by Marie Joseph
‘Disgraceful!’ Florence declared in a ringing tone, causing Mrs Mac to dart her a suspicious look.
‘There’s four more bedrooms up there.’ She nodded towards a shorter flight of uncarpeted stairs. ‘Mrs Entwistle kept her regulars up there, but there’s only two left. Mr Schofield works for the post office, so he’ll be out.’ Without warning she lifted her head and called out; ‘Anybody at home? Mr Penny? Yoo-hoo!’
The door at the top of the stairs opened almost at once to reveal a man with brushed-back brown hair, wearing a speckled tweed jacket and with the fingers of his right hand curved round the stem of a pipe. In his left hand he held a book, and by the absent-minded way he blinked down at them Daisy guessed he had been reading a passage he was loth to leave. Herbert Marshall, she thought at once. In Trouble in Paradise, an upper-class story of sophisticated jewel thieves, with Miriam Hopkins looking ravishing. A gentleman.
Cultured, Florence thought. A man of letters, maybe? More at home, she would have thought, in a book-lined study with a dog at his feet. Pedigree of course.
An unlikely pair, Joshua Penny told himself. The least likely of any of the potential buyers shown round by the indefatigable Mrs Mac. The younger one recently widowed? The other with a vague likeness to Edith Sitwell. Her sister-in-law? What a dreadful hat she was wearing. It reminded him of something, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what.
‘Good afternoon, ladies. I go with the house, I’m afraid.’
What an urbane smile. Florence was sorry when he nodded politely and closed his door firmly behind him. She would have liked to ask him the title of the book he was reading, or at least apologize for disturbing him so rudely.
‘Very sad.’ Mrs Mac went down the stairs crabwise, clinging firmly to the banister. ‘All my family have rheumatism,’ she explained proudly, as if it was an achievement of which to be justly proud. ‘They wheeled my mother out in a Bath-chair with it for the last three years of her life. All her fingernails and toenails rotted off. With the acid.’
‘I hope you don’t go the same way.’ Daisy exchanged a wicked glance with Florence.
Mrs Mac had at last reached the bottom stair. ‘Well, if I do, yon husband of mine wouldn’t push me out in a Bath-chair. Too idle to blow the skin off his rice pudding, that one is.’
‘What was very sad about Mr Penny?’ Outside again, Florence lifted her hooded eyelids. ‘He looked quite cheerful to me.’
‘Gassed. In the last war.’ Mrs Mac led the way back to BALMORAL next door. ‘Lungs shot, I gather. Then his wife, dead of the consumption, choking to death on her own spit, weighing no more than a pullet. He brought her here for the air, but it was too late, poor soul. He’s a teacher in a school at Preston. He travels. Every day. There and back. Well,’ she said, reaching her own front door, ‘I’ll have to get on. If you want to see the house again I can give you an address to write to. Mrs Entwistle’s son. Never spent a penny on her when she was alive, but he’s holding his hand out now for the money. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
‘Is she real?’ Daisy and Florence couldn’t walk straight for laughing. ‘Travels. To Preston. There and back. Oh, Florence, you’d have thought she was talking about Outer Mongolia!’
‘That awful house! Poor Mrs Entwistle sure had no eye for colour. Heaven knows what lurked in the WC. Mrs Mac didn’t even open the door!’
‘I’m sure I could smell bugs.’
‘And worse.’
‘But the hairy tweedy man on the top floor was nice.’
‘You mean the intrepid traveller?’
‘Marco Polo.’
‘Oh, stop it, Daisy. If we don’t hurry we’ll miss the train.’
‘And the flamin’ oven will have gone out.’
They caught the train with a minute to spare, but in spite of rushing into the bakehouse still wearing her coat and hat, Daisy found the fire had sunk to a pile of grey ashes, and with the rain lashing down outside, the bakehouse was as cold and unwelcoming as a coffin-strewed tomb.
Chapter Six
DAISY WAS FINDING it hard to rationalize her thinking. She was at a crossroads in her life, she told herself dramatically. There was some point in everyone’s life when they stood irresolute, wondering which direction to take. Martha dying had removed the valid reason for keeping the shop going, she knew. Daisy did not feel like running up a flag over the bakehouse because the pies and the fancies had a reputation for being the best for miles around. Even keeping the recipes secret seemed a childish thing to do. A pinch of pepper here, a sprinkling of sage in the pork-meat; what did it matter if she wrote the whole lot down on a blackboard and set it up in the shop?
The baker was retiring at Christmas, and the two boys would be off as soon as they finished their apprenticeships. There would be dozens of applicants, maybe hundreds, then the whole cycle of training and adjustment would begin again.
‘I could run a smallish place like that boarding-house at Blackpool with one hand tied behind my back,’ Daisy said one evening after a particularly hectic day. ‘Would you come in with me if I was daft enough, or wise enough to sell up here?’
‘Whither thou goest …’ Florence said at once. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do. It never fails.’
‘Toss a coin? Take the best out of three?’
‘Two columns.’ Florence jumped up to take a writing pad from the sideboard drawer. She ruled a steady line down the centre of a page and licked the point of a pencil. ‘Now! Let’s have the FOR.’
‘No bakehouse fire to keep going. That one’s easy.’
‘But you’d have to get up early to fry sixty-four sausages and four pounds of bacon.’
‘You’ve forgotten the eggs.’ Daisy grinned. ‘Number two on the FOR list. I’d enjoy doing that place up.’
‘There are two unattached men in the attic.’ Florence rolled her eyes.
‘We never saw Mr Schofield. He could be bald and bandy.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Miss Bell.’
‘We could wing those plaster birds in full flight.’
‘And find out what lurked behind the door marked WC.’
‘I’ve just remembered.’ Daisy got up and walked to the glass-fronted bookcase set in the alcove at the side of the fireplace. ‘My father had a book on Lancashire houses. I’m sure he did. That kind of thing fascinated him. Here it is!’ Daisy took out a thick book with a stained and mottled leather cover, its pages yellowed with age. She flipped them over, gave an exclamation of triumph and sat down again, balancing the heavy book on her knees. ‘Here we are! Seaside Dwelling Houses, and three whole pages on Blackpool. Where’s me glasses? In the eighteen-eighties a house just off the front would be assessed at between seventy and ninety pounds. Some further back and closer to the centre sold for as little as eighteen to twenty-five pounds.’
‘Back in the eighties,’ Florence reminded her. ‘More than fifty years ago.’
‘Mrs Mac was right about this, though.’ Daisy turned a page. ‘In 1893 the Borough Surveyor said that a Blackpool dwelling house needed ten or twelve bedrooms on a plot more suitable for three or four if the tenant was to pay his way.’ Her glasses slipped down her nose and she pushed them back with an impatient hand. ‘That was because the builders were able to dominate the Building Plans Committee. Some of the houses had no more than eleven feet at the back. Fancy trying to dry bed-linen in a space like that.’
‘My mother remembered the landladies spreading their sheets out on the sands to dry.’ Florence leaned forward, catching some of Daisy’s excitement.
‘Mrs Mac was right again. Mill workers wanted to spend their holiday in houses as much like their own as possible. Small rooms and cramped terraces. Women could make a reasonable living by lodging-house keeping until well after the war. Especially if they took in regulars. And owner-occupiers were a rarity. Still are I expect.’ Daisy took off her glasses and closed the book. ‘That’s another thing my father taught me. “Never rent. Always buy.” I can still
hear him saying it. Rent is money poured down a drain. See something in the long run for your money, even if you have to wait twenty or thirty years. Give me that pad.’ She stretched out a hand. ‘I’m going to write a letter to Mrs Mac for forwarding to sad Mrs Entwistle’s son who never came to see her.’
‘Waiting, greedily, with hand outstretched for the money from his mother’s house.’
‘Exactly.’ Daisy put her glasses on again. ‘And I can beat him down from strength if I’m quoted a good price for this place. Which I will be.’
‘You’re a female tycoon!’ Florence laughed out loud. ‘Joan Crawford in a black dress with white collar and cuffs, and a clean pair of white gloves in her handbag, setting off to do business with a captain of industry.’
‘I bet he sings in the chapel choir and cheats at snakes and ladders.’ Daisy tore the first leaf out of the writing pad and wrote her address at the top of the next.
Mrs MacDougal wasn’t too surprised to receive the letter from Daisy. She had shown a lot of people over the house next door, realizing the majority of them were there out of curiosity, sometimes merely for a nice look round on a day when it wasn’t fit to go on the sands. But little Miss Bell was a different kettle of fish. There had been a genuine interest in her expression as she had looked around the rooms. Probably come into some money, a nice little legacy from a distant relative. The one she was in mourning for, poor thing. Mrs Mac filled in the appropriate address on the enclosed envelope and told her husband to go out and catch the dinnertime collection. That was if he could summon the strength to shift himself and totter bravely down the street.
‘You’re no’ in the least bit funny, woman.’ Angus MacDougal peeled himself from a kitchen chair with the reluctance of a sticking-plaster left on a cut finger for too long. ‘Sticks and stones may hurt me bones, but your words they canna wound me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to be funny,’ Mrs Mac said truthfully, going back to stacking the plates away in racks running round three walls of the tiny kitchen, feeling a headache coming on, wondering whether it was the onset of a migraine or possibly the first symptom of a brain tumour.
Mrs Entwistle’s son lived up in Glasgow and hadn’t spoken to his mother for twenty years since running away from home to join the navy. He was a small man with smooth fawn hair, large waxy ears, and a gargoyle smile which not many people saw as he used it very rarely. He had lived alone for the past five years, having left his wife when he discovered he disliked her with the same intensity as he had loathed his mother. Now he begrudged her every penny he was forced to contribute to her upkeep, seeing no reason why he should be her meal ticket for life. Working as a ledger clerk in the office of a large iron foundry gave him dyspepsia and made him bitingly sarcastic with the three young men beneath him. He had fallen out with the milkman, the boy who delivered the papers, and the neighbours on both sides of his tiny terraced cottage. He wanted to be left alone, that was all. When the letter arrived from a Miss Bell down in Lancashire he read it in distasteful astonishment.
Dear Mr Entwistle,
You don’t know me, and why should you, but I was shown over your property in Blackpool the other week by a Mrs MacDougal to whom you had entrusted the key.
First I must say how sorry I was to hear about your mother dying. I lost my own mother recently and so I can guess how you must be feeling. May she rest in peace.
Secondly, I would like to know a little more about your property. Details like how much are you thinking of asking for it? Would the price include the furniture and fittings? Here, without hurting your feelings, I must point out that most of them would have to be renewed. Also I would like to see any records kept of the weekly income and expenditure, and your dear mother’s address book of her regular visitors. And any tradesmen’s bills, of course.
I have no idea where you live, but perhaps you could arrange to meet me at the property in the near future. A Sunday would suit me best. I need a second and more thorough viewing of the property before I even consider taking the most important step in my life. I am sure you will understand my necessary caution.
I hope you are well, Mr Entwistle, and that we are able to meet soon.
Yours very sincerely,
Daisy Mary Bell (Miss)
Mr Entwistle was livid. How dare Mrs MacDougal invade his hard-won privacy like this? She had clear instructions to send anything on to the solicitor down in Blackpool, and yet here she had sent him a letter of such a personal nature one could be mistaken in thinking that the writer was actually acquainted with him. May his mother rest in peace, indeed! She didn’t deserve to rest in peace, not after the way she had treated him. How she had treated her only son was becoming a bit vague after so long, but Mr Entwistle remembered the blistering rows and the way he had, in desperation, stolen the gas money as a thin, unhappy boy of sixteen, and caught the night train to Liverpool. Just for a brief moment he was that boy, huddled in the corner of a compartment, hungry and terrified, knowing only one thing – that he was never going to speak to her again.
Holding the letter between a finger and thumb as if it would contaminate him, he pushed it into an envelope, and sat down to compose a letter to the solicitor.
Dear Sir,
I received the enclosed today. Will you deal with it as you consider suitable.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard Entwistle
Sealing the letter, he put it in his pocket, tied his handkerchief in a knot to remind him to buy a stamp the next day, and went to boil an egg for his tea. A neat ugly little man without a friend in the world, shelled in his own solitude, telling himself for so long that he preferred it that way that now he believed it. Implicitly.
Mr Harmer of Harmer and Warton read Daisy’s letter with a smile and passed it over to his secretary Miss Browne, spelt with an ‘e’ as she was in the habit of saying. Flipping over the pages of his desk diary, he ran his finger down the lined pages.
‘Suggest the Sunday of the seventeenth,’ he said. ‘At around half-past eleven at the house. The property,’ he amended. ‘That should give me time to be back for my roast dinner at half-past one. I’ve a feeling our Miss Bell’s intentions could be serious. She writes like a woman who has already made up her mind.’ He picked up Bernard Entwistle’s brief note. ‘File this one-liner. Our Mr E. would communicate by Morse code if he could. A man of few words, Miss Browne.’
‘I suppose it’s the done thing to meet the solicitor instead of the owner,’ Daisy said on the evening of the 16th. ‘I’d have felt more comfortable meeting Mrs Entwistle’s son. I wonder why he didn’t answer my letter himself?’
‘Probably a monk in some closed order, under a vow of silence.’ Florence was ironing her best crêpe-de-chine blouse to look her smartest the next day. ‘That’s why his mother was sad.’
‘Or married above his station.’ Daisy looked up from whitening her shoes with a block of Blanco. ‘To a wife who could never lift up her head again if her friends found out that her mother-in-law was a landlady.’
‘The lowest of the low,’ Florence said.
‘I haven’t committed myself.’ Daisy looked suddenly vulnerable. ‘Even though the price the man told us we’d get for this place almost sent me into a coma. Would you have guessed we were sitting on a little gold mine? That’s what the man kept saying it was – a little gold mine.’
‘There are two houses,’ Florence reminded her. ‘This one and the next door with the bakehouse down below and the storage place upstairs. Plus the fact that the custom is already there. Plus the mill right across the street, plus the fact that folks can’t eat fish and chips every day and that your pies make a nice change, plus the fact that …’
The loud knocking at the shop door stopped her in mid-flow. Up-ending the flat-iron on to its asbestos stand, she glanced at the clock set squarely in the middle of the mantelpiece.
‘Who on earth? At this time of night?’
It was coming up to half-past ten. It had been a dank and di
smal day, and now it was a dank and dismal dark night. Before Florence had lifted the flap of the shop counter to pass through, the knocking began again. Loud, insistent, as if whoever was on the other side of the door was frantic with impatience.
‘Ask who it is, first.’ Daisy was right behind her.
But as if she had known, Florence drew back the bolt at the top, turned the key and opened the door wide – letting in the huge bull-like man with staring eyes and blood pouring from a cut on his forehead.
‘I think I’ve killed her!’ Matthew Livesey stumbled into the darkened shop, swaying where he stood, bloodshot eyes protruding with fear, smelling of Saturday-night drink, hatless, coatless, shirt black-wet with rain. ‘You have to come, lass. It’s either you or the doctor.’ To Daisy’s horror and disgust he dropped down to his knees and clutched at Florence’s legs. ‘An’ if the doctor sees her he’ll send for the police. An’ if the police come then I’m a goner.’
Florence stood frozen for a long moment. Daisy moved first.
‘I’ll go and get our coats,’ she said, ‘and the first-aid box from the bakehouse.’
When she came back Florence was standing by the counter staring wide-eyed at the spectacle of her father sprawled on the floor, sobbing like a child, beating his fists on the oilcloth, moaning and retching, his mouth held loosely open as a thin stream of evil-smelling vomit spread like an obscene puddle.
The woman wasn’t dead, but blood was pouring from a wound on the crown of her head. She lay on her side on the rug by the fender, her legs drawn up, almost to her chin. Steeling herself to touch her, Daisy turned her over, feeling the bile rise in her own throat at the sight of the woman’s face battered almost to a pulp, with swollen lips drawn back into a grotesque snarl, and one eye no more than a slit in a mound of bruised flesh.
‘Water,’ she ordered. ‘And cloths. If we get rid of the worst of the blood we’ll be able to see. Stop that!’ Her voice rose to a shout as Matthew Livesey began the low animal moaning again. ‘Go and stick your head underneath the cold tap in the kitchen and stop that row! Do you hear me? STOP IT!’