A Better World than This (16 page)

‘Do you know what that awful commercial traveller trying to make us order new baking tins called us yesterday?’ In her disgruntled mood Daisy’s sense of humour had totally deserted her. ‘The Dolly Sisters! They must be forty years old at least! And he wasn’t trying to be funny either. Just because I didn’t give him an order for his flamin’ tins.’

‘Well, you must admit those in the bakehouse must have been around since Adam was a lad.’ Florence’s eyes sharpened with what Daisy privately called her ‘hygienic’ expression. ‘Why are they never given a proper wash? It’s disgusting.’

‘To scour them would ruin them.’ Daisy wondered how many times Florence would have to be told this before she believed it. ‘They’ve formed a proper surface which even hot water would ruin. Allow me to know better, Florence.’

Daisy was wearing her round-rimmed glasses. She had been reading her library book at the same time as rolling up her fringe in pipe cleaners, hoping it would comb out with the same bounce and curl as Claudette Colbert’s the next day. ‘Why I try to look glamorous, I don’t know. There’s no Red Shadow going to come in for a box of fancies, take one look at me and carry me off to his tent in the desert. So why do I bother? Answer me that.’

Florence pushed the cat off her lap and began her own nightly preparations. Taking the Kirby grips out of her French pleat she allowed her barley-pale hair to fall unfettered round her shoulders, as fine and silky as a child’s.

Reminding Daisy of Dorothy’s hair; reminding her yet again of Sam. She took off her glasses quickly, as if he had suddenly materialized in a whiff of ectoplasm and caught her wearing them. She stored them away in the peeling case, and closed her book.

‘Are you happy, Florence? I don’t mean deliriously happy. Just day-to-day happy. Tell me honestly.’

‘That’s easy.’ Florence began to massage Pond’s Vanishing Cream into her long thin hands, working it well into the cuticles. ‘I ask myself every day what would have become of me if you hadn’t taken me in that night. I would never have gone back to live at home.’

‘Well, you didn’t have to.’ Daisy’s voice was sharp as she accepted that only her mother dying so conveniently on that very day had made it possible for Florence to move in straight away. ‘But are you happy only because you were so miserable
before
? That’s a mere matter of comparison. Like the feeling when you stop banging your head against a wall.’

Florence was storing the Kirby grips all facing the same way in an old Oxo tin. ‘When you can go to the pictures again you’ll feel better, though why you don’t go now is beyond me. You keeping away isn’t going to bring your mother back. Who decided three months would be a respectful time to keep away? Who made the rules? Six months for deep mourning, another six for wearing mauve or a decent navy-blue. On the day you wear a yellow jumper, will that free you from the obligation of ever thinking about your mother again? I went to
my
mother’s funeral in a bright red hat.’

‘And it didn’t suit you neither,’ Daisy said at once, sounding so much like Martha that Florence laughed out loud. ‘Let’s go to Blackpool on Sunday,’ Daisy said, leaning forward. ‘On a day excursion. We can pick the … the things
up
from the hospital and have a blow on the front, and still be back in plenty of time for the oven if I bank it down carefully enough. It won’t bother me,’ she said quickly, reading Florence’s doubtful expression. ‘In fact, I would
like
to go again. Because if I don’t go soon I may never want to go at all.’

‘On account of your mother, or on account of Sam?’

Daisy was silent. If she saw the place, the very spot where he had tried so carefully to explain to her that he valued her friendship and nothing more, maybe the acceptance that it was all over would be easier. But friends wrote letters, didn’t they? She had answered his note, thanking him for the money, not mentioning that it hadn’t arrived on time. She had bought flowers the following Sunday at the shop across from the cemetery gates, filled a stone sarsaparilla jar from one of the stand taps and stood the jar on the newly-laid stone. ‘From Sam’, she had written on a card, that being as suitable a message as she could think of. ‘And Jimmy and Dorothy’ she had added, hoping the children had not
dwelled
on what had happened that day. Then she had written to Sam telling him what she had done, but although her heart skipped a beat whenever the postman called, he had not written back.

‘I never give Sam a thought,’ she lied. ‘That’s over and done with. So what about catching the early train on Sunday? We’ll give chapel a miss for once.’

The train had just chugged its way beyond Wrea Green when Florence spotted a small dark finger rising up from the meadow flats.

‘The Tower!’ she announced, and everyone in the compartment smiled and craned their necks for a better look.

‘Aye, it’s still there,’ an elderly man in the corner seat said with satisfaction. ‘I were there at the stone-laying ceremony in 1891, and I were there in Whit week in 1894 when it opened. They reckon rain is worth a guinea a drop to the Tower Company. It fetches everybody in off the sands.’

Just outside Central Station the train stopped for almost five minutes. Florence jumped up from her seat and stuck her head out of the window to see, above the red signal lights, the marvels of the Tower in close-up, its ironwork impressive and detailed.

‘Three years to build; more than one poor bugger falling to his death and five hundred and eighteen feet up into t’sky.’ The man in the corner knew his facts and was determined to show off his knowledge. ‘It has yon Eiffel Tower in Paris beaten to a frazzle.’

‘I reckon he’s a shareholder,’ Florence said as they walked out of the station. ‘Oh no! It’s starting to rain. I knew we should have brought umbrellas.’

‘We’ll take a taxi.’ Daisy wanted to get it over with. ‘Hang the expense; there are no pockets in shrouds.’

She gave the name of the hospital to the driver and as they were driven through the closed shopping centre, past shuttered theatres and vast forecourts of newly-built garages, she saw how the Virginia creeper cloaking the red Accrington brick of the houses was already turning a dull coppery shade.

‘It’s very quiet today.’ Florence always chatted to taxi drivers and bus conductors. It enriched the mind, she had often told Daisy, finding out about other people’s lives.

‘Aye, it’s always quiet of a Sunday.’ The driver had an angry boil on the back of his neck. ‘But wait till the Illuminations come on. You won’t be able to put a pin between the crowds then. Lodging houses are booked solid already.’

‘Marshmallow ointment,’ Florence told him, as Daisy paid the fare outside the hospital. ‘Cut a hole in a piece of lint, then get your wife to put it on your neck and press, then apply the ointment. It won’t even leave a scar.’

‘You a nurse?’ The man jerked his head towards the hospital main doors. ‘Going on duty then?’

‘Nightingale’s her middle name. Come on, Florence,’ Daisy said, and the mild joke got her through the swing doors
and
up to the reception desk. It was stupid feeling like this, but the last time she had been here Sam had been with her, the sun had been shining and it hadn’t properly dawned on her that her little mother was dead. Whereas now. …

In the Almoner’s office she signed for the buff envelope and put it in her bag. They walked back to the front, glad that the rain had stopped, but expecting it to begin again at any minute. It was there in the wind; it beaded their coats like hoar frost and brought the colour back to Daisy’s cheeks.

They got vaguely lost in a labyrinth of little streets lined with lodging houses, with dining tables pushed close to the windows and peeling park benches outside. The air had an autumnal tinge to it, but back on the front they crossed the road to the promenade and walked on the almost deserted beach. Far out on the horizon a faded sun struggled to get through the mist, revealing long stretches of grey-green sea before hiding them again. With their backs to a breakwater, a family of late summer visitors sat huddled in coats and hats, sipping beakers of tea from a huge flask.

Daisy opened the envelope handed to her at the hospital and drew out a string of crystal beads, a seed-pearl brooch set in a rolled gold bar, and a hatpin with a mother-of-pearl head on it as big as a grape.

‘My mother’s jewellery.’ The sight of it made her want to weep. ‘That’s it. The lot. Imagine working hard all your life long and ending up with as little as this.’ She pushed the envelope deep into her handbag. ‘Well, that’s it. That’s what we came for. The effects have been claimed by the next of kin of the deceased. Now. What shall we do now?’

‘Go up the Tower,’ Florence said at once. ‘I’ve never been, but I’ll try anything once. It’ll blow your cobwebs away and warm your cockles, if that’s possible at one and the same time.’ Anything, she was thinking, to take that look of utter desolation from Daisy’s face. Even though standing on the piano stool was enough to turn Florence dizzy. What were friends
for
, for goodness’ sake?

It cost ninepence each to go in, and Florence paid with a flourish.

When the doors slid to with a silky whoosh she looked round for something to cling on to. Through the windows she saw the blurred skeleton of the Tower rushing downwards, taking her stomach with it, so she closed her eyes, opening them again when the jerk the lift gave as it stopped threw her off balance. Gratefully she stepped out into the enclosed gallery suspended seemingly, she decided, in the sky itself.

It was bitterly cold up there, so she wrapped the long trailing duster-coat closer round her angular body. Beneath the brim of her atrocious hat her pale face looked pinched and mean. ‘It is a far far better thing I do …’ she muttered, and turned her head away from the sight of Daisy rushing from one viewpoint to the next. The wind wailed and moaned, and Florence was sure the Tower itself was swaying to and fro. She wondered if she was going to be sick; summoned all her self-control and looked round, telling herself she might as well get her money’s worth.

The tiny gift shops were closed and the custodian, a man with a large flat face, nodded to her, then went on reading a newspaper folded to the racing pages.

On legs turned into lettuce leaves Florence forced herself to walk to a window and look down. Down, down, down to a world of a few minute figures like ants scurrying about at the edge of a sea throwing up patterns of white lace. A boat bobbed about in the distance, a black fly thrashing around, drowning in a rippling sea. The wind rose to a crescendo, and oh Lord, the whole Tower was leaning forward to topple into the sea at any minute. Her breakfast of hastily eaten bacon sandwiches rose to her throat with a salty acid taste.

Florence gave up being a martyr and turned to totter back to the comparative safety of the lift.

In a moment Daisy was beside her, holding her arm, but worse was to come. The lift fell like a stone dropped down a well-shaft, and two shades greener than her hat Florence emerged to walk unsteadily out of the pagoda, out of the Eastern Temple, along the back of a high-ceilinged gallery glittered by chandeliers into the balcony of the Tower Ballroom.

‘Fancy a dance?’ Daisy, flushed and exhilarated, pointed down to the couples waltzing gravely, some of them wearing outdoor coats and hats. ‘A nice old-fashioned waltz, with lots of twirls?’

‘Aw, give over, Daisy.’ Florence sat down on a red plush seat. ‘If I never do that again it’ll be too soon.’

‘Did it really upset your stomach?’

‘What stomach?’ Florence held a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘Lead me to some fresh air. Ground-level fresh air, and don’t listen to any more of my good ideas.’

‘And you in that hat n’all.’ Daisy tweaked the flap at one side of the helmet-type hat. ‘Amy Johnson would be ashamed of you.’

By the time they had walked along the front to the North Pier and turned back Florence declared she was made over again. Well enough to think longingly of a pot of tea and a hot toasted teacake. ‘See, there’s a place over there,’ she said.

‘A pity you didn’t look out at the other side, over the town.’ Daisy poured water from a plated jug into the teapot. ‘You could see all the way back over the Fylde to the Pennines, even on a day like this. It’s the view we get in reverse from the tank on Revidge on our Sunday walks.’

‘I accept your word for it.’ Florence shuddered. ‘I’m definitely not going back up there to check.’

‘I once took Sam up on to the tank. One cold rainy night last winter.’ Daisy was glad she could mention Sam now and again, especially when she could see Florence was in no mood to turn nasty.

‘That selfish rotter?’ Florence said at once.

‘My hat blew off.’ Daisy’s face was dreamy.

‘Which one?’ Florence was not going to listen to any sob stuff about Mr Samuel Barnet. You could have written her opinion of him on the back of a twopenny stamp in just one word – and not a nice one either. She had Sam’s measure, and he wasn’t good enough for Daisy. Let him keep away, please God, and get on with passing his exams, while his wife
brought
his children up all on her own. What did he think he was going to do when he’d passed the flamin’ things, anyway? Walk into a job paying a thousand a year? Good grief, in these days of depression, there were B.Sc.s sweeping the streets. She’d heard that one so often it must be true.

‘Which hat?’ Daisy was smiling to herself. ‘My dark green one, the one with the turned-back brim that almost matched my winter coat. Why do you ask?’

‘So losing it was one of life’s little bonuses,’ Florence said, dead-pan.

As Daisy’s laugh rang out, two youths sitting at a table across the centre aisle turned round quickly, then just as quickly turned back and went on with their conversation.

‘We don’t
appeal
to them,’ Daisy whispered. ‘I thought Blackpool was supposed to be a place for clicking? They’re obviously on holiday, you can see them cursing the weather and wondering what to do next.’

‘We’re old enough to be their
mothers
,’ Florence exaggerated, pretending to take Daisy seriously. ‘But if we weren’t, bags me the one without the spots.’