A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Yes, Daisy would tell her what to do. Kindness personified, that was her friend. Florence could see her filling the kettle, setting it to boil. She could almost hear the gas jet plop into life as Daisy applied a match to it. Feet on the ground, unflappable Daisy, never moody, always the same.

  A rock in a storm-tossed sea, thought Florence, wondering if she had read that somewhere. Or just made it up.

  In all her wild imaginings Daisy could never have believed that she would be strolling along the prom at Blackpool with the wind and the sun stinging her cheeks and Sam looking so nautical in his single-breasted flannel jacket with brass buttons.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ he said suddenly, drawing her towards two deckchairs set side by side by the sea wall.

  ‘You have to pay even if you only stop for …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He seemed on edge, irritated, as he reached into his inside pocket for his silver cigarette case. For a few seconds he busied himself, taking a cigarette, tapping it against the polished surface, then struggling with his lighter, shielding the flame with his hand.

  A faint niggle furrowed Daisy’s forehead. She stared down at the sands, at the pools left by the morning tide. Surely there were no sands as clean or as satisfying as those at Blackpool? It came from the children’s buckets with a decent plop, unsullied by stones or pebbles. There was a family playing cricket by the sea’s edge and even as she watched the father hit the ball for a glorious six, while the smallest boy hurled himself face-downwards on the sands because he felt his turn was well overdue.

  ‘I may not be coming this way again.’ Sam drew on the cigarette. He looked up at the sky as if searching for the right words. ‘I don’t want you to read more than there is into our …’ he hesitated, ‘our friendship.’

  A drove of donkeys galloped along the beach, girls screaming in mock terror as they clung on for dear life. Quite dispassionately Daisy turned her head to watch them go by. She had the strangest notion that if she ignored what Sam was trying to tell her, the words would float away over the horizon.

  ‘I don’t live with my wife.’ Sam studied the glowing tip of his cigarette. ‘For the past year I’ve been living alone over the garage at my boss’s house.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mr Evison understands the situation. It suits him, and it suits me. In return for being at his beck and call, driving the other car to take his wife shopping and picking his children up from school. From three different private schools. As well as doing the garden and acting as general dogsbody. He pays me a decent wage and lets me live rent-free.’

  ‘I see,’ Daisy said in a small voice.

  Sam flicked the remains of the cigarette over the railings. ‘I have one more year to go with my studies – I’m doing a correspondence course in motor engineering – then I will have the certificates to show that I am a qualified engineer. I served my time as an apprentice just after the war, then instead of going any further I got married. My wife’s father had a small printing business, and he gave me a job in the front office, being nice to customers and helping them to choose letter-headings and wedding invitation cards. Nicer than wearing overalls and lying underneath cars, you see.’

  He reached for another cigarette. ‘But he went bust, then he died, and for a while I did anything I could find: door-to-door selling, an attendant at a swimming baths – oh, don’t you believe that there’s no unemployment down south. And I got the sack – I forget from which job – and my wife got part-time work.’ He sighed. ‘That was when the rot set in.’

  ‘So you looked after the children?’

  Daisy was busy adjusting the white buckle on the belt of the flower-sprigged dress. Straightening it so that the thin material threaded through evenly. Sam suddenly wanted to slap her hand away. Yet what had he expected? That she would burst into tears, and tell him she would die if he meant what he’d said about not coming north again?

  ‘Her mother looked after the kids.’ He kept his voice as even as hers. ‘So where did that leave me?’ He turned to face Daisy and she flinched at the bitterness in his expression. ‘After a hell of a dust-up I packed my things and cleared off.’

  ‘Leaving your wife with her mother?’

  ‘Oh, God, no. Now that my wife’s working she pays a woman to have them, to pick them up from school at lunch time. Oh, God, no, her mother isn’t the clinging type. She has a life of her own, has Queenie.’

  ‘You mean she doesn’t live her life through her daughter and grandchildren.’

  ‘Hell, no.’

  ‘It’s a working-class thing that, isn’t it?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘But it’s true.’ Daisy seemed to have settled the buckle to her satisfaction. ‘Especially up here. It’s a trap, really. Florence would have been just the same if her mother hadn’t died.’

  ‘Florence?’

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you told me.’

  ‘But you are quite wrong in thinking that I read more than I ought into our friendship.’ Daisy’s voice was very high, very clear. ‘Florence would laugh if I told her, not that I will tell her. I’ve never mentioned you, as a matter of fact. She doesn’t have a very high opinion of men.’ She jumped up suddenly. ‘I really think we should be getting back. Those children will be hungry, and my mother likes her meals at regular times, even picnics. That’s a northern trait, too.’

  ‘Daisy?’ Catching hold of her hand, Sam pulled her back to her chair. ‘Please listen to me.’

  ‘Is there something else you want to tell me?’ Daisy’s chin lifted. ‘It helps to talk to a friend, I know.’

  ‘Daisy!’ Jerking her towards him, Sam held her fast by the wrists. ‘Stop being so …’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So un-Daisyish.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  He missed entirely the break of near hysteria in her voice. ‘Pretending not to mind when you do.’ His beautiful eyes were liquid with tenderness and she couldn’t bear to look at him. ‘I care,’ he told her. ‘Meeting you has been a revelation to me. You’re the kind of person who makes the best of things, love. There isn’t a martyred bone in your body. You don’t rail against what fate throws up for you. You just get on with living.’ His voice was soft, almost soporific. ‘You’re not for ever thinking the grass could be greener over the other side of the fence. You accept the inevitable, and cooperate with it.’

  ‘And what you really mean is that for me the inevitable is accepting that I will never see you again?’

  ‘That too.’ A smile lifted the corner of his mobile mouth. ‘You are all right, Daisy. A lot more than all right. No, don’t pull away.’ Bending his head he kissed her lips in a tender-sweet caress. ‘There will always be a special corner in my heart. Just for you, Daisybell. I wish I could have got to know you better.’

  ‘Shall we go back?’

  Breaking free, Daisy began to walk back along the promenade. There was so much anger inside her she could feel it drumming her heartbearts and flushing her face. How dare he patronize her like that? He wasn’t worth one of the shop’s twopenny buns, not even one without cream in it. She was sorry for his wife, heart-sorry for her, and it was no wonder she’d chucked him out, in spite of what he’d said about walking away himself. Lies? He could tell them to music. He was as much like Clark Gable as she was like Shirley Temple. His eyes were too close together, just as her mother said. She couldn’t bear it. His assumption that she would break her heart. …

  She began to run, dodging round a woman in a pink floppy hat licking an ice-cream cornet, almost knocking over a toddler with a livid boiled face, staggering bandy-legged beside his pushchair. People were staring at her, and she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was to put as much distance between them as she could. Why, she wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole, not even a mile-long barge pole. If he lay dying of thirst with a cup of water just out of reach, she would kick it over rather than give him a sip. All this she told he
rself without believing a word of it.

  She could see her mother now on the sands, sitting with her deckchair positioned away from the sun, because Martha didn’t believe in the sun. The two children were running backwards and forwards from a pool with buckets of sea to pour into the moat encircling Windsor Castle. Intent on what they were doing.

  The beach was very crowded now. Daisy had to step over a fully-clothed man with a newspaper over his face lying prone on a striped towel before she could reach her mother.

  Martha’s right hand trailed listlessly in the sand. Her head had fallen sideways as she slept, knocking her hat askew. Her mouth was wide open. And behind the veil so were her eyes.

  A group of children ran screaming past the chair, dragging a long senna-coloured trail of seaweed; not a yard away a woman, fresh from her swim, struggled out of a wet bathing suit beneath a tent-like towelling robe. A beach ball, red and shiny, bounced almost into Daisy’s face and she knocked it away with an automatic swipe of a hand.

  Stunned and disbelieving, she looked up at Sam picking his way towards her. Knowing that although the sun was still shining from a clear blue sky, although children played, balls bounced and the raucous voices of Punch and Judy clamoured for attention not yards away, her mother would hear and see nothing ever again.

  Trying to take in the indisputable fact that her mother was dead.

  Chapter Four

  EDNA MISSED NOTHING that went on in the street. Let a neighbourly row erupt on the flagstones, or the milkman’s horse do the unforgivable outside her house, and she would be out there, giving advice in her tinny chirrupy voice.

  So it wasn’t surprising that she just happened to be standing on her doorstep for a breath of air when Daisy’s friend swanned past on the other side.

  Edna blinked, trying to believe the evidence of her eyes. Florrie Livesey was wearing her nightie – there was no doubt about it. It was one of those stockinette jobs off the material man on the market, that trebled in length when you washed it. The one Edna had made for their Betty, bless her, had dropped that far she’d got two good rubbing cloths with the pieces cut from the bottom. And there was Florrie Livesey in one, walking down the street with it sticking out like a fishtail exhaust from beneath her winter coat. Edna stepped on to the pavement for a better view. Come to that, what was Florrie Livesey doing wearing her winter coat on a day when the sweat stood out on you like gob-stoppers? Her hair was hanging loose too, rats’ tails over the musquash collar. Edna watched her cross over the street and start to rattle the sneck on the bakehouse door. Saw her rattle it and keep on rattling. Enough to break it if she wasn’t careful. Edna went into battle.

  ‘It’s no good carrying on like that, Florrie. They’ve gone to Blackpool for the day. With Daisy’s friend.’

  ‘I am Daisy’s friend!’ Florence began beating on the door with clenched fists, crying now, with great glycerine tears oozing from beneath swollen pink eyelids, then staring at Edna with eyes that were dazed and dead in the green-tinged whiteness of her face. ‘I want a drink!’ Her voice came rusted from the desperation of her need, and her tangled hair fell forward, as knotted as a bead curtain. ‘I have to have a drink.’

  Edna flared her nostrils. So that was it. Drink. She couldn’t smell it on her, but it was in the family all right. That randy father of hers would spit whisky if he as much as coughed. Martha had told her he had recently lost his job.

  ‘Florrie!’ Edna was determined to show this unlovely apparition what was what.

  ‘My name is Florence!’ A purplish bruise swelled one cheek and lifted the corner of her mouth from which a cut ran, congealed with dried blood. Florence touched it gingerly. ‘He did this, you know. Because I dared to tell him what I thought of him.’

  Normally Edna would have been all agog to hear the details, but she was tired to the point of exhaustion. All that day the sun had beat down from a sky unpolluted by smoke from mill chimneys that normally faded the blue even from a summer sky. Now, with the sun gone and long shadows edging like gloved fingers across the street, Edna was more than a bit worried. They should have been back from Blackpool ages ago. Martha would be fit for nothing. Edna had seen her more than once so tired she could barely climb the stairs to bed, so weary she’d sleep in her corsets but for a helping hand.

  ‘Now come on, Florrie.’ Her tone was even brisker this time, standing no nonsense. ‘Best get yourself home to sleep it off.’

  The last thing Martha needed to come home to was a drunken woman in a dirty nightie, carrying on crying and wailing on the doorstep, Let this Florrie Livesey see who was boss, then she might pull herself together and see sense. That was the only way to deal with drunks. Not that Edna had any first-hand dealings with them.

  ‘Off you go, love!’ She wagged a tolerant finger now, deciding that the gentle approach would be best. ‘I know what these holidays at home can be like. All your club money saved and the shops closed so you can’t spend it. Come on, love. Your mother would turn in her grave if she saw you out in the street like this.’

  It was the mention of Florence’s mother that did it.

  The glazed look disappeared from her eyes, to be replaced by a shining, blazing anger. ‘My mother! Oh, if my mother saw what he’d done to me it would break her heart.’ Again she touched the swelling bruise on her cheek-bone. ‘That’s what he did to me! And that terrible woman living in my mother’s house – he hits her too. But she eggs him on, and do you know why? Because she enjoys it!’

  ‘You mean she likes him hitting her?’ Edna was fascinated in spite of herself.

  ‘It is beyond your understanding.’ Florence lowered her voice. ‘Men and women sometimes do terrible things to one another. For sexual gratification.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ Edna stopped her own mouth with her hand, as if she had said such a dreadful thing herself.

  ‘He hits her. She whimpers a bit. He hits her again, then her temper explodes and she hits him back. She throws anything she can get her hands on, but he knocks it all away as easily as if he was brushing a fly from his nose. So she grows madder and madder and claws at his face, but he holds her wrists, and she struggles and struggles. Then, when they are both panting, and have most of their clothes torn off, they. … Well, I was so upset the first time I saw them fighting I tried to help her and she swore at me.’

  ‘You mean they …?’ Edna’s eyes stood out like chapel hat-pegs.

  ‘Oh, they go upstairs. If I’m there. But if I’m out, I don’t suppose it matters where. Some men are worse than animals.’ Florence seemed to have recovered a little of her composure. ‘I am never going back to that house,’ she told Edna in a strange ringing voice. ‘I came down this morning and confronted them in the middle of their filthy antics. I called them both perverts – my father a sex-crazed maniac and her a whore.’

  ‘They wouldn’t like that, Florrie.’

  ‘No. That was when he landed out at me, but I stood my ground. I asked him did he know it was my mother’s birthday anniversary, and he told me to get out and never come back. I got my coat down from its peg at the stair bottom and walked out.’

  ‘First thing this morning?’

  ‘I have been walking all day long, Mrs Bell.’

  Edna didn’t correct her. What was a wrong name at a time like this?

  ‘Without a drink of water or a bite to eat. I tried to drink from the fountain in the park, but a keeper mistook me for a tramp and shooed me away. Did you know my mother, Mrs Bell?’

  Edna nodded. Martha had described her more than once. ‘You could eat your dinner off her lavatory seat, she’s that clean,’ she had said. ‘She even takes her oilcloth up from the floor every spring to scrub underneath, going down on her knees to prise every bit of muck from the nicks in her floorboards. Makes her husband leave his shoes outside the back door before he comes in from work. She even irons the cord in his pyjamas, then threads it back again, she’s that pernickety.’

  Edna was. at a loss what to do. She
wasn’t an unkind person. Not many folks in need were ever turned away from her door. Even though Arnold had been out of work for a long time she never shirked her turn to make the scones for the Ladies’ Thursday Afternoon Bright Hour. She could invite this Florrie Livesey into her house, make her a cup of tea and let her wait there comfortable till they got back from Blackpool. But what about Arnold and Cyril having to listen to mucky talk about whores and sex when they’d just finished a nice tea of potato cakes and beetroot? And what about their Betty, bless her, sitting up in bed suffering with her nipples, wondering what was going on downstairs?

  ‘If you’ll come with me I’ll get you a cup of water,’ she said at last. ‘Then I really do think you will have to go home.’ She patted the sleeve of Florence’s winter coat. ‘All families have squabbles, love. It’s part of life’s pattern. Those who say they never have a cross word don’t tell the truth. …’

  Her voice tailed away. Florrie Livesey was off like a cannon shot, half-way up the street already, muttering to herself with her head down, then suddenly beginning to run. Hitching the nightdress up with one hand and disappearing round the corner in the direction of the allotments with their pigeon cotes and hen-pens.

  ‘Potty,’ Edna said aloud. ‘Maybe not drunk, but definitely potty.’

  She didn’t go into her house straight away. Instead she stood on the doorstep, arms folded across her flat chest. The glory of the bright day had almost faded, and somehow a great weight of unease had settled on her.

  It was the unnatural heat, she told herself, going inside at last and closing the door. Folks weren’t used to it up here. It overheated the blood.

  Sam had seen to everything. He couldn’t get over the kindness of the Lancashire crowd on that sun-drenched beach. A man in a flat cap ran to find a telephone to summon an ambulance. A stout woman with three children grouped round her on a plaid rug found places for Jimmy and Dorothy, holding out two sticky buns with the icing peppered with sand.