Dressmaker (8 page)

‘If I have your permission,’ said Nellie sharply, tucking her hair under her hat.

‘Don’t you think,’ said Margo, when Nellie had gone, ‘that we had a rum childhood – I mean, thinking about it—’

‘Rum,’ said Jack, not understanding.

‘Restricted. The way Mother was – all them rules, going to church.’

‘What rules?’

‘Don’t you think we were damaged?’

‘Don’t talk daft.’

He sat up, clutching his belly, filled with irritation at the way she carried on. Whenever Marge started to talk in this fashion
it made him angry: he was defending someone, something, but he didn’t know what. It was like when Lord Haw Haw had been on
the wireless – he wanted to jump to his feet and wave the flag.

‘We were never given a chance,’ said Margo. ‘Never. All that church-going and being respectable – you can never get away from
it.’

‘Church never did anyone any harm,’ he said hotly.

‘You haven’t been inside a church for donkey’s years.’

‘It never did any harm,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘It might have been better if you had listened to what the good book said.’

‘I did listen – I did nothing else. Always being told what to do, always being got at. Doing what Mother said was best.’

‘Mother was a wonderful woman,’ he cried, looking at her with hostility. ‘She brought us up never to owe a penny, never to
ask anybody for anything.’

‘She asked Nellie for plenty. It was Nellie that did all
the work. She walked in Mother’s shadow. She still does.’

‘Oh, get off,’ he said, hating the sight of her: the naked face with the eyes like an actress on the stage, the mouth spitting
rubbish.

‘And what about Rita?’ She knew she was annoying him – the trick he had of twisting his head sharply as if someone had fired
an ack-ack gun behind his ear – but she had to say it. ‘She’s just like Nellie, really. Keeping herself to herself, never
saying anything important, just being proper.’

She hoped it was true: she couldn’t bear to think of Rita getting into trouble – the shame of it, the gossip in the street.

‘If our Rita is half the woman Nellie is, she’s got nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘But it’s different times,’ Margo cried. ‘It’s the war. People aren’t the same. That sort of person isn’t needed any more.
The past is gone, Jack. Things are different now.’

‘What sort of person?’ he asked her, outraged, sensing Mother and Nellie relegated to the scrap heap.

‘People who had to be told what to do. There’s things happening now that nobody can tell you what to do about. You can’t act
the same. That’s why our Nellie gets so bad-tempered – she knows it’s not the same.’

‘Where would you have been without our Nellie?’ he shouted, jumping to his feet.

The small blue indentures on either temple, marks of the forceps at his birth, darkened as blood suffused his face.

‘God knows,’ she cried, facing him in the unlovely room, ‘but I mightn’t have been all on me own.’

She trembled, filled with pity for herself and indignation that he thought so little of her. He was marching up and down
the floor, twitching his head, struggling to contain his anger.

Margo was spent. She sat down at the table, blinking her eyes to stop the tears from falling. She wanted to say: Your Rita,
our Rita is going out with a foreigner, meeting him at this moment, going into shop doorways with him. She wanted to reproach
him for stopping her belonging to Mr Aveyard, for the chances he had made her miss in the past. It was all his fault – his
and Nellie’s. All the rubbish he talked about wanting to go and live on a boat after the war, travel, see how the other half
lived – his remembrance of poetry, his sentimentality. It was all me eye and Peggy Martin. He was bound, like Nellie, hand
and foot to the old way of life. It mattered to him what the neighbours said, if he caused gossip, if he owed money, if he
seemed too much to be alive. He hated to have to look inside himself – the wicked women standing on Lime Street, the immorality,
the heart beating raw and exposed like the pigs he slaughtered.

‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I don’t need you blethering on, the way I feel.’

And he went. Tying his muffler about his neck in a paddy, squashing his worn Homburg hat on to his head.

‘Why d’you think we’re sitting here in the cold?’ she shouted, following him up the hall, ashamed she was driving him away.
‘All because Nellie won’t have a fire
in summer! I’m sick of it. Don’t you blame me, Jack, if there’s trouble.’

Out he went, slamming the door behind him, leaving her exhausted in the hall.

Rita came back before Nellie – like a dog that had been whipped, her face asking for help.

‘Oh dear,’ said Margo, going through to put on the kettle. ‘You silly little twerp, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I want to die,’ said Rita, dropping her coat to the floor and gazing about the room as if she was demented. He hadn’t turned
up at the station, he hadn’t come to the bus stop, he hadn’t said he would see her again. He walked away to the sound of the
dance-band and she never saw him again.

‘What happened?’ asked Margo, wanting a full explanation before Nellie returned home full of talk about Valerie and her glowing
secure future.

‘He said I was a drowned rat.’

‘Oh, he didn’t!’

‘He said: “Don’t you ever wear nothing pretty, no dresses with frills?”’

‘Oh, luv.’

‘He said I was pretty as a picture, pretty as a rose garden.’

‘Oh you are, little lamb, little pet, you are.’

‘He never – he said I was a drowned rat.’

There was a storm of weeping, Margo crying with her, recalling other words from other men, time after time,
years ago. They clung to each other, voices resonant with grief.

‘When we were in the country, in the garden … he tried to – touch me. I pushed him away.’

‘What did he do to you?’

‘He tried to – well, he touched me – here.’ She indicated with her hand the small swell of her breast. ‘I pushed him away,
Auntie.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Margo, rising to her feet, feeling old and responsible. She made tea and told Rita to wipe her eyes in case
Nellie came back. Like something she had heard on the wireless, one of those educational talks late at night, she lectured
her: ‘Now look here, our Rita,’ putting her heart into it, as if there was one more chance, the very last chance. ‘You got
to be decent, you got to have respect, but if you love him you have to give.’

In her mind a picture of George Bickerton undoing the buttons of his jacket, the drooping moustache painted on the boy’s face,
the unsure arms encircling her; the way his body trembled, the fear she felt, the stranger she was to her own flesh. She didn’t
know what to do, and neither did he. Never been talked to, never read any books, never known what it was to take off her clothes
without turning away. A mist of ignorance, of guilty fumblings; it didn’t matter about the church and that they were allowed
to be in bed together. Nellie was in the next room, the blankets over her head. There was no excitement, no joy. It was the
doctor tapping her chest, it was an illness.

‘You mustn’t lose him because you’re feared,’ she cried. ‘You mustn’t, Rita. I’ve read books since – it’s natural, you shouldn’t
listen to Nellie. God knows, girl. Look at me – I’m a casualty.’ She held her arms out dramatically as if she was on a cross.

And Rita did listen, she did appear to take notice: concentrating on her aunt, the black eyes shining like marble, the mouth
grimacing with feeling, the thick body ensnared in the over-large cocktail dress.

Rita wrote a letter to Ira in her lunch hour.

Dear Ira,

I’m sorry if I annoyed you in any way but I do love you. I waited for you at the station for two hours, but you
did not come. Please meet me next Saturday at 6.30 under the clock. I have got my Auntie Nellie to make me some pretty clothes
so that you will be proud of me.

Your loving Rita.

She wanted to put kisses and even draw a heart, but it seemed common. After work she knocked at the Manders’ front door and
asked to see Valerie. Mrs Mander was curious to see her and eager to know about her young man.

‘Lives in Washington, I believe,’ she said, and Rita nodded, because she couldn’t admit she didn’t know where he lived, or
how old he was, whether he had a mother and a father. ‘He’s got a dog and a goat and a horse,’ she said, ‘and a hen that sits
by the fire.’

‘In the city?’ said Mrs Mander, taken aback.

Rita went into the front room with Valerie, bent her head shyly, twisted her hands about in their grubby white gloves, standing
by the piano with the photograph of George, debonair in his sailor uniform.

‘I want you to give a letter to Chuck,’ she said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Valerie.

‘Me and Ira had a quarrel.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Could you ask your Chuck to give him this letter?’

She took out the letter from her handbag.

‘My Chuck doesn’t know him very well, you know. I doubt if he sees him much in the camp. They’re not buddies.’

It sounded like a tree about to bloom: Chuck and Ira on the same bough.

‘I’d be ever so grateful,’ Rita said.

She felt close to the older girl, dressed in such good taste, her plump left arm encircled in a bangle of shiny metal, her
eyes sympathetic, not quite assured.

‘Do you and Chuck have upsets?’ she asked, trying to identify herself with them. ‘Have you ever fallen out?’

‘Everyone does,’ Valerie said. ‘Don’t worry, luv.’

She was curious how Rita had ever gone out with the American in the first place. Rita was so put down, so without passion,
living all her life with the old women down the road. As a child she had never played out in the street, never put her dolls
to sleep on the step, never hung around the chip shop on Priory Road. In the air-raid shelter she
wore a hat belonging to Auntie Nellie as if she was in church.

She stowed the letter away in the pocket of her jacket – not carelessly, with feeling.

Rita was brighter than she had been for days. Setting the table for tea, humming as Aunt Nellie cooked the Spam fritters on
the stove. When Margo came in she couldn’t wait to tell her what she had done, running into the hall when she heard the key
turn in the lock, whispering in her ear that she had written a letter and given it to Valerie.

‘That’s good,’ said Margo, tired from her day and wanting to sit down. Her moment of elation having passed with the night,
she had spent the entire day brooding over the advice she had given the girl. She wasn’t sure of herself any more, she wanted
to share the responsibility. She sat by the grate, and her handbag dropped to the floor and she let it lie.

‘Sam, Sam,’ said Rita, ‘pick up thy musket,’ and she and Nellie broke into little trills of laughter, the room filling with
the smell of melting dripping.

Jack’s shop was in Moss Street on the other side of the park. When he saw Nellie, his eyes widened with concern at her having
made the journey.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ he scolded. ‘Bogle told you to take it easy.’

‘I wanted the exercise,’ she said. ‘I’m that busy on Rita’s new clothes I had to force meself out of the house. I was straining
me back.’

He sat her in the little cubicle at the back of the shop, perched on the stool behind the cash register, while he served his
customers. He wore an apron that Nellie had made him, over his suit, with his coat sleeves rolled up. His small hands were
always red and chapped from continually being doused under the cold tap in the back – he couldn’t bear the contamination of
the raw meat. He would have taken Nellie upstairs to rest, but he knew when his back was turned she would be washing his breakfast
pots and tidying his bed.

‘Was that Ethel Morrisey?’ she called, when an old woman wearing carpet slippers had gone shuffling across the sawdust to
the door.

‘That’s right.’

‘By gum, she’s aged.’

‘We all have,’ he said, dipping his head, in his Homburg hat, to avoid contact with the two rabbits hanging on a rail above
the counter, bending over the marble slab industriously with a wet cloth in his hand.

Outside the window the errand boy balanced his bicycle against the kerbstone and came in whistling. He had red hair and a
great bulging forehead over which his cap wouldn’t fit.

‘Hello, Tommy,’ Nellie called, smiling and nodding at him through the glass of the cubicle. ‘How’s your mother keeping?’

‘Me mam’s fine,’ he said, keeping his eyes down to his boots, hating to be noticed.

Jack told him to skin one of the rabbits, while he took Nellie upstairs and made her a cup of tea. He thought
it would be nice to wrap one up for her and pop it in her shopping bag without her knowing. He had some difficulty bringing
her down from the stool; she clutched at him as if she was drowning, leaving a pale dusting of talcum powder on the upper
sleeve of his jacket.

She tried to shut her eyes to the state of the living room. She couldn’t expect a man to keep it decent, and she supposed
he did his best. It made her a little sad, the disarray, the neglect, as if he was homeless, about to move on; there were
some things still in boxes and never unwrapped. And he never would move on, not now. It was a funny way to end up – he was
a bigoted man in his views, and his surroundings were such a contradiction. He couldn’t stand gipsies or Jews, or Catholics
for that matter, and here he was in a pigsty. In his person he was very particular, though: his ears, his nails, the round
collars he took himself to be washed and starched at the Chinese laundry over the road.

‘Whatever are you doing with that?’ she asked, looking in bewilderment at the wind-up gramophone removed from its place behind
the door and set in the centre of the hearthrug.

‘I was thinking maybe our Rita could use it. You know, when she’s got friends in, now she’s of an age.’

It was just an idea he had. He didn’t think it would come to anything. He had never met any friends she might have had. Watching
Nellie turning over the pile of heavy records, wrinkling her nose as he held one or two to the light to read the labels.