One of the most important things on a day like this was to look good, but when you’re blind that can be something of a problem. It was her old friend Beatrice who told Daisy, “Of course we have to do something about your appearance: you’re the artist, you’ll be the star of the whole event!” And she had proceeded to go through her wardrobe with her and to groom her. So Daisy was wearing a very fetching summer dress that revealed rather a lot of her curvaceous figure. Her unruly blond curls had been put up in a kind of dashing bun, drawing attention to her small, shapely ears to the best advantage. The dark round glasses she wore to hide her atrophied eyes happened to be quite fashionable that year. “Now,” dear Beatrice had concluded, “I’ve brought some glittery earrings, nothing expensive; let me fix them to your earlobes. There, you really look like a great star!”
And when the guests started to arrive at the opening of her exhibition, they complimented her on her appearance. “Darling, you look gorgeous today, you can be such a grey mouse sometimes.” Daisy giggled and felt some relief at this opening line that was repeated by many. It was an easy way to break the ice, as she was feeling very nervous. What also put her somewhat at ease was all the hugging and pecking that was going on. Hugging was always a favourite with Daisy, but on that day it was particularly pleasant, everyone well groomed, smelling nicely of shampoo and toothpaste, coming up to her and pecking her on the cheeks, taking her in their arms… Sometimes she had no idea who she was embracing, so she would chuckle, and say, “Nice to meet you, but who is this, anyway?”
“You don’t know me, but I certainly know you, don’t you worry…
“Aha… a mystery man! I like that… Welcome to my exhibition, enjoy the show.”
“Thank you. See you later.”
Soon the small gallery in Tufnell Park filled up with guests, and there was quite a hubbub. Daisy liked that too. Everyone talking at once, exclaiming, laughing, the voices louder and louder as more bubbly wine was imbibed. It gave you a sense of how many people were there, and of where they were standing, even of who was talking to whom.
On the other hand, you tended to feel a bit lost in the crowd. Daisy had the gallery well mapped in her mind, including the exact location of each sculpture on display, but she hadn’t taken into account that the place would be filled up with so many people. It made her lose her bearings: you could no longer move in a straight line for all the visitors standing in the way…
This was Daisy’s first solo exhibition. That is to say, the sculptures were hers, the photographs and paintings on the walls were by others. So, many people from many different areas of her life had answered her invitation. It reminded Daisy of something from a novel, where half a dozen plot lines would originate from a single gathering like this one.
To start with, there were some childhood friends from the school for the blind that Daisy had attended. She had known these girls from the age of six, until they had done their A Levels together when they were eighteen. Now the three girls that had come—well, they were mature women—clustered around one sculpture after another and touched it, and touched one another, and giggled, giggled… Daisy sighed. She would have liked to join them for the rest of the evening. There is nothing above the friendship, the deep understanding, of a bunch of blind girls among themselves. But there were other guests to attend to, Daisy had to perform her duties as a hostess.
Everybody was allowed to touch the sculptures, of course. Between the welcoming of guests, Daisy reflected on the difference between the 30s or 40s, when “touching things” had been strongly frowned upon, and the swinging 60s of today’s London, when the “touchy-feely” approach had become all the rage. Now a blind lady who was interested in sculpture was often allowed to touch the works on display. Daisy had just told her school friends, “I never go to a museum or a gallery without a pair of surgical gloves, so that they can’t turn down my request without looking silly…”
There were a few colleagues from work, women who were younger than Daisy and admired her a great deal as a physical therapist. The notion of the blind masseuse is a hackneyed cliché, of course, but in this case you really had to admire the woman’s deep knowledge of the human anatomy and her fabulous flair for finding out what was ailing a patient. And she was also such a friendly person, always very generous with her advice. But today these younger therapists discovered a side of their colleague that they had never suspected.
“She’s a real artist!”
“There’s bubbly wine galore!”
“Who could have imagined? Good old Daisy!”
Then there were the remnants of the gang, the cousins of Daisy’s first husband Ralph. She had known them since she was sixteen, and they too enjoyed an easy relationship with her, based on a deep understanding. Besides, they had all three been among her first sitters for the portraits.
Beatrice, looking at the resulting bronze cast of her likeness, felt a grim satisfaction at the result. Daisy had rendered her big nose and absence of a chin with unwitting brutality. An impressive monstrosity was looking down at her: a caricature worthy of Daumier. On the other hand, beautiful, plump Joan had been rendered as a shapeless balloon, a soft hump of dough. As for William, with his boyish good looks, he had been represented as all sharp cheekbones and jawbones, brutal edges and wedges that obliterated the doe-eyed softness of his personality… So there was no winning at this game, which was probably the reason why everybody was so enthralled by it.
On the walls of the gallery, a local photographer had hung huge black-and-white blow-ups of his portraits of the sitters, so that the visitors could compare his relatively objective renderings with the highly subjective ones of the blind sculptor Daisy Hayes… Enthralling indeed.
In the meantime Daisy was listening to William talking about computers, the only subject that really interested him.
“We’ve made tremendous progress since the war. Today almost all the banks and insurance companies in the land have their own computer.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that even Daddy’s bank sends me punched cards nowadays. Couldn’t they make those computers print my statements in Braille?”
“Of course they could! But I’m afraid there are not enough blind customers to make it worth their while… But what I’m working on in Oxford right now is something entirely different: a new chess project! Our computer is getting pretty good at the game of kings…”
“And what’s the use of that? Surely there’s no joy in it for a computer!”
“Maybe not, but it’s a test, don’t you see? If a computer can beat a human being at chess, that’s one better for the machines over us humans…”
“Oh, William, the silly things you say!”
“No, but seriously, Daise. We’ve been dreaming of this for a long time. In Manchester in the 40s, when Alan Turing was still with us, we used to write chess programs and play each other. At the time our computer was too primitive to run these programs, obviously, but we used to sit down at a chess board and we played one another by strictly following the instructions of our own program. The chap who won the game had supposedly written the best program. And Turing always won the tournament, of course.”
“You miss the man terribly, don’t you?”
“Heavens, yes!”
This conversation was interrupted by the unknown “mystery man”, who suddenly appeared at Daisy’s elbow and muttered, “Nice exhibition, Daisy Hayes, remarkable work…”
Daisy said to William, “I’ll talk to you later, darling…” Then turning to the intrusive guest, she said, “Well, thank you for your appreciation, mister… Do you have a name?”
“Of course, but I don’t think it will ring a bell. Martin McCullough.”
“And we know each other?”
“You’ve never met me, but I know you from way back, when we were both still very young and idealistic… Listen, I need to talk to you urgently.”
“Well, you’re talking to me right now.”
“No, I mean in private.”
“Well, as you can see, I’m in the middle of hosting a very public opening, so you’ll have to come back later…”
“Sure, I’ll stick around.”
Then suddenly the members of Ralph’s crew and his former batman Victor were surrounding Daisy, hugging and congratulating. Daisy’s first and second husbands had both been bomber pilots. Ralph hadn’t survived the war, but his old comrades still formed a loyal band of friends who were very protective of their skipper’s widow.
“And where’s the new skipper?” someone asked—Cray Collier, who had been the rear gunner—, “Is your current ex-husband letting you down again?”
“Come on, Cray, you know how it is. Nowadays Richard flies for BOAC on the line to Australia, and besides, now that we are separated, he doesn’t owe me anything…”
“But you did send him an invitation?”
“Of course! He would be perfectly welcome!”
“There you are then. My point exactly.”
Then Victor asked, “Who was that man you were just talking to? He seems familiar but I can’t place him…”
“He just told me that his name is Martin McCullough, but I have no idea who he is.”
“McCullough! Of course! Haven’t seen the chap for more than fifteen years…”
“He did mention that he knows me from way back.”
“Yes, but the point is, he is not supposed to know you at all!”
“Now you are making me curious…”
Victor made a gesture that compelled the crew-members to huddle closer around Daisy, and the he told them under his breath, “Remember the tiny explosive lens that we needed in 1950? This is the man who provided it and built it into the miniature radio receiver. He knew what it was meant for, but the deal was that he would not be told for whom he was making it.”
“Good God!” Daisy muttered, “I don’t like this at all!”
Now, Ralph’s mother and younger sister Margery came over to greet her. They knew Victor and the crew only as acquaintances one meets at precisely such events as this one, so all present greeted one another or nodded, and then the crew left Daisy alone with her in-laws.
Ralph’s mother Stella was a very frail old lady and her daughter-in-law was much impressed that she had gone to the trouble of coming to her opening.
“Oh! bless you, dear girl! I wouldn’t have missed this for the world! I am so impressed by your artistic achievements.”
“But you came all the way from Bottomleigh! How’s life at the old manor these days?”
“Oh! very nice, thank you. There are more and more local pensioners living there with me. We share the costs; we share everything. In fact, we have established a real commune along the lines of what all those hippies are doing…”
“My darling Stella, you are so full of surprises!”
“You must come and visit us one of these days, when all the excitement around your exhibition has abated.”
“Oh, I’d like to. I hope I will.”
“But there’s one thing that surprises me a little, my dear. Why are you calling yourself Daisy Hayes on the posters and in the catalogue, if I may ask? Now that you no longer need to be called Daisy Clayton, I would have expected that you would revert to Daisy Prendergast…”
“Well, I’m sorry, but yes, I use my maiden name nowadays. I never imagined that it might distress you, believe me. It may look to you as if I want to erase Ralph’s memory, but nothing could be further from the truth. I still think of Ralph every day, but nowadays, yes, it is one Daisy Hayes who keeps those fond memories alive.”
“Of course,” Margery intervened, “We understand, don’t we Mother? You did well, Daise…”
Margery had been twelve years old the first time she had met Daisy—who had been all of sixteen. She had been deeply impressed, especially as Daisy was blind, and she had become a lifelong admirer. But now that they were both grownup women, forty and forty-four years old, both unmarried, as it happened, the difference between them had lost any relevance. They were both professional women, Daisy a physiotherapist, and Margery Prendergast a chemist who led a small research group at King’s College, London.
Margery now told Daisy that she liked her older, cubist work better than the new, expressionist portraits. “Particularly the ‘Kitchen Table’ series. Your ‘Kitchen Table XII’ was gorgeous. But there is something of a paradox in the fact that each iteration was so different from the previous one, while you still claim that you were only rendering a table the way you perceive it…”
“Good point, Margery. Very astute. But as an artist, am I not allowed some poetic licence? Besides, each time I made a new representation of a table, I gained new insights for the next one… A never ending process!”
Stella Prendergast now said, “You must attend to your exhibition, Daisy. Shall we leave you to it?”
“Just a moment, dear Mother. I had planned to introduce you to an old neighbour of mine who was very fond of Ralph when we moved in at Tufnell Park in ’41. She would be delighted to make your acquaintance. I can hear her over there, an old lady with a heavy French accent…”
Margery moved them over to where the lady was holding forth among a group of Daisy’s neighbours, and the introductions were made. “Ah, Mrs Prendergast, Ralph’s mother, I am so glad to meet you at last!” Mrs Maurois exclaimed. “You know, it is funny, when your boy moved in with Daisy, they both referred to me as ‘the old lady next door’. But at the time I was about the same age as Daisy is now…”
“Good God,” Daisy cried, “so you were not an old lady at all!”
“Certainly not! You were just a very young and ignorant girl…”
“And blind, Mrs Em. I think there are all sorts of very reliable visual clues that allow normal people to know at a glance how old other people are. But we blind people can’t see it!”
“Well, dear Ralph was not blind, but he also thought me very old when he was eighteen years of age! Anyway, I am indeed pretty old now, by any measure, and so are you, Mrs Prendergast, what do you say?”
“Yes indeed, Mrs Maurois, there comes a time when one is old by any measure…”
At that moment an unknown man joined the little group, and politely said, “Excuse me, ladies, may I take Mrs Hayes away from you? I’m a journalist, and I would like to put a few questions to the artist…”
The ladies were delighted. “A journalist! Really? My-my, Daisy, you’ll become famous yet!” And they moved off, commenting excitedly on the unexpected event.
“A journalist, huh?” Daisy said, “May I ask from which paper?”
“Well, Nick Aaron is the name. I have my press card here, you can ask anyone to verify for you…”
“No, no need for that. But for which paper do you work? I’m just curious…”
“Well that’s the thing. I’m a ‘casual’, a freelance writer, but I’m very excited by what I have seen here today, and I’m certain that I can sell a piece on you to several publications.”
“All right. I guess a little bit of publicity can’t hurt… What do you want to know?”
“First tell me exactly how you go about modelling a portrait. I take it you work with clay?”
“Yes, I just follow the normal procedure. And you know that since Rodin was seen to make his sitters pose very close to him, that has been normal procedure as well. As a blind sculptor I need to touch the sitter’s face, so I make them sit on a high stool very close to me and I do exactly that… They do end up with smudges of fresh clay on their face; maybe that did not happen with Rodin, though one can’t be so sure about that.”
“Wonderful! Great story, I’m taking this down… Anything more on this closeness thing?”
“Well, I have to be quite intimate with the sitter to be able to do their portrait. Which means that if you wanted me to portray you, for instance, you would have to allow me to get very close first, in more than one sense… On the other hand this is a good thing, as I’m told that the results of my work are rather brutal and can be very confronting.”
“Great! Now tell me about your studio. Do you have a studio?”
“Yes, I have a plot at a collective. I was lucky to get in… In a way, being blind opens many doors and generates a lot of goodwill. So one could argue that a blind artist has it easier than most…”
“I see… great, and then you have the portraits cast in bronze. Isn’t that rather expensive?”
“Yes, you’re right about that. I’ve put almost all my savings into this project. It has taken me many years to accumulate enough pieces for this exhibition…”
“I can imagine. But now I have a completely different question. I’ve been looking at your work, and it seems to me that there is an aggressive edge to each of your pieces, an element of violence that most people do not perceive… You’ve used the word ‘brutal’ yourself a moment ago. Is that what your inner world looks like? Is this typical of the blind? Some level of frustration, maybe?”
“No… Well, I guess you’re right about an edge of violence, and why not? Isn’t there a dark side to us all? But I don’t think that you could call it typical of the blind. On the contrary, why would blind people be any different from others?”
“It’s just that I find it a bit ironic. Listening to the reactions of the public, everyone sees you as the brave blind lady who creates beautiful art against all odds…”
“Well, you may quote me on this: I’m a normal artist. I have a dark side like every human being. And the difficulties I have to overcome are no different from those of any other artist. Or rather, as I just told you a moment ago, the fact that I’m blind opens many doors and generates a lot of goodwill…”
Then the journalist told Daisy that he was very interested in the story of the model railway set that he’d read about in the catalogue. How as a child she’d been fascinated by the train station from her daddy’s railway set. That suddenly she had perceived with her fingers what normal people could see with their eyes: a train station; a locomotive; a double-decker bus; a milk float… “Are your parents here? I would like to talk to your father in particular… I assume I may use this childhood story in my own piece?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Consider the contents of the booklet as a press release. And if you want to talk to my father, I heard Daddy laughing just a moment ago. He must be somewhere in that direction, behind you, a tall, slender gentleman, balding, with a moustache; your typical Great War veteran…”
“Yes, I think I’ve spotted him, thanks. See you later.”
Daisy was left alone, and suddenly the mystery man was at her side again, saying “How is it going, Daisy Hayes?”
“Fine, just fine, Martin McCullough. Now I know who you are…”
“Yes, I saw you huddling with Victor and his men, so I thought you must be talking about me.”
“Yes, well, I find your presence here very disturbing, as you can imagine. What is it that you want?”
“I need your help, Daisy Hayes. You got some help from me at the time, remember? Now it’s your turn to help me…”
“All right. Sounds fair enough. What can I do for you?”
“Well, listen. My daughter disappeared more than a year ago, and I need your help to find her…”
“Good God! That’s awful! How old is she? What’s her name?”
“See? Already you’re asking the right questions! Her name is Loretta and she was fifteen when she disappeared. She would be sixteen now… And the police are asking all the wrong questions, they keep telling me that there is nothing they can do.”
“Well, but you do realise that as a blind person there is not much I can do either…”
“We’ll talk about that later. Here’s a gentleman who clearly is making a beeline to chat with you.”
And just as suddenly as he had appeared at her side, the mystery man was gone.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything, Mrs Hayes?”
“Mr Dobbs junior! What a pleasant surprise, how nice of you to have come!”
“I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this for the world, Mrs Hayes. Fancy you a sculptor! I would never have guessed…”
“Ah, you see, there is more to me than meets the eye! How is business?”
“Fine, thank you. As long as people need their pills… You and I, who work in healthcare, will always have enough to do.”
“True. Imagine if for once everyone felt well all the time…”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about! But you know, looking at your impressive artworks, I can’t help reflecting how my father would have loved to see this. He was a great admirer of yours; he called you a plucky girl; but that was a long time ago…”
“And I called him a clever man, and an angel, and everyone in the neighbourhood was very sad when he passed away.”
“Well, thank you… You know, I’ll never forget that day during the war, when my father got home late and told us about this blind girl whose husband had been murdered. ‘Can you imagine?’ he told us, ‘he was a bomber pilot and he was killed by someone on our own side during a raid over Berlin!’ We kids were astounded, of course, especially when Dad told us how you, the blind girl, had somehow found out that there must have been poison in the pilot’s thermos flask!”
“Yes, and your father, the darling man, was the only one in this whole sorry story who believed me. He just looked at the facts and accepted that I was right. Whether I was blind or not. You have no idea