A Better World than This (48 page)

‘As I thought,’ he muttered, shining the beam on a damp circular patch on the ceiling, dripping water down the light cord. ‘It’s not too bad in here,’ he reassured Daisy. ‘Bring me the washing-up bowl, love, then you’ll need mops and buckets, and saucers for the candles. Don’t say young Winnie’s managing to sleep through all this?’

‘She’d sleep through the Charge of the Light Brigade once she’s got off.’

‘Then let her be.’ Joshua was half-way upstairs handing out candles to the men from number two and number three. ‘Don’t tell me the bloke responsible for this flood is back in bed?’ He stared round in disbelief.

‘He is, y’know.’ Number two was using one of Daisy’s good towels to mop up with, bending from the waist, sloshing it about in the water, twisting the Christy towel into a rope before squeezing the water into a chamber pot hastily snatched from the cupboard by the side of his bed. ‘I’ve sent the missus back to bed; she’s neither use nor ornament at the best of times, but would you credit that fella doing the same? Does he expect us to mop round him while he lies there like bloody King Canute?’

‘Well, they say it takes all sorts.’ Number three up-ended a candle into a saucer, letting the wax drip before he anchored the candle firmly. ‘Right, gaffer. Let’s be having me marching orders.’

‘Just get as much water up as you can, as quick as you can.’ Joshua’s mind accepted that he was wearing his captain’s hat once again as he issued orders, handed out jobs, urged and cajoled. Captain Penny of the East Lancashire Fusiliers, in charge of his men, liked and respected because he would not
ask
them to do anything he would not willingly do himself.

In number four bedroom he glanced round at the tell-tale signs, the torch beam showing a waistcoat stained with yellow vomit over the back of a chair, an empty whisky bottle, an overflowing ashtray. His temper flared.

‘Out of there, man!’ Without ceremony Joshua whipped the blankets away. ‘On your feet, there’s work to be done.’

The man was a pitiful sight, but Joshua hardened his heart. He guessed how the poor devil felt, he could imagine the thousand demons pounding away in his head, but the careless blighter was
responsible
for this unholy mess! ‘On your feet!’ He waited none too patiently.

‘I can’t. If I bend over I’ll be sick again. Oh, God, is it worth it? Is anything bloody worth it?’

One minute he was lying there, sick and sorry for himself; the next he was out of bed, gasping as his bare feet met the drenched carpet. Yet he had no firm recollection of the man standing there having touched him. Brown eyes blazed at him from a face as hard as granite.

‘If you’re sick use that.’ Joshua thrust a bucket at him. ‘But for now face up to things. We
know
it was an accident, but buckle to and help to put it right. At the double! D’you hear me?’

By four o’clock they had done what could be done. A shivering Daisy was ordered back to bed by Joshua. ‘Do you want to be ill? Do you want to crack?’ He steeled himself against her pleading expression. ‘And change out of that nightgown. The hem’s soaking.’ His voice softened. ‘I’ll go down and make them a pot of tea, love. You can do your thanking later. They
wanted
to help.’ He half smiled. ‘All but your precious number four, though I soon had him sorted out.’

‘They are my guests.’ She was so tired the words came slurred.

Joshua shone the torch on to her feet, blue with cold and none too clean. Without giving himself time to think he scooped her up into his arms and carried her up to her room.
Kicking
the door open he deposited her none too gently on her bed. ‘Right! Are you going to take off that wet nightie, or do you want me to do it for you? That’s what your dad would have done, isn’t it, when you were a child? And if I remind you so much of him. …’

In the kitchen the four men leaned against whatever was handy and sipped hot sweet tea, as close as if they were lifelong mates. Joshua had seen it happen many times in France. Catapult a group of strange men into a crisis and they end up closer than blood brothers. Number three passed round a battered packet of Woodbines, and it was like lifting a curtain on his memories. … Shadowed weary faces lit by flickering candleshine, the quiet murmur of voices, frozen hands held round steaming tin mugs.

Number two had been in the bloody battle of the Somme. Number three had lost an eye at Ypres. Only number four was too young to join in the reminiscing.

‘The insurance?’ Sitting down at the table, lingering behind when the other two had gone up to bed, he buried his face in his hands. ‘Will Miss Bell be covered? It wasn’t an act of God, was it?’ He groaned. ‘Nothing goes right for me. Not one bloody thing. I’m a walking disaster zone, that’s me.’

‘Want to talk about it?’ Joshua sat down, facing him across the table. ‘If you feel like talking I’m here, listening.’

It was an all-too-familiar story. Days of tramping the streets in first one town then another. Shopkeepers shaking their heads, some of them hardly sparing him the time of day. At the end of the week an empty order book and the threat of finding himself out of work yet again. A wife and two children at home. Behind with the rent on their new council house and behind with the payments on the three-piece suite and the clothing club. Cardboard in his shoes because it seemed a drink and a smoke was more of a necessity.

‘The worst thing is knowing they’re going to say no even before I open my case.’ His voice breathed defeat.

‘Is what you’re trying to sell good quality? Value for money? Do you have faith in it?’

‘Yes, oh yes. You won’t get better writing paper nowhere.’

‘Then let that faith
show
.’ Joshua leaned forward. ‘Have you heard of thought transference?’

‘What’s that? I wasn’t much of a scholar, Sir. Book learning has always come hard to me.’

Joshua blinked at the ‘Sir’. He drummed impatient fingers on Daisy’s well-scrubbed table, weighing his words:

‘I had a pal during the war who had managed to evade the school system almost entirely. He had a vocabulary of about ten words, nine of them filthy, but what he saw out there in France incensed him so much he came home determined to get his own back somehow. He talked his way into a job; he convinced his employer he knew more about timber than the poor bewildered chap had forgotten. He went to the public library of every town he visited and made lists of all the builders. By the force of his anger – because it was anger driving him on – he persuaded them they needed more wood than they would ever use. He didn’t walk into their offices with his shoulders slumped,
knowing
they were going to say no. They’d been sitting on their fat behinds during the war while he’d been fighting that they might live, so he looked them straight in the eyes and. …’

Joshua paused. This insignificant little tyke didn’t look as if he’d ever stared his own mother straight in the eye, but he was taking it all in, nodding his head. ‘I’m angry too.’ He actually beat his puny chest. ‘I wasn’t in the war, but that wasn’t my fault, and I deserve better. My
wife
deserves better.’

‘Channel that anger in the right direction. Make it positive. Make it work for you.’

‘You smug bastard.’ Getting wearily into bed ten minutes later, Joshua closed his eyes. ‘Playing God isn’t a role you’re much fitted for,
Captain
Penny! You’re not making much of a success of your own life at the moment, are you?’

From along the landing he heard the muffled sound of coughing, fancied he heard Daisy turning over in bed.

He hoped she’d done as he told her and changed her wet nightgown; he told himself it was none of his business if she hadn’t. He snuffed out his candle and reminded himself to go out and phone the joyful Mr Leadbetter before breakfast. And fell asleep with the sound of the west wind rattling his window frame, overwhelmed with weariness and the utter hopelessness of his love.

IT TOOK JUST
two months for Daisy to realize that her infatuation for Sam was over.

It was unbelievable,
impossible
that during those long frustrated months of her loving she had looked in her mirror and seen a face with a dreamy abstracted expression gazing back at her. With lips half parted and eyes shining like the proverbial stars. All because of Sam.

Impossible to accept that she had actually prayed to God for a letter with a London postmark; trembled at his nearness,
wanted
him, with her body actually aching for the need of him. Walked by his side with the wind on her face, and not known that the wind was blowing. Remembered every single word he had said to her, storing even the mundane remarks away in her head like jewels in a box, giving them fresh meanings each time she took them out to mull over them. Read his horoscope before her own in the morning newspaper; seen his likeness round every corner, down every street.

Work had helped her get over him, of course. There was plenty of that. The NO VACANCIES sign had gone up again in the window of Shangri-La. Mrs Mac was genuinely amazed at the way little Miss Bell had coped with the routine of shopping, cooking and cleaning, with only Mrs Whalley’s Winnie to help out. Mrs Mac was
pleased
for Daisy, of course, even though she was sure the reaction from her friend’s suicide was bound to set in. And there was never a peep about
that
chap from London. Not as much as a word about him for weeks now. She told San Remo next door that Shangri-La’s visitors got a bedtime drink with a homemade biscuit, all inclusive. San Remo sniffed and said that Shangri-La would learn to cut corners with the rest of them in the end, especially in the winter when the trade went dead.

Winnie was pleased that Daisy – they were on first-name terms by now – had gone out with Mr Penny for his nightly constitutional, leaving her to serve the bedtime tea and biscuits. She could have a crafty fag if she left the back door wide open, and a hefty slice of Daisy’s richly moist slab cake. Not that she would be begrudged a crumb if she asked for it. Not being hungry all the time took a bit of getting used to; sleeping in a room of her own was taking even longer. Some nights she would lie awake on purpose, just for the novelty of being able to stretch her arms and legs out in bed as far as they would go without encountering a sister’s backside, or sharp toenails.

Finishing the cigarette, she wrapped the stub up in a piece of newspaper and buried it deep in the pig bin outside the back door. No point in looking for trouble, even though Daisy had never actually
said
she didn’t like Winnie smoking. A furtive fag tasted much better than one smoked openly, and anyroad the fag-end was the pig’s problem now, not hers.

Joshua and Daisy walked towards the North Shore, through the alpine rock gardens with their artificial crags.

‘Would you ever have imagined just after Florence died that you would be coping as well as you are?’ Joshua turned to Daisy, walking serenely by his side, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of a long knitted cardigan.

‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’ Her smile was warm and direct. ‘You’ve been a pillar of strength, Joshua.’

‘You won’t
let
me do as much as I’d like to. I haven’t done all that much.’

‘You’ve
been there
, to hold my hand when things went wrong.’ Her laugh was infectious. ‘Like me trusting Winnie with the ledger, and her booking two honeymoon couples into the same room for the same week.’

‘That could have been tricky, I admit.’

‘Or the time a tap was left running in a wash basin and that commercial traveller didn’t wake up till his bed was floating out of the door. The lights fused and everyone came out on the landing for a paddle at one o’clock in the morning. You were
marvellous
then, Joshua.’

‘You’d have coped.’ Joshua spoke so sharply that Daisy stared at him in surprise. ‘You’re what is called a tough cookie, as they say in American films.’

‘I’d much rather be a fragile flower.’

Joshua pointed at an iron bench with its back towards the cliff drive. ‘Let’s sit here for a while. I want to talk to you.’

Daisy was quite content to sit quietly, waiting for Joshua to collect his thoughts. She knew him so well by now. Never an impetuous man, apart from that one time when he had drunk too much and kissed her passionately. She smiled at the memory. Joshua was a man of integrity. A true gentleman, as her mother would have said. Modest to a fault. It was only recently that she had picked up a letter from the mat addressed to Captain Penny, MC. He never used that form of address, he had said, taking the letter from her quickly. MCs were two a penny, he had said when she tried to talk to him about it, his eyes twinkling at the terrible pun.

It was a beautiful night, with a full moon sending silvered beams across the faintly murmuring sea far below. Such a perfect setting for what Joshua had to say, and he wasn’t going to bungle it this time. Sitting close to her, filled with love for her, he reached for her hand. At once her fingers curled into his palm.

‘How would it be if we got married?’ he said.

Daisy stared at him for a while. ‘I wish you hadn’t said that, Joshua. I
love
you, but not in that way. I never want to
feel
that way again.’ She smiled. ‘What I feel for you is the warmth of a loving friendship. I like you and admire you. I wish I had a quarter of your stability, your confidence, your belief in yourself.’

‘Is that how you see me?’ He sounded deflated, almost bitter, very sad.

‘Yes, it is.’ She hesitated. ‘Since Sam I don’t trust my own judgement. I feel
safe
now, you see. I’m no longer looking for admiration. I hate to even
think
about Sam. I am so angry with him for being the cause of me behaving so stupidly. He
humiliated
me, Joshua. He diminished me, and, maybe unfairly, I can’t forgive him for that. It was self-inflicted, I know, but still I can’t forgive him. I never want to hear from him or see him again. What I felt for Sam can’t ever dissolve into friendship. I was weeping and laughing at the same time. I was either dizzy with happiness, or drowning in despair. I am never going to go through that again, Joshua.’