A Better World than This

by Marie Joseph

  Poor Daisy. Florence felt very close to her as they worked together through what was left of the afternoon. They were making curtains for the room Jimmy had been sleeping in.

  ‘Why don’t we move him into my room now? It’s better he should get used to it before the busy time begins.’ Daisy frowned. ‘It’s not ideal, but I just can’t give him a room of his own. He’ll be okay with that old screen in front of his bed.’

  In the room on the top landing Florence shooed the kitten off the foot of a rather rickety camp bed. She plumped up a pillow. ‘How many kids did you know who had a room to themselves? Not many at our school. Do you remember the Cleggs? They slept four to a bed!’

  ‘And had the nits to prove it.’

  Florence wrinkled her nose in disgust. She wasn’t in the mood for talking about or even thinking of nits. From Joshua’s room came the faint sound of music. Debussy, Florence guessed. Oh, yes, it would have to be Debussy. Soaring, sensual music. She imagined him listening to it as he sat in his chair with his head back and his eyes closed. When their relationship deepened she would sit with him, without speaking, without the need to say a word. And when the record finished Joshua would discuss with her the merits of the strings versus the wind instruments – her thoughts were wild and vague – he would teach her to understand.

  ‘If music be the food of love, play on. …’ Shakespeare never failed her.

  She gazed limp-eyed into the middle distance. She would try to convey to Joshua the way she felt when the chapel choir lifted their voices in The Messiah or The Crucifixion. The way she felt at times her heart would burst when the congregation rose to join in the singing: ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Daisy’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. ‘You look like Jimmy looks just before he’s sick without bothering where.’ She bit back what she was going to say, then said it anyway. ‘I expect it’s because you missed a meal out. You’d think your father would have offered you something, even if it was only a cream cracker and a cup of tea.’

  Florence shot her a venomous look. She’d often suspected Daisy had no soul.

  Now what have I said, Daisy wondered.

  ‘They were too busy praying, and anyway I wouldn’t have fancied anything,’ Florence said, taking umbrage. At what, Daisy couldn’t imagine.

  Jimmy went to bed quite happily. He liked the idea of sleeping in Daisy’s room, but he wasn’t going to say so. It could be dead good sleeping behind the screen in the narrow little bed. Like being in a den.

  Before his dad had gone to live in the other place, before all that, when his mum and dad slept together, they had sometimes let him climb in between them if he’d had a bad dream. It was hot and squashy, but he’d liked it a lot. His mother always smelled of talcum powder he’d often seen her shake down the front of her nightdress, and he liked her with her face all shiny with the cream she used for her wrinkles, not that he could see all that many.

  Bogey men hadn’t a chance of getting at him when he was sandwiched between them. Even if the wardrobe door was slightly open he could be certain a body wouldn’t lollop out with a knife stuck in its back with the blade gone all the way in and just the handle showing.

  The worst dream of all was the one he’d had the week he started going to school – the one where his dad was driving the motorbike with his mother sitting upright in the sidecar with her hair blowing, where they’d gone over the edge of a cliff into the sea. Daisy had sat on his bed and read him a story till he went to sleep again and told him that everybody had bad dreams sometimes.

  ‘No, they never come true,’ she had sworn, and had spit on her finger and drawn it across her throat. ‘Make me into rabbit pie, should I ever tell a lie,’ she’d said, and laughed that gurgly laugh she had so that you had to laugh too, even when you’d rather have carried on being cross.

  ‘You’re as daft as a brush,’ he’d said, furious with her for making him smile.

  ‘Yard or tooth?’ she’d joked, and when he’d worked that out, and she’d tickled the soles of his feet, he’d ended up laughing so much she’d had to go down again and fetch him a drink of water.

  ‘I saw someone we know on my way back to the station.’

  ‘Who?’ Daisy wanted to know, folding up a pair of finished curtains, taking off her glasses to rub her tired eyes.

  ‘Someone you know very well,’ Florence said, wearing her fierce face.

  ‘Tell me then. It’s too late for guessing games.’ Daisy yawned and stretched, raising her arms high above her head. ‘I think I could sleep on a clothes-line tonight. I hope Jimmy doesn’t wake up when I go into the bedroom. He’s taking things too quietly for my liking lately. You can never tell what’s going on in a child’s mind, can you? He hasn’t mentioned his dad for ages. It’s strange that. I know kids are adaptable, but not that much, surely? He’s got such a tight little shut-in face, hasn’t he? Probably worrying his little guts out secretly and totally unable to communicate with us. I remember having the most awful fears when I was small, you know, irrational fears from things grown-ups said. I remember coming home from school once and calling out for my mother the minute I got in through the door the way I always did. And she wasn’t there, but my Auntie Edna was, and when I asked her where my mother was she said she had gone off with the coalman. For a joke, for heaven’s sake, but I believed her! I saw my mother sitting up behind the horse on the cart with all the folded sacks and the coalman whipping that old horse to a frenzy as he made off with my mam. …’

  ‘Daisy!’ Florence closed her eyes and put up a hand like a policeman directing the traffic. ‘You’re not listening to me! I said I saw someone you know. I could keep it to myself, but for your own good I think you ought to know.’

  ‘Who then?’

  Now that the time for telling had come, Florence felt flushed and uncomfortable. Daisy looked so trusting sitting there, talking too much the way she always did when she was overtired. Telling her would be like kicking a defenceless puppy on its soft white underbelly.

  ‘I saw Sam.’

  Daisy felt waves of shock prick like a whole paper of pins in her armpits. Her face went cold and somehow stiff.

  ‘He was driving the Rolls up the street from the mill. There was a man sitting in the back wearing a black homburg hat.’

  ‘Mr Evison,’ Daisy heard her voice say. ‘Sam’s boss.’ Her chin lifted as her mind raced ahead. ‘Oh, yes, Sam said in his letter that he might possibly have to come up north this weekend. Driving Mr Evison up on urgent business. He asked me not to mention it to Jimmy because he didn’t think there would be any chance of him coming to Blackpool.’

  Don’t overdo it, she warned herself. Not too many explanations. Keep it casual. Florence is opening and closing her mouth like a fish. She does look funny, but I mustn’t laugh, because if I laugh then I’ll burst out crying, and she’ll guess I had no idea.

  ‘Well, you could have told me.’ Florence was blustering. ‘I got quite a turn when I saw him.’ She began to unpin her hair. ‘I’ll go up now.’

  ‘How was he looking?’

  ‘Very well.’ Florence stored the hairgrips away in their little box and stood up. She was nobody’s fool, but if Daisy wanted to take up this attitude then what could you do but admire her? The Florence Liveseys of this world though were too sensitive and all-seeing not to realize the truth of it. Daisy’s smile was like the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa. Enigmatic, giving nothing away. She was making no move to go to bed, buttoning and unbuttoning her cardigan with fingers that Florence was sure were trembling.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘No.’

  As Florence climbed the stairs she saw an unflattering picture of herself hiding in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, eyes almost popping out of her head in astonishment. Rushing off to the station to catch her train, anticipating the look on Daisy’s face when she dropped her bombshell.

  Florence began to dislike herself just a little, bu
t not for long. There was a rim of light showing beneath Joshua’s door. The temptation to knock gently and call out a tender goodnight was almost overwhelming. She could smell the smoke from his pipe and imagined him sitting there puffing away and reading, huddled against the cold in the grey plaid dressing-gown she had once seen hanging behind the door. She stood with a hand raised, head inclined forward, barley-pale hair wisping round her face.

  ‘Goodnight, Miss Nightingale. Mislaid your lamp?’

  She whirled round to see Bobbie Schofield standing right behind her, returned from God only knew where at this time of night, dancing pumps beneath an arm, black patent hair flattened to his head as if glued there by flour paste. Grinning at her and fingering his loathsome five-a-side moustache. Why had she never realized before quite how common a little man he was?

  ‘Goodnight.’ Her glance was withering, her tone barely civil.

  ‘Be like that then,’ said Bobbie, chirpily cheerful, going into his own room and closing the door.

  Daisy needed air. Taking her coat from the antler stand she opened the front door and stepped out into the street. The lodging-houses on either side were blurred to wraiths in the darkness, the street lamps dimmed, the air fresh and salt-tasting. When she reached the end of the street she could hear the sea pounding at full tide against the sea wall, and imagined it sending showers of spray across a gleaming wet promenade. The weather had changed in keeping with her mood, and for a moment she was tempted to walk down to the front and stand by the railings letting the wind and the unquiet water take her thoughts and whirl them away.

  Sam had been within a few miles of her all that day and she hadn’t known. She had gone about her day not knowing, not even feeling that he was near. She was not doubting him; there would be a reason why he hadn’t mentioned he was coming north in his letter. Business transactions were planned overnight, important journeys made at a moment’s notice. Besides all that, Sam was not his own master. No, Sam must have been feeling as bad as she was feeling now at being so near and yet so far. Within the next few days there would be a letter telling of his frustration. …

  She turned into a side street, thrusting her hands deep into her pockets.

  Did she believe all that? Could she really believe it? At odd times, heart-stopping times like now, there would be a chink in the curtain of her reasoning, revealing glimpses of the truth.

  She was going to lose Sam, Her beautiful Sam was as far removed from her as the stars in heaven. He wasn’t hers at all. Yet when she was with him she was sure that he loved her. Most of the time anyway. She could listen to his voice for ever and the way he lingered over her name. Daisybell. It sounded like music the way Sam said it.

  She turned into a parade of shops bolted and darkened for the night. She had thought they were spiritually close and yet he had been within a few miles of her that day and she hadn’t sensed his nearness.

  Why, oh why hadn’t he told her he was coming north? She was just kidding herself pretending he wouldn’t have known. And why did he have to have a wife who hadn’t gone away, however Daisy brushed her suspicions aside. There were so many things unexplained, so many subjects taboo. Sam’s wife spoilt everything by merely existing.

  Death not divorce would be a better solution, death being more final, less messy. A cosy sort of death, nothing too painful or too distressing. Daisy wasn’t that ruthless. Something instantaneous such as Sam’s wife having walked around all her life with a clot of blood a hundredth of an inch from her heart – a clot which moved and stopped her heart beating after a happy day spent walking in the country with her lover. Perhaps even as she lay by her lover’s side in bed so that Sam wouldn’t be able to feel too grief-stricken about it. Definitely no last-minute reconciliation scene leaving Sam with a sense of guilt to torment him for the rest of his days.

  Automatically Daisy about-faced and retraced her steps. She imagined Sam sending for her after the funeral. She saw herself getting off the train at Euston with Jimmy, seeing Sam waiting for her, little Dorothy holding his hand, a big black taffeta bow in her hair. ‘I knew you would come,’ Sam saying simply. ‘You’ll have to be their mother now, Daisybell.’

  The boarding-house would have to be sold, of course. Mr Harmer would see to that. Then there was Florence. With a sudden flash of inspiration Daisy married her off to Bobbie Schofield. Daisy would lend Bobbie the money to start a dancing school – in a small way at first till he worked up a regular clientele. Florence would accept the late flowering of passion gratefully and have two brilliant children who won scholarships to grammar schools without even trying.

  Daisy crossed the street totally unrepentant that she had wished Sam’s wife dead and married her best friend off to the nearest man just to ensure her own happiness. Then as the rain began in earnest the fear gripped her once again. Sam was not for her. Her breath caught on a sob. Oh, dear dear God, then if Sam was not for her she was lost. The years to come would be hollow; without him all would be meaningless, there was no room for any other emotion but her love for him.

  Sam had looked on her with love. His eyes had told her she was beautiful. With his long slim hands, a pianist’s hands, a surgeon’s hands, he had held her face still for his kiss. Because of her love for him she was a stranger to herself, a different kind of woman who had found the love she always hoped would be there, waiting just for her. A love as full of joy as a bright summer’s day.

  As terrible as the last dark hour at the ending of the world. …

  ‘You all right, lass?’ A policeman riding his bicycle wobbled to a stop at the kerb. ‘Best get on home.’ He peered into Daisy’s face. ‘There’s nobody been bothering you, has there?’ He fell into step with her, wheeling his bicycle with one hand. ‘Tell me where you live and I’ll see you home. We’ve heard there’s a man exposing himself to young women – down Talbot Square way. Not a violent man by all accounts, but it’s best to be warned, and I hope you don’t mind me saying, but it’s a bit late to be out on your own, isn’t it? I’ve not seen you before. You don’t look like. …’

  ‘No, I’m not!’ Daisy felt her face grow hot at the inference. ‘I just felt like a walk, that’s all.’ She pointed across the street. ‘I live over there.’ Very dignified she was. ‘Goodnight, Officer. Thank you for your concern.’

  Before she closed the big front door she looked up at the night sky. There were cloud mirages now over to the north, huge black mountain ranges. A man lurched along the opposite pavement, keeling sideways, sodden with drink. Daisy saw the policeman approach him.

  She felt better; blown about and weary, but better. When she reached the top landing she saw a rim of light beneath Joshua’s door.

  He would be fit for nothing in the morning, she worried, her mind already on the good cooked breakfast she would see he had before he left to catch his train.

  The nightmare gripped Jimmy around three o’clock. Surfacing from it he lay quite still, feeling for the kitten curled up at the foot of his bed.

  It was worse this time. His mother’s mouth was wide open in a silent scream. The motorbike hung suspended before plunging into the water, but his father was laughing, his head thrown back and his teeth white in the light from the moon. Jimmy sat bolt upright, stretched out a hand and touched the screen. Only half awake, he fought his way out of the bedclothes, whimpering, trying to determine where he was, struggling against a terrible drowsiness that threatened to plunge him back into the dream again.

  ‘Jimmy?’ Daisy’s voice sounded very near. ‘It’s all right, love. Don’t be frightened. I’m here.’

  The relief brought the tears up from his chest and into his throat to spill out from his eyes and roll down his cheeks. Jimmy pushed the screen aside and padded over to Daisy’s bed. Shivering, he stood by her pillow, clenching his hands into fists as he made out the shape of her head and the whiteness of her arms as she stretched them out to him. She was all soft warmth and comfort as she held him close, tucked him in beside her and mopped his face wit
h a handkerchief that smelled of lavender water.

  ‘There, there, little sweetheart. You’ve had a bad dream, that’s all. It’s all right now. Shush, hush up now. Daisy’s got you, safe as a row of houses. That’s right, turn over and sit on my knee. We’re like spoons in a box now, you a teaspoon and me a great big tablespoon. Go back to sleep, sweetheart. The bad dream’s all gone.’

  His hair smelled of the green soft soap she had washed it with the night before. His little bottom against her stomach was hard like an apple, and when she put an arm round him his fingers curled into her hand. Because he had not wakened fully he was asleep with the suddenness of a stone dropping down a well. By the rhythmic sucking sound Daisy knew he had put a thumb into his mouth, indulging himself in a babyish habit he would never have admitted to during the day.

  This was Sam’s child. Some other woman had given birth to him, washed his nappies, rinsed his feeding bottles out in Milton, spooned mashed-up carrots into his mouth, held out her arms to him as he took his first steps. And rejected him when he became what she described as impossible.

  And he was impossible. In the way all small boys were impossible. Daisy smiled into the thatch of hair, clean-smelling it was true, but slightly sticky because he had fought the last rinsing water, yelling that she was trying to drown him.

  Jimmy, who could run along the top of the backyard wall with the deftness of a squirrel, but who always managed to fall down the last three stairs to land in the hall with a thump. Jimmy, who stepped out of his clothes and left them lying there; Jimmy, who could tell fibs to music, who stole crayons from school and used Florence’s lipstick to write a rude word on a newly painted wall. Jimmy, who had asked why Florence had no bosoms sticking out the front of her blouses, just as Daisy was up-ending a steamed sponge pudding from its basin. Jimmy, who swore that he was the only boy in the school not allowed to stay up till midnight and take a bottle of fizzy lemonade to bed with him when he finally decided the time was right to go. Jimmy, who had eaten two packets of Bird’s Jellies and denied it with indignation flaring his nostrils, and who had come downstairs only last week at a quarter to twelve to tell an exhausted Daisy that he was Pontius Pilate in a play and needed a costume plus real-looking beard to take with him to school the very next morning.