A Better World than This (33 page)

‘
Your
turn next, Joshua,’ she mouthed. ‘Don’t run away!’

Daisy blinked, then as if she’d imagined it, Florence closed
her
eyes again and executed a perfect cornering. Daisy blinked again and almost wished she’d worn her glasses. Had
Florence
been drinking? What
on earth
was the matter with everybody? She looked at Joshua, squarely moribund by her side, and through another gap in the dancers saw Florence, wakened now from her trance, trilling the words of the song into Bobbie’s oiled and sleeked-back hair.

‘Shall we dance, Daisy?’

Square and broad-shouldered Joshua stood before her, fastening the middle button of his dark brown jacket.
Handsome
, she saw with a start of surprise. A fish out of water, and bad-tempered because of it, but definitely handsome with his brown eyes regarding her sombrely. She slid into the circle of his arms.

‘I can’t do …’ she began, but he tightened his hold on her, moving slowly to the music which had changed now to a slow foxtrot, guiding her into the solid mass of dancers in the middle of the floor.

This wasn’t dancing. This was merely leaning on each other to music, Daisy thought, bemused and unaccountably flustered by his nearness. For the first time she was acutely conscious of his strength and her own fragility. She was sure she could feel the hard beating of his heart; the hand holding hers pulled it up against his shoulder so that they swayed as if welded together.

‘Do you come here often?’ she teased.

‘Don’t talk!’ Joshua jerked her even closer.

Daisy closed her eyes, the intimate contact of his body alarming her so that she lost step. She felt his cheek against her hair. On the band platform a girl vocalist crooned a Jerome Kern melody into the microphone, her voice a throaty replica of Alice Faye’s. A sudden fancy took hold of Daisy. …

It wasn’t Joshua she was dancing with. It was
Sam
. He had driven up from London to see her, and they were dancing alone on an empty floor as mysterious as a lake bathed in moonlight. The couples swirling round them had vanished
into
thin air, just like they did in a film, leaving Daisy and Sam to their enchantment. Her striped Macclesfield silk dress, with its inverted pleat at the back and its Peter Pan collar, had changed into a floating gown of white shimmering organza which billowed out as they danced; round and round they went, merged as one into an intoxicating dream, with a sobbing saxophone playing from a deeply shadowed background.

Joshua held her close against his heart. She was small and light. She was the woman he had never thought to find again. She was sweet and warm and funny; she worked so hard her exhaustion at times almost broke his heart. She was loyal, tender, vulnerable, filled with an optimism he felt at times to be misplaced.

And she was thinking at this very moment of another man.

With a suddenness that startled both of them, the band stopped playing. The dancers clapped, and section by section the lights came up again.

Florence bounded over to them, linking her arm in Joshua’s as they walked off the floor; her face was a bold brick-red and her hair was wisping down from its pleat. She was so highly charged with excitement Daisy wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see blue sparks shooting out of the top of her head. She seemed not to notice that both Joshua and Daisy wore the bemused expressions of sleep-walkers wakened cruelly from their respective trances.

‘The next dance is mine,’ Florence enthused, giving Joshua’s arm a little squeeze. ‘Oh, I do hope it’s a waltz. One-two-three, one-two-three.’ Her hands dangled floppily from her bony wrists as she waved them about. ‘One-two-three, one-two-three. Oh, I
love
the waltz, don’t you? So graceful, so romantic. …’

‘Unless they’ve changed the programme, the next dance will be the Military Two-Step.’ Bobbie fingered the pencil-slim line of his moustache. ‘There’s a friend of mine who always expects me to dance this one with her. Will you excuse me, please?’

Eyes shining, teeth flashing, he greased his way across the floor to approach a thin girl wearing a dress the colour of a cow-clap, with black bands round the hem.

‘She must be very rich,’ Daisy whispered to Florence. ‘A dress that colour must have cost a fortune.’

Florence wasn’t listening. She was tapping her feet in time to the trumpets sounding the opening bars.
Pawing
the ground, Daisy thought unkindly. Dragging an obviously unwilling Joshua on to the floor and
stampeding
him into the dance.

A long sallow young man, who looked as if something nasty could have happened to him in the woodshed in his youth, smiled furtively at Daisy and asked her if she would care to? He jerked a narrow head towards the dance floor, pulsating with the pounding of feet. It made no difference, he said, that she had never danced the Military Two-Step in her life before. He just walked round the edge anyway.

And wasn’t that the story of his life anyroad up, him having been out of work for three years, with barely the strength to blow the skin off his mother’s rice pudding, never mind hurl his partner round a dance floor like an Apache gone clean out of his mind. The world was a terrible place, what with the Depression and the way things were going in Germany, he opined as they trundled dolefully round the perimeter of the floor. Still, if the war came, it would give the out-of-work something to do, not that
he
would be affected with his bad health, but being a Christian Scientist he was used to smiling through his pain. Shoes were his worst problem, he said, stopping walking for long enough to lift a foot and display a sole hanging loose like the tongue of a panting dog. You could get shoes for twopence a pair at church jumble sales and if they didn’t quite fit, the agony wore off in a couple of weeks. Oh yes, he granted Daisy, he didn’t
look
all that poor, but if she saw him in the daylight she’d see that his suit shone like polished glass. How had he got in? Oh, he never paid. The woman in the cash desk knew his sad background and always waved him through. Anyway,
as
soon as the season started he would be in great demand as a partner for the hordes of mill girls who descended on Blackpool, hoping to click with a presentable young man.

‘You?’ Daisy asked, hoping the surprise showed in her voice.

But he wasn’t listening. A captive audience was all he needed apparently for the continuing monologue. I might as well be a plank of wood he’s trundling round with him, Daisy thought, as Florence and Joshua pranced by, Florence tossing her head with each thump of her feet and Joshua, polite and aloof, holding their joined hands high for the twirly bit so that Florence didn’t have to bend her head too much.

On the next circuit Daisy sent him an S O S with her eyes, a frantic signal to be rescued, which, to the obvious annoyance of Florence, he obeyed with alacrity.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Daisy’s partner, tapping him on the shoulder. ‘Time to catch our tram, dear,’ he said to Daisy. ‘The twins will be waking for their bottles.’

‘And my shift at the factory starts at eleven,’ Daisy said. ‘Yes, you’re right. We must go now, dear.’

Devoid of all expression, Daisy’s partner held out his arms to Florence. ‘Care to?’ he asked hopefully.

But Florence was stalking from the floor in the highest of dudgeons. ‘
You’re
ready to go home, so we
all
go home,’ she told Daisy, as Joshua wove his way through the Military Two-Steppers to tell Bobbie what was happening. ‘You can be very selfish, you know. I was really enjoying myself.’ She looked upset.

‘You stay on with Florence,’ Daisy suggested when Joshua came back to them. ‘I’ll go and relieve Mrs Mac. It’s not fair to keep her up too late, anyway.’

‘Let Florence stay with Bobbie,’ Joshua said too quickly, taking Daisy’s arm. ‘I’ve got some marking to do.’

Florence shot Daisy a filthy look. ‘We’ll leave Bobbie to enjoy himself. He doesn’t need us. I’m ready to go, anyway. Dancing the night away is all right for some, if that’s what they want, I suppose.’

Daisy’s eyes widened in surprise. But why should she feel surprise? The whole evening had had more than a touch of Alice in Wonderland unreality. The last thing she noticed as they left the ballroom was her former partner steering a girl backwards round the dance floor, a girl dressed in green, so tall, thin and flat she would have won first prize as a runner-bean at a fancy-dress ball.

Outside the air was fresh and clean, gusting breezily from the sea. Belisha beacons glowed like oranges against the night sky.

‘Now
this
is more like it,’ Joshua said, striding out. ‘Dancing is all right for some. As you so rightly said, Florence.’

‘Great minds think alike, Joshua.’ Florence smiled at him, restored at once to good humour. For a reason Daisy wasn’t prepared even to
try
to fathom.

Daisy was still wide awake when Bobbie Schofield let himself quietly into the house at well past midnight. The hours he kept had long since ceased to intrigue her. It was none of her business, anyway. He was neat and undemanding and kept his room as tidy as a ship’s captain’s cabin, which incidentally
reminded
her of a ship’s cabin because of the tin trunk covered with a Spanish shawl in the window recess. Once, out of curiosity, dusting round the lid, she had tried to open it only to find that it was securely padlocked.

‘Hope there isn’t a head in it,’ she’d told Florence, who in one of her now frequent humourless moods had explained that there would have been a distinct
smell
if there were.

Daisy sighed and turned her pillow over, thumping it into a more acceptable shape, but not too enthusiastically in case she woke Jimmy, snoring gently from his little camp bed.

She folded her arms across her chest and stared up into the darkness. Something was worrying her and she knew she would go on worrying until she realized what it could be. Was it her decision to try to manage without outside help till they saw how things went? Was the prospect of having to
work
like a galley slave once the visitors arrived sending Florence slightly potty? Martha had always said that Florence was unstable, like her mother before her. Could she have been right? Florence was
eccentric
, that was all. Artistic clever people were often eccentric. Look at Virginia Woolfe. And
she
didn’t have the frustration of having to work as a domestic in a Blackpool boarding-house.

The worrying was well established by now.
Would
they be able to manage, just the two of them? Daisy’s feverish mind ran through what would be a typical day’s routine.

Full cooked breakfast for at least twelve people. Beds made or changed, wash basins cleaned, floors swept, lounge tidied and the fire lit, unless there was an unlikely heatwave, the dining room cleared after breakfast and check tablecloths changed for white damask. All that
after
they had cleared the breakfast things and washed up. Plus the daily shopping for fresh meat or fish and the preparation of the vegetables before the cooking of the wholesome meal she was determined to provide at the end of the day.

She glanced across at the outline of Jimmy’s dark head on his pillow. Could two people, however hard they were willing to work, achieve all that? And what time was there going to be to spare for a child? Daisy sighed and closed her eyes, seeing Jimmy creeping in from school, snatching a bite to eat at the kitchen table, trying to talk to her and being ignored because she was busy basting the day’s joint or rolling pastry for fruit pies. Being forbidden the lounge because it was for the visitors, missing his bedtime story because there just wasn’t the time.

She would have to discuss all that with Sam when he came. And
where
was Sam going to sleep? All the rooms were booked for Easter, and Mrs Mac had warned her that folks turned up on the doorstep, and she daren’t turn paying guests away if she could possibly squeeze them in. Florence had had enough to say about Auntie Edna and Uncle Arnold coming for nothing at such a busy time. Florence had seen the books and knew what a narrow line divided them from sinking or
swimming
. Everything had cost so much more than Daisy had budgeted for. Getting things on tick wasn’t Daisy’s style at all, and to be in the red at the bank was unthinkable.

‘Never spend a penny unless you can cover it with another,’ Martha had always said.

‘I owe no man a farthing,’ her father had boasted.

He would have thoroughly approved of Hills’ recent policy. The big department store had given up their hire-purchasing trading because of the recurrent financial instability of the town’s landladies.

‘If you can’t afford a thing, then do ’bout it,’ her father would have said. He had never been what you could call a deeply religious man, but all at once Daisy remembered a prayer he had taught her, saying he said it himself when things got too much for him:

‘Dear God, I am sailing the wide wide sea. Please guide my little ship for me.’

Desperate for a sleep that would not come, Daisy clasped her hands together and began to pray.

‘Dear God, I am sailing. …’

As she repeated the comforting words her breathing grew deeper, her whole body relaxed, her forehead puckered into a frown, as she slid at last into an unconsciousness as profound as a coma.

‘WHAT’S YON LITTLE
lad doing here?’

Edna, freshly permed for her holiday, the tight helmet of grey corrugated waves imprisoned in an invisible net, jerked her pointed chin at Jimmy as he ran past her in the hall en route for the kitchen and the biscuit tin.

‘Eh up, our Daisy. I know who he is. He’s the little lad belonging to yon London chap, isn’t he?’ Edna’s monkey face expressed amazement, then sorrow. ‘Nay, don’t tell me you’re still carrying on with him? He’s not here as well, is he?’

‘Come in here, Auntie.’ Daisy opened the lounge door. ‘There’s something I want to say to you.’

Chunnering, Edna followed Daisy into the newly furbished room with its flame-coloured curtains and peach-shaded walls, its mock-leather chairs and sofa, and the large square carpet blooming with yellow roses. Refusing to sit down, she stood straight as a ruler, the room’s shining splendour wasted on her.