Read Online A Better World than This by Marie Joseph - Free Book Online Page A

do.’
    Daisy sighed with relief as she heard the slip-slop of her auntie’s down-at-heel bedroom slippers receding. Betty bless her, she told herself, eager to tell her mother about seeing me standing on the Boulevard with no hat on and crying like a potty woman.
    ‘What did the doctor say?’ she whispered. ‘He told you you had to rest. Did you tell him you’d been stoking the fire-oven when there was no need?’
    ‘You never said what time you were coming back.’ Martha’s small beady eyes were slits of accusation. ‘You might have been stopping out all night for all I knew.’
    ‘Oh, Mother. …’ Daisy’s wet hair drooped over the shiny green eiderdown. ‘Why do you say such things when you know they aren’t true? You know I’d never do a thing like that.’
    ‘Is he getting a divorce, then?’ Martha spat out the word as if it were an obscenity. ‘Bringing a divorce into our family? Shaming us in front of your Auntie Edna?’ Her head turned wearily towards the wall. ‘The BBC won’t have no truck with divorce. They sack them if they’re the guilty party. Give them their marching orders, that’s what they do.’
    ‘He doesn’t
work
for the BBC!’ Getting up from her knees Daisy caught sight of herself tripled in the swing mirrors on her mother’s dressing-table. Green coat black-wet, hair dangling round her face like wet snails. ‘He’s gone, Mother, and I doubt if he’ll be back.’
    Deliberately she put behind her the scene where Sam came to meet her, striding through a field of yellow nodding daffodils. The singing in her heart had gone too, fading as if it had never been. That had been the dream. This was reality.
    ‘You have to rest.’ She found she was wringing her hands, when she had thought people only did that in books. ‘We can afford to get someone in for serving in the shop, and I can manage the rest. I’m strong, Mother. Hard work doesn’t bother me. I can supervise them in the bakehouse and see to the shop, and look after you.’ Her voice rose. ‘But you have to let me take care of you!’
    Peeling off her sodden coat, she found the rain had soaked through the lining, staining her blouse in bottle-green patches. In the chill of the unheated room she was shivering as though she’d been for a dip in the sea at Blackpool when it wasn’t fit.
    ‘We can pick and choose with half the town on the dole,’ she said through chattering teeth. ‘A nice girl to give the shop a bit of tone. Florence,’ she added on impulse. ‘She hates her job at the Rialto. You know how nicely she speaks. You’ve always said so. Remember when she read the Lesson at chapel last May on Anniversary Sunday? You’d’ve thought she’d had elocution lessons.’
    ‘Her father’s nowt but a butter-slapper at the Maypole,’ Martha said, perking up a bit. ‘And he’s living over the brush with that woman out of Tontine Street.’
    ‘You can
retire
.’ Daisy hugged the damp coat to her chest to hide the stains on her blouse. ‘You can stop in bed till dinner time reading and knitting. We’ll have
Woman’s Weekly
delivered with the papers. There’s nice knitting patterns in there. And nice stories. You like stories and reading. I know that.’
    ‘About daft woman who fall in love with stupid men swishing riding crops and being masterful?’ For the first time Martha seemed to notice the state her daughter was in. ‘Best get them wet things off,’ she said. ‘Before you get pneumonia. The double kind by the look of you,’ she added, closing her eyes again.
    Daisy hesitated by the door. Downstairs she could hear the rise and fall of Auntie Edna’s voice, interspersed by Betty’s clear childlike treble. She would have to face them when she had changed out of her wet things, but there was a terrible longing inside her to go back to the bed, take her mother’s hand, and tell her how much she loved her. Tell her that even if she never got out of bed again she would care for her and keep her