A Better World than This (8 page)

Daisy felt the blush spread up from her throat. She wouldn’t have believed her friend could have said a thing like that. Not right out on a Sunday afternoon, sitting sipping tea with her little finger crooked.

‘You must get away,’ she said through the blush. ‘I don’t suppose they want you there if the truth were told.’

‘The truth
is
told!’ Florence put her cup down on the tiled hearth, took a clean folded handkerchief from her handbag and began to weep tidily into it. ‘I objected to her wiping the gas oven down with the dishcloth the other day and she yelled at me, and my father came in and said the best thing would be for me to get out. “Get out,” he shouted.’

‘He wouldn’t mean it, love.’ Daisy glanced anxiously at the door. It would be just like her mother to come downstairs
now
to be struck almost paralytic with such talk. And calling Florence ‘Florrie’ when she knew she hated it. She frowned and bit her lip. ‘Your father always was a …’ she sought for the right word ‘… a virile sort of man.’

‘He sleeps with nothing on. And walks along the landing stark naked.’ Florence was obviously determined to have her say. ‘I never liked him,’ she added. ‘Neither did my mother. He was descended from fair folk, you know.’

A terrible picture came into Daisy’s mind – of Mr Livesey with his red bull neck and mutton-chop whiskers trotting along the landing in the altogether. She suppressed a shudder.

‘Where would I
go
?’ Florence was beside herself. ‘My wages wouldn’t pay the rent of a single room, let alone keep me in food and clothes. I’m a suffragette in here.’ She stabbed at her chest. ‘I believe in the emancipation of women. Passionately.’ Her lip curled. ‘I do not regard a man as a meal ticket, and yet I am beholden to my father, because he pays the rent. I want to scream at him that I will go, that I will manage, but emancipation takes money, Daisy! Think about those women who fought tooth and nail for the vote for us. The Pankhursts, Annie Kenny. They were financially independent
before
they became suffragettes. They submitted to being force-fed because they knew their dinner would be waiting for them if they
chose
to go home. They sang as they were marched into prison, and when they were let out they went back to the bosoms of their families, to be cosseted back to health. But they had made their gestures! Don’t you see?’

Daisy was losing the thread of the argument, but she nodded vaguely. Florence always sounded as if she knew exactly what she was talking about.

‘We should have been teachers.’ Florence was weeping again. ‘Both of us top of the class and what good did that do? You went straight into that bakehouse at fourteen, and I went to work as an usherette so I could mind my mother during the day.’ She lifted her head, her expression bleak. ‘Don’t you ever look at the rows of pies and loaves of bread and tell yourself there should be something more to life than
that
? Do you ever want to open that door and just walk away?’

Now Daisy was on firm ground. ‘Every single day.’ Leaning forward she took the cup and saucer from Florence’s trembling hands and set them back on the table. ‘But we can’t always turn our backs on a life that doesn’t turn out to the pattern we dreamed up for it. Sometimes the gesture we make if we stay is braver than the one we would make if we ran away.’

Something had stopped her telling Florence about Sam, but she was pretending, she knew, that he had asked her to go away with him. That she was staying to nurse her mother because of duty. That even if he had gone down on his bended knees she would have refused him gently, pointing out where her duty lay. It was the only way she could go on. And on and on and on.

‘It’s all right for you,’ Florence was saying. ‘You
belong
. You may get bored, or frustrated, but you
belong
. You’re needed. I’m not needed any more.’

‘But you won’t do … do what you said?’ Daisy watched as her friend pulled on the lacy gloves with their tiny frilled gauntlets. ‘You would never do away with yourself?’

Big-boned and desolate, Florence stood up and adjusted the flaps of her hat which was modelled on Amy Johnson’s flying helmet. It lent an air of gauntness to her long face, and at once Daisy was struck by the thought of how noble her friend would have looked chained to a row of iron railings, and wished she’d been given the chance.

‘I am not brave enough, alas,’ Florence said, and held up a netted finger. ‘Don’t get up, Daisy. You look as if you might be coming down with a cold.’

But Daisy followed her through the kitchen and out into the yard, surprised to find that the fog which had threatened as they walked back from Sunday School was now a blanket of sulphur-smelling thickness, so all-enveloping it was almost tangible.

Florence lifted the sneck on the back gate. ‘Even if I had
decided
to throw myself into Potter’s Pond,’ she said, ‘I’d never find it in this lot, would I?’

‘See you next week.’ Daisy closed her eyes in relief. Her friend’s wit might be as dry as a ship’s biscuit, but at least she still retained it. And that was all that mattered. Florence would survive.

Peering up the street she tried to see her walking with her loping stride, large feet encased in nurse’s lace-up shoes because standing so long at work had dropped Florence’s arches. For a moment Daisy thought she saw her, wreathed in yellow fog, a shadowy figure in a spy thriller, Mata Hari going to her doom.

‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Daisy reassured herself, rubbing the tops of her arms as she walked back up the yard. ‘It’s the ones who suffer in silence and say nothing who do it.’

She imagined Florence walking past her own house, up Earl Street fields, past allotments with their hen-pens and pigeon cotes. Tall and long-necked with a felt hat like a flying helmet hiding the scragged-up hair. On across fields to the local pond, a sheer drop into a murky splash of water into which it was said a man, three years on the dole, had hurled himself one wintry day, sinking like a stone to his death.

‘Why is life so … so awful?’ she asked herself, setting the table for a boiled ham tea, turning an anguished face towards her mother appearing droop-eyed from her long sleep.

‘They never do it when they say they’re going to,’ Martha said, when Daisy voiced her fears. ‘I only dozed,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been reading the paper. It says that the people living on the dole are existing far below the threshold of adequate nutrition. And
they
don’t go jumping into mucky water. Neither will Florrie Livesey. Her mother was a grand little woman, God rest her soul.’ She pulled her chair up to the table. ‘Fourpence a quarter for that ham,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s cut that thin I can see the pattern on the plate through it. I’ll have to double it up if I’m going to make it into a sandwich.’

*

It snowed that Christmas, and on mill lodges ice formed. On Christmas Day nearly thirty thousand followers of the Rovers watched them play football at Ewood Park. A very much alive Florence came to tea and advised an exhausted Daisy to use Knights Castile soap for tired skin to revive her sallow complexion. Or to use rouge, just a touch on the cheek-bones, to brighten her tired eyes.

‘You’re doing too much,’ she told her friend kindly, and went on to describe the current film at the Rialto:
I Was a Spy
with Conrad Veidt, Herbert Marshall and Madeleine Carroll. ‘Her humanity impelled her to serve in a German hospital,’ she informed Daisy and her mother. ‘And they trapped her so she was forced to work as a spy. But they wouldn’t have forced
me
,’ she added, pale eyes glistening. ‘Put me against a wall and shoot me, but never expect me to betray my heritage.’

‘A fat chance,’ said Martha, eyeing her malevolently.

The biting winds of a spring coming too late for comfort flattened the daffodils in the park as if an army had trampled them. Still there was no word from Sam.

In May the Broad Walk in the park was lined with mauve and pink rhododendrons and Daisy, to cheer herself up, bought a new straw hat from the Hat Market. She wore it for the Anniversary Sunday at chapel, its spray of scarlet cherries bobbing as she walked up the street with Martha who was breathing hard and leaning heavily on her arm. Daisy had taken in the seams of her mother’s good linen coat, and beneath the veil on a hat that made her look like a consumptive bee-keeper, Martha’s once round face was drawn and pale.

Like the spring daffodils, Martha had drooped and flattened as each month went by, her once towering cottage-loaf hair-style sunk to the thickness of an oatmeal biscuit. A fierce lady from Spirella had visited the house and fitted her with a new pink corset more in keeping with her shrinking frame, and her old ones had gone for fourpence each at a chapel jumble sale.

Daisy had long since lost her battle to have Florence working behind the counter in the little shop. Edna was firmly ensconced and would take some shifting now.

‘They need the money with Arnold being out of work and the baby coming,’ Martha had argued.

‘It’s Betty’s and Cyril’s baby!’ Daisy’s objections were loud and forceful, but her mother was adamant.

‘It’s her first grandchild and I know how she feels. I would go out and scrub floors for a grandchild of mine,’ she added, shooting a baleful glance at Daisy. ‘But then I won’t be here to see one of
mine
.’

She sat constantly over the fire, needles clicking as she worked on a matinée jacket in yellow with an intricate scalloped edging. In yellow, because that would do for either.

‘Your Daisy’s seen the back of that Londoner,’ Edna said one day.

‘He’s spoilt her for other men,’ Martha agreed at once. ‘She’s started going to the pictures again once she’s got me to bed, but she won’t meet the right sort that way. She’ll never meet a man if she doesn’t mix up.’

‘It isn’t natural a girl of her age going to the pictures on her own.’ Edna smiled complacently. ‘You never know who she’s sitting next to. Our Betty, bless her, and Cyril, never go out except to his mother’s of a Friday. They’ve got more to do with their money.’

Neither of them could see or understand that the cinema was a lifeline to sanity for Daisy. Her sixpenny ticket to a world where glossy-lipped beautiful women, wearing satin dressing-gowns and smoking cigarettes in long ebony holders, drove men mad. Exhaling the smoke into their lovers’ eyes, they lowered spider’s legs eyelashes over pancake make-up, not a hair on their heads out of place, even in force ten gales.

Where Sam’s handsome features became superimposed on the rugged countenance of Clark Gable; where the suave John Gilbert’s tight smile reminded her of the way Sam had
looked
the night he went away. The lanky stride of Gary Cooper brought his walk to mind, but on the evening Daisy identified him with Paul Muni escaping from the chain gang, she accepted the fact that she had almost forgotten Sam’s face.

Sitting alone, huddled in a tip-up chair in the back stalls, Daisy gave herself up to the Hollywood dream. She was a thick-lidded Garbo in
Grand Hotel
, an anguished Helen Hayes in
A Farewell to Arms
and a husky-voiced Claudette Colbert in
The Sign of the Cross
.

In the cinema she knew that Sam would come to her again.

In the bakehouse in the cold pre-dawn mornings she knew that he would not.

Wakes Week came as usual in the middle of July.

Evolved originally from village religious festivals, the Wakes holidays had weathered the Industrial Revolution, and the whole of the cotton and engineering industries still closed down completely for at least a week.

‘If the world was to end with them,’ Josiah Wedgwood down in the Potteries had complained a long time ago, ‘Wakes
must
be observed.’

The holiday savings clubs were the salvation of the working people. Sixpence a week for a year meant twenty-five shillings plus interest to be collected just before the Wakes, and the amount of money saved was often the deciding factor as to the length of the holiday. Every train carried crowds of holidaymakers away from the smoke and the grime, and the rows of closed shops gave towns the appearance of Hollywood sets shuttered away when filming finished.

In the middle of Wakes Week Edna came excitedly into the living room of the pie shop to announce that she was the grandmother of a seven-and-a-half-pound boy. With her nose and Betty’s, bless her, hair.

‘We’ve had a bit of bother with the afterbirth,’ she said, sitting down and fanning her hot face with the corner of her
apron
. ‘It wouldn’t come away,’ she mouthed to Martha, who pursed her lips and jerked her chin in Daisy’s direction.

‘It’s all right. I know where babies come from.’ Daisy went back to her library book, an Agatha Christie where the characters were all gathered in the drawing room to be told who had done it. By cheating and looking at the last few pages she already knew, so the book had lost its interest.

‘I’m going to put the baby on the bottle before long,’ Edna confided to her sister. ‘I’m not having our Betty’s strength drained, bless her. The baby thriving, and her being pulled down.’

‘It’s not for you to say, surely?’ Daisy could feel herself being nasty. She accepted she was jealous about the baby and admitted that she could just be turning into a sour old maid with bitter and twisted thoughts and a tongue to match. It wouldn’t be long, she told herself, before she ran true to form and took to wearing white ankle socks over her stockings, and never ventured out without a safety pin fastening the front of her knickers in case the elastic went.

‘The midwife had the cheek to send me out of the room.’ Edna was above taking any notice of her niece. ‘I’d sent Cyril off to the Town Hall as usual. Men only get in the way at a time like this. He’s a proper ditherer, that lad. You’d think he had the St Vitus’s Dance even when he’s just sat there having his tea.’

Oh, Sam … Daisy thought suddenly. Where are you? Did I dream you up?

‘His mother’s just the same.’ Edna wondered when Daisy was going to go through and put the kettle on. ‘First time I met her I thought she’d got a wasp in her corsets.’