A Better World than This (3 page)

For a moment Daisy saw her cousin Betty’s husband in her mind’s eye. Middle-aged at twenty-three, living with his mother-in-law and going off to work with his red hair smarmed back, and forty-two years to serve before he got his pension.

No wonder Martha had wanted to swank with a man who resembled Clark Gable and dressed in his chauffeur’s
uniform
looked like Maurice Chevalier in
The Merry Widow
.

Now it would be all over that Daisy Bell from the pie shop was knocking about with a married man. Angrily she brushed back an escaping tear with the back of her hand.

‘I’m off now, Daisy.’

When Sam appeared, buttoning himself into his jacket, she could sense the irritation held tightly inside him. He was smiling at her, but his blue eyes stayed cold

‘That woman. …’ He jerked his head towards the living room. ‘If she was thrown to the lions they’d spit her out.’

Surprising Daisy, he took the teapot from her, then held her firmly, forcing her to meet his eyes.

‘I’m sorry, love. Believe me, I had no intention of starting a family bust-up when I took you to the pictures last night.’ He shook her gently. ‘And I never dreamed that accepting an invitation to tea today cast me in the role of your suitor.’

‘Oh, how can you say that?’ Humiliation brought the tears to Daisy’s eyes. She trembled with the shame of it. With self-disgust she remembered how he had touched her breast in the pictures and how she had only knocked his hand away because she was scared. Her lack of sophistication was total. Her experience of men less than nothing. ‘Yes, go,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been embarrassed. Please … just go.’

‘I never knew that such narrow-mindedness existed.’ This time his smile was genuine as he trailed a finger down Daisy’s cheek. ‘But you’re okay, love. You’re a lot more than okay. I’ve enjoyed meeting you.’ Pulling her to him, he kissed the tear-stained cheek she tried to twist away from him, then opened the door and stepped outside, leaving her alone with a terrible all-enveloping shame.

‘Daisy?’ Edna’s voice was wobbly with a vibrant satisfaction. ‘He’s gone then, has he?’ She advanced towards the teapot. ‘Your mother and me’s spittin’ feathers waiting for another cup of tea. Aw, come on, love. He’s not the only fish in the sea, and you weren’t to know he was married.’ Licking a finger she smoothed an eyebrow. ‘Good riddance
to
bad rubbish, and a good job I was here to rumble him. There’s no flies on your Auntie Edna.’

‘I’m going to my room.’

Daisy’s face was wrenched out of shape with the force of her emotions, but Edna noticed nothing. ‘You’ll be frozen stiff up there, love. It’s chucking it down in buckets outside.’

‘I’ll go down the yard first.’ Pulling the door open so violently it was in danger of coming adrift from its hinges, Daisy escaped. Hardly feeling the torrential rain beating down on her head she lifted the latch of the yard door and stepped out into the street.

And miraculously, round the corner by the shop front, Sam was there. He had put his raincoat on and he was standing at the kerb pulling the collar up round his throat. In the darkness, in his peaked cap, he looked, she thought, like Lew Ayres in
All Quiet on the Western Front
.

When she clutched his arm he was startled at first, then concerned.

‘For God’s sake, Daisy! You’re wet through. Here, come back here.’ He pulled her backwards into the doorway of a greengrocer’s shop, into a pungent smell of rotting cabbages and bruised apples. ‘Now then. What’s all this about?’

‘I want to talk to you.’ Daisy heard her voice, hoarse with uncontrollable emotion, and yet a part of her was so calm, so determined, it was as though she was in a film reading from a script. A wild woman, drenched with rain, pleading with the man she loved not to leave her. ‘Not here.’ Taking Sam by the hand she led him round the corner and into her own backyard. ‘Shush,’ she said, although he hadn’t uttered a sound. ‘In here,’ she whispered, opening a door and pulling him inside. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’

‘Where the hell are we?’ Sam waved a hand in front of his face. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

‘I can’t put the light on.’ Daisy reached up and took a large torch from a high shelf. ‘They would see it from the house.’ She shone the torch on a pile of coal, the overflow from a wooden bunker. ‘See. That over there is the fire-oven, and
here
… this is where I shovel the coal. Into the firebox, you can see the ashbox below it. And the heat of the oven is controlled by that damper up on the wall.’

She was like a tour guide explaining things to a group of schoolchildren. She was close to hysteria; she could feel it like a spreading lump in her throat. She did not need to shine the torch into Sam’s face to know that he was staring at her with a look of mild astonishment. All she knew was that she had stopped him walking down the street, out of her life, for ever.

She had to keep him, just for a little while. For long enough to explain that asking him to tea had been a terrible mistake. That a worse mistake had been her mother jumping the gun and asking Edna along. Only to show off, of course, to make it plain that Daisy could get a man if she wanted, that she wasn’t well on her way to being an old maid.

And most important of all, Sam had to be told to forget the whole thing. To remember her, if at all, with some kind of respect. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t want him
remembering
her. She wanted to keep him, to never have to say goodbye, to love him, to have him make love to her. …

There was no pride in her thinking, no way she could explain, even to herself, how she felt. She was in an alien world she had never entered before. In this world she was young, she was beautiful, and he was there, the man she loved. … Daisy shivered. It was like all the films she had ever seen, only better. Or worse.

‘Let’s sit down, shall we? Then you can tell me what all this is about.’ Sam’s eyes were used to the darkness now, and taking her hand he led her over to a pile of sacks in a corner.

He was behaving, he knew, in a way he hadn’t behaved since he was fifteen years old. All spots and incipient moustache, and kissing a girl on the top deck of the tram on the way home from school. Daisy’s hair had come out of curl with the rain. She sighed when he put his arm round her, snuggling close to him like a child, with her hair tickling his chin and her arm lying loosely round his waist.

There was a sweet vanilla smell, and Sam could see cobwebs festooning the corners of the whitewashed walls. There were baking tins piled high on shelves, and two long tables at the far end of the large room with open-tread stairs leading to an upper floor. In the light from a street lamp directly outside Sam saw the gleam of a piece of machinery clamped to the wall and guessed it was some kind of mixer for the dough. From somewhere deep inside Sam’s bank of memories he saw himself as a small boy helping the village baker with his round. Hanging the baskets on door knockers, baskets filled with orders of rock cakes, doughnuts, crusty loaves of bread and Atora beef suet wrapped in greaseproof paper. The crust of that bread, he remembered, had crackled and flaked in his mouth.

‘Now then. …’ He tightened his hold on Daisy, whispering into her hair. ‘What’s all this about. We’re too
old
for this kind of thing. We’re not a couple of kids snidging in corners. Are we?’ he said, giving her a little shake.

‘It’s nice in here, isn’t it?’

Her voice was soft, light and dream-tinged. Like a woman’s when the act of love is over and she needs to be held for a while, Sam told himself.

‘I like it in here very early in the mornings, before the men come in, and the mad rush starts.’ Daisy’s breath was close to his ear. ‘I tried to tell you about this place last night, how I like being in here on my own, well,
love
being in here on my own really.’

She could hear herself speaking in what her mother would undoubtedly have called her ‘poetry’ voice, but it wasn’t intentional. It was just the way she felt, all dreamy and far away. Her upturned face was gentled with love.

‘I come in here long before the knocker-up comes down the street with his long stick tapping on the windows to get folk up for the mill. I come in here before the chill has gone from the streets, but it’s warm and cosy quiet, with no sound but the cinders clinking down into the ashpan over there. And sometimes, where there’s a moon, it makes the oven
door
shiny and black as treacle. Like a Pontefract cake. And sometimes the policeman on his beat stops and knocks on the window. He comes in if it’s wet and shakes the rain from his cape. “Nasty neet, Daisy,” he says. “You mean nasty morning,” I say, and I make him a pot of tea. And when he goes I climb on that stool and look through the window to watch him go up the street, with the light from the lamp silvering the drizzle.’ She sighed. ‘Mornings can be very beautiful, Sam.’

‘You’re a funny one.’ Sam shifted his position slightly. Her voice … like warmed honey poured over silk, he decided. A voice to come home to, he told himself. ‘You’re a lonely girl, aren’t you, Daisy?’

Her head came up so quickly it butted him on the chin. ‘Me? Lonely? What a daft idea! It’s like bedlam when the men come in, and goodness, you saw me in the shop, run off me feet. And I make enough noise for a dozen. I’m always being told that.’

‘
I’m
lonely.’ Sam gently pushed her head down again. ‘Most people are, if they admit it. It’s only the very lucky ones who find someone to share their loneliness. A friend. Or a lover.’

Daisy shivered. His whole manner, his very way of speaking was new to her. No man from round here would have said the word ‘lover’, not in that way. Words like that were left to books or films, and yet Sam had just said it in ordinary conversation. She didn’t
know
him at all, and yet strangely she had no desire to know him as a friend. All she wanted was to love him. For him to be her lover. … She closed her eyes.

‘I wish we could stay here for ever.’

Above her head Sam Barnet pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. He felt suddenly totally dispirited. What in God’s name was he doing? What in God’s name was he getting himself into? This wasn’t the kind of girl he was used to. Not a cheeky uncomplicated lass from the mill who would have gone out with him, said yes, or no, and that would have been
that
. No recriminations. Nothing. ‘Ta-ra then,’ as they said up here.

Daisy spoke to him with the candour of a child. No guile, no flirtatious manner. All at once he thought of her coming into this dark hole of a place, early in the mornings, shovelling coal into that black firebox. Every day since she was fourteen, she had said. And seeing the lamp-light silvering the drizzle. …

‘I’ll be back in London by the weekend.’ He shook her gently. ‘Wake up, Daisy, love. Stop making something out of nothing. You’ll have forgotten me in less than a month.’

She ignored him. What kind of talk was that, anyroad? Forget him? She had managed to forget that he had a wife, hadn’t she? From that first mention of her she had blotted her out completely. She didn’t want to know what she looked like or what her name was, and she certainly wasn’t going to let go of this dream. Not yet … oh no, not yet.

Sam got to his feet, pulling her with him. Cupping her face in his hands he kissed her mouth, his fingers absent-minded in her hair as he tried to think of a way of letting her go, of saying goodbye without making her cry. But the sweetness of the kiss caught him unawares, and he strained her to him, feeling the stirrings of desire.

If he had been a lesser man, he told himself, putting her resolutely from him; if she had been a different sort of girl – the pompous phrases inside his head caught him unawares. He would lie down with her on the pile of sacks and make love to her. And she would let him. Her thinking had gone beyond reason; with a girl like Daisy it was all or nothing. And if he made love to her she would be committed, and a commitment was the last indulgence he could afford.

‘I’m married,’ he told her cruelly. ‘Why look at me like that? I can’t give you anything. I can’t make you happy. Why have you gone all serious on me?’

‘I’m not going to cry,’ Daisy said.

‘Well of course you’re not going to bloody well cry!’ Sam’s exasperation spilled out into his voice. ‘Look, I can’t
face
that harridan coming looking for you and finding us in here together. And she will once she realizes you’re not in the house. And God knows why, but I can’t say goodbye to you like this, because tears or no tears you’re upset.’

‘Stop shouting at me.’

‘Tomorrow then. Down the town.’ Sam began to button his raincoat. ‘Outside Woolworth’s. I suppose you’ve got a Woolworth’s?’

‘Not far from the Boulevard.’

‘The Boulevard?’

‘Where the trams and buses start off from.’

‘At half-past seven. We’ll go to the pictures again.’

‘I’ll wait till you come.’

Moving quietly, Daisy opened the bakehouse door and walked across the yard to the back gate. Lifting the sneck she opened it just wide enough for Sam to slip through.

The rain had stopped. Thin clouds veiled a drifting moon. When Sam got to the top of the street he turned round to look down over the town. Twinkling lights were spiked with the tall outlines of mill chimneys, and the air was so sharp and clean he fancied he could taste the tang of the sea.

What on earth had made him suggest seeing her again? His life was complex enough, without any further complications. He walked on, ashamed of his weakness. But so help him, it was a long time since a woman had looked at him like that. With her soul in her eyes. As if he were God. And yet … and yet, Daisy was no mealy-mouthed nothing. She had guts; must have plenty to get up each morning before dawn, stoking that great gaping hole with coal, then working with the men, one of them, an equal he suspected. Integrity – she had that, too. Living with that mother who had had the sweetness soured from her soul a long time ago, he guessed. And that other one, Edna, with the spite-filled laugh and the anchor clipping her non-existent bosoms together.