A Better World than This Read online

  ‘I wish we could stay here for ever.’

  Above her head Sam Barnet pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. He felt suddenly totally dispirited. What in God’s name was he doing? What in God’s name was he getting himself into? This wasn’t the kind of girl he was used to. Not a cheeky uncomplicated lass from the mill who would have gone out with him, said yes, or no, and that would have been that. No recriminations. Nothing. ‘Ta-ra then,’ as they said up here.

  Daisy spoke to him with the candour of a child. No guile, no flirtatious manner. All at once he thought of her coming into this dark hole of a place, early in the mornings, shovelling coal into that black firebox. Every day since she was fourteen, she had said. And seeing the lamp-light silvering the drizzle. …

  ‘I’ll be back in London by the weekend.’ He shook her gently. ‘Wake up, Daisy, love. Stop making something out of nothing. You’ll have forgotten me in less than a month.’

  She ignored him. What kind of talk was that, anyroad? Forget him? She had managed to forget that he had a wife, hadn’t she? From that first mention of her she had blotted her out completely. She didn’t want to know what she looked like or what her name was, and she certainly wasn’t going to let go of this dream. Not yet … oh no, not yet.

  Sam got to his feet, pulling her with him. Cupping her face in his hands he kissed her mouth, his fingers absent-minded in her hair as he tried to think of a way of letting her go, of saying goodbye without making her cry. But the sweetness of the kiss caught him unawares, and he strained her to him, feeling the stirrings of desire.

  If he had been a lesser man, he told himself, putting her resolutely from him; if she had been a different sort of girl – the pompous phrases inside his head caught him unawares. He would lie down with her on the pile of sacks and make love to her. And she would let him. Her thinking had gone beyond reason; with a girl like Daisy it was all or nothing. And if he made love to her she would be committed, and a commitment was the last indulgence he could afford.

  ‘I’m married,’ he told her cruelly. ‘Why look at me like that? I can’t give you anything. I can’t make you happy. Why have you gone all serious on me?’

  ‘I’m not going to cry,’ Daisy said.

  ‘Well of course you’re not going to bloody well cry!’ Sam’s exasperation spilled out into his voice. ‘Look, I can’t face that harridan coming looking for you and finding us in here together. And she will once she realizes you’re not in the house. And God knows why, but I can’t say goodbye to you like this, because tears or no tears you’re upset.’

  ‘Stop shouting at me.’

  ‘Tomorrow then. Down the town.’ Sam began to button his raincoat. ‘Outside Woolworth’s. I suppose you’ve got a Woolworth’s?’

  ‘Not far from the Boulevard.’

  ‘The Boulevard?’

  ‘Where the trams and buses start off from.’

  ‘At half-past seven. We’ll go to the pictures again.’

  ‘I’ll wait till you come.’

  Moving quietly, Daisy opened the bakehouse door and walked across the yard to the back gate. Lifting the sneck she opened it just wide enough for Sam to slip through.

  The rain had stopped. Thin clouds veiled a drifting moon. When Sam got to the top of the street he turned round to look down over the town. Twinkling lights were spiked with the tall outlines of mill chimneys, and the air was so sharp and clean he fancied he could taste the tang of the sea.

  What on earth had made him suggest seeing her again? His life was complex enough, without any further complications. He walked on, ashamed of his weakness. But so help him, it was a long time since a woman had looked at him like that. With her soul in her eyes. As if he were God. And yet … and yet, Daisy was no mealy-mouthed nothing. She had guts; must have plenty to get up each morning before dawn, stoking that great gaping hole with coal, then working with the men, one of them, an equal he suspected. Integrity – she had that, too. Living with that mother who had had the sweetness soured from her soul a long time ago, he guessed. And that other one, Edna, with the spite-filled laugh and the anchor clipping her non-existent bosoms together.

  Daisy Bell had done something for him he wouldn’t have believed possible. She’d put the fire back in his belly, that’s what she’d done.

  Sam snatched off his hat and walked along swinging it by his hand. The digs he’d found were the other side of the Corporation Park and as he entered by a side gate he saw the dark shadow of a family of ducks, huddled into the shelter of an overhanging tree. The gravel crunched beneath his feet, and a man walking a thin wet dog called out a greeting.

  ‘Nasty neet,’ he said, and Sam nodded.

  ‘Pity them at sea,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, the poor buggers,’ the man called over a disappearing shoulder.

  ‘So you’ve come in, then?’

  Martha was clearing the cups and saucers from the table, clattering them together as if they were her everyday thick Willow and not her Royal Albert from the china department at the Co-op Emporium. She had switched off the ceiling light, and in the softer glow from the standard lamp the veins stood out on her cheeks like a contour map drawn in red ink.

  ‘You’ve not been upstairs. Not you, madam. You’ve been in the bakehouse getting up to God knows what with that … that dago.’ She slid a lace doyley from beneath a couple of scones and shook it, ready to go in the drawer for next time.

  ‘It isn’t like that, Mother. You don’t understand.’ Daisy picked up the milk jug, just to show willing. ‘Don’t humiliate me. Please?’

  Martha gave a snort half-way between a sneer and a Victorian pshaw. ‘Not understand? Aw, my goodness! You might have been born yesterday, but I wasn’t. Not by a long chalk I wasn’t!’

  ‘You’d no right to invite Auntie Edna.’ Daisy’s voice shook. ‘You only asked her just to show off. To show Sam off. Like he was a trophy, a silver cup I’d won at tennis.’

  ‘You was never any good at tennis.’ Martha was already losing control of the argument. ‘All that money I laid out for your subscription and those two white dresses from Lewis’s at Manchester. Good as new, hanging in the wardrobe for the moths to get at.’

  ‘It’s my life,’ Daisy shouted emotionally, ‘to do with as I please!’

  ‘And me having to be mother and father to you all these years, and our Edna doing sweet Fanny Adam to help, and coming to the funeral in a pink hat. After me going up the street day after day with her husband’s dinner between two plates while Madam Muck went off to her Ladies’ Guild and the Inner Wheel, not to mention the Mothers’ Union even though she’s chapel.’

  ‘There has to be something for me!’ Daisy fell into the rhythm of the row. ‘You stopped me being Eliza in Pygmalion at the Dramatics because you heard there was a swear word in it! You said Bernard Shaw must be a dirty old man!’

  ‘You’re a silly, stupid girl!’ Globules of spit were frilling Martha’s mouth. ‘It said on your last report from school that you lacked self-control, and you do. The first man that beckons and you’re like a bitch on heat!’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Our Edna will have told half a dozen already. She saw that torch flashing in the bakehouse. “And I bet that’s not all he’s flashing,” she said.’

  ‘It’s not like that!’

  Daisy’s voice tailed away as she saw her mother clutch her heart, saw her blink her eyelashes up and down as if in surprise, and her lips turn blue as if she’d been sucking an indelible pencil. Groping behind her for the comforting feel of an armchair, Martha lowered herself down slowly into it.

  ‘Leave me be,’ she whispered through terrible blue-mauve lips when Daisy knelt down beside her and began to try to loosen her blouse. ‘It’s only me palpitations. I’ll be all right when I get me breath back.’ She tried to sit up, but fell back, beads of sweat standing out on her forehead.

  ‘I’m going for the doctor.’ Daisy, with a last despairing glance at her mother, made for the door, only to turn round in
time to see her mother pushing herself up by the chair arms, her face grey with determination.

  ‘You’ll fetch no doctor. I’m not paying him seven and sixpence for nowt. It’s passing. Stop fussing. I’ll be right as rain when I’ve had a lie-down.’

  Leaning heavily on Daisy, she managed to climb the steep narrow stairs, but in her bedroom she stood like a child and allowed Daisy to undress her.

  ‘Leave me vest on! Roll me corsets up! And hide me knickers under that cushion.’

  Lying quiet and still for once, beneath her green silk eiderdown in the icy room, Martha’s panting breath seemed to ease a little.

  ‘I’m going for the doctor. I don’t care what you say, I’m going.’

  Daisy ran down the stairs with the sound of the protesting voice spiralling after her. Stopping only to grab a coat from the nail behind the kitchen door, she ran out into the yard, past the bakehouse and into the street.

  If her mother died, then it was all her fault. She would carry that burden of guilt with her for the rest of her life. She would have killed her own mother as surely as if she’d stuck a knife in her heart.

  The little waiting room in the surgery across the street was empty, its horsehair stand-chairs lined against the walls, and its NO SPITTING notice peeling from the wall. For a moment Daisy stood irresolute, wringing her hands together, praying that the doctor hadn’t been called out.

  ‘I was just about to lock up.’ The doctor’s wife came out of the tiny dispensary, a bottle of cherry-red medicine in one hand. When she saw Daisy’s face she went to fetch her husband.

  Doctor Marsden was past retiring age. He had been on the go since seven o’clock that morning and his exhaustion showed in his red-rimmed eyes. He had brought Daisy into the world, and he had tried in vain to put together what was left of her father after the accident at the mill. He knew Daisy’s mother for what she was – a stubborn Lancashire woman who would die on her feet rather than rest. He knew that her dominance over her daughter was total, that Daisy was her insurance for life, that even if Daisy married she would merely move in next door or in the next street, never really leaving home. It was a repeating pattern he had seen over and over again among the working classes of this town he loved so much.

  In Doctor Marsden’s opinion it was an abomination, but the pattern had been forged, he guessed, before the Industrial Revolution, when whole families had looms set up in their front rooms, and travel, even to the nearest town, was an adventure.

  ‘Your mother?’ The question was more of a statement. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Daisy.’

  Already his wife was helping him into his coat and winding a long woollen scarf round his neck. ‘You’re wearing your carpet slippers!’ she shouted after them, but it was too late. Without a spare inch of fat on his large frame, Doctor Marsden was as nimble as a mountain goat.

  ‘In bed, is she?’ Inside the house he made straight for the stairs. ‘What did you do to get her there? Pole-axe her?’

  ‘She had a bad turn, Doctor.’ Stumbling after him Daisy stopped dead in the doorway of Martha’s bedroom, her eyes wide with shock.

  Sitting bolt upright against her pillows, two spots of bright colour on her cheeks, Martha twinkled roguishly at the doctor.

  ‘So she fetched you, then?’ With normal-coloured lips she smiled, showing the bright pink gums of her dentures. ‘There’s nowt wrong with me but a bit of heartburn, and that’s gone. But you can syringe me ears out as you’re here, if you like. Our Daisy’ll bring a bowl of water and a towel up from the kitchen, won’t you, love?’

  Doctor Marsden sat down on the side of the bed and opened his little black bag to take out his stethoscope. He knew his patient’s history without having to take down his boxes and consult her record card. He had nursed Martha through the Spanish ’flu after the war; he had personally wiped away the black mucus streaming from her nostrils; he had ordered her warm milk and brandy at that terrible time when up in the cemetery people were being buried in their hundreds by torchlight.

  He had watched Martha sponge her little daughter all over with eucalyptus oil when Daisy seemed to be choking her life away with diphtheria, and when Martha’s husband had been brought from the mill, carried across the street on a door with his blood seeping down into the cobblestones, he had sewn up his wounds, pulling the great gaping holes together, even as he knew that all hope was gone.

  ‘Go downstairs and make your mother a cup of tea.’ He motioned to Martha to undo the top buttons on her nightdress. ‘I’ll just have a listen to your chest, Mrs Bell.’

  ‘You’ll ’ear nowt.’

  Daisy could hear her mother’s voice chuntering away as she set the kettle to boil. Surely her mother hadn’t been shamming? Best use the rose-sprigged cups, or she’d be in bother. Surely she hadn’t imagined the pallor of her mother’s face, the rapid gasping for breath, the frantic fluttering of the eyelashes? Hadn’t she herself tucked her mother up into bed and left her lying there like a corpse waiting to be boxed in its coffin? Best put two cups out and the apostle spoons, and a crochet-edged cloth on the tin tray. Martha was a stickler for wanting people to know they knew what was what. But she never drank tea in bed. Since almost dying of the ’flu Martha had never had a single day in bed, despising women who, as she put it, enjoyed bad health.

  ‘I’ll go out till the day I die!’ she was fond of saying, even if going out most days meant no further than across the yard to the bakehouse.

  ‘I don’t think there’s too much to worry about at the moment.’

  Doctor Marsden’s sudden reappearance startled Daisy so much she set the cups and saucers rattling as she put the tray back on the table.

  The doctor waved the tray away. ‘Put the cosy on the teapot and have it when I’ve gone.’ His eyes were very shrewd as he shrugged himself back into his coat, then stared down ruefully at his mud-stained slippers. ‘There’s some enlargement of the heart,’ he went on, ‘and her pulse is too rapid, but then she’s no chicken. You were a menopausal baby, weren’t you?’

  He wasn’t surprised to see a blush stain Daisy’s cheeks. It was a prim, puritanical working-class mentality; he came across it all the time. Why, the women would have their babies with their legs crossed, some of them, if they could. He rubbed the stubble on his chin reflectively, remembering for the first time that he hadn’t shaved that day.

  ‘Your mother is no chicken, Daisy. A woman of her age should be resting up a bit, not working every hour God sends.’ His sidelong glance took in the half-filled plates of cakes on the dresser, the butter in its blue dish and the large glass sugar-bowl. ‘Too many starches are bad for her. She’s carrying too much weight for her height. Far too much.’ He had seen in the upstairs room the corsets pinkly furled, standing to attention on the basket chair. He decided to be blunt. ‘Eating a meal like that …’ he nodded towards the dresser, ‘with her stomach tightly bound is enough to give anyone palpitations. One proper meal a day is enough at your mother’s age.’

  ‘We had a bit of a row.’ Daisy’s head drooped forward. ‘I said things that got her worked up. If she’d had a heart attack and died it would’ve been all my fault.’

  ‘That’s utter nonsense.’

  Doctor Marsden was so hungry he could almost taste the liver and bacon casserole simmering in the oven in the house across the street. He’d been going to eat it listening to a carol service on the wireless. But he could smell despair as if it were a piece of ripe gorgonzola, and this young woman was, he would swear, in some kind of emotional frenzy.

  ‘What was the row about, Daisy?’ He put his bag down on the table with a little thump. ‘You can tell me all about it if you think it would help. It won’t go any further, I can promise you that.’

  Daisy picked up a teacloth and began to twist it as if she was wringing water from it. Suppose she said to him: ‘Doctor, I met a man just yesterday, and something has happened to my mind. I can’t stop thinking about him, not for a minute, and if he asked me to go
away with him I would, even though I know he’s married. I’d leave me mother and the shop, and though it would hurt me to do that, nothing could compare to the hurt I’ll feel when he goes away. He’s so handsome it makes my heart ache just to look at him, and he’s kind; no one can tell me that he isn’t kind. I love him, Doctor. It was love at first sight, just like on the pictures, but a million times better than the pictures because it’s real.’

  ‘Daisy?’ The doctor’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way away.

  ‘Sam listens to me, really listens when I talk to him, and I don’t have to make jokes all the time just because I’m Daisy Bell, good for a laugh. But he isn’t serious with me; half the time he can’t make me out.’

  For a moment Daisy wondered if she had been speaking aloud, but the patient waiting expression on Doctor Marsden’s face told her she had not.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong I can’t sort out for myself,’ she said firmly. ‘Will you be coming to see me mother again?’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on her.’ The doctor picked up his bag. ‘Remember, Daisy, if ever you do want a chat you know where to find me.’

  ‘A hop, jump and a spit away.’ Daisy’s joky response was automatic, she knew it was expected of her.

  ‘Your mother will be all right. If she rests.’ Doctor Marsden turned at the door. ‘You can’t expect her to go on for ever, working like a cart-horse.’ His thin face was crumpled into a genuine anxiety. ‘Does she still help with the baking early in the bakehouse, then stand all day in the shop?’

  ‘The pies,’ Daisy said. ‘Only she knows the right consistency for the fillings. She won’t let nobody else touch the mixing. Just now she’s on with the Christmas cakes, an’ that’s her secret recipe too. She puts marmalade in them, an’ she’d slit me throat if she heard me telling you.’