A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  ‘I’m here for the rest of the day,’ she told Sam. ‘You come back when you can, love. They’ll come to no harm. I promise you that. They’re better not seeing more than they have to.’

  She had a square face, red like a scald, arms like ham shanks, and eyes sunk deep into puffy cushions of flesh. She was clean and kind, as wholesome as a baked apple, and Sam knew he could trust her; knew he had no choice but to trust her. He glanced over to the deckchair. A small but respectful crowd had circled it, offering advice, murmuring sympathy. Someone had put Martha’s hand back on her lap; a girl in a one-piece bathing costume was saying that maybe a towel over the old lady’s face? Children, wide-eyed with morbid curiosity, were led away. Daisy knelt in the sand stroking her mother’s arm.

  The ambulance came. Two men wearing navy-blue peaked caps trod splay-footed across the sand, dispensed with the stretcher and carried Martha away, first letting the deckchair down and covering her with a brown blanket.

  From the foot of the iron steps Sam looked back at his children. Dorothy was being read to and Jimmy was busy once again on Windsor Castle, with two of the boys from the plaid rug burrowing like moles beside him to deepen the moat.

  Daisy was a stone. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as they waited in a corridor of a hospital with wide echoing passageways leading off it in all directions. ‘What would I do without you?’ she asked, when Sam took over the awful formalities, answering questions for her, even pointing to the place on the form she had to sign.

  ‘She never did get her traipse round Woolworth’s, did she?’ Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘Did you see how small she was? And her mouth seemed to be smiling. Or does that happen sometimes when people die? I think I read somewhere that it did.’

  It had all turned out to be so simple really. The body – it was impossible to think of her mother as that – would be taken back home to the Chapel of Rest. They had given Sam a card with the name of an undertaker printed on it in decent black lettering.

  ‘By tomorrow afternoon,’ they told Sam, professional, efficient, as if they dealt with people dying in deckchairs every single day. ‘Mr Taylor will call.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Sam asked Daisy. ‘You say exactly what you want.’

  ‘There isn’t the room,’ she said, explaining without saying the words.

  ‘No.’ Sam closed his eyes, trying to see Martha in that small overheated room at the back of the shop, lying in a coffin with a white frill round her neck, her hands crossed over that spade-flat chest. He had an overwhelming urge to get back to the children. ‘I think we can go now,’ he said with gentleness. ‘There isn’t anything left for us to do here.’

  ‘We must get back to the children,’ Daisy said, reading his mind. ‘I hope they didn’t see. What are we going to tell them, Sam?’

  She really was the most incredible girl. Outside the hospital Sam hailed a passing taxi. But that was the way she was; somehow he knew that for sure. The shock had made her seem somehow older and plainer than she had before. It was the liveliness of her normal expression that made her attractive, he realized. In the taxi she turned her head away from him to stare through the window on her side.

  ‘Honeymoon Couple Starves for Love.’ Daisy’s mind registered the words spelt out on a billboard as the taxi drew near to Central Pier. Only that morning she had thought how colourful the holidaymakers were. How happy they were, like vivid postcards. Now, somehow, they appeared to have changed. The men grim-faced, wearing ill-fitting jackets and trousers, looking bent and ill as though on a hunger march. The women in frocks of dark prints, dragging whining children past a peep-show. ‘The Rector of Stiffkey,’ the notice shouted. ‘Come and see him starving in a barrel.’

  It was all there. The pole-squatting, the sixpenny sheet-music bazaars, the stalls with shocking-pink rock layered in tiers. ‘Lettered all through.’ Girls walking arm in arm wearing KISSMEQUICK hats, laughing at gangs of youths with hair cut close to their heads like convicts.

  ‘Undignified,’ Martha would have said. ‘Well, let’s talk straight, then. Common.’

  ‘In her own way, my mother was a little lady,’ Daisy told Sam. ‘She was very well respected. She didn’t have many friends, but she won’t have left any enemies. She was a dignified sort of person in her own way.’

  ‘She died with dignity,’ Sam said soothingly. He helped Daisy down from the taxi, and spotted the children as soon as they were across the tramlines. Tactfully, he curbed the enthusiasm of his wave.

  ‘I’m starving hungry,’ Jimmy grumbled, morose and disagreeable, kicking at a pebble. ‘Dorothy’s wet her knickers. The lady told her to “go” in the sea, but she wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ve not!’ Dorothy jumped up from the plaid rug, a half-moon swathe of wet knicker, sand encrusted, hanging down below the hem of her pink cotton dress. ‘What did those men do with that old lady?’

  ‘I’ve told you and told you. She’s died,’ Jimmy said. ‘But she had white hair, so it was time.’

  ‘That’s enough, son.’ Sam stared down anxiously at Dorothy, but cocooned in her own important misery she accepted a square of sweating chocolate and crammed it in her mouth, chewing with it wide open so that brown saliva trickled down her chin.

  ‘They don’t bother.’ The stout woman, her face by now looking as if it had been boiled in a bag, handed over the carrier bag with its string handles. ‘It goes over their heads at that age. Callous little buggers, really.’ She jerked her chins sideways. ‘But he’s sharp. Knows how many beans make five, that one does.’ From behind her back she produced Martha’s portmanteau-like handbag. ‘I knew you’d never given this a thought, and no wonder, but I brought it over to be on the safe side.’

  She knew by the way Daisy’s face crumpled that something about the bulky handbag had touched her to the quick. She knew the feeling. It was the kindness in folks that undermined you just when you thought you had yourself under control. She adjusted the hankie tucked into the V of her dress. Best pretend to be doing something to give the lass a chance to sort her face out before she burst into tears. Fussing with the hankie, she knew that in spite of its protection the blisters would come up. But with only the one day at the seaside to get brown in, there wasn’t time to hang about. How nicely spoken the two children were. From London, the boy had said. This lass wasn’t their mother, though he was the father. There were some funny set-ups in this world. Not that it was any business of hers.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she told Sam when he tried to thank her. ‘Poor soul,’ she whispered, glancing over to where the sand still held the deeply scored marks of Martha’s deckchair. ‘Has she been badly for long? Or was she took sudden?’

  ‘Both.’ Sam held out his hand and felt it smothered up in a warm moist clasp. ‘I really can’t thank you enough for what you did. It was a kindness I will remember for a long time.’ Emotion, held in check for the past few hours, suddenly flooded through him. He bent down and held the sweaty hand for a long moment.

  ‘We only pass this way but once,’ the woman said, bemused by Sam’s nearness.

  ‘The children must eat, Sam.’

  For their sakes Daisy was keeping a tight hold on herself. There was a strange calmness about her, so that she could be quite brisk and sensible, giving the impression that she was being brave, when in reality the awful thing that had happened hadn’t touched her yet. She accepted that it wasn’t in her nature to roll on the ground and scream, or even have mild hysterics. Play-acting, her mother would have called it. Showing herself up, especially outside the house, was perhaps the greatest sin of all. Emotions and hysterics were for the likes of Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, and even they looked a bit daft at times. After one of her rare visits to the pictures, Martha had said: ‘All that carrying on, when a clip round the ear-hole would have settled it in one minute flat.’

  ‘I couldn’t bring myself to touch the sandwiches.’ Daisy looked at the carrier-bag and shuddered. ‘They’ll be horrible by now, anyw
ay.’

  Immediately Sam left her side to tip the whole lot into a waste-bin. It gave him something constructive to do. He had never dealt with someone so recently bereaved before and he wasn’t at all sure how to behave. If Daisy had sobbed and cried he could have put his arms round her and comforted her, but although all the vivacity had been wiped from her face she didn’t have the haunted expression you sometimes glimpsed through a car window in a funeral cortège on its way to the cemetery.

  ‘I parked the Rolls outside the Savoy.’ Best stick to practicalities, he decided. ‘You can make a telephone call from there.’

  ‘Who to? Auntie Edna?’ Daisy shook her head. ‘There’s only one man with a telephone round our way, and he’s gone on his holidays. Doctor Marsden is away too, and the doctor standing in for him wouldn’t know who I was.’ She glanced back over her shoulder at Jimmy plodding along with his head bent. ‘It’s kinder if I tell them myself. It’s going to be a terrible shock.’

  Dorothy was crying now, a low monotonous wail all on one note. She walked pigeon-toed in the tight sandals; her eyes ran, her nose dripped, and no one had thought to pull her drooping knickers up properly. She looked, Sam thought irritably, like a slum child’s picture taken especially for a Sunday newspaper by a photographer showing how the other half lived.

  To show his disgust, Jimmy walked a few paces behind, to pretend he was with someone else. Dorothy had no right to be making that noise. It wasn’t real crying anyway – just a habit she had got into nowadays. He dropped even further behind, whistling to show his contempt, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his shorts. He had quite liked the lady with the plaid rug, even though he bet she was fat enough to go in a peep-show on the fairground. She had kept them going with food all afternoon, but he wasn’t going to mention that. The ice-cream cornet and the wedge of pork pie with the pink meat encased in a salty jelly. Fist time he’d eaten a pie like that. And the crisps with the little blue bag of salt had been good, too. The lady had showed Dorothy how to distribute the salt without spilling any of the crisps when she shook the bag. If Dorothy kept quiet they might get something else to eat, like a cone with candy-floss busting out of the top, or a stick of rock, or a bag of fish and chips with vinegar trapped in the corners so that when you’d finished you could upend it and drink the dregs. Anything would do. Watching these delicacies passing, clutched in sandy hands, he felt the juices fill his mouth and dribble down his chin.

  He wasn’t going to think about the old lady dying, though, or where they had taken her. How did they know she was dead, anyway? There hadn’t been any blood about as far as he could see. She hadn’t been shot or stabbed or anything. Nurtured on comics like The Wizard, with Lionheart Logan of the Royal Mounties chasing villains through the snow, death for Jimmy was a violence, to be met bravely, murmuring a few well-chosen words of farewell, if possible. Preferably with a bullet hole in the victim’s forehead.

  He slouched along, the whistling silenced now. … His mother’s hair was almost white, especially at the front. The back was darker, he consoled himself, but the big front wave was as white as the old lady’s hair. His mother did it herself with a brush dipped in a bottle. ‘Jean Harlow. The original platinum blonde!’ she’d say, and they would laugh as if it was funny. No, his mother wasn’t ready to die. White hair didn’t count when it was brushed on. She was strong, his mother was. Probably live to about a hundred and ninety, he bet. The whistling began again.

  There was a crowd in the hall of the Savoy restaurant, massed in front of the staircase.

  ‘High teas first floor,’ Sam said, lifting Dorothy and motioning the other two to follow.

  Daisy put a hand over her mouth in a small gesture of comfort. It was impossible. She couldn’t do it. Not walk into a restaurant as if nothing had happened. But she had to. For the sake of the children. They were Sam’s children, not hers, and her mother dying in her deckchair like that when she was supposed to have been looking after them could scar their little minds for ever if they didn’t play this next bit right. Suppose Jimmy had asked Martha for something; suppose he had touched her and she had slowly toppled over, like bodies did in films? Or even if he hadn’t touched her, but merely tried to speak to her, thinking she was listening because her eyes were open?

  Daisy followed Sam down the long brown-panelled room overlooking the sea-front to an empty table. ‘Thank you,’ she said when he pulled her chair out for her to sit down.

  I hope someone closed her eyes, a voice inside her head said clearly.

  Surely Sam could have got the children a bag of chips? A toffee apple? Anything. They could have eaten them in the car. Daisy sighed. But they couldn’t do that, could they? Not sitting in the back of the Rolls on that pale beige upholstery, making crumbs, or touching the splendour of it all with sticky fingers. Sam would never have allowed that. She watched him take a menu card from an elderly waitress and study it carefully.

  Things mattered more than people to Sam. He was kind and he was caring. But only so far. Daisy found she could think quite logically. You had to have imagination to feel, and imagination was lacking in Sam. She tried to be fair. Her mother was nothing to Sam. How could she be when he hardly knew her? But his children meant a great deal to him. You needed no imagination to understand that.

  ‘Sausage and chips for the children, I think, and Welsh rarebit for me. Daisy?’ His hand came out to cover her own. ‘We haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast time. I told my landlady we wouldn’t need anything when we got back, so there won’t be anything for the children there. I know how you feel, but try, love. Just a scone or a cake maybe?’

  ‘Afternoon teas downstairs, high teas up here,’ the waitress said, but her disapproval was more maternal than unfriendly.

  ‘All right then, but I know I can’t.’

  Daisy turned her head sharply to hide the glisten of tears. Out there on the sea-front crowds of people still walked about in the wilting sunshine. The light was fading in the restaurant now, the colour seeping from the walls, though darkness was hours away. Daisy wondered what Auntie Edna would do when she heard about it. She wouldn’t have anyone to score off now, or boast to, or openly envy. Except me, Daisy thought bleakly … except me.

  ‘Your mother was very old, you know.’ At once Daisy turned, and saw the widening of Jimmy’s troubled eyes, the fear in the self-conscious tilt of his head. His forehead furrowed with the weight of his anxiety. ‘People only die when they get old, you know. You’re not ready yet, Daisy, and my mum isn’t ready.’ There was a terrible earnestness in his expression. ‘She’s coming back from France, you know. The boat won’t sink or anything. I expect she’ll be waiting when we get back home. Won’t she, Dad?’

  ‘She’ll be back, son.’ Sam’s mouth tightened. She had better be back. Mr Evison had been more than understanding about the children turning up unexpectedly like that, but he wasn’t running a crêche, for Pete’s sake. He could fill Sam’s job without thinking twice. There would be hundreds of men who would give their back teeth for a job with living accommodation, even if it was only a room over a garage. Where else would he have such a chance to study, way into the night if he wanted, without a wife nagging him to come to bed and telling him for the umpteenth time he was wasting his time when there were B.Sc.s sweeping the streets?

  Jimmy was examining Daisy’s face closely for any sign that mirrored his own uncertainty. But her face was smooth, much smoother than his mother’s face when she’d been rowing with his dad. He touched her dress. Not so she would notice, but touching it all the same.

  When the meal came he fell on it as if he hadn’t seen food for the past three days.

  ‘You understand that I have to go now? That I would stay with you if it were humanly possible?’

  By the back door leading into the bakehouse Sam cupped Daisy’s face in his hands, gazing deeply into her eyes. The children were fast asleep on the back seat of the car, and he would carry Dorothy straight up to the camp bed in the back bedro
om of his digs and tell Jimmy he could go to bed without washing for once. Mr Evison would be back from his trip to Scotland before ten, could even be back now, and he would expect to see the Rolls shining brightly, topped up with petrol, ready for the drive back early the following morning.

  ‘Of course you have to go. You’ve done more than enough already.’ Daisy’s voice was slightly brisk, her manner forcibly cheerful.

  Which was as it should be, Sam thought on a great rush of relief. There had been enough drama for one day, and if that sounded callous he could not help it. He had fetched Edna and tactfully suggested that her husband came with her as the news wasn’t good, and now there they were in the living room, Edna crying her eyes out and saying she couldn’t and wouldn’t believe it, and Arnold standing helplessly on the rug, looking totally superfluous, his hands straight down by his sides as if he were on parade.

  ‘I don’t want to go.’ Sam stepped back a pace. ‘I feel awful. Will you be staying with your aunt and uncle tonight?’

  ‘There isn’t the room. Besides, the minute you’ve gone I’m going to ask Uncle Arnold to go for Florence.’

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’ Still he hesitated, the sight of the dry-eyed Daisy unnerving him. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  Remembering every word of the speech he’d made that morning on the promenade before … before they had found her mother. … Daisy knew the cotton-wool head on her shoulders wasn’t going to let her down now. Through its weightlessness she could absorb everything going on around her. She could take part, or she could not take part. Even Edna’s genuine grief left her unmoved. Well, not unmoved, pitying, that was all.

  It was funny, she reflected, as she watched the big car draw away from the kerb, that films were so often very far from realistic, even when they were supposed to show life ‘right down to the grain’. People didn’t always wail in anguish when someone close to them died and have to be led by the arm, even from one chair to another. Prostrate with grief. Was that what she should be at that very moment? Instead of which she was going inside to talk to Uncle Arnold, glad that Sam had at last got over the embarrassment of saying goodbye, and driven away.