Dressmaker (13 page)

Nellie was furious at Marge going out like that. Thinking her safely in bed, she hadn’t bothered to take a key. She had to
wait for half an hour on the step until Rita came home from work.

‘God knows what came over your Auntie Marge,’ she said. ‘I left her ill in bed. Wait till I see her.’

Rita was so happy she peeled potatoes and made Nellie a cup of coffee.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the tea.’

All her face was light and curved. Gone the morose set to her mouth, the desperate look in her eyes.

‘Ira rang,’ she said, unable to keep it to herself. ‘He’s busy training. He can’t see me this week, but he rang me up to see
how I was. He’s been chosen for some course – they’re sending him to Halifax for three days. He’s going to write me a letter.’

She was a different girl; it was amazing the effect a man had on a woman. Nellie had seen it before in Marge, the fluctuations
of mood, as if the man held the reins and drove as he pleased. It left her cold. She had been too busy nursing Mother to experience
that sort of thing – blacking the grate, preparing the food, seeing the boys went off to work decent.

Time had gone like the pages of a book flipping over.

When Marge came in she never said she was sorry for gadding off like that. She wasn’t contrite about being late home.

‘Auntie Nellie was locked out,’ said Rita. ‘She had to wait on the step.’

‘I wasn’t to know you didn’t have your key,’ cried Marge, belligerently.

She tried to get Nellie off to bed early so that she could talk to Rita. But Nellie wouldn’t budge – taking her stays
off and sitting by the empty grate for an age, yawning, stirring her tea. In the end Margo went up first – she was that worn
out – falling asleep without a thought in her head.

The following night Nellie went to the Manders’ to give Valerie a fitting. As soon as she was out of the door, Margo asked
Rita what Ira had said to her on the telephone.

‘How d’you know he phoned?’ asked Rita. ‘I never told you.’

‘I know, he did, that’s why.’`

‘He’s been chosen for some course. I’ll probably see him on Saturday.’

‘He’s not been chosen for any course,’ said Margo. She couldn’t put it tactfully – it wasn’t the way – it had to be done like
a bull in a china shop. She watched Rita’s face, like smooth glass, not a line on it.

‘He called here yesterday.’

‘He what?’

The glass splintered. Furrows appeared on her high forehead, her mouth puckered in surprise.

‘He called. He called to ask me to—’

It wasn’t that simple. She felt like Jack, slashing the throat of a young pig, letting its life’s blood soak into the sawdust.

After a time Rita said: ‘Asked you to what?’ Her voice was hard like a stone.

‘He feels you’re too young. He minds about you.’

‘Too young?’

‘He doesn’t want to commit himself.’

‘What did he come here for when he knew I was out?’

‘He wants to do what’s best.’

‘I told him you were off work.’

‘He’s a nice lad.’ She felt like Judas, giving the signal for young Rita to be cut down by swords.

‘He’s going to ring me tomorrow – he said so.’

Margo didn’t have the strength. The malice drained out of her. It wasn’t competition – it was little Rita, without a mother
and father. She wasn’t even angry any more about the dirty book gone from her drawer. Jack and Nellie had moulded Rita, cramped
her development, as surely if they had copied the Chinese, binding the feet of infants to keep them small.

‘He’s been picked for a course,’ said Rita stubbornly. ‘He’s going to write me a letter.’

On Friday, Rita went straight from work to Uncle Jack – surprised him in his braces, the shop shuttered, cooking his tea.

‘Does your Auntie Nellie know you’re here?’

‘I just thought I’d come.’

He was cooking kidneys in a white pouch of fat, boiling a whole cabbage in the pan. She was hungry. She sliced the dark brown
meat, rare with blood, and shovelled it into her mouth. She told him Marge had said Ira had visited her. She sprinkled pepper
on to the cabbage and wiped her bread across the plate. The way she ate disgusted him. He had to put down his knife and fork
and turn his head away.

‘Who called on Marge?’ he said.

‘Ira. She said Ira called.’

‘He never called to see her,’ said Jack. ‘It’s Marge’s way. She’s trying to protect you.’

‘What from?’

She was looking at him with her mouth filmed with fat.

‘Just from getting upset. What’s he supposed to have called for?’

‘He said he wanted to do what’s best.’

‘There you are. What did I tell you? It’s just Marge’s way.’ He walked round the gramophone, still in the centre of the room,
and went into the small kitchen, the paper peeling from the walls.

‘Don’t you mind the mess, Uncle Jack?’ Rita asked.

He didn’t like her criticising him – it wasn’t respectful.

‘I don’t really see it. It’s only temporary, this place. One day I’ll buy meself a little boat and retire to the waterways.
When the war’s over.’

When the war was over, she thought, Ira would go home. Back to his big family and his father in real estate.

‘What do you do when you work in real estate?’ she asked.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Jack said. ‘You’re Ira’s dad is never in business. He’s a farming lad – you can tell. He’s been raised
near the soil – it’s in his face.’

‘He’s been sent on a course. He’s been chosen.’

Jack was relieved they weren’t going to have a scene about Marge. Whatever the truth of it was, the child didn’t seem too
upset.

‘Do you think he did come round? I said Auntie Marge was off sick when he rang me in the morning.’

‘I’m blessed if I know. Don’t ask me, ask her.’ He made tea and Rita put cups on to the table. ‘It’s always the same, when
you get infatuated. It’s like a virus in the blood. A perpetual state of fever. One time, I went on holiday and nearly died
of love.’

‘With me mam?’

‘No, before your mother. I went on holiday to the Isle of Man and we played tennis on the back lawn. And there was this woman
there that drove me out of me mind. I’ve got a photograph somewhere.’ And he rummaged through the packing cases on the floor,
looking for the image he remembered, finding himself in white trousers sprawled before a net with a young woman with a bandeau
round her head and a smirk on her face.

‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I’d survive. But I did. Went back home, caught the number twelve tram and met your
mam on the top deck.’

‘But why did you leave her on the Isle of Man?’

‘She preferred someone else. Went off with him the last week of the holiday.’

He took the photograph from her and stuffed it away among the pictures of Nellie and Marge and Rita as a baby.

‘You best be off,’ he said. ‘I don’t want Nellie upset. She’s a wonderful woman.’

He was always so anxious about Nellie, afraid she might have another attack. He gave her a piece of meat to take home.

‘Passion,’ he said, as he let her out of the shop, ‘is a strange thing. Why I could have killed the fellow that young woman
went off with. I’d have swung for him.’

Rita went down town on Saturday and Ira wasn’t there. She came home slowly, dragging her feet along the road, not staying
up for a cup of tea, going straight to her room with the pencil and paper she had ready in her handbag. Laboriously she wrote
the letter:

Auntie Margo said you came to the house last week. I don’t know if you did or not. She said you wanted to do what’s best.
What’s best is that you should see me. You have not written me a letter as you promised. You have not telephoned me. Mr Betts
sent me for stamps at the post office on Friday and I didn’t like to ask if you had rung. Did you ring me Friday? I keep asking
if anyone has telephoned me and it makes me feel foolish. They all look at me in the office. I went to the station tonight
to look for you but you weren’t there. Are you on your course? I saw all the other women waiting and I thought we were not
like them. If you truly don’t want to see me, please tell me. Please dear Ira, on my mother’s head, please tell me. Your loving
Rita.

When she read it again she crossed out the bit about her mother’s head. It seemed out of place. She would go tomorrow to Valerie
Mander and ask her to give Chuck the letter. It didn’t matter any more if Valerie thought
she was chasing him. She couldn’t live another day waiting for that telephone to ring. She was worn out with waiting for
the postman to come, worn out with tossing and turning in her bed trying to work out if Margo was telling the truth or not.

Rita waited till Monday to give Valerie the letter – in case he telephoned Monday morning. Again she stood in the front room
holding her white envelope.

‘I know it’s a nuisance,’ she apologised, ‘but I’m desperate, Valerie.’

She stared deliberately at the older girl, her lip quivering. She needed to enlist sympathy.

‘But what’s up now?’ asked Valerie, puzzled. ‘Your Auntie Nellie said he rang last week.’

‘Yes, but he’s gone to Halifax on a course and he said he’d write, but he hasn’t. And he said he would probably see me on
Saturday, but he didn’t come.’

‘On a course?’ said Valerie. ‘What sort of a course?’

‘In Halifax. He’s been chosen.’

‘They don’t go on courses. He’s maintenance. He looks after the boilers and the electricity.’

Rita was insistent. There was a stubborn set to her jaw; she was polite but firm.

‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but Chuck did give him the other letter.’

‘Well, he didn’t mind the one about meeting him at the pictures.’

Valerie saw the look on the girl’s face. Outside in the hall Mrs Mander was greeting someone from up the road,
taking them up the hall, opening the kitchen door. The sound of the wireless was turned lower.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ said Valerie, ‘but Chuck told me about what was in the letter. He couldn’t help it. He had to
read it to Ira.’

‘What d’you mean?’

Valerie was twisting the engagement ring round and round on her finger, feeling the three white diamonds in their setting
of gold.

‘Didn’t you know?’ she said. ‘He can’t read or write.’

It was too dreadful to take in. It was unbelievable, like Auntie Margo saying he had called at the house. She fled from the
Manders’, the letter crushed in her fist. She ran up the alleyway behind the houses. Once there had been meadows and trees,
cows grazing, ducks on a pond – before they claimed the earth and built the wretched little houses: the industrial revolution,
Uncle Jack called it, when they took the green and pleasant land and made it into a rubbish dump, with dwellings fit for pigs,
the sky black with smoke from the factories, the houses built back-to-back to conserve room – more bricks to the acre; a time
when not many went to school, when education was for the few, when only the privileged could read or write. Her mind spun
excuses for him: he had been ill as a child, he had been born in a desert far from the city. She saw him lying on a couch
like the death of Chatterton with his arms spread wide; she saw him hoeing the sandy earth with a trowel, not a tree in sight.
It was like learning he was blind or a cripple or a criminal. She didn’t know how to cope with
it. He was a dunce, her Ira, thick as a plank, not able to play cards, to read a book; he would never write her a letter.
And at this thought hope surged up in her heart, she could have cried aloud with the enormous sense of relief. That was why
he hadn’t written as he promised! He couldn’t. He had gone to visit Auntie Marge to tell her he wasn’t good enough for her.
He knew Rita was clever at English, at composition. Nellie had boasted of the fact. He had come to Margo to say he was not
worthy. Dear God, she thought, running up the cobbled alleyway, if he was that unschooled, he would need her, he would want
to hold her in his life. She kicked the back gate open wide and strode up the sloping yard, not frightened any more.

Margo was disillusioned with the Dramatics Society. The cast seemed to be mainly workers from the crippled section. Apart
from the principal boy and Cinderella, they all had one leg shorter than the other, or withered arms. The Ugly Sisters, two
fellows from the explosives department, wouldn’t need any make-up. They hadn’t offered her a part. She was just one of the
chorus. She sat around for hours after work waiting for the pianist to come, wrapped in her fur coat at the back of the hall.
They wanted her to come on Thursday as well. Some big mouth had said Margo’s sister was a dressmaker and they wanted Margo
to give them some idea about costumes.

‘It’s Nellie that knows about clothes,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can come.’

But they insisted – they said she must pull her weight. She thought gloomily of staying late one night a week all through
the winter, standing in the freezing cold to catch her bus home, her dinner lying shrivelled in the oven.

The feeling of hope inside Rita didn’t last very long. He never telephoned. At work she put her fingers in her ears to deaden
the sound of the bell that never stopped ringing. Mr Betts spoke to her quite sharply – he said she was slacking, she wanted
to pull her socks up.

On the Saturday, hope died entirely. He wasn’t under the clock. She waited for hours. She didn’t want to go back home.

Nellie had almost finished the beautiful engagement dress; she was sewing the buttonholes by hand. Valerie said she felt the
right shoulder was a wee bit out of line. Nellie unpicked the arm-hole and reset it. She wouldn’t have taken notice of anyone
else, but Valerie had an eye for such things. They were going to have the engagement party next weekend. Cyril Mander was
decorating the front room; Mrs Mander had chosen new curtains. George might even be able to get leave. When Rita asked Valerie
if Chuck had seen Ira, the older girl hated to tell her there was no sign of the boy.

‘Chuck did look.’

‘But where is he?’ cried Rita.

‘It’s a big camp, you know, love. It doesn’t mean he isn’t there.’