A Better World than This (38 page)

‘What will happen to him?’ She jumped at the sound of the front door opening downstairs. ‘Will he have to go to prison?’ Inadvertently her eyes went to the mantelpiece crowded with silver dancing trophies. Nineteen thirty-four, the only year not represented by a trophy of some kind or other. ‘Has he been to prison before?’

‘Well, let’s say he’s not exactly a first offender, Miss,’ the policeman said, his eyes rotating like catherine wheels. ‘Will that be him coming up the stairs now?’

Daisy wanted to warn Bobbie. To tell him to turn and run and never come back. She wasn’t like Florence, always on the side of the villains, making excuses for them, saying that any man who had survived the trenches in the war was bound to be an emotional mess. But all the same Daisy had grown fond of the chirpy little man with his patent leather hair, and his size seven feet twinkling in their shiny dancing pumps. There was the time he’d brought her a bunch of daffodils, mysteriously unwrapped. Pinched from the display outside the greengrocer’s shop, no doubt. And the box of sugared almonds produced from the deep inside pocket of the camel-hair coat.

‘Sweets for the sweet,’ he’d said, handing them over with a little bow.

Whipped straight from the counter of the newsagent’s shop on the corner, almost certainly!

‘Tea for two. …’ Daisy thought she had never seen anything as sad as the dapper little man rounding the bend of
the
stairs, whistling merrily through his teeth, executing a Fred Astaire lighter-than-air dance step as he reached the top landing.

‘Something smells good, Daisy. Were you coming to find me? I’ll be down in the jolliest of jiffs.’

‘Bobbie. …’ Daisy held out a hand towards him. ‘Oh, Bobbie. …’

Behind her the pop-eyed policeman opened the lid of the trunk with a flourish. ‘We meet again, Mr Schofield. You’ve led us a pretty dance this time.’

Daisy couldn’t bear it. Bobbie’s shame was her shame somehow. When he sank to the bed and buried his face in his hands she went to him and pressed his shoulder. ‘Don’t cry, Bobbie. We’ll help you. Florence, Joshua and me. We’re your good friends. You mustn’t upset yourself like this. You can’t help it. It’s like being ill.

‘It’s not as if anything in that flamin’ trunk is of the slightest use to him!’ she shouted at the policeman. ‘Can’t you see it’s
help
he needs, not prison?’ She was talking like Florence, and meaning it, too.

‘Are you going to come quietly?’ Ignoring Daisy, the policeman moved towards the door. ‘We don’t want a repetition of last time, do we?’

‘Last time? What did he do last time?’ Daisy followed them down the stairs.

‘Only broke a colleague’s nose in four places trying to avoid arrest. That’s all.’

‘He must have had a big nose!’ Daisy wanted to weep at the sight of her top-floor regular being escorted down the hall and out of the front door, his neat little head sunk low on his chest and his feet dragging instead of gliding across the floor.

‘I wouldn’t put it past him being one of them pansies as well.’ Edna’s voice was strong and assertive as she prodded the carrots bubbling away in a pan. ‘I’ve decided to mash these with butter.’

She looked so important, so
chuffed
that things were going
wrong
. So filled with triumph at being in charge, Daisy wanted to hit her.

‘Why on earth should you think Mr Schofield was a pansy?’

‘Going out dancing and wearing a camel-hair coat, and wiggling when he walks? Of course he’s one, and I’ll tell you another thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that Florrie Livesey isn’t tarred with the same brush. She’s never had a man, has she?’

Serving the meal, Daisy marvelled at her own self-control. She insisted that Edna sat down with the rest to enjoy her food, and when Sam winked at her over his plate of hotpot she winked straight back.

Sam had faith in her. Sam believed she was all right. A lot more than all right, he had once said, holding her face for his kiss. Somehow, since that day, she had grown in confidence. Yes, with or without Florence, she would make a go of things. Sam’s wink had told her he was proud of her.

No, she told Edna, she wouldn’t dream of allowing her to help with the washing-up. They were here for a holiday, and they must hurry if they were going to be in time for the second-house pictures.

It never once occurred to her as she began on the piles of plates and pans that Sam might have come in from the lounge where he was playing Ludo with Jimmy and offered to help. Joshua would have walked in, picked up a teacloth and that would have been that. But Sam wasn’t Joshua, was he? It would be a funny world if we were all made the same, as her mother would have said.

What on earth were they doing to Florence? In the two hours since she had been carried into Casualty nothing had happened. Nothing but the silence of the long wide corridor. Once a nurse had bustled out in a crackle of starched apron and Joshua had asked what he thought was a perfectly
reasonable
question, only to be quelled by a glance from the nurse’s beady eyes.

‘The doctor will be along. All in good time,’ she said in a scathing tone which implied, Joshua thought, that he had been jumping up every five minutes and rushing into Casualty demanding to know how long Miss Livesey would be, for God’s sake?

At the end of the first hour the ambulance man who had brought them into the hospital came through the swing doors leading by the arm an elderly man with a blood-stained bandage round his head. He showed no surprise at all at seeing Joshua still sitting there.

‘Your lady friend won’t be long,’ he said on his way out. He winked and walked jauntily away down the bleak corridor.

Joshua took his pipe out of his pocket, stared at it with longing and put it back again. His lady friend? Nothing could be further from the truth.

Tucked up in bed at last, Florence watched Joshua walk towards her down the long ward. He turned to smile at a child sitting propped up by pillows and she was immediately struck by the nobility of his profile. A great pity filled her for the other patients with their scrawny little husbands sitting by their bedsides for the visiting hour.

‘You should have gone home, Joshua.’ She held out a hand to him, wishing she was wearing a decent bedjacket and not the hospital issue nightgown, with its high round neck and row of calico-covered buttons mangled out of shape by the laundry.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He stood awkwardly by the side of the bed, wanting his hand back and not knowing how to manage it without giving offence. ‘I got used to waiting around in hospitals. You could say I’m an expert, I suppose.’

‘Your dear wife.’ Florence gripped his hand even tighter. ‘Life can be very cruel to some. Both you and I have had more than our fair share of trouble, but we’ll win through in the end.’

Joshua wished she wouldn’t stare at him with those pale bulbous eyes. Florence had a way of making him feel sorry for her and angry at the same time. She took for granted an intimacy that didn’t exist, which irritated, then made him feel guilty because he
was
irritated.

Florence tidied her hair with her free hand. ‘The blistering of my feet looks terrible, but once they’ve gone the doctor says there’ll hardly be a blemish. Daisy was quick off the mark with the carron oil.’

‘She never panics.’ Joshua freed his hand at last. ‘She would have made a marvellous nurse. I thought so when Jimmy had scarlet fever. She has a way with her.’

‘She’s not
perfect
, Joshua.’

Florence was appalled at the sharpness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. His whole expression changed when he said Daisy’s name. He was either very fond of her or, dear God, he
loved
her. Was in love with her. The truth hit her like a slap. Florence opened her mouth and drew in a deep breath. Beneath the bed-cage the pain in her feet blazed into life as if she felt again the agony of the boiling water cascading over them.

Oh, dear God, how could she have thought … how for one moment imagined that this lovely quiet man would look twice at
her
? She trembled with pity for herself, and anger with him that all he wanted to do was to walk away and leave her feeling bereft and suffering. He cared nothing for her. She knuckled a fist into her open mouth. It was strange how in one blinding moment she had accepted that. It had been there, she now realized, in the way he walked towards her bed down the length of the long ward. There had been no eager anticipation on his face, no fevered anxiety for her pain, no desperate hurry to reach her. Just a good kind man plodding patiently up a ward after sitting for hours doing what he saw as his duty. Doing it for Daisy.

All self-control slipped away from her as Florence felt a hatred so hot for Daisy it flooded her whole body with heat. In that moment she wished her ill. She would have stuck pins
in
if she’d had an effigy of her. The pain in her feet was making her feel sick.

‘She’ll marry Sam, you know.’ Her tongue was running away with her, but there was nothing she could do about it. ‘Even against her better judgement she’ll marry him.’

‘I don’t think we should be discussing Daisy.’ Joshua backed away from the bed. ‘I’d better go now, Florence. They must be wondering what’s happening. It’s almost three hours since we came here.’

‘She is very sexually immature,’ Florence said in a loud carrying voice. ‘Because she spent the night with Sam the last time he came up, she’ll feel committed. Daisy believes in one man, one woman. Like in the Bible. She’s as good as married to him already.’

Joshua moved to the foot of the bed, regarding her gravely over the top of the cradle covering her injured feet. ‘Goodnight, Florence. You’ll feel better tomorrow. I think we’ll both forget that last indiscreet remark.’ He started to walk away. ‘
I’ve
forgotten it already.’

‘Oh no you haven’t!’ Florence shouted after him. ‘You’re as daft as all the rest, Joshua Penny! You can’t see past the nose on your face, and that’s not far, for God’s sake. She’s not your type, Joshua! She was born with a bloody wooden spoon in her hand. Can’t you see that? She
cooks
her way into men’s affections! She’s got everything, and I’ve got
nothing
!’

Visitors sitting on their little hard chairs turned astonished faces in her direction. Patients raised weary heads from pillows, and a nurse came in at a forbidden run to draw the curtains round Florence’s bed.

It was no use. The finely balanced control holding Florence’s anger tight inside her had been fraying for a long time. Now it snapped. The frustrations of a lifetime surfaced. The years of tending her mother, the suppression of her desperate thirst for knowledge, the need to be loved, the
knowing
deep inside her that she had somehow been born out of time, out of place, rose up to confront her.

‘Oh, God!’ Throwing herself back on the bed Florence
covered
her face with both arms. There was something else. The worst of all. The terrible thing she had buried so deep inside her that it had been blotted from her memory. ‘Oh, no. …’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, no … no. …’

‘Miss Livesey?’ The nurse came back with the Sister, a pretty dark-haired young woman from the Welsh valleys.

Florence opened her eyes and looked into a face as pleasantly round as hers was unattractively long; at cheeks as freshly pink as her own were sallow, into eyes fringed with eyelashes like spider’s legs. It wasn’t fair. Hysterical now, she screamed her fury aloud.

‘It’s all right now. It’s all right.
All right
.’ Seemingly from nowhere a young doctor materialized. Florence felt the slight prick of a needle in her arm.

‘You don’t know,’ she whimpered, as the drug began to take almost immediate effect. ‘You don’t know what my father did to me when I was a little girl.’ Tears held back for over twenty years rolled down her cheeks. ‘He said if I didn’t tell anybody he’d never do it again, and I didn’t tell anybody.’ Her eyelids drooped. ‘And he never did do it again.’ She opened her eyes with an effort. ‘But he might have. He
might
have … any day he might have … I was so frightened … always so afraid. Till I forgot about it. Forgot. …’

Walking back down the long corridor the young doctor, who had almost decided to go on and specialize in psychiatry, pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. Interesting that last-minute revelation. If it were true, which he doubted, the patient being an obvious hysteric, a thing like that, festering away inside her subconscious, could have coloured her attitude towards men all her life. It would take a very special man to penetrate beneath that loathing; that rare being, a
good
man he supposed, one who posed no threat physically. Sexually, he supposed.

If what she said was
true
, of course, which one doubted in a spinster of her obvious type. He wouldn’t have believed before taking up medicine the fantasies some maiden ladies
insisted
on describing to him. One had to beware of them, in fact. Still, Miss Livesey was an interesting case. Not quite run of the mill. Cut out with jagged edges, as if with pinking scissors.

Proud of his perception, he walked on, serious and dedicated, muttering to himself like an earnest professor three times his own age. He would suggest to his superior that they kept her in for a few days.

‘I wish I knew what was happening at the hospital.’ Daisy perched uncomfortably on the arm of Sam’s chair in the lounge, which still smelled of paint and wallpaper paste. She wanted him to say that he would go there on the tram and find out for her, while she sat in with Jimmy and got on with all the thousand and one things she had to do, but he didn’t offer. He seemed to have distanced himself from what was going on all around them, as if already he was miles away leading his own life which – she had to face it – hardly touched hers at all.

‘You know what they’re like at hospitals.’ He pulled her down on to his knee. ‘I once knew a man who waited so long in Out-Patients he was completely cured when his turn came.’ He kissed the small hollow at her throat. ‘Time being the great healer, you see.’