Dressmaker (2 page)

Nellie had to see the fairness of that. She was never unreasonable. She supposed she could alter something in time if the
child was really keen. Neither of them
looked at Rita to see what she felt. Or they could pool their clothing coupons and go to George Henry Lees’ for a new frock.
That might be best.

They were interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Lyons, come for her fitting. Rita curled herself up on the sofa with a library
book and the cat. She murmured ‘Goodevening’ to Mrs Lyons, keeping her eyes down to the printed page as the stout lady stepped
out of her skirt and stood in her slip on the rug.

Nellie put a match to the fire so that Mrs Lyons wouldn’t catch her death. She grudged every morsel of coal burned in summer
time, but she couldn’t afford to lose her customers. Even so, the room took some time to warm, and it wasn’t till Mrs Lyons
had left that the benefit could be felt. Nellie made a pot of tea before getting ready for bed, spooning the sugar into Marge’s
cup and hiding the basin before Marge could help herself. The aunts put on their flannel nightgowns over their clothes and
then undressed, poking up the fire to make a blaze before removing their corsets. The girl sat withdrawn on the sofa, stroking
the spine of the cat, while the two women grunted and twisted on the hearth rug, struggling to undo the numerous hooks that
confined them, until, panting and triumphant, they tore free the great pink garments and dropped them to the floor, where
they lay like cricket pads, still holding the shape of their owners, and the little dangling suspenders sparkling in the firelight.
Dull then after such exertions, mesmerised by the heat of the fire, the aunts stood rubbing the flannel nightgowns to and
fro across their stomachs,
breathing slow and deep. After a while they sat down on either side of the fender and removed their stockings. Out on the
woollen rug, lastly, came their strange yellow feet, the toes curled inwards against the warmth.

‘Rita,’ said Nellie, picking up the half-furled corsets, rolling them tidily like schoolroom maps, ‘what sort of dress shall
it be for the party?’

‘It’s not a party,’ said Rita. ‘It’s just a bit of a singsong.’

She said she didn’t know what the fuss was about. She didn’t want anything altered nor did she need a new frock. She knew
she would have to go, if only for the sake of Margo. Left to herself, she mightn’t have bothered. But at some point on Saturday
Margo would start to apply rouge and powder, saying she was thinking of popping along to the Manders’ to keep the child company.
And Nellie would say she was pushing herself, and they would start to argue, until turning to her they would remind each other
of the time, telling her she must hurry, comb her hair, change her frock.

‘Don’t you want to look nice?’ cried Nellie.

But Rita wouldn’t discuss it any further. She went upstairs on her own to bed, leaving them muttering by the fire.

Jack came promptly at four-thirty. He parked his van in the back alley and carried the Sunday joint wrapped in newspaper.
He wore his Homburg hat and his overcoat.

‘Have you got a cold, then?’ asked Nellie, for it was a warm afternoon and the sun was shining somewhere beyond the dark little
houses.

He had brought a piece of pork and some dripping and he put them on a plate high on the shelf so that the cat would leave
it alone.

‘Where’s Rita?’ he asked, removing his coat and going into the hall to hang it over the banisters.

At the foot of the stairs he cracked his ankle bone against the little iron stand set in the floor.

‘That blooming thing,’ he said, hobbling into the kitchen. ‘God knows why they put the damn thing where you can trip over
it.’

‘What thing?’ said Nellie, not understanding him.

‘That umbrella stand. One of these days I’ll break me blooming neck.’

‘I never trip over it,’ she said.

He lay down on the sofa with his feet on a newspaper and his hat still on his head. He always lay down when he came to Nellie’s;
she was forever telling him to
rest and he mostly felt tired as soon as he set eyes on her. He didn’t say much when Nellie told him Rita had gone with Marge
to have her hair set for a party. But then it wasn’t his province any more. When his wife had died leaving him with Rita not
five years old he had suggested that Nellie pack up the house in Bingley Road and come to live with him in Allerton. But she
wouldn’t. She said Mother would never have approved and where would she put the furniture? She was right of course – she was
too old to be uprooted. Nellie knew about death – she was his right-hand man, so to speak. Three sisters in infancy; Sally
with the consumption, though Marge insisted it was a broken heart; Mother, Uncle Wilf, and George Bickerton, Marge’s husband,
dying with influenza within six months of returning from France. The last four had passed away in the little back bedroom
upstairs. It was not as if Nellie cared to leave a house that held so many memories of departure. Grieved as she had been
to say good-bye to Mother, it was only in the nature of a temporary farewell. She had merely sent Mother ahead on a journey
and would catch up with her later. It would never do to leave her post till her call came. So he sold his own home and moved
with Rita into the two rooms above his butcher’s shop in Anfield. Nellie was a wonderful woman. She came every morning and
did for them and took the child out for an airing and put her to bed at night. But several times she took her back to Bingley
Road, because she couldn’t neglect the dressmaking, and it didn’t seem sensible to troop out after tea, in winter, on the
tram, all that way. It became a regular thing. After
a time the child copied her aunts and called him Uncle Jack. He tried sleeping in the little boxroom at weekends to see
more of her, but it wasn’t convenient. And Nellie looked after her beautifully, making her little dresses, and always seeing
she had clean white socks, and putting her hair in rags every night to make it curl. And later Nellie was very strict about
her education and her homework – only the bombing was at its worst and the child was in the shelters at night, and then the
school she attended had a direct hit and a lot of her friends were evacuated. Marge used to say it was all wrong for the child
to live with them, they were too old, they hadn’t the patience. But that was nonsense. Nellie had never raised her voice to
the girl, never said a bad thing to her. Marge had gone on about the nightmare Rita had from time to time. She said it wasn’t
natural for a young girl to have such nasty dreams, at least not the same one every time. Nellie said it was growing pains.
Dr Bogle said the same. Nellie was livid with Marge for taking the child to the doctor behind her back. Most of the time he
too forgot that Rita was not Nellie’s daughter, but his. And she did favour the aunts in appearance. She was in their mould
– nothing of his dead wife that he could see: like Marge in feature, with a mouth so pale that the upper lip seemed outlined
in brown pencil, making it prominent, and with Marge’s slightly frantic eyes, startled, owing to the width between brow and
lid. But she was Nellie’s creation. It was as if the dressmaker had cut out a pattern and pinned it exactly, placing it
under the sewing machine and sewing it straight
as a die, over and over, so that there was no chance of a gap in the seams.

Even more like Nellie, he thought, when Rita came in with Marge, face flushed red from the dryer and her hair stuck dry as
a bone to her small head.

‘My word,’ he said, ‘we do look a bobby dazzler!’ though secretly he wondered what had happened to her nice brown hair – so
little of it left and that all curled up.

‘Have you had it cut then?’ he asked. But she had gone out into the back yard to look for the cat. ‘How much did it cost?’
he wanted to know, half sitting up and putting his hand in his pocket.

‘Never you mind,’ said Margo, ‘it’s my treat.’

There was something restless about her, agitated. She strode about the room picking things up and putting them down, forgetting
about the cigarette she held between her fingers. She was forever going into the scullery to bend down and relight it at the
gas jet under the kettle.

‘You’ll not have a hair left on your head one of these days,’ warned Nellie, putting the Saturday tea on the table.

He ate his tea lying down. Nellie propped his head up with pillows and balanced his plate on his chest. They had a tin of
salmon that a customer had given him in return for a favour. He couldn’t tell Nellie how he got it because she didn’t approve
of the black market. Instead he said he’d had it in the cupboard since the beginning of the war. They listened to
Toytown
on the wireless and
Marge stood at the mantelpiece, covering her mouth with her hand, her eyes all screwed up as if she were in pain, pretending
it was Ernest the policeman she found comic, though he knew it was him.

‘What’s so funny, Marge?’ he demanded, offended.

And she said: ‘Rigor mortis will set in if you stay like that much longer.’

He had to smile at that even though Nellie was tut-tutting. He struggled to sit upright on the sofa and put his dish down
on the table. Marge had always had a sense of humour – dry, bitter at times – but she was good company. Sometimes it was as
if Nellie was a damn sight too worthy for this world, making him feel he was perpetually in church, or remembering Mother
who had died when he was seven, all lowered voices and pious talk. He looked at Rita, but she was stolidly eating – not a
trace of a smile, the colour quite faded from her cheeks.

At seven Marge went upstairs and came down in a peach crêpe dress with a necklace round her neck that had belonged to his
wife. He’d offered it to Nellie, but she said she had no need of such fripperies, and it was hardly suitable for Rita.

‘What’s all this, then?’ asked Nellie, and Marge said she was just popping round to the Manders’ with Rita, to keep an eye
on her.

‘You weren’t asked,’ said Nellie.

‘Get away,’ Margo said, and proceeded to put powder on her cheeks.

He could tell Nellie was put out about something.

‘Do you want to go?’ he asked. ‘Don’t worry about
me. I’ll put me feet up and listen to
Saturday Night Theatre
.’

At this she made a funny little gesture of contempt with her elbows, flapping them like a hen rising from its perch in alarm.

‘Not me,’ she said.

So he lay down again and placed the
Saturday Echo
over his eyes to be out of it. He could hear them talking in whispers out of deference to him, trying to get Rita to hurry
up and change. ‘In a minute,’ she kept saying, ‘I’ll go in a minute.’ And before she went upstairs he distinctly heard her
say, ‘That was my mam’s, wasn’t it?’ and he opened his eyes and she was at the fireplace staring at Marge’s neck, half reaching
up her hand to touch the necklace about Marge’s throat. God knows how she knew that. He was quite startled, screwing up the
side of the newspaper and damaging the Curly Wee cartoon with his clenched fist. But she didn’t touch Marge; she peered as
if she were short-sighted, leaving Marge standing there with her own hand up to the cheap link of pearls and her mouth all
red and bold with lipstick.

He closed his eyes again, and soon Nellie sat down at the sewing machine and spun the wheel, pressing the treadle up and down
rapidly, running material under the stabbing needle, settling into the rhythm of it, in her element. As long as he could remember,
Nellie had played the machine, for that’s how he thought of it. Like the great organ at the Palladium cinema before the war,
rising up out of the floor and the organist with his head bowed, riddled with coloured lights, swaying on his seat in time
to the opening number. Nellie sat down with just such a flourish, almost as if she expected a storm of applause to break
out behind her back. And it was her instrument, the black Singer with the handpainted yellow flowers. She had been apprenticed
when she was twelve to a woman who lived next door to Emmanuel Church School: hand sewing, basting, cutting cloth, learning
her trade. When she was thirteen Uncle Wilf gave her a silver thimble. She wasn’t like some, plying her needle for the sake
of the money, though that was important: it was the security the dressmaking gave her – a feeling that she knew something,
that she was skilled, handling her materials with knowledge; she wasn’t a flibbertigibbet like some she could mention. For
all that she lifted the tailor’s dummy out from its position under the stairs coquettishly, holding it in her arms like a
dancing partner, circling the arm-holes with chalk, stroking the material down over the stuffed breast, standing back to admire
her work with her mouth clamped full of little pins, tape measure about her neck.

When the knock came at the front door he was almost asleep. He opened his eyes in bewilderment and saw Marge on her chair
by the grate, and Nellie, her foot arrested in mid-air trying to recognise the hand at the door. He rubbed his eyes and stood
upright, smoothing his clothes to be respectable. They all listened. Rita opened the front door. A strange voice, like on
the films, drawling. She brought him into the kitchen. He was well-fed, dressed in uniform and he had been drinking. A great
healthy face, with two enquiring eyes, bright blue,
and a mouth which when he spoke showed a long row of teeth, white and protruding. It was one of those Yanks. Jack was shocked.
Till now he had never been that close. They were so privileged, so foreign; he had never dreamt to see one at close quarters
in Nellie’s kitchen, taking Rita and Marge, one on each arm and bouncing them out of the house. He ran to the door to watch
them go, linking arms, heads bowed, like they were doing the Palais Glide.

‘I didn’t know there would be Yanks,’ he said.

‘There’s no harm,’ said Nellie. ‘Valerie Mander knows how to conduct herself.’

But he was bothered. He couldn’t lie down and compose himself; the sheer fleshiness of the young American disturbed him –
the steak they consumed, the prime pork chops, the volume of butter and bacon. He remembered all the things he had read: the
money they earned, the food they digested, the equipment they possessed. He’d seen them down by Exchange Station, pressing
young girls up against the wall, mouth to mouth as if eating them, and jeeps racing up Stanley Street full of military police
and great dogs on metal chains with their jaws open and their pink gums exposed.

‘I didn’t know there’d be Yanks,’ he said again, walking up and down the room in his green waistcoat that Nellie had made
and his gun metal trousers.

‘Did you notice what our Rita said about that necklace?’ he asked in astonishment.

But Nellie was placing the top half of Mrs Lyons’ grey
costume under the steel clamp, her head bent and all her concentration on the lovely width of serge beneath her fingers.