A Better World than This Read Online Free

‘You’ll be frozen stiff up there, love. It’s chucking it down in buckets outside.’
    ‘I’ll go down the yard first.’ Pulling the door open so violently it was in danger of coming adrift from its hinges, Daisy escaped. Hardly feeling the torrential rain beating down on her head she lifted the latch of the yard door and stepped out into the street.
    And miraculously, round the corner by the shop front, Sam was there. He had put his raincoat on and he was standing at the kerb pulling the collar up round his throat. In the darkness, in his peaked cap, he looked, she thought, like Lew Ayres in
All Quiet on the Western Front
.
    When she clutched his arm he was startled at first, then concerned.
    ‘For God’s sake, Daisy! You’re wet through. Here, come back here.’ He pulled her backwards into the doorway of a greengrocer’s shop, into a pungent smell of rotting cabbages and bruised apples. ‘Now then. What’s all this about?’
    ‘I want to talk to you.’ Daisy heard her voice, hoarse with uncontrollable emotion, and yet a part of her was so calm, so determined, it was as though she was in a film reading from a script. A wild woman, drenched with rain, pleading with the man she loved not to leave her. ‘Not here.’ Taking Sam by the hand she led him round the corner and into her own backyard. ‘Shush,’ she said, although he hadn’t uttered a sound. ‘In here,’ she whispered, opening a door and pulling him inside. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’
    ‘Where the hell are we?’ Sam waved a hand in front of his face. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
    ‘I can’t put the light on.’ Daisy reached up and took a large torch from a high shelf. ‘They would see it from the house.’ She shone the torch on a pile of coal, the overflow from a wooden bunker. ‘See. That over there is the fire-oven, and here … this is where I shovel the coal. Into the firebox, you can see the ashbox below it. And the heat of the oven is controlled by that damper up on the wall.’
    She was like a tour guide explaining things to a group of schoolchildren. She was close to hysteria; she could feel it like a spreading lump in her throat. She did not need to shine the torch into Sam’s face to know that he was staring at her with a look of mild astonishment. All she knew was that she had stopped him walking down the street, out of her life, for ever.
    She had to keep him, just for a little while. For long enough to explain that asking him to tea had been a terrible mistake. That a worse mistake had been her mother jumping the gun and asking Edna along. Only to show off, of course, to make it plain that Daisy could get a man if she wanted, that she wasn’t well on her way to being an old maid.
    And most important of all, Sam had to be told to forget the whole thing. To remember her, if at all, with some kind of respect. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t want him
remembering
her. She wanted to keep him, to never have to say goodbye, to love him, to have him make love to her. …
    There was no pride in her thinking, no way she could explain, even to herself, how she felt. She was in an alien world she had never entered before. In this world she was young, she was beautiful, and he was there, the man she loved. … Daisy shivered. It was like all the films she had ever seen, only better. Or worse.
    ‘Let’s sit down, shall we? Then you can tell me what all this is about.’ Sam’s eyes were used to the darkness now, and taking her hand he led her over to a pile of sacks in a corner.
    He was behaving, he knew, in a way he hadn’t behaved since he was fifteen years old. All spots and incipient moustache, and kissing a girl on the top deck of the tram on the way home from school. Daisy’s hair had come out of curl with the rain. She sighed when he put his arm round her, snuggling close to him like a child, with her hair tickling his chin and her arm lying loosely round his waist.
    There was a sweet vanilla smell, and Sam could