A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Joshua walked a little slower, bitter memories surfacing, reminding him of how it might have been. He shook his head slowly from side to side. He wasn’t the sort of man to dwell to no good purpose on what might have been. Or was he?

  ‘That way madness lies. Let me shun that.’ Shakespeare, as Florence would have added. What would become of her? He saw no future as a landlady for Florence.

  He would have to leave Shangri-La. There was no future either for him there. Yet he dreaded having to find another room at the top of some boarding-house or small hotel. There was comfort and stability in the familiar, and he’d grown to love the view from his window of rows of chimney pots and grey slate roofs, wet with rain more often than not.

  He coughed, feeling the raw pain deep inside his chest. The doctor at the field hospital behind the lines in France had told him that mustard gas left a man vulnerable to the cold and the damp for the rest of his life. The wind was growing chill now, but perversely he decided to walk the length of Central Pier. He needed to isolate himself from the milling crowds, where everywhere he looked he saw couples walking side by side. Two halves of the same one, he told himself. He cursed at his mood of uncharacteristic self-pity. Inside the pier toll-gate he paid the entrance fee and set his face towards the open sea.

  Daisy. He remembered the day down on the sands when he had held her close in his arms, lifting her free from the creeping wave. He could still remember the soft warm feel of her held against his heart. Why not face the fact that his life, since she came into it, had held a purpose, even the chance of a happiness he had thought was denied him? Why not admit that she had quickened his steps each evening as he walked from the station after hours spent teaching children simple things they would have forgotten by the very next day.

  He had grown to anticipate the way she always came to greet him as he stepped into the hall, smiling, cheerful, in spite of her at times obvious exhaustion. Not a martyred bone in her body, that was Daisy. Patient, calm, but not passive, never that. Her temper could flare and recede just as quickly. A great speaker of her mind was Daisy. Vulnerable, too. Blushing so readily. He had seen the tenderness in her expression when she was with Jimmy. As if the boy was her own … Joshua frowned. Florence had mentioned something about Jimmy going back with his father; maybe that was what she had wanted to gossip about as they sipped their Earl Grey together?

  He was nearing the end of the pier now. The weak sun was fading, but when he turned he saw that it had bathed the long parade of hotels and guest-houses on the promenade into a mute glory. By a quirk of the fading light the buildings seemed to be outlined in black crayon. The lacy tracings of the Tower, the Jacobean Town Hall spire, the distant cliffs at the north end with their mock-medieval castle, all standing out in relief against the deepening sky.

  Daisy. … How beautiful she was, and what made her even more so was the fact that she had no idea. At some time in her life, Joshua guessed, she had been starved of admiration, making her far too susceptible to flattery. Maybe that was why. …

  Joshua pulled up the collar of his jacket and thrust his hands deep into his pockets before turning and walking on. His pace had slackened now, but there was still something of the soldier’s slogging rhythmic beat in the way his feet marched along the boards.

  Jimmy, recovered now from his sickness, had enjoyed the sound of his footsteps drumming on the pier. Between the boards he could glimpse a swelling sea, dark and mysterious. He was the captain of a pirate ship sailing the seven seas on the look-out for cargo ships to pillage and plunder. There was a cutlass in his belt, blood-stained from his last fight, and a black patch over his left eye.

  Daisy and his dad were talking boring stuff. They were leaning over the pier rail with their heads close together. He expected they’d get married soon, then he’d have two mothers like a boy in his class.

  He walked with a rolling gait over to the opposite side and raised a telescope to his good eye.

  ‘Ship ahoy!’ he shouted to his men, pointing a finger to a ship on the horizon. Even at that distance he could tell it had a hold stuffed with gold and jewels. He smacked his lips at the thought of its crew blissfully unaware of the gory fate awaiting them. ‘Slit their throats first, then ask questions later!’ he ordered his men. He drew the cutlass from his belt, spitting on it before giving it a good sharpen on the ship’s rail. A blunt knife wouldn’t draw much blood.

  ‘So how will Jimmy get back here at the end of the week?’ Daisy removed a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘Will you be able to bring him yourself?’

  ‘Nope.’ Sam looked uncomfortable. ‘I expect someone will put him on the train to Preston in charge of the guard, if someone wouldn’t mind meeting him there.’

  By ‘someone’ he means me, Daisy thought. She imagined herself leaving a meal half-cooked, visitors waiting in the dining room, Florence revolting – in both senses of the word. ‘I have to go to Preston. Just talk between yourselves till I get back.’ Miss Bell, the perfect landlady, standing in the doorway of the dining room to make her announcement. ‘I won’t be more than a couple of hours.’

  ‘We could make it Sunday, if that’s easier for you.’ Sam tried to light a cigarette and failed.

  ‘We?’

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Aileen and me.’ When Daisy tried to draw away he tightened the arm round her shoulders. ‘My wife and I, for Pete’s sake.’

  ‘So you’re seeing her again?’

  ‘Well of course I’m seeing her when it’s necessary. When the children are involved. What do you expect me to do? Post letters to her in a tree?’

  ‘What about her boyfriend? Is he there when you call round at your wife’s house?’

  ‘My house as well. I used to live there. Surely you realize that?’

  ‘Is he there?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  Daisy studied the angle of his jaw-line. In a moment I will be shouting at him, she told herself, in the very way I’m sure his wife used to shout at him. Furious with him for his assumption that I understand. When the truth is I don’t understand.

  ‘Where is he, then?’

  ‘If you must know he’s gone over to Canada. To see his father and to fix up a few things.’

  ‘Such as a place for him and your wife to live in when they are married?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Well, you should know. Surely that’s the kind of thing you should be asking. If the divorce has to go through.’

  Sam turned to face her, his blue eyes cold. ‘The divorce, the divorce. That’s my province, surely?’ He was struggling to keep his voice even. ‘You’re beginning to sound like Florence.’

  ‘You don’t know me really, do you, Sam?’

  ‘Not when you’re in this mood. No, I don’t. This isn’t the Spanish Inquisition. Or is it?’

  ‘I think I have a right to know what’s going on, Sam. Your letters don’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Black and white. Putting things down in black and bloody white. I thought you were the one who had decided on strict circumspection? Anyway, I can’t write letters. You should have fallen in love with a bloody poet if you’d wanted hearts and flowers.’

  ‘Stop swearing, please!’

  ‘Then stop nagging. Either trust me or don’t trust me. But stop nagging!’

  They were rowing. Jimmy, fresh from the heady triumph of a glorious battle, with dead bodies strewn in blood-stained heaps all round him on the sloping deck of the sinking cargo ship, sighed with deep resignation.

  Daisy and his dad. Going at it like his mum and dad used to do. Angry faces shouting horrible things. Looking as if they could be hitting each other any time now. Once his dad had swiped his mum so hard she had fallen over, then when his dad had knelt down just to see if she was hurt bad she’d hit him – wham! So that his dad rushed from the house yelling at her to go to hell, that he was never coming back.

  Daisy. Her face was all screwed up as if she was going to cry, but she wouldn’t
cry. Jimmy felt sick again. Daisy shouted when she was angry, but he’d never seen her cry. If his dad made Daisy cry he couldn’t bear it. He hadn’t liked it when his mum cried, but when he’d tried to put his arms round her and tell her it didn’t matter she had pushed him away and told him to get out of her sight. If Daisy did that he couldn’t bear it.

  Stumbling, falling over his trailing shoelaces, Jimmy ran as fast as he could away from them, making for the end of the pier, way in the far distance, to where the sea rose and fell against the iron struts.

  *

  ‘I didn’t mean it, love.’ Sam pulled Daisy close, wrapping her in his arms, tracing her mouth with soft kisses. ‘I get so worried. I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  ‘I understand.’ There, she was saying it again. Daisy stayed quite still, unable to resist as his mouth covered her own. ‘It’s the way I am, the way I’ve always been. Needing to know. Wanting the truth.’ She put up a hand and touched the lock of black hair falling in true Clark Gable fashion over Sam’s harassed forehead.

  ‘And you shall know, Daisybell. Just as soon as things begin to sort themselves out. You’re right. I’m not being fair to you, but have you ever thought I might be trying to spare you the sordid details?’ He gazed out to sea. ‘Breaking a marriage isn’t easy, especially when kids are involved. It’s mean and petty, horrible and nasty. It’s being greedy when you thought you cared nothing for possessions; it’s wanting to hurt someone else just as much as they’re hurting you. It’s a sense of failure that you’ve done it all wrong when every other couple seem to have got it right. It’s wounded pride that’s the worst of all.’

  ‘And me being difficult doesn’t help.’ Daisy could see a nerve jumping in his cheek. The sight of it twitching away tore at her heartstrings. ‘It’s just that finding myself the “other woman” has landed me in a role I don’t know how to play. I feel guilty on account of not feeling guilty. I’ve shut my mind to what you must going through, Sam, so in a way I’m selfish and greedy too. In fact, there are days when I don’t like me at all.’

  Sam half smiled at that, so that the elongated dimples in his cheeks came and went. Daisy smiled back and leaned her head on his shoulder. She had to accept him the way he was. That was what loving someone meant. Loving them the way they were, not the way you wished they could be. She had to trust Sam, as he said, not make things harder for him by demanding answers he wasn’t in a position to give. He was suffering enough without her making his life even more difficult. She could carry on nagging, as he called it. … And she could lose him.

  Losing Sam was something she couldn’t face. Without him she would be all alone again. Daisy Bell, the joky girl from the pie shop, always good for a laugh. A long way from being old, but not young either, far from beautiful, but not so ugly children ran away screaming when she passed by. Daisybell, as Sam called her. Liked by almost everybody, but loved by no one in particular. Till Sam. …

  The path of true love never ran smooth. The many books she had read and the films she had seen all proved that. Lovers were meant to suffer before they walked hand in hand into the sunset with a full string orchestra playing in the background. Idly, Daisy lifted Sam’s hand to look at his watch.

  ‘Oh no!’ She whirled round in dismay. ‘I promised Florence I’d be back over an hour ago!’ She looked round for Jimmy, narrowing her eyes to peer into the middle distance. ‘Can you see him, Sam? He was there a little while ago, over by the rail. Leaning over.’ She tried to subdue the panic in her voice. ‘You don’t think he’s …?’

  ‘No, I don’t. We would have heard the splash,’ Sam said, being flippant to hide his own feeling of unease. ‘He’ll be waiting for us by the toll-gate. To punish us for not taking enough notice of him. I know my son. He can’t bear to feel he’s being ignored.’

  Outside the pier entrance on the promenade Daisy clutched Sam’s arm. She looked down at the strip of sand pitted with darker patches, the shallow pools left by the receding tide. The face of every passer-by took on a sinister expression as, for a moment, her vivid imagination ran in terrifying riot. Far out to sea a dank and creeping mist already shrouded the far outline of the pier.

  ‘You don’t suppose he went that way?’

  ‘Right to the end of the pier?’ Sam frowned and shook his head. ‘I can’t see him doing that, can you?’

  ‘Too far and too scary for him.’ Daisy ran back to the toll-gate. ‘I’ll just ask. You never know. …”

  The man in the cubby-hole shrugged his shoulders. ‘A little lad? In a school cap with a red badge? Nay, love, there’s been little lads here all day, with the schools breaking up yesterday. An’ most of them without paying if they can manage it.’

  ‘Black hair,’ Daisy said desperately. ‘Wearing a navy-blue raincoat. This tall.’ Placing a hand beneath her chin. ‘In the last ten minutes.’

  The man liked the look of Daisy. She reminded him of Janet Gaynor, his favourite film star, with her wide-set eyes and small determined chin, but small boys in school caps were the bane of his life, forever snidging through past his little window before charging off like rampaging maniacs down the pier. ‘Sorry, love. If I had a pound note for every little lad passing through here I’d be a millionaire. They all look alike to me.’

  ‘You go back to the house.’ Sam was worried now, trying to hide it. ‘I’ll walk back along the pier. He may have gone to see if he can find anyone fishing from the jetty.’

  Waiting for a tram to rock by before crossing the road, Daisy suppressed a shudder. What chance would a small boy have if he tripped over his shoelaces in front of one of those clanking monsters? Who would see a boy fall from the end of the jetty, leaving nothing but a ring of bubbles and a little round cap floating on the waves? She narrowed her eyes at a harmless old man going home for his tea. There were sick and evil men about, even in friendly Blackpool. What was it the policeman had said to her that time she had taken a late-night walk down to the front and back?

  ‘There’s a man been reported for exposing himself round Talbot Square way. We don’t think he would harm anyone,’ he had said.

  But you never knew. You never knew. …

  The town was already filling up for the Easter holiday. Day trippers pouring from the excursion trains, men driving sports cars. Daisy glared so suspiciously at a young man at the wheel of a pale blue and chromium car drawn up politely to let her cross the road he almost stalled the engine.

  ‘You’re not my type, ducky,’ he called out, flicking his cigarette away through the open window, but Daisy was running along the pavement towards the Tower, hearing the breath rasp in her throat, ignoring the agony of the stitch stabbing at her side.

  Florence was just about fed up to her large back teeth. Daisy had said she would be back over an hour ago. A couple from Accrington had turned up on an earlier train, and there they were, sitting in the lounge, a stunned and captive audience for Daisy’s moronic auntie. On one of her dashes from the kitchen to the dining room Florence had overheard Edna holding forth about their Betty, bless her, and the baby who had walked so early he’d been able to pass beneath the table without bumping his head.

  Lancashire hotpot was the dish Daisy had chosen to cook and make her visitors feel thoroughly at home on their first evening. Florence had watched her prepare it that morning with sheep’s kidney and thick neck chops – two per person – lashings of onions, minced and layered with sliced potatoes.

  ‘A good stock with plenty of body in it,’ Daisy had said, just as if she was giving a cookery demonstration for beginners. ‘Poured over like this and cooked very slowly for at least three hours.’

  Before she’d gone out with the flarchy rotter and his son she had given Florence strict instructions about the time the brown dish had to go in the oven, giving herself plenty of time when they came back, she explained, to remove the lid and brown the top layer of scalloped potatoes, crisping them at the edges to add colour and what Daisy called ‘eye appeal’.

  After a
ll these weeks of preparation for the first Easter visitors it was almost inconceivable that Daisy would go gallivanting on the very day. Yet off she’d tootled, all starry-eyed, twiddling her fingers at Florence in an airy ta-ra. She was besotted. Out of her mind, off her chump, and all for a man who wouldn’t recognize the truth for what it was if it stared him full in his handsome face.

  Florence picked up a fork and prodded away at a large bowl of red pickled cabbage. Thank God Daisy hadn’t left any instructions about that. Evenly shredded, glistening with vinegar, it looked in a blessed state of readiness. Not like the Prince of Wales pudding she’d had steaming away for ages in its basin covered with double-thickness greaseproof paper. Twice at least she’d topped up the water from a boiling kettle in a fever of anxiety in case the pan boiled dry. They were going to have marmalade sauce with it, as a change from custard, but Florence was damned if she was going to try to make it.

  The time she had been allowed to make the gravy – and ended up carrying it out to the bin wrapped in newspaper like a parcel – had convinced her that it wasn’t true anyone could do anything just as long as they put their mind to it. Concentrating as hard as a chess player within sight of winning the world championship wasn’t going to turn Miss F. Livesey into a cook.

  ‘Our Florence is the only girl I know who can make a lumpy cup of tea,’ her father had once joked. Had her father ever joked? He must have, Florence supposed. She lifted the heavy kettle to give the Prince of Wales pudding water yet another top-up.

  ‘Jimmy! Have you seen Jimmy?’

  Breathless from her headlong dash, heedless of the Accrington couple sitting stunned into silence before Auntie Edna’s continuing saga, Daisy burst into the kitchen. Causing Florence to jump as if she’d been suddenly shot in the back, bang the kettle down on its gas jet, scorch the wide cuff of her knitted jumper and, missing the edge of the stove, tip up the kettle sending a cascade of boiling water down over her feet.