A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Daisy touched her mouth as if to feel the kiss again. Joshua was going to feel very embarrassed if he remembered it tomorrow. It was tomorrow now though, wasn’t it?

  ‘Must get my beauty sleep in,’ Sam had announced in a loud voice. For the benefit, Daisy guessed, of the Accrington couple, who had carried on shaking the dice and climbing up ladders or slithering down snakes for a long time after Sam had given her that meaningful look and gone upstairs. ‘Got an early start in the morning,’ he had said.

  Daisy stood up and slid her arms into the wide kimono sleeves of her dressing-gown. Her mouth felt dry and her heart was beginning to throb in loud thumping beats. If you loved someone, really loved them, what she was about to do wasn’t wrong. In fact, it was more wrong not to. Withholding yourself was cold and calculating; being so frightened was unnatural. She could lose Sam through being afraid.

  Daisy tiptoed to the door. If she lost Sam, she lost hope. The hope that some day, no matter how far in the distant future, they would be married. It had come to her quite recently how foolish they would be to rush things. They couldn’t anyway till Sam got his divorce. There were his exams to pass, and his ambition of getting a good job to be realized. Quite apart from the fact that she was determined to get the boarding-house on its feet before she started having babies.

  Half-way down the top landing stairs Daisy stopped and shivered. This was a fine time to be thinking about babies! Sam had said she would be all right, that he would see no harm came to her.

  ‘The only safe method of contraception is total abstinence,’ Florence had declared one day in ringing tones, shaming Daisy on the tram to Bispham with a woman sitting behind them with her ears flapping.

  All she really wanted was for Sam to hold her. Daisy negotiated the last three stairs, being careful to avoid the one that creaked. She would tell him that. To be held and told how much she was loved, that was the great need in her. Not to feel so alone in what she was trying to achieve; to have someone share the burden and the worry with her, and the joy when things began to go right for her.

  In a sliver of moonlight filtering through the big landing window Daisy saw Sam’s bedroom door slightly ajar, opened it quietly and slipped inside.

  At that exact moment Joshua woke up with a start. There was a terrible taste in his mouth and the pain of a thumping headache spreading across his forehead. He swallowed and the saliva in his mouth tasted like acid. That would be because he had drunk too much and not eaten anything. Or had he eaten something? He put out a hand to feel for his watch on the bedside table and closed it over what felt like the remains of a biscuit. He sat up and groaned.

  Oh, God! He remembered now. Daisy’s fearsome auntie had been coming out of the lounge carrying a tray and he had taken a biscuit from a plate. He remembered her looking at him with her nose sharpening into suspicion. And before that … before that he had been in the kitchen with Daisy, kissing her. Kissing her! Joshua groaned a bit louder. That meant he’d blotted his copy book good and proper. Had she smacked his face? He made the headache worse by forcing himself to try to remember, but it was no use.

  What he did have was a hazy recollection of Daisy struggling for a moment, then winding her arms round his neck and kissing him back with a great deal of enjoyment.

  Joshua sighed and pulled the blankets over his head. He must have been even more drunk than he remembered.

  ‘You’re shaking, love.’

  When Sam’s arms came round her Daisy’s immediate reaction was an overwhelming desire to push him away, to ask him, plead with him not to be so eager, so rough, so impatient. Not to kiss her like that with his mouth open, his tongue probing, and his face burning against hers.

  ‘Wait!’ she whispered. ‘Sam, please! Listen to me!’

  But Sam was obviously in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. Not when he was smothering her with his weight, suffocating her, terrifying her so that she had to bite on a fist to stop herself from screaming out loud.

  It was like being attacked, not made love to. Sam had gone completely berserk. Daisy fought him off with all her strength. This was nothing like her fantasies where honeymooners gazed into each other’s eyes as the strings of a full orchestra soared in the background. This was a Sam she didn’t know; a Sam she had never suspected existed.

  ‘No! You mustn’t! Stop! I don’t want you to!’

  She had thought he was beyond hearing her strangulated cries, but as he rolled away from her she saw in the half-light the look of total disbelief on his face.

  ‘You bitch! You cruel little. …’

  He pushed her so hard she rolled to her side of the double bed, shaking and trembling with the humiliation of it all.

  ‘Sam, I’m sorry. I just wanted you to. …’ The shame engulfed her, bringing tears to her eyes.

  ‘Wanted me to what?’ He was out of bed now, lighting a cigarette and be hanged to the bloody notice on the door. ‘You come into my bed in the middle of the night and you just want me to … what, Daisy? What sort of game is this supposed to be, for God’s sake? What do you think I’m made of? Bloody stone?’

  ‘I’ve got feelings too!’ Daisy got out at her side to stand huddled and diminished, the anger in her keeping her from total collapse. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before! An’ I couldn’t have, not like that. Not without. …’ Not without tenderness, she had been trying to say; not without loving kindness, not without romance. But he would never understand.

  ‘Not without a wedding ring on your finger, Daisy?’ His contempt was all the more terrible for having to be whispered. ‘A common streetwalker has more heart than you, do you know that?’

  A sudden sharp scream of terror propelled Daisy to the door almost without conscious volition. ‘Jimmy! He’s dreaming. …’ She was up the short flight of stairs and back in her room before Sam had time to realize what was happening.

  For a brief moment he considered following her, then as the screams died away he shrugged and got back into bed to puff furiously at his cigarette, flicking the ash contemptuously over the side of the bed and on to the new pale grey carpet, which was an exact match to the grey self-repeating pattern in the wallpaper.

  ‘It’s all right, love. I’m here.’ Daisy rocked Jimmy in her arms, stroking the hair away from his forehead, feeling him relax against her, already drifting back into sleep.

  Shivering, she crept back into her own bed. ‘Dear God,’ she prayed, lying curled up in the foetal position. ‘Is that the truth about me? That I’m no better than a common streetwalker?’

  How dare Sam say a thing like that about her? She clutched the top sheet, holding it to her like a shield. ‘If a girl works a man up,’ her mother had told her once, ‘she only deserves what she gets. She asks for what she gets, and you can’t blame the man because they’re made different. More like animals.’

  Well, she had done it good and proper, getting into Sam’s bed and working him up, then expecting him to switch off and have a nice cosy chat. Guilt fought for supremacy with the humiliation and shame.

  But suppose she had? Suppose they had? And suppose that in spite of what Sam had promised she had become pregnant? Daisy’s eyes grew rounder in the darkness as fear possessed her once again and her vivid imagination took over.

  There she was with her whole life ruined, growing fatter with each passing month. Fainting in the kitchen as she struggled with heavy pans, watching herself being watched in disbelief by Florence and Mrs Mac and then her visitors. Having to sell the house at a loss. Writing to tell Sam and not getting any replies to her letters.

  Or not telling anyone, and going on her own down some back street to lie on a filthy bed and let an old toothless hag do something unspeakable to her insides with a rusty knitting needle.

  Oh, she had done the right thing in not letting him. The terror that had given her the strength to push Sam away from her had returned with a vengeance, but this time as an all-pervading sense of mounting horror. Martha Bell had done a good
job on her only daughter. Nice girls never did; it was the scum of the earth who gave in, and yet ironically it was the ‘nice’ girls who got caught, got into trouble and brought disgrace on their families. The deeply ingrained beliefs, the shame of what she had almost done held Daisy rigid in a grip of horror, before the relief that she had emerged unscathed brought her to her senses.

  ‘Thank you, God,’ she whispered, meaning it with all her heart.

  But what of passion? What of the love that was ‘fathom deep’, the love that Florence’s Shakespeare was always writing about? The giving of yourself to the man you loved in feverishly unbridled lust?

  ‘Them’s mucky thoughts, Daisy,’ Martha’s shadowy ghost intoned from the end of the bed where she stood in her flannel nightgown minus her teeth, a work-roughened hand placed over her outraged heart. ‘If you weren’t too old I’d make you go through to the scullery and wash your mouth out with soap and water.’

  But what she had done, or not done had been cruel. Daisy knew that. There was a word for what Sam would think she was, and it wasn’t a nice word. It would be a long time before he forgave her, if ever. Daisy sighed. The truth was she hadn’t been herself since the day she set eyes on him. Sometimes it was as if she was looking down watching herself behaving like a mad woman, all dignity forgotten, all pride gone. The shameful truth was she hadn’t stopped Sam from having his way with her because it would have been a sin. The only reason she had fought him off was because she was convinced he would have got her into trouble.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘I really am sailing on the wide wide sea. Please guide my little ship for me. …’

  The light touch on her shoulder brought her to a startled sitting position, every nerve in her body alive and quivering.

  ‘Daisy? You’re making a funny noise. Can I come in your bed?’ Jimmy dived in without waiting for an answer. ‘Lie down, Daisy. You was talking in your sleep and making a funny noise. Not snoring, Daisy. Just making this funny noise.’

  After a demonstration to illustrate exactly what he meant, Jimmy snuggled himself into Daisy’s back and fell immediately asleep again.

  Young Winnie Whalley was ringing the door-bell to be let in before Daisy had drunk that first essential cup of tea. Daisy poured her a cup and wondered if the girl would last the morning. Winnie was painfully, terribly thin, with a small white pointed face beneath the shock of fiercely ginger hair, and spindle legs. If Florence could see what was replacing her, even temporarily, Daisy thought, she’d be doing cartwheels in spite of her scalded feet! Winnie was so thin, she could have been dropped through a telescope without blocking the view.

  ‘Now, what I’d like you to do first,’ Daisy said, marvelling that the new help had found the strength to lift the cup of tea to her lips, ‘is to run a duster over the lounge and the dining room, then Ewbank the carpets, making as little noise as possible. Do you think you can manage that, Winnie?’

  Winnie, who had obviously been well-primed, narrowed pink-lidded eyes into cunning slits. ‘Me mam said you’d give me a cooked breakfast before you set me to work, Miss Bell.’

  Daisy went on cutting the rinds off twenty-four bacon rashers. ‘When you’ve cleaned the lounge and the dining room, Winnie.’

  ‘I might faint,’ Winnie warned, walking so slowly towards the door Daisy was sure she would keel over. ‘I’ve got terrible anaemia.’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’ Daisy said. ‘A doctor once told me that if he bled me dry it wouldn’t fill a good-sized thimble. I’m a fainter meself,’ she lied, ‘so if you hear a thud it’s me gone over, but don’t worry, I’m never out for more than ten minutes. What’s your record?’

  She saw Winnie trying to weigh her up; she could almost see the cunning little brain working overtime. If the child was genuinely ill, then the kindly Mrs Mac would surely never have recommended her?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Daisy went on, ‘the Bells have always been a bloodless lot. I once had an uncle who cut his throat without even staining the knife.’

  A strange sound bubbled from Winnie’s small mouth. For a startled moment Daisy thought she really was going to throw a fit, then realized that the thin tinny noise was Winnie laughing. Not really to Daisy’s surprise, she picked up the Ewbank and trotted quite eagerly down the hall.

  ‘I thought we’d get off early,’ Sam said, coming into the kitchen with a yawning Jimmy in tow. ‘That way we won’t get involved with your visitors.’ He still looked very angry, refusing to meet Daisy’s eyes. ‘There’s a workmen’s café near the station, so we’ll have something there. I’m not sure of the train times anyway, so we’re better checking as soon as possible.’

  Winnie, sitting at the table, munching a bacon sandwich, couldn’t take her eyes off Sam.

  ‘This is Winnie,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s come to help me till Florence is better.’

  ‘Remember me to Florence,’ Sam said insincerely, picking up his case. ‘Come on, son.’ He turned to Jimmy. ‘That cat will be here when you come back. It’s your own fault if he scratches you. You’re squeezing him too hard.’

  Daisy followed them into the hall. Sam couldn’t go like this, not without a word, not without giving her just a minute to try to explain. She saw that his eyes held the over-bright propped-open look of someone who had slept badly.

  ‘Sam?’ she began, but he looked pointedly at Jimmy, remote from her as if they were strangers. ‘Jimmy. Go and ask Winnie to give you one of her sandwiches,’ she said. ‘He can’t go out without anything,’ she told Sam. ‘I don’t expect you to like me much this morning,’ she said quickly, when Jimmy ran into the kitchen ignoring his father’s shake of the head. ‘I don’t like myself all that much either, but you can’t go like this, not when I don’t know how long it will be before I see you again.’

  ‘Leave it, Daisy!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For last night.’

  ‘I said leave it, Daisy!’

  ‘No, I won’t leave it.’ She was near to tears. ‘I can’t let you go without things being sorted out between us. It’s not my way.’ She touched his arm. ‘I say what I mean, and you say what you mean, then we know where we stand.’ She lowered her head, speaking softly. ‘I played a rotten trick on you last night, but I didn’t know I was going to. I came into your room thinking you would listen to me. …’ She raised her head. ‘But you never gave me a chance. You tried to rush me into something I wasn’t ready for, but I see now I didn’t take a man’s normal feelings into account.’

  ‘A man’s what? Oh, my God, Daisy. You’re unique, did you know that? Bloody unique!’

  ‘I don’t see why.’ She was genuinely puzzled. ‘I can’t see anything out of the ordinary about me.’

  ‘Well, I can.’ With a laugh that was half a groan Sam pulled her into his arms. ‘You make me spitting mad, then you make me laugh. You stand on the doorstep at seven o’clock in the morning calmly discussing your reasons for climbing into my bed in your nightie in the middle of the night, and yet another time if I as much as look at you, you blush.’ He wrapped his arms tighter round her. ‘Oh, Daisybell, you’re a two-headed woman, did you know that?’

  ‘I’m a Gemini, the sign of the twins, that’s why.’ Daisy stared at him, feeling love for him well inside her. ‘I’m glad you didn’t spare me last night. I deserved your anger. I’ll be sorted out in my own mind the next time we meet.’

  ‘I wish you’d sort me out at the same time.’ Sam put her from him, grinning. ‘But remember I’m a different breed. From the wicked south. Like you once told me, we even think differently down there. We don’t always call a spade a spade where I come from.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, Sam?’

  He was looking at her with gently sad eyes. ‘That I never wish to hurt you. Will that do for now?’

  She saw that he was looking past her at Jimmy swaggering down the hall with a glistening greasy chin.

  ‘Say goodbye to Daisy.’ Sam trailed a
finger down her cheek before picking up the cases. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he whispered. ‘Very soon.’

  Jimmy hesitated, came towards Daisy, changed his mind almost visibly and took the three steps down to the pavement in one mighty leap. Then came back and kissed her, a swift smack of his lips in the air, but a kiss all the same.

  Daisy watched them walk together down the long street of tall houses. It seemed important somehow that she imprinted the memory of Jimmy’s back view on her mind. His over-long raincoat – bought on the big side for him to grow into – his grey knee-socks already concertina-wrinkled round his ankles, his belt twisted and the collar of his coat half up and half down.

  Standing there, with a million and one things still to do, she waited until they turned the corner. She had the strangest feeling, quickly subdued, that she would never see Jimmy again. Pushing the thought away before it could take hold, she went inside and closed the door. And immediately smelled tobacco smoke.

  In the lounge, sitting swamped in one of the brown chairs, Winnie was smoking the butt-end of a cigarette from one of the overflowing ashtrays. Inhaling deeply, she lifted the white planes of her small face to the ceiling and blew smoke down her nose. For a moment she blinked her sparse eyelashes up and down as if overwhelmed at the achievement. Then did it again, with more confidence this time.

  Edna told Daisy that she’d passed a very disturbed night what with somebody chasing up and down the landing and somebody else screaming blue murder. ‘There’s nothing like your own bed and your own lavatory seat,’ she said wistfully, tucking into her egg and bacon. ‘You don’t seem to get the comfort away from home.’