Secret Sister by Cherry Durbin

Author:Cherry Durbin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

18

Meeting the Bartons

When John got home that evening I read him the ‘documents’ from Daisy, and once I’d finished he remarked, ‘I’ll say one thing for her: it seems she’s a survivor, just like you.’

It was true: she’d been separated from one daughter by the occupation of Jersey, then her husband left her and she’d been forced to give another daughter away; her second husband, the love of her life, died suddenly and tragically; and finally, she’d married a third husband with whom she had four children. She must be an extraordinarily strong woman to have come through it all even remotely sane.

‘And her son Pete was a good lad, I thought. It’s a reflection of her parenting skills that she’s brought up such a friendly individual.’

I agreed, especially when I received a letter from Pete Junior enclosing copies of all the photos he’d taken in the pub: ‘We should have picked a better background – the wallpaper is falling off behind us. Still, that’s not important, is it? What really counts is that we met after all these years. I only wish it was sooner because I’ve missed so much of your life.’ He wrote that he would pop in to visit us if his driving jobs ever brought him down south and I replied, offering him an open invitation.

Looking through the photos, the resemblance between Daisy and me was even stronger than I had noticed in the flesh: our smiles were exactly the same. Pete commented on it in his letter, so it wasn’t just me imagining things. We’d already made plans for John and me to go up and stay with them at Easter, and Pete wrote that he couldn’t wait to introduce us to everyone else.

Before then, in February 1987, Daisy was facing a gruelling round of medical tests. She sent me lots of documents and newspaper stories about Opren, so that I could understand what she was going through, and then, very touchingly, she wrote that she was going to name John and me as beneficiaries in her will, so that I would get a share of the payout from the drugs company after her death. She advised me that I should make a will and put John’s name in it so that Eric could not claim any of the money. I wrote back that I didn’t want any of her money and I thought she should spend it all on herself. She deserved it after all she had been through.

All in all, it sounded as though the legal battles were at the centre of her life, and I hoped she wasn’t going to be disappointed. She really felt her ‘youth’ had been stolen from her by Opren.

The Opren side effects weren’t Daisy’s only health problems. She had an arthritic hip, which made her limp, and she had glaucoma affecting her vision; she often wrote that she had to stop writing because her hand was hurting, or her eyes were giving out. I knew about

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