A Better World than This (2 page)

‘You heard that too?’ Daisy decided, not for the first time, that she didn’t like her mother.
Loved
her, but didn’t
like
her. Was that possible?

‘He won’t turn up.’ Martha was sprinkling sugar on her tomato to bring out the flavour. ‘He’ll be like a commercial traveller, with a girl in every town he visits.’

‘But I’m not a girl, am I?’ Daisy got up and stared at her reflection in the fluted mirror over the fireplace. ‘And
he’s
not a boy, is he?’

‘Fancies himself in that uniform. With them gaiters.’ Martha’s eyes skinned over with spite. ‘Ivor Novello would have him in the chorus quick if he clapped eyes on him.’

‘Mother?’ Daisy turned round, her eyes willing Martha, just this once, to be
glad
for her. Even to laugh with her and agree that no harm could come of a visit to the pictures with a man who would be gone tomorrow. But Martha had her martyr’s face on her. So Daisy sat down again at the table and sprinkled salt on
her
tomato. Just to be different. ‘You’re right, he won’t turn up,’ she said, reaching for a slice of bread
and
butter, relenting and choosing one with rounded edges because she knew her mother only liked the square.

‘Your father wouldn’t like it.’ Martha was making a sandwich from a slice of the jellied meat. ‘Revolving in his grave at this very moment, more than likely.’

Daisy stared down at her plate. … When I was a girl, her mind screamed silently, no more than a girl, my father left the bakehouse one day to help repair the engine at the mill across the street. Because he was a wizard with engines he helped out, then lay trapped beneath a mass of machinery. And since that day, ten long years ago, I’ve tried to take his place. …

‘Don’t worry. He won’t come,’ she said. ‘Me father can lie undisturbed.’

‘Till the trumpets shall sound,’ said Martha, starting on a slice of date and walnut loaf spread thickly with butter.

Sam came promptly at half-past seven, giving them plenty of time to queue for the second house. Daisy was upstairs getting ready, just in case, trying on a hat in several different ways. Best like a push-back beret, she decided, with her hair rolled up into a sausage anchored by Kirby grips.

She heard her mother let him in, and the murmur of voices. After a last despairing glance at her reflection in the tripled mirror on her dressing-table she ran quickly downstairs, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves with fluted gauntlets.

‘Hello there!’ Sam came forward with outstretched hands to greet her.

Just as though he had never expected to see her again, Daisy thought, wondering what had happened to the handsome man in the smart grey uniform, hating the shabby brown suit and the way he was carrying a raincoat over his shoulder instead of his arm. The very gesture made him seem alien somehow.

Sam smiled at her, wondering what she had done to the glorious mop of curly hair, telling himself that surely she couldn’t have cut it off since he saw her a couple of hours ago.

‘Well, you’d best be off then.’ Martha jerked her head towards the mantelpiece. ‘You’ve forgotten your glasses,’ she said with spite, pointing at a shabby, peeling case. ‘She won’t be able to tell the News from the big picture without them,’ she informed Sam sweetly. ‘See she puts them on, won’t you, Mr Barnet.’

‘Your mother’s a card.’ Outside in the street Sam did a twiddling step to get to the polite side of the pavement. When he put his trilby on, the wide curving brim shadowed his face.

He isn’t a bit like Clark Gable now, Daisy thought. More like George Raft in
Scarface
, in fact. He stopped to put the raincoat on, then tucked her left hand into the crook of his elbow so that they walked along together, welded like lovers.

Daisy gave a little gurgling laugh, just to show she was used to that kind of thing; she hoped they would meet someone she knew, but it was so cold and wet, people hurried past with heads bowed against the driving wind. He said something to her, but the freezing wind tossed his words away, so they walked the rest of the way in silence.

In the pictures it was better. To Daisy’s delight Sam bought two tickets for the circle, and for the first time in her life Daisy walked up the wide shallow stairs with their rubber nosings to seats exactly in the middle of the back row.

She touched the bulge in the front of her handbag and decided against wearing the glasses. What did it matter if the figures on the silver screen were a blur? And what if she couldn’t read the adverts, or make sense of the trailers for next week’s performance? At least if Sam kissed her he could do so without bumping his nose on the despised tortoiseshell frames.

Adolescence had been and gone without touching Daisy. She had never dreamed long hours away in sulky idleness; never danced in the Public Hall till two o’clock in the morning; never gone to late-night parties, or even stayed up late listening to the big bands on the wireless – Jack Hylton,
Ray
Noble and Ambrose. Since her father’s accident her life had been ruled by the great fire-oven in the bakehouse. The gaping black hole that gobbled up coal with a never-flagging appetite.

Now, in the warm gloom of the cinema, she had the feeling she was sitting in the middle of a cloud. When Sam reached for her hand she curled her fingers into his. A sensation like pain shivered through her. When the big picture came on the music swelled as if it was coming from somewhere deep inside her. Sam’s arm was round her shoulder now, his fingers in her hair as he loosened the Kirby grips from the carefully rolled sausage. Obligingly Daisy removed her hat, placing it on top of her handbag and the bulge concealing the hated spectacles.

He kissed her as the music soared three beats to a bar. He struggled with the buttons on her coat, and when his hand slid inside and cupped her breast she trembled, partly with happiness but mostly with shame.

‘No!’ When his fingers began to move gently round and round, Daisy sat bolt upright and pushed his hand away.

To stare unseeing at the silver screen, where a dog – or it could have been a cat – lolloped across a lawn dappled in sunshine.

When she got home she crept upstairs to undress in the dark, but light or no light her mother appeared, standing by the bedroom door in her long flannel nightdress.

‘Well?’ Without her teeth Martha’s plump face looked as if it had been squashed in a nut-cracker. ‘You’ve not come straight home, have you?’

‘We were talking.’ Getting into bed, Daisy pulled the sheet up to her chin. ‘I have to be up in less than five hours, Mother. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’

‘You’ve not washed your face, neither. You’ll have spots the size of ping-pong balls leaving that powder muck on. Sets like biscuits on your cheeks when you sweat in the night.’ Taking a step forward into the room Martha clasped the
brass
knob on the bed-end with both hands. ‘That man is no good.’

‘Oh, Mother, you don’t know him.’ Daisy’s feet had found the comfort of a stone hot-water bottle. She closed her eyes in a kind of shame. ‘He’s a kind man. And he’s in work. He’s got a good job.’

‘He’s a southerner.’ Martha’s hands tightened on the brass knob. ‘He’s a here-today, gone-tomorrow sort of man. Smarmy. Unstable. Too good-looking for his own good. Men like him prey on a girl’s feelings, then leave her with her heart broke into little pieces.’ She polished the knob with the sleeve of her nightgown. ‘Why did he pick on
you
, when the shop was full of girls from the mill? Why ask
you
, and not one of them?’

‘I wonder?’ Daisy’s voice was rough with the hurt of her mother’s words. ‘You can ask him yourself tomorrow. He’s taking his boss to Burnley and Padiham, but they should be back here by late afternoon. I’ve asked him to his tea.’

‘So it’s serious between you, then?’ Martha sniffed. ‘Talk about not letting the grass grow underneath your feet … you’ve not even given yours a chance to seed!’

In the soft plushed cinema he had kissed her. Daisy traced the contour of her lips. He had tried to touch her, but when she said he mustn’t he hadn’t persisted. His hands had been cool and hard, and now and again she had stolen a glance at his profile, stern and somehow beautiful in repose. Like a head on a coin.

Daisy closed her eyes, willing a sleep that would not come. On the way home they had talked and talked.

‘Why have you never married, Daisy?’

‘Because I’m an unclaimed blessing.’

He had stopped then and laughed out loud before suddenly lifting her off her feet and whirling her round and round. And she’d felt just like Ginger Rogers or Anna Neagle, dancing in the street with a man who turned out to be a millionaire, ready to whisk her off to a life spent lying on white fur rugs, wearing backless satin gowns, listening to the popping of champagne corks.

*

Sam came at half-past five, and because it was a Thursday and half-day closing, the shop had been shut since one.

To Daisy’s surprise her mother had said nothing when she emerged from her lie-down to see the table set with the rose-sprigged cups with gold fluted rims, and the cloth embroidered with blue forget-me-nots. There was ham off the bone, Canary tomatoes in the blue dish, four small pots of shrimps with the butter softening nicely on the tops, a plate of thinly-cut bread, and a three-tiered cake-stand. Scones on the bottom plate, risen high and brown, fatty-cake on the middle tier, short with best lard and stiff with currants. And on the topmost layer a feather-light sponge sprinkled with caster sugar and split with home-made raspberry jam.

Sam apologized for not having had the time to change out of his uniform, but Daisy was glad. She told him to make himself at home and take off his jacket, and when she saw that instead of braces he was wearing a brown leather belt which nipped in his narrow waist she couldn’t look away from him. If a man could be described as beautiful, she decided, then Sam Barnet was beautiful. She was so aware of herself she blushed each time she spoke. She prayed she looked all right; sure she did not.

‘Your Auntie Edna’s coming.’ Martha made the announcement without looking at Daisy. ‘So we’d best not tuck in till she arrives.’

A headache of despair settled on Daisy. Her mother’s sister lived two doors up the street by the bakehouse, and the two were welded together with an affection compounded of envy and spite. Edna was one up at the moment, for although her husband Arnold had been out of work for two years, her daughter Betty was married and pregnant at the age of nineteen.

‘My sister’s daughter’s husband works at the Town Hall.’ A malicious expression drooped the lines of Martha’s round face. ‘With a pension to come when he’s sixty-five.’

Daisy sat next to Sam on the two-seater hide settee with its velvet cushions, feeling sorry for him and sorrier for
herself
. She tried hard to think of something interesting to say, and wondered if her mother knew that the bones of her corsets were outlined through the tightness of her brown dress.

‘Did you know, Mr Barnet,’ Martha said into the silence, ‘that through the wireless the chimes of Big Ben can be heard up here before a man walking down Whitehall can hear them?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Sam grinned. ‘That’s marvellous.’

‘Do they have the Means Test in London?’ Martha’s answering smile was evil. ‘It would do a lot of them snobs good to come up here and see what goes on. Folks up here are starving while they line their pockets.’

‘Yoo-hoo!’

At the sound of her auntie’s voice Daisy gave a huge sigh of relief. Once her mother got into this mood there was no knowing what she would say next.

‘Well, then!’ Edna came into the room, a sparse little woman with a neat monkey face and grey hair permed to an immovable frizz. She was wearing a green dress fastened for modesty’s sake with a large gilt brooch in the shape of an anchor. ‘So this is Daisy’s new beau?’ She held out a hand and as she came closer Daisy saw the layer of talcum powder dusting her nose. ‘Pleased to meet you, I must say. I’ve heard a lot about you!’

It was worse at the table. Sam ate with head lowered, answering personal questions with a quiet dignity, although Daisy could sense his irritation. She wished she could take his hand and lead him away, out of the house, into the rain-swept street outside, and never mind if it took the curl out of her hair.

‘Our Betty’s expecting a happy event, bless her,’ Edna said into the lull between the ham and the cakes. ‘I think nineteen’s just the right age to start a family so you can enjoy them when you’re young.’ She accepted a scone. ‘Do you like children, Mr Barnet?’

There was a slight hesitation. ‘Excuse me, ladies.’ Sam
pushed
back his chair, leaned across and picked up his jacket from the back of the settee. Taking a wallet from the inside pocket, he took out a photograph.

‘My children,’ he said, offering it to Edna first. ‘The boy is six and the girl is five.’

‘So you’re a widower, then, Mr Barnet?’ Edna’s features sharpened visibly.

‘No.’ Sam shook his head, smiling. ‘No, I’m not a widower. My wife is very much alive.’

Daisy saw the glitter of triumph in Edna’s button eyes; saw her almost hug herself in delight as she helped herself to a second scone and a further dollop of raspberry jam.

‘You know, you could be an announcer on the wireless, Mr Barnet,’ she said, rooting for a raspberry seed in a back tooth. ‘Your accent would be just right. You must have a most interesting job driving a limousine all over the country. I suppose your wife has got used to you always being away?’

Martha seemed to have been struck dumb. Not daring to meet her eyes, Daisy pretended they needed a fresh pot of tea. Taking it through into the kitchen she set the kettle to boil on the gas stove and leaned against the sink, listening to her auntie’s voice going on and on, interspersed with refined little bursts of laughter.

Why hadn’t he told her he was married? Last night they’d talked and talked and he had never said a word about a wife. Squeezing her eyes tight shut Daisy willed the threat of tears back. She would never have asked him to his tea had she known he was married. And her mother would never have asked Auntie Edna in if she hadn’t wanted to show off – show her sister that
her
daughter could get a man too.