A Better World than This (43 page)

‘I am neither use nor ornament,’ Florence intoned.

‘And a happy Easter to you too,’ Daisy said, getting up to go. Bending over the bed she dropped a light kiss on Florence’s forehead. ‘Cheer up, love. It’ll all be the same a hundred years from now.’

‘Is that a cause for rejoicing?’ Florence raised a languid hand to push a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Give my love to Joshua.’

‘He’ll be coming to see you over the long weekend, I’m sure of it. He’s very fond of you, you know.’

The look Florence gave her would have floored a lesser woman. Now what had she said? On the way out Daisy had a quick word with Sister, who told her that Miss Livesey wasn’t making the progress they had hoped for, that shock sometimes had that effect.

‘She’ll be all right when I get her home,’ Daisy told her, hurrying away down the long corridor, her mind already firmly fixed on the busy hours ahead. She had seen Florence in this mood before. In particular, on one July day when the streets shimmered in the heat and Daisy had left her little mother lying dead somewhere in this same hospital. Daisy would have a word with Joshua when he’d recovered from his embarrassment over his silly behaviour of the night before. Together they would coax Florence back into cheerfulness again. And Winnie would help. Winnie Whalley was a laugh a line if anyone was. And the extra money to pay her wages? Well, Daisy had a motto for that:

‘Spend and God’ll send.’

She only hoped He would cooperate!

Joshua wasn’t going to mention his lapse. Daisy was relieved about that. She was flip-flapping a fillet of hake in and out of the batter when he came into the kitchen.

‘I know, I know,’ she said, too busy to look at him. ‘It looks like an earthquake has just hit us, but it’s what you call organized chaos. We know what we’re doing, don’t we, Winnie?’

‘We’re a good team, Mr Penny,’ Winnie said, repeating what Daisy had kept telling her. ‘We have some good laughs too, don’t we, Miss Bell?’

‘We do an’ all.’ Daisy made the time to turn round and wink at Joshua. ‘Go through and make sure every table has a sauce bottle on it, Winnie, love, and put the high chair round the Birtwistles’ table. They’re letting the baby stop up for his meal.’

‘Winnie has five younger brothers and sisters,’ Daisy told Joshua. ‘And I suspect she’s half-starved. The mother has to do
two
jobs to keep them, would you believe it? Charring by day and working behind a bar at night. The next one down to Winnie, a fourteen-year-old girl, will be taking over from today. By the way, Florence sends you her love. I went to see her this afternoon and found her plumbing the depths. Poor Florence, she feels things keenly, always has.’

Joshua couldn’t take his eyes off her. Daisy was the only person he had ever met who could do not two things at once but three,
and
keep up a running conversation at the same time. Not many yards away, gathered together in the lounge, what looked like enough people to fill a football stadium waited noisily to be called into the dining room. A man with a beer belly and a Friar Tuck fringe strummed on the piano, one small boy had his brother in an armlock on the rug, while sitting on the settee showing her blue directoire knickers, Daisy’s auntie passed photographs round of a large bandy-legged baby.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Joshua felt a sudden pang of tenderness choke him in the throat. It was impossible, surely, that one young woman, almost single-handed, could produce and serve a meal for the obviously ravenous horde whooping it up in the lounge. ‘Till Florence comes back,’ he went on. ‘Just for this school holiday?’ The noise outside rose to a crescendo. ‘Daisy! Make
use
of me.
I’m
panicking even if you aren’t.’

‘You can sound the gong,’ Daisy said. ‘For the very first time. I will give you that honour, Joshua. But don’t hit it too hard. There’s a four-month-old baby asleep in the double
room
at the front. I’d like its parents to enjoy their meal in peace.’

How on earth had she managed it? How had she kept all this food piping hot till the very last minute? Had he ever tasted batter so crisp, feather-light and dry? Chips so evenly browned?

‘Nowt to beat home-cooked fish and chips,’ Joshua heard the man on the next table tell his wife. ‘Beats all this foreign muck they’ll be having in the posh hotels on the front. Rice – and I don’t mean rice pudding – served on the same plate as the meat, mushroom vollyvarnts and horses doovers. You know the kind of thing. I met this chap on the pier while you were round the shops and he told me about it. And they’re paying eight shillings a night, with meals charged on top of that! I reckon we’ve struck it lucky here. Eh up, lass, it looks like we’re getting a proper pudding as well.’ He licked his lips at the sight of the wedge of golden-tinged coconut sponge set in front of him by a gently perspiring Winnie, her red hair almost standing on end.

Faced when it was all over by the mountain of washing-up, Winnie clapped a dramatic hand to her forehead. ‘We’ll be at it till midnight, Miss Bell.’ She reached for a towel. ‘Good job we made time for a bite before we began.’ She eyed the remains of the pudding with a gleam in her eye. ‘That going beggin’, Miss Bell? I’m that hungry I might faint.’

‘If you do I will cover you up with a tablecloth and carry on,’ Daisy told her. ‘Finish the custard up at the same time. It was worth making it properly with plenty of eggs and full-cream milk. I just hope they could tell the difference.’

‘Oh, I told one woman,’ Winnie said, scraping her spoon diligently round the large pie-dish. ‘None of your powdered muck for Miss Bell,’ I said. ‘Everything’s made from bloody scratch in yon kitchen. The eggs in that custard were still warm from the hens’ backsides.’

‘You never said that?’ Daisy’s uninhibited laugh rang out. ‘Oh, Winnie. I do love you!’

It had been said lightly, a spontaneous remark from a full
and
thankful heart that the first meal had gone off so well. What Daisy wasn’t prepared for was Winnie’s reaction.

Laying her head down on the table by the side of the scraped-clean pie-dish Winnie burst into noisy tears. ‘An’ I love
you
, too,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ve never been so happy in my whole life as I’ve been today. You don’t know what it’s like at our house with the kids crying and the boys fighting, an’ no carpets down an’ me mam coming in from work in a flamin’ temper on account of being tired, then going out again in time for the pub to open, with too much rouge on her face so she won’t look so pale behind the bar. It’s like being in a palace in this house. Everybody happy and laughing with being on their holidays, and you and me such a good team.’ She raised a ravaged face. ‘An’ when your friend comes out of hospital you won’t need me no more. You an’ her’ll be having all the good laughs we’ve had today an’ I’ll be back at home wiping noses and worse – oh, Miss Bell, three of me brothers are all under four ’an you’ve no idea how many bottoms they seem to have between them!’

‘Oh, Winnie. …’ Wiping her hands on her apron, Daisy came and knelt down on the oilcloth beside Winnie’s chair. ‘It has been grand today, hasn’t it? If I could afford to I’d keep you on like a flash.’ She was rapidly doing little sums in her mind. ‘As it is, Miss Livesey won’t be up to much for a long while yet. She’ll need looking after and feeding up – she looked awful when I saw her this afternoon – so there’s no question of you leaving here just yet.’

‘I hope they send her to a convalescent home.’ Winnie’s expression was fierce as she began on the drying-up. ‘Me dad went to one of those before he died and he was there for four weeks.’ She rubbed a plate round vigorously. ‘But it didn’t do him no good.’

‘Tell me about him,’ Daisy said. ‘All the nice things you remember, then we’ll soon get through this lot.’

‘He was … he had lovely manners. Like what I mean is, he never spit in the fire.’

‘I like the sound of him already,’ said Daisy, watching the
colour
slowly creeping back into Winnie’s pale face.

‘Winnie could have Bobbie’s room,’ Daisy told Joshua at a quarter to midnight on Easter Monday. ‘Do you really think he’ll be away for all that time?’ She rubbed her eyes in an attempt to stop her eyelids drooping. ‘I can’t thank you enough for going to see him again. I’ll go myself later on this week, though Mrs Mac says I could have a full house again with the weather turning so mild. You’re sure Florence will be all right to come back by taxi tomorrow? It was so good of you to go to see her twice this weekend.’ She smiled a tired smile. ‘You’re a very nice man, Joshua Penny.’

‘Somebody has to try to look after you.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Do you still want me to go to Preston to meet Jimmy on Sunday?’

‘If you’re sure, and if you don’t mind. …’

‘I don’t mind and I’m sure.’

‘Remember that time when we sat in here like this, that first time we met, and you made me an omelette that could have been used to replace a tile on the roof?’

‘That bad?’

‘Worse.’

‘We coped, Bobbie and me.’

Joshua knew that Daisy was only half listening to him, that her ears were straining to pick up the second the insensitive pair in the lounge stopped shaking the dice and ended what seemed to be a spirited game of Ludo. He wished he had the right to tell her to go on up to bed, that he would see to the lights and the fire. He knew that he ought to have told her of his decision to move out of his room and find another place to live. He worried about the look on Florence’s face when Daisy’s name came up. It was a look he recognized very well from his specialized training of years ago. A child in his school had it – a sly expression compounded of spite and envy, destructive wasteful emotions both of them.

The scalding of Florence’s feet was, in his opinion, merely the culmination to months of mental deterioration. Her
moods
had swung from near hysterical gaiety to bleak depression. Florence was unstable, and if he tried to warn Daisy she would refuse to believe him. ‘Florence has a great burning anger inside her.’ He remembered Daisy saying something like that to the solicitor on that first day when he had lingered shamelessly outside the lounge door and eavesdropped.

No, he must move on before he became too involved. After all, he had no claim on Daisy, and though the prospect of never seeing her again appalled him, he must remind himself what one of his favourite ancient Chinese philosophers had once said: ‘You can’t lose what you never had.’ True, matter-of-fact and sensible.

‘I think Sam is seeing his wife again.’ Daisy picked up a spoon from the table and began to run her finger along its length. She raised troubled eyes. ‘I have to talk to someone, Joshua. There isn’t anyone else as totally unbiased as you are. Florence is scared in case I marry Sam and cast her aside – as if I would. She’s very conscious of the fact that she’s forced by circumstances to
rely
on me for her livelihood and the roof over her head. At least that’s the way she sees it. She can never ever see that I need her as much as she needs me. For someone as independent as Florence it must be agony to be reliant on someone else. It’s enough to make her hate me.’

She looked so distressed that Joshua had to clench his hands to prevent himself from reaching out to her. ‘Sam will have to meet his wife to discuss what happens to the children,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t believe his wife has lost all interest in Jimmy. They would need to talk about that.’

‘It’s more. We … we were, at least
I
had brought the subject up when Jimmy ran off on his own. Sam got very angry in the way people do when someone has touched on a problem they don’t want mentioned. For a minute I thought he was going to hit me. Not that he would, not Sam.’ She put a hand to her mouth in a familiar gesture. ‘Oh, Joshua. Here I am, telling you my troubles. It must be upsetting for you listening to me going on and on about Sam and his wife
wanting
to be divorced. It must make you feel bitter to think that some husbands and wives can’t live together when the wife you loved with all your heart had to die.’

Joshua stretched out a hand across the table. ‘I’d be a very foolish man to go down that road, Daisy. What we have to do is just carry on. The scales usually balance eventually.’

‘Florence wouldn’t believe that.’

‘Not even if her beloved Shakespeare had said it?’

‘Did he?’

‘I’m damned if I know.’ Joshua stood up and smiled. ‘There they go at last, the Ludo fanatics. I’d hide those games before your next lot of visitors arrive.’

‘Thank you for listening to me, Joshua.’

‘Any time.’

They walked up the stairs together, switching off lights as they went. Like a comfortably married couple at the end of a long hard day.

FLORENCE SAT WITHIN
view of the doors, waiting for the taxi driver to walk through them and claim her. She had scorned the suggestion that she went home by ambulance.

‘I can walk all right in these slippers,’ she told a nurse, run off her legs by the rush of all the after-Easter admissions. ‘It’s not as if I scalded the
soles
of my feet. I can manage to walk to the taxi, and out of it into my house. Into my
friend’s
house,’ she added quickly.

‘And you have your appointment for Out-Patients?’

‘Engraven on my heart. Thank you.’

The nurse left Florence sitting there, the small case with her belongings by her side on the bench. A difficult patient. Acerbic and uncooperative. Typical frustrated spinster. Nurse Hornby smiled at the thought of the brand-new engagement ring – three small diamonds in their claw setting – in the top drawer of her dressing-table. What Miss Livesey needed was a man, though she’d probably run a mile if one spared her more than a second glance.

Florence stared straight ahead. Joshua had offered to come and take her home, but she had refused. The taxi driver appeared and she moved towards the doors with the gingerly steps of a fakir on a practice trot across a bed of hot coals. She wasn’t surprised to see it was raining hard. The way she was feeling sunshine would have seemed like an insult.