A Better World than This Read online

  He kissed her as the music soared three beats to a bar. He struggled with the buttons on her coat, and when his hand slid inside and cupped her breast she trembled, partly with happiness but mostly with shame.

  ‘No!’ When his fingers began to move gently round and round, Daisy sat bolt upright and pushed his hand away.

  To stare unseeing at the silver screen, where a dog – or it could have been a cat – lolloped across a lawn dappled in sunshine.

  When she got home she crept upstairs to undress in the dark, but light or no light her mother appeared, standing by the bedroom door in her long flannel nightdress.

  ‘Well?’ Without her teeth Martha’s plump face looked as if it had been squashed in a nut-cracker. ‘You’ve not come straight home, have you?’

  ‘We were talking.’ Getting into bed, Daisy pulled the sheet up to her chin. ‘I have to be up in less than five hours, Mother. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ve not washed your face, neither. You’ll have spots the size of ping-pong balls leaving that powder muck on. Sets like biscuits on your cheeks when you sweat in the night.’ Taking a step forward into the room Martha clasped the brass knob on the bed-end with both hands. ‘That man is no good.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, you don’t know him.’ Daisy’s feet had found the comfort of a stone hot-water bottle. She closed her eyes in a kind of shame. ‘He’s a kind man. And he’s in work. He’s got a good job.’

  ‘He’s a southerner.’ Martha’s hands tightened on the brass knob. ‘He’s a here-today, gone-tomorrow sort of man. Smarmy. Unstable. Too good-looking for his own good. Men like him prey on a girl’s feelings, then leave her with her heart broke into little pieces.’ She polished the knob with the sleeve of her nightgown. ‘Why did he pick on you, when the shop was full of girls from the mill? Why ask you, and not one of them?’

  ‘I wonder?’ Daisy’s voice was rough with the hurt of her mother’s words. ‘You can ask him yourself tomorrow. He’s taking his boss to Burnley and Padiham, but they should be back here by late afternoon. I’ve asked him to his tea.’

  ‘So it’s serious between you, then?’ Martha sniffed. ‘Talk about not letting the grass grow underneath your feet … you’ve not even given yours a chance to seed!’

  In the soft plushed cinema he had kissed her. Daisy traced the contour of her lips. He had tried to touch her, but when she said he mustn’t he hadn’t persisted. His hands had been cool and hard, and now and again she had stolen a glance at his profile, stern and somehow beautiful in repose. Like a head on a coin.

  Daisy closed her eyes, willing a sleep that would not come. On the way home they had talked and talked.

  ‘Why have you never married, Daisy?’

  ‘Because I’m an unclaimed blessing.’

  He had stopped then and laughed out loud before suddenly lifting her off her feet and whirling her round and round. And she’d felt just like Ginger Rogers or Anna Neagle, dancing in the street with a man who turned out to be a millionaire, ready to whisk her off to a life spent lying on white fur rugs, wearing backless satin gowns, listening to the popping of champagne corks.

  *

  Sam came at half-past five, and because it was a Thursday and half-day closing, the shop had been shut since one.

  To Daisy’s surprise her mother had said nothing when she emerged from her lie-down to see the table set with the rose-sprigged cups with gold fluted rims, and the cloth embroidered with blue forget-me-nots. There was ham off the bone, Canary tomatoes in the blue dish, four small pots of shrimps with the butter softening nicely on the tops, a plate of thinly-cut bread, and a three-tiered cake-stand. Scones on the bottom plate, risen high and brown, fatty-cake on the middle tier, short with best lard and stiff with currants. And on the topmost layer a feather-light sponge sprinkled with caster sugar and split with home-made raspberry jam.

  Sam apologized for not having had the time to change out of his uniform, but Daisy was glad. She told him to make himself at home and take off his jacket, and when she saw that instead of braces he was wearing a brown leather belt which nipped in his narrow waist she couldn’t look away from him. If a man could be described as beautiful, she decided, then Sam Barnet was beautiful. She was so aware of herself she blushed each time she spoke. She prayed she looked all right; sure she did not.

  ‘Your Auntie Edna’s coming.’ Martha made the announcement without looking at Daisy. ‘So we’d best not tuck in till she arrives.’

  A headache of despair settled on Daisy. Her mother’s sister lived two doors up the street by the bakehouse, and the two were welded together with an affection compounded of envy and spite. Edna was one up at the moment, for although her husband Arnold had been out of work for two years, her daughter Betty was married and pregnant at the age of nineteen.

  ‘My sister’s daughter’s husband works at the Town Hall.’ A malicious expression drooped the lines of Martha’s round face. ‘With a pension to come when he’s sixty-five.’

  Daisy sat next to Sam on the two-seater hide settee with its velvet cushions, feeling sorry for him and sorrier for herself. She tried hard to think of something interesting to say, and wondered if her mother knew that the bones of her corsets were outlined through the tightness of her brown dress.

  ‘Did you know, Mr Barnet,’ Martha said into the silence, ‘that through the wireless the chimes of Big Ben can be heard up here before a man walking down Whitehall can hear them?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Sam grinned. ‘That’s marvellous.’

  ‘Do they have the Means Test in London?’ Martha’s answering smile was evil. ‘It would do a lot of them snobs good to come up here and see what goes on. Folks up here are starving while they line their pockets.’

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  At the sound of her auntie’s voice Daisy gave a huge sigh of relief. Once her mother got into this mood there was no knowing what she would say next.

  ‘Well, then!’ Edna came into the room, a sparse little woman with a neat monkey face and grey hair permed to an immovable frizz. She was wearing a green dress fastened for modesty’s sake with a large gilt brooch in the shape of an anchor. ‘So this is Daisy’s new beau?’ She held out a hand and as she came closer Daisy saw the layer of talcum powder dusting her nose. ‘Pleased to meet you, I must say. I’ve heard a lot about you!’

  It was worse at the table. Sam ate with head lowered, answering personal questions with a quiet dignity, although Daisy could sense his irritation. She wished she could take his hand and lead him away, out of the house, into the rain-swept street outside, and never mind if it took the curl out of her hair.

  ‘Our Betty’s expecting a happy event, bless her,’ Edna said into the lull between the ham and the cakes. ‘I think nineteen’s just the right age to start a family so you can enjoy them when you’re young.’ She accepted a scone. ‘Do you like children, Mr Barnet?’

  There was a slight hesitation. ‘Excuse me, ladies.’ Sam pushed back his chair, leaned across and picked up his jacket from the back of the settee. Taking a wallet from the inside pocket, he took out a photograph.

  ‘My children,’ he said, offering it to Edna first. ‘The boy is six and the girl is five.’

  ‘So you’re a widower, then, Mr Barnet?’ Edna’s features sharpened visibly.

  ‘No.’ Sam shook his head, smiling. ‘No, I’m not a widower. My wife is very much alive.’

  Daisy saw the glitter of triumph in Edna’s button eyes; saw her almost hug herself in delight as she helped herself to a second scone and a further dollop of raspberry jam.

  ‘You know, you could be an announcer on the wireless, Mr Barnet,’ she said, rooting for a raspberry seed in a back tooth. ‘Your accent would be just right. You must have a most interesting job driving a limousine all over the country. I suppose your wife has got used to you always being away?’

  Martha seemed to have been struck dumb. Not daring to meet her eyes, Daisy pretended they needed a fresh pot of tea. Taking it through into the
kitchen she set the kettle to boil on the gas stove and leaned against the sink, listening to her auntie’s voice going on and on, interspersed with refined little bursts of laughter.

  Why hadn’t he told her he was married? Last night they’d talked and talked and he had never said a word about a wife. Squeezing her eyes tight shut Daisy willed the threat of tears back. She would never have asked him to his tea had she known he was married. And her mother would never have asked Auntie Edna in if she hadn’t wanted to show off – show her sister that her daughter could get a man too.

  For a moment Daisy saw her cousin Betty’s husband in her mind’s eye. Middle-aged at twenty-three, living with his mother-in-law and going off to work with his red hair smarmed back, and forty-two years to serve before he got his pension.

  No wonder Martha had wanted to swank with a man who resembled Clark Gable and dressed in his chauffeur’s uniform looked like Maurice Chevalier in The Merry Widow.

  Now it would be all over that Daisy Bell from the pie shop was knocking about with a married man. Angrily she brushed back an escaping tear with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’m off now, Daisy.’

  When Sam appeared, buttoning himself into his jacket, she could sense the irritation held tightly inside him. He was smiling at her, but his blue eyes stayed cold

  ‘That woman. …’ He jerked his head towards the living room. ‘If she was thrown to the lions they’d spit her out.’

  Surprising Daisy, he took the teapot from her, then held her firmly, forcing her to meet his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, love. Believe me, I had no intention of starting a family bust-up when I took you to the pictures last night.’ He shook her gently. ‘And I never dreamed that accepting an invitation to tea today cast me in the role of your suitor.’

  ‘Oh, how can you say that?’ Humiliation brought the tears to Daisy’s eyes. She trembled with the shame of it. With self-disgust she remembered how he had touched her breast in the pictures and how she had only knocked his hand away because she was scared. Her lack of sophistication was total. Her experience of men less than nothing. ‘Yes, go,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been embarrassed. Please … just go.’

  ‘I never knew that such narrow-mindedness existed.’ This time his smile was genuine as he trailed a finger down Daisy’s cheek. ‘But you’re okay, love. You’re a lot more than okay. I’ve enjoyed meeting you.’ Pulling her to him, he kissed the tear-stained cheek she tried to twist away from him, then opened the door and stepped outside, leaving her alone with a terrible all-enveloping shame.

  ‘Daisy?’ Edna’s voice was wobbly with a vibrant satisfaction. ‘He’s gone then, has he?’ She advanced towards the teapot. ‘Your mother and me’s spittin’ feathers waiting for another cup of tea. Aw, come on, love. He’s not the only fish in the sea, and you weren’t to know he was married.’ Licking a finger she smoothed an eyebrow. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, and a good job I was here to rumble him. There’s no flies on your Auntie Edna.’

  ‘I’m going to my room.’

  Daisy’s face was wrenched out of shape with the force of her emotions, but Edna noticed nothing. ‘You’ll be frozen stiff up there, love. It’s chucking it down in buckets outside.’

  ‘I’ll go down the yard first.’ Pulling the door open so violently it was in danger of coming adrift from its hinges, Daisy escaped. Hardly feeling the torrential rain beating down on her head she lifted the latch of the yard door and stepped out into the street.

  And miraculously, round the corner by the shop front, Sam was there. He had put his raincoat on and he was standing at the kerb pulling the collar up round his throat. In the darkness, in his peaked cap, he looked, she thought, like Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front.

  When she clutched his arm he was startled at first, then concerned.

  ‘For God’s sake, Daisy! You’re wet through. Here, come back here.’ He pulled her backwards into the doorway of a greengrocer’s shop, into a pungent smell of rotting cabbages and bruised apples. ‘Now then. What’s all this about?’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’ Daisy heard her voice, hoarse with uncontrollable emotion, and yet a part of her was so calm, so determined, it was as though she was in a film reading from a script. A wild woman, drenched with rain, pleading with the man she loved not to leave her. ‘Not here.’ Taking Sam by the hand she led him round the corner and into her own backyard. ‘Shush,’ she said, although he hadn’t uttered a sound. ‘In here,’ she whispered, opening a door and pulling him inside. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’

  ‘Where the hell are we?’ Sam waved a hand in front of his face. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

  ‘I can’t put the light on.’ Daisy reached up and took a large torch from a high shelf. ‘They would see it from the house.’ She shone the torch on a pile of coal, the overflow from a wooden bunker. ‘See. That over there is the fire-oven, and here … this is where I shovel the coal. Into the firebox, you can see the ashbox below it. And the heat of the oven is controlled by that damper up on the wall.’

  She was like a tour guide explaining things to a group of schoolchildren. She was close to hysteria; she could feel it like a spreading lump in her throat. She did not need to shine the torch into Sam’s face to know that he was staring at her with a look of mild astonishment. All she knew was that she had stopped him walking down the street, out of her life, for ever.

  She had to keep him, just for a little while. For long enough to explain that asking him to tea had been a terrible mistake. That a worse mistake had been her mother jumping the gun and asking Edna along. Only to show off, of course, to make it plain that Daisy could get a man if she wanted, that she wasn’t well on her way to being an old maid.

  And most important of all, Sam had to be told to forget the whole thing. To remember her, if at all, with some kind of respect. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t want him remembering her. She wanted to keep him, to never have to say goodbye, to love him, to have him make love to her. …

  There was no pride in her thinking, no way she could explain, even to herself, how she felt. She was in an alien world she had never entered before. In this world she was young, she was beautiful, and he was there, the man she loved. … Daisy shivered. It was like all the films she had ever seen, only better. Or worse.

  ‘Let’s sit down, shall we? Then you can tell me what all this is about.’ Sam’s eyes were used to the darkness now, and taking her hand he led her over to a pile of sacks in a corner.

  He was behaving, he knew, in a way he hadn’t behaved since he was fifteen years old. All spots and incipient moustache, and kissing a girl on the top deck of the tram on the way home from school. Daisy’s hair had come out of curl with the rain. She sighed when he put his arm round her, snuggling close to him like a child, with her hair tickling his chin and her arm lying loosely round his waist.

  There was a sweet vanilla smell, and Sam could see cobwebs festooning the corners of the whitewashed walls. There were baking tins piled high on shelves, and two long tables at the far end of the large room with open-tread stairs leading to an upper floor. In the light from a street lamp directly outside Sam saw the gleam of a piece of machinery clamped to the wall and guessed it was some kind of mixer for the dough. From somewhere deep inside Sam’s bank of memories he saw himself as a small boy helping the village baker with his round. Hanging the baskets on door knockers, baskets filled with orders of rock cakes, doughnuts, crusty loaves of bread and Atora beef suet wrapped in greaseproof paper. The crust of that bread, he remembered, had crackled and flaked in his mouth.

  ‘Now then. …’ He tightened his hold on Daisy, whispering into her hair. ‘What’s all this about. We’re too old for this kind of thing. We’re not a couple of kids snidging in corners. Are we?’ he said, giving her a little shake.

  ‘It’s nice in here, isn’t it?’

  Her voice was soft, light and dream-tinged. Like a woman’s when the act of love is over and she needs to be held for
a while, Sam told himself.

  ‘I like it in here very early in the mornings, before the men come in, and the mad rush starts.’ Daisy’s breath was close to his ear. ‘I tried to tell you about this place last night, how I like being in here on my own, well, love being in here on my own really.’

  She could hear herself speaking in what her mother would undoubtedly have called her ‘poetry’ voice, but it wasn’t intentional. It was just the way she felt, all dreamy and far away. Her upturned face was gentled with love.

  ‘I come in here long before the knocker-up comes down the street with his long stick tapping on the windows to get folk up for the mill. I come in here before the chill has gone from the streets, but it’s warm and cosy quiet, with no sound but the cinders clinking down into the ashpan over there. And sometimes, where there’s a moon, it makes the oven door shiny and black as treacle. Like a Pontefract cake. And sometimes the policeman on his beat stops and knocks on the window. He comes in if it’s wet and shakes the rain from his cape. “Nasty neet, Daisy,” he says. “You mean nasty morning,” I say, and I make him a pot of tea. And when he goes I climb on that stool and look through the window to watch him go up the street, with the light from the lamp silvering the drizzle.’ She sighed. ‘Mornings can be very beautiful, Sam.’

  ‘You’re a funny one.’ Sam shifted his position slightly. Her voice … like warmed honey poured over silk, he decided. A voice to come home to, he told himself. ‘You’re a lonely girl, aren’t you, Daisy?’

  Her head came up so quickly it butted him on the chin. ‘Me? Lonely? What a daft idea! It’s like bedlam when the men come in, and goodness, you saw me in the shop, run off me feet. And I make enough noise for a dozen. I’m always being told that.’

  ‘I’m lonely.’ Sam gently pushed her head down again. ‘Most people are, if they admit it. It’s only the very lucky ones who find someone to share their loneliness. A friend. Or a lover.’

  Daisy shivered. His whole manner, his very way of speaking was new to her. No man from round here would have said the word ‘lover’, not in that way. Words like that were left to books or films, and yet Sam had just said it in ordinary conversation. She didn’t know him at all, and yet strangely she had no desire to know him as a friend. All she wanted was to love him. For him to be her lover. … She closed her eyes.