by Marie Joseph
Joshua wished she wouldn’t stare at him with those pale bulbous eyes. Florence had a way of making him feel sorry for her and angry at the same time. She took for granted an intimacy that didn’t exist, which irritated, then made him feel guilty because he was irritated.
Florence tidied her hair with her free hand. ‘The blistering of my feet looks terrible, but once they’ve gone the doctor says there’ll hardly be a blemish. Daisy was quick off the mark with the carron oil.’
‘She never panics.’ Joshua freed his hand at last. ‘She would have made a marvellous nurse. I thought so when Jimmy had scarlet fever. She has a way with her.’
‘She’s not perfect, Joshua.’
Florence was appalled at the sharpness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. His whole expression changed when he said Daisy’s name. He was either very fond of her or, dear God, he loved her. Was in love with her. The truth hit her like a slap. Florence opened her mouth and drew in a deep breath. Beneath the bed-cage the pain in her feet blazed into life as if she felt again the agony of the boiling water cascading over them.
Oh, dear God, how could she have thought … how for one moment imagined that this lovely quiet man would look twice at her? She trembled with pity for herself, and anger with him that all he wanted to do was to walk away and leave her feeling bereft and suffering. He cared nothing for her. She knuckled a fist into her open mouth. It was strange how in one blinding moment she had accepted that. It had been there, she now realized, in the way he walked towards her bed down the length of the long ward. There had been no eager anticipation on his face, no fevered anxiety for her pain, no desperate hurry to reach her. Just a good kind man plodding patiently up a ward after sitting for hours doing what he saw as his duty. Doing it for Daisy.
All self-control slipped away from her as Florence felt a hatred so hot for Daisy it flooded her whole body with heat. In that moment she wished her ill. She would have stuck pins in if she’d had an effigy of her. The pain in her feet was making her feel sick.
‘She’ll marry Sam, you know.’ Her tongue was running away with her, but there was nothing she could do about it. ‘Even against her better judgement she’ll marry him.’
‘I don’t think we should be discussing Daisy.’ Joshua backed away from the bed. ‘I’d better go now, Florence. They must be wondering what’s happening. It’s almost three hours since we came here.’
‘She is very sexually immature,’ Florence said in a loud carrying voice. ‘Because she spent the night with Sam the last time he came up, she’ll feel committed. Daisy believes in one man, one woman. Like in the Bible. She’s as good as married to him already.’
Joshua moved to the foot of the bed, regarding her gravely over the top of the cradle covering her injured feet. ‘Goodnight, Florence. You’ll feel better tomorrow. I think we’ll both forget that last indiscreet remark.’ He started to walk away. ‘I’ve forgotten it already.’
‘Oh no you haven’t!’ Florence shouted after him. ‘You’re as daft as all the rest, Joshua Penny! You can’t see past the nose on your face, and that’s not far, for God’s sake. She’s not your type, Joshua! She was born with a bloody wooden spoon in her hand. Can’t you see that? She cooks her way into men’s affections! She’s got everything, and I’ve got nothing!’
Visitors sitting on their little hard chairs turned astonished faces in her direction. Patients raised weary heads from pillows, and a nurse came in at a forbidden run to draw the curtains round Florence’s bed.
It was no use. The finely balanced control holding Florence’s anger tight inside her had been fraying for a long time. Now it snapped. The frustrations of a lifetime surfaced. The years of tending her mother, the suppression of her desperate thirst for knowledge, the need to be loved, the knowing deep inside her that she had somehow been born out of time, out of place, rose up to confront her.
‘Oh, God!’ Throwing herself back on the bed Florence covered her face with both arms. There was something else. The worst of all. The terrible thing she had buried so deep inside her that it had been blotted from her memory. ‘Oh, no. …’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, no … no. …’
‘Miss Livesey?’ The nurse came back with the Sister, a pretty dark-haired young woman from the Welsh valleys.
Florence opened her eyes and looked into a face as pleasantly round as hers was unattractively long; at cheeks as freshly pink as her own were sallow, into eyes fringed with eyelashes like spider’s legs. It wasn’t fair. Hysterical now, she screamed her fury aloud.
‘It’s all right now. It’s all right. All right.’ Seemingly from nowhere a young doctor materialized. Florence felt the slight prick of a needle in her arm.
‘You don’t know,’ she whimpered, as the drug began to take almost immediate effect. ‘You don’t know what my father did to me when I was a little girl.’ Tears held back for over twenty years rolled down her cheeks. ‘He said if I didn’t tell anybody he’d never do it again, and I didn’t tell anybody.’ Her eyelids drooped. ‘And he never did do it again.’ She opened her eyes with an effort. ‘But he might have. He might have … any day he might have … I was so frightened … always so afraid. Till I forgot about it. Forgot. …’
Walking back down the long corridor the young doctor, who had almost decided to go on and specialize in psychiatry, pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. Interesting that last-minute revelation. If it were true, which he doubted, the patient being an obvious hysteric, a thing like that, festering away inside her subconscious, could have coloured her attitude towards men all her life. It would take a very special man to penetrate beneath that loathing; that rare being, a good man he supposed, one who posed no threat physically. Sexually, he supposed.
If what she said was true, of course, which one doubted in a spinster of her obvious type. He wouldn’t have believed before taking up medicine the fantasies some maiden ladies insisted on describing to him. One had to beware of them, in fact. Still, Miss Livesey was an interesting case. Not quite run of the mill. Cut out with jagged edges, as if with pinking scissors.
Proud of his perception, he walked on, serious and dedicated, muttering to himself like an earnest professor three times his own age. He would suggest to his superior that they kept her in for a few days.
‘I wish I knew what was happening at the hospital.’ Daisy perched uncomfortably on the arm of Sam’s chair in the lounge, which still smelled of paint and wallpaper paste. She wanted him to say that he would go there on the tram and find out for her, while she sat in with Jimmy and got on with all the thousand and one things she had to do, but he didn’t offer. He seemed to have distanced himself from what was going on all around them, as if already he was miles away leading his own life which – she had to face it – hardly touched hers at all.
‘You know what they’re like at hospitals.’ He pulled her down on to his knee. ‘I once knew a man who waited so long in Out-Patients he was completely cured when his turn came.’ He kissed the small hollow at her throat. ‘Time being the great healer, you see.’
Daisy smiled. ‘Oh, Sam. You can always make me laugh. I wish you weren’t going back in the morning. Everyone will be arriving and I won’t even have time to say goodbye.’
He whispered something in her ear, half teasing, half serious. She couldn’t be sure which. She drew away from him, staring at him with startled brown eyes.
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it would be wrong.’
‘A mortal sin? You’re not a Catholic kow-towing to the Pope, are you?’
‘You know I’m not.’
Daisy sat bolt upright on his knee, struggling to make sense of her emotions. What he had whispered had excited her; she could feel her heart beating faster. With frustrated passion, she supposed. She bit her lips and frowned. She was a two-headed woman, that’s what she was. One half of her wanting to sink back in Sam’s arms and let him have his way with her, the other half telling her not to be so daft. Bes
ides, he was still married. He was still seeing his wife, even if only to have shouting rows with her about the children, which was what he had implied as they talked together on the pier. So if she gave in to him and had a baby there’d be no hasty marriage arranged to cover her shame.
‘I wouldn’t give you a baby,’ he said, as if reading her mind.
Daisy blushed. What a way to be talking like this, with the middle light switched on and her still wearing her pinny from the washing-up. For a moment she felt as if she was back on the Giant Plunger on the Pleasure Beach, going far too fast, with the earth dropping away from her. Everything was going too fast. In the last few hours Florence had gone into hospital and Bobbie had been taken into custody. The Easter visitors were arriving and in spite of her determination to manage she knew she would have to get extra help from somewhere.
Besides, where would the romance be in her creeping down to Sam’s room with her Auntie Edna straining her ears from the next room, maybe even bursting in and catching them in flagrante delicto – Florence had said that was a polite way of putting it. For Daisy to take the initiative like that would be awful, brazen. You wouldn’t catch Janet Gaynor or Deanna Durbin sneaking about in the middle of the night in their nighties, climbing into beds, even when invited. Besides, suppose Jimmy woke up with one of his nightmares and found her missing? And worse. Suppose he came to look for comfort and found her tucked up in bed with his father? Then went down to London and told his mother? Miss Bell would definitely be cited as co-respondent then.
The awful thing was she really wanted to. She shivered at the thought of lying close to Sam with their bare skins touching. She would belong to him properly then. It would make them seem almost married. It wasn’t as if she wanted to marry him wearing a wreath and veil, anyway. Daisy had never thought anyone over twenty-five suited orange blossom. A nice blue two-piece would be much more in keeping at a wedding where the groom was marrying for the second time.
But why didn’t he pull her down against him, instead of lighting a cigarette behind her back? Why didn’t he force her to make up her wavering mind?
‘If you come to me it must be because you want to,’ he said cheerfully, blowing smoke up over her left shoulder. ‘Sex isn’t the all-important thing you have built it up to be in your mind. You have to grow up some time, Daisybell, there’s nothing endearing about a thirty-year-old virgin.’
She whipped round. ‘I’m not thirty yet! Do I look thirty, Sam?’
‘Not a day over twenty-nine and a half.’ As he grinned impudently Daisy was sure her heart turned over. ‘Come here, sweetheart. You don’t know yet when I’m teasing, do you?’ He ground the cigarette out in the copper ashtray on its leather strap taped to the chair-arm. ‘You look about seventeen, all worried and anxious about whether to give in and do what comes naturally.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it, Sam. What if I did have a baby?’ Daisy said all in a rush, bemused by the way his eyes, seen at such close quarters, had little yellow flecks in their irises.
‘You wouldn’t. I’d look after you.’ He bent his head and kissed her.
‘What if somebody saw me?’
‘They wouldn’t if you timed it right.’ He kissed her again, parting her lips with the tip of his tongue.
‘What if you lost all respect for me?’
‘I would respect you more.’ His hand crept down to the fullness of her breast. ‘Oh, Daisy, I need to. You don’t know how much.’
His face burned against hers; she closed her eyes as he fiddled with the tiny buttons down the front of her Viyella blouse, then pushed the strap of her brassiere down to cup his hand round her breast. When he kissed her throat, she arched her back and tangled her fingers in his dark hair.
‘Sam … oh, Sam. …’
The opening of the front door brought her to her feet in seconds. Struggling to fasten the tiny buttons, breathing quickly, embarrassment flooding her entire body, she heard the click of Sam’s lighter as he lit a cigarette.
‘It’s okay, love. They’ve gone on through into the kitchen.’ He adjusted the band on her skirt for her. ‘Don’t look so stricken.’
Joshua couldn’t bear to look at Daisy. Her hair was mussed up, her eyes heavy, and her mouth still bore the almost visible imprint of Sam Barnet’s kisses. There was a button undone down the front of her blouse, but he switched his mind away from the implication of that.
‘Florence is okay.’ To avoid looking at her, he ran himself a glass of water and stood with his back to her drinking it. ‘Her feet aren’t as badly scalded as they thought at first, but she’s had a shock and for that reason they’ll be keeping her in for a couple of days.’
I should have gone to the hospital, Daisy thought. Somehow I should have found the time. Surreptitiously she fastened the odd button. It wasn’t that she didn’t care what was happening to Florence, far from it. She stared at Joshua’s broad back. It was just that with Sam around she seemed to become another person. A totally selfish person with no sense of loyalty or duty, no principles, no sense of right or wrong, unable even to think straight. Capable of anything.
‘I hope they gave her something for the pain,’ she said. ‘Florence is so highly strung, pain demoralizes her.’
‘She’s all right.’ There was such an edge of irritation to Joshua’s voice that Daisy immediately put the wrong interpretation on it.
‘You must be starving hungry, Joshua. If you’d like to go through into the dining room, I’ll bring something in a few minutes.’
‘No!’
‘Joshua!’ Daisy blinked. What was wrong with him? The way he’d just banged that glass down on the draining-board showed him to be in a filthy mood.
‘I don’t want anything, thank you.’
‘But you must have something. A slice of apple pie and a nice wedge of Lancashire cheese?’
‘I am not hungry.’
The slow, barely controlled delivery of his words convinced Daisy that he was more angry than she had ever believed Joshua could be. When he turned round at last she saw the coldness in his eyes.
‘You think I should have gone with Florence to the hospital. That’s it, isn’t it?’ She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘Oh, Joshua … I can’t … I can’t be all things to all men. Isn’t that what they say? I thought something dreadful had happened to Jimmy till you walked in with him; I was late, my visitors were waiting, and Florence was cross with me because I’d left her to cope with the meal. I should have gone with her to the hospital. It’s just that you were there and I knew that you would look after her.’
‘Good old Joshua!’ There was such a wealth of bitterness in his voice that she flinched.
‘I’ve gone down in your estimation, haven’t I?’
Joshua folded his arms, averting his eyes from the red mark on her neck. Let her believe that failing to take Florence to the hospital was the cause of his anger if she wanted to. Let her think anything, but let him get to hell out of the house before he took her in his arms and shook her, or slapped her face. Or kissed her.
‘I’m glad you found Jimmy, Joshua.’ Daisy struggled to make things right between them. ‘Sam and I were worried to death about him running off like that.’ The despised blush betrayed her again. ‘We were talking, and Jimmy must have got bored.’
‘So bored that he wandered alone to the very end of the pier, to the far end of the jetty, a little lad on his own. Crying his heart out.’
‘Crying?’ Daisy put a hand to her mouth. ‘Why should he be crying?’
‘I should imagine you and Sam know the answer to that.’
Joshua walked towards the door. He could no longer stand there watching the changing expressions on Daisy’s face. Now she was looking bewildered and contrite. Before, when she had first come into the kitchen, she had looked dazed, as if she wasn’t quite sure what was going on around her. He ached to hold her in his arms and yet he needed to humiliate her. He was no longer in control of his own emotions.
�
�Bobbie’s been arrested,’ she said from behind him.
‘What did you say?’ He turned round and closed the door. ‘Bobbie’s been arrested?’
‘For stealing from shops; for breaking into houses late at night on his way back from the dancing. The stuff was hidden in a trunk in his room.’
‘I’m going for a bit of a blow. Coming with me, Daisybell?’ Sam put his head round the door. ‘So you’re back, Joshua. Hope the damage wasn’t too bad, but Florence is one tough lady. She’s not going to let a scalded foot upset her too much.’
‘Two scalded feet.’
Sam looked from Joshua’s set face to Daisy’s flushed one.
‘Look here, old chap, I haven’t had the chance to thank you for finding Jimmy and bringing him back, but he’s old enough to know better than to run off like that. Used to make a habit of it at one time, running away, but I thought he’d grown out of it.’ He did a little shuffle with his own two feet as if he couldn’t wait to get away himself. ‘Coming, Daisybell? Joshua will stay with Jimmy for half an hour or so, won’t you, old chap?’
‘I can’t come with you,’ Daisy said.
‘Sorry, but I have to go out,’ Joshua said. ‘Right away. Sorry.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’ Sam asked. ‘Sure you won’t come with me, Daisybell?’
Mrs Mac said she had bumped into that nice Mr Penny haring off one way down the street, and that young lad’s father haring off in the other direction. Sitting down heavily on a kitchen chair, she said that her ankles came up like balloons about this time, and that what with all the upset, everything she’d eaten for her tea was talking back at her.
‘It’s bad news about Miss Livesey,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I can recognize bad news at less than spitting distance. Your Mr Penny had a face on him as long as a wet weekend. Scalds can take bad ways.’
‘Florence is going to be fine,’ Daisy said quickly, ‘but it’s not good about Mr Schofield. That policeman had come to arrest him.’
