Free For a Father's Pride by Diane Allen Page A

your arms.’ Bob pulled Daisy down to him and kissed her hard on the lips, while his free hand felt its way down the front of her bodice,
squeezing her pert breast.
    ‘No, Bob, I can’t do it this way. I’ll not have you treat me this way. We need to talk. I don’t want children. In fact I don’t want sex – never, ever! I hate
a man’s hand touching me. I’m sorry. I love you, but I can’t have children. I won’t have children, not with you or anyone.’
    Daisy pulled herself away and stood defiantly in her undergarments, her face red and determined.
    ‘What sort of wife are you to me? You show me up, by wanting to work; you won’t lie with me; and now you are telling me you won’t bear me children? Perhaps we shouldn’t
have got married today. Perhaps I’ve been an old fool, and I should have listened to my mother. She told me I was too old to wed.’
    ‘Perhaps you should have listened to your mother. I don’t think we should have married, if all you want of me is sex, and for me to be tied down with a baby every year. That’s
not for me. And I’m away to my bed now, and you needn’t follow.’
    Daisy gathered up her dress and decided to climb the stairs to their bedroom. There she changed into her nightdress and lay in the new marital bed. She waited, fretting about the tempestuous
Bob. So his mother had told him not to marry; perhaps she had been telling Bob what to expect from his new bride, and Daisy was not fitting into his mother’s expectations of a perfect wife.
She waited for Bob’s footsteps to mount the stairs. She didn’t want him to touch her, but with the temper he was in, she thought it better just to lie there and take whatever she was
given. She felt tears welling up to the surface again; this was not what a wedding night should be like. Although she had not been looking forward to this moment, she had hoped he’d be kind
and caring, if there was to be any lovemaking, but now she was alone.
    She lay in the darkness, with the ticking of the clock passing the seconds, the minutes and then the hours. She couldn’t hear Bob. He wasn’t making a sound downstairs – he must
be sitting sulking. Well, let him sulk, she thought, as her fear turned to anger with the passing of the hours. He’d ruined her day and shown his true colours. The cloak of sleep eventually
got the better of her, although thoughts of a raging Bob clouded her dreams.
    Dawn came quickly, and Daisy rose from her sleep to find the other side of her bed cold and empty. A late-summer mist hung around the house and trailed along the valley bottom,
following the course of the river. The windows were cold and covered with condensation from the difference in temperature inside and out. She wiped a clear round on the wet window and noted that,
once the mists cleared, it would be a fine day. She could tell that by the bit of blue sky that fleetingly made an appearance through the white cloud. She pulled her now long brown hair from behind
her shoulders to the side of her face and, after using the chamber pot, quietly made her way down the stairs to the kitchen and living room.
    The clock’s constant tick was the only noise, until suddenly the clatter of an early-morning train rattled past the house, making Daisy jump as her unclad feet hit the cold stone-flagged
floor of the kitchen. The rocking chair was empty, and the grey embers of the fire were the only sign that someone had been in the kitchen the previous evening. Daisy pulled the green chenille
curtain back. It divided the kitchen from the living room. The week before she had lovingly sewn the tassels that now hung from it, as she’d looked forward to seeing it hanging in their new
home. She fastened it back with the hook that retained it, and shivered in the morning’s light.
    ‘Bob, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have listened to Jenny. You are right. I should never have worn that dress – it wasn’t me. And as for children, we can have as many as