massaging and gently manipulating his neck and shoulder in a way that brought him almost instant relief.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked conversationally.
He sighed. ‘I was playing tennis and pulled a muscle. Just takes time, so they say. How…you did tell me you were a vet, didn’t you?’ he enquired bitterly.
Lydia laughed down into his upturned face. ‘Animals also have muscles, tendons and nerves. I specialise in horses and I’ve done quite a lot of work with racehorses and polo ponies; they often pull muscles. There. What you need is regular physiotherapy, probably.’
She moved round to stand in front of him and held out her hand.
Joe Jordan didn’t take it immediately for the very good reason that he was suddenly struck by the insane desire to see this girl without her clothes. To unbutton her mannish jacket and watch the pinstriped trousers sink to the floor, to find out how her figure was curved and how she could be strong yet so slim, to watch that fascinating stride…
‘Goodbye, Mr Jordan,’ she said gravely. ‘I feel we understand each other quite well, don’t you?’
If you can understand going from one sister to the other. If you have any idea how enigmatic you appear, Lydia Kelso. If you can understand that you’ve successfully made me feel like a piece of horseflesh… He bit his lip on all that was hovering on the tip of his tongue and said instead, ‘I guess so. Goodbye, Miss Kelso. You have magic hands, by the way.’
‘So I’m told. Oh!’
He followed her dark blue gaze to see it resting on his sketchpad. ‘Ah, I apologise,’ he murmured. ‘I do these things without thinking sometimes.’
But Lydia was laughing down at the cartoon of herself, immensely tall and obviously haranguing a diminutive, seated Joe Jordan in short pants, whose feet didn’t even touch the ground. ‘It’s so good,’ she said, still chuckling appreciatively.
‘It’s not meant to make you laugh,’ he replied with dignity.
‘Then I must have an odd sense of humour! May I have it?’ She paused, then added blithely, ‘I can use it to warn myself against being too dictatorial and overpowering, even bossy.’
‘You don’t believe that for one moment, do you?’ he countered.
She laughed again. ‘How could you tell?’
He paused. ‘I just have the feeling you…’ He hesitated, and wondered what use it was to ponder any further about Daisy Kelso’s surprising sister. ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, I guess.’ But as he stood up he was curiously relieved to discover he was an inch taller than she was.
‘No. It doesn’t,’ she agreed, with an oddly significant little glance.
He shook her hand, then tore the drawing off the pad and gave it to her.
‘I’ll get it framed—don’t bother to come down; I’ll let myself out,’ she murmured, with a look of delicious mischief in her eyes now. And she went round the desk, slung her navy bag on her shoulder and strode out.
She was still chuckling as she walked along the street in Balmain where Joe Jordan had his townhouse. It was a lovely afternoon and, since its revival in the 1960s, Balmain was a pleasant spot.
One of Sydney’s oldest suburbs, on a peninsula into the harbour with a few miles of coastline, its fortunes had been varied. But although there were plenty of interesting and historic buildings from its early times of affluence, it now had a trendy population, and she wouldn’t mind a townhouse there herself, she thought, as she waited for the ferry to take her across the harbour. Especially one as nicely restored as Joe Jordan’s.
But then, he could be described as trendy himself, she mused, which she was not, particularly, yet he wasn’t quite what she’d expected…
The ferry came and she stepped aboard and turned to have a last look not only at Balmain but at the home suburb of, yes, she had to admit it, a slightly intriguing man.
That evening, as she was putting the finishing touches to her packing, Daisy wandered into her room and sat down at the dressing table.
‘I’m going to miss you, Lyd,’ she said as she unpinned the glorious fall of her dark hair and started to brush it.
‘Me too.’ Lydia sat down on the bed and eyed her sister’s back. ‘But you’ll have plenty to occupy yourself, what with the Musica Viva tour and the start of the symphony season.’
Daisy sighed and lowered her hand. ‘Can’t seem to get excited about it, somehow.’ She swung round on the stool. ‘It’s my biological clock,’ she added. ‘I can feel it ticking away madly.’
‘It actually ticks?’
Daisy pulled a face. ‘You know what I mean. I just wish,’ she said intensely, ‘you could meet Joe and give me your opinion. Then I’d know whether to go ahead or not.’
Lydia experienced an inner tremor of guilt, but she said easily, ‘There’s an old saying—when in doubt, do nowt. To be honest, Daisy, I think you should put up with your biological clock a bit longer and wait for the right man to come along.’
‘So you’ve said. But you’re not twenty-nine—I’ll be thirty in two months!’
‘Maybe you’re confusing the dreaded thirty—remember when we used to think anyone over thirty was ancient?—with the biological clock?’
Daisy smiled briefly. ‘I just keep thinking my life is slipping away from me, and that there may not be a Mr Right out there for me.’
‘So Joe,’ Lydia said carefully, ‘is not necessarily Mr Right?’
‘Joe’s lovely, most of the time. He can also be moody and sarcastic, and there are times when I don’t think he knows I exist.’
Lydia smoothed a pair of khaki shorts across her lap as she wondered how to ask her sister whether she’d actually slept with Joe Jordan. This was one point Daisy had been reticent about, but then she was always reticent, if not to say capable of closing up like a clam, with her family on this touchy subject, because they, above all, knew how frequently she fell in and out of love. But would Joe Jordan squire around a beautiful woman he was not sleeping with? A woman who had indicated her willingness on their first date? She doubted it deeply, Lydia decided.
She asked cautiously instead, ‘Would you say you’re having an affair with him, Daisy?’
‘Not exactly. I mean, when I decided I wanted him for the father of my child, I made most of the running, you could say. Then I thought—Hey, this guy is also something else; he can give you goosebumps just by looking at you, let alone the rest of it, so…’ She paused with an uplifted expression on her face that Lydia felt answered her question better than words might. ‘So,’ Daisy went on, ‘then I thought, Perhaps I should hang on to him but, put simply, Lyd, he’s not that easy to hang on to.’
Daisy’s eyes were a true violet. She wasn’t tall, she had a perfect oval face, a lovely figure, she was exquisitely groomed, even for a dinner at home, and she looked every inch a sophisticated twenty-nine-year-old. Nor did her just uttered sentiments belie this—unless you knew her well enough to know that of the two of them she was the much more naive.
‘Does he have other women?’ Lydia asked, packing her shorts and reaching for a blouse.
‘I don’t think so. But the fact of the matter is he hasn’t had much of me lately. He’s losing interest, I would say.’
Thank heavens, Lydia thought. She said bracingly, ‘Then he’s not worth it, Daisy. Besides, you could end up with a moody kid!’
‘All the same, there’s something about him—’
‘Listen, Daisy.’ Lydia was suddenly serious. ‘I went along with this when I thought you were theorizing as opposed to actually doing it, because you’re a lot like Dad. Once he gets an idea into his mind nothing can change it until he gets it out of his system.’
‘Thank you,’ Daisy said gravely.
‘But now it’s time for straight talking,’ Lydia went on pointedly. ‘If you love Joe Jordan and he loves you and wants to marry you, you have my blessing. Otherwise it’s a dangerous game you’re playing—don’t do this to yourself. You’re worth much more than a life of seducing men so you can have a baby.’
Daisy turned the brush over in her hands. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, Lyd,’ she said slowly. ‘You fell in love once and it worked out perfectly—well, until Brad died, of course. But it never works perfectly for me.’ She brushed away a tear.
‘Could you be…could you be a shade too generous, Daisy?’ Lydia suggested, picking her words with care. ‘Why don’t you play hard to get for a change?’
Daisy lifted her head as if struck by inspiration. ‘Oh. Maybe Joe would respond to that!’
‘Forget Joe Jordan—’ Lydia broke off and bit her lip.
‘Why?’
‘Uh—you told me yourself that he’s very clever and that he can be moody and sarcastic. That’s always hard to live with unless you’re clever in the same way. What you need is someone musical, someone who could share the area where you’re really sensitive and creative.’
Daisy stared reflectively into the distance. ‘There is a new oboe player who’s just joined the orchestra. He’s rather sweet, and I can tell he’s interested, but, no, it wouldn’t work.’
‘It’s probably far too early to tell whether it would work,’ Lydia commented practically, ‘but how can you be so sure it wouldn’t?’
‘He’s younger.’
‘Younger… How much?’
‘He’s about your age, I guess.’
Lydia was struck silent for a long moment, struck by the irony of her sister plotting to have some man’s child to bring up on her own yet unable to contemplate a normal relationship with a man because he was a little younger…
She said, at length, ‘Three years—that’s nothing, really.’
‘Oh, yes, it is. When I’m thirty he’ll still be in his twenties. More importantly, when I’m fifty, he’ll still be in his forties. I’m sure it should be the other way around because men tend to age better than women, don’t you think?’
But Lydia was suddenly gripped by the feeling that a younger man could be just what Daisy needed. Might it not bring out a so far latent streak of maturity in her? As well as getting her over Joe Jordan, of course. Then she sighed and decided she’d done enough interfering in her sister’s life for one day.
‘Why don’t you just wait and see what happens?’ she murmured, and reached for the silver-framed photo of Brad on the dressing table. She stared down at it, blinked a couple of times, then laid it gently face down on top of her clothes in the suitcase.
Daisy was on her feet in a flash, and she knelt in front of Lydia and took her hands. ‘Do you still miss him so much, darling? I had hoped it was getting easier.’
‘It is, mostly,’ Lydia said tremulously. ‘Just sometimes it’s actually harder. I don’t know why. Unless it’s because I’m afraid I’ll forget.’
‘You know,’ her sister said, ‘you worry an awful lot about me, but I can tell you that Brad loved you so much he would not want you to be unhappy for ever. And it’s been five years now. Time to stop living a half-life. Time to have no guilt about finding someone else.’
Lydia smiled painfully. ‘The problem is, I couldn’t care less if I never did find anyone else. Men don’t seem to interest me much, apart from—’ She stopped abruptly as it surfaced in her mind that Joe Jordan was the first interesting man she’d met for a long time. To make matters worse, she’d been just about to say it.
‘So there is someone?’ Daisy said eagerly.
‘No!’ Lydia denied hastily.
‘But you said—“apart from…”?’
‘Um—the ones you can’t have,’ Lydia improvised madly, then thought, Well, that wasn’t so far from the truth either.
‘Still, that could be a start!’ Daisy frowned. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘No. No—’
‘Is he married?’ Daisy asked, with both understanding and sympathy. ‘A lot of the best ones are.’
‘You’re right—was that Chattie calling?’ Their aunt Charlotte was universally known as Chattie Kelso, and she still lived with them in the big old house at Bronte, a beachside suburb of Sydney where both Daisy and Lydia had grown up.
Daisy rose. ‘She’s cooked roast pork,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘You know how paranoid she is about getting the crackling crisp. We’d better not keep her waiting.’
James Kelso, who was renowned for his bush ballads and poetry written under the name of Kelso James, as well as renowned for always wearing a bush shirt and jeans, raised his glass and cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to propose several toasts. First to you, my dear Chattie, for the crispest crackling you’ve ever produced.’
Chattie, a spinster in her fifties, with Lydia’s colouring and build although her hair was sprinkled with grey now, looked gratified. She raised her glass in return and her fine eyes glinted with mischief. ‘Thought so myself, although I didn’t like to say it.’
‘And to you, my dear Daisy—’ James inclined his head towards his elder daughter ‘—for looking sensational, as usual. No one would think you were a day over nineteen.’
Daisy smiled fondly at him. ‘Dad, you’re sweet, but you tell awful lies!’
‘May one enquire how your love life is going at present?’
‘One may—it’s going, but it’s at a critical stage, you could say.’
‘Hmm. Dangerous age, twenty-nine. Would you agree, Chattie?’
‘No. They can all be dangerous. I consider myself at my most dangerous when I was seventeen, closely followed by thirty-nine. At seventeen I would have done anything to have a boyfriend and be like the rest of the girls, and at thirty-nine I would have done anything to have a husband.’
‘What about children?’ Daisy asked.
‘That too. I gave serious thought to having one without a husband—’
‘Chattie!’ James reproved. ‘Don’t put silly ideas into their young heads.’
Lydia ate her roast pork and thought that if Joe Jordan were a fly on the wall he might be able to judge for himself how eccentric her family could be.
‘If you’d let me finish,’ Chattie said, ‘I decided against it because I realised it was extremely unfair to a child to deprive it of a father.’
Lydia put her knife and fork down and glanced at her aunt through her lashes. Had a whiff of Daisy’s state of mind got through to her?
