A Better World than This Read online

  A Better World than This

  Marie Joseph

  Random House (2012)

  Tags: Historical, Fiction

  * * *

  Synopsis

  In a small Lancashire cotton town in the 1930s, Daisy Bell dreams her life away. At twenty-six, still a spinster and heiress to her mother's potato pie shop, she's resigned to a lonely old age. But toiling over the bake-house fire she dreams of a better world - a world of glamour and romance as seen on the silver screen.Then she meets Sam a dashing Clark Gable look-alike and chauffeur to a wealthy London businessman - and suddenly her life is changed forever...

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  RING-A-ROSES

  MAGGIE CRAIG

  A LEAF IN THE WIND

  EMMA SPARROW

  GEMINI GIRLS

  THE LISTENING SILENCE

  LISA LOGAN

  THE CLOGGER’S CHILD

  POLLY PILGRIM

  A BETTER WORLD

  THAN THIS

  Marie Joseph

  For Mary, Norrie and Jamie

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  ‘HAVE A LOOK through the window, Daisy! You’ve got Clark Gable out there queueing up for a spud pie and a basin o’ peas!’

  The girl holding out her hand for change from half-a-crown turned round to the crowded shop and winked. ‘Dimples ’n all. Wouldn’t mind finding one like him in me Christmas cracker!’

  The cotton mill across the street from the pie shop had closed its gates for the day, and the weavers were clattering in to buy a two-pound loaf or a bag of barm-cakes to spread with margarine and jam for their tea, if money wouldn’t run to fish and chips again that week.

  Behind the wide counter Daisy Bell passed over the crusty loaves, standing them first on a layer of tissue paper which she twisted swiftly into little points.

  ‘I’m glad I put me curlers in last night,’ she confided, jerking her head towards the window. ‘D’you reckon it really is Clark Gable? Do you suppose he saw me beauty when he was passing and wants me for his next film?’

  She stood first on one foot, then the other. It had been a long day, starting for Daisy at half-past four that morning, and once the rush was over she was looking forward to having her tea, then going to the second-house pictures. Sliding three Eccles cakes into a paper bag, she considered carefully. Evelyn Laye was on at the Olympia. ‘Music, Comedy, and Charm’ the advertisement in the Weekly Times had said.

  ‘Four barm-cakes, Mrs Margerison.’ She smiled, slipping them floury and soft into a bag. She quite liked Evelyn Laye. Possessing hair as fair as Daisy’s was dark, the musical-comedy star had a look of appealing fragility about her. Evelyn Laye looked like a fainter, and fainters always came off best. Daisy often considered fainting when her legs were aching and her feet killing her. She’d be good at it too after watching so many glamorous stars of so many Hollywood films slide gracefully to the floor with soft little moans.

  Daisy spent a lot of time dwelling on glamour, there not being much of it about in the north-east Lancashire cotton towns during the depressed middle thirties.

  The shop was slowly emptying, and ‘Clark Gable’ was coming closer by the minute. Daisy reached for a slab of parkin, leaning sideways for a better look at him. He really did bear more than a passing resemblance to the handsome star who, in a recent film, had startled audiences by revealing that beneath his shirt he was vestless. How manly, Daisy had decided dreamily. She stole another look at the man now approaching the counter.

  Yes, he had the star’s broad shoulders, and the black hair springing away from a crumpled forehead. Plus the same air of cheerful impudence as he grinned at her, and jingled a handful of coins in his hand. He wore a chauffeur’s pale grey uniform, buttoned down the side of the jacket, with epaulet shoulder pieces. A peaked cap was pushed cheekily to the back of his head. Not from hereabouts, definitely not from round here, Daisy told herself, flashing him her open friendly smile.

  ‘And what can I get for you, sir?’ His eyes were dark blue, his eyelashes as long as a girl’s. Oh, yes, she was right. They certainly didn’t grow men like this vision up here. The men in this town all looked as if they’d been grown in the dark, like mushrooms.

  ‘I’ll have two of those, please.’ The voice was low, with a caress in it.

  Daisy poshed up her accent as she spoke to him. ‘They’re called Eccles cakes, sir. Me mother’s speciality. The kids call them flies’ coffins. They’re luvly spread with a bit of butter and warmed up in the oven.’

  ‘Are they now?’ He handed over the money, and was she imagining it or did his hand close over hers for a second as she gave him change from a shilling?

  The shop was empty now, and he stood there, smiling, swinging the paper bag from his hand.

  ‘I’m afraid these will have to be eaten as they are. In my boss’s car. And without making crumbs.’ He leaned forward. ‘It’s a Rolls-Royce. A Phantom. It goes at over seventy miles an hour.’ His eyes narrowed into mischievous slits. ‘I once saw my boss whip out a gun and shoot a bird stone dead for doing its whatsit on the bonnet.’

  ‘You never!’ Daisy was enchanted. He talked as if he was wobbling a hot potato round his mouth. A bit like Ronald Colman. ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘Nope.’ He began to back away, his broad forehead crinkling into mock anxiety. ‘I’ve left it parked outside the mill. Do many cars get pinched round here?’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t get far with it, would they?’ Daisy’s eyes twinkled. ‘Aw, mister. Folks round here are still using hand-carts for flitting. A lad with his wits about him can make a penny a bucket from horse droppings.’

  As she laughed out loud, Sam Barnet stopped in his tracks. He’d never heard a woman sound quite like that before. It was a child’s laugh, throaty and uninhibited. Warm, filled with gaiety as though it could obliterate all the sorrows of the world. Motherly too, and yet she couldn’t be more than in her middle twenties. He glanced at her hand as she lifted it to push a wayward strand of dark brown hair into place. No ring. …

  On an impulse he stepped forward, oblivious to the fact that an elderly woman was watching him intently from a crack in a door to his left.

  ‘I know this sounds a bit of a cheek, but would you let me take you to the pictures tonight? I’m free when I’ve driven my boss to his hotel.’ His smile was now that of a little boy lost. ‘I’m a complete stranger to these parts. You’d do me a favour if you came with me.’ He held out his hand. ‘Sam Barnet. Chauffeur to a London businessman who hopes to bring a deal of work to this town.’ He grinned, the dimples flashing. ‘Well, what do you say, Daisy? See, I know your name, so that’s a beginning.’

  Daisy could see her mother standing motionless behind the door leading
into the back living room. Listening so intently it was a wonder her ears weren’t flapping. Spying, if you decided to call a spade a spade, which Daisy always did. She could almost smell the disapproval emanating from every pore of the squat little figure with its pouter-pigeon bosom encased in the old-fashioned black marocain blouse.

  Daisy’s dark brown gaze flickered from her mother’s set face to the handsome one smiling at her across the width of the counter. Marking time, she picked up a cloth and gave the mahogany surface an unnecessary wipe. A tiny frisson of excitement inside her told her she was being picked up. That she had clicked. She, Daisy Bell, spinster of this parish, good-for-a-laugh Daisy from the pie shop. Liked by just about everybody, but loved, alas, by no one in particular.

  Her mother’s shadow shifted slightly and Daisy’s mind was made up.

  ‘Well …’ she said, pretending to consider. ‘All right, then. I can cancel the engagement I already had. No problem. Call for me about half-past seven at the door round the corner by the bakehouse. Ta-ra, then. Enjoy your cakes.’

  Smiling as she turned away, hearing the shop door ping closed, then widening her eyes as she pretended to see her mother for the first time.

  ‘Well!’ Martha Bell had never minced her words and she wasn’t going to start now. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. What about that girl up Oswald Street who went out with that commercial traveller and was never seen again?’

  ‘What about her?’ Daisy could feel the euphoria of the past minutes fading away.

  ‘White Slave Traffic,’ Martha said, going over to lock the shop door. ‘An Arab’s plaything that poor girl will be now. Doped and drugged into a life of shame.’

  She marched through into the living room, muttering to herself, knowing she had wiped the look of happiness from her daughter’s face, and not sorry, neither. Accepting too that she still saw her only daughter as a clumsy little girl with ribbons in her hair that never stayed tied, an apple-cheeked child with straight hair and round horn-rimmed glasses always slipping down her nose.

  ‘I’ll go and get the tea.’ Daisy walked quickly through into the kitchen and opened the pantry door. She stared at the basin of potted meat on the cold slate slab, but made no attempt to reach in and get it. Through the gauze over the tiny window she could see the bakehouse wall, the bricks running damp, the recent pointing standing out like fretwork.

  On her fourteenth birthday ten years ago she had left school and started working in the bakehouse, with flour in her hair and murder in her heart. She had told herself then that this was the way it was going to be for the rest of her life. And she’d been right. Daisy gloomed at the thick white basin. Pricking pies round their edges and knifing them to let out the steam, it seemed at times as if she was driving the blade into her own heart. Education could have opened the doors to a wider world than this. With education you could have a face like the back of a frying pan and it wouldn’t matter. Schooling opened doors to the world of dreams Daisy was sure lay far beyond the confines of the Lancashire market town. Think about the Brontës. They would never have been discovered by a Hollywood talent scout, not according to Branwell’s portrait of them, but think of the passions concealed in those flat maidenly bosoms!

  ‘I’ve mashed the tea, Daisy!’ Martha’s voice seemed to be coming from far away.

  Daisy took no notice. … Passion. That was a word Daisy often pondered on; a word she had never said aloud.

  Carrying the basin of potted meat into the living room, she set it down on the table. What would happen if she were suddenly to turn to her mother and say:

  ‘There is a need in me for passion, Mother. I am twenty-four years old, and all I know of passion is one kiss on the way home from a chapel hot-pot supper when I was seventeen. It was a French kiss, and for three weeks I thought I was going to have a baby, but now I’m willing to give passion another try.’

  ‘What are you going to put on if you’re set on going?’

  Daisy blinked at the sound of her mother’s voice. ‘Me mink, of course,’ she said dreamily.

  ‘I told you that bottle-green coat did nothing for you when you got it.’ Martha up-ended the potted meat neatly like a blancmange on to a plate and began to slice it to have with the tomatoes arranged in a blue dish. ‘And your edge-to-edge will be too draughty. Unless, of course, he’s coming for you in the Rolls.’

  ‘You heard that too?’ Daisy decided, not for the first time, that she didn’t like her mother. Loved her, but didn’t like her. Was that possible?

  ‘He won’t turn up.’ Martha was sprinkling sugar on her tomato to bring out the flavour. ‘He’ll be like a commercial traveller, with a girl in every town he visits.’

  ‘But I’m not a girl, am I?’ Daisy got up and stared at her reflection in the fluted mirror over the fireplace. ‘And he’s not a boy, is he?’

  ‘Fancies himself in that uniform. With them gaiters.’ Martha’s eyes skinned over with spite. ‘Ivor Novello would have him in the chorus quick if he clapped eyes on him.’

  ‘Mother?’ Daisy turned round, her eyes willing Martha, just this once, to be glad for her. Even to laugh with her and agree that no harm could come of a visit to the pictures with a man who would be gone tomorrow. But Martha had her martyr’s face on her. So Daisy sat down again at the table and sprinkled salt on her tomato. Just to be different. ‘You’re right, he won’t turn up,’ she said, reaching for a slice of bread and butter, relenting and choosing one with rounded edges because she knew her mother only liked the square.

  ‘Your father wouldn’t like it.’ Martha was making a sandwich from a slice of the jellied meat. ‘Revolving in his grave at this very moment, more than likely.’

  Daisy stared down at her plate. … When I was a girl, her mind screamed silently, no more than a girl, my father left the bakehouse one day to help repair the engine at the mill across the street. Because he was a wizard with engines he helped out, then lay trapped beneath a mass of machinery. And since that day, ten long years ago, I’ve tried to take his place. …

  ‘Don’t worry. He won’t come,’ she said. ‘Me father can lie undisturbed.’

  ‘Till the trumpets shall sound,’ said Martha, starting on a slice of date and walnut loaf spread thickly with butter.

  Sam came promptly at half-past seven, giving them plenty of time to queue for the second house. Daisy was upstairs getting ready, just in case, trying on a hat in several different ways. Best like a push-back beret, she decided, with her hair rolled up into a sausage anchored by Kirby grips.

  She heard her mother let him in, and the murmur of voices. After a last despairing glance at her reflection in the tripled mirror on her dressing-table she ran quickly downstairs, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves with fluted gauntlets.

  ‘Hello there!’ Sam came forward with outstretched hands to greet her.

  Just as though he had never expected to see her again, Daisy thought, wondering what had happened to the handsome man in the smart grey uniform, hating the shabby brown suit and the way he was carrying a raincoat over his shoulder instead of his arm. The very gesture made him seem alien somehow.

  Sam smiled at her, wondering what she had done to the glorious mop of curly hair, telling himself that surely she couldn’t have cut it off since he saw her a couple of hours ago.

  ‘Well, you’d best be off then.’ Martha jerked her head towards the mantelpiece. ‘You’ve forgotten your glasses,’ she said with spite, pointing at a shabby, peeling case. ‘She won’t be able to tell the News from the big picture without them,’ she informed Sam sweetly. ‘See she puts them on, won’t you, Mr Barnet.’

  ‘Your mother’s a card.’ Outside in the street Sam did a twiddling step to get to the polite side of the pavement. When he put his trilby on, the wide curving brim shadowed his face.

  He isn’t a bit like Clark Gable now, Daisy thought. More like George Raft in Scarface, in fact. He stopped to put the raincoat on, then tucked her left hand into the crook of his elbow so that t
hey walked along together, welded like lovers.

  Daisy gave a little gurgling laugh, just to show she was used to that kind of thing; she hoped they would meet someone she knew, but it was so cold and wet, people hurried past with heads bowed against the driving wind. He said something to her, but the freezing wind tossed his words away, so they walked the rest of the way in silence.

  In the pictures it was better. To Daisy’s delight Sam bought two tickets for the circle, and for the first time in her life Daisy walked up the wide shallow stairs with their rubber nosings to seats exactly in the middle of the back row.

  She touched the bulge in the front of her handbag and decided against wearing the glasses. What did it matter if the figures on the silver screen were a blur? And what if she couldn’t read the adverts, or make sense of the trailers for next week’s performance? At least if Sam kissed her he could do so without bumping his nose on the despised tortoiseshell frames.

  Adolescence had been and gone without touching Daisy. She had never dreamed long hours away in sulky idleness; never danced in the Public Hall till two o’clock in the morning; never gone to late-night parties, or even stayed up late listening to the big bands on the wireless – Jack Hylton, Ray Noble and Ambrose. Since her father’s accident her life had been ruled by the great fire-oven in the bakehouse. The gaping black hole that gobbled up coal with a never-flagging appetite.

  Now, in the warm gloom of the cinema, she had the feeling she was sitting in the middle of a cloud. When Sam reached for her hand she curled her fingers into his. A sensation like pain shivered through her. When the big picture came on the music swelled as if it was coming from somewhere deep inside her. Sam’s arm was round her shoulder now, his fingers in her hair as he loosened the Kirby grips from the carefully rolled sausage. Obligingly Daisy removed her hat, placing it on top of her handbag and the bulge concealing the hated spectacles.