A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Opening her mouth wide, Florence yelped like a wounded dog.

  ‘Carron oil!’ Edna said, coming into the kitchen to see what all the noise was about. ‘Poured on straight from the bottle.’

  ‘A clean pillow-case wrapped round to keep out the air,’ Mrs Mac said, following Daisy into the house to see why she’d been dashing about the street like a bee in a bottle when she should be putting the finishing touches to her visitors’ first meal.

  ‘Get her stockings off!’ Uncle Arnold gently pushed Florence down into a chair, knelt on the floor and decently averted his eyes as Daisy unfastened Florence’s suspenders. ‘I’ll try not to hurt you, lass,’ he said, tugging with his large clumsy hands at the lisle stockings in Florence’s favourite gun-metal shade.

  And at the same time peeling clean away the skin from Florence’s long thin bony feet.

  Jimmy was relieved to find that when the man shrouded in mist at the end of the jetty swung round it turned out to be Joshua. Safe, nice Joshua, with his empty pipe clutched between his teeth.

  Yes, he was quite by himself, he lied. Daisy and his dad had gone off and left him, so he thought he would just walk along the pier and climb down on to the jetty. Maybe have a bit of a fish. He took a length of string from a sagging pocket and began to unroll it.

  Joshua could tell that Jimmy had been crying. There were the tell-tale dirty smudges round his eyes where he’d rubbed at them with grubby fists. A left-over sob crept up and trembled Jimmy’s lower lip as he busied himself picking at a knot in the string.

  ‘A bloody knot,’ he muttered.

  Joshua ignored the swear-word. ‘Best be getting back to the house, old son,’ he said. ‘I doubt if the fish will be biting today. Too foggy.’

  ‘Fish don’t bother about fog.’ Jimmy’s voice was scathing, but he obediently rolled the string back into its little ball and shoved it deep into his pocket.

  ‘Did you go on the Pleasure Beach?’ Joshua waited patiently for Jimmy to fall into step beside him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really? I was sure you told me you were going on the Pleasure Beach with Daisy and your dad. Wasn’t it the Giant Plunger you were going to try first?’

  ‘No. That’s kid’s stuff. Dead boring that Giant Plunger. It doesn’t go fast enough for me.’

  ‘I see.’ Joshua was a man schooled in patience. ‘So the three of you went for a walk instead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is no the only word you can say?’

  ‘No.’

  Joshua put his hand inside his pocket and brought out a wrapped sweet. ‘Would you like a caramel? A banana split?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  A sigh, seemingly dredged up from Jimmy’s trailing shoelaces. ‘Yes please, Joshua.’

  ‘That’s better.’

  Joshua handed over the toffee and they trudged on in silence.

  The worst thing to do when questioning a difficult child was to let exasperation show. Joshua’s years of training and experience had taught him that truth. Shake a child, or demand an answer and they clammed up tighter than a miser’s purse. He glanced down at the small disconsolate figure plodding along by his side. Jimmy would tell him in his own good time. But where were Daisy and her Sam? Searching frantically for this young whipper-snapper, Joshua would take a bet on that.

  They walked past the place where Sam had shouted angrily at Daisy, gripping her arm and twisting her round to glare at her. Jimmy averted his face. He bet anything if his dad had hit Daisy he would be sorry. He bet Daisy was good at thumping people when she got really mad.

  Joshua phrased his question casually, as if it didn’t really matter one way or another. ‘Did you come on the pier all by yourself, old son?’

  A trickle of yellow saliva oozed from a corner of Jimmy’s mouth. ‘Oh, yes,’ he fibbed, ‘I come on here most days. After school.’

  ‘Better get you home,’ Joshua said, knowing when even he was beaten.

  The couple from Accrington said afterwards that it was better than a front row seat at the pictures. First the poor lass with the scalded feet was given a drink of brandy out of a cup. Then a tall dark man had rushed through the open door, yelling for someone called Jimmy. He had dashed upstairs, stamped along the landing, flung doors open. In a right state. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that!

  Then, another man had walked into the hall holding a little lad by the hand. A little lad with a mucky face who looked as if he’d been crying. Jimmy? Yes, obviously the same, because the girl who had dashed past the lounge in her hat and coat just before the accident, came into the hall and went down on her knees to hug the little lad.

  ‘Jimmy! Oh, thank God you’re safe! We were so worried about you.’

  ‘Jimmy! You young devil!’ This was the first man, the younger one with the film-star looks, flying back down the stairs to put a stop to the hugging and kissing by walloping the little lad hard on his backside.

  There was such a commotion the ambulance man at the door, followed by his mate carrying a stretcher and a red blanket, had to knock three times before he could be heard.

  ‘This is the patient?’ Advancing on the little lad, who proved he wasn’t by running upstairs screaming blue murder, followed by the good-looking man who they could see now must be the father.

  The Accrington couple stood in the doorway to the lounge watching with reverence as Miss Livesey was carried past, lying prone on the stretcher with her eyes closed and her face as white as a sheet.

  ‘I’ll go with her, Daisy,’ the second man whispered to the girl in the hat and coat. ‘She’ll be all right.’

  Which should have been the end of the interesting drama. But no. The peculiar woman with the daughter called Betty Blesser suddenly let out a piercing scream before rushing into the kitchen. To emerge triumphant and announce that in the nick of time she had saved the Prince of Wales from drying up!

  No wonder nobody took the slightest notice of the policeman banging the iron knocker against the front door.

  ‘A Mr Schofield live here? A Mr Robert Schofield?’

  The fat woman in the flowered cross-over pinny from next door came to first. ‘Mr Schofield goes dancing every afternoon in the Tower Ballroom with Reginald Dixon on the organ.’

  The policeman coughed apologetically. ‘I have a warrant to search his room. If I may be shown. …’

  ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Officer.’

  The hat-and-coat girl stepped forward and almost pushed them back into the lounge. She closed the door.

  ‘I’m Miss Bell. Your landlady. Welcome to Shangri-La. I’m sorry about the little upset, but your meal won’t be long. You’ve seen your room? Good. I know you’re going to enjoy your stay with us. Please sit down and make yourselves comfortable.’

  ‘Well! I’ve seen nowt as funny as that lot since your mother got her beads caught in the mangle and nearly throttled herself.’ The man from Accrington nudged his wife and winked. ‘I reckon we’ve come to a madhouse, love. If Boris Karloff came through that door with a dirty great bolt through his neck I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.’

  ‘It wasn’t me mother’s beads got caught in the mangle. It was her scarf, and I never thought it was funny then and I don’t think it’s funny now.’

  ‘Aw heck.’ Her husband sat down on the settee. ‘Come on, lass. Smile and give your face a treat. We’re on our holidays, think on.’

  Chapter Six

  STANDING JUST INSIDE the door of Bobbie’s room, her unruffled expression betraying nothing of the turmoil raging away inside her, Daisy closed her ears to the sound of pan lids clattering as Edna reigned in triumphant control down in the kitchen.

  She would keep calm, she would cope, and the lump in her throat wasn’t the onset of hysteria. Daisy Bell wasn’t the type to roll on the floor with the screaming ab-dabs anyway.

  But surely Bobbie Schofield with his matching ties and hankies couldn’t be the notorious flasher of Talbot Squa
re? Flashers wore dirty raincoats, not double-breasted camel-hair, with the belt knotted instead of threaded through the buckle. Besides, if Bobbie was the flasher, why was the policeman searching his drawers so diligently, rooting amongst the neatly rolled socks and folded cravats? Daisy wouldn’t have thought that equipment was necessary. She felt her cheeks grow warm.

  Sam had come downstairs to see what all the noise was about. He was very sorry that Daisy was having such problems, especially on her first day on the job, as it were. He wished he hadn’t to go back the next morning, especially so early, but at least he was taking Jimmy with him, which would help.

  Mrs Mac had gone back reluctantly to get on with her own cooking. She predicted that Florence would be laid up for at least a month, as scalds were always worse than burns. She might never walk again, of course. It was best to take things a day at a time.

  The policeman had rolling eyes like Peter Lorre. Daisy wondered for a moment if he could be doing an impromptu imitation of the film star.

  ‘That trunk, Miss Bell. Do you happen to know where your Mr S. keeps the key?’

  No, she said, she didn’t know. She respected her boarders’ privacy. She blushed again, remembering the times she had lifted the padlock and wondered what on earth the shabby tin trunk could have inside.

  Without warning, the policeman sidled towards the dressing-table and opened a round leather collar-stud box. With a buttery smile he held a key aloft.

  ‘Always in the most obvious place, Miss Bell. Nothing surprises me any more. This will be the one, you will see.’ His voice deepened, throbbing with melancholy as he lifted the lid. ‘Aladdin’s treasure. Come and see for yourself, Miss Bell. The loot of a typical kleptomaniac. One with an obsessive impulse to steal,’ he explained, as if he suspected Daisy had never heard the word before. ‘We’ve been getting reports about him for a long time now. The gift shops and Woolworth’s have been his stamping ground in the winter, but come the summer he starts on the bazaars and stalls on the front.’ He held up a cigarette lighter. ‘This isn’t new.’ He flicked it into action. ‘This kind of thing he takes from houses, breaking in when the owners are in their beds. Never risking the upstairs rooms where the jewellery might be, or where he might find spare cash lying around on dressing-tables.’ He held up a miniature heart-shaped photo-frame. ‘Hasn’t even bothered to take the photograph out. That’s typical, too.’

  ‘But these things aren’t worth the pinching!’ Daisy stared down in amazement at the motley collection of trinkets: hair-slides fastened to display cards, two or three sets of bicycle clips, glittering Woolworth’s brooches, tie-pins, boxes of paper-clips, tiny bottles of April Violet scent, a sixpenny tin of Milk of Magnesia tablets, pocket cases of Mannikin cigars, tins of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, sixpenny boxes of Pond’s face powder, threepenny sachets of Amami wet or dry shampoo, and at least a dozen packets of Foster Clark’s Cream Custard neatly bound together with rubber bands.

  ‘He prefers evaporated milk to custard,’ she said, stunned.

  The policeman rubbed his hands together. ‘Got him at last,’ he enthused. As if, Daisy thought, he’d caught Jack the Ripper, or that doctor over at Lancaster who’d killed his wife and chopped her up into little pieces.

  ‘What will happen to him?’ She jumped at the sound of the front door opening downstairs. ‘Will he have to go to prison?’ Inadvertently her eyes went to the mantelpiece crowded with silver dancing trophies. Nineteen thirty-four, the only year not represented by a trophy of some kind or other. ‘Has he been to prison before?’

  ‘Well, let’s say he’s not exactly a first offender, Miss,’ the policeman said, his eyes rotating like catherine wheels. ‘Will that be him coming up the stairs now?’

  Daisy wanted to warn Bobbie. To tell him to turn and run and never come back. She wasn’t like Florence, always on the side of the villains, making excuses for them, saying that any man who had survived the trenches in the war was bound to be an emotional mess. But all the same Daisy had grown fond of the chirpy little man with his patent leather hair, and his size seven feet twinkling in their shiny dancing pumps. There was the time he’d brought her a bunch of daffodils, mysteriously unwrapped. Pinched from the display outside the greengrocer’s shop, no doubt. And the box of sugared almonds produced from the deep inside pocket of the camel-hair coat.

  ‘Sweets for the sweet,’ he’d said, handing them over with a little bow.

  Whipped straight from the counter of the newsagent’s shop on the corner, almost certainly!

  ‘Tea for two. …’ Daisy thought she had never seen anything as sad as the dapper little man rounding the bend of the stairs, whistling merrily through his teeth, executing a Fred Astaire lighter-than-air dance step as he reached the top landing.

  ‘Something smells good, Daisy. Were you coming to find me? I’ll be down in the jolliest of jiffs.’

  ‘Bobbie. …’ Daisy held out a hand towards him. ‘Oh, Bobbie. …’

  Behind her the pop-eyed policeman opened the lid of the trunk with a flourish. ‘We meet again, Mr Schofield. You’ve led us a pretty dance this time.’

  Daisy couldn’t bear it. Bobbie’s shame was her shame somehow. When he sank to the bed and buried his face in his hands she went to him and pressed his shoulder. ‘Don’t cry, Bobbie. We’ll help you. Florence, Joshua and me. We’re your good friends. You mustn’t upset yourself like this. You can’t help it. It’s like being ill.

  ‘It’s not as if anything in that flamin’ trunk is of the slightest use to him!’ she shouted at the policeman. ‘Can’t you see it’s help he needs, not prison?’ She was talking like Florence, and meaning it, too.

  ‘Are you going to come quietly?’ Ignoring Daisy, the policeman moved towards the door. ‘We don’t want a repetition of last time, do we?’

  ‘Last time? What did he do last time?’ Daisy followed them down the stairs.

  ‘Only broke a colleague’s nose in four places trying to avoid arrest. That’s all.’

  ‘He must have had a big nose!’ Daisy wanted to weep at the sight of her top-floor regular being escorted down the hall and out of the front door, his neat little head sunk low on his chest and his feet dragging instead of gliding across the floor.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him being one of them pansies as well.’ Edna’s voice was strong and assertive as she prodded the carrots bubbling away in a pan. ‘I’ve decided to mash these with butter.’

  She looked so important, so chuffed that things were going wrong. So filled with triumph at being in charge, Daisy wanted to hit her.

  ‘Why on earth should you think Mr Schofield was a pansy?’

  ‘Going out dancing and wearing a camel-hair coat, and wiggling when he walks? Of course he’s one, and I’ll tell you another thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that Florrie Livesey isn’t tarred with the same brush. She’s never had a man, has she?’

  Serving the meal, Daisy marvelled at her own self-control. She insisted that Edna sat down with the rest to enjoy her food, and when Sam winked at her over his plate of hotpot she winked straight back.

  Sam had faith in her. Sam believed she was all right. A lot more than all right, he had once said, holding her face for his kiss. Somehow, since that day, she had grown in confidence. Yes, with or without Florence, she would make a go of things. Sam’s wink had told her he was proud of her.

  No, she told Edna, she wouldn’t dream of allowing her to help with the washing-up. They were here for a holiday, and they must hurry if they were going to be in time for the second-house pictures.

  It never once occurred to her as she began on the piles of plates and pans that Sam might have come in from the lounge where he was playing Ludo with Jimmy and offered to help. Joshua would have walked in, picked up a teacloth and that would have been that. But Sam wasn’t Joshua, was he? It would be a funny world if we were all made the same, as her mother would have said.

  What on earth were they doing to Florence? In the two hours since she had been car
ried into Casualty nothing had happened. Nothing but the silence of the long wide corridor. Once a nurse had bustled out in a crackle of starched apron and Joshua had asked what he thought was a perfectly reasonable question, only to be quelled by a glance from the nurse’s beady eyes.

  ‘The doctor will be along. All in good time,’ she said in a scathing tone which implied, Joshua thought, that he had been jumping up every five minutes and rushing into Casualty demanding to know how long Miss Livesey would be, for God’s sake?

  At the end of the first hour the ambulance man who had brought them into the hospital came through the swing doors leading by the arm an elderly man with a blood-stained bandage round his head. He showed no surprise at all at seeing Joshua still sitting there.

  ‘Your lady friend won’t be long,’ he said on his way out. He winked and walked jauntily away down the bleak corridor.

  Joshua took his pipe out of his pocket, stared at it with longing and put it back again. His lady friend? Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Tucked up in bed at last, Florence watched Joshua walk towards her down the long ward. He turned to smile at a child sitting propped up by pillows and she was immediately struck by the nobility of his profile. A great pity filled her for the other patients with their scrawny little husbands sitting by their bedsides for the visiting hour.

  ‘You should have gone home, Joshua.’ She held out a hand to him, wishing she was wearing a decent bedjacket and not the hospital issue nightgown, with its high round neck and row of calico-covered buttons mangled out of shape by the laundry.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He stood awkwardly by the side of the bed, wanting his hand back and not knowing how to manage it without giving offence. ‘I got used to waiting around in hospitals. You could say I’m an expert, I suppose.’

  ‘Your dear wife.’ Florence gripped his hand even tighter. ‘Life can be very cruel to some. Both you and I have had more than our fair share of trouble, but we’ll win through in the end.’