by Marie Joseph
‘Nightingale’s her middle name. Come on, Florence,’ Daisy said, and the mild joke got her through the swing doors and up to the reception desk. It was stupid feeling like this, but the last time she had been here Sam had been with her, the sun had been shining and it hadn’t properly dawned on her that her little mother was dead. Whereas now. …
In the Almoner’s office she signed for the buff envelope and put it in her bag. They walked back to the front, glad that the rain had stopped, but expecting it to begin again at any minute. It was there in the wind; it beaded their coats like hoar frost and brought the colour back to Daisy’s cheeks.
They got vaguely lost in a labyrinth of little streets lined with lodging houses, with dining tables pushed close to the windows and peeling park benches outside. The air had an autumnal tinge to it, but back on the front they crossed the road to the promenade and walked on the almost deserted beach. Far out on the horizon a faded sun struggled to get through the mist, revealing long stretches of grey-green sea before hiding them again. With their backs to a breakwater, a family of late summer visitors sat huddled in coats and hats, sipping beakers of tea from a huge flask.
Daisy opened the envelope handed to her at the hospital and drew out a string of crystal beads, a seed-pearl brooch set in a rolled gold bar, and a hatpin with a mother-of-pearl head on it as big as a grape.
‘My mother’s jewellery.’ The sight of it made her want to weep. ‘That’s it. The lot. Imagine working hard all your life long and ending up with as little as this.’ She pushed the envelope deep into her handbag. ‘Well, that’s it. That’s what we came for. The effects have been claimed by the next of kin of the deceased. Now. What shall we do now?’
‘Go up the Tower,’ Florence said at once. ‘I’ve never been, but I’ll try anything once. It’ll blow your cobwebs away and warm your cockles, if that’s possible at one and the same time.’ Anything, she was thinking, to take that look of utter desolation from Daisy’s face. Even though standing on the piano stool was enough to turn Florence dizzy. What were friends for, for goodness’ sake?
It cost ninepence each to go in, and Florence paid with a flourish.
When the doors slid to with a silky whoosh she looked round for something to cling on to. Through the windows she saw the blurred skeleton of the Tower rushing downwards, taking her stomach with it, so she closed her eyes, opening them again when the jerk the lift gave as it stopped threw her off balance. Gratefully she stepped out into the enclosed gallery suspended seemingly, she decided, in the sky itself.
It was bitterly cold up there, so she wrapped the long trailing duster-coat closer round her angular body. Beneath the brim of her atrocious hat her pale face looked pinched and mean. ‘It is a far far better thing I do …’ she muttered, and turned her head away from the sight of Daisy rushing from one viewpoint to the next. The wind wailed and moaned, and Florence was sure the Tower itself was swaying to and fro. She wondered if she was going to be sick; summoned all her self-control and looked round, telling herself she might as well get her money’s worth.
The tiny gift shops were closed and the custodian, a man with a large flat face, nodded to her, then went on reading a newspaper folded to the racing pages.
On legs turned into lettuce leaves Florence forced herself to walk to a window and look down. Down, down, down to a world of a few minute figures like ants scurrying about at the edge of a sea throwing up patterns of white lace. A boat bobbed about in the distance, a black fly thrashing around, drowning in a rippling sea. The wind rose to a crescendo, and oh Lord, the whole Tower was leaning forward to topple into the sea at any minute. Her breakfast of hastily eaten bacon sandwiches rose to her throat with a salty acid taste.
Florence gave up being a martyr and turned to totter back to the comparative safety of the lift.
In a moment Daisy was beside her, holding her arm, but worse was to come. The lift fell like a stone dropped down a well-shaft, and two shades greener than her hat Florence emerged to walk unsteadily out of the pagoda, out of the Eastern Temple, along the back of a high-ceilinged gallery glittered by chandeliers into the balcony of the Tower Ballroom.
‘Fancy a dance?’ Daisy, flushed and exhilarated, pointed down to the couples waltzing gravely, some of them wearing outdoor coats and hats. ‘A nice old-fashioned waltz, with lots of twirls?’
‘Aw, give over, Daisy.’ Florence sat down on a red plush seat. ‘If I never do that again it’ll be too soon.’
‘Did it really upset your stomach?’
‘What stomach?’ Florence held a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘Lead me to some fresh air. Ground-level fresh air, and don’t listen to any more of my good ideas.’
‘And you in that hat n’all.’ Daisy tweaked the flap at one side of the helmet-type hat. ‘Amy Johnson would be ashamed of you.’
By the time they had walked along the front to the North Pier and turned back Florence declared she was made over again. Well enough to think longingly of a pot of tea and a hot toasted teacake. ‘See, there’s a place over there,’ she said.
‘A pity you didn’t look out at the other side, over the town.’ Daisy poured water from a plated jug into the teapot. ‘You could see all the way back over the Fylde to the Pennines, even on a day like this. It’s the view we get in reverse from the tank on Revidge on our Sunday walks.’
‘I accept your word for it.’ Florence shuddered. ‘I’m definitely not going back up there to check.’
‘I once took Sam up on to the tank. One cold rainy night last winter.’ Daisy was glad she could mention Sam now and again, especially when she could see Florence was in no mood to turn nasty.
‘That selfish rotter?’ Florence said at once.
‘My hat blew off.’ Daisy’s face was dreamy.
‘Which one?’ Florence was not going to listen to any sob stuff about Mr Samuel Barnet. You could have written her opinion of him on the back of a twopenny stamp in just one word – and not a nice one either. She had Sam’s measure, and he wasn’t good enough for Daisy. Let him keep away, please God, and get on with passing his exams, while his wife brought his children up all on her own. What did he think he was going to do when he’d passed the flamin’ things, anyway? Walk into a job paying a thousand a year? Good grief, in these days of depression, there were B.Sc.s sweeping the streets. She’d heard that one so often it must be true.
‘Which hat?’ Daisy was smiling to herself. ‘My dark green one, the one with the turned-back brim that almost matched my winter coat. Why do you ask?’
‘So losing it was one of life’s little bonuses,’ Florence said, dead-pan.
As Daisy’s laugh rang out, two youths sitting at a table across the centre aisle turned round quickly, then just as quickly turned back and went on with their conversation.
‘We don’t appeal to them,’ Daisy whispered. ‘I thought Blackpool was supposed to be a place for clicking? They’re obviously on holiday, you can see them cursing the weather and wondering what to do next.’
‘We’re old enough to be their mothers,’ Florence exaggerated, pretending to take Daisy seriously. ‘But if we weren’t, bags me the one without the spots.’
We look like what we are, Daisy told herself morosely. What we will be some day. Two unmarried friends – Miss Bell in her black, and Miss Livesey in her coat like a tent. Thousands like them all over the country, cast in the same mould. Women living on the stories of their sweethearts being killed in the war; women with mothers and fathers to care for, and women who couldn’t get a man, as Martha would undoubtedly have said.
For such a little precious time Sam had made her feel beautiful. She had felt passion when he kissed her; she had gloried in merely walking along by his side, and because he had made her feel beautiful, the beauty had been there. She had seen it reflected in the fluted mirror over the fireplace. Her eyes had shone and her hair had curled round her face just the way she wanted it to. He had told her she reminded him of Olivia De Havilland, and she had believed him. Olivi
a De Havilland gazing up at Errol Flynn as he raised a quizzical eyebrow before sweeping her into his arms, devouring her with kisses before leaping off a balcony and swinging from a chandelier with a sword in his hand to fight off seven men single-handed.
Now all that was over and she might as well admit it. She was an unclaimed blessing, as she had told Sam, making him shout with laughter and lift her off her feet in the street.
‘I once had an affair with a married man,’ she would say in years to come. Just as Florence had said on the day of the funeral. She stared across the table at the familiar sight of her friend pulling on the lace gloves, adjusting the neat frill at her bony wrists.
‘Have you ever slept with a man?’
She asked the question in a kind of desperation as they walked out into a day turned cloudy and grey. A gust of wind whipped an empty cigarette packet round her ankles.
‘Don’t talk filthy.’ Florence laughed and held the folds of her coat more closely round her. ‘Where to now? Home?’
She linked her arm in Daisy’s as they moved into the labyrinth of streets behind the café, and Daisy wished she wouldn’t. It made them look … oh, dear God, she didn’t know what it made them look like, but it irritated her. What was wrong with her? There was a singing in her veins that would not be stilled; she felt as frantic as she imagined a butterfly would, held captive in the palm of a hand.
What was wrong with her? There was a man striding along across the street and she thought he looked like Sam, then admitted that every tall dark man reminded her of Sam. For a little while she fantasized that it had been him; that he had come to find her, telling her that his wife wanted to divorce him.
‘I love you,’ he would say in his beautiful voice. ‘I thought I could go away and forget you, but I was wrong. You are there before me, every waking moment. I see your face before I sleep and wake to find you with me still. Come live with me and be my love, Daisybell.’ Only Sam had ever said her name like that.
‘There’s a house across the street with a FOR SALE notice in the window,’ Florence was saying. ‘How would you fancy being a landlady, Daisy?’
She was joking. Daisy knew she was joking, but on a sudden whim she brushed Florence’s arm away and crossed the street to stare up at the three-storeyed house, with a framed plate alongside the door: HAVENREST MRS ENTWISTLE, CHORLEY.
‘That’s to show families from Chorley they will be welcome here,’ she said. ‘My father told me that was common practice when these houses were built.’ She looked up at the dignified frontage. ‘It showed Chorley visitors that if they stayed here with Mrs Entwistle from their home town they wouldn’t be diddled. No charging for the cruet, a shilling a week, or anything like that. And look. This house is at the centre of the terrace, so it has a flattish gable in place of the normal eaves. My father used to spend most of the holiday week wandering about, leaving me mother to traipse round the shops. He used to take me with him and point things out to me.’
‘A bit of a scholar, your father.’ Florence stared up at the house. ‘I guessed the books in your bookcase had once belonged to him. Philosophy, architecture, Victorian social history. I do admire self-taught men.’
‘He was also a natural mechanic.’ Daisy bit her lip, remembering the day when her beloved father had been called to the mill to tend the engine, and been carried back broken and bleeding to die in his bed. ‘He could have been anything, given the chance.’
‘He had an untutored intelligence,’ Florence said, unable to hear any confidence without going one better. ‘How many budding intellectuals lurk beneath the flat caps of our working classes? Think of the amateur botanists who leave the mills behind at the weekends and go out with haversacks on their backs.’
‘He used to do that, too. He brought plants back, little shoots of wild flowers, to press in scrap-books with mother’s flat-iron to act as a weight. She used to get so flamin’ mad. Especially when she needed the iron to press her potted meat in a basin.’
‘There’s a woman come out of the next door,’ Florence said, rolling her eyes in the appropriate direction and speaking from the corner of her mouth. ‘She’s been watching us from the window.’
‘She’s coming out to speak to us. Thinks we’re interested in buying this house, or looking for a place to stay.’
‘She’s a NO VACANCIES, love. By gum, but she’s never been short of a butty, has she?’ Florence turned to smile at the stout woman advancing towards them, changing her accent with a speed that would have done a seasoned trouper proud. ‘Good afternoon. Quite a change in the weather, isn’t there? We’ve had a disappointing back end, haven’t we?’
The woman’s fat cheeks creased into a smile. ‘I’m BALMORAL next door. Mrs MacDougal. I can show you round this place if you like.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Poor soul. Died at her post just when the season started back in June. Frying bacon when she should have been lying in hospital in an oxygen tent. Emphysema.’ With a podgy hand she made the movements of smoking a cigarette. ‘Couldn’t give it up, not that I blamed her with what she’d had to put up with. Passed over with a fag stuck in her face.’ She patted the pocket of her apron. ‘I’ve got the key if you’d like to see inside.’
‘We have a train to catch, I’m afraid,’ Florence said quickly.
‘Yes, please,’ Daisy said. ‘That’s if you can spare the time.’
Deliberately avoiding looking at Florence’s face, Daisy followed Mrs MacDougal into the house, into a hall dominated by a large antlered coatstand. The walls were painted a hideous mustard shade with brown stipples blurring into each other. Mrs MacDougal opened a brown door on the left with a flourish.
‘The lounge,’ she announced. ‘You’d never find lounges in the houses up nearer the centre. These houses further north are far superior. Purpose-built this road was. Built to last. Like me.’ Laughing, she patted a barrel-tight stomach. ‘A piano,’ she told them, pointing to an upright monstrosity. ‘Mrs Entwistle’s visitors liked a bit of a sing-song when the weather got them down.’
Daisy glanced round the room, wrinkling her nose at the smell which suggested the possibility of mice. A threadbare carpet, flanked by stained boards, a fireplace with a drunken fan of crêpe paper in the grate, assorted chairs with frayed covers, and a settee with the springs clearly defined through velvet cushions with the nap rubbed off them.
‘Very nice,’ she said insincerely.
The dining room was better, although the hectically patterned carpet vied for attention with the vividly flocked walls, and a flight of plaster birds soared on outspread wings across the wall where the clear marks of a boarded-up fireplace were only partly hidden by a table pushed close against it.
‘Mrs Entwistle used to seat forty at high season.’ Mrs MacDougal caught the look of disbelief which passed between Daisy and Florence. ‘Needs must, Miss, with the season being so short, and with these tables pushed together and a couple of card tables, she managed fine.’
‘May we see the kitchen, please?’ Florence seemed to have found her voice, but Mrs MacDougal had decided that the shorter prettier one was the one that mattered. She hadn’t taken to Florence at all. She turned eagerly to Daisy.
‘This way, Miss …?’
‘Miss Bell.’ Daisy nodded towards Florence. ‘And this is my friend, Miss Livesey.’
‘This way, Miss Bell. And call me Mrs Mac. Everybody does, though there’s not a drop of Scottish blood in my veins. It’s me husband who comes from the land of the heather.’
‘He helps you to run the business?’ Florence was a bit put out at being ignored. ‘The Scot has never been afraid of hard work.’
‘Then my Angus must be an exception to the rule,’ Mrs Mac said at once. ‘He’s that lazy he’d scorch his trousers sooner than shift back from the fire. The kitchen,’ she said, opening a door into a room so much smaller than Daisy had anticipated she felt her mouth drop open with surprise.
‘It has to be the bedrooms,’ Mrs Mac said, reading Daisy’s expr
ession. ‘If you haven’t got the bedrooms then you can’t make it pay.’
‘How many visitors stay here? At the busiest time?’ Daisy stared at the shelves piled with crockery, each shelf hung with pans dangling from hooks on the underside.
‘Eight bedrooms, four on each floor – say twenty-two guests. Two cots on the landing, and the put-you-up in the lounge. When the Illuminations begin I’ll have one lad sleeping on a board across the bath, and his mate on a deckchair in the cupboard under the stairs.’ Mrs Mac was unrepentant. ‘Anyroad, who wants big bedrooms? They’re not used to them where they come from, it’s more comfortable with a place that’s home from home.’
‘They would be frightened away with more impressive surroundings. I can understand that.’ Florence had been quiet for long enough. ‘And I can also understand that seeing their landlady visibly involved must be reassuring.’
Mrs Mac’s sparse eyebrows shot almost to her frizzy hairline. Lah-de-dah, they said silently. Who does Miss Livesey think she is? Talking like she’s swallowed an ’apenny book. ‘Well, I’m homely meself,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they want. A home from home, like I said. Bedrooms now. Lead on, MacDuff.’
Purpose-built indeed. Daisy’s eyes grew rounder as they opened first one door then another into what seemed like a warren of tiny rooms, each one furnished with a double bed, a marble-topped wash-hand-stand, and a single wardrobe, with the two marginally bigger bedrooms at the front of the house squeezing in a single bed and a cot at the foot of the bed.
‘The bathroom.’ Mrs Mac threw open the door of a narrow room with a pedestal bath in chipped white enamel, closed it quickly and inclined her chin to a closed door on the right. ‘The WC,’ she said unnecessarily, pointing to the two letters on the door. ‘There are chambers in all the rooms, but we don’t encourage their use with the cost of labour being what it is. I’m giving my girl this summer fifteen shillings a week and her keep, and she still feels she’s badly done to, though back at home she’s an out-of-work weaver.’