by Marie Joseph
‘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.
Chapter Three
‘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.’
Daisy felt the blush spread up from her throat. She wouldn’t have believed her friend could have said a thing like that. Not right out on a Sunday afternoon, sitting sipping tea with her little finger crooked.
‘You must get away,’ she said through the blush. ‘I don’t suppose they want you there if the truth were told.’
‘The truth is told!’ Florence put her cup down on the tiled hearth, took a clean folded handkerchief from her handbag and began to weep tidily into it. ‘I objected to her wiping the gas oven down with the dishcloth the other day and she yelled at me, and my father came in and said the best thing would be for me to get out. “Get out,” he shouted.’
‘He wouldn’t mean it, love.’ Daisy glanced anxiously at the door. It would be just like her mother to come downstairs now to be struck almost paralytic with such talk. And calling Florence ‘Florrie’ when she knew she hated it. She frowned and bit her lip. ‘Your father always was a …’ she sought for the right word ‘… a virile sort of man.’
‘He sleeps with nothing on. And walks along the landing stark naked.’ Florence was obviously determined to have her say. ‘
I never liked him,’ she added. ‘Neither did my mother. He was descended from fair folk, you know.’
A terrible picture came into Daisy’s mind – of Mr Livesey with his red bull neck and mutton-chop whiskers trotting along the landing in the altogether. She suppressed a shudder.
‘Where would I go?’ Florence was beside herself. ‘My wages wouldn’t pay the rent of a single room, let alone keep me in food and clothes. I’m a suffragette in here.’ She stabbed at her chest. ‘I believe in the emancipation of women. Passionately.’ Her lip curled. ‘I do not regard a man as a meal ticket, and yet I am beholden to my father, because he pays the rent. I want to scream at him that I will go, that I will manage, but emancipation takes money, Daisy! Think about those women who fought tooth and nail for the vote for us. The Pankhursts, Annie Kenny. They were financially independent before they became suffragettes. They submitted to being force-fed because they knew their dinner would be waiting for them if they chose to go home. They sang as they were marched into prison, and when they were let out they went back to the bosoms of their families, to be cosseted back to health. But they had made their gestures! Don’t you see?’
Daisy was losing the thread of the argument, but she nodded vaguely. Florence always sounded as if she knew exactly what she was talking about.
‘We should have been teachers.’ Florence was weeping again. ‘Both of us top of the class and what good did that do? You went straight into that bakehouse at fourteen, and I went to work as an usherette so I could mind my mother during the day.’ She lifted her head, her expression bleak. ‘Don’t you ever look at the rows of pies and loaves of bread and tell yourself there should be something more to life than that? Do you ever want to open that door and just walk away?’
Now Daisy was on firm ground. ‘Every single day.’ Leaning forward she took the cup and saucer from Florence’s trembling hands and set them back on the table. ‘But we can’t always turn our backs on a life that doesn’t turn out to the pattern we dreamed up for it. Sometimes the gesture we make if we stay is braver than the one we would make if we ran away.’
Something had stopped her telling Florence about Sam, but she was pretending, she knew, that he had asked her to go away with him. That she was staying to nurse her mother because of duty. That even if he had gone down on his bended knees she would have refused him gently, pointing out where her duty lay. It was the only way she could go on. And on and on and on.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Florence was saying. ‘You belong. You may get bored, or frustrated, but you belong. You’re needed. I’m not needed any more.’
‘But you won’t do … do what you said?’ Daisy watched as her friend pulled on the lacy gloves with their tiny frilled gauntlets. ‘You would never do away with yourself?’
Big-boned and desolate, Florence stood up and adjusted the flaps of her hat which was modelled on Amy Johnson’s flying helmet. It lent an air of gauntness to her long face, and at once Daisy was struck by the thought of how noble her friend would have looked chained to a row of iron railings, and wished she’d been given the chance.
‘I am not brave enough, alas,’ Florence said, and held up a netted finger. ‘Don’t get up, Daisy. You look as if you might be coming down with a cold.’
But Daisy followed her through the kitchen and out into the yard, surprised to find that the fog which had threatened as they walked back from Sunday School was now a blanket of sulphur-smelling thickness, so all-enveloping it was almost tangible.
Florence lifted the sneck on the back gate. ‘Even if I had decided to throw myself into Potter’s Pond,’ she said, ‘I’d never find it in this lot, would I?’
‘See you next week.’ Daisy closed her eyes in relief. Her friend’s wit might be as dry as a ship’s biscuit, but at least she still retained it. And that was all that mattered. Florence would survive.
Peering up the street she tried to see her walking with her loping stride, large feet encased in nurse’s lace-up shoes because standing so long at work had dropped Florence’s arches. For a moment Daisy thought she saw her, wreathed in yellow fog, a shadowy figure in a spy thriller, Mata Hari going to her doom.
‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Daisy reassured herself, rubbing the tops of her arms as she walked back up the yard. ‘It’s the ones who suffer in silence and say nothing who do it.’
She imagined Florence walking past her own house, up Earl Street fields, past allotments with their hen-pens and pigeon cotes. Tall and long-necked with a felt hat like a flying helmet hiding the scragged-up hair. On across fields to the local pond, a sheer drop into a murky splash of water into which it was said a man, three years on the dole, had hurled himself one wintry day, sinking like a stone to his death.
‘Why is life so … so awful?’ she asked herself, setting the table for a boiled ham tea, turning an anguished face towards her mother appearing droop-eyed from her long sleep.
‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Martha said, when Daisy voiced her fears. ‘I only dozed,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been reading the paper. It says that the people living on the dole are existing far below the threshold of adequate nutrition. And they don’t go jumping into mucky water. Neither will Florrie Livesey. Her mother was a grand little woman, God rest her soul.’ She pulled her chair up to the table. ‘Fourpence a quarter for that ham,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s cut that thin I can see the pattern on the plate through it. I’ll have to double it up if I’m going to make it into a sandwich.’
*
It snowed that Christmas, and on mill lodges ice formed. On Christmas Day nearly thirty thousand followers of the Rovers watched them play football at Ewood Park. A very much alive Florence came to tea and advised an exhausted Daisy to use Knights Castile soap for tired skin to revive her sallow complexion. Or to use rouge, just a touch on the cheek-bones, to brighten her tired eyes.
‘You’re doing too much,’ she told her friend kindly, and went on to describe the current film at the Rialto: I Was a Spy with Conrad Veidt, Herbert Marshall and Madeleine Carroll. ‘Her humanity impelled her to serve in a German hospital,’ she informed Daisy and her mother. ‘And they trapped her so she was forced to work as a spy. But they wouldn’t have forced me,’ she added, pale eyes glistening. ‘Put me against a wall and shoot me, but never expect me to betray my heritage.’
‘A fat chance,’ said Martha, eyeing her malevolently.
The biting winds of a spring coming too late for comfort flattened the daffodils in the park as if an army had trampled them. Still there was no word from Sam.
In May the Broad Walk in the park was lined with mauve and pink rhododendrons and Daisy, to cheer herself up, bought a new straw hat from the Hat Market. She wore it for the Anniversary Sunday at chapel, its spray of scarlet cherries bobbing as she walked up the street with Martha who was breathing hard and leaning heavily on her arm. Daisy had taken in the seams of her mother’s good linen coat, and beneath the veil on a hat that made her look like a consumptive bee-keeper, Martha’s once round face was drawn and pale.
Like the spring daffodils, Martha had drooped and flattened as each month went by, her once towering cottage-loaf hair-style sunk to the thickness of an oatmeal biscuit. A fierce lady from Spirella had visited the house and fitted her with a new pink corset more in keeping with her shrinking frame, and her old ones had gone for fourpence each at a chapel jumble sale.
Daisy had long since lost her battle to have Florence working behind the counter in the little shop. Edna was firmly ensconced and would take some shifting now.
‘They need the money with Arnold being out of work and the baby coming,’ Martha had argued.
‘It’s Betty’s and Cyril’s baby!’ Daisy’s objections were loud and forceful, but her mother was adamant.
‘It’s her first grandchild and I know how she feels. I would go out and scrub floors for a grandchild of mine,’ she added, shooting a baleful glance at Daisy. ‘But then I won’t be here to see one
of mine.’
She sat constantly over the fire, needles clicking as she worked on a matinée jacket in yellow with an intricate scalloped edging. In yellow, because that would do for either.
‘Your Daisy’s seen the back of that Londoner,’ Edna said one day.
‘He’s spoilt her for other men,’ Martha agreed at once. ‘She’s started going to the pictures again once she’s got me to bed, but she won’t meet the right sort that way. She’ll never meet a man if she doesn’t mix up.’
‘It isn’t natural a girl of her age going to the pictures on her own.’ Edna smiled complacently. ‘You never know who she’s sitting next to. Our Betty, bless her, and Cyril, never go out except to his mother’s of a Friday. They’ve got more to do with their money.’
Neither of them could see or understand that the cinema was a lifeline to sanity for Daisy. Her sixpenny ticket to a world where glossy-lipped beautiful women, wearing satin dressing-gowns and smoking cigarettes in long ebony holders, drove men mad. Exhaling the smoke into their lovers’ eyes, they lowered spider’s legs eyelashes over pancake make-up, not a hair on their heads out of place, even in force ten gales.
Where Sam’s handsome features became superimposed on the rugged countenance of Clark Gable; where the suave John Gilbert’s tight smile reminded her of the way Sam had looked the night he went away. The lanky stride of Gary Cooper brought his walk to mind, but on the evening Daisy identified him with Paul Muni escaping from the chain gang, she accepted the fact that she had almost forgotten Sam’s face.
Sitting alone, huddled in a tip-up chair in the back stalls, Daisy gave herself up to the Hollywood dream. She was a thick-lidded Garbo in Grand Hotel, an anguished Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms and a husky-voiced Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross.
In the cinema she knew that Sam would come to her again.
