A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  As Daisy soaked the blood away from the tangled hair, the woman opened her eyes. Whether she was dark or fair Daisy had no idea, but the wound was gaping, the edges apart like smiling lips.

  ‘It will have to be stitched.’ Sitting back on her heels she spoke with a firmness she was far from feeling. ‘The hair will have to be shaved and it will need stitching.’ Her voice softened as she spoke directly to Florence. ‘Can you hold the cloth like this while I run and get Doctor Marsden?’

  Florence backed away, a hand held to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Daisy. I’m sorry … sorry … but I can’t. …’ She looked frail and ill, all the animation of less than fifteen minutes ago wiped from her face as if it had never been. ‘If she dies … oh, God!’

  Daisy kicked aside a broken gin bottle with jagged edges lying on the rug. She handed the cloth to Florence, and showed her how to press it over the gaping ugly wound to stem the flow of blood, now mercifully reduced to a trickle.

  ‘If she dies …’ Florence said again, ‘what will happen?’

  ‘Your father will be tried for murder. Or manslaughter, as it’s obvious she has been fighting too. Now hold that still. Are you listening? Wake up, Florence. It’s happened and we have to make the best of it we can.’

  Then she ran down the street, as she had run not all that long ago, to fetch the good Doctor Marsden from his well-earned rest.

  It was the anger that had made her speak so harshly and cruelly, Daisy told herself, swaying with the movement of the train on her way to Blackpool the next morning.

  It was the sight of Florence, lately so happy, reduced once again, in the space of a few minutes, to the state she had been in on the day she had contemplated suicide. Florence needed affection, Daisy realized, as a plant needed water, not as a reward but because her life was intolerable without it. Underneath that tall, drooping exterior, that know-all confidence, was an insecurity so near the surface of her emotions that Daisy feared for her. Thinking that no one loved her made it impossible for Florence to love herself. Misery had a bad effect on Florence, Daisy told herself, changing trains at Preston without really knowing what she was doing. Misery diminished Florence into a feeble and unhappy creature. No wonder she hated men in general and her father in particular when he was the reason for it all.

  By the time Daisy had got back with the resigned doctor in tow, the broken bottle had disappeared. The cushions on the sofa had been put back in place, and the standard lamp up-ended in its corner. By then Mr Livesey, his black curly hair plastered to his head, was sitting hunched and silent, his big hands hanging loosely between his knees.

  The woman – Daisy had to think of her as that, never having heard her name – had come round and told the doctor that she had fallen heavily, tripped and caught her head on the steel fender. No, she wasn’t going to press charges, how could she, when it had been nothing more than a drop too much to drink, and a scuffle getting a bit out of hand?

  ‘You must go and keep the appointment,’ Florence had said about three o’clock that morning when the woman had been stitched up at the infirmary and kept in overnight, and Mr Livesey was snoring his head off in bed. ‘It’s too late to let anyone know anyway, but I’ll have to stay here. He’s going to be so sick and sorry for himself when he comes to there’s no knowing what he’ll do.’ Something of the old Florence had shone from her eyes. ‘And don’t go all romantic and tell me it’s on account of love. Because if you do I’ll be sick. Love? Give me an honest dollop of hatred any old day.’

  Almost pushing Daisy out of the door into a dark and deserted street she had said sadly: ‘You’re my best friend.’

  ‘And you are mine,’ Daisy remembered saying, wanting to put her arms round the tall drooping figure and not knowing how to. ‘We’ll work something out, you’ll see.’

  But would they? Daisy got out of the train at Blackpool Central Station and walked out into the forecourt. Florence had cast herself into the role of a dutiful daughter, and for her mother’s sake would play herself into a permanent decline. Daisy could feel it in her bones.

  *

  The minute Daisy stepped into the brown hall of the three-storeyed house she knew that the feeling she had about it was still there. It needed her, this neglected, shabby dwelling, as the solicitor insisted on calling it. And oh, dear God, how she wanted to be needed at this moment. She was so tired, her mouth seemed to be having difficulty in stretching itself round the words.

  Mr Harmer of Harmer and Warton had brought a large manilla envelope with all the details. He sat with Daisy in the brown lounge with its brown threadbare carpet and its beef-tea-coloured oilcloth surround, and talked to her in a measured legal voice, interspersed by little apologetic coughs. Cecil Parker, Daisy thought, unable as ever to meet anyone for the first time without casting them in a film. In A Cuckoo in the Nest. With a capacity to be either amiable or sinister.

  ‘My client,’ Mr Harmer was saying in Cecil Parker’s silky voice, ‘wishes to remain anonymous throughout any transaction. It would be better if you did not approach him directly again. His desire is to keep well out of any negotiations.’ The long upper lip quivered. ‘A most unusual condition, Miss Bell.’

  ‘Guilt,’ Daisy said at once. ‘Because he never came to see his mother. I bet he’s just sitting there up in Scotland, being anonymous with his hands outstretched for the money.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Mr Harmer liked this little Miss Bell. As honest as the day is long, he decided, his shrewd glance taking in Daisy’s straight brown gaze and the tilt of her determined chin. Young though, to be considering a venture like this on her own. There should be a man somewhere in the background. A father, or an uncle. He glanced at her ringless left hand. Happily married to a wife who only breathed in and out when he did, it was inconceivable to Mr Harmer that any woman could stand on her own two feet without falling flat on her face. For one thing he wasn’t at all sure how this bonny little woman would fare with the bank or with any of the monetary side of things without a man to guide her, advise her, stand in as security and nay, dammit, see her through the whole transaction.

  ‘I’m sorry, I ought not to have said that.’ Daisy looked as helpless as nature, in Mr Harmer’s opinion, had intended her to be.

  ‘That’s all right, my dear.’ Mr Harmer relaxed visibly. Now he could ask her the personal questions her attitude had precluded him from doing hitherto.

  ‘I had a bad night,’ she was saying. ‘I only slept for an hour, if that.’

  ‘Worried, my dear.’ Mr Harmer, without moving an inch, patted her hand in a fatherly fashion.

  ‘Oh, not about the house,’ Daisy corrected him swiftly. ‘Once my mind is made up, things will go forward. No, I was worried about my friend.’

  ‘Your fiancé? You mean he isn’t sure about you taking such an important step?’

  ‘There is no fiancé.’ Daisy sat bolt upright, a blush creeping up and staining her cheeks. ‘I am doing this on my own. At least I may have to. Now it’s not certain that my friend will be able to come in with me. For domestic reasons,’ she added, seeing Florence standing on her father’s doorstep only hours before, her long features ennobled by a shaft of moonlight.

  ‘Did you hear what the doctor said about my father never really having got over my mother’s death?’ she had asked Daisy. ‘He was trying to tell me in the nicest way he could that I had been so wrapped up in my own grief that I had shut him out. I forced him to drink,’ Florence had intoned, presenting the flat planes of her face to the dark sky. ‘He brought that woman here because he couldn’t bear the loneliness. Oh God, I can see it all now.’

  ‘My friend has a parent she feels is going to need her care,’ Daisy told Mr Harmer. ‘He … he wasn’t at all well last night. That is why she hasn’t come with me today.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ With two daughters happily married off, and an elder one already filling her days ministering to his semi-invalid wife, Mr Harmer understood perfectly. ‘Her soul will be
enriched by her decision, my dear. God will reward her. If not here on earth, then in His heavenly kingdom.’

  ‘That’s a lot of sentimental tosh!’ Daisy was too tired, too overwrought to be polite. The sleepless night and the silent brooding on the train journey had drained away her hard-fought-for control. Getting up from her low brown chair she began to pace up and down on the shabby brown carpet, her face drawn and pale beneath her shiny black straw hat.

  ‘My friend’s sacrifice would be an intolerable waste of a bright spirit,’ she told an astonished Mr Harmer. ‘She will turn out exactly as I myself would have turned out if. …’ She walked over to the window, swallowing to get rid of the lump in her throat, trying to check the flow of words and finding to her shame that it was too late. ‘If my mother hadn’t died suddenly. Setting me free.’ She wheeled round, causing Mr Harmer to shrink back in his seat. ‘Oh, I loved my mother, and for as long as she lived I would have looked after her. But she possessed me, you see.’ The lump in Daisy’s throat dissolved into the threat of tears. ‘I spent my whole life trying to please my mother, Mr Harmer. I was the good little girl she always wanted me to be, and I went on still trying to be that same little girl who always wanted to please.’

  ‘Miss Bell. …’ The solicitor put up a hand, as embarrassed as if Daisy had said: ‘Excuse me while I loosen my stays.’ Emotion in his own home was nipped in the bud long before it had a chance to flower. Emotion was for unbalanced females, and, let’s face it, for neurotic spinsters like this one pulsating before him with tears in her eyes.

  ‘And if I did please her. …’ It would have taken more than a raised hand to stop Daisy now. ‘Never once did she tell me so. I used to ache for my mother to praise me, Mr Harmer, just for any small thing, but she never did. And do you know why?’

  ‘I really don’t. …’

  ‘Because praising me would have weakened her position, which was to dominate me.’ Daisy’s voice rose, so that the man passing the lounge door at that moment stopped transfixed. ‘I was unthanked. Taken for granted. Just as my friend will be. But it will be all the harder for her because she has a great and enormous rage inside her. It has nearly destroyed her once and it will destroy her again.’

  All at once Daisy walked back to her chair, sat down, straightened her hat, held out her hand for the manilla envelope, and apologized.

  ‘Thank you for listening to me, Mr Harmer. You have a kind face and that set me off. Being a legal man you must be used to hearing people’s problems.’ Daisy smiled a smile of such sweetness that the solicitor blinked.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I ever. …’

  ‘It was either blurting all that out or bursting, and that’s only the half of it.’

  ‘I really must. …’

  ‘Oh, I’ve finished, Mr Harmer. Thank you for meeting me and showing me round again.’ Daisy clutched the envelope to her chest. ‘I’ll study this and let you know, and if there are any takers for the shop then I’ll have a better idea of where I stand. How soon will you need to know my decision?’

  Mr Harmer fingered his top lip, stroking it as if remembering the moustache once sprouting there when he was a captain in the Army Pay Corps. Two houses and a shop to sell. Hm … m … Hm … m … This could turn out to be a cash sale. One he could easily negotiate himself without bringing in a shark of an agent. Mr Entwistle had given him permission to execute proceedings any way he thought fit, just as long as he wasn’t involved in any way. Hm … Hm … m. … That would mean he could quote his own terms.

  ‘A month,’ he said at last. ‘Give or take a week or so. My client doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry.’ He got up from the low chair and held out his hand. ‘We will meet again, Miss Bell, and you know where I am should you need any further advice.’

  At the front door he shook hands again before planting a black bowler hat squarely on his head. ‘Goodbye, Miss Bell. Hm … Hm … Goodbye.’

  There was a smell of Sunday dinner coming from Mrs Mac’s lodgings next door. Sitting at the table in the window, a party of four holidaymakers plied knives and forks with obvious enthusiasm. Daisy realized that she hadn’t eaten a thing since the boiled ham tea shared with Florence the day before. But she wasn’t hungry, she told herself, setting off to walk to the station to catch the next train back. She had more on her mind than her stomach, for goodness’ sake. Decisions to make, big decisions, possibly the biggest she would ever make in the whole of her life.

  ‘Miss Bell! Miss Bell?’

  At the sound of her name being called, Daisy stopped, turned round and saw the pipe man from the upstairs room hurrying along the pavement towards her; looking more like Herbert Marshall than ever, she decided, with his nice kind face crumpled with anxiety and a teacloth clutched in his hand.

  ‘Joshua Penny. I go with the house. Remember?’ He hesitated, unnerved by the close-up of Daisy’s tear-stained cheeks. ‘Oh, look. I think it’s a bit much that chap sort of dismissing you like this, and most places are closed, it being Sunday you know.’ He stared down at the teacloth in a baffled kind of way. ‘So I was wondering. Would you like to come back inside and have a cup of tea, at least. You can have a proper look at the kitchen at the same time. Sort of kill two birds with one stone. There won’t be a train for a couple of hours. I know that line pretty well.’

  The intrepid traveller, Daisy remembered, responding to kindness the way she always did. ‘I’d like that very much,’ she said.

  Joshua Penny helped her off with her black coat and hung it on the antler coatstand in the hall. Daisy refused to part with her hat because she had gone to bed without her usual helmet of steel curlers, so felt her hair was best tucked away out of sight.

  In the kitchen Daisy sat at one end of a table watching Mr Penny making heavy weather of brewing a pot of tea. No warming the pot first, no measuring the tea out carefully, just a sloshing of boiling water on tea-leaves he’d sprinkled in like salt.

  ‘I have to tell you I heard most of what you said in there.’ He poured the tea without letting it stand for as much as a single minute, then handed Daisy a cup of a white milky drink, tasting of steam and nothing else. ‘I was passing the door when you were up to the bit about your friend, and I meant to move on but I couldn’t take another step. I was riveted,’ he admitted. ‘I’m glad you had a bit of a cry. You were crying, weren’t you?’

  To Daisy’s everlasting shame her eyes filled with tears again. What a peculiar man this Mr Penny was turning out to be. Admitting he’d been eavesdropping and dying to know what came next! A habit Daisy had indulged in many times.

  ‘I don’t really know why I am crying.’ She took a sip of the tea and shuddered. ‘I cried a bit on the day of my mother’s funeral, but not much, and only once briefly on the day she died. But it’s all in here.’ She tapped the front of her black silk blouse. ‘And now my friend might not be coming here with me, and as you heard, not coming with me could destroy her.’ The tears began to roll unchecked. ‘I am so sorry. I’m making such a fool of myself today. I’d have been better stopping at home. I really would.’

  ‘Wrong.’ Mr Penny was drinking the tea as if he relished every sip. ‘I expect Mrs Mac told you about me?’

  Daisy nodded. The consumptive wife who shrank to the size of a pullet, she remembered.

  ‘I nursed my wife for almost two years. Taught during the day and took over as soon as I got home. Hardly any sleep, no proper meals, no tears, not even as I stood by her graveside. Then about six weeks later when I was buying a pound of potatoes from the greengrocer, he asked me how I was managing on my own. Sliding the potatoes into my carrier-bag and asking just a straightforward question in an ordinary voice. I only knew him as a greengrocer, Miss Bell. He wasn’t a friend or anything, but there and then I began to cry. Can you imagine? A man holding out a paper bag to receive a few potatoes, shaking with sobs, with his eyes and his nose running, and the poor chap wishing the ground would open and swallow me up.’

  ‘Oh, I can just see i
t,’ Daisy said at once, because she really could. ‘I’m so sorry for you, Mr Penny.’

  ‘And I am sorry for you, Miss Bell.’ Joshua got up and took a basin of eggs down from a shelf. ‘So now we’ve established how sorry we are for each other, shall we have something to eat as a consolation? An omelette, perhaps? I’m a dab hand with those.’

  But he wasn’t. Daisy watched in horror as he broke the eggs into a basin, put far too much butter into a frying pan too large for omelettes, whipped the eggs furiously as if they were intended for a fatless sponge, then tipped them into the pan on top of the butter which by now was burned almost to toffee.

  ‘This is a shocking omelette, Mr Penny,’ she told him, cutting through the leathery pancake no thicker than a decent sheet of blotting-paper. ‘You’re helping me to make up my mind, you know.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘At least with me to cook for you there’ll be less chance of you ending up with chronic indigestion,’ Daisy said, swallowing valiantly. ‘If I hadn’t seen you make this with me own eyes, I could be forgiven for thinking I was eating a corn plaster!’

  ‘He only laughed when I said that,’ Daisy told Florence that same evening. ‘He’s a nice man, is Mr Joshua Penny. Quite old, about forty-eight or nine, I should think. He reminded me strongly of my father. My father smoked a pipe, you know, puffing away in that chair you’re sitting in now, his head wreathed in smoke.’

  ‘Was Mr Schofield there?’

  ‘Out again.’ Daisy lowered her voice to a respectable level. ‘How is your father? I hardly dare ask.’

  ‘I must get back,’ Florence said. ‘It’s terrible. He has spent the whole day wallowing in remorse, and remorse is such a wasted emotion, Daisy. He keeps on begging my forgiveness, calling on my mother to beg her forgiveness, and praying to God to pardon him from all his sins. He says Jesus appeared at the foot of his bed in the night and asked him to renounce all his wicked ways. I can’t see Jesus setting foot in our house, somehow. The doctor came again and said my father needs a week in bed to recover from what he called nervous exhaustion. Doctors always say that when they’re flummoxed. Nervous exhaustion! A glass of gin would set him on his feet again, but apparently Jesus made him promise never to touch the stuff again. I give him a week before he’s on the booze again.’