A Better World than This (12 page)

Trying to take in the indisputable fact that her mother was dead.

EDNA MISSED NOTHING
that went on in the street. Let a neighbourly row erupt on the flagstones, or the milkman’s horse do the unforgivable outside her house, and she would be out there, giving advice in her tinny chirrupy voice.

So it wasn’t surprising that she just happened to be standing on her doorstep for a breath of air when Daisy’s friend swanned past on the other side.

Edna blinked, trying to believe the evidence of her eyes. Florrie Livesey was wearing her nightie – there was no doubt about it. It was one of those stockinette jobs off the material man on the market, that trebled in length when you washed it. The one Edna had made for their Betty, bless her, had dropped that far she’d got two good rubbing cloths with the pieces cut from the bottom. And there was Florrie Livesey in one, walking down the street with it sticking out like a fishtail exhaust from beneath her winter coat. Edna stepped on to the pavement for a better view. Come to that, what was Florrie Livesey doing wearing her winter coat on a day when the sweat stood out on you like gob-stoppers? Her hair was hanging loose too, rats’ tails over the musquash collar. Edna watched her cross over the street and start to rattle the sneck on the bakehouse door. Saw her rattle it and keep on rattling. Enough to break it if she wasn’t careful. Edna went into battle.

‘It’s no good carrying on like that, Florrie. They’ve gone to Blackpool for the day. With Daisy’s friend.’

‘
I
am Daisy’s friend!’ Florence began beating on the door with clenched fists, crying now, with great glycerine tears oozing from beneath swollen pink eyelids, then staring at Edna with eyes that were dazed and dead in the green-tinged whiteness of her face. ‘I want a drink!’ Her voice came rusted from the desperation of her need, and her tangled hair fell forward, as knotted as a bead curtain. ‘I have to have a drink.’

Edna flared her nostrils. So that was it.
Drink
. She couldn’t smell it on her, but it was in the family all right. That randy father of hers would spit whisky if he as much as coughed. Martha had told her he had recently lost his job.

‘Florrie!’ Edna was determined to show this unlovely apparition what was what.

‘My name is
Florence
!’ A purplish bruise swelled one cheek and lifted the corner of her mouth from which a cut ran, congealed with dried blood. Florence touched it gingerly. ‘
He
did this, you know. Because I dared to tell him what I thought of him.’

Normally Edna would have been all agog to hear the details, but she was tired to the point of exhaustion. All that day the sun had beat down from a sky unpolluted by smoke from mill chimneys that normally faded the blue even from a summer sky. Now, with the sun gone and long shadows edging like gloved fingers across the street, Edna was more than a bit worried. They should have been back from Blackpool ages ago. Martha would be fit for nothing. Edna had seen her more than once so tired she could barely climb the stairs to bed, so weary she’d sleep in her corsets but for a helping hand.

‘Now come on, Florrie.’ Her tone was even brisker this time, standing no nonsense. ‘Best get yourself home to sleep it off.’

The last thing Martha needed to come home to was a drunken woman in a dirty nightie, carrying on crying and wailing on the doorstep, Let this Florrie Livesey see who was boss, then she might pull herself together and see sense. That was the only way to deal with drunks. Not that Edna had any
first
-hand dealings with them.

‘Off you
go
, love!’ She wagged a tolerant finger now, deciding that the gentle approach would be best. ‘I know what these holidays at home can be like. All your club money saved and the shops closed so you can’t spend it. Come on, love. Your mother would turn in her grave if she saw you out in the street like this.’

It was the mention of Florence’s mother that did it.

The glazed look disappeared from her eyes, to be replaced by a shining, blazing anger. ‘My mother! Oh, if my mother saw what he’d done to me it would break her heart.’ Again she touched the swelling bruise on her cheek-bone. ‘That’s what he did to me! And that terrible woman living in my mother’s house – he hits her too. But she eggs him on, and do you know why? Because she enjoys it!’

‘You mean she likes him hitting her?’ Edna was fascinated in spite of herself.

‘It is beyond your understanding.’ Florence lowered her voice. ‘Men and women sometimes do terrible things to one another. For sexual gratification.’

‘Oh, my goodness!’ Edna stopped her own mouth with her hand, as if she had said such a dreadful thing herself.

‘He hits her. She whimpers a bit. He hits her again, then her temper explodes and she hits him back. She throws anything she can get her hands on, but he knocks it all away as easily as if he was brushing a fly from his nose. So she grows madder and madder and claws at his face, but he holds her wrists, and she struggles and struggles. Then, when they are both panting, and have most of their clothes torn off, they. … Well, I was so upset the first time I saw them fighting I tried to help her and she swore at me.’

‘You mean they …?’ Edna’s eyes stood out like chapel hat-pegs.

‘Oh, they go upstairs. If I’m there. But if I’m out, I don’t suppose it matters where. Some men are worse than animals.’ Florence seemed to have recovered a little of her composure. ‘I am never going back to that house,’ she told Edna in a
strange
ringing voice. ‘I came down this morning and confronted them in the middle of their filthy antics. I called them both perverts – my father a sex-crazed maniac and her a whore.’

‘They wouldn’t like that, Florrie.’

‘No. That was when he landed out at me, but I stood my ground. I asked him did he know it was my mother’s birthday anniversary, and he told me to get out and never come back. I got my coat down from its peg at the stair bottom and walked out.’

‘First thing this morning?’

‘I have been walking all day long, Mrs Bell.’

Edna didn’t correct her. What was a wrong name at a time like this?

‘Without a drink of water or a bite to eat. I tried to drink from the fountain in the park, but a keeper mistook me for a tramp and shooed me away. Did you know my mother, Mrs Bell?’

Edna nodded. Martha had described her more than once. ‘You could eat your dinner off her lavatory seat, she’s that clean,’ she had said. ‘She even takes her oilcloth up from the floor every spring to scrub underneath, going down on her knees to prise every bit of muck from the nicks in her floorboards. Makes her husband leave his shoes outside the back door before he comes in from work. She even irons the cord in his pyjamas, then threads it back again, she’s that pernickety.’

Edna was. at a loss what to do. She wasn’t an unkind person. Not many folks in need were ever turned away from her door. Even though Arnold had been out of work for a long time she never shirked her turn to make the scones for the Ladies’ Thursday Afternoon Bright Hour. She could invite this Florrie Livesey into her house, make her a cup of tea and let her wait there comfortable till they got back from Blackpool. But what about Arnold and Cyril having to listen to mucky talk about whores and sex when they’d just finished a nice tea of potato cakes and beetroot? And what about their
Betty
, bless her, sitting up in bed suffering with her nipples, wondering what was going on downstairs?

‘If you’ll come with me I’ll get you a cup of water,’ she said at last. ‘Then I really do think you will have to go home.’ She patted the sleeve of Florence’s winter coat. ‘All families have squabbles, love. It’s part of life’s pattern. Those who say they never have a cross word don’t tell the truth. …’

Her voice tailed away. Florrie Livesey was off like a cannon shot, half-way up the street already, muttering to herself with her head down, then suddenly beginning to run. Hitching the nightdress up with one hand and disappearing round the corner in the direction of the allotments with their pigeon cotes and hen-pens.

‘Potty,’ Edna said aloud. ‘Maybe not drunk, but definitely potty.’

She didn’t go into her house straight away. Instead she stood on the doorstep, arms folded across her flat chest. The glory of the bright day had almost faded, and somehow a great weight of unease had settled on her.

It was the unnatural heat, she told herself, going inside at last and closing the door. Folks weren’t used to it up here. It overheated the blood.

Sam had seen to everything. He couldn’t get over the kindness of the Lancashire crowd on that sun-drenched beach. A man in a flat cap ran to find a telephone to summon an ambulance. A stout woman with three children grouped round her on a plaid rug found places for Jimmy and Dorothy, holding out two sticky buns with the icing peppered with sand.

‘I’m here for the rest of the day,’ she told Sam. ‘You come back when you can, love. They’ll come to no harm. I promise you that. They’re better not seeing more than they have to.’

She had a square face, red like a scald, arms like ham shanks, and eyes sunk deep into puffy cushions of flesh. She was clean and kind, as wholesome as a baked apple, and Sam knew he could trust her; knew he had no choice but to trust
her
. He glanced over to the deckchair. A small but respectful crowd had circled it, offering advice, murmuring sympathy. Someone had put Martha’s hand back on her lap; a girl in a one-piece bathing costume was saying that maybe a towel over the old lady’s face? Children, wide-eyed with morbid curiosity, were led away. Daisy knelt in the sand stroking her mother’s arm.

The ambulance came. Two men wearing navy-blue peaked caps trod splay-footed across the sand, dispensed with the stretcher and carried Martha away, first letting the deckchair down and covering her with a brown blanket.

From the foot of the iron steps Sam looked back at his children. Dorothy was being read to and Jimmy was busy once again on Windsor Castle, with two of the boys from the plaid rug burrowing like moles beside him to deepen the moat.

Daisy was a stone. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as they waited in a corridor of a hospital with wide echoing passageways leading off it in all directions. ‘What would I do without you?’ she asked, when Sam took over the awful formalities, answering questions for her, even pointing to the place on the form she had to sign.

‘She never did get her traipse round Woolworth’s, did she?’ Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘Did you see how small she was? And her mouth seemed to be smiling. Or does that happen sometimes when people die? I think I read somewhere that it did.’

It had all turned out to be so simple really. The body – it was impossible to think of her mother as that – would be taken back home to the Chapel of Rest. They had given Sam a card with the name of an undertaker printed on it in decent black lettering.

‘By tomorrow afternoon,’ they told Sam, professional, efficient, as if they dealt with people dying in deckchairs every single day. ‘Mr Taylor will call.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Sam asked Daisy. ‘You say exactly what you want.’

‘There isn’t the room,’ she said, explaining without saying the words.

‘No.’ Sam closed his eyes, trying to see Martha in that small overheated room at the back of the shop, lying in a coffin with a white frill round her neck, her hands crossed over that spade-flat chest. He had an overwhelming urge to get back to the children. ‘I think we can go now,’ he said with gentleness. ‘There isn’t anything left for us to do here.’

‘We must get back to the children,’ Daisy said, reading his mind. ‘I hope they didn’t see. What are we going to tell them, Sam?’

She really was the most incredible girl. Outside the hospital Sam hailed a passing taxi. But that was the way she was; somehow he knew that for sure. The shock had made her seem somehow older and plainer than she had before. It was the liveliness of her normal expression that made her attractive, he realized. In the taxi she turned her head away from him to stare through the window on her side.

‘Honeymoon Couple Starves for Love.’ Daisy’s mind registered the words spelt out on a billboard as the taxi drew near to Central Pier. Only that morning she had thought how colourful the holidaymakers were. How happy they were, like vivid postcards. Now, somehow, they appeared to have changed. The men grim-faced, wearing ill-fitting jackets and trousers, looking bent and ill as though on a hunger march. The women in frocks of dark prints, dragging whining children past a peep-show. ‘The Rector of Stiffkey,’ the notice shouted. ‘Come and see him starving in a barrel.’

It was all there. The pole-squatting, the sixpenny sheet-music bazaars, the stalls with shocking-pink rock layered in tiers. ‘Lettered all through.’ Girls walking arm in arm wearing
KISSMEQUICK
hats, laughing at gangs of youths with hair cut close to their heads like convicts.

‘Undignified,’ Martha would have said. ‘Well, let’s talk straight, then. Common.’

‘In her own way, my mother was a little lady,’ Daisy told Sam. ‘She was very well respected. She didn’t have many
friends
, but she won’t have left any enemies. She was a
dignified
sort of person in her own way.’

‘She
died
with dignity,’ Sam said soothingly. He helped Daisy down from the taxi, and spotted the children as soon as they were across the tramlines. Tactfully, he curbed the enthusiasm of his wave.

‘I’m starving hungry,’ Jimmy grumbled, morose and disagreeable, kicking at a pebble. ‘Dorothy’s wet her knickers. The lady told her to “go” in the sea, but she wouldn’t.’

‘I’ve not!’ Dorothy jumped up from the plaid rug, a half-moon swathe of wet knicker, sand encrusted, hanging down below the hem of her pink cotton dress. ‘What did those men do with that old lady?’

‘I’ve
told
you and
told
you. She’s died,’ Jimmy said. ‘But she had white hair, so it was
time
.’

‘That’s enough, son.’ Sam stared down anxiously at Dorothy, but cocooned in her own important misery she accepted a square of sweating chocolate and crammed it in her mouth, chewing with it wide open so that brown saliva trickled down her chin.