A Better World than This (10 page)

‘Dressed up like a dog’s dinner,’ Edna said, coming in to see them off. ‘You’re not making sandwiches, are you? There’ll be a hamper in the boot with silver goblets, and damask napkins big as tablecloths. Chicken legs and caviar.’ The novelty of it all was making her skittish. ‘I go to the pictures as well as you, Daisy Bell.’

‘Shrimp paste and cucumber.’ Daisy looked flustered and pretty. ‘She doesn’t trust café food.’

‘Cucumber repeats on her,’ Edna said with satisfaction. She lowered her voice. ‘Is it on again with you and him?’ She popped a sliver of cress into her mouth. ‘You’ll be taking a lot on bringing up somebody else’s children. Especially the boy. He’s too sharp for his age.’ A piece of cress dangled from the corner of her mouth. ‘We’ve never had a divorce in the family. It’s bound to upset your mother, chuck. What
have
you got in there?’ Her sharp features hardened into irritation as Martha came into the kitchen leaning sideways from the weight of a massive brown handbag looped over her arm.
‘Your
last will and testament?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’ Martha tottered crab-wise to the gas oven. ‘And the deeds of the shop, and our birth certificates. You won’t catch me leaving this lot behind for the burglars.’

‘You look very nice, dear,’ Edna said, with deep insincerity.

The children were fascinated by Martha’s veil.

‘What if you want to blow your nose? I mean, if you forget it’s there when you blow your nose?’ Jimmy asked.

Martha lifted the veil and tucked it over her hat. ‘Like this.’ Taking a handkerchief from her pocket she demonstrated. ‘All in a day’s work.’

She sat on the wide seat at the back of the Rolls between the two of them, unnaturally straight from lacing her corset too tight.

Watching them from the pavement Edna thought her sister looked shocking; hoped Martha knew what she was doing. She waved and smiled before going back to her own house two doors up. ‘Thinks she’s Queen Mary,’ she told Betty, who was having trouble with sore nipples now. ‘Sometimes I think your auntie is going round the bend.’

As the big car drew away from the kerb Daisy, sitting in the passenger seat next to Sam, closed her eyes in ecstasy. So as they turned the corner by the front of the shop she failed to see Florence weaving her way down the street like a drunken woman, wild of eye, with her duster coat flying open, and her hair hanging any old how round an ashen face.

It was like sitting on a moving cloud, Daisy thought, opening her eyes to watch Sam’s hands at the correct position on the wheel. To make it all perfect the weather was
marvellous
. Blue skies and little puffs of white clouds, just as the man on the wireless had predicted.

Sam drove very fast, so that soon they had left the drab streets behind and were bowling along wide roads, with
semi-detached
houses set back from green verges, on to a main road lined with trees, and now and then a row of cottages with women hanging washing out to dry.

‘All right, love?’ Sam put his hand on her knee for a fleeting moment. ‘All right there in the back?’ he called out.

A little way from Preston he followed a large white sign with an arrow pointing left. ‘Blackpool!’ he called out, swinging the car smoothly on to the by-pass.

On the wide motor-road he put his foot down hard on the accelerator. With Jimmy urging him on from behind to go faster, faster, they were soon overtaking a stream of holiday traffic. Motorbikes and sidecars, small saloons and lumbering charabancs. Rummaging in the enormous bag Martha produced a pink chiffon scarf and tied it round her throat, in case she felt a draught. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ she told Jimmy.

He nodded. ‘You’re very old, aren’t you?’ he whispered, and Martha agreed that indeed she was.

Dorothy was already fast asleep with her head lolling against Martha’s arm.

Turning round for a moment Daisy thought her mother looked more peaceful than she had for a long time. There was a serenity in the pinched face as she gently shifted her position to make the child more comfortable. She really loves children, Daisy told herself, turning back again. She would have made the most wonderful grandma. I have let her down, she told herself, by not marrying at eighteen like cousin Betty. She frowned and bit her lip. And was silent for the next few miles.

When Sam was driving, he drove with complete concentration. The car was coasting along, and when Daisy saw on the clock the speed they were going she couldn’t believe the evidence of her eyes. Sixty miles an hour, and yet it felt as if they were hardly moving. As fast as the Royal Scot, she marvelled.

She was the first to see Blackpool Tower. Standing like a sentinel, it rose proudly into the bright blue sky. She remembered as a child rushing to the right side of the train to
let
the window down, craning her head out to see it before anyone else in the compartment.

‘If another train is coming the other way you’ll have your head whipped off,’ Martha had warned without fail every single year, but nothing could spoil that first glimpse of the famous landmark.

Happiness, light as a bubble, gurgled inside her. It was all so unbelievable. There she was, Daisy Bell from the pie shop, sitting like Lady Muck in the passenger seat of a Rolls-Royce limousine, next to a man so handsome he would make Ronald Colman look like something dropped from a flitting. Bowling along a suburban road now, en route to the sea. It was like being in a film, only a million times better. She was Madeleine Carroll, she was Marlene Dietrich, wearing not a blue cotton dress sprigged with flowers but a white satin suit with a big shawl collar, and a silver fox tippet slung casually round her shoulders.

‘There’s the sea”!’ Daisy twisted round in her seat as the car turned on to the promenade by Central Pier. She laughed out loud from the sheer joy of it all, the deep-throated laugh that Sam remembered, waking Dorothy up from her sleep.

Out to sea they could see the curls of crashing foam rising and falling against the black pier-head. On the promenade the wind flapped the trousers of gaily-coloured beach pyjamas on girls with faces burned brick-red by the sun and wind. Small boys dragged iron spades along the concrete, and a panama hat was torn from an elderly man’s head, to disappear behind the hooves of a horse drawing a Victorian landeau.

‘Woolworth’s!’ Martha’s voice breathed satisfaction. ‘Bigger than the one we’ve got at home.’ She craned her head to see better. ‘Nay, but it’s many a long day since I had a traipse round Woolworth’s.’

Behind the store the Tower climbed majestically into the sky. From close up they could see the lift ascending, and the iron lace network of galleries. A crowd of children with clinking buckets and spades charged in front of the car,
causing
Sam to brake sharply.

Dorothy leaned across Martha to watch a little girl with dress tucked into her knickers walk bare-footed over to the steps by the railings, holding fast to the hand of a boy carrying a shrimping net.

‘Donkeys!’ Jimmy shouted. ‘Can I go on a donkey, Dad? Can I have some ice-cream? Can I, Dad?’

Meshed into the web of holiday traffic, Sam pulled into the side and told them to get out of the car and wait for him, just over there, by the man with the deckchairs.

‘He’s gone to park the car in a safe place.’ Jimmy passed on this information with an air of importance. ‘Mr Evison would kill him if it got scratched.’

Holding on to the massive handbag, Martha teetered sideways to the deckchair man in his peaked cap with his leather bag swathed across his chest. She wasn’t going to say anything, definitely not going to spoil anybody’s pleasure, but the car ride had made her feel distinctly funny. Now the wind was getting at her through her coat, giving her a prickly sensation when she caught her breath. The sun might be shining, oh aye, she’d grant you that, but the wind had an edge to it like a bread-knife. In spite of all the silly beggars walking about with next to nowt on. Women with angry Vs of sunburn at the necks of their print dresses, and men with bald heads who would suffer for it tomorrow.

There was a tight feeling in her chest as if a hand was scrunching it up. She should have stopped at home instead of gallivanting when she wasn’t fit. She shot a baleful glance at Daisy leaning over the railing as if she was on the deck of an ocean liner, lifting her face and getting her hair blown about any old how. Happy as Larry, the silly girl, thinking that man was going to marry her, when her mother knew he’d never leave his wife.

What did Daisy know about men? If one hung his trousers on the bedpost she’d think he was just going for a swim. Flinging her hat over the windmill for a man with less life in him than a tramp’s vest. Martha had Mr Samuel Barnet
weighed
up all right. Polite he may be – she’d grant him that – and kind to a point, but he was only out to feather his nest, like the rest of them.

He was going to hurt Daisy and hurt her bad. Martha knew that for sure. And there was nothing she could do about it. Look at those children, down on the sands when their father had told them to stay put. She narrowed her eyes at the sight of Jimmy down on his stomach like a mole, scrabbling in the sand with his fingernails. And his sister shoving her frock into her knickers and whipping her sandals off. Now Daisy was down there with them, on her knees, laughing. At that moment, a child herself.

She would make such a grand mother. … Martha, who never cried, felt the prick of tears behind her eyelids. Why had her daughter got missed when there were married women with faces like rock buns and natures to match? The bag was dragging at her arm, but she wasn’t going to put it down, not with that shifty-eyed weasel of a deckchair man giving her funny looks. Men? She’d shoot the lot of them, given the chance.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Mother?’ There was an expression of genuine concern on the deckchair man’s face as he pointed to a chair by the railings. ‘I won’t charge you if you’re just waiting for someone.’

To his astonishment, Martha clutched the portmanteau-sized bag to her chest, wrapping both arms round it, glaring fiercely at him through the handles.

‘That’s me daughter,’ she hissed. ‘Down there, and her friend’s here, coming along the front. You thought I was on me own, didn’t you?’

Bewildered, the man went back to his post, shaking his head and hitching at the leather straps criss-crossed over his chest, one bag for the money and the other for the tickets. He was well aware of the fact that you met all sorts, but there were some that should be locked up. Definitely.

By the time Martha was ensconced in a deckchair on the
sands
with the bag safely between her feet she felt a bit better. Sam had reappeared bearing spades and buckets and two sets of paper flags for the sandpies.

‘Would you like a drink of tea out of the flask, Mother?’ Daisy knelt by the deckchair, flushed and excited because
he
had come back.

Martha said no, even though her mouth felt parched and dry. She hadn’t seen any Conveniences as she stood on the prom, so where on earth would she
go
? They were whispering together, her Daisy and that man. She could see them, even though she couldn’t hear what they were saying, and Daisy was smiling and nodding her head, the silly faggot.

Martha closed her eyes. What was wrong with her? For a moment the sea and sky had dipped and swayed together, merging in shiny blue and green ripples, all too much for her.

‘Are you all right, Mother?’

She opened her eyes to see Daisy smiling at her. With too much lipstick on, Martha thought. Oh, the silly, silly girl.

‘Sam and I are going for a little walk. You won’t mind keeping an eye on the children, will you?’

‘As long as they don’t go near the sea.’ Martha nodded through the veil at the row of sandpies and the castle coming on nicely under Jimmy’s expert efforts.

‘It’s Windsor Castle. I’m going to put the Union Jack on top. Watch me!’

Martha smiled and nodded before closing her eyes again, folding her hands over her stomach and settling down into one of her jerky twitchy sleeps.

Up on the promenade Sam took Daisy’s hand in his. He glanced back at the sands. ‘They like your ma, there’s no doubt about that. Kids are funny the way they take to some people straight away. And they like you too, but that’s not surprising.’

As they walked away they could see the South Pier in the distance, its Moorish cupolas glistening in the bright sparkling sunshine. Sam was very quiet, but Daisy was so happy she hardly noticed his preoccupation. A trio of girls in
floppy
hats and beach pyjamas walked past them, licking ice-cream cornets. Mill girls, Daisy guessed, intent on having a good time away from their looms in some vast and noisy weaving shed.

‘They used to say that if folks had any money left over at the end of their holiday week they would fling it out of the train window on the journey home. Just to show they’d had a marvellous time and spent the lot. Then start saving again for next year.’

Daisy pointed out a man with a handkerchief knotted over his bald head trotting along in his wife’s shadow, a fat short woman in a wallpaper-patterned dress, her plump bare arms mottled red by the sun.

‘They’re like a couple on one of those rude postcards, aren’t they?’ She watched the couple with delight. ‘Oh, Sam. Thank you for bringing us. I do love you for it.’

At once Sam dropped her hand, striding along more quickly, but Daisy merely tucked the hand into the crook of his arm.

‘Just look at the Pleasure Beach! Isn’t it wonderful? I once went on the Big Dipper. If I’d coughed I’m sure I would have spat me stomach out. It was in me mouth, that’s for sure.’ With the habit she had of suddenly turning serious, her eyes clouded. ‘When you’re here you can forget that behind all this glitter there are thousands of people on the dole who can’t afford to come, even for a day.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Do you read a lot, Sam?’

There were so many things about this man she didn’t know. He had told her very little, she realized; almost nothing about his home. Or his wife. She looked up at the sky, as if surprised to find that the sun was not covered by a cloud. But today the sky and the sea were as one, merging into the far distance with a lone seagull wheeling and dipping its wings in graceful flight. Well, if he didn’t want to talk about it, then that was okay by her. And nothing,
nothing
was going to mar this one perfect day.