A Better World than This (6 page)

Sam suddenly presented his face to the sky. ‘It’s raining.’
He
spoke with a kind of satisfaction. ‘Suppose I walk you home, love? I really do have a lot of things to do before we leave. Suppose we just nip round the corner to the pub and have a drink?’

Daisy opened her mouth to tell him that nice girls never went in pubs, only tarts and women who should have known better, but at that very moment a tram blundered round the corner, sparks whooshing from the arm clamped to the overhead wires.

‘I know! Let’s go for a tram ride!’ She ran across the street, pulling Sam with her. ‘Come on! It’s better than standing about not knowing what to do.’ She was behaving badly, she knew, but it was as though she’d been taken over by a woman who did strange and unpredictable things. Her heart was beating so madly she could hear it in her head, pounding away like a drum. ‘You’ll have plenty of time,’ she told him, climbing the stairs and swaying in front of him to a seat further along. ‘I’ll show you the town.’

The tram heaved its way round a sharp corner, a lumbering clanging ship in a rough sea. The window on Daisy’s left side was half-way open and a stinging wind made Sam turn up his collar and curse.

‘You have some funny ideas,’ he told her, but she wasn’t listening.

‘That’s where we have the market. Wednesdays and Saturdays, and in a minute you’ll see the shops all dressed fancy for Christmas!’ She bounced round in her seat. ‘Those are the posh shops. Ten shillings and sixpence for a shirt! That’s two shillings more than they pay round us for rent!’ Happiness was making her light-headed. The tram swooped up the Preston Road, past the park gates on the right, and the High School further up on the left. ‘That’s the school I won a scholarship to. I would have gone there if me father had had his way, but me mother said it would be a waste when I’d be going in the shop anyway.’

Obligingly Sam looked at the dark building set back from the road, amused and irritated at one and the same time.
Settled
back in the slatted seat, he let his body sway with the movements of the tram. He had thought he knew women, but this one had him beat. She was different, so very, very different; young beyond belief for her years, and yet somehow as mature as a woman twice her age.

Last night she had told him she could see beauty through the high window of a dismal bakehouse at five o’clock in the morning, and now she was exhilarating in this ride along a road of dimmed lights, with dark silhouettes of houses now on either side.

In this, his first visit to the industrial north, he had been appalled at the drabness of the mean streets. Yesterday he had seen groups of the unemployed, standing idly on corners, hands in pockets, as if waiting for a bus they knew would never arrive. Waiting outside the Town Hall for his boss, he had left the Rolls for a moment and seen men in flat caps shuffling into the reading room at the Public Library, to spend the the day, he guessed, sitting or standing in a fug of damp clothes, turning newspaper pages over and over to read the hours away.

He had followed his boss into the cotton mill across the street from Daisy’s shop and seen the weavers standing at their looms, cotton dust in their hair. Over the clanging clatter of the machines, they communicated with each other with exaggerated lip movements, stretching their mouths and pointing at their chests. And laughing, always laughing. What, he had wondered, had they found to laugh at in an atmosphere which surely should have sapped their spirits long ago?

‘Up here is where the nobs live,’ Daisy told him, as they climbed down from the tram at the terminus. ‘Doctors and solicitors and the like. If you live up here folks know you’re
it
.’

The felt hat had slipped back from her forehead, and her upturned face was luminous in the darkness. ‘It’s stopped raining, thanks be to goodness,’ she said. ‘I’m going to show you now where I go for a walk on Sunday afternoons in
summer
. With my friend Florence. She works as an usherette at the Rialto cinema, so I only see her on Sundays. It isn’t far,’ she told him when he hesitated. ‘You can get back in plenty of time. It isn’t right what I know you’re thinking about Blackburn. You’ve only seen the part down by the mills.’ She urged him forward. ‘There are fields not far away, Sam. Miles and miles of meadows, and rolling hills and trees, and little sparkling rivers.’ She tucked a hand into his arm. ‘Pretend it’s summer. Go on. It’s easy if you try. I’m wearing a blue dress, pleated all round, and you’re wearing a pair of grey flannels and a yellow-spotted cravat tucked into the neck of your shirt.’

They were walking up an incline now, away from the terminus. Set back from the road on either side were tall dark houses, solidly Victorian, fronted by tiny gardens fringed by brick-built walls.

‘Nearly there!’ Suddenly Daisy let go of his arm and strode up an unmade road to the left. ‘Up here, Sam! Come on, you’ll soon see what I mean.’

‘Where the hell are we now?’ Sam wished he wasn’t so good-natured. His wife would never have called him that, but he knew he was. Why else would he be God knew where, trudging up a muddy lane and climbing into what seemed to be a large stone boxers’ ring, instead of behaving like the sultan his wife thought him to be, and putting paid to this ridiculous escapade with an imperious wave of a hand.

‘You’ve no imagination!’ his wife had often screamed at him. ‘That’s what comes of being a glorified car mechanic. You’ve got gear oil instead of blood in your veins, Samuel bloody Barnet!’

A car mechanic. … Sam winced as if the words had come at him out of the darkness. He’d show her, when he’d finished with his engineering exams and got certificates to prove he was qualified. A late starter he might be, but he was catching up fast. And as for having no imagination. … He bounded up the stone steps after Daisy, feeling the sun warm on the top of his head, spruce in his grey flannels with a yellow-spotted
cravat
tucked into his open-necked shirt.

What was she doing to him, this strange young-old girl with the dark-brown voice, running ahead of him now to lean over a railing as if she was on the deck of a ship watching the moon shining on the sea? Why did he feel so protective towards her? As if she needed shielding from all the hurts of the world. No one could do that. When it came to it we were all alone, like animals, fending for ourselves, and making the best of things. Working out our salvations and knowing that the paths we trod were the paths we chose. Of our own volition, God dammit.

Almost as an extension of his own thoughts he went over to the railings and put his arms round Daisy, straining her to him, just as a fierce gust of wind, seemingly from Siberia, tore the ugly felt hat from her head, bowling it along in the darkness like a leaf before swooping it up and casting it into the darkness below.

‘I
hated
that hat,’ she shouted over the sighing moaning wind. ‘I didn’t suit it, and never have. I only bought it because it matched me coat, and because the lady in the Hat Market said it was just me.’ Spreading her arms wide she let the wind take her hair and whip it round her head like a nimbus. ‘How did she know what was just me when I don’t know meself?’

‘I think you
do
know.’ Sam pulled her to him again. ‘I think you know exactly what you are and who you are.’

‘Well, whoever I am didn’t suit that hat.’ Her laugh was the laugh he remembered from first seeing her, as unselfconscious as a child’s. ‘On a real summer’s day you can see Blackpool Tower.’ She pointed away from the town. ‘It looks a bit like a mill chimney, and when the sun shines,
really
shines, you can sometimes fancy you see the sea flashing like a silver needle.’ She lifted her face. ‘Sniff up, Sam, then lick your lips and tell me you can taste the sea. Oh, I
love
the sea. One day when I’m old I will live by the sea, an’ I’ll go to sleep at night with the sound of the waves in me ears.’ Turning suddenly completely round, she pulled him with her. ‘And
that
is the Corporation Park down there, and beyond that the town. If only it was light you could see the tall chimneys waving little banners of smoke.’ Again he was whirled round. ‘Back to the sea now, Sam. But before you arrive there are more than thirty miles of green fields and woods.’

‘With your hat whipping through them.’

‘Fetching up on the sands at Blackpool.’

He hugged her close. He couldn’t help himself. She put her mouth to his and as the kiss deepened, he tasted the sweetness of her.

‘I’m getting better at kissing, aren’t I?’

Even as she spoke the rain came swiftly, a cloud-burst directly above them, it seemed. Before they reached the road her hair was soaking wet, flattened to her head, a black rubber bathing cap. Sam offered her his own hat, his coat, anything, but it was obvious to him she didn’t care.

The misery of his going had hit her with the force of the deluge of water cascading down from an unseen sky. Already the grids were overflowing, and the gutters ran like rivers. It was Hollywood rain, Joan Crawford in an oiled perm, with lipstick intact on her wide-gashed mouth, with a man beside her in a riding macintosh, wide-brimmed trilby lowered over his face, a strong arm round her as he urged her along so quickly it seemed as if her feet would leave the ground. ‘How beautiful you look in the rain,’ he would say. ‘All woman.’

‘You must have a hot bath as soon as you get inside,’ said Sam.

‘I won’t melt,’ Daisy told him, wondering if he knew that taking a bath meant bringing in the zinc bath from its nail on the backyard wall, heating the water up in the kitchen copper, then carrying it in pails through to the fire.

As they reached the bottom of the slope and turned the corner, a tram was there, with the conductor standing on his platform, his finger on the bell.

‘Nice weather for ducks,’ he grinned. ‘Chucking it down in buckets,’ he added from his shelter. ‘Been for a swim in the park lake, have you, love?’

Ignoring him, Daisy made for the front of the tram, swayed almost off her feet as it jerked into motion.

‘Does it ever do anything else but rain up here?’ Taking off his hat Sam shook the raindrops from it, scattering them like beads on the corrugated floor. ‘Here, take my hankie and wipe your hair with it.’

‘I suppose it never rains in London?’ Daisy scrubbed away at her wet face. ‘I suppose you have to crawl about on dusty roads with your tongue hanging out wailing for water?’

All at once the mock-crocodile shoes were giving her gyp, and looking down she saw her lisle stockings hanging over them in muddy creases. She discovered that she was chilled to the bone; there was a cold wetness trickling down her neck. Her mother would act as if she had caught her death, and make her a pot of cocoa with the steam coming through the froth on the top. And what for? What, in the name of God, was it all for? So she would be well enough and able enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and stoke the fire-oven for the massive Saturday bake? For the one-pound and two-pound loaves, the soft-centred barm-cakes, the scones, the iced Bath buns, the sultana sponges?

‘You are not walking me home.’ Her voice was ragged with misery. ‘You have a lot to do before you go back to the Sahara. What do you do when you’re nearly there? Swap your chauffeur’s fancy hat for a pith helmet?’

Sam leaned across her to breathe on the steamed-up window. As removed from her as if they had already parted, she guessed. The back of his coat was black-wet, and she hoped it had gone right through to his vest. If he
wore
a vest, she wondered, remembering that Clark Gable never did.

‘If you’re sure.’ Sam wrinkled his nose against the smell of wet raincoats as the tram filled up at the park gates with a crowd of parents on their way home from a grammar school prize-giving. ‘If it freezes on top of this the roads will be like glass.’

All at once Daisy saw the Rolls-Royce limousine skidding from the road, overturning in a ditch with its wheels
spinning
. With Sam slumped lifeless over the wheel, and his boss dead as a door-nail on the back seat with his eyes wide open and blood trickling from a gash on his forehead.

‘Then you’ll have to drive a bit slower than seventy miles an hour, won’t you?’ Daisy turned a despairing face towards him, remembering, as she was to remember for a long time to come, every single word he had ever said.

‘She holds the road like a dream,’ Sam told her, recognizing they had come to the end of the journey, standing up as if he couldn’t wait to be off and away.

On the Boulevard, heedless of passers-by, he kissed her gently, a fleeting on the mouth kiss with lips that tasted of rain. ‘Thank you for being so nice to me, Daisy. Thank you for being my friend these past two days.’

Friend? The emphasis on the word stabbed like a finger jabbed into Daisy’s heart. She felt the tears prick behind her eyes and blinked them angrily away. She knew that he was trying not to look at his watch, glad that his back was turned away from the station clock.

Sam was controlling the urge badly. There were a thousand and one things he had to do before they started on the long drive south. Already he was feeling a pleasurable anticipation at the thought of sitting behind the wheel of the car he knew to be the best in the world, the Spirit of Ecstasy statuette poised on the bonnet. The Flying Lady, as some preferred to call it. Speeding down arterial roads through the dark night, listening to the rhythmic purr of the engine.

To Sam a car engine was a thing of beauty – to be kept so spotless a man could eat his dinner off it – the Rolls, as
he
drove it, was an extension of his own body. As a surgeon’s fingers would probe the innards of his patient on the operating table, so Sam could detect the slightest fault in the engine of a car. Every throb told its own story and he knew he could have dismantled and rebuilt it from instinct.

And one day, when he held his paper qualifications in his hand, he would find a better job, and possess his own car. Giving in to temptation, he glanced at his watch. And winced.

‘Be happy, love.’ He needed to leave this Lancashire lass with his conscience unruffled. He wanted to be kind. He didn’t see himself as a cruel man, even though ‘cruel bastard’ was his wife’s pet name for him. No, what he saw himself as was a sort of sentimental softie, a world-weary man with a puzzling attraction for women. And this one was crying. She was trying hard to disguise it and not succeeding very well. Sam came to a sudden decision. Putting her from him he smiled down into her anguished face.