A Better World than This (44 page)

‘Nice to be going home,’ the driver said, as he helped her into the back of the cab.

‘For some,’ said Florence bitterly. ‘Drop me here,’ she said suddenly when they reached the town centre, pointing to an arcade of shops with crowds of holidaymakers pushing their way into it to shelter from the rain.

‘As you say, Missus,’ the driver said, fed up to the back teeth with the weather and the way things always seemed to be taking a turn for the worst.

The letter came by the second post. When Daisy recognized Sam’s writing on the envelope she took it at once up to her room to read it in private.

Dear Daisy,

There has been a change of plans. Aileen doesn’t want Jimmy to come back north. She sees a great change in him, and can hardly believe he’s the same boy. She thinks Dorothy must have been fretting for him on the quiet as they got on really well together in Suffolk. She wants me to thank you for looking after him so well, and will be writing to you herself. I know there are still some of his things with you, but he has plenty of clothes to be going on with, and I will collect the rest when I come up to see you. When this will be I can’t say, but I’ll be in touch and let you know the exact date.

I would feel guilty about all this, as I know you are very fond of Jimmy, but I can’t help realizing how hard it would be for you to have a small boy about the house during your busy season. It wouldn’t have been
fair
to leave him with you any longer on top of all you have to do.

I hope Florence’s feet healed quickly. I should imagine she has great powers of resilience. She always reminds me somehow of those pioneer Englishwomen who braved storm and flood in new continents, always keeping up standards and flying the flag at all costs. I can’t imagine blistered feet will get her down for long.

Do you know I never met your Mr Schofield? I wonder sometimes if he really existed?

Dear Daisybell, we have a lot to talk about when I see you again. I promise it will be soon. Just parcel Jimmy’s few things up and tuck them out of your way. He seems to be worried about the cat, but Aileen won’t budge on that one. They make her sneeze.

I will express my gratitude properly when I see you, but I think you know what it meant to me you accepting Jimmy the way you did. They don’t grow them like you very often, Daisybell. You are unique. But then, I’ve said that before, haven’t I?

See you soon.

Yours with love,

Sam

Daisy had left the door of her room half open so that Joshua saw her struggling to dismantle the camp bed.

‘It’s supposed to
fold
,’ she told him. ‘The legs come off, then you take these struts out and the whole thing goes flat.’

He jumped at once to the wrong conclusion. ‘You’re putting Jimmy in Bobbie’s room? That’s a good idea.’ Getting down on his knees he busied himself with the flimsy bed. ‘I’d start getting used to the notion that Bobbie won’t be coming back here, Daisy. My guess is he’ll get six months at least. He’s got too much pride not to want to move on after he comes out.’ He slid a strut out from the canvas and added it to the pile by his side on the carpet. ‘He sends you his love, by the way, but he doesn’t want to see you. Couldn’t face you, he says.’

‘That makes me feel terrible.’ To her horror Daisy began to cry. ‘Does Bobbie think I’m perfect? That I’ve never done a mean thing in my life? That I’m so sanctimonious I would be ashamed to be his friend? Is
that
the impression I give? That they don’t grow them like me very often? That I am so
unique
I don’t have feelings like other people? Is that what he thinks? Because that’s the way Sam sees me.’ She groped for her handkerchief in the pocket of her morning apron and found instead Sam’s letter. ‘Here, you might as well read this. There’s nothing personal in it.’

The tears were running down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away.

‘Oh, I know I’m stupid. There was something telling me all the time that Jimmy would have to go away sometime. I couldn’t believe that any woman could just give her son away like that.’ She accepted Joshua’s proffered handkerchief. ‘I’d even gone as far as thinking that when Sam and me were married Jimmy would be with us, and in time come to look on me as his mother.’ She blew her nose and pushed the handkerchief and the letter back into her pocket.

‘You know what’s wrong with me, Joshua? I’ve seen too many films. Up to coming here I used to go three times a week. One week I’d be Joan Crawford, the next Greta Garbo, and the next one after that Barbara Stanwyck. And most times things turned out all right. But they’re not going to this time, are they? Thank you for not laughing, Joshua. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Do you know that? In spite of being a man.’

She started to fold one of Jimmy’s grey school shirts, smoothing the collar and tucking in the sleeves. ‘Florence is my friend too, but she’s more critical of me than you are. She sees me straight on.’

‘And I don’t?’

Daisy rolled a striped tie round her fingers. ‘You only see me at my
best
.’ There was the faintest suspicion of a twinkle in her red-rimmed eyes. ‘An’ because you’re so kind and understanding, I
am
at my best.’ She thrust a hand inside a grey knee-sock. ‘I’ll mend this before I pack it up. Oh, it’s all too complicated, but what I think I mean is this: in everybody’s life they meet, say, two or three people, sometimes more if they’re lucky, people they are
comfortable
with. Real true friends. People they could trust to the ends of the earth.’ She examined the second sock carefully. ‘I’m so charged with emotion this morning, I couldn’t feel worse if I’d drunk three sherries straight down. There was a cloud sitting on my head, an’ I couldn’t peer my way through it, but it’s going. At least it’s lifting. It started to lift when I read that letter.’

‘Sam’s letter?’ Joshua willed her to carry on.

‘Yes, Sam’s letter.’ Daisy got up from the bed. ‘I’d better go back to the kitchen before Winnie collapses under the strain of having to scrape three pounds of carrots.’ She turned round at the door. ‘Thanks for listening to me, Joshua. I’m always saying that, aren’t I?’ She hesitated. ‘But don’t get the wrong idea of me. I’ve done some flamin’ foolish things in my life. Really stupid want-your-head-examining kind of things.’

‘Haven’t we all?’ Joshua said, gathering the dismantled bed together. ‘Now tell me where you want me to put this.’

By late afternoon the sky was purple, thick with storm clouds. If the café in the Arcade hadn’t been so crowded, the waitresses run off their feet, one of them would have noticed the tall gaunt woman drinking endless cups of tea, shuffling to the Ladies, coming back to change tables and ordering yet another pot of tea. Florence had abandoned her case a long time ago. It had been kicked aside and pushed out of the way by holidaymakers hideous in their bedraggled rainwear, the women with permed hair frizzed by the rain, and the men with raindrops dripping from the nebs of their flat caps.

To Florence every face had a pinched and mean look about it. These people
smelled
. The odour rising from their damp clothing was turning her fastidious stomach. Blackpool itself was ugly; cheap and nasty, stripped of its so-called glamour by the rain cascading from a gun-metal sky. Coming out of the Arcade Florence turned right instead of left. She didn’t
choose
to go home yet. There wasn’t much left to her really, was there, but freedom of choice? Resolutely she turned her long-suffering face towards the front.

Eight million visitors the resort was reported to have had the year before, and Florence calculated that most of them that afternoon were seeking shelter from the rain along the Golden Mile. On a corner of Brunswick Street a patient queue waited outside a palmist’s booth. Florence stopped on the pavement to read the caption:

‘Madame Boranev can help you as she has helped others. She will give you sound advice. Come inside and consult her at once! Only one shilling a session.’

Florence joined the queue.

‘You know what it’s like,’ Mrs Mac said, coming in unannounced through the back door to ask Daisy could she possibly lend her such a thing as a cup of arrowroot? ‘They never tell you the exact time you’re being discharged, then when they do you have to wait around for your take-home medicine. They’ll be keeping your friend doped to the eyeballs for a while after a shock like that. Did she ever have St Vitus’s Dance as a child? She always looked to me ready to start twitching.’

‘Maybe I got the day wrong.’ Daisy reached up into a cupboard for the packet of arrowroot. ‘She wouldn’t let
anyone
go and fetch her. She’s so independent she’d run her own shroud up on the sewing machine if she knew exactly when she was going to die.’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me if she doesn’t work
that
out for herself,’ Mrs Mac said, pushing the packet behind the bib of her pinny to keep it dry on her way back next door. ‘Not that I’m casting aspersions, but your friend has always struck me as being a mite too big for her boots. A round peg in a square hole, if you get my meaning.’

Florence emerged from the palmist’s booth muttering to herself. ‘A tall dark man? Marriage within the year, followed by two children? Dear God, it would be funny if it wasn’t so hopelessly untrue.’

Because she couldn’t help seeing the humour in it, she laughed aloud as she joined the queue outside the peep-show next door. Admission twopence for the privilege of seeing ‘Colonel Barker and his Bride on a Strange Honeymoon’.

They were displayed down in a pit, the army officer and his bride, with the crowds moving slowly round the top, staring down at the two beds separated by a pedestrian
crossing
embellished by orange Belisha beacons.

‘A crude attempt at sexual innuendo,’ Florence told a girl in front of her with tinselly fair hair and two red rings of rouge high on her cheek-bones.

‘Potty,’ the girl told her friend, a large girl with a laugh like a rasp-throated seagull. ‘Take no notice.’

In one of the beds the fat Colonel lay in his nightshirt; in the other a very young girl in a chiffon nightie, showing thighs blue with cold, a large Dalmatian dog by her side. Florence spotted a bottle of whisky under the bridegroom’s bed.

‘Fancy lying there doing nowt for twelve hours a day.’ The fair-haired girl leaned dangerously over the flimsy railing. ‘They say the Colonel’s a woman.’

‘That’s why they lie there doing nowt then,’ her bosom friend said. ‘What a rotten two-pennorth!’

‘Can’t you see the awful tragedy in it all?’ Florence rounded on them in anger. ‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows. Shakespeare saw it all!’

‘She should be put away.’

‘Probably an escaped loony.’

The bosom friends hurried away, into an arcade of slot machines, where for an outlay of threepence between them they won a fourpenny packet of Player’s Weights, a twopenny bar of Nestlés chocolate and a pocket mirror. Making their day.

‘The first thing I’m going to do when I see I’m on the way to making me pile is to have a telephone installed,’ Daisy informed Mrs Mac when she returned the cup of arrowroot later that afternoon. ‘I could have rung the hospital by now to find out about Florence, or she could have rung me to say what time to expect her. As it is I don’t even know whether I’ve got the right day. I’d run out to the phone box at the end of the street but Winnie says it’s not working.’

‘Hoodlums from the caravan sites,’ Mrs Mac said. ‘Rampaging back from the pubs at closing time. Angus says
the
corporation should step in to have those caravans taken away. It’s no wonder the owners of those sites can charge less than what we do. They’ve got far lower overheads.
Our
living is precarious enough as it is. Though you have to say one thing in favour of the Depression.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, all those folks who had started fancying going down south and even abroad for their holidays have settled back for Blackpool. Angus says there’s going to be another war, and if he’s right it’ll be like the last time all over again.’ She eased her considerable bulk down on to a chair. ‘Angus’s mother had a lodging-house up by the station during the last war. She had servicemen billeted on her from the beginning. She got three and fourpence a day for each man, but being a good manager she fed them well on one and sixpence a day. Her sister down Bispham way wasn’t so lucky.
She
had Belgian refugees plonked on her and only got ten shillings a
week
for them. But her other sister over in the Isle of Man came off worst. They stopped the steamers going over, you see.’

‘Those two ladies in number four have asked for a tray of tea in their bedroom.’ Winnie’s face round the door was stiff with disapproval. ‘Why can’t they have it in the lounge with all the rest?’

‘You should start off the way you mean to go on.’ Mrs Mac waited until Winnie had left the kitchen, stoop-shouldered from the weight of two cups and saucers, a small teapot and a tiny milk-jug and sugar-basin. ‘I don’t stop my lot from coming in out of the rain, but I don’t provide tea. You try putting it down as extras on their bills and see where that gets you.’

Daisy, who had every intention of starting as she meant to go on and no intention at all of charging for the odd cup of tea, believing firmly that hers was the way to make sure her visitors came back the next year, said nothing.

‘Owt to do with the last war,’ Mrs Mac continued, picking up the threads, ‘and Angus can remember it clear as a bell.
Ask
him to fetch four things from the shops and he’ll forget two of them.’

‘Does he really think there’s going to be another war?’ Daisy looked alarmed. ‘The local paper is full of nothing else but the arrangements for the Coronation celebrations in May.’

‘Angus’s niece went over to Germany last summer.’ Mrs Mac drew her chair closer in to the table and lowered her voice dramatically as if she suspected the house could be teeming with spies. ‘She is half-cousin to one of those Hitler Youth, a German girl from Berlin. Not, I might add, related on Angus’s side. No, there’s nothing like that in
his
family – where was I? Oh, yes. This niece came back from Germany with tales of hundreds and thousands of young men and women marching, drilling and singing war songs, going away for weeks at a time to these summer camps. Living like
soldiers!
Disciplined soldiers, not hoodlums like those from our holiday camps, running the streets and breaking telephones just for the fun of it.’ She got laboriously to her feet. ‘Well, you’ve detained me for long enough, Miss Bell, interesting though I always find your conversation to be.’ She sniffed appreciatively. ‘Something smells good. What’s on the menu for tonight?’