by Marie Joseph
‘Before you go,’ said Matthew Livesey, humbled and docile in his striped flannel shirt, ‘I would like you to join Nora and me in a prayer.’ To Florence’s acute embarrassment he knelt down on the rug her mother had once pegged and clasped his huge hands together.
There was more grey in his hair than when Florence had last seen him, but his eyes were clear and bright and the puffiness had gone from his face, smoothing his features into a semblance of uncharacteristic passivity. Nora was growing the peroxide from her hair so that it sprouted mousily from the parting, ending in yellowed tips as though she had accidentally trailed it through a tin of paint. She too clasped her hands together and closed her eyes.
‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.’ Matthew’s voice was resonant and deep.
‘I will not kneel down,’ Florence told herself, lowering her head and closing her own eyes in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I would feel a fool. I will not be made to pray when I don’t feel like it. Oh, God, this is awful. I wish I’d never come. He doesn’t need me, not now he’s got religion and Nora. He is transformed, and it’s a terrible thing. God knows why, but I almost prefer him ranting and raving with the drink inside him. This is obscene.’
‘He hath exalted the humble and meek,’ intoned Matthew. ‘Seek ye the Lord,’ said Matthew. ‘Amen,’ answered Nora.
Thinking they were finished, Florence raised her head to see them swaying together, eyes rolled up ceilingwards in a fervour of uncontrolled emotion.
‘I’ve got a train to catch,’ she whispered in desperation.
Bending her head, she stared down at her net gloves folded neatly on her knees. She tried to make her mind a blank, but that was something she had never been very good at. She distanced herself from the small back living room with its square table in the middle and the shiny horsehair sofa flanking the fireplace, with yesterday’s ashes forcing the ashpan out into the hearth.
Daisy would be in the kitchen now, flushed from the heat of the oven, basting the nice piece of topside she’d got from the butcher the day before. Putting the par-boiled potatoes round the joint, mashing the carrots with a knob of butter, and making the custard to go with the apple sponge pudding risen to a brown glossiness with the apples spiced with just a sprinkling of cinnamon underneath.
Sunday to Daisy meant a roast dinner. Chapel first, of course, but since moving to Blackpool there hadn’t been time for regular worship. Florence had been twice to the evening service with Joshua Penny. Surprised to find he had a pleasant light baritone voice, but why surprised? Joshua was a musical man, after all. She had seen him sitting in the armchair in his room, listening to a concert on the wireless, head back, eyes closed, somehow disarmed and helpless in his enjoyment of the soaring music. Played so quietly with the sound turned low, because Joshua was first and foremost a considerate man.
Florence could remember every detail of what she liked to think of as her growing relationship with the softly-spoken cultured man who came and went from the house, offering help at times, and keeping out of the way at others. Again she saw herself working with him at stripping endless walls of endless layers of wallpaper. Again she walked with him along the promenade, feeling the touch of his hand on her arm as they crossed the street.
Joshua was a lonely man; she had sensed that from the very beginning. A good man. Look at the way he managed to curb Jimmy’s boisterous ways when he could see that Daisy was at the end of her tether. Florence’s mother had always maintained that if a man was good with children that said everything there was to know about him. Kindness, the quality that counted more than any other. Stubborn perhaps, and rude when he wanted to be, but that made him more of a man, tempered his gentleness with a touch of masculine superiority.
‘I was made whiter than snow,’ said Matthew.
‘Let my voice cry unto Thee,’ replied Nora.
I love him, Florence’s heart cried. Oh, why didn’t I realize that before? If ever a man cried out for a woman’s love, a woman’s touch, then that man was Joshua Penny. He admired her, she had sensed that. He tolerated Daisy, but he admired her. When they talked about music and literature, his brown eyes sparkled. When he moved she was conscious of his strength and his gentleness. The combination of the two qualities was irresistible. When she was with him she could forget her own height, the angular set of her body; he was not the kind of man, she was convinced, who set great store on feminine beauty. In one way he was totally unobservant, wrapped up in himself, she had to admit that. But not in a selfish way, never that. He had suffered greatly in the trenches during the war, she guessed that without him having said so. Losing his wife had deepened that sadness. He was crying in the dark, and the flame consuming her could warm him, comfort him. She was strong, both in body and spirit; she had no time for the dreamy defeated kind of woman. She could bring him to life again.
‘For the sake of Thy dear Son, Jesus Christ,’ said Matthew.
‘Amen,’ said Nora.
‘I have a train to catch,’ said Florence, as they got up from their knees.
‘May God go with you,’ her father said, genuinely touched by the rapt unseeing expression in his daughter’s eyes.
‘I think we may have saved another soul,’ he told Nora, as the front door closed behind Florence. ‘The light was on her. She has stopped seeing through a glass darkly.’
‘Praise the Lord,’ said Nora.
Edna missed seeing Florence walking back down the street because they were round the table eating their Sunday dinner. But if she had been standing on the front doorstep Florence would have looked straight through her. As if in a trance, she put one large foot in front of the other, her unbuttoned coat flowing tent-like round her, the net gloves for once pushed deep into a pocket, and the ugly green hat slightly askew on the head that looked just too small for the rest of her.
Joshua. Joshua. His name was a hymn singing in her veins. Her life had been a barren waste up to now. How could she have considered going on with it as it was? Kow-towing to stupid people because Daisy said she had to. Tolerating them because they were paying for the privilege of being cosseted? Unlessoned minds; women with red hands swollen with work, cloth-capped men with their brains in their trousers, unruly children bringing sand in on their shoes. She could pity them, but unlike Daisy she could not love them. She thought of Daisy, for ever striving to please, loving a man who was not worthy of her love, giving him her unquestioning loyalty because he was the first man who had looked upon her and told her she was beautiful.
Joshua was not a man to tolerate fools gladly; she knew that, too.
She was passing the pie shop when she saw the Rolls-Royce parked in the short street outside the mill. She was hesitating, unable to believe her eyes, when she saw Sam Barnet get out from the driving seat, holding the door open for a squat little man wearing a black overcoat and a black homburg hat. She stepped back into the shadow of the greengrocer’s shop, her foot squelching on a rotten tomato. She saw Sam back the car smoothly up the short street, reverse into the traffic-free Sunday street, and drive on away from her, passing so close to where she stood she saw the sculptured line of his handsome profile and the way his black hair curled up over the back of his chauffeur’s peaked cap.
‘I have a train to catch,’ she reminded herself, forcing herself to come out from her hiding-place and start walking towards the station. There would be an explanation for it, she told herself. Sam’s boss had made an unexpected trip up north. Sam hadn’t known he was coming, it had all been arranged so quickly he hadn’t had time to tell Daisy. Florence quickened her steps. But to be less than twenty-five miles away – miles that could be covered in a car like that at the blink of an eyelid. But then it wasn’t Sam’s car. He was on duty. He couldn’t expect his boss to give him hours off to see his son, even if that son was merely a handful of miles away. She was being ridiculous, jumping to conclusions, refusing to give Samuel Barnet the benefit of the doubt.
Florence caught the train w
ith seconds to spare and sat by the window seat staring unseeing through the grimy window. It could be that when she got back to Blackpool the big car would be parked in the street outside the house with Sam already inside, grinning at the surprise and delight on Jimmy’s face, holding Daisy close, bringing the colour back to her cheeks and the sparkle back to her eyes.
‘And if you believe that, then you will believe anything,’ Florence muttered aloud, drawing the net gloves from her pocket and smoothing them over her long hands, being careful to get the seams of the fingers just so.
Joshua came into the kitchen just as Daisy was starting on the washing-up after a Sunday dinner which he declared could have graced the table at Buckingham Palace and not been bettered. Picking up a teacloth, he advanced towards the draining-board.
Daisy was shocked. ‘No, thank you, Joshua. You’re a guest in this house.’ She almost said a paying guest, then snatched the word back in time, feeling it might sound indelicate.
Joshua took no notice. He picked up a dinner plate and began to wipe it, rubbing it with a circular movement, the cloth all screwed up; Daisy had noticed in films that the men always dried up that way. ‘I thought I was a friend.’ He pretended to sound hurt. ‘Anyway, why don’t we get this lot finished, then take Jimmy out for a walk? It’s so warm outside it could almost be a summer’s day.’
‘A walk?’ Daisy’s face was a study. ‘Do you know what I have to do this afternoon?’ She pushed a wayward strand of hair behind an ear. ‘You would never imagine, would you, that with thirty-four samples to choose from for curtain material for the lounge I could pick out the wrong shade? Would you have guessed that what looked like a pale shade of apricot in the shop could turn out to be bright blood-orange when you get it home? Have you noticed that the chairs I bought that were so comfortable to sit in in the furniture emporium have turned out to be so near to the ground that it would take an athlete at the peak of a year’s intensive training to spring out of them?’
‘A walk,’ Joshua said, picking up the gravy-boat and shoving the whole of the cloth inside it to get it dry. ‘Jimmy’s in Bobbie’s room beating him hands down at Ludo. Telling Bobbie to look through the window at something or other, then palming his own counters and moving them on. That lad could make a seasoned card-sharper on an old-time Mississippi river boat look like an old lady at a church whist drive.’
Daisy looked worried. ‘He’s so furtive, Joshua,’ she frowned. ‘Not a nice word to describe a small boy, but that is what he is. Furtive and sly. He came home from school last week with half a dozen crayons on his head underneath his cap, and swore he had no idea how they’d got there.’
‘A crooked card-sharper and a kleptomaniac.’ Joshua picked up a knife that hadn’t been washed and wiped it vigorously on the cloth. ‘Come on, Daisy. The blood-orange curtains will still be there when we get back.’
‘And in a hundred years it will all be the same,’ Daisy said, savouring the feeling of being ordered about instead of making all the decisions herself.
‘Poor Sam,’ she said, as they stepped out into a day so golden it could have been high summer. ‘He’s spending the whole weekend slaving over his books. If he fails these coming exams I don’t know what he’ll do.’
‘Has his divorce come through yet?’
Daisy glanced at him sharply. The word had such a worrying connotation in her own mind that to hear it spoken out so naturally startled her. She was getting paranoiac about it, she thought, catching herself looking over her shoulder in case a woman coming up close behind had overheard.
‘We never discuss it in our letters,’ she said stiffly. ‘Putting things down in black and white, you see.’
‘Of course.’ Joshua accepted her explanation immediately. But then, that was the way he was, asking direct questions, then accepting your answer without further discussion. A comfortable sort of man to be with. She relaxed, matching her steps to his, glad she had left her handbag at home so that she could swing her arms a little.
It was such a lovely afternoon. The wind had that first spring softness in it, and along the Golden Mile the new posters advertising the coming attractions had a shiny look about them. Far to the north, towards The Gynn and Cleveleys, the hotels and big houses were washed in a soft peachy shade, the exact colour Daisy had had in mind for the lounge curtains. Turning their backs on them, they began to walk south.
Half-way towards the pier they smiled at each other and coming to a decision climbed down one of the iron stairways to the beach. The tide had left pools of clear green water and soon Joshua’s brown suede shoes were muddied and stained.
‘Your shoes will be ruined.’ Daisy was anxious, motherly.
‘They’re only shoes.’ Joshua kicked at a pebble. ‘It’s hard to believe that soon this stretch of sands will be crowded, with cars streaming past on the promenade up there, isn’t it?’ He pointed ahead into the far distance. ‘Just look at those two horse-riders way over there. They’re making the most of having the beach to themselves, and who can blame them?’
Obediently Daisy looked, shading her eyes against the sun, but the fast-moving specks were out of her limited field of vision. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, but Joshua wasn’t fooled.
‘Why don’t you wear your glasses more often, Daisy? You miss so much and they suit you. No, I mean it, they really do. You look about twelve when you’re wearing them, especially when they keep slipping down your nose and you push them back with a finger. And while I’m being personal, can I say how it also suits you to wear your hair straight instead of curled? There are auburn lights in it that don’t show when it’s all curled up like. …’
‘Claudette Colbert’s?’
‘What I had in mind was Greta Garbo’s in Anna Karenina. A big bunch of frizz stuck over her forehead.’ He seemed to walk deliberately through a shallow puddle, like a naughty boy. ‘Did you see that one?’
Daisy sighed. ‘Twice.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Do you remember the moment when she stepped from the train in a cloud of steam, and Frederic March saw her for the first time. …’
‘And their eyes met, and in that instant they knew!’
‘Even though she was married to another. It made no difference.’
‘And from that moment on they were doomed.’ Joshua had stopped too. For a long breathless moment they stood quite still, staring into each other’s eyes. As lost in a spell of wonder as if they sat close together in red plush seats in the warmth of a cinema. With Tolstoy’s tragic story firing their imaginations so that the real world faded and dimmed. ‘They say that Tolstoy understood the working of the human mind better than any other writer has done either before or since,’ Joshua said softly.
‘She was honour bound to a selfish man.’ Daisy appeared to be talking to herself. ‘Basil Rathbone, with his long cold face and his possessive love for his young son. He used the boy to punish his wife for her infidelity.’
‘You knew from the very beginning that it would end tragically.’
‘I knew when they showed the wheel-tapper crushed to death between two carriages of the shunting train.’ Daisy’s face was rapt. ‘The end was terrible when you saw her face and guessed she was going to throw herself off the platform beneath those grinding wheels. …’
Suddenly she gave a small scream as her feet were sucked from beneath her by a wave of the rapidly incoming tide. Always quicker to move than to cry out in any crisis, Joshua’s arms came round her, lifted her free of the swirling water, held her close against him before carrying her to safety.
Her hair smelled of summer flowers, and her body was small and soft. He could feel the swell of her breasts as he strained her to him. She was suddenly the ghost of an old pain, the first woman he had held in his arms since his wife had died. She was, in that moment, the comfort and kindness, the warmth he craved, the expression of the aching need in him. Dear God, a voice inside him said, I would like this dear, dear woman to bear my child.
With that totally unbidden thought, he
felt the shameful tears fill his eyes.
‘Now my shoes are ruined.’ Daisy was laughing up at him.
Reluctantly Joshua set her down on the rippled sand. It was the laugh he had found himself listening for when he came into the house in the early evenings, a combination of music and the promise of a lasting happiness.
As they walked back to the house together Joshua looked up at the wide arc of the sky. The Tower rose into it, wreathed now by cloud drifting in from the east. He shivered and dug his hands deep into his pockets.
When they met Florence walking plod-footed from the station Joshua nodded curtly and excusing himself, broke away from them to hurry into the house and up the stairs into the solitude of his quiet room.
On her journey back, Florence had decided not to tell Daisy about seeing Sam until they were alone. Out of consideration for Daisy’s feelings of course. She was bound to be upset, and who was it who had said evil news rides post? Shakespeare could have said it, but she had a feeling it was Milton.
‘I see you’ve been for a walk,’ she said, and innocently Daisy explained that Joshua had insisted.
‘Been for a paddle in the sea?’ Florence stared at Daisy’s shoes encrusted with wet sand. ‘Best go and get those off.’
She was glad to see that Daisy’s hair looked such a mess, and eyed her own neat hair-do with satisfaction as she took off her hat and fluffed up the front piece in front of the hall mirror. She restrained herself from running upstairs after Joshua to tell him about seeing Sam, knowing instinctively how interested and concerned he would be. Knowing equally that it would be just like him to advise her to keep the news to herself.
But Daisy had to know. There was a tiny bubble of excitement inside Florence at the thought of the telling. Samuel Barnet deserved to be shamed. And the sooner the better. He was getting between Daisy and her wits. It was as if she saw him surrounded in a white shining light like a knight of old, his character unblemished, his integrity intact. That wasn’t real love, she told herself later as she sat inserting hooks into the top hems of curtains newly machine-hemmed by Daisy. Real love saw a loved one’s faults and accepted them as part of him. Just as she had accepted Joshua’s apparent rudeness when he had barely acknowledged her earlier. Joshua could be cool, indifferent and unthinkingly uncaring when he’d a mind. And she loved him for it.