A Better World than This Read Online Free PDF Page A

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