by Marie Joseph
‘Florence?’ She tapped on the door and waited, head inclined, listening for the sound of sobbing. She rattled the door knob. ‘Florence? Come on out, or at least let me in so we can talk.’
‘So you can use your charm on me?’ There was such a wealth of bitterness in Florence’s voice that Daisy recoiled.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
Silence. Daisy rattled the door again, then walked slowly back along the landing and down the stairs. So that was it! Mr Schofield. Pausing briefly by the mirror in the hall Daisy stared at the reflection of an ordinary round face with a halo of sausage curls, cheeks too pink for beauty, and brown eyes ringed with tiredness. Charm? Was that what Florence thought she had?
Yet she was the one Mr Schofield had flirted with. Not Florence. He had taken off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and made endless journeys into the house with chairs, the back end of a dressing-table, joking with the driver, teasing Daisy. ‘Now, Miss Bell, where shall we put this chair? Chippendale, I presume? Back a bit, Horace.’ Winking at Daisy. ‘Nasty cough you’ve got there, Horace.’ And Daisy had just had to stop what she was doing and laugh, because whatever the driver’s real name was, Horace fitted him perfectly. Mr Schofield was a bit of a gas, no doubt about that.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she’d asked him, as he staggered upstairs, long legs bowed beneath the weight of a heavy mahogany bedside table.
‘A bad back,’ he’d told her, and after one startled moment her laugh had rung out again, the infectious laugh that Sam had once thought embraced all the sorrows of the world.
Mr Schofield went dancing every single night. He had more cups to prove his expertise at the tango than you could buy on a pot market, he’d said, and sure enough, when he’d invited her into his room for what he called a look-see, there they were on shelves all round the walls, big cups and little ones, all engraved with his name, Robert Schofield. Tango 1932. Quick-step 1933. Waltz, modern and old-fashioned, 1935.
‘What happened to 1934?’ she asked him, and he twirled imaginary ends of his five-a-side moustache.
‘The year of me back,’ he said solemnly, but not before she saw a shadow pass across his face.
Where was Florence when all this was going on? Daisy reached up and took three eggs down from the bowl on a shelf by the gas cooker, and like the re-run of a film remembered Mr Penny doing the same the day he had made the leathery omelette.
Florence had been busily unpacking their joint collection of books, she recalled. Stacking them at the sides of the stairs and moaning about the lack of shelves. Florence, dusty and untidy, pushing the fine wispy hair from her face, with a streak of dirt down her long nose, hearing their laughter and tightening her mouth into a hard straight line.
Daisy rummaged in a carton and came up with the bottle of olive oil she had hoped to find there. She decided to grate a little cheese into the potatoes and onions to give them a bit of taste. She would have to have a nice long talk to Florence, but not now … not just now.
Charm. The very word tasted bad on Florence’s tongue. What or who was it decided that some people had it in abundance, while others lacked it completely? Daisy wasn’t beautiful, not in the conventional sense of the word, she didn’t even have a way with men; she wasn’t coy, heaven forbid, or flirtatious. She didn’t play the helpless female, or flutter her eyelashes, or do any of the things Florence despised. Yet men took to her straight away. Why? Because she made them laugh? Because they knew she wasn’t waiting for them to fall in love with her? Florence stared out of the window at a narrow yard flanked by a sandy strip of uncultivated garden. Was it because Daisy liked men, while Florence mistrusted them, found them on the whole to be like overgrown schoolboys, especially the twirpish Mr Schofield who obviously thought he was God’s gift to unattached females?
Florence ran a finger down the pane of glass and grimaced at the grime it revealed. The grinding pain low down in her back was spreading round to her front. Angular, tall, long-necked, aggressive and filled at times with this undefined anger, she saw herself so clearly she wondered if she could just possibly be one of those unnatural women? But her furtive enjoyment of The Well of Loneliness had left her filled with pity, but with no sense at all of reader identification.
She had told Daisy of an affair with a married man. Florence pressed her forehead against the window, adding to the dirty streak already there. A few burning glances, hands held across a pot of tea in a café in Preston; a suggestion that she would meet him one afternoon in a dingy hotel room and Florence had heard the music of love fade away. No, if she couldn’t have love that was pure and clean and undefiled, she would do without it.
Love from a gentle man, in both senses of the word. Gentle but strong, cultured, maybe not a scholar but a man fond of books, of music, of country walks in the rain. Not good-looking in a conventional way, but nicely spoken. A man something like Daisy’s dead father. Florence sighed as the rage inside her began to subside. She could hardly remember him, but every time Daisy spoke about him, she identified.
Yet he had married Daisy’s mother. That little woman with the razor-sharp tongue whose idea of culture was a night out at the Palace Theatre watching a variety show, with a hot potato from the cart on the Boulevard afterwards. Daisy’s mother had admired Frank Randle, the music-hall comedian of overpowering vulgarity, and George Formby of the toothy grin and the ukelele, with the double entendre in his songs. It didn’t make sense.
At the sound of voices down in the hall Florence opened the door and moved out to the landing, looked down over the banisters and saw Daisy greeting Mr Penny, home from his teaching job at Preston, the man Daisy had confessed reminded her of her father.
‘No, I insist,’ Daisy was saying. ‘Your tea will be ready at six o’clock. If you can climb over all those books on the stairs, just go up and wash your hands and come down when you’re ready. Mr Schofield will be back and I’m going to put you together, unless you would like to eat at separate tables. You’ve got the dining room to yourselves, so you can choose.’
‘But on your first day!’ The kind Mr Penny was objecting in his nice refined voice. ‘I never expected … I really didn’t.’ As he lowered his voice, Florence leaned dangerously over the banister rail. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like to sit down yourself while I make you an omelette? My speciality, as you know.’
As Florence began to walk slowly down towards them, Daisy’s distinctive laugh rang out, as uninhibited and chuckly as a child’s.
So that when Joshua Penny turned and saw Florence the merriment in his own eyes died away at the sight of the horse-faced woman with a streak of dirt down her long nose, glaring at them as if she had caught them out in some indiscretion.
‘You remember my friend, Miss Livesey?’ Daisy’s voice was brittle with enforced gaiety. ‘From that first day? You remember?’
‘I can’t think why he should.’ Florence tripped over an Atlas of the World and almost fell, recovering herself enough to stalk past a bewildered Joshua with his hand outstretched in greeting. On into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her with a bang that seemed to shake the house to its foundations.
‘She’s tired.’ Daisy spoke into the awkward silence. ‘And not very well.’
‘Understandable,’ Joshua said politely. ‘Moving day can be very trying.’
‘We’ve got to get this straight. Right now.’
Daisy sat down at the kitchen table opposite a sulky Florence, viewing her with difficulty over the top of a big carton piled high with pans. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, but whatever it is you keep it between us from now on. To involve the boarders in petty squabbles is wrong.’ Impatiently she pushed the carton to one side, dislodging a milk pan which clattered noisily to the floor, setting her teeth on edge. ‘The customer is always your first concern, just as it was when you were serving in the shop. That nice Mr Penny must be wondering what on earth is going on.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We need him. Can’t you see th
at? We need him and we need Mr Schofield, and we’re going to go on needing them until we can have this place ready for visitors. So … we’ve got to treat them right, feed them right, and make them happy and comfortable.’
‘And kow-tow to them, you mean.’ Florence sniffed. ‘Demean ourselves, you mean.’
‘Yes! A thousand times yes! And if you can’t see that. …’ Daisy hesitated, but went on firmly. ‘You ought never to have agreed to come in with me.’
‘Are you dismissing me, Miss Bell?’
Daisy ignored the break in Florence’s voice. ‘Don’t talk daft.’ She stretched out a hand across the cardboard carton. ‘Aw, come on, Florence. You’ve known me for a long, long time. Can you really see me playing the big I AM? Wielding the whip while you scurry round to do my bidding? You’re my friend. My partner, and if I go under in this, then you go with me. If I lose all me money in this venture then we’ll have to unbutton the top two buttons on our blouses, get ourselves black stockings with clocks up the backs and go on the streets.’
There was a slight, only a very slight hesitation, but Daisy saw Florence’s dusty nose begin to quiver.
‘Or seduce Mr Penny and Mr Schofield.’ The wide pale eyes sparkled with the relief of held-back tears.
‘Bags me Mr Penny,’ Florence said. ‘I don’t think I’m Mr Schofield’s type.’
‘Then I suppose I’d better start learning to tango.’
Daisy got up and moved over to the cooker. To let Florence get her bit of a cry over and done with in peace.
The potato pancakes went down a treat. Daisy had grated potatoes and onions into a basin, added flour and salt, and mixed them with the eggs into a soft paste. She had heated the pan with no more than a dash of olive oil and dropped the mixture in, a tablespoonful at a time, turned them when brown underneath and Florence, with her face washed and her hair neatly pleated, had borne them into the dining room with all the aplomb of a Lyons’ Corner House Nippy.
Mr Schofield had gone off dancing with his patent-leather pumps in a brown paper bag, and Mr Penny had gone to his room to get on with marking exercise books, once his offers of help had been firmly rejected.
Now, at almost midnight, with Florence tucked up in bed with a hot-water bottle and a dose of the Indian brandy, mercifully discovered at the bottom of a carton, Daisy was alone downstairs in the depressingly brown lounge. Bodily exhausted, but mentally as alert as if spiders crawled round and round in her mind.
Florence’s outburst had depressed her more than she realized. There had even been a small ‘do’ about the dark and dismal WC on the first landing. Sharing that and the bathroom with two men had upset Florence’s sense of what was right and proper.
‘Suppose I have to go in the night and one of the men happen to be in? Suppose they see me in my dressing-gown? And know where I’m going?’
‘I bet even Greta Garbo has to go to the lavatory sometimes,’ Daisy had said. And your precious Shakespeare. I bet even he. …’
‘You can be very vulgar at times,’ Florence had said, trailing listlessly upstairs with her stone hot-water bottle underneath her arm.
So what was it going to be like when Daisy reminded Florence that once the visitors arrived they might have to share a room on the top landing? With no privacy, and little time to indulge in its niceties, anyway.
Daisy closed her eyes to shut out the fawn-coloured walls, and tried to see them papered in an apricot shade, with maybe the faintest white fleck in it. …
Good heavens, there were some Blackpool landladies who slept on camp beds in the kitchen, putting their husbands out with the cat to sleep as best they could in the backyard shed, according to Mrs Mac who had popped in for an hour earlier on.
‘Wish I could do that with mine. He’s about as much good as a concrete cushion,’ she’d said. ‘Your friend’s a bad colour, isn’t she?’
‘She’ll be all right tomorrow,’ Daisy had said, with meaning, and Mrs Mac’s eyes had lit up.
‘I had a neighbour suffered like that every month. She had to have everything taken away before she was forty, poor soul’
Daisy leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The plumber recommended by Mrs Mac was coming tomorrow – well, today – and she was praying his estimate would be reasonable enough to include a downstairs toilet to fit in the long cupboard underneath the stairs. There was an outside porch, glassed-in at the back of the kitchen, where the Ewbank, the clothes-horse and the card table could go at a pinch. Wash basins in each of the bedrooms, that was priority. No queues on the landing, or visitors peering through a slit in their doors ready for a quick dash into the bathroom the second they heard the click of the lock.
‘He’s in there, bloody shaving!’ she remembered one man shouting to his wife on a long-ago holiday with her mother and father.
‘What does the silly pie-can think he’s doing? Filling his Pools in?’ Martha had said, fuming herself at the sight of Daisy’s father sitting on the edge of the bed with a towel round his neck, patiently waiting his turn.
Her father would have liked this house, Daisy knew that. It had character; it had an Edwardian grandeur about it and, built on the periphery of the district around the North Station, it had ‘class’.
There would be no sub-dividing the bedrooms, even though she knew it was done. No visitors sleeping in the lounge, even at the height of the season. And definitely no extra charge for use of the cruet or the sauce bottle.
The visitors would be Daisy’s own sort of folks. Respectable working-class, with lives that revolved round work, home, family and church or chapel. She could just see them arriving with their carrier-bags and roped-up cases, eyes shining at the thought of a week by the sea. A whole year of saving week by week for a chance to walk on the front breathing in the ozone with its medicinal properties, paddling in the sea, dancing in the Tower Ballroom, listening to Toni’s orchestra on the North Pier. Relaxing in deckchairs, riding the trams along the promenade, walking in Stanley Park, strolling round the Pleasure Beach eating sticky candy-floss. Watching the chunky animals forever circling the Noah’s Ark, then coming back here to this house, faces and arms burned brick-red by the sun and wind, to have a wash in the privacy of their own bedrooms before coming down to a meal that would make them sigh and pat well-filled stomachs.
And making firm bookings for next year’s holiday before they left for home and another whole year of working in factories and mills.
They would have to pay just a little bit extra maybe, but Daisy knew her fellow Lancastrians. They wouldn’t mind spending what they’d got, but by gum they would see to it that they never wasted it. Give them good value for their hard-saved brass, and back they’d come. Again and again.
She was half-way up the stairs, deciding to go curlerless to bed for once, when she heard the chug of a motorbike engine in the street; heard it slow down, then stop.
‘Mrs Mac’s son,’ she thought, the one his mother said came to see her when he felt like it, and only then when he wanted to scrounge something. She remembered too the pride in Mrs Mac’s eyes when she’d talked about her wayward son, and knew that in some ways Mrs Mac was very like Martha, her little mother who would have choked rather than allow a word of praise pass her lips.
Daisy went on climbing the stairs, smiling to herself. Outside Florence’s bedroom door she hesitated briefly, remembered the lateness of the hour and Florence’s dislike of being seen in bed, and passed on.
She was opening her own door when the knock came, followed by a single ring at the bell. There was a dimmed light bulb on the landing and instinctively she glanced up at the two closed doors on the upper landing. The men were obviously in bed and asleep, but a quick cry for help would soon bring them running down to her rescue. Martha had often said that a knock at the door after midnight always spelt trouble. As Daisy went quickly back downstairs she felt apprehension stir like a cold finger tracing the length of her spine.
Drawing the bolt, she opened the door a fraction. ‘Ye
s. Who is it?’
‘Daisy! Thank God!’
At first she didn’t recognize him. The street lamp had been lowered for the night and the man standing there was a dark bulk of leather coat, his hair hidden by a flying helmet with ear-flaps. A pair of goggles swung from his hand, and his face shone eerily with a pale green tinge to it. Daisy blinked and looked past him at the motorbike and sidecar drawn up at the kerb.
‘Daisy? Don’t you know me?’
As he spoke her name again she felt the prickly waves of shock spring in her armpits. She had thought about him every single day, and yet he was the last man on earth she expected to see.
‘Sam?’ She swayed towards him, feeling as if she might faint, but recovered herself enough to open the door wide. ‘Come in. Please come in.’
Snatching off the leather helmet he pushed it at her along with the driving goggles. ‘You take these. I’ll go and get the boy.’
‘The boy?’ Daisy knew she was beginning to sound like a backward parrot, but there was nothing she could do about it, and Sam wasn’t listening anyway. He was out there in the dark silent street lifting his son from the sidecar and carrying him tenderly into the house. ‘In here. Bring him in here.’ Leading the way into the lounge Daisy moved to switch on the standard lamp, leaving the centre light off. Moving a cushion, she stood at the head of the brown sofa. ‘Put him down on here.’
‘He stinks like the devil.’ Sam lowered Jimmy on to the sofa. ‘He was sick twice on the way and I tried to clean him up, but I’ve not made much of a job of it. No, he’s not ill. Just whacked. I borrowed the bike from a pal of mine and that sidecar is normally used for his painting tackle. I think the smell must have lingered and turned Jimmy’s stomach. He’s asleep now, thank God. Dead to the world. As you see.’
Daisy saw all right. Jimmy was so fast asleep every vestige of healthy colour had drained from his face. He looked like she imagined he would look if he lay in a coma, scarcely breathing, arms and legs in exactly the position in which Sam had placed them. A sour smell came from him, and when Daisy saw that his woollen scarf was stiff with dried vomit she eased it gently from his neck.
