A Better World than This (11 page)

‘Technical books,’ he was saying, answering her question.
‘Never
fiction. I used to be told that sticking your nose in a story-book was a waste of time.’

‘In a book I’ve just read,’ she went on, ‘a young man called Harry wins on the horses. Twenty-two pounds for a threepenny bet! He gives half of it away, but with the rest he takes his girl Helen away to the seaside. Away from the terrible slum they live in to a place where they can lie in the bracken and watch little boats sailing out to sea. It’s called
Love on the Dole
.’

At the memory of what the two young lovers did in the bracken besides watching little boats sailing out to sea, Daisy blushed. She glanced at Sam to see if he had noticed, but he was walking along by her side with his head bent. As if looking for a coin he had dropped and lost. And was determined to find.

Florence had walked for what seemed to be miles, staring down at the cracks in the pavement, putting one foot in front of the other, because something told her that was the way you walked. She had been surprised to find that Daisy was not at home, but not amazed. To be amazed would have indicated feeling of some sort or other, and Florence felt nothing. The only thing she was certain of was that she was never going back to the house again. Never. Ever. Ever.

Being Wakes Week, there were few people about in the streets. The few she met stared at her strangely. She couldn’t think why. After all, she had remembered to put on her long coat over her nightdress, and her lace-up shoes over her bare feet, and if her long pale hair was hanging loose down her back instead of rolled up into its neat pleat, what did that signify?

The worrying thing was, where could she go? The neighbours on either side had gone on their holidays, Southport and Cleveleys respectively. Daisy was out, and the one friend she had at work had gone further afield, to Scarborough. Florence saw the park side gates looming in front of her, and with her nightdress trailing, crossed over
the
road. The sun was so hot that a series of gas-tar bubbles had erupted on the newly-laid macadam surface. She remembered the satisfaction of bursting them as a child, leaving flattened blisters and greasy black marks on her clean white dress when she’d wiped her fingers down it.

There was a bench inside the park, not far from the gates. It was set back from the path, fronting rhododendron bushes, overlooking the duck-pond. As Florence sat down and arranged the nightgown neatly round her ankles, she saw that the hem was all smeared with dust.

‘Sorry, Mother,’ she whispered, then pulled herself up sharply. ‘That way madness lies,’ she told herself firmly. ‘Shakespeare.’

Oh, but her mother had been such a lovely little woman. Neat as a new pin, with a clean blouse on every day, never missing. She had always arranged the clothes-rack so carefully after she’d finished the ironing. Underclothes first, then laid over them her lace-edged pillow-cases and embroidered mats, starched stiff as planks and ironed first on the front then the back, to bring the French knots into prominence. Fastidious wasn’t the word for her mother. Spotless was more like it, from the top of her shining hair to the soles of her polished boots. Not clogs, never, even though her mother had, as a young woman, stood at three looms in a weaving shed. No shawls, neither. She had gone to work wearing a coat and hat, and never stood gossiping on the step like the other women in the street. When she sent Florence out for chips she had always given her a white teacloth to lay over the basket, hiding the basin. When she mopped the front step she had got up early and done it in the dark with a piece of sacking protecting her clean flowered apron.

‘Oh, Mother. …’ Two fat tears rolled down Florence’s thin pale cheeks. What would she think about what was going on now? How could she stomach that terrible common woman living in her house, dab-washing in the slopstone and never boiling her whites in the copper?

Florence wasn’t going to think about what had been said
that
morning. What her father had shouted, standing on the cut-rug in front of the fire, wearing a vest that had gone a bad colour with that woman’s slap-dash methods, with his braces dangling, and a love-bite showing up clearly on his thick red neck.

It was terrible … terrible. Unforgivable. Awful. Getting up from the bench, Florence trailed wearily back along the gravel path. Daisy was bound to be back now from wherever she had been when Florence knocked at the door.

Daisy, with her matter-of-fact ways and her solid common sense. She’d probably gone down to the dairy for the milk, with the roundsman being on his holidays. Leaving her mother in bed, making her promise not to answer the door. Florence walked back up a short road hung with trees like a cathedral cloister, ignoring the rude remarks made by two boys with tennis rackets under their arms. Telling herself they were old enough to know better.

Yes, Daisy would tell her what to do. Kindness personified, that was her friend. Florence could see her filling the kettle, setting it to boil. She could almost hear the gas jet plop into life as Daisy applied a match to it. Feet on the ground, unflappable Daisy, never moody, always the same.

A rock in a storm-tossed sea, thought Florence, wondering if she had read that somewhere. Or just made it up.

In all her wild imaginings Daisy could never have believed that she would be strolling along the prom at Blackpool with the wind and the sun stinging her cheeks and Sam looking so nautical in his single-breasted flannel jacket with brass buttons.

‘I have to talk to you,’ he said suddenly, drawing her towards two deckchairs set side by side by the sea wall.

‘You have to pay even if you only stop for …’

‘It doesn’t
matter
.’

He seemed on edge,
irritated
, as he reached into his inside pocket for his silver cigarette case. For a few seconds he busied himself, taking a cigarette, tapping it against the
polished
surface, then struggling with his lighter, shielding the flame with his hand.

A faint niggle furrowed Daisy’s forehead. She stared down at the sands, at the pools left by the morning tide. Surely there were no sands as clean or as satisfying as those at Blackpool? It came from the children’s buckets with a decent plop, unsullied by stones or pebbles. There was a family playing cricket by the sea’s edge and even as she watched the father hit the ball for a glorious six, while the smallest boy hurled himself face-downwards on the sands because he felt his turn was well overdue.

‘I may not be coming this way again.’ Sam drew on the cigarette. He looked up at the sky as if searching for the right words. ‘I don’t want you to read more than there is into our …’ he hesitated, ‘our friendship.’

A drove of donkeys galloped along the beach, girls screaming in mock terror as they clung on for dear life. Quite dispassionately Daisy turned her head to watch them go by. She had the strangest notion that if she ignored what Sam was trying to tell her, the words would float away over the horizon.

‘I don’t live with my wife.’ Sam studied the glowing tip of his cigarette. ‘For the past year I’ve been living alone over the garage at my boss’s house.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mr Evison understands the situation. It suits him, and it suits me. In return for being at his beck and call, driving the other car to take his wife shopping and picking his children up from school. From three different private schools. As well as doing the garden and acting as general dogsbody. He pays me a decent wage and lets me live rent-free.’

‘I see,’ Daisy said in a small voice.

Sam flicked the remains of the cigarette over the railings. ‘I have one more year to go with my studies – I’m doing a correspondence course in motor engineering – then I will have the certificates to show that I am a qualified engineer. I served my time as an apprentice just after the war, then instead of going any further I got married. My wife’s father
had
a small printing business, and he gave me a job in the front office, being nice to customers and helping them to choose letter-headings and wedding invitation cards. Nicer than wearing overalls and lying underneath cars, you see.’

He reached for another cigarette. ‘But he went bust, then he died, and for a while I did anything I could find: door-to-door selling, an attendant at a swimming baths – oh, don’t you believe that there’s no unemployment down south. And I got the sack – I forget from which job – and my wife got part-time work.’ He sighed. ‘That was when the rot set in.’

‘So you looked after the children?’

Daisy was busy adjusting the white buckle on the belt of the flower-sprigged dress. Straightening it so that the thin material threaded through evenly. Sam suddenly wanted to slap her hand away. Yet what had he expected? That she would burst into tears, and tell him she would die if he meant what he’d said about not coming north again?

‘Her mother looked after the kids.’ He kept his voice as even as hers. ‘So where did that leave me?’ He turned to face Daisy and she flinched at the bitterness in his expression. ‘After a hell of a dust-up I packed my things and cleared off.’

‘Leaving your wife with her mother?’

‘Oh, God, no. Now that my wife’s working she pays a woman to have them, to pick them up from school at lunch time. Oh, God, no, her mother isn’t the clinging type. She has a life of her own, has Queenie.’

‘You mean she doesn’t live her life through her daughter and grandchildren.’

‘Hell, no.’

‘It’s a working-class thing that, isn’t it?’

‘I never said that.’

‘But it’s true.’ Daisy seemed to have settled the buckle to her satisfaction. ‘Especially up here. It’s a trap, really. Florence would have been just the same if her mother hadn’t died.’

‘Florence?’

‘My friend.’

‘Oh, yes, you told me.’

‘But you are quite wrong in thinking that I read more than I ought into
our
friendship.’ Daisy’s voice was very high, very clear. ‘Florence would laugh if I told her, not that I
will
tell her. I’ve never mentioned you, as a matter of fact. She doesn’t have a very high opinion of men.’ She jumped up suddenly. ‘I really think we should be getting back. Those children will be hungry, and my mother likes her meals at regular times, even picnics. That’s a northern trait, too.’

‘Daisy?’ Catching hold of her hand, Sam pulled her back to her chair. ‘Please listen to me.’

‘Is there something else you want to tell me?’ Daisy’s chin lifted. ‘It helps to talk to a friend, I know.’

‘Daisy!’ Jerking her towards him, Sam held her fast by the wrists. ‘Stop being so …’

‘So what?’

‘So un-Daisyish.’

‘And what does that mean?’

He missed entirely the break of near hysteria in her voice. ‘Pretending not to mind when you do.’ His beautiful eyes were liquid with tenderness and she couldn’t bear to look at him. ‘
I
care,’ he told her. ‘Meeting you has been a revelation to me. You’re the kind of person who makes the best of things, love. There isn’t a martyred bone in your body. You don’t rail against what fate throws up for you. You just get on with living.’ His voice was soft, almost soporific. ‘You’re not for ever thinking the grass could be greener over the other side of the fence. You accept the inevitable, and cooperate with it.’

‘And what you really mean is that for me the inevitable is accepting that I will never see you again?’

‘That too.’ A smile lifted the corner of his mobile mouth. ‘You are all right, Daisy. A lot more than all right. No, don’t pull away.’ Bending his head he kissed her lips in a tender-sweet caress. ‘There will always be a special corner in my heart. Just for you, Daisybell. I wish I could have got to know you better.’

‘Shall we go back?’

Breaking free, Daisy began to walk back along the promenade. There was so much anger inside her she could feel it drumming her heartbearts and flushing her face. How dare he patronize her like that? He wasn’t worth one of the shop’s twopenny buns, not even one without cream in it. She was sorry for his wife, heart-sorry for her, and it was no wonder she’d chucked him out, in spite of what he’d said about walking away himself. Lies? He could tell them to music. He was as much like Clark Gable as she was like Shirley Temple. His eyes were too close together, just as her mother said. She couldn’t bear it. His assumption that she would break her heart. …

She began to run, dodging round a woman in a pink floppy hat licking an ice-cream cornet, almost knocking over a toddler with a livid boiled face, staggering bandy-legged beside his pushchair. People were staring at her, and she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was to put as much distance between them as she could. Why, she wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole, not even a mile-long barge pole. If he lay dying of thirst with a cup of water just out of reach, she would kick it over rather than give him a sip. All this she told herself without believing a word of it.

She could see her mother now on the sands, sitting with her deckchair positioned away from the sun, because Martha didn’t believe in the sun. The two children were running backwards and forwards from a pool with buckets of sea to pour into the moat encircling Windsor Castle. Intent on what they were doing.

The beach was very crowded now. Daisy had to step over a fully-clothed man with a newspaper over his face lying prone on a striped towel before she could reach her mother.

Martha’s right hand trailed listlessly in the sand. Her head had fallen sideways as she slept, knocking her hat askew. Her mouth was wide open. And behind the veil so were her eyes.

A group of children ran screaming past the chair, dragging a long senna-coloured trail of seaweed; not a yard away a
woman
, fresh from her swim, struggled out of a wet bathing suit beneath a tent-like towelling robe. A beach ball, red and shiny, bounced almost into Daisy’s face and she knocked it away with an automatic swipe of a hand.

Stunned and disbelieving, she looked up at Sam picking his way towards her. Knowing that although the sun was still shining from a clear blue sky, although children played, balls bounced and the raucous voices of Punch and Judy clamoured for attention not yards away, her mother would hear and see nothing ever again.