A Better World than This by Marie Joseph Page B

instinct.
    And one day, when he held his paper qualifications in his hand, he would find a better job, and possess his own car. Giving in to temptation, he glanced at his watch. And winced.
    ‘Be happy, love.’ He needed to leave this Lancashire lass with his conscience unruffled. He wanted to be kind. He didn’t see himself as a cruel man, even though ‘cruel bastard’ was his wife’s pet name for him. No, what he saw himself as was a sort of sentimental softie, a world-weary man with a puzzling attraction for women. And this one was crying. She was trying hard to disguise it and not succeeding very well. Sam came to a sudden decision. Putting her from him he smiled down into her anguished face.
    ‘We’ll be up this way again,’ he told her. ‘In the spring – when the daffodils are blooming in that park of yours. So this isn’t goodbye.’ He touched the tip of her damp nose with a finger. ‘My boss has a lot of unfinished work to do up here.’
    Before he turned away he doffed his hat, just a small doff because he hated getting his hair wet. He walked swiftly away, leaving Daisy staring after him, teetering on the kerb in the too-tight shoes, like a suicide deciding to make the final jump into oblivion.
    ‘Daisy!’
    When she turned round she saw her Auntie Edna’s daughter, her cousin Betty, with husband Cyril, sharing an umbrella as big as a marquee. They were wearing identical fawn gaberdine raincoats, buttoned to the throat, with Betty’s straining a little over her stomach where the baby had begun to show.
    Considerately, Cyril positioned the massive umbrella over Daisy, so that the three of them stood beneath it in an uneasy lengthening silence.
    ‘You’re wet through, our Daisy.’ Betty exchanged a wifely conspiratorial glance with her young husband. ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘Perfectly all right, thank you.’
    Their presence irritated Daisy so much she could hardly bear to look at them. They hadn’t even given her time to work out which month the daffodils bloomed in the Corporation Park. Was it before Easter, or after? Late March, or early April? She supposed a lot depended on the weather.
    ‘We’ve just come off the train.’ Betty nodded her head in the direction of the station. Her headscarf, Daisy noted, printed with horses’ heads, was pinned at the front with a row of Kirby grips to stop it slipping back from her fair slippery hair. She gave off a smell of Pears soap, and in that moment Daisy knew exactly the kind of baby she would have. Clean and shiny, with round blue eyes and soft sparse hair. Summoning all her will-power, she took her mind off the daffodils and smiled at them through chattering teeth.
    ‘I’m glad about the baby,’ she said sincerely. ‘You always said you would have one before your twenty-first, didn’t you?’
    ‘I don’t remember no such thing.’ Betty gave her mother’s trilling laugh. ‘What a thing to say!’
    ‘We’ve been to me mother’s.’ Cyril’s eyes beneath the neb of his tweed flat cap were kind. He’d always felt sorry for Daisy ever since the wedding when she’d looked awful in a mauve sprigged dress, made to match the younger bridesmaid’s with a frill standing out from her neck like Punch, or was it Judy, wore? Picture mad, his mother-in-law had said. Thinks nothing of going night after night on her own and sitting next to God knows who. ‘A born spinster,’ she’d added maliciously, eyeing her daughter resplendent in wreath and veil. ‘Run a mile as soon as look at a man, that one.’
    ‘We go of a Friday, straight from work,’ he explained. ‘For our tea.’ The nudge his wife gave him almost knocked him off balance. ‘Well, yes.’ He gave a little cough. ‘We’d best be going.’
    ‘Yes,’ Daisy said. ‘Ta-ra, then.’
    Again the furtive exchange of glances.
    ‘Look, our Daisy.’ Betty’s features sharpened into her mother’s monkey expression. ‘I know it’s none of our business, but it’s not right you