A Better World than This (23 page)

‘There,’ she whispered, tucking it round Jimmy. ‘There, love. I’ll light the gas fire.’

‘He’d sleep on a clothes-line.’ Sam came back with a suitcase and set it down by the door. ‘We went to the shop in Blackburn first. I’d forgotten you’d moved. They gave me your address. I think I got them out of bed.’

‘I sent you a card,’ Daisy said foolishly. ‘Telling you I was moving in here today. With Florence.’

‘Florence?’

He wasn’t listening to her – he never really listened. ‘My
friend
,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s upstairs in bed.’

Sam was drawing off his black leather gauntlet gloves. He dropped them on to a chair and ran his fingers through his hair, springing it back to life again.

‘Damn and blast!’ He spread oil-grained fingers wide. ‘Still, never mind, it’s clean muck. The bike conked out three miles out of Preston. I thought I’d never get it going again, but I was determined to get here somehow, and when I’d found the trouble we had a clear run. The policeman I spoke to in Talbot Square asking for directions to this address gave me a suspicious look and for one horrible moment I thought he was going to take me in for questioning, especially when he saw Jimmy lolling in the back. Is there somewhere I could wash my hands, love?’

Not a word had been said above a whisper; he hadn’t touched Daisy, not even to take her hand. It was that single-mindedness again, she thought ruefully. There was yet another carton of books in the middle of the floor, three pictures propped against the arm of a chair, two rolled-up rugs by the far wall, and she could swear he hadn’t noticed anything unusual.

The expression of despair clouding his handsome face touched her so deeply she had to restrain herself from going to him and putting her arms around him. She knew something awful had happened and that he would tell her when he was ready, and because she loved him so, she would wait.

‘Upstairs,’ she told him. ‘On the first landing. The doors are marked. I’ll go through in the kitchen and put the kettle on.’

Florence knew that something had awakened her, but Indian brandy always made her woozy, so she thought she must have
imagined
it. The griping pain in her lower abdomen had faded, and the stone bottle was growing cold so she moved it down to the bottom of the bed.

She had behaved badly. She could admit that now, and in the morning she wasn’t going to let pride stand in the way of an apology. She turned on to her back, staring up into the darkness. It was just that she hated being
beholden
, and she was going to have to accept that independence wasn’t a commodity she could afford for the time being. Daisy held the reins and more importantly the purse strings, and in spite of her genuine niceness there was a side to her that wasn’t all sweetness and charm – that hateful word again – oh yes, Daisy was the boss, make no mistake about that.

Florence sighed so deeply that her breath fluttered the ribbon tie at the neck of her nightdress. It was the anger inside her that caught her unawares at times. A helpless rage against people and the way things were. She’d never be like Daisy, liking and trusting till she found out otherwise, then forgiving and understanding most of the time. But as Daisy had rightly said, kow-towing to people would be part of the job in this business.

She covered her face with an arm. Two strong-willed women in one house. Was it going to work? Would their long-standing friendship stand the strain? It had been fine in the little shop because there she knew what she had to do and did it well. Here there were so many things to do, so many decisions to be made, and Daisy would be the one to make them; she knew that already. Could she start behaving like a fluffy kitten when nature had fashioned her like a sleek and spitting Siamese? She doubted it.

Suddenly she sat up and swung long thin legs over the side of the bed. Dare she risk a quick dash along the landing without her dressing-gown which was as far as she knew at the bottom of an unpacked trunk of clothes? Needs must, she told herself, opening her bedroom door and stepping out on to the landing.

She reached the door marked WC at the exact moment a
tall
dark man with staring eyes and a lean and haggard face opened it from the other side to a background noise of a lavatory cistern flushing. Not Mr Penny or yet Mr Schofield, but a man she had never seen in her life before.

When she screamed Sam gripped her by the arms to calm her, but at his touch she screamed louder than ever, bringing Mr Penny and Mr Schofield hurtling down the attic stairs in striped pyjamas, and Daisy at the double from below, her blue turban slipping over her forehead in her agitation.

From somewhere downstairs came the frightened wail of a child, and from God alone knew where, the Westminster clock loudly chimed the hour.

‘SO THAT IS
friend Florence?’

A much cleaner Sam came into the kitchen after putting Jimmy into the bed made up for Daisy and staying with him till he slept again. ‘I knew I had a devastating effect on women, but that’s the first time one has thrown a fit at the sight of me. Is she highly strung, or something? She certainly took some calming down.’

‘Sensitive,’ Daisy said loyally. ‘Reserved.’ She poured tea from a brown pot. ‘She’ll be okay when she’s got over the shock. She
feels
things more than most people do.’

Neurotic, Sam had decided straight away. Unappetizing, unfeminine and not his type. He dismissed Florence from his mind, and looked properly at Daisy for the first time since knocking at the door. He had been imagining her the way he saw her last. In the blue print dress with a string of beads like mint imperials round her neck. With soft curls blown round her face, her cheeks glowing from the sun and the brisk Blackpool breezes. The Daisy he had said goodbye to, dry-eyed and pale, he had preferred to forget. Now her hair was tucked away beneath some sort of scarf knotted above her forehead, and her eyes. …

‘I never knew you wore glasses,’ he said.

Immediately she snatched them off, pushing them deep into her apron pocket. ‘Only for sustained reading,’ she said stiffly, as if he’d made a personal insensitive remark about a physical deformity. ‘I never wear them outside.’ She sat
down
opposite to him. ‘Talk, Sam,’ she said. ‘I know we’re both half asleep, but you have to tell me why you’ve turned up like this with young Jimmy. It isn’t a social call, is it, Sam?’

He saw now that her eyes were soft with the dreamy look of the slightly myopic, and he remembered in that instant the steely blue of his wife’s eyes as she had confronted him in the room above Mr Evison’s garage.

‘I found out this morning –
yesterday
morning – that you are the only person in the whole world I can trust implicitly,’ he said quietly. ‘That you must believe, Daisy.’

Daisy ignored the sudden lift of her heart. ‘No flarching, Sam. Just straight out with it, Sam. Please.’ Her glance was direct and steady. ‘You’re in some kind of mess, aren’t you?’

He stared down at the tea cooling in its cup with the unmatched saucer. ‘A hell of a mess,’ he admitted. ‘It’s Aileen. My wife.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’d just got back from taking the Evison children to their private schools in three different districts of north London, and I was more or less free for the day because I’d taken the boss and his wife to a business dinner and dance at the Dorchester the night before. I’d waited for them until half-past two, and for all his faults Mr Evison is no slave driver. I was going to work at my books all day.’

Daisy experienced a wave of tenderness and pity for him. Sam was floundering, unsure of himself, uncertain of what her reactions were going to be. Desperately wanting her to understand. ‘Drink your tea,’ she said softly.

‘Take that scarf thing off your head,’ he said, startling her into obeying him. ‘How can I talk seriously to you when you sit there looking like Sabu, the elephant boy?’ He stared up at the ceiling. ‘It’s Jimmy. His mother doesn’t want him. She’s divorcing me for desertion and going to live in Canada with the man she says she’s going to marry. Taking Dorothy with her because this paragon of all the virtues, this man who is everything I’m not, according to her, prefers little girls with bows in their hair to wicked small boys with caterpillars in
their
pockets.’ His face darkened. ‘He doesn’t like Jimmy, so Aileen gave him to me.’

‘
Gave
him? You mean handed him over, just like that? I can’t believe it!’

‘It’s true enough.’ Sam put a hand over his eyes for a second. ‘Jimmy has, apparently, turned into a holy terror. The scourge of the Mixed Infants, threatened with expulsion, drummed out of the church choir, beastly to old ladies, foul-mouthed, disobedient, a sadist and a thief. And that’s on one of his good days, according to his mother.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Nope. Dorothy is so terrified of him she cries if he as much as looks at her. He
tortures
her.’

‘Tortures her?’

‘Tied her to a tree on the common, ran off and said he’d forgotten which tree. Or so he said. Went off with his pals and it slipped his memory about rescuing her.’

‘But that’s just a boyish prank.
Surely
, Sam?’

‘When his memory lapse stretched to two hours and a violent thunderstorm had scared Dorothy witless apart from soaking her to the skin?’

‘Well, there’s a reason, obviously.’

‘Oh, yes, there’s a reason. Aileen says he loathes this bloke she’s set on marrying. Took his papers from his briefcase and set fire to them in the garden incinerator.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘More than oh dear. They were the notes for an important conference this tycoon was organizing – the only copies – and Jimmy burned them the night before the conference was due to take place. Pranced round the fire brandishing a stick, like a dancer in some evil rite. Again according to his mother.’ Sam nodded his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know the reason. In his childish way Jimmy has been behaving so badly he hoped to scare this bloke off. Hoped he would disappear and I would move back. We never meant it to be that way, but that was the way it turned out. Dorothy was
her
mother’s girl, and Jimmy was my boy. Divided, clean down the middle. Two camps, never a real family at all. But I hoped … I thought that if we separated for a while, giving the kids a chance to grow, away from the everlasting rows and bickering, giving
me
a chance to pass my exams and get a better job – I hoped. …’ His voice tailed away.

‘You would get back together again?’

‘Yes. No! Oh, God, I don’t know
what
I thought. I don’t know what I’m thinking now, if you want the honest truth. There’ll be a divorce, and Aileen will marry again, and the paragon will adopt Dorothy and give her his name. …’

‘You’d have a say in that, I’m sure, Sam.’

‘But I’d agree if it would be better for her. I wouldn’t want her growing up feeling the odd one out because her name was different. Anyway they’ll be so far away she’ll soon forget me. The paragon’s father has a thriving firm in Ontario, something to do with storm windows. He’s due to retire soon, so once his son takes over that’s where they’ll stay.’

‘Is he
able
to take over? I mean, we don’t have storm windows here, do we?’

‘He has an engineering degree. So that qualifies him for anything, doesn’t it? Paper qualifications, Daisy. Worth years of learning how to build a car engine from bloody scratch.’ Sam tapped his forehead. ‘You can have as much as you like up here, but if you can’t write it down then what does it count for? I’ll tell you, Daisy. Nothing!’

Daisy rubbed the back of her neck, trying unconsciously to rub the ache of exhaustion away. Her mind and her senses were alert and listening; it was just her body giving up on her, she told herself. Sam’s voice was low, almost soporific; they were cocooned in an island of silence with the rest of the house sleeping around them.

‘And your wife’s mother? What does she have to say about all this?’

‘Queenie?’ Sam’s mouth twisted. ‘She’s married a man half her age and they’re running a pub together somewhere in Suffolk. Thrown herself into the role of chief barmaid with
such
abandon and verve, Aileen says there’s a round of applause each time she pulls a pint. No room for a grandson there.’

‘Poor little Jimmy.’ Daisy’s tired mind was refusing to accept the implications of it, but she realized she had known the score almost from the time Sam had carried the sleeping boy into the house. Sam had come to ask her to take care of his son. It was totally unbelievable, but it was true.

‘And you can’t have Jimmy living with you, Sam? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Is it?’

‘How can I?’ His voice rose, cracking with weariness. ‘My living quarters are primitive, to say the least, even if Mr Evison would tolerate a child there anyway. Take the other night, for instance. I couldn’t have left Jimmy alone in that room while I was up in town. There’s only a rickety oil stove for heating for one thing.’ His handsome face flushed. ‘Besides, I’m in the last year of my correspondence course, and I’m going to get my Higher National Certificate if it’s the last thing I do. I left school at fourteen, for God’s sake, and book learning doesn’t come easy. But I’m nearly there, Daisy! I can’t stop now!’

He held out a hand across the table, and she gave him her own, closing her eyes as he traced the fine blue veins at her wrist, moving his thumb round and round. The remembered weakness flooded through her, accentuated by her weariness.
Passion
, she admitted shamelessly, the emotion she thought had passed her by, the emotion she had thought she would never experience. She was trembling when he came to her and pulled her up into his arms, and as he kissed her she melted into him, parting her lips as the kiss deepened. Olivia De Havilland kissing Errol Flynn.

‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘Do you love me, Sam?’

‘You know I do.’

She wanted to draw back to look for the truth of it in his eyes, but he held her closer, tangling his fingers in her hair.