A Better World than This (5 page)

An umbilical cord, he told himself, that had never been cut. Devotion that turned a girl like Daisy into an old maid before she’d had time to be a lass. Me mother this, me mother that. Middle-aged women helping their mothers along the pavement, settling them into their chairs by the fire. Bound hand and foot by a love that was self-destructive in its loyalty.

‘Will she be all right if I leave her by herself tomorrow night?’

The doctor’s eyebrows shot up at the question, so unexpected, so contrary to what he had been expecting her to say. ‘You mean
all
night, Daisy?’

‘No. Just from about seven o’clock till eleven.’ Her chin was up as she faced him with a defiance he couldn’t see the reason for. ‘I could ask someone to sit with her if you think it’s necessary.’

Assuring her that it wouldn’t be necessary, the doctor smiled, nodded and stepped out into the rain-swept yard, a man as bewildered as he looked. So much for imagining he could read his patients like a book, he muttered, heading off across the cobbles in his carpet slippers, with the rain beating down on his uncovered head.

Daisy went upstairs and found her mother sleeping. She stood in the doorway, noticing the whiteness of the puff of hair teased up from Martha’s forehead. There were whiskers sprouting from the small determined chin, black whiskers at variance with the bleached white of her hair.

And it came to her that if her mother
had
died she would
have
left her covered with a sheet and still gone out to meet Sam.

No one had warned her that falling in love was like this. In films there were coy glances, there were dewy-eyed faces staring into mirrors, fingers touching lips that had been kissed. There were melting glances exchanged across candle-lit tables, and love letters pressed to quivering lips before being hidden beneath silk stockings and lace-edged handkerchiefs in top dressing-table drawers.

Love, she had thought, would be a gentle sort of glow suffusing the heart, not a low grinding actual pain in her lower belly, as if she’d eaten plums from a tin that had blown.

Back downstairs she stood recklessly on the raised tile hearth to see herself clearly in the fluted mirror.

‘Oh, God, don’t let anything stop me going to meet him tomorrow,’ she whispered to the reflection of a wild-eyed woman she hardly recognized. ‘Don’t let me mother work herself up again, ’cos I’m going, even if she rolls on the floor and froths at the mouth.’

Her half-closed eyes held an expression she was hard put to identify. They were the eyes of a woman desperate for the touch of a man; they were slumbrous with desire.

Passion. … For the first time in her life Daisy knew the meaning of the word as she stepped back, pressed both hands to her breasts, and with a conscious effort shook the shocking thoughts away.

‘Oh, God, help me. …’

It was not a blasphemy, it was a prayer. Whipping the embroidered tablecloth from the table, she shook the crumbs in the hearth, then went to put it in soak when she saw the tea stain ringing a wreath of blue forget-me-nots.

MARTHA WAS UP
and doing the next morning when the first batch of loaves had been set in rows in the proving oven. Fifty bags of flour were due to arrive from a mill at Liverpool and she wanted to be there on the spot to count them as they were carried into the bakehouse. The pork steak from the butcher’s was late, and she was all for going down the town to give somebody a piece of her mind.

‘Folks
die
in their beds,’ she told Daisy, getting her spoke in before Daisy had a chance to say a word. ‘Doctors know nowt, but he’ll send his man round just the same on Friday night to collect his shilling. I bet that bottle of tonic you’ve to go for this dinner time’ll be nowt but coloured water. Cochineal in tap water, that’s all it is. No wonder his wife has a new outfit summer and winter.’

Martha’s gaze was lynx-like as she stared at her daughter. Oh, aye, she told herself, it was all there, written on Daisy’s sloppy face. The red-rimmed eyes telling of a sleepless night, the haunted expression, and the naked anguish in the large brown eyes, all telling their tale, revealing that Daisy was in love. Or thought she was, the silly faggot.

Martha had seen it all before. Their Edna had been in just the same state during the years coming up to the war, when she’d been courting Arnold, swooning about all over the place and reading poetry in bed. The same as that daft ’aporth of a girl they’d taken on as errand girl when young Bill had gone to his death in France. Martha could bring her to mind
right
this minute, riding the shop tricycle with her garters showing, till her stomach got too swollen for her to cock her leg over the cross-bar.

Romance. The whole stupid business made her feel sick. Men! Walking around with their brains in their trousers; there wasn’t one among them worth a twopenny bun. Fourteen years Martha had courted before she got married, and then only because her mother had died and didn’t need her any more. Working day and night to get the business going hadn’t left time or the energy for jumping around in bed.

Whoever had invented that carry-on needed their brains seeing to! Clever-clogs Edna had sworn that Martha falling with Daisy must have been the second immaculate conception! Then laughed her silly head off. But then, Edna had always laughed at nowt.

‘He’s not worth it, you know.’ She speared a slice of bread on the toasting-fork and held it to the fire. ‘His eyes are too close together for one thing.’

‘I’m seeing him tonight.’ Daisy’s voice came out in a croak. ‘For the last time. To say goodbye.’

‘You’re what?’ Martha felt sympathy slide away from her like butter from a dish tilted too close to the fire.

‘He’s going back to London on Saturday.’

‘To his wife?’

Daisy watched her mother spread about half a pound of butter on her toast. ‘The doctor says you have to cut down.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he, with a wife with a bottom like two eggs in a handkerchief. Have you thought what you’ll do when that dago’s wife comes up here and smacks your face? Bit of the tar-brush in him, if you ask me.’

‘Stop talking like that!’ Daisy laid a hand dramatically over her heart. ‘And I don’t want no toast. Thank you.’

‘You were such a good little girl.’ All at once Martha reached for a corner of her flowered pinafore and dabbed her eyes. ‘Do you remember that white silk dress I made for you, the one with three tiers in the skirt, all picot-edged from the
button
stall in the market-house? You never used to answer me back in them days.’

‘I should have!’ Daisy’s voice rose to a wail. ‘I should have stood on me own two feet a long time ago. I’m not a child, Mother! Have you forgotten how old I am?’

‘Standing there with mucky thoughts in your head.’ Martha pushed her chair back and stood up. ‘Telling me you’re going out with a married man. Bold as brass and twice as cheeky. You’ll kill me before you’ve finished.’ With her feet set at their ten-to-two angle she marched through into the kitchen, to appear almost at once with the long brush held out in front of her as if she was on a bayonet charge. ‘All I can say is I’m right glad your father isn’t here to see the day!’

All day long Daisy kept stealing glances at her mother’s face. It was as smooth and bland as the barm-cakes she slid into paper bags before handing them over to the customers standing three deep in the little shop. No sign of the drama of the day before.

‘I have to go,’ she kept muttering to herself. ‘Dear God, help me, but I have to go and meet him. I’ll die if I don’t see him again,’ she told herself, dashing from the bakehouse with trays of hot meat-and-potato pies, covered with a cloth because it was flamin’ raining again.

By seven o’clock she was dead on her feet as usual, feeling sick on account of picking at her tea, but ready to meet Sam wearing her green coat and hat and a pair of shoes that killed her even when she was sitting down.

‘I’m off then.’ She put her head round the door of the living room and saw her mother knitting feverishly at a mauve wool jumper in a raspberry stitch with a deep welt.

‘I’m trying to get this finished for you in time for Christmas.’ Martha sighed deeply. ‘It was meant to be a surprise, but you’re too old now for surprises I suppose.’ She held the knitting up to her eyes as if her sight was failing. ‘Pass wool over needle and knit three times into next stitch, then wool round needle three times. I’ve been working on it on your picture nights. On me own.’

‘You’ll be all right, Mother?’

‘I’ll have to be, won’t I?’ Martha paused with one finger crooked over the knitting needles. ‘It’s got puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar above a ribbed yoke.’

‘It’ll be lovely.’ For a moment Daisy hesitated, then knowing her mother wasn’t going to make it easy for her to go, nodded twice before closing the door behind her.

Half-way down Victoria Street she stopped, sure she could smell rain in the wind. To go back for her umbrella was out of the question, so she walked on, taking tiny steps to accommodate the pain of the too-tight shoes bought in a weak moment from a newly-opened shop in King William Street. Mock crocodile, they came to a point, gripping her toes as if in a vice, making each step a burning agony. But by the time she had reached the town her excitement spilled over so that she forgot the pain. On a corner, by the school clinic, the green hat blew up from her head, waving like a sail, tethered only by a pearl-headed pin. She stepped into the wide doorway of the Home and Colonial grocers to fix it back, hoping her hair hadn’t come out of the small sausage curls she’d made by curling tiny strands over her finger back in the icy chill of her bedroom.

It was dead on half-past seven, but he wasn’t there where he had said he would be, outside Woolworth’s. Daisy ran quickly round the corner, ashamed of being first. Suppose they’d said seven and not half-past? Suppose he’d been and gone? Yesterday had been so awful, he couldn’t be blamed if he never wanted to set eyes on her again. For a frantic moment she couldn’t remember his face.

The pavements shone like black glass after the day’s rain. The short side street was as deserted as if a curfew bell had sounded, but soon they would be queueing for the second house, and the first house would be coming out of the picture palace nearby.

Naughty Marietta
with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Daisy had been to see it on the Monday, before Sam had walked into the shop, and the bit at the beginning where
Jeanette
MacDonald as a young French princess had yearned for a man to love had answered an echo in her own heart.

With her curls neatly arranged round her heart-shaped face, the princess had cried out something like: ‘Oh, how I would love to meet him, standing so tall and noble in the rays of the sun.’ Then she had run away to America to avoid an arranged marriage to an old and ugly man. Feeling a spot of rain on her nose, Daisy stepped backwards into a doorway. And the ending … oh yes, the ending where Jeanette MacDonald had sung ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’, and Nelson Eddy as a dashing Yankee officer had listened to her with a dazed expression on his face, then joined in, gazing into her eyes.

The sentiments were lovely, but Daisy wasn’t too sure about the appeal of a couple of lovers singing up each other’s nostrils. Perhaps they would be better going to see
The Thin Man
with Myrna Loy and William Powell. The newspaper had said it was all about a sophisticated marriage. Daisy peered out from her shelter, holding firmly to her hat. Or maybe
The Count of Monte Cristo
with Robert Donat? But that was a bit of a walk, and she didn’t want to arrive looking like a drowned rat.

A man walked by, pausing to light a cigarette. Thinking she was a street woman, Daisy decided, and making up his mind to ask her how much she charged. Turning her head away she walked quickly past him, the too-high heels making little staccato noises on the shiny pavement.

When she rounded the corner and saw Sam coming towards her, her instinct was to rush into his arms and have him lift her up and swing her round, but he merely raised his trilby a few inches from his head so that the lamp-light shone on his Brylcreemed hair.

‘Good timing,’ he grinned, the elongated dimples coming and going.

‘I was delayed,’ she lied. ‘I’m glad I didn’t keep you waiting.’

He seemed preoccupied, almost embarrassed. Daisy felt a
sudden
sinking of the heart. ‘Where shall we go?’ She took hold of his arm. ‘I can tell you everything that’s on so you can choose.’

‘Look, love. …’ Sam shot out a wrist and glanced at his watch. ‘There isn’t time for us to go to the pictures. My boss has decided he wants to go back tonight, leaving about ten o’clock. He’s a family man and doesn’t like being away from home too long. So that doesn’t give us much time. We can go to the pictures if you like, and come out before the end.’

‘No!’ Daisy knew she couldn’t bear it. Not to sit on the back row with him in a double seat and have to come out long before the ballroom scene with Nelson Eddy with his cloak swirling round him as he sang ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ to Jeanette MacDonald’s upturned face. Life wasn’t a mystery; it was predictable, at least as far as she was concerned. Already Sam seemed to have gone from her, borne on the freezing wind whipping a torn newspaper across the road.

There were things she had to say to him, things that would make him remember her for ever. He was so good-looking, just to be with him was an ache inside her. His handsome face was so noble in the lamp-light and she could feel his arm strong and powerful through her fingers on the sleeve of his raincoat. She had bitten off her Tangee lipstick and she didn’t care. The pain of his going was already hurting. If a lorry or a bus had mounted the pavement at that moment and killed them both, she felt it would have been right and proper.

‘Where
can
we go if we don’t go to the pictures?’ He seemed uncaring, totally impervious to her distress. ‘I don’t suppose there are any cafés open at this time of night?’

‘This isn’t London,’ she reminded him, strident in her misery. ‘People stop in up here and listen to the wireless or go to the pictures, or to concerts in King George’s Hall. It’s
The Messiah
in two weeks’ time, with a chorus of two hundred and fifty,’ she added wildly. ‘Or they go to school prize-givings, or to roller-skating at the Overlookers’ Hall. There’s
always
something going on.’