A Better World than This (41 page)

She glanced over to where Jimmy lay humped in his own little bed, snoring with the rhythmic put-put she had grown used to hearing. If an army of soldiers marched through the bedroom she doubted if he would wake up. The house was as quiet as the grave. Before she ventured out on to the landing Daisy tried to place everyone in her mind’s eye.

The Accrington couple who had kept her up so late while they played endless games of snakes and ladders, or Ludo from the box of games she had provided for rainy days. They would be lying tidily side by side on their new Vi-spring bed. Auntie Edna and Uncle Arnold next door to them, Edna with a pink net over the invisible one to preserve her holiday set, and Arnold in his shirt because he had never taken to pyjamas. Florence’s room empty, and Bobbie’s the same, with Joshua in his sleeping off the drink that had made him behave so out of character.

Daisy touched her mouth as if to feel the kiss again. Joshua was going to feel very embarrassed if he remembered it tomorrow. It was tomorrow
now
though, wasn’t it?

‘Must get my beauty sleep in,’ Sam had announced in a loud voice. For the benefit, Daisy guessed, of the Accrington
couple
, who had carried on shaking the dice and climbing up ladders or slithering down snakes for a long time after Sam had given her that meaningful look and gone upstairs. ‘Got an early start in the morning,’ he had said.

Daisy stood up and slid her arms into the wide kimono sleeves of her dressing-gown. Her mouth felt dry and her heart was beginning to throb in loud thumping beats. If you loved someone, really loved them, what she was about to do wasn’t wrong. In fact, it was more wrong
not
to. Withholding yourself was cold and calculating; being so frightened was unnatural. She could lose Sam through being afraid.

Daisy tiptoed to the door. If she lost Sam, she lost hope. The hope that some day, no matter how far in the distant future, they would be married. It had come to her quite recently how foolish they would be to rush things. They couldn’t anyway till Sam got his divorce. There were his exams to pass, and his ambition of getting a good job to be realized. Quite apart from the fact that she was determined to get the boarding-house on its feet before she started having babies.

Half-way down the top landing stairs Daisy stopped and shivered. This was a fine time to be thinking about
babies
! Sam had said she would be all right, that he would see no harm came to her.

‘The only safe method of contraception is total abstinence,’ Florence had declared one day in ringing tones, shaming Daisy on the tram to Bispham with a woman sitting behind them with her ears flapping.

All she
really
wanted was for Sam to
hold
her. Daisy negotiated the last three stairs, being careful to avoid the one that creaked. She would tell him that. To be
held
and told how much she was loved, that was the great need in her. Not to feel so alone in what she was trying to achieve; to have someone share the burden and the worry with her, and the joy when things began to go right for her.

In a sliver of moonlight filtering through the big landing
window
Daisy saw Sam’s bedroom door slightly ajar, opened it quietly and slipped inside.

At that exact moment Joshua woke up with a start. There was a terrible taste in his mouth and the pain of a thumping headache spreading across his forehead. He swallowed and the saliva in his mouth tasted like acid. That would be because he had drunk too much and not eaten anything. Or had he eaten something? He put out a hand to feel for his watch on the bedside table and closed it over what felt like the remains of a biscuit. He sat up and groaned.

Oh, God! He remembered now. Daisy’s fearsome auntie had been coming out of the lounge carrying a tray and he had taken a biscuit from a plate. He remembered her looking at him with her nose sharpening into suspicion. And before that … before that he had been in the kitchen with Daisy, kissing her.
Kissing
her! Joshua groaned a bit louder. That meant he’d blotted his copy book good and proper. Had she smacked his face? He made the headache worse by forcing himself to try to remember, but it was no use.

What he did have was a hazy recollection of Daisy struggling for a moment, then winding her arms round his neck and kissing him back with a great deal of enjoyment.

Joshua sighed and pulled the blankets over his head. He must have been even more drunk than he remembered.

‘You’re shaking, love.’

When Sam’s arms came round her Daisy’s immediate reaction was an overwhelming desire to push him away, to ask him,
plead
with him not to be so eager, so rough, so
impatient
. Not to kiss her like that with his mouth open, his tongue probing, and his face burning against hers.

‘Wait!’ she whispered. ‘Sam, please! Listen to me!’

But Sam was obviously in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. Not when he was smothering her with his weight, suffocating her,
terrifying
her so that she had to bite on a fist to stop herself from screaming out loud.

It was like being
attacked
, not made love to. Sam had gone completely
berserk
. Daisy fought him off with all her strength. This was nothing like her fantasies where honeymooners gazed into each other’s eyes as the strings of a full orchestra soared in the background. This was a Sam she didn’t know; a Sam she had never suspected existed.

‘No! You mustn’t! Stop! I don’t want you to!’

She had thought he was beyond hearing her strangulated cries, but as he rolled away from her she saw in the half-light the look of total disbelief on his face.

‘You bitch! You cruel little. …’

He pushed her so hard she rolled to her side of the double bed, shaking and trembling with the humiliation of it all.

‘Sam, I’m sorry. I just wanted you to. …’ The shame engulfed her, bringing tears to her eyes.

‘Wanted me to what?’ He was out of bed now, lighting a cigarette and be hanged to the bloody notice on the door. ‘You come into my bed in the middle of the night and you just want me to … what, Daisy? What sort of game is this supposed to be, for God’s sake? What do you think I’m made of? Bloody stone?’

‘I’ve got feelings too!’ Daisy got out at her side to stand huddled and diminished, the anger in her keeping her from total collapse. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before! An’ I couldn’t have, not like that. Not without. …’ Not without tenderness, she had been trying to say; not without loving kindness, not without
romance
. But he would never understand.

‘Not without a wedding ring on your finger, Daisy?’ His contempt was all the more terrible for having to be whispered. ‘A common streetwalker has more heart than you, do you know that?’

A sudden sharp scream of terror propelled Daisy to the door almost without conscious volition. ‘Jimmy! He’s dreaming. …’ She was up the short flight of stairs and back in her room before Sam had time to realize what was happening.

For a brief moment he considered following her, then as the screams died away he shrugged and got back into bed to puff furiously at his cigarette, flicking the ash contemptuously over the side of the bed and on to the new pale grey carpet, which was an exact match to the grey self-repeating pattern in the wallpaper.

‘It’s all right, love. I’m here.’ Daisy rocked Jimmy in her arms, stroking the hair away from his forehead, feeling him relax against her, already drifting back into sleep.

Shivering, she crept back into her own bed. ‘Dear God,’ she prayed, lying curled up in the foetal position. ‘Is that the truth about me? That I’m no better than a common streetwalker?’

How
dare
Sam say a thing like that about her? She clutched the top sheet, holding it to her like a shield. ‘If a girl works a man up,’ her mother had told her once, ‘she only deserves what she gets. She
asks
for what she gets, and you can’t blame the man because they’re made different. More like
animals
.’

Well, she had done it good and proper, getting into Sam’s bed and working him up, then expecting him to switch off and have a nice cosy chat. Guilt fought for supremacy with the humiliation and shame.

But suppose she had? Suppose they had? And suppose that in spite of what Sam had promised she had become pregnant? Daisy’s eyes grew rounder in the darkness as fear possessed her once again and her vivid imagination took over.

There she was with her whole life ruined, growing fatter with each passing month. Fainting in the kitchen as she struggled with heavy pans, watching herself being watched in disbelief by Florence and Mrs Mac and then her visitors. Having to sell the house at a loss. Writing to tell Sam and not getting any replies to her letters.

Or not telling anyone, and going on her own down some back street to lie on a filthy bed and let an old toothless hag do something unspeakable to her insides with a rusty knitting needle.

Oh, she had done the right thing in not letting him. The
terror
that had given her the strength to push Sam away from her had returned with a vengeance, but this time as an all-pervading sense of mounting horror. Martha Bell had done a good job on her only daughter. Nice girls never did; it was the scum of the earth who gave in, and yet ironically it was the ‘nice’ girls who got caught, got into trouble and brought disgrace on their families. The deeply ingrained beliefs, the shame of what she had almost done held Daisy rigid in a grip of horror, before the relief that she had emerged unscathed brought her to her senses.

‘Thank you, God,’ she whispered, meaning it with all her heart.

But what of passion? What of the love that was ‘fathom deep’, the love that Florence’s Shakespeare was always writing about? The giving of yourself to the man you loved in feverishly unbridled lust?

‘Them’s mucky thoughts, Daisy,’ Martha’s shadowy ghost intoned from the end of the bed where she stood in her flannel nightgown minus her teeth, a work-roughened hand placed over her outraged heart. ‘If you weren’t too old I’d make you go through to the scullery and wash your mouth out with soap and water.’

But what she had done, or
not
done had been cruel. Daisy knew that. There was a word for what Sam would think she was, and it wasn’t a nice word. It would be a long time before he forgave her, if ever. Daisy sighed. The truth was she hadn’t been herself since the day she set eyes on him. Sometimes it was as if she was looking down watching herself behaving like a mad woman, all dignity forgotten, all pride gone. The shameful truth was she hadn’t stopped Sam from having his way with her because it would have been a
sin
. The only reason she had fought him off was because she was convinced he would have got her into trouble.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘I really
am
sailing on the wide wide sea. Please guide my little ship for me. …’

The light touch on her shoulder brought her to a startled sitting position, every nerve in her body alive and quivering.

‘Daisy? You’re making a funny noise. Can I come in your bed?’ Jimmy dived in without waiting for an answer. ‘Lie down, Daisy. You was talking in your sleep and making a funny noise. Not
snoring
, Daisy. Just making this funny noise.’

After a demonstration to illustrate exactly what he meant, Jimmy snuggled himself into Daisy’s back and fell immediately asleep again.

Young Winnie Whalley was ringing the door-bell to be let in before Daisy had drunk that first essential cup of tea. Daisy poured her a cup and wondered if the girl would last the morning. Winnie was painfully, terribly thin, with a small white pointed face beneath the shock of fiercely ginger hair, and spindle legs. If Florence could see what was replacing her, even temporarily, Daisy thought, she’d be doing cartwheels in spite of her scalded feet! Winnie was so thin, she could have been dropped through a telescope without blocking the view.

‘Now, what I’d like you to do first,’ Daisy said, marvelling that the new help had found the strength to lift the cup of tea to her lips, ‘is to run a duster over the lounge and the dining room, then Ewbank the carpets, making as little noise as possible. Do you think you can manage that, Winnie?’

Winnie, who had obviously been well-primed, narrowed pink-lidded eyes into cunning slits. ‘Me mam said you’d give me a cooked breakfast before you set me to work, Miss Bell.’

Daisy went on cutting the rinds off twenty-four bacon rashers. ‘When you’ve cleaned the lounge and the dining room, Winnie.’

‘I might faint,’ Winnie warned, walking so slowly towards the door Daisy was sure she would keel over. ‘I’ve got terrible anaemia.’

‘Who hasn’t?’ Daisy said. ‘A doctor once told me that if he bled me dry it wouldn’t fill a good-sized thimble. I’m a fainter meself,’ she lied, ‘so if you hear a thud it’s me gone over, but don’t worry, I’m never out for more than ten minutes. What’s
your
record?’

She saw Winnie trying to weigh her up; she could almost see the cunning little brain working overtime. If the child was genuinely ill, then the kindly Mrs Mac would surely never have recommended her?

‘Oh, yes,’ Daisy went on, ‘the Bells have always been a bloodless lot. I once had an uncle who cut his throat without even staining the knife.’

A strange sound bubbled from Winnie’s small mouth. For a startled moment Daisy thought she really was going to throw a fit, then realized that the thin tinny noise was Winnie laughing. Not really to Daisy’s surprise, she picked up the Ewbank and trotted quite eagerly down the hall.

‘I thought we’d get off early,’ Sam said, coming into the kitchen with a yawning Jimmy in tow. ‘That way we won’t get involved with your visitors.’ He still looked very angry, refusing to meet Daisy’s eyes. ‘There’s a workmen’s café near the station, so we’ll have something there. I’m not sure of the train times anyway, so we’re better checking as soon as possible.’

Winnie, sitting at the table, munching a bacon sandwich, couldn’t take her eyes off Sam.

‘This is Winnie,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s come to help me till Florence is better.’