by Marie Joseph
‘We never had a cross word,’ Edna was saying when Daisy went back into the living room.
‘Except the time you didn’t speak to each other for six months.’ Arnold wasn’t going to allow his wife to get away with a statement like that. Even under the circumstances.
‘She didn’t suffer,’ Daisy told them for the third time. ‘The doctor at the hospital said her heart just stopped beating. She died in her sleep.’
‘But in a deckchair!’ Edna began to cry again. ‘It’s a good job we’re not RCs and can die without some Father O’Malley or Father O’Reilly telling a great string of beads over us. But it would have been nice if the new minister up at the chapel had been with her. Just to ease her passing.’
‘She was happy.’ Daisy spoke in desperation. ‘She was out for the day, in the sunshine, and she was with the children. You know how she loved children.’
‘She’s right, Edna.’
Edna ignored her husband. She had been ignoring him for thirty-two years so it came easy. ‘I’m not having you stopping here all on your own tonight, love. You can come to our house and sleep with me. Your uncle can sleep on the settee.’
‘No!’ The thought of lying side by side with Edna in the double bed in the front room with its mahogany headboards and quilted spread filled Daisy with horror. ‘Florence will come.’
All at once Florence Livesey was the one person in the whole world she needed to see. Florence wisping into the house, net gloves and all, shoulders drooping, baby-fine hair scragged back into what she called her French pleat. Florence dispensing advice, her accent at times at variance to her upbringing. The friend who would understand what losing a mother meant. Because I’m damned if I do, Daisy thought, trying once again to grope her way through the billowing wool in her head that seemed to have mopped up all feeling.
‘Florence will come,’ she said again, appealing to Arnold. ‘You know where the Liveseys live. If you say what has happened she will come straight away.’
‘Florrie Livesey?’ Daisy had expected opposition, but what she wasn’t prepared for was the way Edna clapped a hand over her mouth stifling a shriek. As if she’d suddenly remembered something she’d left on the gas stove. ‘The last I saw of your friend,’ she managed to say at last in a sepulchral voice, ‘she was running up the street with her nightie sticking out from under her good winter coat. The one with the musquash collar,’ she explained, making the movements of fastening it at the front under her chin. ‘Gone to do away with herself by the look on her face, though she’s always had a nervous streak in her, and no wonder with a father who belts her round the face and blacks both her eyes.’
‘She wouldn’t do a thing like that, love.’ Arnold caught up with Daisy outside the back door. ‘They never do it when they threaten.’
But Daisy was half-way up the street, and Arnold knew there was nothing else he could do but lumber after her.
*
Florence sat on the grassy bank, her body curled over her bony knees. The grass was dirty; she had taken a blade and run it through her finger and thumb and the soot was there all right. It didn’t even smell like grass, either. She remembered as a child picking grass and eating the white nutty part that came from the soil. Her mother had told her how dangerous that was – that if a cow had passed its water on the grass and little Florence had eaten it, she could develop a terrible disease which made her toenails drop out.
Dear Mother … dear timid little Mother with her constant warnings of doom and gloom. ‘Never sit on the seat of a public lavatory, or get your feet wet, or let your head get cold. Never wash your hair at that certain time in a month; always breathe through your nose, but don’t breathe at all if you’re near a bad smell; eat your crusts to make your hair curl, and the skin off the rice pudding to give you pink cheeks.’
How had she married that terrible man with his thick bull neck and the thread veins in his eyes, when his daughter couldn’t bear to be near to him? All that coarse flesh folded loosely like tyres – how had her little mother felt when he pressed her close to his side?
It was dark now, but Florence could see the water down below flashing again and again like the blade of a knife. There were dead dogs in there, and dead cats, their bodies hideously bloated and swollen, rotting and disintegrating just as her body would rot and disintegrate in the fullness of time. The stars were very bright; but there was one which looked as if it was caught in the branches of a tree; if she were one of the silly stupid women in the films she was forced to see night after night she would widen her eyes, run her fingers through her hair and start to warble a silly song. Then from over the hill behind her a man would appear. He would be tall and incredibly handsome – that went without saying – and he would pull her to her feet, in one graceful movement of course, and they would serenade the star together, cheeks welded close.
Daisy fell for that sort of tosh. Daisy believed that one day a man would come along and take one look at her and fall in love. Daisy believed in happy endings. Daisy was a romantic, but she wasn’t. Not flamin’ likely!
There wasn’t a man in the world who could bamboozle Florence with sweet talk, a hard-luck story, or a little-boy-lost appeal. Men had tried; well, of course they had. A cinema usherette was easy meat for men on the prowl. Some nights she only had to sit down on the end seat at the back of the stalls to rest her feet and some pervert would be there, trying to put his hand on her knees, or up her skirt. Narrowing her eyes, Florence nodded to herself. Many a man had hastily moved to another seat when she’d dotted him one with the business end of her torch. And she wasn’t saying where, either.
Florence was past the stage of coherence. She was exhausted, cold, hungry and thirsty. The cup of water the woman on London Road had given her had done no more than make her long for a proper drink. She closed her eyes. A cup of tea, so strong a fly could walk across it without sinking, and one of Daisy’s mother’s cream buns, the sponge so soft and the cream so sweet and laced with sugar it made you close your eyes in ecstasy. Or one of the vanilla slices Mrs Bell made – wafer-thin slices of puff pastry, glued together with custard, rich and vanilla tasting, topped with icing sticky-sweet to the tongue. Or Eccles cakes, brittle till you bit into them, with currants layered just beneath the surface, or parkin, moist with golden syrup and spicy with ginger. Or date and walnut loaf, cut thick and spread with butter. Was this how men lost in the desert felt when they saw a mirage?
Daisy would miss her and be suitably horrified when her friend’s body was dragged from the pond. ‘She warned me she was going to do it and I wouldn’t believe her,’ she would sob. But Daisy had another friend, someone Florence knew nothing about. She had gone to Blackpool for the day and taken her mother. On the train? Florence tried to imagine poor sick Mrs Bell struggling to the railway station, and failed. A charabanc? That would be more likely. Or maybe the friend had a car?
Florence stood up. She brushed the dry dirty grass from the back of her coat, the sudden movements making her sway and almost topple over. Her heart shifted with an emotion she couldn’t define. She felt weak, she felt ill, she had no idea what to do or where to go. But hell’s bells, she wasn’t going to drown herself in that murky water down there lapping sluggishly against a mucky bank! She was at a point in her life where she felt so low that if she sat on a sheet of tissue-paper her legs would dangle; she was twenty-five years old, a virgin, if that wasn’t too rude a word. She had legs that walked and arms that could hold a man tight, if she wanted to.
Florence lifted her arms to the sky. And she didn’t want to! There wasn’t a man alive worth any woman killing herself for. She would emigrate! To America, the land of the free; to Australia, to Canada. She’d had enough of showing morons to their seats in darkened cinemas, wearing a uniform she didn’t suit, and a pill-box hat that made her look like Buttons in a Cinderella pantomime. She accepted that she was overexcited and confused, but she was alive! And suddenly and gloriously determined to stay that way.
Th
e sun-scorched stubble crackled beneath her feet as she made her way back up the bank to the dirt road at the top of the hill. She had, at that moment, no clear conception of where she was going. All she wanted to do was to get as far away as she could from the pond. And, just as important, away from her father with his big hands with black hairs sprouting between the fingers, his florid face and his whisky breath. She was never going home again. Never, ever ever. Not even to get clean clothes, or her birth certificate from the wooden box on top of her father’s tallboy where all the family documents were kept. Her mother had set great store on Florence always knowing where her birth certificate was kept. As if without it she could be crossed out, like a word on a sheet of paper.
It was no good, the hill was steeper than she thought, so steep it was coming up towards her, hitting her smack between the eyes. But not before she had seen the outline of what looked like a wild woman coming towards her, falling over in her haste, picking herself up and lurching forward again.
‘Florence!’ Daisy reached her as she fell, knelt down on the dusty grass and pulled hard at her friend’s shoulder to turn her the right way up. Then stared aghast at the tousled hair, the livid bruise on Florence’s cheek, the swelling on her lip that had ballooned into a dark purple blister, and the eyes half-closed in cushions of swollen flesh.
‘Daisy!’ Opening her eyes, Florence stared up into Daisy’s shocked face. ‘I wasn’t going to, you know.’ She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘I only came up here for a good think. I’d never have jumped in.’
‘Waste of time if you had.’ Daisy heaved Florence to a sitting position. ‘The heatwave has dried it all up. There’s just about enough water down there to brew a pot of tea.’
‘How do you know that? Who told you?’
‘A man I met putting his cat out on the way here.’ Daisy was brisk, matter-of-fact. ‘I shouted to him to follow me with a rope, and when I told him what it was for he said you’d be lucky if you got more than your knee-caps wet.’
The hard lump that had been in Florence’s throat all day spilled out into hysteria. Shaking, laughing and crying at the same time, she clutched at Daisy. ‘I can’t go back home. I’ve made up my mind I’m never going back.’ She touched her swollen face. ‘He did this, Daisy. The humiliation of it made me sick to my soul.’ Her words were staccato sharp as if she was tapping them out on a typewriter. ‘I am not going back there. Never. Ever.’
‘Then you must come home with me,’ Daisy said at once.
The long hot day was ending. Over to the east storm clouds were gathering. The air was as thick and heavy as fog as they staggered down the slope, the tall fair woman leaning heavily on the shorter dark one. Clinging, without knowing who was clinging to whom.
Meeting Arnold, holding a hand to the stitch in his side and panting like a pair of bellows.
Daisy’s tears came when she removed her mother’s nightdress from the bed in readiness for Florence to climb in. Burying her face in the winceyette folds – Martha had always refused to wear anything thinner, even in summer – Daisy knelt down by the side of the bed and sobbed away some of the grief held tightly inside her all that long day.
Edna had gone back to her own house, hoping Daisy knew what she was letting herself in for, whispering that Florrie Livesey would be a hard one to shift once she got her feet under Daisy’s table. All right Florrie saying she was never going back home, but where did she think she was going to live? Martha would never have allowed it, that much was certain. But if Martha had been alive there wouldn’t have been the room, would there? Far better for Daisy to have come to their house as had been suggested, and let Florrie Livesey sort her own problems out. Look at that woman three doors up. Her mother-in-law had come for her tea and stopped fourteen years, only going back to her own house to collect her bits and pieces. No, Florrie should have been made to pull herself together and go back to her own house. Now Daisy was lumbered and would live to regret it.
Arnold watched his wife’s mouth opening and shutting, able, by long practice, to let the sounds wash over him like waves on a distant shore. It would be a long while before he forgot the sight of those two lasses, leaning on each other and coming slowly towards him down the dirt road. If ever a lass needed a friend then it was Daisy that night. And Florrie Livesey looked as if she was all in till Daisy had bustled to and given her a basin of pobs glistening with butter, nutty sweet with brown sugar. It was the best thing out for Daisy having something to do, someone to care for. A giver, Daisy was. Not a taker. A right grand lass, and had been since a little whipper-snapper in a white dress at the Sunday School Field Day. Arnold nodded his head to show his wife he was still listening.
But that chap from London wasn’t Daisy’s sort. He’d not been able to get away fast enough once he’d handed Daisy over. Arnold nodded again, only to flinch at his wife’s look of utter disgust. Maybe that was one time he should have shaken his head, he thought, setting his chair rocking in a way he knew annoyed her.
Florence’s father had been and gone. Worried, he said, because she had run out like that and stopped out all day. But he knew she would be with Daisy, so now his mind could be at rest. He had looked sweaty and old, and frightened too, and when Daisy had told him about her mother his red-veined eyes had swum with tears.
‘He always cries when he’s drunk,’ Florence had said, refusing to come out and speak to him. ‘Bullies always have a sentimental streak in them.’
Florence was asleep in Martha’s chair, wearing a pair of Daisy’s pyjamas with the trousers at half-mast and her wrists sticking out from the jacket sleeves. She had agreed that maybe she would slip back for a few of her bits and pieces, and her birth certificate later on the next day when she was sure her father would be out. But Florence was adamant she would never speak to him again.
‘No man hits me twice,’ she kept saying.
Daisy was too tired, too numbed by all that had happened that day to explain that in her opinion Mr Livesey cared more than a little for his daughter. That from what Daisy had heard it could have been Florence’s mother’s fault for setting father and daughter against each other. But the day had gone on far too long for expounding theories. Daisy dried her eyes and went to tell Florence the bed was ready.
When Daisy got into her own bed and pulled the sheet over her face the darkness was filled with images that wouldn’t go away. She dreamed at last, a terrible dream, where Sam appeared at Martha’s funeral wearing a stovepipe black hat with streamers, in the guise of an undertaker from Victorian times. When he took off his hat at the graveside there was no top to his head, and when he turned round Daisy saw that his eye-sockets were empty voids.
Afraid to sleep again, she padded through into her mother’s room, sure that Florence would be awake, but Florence was sleeping the sleep of the just, mouth slightly open and a put-put snore coming from her lips.
Shivering in the chill left in the wake of the storm, Daisy crept downstairs and made herself a soothing cup of tea. On an impulse she reached to the back of the sideboard cupboard for the half bottle of brandy – strictly for medicinal purposes. Took it back to bed with her and slept like a log, to wake bleary-eyed with a headache that throbbed like a jungle tom-tom. Finding Florence in the kitchen scouring the bottom of the frying pan. Bringing it up like new.
The funeral was to be on the Friday.
‘Not many people die in Wakes Week,’ Mr Taylor the undertaker said. ‘They seem to hang on till they get back from their holidays. There’s no nonsense about an inquest, with your mother having been under the doctor.’
Edna’s and Arnold’s wreath was pink carnations in the form of a cross, and the five-day-old baby sent a posy of rosebuds which Daisy held in her hands and wept over. Sam sent a note to Daisy along with two pound notes, asking her to buy flowers and inscribe a suitable card. It came too late but Daisy showed it to Florence.
‘That’s from the friend I went to Blackpool with. I kept telling you how impersonal our friendship i
s. Read that. He even signs himself “Yours sincerely”.’
Florence looked up from arranging biscuits on a blue plate. ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That type of man is far too clever to commit himself to paper. Divorce evidence, or breach of promise. You know the sort of thing.’
‘No, I don’t know the sort of thing!’ Daisy put down the knife she was using to slice ham off the bone. ‘Look. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. But there wasn’t anything to tell, and I didn’t want to look a fool when he didn’t come back.’ She blushed. ‘But he did come back, and here we are making my mother’s funeral tea, and she might still be alive if I hadn’t made her go to Blackpool when she wasn’t fit.’ The doubts that had plagued Daisy surfaced with a rush of emotion. ‘Was it the excitement? She was like a child getting herself ready. She went upstairs twice just to make sure she had everything.’ Daisy began to cry. ‘She stuffed her handbag so full it’s a wonder she could lift it. Then the ride in that car … she was sitting bolt upright on the back seat between those two children with her eyes sparkling and an arm round the little girl. …’
‘And she was happy.’ Florence got a clean handkerchief from the dresser drawer and passed it to Daisy. ‘That’s what you have to remember and hang on to. That she died having a good day out.’
‘Because of Sam.’
Florence’s sympathy receded a little. ‘I still can’t understand why you never talked about him.’
‘Because you would have diminished him.’ Daisy was too upset to choose her words more carefully. ‘You would have dismissed him as a rotter or a cad, or even a potential rapist, and you know it.’ A loud sob filled Daisy’s eyes with tears again. ‘And that I couldn’t have borne. Because he was kind. Married to someone else, but kind to me.’
