A Better World than This (20 page)

‘Joshua Penny. I go with the house. Remember?’ He hesitated, unnerved by the close-up of Daisy’s tear-stained cheeks. ‘Oh, look. I think it’s a bit much that chap sort of dismissing you like this, and most places are closed, it being Sunday you know.’ He stared down at the teacloth in a baffled kind of way. ‘So I was wondering. Would you like to come back inside and have a cup of tea, at least. You can have a proper look at the kitchen at the same time. Sort of kill two birds with one stone. There won’t be a train for a couple of hours. I know that line pretty well.’

The intrepid traveller, Daisy remembered, responding to kindness the way she always did. ‘I’d like that very much,’ she said.

Joshua Penny helped her off with her black coat and hung it on the antler coatstand in the hall. Daisy refused to part with her hat because she had gone to bed without her usual helmet of steel curlers, so felt her hair was best tucked away out of sight.

In the kitchen Daisy sat at one end of a table watching Mr Penny making heavy weather of brewing a pot of tea. No warming the pot first, no measuring the tea out carefully, just a sloshing of boiling water on tea-leaves he’d sprinkled in like salt.

‘I have to tell you I heard most of what you said in there.’ He poured the tea without letting it stand for as much as a single minute, then handed Daisy a cup of a white milky drink, tasting of steam and nothing else. ‘I was passing the door when you were up to the bit about your friend, and I meant to move on but I couldn’t take another step. I was
riveted
,’ he admitted. ‘I’m glad you had a bit of a cry. You
were
crying, weren’t you?’

To Daisy’s everlasting shame her eyes filled with tears again. What a peculiar man this Mr Penny was turning out to be. Admitting he’d been eavesdropping and dying to know what came next! A habit Daisy had indulged in many times.

‘I don’t really know why I am crying.’ She took a sip of the tea and shuddered. ‘I cried a bit on the day of my mother’s funeral, but not much, and only once briefly on the day she died. But it’s all in here.’ She tapped the front of her black silk blouse. ‘And now my friend might not be coming here with me, and as you heard,
not
coming with me could destroy her.’ The tears began to roll unchecked. ‘I am so sorry. I’m making such a fool of myself today. I’d have been better stopping at home. I really would.’

‘Wrong.’ Mr Penny was drinking the tea as if he relished every sip. ‘I expect Mrs Mac told you about me?’

Daisy nodded. The consumptive wife who shrank to the size of a pullet, she remembered.

‘I nursed my wife for almost two years. Taught during the day and took over as soon as I got home. Hardly any sleep, no proper meals, no tears, not even as I stood by her graveside. Then about six weeks later when I was buying a pound of potatoes from the greengrocer, he asked me how I was managing on my own. Sliding the potatoes into my carrier-bag and asking just a straightforward question in an ordinary voice. I only knew him as a greengrocer, Miss Bell. He
wasn’t
a friend or anything, but there and then I began to cry. Can you imagine? A man holding out a paper bag to receive a few potatoes, shaking with sobs, with his eyes and his nose running, and the poor chap wishing the ground would open and swallow me up.’

‘Oh, I can just see it,’ Daisy said at once, because she really could. ‘I’m so sorry for you, Mr Penny.’

‘And I am sorry for
you
, Miss Bell.’ Joshua got up and took a basin of eggs down from a shelf. ‘So now we’ve established how sorry we are for each other, shall we have something to eat as a consolation? An omelette, perhaps? I’m a dab hand with those.’

But he wasn’t. Daisy watched in horror as he broke the eggs into a basin, put far too much butter into a frying pan too large for omelettes, whipped the eggs furiously as if they were intended for a fatless sponge, then tipped them into the pan on top of the butter which by now was burned almost to toffee.

‘This is a shocking omelette, Mr Penny,’ she told him, cutting through the leathery pancake no thicker than a decent sheet of blotting-paper. ‘You’re helping me to make up my mind, you know.’

‘I am?’

‘At least with me to cook for you there’ll be less chance of you ending up with chronic indigestion,’ Daisy said, swallowing valiantly. ‘If I hadn’t seen you make this with me own eyes, I could be forgiven for thinking I was eating a corn plaster!’

‘He only laughed when I said that,’ Daisy told Florence that same evening. ‘He’s a nice man, is Mr Joshua Penny. Quite old, about forty-eight or nine, I should think. He reminded me strongly of my father. My father smoked a pipe, you know, puffing away in that chair you’re sitting in now, his head wreathed in smoke.’

‘Was Mr Schofield there?’

‘Out again.’ Daisy lowered her voice to a respectable level. ‘How is your father? I hardly dare ask.’

‘I must get back,’ Florence said. ‘It’s terrible. He has spent the whole day wallowing in remorse, and remorse is such a wasted emotion, Daisy. He keeps on begging my forgiveness, calling on my mother to beg
her
forgiveness, and praying to God to pardon him from all his sins. He says Jesus appeared at the foot of his bed in the night and asked him to renounce all his wicked ways. I can’t see Jesus setting foot in our house, somehow. The doctor came again and said my father needs a week in bed to recover from what he called nervous exhaustion. Doctors always say that when they’re flummoxed. Nervous exhaustion! A glass of gin would set him on his feet again, but apparently Jesus made him promise never to touch the stuff again. I give him a week before he’s on the booze again.’

‘And … and the woman?’

‘Discharged herself and gone back to her husband, can you believe it? The poor mutt has taken her in. With thousands of spinsters at loose in the country looking out for a man, and only half of them qualifying for a pension at the end of their long working lives. Frustrated neurotics like thee and me.’

‘And a merry Christmas, to you, too,’ Daisy said. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’ve decided to do about the house? Though I think I’ll see what Uncle Arnold says before I make up my mind properly. I trust his judgement. I always have.’

‘I’d get him on his own,’ Florence advised. ‘You don’t want your Auntie Edna putting her spoke in. She’d put the kybosh on things right away if she knew you were consulting him. She could emasculate Tarzan, that woman.’

Florence walked hunch-shouldered from the room, a Kirby grip loosening itself from the French pleat to drop with a tinkle on the oilcloth surround by the door. ‘But you’ll take the house. Some things are written in the stars. With me or without me, whatever your uncle says, you’ll take it. An’ you know you will.’

Arnold spent many happy hours with Daisy during the next few weeks.

‘All things being equal I would have liked nothing better
than
an office job,’ he told her when she remarked on the neatness of his writing and his quickness at working out columns of figures. ‘But things weren’t equal, were they, chuck? The war saw to that. Aye, there were more than bodies buried in Flanders mud. Ambitions as well. Chances lost, opportunities never taken up. Nay, a white-collar job was out for me by the time all that lot was over.’

‘But don’t you feel resentful? Bitter?’

‘An’ where would that get me, lass?’ He opened the flap of Mr Harmer’s manilla envelope, spilling its contents over the table. ‘Right, now. Where was we last time?’ He showed Daisy a closely written page of figures. ‘This is the way I see it, lass. If you can up the Cronshawes a hundred pounds or so for the business, it will give you a bit to play with for solicitor’s fees and the like.’ He tapped the paper with a soil-ingrained finger. ‘They can afford it. Their chip-shop’s a little gold mine. They wouldn’t be setting their daughter up in the confectionery business if they didn’t know when they were on to a good thing.’

‘I don’t want to fleece them.’

‘
Fleece
them?’ Arnold clamped his lips together and moved his head from side to side. Tough on the outside this beloved niece of his, but with a heart as soft as marshmallow. ‘Why do you think they asked for first refusal even before they knew you’d decided to sell? There might be a slump, but one thing always does well if you give value for money, and that’s food. Folks can do without clothes and furniture, but food’s a necessity. Go ’bout shoes and you get segs on your feet; go ’bout food and you die.’

He could feel the warmth spreading through his chest as Daisy listened to him, her bright eyes on his face, drinking in every word he said. It made him feel like a man again, to be taken for his proper worth. Not sneered at by his wife, a sneer often mirrored on his daughter’s face. There were days when he felt like shouting his head off at both of them, asserting his authority, but what authority was left to a man out of a job for over two years, a man who still had an instinct
to
throw himself flat on the ground, or run for the nearest bolt-hole when a rocket whooshed into the sky on Bonfire Night? Nay, best let them get on with it, the pair of them, and leave him to his allotment and his dominoes down at the pub on a Friday.

‘You’ll be having it properly surveyed and valued, lass?’

‘Mr Harmer is seeing to that, but they’re good solid houses, Uncle Arnold. Not jerry-built like some they’re throwing up further back from the promenade. I wish you could go with me one Sunday and give me your honest opinion.’

He had to pretend to have a coughing fit to hide his pleasure, but Daisy recognized it for what it was. ‘It won’t cost you anything,’ she said carefully. ‘We’ll put it down to business expenses.’

‘I’ll come, and I’ll pay my own way.’ Arnold stood up to go. ‘If I can’t scrape up the train fare to Blackpool then it’s time I threw the flippin’ sponge in. Would next Sunday suit you, lass?’

‘You’re sure Auntie Edna won’t mind?’ Daisy followed him to the door. ‘She won’t feel left out or anything? I’d ask her to come as well, but she’s not on my side about all this.’

Arnold unlatched the back door. ‘Leave it to me, chuck. You might not believe it, but I know how to handle your Auntie Edna.’

‘Well, what did you think of it?’ Edna was feeding the baby from a bottle when Arnold got back from Blackpool, his cheek-bones flushed where the sun and wind had caught them. ‘I hope you didn’t encourage that young madam to do something she’ll be sorry for. How she can even think of selling the shop our Martha worked her fingers to the bone for, I don’t know.’ The baby gulped the milk too quickly so Edna up-ended him and gave him a good thump. ‘It’s obvious the Cronshawes recognize they’re quids in buying the shop for their daughter. Fat chance of you ever doing anything like that for our Betty, bless her.’ She glared at him. ‘An’
before
I forget. I found another lot of flamin’ green tomatoes at the back of the sideboard drawer where you’d hidden them to ripen off. If you fetch any more down from that allotment I’ll chuck them to the back of the fire.’

‘You could always make them into chutney.’ Arnold sat down and unlaced his boots. ‘It’s a good house, but it wants a lot doing to it. Daisy is going to have to offer special rates for Christmas and Easter to attract the custom she’s going to need.’ He eased his feet into a pair of shabby carpet slippers. ‘We found out today that the winter weekend trade is catching on fast. So there’s money about in spite of the slump. And in the winter Daisy can take in regulars at reduced rates. There’s two living in already.’

Edna had lost the thread of what he was saying, but she wasn’t going to let on. She got up to put the baby in his pram, parked like a nuisance between the settee and the sideboard. ‘Is it true that Florrie Livesey’s going in with Daisy? Her father’s living with that common woman again. She went back to her husband for a while, but he soon threw her out.’

‘You wouldn’t like to think Daisy was going in for all this on her own, would you?’ Arnold reached up to the mantelpiece for his tobacco pouch, then realized his baccy money had gone towards his day out. ‘She’s only a girl in spite of everything.’

Edna’s better nature struggled with itself and for once won. ‘No, I wouldn’t like to think of her going away on her own. For our Martha’s sake I’d like her to be happy. God knows that was all Martha ever wanted for her. And if you’re pining for a smoke there’s an ounce of Tam-O-Shanter in the drawer behind those flamin’ green tomatoes. I managed it with cutting down on the Co-op order, so if food’s a bit short you’ll know why.’

Arnold gave the pram handle a little jig as he took the tobacco out of the drawer. ‘He’s going off, love,’ he said, remembering to keep his voice low.

ALMOST THE LAST
thing Daisy did before she left the shop and the bakehouse to begin her new life was to send a printed card to Sam. She wrote a gay little note on the back:

‘Guess what? Can you see me as a Blackpool landlady?’

On the front the card bore the letters ‘Shangri-La’, a name dreamed up by Daisy who had resumed her picture-going by a visit to
Lost Horizon
with the gentlemanly Ronald Colman as the hero of a Tibetan Utopia. The address, with ‘Proprietress Miss Daisy Bell’ in the bottom right-hand corner, was flanked on the left by ‘Breakfast and Evening Meal. Wash basins in all Bedrooms.’

It wasn’t the same as a letter, she told herself. Not like running after him, as Martha would have said. Just a courtesy gesture to an old friend, in fact.

She gave him time to reply. She fantasized about him sending her a telegram wishing her well, or a Good Luck card, or better still giving her the best thrill of all by writing to book a nice holiday break for himself and the children.

But nothing came, and at the end of a traumatic fortnight spent training Ada Cronshawe, now a triumphant Ada Davison, and her new husband into the ways of counter selling, wholesale buying of flour, currants and fresh supplies of pork-meat and daily deliveries of cream for the famous fancies, Daisy was forced to accept that Sam had crossed her from his memory. So why then couldn’t she be sensible and do the same? Why was he still there in the forefront of her
thoughts
before she slept at night, and there again when she opened her eyes each morning at the insistent ringing of her alarm clock? Why wouldn’t he just
go away
and leave her in peace?