A Better World than This (22 page)

Love from a gentle man, in both senses of the word. Gentle but strong, cultured, maybe not a scholar but a man fond of books, of music, of country walks in the rain. Not good-looking in a conventional way, but nicely spoken. A man something like Daisy’s dead father. Florence sighed as the rage inside her began to subside. She could hardly remember him, but every time Daisy spoke about him, she
identified
.

Yet he had married Daisy’s mother. That little woman with the razor-sharp tongue whose idea of culture was a night out at the Palace Theatre watching a variety show, with a hot potato from the cart on the Boulevard afterwards. Daisy’s mother had admired Frank Randle, the music-hall comedian of overpowering vulgarity, and George Formby of the toothy grin and the ukelele, with the
double entendre
in his songs. It didn’t make sense.

At the sound of voices down in the hall Florence opened the door and moved out to the landing, looked down over the banisters and saw Daisy greeting Mr Penny, home from his teaching job at Preston, the man Daisy had confessed reminded her of her father.

‘No, I insist,’ Daisy was saying. ‘Your tea will be ready at six o’clock. If you can climb over all those books on the stairs, just go up and wash your hands and come down when you’re ready. Mr Schofield will be back and I’m going to put you
together
, unless you would like to eat at separate tables. You’ve got the dining room to yourselves, so you can choose.’

‘But on your first day!’ The kind Mr Penny was objecting in his nice refined voice. ‘I never expected … I really didn’t.’ As he lowered his voice, Florence leaned dangerously over the banister rail. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like to sit down yourself while I make you an omelette? My speciality, as you know.’

As Florence began to walk slowly down towards them, Daisy’s distinctive laugh rang out, as uninhibited and chuckly as a child’s.

So that when Joshua Penny turned and saw Florence the merriment in his own eyes died away at the sight of the horse-faced woman with a streak of dirt down her long nose, glaring at them as if she had caught them out in some indiscretion.

‘You remember my friend, Miss Livesey?’ Daisy’s voice was brittle with enforced gaiety. ‘From that first day? You
remember
?’

‘I can’t think why he should.’ Florence tripped over an
Atlas of the World
and almost fell, recovering herself enough to stalk past a bewildered Joshua with his hand outstretched in greeting. On into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her with a bang that seemed to shake the house to its foundations.

‘She’s tired.’ Daisy spoke into the awkward silence. ‘And not very well.’

‘Understandable,’ Joshua said politely. ‘Moving day can be very trying.’

‘We’ve got to get this straight. Right now.’

Daisy sat down at the kitchen table opposite a sulky Florence, viewing her with difficulty over the top of a big carton piled high with pans. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, but whatever it is you keep it between us from now on. To involve the boarders in petty squabbles is
wrong
.’
Impatiently
she pushed the carton to one side, dislodging a milk pan which clattered noisily to the floor, setting her teeth on edge. ‘The customer is always your first concern, just as it was when you were serving in the shop. That nice Mr Penny must be wondering what on earth is going on.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We
need
him. Can’t you see that? We need him and we need Mr Schofield, and we’re going to go on needing them until we can have this place ready for visitors. So … we’ve got to treat them right,
feed
them right, and make them happy and comfortable.’

‘And kow-tow to them, you mean.’ Florence sniffed. ‘Demean ourselves, you mean.’

‘Yes! A thousand times yes! And if you can’t see that. …’ Daisy hesitated, but went on firmly. ‘You ought never to have agreed to come in with me.’

‘Are you dismissing me, Miss Bell?’

Daisy ignored the break in Florence’s voice. ‘Don’t talk
daft
.’ She stretched out a hand across the cardboard carton. ‘Aw, come on, Florence. You’ve known me for a long, long time. Can you really see me playing the big I AM? Wielding the whip while you scurry round to do my bidding? You’re my
friend
. My partner, and if I go under in this, then you go with me. If I lose all me money in this venture then we’ll have to unbutton the top two buttons on our blouses, get ourselves black stockings with clocks up the backs and go on the streets.’

There was a slight, only a very slight hesitation, but Daisy saw Florence’s dusty nose begin to quiver.

‘Or seduce Mr Penny and Mr Schofield.’ The wide pale eyes sparkled with the relief of held-back tears.

‘Bags me Mr Penny,’ Florence said. ‘I don’t think I’m Mr Schofield’s type.’

‘Then I suppose
I’d
better start learning to tango.’

Daisy got up and moved over to the cooker. To let Florence get her bit of a cry over and done with in peace.

The potato pancakes went down a treat. Daisy had grated
potatoes
and onions into a basin, added flour and salt, and mixed them with the eggs into a soft paste. She had heated the pan with no more than a dash of olive oil and dropped the mixture in, a tablespoonful at a time, turned them when brown underneath and Florence, with her face washed and her hair neatly pleated, had borne them into the dining room with all the aplomb of a Lyons’ Corner House Nippy.

Mr Schofield had gone off dancing with his patent-leather pumps in a brown paper bag, and Mr Penny had gone to his room to get on with marking exercise books, once his offers of help had been firmly rejected.

Now, at almost midnight, with Florence tucked up in bed with a hot-water bottle and a dose of the Indian brandy, mercifully discovered at the bottom of a carton, Daisy was alone downstairs in the depressingly brown lounge. Bodily exhausted, but mentally as alert as if spiders crawled round and round in her mind.

Florence’s outburst had depressed her more than she realized. There had even been a small ‘do’ about the dark and dismal WC on the first landing. Sharing that and the bathroom with two men had upset Florence’s sense of what was right and proper.

‘Suppose I have to go in the night and one of the men happen to be in? Suppose they
see
me in my dressing-gown? And know where I’m going?’

‘I bet even Greta Garbo has to go to the lavatory sometimes,’ Daisy had said. And your precious Shakespeare. I bet even he. …’

‘You can be very vulgar at times,’ Florence had said, trailing listlessly upstairs with her stone hot-water bottle underneath her arm.

So what was it going to be like when Daisy reminded Florence that once the visitors arrived they might have to share a room on the top landing? With no privacy, and little time to indulge in its niceties, anyway.

Daisy closed her eyes to shut out the fawn-coloured walls, and tried to see them papered in an apricot shade, with
maybe
the faintest white fleck in it. …

Good heavens, there were some Blackpool landladies who slept on camp beds in the kitchen, putting their husbands out with the cat to sleep as best they could in the backyard shed, according to Mrs Mac who had popped in for an hour earlier on.

‘Wish I could do that with mine. He’s about as much good as a concrete cushion,’ she’d said. ‘Your friend’s a bad colour, isn’t she?’

‘She’ll be all right tomorrow,’ Daisy had said, with meaning, and Mrs Mac’s eyes had lit up.

‘I had a neighbour suffered like that every month. She had to have everything taken away before she was forty, poor soul’

Daisy leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The plumber recommended by Mrs Mac was coming tomorrow – well, today – and she was praying his estimate would be reasonable enough to include a downstairs toilet to fit in the long cupboard underneath the stairs. There was an outside porch, glassed-in at the back of the kitchen, where the Ewbank, the clothes-horse and the card table could go at a pinch. Wash basins in each of the bedrooms, that was priority. No queues on the landing, or visitors peering through a slit in their doors ready for a quick dash into the bathroom the second they heard the click of the lock.

‘He’s in there, bloody
shaving
!’ she remembered one man shouting to his wife on a long-ago holiday with her mother and father.

‘What does the silly pie-can
think
he’s doing? Filling his Pools in?’ Martha had said, fuming herself at the sight of Daisy’s father sitting on the edge of the bed with a towel round his neck, patiently waiting his turn.

Her father would have liked this house, Daisy knew that. It had character; it had an Edwardian grandeur about it and, built on the periphery of the district around the North Station, it had ‘class’.

There would be no sub-dividing the bedrooms, even
though
she knew it was done. No visitors sleeping in the lounge, even at the height of the season. And definitely no extra charge for use of the cruet or the sauce bottle.

The visitors would be Daisy’s own sort of folks. Respectable working-class, with lives that revolved round work, home, family and church or chapel. She could just see them arriving with their carrier-bags and roped-up cases, eyes shining at the thought of a week by the sea. A whole year of saving week by week for a chance to walk on the front breathing in the ozone with its medicinal properties, paddling in the sea, dancing in the Tower Ballroom, listening to Toni’s orchestra on the North Pier. Relaxing in deckchairs, riding the trams along the promenade, walking in Stanley Park, strolling round the Pleasure Beach eating sticky candy-floss. Watching the chunky animals forever circling the Noah’s Ark, then coming back here to this house, faces and arms burned brick-red by the sun and wind, to have a wash in the privacy of their own bedrooms before coming down to a meal that would make them sigh and pat well-filled stomachs.

And making firm bookings for next year’s holiday before they left for home and another whole year of working in factories and mills.

They would have to pay just a little bit extra maybe, but Daisy knew her fellow Lancastrians. They wouldn’t mind spending what they’d got, but by gum they would see to it that they never
wasted
it. Give them good value for their hard-saved brass, and back they’d come. Again and again.

She was half-way up the stairs, deciding to go curlerless to bed for once, when she heard the chug of a motorbike engine in the street; heard it slow down, then stop.

‘Mrs Mac’s son,’ she thought, the one his mother said came to see her when he felt like it, and only then when he wanted to scrounge something. She remembered too the pride in Mrs Mac’s eyes when she’d talked about her wayward son, and knew that in some ways Mrs Mac was very like Martha, her
little
mother who would have choked rather than allow a word of praise pass her lips.

Daisy went on climbing the stairs, smiling to herself. Outside Florence’s bedroom door she hesitated briefly, remembered the lateness of the hour and Florence’s dislike of being seen in bed, and passed on.

She was opening her own door when the knock came, followed by a single ring at the bell. There was a dimmed light bulb on the landing and instinctively she glanced up at the two closed doors on the upper landing. The men were obviously in bed and asleep, but a quick cry for help would soon bring them running down to her rescue. Martha had often said that a knock at the door after midnight always spelt trouble. As Daisy went quickly back downstairs she felt apprehension stir like a cold finger tracing the length of her spine.

Drawing the bolt, she opened the door a fraction. ‘Yes. Who is it?’

‘Daisy! Thank God!’

At first she didn’t recognize him. The street lamp had been lowered for the night and the man standing there was a dark bulk of leather coat, his hair hidden by a flying helmet with ear-flaps. A pair of goggles swung from his hand, and his face shone eerily with a pale green tinge to it. Daisy blinked and looked past him at the motorbike and sidecar drawn up at the kerb.

‘Daisy? Don’t you know me?’

As he spoke her name again she felt the prickly waves of shock spring in her armpits. She had thought about him every single day, and yet he was the last man on earth she expected to see.

‘Sam?’ She swayed towards him, feeling as if she might faint, but recovered herself enough to open the door wide. ‘Come in. Please come in.’

Snatching off the leather helmet he pushed it at her along with the driving goggles. ‘You take these. I’ll go and get the boy.’

‘The boy?’ Daisy knew she was beginning to sound like a backward parrot, but there was nothing she could do about it, and Sam wasn’t listening anyway. He was out there in the dark silent street lifting his son from the sidecar and carrying him tenderly into the house. ‘In here. Bring him in here.’ Leading the way into the lounge Daisy moved to switch on the standard lamp, leaving the centre light off. Moving a cushion, she stood at the head of the brown sofa. ‘Put him down on here.’

‘He stinks like the devil.’ Sam lowered Jimmy on to the sofa. ‘He was sick twice on the way and I tried to clean him up, but I’ve not made much of a job of it. No, he’s not ill. Just whacked. I borrowed the bike from a pal of mine and that sidecar is normally used for his painting tackle. I think the smell must have lingered and turned Jimmy’s stomach. He’s asleep now, thank God. Dead to the world. As you see.’

Daisy saw all right. Jimmy was so fast asleep every vestige of healthy colour had drained from his face. He looked like she imagined he would look if he lay in a coma, scarcely breathing, arms and legs in exactly the position in which Sam had placed them. A sour smell came from him, and when Daisy saw that his woollen scarf was stiff with dried vomit she eased it gently from his neck.

‘I’ll go and get the case.’ Cumbersome in the heavy leather coat and leggings Sam walked stiffly from the room, leaving Daisy staring down at the small boy, a hand pressed to her mouth as if she still could scarcely believe the evidence of her eyes.

Forcing herself to do something,
anything
, she went into the hall and took her warm winter coat from its peg on the antler stand.