A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  ‘You’ll be lucky if you’re ready to open by next Christmas, missus, with that lot on the agenda. You’ll be lucky if you’ve enough money left for a chip butty by the time you’ve finished.’

  ‘That was telling her,’ he said to his apprentice. ‘Now then, Mervyn, me lad, let’s have a dekko at what passes for a toilet. I reckon this one was put in when Queen Victoria was just a twinkle in her dad’s eye. Where’s me pencil?’

  ‘Behind your ear, Mr Leadbetter,’ Mervyn said, with all the animation of a slug emerging from a rotten apple. ‘Where you always keep it, Mr Leadbetter.’

  ‘So that’s the lowest figure you can quote me?’ Daisy faced Mr Leadbetter at the end of a morning in which she’d shopped, cleaned, made a pan of chips for Jimmy which he hadn’t eaten, and doubted the survival of the black and white kitten which was being cuddled, caressed, tickled, poked and prodded until it squealed for mercy. ‘It’s a lot more than I’d reckoned on.’

  ‘You’d be paying for the labour, remember, missus.’ The builder consulted a notebook with a hard grimy cover. ‘These rooms have all been papered on top of paper. Layers and layers of it.’ There and then he ripped off a strip of wallpaper, revealing another pattern underneath. He spoke jokingly to Florence, down on her knees by the lounge fireplace. ‘More layers here, missus, than a Spanish onion. Take Mervyn the best part of a week to strip this one room. Ha-ha haw haw!’

  ‘And I suppose by that you just mean the top layer?’ Florence got to her feet, dwarfing the little man by at least six inches. ‘But suppose we did the stripping and preparing ourselves? Leaving you with merely the papering? That would cut the cost considerably, wouldn’t it?’

  Daisy shot Florence a grateful glance. In her mind she was already busily calculating the number of rooms and the hours taken up when she should be making curtains, running up bedspreads, repairing what was fit to be repaired, cleaning up years of neglect, and laying acres of linoleum.

  ‘Let me know when you’ve revised your estimate, Mr Leadbetter.’

  She walked through to the kitchen in time to see the kitten daintily relieving itself beneath the table.

  After dinner that night – lamb cutlets, with turnips and potatoes mashed together with butter, followed by steamed treacle sponge pudding and custard – Joshua Penny came into the lounge where Daisy and Florence were soaking the walls with water in readiness to strip away the accumulated layers of paper.

  He had never, he thought, seen anyone look so tired and worn out as little Miss Bell did at that moment. Her friend, Miss Livesey, was wielding a large distemper brush, using it to sweep the water from a zinc bucket in wide arcs up and down the wall. Bending, then stretching up again, reaching the picture-rail without difficulty. In a way enjoying it, he could see.

  ‘You ladies are going to do the decorating yourselves, then?’ Moving a dust-sheet to one side, he sat down on the arm of the settee, then immediately got up again. ‘Here, let me.’ Smiling at Daisy, he took the brush from her. ‘It’s all right, Miss Bell. I was going to listen to a concert on my wireless, but I’d far rather be down here. One can get very tired of one’s own company at times, even of Mozart’s. If that isn’t sacrilege bordering on heresy.’

  ‘But it’s not right.’ Daisy hovered uncertainly behind him. ‘You’ve been out working all day. No, we’re not going to do the actual decorating. Just the stripping. It’s cheaper that way,’ she added, frank and honest as always.

  ‘You are a musical man, Mr Penny?’

  Joshua blinked at the change in Florence’s accent. Not an hour before he had heard her chivvying the little lad into bed, saying that no, he couldn’t have the kitten in his room, not until it was properly house-trained. He had peeped round the open bedroom door on the way down, however, and seen the pair of them fast asleep in bed. Jimmy holding the kitten close to him, as if he cradled a teddy bear. Somehow, the sight had moved him immeasurably.

  ‘I love listening to music,’ he said. ‘But I don’t play any instrument, I’m afraid. My wife used to play the piano, but I got rid of it when I gave the house up.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘Do you play, Miss Livesey?’

  ‘No, unfortunately.’ Florence sloshed more water on to the wall. ‘But, like you, I am a devotee. Opera,’ she went on. ‘My mother had a gramophone and we had the whole set of Pagliacci records. “On with the Motley” – the heartbreak of a clown. So poignant, don’t you think?’

  Joshua opened his mouth to reply, but Florence was well into her stride.

  ‘I am a lover of the arts, Mr Penny. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” Shakespeare.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Joshua said, bewildered.

  ‘Teaching is such a noble profession.’ She was even using her brush more ‘artistically’, Daisy thought, suppressing a smile. What fun Florence was when she got into her cultural stride. ‘I would have gone to college myself, but my mother’s health made it necessary for me to choose my hours to suit her.’

  ‘What did you do, Miss Livesey?’

  Did Daisy detect an amused quiver in nice Mr Penny’s voice? No, she decided, he was just being his polite and curious self. Fascinated. Wanting to know.

  ‘Latterly, the cinema business. Since the onset of talking films,’ Florence said in the clipped cut-glass accent. ‘But Daisy here is the expert on that subject. She could tell you what the editor of Picturegoer had for his breakfast.’

  ‘Really?’ Joshua turned round, dripping water down his grey cardigan. ‘Me, too. There are plenty of cinemas in Blackpool, Miss Bell. Do you like the Busby Berkeley routines? With all those dancing girls moving into kaleidoscopic patterns? Did you see his Gold Digger film? About a group of girls in search of millionaire husbands? And Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Flying Down to Rio? With the brilliant finale with chorus girls on the wings of flying aeroplanes? We must. …’

  ‘I expect it’s the sheer artistry that impresses you,’ Florence interrupted quickly. ‘The mathematical genius that goes into the formations. Are you on the science side, or the artistic, Mr Penny? No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.’

  ‘I teach backward children,’ Joshua said. ‘Mostly from deprived backgrounds. Undersized kids with rickets, or with impetigo on their chins.’ His expression was serious and intense. ‘A brother and sister, twins aged nine, with middle-aged faces on tiny stunted bodies. The father hasn’t worked for five years apart from a temporary job with the post office at Christmas. Weekly income of twenty-nine shillings, and a rent of eight shillings to pay out of that. And they are well off compared to some. An adequate income according to the Ministry of Health. The father was a weaver, a good conscientious worker in plain weaving with a choice at the time of plain or fancy cloth. And not knowing any better he chose plain, because he had no way of knowing the way things were going to turn out.’

  He is like my father, Daisy told herself, rubbing her aching arms and watching the way Mr Penny’s face became animated when he talked about a subject close to his heart. She realized also that he was talking quickly, the way the lonely did, the words tripping over themselves. She felt a pang of pity for the kindly man and imagined him coming back night after night to the cold almost empty house, cooking himself a leathery omelette before shutting himself away in his attic room with his books and his wireless and gramophone. With only Mr Schofield to talk to, when that dapper man wasn’t out practising his quick-step, or gliding across some well-sprung floor in tango rhythm.

  ‘Little did we know,’ Joshua was saying now, diligently watering the wall, ‘what all those smiling students from the East were up to when they enrolled in our technical colleges. The whole prosperity of Lancashire was based on the export of cheap cotton to Japan. Millions and millions of yards of the stuff, and now they are teaching their weavers our trade and the mills are closing down one by one. The father of my twins hasn’t worked for five years. You tell me the answer, because I don’t know it.’

  ‘There are mill owners picking up cigarette ends out of the gutter
s,’ Florence said. ‘B.Sc.s sweeping the streets. And don’t forget Gandhi in his loincloth. At one time the loins of every single Indian on that vast continent were girded with cheap fent woven in Lancashire.’

  ‘I’ll go and make a pot of tea,’ Daisy said faintly, knowing when she was superfluous.

  ‘“O brave new world” as Shakespeare said. …’ Florence’s dulcet tones followed her into the kitchen.

  ‘Quite right,’ Mr Penny replied, sounding as bewildered as he obviously felt.

  When Daisy got back with the tea on a tray, Florence was still holding forth, but Mr Penny had exchanged his brush for a palette knife and was well on the way to stripping bare the wall at the window side of the fireplace. They worked for another hour, then he threw down the knife.

  ‘Time for my nightly constitutional.’ He addressed both girls, but looked at Daisy. ‘The air on the sea-front takes your breath at this time of the year, but it’ll bring the colour back into your cheeks.’ A sudden shyness seemed to envelop him. ‘Would you …?’

  ‘I’ll get my coat,’ Florence said at once. ‘I’ve not put a foot over the doorstep all day.’

  Daisy sat at the kitchen table, unscrewed the top from her fountain pen and began:

  Dear Sam,

  It has been a long day and I can’t believe that you were here only this morning. So much seems to have happened, but the main thing is that Jimmy is fast asleep in bed. He’s bound to feel strange for a while, but I think I can start to believe that he will settle down eventually. So try not to worry about him too much. One of my lodgers is a teacher. He says he is friendly with the headmistress of a junior school not too far away – no big roads to cross – and he will go and see her at the weekend with a view to getting Jimmy into her school. He says it is a good school, a church school, which I hope pleases you. You and I never discussed religion, but I hope you feel it is important for Jimmy to have regular scripture lessons and know his catechism, even if he dismisses it all as nonsense when he is old enough to think for himself. He has been very good today, a bit quiet at times and that is only to be expected, but he will be all right, Sam. We are so busy I wish I had more time for him, but you can guess what it is like here. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

  Yours,

  Daisy

  It was a terrible letter. Daisy just hoped he would understand and read between the lines, but that afternoon Florence had warned her about putting ‘things’ down in black and white.

  ‘Remember you are the other woman in the case,’ she had said. ‘The judge might not agree about Sam’s desertion being grounds enough, but adultery certainly is.’

  Daisy had felt her blood freeze in her veins. ‘I haven’t committed. …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word. ‘Sam would never put me in a position like that.’

  Years of her mother’s dire warnings surfaced. In her fevered imagination she saw herself as headlines in the News of the World: ‘Love nest in Lancashire’. ‘Miss Daisy Bell, a Blackpool landlady, the woman named in a recent divorce case. …’

  She saw the clerk of the court hold a pile of her letters aloft. Worse, she saw him take one out and read it aloud, lingering over the ‘purple passages’ with the judge leaning forward, his wig slipping to reveal a bald and shining pate. She thought of famous mistresses: Anna Neagle in Nell Gwyn, Greta Garbo in Camille. Her mind ran riot. Sam was a married man; there was no getting away from that. Suppose his wife had hired a private detective to follow him up north? Suppose when they had lain together on the settee all through the night, the detective had been out there in the street, wearing a shabby raincoat with the collar turned up, peering through the chink in the curtains, making notes in a little notebook?

  ‘Your good name gone for ever,’ Florence had said.

  ‘Oh, you silly, silly girl,’ her mother’s ghost had echoed.

  As a tripper down the primrose path, Daisy decided, she’d never even have the guts to step off the grass verge.

  She slid the letter into an envelope and copied the address down from the slip of paper Sam had given her. She decided not to post it until she heard from Sam, which would be the day after tomorrow, she calculated, if he wrote straight away, as he had promised. She would take her cue from his letter, then make him promise to burn hers the minute he’d read them. That way she could write a proper letter and tell him what was in her heart. How she loved him and missed him already; how she had wanted him to make love to her in the night, though she had known it was wrong and would almost certainly have given her a baby. She knew about men taking precautions of course. She wasn’t that naïve, but she didn’t think Sam was the kind of man to carry ‘things’ around in his pocket. Like a boy at a Sunday School Field Day who had once blown one up like a balloon in a corner of the field, sending a ring of giggling girls screaming for safety.

  At the very thought she blushed a bright and stinging scarlet. Even though there was no one to see.

  Blackpool in February was dead. The Christmas and New Year visitors had gone back home and across from the wide stretch of promenade the stalls and shops were shuttered, buffered against the Atlantic gales. The smell of frying and sugary candy-floss had been whisked away by the cold bracing air. It tasted now of seaweed and salty sea, Florence decided, striding along by Mr Penny’s side, without having to modify her steps to his. In the darkness the incoming tide battered its waves against the sea wall and sent glistening showers of spray over the railings, beading their coats and dampening the scarves wrapped tightly round their necks.

  Florence felt gloriously and wonderfully alive. At one with the elements, she told herself. Now and again she glanced sideways at the man walking beside her, shoulders hunched into the collar of his tweed overcoat. She was going to enjoy getting to know this man better. How marvellous to meet a man with a soul twinned to your own, far removed from the furtive cinema-goers she had known with their wandering hands and common ways.

  Mr Penny had been humouring Daisy when he talked about his fondness for Hollywood musicals. She was sure of that. For all her friend’s untutored intelligence, Daisy was more than a bit naïve, one had to admit that. Two men huddled in raincoats walking a windswept dog passed them, leaning into the wind.

  ‘Daisy’s heart rules her head, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘That child is the last thing she needs to be burdened with just now.’

  ‘How long has she known Jimmy’s father?’ The howling wind almost tore his words away.

  ‘A whirlwind romance, Mr Penny. Straight from a film in which everybody sings a love song at the drop of a hat. Preferably in Paris, in spring.’ They crossed the road and as he took her arm she bent her knees slightly to make herself roughly the same height. ‘Old Mrs Bell used to keep Daisy’s feet on the ground, but she died, alas, in tragic circumstances and Mr Barnet was there at the time to console, so you see. …’

  ‘What kind of tragic circumstances?’

  They walked back past the shuttered stalls which, on that sunny July day, had been piled with tiers of Blackpool rock ‘lettered all through’. Florence told him how Martha had died in a deckchair with the sun shining. In front of Sam’s children, though they hadn’t seemed to notice, from what Daisy had said, which surprised her as young Jimmy took all in without saying much.

  Florence marvelled at the way Mr Penny listened intently, inclining his head to catch her every word.

  ‘Very traumatic,’ she said, and he agreed.

  ‘Poor little Miss Bell,’ he said.

  Florence bent her knees until she was walking almost bandy-legged. Life has written those lines on his face, she told herself. A mere glimmer of light shone from the Tower. Flattered beyond words at his interest in what she was saying, Florence told about the day she had taken Daisy up in the lift. ‘To cheer her up.’

  ‘Kind of you,’ Joshua said. ‘Have you been friends for long, Miss Livesey?’

  ‘All our lives.’ Florence clutched at her hat. ‘That was the day we first saw the house,�
� she explained. ‘It came at just the right time for Daisy. Her being at a crossroads in her life. “Men at some time are masters of their fates,”’ she quoted as they turned away from the front into the web of dark and deserted streets.

  ‘Shakespeare?’ said Joshua, quickening his pace as they came closer to Shangri-La, wondering if Florence had some terrible affliction that caused her to walk bow-legged like that.

  When Daisy went upstairs to take the kitten from Jimmy’s bed to make it perform on the cindered tray by the back door, she found them both asleep. The kitten purring on each exhaled breath, Jimmy muttering and twitching, his cheeks flushed bright red.

  Holding her breath, Daisy smoothed the tangled hair back from the rounded forehead, only to draw her hand back in horror. Jimmy’s skin burned, and she saw now that his lips were cracked and dry with a yellow scum at the corners.

  ‘Jimmy?’ She sat down on the bed and took his hand. It lay horny and hot in her own. ‘Jimmy, love?’ Daisy tried to conceal the panic in her voice. ‘What is it, pet? Open your eyes. You can open them, can’t you?’

  ‘My throat hurts.’ Jimmy’s eyes glittered at her from between swollen eyelids. ‘My throat’s got a knife in it, Mummy.’

  He couldn’t see her! Oh, dear God! Since putting him to bed something had struck him blind! Daisy was so shocked she found it was a real physical effort to stand up and walk to the door. He hadn’t eaten, apart from a bite of toast that morning, not really finished his meals all day. Not even the chips smothered in tomato sauce. She had put it down to Sam going away and leaving him with virtual strangers. She had consoled herself with the thought that it was perfectly understandable, that in a few days he would adjust. Children were very adaptable; she remembered her mother saying that. Give them love and three meals a day and they’ll survive.

  Downstairs she stood in the hall, irresolute, the enormity of her responsibility hitting her with the force of a flat-handed slap. Back home she could have opened the front door and run out into the street, not even stopping to put her coat on. She could have rung Doctor Marsden’s bell, and he would have come straight away.