The Dressmaker

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Sardines?’

  ‘Somebody hides and whoever finds them like, hides with them. You know – girls and boys.’ She winked a mascaraed eye. ‘Didn’t you ever play it?’

  ‘They got the last game wrong,’ said Margo crossly. ‘It was never Napoleon.’

  She resolutely put down her plate of ham and went into the hall. The trouble with the Manders’ house was that it pretended to be different from hers and Nellie’s. No landmarks anywhere. Everything old had been ripped out and replaced by something modern, unfamiliar. A recess lit by a lamp where the cupboard under the stairs would have been; a whole window of glass put in the hall at the side of the front door. To give more light, Mrs Mander said. Light was meant to be outside – that was the point of living inside. And anyway it was sheer foolishness, considering the bombing could start up again. There might even be doodlebugs, and they’d be sorry they hadn’t kept the bricks.

  On the bottom stair there was a couple courting.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I want to get up there.’

  They made themselves small, squeezing against the rail. The war had made everyone lax, openly immodest. It wasn’t only the Yanks. There were all the jokes she heard at work about the girls in the Land Army getting in the hay with the Italian prisoners of war, and ‘Up with the Lark’ and ‘To Bed with a Wren’.

  Upstairs the place was in darkness. She tried putting the light on in the front bedroom, but there were bodies everywhere – on the bed, on the floor – so she turned it off quick. But not before she had caught a glimpse of Valerie lying on her mother’s bed, dazed in Chuck’s military arms.

  ‘Valerie,’ she said loudly, ‘where’s our Rita?’ And Valerie replied in a funny strangled voice: ‘She’s hiding, Auntie Marge.’

  ‘Rita!’ called Margo, thoroughly alarmed.

  The back bedroom was empty. No breathing, no sounds. She put the light on. There was a small bed and a big wardrobe. She stood, not knowing what to do; it was not in her nature to make a scene in someone else’s house. Nellie would look under the bed and into the wardrobe, but this was Valerie’s room, private, full of her belongings and her secret jars of face cream. It was a shock to find the room so plainly furnished – oil cloth on the floor and a cheap little square of carpet bought at Birkenhead market. It was not as she expected. Where was the flam-boyancy, the style that showed in the clothes she wore? She opened the wardrobe and looked inside. There was Rita among the dresses and the pin-striped suits, staring out, not touching the young man with the long bony face.

  After a moment of surprise Rita said: ‘This is Ira. He’s an American.’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Margo, and Rita stepped out of the wardrobe and he followed.

  They walked ahead of her down the stairs, casually, not hurrying. In the kitchen she saw his face plainly: pale eyes, pale mouth, colourless hair. They were like brother and sister. Not at all threatening, no bulk to him, thin as a whippet, with big hands dangling and feet like an elephant. Rita was perfectly composed, sitting down at the table and sipping thoughtfully at a glass of dandelion and burdock. He said nothing, leaning against the wall as if he was sleepy, looking at the girl.

  ‘Do you want to go now, Auntie? Have you had enough?’

  ‘Well, I think we better. I haven’t brought the key …’

  ‘And Auntie Nellie will be waiting up,’ said Rita, finishing the sentence for her, thanking Mrs Mander very much for a lovely party, not looking at the young man, going out into the hall. Mrs Mander gave Marge a serviette full of ham for Nellie and a pickled onion – to placate her, though she didn’t say so.

  ‘Tarrah, Valerie!’ called Rita up the stairs. ‘Thank you very much for having me.’

  It was warm in the street, dark and sheltered. From two roads away the sound of a tram.

  ‘It’s not that late, then,’ said Margo wonderingly.

  ‘You look a fair sight,’ said Nellie, eyeing Margo’s washed-out face and the lipstick smeared at the corners of her mouth.

  Mrs Lyons’ costume, inside out and lined with grey taffeta, shimmered on the padded torso of the dressmaking dummy.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself, love?’ asked Jack, of Rita.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ And she was off upstairs to bed, not even bothering to wipe her face or clean her teeth.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Nellie. ‘Who was there?’

  ‘We played games,’ Margo told her.

  ‘Games?’

  ‘You know, party games. Hide and seek – and dancing—’

  ‘Hide and seek?’

  ‘Upstairs in the wardrobes.’ She fidgeted on her chair, aware that she had told a part but not the whole. ‘I’m tired, Nellie. I’ll tell you in the morning.’

  ‘You’ll tell us now,’ retorted Nellie firmly. ‘It seems to have been a rum do. What about the sing-song?’

  ‘They had none of the neighbours in,’ said Margo.

  ‘Who played the piano?’

  ‘We didn’t have a sing-song. There were just Yanks from the camp and friends of Valerie’s.’

  ‘Did Mrs Evans do “Bless This House”?’

  ‘I told you, none of the neighbours were asked.’ She tried hard to keep the irritation out of her voice. ‘Mrs Mander saved you some ham.’

  She reached in her handbag and brought out the serviette parcel.

  ‘Very nice of her, I’m sure,’ said Nellie, unwrapping it. ‘Jack and I had rubber egg and boiled tomatoes.’

  There was something troubling Margo, something she wanted to verbalise if she could only find the words. She wanted to get it out because it put her in a good light, made her seem responsible and right-thinking. But how to phrase it? She began: ‘I wonder if it’s normal for Rita to be so …’ and couldn’t go on.

  Nellie said sharply: ‘To be what?’

  Margo pondered. ‘So – quiet.’

  It wasn’t right. Jack looked at her without expression.

  ‘I mean, she doesn’t let on much, on the surface, how she’s feeling.’

  ‘Get away!’ said Nellie, remembering the afternoon Jack had told Marge to give up Mr Aveyard. They all remembered it, even Margo whose thoughts were confused. Jack had driven with Rita in the van to meet Marge coming out of work at Belmont Road Hospital. She was a long time, and like all men kept waiting he was in quite a paddy when she finally got into the car. Blurting it out with no finesse, telling her he and Nellie had decided she must give Mr Aveyard the push. Marge said she didn’t see why she should, and he said women of her age got foolish notions; and that made her weep. And the child, leaning her elbows on the front seats, stared at both their faces: Jack white because he was thwarted, and Marge with the tears dripping down her cheeks. At the lights on Priory Road she had leapt out of her seat and run headlong down the street. Jack had followed in the van, bellowing at her out of the window: ‘You daft baggage! Learn sense, woman!’ ‘I love him,’ screeched Marge, mad with rebellion. ‘I won’t give him up, I won’t!’ And an old woman wrapped in a black knitted shawl, with a baby’s hand like a brooch clawing at the front of her bosom, stopped and turned to look. Jack jumped out on to the pavement and caught up with Marge, struggled with her, tried to drag her back to the car. Twisting away from him, she ran like a girl down the side street, her hair coming out from under her hat and her heels flying. Jack thought he heard a baby crying as he passed the old woman all in black, but when he climbed into the car it was Rita. When they returned to Bingley Road, Nellie was angry with him. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, ‘not in front of the child, you shouldn’t have,’ taking the little girl in her arms and rocking her. ‘I want my Auntie Margo,’ wailed the child, running to the door and not tall enough to turn the latch. There was nothing for it but to sit in the best front room with the chair turned to the window, the lace curtains hitched up, so that she could see down the street. Waiting. Twice Nellie tried to carry the girl upstairs to bed, but she woke and broke out sobbing afresh, so they sat all night on the green plus
h chair. Now and then Nellie dozed and the little girl slipped on her lap and held her hand up to cover her cheek from the row of pins stuck in the bodice of her aunt’s dress – then the light coming in the sky, like war being declared or Mother dying, dramatic, till the bow-legged man came with his long pole and snuffed out the lamps in the street.

  ‘I just wondered. I’m not easy in my mind,’ said Margo, watching Nellie picking at the ham crushed in the paper napkin, strands of Silko adhering to her skirts, and Jack packing shreds of Kardomah tea into the bowl of his pipe.

  ‘How you can smoke that stuff beats me,’ said Nellie. She stood up, grasped the dressmaking dummy in her arms, as if she was tossing the caber, and staggered the few steps into the hall. Parting the brown chenille curtains under the stairs with her foot, she trundled the dummy safely into the darkness.

  4

  If I am seen, thought Rita, I shall deny it. I shall think of nothing but the house with the cherry trees in the garden and I won’t hear what they say. She looked out of the window of the bus and resisted the temptation to hide under the seat. Her companion, wearing a little mustard cap tilted over one eye, raised his long legs and rested them on the curved rail before the window. She tried not to be agitated by his lack of consideration. Auntie Nellie said only louts behaved in public as if they were in the privacy of their homes. She did notice he wore nice white socks.

  All the way on the tram from Priory Road she didn’t think she would meet him. What if Auntie Nellie had an accident and they phoned her at work to come home quick? She should have stayed in her seat till they reached the mouth of the Mersey Tunnel, but she found herself standing on the platform as the tram swayed past the Empire Theatre with a picture of George Formby pasted to the wall; and she jumped while the tram still moved, running on the pavement with her handbag clutched to her chest. It surprised her. She didn’t look up, because that way it was more of a dream, walking through the crowds hurrying in the opposite direction, with the stone lions crouching on St George’s plateau across the square and Johnny Walker high on the hoardings above the Seamen’s Hotel. When she was little, Uncle Jack had held her hand, in the dark, and said, ‘Look at his hat,’ and there he was, all lit up and moving, his hat coming off his head and his legs marching, and the great bottle of whisky emptying as the coloured lights mathematically reduced. It’s me, she thought, and it’s not me, scurrying along in her mackintosh, for it had rained without ceasing all summer.

  ‘It’s a helluva place,’ said Ira, looking at the scarred streets and the cobblestones worn smooth by the great cart-horses that thundered down the hill to the coal yards behind Lime Street Station.

  ‘The place we’re going to,’ said Rita, ‘is quite nice really. Not like America, but it’s nice.’

  She felt better once the bus was on the dock road going out of town, past the sugar refinery of Tate and Lyle, and the warehouses, a smell of damp grain coming through the open window and the glimpses beyond the bomb sites of ships in the river.

  ‘Uncle Jack,’ she told him, ‘says the slaves built the docks. On the wharves they’ve got posts with rings in where they chained them up.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it’s a helluva place.’

  Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned the slaves, he being American and used to coloured soldiers. She hadn’t the knack of conversation; all her life she had been used to being spoken to without the need to respond, of looking at faces without imagining she was being observed. It came hard to her, the business of being alone with him. She sat weighted in her seat, distressed by his silence, her neck aching with the effort of not turning to stare at him. She would have feasted her eyes on him if others had been present, the pale saddle of freckles on the bridge of his nose, the almost invisible line of his blond eyebrow, which she had registered on a previous occasion.

  They were leaving the town altogether now, the miles of docks that carried on into Bootle and beyond, winding inland away from the camouflaged depots and goods yards – not entirely countryside yet, but fields here and there separating the groups of houses; allotments growing vegetables; washing hanging on a line strung between two leafy trees. They went over a little hump-backed bridge and there were water lilies floating.

  ‘Oooh,’ she went, as the bus accelerated and dipped down sharply.

  ‘It’s not far now,’ she said, darting a glance at him, seeing his eyes closed as if he slept.

  She hoped she had remembered the place rightly, had not mistaken its situation: a cornfield and ornamental gates guarding a big estate, a small lodge house with a cherry tree growing against the wall. Uncle Jack had shown it to her when she was a child, on the way to a farmer he knew, to slaughter pigs. And again at the beginning of the war, to a picnic at the side of the cornfield. ‘When the Germans come,’ he said, ‘which they will, mark my words, they’ll smash the house down, quick as a flash.’ ‘How?’ she asked, mouth open that such a thing could happen, looking in through the mullioned windows and seeing a potted geranium and a round stuffed hen with stippled breast and legs set wide apart. ‘Tanks,’ he had said darkly. ‘Armoured tanks, drive straight at the gate and through, and Bob’s your uncle.’ And she saw it all, the bricks giving and the stairway collapsing, one wall with a picture still hanging on a nail, and the hen with its stuffing coming out lying under the cherry tree.

  When they came to Ince Blundell and the roundabout planted with pink and mauve flowers, she thought they were near. The bus swung round the curve of the road, hugging the pavement, nudging the branches of a tree that brushed its leaves the length of the windows.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Ira, waking in alarm, his eyes filled with a blur of green whipping across the glass.

  ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ she said, and could have bitten her tongue.

  ‘Are we there?’ he asked, yawning, and stretching his long arms above his head.

  So eager was she not to miss the place that they left the bus a mile too soon, plodding along the main road lined with red-brick bungalows, the sun coming out, not strongly but shining all the same.

  ‘Look,’ she said ‘at the gardens.’

  And he looked, though she couldn’t tell what he made of the neat hedges, the shrub roses, the crazy-paving spotted with small rock plants, white, blue and buttercup yellow. Isn’t it pretty, she thought; it’s so pretty. She remembered the back yard under soot in Bingley Road and the one lump of lupins coming up each year by the wash-house wall.

  The road cut clear through the woods. They were forced to walk single-file because the path was so narrow. On the films she had seen women wandering down deserted country roads, dappled by sunshine, about to meet lovers or strangers, and they all swayed with a particular motion of the hips, as if they were bare under their clothes. She herself moved stiffly, she felt, like a nailed-up box. She had wanted to wear a thin summer dress under her mackintosh, but Auntie Nellie would have commented, and she hadn’t known when she dressed that she had intended to meet the American. She wasn’t clear in her mind whether it was fear on her part or a belief that he wouldn’t be there, at the bus terminal, as they had arranged. She wished it could be hot and dazzling in the heat – walking hand in hand through the green glade and a rush of words because they were so close. At the moment they were strangers, the words waiting to be said, but soon it would be different, she was quite sure of that. She wished he could catch a fragrance from her hair or the folds of her sensible dress, that he would hold her hand as he had done so fleetingly in the wardrobe, that he would look at her searchingly; she was so anxious for the love story to begin. The gates were still there, set back from the road, the carved griffins on their stone posts beside the entrance, the lodge through the iron bars, windows encircled by ivy and a tree growing close to the wall. But when she ran to look through the gates into the house she couldn’t see into the room. In some way the lodge had retreated further into the trees.

  ‘There was a stuffed hen,’ she cried, ‘with a yellow beak.’

 
; ‘Hens,’ he said, ‘are cunning birds. Why, we had a hen at home that sat on a chair by the fire and never gave up. Not if you poured water over it.’

  ‘Have you got pets at your house, then?’

  ‘No, we have a dog and a goat and a mare, but we don’t have no pets.’

  She was mad for the way he said ‘dawg’, like he was a movie star, larger than life.

  ‘I had a rabbit called Timoshenko. I kept my nightie in it.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It was a bag with ears, for me nightie. Auntie Nellie made it me. When I got the measles she sent it to a children’s home in case it was infected.’

  He shook his head, either in sympathy or because he didn’t understand. He stood, scuffing his feet on the gravel, watching the cars as they drove past. After a moment he said, ‘What we going to do now – now that we’re here?’

  ‘Just walk,’ she said. ‘We can’t get in there, it’s private.’

  She tried to think where the cornfield grew, in which direction, beyond the woods or up the road. She didn’t want to go ahead of him lonely any more, so she ran across the road and scrambled down into the ditch, climbing up on to the far bank with her shoes soaked and her stockings splashed with mud.

  ‘It’s a helluva place to go,’ he said, looking at her across the ditch.

  He stayed on the path, separated from her, as she tore a trail through the puddles of water and patches of bramble. She was amazed at the amount and variety of plants that grew in the woods, quite apart from the trees – the quantity of thorn bush and briar that assailed her on every side. It only made her the more determined; she wasn’t put out.

  ‘There’s a cornfield,’ she cried, keeping up with him as he sauntered along the pavement with his hands in his pockets. ‘My dad took me when I was little for a picnic.’

  He stopped quite still to look at her.

  ‘Your dad?’

  It had slipped out, it wasn’t any part of them. She dragged her feet through the mud and wondered what Auntie Nellie would say about the state of her stockings. I fell off a tram, she thought, and a dog got at me. In spite of the worry, she began to laugh. It was daft to try and get away with it. She could see her aunt’s eyebrows slanting upwards like a Chinaman, bewildered: ‘You fell off a tram?’ Her eyebrows, grey like her hair, save at the tips which were tinged with brown, inscrutably raised in disbelief. ‘I was pushed from behind, Auntie Nellie, and then this spaniel worried me.’ Like in the English lessons at school, finding the most suitable word for the occurrence.