A Better World than This (40 page)

‘She’s fifteen, but she could pass for eleven,’ Mrs Mac was saying. She got up and waddled her way down the hall. ‘I’ll send Angus round to see Winnie’s mother now. The exercise’ll shake his liver up a bit.’ She picked up the unread evening paper from the hallstand and glanced at the headlines. ‘I see the death toll from that earthquake in South America has risen to over a thousand,’ she remarked pleasantly. ‘And those triplets born to that woman of fifty in Italy aren’t expected to live. You’d think she’d have made her husband sign the pledge, wouldn’t you? He looks seventy if he’s a day. I suppose it’s all that highly-spiced food they eat.’ She paused on the doorstep. ‘Or is that India? Still, it’s all foreign muck, isn’t it?’

‘Mrs Mac?’ Daisy was determined to get a word in, even edgeways. ‘Thank you.’

‘She’s nobbut a lass.’ Mrs Mac handed Angus his muffler. ‘She’s going to wonder what’s hit her when her visitors start arriving in the morning. She’s been playing at it up to now.’

‘She’s spent plenty of brass on doing things up.’ Slowly Angus wound the muffler round his neck. ‘High living standards mean higher prices. I hope she isn’t over-reaching herself. She’s taking a lot for granted if you ask me. It’s those holiday camps we’ve got to watch, though we can thank the Depression for keeping folks from travelling further afield, so what we’ve lost on the swings we’ve made up on the roundabouts.’

‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ Mrs Mac said, giving her husband a helpful shove to send him on his way. ‘And no
stopping
off on your way back. I’ll smell it on your breath if you do.’

‘You’re a hard woman, Mrs MacDougal.’ Angus opened the front door with reluctance. ‘There’s a wind blowing fit to freeze the …’ He hesitated, then saw his wife’s face. ‘The
ears
off a brass monkey.’

Joshua needed a drink. He had played the Good Samaritan three times that day, and he was fed up with the role. Hands in pockets, collar turned up against the now biting wind, he walked past the impressive Imperial Hotel which always reminded him of the Tuileries in Paris, past the Savoy with its bluish cupola, on to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

He wasn’t surprised to find that the inn was crowded. It was the warmth and friendliness that drew people in from the biting wind sweeping across the Atlantic. And had done for years and years. Ever since the place had been an old wooden shanty on the crumbling edges of the cliffs.

He found a table by the door and from a white-jacketed waiter ordered a pint of beer. He was glad when it came, borne aloft on a tray over the heads of the crowded tables. He wasn’t hungry, just filled with a terrible thirst. He stared without seeing her properly at a Florrie Ford-type woman singing a song about tripe and onions, accompanied by a man half her size playing a tinkling piano.

‘Come on, luv. Join in!’ A woman with a headscarf tied round her hat at the next table raised her glass to Joshua. ‘Don’t look so bothered, luv. It may never ’appen!’

‘I don’t know the words.’ Joshua moved so that his back was towards her. Let her think what she liked. Community singing had always embarrassed him anyway, and he refused to be kind, thoughtful or considerate to
anyone
for what was left of his day.

‘Bail?’ the sergeant down at the police station had thundered at him. ‘Look, sir, your best buddy he might be, but biting one constable’s ear and winding another so he still can’t straighten up properly just isn’t cricket. Not cricket at all, sir.’

Bobbie Schofield a man of violence? It didn’t make sense. Unless of course he
wanted
to be locked away. Fastidious to the point of obsession, to be branded as a common criminal would be bound to almost destroy someone like Bobbie.

Joshua beckoned to a passing waiter and ordered two double whiskies.

‘
Two
, sir?’ Twisting to avoid a customer, managing to hold a tray of drinks above his head without spilling a drop, the waiter rushed away, coming back within minutes to put the two glasses down on Joshua’s tiny round table.

Joshua took out his pipe and busied himself with the familiar rigmarole of lighting it. They were singing a song now about feeling a glow just thinking of some girl and the way she was looking that night. Serious, worn faces, men with coal dust etched in the deep wrinkles grooving their cheeks; women with faces the colour of putty beneath knotted turbans or C & A hats. Singing about when they would be old and grey and when the world would be cold. As if it wasn’t cold for most of them right now. Joshua downed one of the whiskies and marvelled at the energy in the North Country voices. God, how he loved this windswept coast and these hard-working folks who had inherited from their ancestors the gifts of frankness, straightforward honesty and open-hearted sincerity.

Blackpool brought out all those qualities. After scrimping and saving for a whole year, Mother could loll in a deckchair or soak her corns in the sea while Dad rolled up his trousers and got down to the serious business of building a sand castle for his kids, bigger and better than any of those going up around him. The young ones could dance their feet off, flirt, and maybe fall in love. Joshua had met his own wife at Blackpool. He picked up the second glass and downed half of that.

Daisy
was a typical Lancashire lass. Optimistic, laughing off setbacks, determined to make a go of things. They were singing about romance now. One with no kisses. Joshua narrowed his eyes against the pall of smoke clouding the
rather
ugly room. Someone had switched off most of the clusters of electric lights, and the fat woman on the platform held out podgy dimpled hands beckoning everyone to join in. Joshua beckoned for two more double whiskies.

The spirits, drunk on an empty stomach, went straight to his head. How beautiful everyone looked, how enchanting in the half-light. Salt of the earth every one of them. Sentimental tears filled his eyes. When, for some unknown reason, the pianist started to play ‘Jerusalem’ Joshua had to restrain himself from putting his head down in the beer spills on his table and howling aloud. He drained his glass. Dear God – this land of dreaming spires, of mists and mellow fruitfulness. And is there honey still for tea? His close friend drowning in a sea of mud in Flanders Fields, his face the last part of him to disappear, eyes and mouth wide open in a last terrible plea for help. Joshua’s wife coughing her life away, haemorrhaging over the nice clean sheets, the blood bright red and foamy, running a hopeless race. With death holding the stakes.

By the time Joshua stepped out of the inn to walk only slightly less than steadily along the cliff drive, he was more drunk than he had ever been in his life before. In the pearly darkness the Tower rose over the huge complex of the Derby Swimming Baths as if from the green slope of a hillside.

‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem,’ Joshua sang in his head. ‘With no kisses,’ he sang aloud, passing a couple of mill girls on their way back to their digs from the second-house pictures.

‘He’s well away,’ one of them said, leaning giggling on her friend before walking on. Switching her mind back into the dream where she danced with Fred Astaire in a deserted bandstand, her hair swinging out round her shoulders in a perfectly smooth and shining pageboy bob.

When he got back to the house, Joshua told himself, he was going to go straight through to the kitchen, open the door and give Daisy a watered-down version of his visit to the police station to see Bobbie. No point in worrying her more
than
was necessary. He had trouble getting the word right. Necessary … too many s’s surely?

Daisy had such a tender heart. A sickly smile wobbled his features into a rubbery grin. Daisy liked Bobbie. Joshua liked Bobbie. Dammit, even pernickety Florence liked Bobbie.
Everybody
liked Bobbie. Bumping into a lamp-post Joshua doffed his hat, swept the lamp a deep bow and apologized to it.

What a pity that nobody liked Florence – apart from Daisy. But then, Daisy would have put out her arms and embraced the whole world if she could. Daisy was pure gold. But not perfect. Oh, no, not perfect. Joshua admonished himself with a wagging finger. Too gullible. He managed the word on a rush. Too taken in by flattery, especially from the dimpled Lothario. That was because … Joshua frowned, trying to get his thoughts into some kind of coherence … that was because he guessed that Daisy hadn’t been flattered much before Romeo Barnet came on the scene. Joshua grinned, pleased with the brilliance of his thinking.

‘And good evening to
you
, sir.’ Joshua raised his hat to Mrs Mac’s little husband coming down the steps at the front of Shangri-La, followed by a young lass with bright red hair and the look about her of a very old pantomime babe. Joshua opened the door and stepped into the hall, forgetting to remove his hat.

Daisy
was
in the kitchen, just as he had known she would be. And
alone
. As he had never thought she would be. She was standing at the sink peeling what looked like a mountain of potatoes. Getting in front with herself, as he had heard her say more than once. Where then was Romeo? Joshua closed the door and leaned against it, needing the support.

‘Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ a voice slurred in his head. He smiled an oily smile.

‘I have been to see Bobbie,’ he began, enunciating each syllable with great care. ‘At the po-lice st-ation.’

Daisy turned round, the potato peeler still clutched in one hand.

‘He is up before the magistrates in the morning, and it all depends on how he pleads.’

‘Yes?’ What was Joshua doing talking out of the side of his mouth like a gangster and wearing his hat in the house? His familiar features seemed to be all out of flunter somehow, as if he was looking at her through the wire mesh of a flour dredger.

‘If he pleads not guilty he may be allowed out on bail. But if he pleads guilty he will be remanded in cust-custody till his case comes up.’

‘For stealing a few things that don’t amount to much? Kept locked up?’ Daisy clattered the potato peeler on to the draining-board. ‘I don’t believe it!’

‘He belted a policeman.’ Joshua shook his head from side to side at the seriousness of it, then grinned.

‘Hard?’

‘Necess … necess. …’ Joshua gave up. ‘Needing five stitches.’

‘Oh, no!’ Daisy’s face crumpled. It was all there, written in her eyes. The worry of the day gone so badly wrong, the exhaustion, the hurt and the disappointment.

Joshua, in his whisky-induced sentimentality, couldn’t bear it.

‘My little love, my very dear love.’

In two strides he was with her, pulling her into his arms, straining her close. Kissing her. Taking possession of her with the kiss, their bodies fitting together, just as he had dreamed they would.

‘Daisy … oh, Daisy. …

When the kiss was ended and before she could move or speak, he bent his head and kissed her astonished mouth again. Briefly. Then he let her go.

‘I should not have done that,’ he said clearly. ‘But I am not sorry. I do
not
agolopize. I am glad I did.’ As if remembering he was still wearing his brown trilby hat, he raised it politely, then replaced it on his head, pulling it down over his forehead as if saluting her. ‘Goodnight to you, Daisy.’

‘And goodnight to you, madam,’ he said to Edna, emerging from the lounge with a tray of cups and saucers and a plate bearing a single Marie biscuit. ‘If I may …?’ Joshua took the biscuit and started up the stairs. ‘I find I am a little hungry, after all.’

Edna bustled indignantly into the kitchen and clattered the tray down on the table.

‘If I had a suspicious mind, I would think your nice Mr Penny has been drinking,’ she said.

Joshua
had
been drinking. Daisy had known it the moment she had turned round from the sink to see him standing there, too serious, too straight, too dignified, with a terrible yearning look in his eyes.

It would be with drinking on an empty stomach, she decided. Forgiving him.

DAISY LAY IN
her bed, twitching and bothered, trying to decide what to do. Thinking and dwelling on
passion
.

She had lived this moment so many times in her dreams and fantasies of how it would be when she surrendered herself to the man she loved, giving her
all
, that now there was no turning back she wondered why she felt such a sense of anticlimax.

For one thing, in her wild imaginings, she had always been lying in a wide bed wearing a satin nightgown cut on the cross, with a halter neckline to show off her bust. Or, alternatively, a pair of scarlet silk pyjamas with the jacket fastened down the side Russian-style. Her husband, her brand-new husband, had invariably been out on the balcony – there was
always
a balcony – wearing a striped heavy silk dressing-gown with maroon lapels and smoking a last cigarette. He would toss the cigarette over the balcony rail into some sweet-scented bush, then stride eagerly into the bedroom, taking off the dressing-gown to reveal white tailored pyjamas with his initials embroidered on the pocket.

And in the darkness with her hair spread on the pillow like a dark cloud she would give of herself freely and without restraint, surprising him by the depth of her passion.

‘How beautiful you are,’ he would murmur, his voice husky with desire.

Daisy stretched her eyes wide to ward off the feeling of drowsiness creeping over her. The truth being that she
wasn’t
beautiful
, in spite of what Sam had whispered in her ear downstairs. She had a tiny waist, it was true, but below that her hips were too rounded. Let’s face it, she was
pear-shaped
, she thought in a sudden and great distress. Besides that, Sam had never put his arms round her when she hadn’t been wearing a brassiere. She always wore Kestos, the make that promised to give a woman ‘line’. So what would Sam think if her unfettered bosoms weren’t quite where he expected them to be when he drew her close in his arms?

She had at least remembered to leave off her customary layer of Pond’s cream. A sticky face next to Sam’s on the pillow wouldn’t have done at all. Daisy ran a finger down the soft smoothness of her cheek, made the mistake of closing her eyes and felt the bed begin to sink beneath her. At once she sat up, swung her legs over the side and groped with her bare feet for her slippers.