Free A Better World than This by Marie Joseph

objected to her wiping the gas oven down with the dishcloth the other day and she yelled at me, and my father came in and said the best thing would be for me to get out. “Get out,” he shouted.’
    ‘He wouldn’t mean it, love.’ Daisy glanced anxiously at the door. It would be just like her mother to come downstairs now to be struck almost paralytic with such talk. And calling Florence ‘Florrie’ when she knew she hated it. She frowned and bit her lip. ‘Your father always was a …’ she sought for the right word ‘… a virile sort of man.’
    ‘He sleeps with nothing on. And walks along the landing stark naked.’ Florence was obviously determined to have her say. ‘I never liked him,’ she added. ‘Neither did my mother. He was descended from fair folk, you know.’
    A terrible picture came into Daisy’s mind – of Mr Livesey with his red bull neck and mutton-chop whiskers trotting along the landing in the altogether. She suppressed a shudder.
    ‘Where would I
go
?’ Florence was beside herself. ‘My wages wouldn’t pay the rent of a single room, let alone keep me in food and clothes. I’m a suffragette in here.’ She stabbed at her chest. ‘I believe in the emancipation of women. Passionately.’ Her lip curled. ‘I do not regard a man as a meal ticket, and yet I am beholden to my father, because he pays the rent. I want to scream at him that I will go, that I will manage, but emancipation takes money, Daisy! Think about those women who fought tooth and nail for the vote for us. The Pankhursts, Annie Kenny. They were financially independent
before
they became suffragettes. They submitted to being force-fed because they knew their dinner would be waiting for them if they
chose
to go home. They sang as they were marched into prison, and when they were let out they went back to the bosoms of their families, to be cosseted back to health. But they had made their gestures! Don’t you see?’
    Daisy was losing the thread of the argument, but she nodded vaguely. Florence always sounded as if she knew exactly what she was talking about.
    ‘We should have been teachers.’ Florence was weeping again. ‘Both of us top of the class and what good did that do? You went straight into that bakehouse at fourteen, and I went to work as an usherette so I could mind my mother during the day.’ She lifted her head, her expression bleak. ‘Don’t you ever look at the rows of pies and loaves of bread and tell yourself there should be something more to life than that ? Do you ever want to open that door and just walk away?’
    Now Daisy was on firm ground. ‘Every single day.’ Leaning forward she took the cup and saucer from Florence’s trembling hands and set them back on the table. ‘But we can’t always turn our backs on a life that doesn’t turn out to the pattern we dreamed up for it. Sometimes the gesture we make if we stay is braver than the one we would make if we ran away.’
    Something had stopped her telling Florence about Sam, but she was pretending, she knew, that he had asked her to go away with him. That she was staying to nurse her mother because of duty. That even if he had gone down on his bended knees she would have refused him gently, pointing out where her duty lay. It was the only way she could go on. And on and on and on.
    ‘It’s all right for you,’ Florence was saying. ‘You
belong
. You may get bored, or frustrated, but you
belong
. You’re needed. I’m not needed any more.’
    ‘But you won’t do … do what you said?’ Daisy watched as her friend pulled on the lacy gloves with their tiny frilled gauntlets. ‘You would never do away with yourself?’
    Big-boned and desolate, Florence stood up and adjusted the flaps of her hat which was modelled on Amy Johnson’s flying helmet. It lent an air of gauntness to her long face, and at once Daisy was struck by the thought of how noble her friend would have looked chained to a row of iron railings, and wished she’d been