A Better World than This (21 page)

Florence went to say goodbye to her father, who was still in a state of holiness, and his equally sanctimonious lady friend, but when Matthew suggested they went down on their knees on the very spot where the broken gin bottle had lain to ask the Lord to shower His blessings on her new venture, she flatly refused.

‘The Lord helps those who help themselves,’ she said, leaving the pair of them to their devotions, hardly raising an eyebrow when Matthew swore the only drop he was ever going to touch again was Communion wine.

Edna was being decent about it all now that Daisy had given her and Arnold a firm invitation to spend Easter at Shangri-La. ‘On the house, of course,’ Daisy had promised, and Betty, bless her, whispered a heartfelt thank you to her cousin for giving her the chance of a few days alone with Cyril and the baby. Not that she meant it nasty, not after what her mother did for them, but it would be nice all the same.

At least twenty of the shop’s regular customers had promised to come for their holidays, making firm bookings, and the good Doctor Marsden and his wife had sent a set of ecru antimacassars in drawn-threadwork which Daisy had already allocated in her mind for the backs of the new chairs she was determined to buy for the brown lounge of Shangri-La.

When the day came she went into the bakehouse for the last time. The new baker, with flour in his eyebrows, gave her a powdery handshake and one of the apprentices turned round from sliding a tray of loaves into the proving oven and grinned. Daisy patted the shiny black door of the fire-oven, stopped herself just in time from reaching up to adjust the damper, stepped out into the yard and walked through the door where Sam had once cupped her face in his hands and
told
her she was lovely. She was going now to a house where he had never been; where no memories lingered. She was free of him at last.

They were travelling in the furniture van, parked in the exact spot where, on a brilliant summer’s day, the Rolls-Royce had stood at the kerb, gleaming with polish, with the Spirit of Ecstasy poised spread-winged on the bonnet.

‘All set, love?’ The driver, a scrawny little man, told Florence to hutch up. Daisy climbed in and they were off.

The driver’s mate had helped to load the van with the few pieces of furniture Daisy had decided to take with her, had clutched his back, sworn he’d done it in and walking like a bent paper-clip, had gone off home to lie on a board.

‘I’ll manage, never fear.’ The driver coughed and wheezed, thumping his chest with a closed fist. ‘Breaks up the phlegm,’ he explained.

After a few miles of listening to him hawking and rasping in his throat, Daisy uttered to Florence in a whisper she knew would be drowned by the noisy engine of the shabby little van: ‘If he doesn’t spit it out I’ll go crazy!’

‘If he
does
, I certainly will,’ Florence said, speaking equally softly and smiling at him, as he clenched his fist to begin the thumping and hawking process again.

By a fluke of nature the day was more like spring; the Blackpool sky so wide and blue it reminded Daisy of a drawing in a child’s reading book, the clouds as white and stuffed as fat feather pillows. Climbing down from the van she lifted her head to sniff the salt and shrimps smell she had associated with Blackpool since her childhood. It was a day for walking on the promenade with a headscarf tied under her chin, not for watching helplessly as the puny driver struggled to unload a single mattress from the van.

‘He’s got a terrible chesty cold,’ she told Mrs Mac, who had appeared on the pavement the minute the van drew up at the kerb.

‘And TB,’ Mrs Mac said at once. ‘His lungs are shot, that’s
obvious
. I hope he didn’t breathe on you on the way.’

‘Coughed in my face the whole time,’ Florence said cheerfully. ‘Where is the nearest sanatorium I can book into when I start spitting blood?’

Mrs Mac ignored her. ‘No good asking my husband, not with his hernia. He can’t move an inch without his truss, and Mr Penny’s at work, of course. Ee, my goodness, that mattress’ll flatten him if he doesn’t watch out.’

With a swift exchange of glances, Daisy and Florence moved into action, spreading arms that didn’t seem long enough round one end of the unwieldy mattress and tottering backwards across the pavement. Daisy’s hat was knocked off, and Florence felt her hair coming down, but they managed to negotiate the front steps before setting their end down with a thud.

‘What on earth?’

Two red faces turned as one in the direction of the voice. A man of slightly more than average height, his straight black hair plastered to his head with brilliantine, was coming out of Shangri-La wearing a camel-hair coat and a disbelieving expression on his neatly sculptured features.

Cary Grant, Daisy’s mind registered at once, even to the cigarette held loosely in his left hand. She put a hand up to her unruly hair and bent down to retrieve her hat, thinking that if the vision stood still in a shop window as a dummy nobody would know the difference, so perfect was he in every detail from his polished shoes to his patent-leather hair.

‘Miss Bell, I take it?’ The vision held out a hand to Florence.

‘
I’m
Miss Bell.’ Daisy put out the hand holding the hat and blushed.

‘Looks like you’re having a spot of trouble.’ Taking off the splendid coat, he handed it to Mrs Mac and tossed the cigarette away. ‘Bobbie Schofield at your service,’ he said, taking one end of the mattress and negotiating the steps as nimbly as a mountain goat. ‘Up a bit with your end, old fruit. That’s the ticket!’

*

‘No, we’re
not
going out for fish and chips.’ Daisy stood in the middle of the kitchen late that afternoon, surrounded by cartons and boxes and things with nowhere to go. ‘This is the first meal in this establishment and I won’t sink so low!’ She looked round wildly, trying to remember where she had packed the perishable food. ‘Mr Penny will be back from work soon and he’s going to sit down in the dining-room with Mr Schofield in a civilized manner and eat a decently-cooked tea. Ah, here it is!’ She pounced on a carton of greengrocery. ‘I knew there wouldn’t be time to do any food shopping today, so I brought a few things with me. I’ll make potato pancakes, with boiled beetroot and a nice slice of ham. And somewhere … somewhere there’s a box of Eccles cakes. They’ll have to do for pudding just for today.’

There was a gleam in her eye that wouldn’t be denied. Florence could see already that Daisy was going to be in her element. The house might be in a turmoil of unpacked cases, books spilling everywhere, even down the stairs, no beds made up for them to sleep in tonight, and God knew where the knives and forks were kept underneath all this. But there were two hungry men to feed and come hell or high water Daisy would cook them a meal.

‘They’ve been fending for themselves for several months now, for heaven’s sake! One more day isn’t going to make any difference!’ Florence was really put out. The sight of Daisy wearing a blue scarf tied like a turban calmly gathering her ingredients together sent a prickle of irritation up her spine.

‘All the more reason they should know what properly cooked food can taste like.’ Daisy pounced with joy on a bag of plain flour. ‘Now, if I can find the onions. …’

‘Food!’ Florence clenched her fists. ‘You’re obsessed with food!’

‘Well, of course I am. It’s my job, and always has been.’ Daisy turned round in surprise. ‘There’s no need to be shirty about it.’

‘I am
not
being shirty!’ Florence made a last attempt to latch on to her slipping control, and failed. ‘I just don’t think now is the time to do your Mrs Beeton act, that’s all.’

Her legs ached, and there was a low grinding pain in the pit of her stomach. She could feel her poorly time coming on and knew it was going to be bad this month. If they had remembered to bring the Indian brandy she had no idea where it was. She had no idea where
anything
was, and if Daisy didn’t stop being so sweetly reasonable she might just clock her one. The force of Florence’s rage took her by surprise.

‘You were just the same at Guide camp,’ she said coldly and clearly. ‘Insisting on cooking flamin’ rabbit pie when sausages and bacon would have done just as well. Standing there under a tarpaulin in a wet field rolling pastry to show off. Everybody was laughing at you, if you must know.’

‘How many years ago was that?’ Daisy was genuinely astonished. ‘They ate the pie, anyroad.
And
enjoyed it, if I remember rightly.’

‘Making you the heroine of the hour once again.’

‘The what?’

‘The flamin’ heroine. Like one of your flamin’ film stars. Who are you being now? Janet Gaynor?’ With that she turned on her heel and lurched from the kitchen, holding a hand to her head.

Daisy heard her feet pounding on the stairs, then the slam of a door. It was a good job they were alone in the house, she muttered, following on with the potato-peeler still clutched in a hand. Imagine the visitors come for a nice holiday, sitting in the lounge or the dining-room, and hearing the staff quarrelling at the tops of their voices in the kitchen! She hurried along the landing to find that Florence had locked herself in a bedroom, turning a key that Daisy had thought was rusted into its lock.

‘Florence?’ She tapped on the door and waited, head inclined, listening for the sound of sobbing. She rattled the door knob. ‘Florence? Come on out, or at least let me in so we can talk.’

‘So you can use your charm on
me
?’ There was such a wealth of bitterness in Florence’s voice that Daisy recoiled.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

Silence. Daisy rattled the door again, then walked slowly back along the landing and down the stairs. So that was it! Mr Schofield. Pausing briefly by the mirror in the hall Daisy stared at the reflection of an ordinary round face with a halo of sausage curls, cheeks too pink for beauty, and brown eyes ringed with tiredness. Charm? Was that what Florence thought she had?

Yet
she
was the one Mr Schofield had flirted with. Not Florence. He had taken off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and made endless journeys into the house with chairs, the back end of a dressing-table, joking with the driver, teasing Daisy. ‘Now, Miss Bell, where shall we put this chair? Chippendale, I presume? Back a bit, Horace.’ Winking at Daisy. ‘Nasty cough you’ve got there, Horace.’ And Daisy had just had to stop what she was doing and laugh, because whatever the driver’s real name was, Horace fitted him perfectly. Mr Schofield was a bit of a gas, no doubt about that.

‘Why aren’t you at work?’ she’d asked him, as he staggered upstairs, long legs bowed beneath the weight of a heavy mahogany bedside table.

‘A bad back,’ he’d told her, and after one startled moment her laugh had rung out again, the infectious laugh that Sam had once thought embraced all the sorrows of the world.

Mr Schofield went dancing every single night. He had more cups to prove his expertise at the tango than you could buy on a pot market, he’d said, and sure enough, when he’d invited her into his room for what he called a look-see, there they were on shelves all round the walls, big cups and little ones, all engraved with his name, Robert Schofield. Tango 1932. Quick-step 1933. Waltz, modern and old-fashioned, 1935.

‘What happened to 1934?’ she asked him, and he twirled imaginary ends of his five-a-side moustache.

‘The year of me back,’ he said solemnly, but not before she
saw
a shadow pass across his face.

Where was Florence when all this was going on? Daisy reached up and took three eggs down from the bowl on a shelf by the gas cooker, and like the re-run of a film remembered Mr Penny doing the same the day he had made the leathery omelette.

Florence had been busily unpacking their joint collection of books, she recalled. Stacking them at the sides of the stairs and moaning about the lack of shelves. Florence, dusty and untidy, pushing the fine wispy hair from her face, with a streak of dirt down her long nose, hearing their laughter and tightening her mouth into a hard straight line.

Daisy rummaged in a carton and came up with the bottle of olive oil she had hoped to find there. She decided to grate a little cheese into the potatoes and onions to give them a bit of taste. She would have to have a nice long talk to Florence, but not now … not just now.

Charm. The very word tasted bad on Florence’s tongue. What or who was it decided that some people had it in abundance, while others lacked it completely? Daisy wasn’t beautiful, not in the conventional sense of the word, she didn’t even have a way with men; she wasn’t coy, heaven forbid, or flirtatious. She didn’t play the helpless female, or flutter her eyelashes, or do any of the things Florence despised. Yet men took to her straight away. Why? Because she made them laugh? Because they knew she wasn’t waiting for them to fall in love with her? Florence stared out of the window at a narrow yard flanked by a sandy strip of uncultivated garden. Was it because Daisy
liked
men, while Florence mistrusted them, found them on the whole to be like overgrown schoolboys, especially the twirpish Mr Schofield who obviously thought he was God’s gift to unattached females?

Florence ran a finger down the pane of glass and grimaced at the grime it revealed. The grinding pain low down in her back was spreading round to her front. Angular, tall, long-necked,
aggressive
and filled at times with this undefined anger, she saw herself so clearly she wondered if she
could
just possibly be one of those unnatural women? But her furtive enjoyment of
The Well of Loneliness
had left her filled with pity, but with no sense at all of reader identification.

She had told Daisy of an affair with a married man. Florence pressed her forehead against the window, adding to the dirty streak already there. A few burning glances, hands held across a pot of tea in a café in Preston; a suggestion that she would meet him one afternoon in a dingy hotel room and Florence had heard the music of love fade away. No, if she couldn’t have love that was pure and clean and undefiled, she would do without it.