A Better World than This (17 page)

We look like what we are, Daisy told herself morosely. What we will be some day. Two unmarried friends – Miss Bell in her black, and Miss Livesey in her coat like a tent. Thousands like them all over the country, cast in the same mould. Women living on the stories of their sweethearts being killed in the war; women with mothers and fathers to care for, and women who couldn’t get a man, as Martha would undoubtedly have said.

For such a little precious time Sam had made her feel beautiful. She had felt
passion
when he kissed her; she had gloried in merely walking along by his side, and because he had made her feel beautiful, the beauty had been there. She had seen it reflected in the fluted mirror over the fireplace. Her eyes had shone and her hair had curled round her face just the way she wanted it to. He had told her she reminded him of Olivia De Havilland, and she had believed him. Olivia De Havilland gazing up at Errol Flynn as he raised a quizzical
eyebrow
before sweeping her into his arms, devouring her with kisses before leaping off a balcony and swinging from a chandelier with a sword in his hand to fight off seven men single-handed.

Now all that was over and she might as well admit it. She was an
unclaimed blessing
, as she had told Sam, making him shout with laughter and lift her off her feet in the street.

‘I once had an affair with a married man,’ she would say in years to come. Just as Florence had said on the day of the funeral. She stared across the table at the familiar sight of her friend pulling on the lace gloves, adjusting the neat frill at her bony wrists.

‘Have you ever slept with a man?’

She asked the question in a kind of desperation as they walked out into a day turned cloudy and grey. A gust of wind whipped an empty cigarette packet round her ankles.

‘Don’t talk filthy.’ Florence laughed and held the folds of her coat more closely round her. ‘Where to now? Home?’

She linked her arm in Daisy’s as they moved into the labyrinth of streets behind the café, and Daisy wished she wouldn’t. It made them look … oh, dear God, she didn’t know
what
it made them look like, but it irritated her. What was wrong with her? There was a singing in her veins that would not be stilled; she felt as frantic as she imagined a butterfly would, held captive in the palm of a hand.

What was
wrong
with her? There was a man striding along across the street and she thought he looked like Sam, then admitted that every tall dark man reminded her of Sam. For a little while she fantasized that it had been him; that he had come to find her, telling her that his wife wanted to divorce him.

‘I love you,’ he would say in his beautiful voice. ‘I thought I could go away and forget you, but I was wrong. You are there before me, every waking moment. I see your face before I sleep and wake to find you with me still. Come live with me and be my love, Daisybell.’ Only Sam had ever said her name like that.

‘There’s a house across the street with a FOR SALE notice in the window,’ Florence was saying. ‘How would you fancy being a landlady, Daisy?’

She was joking. Daisy knew she was joking, but on a sudden whim she brushed Florence’s arm away and crossed the street to stare up at the three-storeyed house, with a framed plate alongside the door: HAVENREST MRS ENTWISTLE, CHORLEY.

‘That’s to show families from Chorley they will be welcome here,’ she said. ‘My father told me that was common practice when these houses were built.’ She looked up at the dignified frontage. ‘It showed Chorley visitors that if they stayed here with Mrs Entwistle from their home town they wouldn’t be diddled. No charging for the cruet, a shilling a week, or anything like that. And look. This house is at the centre of the terrace, so it has a flattish gable in place of the normal eaves. My father used to spend most of the holiday week wandering about, leaving me mother to traipse round the shops. He used to take me with him and point things out to me.’

‘A bit of a scholar, your father.’ Florence stared up at the house. ‘I guessed the books in your bookcase had once belonged to him. Philosophy, architecture, Victorian social history. I do admire self-taught men.’

‘He was also a natural mechanic.’ Daisy bit her lip, remembering the day when her beloved father had been called to the mill to tend the engine, and been carried back broken and bleeding to die in his bed. ‘He could have been anything, given the chance.’

‘He had an untutored intelligence,’ Florence said, unable to hear any confidence without going one better. ‘How many budding intellectuals lurk beneath the flat caps of our working classes? Think of the amateur botanists who leave the mills behind at the weekends and go out with haversacks on their backs.’

‘He used to do that, too. He brought plants back, little shoots of wild flowers, to press in scrap-books with mother’s
flat-iron
to act as a weight. She used to get so flamin’ mad. Especially when she needed the iron to press her potted meat in a basin.’

‘There’s a woman come out of the next door,’ Florence said, rolling her eyes in the appropriate direction and speaking from the corner of her mouth. ‘She’s been watching us from the window.’

‘She’s coming out to speak to us. Thinks we’re interested in buying this house, or looking for a place to stay.’

‘She’s a NO VACANCIES, love. By gum, but she’s never been short of a butty, has she?’ Florence turned to smile at the stout woman advancing towards them, changing her accent with a speed that would have done a seasoned trouper proud. ‘Good afternoon. Quite a change in the weather, isn’t there? We’ve had a disappointing back end, haven’t we?’

The woman’s fat cheeks creased into a smile. ‘I’m BALMORAL next door. Mrs MacDougal. I can show you round this place if you like.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Poor soul. Died at her post just when the season started back in June. Frying bacon when she should have been lying in hospital in an oxygen tent. Emphysema.’ With a podgy hand she made the movements of smoking a cigarette. ‘Couldn’t give it up, not that I blamed her with what she’d had to put up with. Passed over with a fag stuck in her face.’ She patted the pocket of her apron. ‘I’ve got the key if you’d like to see inside.’

‘We have a train to catch, I’m afraid,’ Florence said quickly.

‘Yes, please,’ Daisy said. ‘That’s if you can spare the time.’

Deliberately avoiding looking at Florence’s face, Daisy followed Mrs MacDougal into the house, into a hall dominated by a large antlered coatstand. The walls were painted a hideous mustard shade with brown stipples blurring into each other. Mrs MacDougal opened a brown door on the left with a flourish.

‘The lounge,’ she announced. ‘You’d never find lounges in the houses up nearer the centre. These houses further north
are
far superior. Purpose-built this road was. Built to last. Like me.’ Laughing, she patted a barrel-tight stomach. ‘A piano,’ she told them, pointing to an upright monstrosity. ‘Mrs Entwistle’s visitors liked a bit of a sing-song when the weather got them down.’

Daisy glanced round the room, wrinkling her nose at the smell which suggested the possibility of mice. A threadbare carpet, flanked by stained boards, a fireplace with a drunken fan of crêpe paper in the grate, assorted chairs with frayed covers, and a settee with the springs clearly defined through velvet cushions with the nap rubbed off them.

‘Very nice,’ she said insincerely.

The dining room was better, although the hectically patterned carpet vied for attention with the vividly flocked walls, and a flight of plaster birds soared on outspread wings across the wall where the clear marks of a boarded-up fireplace were only partly hidden by a table pushed close against it.

‘Mrs Entwistle used to seat forty at high season.’ Mrs MacDougal caught the look of disbelief which passed between Daisy and Florence. ‘Needs must, Miss, with the season being so short, and with these tables pushed together and a couple of card tables, she managed fine.’

‘May we see the kitchen, please?’ Florence seemed to have found her voice, but Mrs MacDougal had decided that the shorter prettier one was the one that mattered. She hadn’t taken to Florence at all. She turned eagerly to Daisy.

‘This way, Miss …?’

‘Miss Bell.’ Daisy nodded towards Florence. ‘And this is my friend, Miss Livesey.’

‘This way, Miss Bell. And call me Mrs Mac. Everybody does, though there’s not a drop of Scottish blood in my veins. It’s me husband who comes from the land of the heather.’

‘He helps you to run the business?’ Florence was a bit put out at being ignored. ‘The Scot has never been afraid of hard work.’

‘Then my Angus must be an exception to the rule,’ Mrs
Mac
said at once. ‘He’s that lazy he’d scorch his trousers sooner than shift back from the fire. The kitchen,’ she said, opening a door into a room so much smaller than Daisy had anticipated she felt her mouth drop open with surprise.

‘It has to be the bedrooms,’ Mrs Mac said, reading Daisy’s expression. ‘If you haven’t got the bedrooms then you can’t make it pay.’

‘How many visitors stay here? At the busiest time?’ Daisy stared at the shelves piled with crockery, each shelf hung with pans dangling from hooks on the underside.

‘Eight bedrooms, four on each floor – say twenty-two guests. Two cots on the landing, and the put-you-up in the lounge. When the Illuminations begin I’ll have one lad sleeping on a board across the bath, and his mate on a deckchair in the cupboard under the stairs.’ Mrs Mac was unrepentant. ‘Anyroad, who wants big bedrooms? They’re not used to them where they come from, it’s more comfortable with a place that’s home from home.’

‘They would be frightened away with more impressive surroundings. I can understand that.’ Florence had been quiet for long enough. ‘And I can also understand that seeing their landlady visibly involved must be reassuring.’

Mrs Mac’s sparse eyebrows shot almost to her frizzy hairline. Lah-de-dah, they said silently. Who does Miss Livesey think she is? Talking like she’s swallowed an ’apenny book. ‘Well, I’m homely meself,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they want. A home from home, like I said. Bedrooms now. Lead on, MacDuff.’

Purpose-built indeed. Daisy’s eyes grew rounder as they opened first one door then another into what seemed like a warren of tiny rooms, each one furnished with a double bed, a marble-topped wash-hand-stand, and a single wardrobe, with the two marginally bigger bedrooms at the front of the house squeezing in a single bed and a cot at the foot of the bed.

‘The bathroom.’ Mrs Mac threw open the door of a narrow room with a pedestal bath in chipped white enamel,
closed
it quickly and inclined her chin to a closed door on the right. ‘The WC,’ she said unnecessarily, pointing to the two letters on the door. ‘There are chambers in all the rooms, but we don’t encourage their use with the cost of labour being what it is. I’m giving my girl this summer fifteen shillings a week and her keep, and she still feels she’s badly done to, though back at home she’s an out-of-work weaver.’

‘Disgraceful!’ Florence declared in a ringing tone, causing Mrs Mac to dart her a suspicious look.

‘There’s four more bedrooms up there.’ She nodded towards a shorter flight of uncarpeted stairs. ‘Mrs Entwistle kept her regulars up there, but there’s only two left. Mr Schofield works for the post office, so he’ll be out.’ Without warning she lifted her head and called out; ‘Anybody at home? Mr Penny? Yoo-hoo!’

The door at the top of the stairs opened almost at once to reveal a man with brushed-back brown hair, wearing a speckled tweed jacket and with the fingers of his right hand curved round the stem of a pipe. In his left hand he held a book, and by the absent-minded way he blinked down at them Daisy guessed he had been reading a passage he was loth to leave. Herbert Marshall, she thought at once. In
Trouble in Paradise
, an upper-class story of sophisticated jewel thieves, with Miriam Hopkins looking ravishing. A gentleman.

Cultured, Florence thought. A man of letters, maybe? More at home, she would have thought, in a book-lined study with a dog at his feet. Pedigree of course.

An unlikely pair, Joshua Penny told himself. The least likely of any of the potential buyers shown round by the indefatigable Mrs Mac. The younger one recently widowed? The other with a vague likeness to Edith Sitwell. Her sister-in-law? What a dreadful hat she was wearing. It reminded him of something, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what.

‘Good afternoon, ladies. I go with the house, I’m afraid.’

What an urbane smile. Florence was sorry when he nodded politely and closed his door firmly behind him. She
would
have liked to ask him the title of the book he was reading, or at least apologize for disturbing him so rudely.

‘Very sad.’ Mrs Mac went down the stairs crabwise, clinging firmly to the banister. ‘All my family have rheumatism,’ she explained proudly, as if it was an achievement of which to be justly proud. ‘They wheeled my mother out in a Bath-chair with it for the last three years of her life. All her fingernails and toenails rotted off. With the acid.’

‘I hope you don’t go the same way.’ Daisy exchanged a wicked glance with Florence.

Mrs Mac had at last reached the bottom stair. ‘Well, if I do, yon husband of mine wouldn’t push me out in a Bath-chair. Too idle to blow the skin off his rice pudding, that one is.’

‘What was very sad about Mr Penny?’ Outside again, Florence lifted her hooded eyelids. ‘He looked quite cheerful to me.’

‘Gassed. In the last war.’ Mrs Mac led the way back to BALMORAL next door. ‘Lungs shot, I gather. Then his wife, dead of the consumption, choking to death on her own spit, weighing no more than a pullet. He brought her here for the air, but it was too late, poor soul. He’s a teacher in a school at Preston. He
travels
. Every day. There and back. Well,’ she said, reaching her own front door, ‘I’ll have to get on. If you want to see the house again I can give you an address to write to. Mrs Entwistle’s son. Never spent a penny on her when she was alive, but he’s holding his hand out now for the money. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’