by Marie Joseph
‘Up here is where the nobs live,’ Daisy told him, as they climbed down from the tram at the terminus. ‘Doctors and solicitors and the like. If you live up here folks know you’re it.’
The felt hat had slipped back from her forehead, and her upturned face was luminous in the darkness. ‘It’s stopped raining, thanks be to goodness,’ she said. ‘I’m going to show you now where I go for a walk on Sunday afternoons in summer. With my friend Florence. She works as an usherette at the Rialto cinema, so I only see her on Sundays. It isn’t far,’ she told him when he hesitated. ‘You can get back in plenty of time. It isn’t right what I know you’re thinking about Blackburn. You’ve only seen the part down by the mills.’ She urged him forward. ‘There are fields not far away, Sam. Miles and miles of meadows, and rolling hills and trees, and little sparkling rivers.’ She tucked a hand into his arm. ‘Pretend it’s summer. Go on. It’s easy if you try. I’m wearing a blue dress, pleated all round, and you’re wearing a pair of grey flannels and a yellow-spotted cravat tucked into the neck of your shirt.’
They were walking up an incline now, away from the terminus. Set back from the road on either side were tall dark houses, solidly Victorian, fronted by tiny gardens fringed by brick-built walls.
‘Nearly there!’ Suddenly Daisy let go of his arm and strode up an unmade road to the left. ‘Up here, Sam! Come on, you’ll soon see what I mean.’
‘Where the hell are we now?’ Sam wished he wasn’t so good-natured. His wife would never have called him that, but he knew he was. Why else would he be God knew where, trudging up a muddy lane and climbing into what seemed to be a large stone boxers’ ring, instead of behaving like the sultan his wife thought him to be, and putting paid to this ridiculous escapade with an imperious wave of a hand.
‘You’ve no imagination!’ his wife had often screamed at him. ‘That’s what comes of being a glorified car mechanic. You’ve got gear oil instead of blood in your veins, Samuel bloody Barnet!’
A car mechanic. … Sam winced as if the words had come at him out of the darkness. He’d show her, when he’d finished with his engineering exams and got certificates to prove he was qualified. A late starter he might be, but he was catching up fast. And as for having no imagination. … He bounded up the stone steps after Daisy, feeling the sun warm on the top of his head, spruce in his grey flannels with a yellow-spotted cravat tucked into his open-necked shirt.
What was she doing to him, this strange young-old girl with the dark-brown voice, running ahead of him now to lean over a railing as if she was on the deck of a ship watching the moon shining on the sea? Why did he feel so protective towards her? As if she needed shielding from all the hurts of the world. No one could do that. When it came to it we were all alone, like animals, fending for ourselves, and making the best of things. Working out our salvations and knowing that the paths we trod were the paths we chose. Of our own volition, God dammit.
Almost as an extension of his own thoughts he went over to the railings and put his arms round Daisy, straining her to him, just as a fierce gust of wind, seemingly from Siberia, tore the ugly felt hat from her head, bowling it along in the darkness like a leaf before swooping it up and casting it into the darkness below.
‘I hated that hat,’ she shouted over the sighing moaning wind. ‘I didn’t suit it, and never have. I only bought it because it matched me coat, and because the lady in the Hat Market said it was just me.’ Spreading her arms wide she let the wind take her hair and whip it round her head like a nimbus. ‘How did she know what was just me when I don’t know meself?’
‘I think you do know.’ Sam pulled her to him again. ‘I think you know exactly what you are and who you are.’
‘Well, whoever I am didn’t suit that hat.’ Her laugh was the laugh he remembered from first seeing her, as unselfconscious as a child’s. ‘On a real summer’s day you can see Blackpool Tower.’ She pointed away from the town. ‘It looks a bit like a mill chimney, and when the sun shines, really shines, you can sometimes fancy you see the sea flashing like a silver needle.’ She lifted her face. ‘Sniff up, Sam, then lick your lips and tell me you can taste the sea. Oh, I love the sea. One day when I’m old I will live by the sea, an’ I’ll go to sleep at night with the sound of the waves in me ears.’ Turning suddenly completely round, she pulled him with her. ‘And that is the Corporation Park down there, and beyond that the town. If only it was light you could see the tall chimneys waving little banners of smoke.’ Again he was whirled round. ‘Back to the sea now, Sam. But before you arrive there are more than thirty miles of green fields and woods.’
‘With your hat whipping through them.’
‘Fetching up on the sands at Blackpool.’
He hugged her close. He couldn’t help himself. She put her mouth to his and as the kiss deepened, he tasted the sweetness of her.
‘I’m getting better at kissing, aren’t I?’
Even as she spoke the rain came swiftly, a cloud-burst directly above them, it seemed. Before they reached the road her hair was soaking wet, flattened to her head, a black rubber bathing cap. Sam offered her his own hat, his coat, anything, but it was obvious to him she didn’t care.
The misery of his going had hit her with the force of the deluge of water cascading down from an unseen sky. Already the grids were overflowing, and the gutters ran like rivers. It was Hollywood rain, Joan Crawford in an oiled perm, with lipstick intact on her wide-gashed mouth, with a man beside her in a riding macintosh, wide-brimmed trilby lowered over his face, a strong arm round her as he urged her along so quickly it seemed as if her feet would leave the ground. ‘How beautiful you look in the rain,’ he would say. ‘All woman.’
‘You must have a hot bath as soon as you get inside,’ said Sam.
‘I won’t melt,’ Daisy told him, wondering if he knew that taking a bath meant bringing in the zinc bath from its nail on the backyard wall, heating the water up in the kitchen copper, then carrying it in pails through to the fire.
As they reached the bottom of the slope and turned the corner, a tram was there, with the conductor standing on his platform, his finger on the bell.
‘Nice weather for ducks,’ he grinned. ‘Chucking it down in buckets,’ he added from his shelter. ‘Been for a swim in the park lake, have you, love?’
Ignoring him, Daisy made for the front of the tram, swayed almost off her feet as it jerked into motion.
‘Does it ever do anything else but rain up here?’ Taking off his hat Sam shook the raindrops from it, scattering them like beads on the corrugated floor. ‘Here, take my hankie and wipe your hair with it.’
‘I suppose it never rains in London?’ Daisy scrubbed away at her wet face. ‘I suppose you have to crawl about on dusty roads with your tongue hanging out wailing for water?’
All at once the mock-crocodile shoes were giving her gyp, and looking down she saw her lisle stockings hanging over them in muddy creases. She discovered that she was chilled to the bone; there was a cold wetness trickling down her neck. Her mother would act as if she had caught her death, and make her a pot of cocoa with the steam coming through the froth on the top. And what for? What, in the name of God, was it all for? So she would be well enough and able enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and stoke the fire-oven for the massive Saturday bake? For the one-pound and two-pound loaves, the soft-centred barm-cakes, the scones, the iced Bath buns, the sultana sponges?
‘You are not walking me home.’ Her voice was ragged with misery. ‘You have a lot to do before you go back to the Sahara. What do you do when you’re nearly there? Swap your chauffeur’s fancy hat for a pith helmet?’
Sam leaned across her to breathe on the steamed-up window. As removed from her as if they had already parted, she guessed. The back of his coat was black-wet, and she hoped it had gone right through to his vest. If he wore a vest, she wondered, remembering that Clark Gable never did.
‘If you’re sure.’ Sam wrinkled his nose against the smell of wet raincoats as the
tram filled up at the park gates with a crowd of parents on their way home from a grammar school prize-giving. ‘If it freezes on top of this the roads will be like glass.’
All at once Daisy saw the Rolls-Royce limousine skidding from the road, overturning in a ditch with its wheels spinning. With Sam slumped lifeless over the wheel, and his boss dead as a door-nail on the back seat with his eyes wide open and blood trickling from a gash on his forehead.
‘Then you’ll have to drive a bit slower than seventy miles an hour, won’t you?’ Daisy turned a despairing face towards him, remembering, as she was to remember for a long time to come, every single word he had ever said.
‘She holds the road like a dream,’ Sam told her, recognizing they had come to the end of the journey, standing up as if he couldn’t wait to be off and away.
On the Boulevard, heedless of passers-by, he kissed her gently, a fleeting on the mouth kiss with lips that tasted of rain. ‘Thank you for being so nice to me, Daisy. Thank you for being my friend these past two days.’
Friend? The emphasis on the word stabbed like a finger jabbed into Daisy’s heart. She felt the tears prick behind her eyes and blinked them angrily away. She knew that he was trying not to look at his watch, glad that his back was turned away from the station clock.
Sam was controlling the urge badly. There were a thousand and one things he had to do before they started on the long drive south. Already he was feeling a pleasurable anticipation at the thought of sitting behind the wheel of the car he knew to be the best in the world, the Spirit of Ecstasy statuette poised on the bonnet. The Flying Lady, as some preferred to call it. Speeding down arterial roads through the dark night, listening to the rhythmic purr of the engine.
To Sam a car engine was a thing of beauty – to be kept so spotless a man could eat his dinner off it – the Rolls, as he drove it, was an extension of his own body. As a surgeon’s fingers would probe the innards of his patient on the operating table, so Sam could detect the slightest fault in the engine of a car. Every throb told its own story and he knew he could have dismantled and rebuilt it from instinct.
And one day, when he held his paper qualifications in his hand, he would find a better job, and possess his own car. Giving in to temptation, he glanced at his watch. And winced.
‘Be happy, love.’ He needed to leave this Lancashire lass with his conscience unruffled. He wanted to be kind. He didn’t see himself as a cruel man, even though ‘cruel bastard’ was his wife’s pet name for him. No, what he saw himself as was a sort of sentimental softie, a world-weary man with a puzzling attraction for women. And this one was crying. She was trying hard to disguise it and not succeeding very well. Sam came to a sudden decision. Putting her from him he smiled down into her anguished face.
‘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.
