A Better World than This (7 page)

‘We’ll be up this way again,’ he told her. ‘In the spring – when the daffodils are blooming in that park of yours. So this isn’t goodbye.’ He touched the tip of her damp nose with a finger. ‘My boss has a lot of unfinished work to do up here.’

Before he turned away he doffed his hat, just a small doff because he hated getting his hair wet. He walked swiftly away, leaving Daisy staring after him, teetering on the kerb in the too-tight shoes, like a suicide deciding to make the final jump into oblivion.

‘Daisy!’

When she turned round she saw her Auntie Edna’s daughter, her cousin Betty, with husband Cyril, sharing an umbrella as big as a marquee. They were wearing identical fawn gaberdine raincoats, buttoned to the throat, with Betty’s straining a little over her stomach where the baby had begun to show.

Considerately, Cyril positioned the massive umbrella over Daisy, so that the three of them stood beneath it in an uneasy lengthening silence.

‘You’re wet through, our Daisy.’ Betty exchanged a wifely conspiratorial glance with her young husband. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly all right, thank you.’

Their presence irritated Daisy so much she could hardly bear to look at them. They hadn’t even given her time to work out which month the daffodils bloomed in the Corporation Park. Was it before Easter, or after? Late March, or early April? She supposed a lot depended on the weather.

‘We’ve just come off the train.’ Betty nodded her head in the direction of the station. Her headscarf, Daisy noted, printed with horses’ heads, was pinned at the front with a row of Kirby grips to stop it slipping back from her fair slippery hair. She gave off a smell of Pears soap, and in that moment Daisy knew exactly the kind of baby she would have. Clean and shiny, with round blue eyes and soft sparse hair. Summoning all her will-power, she took her mind off the daffodils and smiled at them through chattering teeth.

‘I’m glad about the baby,’ she said sincerely. ‘You always said you would have one before your twenty-first, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t remember no such thing.’ Betty gave her mother’s trilling laugh. ‘What a thing to say!’

‘We’ve been to me mother’s.’ Cyril’s eyes beneath the neb of his tweed flat cap were kind. He’d always felt sorry for Daisy ever since the wedding when she’d looked awful in a mauve sprigged dress, made to match the younger bridesmaid’s with a frill standing out from her neck like Punch, or was it Judy, wore? Picture mad, his mother-in-law had said. Thinks nothing of going night after night on her own and sitting next to God knows who. ‘A born spinster,’ she’d added maliciously, eyeing her daughter resplendent in wreath and veil. ‘Run a mile as soon as look at a man, that one.’

‘We go of a Friday, straight from work,’ he explained. ‘For our tea.’ The nudge his wife gave him almost knocked him off balance. ‘Well, yes.’ He gave a little cough. ‘We’d best be going.’

‘Yes,’ Daisy said. ‘Ta-ra, then.’

Again the furtive exchange of glances.

‘Look, our Daisy.’ Betty’s features sharpened into her mother’s monkey expression. ‘I know it’s none of our business, but it’s not right you standing here on your own, getting soaked to the bone. If you’re waiting for somebody then he’s not coming. Not at going on for ten o’clock. Best come on with us, eh, Cyril?’

‘Right.’ Cyril relinquished his hold on the umbrella. ‘You two girls share that, I won’t melt.’

‘Off you go, then.’ Daisy knew she was being rude, but the idea of sharing the umbrella with cousin Betty was unthinkable. She had to be alone. She guessed that they knew about Sam and anticipated the questions that would surely come on the walk home. ‘I’m not keeping you,’ she said.

‘Well!’ Taking her husband’s arm, Betty wedged him closer to her side. ‘Suit yourself, Daisy Bell.’

Daisy watched them walk away, Cyril’s baggy trousers flapping wetly round his ankles, Betty’s rubber overshoes making little smacking noises on the wet pavement. Their steps matched as if they were in a three-legged race, and even their backs looked affronted.

Bursting to get home and tell Auntie Edna they’ve seen me standing on the Boulevard at ten o’clock at night, like a potty woman with no hat on, Daisy told herself, waiting until they were well out of sight round the corner by the White Bull.

When she was sure they’d gone she set off herself, the mock-crocodile shoes clenching her toes like viciously held pincers, across the road past Woolworth’s with a window dressed with a fan of gramophone records at one and threepence each. Going the long way round to avoid catching up with Betty and Cyril, past the shops and up a side street with a square-faced chapel at the top. Past terraced houses with aspidistra plants in never-used front parlours, with soft lights behind yellow paper blinds at the upper windows.

The shoes were by now a burning agony, so she took them off and ran the rest of the way, tossing the wet fringe from her eyes, Claudette Colbert running through a field of daffodils, with a blue sky above and the sun warm on her head. Running to meet her lover, a tall man with black wavy hair and a profile to match that of Frederic March in
The Sign of the Cross
.

The lights were on in the house as Daisy slopped her way
through
the kitchen, making dirty footmarks on the nice clean linoleum. And rising from her mother’s rocking-chair, Auntie Edna, stern and forbidding in a cross-over pinafore with safety-pins pinned to the front, her perm trapped in an invisible hairnet.

She wasn’t in the mood to pull punches, so she came straight out with it:

‘The doctor went an hour back,’ she said, ‘and she’s asleep now, so there’s nowt for you to do, madam.’ She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t bear the sight of her sopping-wet niece. ‘Arnold found her in the bakehouse seeing to the fire. Leaning on the shovel with her face as white as a piece of bleached fent. Trying to do your job while you were out breaking her heart!’

‘The fire didn’t need seeing to!’ Daisy was already half-way to the stairs. ‘I left it damped down, and she knew it. There was no call for her to be in there lifting that heavy shovel.’

At the door of her mother’s room she stopped, her hand going to her throat at the sight of Martha neatly parcelled into bed, her face grey, but her eyes wide open and glittering, as if they were the only thing about her alive.

Down on her knees by the bed Daisy stretched out a hand and gently patted her mother’s face. ‘You had no call, Mammy,’ she said, using the childish word she hadn’t used since she was very small. ‘You’ve never lifted that big shovel before.’ Her voice caught on a sob. ‘Why do it tonight? You knew I’d be back to see to it. Why? Listen to me! Why?’

‘Because I just felt like it, that’s why.’ Martha pushed Daisy’s hand away. ‘Fat lot you care, anyroad.’

‘Yoo-hoo!’

Cousin Betty’s voice spiralled up the stairs and, hovering in the doorway, Edna turned with obvious reluctance.

‘It’s our Betty, bless her. Come to see what she can do.’

Daisy sighed with relief as she heard the slip-slop of her auntie’s down-at-heel bedroom slippers receding. Betty bless her, she told herself, eager to tell her mother about
seeing
me standing on the Boulevard with no hat on and crying like a potty woman.

‘What did the doctor say?’ she whispered. ‘He told you you had to rest. Did you tell him you’d been stoking the fire-oven when there was no need?’

‘You never said what time you were coming back.’ Martha’s small beady eyes were slits of accusation. ‘You might have been stopping out all night for all I knew.’

‘Oh, Mother. …’ Daisy’s wet hair drooped over the shiny green eiderdown. ‘Why do you say such things when you know they aren’t true? You know I’d never do a thing like that.’

‘Is he getting a divorce, then?’ Martha spat out the word as if it were an obscenity. ‘Bringing a divorce into our family? Shaming us in front of your Auntie Edna?’ Her head turned wearily towards the wall. ‘The BBC won’t have no truck with divorce. They sack them if they’re the guilty party. Give them their marching orders, that’s what they do.’

‘He doesn’t
work
for the BBC!’ Getting up from her knees Daisy caught sight of herself tripled in the swing mirrors on her mother’s dressing-table. Green coat black-wet, hair dangling round her face like wet snails. ‘He’s gone, Mother, and I doubt if he’ll be back.’

Deliberately she put behind her the scene where Sam came to meet her, striding through a field of yellow nodding daffodils. The singing in her heart had gone too, fading as if it had never been. That had been the dream. This was reality.

‘You have to rest.’ She found she was wringing her hands, when she had thought people only did that in books. ‘We can afford to get someone in for serving in the shop, and I can manage the rest. I’m strong, Mother. Hard work doesn’t bother me. I can supervise them in the bakehouse and see to the shop, and look after you.’ Her voice rose. ‘But you have to let me take care of you!’

Peeling off her sodden coat, she found the rain had soaked through the lining, staining her blouse in bottle-green patches. In the chill of the unheated room she was shivering
as
though she’d been for a dip in the sea at Blackpool when it wasn’t fit.

‘We can pick and choose with half the town on the dole,’ she said through chattering teeth. ‘A nice girl to give the shop a bit of tone. Florence,’ she added on impulse. ‘She hates her job at the Rialto. You know how nicely she speaks. You’ve always said so. Remember when she read the Lesson at chapel last May on Anniversary Sunday? You’d’ve thought she’d had elocution lessons.’

‘Her father’s nowt but a butter-slapper at the Maypole,’ Martha said, perking up a bit. ‘And he’s living over the brush with that woman out of Tontine Street.’

‘You can
retire
.’ Daisy hugged the damp coat to her chest to hide the stains on her blouse. ‘You can stop in bed till dinner time reading and knitting. We’ll have
Woman’s Weekly
delivered with the papers. There’s nice knitting patterns in there. And nice stories. You like stories and reading. I know that.’

‘About daft woman who fall in love with stupid men swishing riding crops and being masterful?’ For the first time Martha seemed to notice the state her daughter was in. ‘Best get them wet things off,’ she said. ‘Before you get pneumonia. The double kind by the look of you,’ she added, closing her eyes again.

Daisy hesitated by the door. Downstairs she could hear the rise and fall of Auntie Edna’s voice, interspersed by Betty’s clear childlike treble. She would have to face them when she had changed out of her wet things, but there was a terrible longing inside her to go back to the bed, take her mother’s hand, and tell her how much she loved her. Tell her that even if she never got out of bed again she would care for her and keep her clean. Send for a commode out of the Sunday paper, and repaint the basket chair for visitors to sit on when they came to call.

But she knew exactly what her mother would do and say if she did just that.

‘Stop being dramatic,’ Martha would say. ‘Who do you
think
you are? Barbara Stanwyck?’

So Daisy left the room, taking the square landing at the top of the stairs in one stride before going into her bedroom to peel off her wet things.

Missing entirely the sight of her mother, holding a hand to her chest where the pain had raged and left her drained. Peering over the top of the dark green taffeta billowing eiderdown, like a terrified animal staring panic-stricken from its cage.

‘YOU LOOK,’ SAID
Florence, ‘a bit like Anna May Wong with your fringe uncurled like that.’

Daisy didn’t mind the personal remark. She was used to her friend Florence Livesey being critical. Perhaps one day she would flash out and ask her friend why she always wore
her
hair scragged back and up into a French pleat, making her look at least ten years older than her twenty-five years. And why she wore net gloves when anyone knew they were common, and why she crooked her little finger when she drank a cup of tea. But she knew she wouldn’t. Florence’s good opinion of herself mattered a lot. Daisy knew that instinctively. The woman her father was living with was two years younger than Florence herself, and it was said he drank more than was good for him, so Florence had plenty of crosses to bear.

It was the week coming up to Christmas, and they had been as usual to Sunday School at the chapel set back behind railings not five minutes’ walk away from the shop. They had sat with the Ladies’ Class and sung ‘We Three Kings from Orient are’ before going out of the big hall into the side vestry for a talk by the Superintendent, a man with thin grey hair and an Adam’s apple that moved up and down out of his white starched collar like a yo-yo.

Now they were sitting drinking tea in Daisy’s living room because their Sunday walk had been sacrificed so that Martha wouldn’t be left too long on her own.

‘How is she?’ Florence jerked her neat head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Does she always have as long as this for her lie-down?’

Daisy nodded. ‘It worries me. One time she couldn’t sit still; now she sleeps all the time. It can’t be natural.’

‘Nature’s remedy,’ said Florence who was very well versed in all things medical. ‘Her body is healing itself.’ She passed over her cup for a refill. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,’ she said. ‘Shakespeare.’

‘I wish you could have come to work in the shop.’ Daisy fingered her hair. ‘I don’t have time to put me curlers in,’ she explained, not wishing to look like Anna May Wong. ‘I’m that tired when I go to bed. Mother insisted on Auntie Edna taking her place in the shop, but she does more gossiping than serving, then she goes home, leaving me with all the clearing up to do. I’m whacked by the time I get me mother her tea, then see her back to bed. And with Christmas coming there’s all the extra. Last night I was icing cakes till midnight.’

‘Sometimes I think I’ll do away with myself. Throw myself into Potter’s Pond,’ Florence said, startling Daisy so much she almost dropped her cup and saucer. ‘We don’t speak now, that … that woman and me. And the noise they make in bed. It makes me feel sick.’