A Better World than This Read Online Free PDF Page B

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