A Better World than This (50 page)
Daisy put the letter at the back of her dressing-table drawer, behind her stockings, took it out again, tore it across and threw it away.
Joshua kept in touch with her too, but not by letter. He called
round
twice and found her in the kitchen both times, doing three things at once, as usual.
‘You look well.’ Daisy said it quietly, carrying on with what she was doing.
‘You look tired,’ he told her, refusing to sit down, standing stiff and serious by the door with his arms folded and his expression stern.
She wanted to weep. For some inexplicable reason she wanted to go to him and have him put his arms around her to feel his gentleness, and his strength. His presence made her feel so vulnerable she wished he would go and leave her alone. Yet when he went she never knew how the sound of a door closing could hurt so much.
It was only natural she should be missing him. He had been so dependable, so loyal a friend. He had talked to her each night after Winnie had gone to bed as she waited in the kitchen half asleep for the last of the visitors to go up to bed. At least,
she
had talked most of the time and he had listened. There was a great and comforting stillness about Joshua, a wisdom, a towering compassion. He had outward control, where she had none. He was free to be always himself, where she was still bound to the values set for her by her mother. Joshua controlled his own thoughts; hers had been taught and ingrained in her from a puritanical childhood.
Why was she seeing all this so clearly now? Daisy drooped over the big account ledger lying open before her on the kitchen table.
How could she have been so close to Joshua and not known how much she loved him? How could she have wasted all that tearing emotion, that
anguish
on Sam, who had never loved her at all?
‘If there is ever anything I can do to help you. …’ Joshua had said the second time he came. In the lounge one of the week’s visitors was playing the piano badly. Two small boys, up far too late, were using the new brown settee as a trampoline, shrieking and bouncing with joy. Joshua raised
his
voice slightly. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’
She would remember, Daisy told him. And if Winnie had not come into the kitchen at that moment she would have gone to him in utter humility, begging his forgiveness for hurting him with thoughtless, childish words on the night he had asked her to marry him.
How clever he was at knowing just the right moment to walk away. Smiling at Winnie and sketching the familiar salute at Daisy, he turned and left the house. In complete command of the situation, leaving her feeling empty and bereft. Knowing instinctively that she must give herself this time of waiting before she went to him.
As a late summer slid into a windy winter, Blackpool was lit up for a continuous six miles along the promenade by over three hundred and seventy-five thousand lamps. They were massed, looped and garlanded along and across the full width of the wide sea road. On a clear night the glow in the sky could be seen from the Isle of Man.
Shangri-La was bursting at the seams. Daisy had even found two ‘regulars’ for the vacant rooms on the top floor. One, a red-faced Irishman working on the last extension of the promenade, and the other an under-gardener at Stanley Park. They were both much-married men, hating the separation from their wives and families, but appreciating Daisy’s cooking to such an extent she found their lavish praise almost an embarrassment.
She knew that after the Illuminations finished in October there was bound to be a lull before Christmas, and had already drafted an advertisement offering half board, good home cooking and constant hot water for reasonable terms.
And in the meantime the biggest spectacle of all was in full swing.
In the last week of the Illuminations Daisy wrote a brief note to Joshua asking him to meet her. Not at the house where they were likely to be disturbed, but by Central Pier, she
suggested
. At nine o’clock, which would be about the time he took his nightly constitutional.
Another thing her mother had taught her was that a girl never ran after a man. That it must be left to
him
to make the advances; that if she was foolish enough or fast enough to do the chasing, his respect for her would vanish.
‘You are still trying to please your mother,’ Florence had said. ‘Even though she is dead.’
‘I need to see you,’ Daisy wrote defiantly. ‘We must talk. There are things I have to say.’
The first thing she saw when she left the darkened streets behind and turned on to the promenade was the Tower, outlined in brilliant lights zipping up one side and down the other, its summit shining with glowing colours like the imperial crown. For a moment, a child again, Daisy held her breath in wonder. The crowded promenade was a seething mass of excited voices, moving along from one set piece to another, rapt faces glimpsed first in blazing light then in shadow.
A tram-car disguised as a Venetian gondola swayed its graceful way along the promenade. An outline of an aeroplane in twinkling diamond lights dipped its shining wings over the kiosks of Central Pier, where Joshua waited for her.
‘Joshua?’
He looked different. That was the first thing she noticed. Hatless for one thing, his thick brown hair unruly from the wind.
Wilder
looking than she had ever seen him, the opposite of his usual quietly courteous self.
‘Daisy.’ He took her hands in his, trying to read her expression. ‘Your letter had me worried. Is something wrong?’
She shook her head, trying hard not to smile, and failing. ‘There is nothing wrong, Joshua. I just wanted to see you, that was all.’
‘But why here?’ He nodded at the tightly packed crowd,
snail-paced
as if they moved on a slow conveyor belt. ‘Why not at the house?’
‘Because the house is filled with strangers; because Winnie is in the kitchen making bedtime drinks for the children, eating twice as many biscuits as she puts out on the plate. Because I haven’t seen the Illuminations since I was a little girl, and I wanted to see them with you.’
They looked at each other for a long time, then walked on in silence, Daisy’s hand tucked into his arm in a way that could have meant everything or nothing at all. From the top of the winking glittering Tower a searchlight swooped across the shadowy sea, over the town’s grey houses and round and beyond over the wide flat countryside with its darkened fields and meadows.
Now it was Daisy’s turn to be afraid. He was so unlike his usual self, so visibly anxious. When she moved her hand down his arm and squeezed his hand, there was no response, no answering pressure. She glanced at him and saw the way his eyes looked troubled and wary. In that moment the glory of the lights dimmed, the whole panorama turned tawdry and cheap. Even without her glasses she could faintly see the wire frames behind the elaborate set-pieces and blinking, winking, gaudy tableaux.
Her thoughts were unbearable.
She
had stopped loving Sam. Why then had she taken it for granted that
Joshua
would go on loving
her
? She had hurt him so much, loving Sam so
visibly
. How could Joshua be expected to believe that she had changed, stopped dreaming, faced reality? And grown up at last.
Could it be that he had fallen in love with the lace-trimmed Miss Halliwell whose house he shared? Was he wondering now how to let Daisy down easily, not wanting to hurt her because she was his friend? His
friend
, that was all.
Her heart filled with darkness. Her footsteps flagged.
The themes outlined in twinkling lights meant nothing to her now. Cinderella’s glass coach had golden wheels, revolving perpetually, but going nowhere. Further on the
Babes
in the Wood slept beneath scintillating emerald-hued trees, with fluttering red-breasted robins scattering red and yellow leaves which seemed to melt away even as they touched the ground.
As they walked along the sea-front shimmering canals flowed alongside them with Dutch girls in winged caps bowling sparkling hoops along the banks. Fairies, elves, and gnomes pranced and pirouetted among rainbow-coloured herbaceous borders, while further on towards the north riders in hunting pink urged horses over gates which appeared and disappeared out of the surrounding gloom.
It was beautiful and it was terrible. The whole of Blackpool, it seemed to Daisy, illuminated with brightly coloured lights, hundreds of thousands of them. The miles of concrete promenade, the three piers stretching jewelled fingers out into the invisible sea, and the Tower etched against the night sky by the lights zipping up one side of it and down the other.
She stopped walking, forcing Joshua to turn and face her.
‘Joshua … dear Joshua … Listen to me. I have something to tell you.’
‘You are back with Sam,’ he said at once. ‘He has left his wife again and is going to marry you. Your silence has told me, and I am too selfish to be glad for you. We have seen the lights together now, so shall we go home?’
Slowly and deliberately Daisy began to unbutton his brown tweed overcoat, opening it so she could get close to him, unbuttoning her own to get even closer.
‘I love you,’ she whispered as his arms came round her. ‘I am about to do a shameless thing, Joshua Penny. Something that would make my mother revolve in her grave. I am going to ask you to marry me. I am
chasing
you, being forward,
asking
for you to lose your respect for me. I want to cook for you, bear your children for you. Come home again, Joshua.’
His mouth tasted of the wind and sea salt. Their first slow kisses were tender, sweet and brief, lips touching, parting slightly, lingering, a slow throb of mounting mutual desire.
Stepping back into the shadows Joshua tightened his arms round her. This time his mouth on hers was gentle at first, then deliberate, searing her with longing, so that when he let her go she clung to him, weak with want of him.
‘No
spark
?’ His eyes teased her. ‘None of that feeling a woman should have for a man when she wants him to make love to her?’
‘Oh, Joshua, I love you so much that beside the passion burning in me all the lights of the Illuminations are just a candle flame.’ She laughed up at him. ‘Will that do?’
‘To be going on with,’ said Joshua.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448107780
First published in 1986 by Century Hutchinson Ltd
Copyright © Marie Joseph 1986
All rights reserved
This edition published in 1995 by Century Ltd
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