A Better World than This (26 page)

He
is
like my father, Daisy told herself, rubbing her aching arms and watching the way Mr Penny’s face became animated when he talked about a subject close to his heart. She realized also that he was talking quickly, the way the lonely did, the words tripping over themselves. She felt a pang of pity for the kindly man and imagined him coming back night after night to the cold almost empty house, cooking himself a leathery omelette before shutting himself away in his attic room with his books and his wireless and gramophone. With only Mr Schofield to talk to, when that dapper man wasn’t out practising his quick-step, or gliding across some well-sprung floor in tango rhythm.

‘Little did we know,’ Joshua was saying now, diligently watering the wall, ‘what all those smiling students from the East were up to when they enrolled in our technical colleges.
The
whole prosperity of Lancashire was based on the export of cheap cotton to Japan. Millions and millions of yards of the stuff, and now they are teaching their weavers
our
trade and the mills are closing down one by one. The father of my twins hasn’t worked for five years. You tell me the answer, because I don’t know it.’

‘There are mill owners picking up cigarette ends out of the gutters,’ Florence said. ‘B.Sc.s sweeping the streets. And don’t forget Gandhi in his loincloth. At one time the loins of every single Indian on that vast continent were girded with cheap fent woven in Lancashire.’

‘I’ll go and make a pot of tea,’ Daisy said faintly, knowing when she was superfluous.

‘“O brave new world” as Shakespeare said. …’ Florence’s dulcet tones followed her into the kitchen.

‘Quite right,’ Mr Penny replied, sounding as bewildered as he obviously felt.

When Daisy got back with the tea on a tray, Florence was still holding forth, but Mr Penny had exchanged his brush for a palette knife and was well on the way to stripping bare the wall at the window side of the fireplace. They worked for another hour, then he threw down the knife.

‘Time for my nightly constitutional.’ He addressed both girls, but looked at Daisy. ‘The air on the sea-front takes your breath at this time of the year, but it’ll bring the colour back into your cheeks.’ A sudden shyness seemed to envelop him. ‘Would you …?’

‘I’ll get my coat,’ Florence said at once. ‘I’ve not put a foot over the doorstep all day.’

Daisy sat at the kitchen table, unscrewed the top from her fountain pen and began:

Dear Sam,

It has been a long day and I can’t believe that you were here only this morning. So much seems to have happened, but the main thing is that Jimmy is fast asleep in bed. He’s
bound
to feel strange for a while, but I think I can start to believe that he will settle down eventually. So try not to worry about him too much. One of my lodgers is a teacher. He says he is friendly with the headmistress of a junior school not too far away – no big roads to cross – and he will go and see her at the weekend with a view to getting Jimmy into her school. He says it is a good school, a church school, which I hope pleases you. You and I never discussed religion, but I hope you feel it is important for Jimmy to have regular scripture lessons and know his catechism, even if he dismisses it all as nonsense when he is old enough to think for himself. He has been very good today, a bit quiet at times and that is only to be expected, but he will be all right, Sam. We are so busy I wish I had more time for him, but you can guess what it is like here. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours,

Daisy

It was a
terrible
letter. Daisy just hoped he would understand and read between the lines, but that afternoon Florence had warned her about putting ‘things’ down in black and white.

‘Remember you are the
other woman
in the case,’ she had said. ‘The judge might not agree about Sam’s desertion being grounds enough, but adultery certainly is.’

Daisy had felt her blood freeze in her veins. ‘I haven’t committed. …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the word. ‘Sam would never put me in a position like that.’

Years of her mother’s dire warnings surfaced. In her fevered imagination she saw herself as headlines in the
News of the World
: ‘Love nest in Lancashire’. ‘Miss Daisy Bell, a Blackpool landlady, the woman named in a recent divorce case. …’

She saw the clerk of the court hold a pile of her letters aloft. Worse, she saw him take one out and read it aloud, lingering over the ‘purple passages’ with the judge leaning forward, his wig slipping to reveal a bald and shining pate.
She
thought of famous mistresses: Anna Neagle in
Nell Gwyn
, Greta Garbo in
Camille
. Her mind ran riot. Sam was a married man; there was no getting away from that. Suppose his wife had hired a private detective to follow him up north? Suppose when they had lain together on the settee all through the night, the detective had been out there in the street, wearing a shabby raincoat with the collar turned up, peering through the chink in the curtains, making notes in a little notebook?

‘Your good name gone for ever,’ Florence had said.

‘Oh, you silly, silly girl,’ her mother’s ghost had echoed.

As a tripper down the primrose path, Daisy decided, she’d never even have the guts to step off the grass verge.

She slid the letter into an envelope and copied the address down from the slip of paper Sam had given her. She decided not to post it until she heard from Sam, which would be the day after tomorrow, she calculated, if he wrote straight away, as he had promised. She would take her cue from his letter, then make him promise to burn hers the minute he’d read them. That way she could write a proper letter and tell him what was in her heart. How she loved him and missed him already; how she had wanted him to make love to her in the night, though she had known it was wrong and would almost certainly have given her a baby. She knew about men taking precautions of course. She wasn’t
that
naïve, but she didn’t think Sam was the kind of man to carry ‘things’ around in his pocket. Like a boy at a Sunday School Field Day who had once blown one up like a balloon in a corner of the field, sending a ring of giggling girls screaming for safety.

At the very thought she blushed a bright and stinging scarlet. Even though there was no one to see.

Blackpool in February was dead. The Christmas and New Year visitors had gone back home and across from the wide stretch of promenade the stalls and shops were shuttered, buffered against the Atlantic gales. The smell of frying and sugary candy-floss had been whisked away by the cold
bracing
air. It tasted now of seaweed and salty sea, Florence decided, striding along by Mr Penny’s side, without having to modify her steps to his. In the darkness the incoming tide battered its waves against the sea wall and sent glistening showers of spray over the railings, beading their coats and dampening the scarves wrapped tightly round their necks.

Florence felt gloriously and wonderfully alive. At one with the elements, she told herself. Now and again she glanced sideways at the man walking beside her, shoulders hunched into the collar of his tweed overcoat. She was going to enjoy getting to know this man better. How marvellous to meet a man with a soul twinned to your own, far removed from the furtive cinema-goers she had known with their wandering hands and common ways.

Mr Penny had been
humouring
Daisy when he talked about his fondness for Hollywood musicals. She was sure of that. For all her friend’s untutored intelligence, Daisy was more than a bit
naïve
, one had to admit that. Two men huddled in raincoats walking a windswept dog passed them, leaning into the wind.

‘Daisy’s heart rules her head, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘That child is the last thing she needs to be burdened with just now.’

‘How long has she known Jimmy’s father?’ The howling wind almost tore his words away.

‘A whirlwind romance, Mr Penny. Straight from a film in which everybody sings a love song at the drop of a hat. Preferably in Paris, in spring.’ They crossed the road and as he took her arm she bent her knees slightly to make herself roughly the same height. ‘Old Mrs Bell used to keep Daisy’s feet on the ground, but she died, alas, in tragic circumstances and Mr Barnet was there at the time to console, so you see. …’

‘What
kind
of tragic circumstances?’

They walked back past the shuttered stalls which, on that sunny July day, had been piled with tiers of Blackpool rock ‘lettered all through’. Florence told him how Martha had died in a deckchair with the sun shining.
In front of
Sam’s
children
, though they hadn’t seemed to notice, from what Daisy had said, which surprised her as young Jimmy took all in without saying much.

Florence marvelled at the way Mr Penny listened intently, inclining his head to catch her every word.

‘Very traumatic,’ she said, and he agreed.

‘Poor little Miss Bell,’ he said.

Florence bent her knees until she was walking almost bandy-legged.
Life
has written those lines on his face, she told herself. A mere glimmer of light shone from the Tower. Flattered beyond words at his interest in what she was saying, Florence told about the day she had taken Daisy up in the lift. ‘To cheer her up.’

‘Kind of you,’ Joshua said. ‘Have you been friends for long, Miss Livesey?’

‘All our lives.’ Florence clutched at her hat. ‘That was the day we first saw the house,’ she explained. ‘It came at just the right time for Daisy. Her being at a crossroads in her life. “Men at some time
are
masters of their fates,”’ she quoted as they turned away from the front into the web of dark and deserted streets.

‘Shakespeare?’ said Joshua, quickening his pace as they came closer to Shangri-La, wondering if Florence had some terrible affliction that caused her to walk bow-legged like that.

When Daisy went upstairs to take the kitten from Jimmy’s bed to make it perform on the cindered tray by the back door, she found them both asleep. The kitten purring on each exhaled breath, Jimmy muttering and twitching, his cheeks flushed bright red.

Holding her breath, Daisy smoothed the tangled hair back from the rounded forehead, only to draw her hand back in horror. Jimmy’s skin burned, and she saw now that his lips were cracked and dry with a yellow scum at the corners.

‘Jimmy?’ She sat down on the bed and took his hand. It lay horny and hot in her own. ‘Jimmy, love?’ Daisy tried to
conceal
the panic in her voice. ‘What is it, pet? Open your eyes. You
can
open them, can’t you?’

‘My throat hurts.’ Jimmy’s eyes glittered at her from between swollen eyelids. ‘My throat’s got a knife in it, Mummy.’

He couldn’t
see
her! Oh, dear God! Since putting him to bed something had struck him blind! Daisy was so shocked she found it was a real physical effort to stand up and walk to the door. He hadn’t eaten, apart from a bite of toast that morning, not really
finished
his meals all day. Not even the chips smothered in tomato sauce. She had put it down to Sam going away and leaving him with virtual strangers. She had consoled herself with the thought that it was perfectly understandable, that in a few days he would adjust. Children were very adaptable; she remembered her mother saying that. Give them love and three meals a day and they’ll survive.

Downstairs she stood in the hall, irresolute, the enormity of her responsibility hitting her with the force of a flat-handed slap. Back home she could have opened the front door and run out into the street, not even stopping to put her coat on. She could have rung Doctor Marsden’s bell, and he would have come straight away.

‘Children can be up one minute and down the next,’ she remembered him saying more than once, smiling at her from the foot of her bed during one of her frequent bilious attacks. ‘Let me know how she is in the morning. If it’s going to turn to measles the spots will be out by then. Look for them first inside her mouth.’

Spots! Daisy ran back up the stairs. Measles! There was nothing to measles. Every child got measles. It was part of childhood. Nothing to worry about. Vaguely she recalled having to lie in bed with the curtains drawn all day to keep the light from her eyes in case she went blind. Her blood froze. Jimmy had been walking around all day with measle eyes, letting the light in and destroying his precious sight. Her blood froze harder. Or maybe the kitten had some
terrible
disease and had passed it on to Jimmy already? Rabies? But then, wouldn’t Jimmy have lockjaw? He was tossing his head from side to side now on the pillow and moaning.

‘Mummy? I’m a good boy, Mummy.’

‘You’re the best boy in the world.’ Daisy pulled the blankets up round his chin.

‘My head hurts, Mummy. …’

Meningitis! Daisy remembered a girl in the next street to the pie shop dying of it. Martha had insisted they show respect and call at the house with a sultana cake to cut at, because she knew there’d be no baking done for the next few days.

The dead girl – her name was Phyllis – was the same age as Daisy, seven, a member of the Junior Sunday School and a Brownie in the Pixie Patrol with Daisy.

‘Here we come the merry Pixies. Helping people when in fixes.’

She lay in her coffin in the front parlour, wearing her Brownie uniform, with the badges sewn down a sleeve proving she could light a fire, clean a room and write a letter. Her hands had been neatly folded on her chest.
Pot
hands, Daisy remembered, cold and hard looking. Someone had combed Phyllis’s hair and fastened it to one side with a tortoiseshell slide in a style she didn’t suit. Phyllis had always worn her hair brushed straight back, held in place with an Alice band from Woolworth’s, and now the strange flat style and the pot hands had turned her into a terrifying monster.

Jimmy’s hands were scrabbling at the turned-down sheet. He rambled in a peculiar high voice, thin with fever.

Daisy turned an anguished face to the door to see Florence and Mr Penny standing there, scarf-wrapped and red-nosed, glowing from their long walk.