Dressmaker (7 page)

‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t argued with Nellie,’ said Margo, when they were alone.

‘You’ve got a vicious tongue in your head, Marge. Mind you, she’s not the easiest of women to get on with. She’s a good woman,
and they’re the worst.’

He sat dangling his small hands between his knees, sitting on Nellie’s chair beside the grate. Bogle had said there wasn’t
much to worry about, it was only a little warning that she should take it easy. It would be best in future not to upset her,
not to cause scenes likely to bring on an attack.

‘How long has she been moody?’ he asked Marge; and she replied more or less since the beginning of the week when she’d gone
to a friend after work and not come straight home. Nellie said she’d get her ciggies for her, only she forgot; and when Marge
spoke out of turn Nellie flew up in a paddy and had hardly uttered a civil word since.

‘Ah well,’ he said and turned on the wireless to relieve the gloom.

He made Nellie a cup of cocoa, but she didn’t want it, and he brought it downstairs and drank it himself. Though there was
still daylight outside the window, inside the kitchen it had grown dark. The dimensions of the room were mean, depressing
without the glow of a fire. All the good furniture had been removed into the front room – dining-room table, sideboard, the
oak chair that father had sat in. Nellie had replaced them with cheap utility stuff bought at Lewis’s.

‘By heck,’ he said, ‘I’ll get the electric put in before another winter passes.’

‘She won’t like that,’ said Margo. ‘You know what
she’s like about the house being shook up.’

Jack went and lit the oven in the scullery for warmth. Margo sat in her coat feeling sorry for herself; the sausage curls
above her ears hung bedraggled from all her running about in the rain. Jack put the tea on the table but neither of them felt
up to eating.

‘I’m that cold,’ he complained, standing up at the table, hugging himself with his arms.

About his brow was a red mark where the band of his hat had bitten too tight. If the calendar said it was summer, even if
there was snow on the wash-house roof, Nellie wouldn’t light a fire. She said they needed the coal for the winter. In vain
he told her that things were going to get better, now the Allies had landed in Europe. She’d read of people being extravagant
and having to burn the furniture to stop themselves from freezing to death.

Some lady on the wireless was singing a song about ‘Tomorrow, When the World was Free’:

There’ll be blue birds over

The white cliffs of Dover,

Tomorrow, just you wait and see …

He joined in the chorus, but his voice broke with emotion and he cleared his throat several times to get over it. Margo was
watching him with contemptuous eyes.

‘It’s something to do with the word,’ he said. ‘It always chokes me up.’

‘What word, you soft beggar?’

‘Blue.’ He emptied his nose vigorously into his handkerchief. ‘I remember a bit of poetry at St Emmanuel’s, something about
the old blue faded flower of day.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, mocking him.

‘And there’s bluebird, bluebell—’

‘Blue-bottle,’ said Marge, and he had to laugh.

There was a great storm of applause on the wireless to greet the end of the song. They both glanced up at the ceiling, hoping
Nellie wouldn’t think they were making a holy show of themselves.

When it was quite dark in the kitchen he went again up the stairs and whispered: ‘Nellie, Nellie, anything you want?’

She didn’t reply. He tiptoed to her bed and she was lying with her hand tucked under her cheek, her body tidy under the counterpane
– beneath the bed, half peeping, her shoes with the laces spread.

There was a row of women standing in front of the long mirror in the ladies’ waiting room, spitting into little boxes and
stabbing eye-black on their lashes. Uncle Jack said they came from all over England, hitch-hiking, making for the American
army bases. He said they were mad for the money the Yanks threw about. ‘They’re wicked women,’ he said, spitting the words
out through puritanical lips, and Rita had believed him. But she knew better now: it wasn’t the money, it was a search for
love, the sort she had found with Ira. The women looked common enough with their bleached hair and their
mouths pouting as they put on lipstick, but they weren’t wicked.

‘’Scuse me,’ she said politely, edging her way in and resting her handbag on the ledge.

Her head scarf was saturated with the rain. Underneath, her hair was limp, crushed to her skull as if oiled. There was a girl
with a paper bag full of sand, one leg on the leather seating of the bench. She was rubbing the yellow grains into her skin
trying to simulate stockings. The sand fell in a little heap to the floor. Rita wiped her face with a handkerchief and squeezed
Crème Simone on to her nose and her cheeks. She had found the cream and a box of orange powder in Auntie Marge’s drawer, but
there wasn’t a powder puff. Carefully she dipped the end of her hankie into the box and dabbed it on her face. When she was
finished she didn’t know that she liked herself. If her hair would only dry it would give her a softer look, less exposed.

Ira wasn’t outside, under the clock, as they had arranged, but then it was raining and he was possibly near the taxi rank
or by the barrier, or in the main hall, or the lavatory, combing his hair to look nice for her. She looked everywhere and
stood outside the gentlemen’s convenience for almost ten minutes until a sailor came out, with his collar flapping upwards
behind his head like a blue sail, and stared at her as if he knew her. He was small and quite old and she didn’t want Ira
to see her with him – he might think she was man-crazy. She went back into the waiting room and sat down. There
was a different batch of women, newly arrived off the Warrington train. They slumped dishevelled on the black-leather seating,
smoking cigarettes, chewing gum. There was a woman that reminded her of Aunt Nellie: the droop to the mouth, the expression
in her eyes beneath a tangle of wet black hair. She wore a bow of crumpled white satin, one end hanging forlornly over her
plucked eyebrow. She never took her eyes off Rita, not even when children ran in screaming through the open doorway, banging
sticks on the oil-cloth of the centre table. When they rolled on the floor, Rita could see the marks of insect bites, pin-points
of scarlet clear up the thin legs to the gape of their torn knickers. She could smell the children: a mixture of damp old
clothing and dirt, and something sickly like the stored grain in the warehouses; and she sat quite still with one hand curled
into a fist as the lavatory lady ran in from the wash-room and ordered them out.

The woman with the bow in her hair made Rita feel uncomfortable. She imagined that it was written all over her face that she
had found someone to love her, that she had Ira. She longed for him to come to the door and call her name and she would run
to him and all the tired and mucky women on the benches would realise she was different from them. But he didn’t come, and
after a while she walked out into the station, which was crowded now with soldiers and airman and shrieking women, for the
trains ran to and fro between the American base outside Warrington and the army barracks at Freshfield and the aerodrome at
Woodvale.
The military police patrolled in pairs, swaggering in their white helmets, swinging their truncheons from their wrists on
little bands of leather. She went down the steps past the taxi-rank under the arch of the station entrance into Stanley Street.
For a time she stood in the doorway of the philately shop, sheltered from the rain, absorbed in a page of German stamps imprinted
with Hitler’s head. But for him, she thought, she would never have met Ira, never been happy. Uncle Jack said he was a maniac,
the monster of the world. She thought he looked rather neat and gentlemanly with his smart black tie and his hair slicked
down over one eye. Now and then she popped her head out of the doorway and stared down the road at the station. She went lower
down the street to the chemist’s, looking at all the funny objects in the window: rubber trusses and surgical braces and adverts
for pills and lotions. There was a photograph of a man in his combs flexing his muscles like a boxer. There was a great brown
nozzle with a ball at one end and holes in the head. ‘Whirling Spray,’ she read, but there was nothing to say what it was
for. It was too big for an ear syringe. She supposed it was for something rude, like the things described in Auntie Marge’s
hidden book. She didn’t like to be seen staring into the window, and there was a tiny sensation of fright just beginning to
grow somewhere in her head or her heart. Why hadn’t he come yet? Please God, she prayed, don’t let him be dead. Make it be
the right place and the right day. Bending her head against the gusts of rain, she walked back to the station. He was there,
lounging
against the soot-covered wall under the giant wrought-iron clock.

‘Oh,’ she cried, laughing with relief, ‘I was beginning to think—’

‘The train was late. The guard wouldn’t shift till some of the guys got out of the carriage.’

He didn’t attempt to kiss her cheek, but she was too grateful at his arrival to be discouraged. She did recognise that some
part of him resisted her. She saw in his cool untroubled eyes an absence of warmth as if he didn’t realise that he had been
waiting all his life to find her. He was slow and unaware, locked in the protracted torpor of adolescence.

‘We can go to the movies,’ he said, looking at her rain-soaked clothes and her face yellow with powder.

‘I can’t go to the flicks now. It’s too late. I can’t be late home – me Auntie Nellie’s poorly.’

She loved walking with him, holding his arm. She hardly noticed the rain or how cold it had grown. In her head they spoke
to one another tenderly, talking about the future, how they loved each other, moving through the town, he with his coat collar
turned up against the wind, she with her head scarf trailing about her shoulders – arm in arm, completely silent in the Double
Summertime. They walked almost to the Pier Head, sheltering under the black arch of the overhead railway that ran alongside
the docks.

‘Is it like home?’ she wanted to know, listening to the sound of a train rumbling above them, thinking it was like a film
she’d seen about America. The municipal
gardens in front of the pier were deserted. The green benches dripped water. Spray rose above the river wall and blew like
smoke across the bushes and the grass.

‘It ain’t nothing like home,’ he said.

They walked back to the town, thankful to have the wind behind them.

‘Don’t you wish we were in the country again?’ she asked, but he didn’t answer: he wouldn’t commit himself. If it had been
the aunt’s, she would have taken the silence for moodiness. But he, she knew, used words sparingly. When the time came he
would know how to talk to her. There were numerous bars and cafés, but she didn’t want to share him, nor did she think Auntie
Nellie would approve of such places.

‘We ought to shelter from the rain,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re soaked right through.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said truthfully, and he stopped quite still and touched the shoulder of her mackintosh. ‘You sure feel
like a drowned rat.’

She stopped breathing with the hurt, blinking her eyes, not knowing where to look. Everything was suddenly cold and bleak,
the black buildings rising into the grey sky, the street filled with strangers wrapped in one another’s arms.

‘I’ve got to get my tram now,’ she said, and in her head he pleaded with her: Please don’t leave me now – you’re pretty as
a picture, you’re lovely as a rose garden.

They waited in the tram shelter outside Owen Owen’s and she studied the angle of his jaw as he turned to listen
to the music of a dance band from the Forces Club across the street. When she boarded the tram he waved his hand in farewell,
and she sat stiffly, holding her handbag to her chest, watching him for one brief moment as he sprinted across the street,
before the tram clanged its bell and tore her from him.

Rita was in the first stage of her nightmare. As yet she had made no sound. She lay perfectly flat with her hands outside
the sheets.

She was in the back of the Wolsely car, the green card table in position … they were driving down the long road of detached
houses. Early evening … she looked through the glass at the gardens. The silver lamp post … the stretch of fencing
… now the house. Windows closed to the air … the wire basket full of lobelia hanging from the roof of the porch.
Inside were the people she cared for … never seen … they sat somewhere inside on high polished chairs. In the upstairs
window a plaster girl patting the ears of a dog with a feathery tail … sweet peas cut from the garden in a bowl on the
hall table … grandfather clock with the hands at eight o’clock … a statue in bronze of two men wrestling with an angel
… a row of tins on the pantry shelf, salmon, soup, pears. A round window cut like a porthole in the front door … a
little frilly skirt of curtain … they passed the house and drove into darkness.

She stirred in the bed, brought her arm up over her face.
She was watching the sky roll down into place at the end of the road. The painted poplars straightened and stood still. The
engine of the car ticked over … waiting … the red penny sun slid into view … she tapped the glass partition with
a little stick … the car drove slowly towards the fence. The house deserted … the people gone away on holiday … the locks broken on the door … the garden gate swinging. Silver gone from the sideboard … knives ripped from the
green baize box … decanters of cut glass torn from the back of the dark cupboard … the statue of the naked men toppled
from its stand … jewellery missing from the upstairs room … the good diamond ring, the watch with the platinum bracelet,
the glass beads from Venice. And a hat with a pin, speared like a roasting chicken on the banister rail in the hall.

She almost woke now, she tried, she fought to get out of the darkness, opening her mouth and beginning to whimper.

The car crawled to the edge of the kerb … slowed to a halt beyond the silver lamp post … out on the front lawn among
the dahlias the pieces of furniture … the polished chairs … the grandfather clock … the wrestling men flashing
fire from the sun … a body flung like a doll among the sweet williams … a man hanging over the fence with his head
dripping blood … the people she knew … the loved ones …

She screamed, trying to get out of the bed, drowning in waves of sleep. A long moment of pressure, heart beating, the blood
pounding in her ears, dizzy like a heat wave.

‘It’s all right, our Rita, it’s all right, Lamb, hush up, our Rita, it’s all right.’

She woke, trying to focus the dark cold bedroom, seeing the dull cylinders of Margo’s curlers touched by a rind of light at
the window.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s not my fault.’

When Nellie had recovered, she made one or two adjustments to the front room. She moved upstairs to the boxroom the little
rosewood table and the china figure of a rustic boy resting his chin on his hand. She would have liked to store the sideboard
too, but she felt Marge would notice, and it was too heavy to shift without help. She wasn’t entirely sure in her mind why
it was important to make such a change, to disturb articles of furniture that had taken up their allotted space in the best
front room for so many years – whether it was to decrease their chance of decay or to test her reaction to the disappearance
of familiar objects. Either way she felt that she had accomplished something. Apart from the truckle bed that had always been
there, the boxroom, though small, could accommodate other pieces: the shelved mirror with the curved frame, the foot-stool
embroidered in faded silks, the bamboo stand which displayed the aspidistra plant. She fully intended to remove all these
items – gradually, so as not to cause comment, over a period of
months. And to help Rita to find a nice young man and settle down she would make her a whole new wardrobe of clothes, dresses
for the winter, a costume, a new coat with a fur collar. She had expected the child to be less than enthusiastic, but she
seemed to welcome the suggestion. She spent several evenings poring over pattern books looking for ideas. Jack was astonished
when Nellie asked him if he could lay his hands on some extra clothing coupons. Rita said she would go with Nellie to Birkenhead
market to choose material, but it would have to be early on the Saturday.

‘I suppose you’re off out in the evening,’ said Margo.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘With Cissie Baines, I expect,’ said Margo sarcastically, but the child only nodded her head passively and went on turning
the pages of a book.

They took the midday ferry from the Pier Head, leaving Margo at home to do the shopping. She didn’t argue. She dreaded lest
she should upset Nellie and be forced to spend another few days washing the pots and cooking the meagre scraps of food.

Rita went upstairs on deck while Nellie made herself comfortable in the saloon, sinking into the dimpling black leather of
the seats that lined the wall, following the curve of the boat. She wriggled herself backwards into position, as if she sat
in a dentist’s chair, her feet not quite touching the floor, with a clear view of the Pier Head and the gulls gliding outside
the glass. She liked the throb of the engines beneath her, the low whine of agony as the boat shuddered and chaffed the rope
buffers
of the landing stage, the gush of tumbled water as it moved backwards and swung in a wide circle to face the opposite side
of the river. There were brave souls marching the deck: a student from the university with his scarf blowing in the air behind
him like a woolly streamer, a man clamping his hands to his head as the wind tore at his trilby hat.

It reminded her of the time Jack had sent them to Ireland for a holiday. He’d paid for it. He knew some hotel outside Dublin
that he’d been to years ago at the time of the Black and Tans, but he couldn’t afford for them to have a cabin and she’d sat
up all night on deck under a tarpaulin, with little Rita asleep on her lap – everyone moaning as the ship rolled, for all
the world as if they were immigrants on their way to America. They went on a train along the coast and at the station there
were some taxis and a funny old-fashioned carriage drawn by horses. And there was Marge, the daft beggar, bustling past the
ordinary vehicles and bundling them into the buggy cart, driving through the streets to the hotel, swaying and bouncing, making
a right show of themselves. It was a lovely holiday. It was nice to watch Rita running in and out of the waves with her little
dress tucked into her knickers. Of course, Marge made a fool of herself, getting off with a commercial traveller from Birmingham,
saying she was going off on the bus to Bray, and her and Rita walking past a café in the afternoon and seeing Marge and him
sitting in the the window eating egg-and-cress sandwiches: caught redhanded in a yellow straw hat with red roses on the brim
and a piece
of watercress stuck to her lip. Rita searched for Nellie as the bell clanged for the passengers to disembark. Through the
window of the saloon she saw her aunt’s corpse-like face etched on the darkness of the interior. She was smiling with her
eyes closed, as if she was happy, the clasped hands on her lap threaded through the strings of her shopping bag. Rita tapped
on the glass. Nellie opened her eyes immediately, stared uncertainly, then came in a little unsteady run to the swing doors,
clasping the brass rail for support.

‘My word, it’s rough,’ she said. ‘You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus.’

She hadn’t been to Birkenhead for two years and was appalled at the change: the air of decay and obliteration. The municipal
gardens were laid to waste. Gone were the roses and the shrubs, the drinking fountain with its marble basin – nothing now
but two slopes of sparse grass; the railings carted away; dogs doing their business where once the tulips had swayed in scarlet
ranks.

Rita wanted black worsted for a dress. She didn’t care what else, but she wanted the black.

‘It’s a bit old,’ said Nellie.

‘I want pleats in the skirt and a white collar and white cuffs.’

‘Sure you don’t want some lace for a frilly cap and apron?’ said Nellie tartly. ‘Then we could get you a job in the Kardomah.’

But Rita insisted. Nellie bought four yards of black, five of grey with a stripe in it and a piece of pink velvet.

They had a cup of tea standing up at a stall and Rita wanted to buy a meat pie.

‘You won’t, Miss,’ said Nellie.

‘It’s me own money.’

‘No.’

Nellie had always impressed on both Rita and Marge that there were two things they must never do: never sit down on somebody
else’s lav and never eat a shop-bought meat pie. The girl seemed to go into a sulk. On her face a look of suffering as if
she had been mortally wounded. She stood there, her face shut to all approaches. Only her eyes were alive, watching the crowd
of shoppers in the market square with a peculiar intensity, as if she was searching for someone.

Mrs Mander told Margo that things had grown very serious between Chuck and Valerie. There just might be an engagement announcement
soon. It would mean a new dress for Valerie if Nellie was up to it. Something romantic, embroidered with sequins to catch
the light. She found the ravaged interest of Margo’s expression disconcerting: she looked like a woman gutted by fire – she
was wearing a dress of a slightly charred texture, several sizes too large for her, with panels of silver let into the bodice.
There was a scorch mark at the shoulder and a diamante clasp at the hip. Her fatigued eyes glittered with excitement as she
told Mrs Mander how thrilled she was for Valerie. In the fulfilment of the girl’s dreams she imagined that she herself moved
one step nearer to happiness. Nellie would make the dress, she was sure – why,
no one could stop her. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and went to fetch the pattern books from under the stairs
so that they could begin at once their search for the ideal gown. Forgotten were the preparations for the evening meal, and
Mrs Mander was too polite to say it was Nellie’s opinion she had come for, even though Marge was younger and could be said
to be more modern in her outlook. There were certain indications of hysteria in Marge’s appearance, a lack of judgement:
the cocktail dress in which she had answered the door, the fur coat she wore to work with white wedge-heeled shoes. There
was the occasion, never to be forgotten, when the Dutch seaman billeted on them in the first year of the war had given her
a length of cloth from the East and she had gone secretly behind Nellie’s back and had it made up into a sarong – wearing
it at a Women’s Guild night, with a slit right up the leg and all her suspenders showing beneath the baggy edge of her green
silk drawers.

‘Nellie’s gone to get material for Rita from Birkenhead market. She’s suddenly taken an interest in clothes,’ said Margo.

‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ said Mrs Mander. ‘Valerie says she’s started courting. She saw them down town last Saturday.’

Margo stared at her. Once her mouth moved perceptibly, as if she was about to say something, but no words came; she wet her
dry lips with her tongue. Mrs Mander was busy studying a three-quarter-length dress with a little matching bolero.

‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘We could put sequins on the coatee.’ She looked up sharply and asked: ‘What do you think of him?’

‘Well, we hardly know him – she’s only been going out with him a short time.’ She prayed she was accurate, that Mrs Mander
wouldn’t catch on.

‘Well, you spoke to him at our house.’

‘What did you make of him?’ asked Margo, stalling for time, trying to remember which young man in particular Rita had sat
with. It could only be the fellow in the wardrobe, the long bony lad with the big feet. She felt enormous relief at being
able to visualise him – that it wasn’t some unknown brutal stranger doing nasty things to Rita.

‘Valerie says her Chuck doesn’t know him very well. He came along that night because he’d been seeing to Chuck’s jeep.’

She implied, Margo felt, that he was in some way inferior to Chuck, less of a catch.

‘He’s a nice lad,’ said Margo. ‘Very polite. He knows his manners. His father’s got quite a business in the city.’

‘What city?’ asked Mrs Mander mercilessly and Margo said it was Washington, near the White House, and was afraid she had made
a fool of herself and that the White House was actually in New York.

‘That’s nice,’ said Mrs Mander. ‘You know, with the lovely figure our Valerie’s got, it’s a crying shame to have a jacket.’

‘That’s true,’ Margo said, and wished she would go
away quickly before too many things were said. She had known all along that Rita was being secretive, coming home with her
stockings ripped to pieces and going down town on a Saturday night and returning drenched to the skin and worn out. That’s
why she’d had her nightmare. The deceit had preyed on her mind. She herself had tried to keep things from Nellie all her
life. She didn’t blame Rita, but she was hurt that the girl hadn’t confided in her. She felt resentful to be shut out from
excitement and intrigue. She had tried in her fashion to shield Rita from Nellie’s influence, to add a little gaiety to the
narrow years spent in the narrow house.

‘I’ll take the books back with me,’ said Mrs Mander. ‘Tell Nellie I called.’

And she was off out through the door, rushing back to the lovely Valerie to tell her that Rita hadn’t let on at home she was
meeting a soldier.

Margo might have told Jack if she had known more herself about the lad in the wardrobe. She longed to be able to tell him
that Rita had confided in her. It would make her seem mature in Jack’s eyes: it was always to Nellie that he turned for advice.

Jack kept complaining of a stomach ache. Nellie made him a glass of hot water to sip before going up the road to congratulate
Valerie.

‘Are you going now?’ asked Margo, alarmed. She didn’t want Mrs Mander blurting it all out to Nellie.