A Better World than This by Marie Joseph Page A

front of the tram, swayed almost off her feet as it jerked into motion.
    ‘Does it ever do anything else but rain up here?’ Taking off his hat Sam shook the raindrops from it, scattering them like beads on the corrugated floor. ‘Here, take my hankie and wipe your hair with it.’
    ‘I suppose it never rains in London?’ Daisy scrubbed away at her wet face. ‘I suppose you have to crawl about on dusty roads with your tongue hanging out wailing for water?’
    All at once the mock-crocodile shoes were giving her gyp, and looking down she saw her lisle stockings hanging over them in muddy creases. She discovered that she was chilled to the bone; there was a cold wetness trickling down her neck. Her mother would act as if she had caught her death, and make her a pot of cocoa with the steam coming through the froth on the top. And what for? What, in the name of God, was it all for? So she would be well enough and able enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and stoke the fire-oven for the massive Saturday bake? For the one-pound and two-pound loaves, the soft-centred barm-cakes, the scones, the iced Bath buns, the sultana sponges?
    ‘You are not walking me home.’ Her voice was ragged with misery. ‘You have a lot to do before you go back to the Sahara. What do you do when you’re nearly there? Swap your chauffeur’s fancy hat for a pith helmet?’
    Sam leaned across her to breathe on the steamed-up window. As removed from her as if they had already parted, she guessed. The back of his coat was black-wet, and she hoped it had gone right through to his vest. If he
wore
a vest, she wondered, remembering that Clark Gable never did.
    ‘If you’re sure.’ Sam wrinkled his nose against the smell of wet raincoats as the tram filled up at the park gates with a crowd of parents on their way home from a grammar school prize-giving. ‘If it freezes on top of this the roads will be like glass.’
    All at once Daisy saw the Rolls-Royce limousine skidding from the road, overturning in a ditch with its wheels spinning . With Sam slumped lifeless over the wheel, and his boss dead as a door-nail on the back seat with his eyes wide open and blood trickling from a gash on his forehead.
    ‘Then you’ll have to drive a bit slower than seventy miles an hour, won’t you?’ Daisy turned a despairing face towards him, remembering, as she was to remember for a long time to come, every single word he had ever said.
    ‘She holds the road like a dream,’ Sam told her, recognizing they had come to the end of the journey, standing up as if he couldn’t wait to be off and away.
    On the Boulevard, heedless of passers-by, he kissed her gently, a fleeting on the mouth kiss with lips that tasted of rain. ‘Thank you for being so nice to me, Daisy. Thank you for being my friend these past two days.’
    Friend? The emphasis on the word stabbed like a finger jabbed into Daisy’s heart. She felt the tears prick behind her eyes and blinked them angrily away. She knew that he was trying not to look at his watch, glad that his back was turned away from the station clock.
    Sam was controlling the urge badly. There were a thousand and one things he had to do before they started on the long drive south. Already he was feeling a pleasurable anticipation at the thought of sitting behind the wheel of the car he knew to be the best in the world, the Spirit of Ecstasy statuette poised on the bonnet. The Flying Lady, as some preferred to call it. Speeding down arterial roads through the dark night, listening to the rhythmic purr of the engine.
    To Sam a car engine was a thing of beauty – to be kept so spotless a man could eat his dinner off it – the Rolls, as
he
drove it, was an extension of his own body. As a surgeon’s fingers would probe the innards of his patient on the operating table, so Sam could detect the slightest fault in the engine of a car. Every throb told its own story and he knew he could have dismantled and rebuilt it from