A Better World than This Read Online Free PDF

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