Dressmaker (9 page)

‘They’re a bit old,’ he said, ‘not very up to date.’

She was touched by his attempt to do something nice for Rita.

‘Does it still go?’ she wanted to know, wiping her hands together to free them of dust; and he told her it might, when he’d
tinkered with it a bit – the spring seemed sound and that was the important part.

He made the tea and she sipped it, holding her cup with her little finger extended, as Mother had taught her. She told him
about Valerie Mander’s imminent engagement, what Cyril Mander thought about it, when they were going to buy the ring, how
they would have to celebrate. He nodded his head expressing interest, but she knew he detested Cyril Mander, and he didn’t
much care for Valerie or for Americans. He was narrow about people from foreign parts. He said they should have joined in
the fight in 1939 and not waited so long. He said it was the Russians that were winning the war, not Uncle Sam. She often
wondered what his attitude would be if he came face to face with a real live Russian, whether he would be so approving of
them in the flesh.

‘Chuck’s a nice lad,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t take offence at him.’

‘It’s as they say,’ he said dourly. ‘There’s only three things wrong with them Yanks. They’re overpaid, over-sexed and over
here.’

He got up saying he had to go downstairs to keep an eye on the shop, and left her to finish her tea. She looked at the mahogany
cabinet and imagined what Marge would have to say about Jack’s gesture and his choice
of records: ‘Just a Song at Twilight’, ‘Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day’. She could just see the look in her eyes, the way
her hands would fly up in a gesture of contempt. She put her cup down on the mantelpiece and peered at the photograph of Jack’s
wife with baby Rita in her arms – holding the infant wrapped in a shawl, as if she was scared she was going to drop it any
moment.

Just then she heard the boy calling ‘Eh, Missus, come down quick!’ And she trotted smartly enough down the uncarpeted stairs,
holding her hand to her heart, seeing Jack as pale as death behind the chopping block.

‘There’s been a mishap,’ he said, ‘with the cleaver.’

‘Where, you daft beggar?’ she cried, fierce with shock. ‘Where’ve you cut yourself, Jack?’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Him,’ looking at young Tommy who was standing at the foot of the stairs with his hands behind his back.

‘It’s nothing, Missus,’ said Tommy. ‘It were him that were took bad,’ and he went to the back of the shop and put his hand
under the tap.

Nellie made him run water over his finger till the cold almost froze him and the bleeding partially stopped. She struggled
upstairs and found some sheeting to tear into a bandage. When she had wrapped his wound she told him to get off home and let
his mam have a look at it. Already as he went out of the door the rag was darkening with blood. She felt irritated with Jack,
slumped there behind the counter, perspiration beading his forehead – like a big soft girl, his face the colour of putty
beneath his old black hat.

‘Go and wet your face,’ she said. ‘It will bring you round.’

She couldn’t think how he managed his business, feeling the way he did; slaughtering pigs, chopping up lambs, pulling the
liver and the lungs out of animals.

The brown rabbit lay on its side, head partially severed, legs stretched out as if it still ran.

All Saturday morning Nellie stayed at her machine, driving herself to finish one dress or another.

‘I just want me black dress,’ said Rita, looking in dismay at the grey cloth with the stripe and the pink velvet alternately
running under the needle. Margo did the shopping again because she knew how much Rita counted on a new dress for the evening.

In the afternoon Nellie said she had a headache, and with consternation Rita cried: ‘Won’t you finish me frock then, Auntie
Nellie?’

And Nellie said: ‘Steady on, Murgatroyd, I’m only human. What’s the stampede?’

‘I wanted me new frock for tonight. I’m meeting Cissie and I want me new black frock.’

‘Well, you can’t get blood out of a stone,’ said Nellie crossly. ‘It’s not ready.’

‘But you said last night it was nearly finished.’

Nellie couldn’t make out what was wrong with the girl, standing there with her face all twisted up with desperation, when
only two weeks ago she wouldn’t let them buy her a new dress for love nor money.

‘You wouldn’t let me try it on you,’ she said. ‘You said you had to wash your hair.’

Rita couldn’t bear to be fitted. The touch of the dry
tips of her aunt’s fingers, as they brushed the circle of her arm or smoothed the material of the shoulder, filled her with
revulsion. She had to grit her teeth to stop from crying out her distaste. She had lived in constant intimacy with the elderly
woman, soaped her white back in the rusty bath upstairs, nuzzled close to the flannel warmth of her at night. She couldn’t
understand this sudden aversion, when Aunt Nellie was being so kind, when she was working her fingers to the bone. At half-past
four, when she knew it was quite hopeless, she ran upstairs and looked inside her wardrobe: the velvet, the blue satin, two
years old, her day dresses, an old skirt – nothing pretty, nothing with frills.

‘Oh please God,’ she whispered, lying down on the narrow bed and burying her face in the pillow.

She thought with self-disgust of how she had refused a new frock from George Henry Lees, how she had nothing frivolous, no
necklaces, no lace hankies, no shiny bangle for her arm. Marge came into her room and said that with a bit of adjustment they
could do something with a brown silk dress in Nellie’s wardrobe.

‘It’s old,’ she said, ‘but it’s got a low neckline, it’s very flattering.’

‘I can’t wear Auntie Nellie’s dress,’ cried Rita. ‘I’ll just have to make do with what I’ve got.’

But Margo brought the dress through on a hanger and asked her to try it on.

‘Just try it, luv. Give it a chance.’

And it was smooth to the touch: it did make her feel silky and pampered, though it didn’t fit.

‘Look at the shoulders,’ she said. ‘Look at the waist.’

‘Well, you’ll have your coat on over it. I can pin it at the back.’

Marge combed her hair into a bun at the back like Valerie Mander sometimes wore. She took the stiff brown bow from the belt
of the dress and pinned it with a Kirby grip to cover the little tendrils of hair that wouldn’t stay in place. She gathered
the slack of the dress into a pleat and secured it with two safety pins. They hadn’t any vaseline for her eyebrows, so Margo
went downstairs and came back with a small smear of margarine on her little finger and it worked quite as well.

‘What if he doesn’t come?’ said Rita, putting two small circles of lipstick on either cheek and rubbing it in with her finger.

‘Oh, he’ll come,’ Margo reassured her, thinking it would be best in the long run if he didn’t, best for Jack and Nellie. As
soon as the girl was safely out of the house she was going to tell Nellie and rid herself of the awful weight of responsibility.

‘Put some colour on your mouth, girl,’ she said; ‘you look like a corpse,’ and could have bitten her tongue at the stricken
expression on Rita’s face: the child’s forehead wrinkling up, the hair dragged severely back behind her ears, which were
small and bloodless. Marge fetched the gold button earrings that Jack had given her last Christmas. She wished she could find
the pearl necklace, but instead she brought a link of glass beads, orange and green, to clasp about Rita’s throat.

‘You look older,’ she said. ‘Look at yourself.’

Rita wanted to be glossy like Valerie, rich and glowing and warm. She saw her face with the dabs of pink on either cheek,
the glint of gold at her ears, the green glass beads above the brown dress. In profile the beak of her nose was over-shadowed
by her jutting lips, painted purple.

‘I’m not pretty, am I?’ she said in despair, and Margo said: ‘Why, you look lovely, you really are a bonny girl.’

And Rita had to believe her, against her better judgement, because how otherwise could she survive, or go to meet him, or
anything? She was dry and faded and slender in the brown dress, with her bold mouth pouting in distress. Being seventeen
she couldn’t imagine how much to be envied was the childish droop to her shoulders, the tender curve of her throat under
the cheap glass beads, the gauche walk she achieved in Marge’s best wedge-heeled shoes. It was only a quarter-past five and
Jack had come in. She could hear him in the hall shouting to Nellie that someone or other had died. She was hungry, unable
to eat, lethargic, unable to sit still. Above all she longed to see Ira and feel that he loved her.

‘I’ll go,’ she said to Margo, pulling on her newly washed white gloves and the mackintosh with the flared back. She wanted
to have time in the waiting room at the station to smooth her hair and make sure her dress wasn’t hanging down at the back.
She said goodbye to Jack and Nellie, flustered by their comments – how smart she looked, quite the young lady. Knowing they
weren’t the right words, she wanted them to say she was pretty. She wouldn’t take the two half-crowns Jack offered her. She
said she had money of her own. She hadn’t noticed before
how old he was, how pinched his face was beneath the familiar hat, as he slid the money into his pocket. At the front door
she was compelled to turn back and kiss her Auntie Nellie – the merest brush of her purple lips against the woman’s powdered
cheek. Even so, she left a mauve imprint to the right of Nellie’s nose.

She kissed Ira on the lips, standing on tiptoe and screwing her eyes up – out of gratitude and to show she wasn’t prudish.

‘You got my letter, then?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘That guy gave it to me.’

‘Don’t you know him, then? Isn’t he a friend of yours?’

‘I don’t reckon I know him that well,’ and he looked at her hair and away again and touched her throat with one finger and
said, ‘You didn’t bury this one, then?’ and she said ‘No,’ and was glad for once it was not raining or the wind blowing a
gale up the dusty street. He said he wanted to take her to the movies: there was a film in Technicolor about a boy and a horse
called
My Friend Flicka
. She took his hand and after a moment withdrew her own and took off her glove, stuffing it into her pocket, so that she would
feel the warm clasp of his fingers.

They had to queue up for the cinema on Lime Street, even though they weren’t going in the one-and-nines. She had never been
treated to the pictures before by a boy, never gone in the back row among the courting couples. She was going to canoodle
with him – she didn’t care if it was common. But she dreaded lest the usherette came and shone a torch on them.

He was so tall, so neat in his clothes, the black tie tucked into his shirt just like Hitler, the crisp edge to his collar;
she thought how well her brown frock toned with his uniform. All the same, it was agony to be with him, shuffling nearer and
nearer to the entrance of the cinema, trying to make conversation, trying not to ask him why he had failed to come last Saturday.
The way he looked at the drunk woman weaving across the road through the traffic, the insolent gaze of his eyes, the pressure
of his hand on her shoulder. Every time he spoke to her, colour flooded her cheeks. She wondered how anyone survived being
in love, let alone got married – condemned to live for ever in this state of quivering uncertainty. She had never been so
aware of herself; she didn’t know what to do with her hands, with her feet. There was grit in the corners of her eyes, in
her nostrils, she could feel the lipstick caked at the corner of her mouth. How vulnerable she felt, how miserable and happy
by turns. The pain of being with him was almost as dreadful as living life without him.

Seeing it was such a fine evening, Jack carried the kitchen chairs into the back yard for him and Nellie to sit on. Marge
refused; she said it was mutton dressed as lamb to be sitting out there in all that concrete. They’d be asking next for a
striped umbrella to sit under. She opened the kitchen window and sat at the table watching them, Nellie with her hands folded
piously in her lap, Jack smoking his pipe full of tea leaves. The tilt of the yard as it sloped down to the back alley gave
them
a precarious look. Any moment, she thought, they might slide slowly and uncomplaining into the brick wall. She could hear
fragments of their conversation.

‘… in a good way of doing.’

‘At the masonic dinner … well thought of …’

Murmuring together in the evening air and a lone Spitfire, high in the washed-out space of sky, banking in a wide circle before
heading out to sea.

‘Ah well … comes to us all in the …’

‘God rest his soul.’

Margo shouted through the open window: ‘Did Rita say she was meeting Cissie Baines again?’

They both ignored her, placidly arranged in the back yard with little particles of soot floating down from next door’s chimney.
She thought of Rita meeting her young man. She thought of Mr Aveyard and her old job at the dairy where he was the manager
– sneaking out to meet him when Nellie was busy at her dressmaking, making excuses on a Sunday afternoon for not going with
her and little Rita to feed the ducks in the park: the time Nellie had given her daffodils to put on Mother’s grave and she
gave them to Mr Aveyard instead. He hadn’t known what to do with them, you could tell by his face. He held them upside down
at the side of his trouser leg like a sunshade that was partially open. They’d pulled down the byre for the cows in Allsops
Lane, and in a way it was a blessing. When they had made her give him up she’d had to leave her job at the dairy, and it was
unsettling to hear the sound of the cows mooing in the early morning, waiting to be milked; it reminded
her of him. He was getting tired of her long before Jack put the kybosh on things. He couldn’t stand the way she had to slip
out behind Nellie’s back. He used to say, ‘Why, you’re a grown woman, Margo, what ails you?’ and he was so set in his ways,
so careful about money – no go in him at all. There was a certain coldness about him, a detachment in his wary brown eyes.
Jack said anyone who had survived the trenches in France was bound to be touched – they’d been to hell and back again. In
the end she was grateful for Jack’s interference, though she would never give him the satisfaction of knowing. When she had
run to Mr Aveyard in tears, telling him Jack had said she had to give him up, he had stood like a statue in the little office
behind the dairy, as if he didn’t know that he should say, ‘Come to me, you stay by me, Margo.’

There was something very like alarm in his eyes. He never put his arms about her as she clung to him. ‘I’m not going back
home,’ she cried. ‘I’m never going back there.’ ‘It’s a bit awkward, Marge,’ he said. ‘Our Nora’s coming next week with the
children. You can’t stay with me.’ So she sat on Lime Street Station all night, telling the policeman she had missed her train
to London, walking back to Bingley Road in the dawn, seeing Nellie asleep at the front window with Rita on her lap. Nellie
said the child had fretted all night, but when Margo held her arms out to her, she whimpered and hung back. She wouldn’t go
to her at all.

She looked out at Jack and Nellie in the yard, silent now, isolated in the little square of brick. Their complacency
filled her with a kind of frenzy, the way they had of being content together, shielding each other from the outside world.
Out there, over the network of decayed alleyways and the stubby houses, the city had turned into Babel, the clubs and halls
filled with foreigners, the Free French and the Americans, the Dutch and the Poles, gliding cheek to cheek with Liverpool
girls to the music of the dance bands, while Jack and Nellie sat through their Saturday evening talking about funerals. No
wonder Rita had taken a leap in the dark.

She rose and went through to the scullery, standing on the back step, arms folded across her chest.

‘Young Rita’s courting,’ she said. ‘She’s been meeting him for weeks.’ And was rewarded by the turn of Nellie’s head, her
face shocked as if Margo had just broken something in the front room.

She was watching the boy running through the yellow grasses – a thin boy, bleached by the sun, all the music swelling up,
as he ran like a deer under the blue sky to the horse beneath the willow trees.

Ira kissed her. Kirby grips slid from her piled-up hair. The boy slowed to a walk and held his hand out; the horse quivered
against the green leaves, its coat chestnut-coloured in the sunlight.

The little brown bow slipped sideways from her hair and fell under the seat. He put his hand over her ear and all the sounds
became confused, receding beyond his spread fingers, the boy’s hoarse voice coaxing the animal, the music of the orchestra,
the rustling of their
clothes. Her neck ached with the effort of keeping her face turned to his.

When he let her go she touched her mouth curiously with the tips of her fingers. She felt her lips had swollen.

The mother of the boy stood on the verandah of the clapboard house, shielding her eyes from the sun. A dog ran among the scratching
hens, and she flapped her apron angrily. The dog grovelled on its belly, its tail sweeping the dust. The hens squawked, dipping
their beaks in search of the uncovered grains of corn. At the boundary fence a man in overalls was driving posts into the
ground. He raised his sunburnt face and called to the woman: ‘Ain’t no sign of him yet?’ and she shook her head. ‘Don’t you
fret, woman,’ he said. There was a close up of her face, the back of her hand rubbing at her rosy cheek, her eyes on the land
and the blue hills beyond the fields.