A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Daisy, who had every intention of starting as she meant to go on and no intention at all of charging for the odd cup of tea, believing firmly that hers was the way to make sure her visitors came back the next year, said nothing.

  ‘Owt to do with the last war,’ Mrs Mac continued, picking up the threads, ‘and Angus can remember it clear as a bell. Ask him to fetch four things from the shops and he’ll forget two of them.’

  ‘Does he really think there’s going to be another war?’ Daisy looked alarmed. ‘The local paper is full of nothing else but the arrangements for the Coronation celebrations in May.’

  ‘Angus’s niece went over to Germany last summer.’ Mrs Mac drew her chair closer in to the table and lowered her voice dramatically as if she suspected the house could be teeming with spies. ‘She is half-cousin to one of those Hitler Youth, a German girl from Berlin. Not, I might add, related on Angus’s side. No, there’s nothing like that in his family – where was I? Oh, yes. This niece came back from Germany with tales of hundreds and thousands of young men and women marching, drilling and singing war songs, going away for weeks at a time to these summer camps. Living like soldiers! Disciplined soldiers, not hoodlums like those from our holiday camps, running the streets and breaking telephones just for the fun of it.’ She got laboriously to her feet. ‘Well, you’ve detained me for long enough, Miss Bell, interesting though I always find your conversation to be.’ She sniffed appreciatively. ‘Something smells good. What’s on the menu for tonight?’

  ‘Savoury meat roll with thick gravy, served with roasted potatoes and carrots chopped fine with butter, followed by treacle sponge pudding and custard. Florence’s favourites,’ Daisy said. ‘Though I doubt if she’s coming out today. I’ll ask Winnie if she can stay on for an hour tonight and try and get to the hospital and back to find out for myself.’

  ‘They won’t let you in out of visiting hours,’ Mrs Mac said, longing to ask Daisy whether she used short or flaky pastry for the savoury roll, but pride forbidding. ‘The prisoners in Sing-Sing get more freedom than the patients do in that hospital. If your friend didn’t go in with a nervous breakdown she’ll be having one by the time she comes out. That’s if her blisters haven’t turned septic, which wouldn’t surprise me. There’s a Sister up there who wouldn’t bat an eyelid if a patient’s feet dropped off with gangrene, as long as the sheets on her bed were mitred proper at the corners.’

  Is it any wonder I love you, Mrs Mac, Daisy thought, when you cheer me up so much?

  Florence had no clear recollection of how she had got on to the pier, but there she was, sitting in a shelter facing a watery sun next to a couple who were fast asleep leaning on each other, with a tartan car rug tucked in round their legs and their mouths wide open snoring in rhythm together.

  She was damp, but not too wet, though the dressings on her feet were showing wet-black through her stockings, and the soles of the flimsy house slippers felt like soggy cardboard. If she leaned forward round the corner of the shelter she could see the dancing going on now the rain had stopped. Women mainly, dancing together, wearing hats and coats or their best costumes and court shoes, their handbags looped neatly over the gloved hands on their partners’ shoulders. Gliding and turning on the boards of the pier, just as if it were the sprung floor of a proper ballroom.

  ‘Pathetic,’ Florence muttered, leaning her head back and feeling the sun warm on her closed eyelids.

  Had she dreamed it or had she really stood on the jetty at the far end of the pier looking down into the sea and trying to find the courage to jump in and put an end to it all? Moving back when the height made her head reel, feeling her stomach come up into her mouth the way it had when she stood with Daisy on the Tower platform on a similar rain-swept day not all that long ago. The way it had done just the same on a hot summer’s day, when she had stared down into the Delph trying to nerve herself to throw herself in.

  What came over her when these black dogs of depression settled on her shoulders? Because that was all they were. Moods. Dark satanic moods over which she had no control. ‘Bound in shallows and in miseries’ as the Bard had said. She never really intended to make an end of it all. Life, in spite of all its vicissitudes, was too precious to be thrown away. A great wodge of uncharacteristic sentimentality settled on her, filling her chest, swelling her heart, so that the music from the pier dance band, the sinking sun setting the frill-trimmed waves of the receding tide dancing, merged and mingled. Her pale eyes filled with tears.

  A string of fairy lights came on, lending fresh enchantment. Florence squared her shoulders. Her life wasn’t over because a man had refused to fall in love with her. Joshua Penny would be moving on. He had hinted as much to her once or twice. But the flarchy rotter wouldn’t marry Daisy. He would go back to his wife, as all flarchy rotters did in the end.

  Daisy would need her then. Florence felt herself being stared at by the couple under the tartan rug. Wanting the shelter to themselves, she guessed, but hard cheese on them. … Had she really at times hated Daisy so much, envied her so much that she wished her dead? It was all the fault somehow of that young doctor in the hospital, sitting on her bed late at night, using his psychology on her and trying to make her talk about her childhood. Hatred, fear, insecurity, anger, all bound up somehow in her childhood. Florence closed her eyes as the couple folded the rug and moved away, leaving her alone.

  Why had she been in the habit of sleeping with her mother in those far off pre-school days? With her father banished to the back room? She had been too young to be able to know why, but she remembered her own bewilderment and the terror, and the look on her mother’s face as she hugged the young Florence close to the clean washed smell of her flowered cotton pinny.

  She remembered too a flight of dark narrow stairs – stumbling down them in her nightie, calling out for her mammy. She must have been very young to still be saying mammy. And after the comforting rocking in the chair by the fire, being laid to sleep on the horsehair sofa that pricked the backs of her legs. Waking to hear the dreadful shouting coming from upstairs, made all the more terrible because her mother, mild of voice and manner, never shouted.

  The banishment of her father to the back room, and Florence taking his place in her mother’s bed seemed to date from then, a situation that didn’t change until she was eleven or twelve years old, when she moved back into her own room and her father went back with her mother to share her room, but not her bed.

  How dare that young doctor try to intrude on her privacy? She had refused to remember. She didn’t want to remember. More harm than good came from remembering. …

  ‘Now I must go home,’ Florence said aloud.

  In the winter when she had finished being nice to the visitors for Daisy’s sake, when she had changed their sheets, wiped round their wash basins, hung their face flannels up to dry, rushed from kitchen to dining room with endless meals, emptied ashtrays, smiled till her face cracked at badly behaved children who needed their bottoms smacking, in the winter, when things were slacker, she would find a job. Part-time possibly, so she could go to night school in the evenings. English literature and social history. Those would be her subjects. She might even go the whole hog and be a mature student studying for a very belated Matriculation Certificate.

  The future was full of possibilities. It always had been if there hadn’t always been something holding her back. She came out on to the promenade with her slow imperious shuffling walk. On the way back home she would call in at the café in the Arcade and retrieve her case. That was if it was still there. She didn’t much care if it had disappeared, there wasn’t anything in it of value. And if there had been, what were material things anyway?

  Daisy would be so surprised to see her. ‘You are impossible, Florence Livesey!’ she would say. Then she would put the kettle on and sit Florence down and tut-tut over her ruined slippers, and the kitchen would be warm and smelling of baking and roasting, and in no time at all they would be drinking tea together. It would
be just the two of them, the way it was meant to be.

  Daisy was her friend. Daisy was her family. Joshua would move on and the flarchy rotter would go back to his wife. It had all been written somewhere in the mists of time.

  Florence waited impatiently to cross the road. She made one attempt, then to be on the safe side stood back as a bus lumbered past. Looking right, then left, then right again, she let a powerful-looking car whizz by. …

  And misjudged entirely the speed of an oncoming two-seater, impudently tooting as it overtook a lumbering taxi.

  Giving the young driver no chance at all to avoid her as she seemed to step right in front of him before disappearing beneath the wheels of his sports car with its souped-up engine, its fancy cigarette lighter and its leather steering wheel.

  Chapter Nine

  PURELY BY COINCIDENCE the young doctor was on duty in Casualty when they wheeled Florence in. She had stopped breathing in the ambulance on the way to the hospital but he went through the motions, listening through his stethoscope for a heartbeat he knew was silenced for ever.

  He wasn’t surprised. He had diagnosed Miss Livesey as an hysteric from the start. She had refused to talk to him. She had set those thin lips of hers into a straight line, even turned her head rudely away when he had tried to help her. A waste of what could have been a good and productive life, but this patient’s life had been programmed for disaster since her childhood. The coronet’s verdict would be clear-cut. ‘While of unsound mind. …’

  ‘Ring for them to take her downstairs,’ he told the nurse, as she drew up the sheet to cover Florence’s face. ‘Don’t suppose she gave a thought to the poor devil driving the car.’

  Joshua, on his way out to post a letter, pulled the door to behind him when he saw the two policemen getting out of their car.

  He lived there, he told them quickly. If it was bad news about Mr Schofield he’d rather be there when Miss Bell was told. No, he wasn’t a relative, just a very good friend. It was about Mr Schofield, wasn’t it?

  The kitchen was in its usual late-afternoon state of what Daisy called organized chaos. She turned a flushed and smiling face as Joshua came in and closed the door behind him.

  ‘There’s no word from the hospital, Joshua.’ Lifting a pan lid she prodded the contents with a fork. ‘I’m going up there as soon as the clearing away is finished. I need to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘Yes?’ One swift glance at his face and she knew something was dreadfully wrong.

  ‘It’s Florence, love.’ His eyes were filled with pain for her.

  ‘She’s coming home tomorrow. I know it will be tomorrow, Joshua.’

  He forced himself to say the words: ‘Florence won’t be coming home tomorrow. She … oh, God, I can’t think of any other way to tell you. She’s dead, Daisy. There are two policemen in the hall waiting to tell you about it.’

  ‘How can she be dead?’ Daisy’s voice came out as a loud angry wail. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so daft in me whole life. She isn’t even ill! Someone has lied. Got names mixed up or something. It happens. … It’s not true! I won’t believe it!’ When he tried to take her in his arms she pushed him away with the flats of her hands. ‘You’re making me mad, Joshua! I haven’t got time to talk to anybody. … Tell them to go away!’

  Joshua gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him. And wanted to die himself when he saw the agonized bewilderment in her eyes. ‘Florence came out of hospital late this morning. She must have walked about for hours, then this afternoon she walked straight out into the road in front of a car. Deliberately. Without looking, the driver said. He’s a very young man apparently, badly shaken up. There was nothing he could do to avoid her.’

  ‘I see.’

  Winnie came through the door to see what was going on. Policemen meant trouble, she knew that much.

  ‘Florence is dead, Winnie.’ Daisy’s voice was flat. ‘I am going upstairs for a little while. Keep your eye on the pans for me, please.’

  She walked out of the kitchen, past the two policemen standing awkwardly in the hall, brushing past them as if they weren’t there. It seemed to her that someone was weeping noisily, but it couldn’t be her. She would never dream of making a noise like that.

  Winnie stood there with her mouth open trying not to be glad. There was only one place for you if you were wicked enough to think evil thoughts like that. Hell, with its flaming Lake of Fire. She shuddered. Poor Miss Bell. Making that awful moaning sound, with the Margerisons from Bolton coming in through the front door and wondering what on earth was going on. Mr Penny had explained it nicely. He had talked to the policemen, too, and they had gone away after whispering together for a few seconds.

  Winnie turned down a gas jet beneath a bubbling pan. She couldn’t be expected to feel heartbroken, could she, when she’d never even met Miss Livesey? Mrs Mac had told Winnie’s mother that Miss Livesey was a bit too lah-di-dah for her liking. Fancied herself too much. If she wasn’t coming back, then her room would be free. The wicked thoughts were intruding again.

  Miss Bell might ask for Winnie to live in. In this lovely house with its carpets and two inside toilets. Jessie was fourteen now and left school. Let her take over looking after the kids at home. She’d always had more patience with them, anyroad.

  Winnie raised pious eyes ceilingwards. ‘I’m not really rejoicing, God. Just finding it hard not to be a little bit glad. We’re such a good team, me and Miss Bell. She says so every day. It would be a shame to split us up now.’

  Be hanged to sensitivity. Joshua ran upstairs to find Daisy. If she was in trouble he had to be there. There was simply no way he could help himself. He found her behind the door in Florence’s room, sobbing quietly now into the blanket roughness of Florence’s old brown dressing-gown. This time, when he pulled her into his arms, she came unresisting.

  ‘She tried to do it once before, Joshua. Her father had shouted at her and disgusted her. He seemed to have the power to disgust her. But I thought she’d put all that behind her. She was happy most of the time. Not all the time, but then nobody’s happy all the time, are they? She loathed housework, you see, even though she liked things to be clean and tidy. She was a contradiction, Joshua.’

  ‘Not knowing what she wanted, but knowing it should be something better.’ Joshua remembered Florence’s face that first day in the hospital when she had talked about Daisy as if she hated her. ‘And sometimes not being able o accept other people’s happiness,’ he said softly.

  ‘But none of those things add up to being bad enough to make her want to take her own life.’ Daisy raised a tear-stained face. ‘She must have been desperately unhappy to do a terrible thing like that. I can’t believe it. She drew back at the last minute the other time, Joshua, and I knew then that in spite of all her black moods Florence’s common sense never really deserted her. I knew her!’

  She was growing calmer by the minute. The frozen mask of shock had gone from her face. Joshua wondered why he had been afraid that she might collapse or have to be put to bed under sedation. So many things were going wrong for her.

  She wiped her eyes and asked him did she look too awful? ‘I’ll just splash my eyes with cold water in the bathroom on the way down,’ she said. ‘Then I must go and rescue Winnie.’ She laid a hand gently against his cheek. ‘Thank you for being so kind to me, Joshua. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  ‘You never need to do without me,’ he said at once, but she was already on her way down the first flight of stairs to bathe her tears away and get on with what she had to do.

  But Daisy didn’t know Florence. Hadn’t known Florence. Joshua went into his own room. He had seen the dark side of Daisy’s friend that afternoon in the hospital, seen her face contorted with rage and envy. She had told him that Daisy had spent the night with Sam, then watched his face to test his reaction. Tormented by rage, frustration and pain, she had done that.

  Joshua picked up a hair
brush and smoothed back the sides of his thick brown hair. He narrowed his eyes at his reflection.

  ‘Oh, no, Daisy. You didn’t know Florence. You might think you did, but you were wrong.’ The brush was stilled in his hand. ‘But I knew her. After that revealing outburst I knew her very well. She couldn’t bear to think of you with a man.’ He threw the brush down. ‘And in your blessed innocence you never suspected the inference of that for a minute, did you, Daisy, love?’

  Edna didn’t bat as much as an eyelid when she heard. She told Arnold that Florrie Livesey was neurotical. Hadn’t her mother been the same, scrubbing her flags till you felt you ought to step out in the road rather than walk on them? She was sweet on that lodger on the top floor, you know, the one in prison for stealing and thumping policemen. She’d gone dancing with him, and now she couldn’t bear the shame. How did she know he’d been arrested? Well, of course she knew. It wasn’t the sort of thing Daisy or that nice Mr Penny would keep to themselves when they visited her in hospital, now was it? It was all right for Arnold sticking up for her. He didn’t see her walking the streets last summer with her nightie sticking out from beneath her coat. He didn’t hear the mucky thoughts coming out of her mouth about her father, either. They were all the same, the Florrie Liveseys of this world. Sanctimonious on the outside, run a mile if they were involved in as much as a breath of scandal, yet underneath as depraved as the rest. Oh, yes, she’d had Miss Livesey weighed up right from the start. Bad blood would out in the end.

  *

  Arnold couldn’t quite make it all out. He had liked Florence. He would never forget the day he had seen her staggering down the hill leaning on Daisy. Something had told him she had never meant to do away with herself. More a cry for help, he would have said. And he couldn’t understand her choosing such a horrible way to end it all. Too messy and undignified for Florence. No, there was definitely something wrong somewhere, if only he could put a finger on it. He had a feeling Florence was being misunderstood right to the very end.