‘What you say?’ he asked, flushed in the face.
‘What’s your work when you’re not a soldier?’
He was clutching her hair in two bunches on either side of her head, tilting her neck. Her mouth opened like a fish.
‘You’re hurting me.’
He let go at once, taking a step backwards, and she followed him blindly, nestling up to him, content to be on a level with his chest, her arms rather awkwardly about him, her head full of dreams.
‘What job do you do when you’re not in the army?’
‘I ain’t got no job. Leastways, nothing settled.’
He was bringing his arm up against her chest as if to push her away but his fingers were feeling the fabric of her dress.
‘Leave off!’ she cried, shocked, butting him with her head so that he stumbled and almost fell.
‘You shouldn’t do things like that. It’s rude doing that.’
Already she was wishing he was different, more to her liking – more chatty, ask her things, tell her about the future, kiss her gently on the lips and not act rude.
He sat down on the wall, defeated, and scratched his head. She felt scorn for him because he didn’t know how to behave. And yet she did love him. She went clumsily and put her arms about his neck, pushing his head down against the throat of her dress, stroking the skin behind his ear as if he was the cat.
‘I like kissing,’ she said primly, ‘but I don’t want to do anything rude.’
‘I can’t make you out,’ he said. ‘I don’t see what I done that was rude.’
The tide was coming in, the sea invading the beach, trickling through the line of concrete defences. She patted his back, as if he was a child that had fallen over.
‘I don’t think it was very awful,’ she said, helplessly. But he laced his arms slackly about her waist and did not attempt to kiss her again.
They walked to the nearest railway station to catch a train to the town. There was a public house near the ticket office and he wanted to see if he could get a drink, but she said her Auntie Nellie wouldn’t like it. She hung on his arm and chattered all the time, filled with confidence, sitting on the upholstered railway seat with her torn stockings and her muddy shoes stretched out for all to see. She covered his hand with both her own, like a little dry animal she was keeping from running away.
5
Jack came to take them for a run in the car. ‘One of these days,’ warned Nellie darkly and left the room to fetch her coat.
‘Don’t you want a run out?’ he asked when she returned, but she drew in her narrow lips and kept silent.
‘I’m allowed a certain amount of petrol,’ he said mildly.
‘It’s not right, Jack, and you know it, buying black-market stuff.’
‘Good God, woman!’ he exploded. ‘Anyone would think I was the Gauleiter of Anfield, plundering the poor.’ He felt quite nettled and put out.
‘Take no notice,’ said Margo, and told Rita to get her things on.
Nellie sat on the front seat beside him and he wound a rug about her knees. It was raining and the streets were gloomy; he didn’t know where to go.
‘Do you fancy anywhere special?’ he asked Nellie, driving down Breck Road towards the cemetery and turning into Prescott Avenue. He would have suggested a cup of tea at Winifred’s Cottage on the East Lanes road, but it was a fair run and he didn’t want another scene over his petrol ration.
‘I want to go to the Cathedral,’ said Rita, tapping his shoulder.
She was wearing some kind of scent, sweet and powerful.
‘My word, someone smells nice. Doesn’t she smell nice, Auntie Nellie?’
But Nellie only nodded her head with an air of martydom, and Marge remarked grimly from the back seat: ‘You’ll not get a word out of her, She’s been like Sarah Bernhardt all week.’
He thought maybe that Nellie had been overdoing it, that she needed a holiday. When she put her hat on, he had noticed the pallor of her face and a little blue vein standing out on her forehead. But where could the girls go for a holiday, that was the problem. Most of the seaside boarding houses had been requisitioned, and he doubted if Marge could get off work.
‘Nellie, what was that place we went to in Shropshire before the war?’
Rita said: ‘I don’t want to be late back, Uncle Jack. I’m going out later.’
‘What place?’ asked Nellie.
‘It had a bowling green. When they put a net up it was a tennis court. You remember.’
‘Herbert Arms Hotel,’ said Margo. ‘Where are you going, Rita?’
‘Just out.’
‘That’s right, Marge, the Herbert Arms. Everybody round a big table for meals and there was a yard with a stable.’ He hardly saw the familiar streets for the picture in his mind of a grey church and an old car parked near a bridge. They had jam for tea in little bowls, all different kinds – strawberry and plum and blackcurrant jelly.
‘It was a cow shed,’ said Marge, ‘with cows, and a great big hill of muck outside the back door.’
‘Trust you to remember that,’ said Nellie.
‘Get off!’ Jack said. ‘It was a proper midden, scientific. There was no smell. They put it on the fields.’
They were driving up Princes Road towards the park, overtaking a solitary tram. The tall trees in the centre of the boulevard were heavy with rain. They swayed and dripped, turning the interior of the van into a green box full of shadows.
Marge was laughing in the back of the car. Jack looked in the mirror and saw her wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.
‘What’s up with you, Marge?’
‘I just thought of that chappie from the Wirral with the short pants.’
‘The what?’
‘With the bike.’
‘It was a tandem,’ said Nellie, and her lips curved upwards at the corner and she let out a little abrupt snigger.
‘By heck,’ said Jack delightedly, ‘I’d forgotten him. With red hair—’
‘And his mam rubbed his legs with goose fat to keep them ready for his bike—’
They were all laughing now, thinking of Marge going off on the tandem with him in little short white socks and a pair of tennis pumps. It was funny, Jack thought, how Marge always attracted the men, even if they were silly beggars. She always had, even when she was getting past her prime. And he darted a quick look into the mirror and saw her there, with tears running down her face and her two cheeks flushed with rouge and her body the same thickness from shoulder to thigh.
They went downhill towards the river. Passing the old black houses built by the shipping owners, four-storeys high with pillars at the front door and steps of granite – occupied now by riff-raff: washing hung sodden on the wrought-iron balconies, a pram with three wheels in the gutter, a running herd of children without shoes. Some of the railings had been taken away to be melted down for the war-effort and there was wire meshing to stop people breaking their necks in the blackout. There was the new Cathedral rising like an ocean liner out of the sunken graveyard, tethered to its dry dock by giant cranes, coloured all over a soft and rusty pink. Rita wouldn’t let him take her round to the front entrance. They parked on Hope Street and watched her push her way through a portion of broken fencing into the cemetery.
‘Why can’t she use the proper gate?’ asked Margo.
‘I wouldn’t mind going for a walk down there myself,’ Jack said, and he looked sideways at Nellie. ‘Do you feel like a blow?’
‘It’s drizzling. Let the child be on her own. It’s natural. She doesn’t want you lumbering about after her.’
‘Would you like a holiday?’ he asked after a while. He opened the window to let out the smoke from Marge’s cigarette. She looked at him astonished. ‘You’ve been looking peaky lately,’ he said.
‘How can I go on a holiday with young Rita to look after?’
‘Well, there’s Marge—’
She withered him with a glance. ‘I wouldn’t leave the cat with our Mar
ge,’ she said.
‘By heck, I’d take a damn sight more care of her than you do.’
There was a silence while the storm gathered.
Jack looked out of the window and saw the small figure moving along the path that wound round the walls, descending lower into the well of the cemetery. She stopped to pull leaves from a bush. On the sky-line floated one small barrage balloon, idiotic, like something a kiddie had drawn with a blue crayon.
‘That would be a fat lot of good,’ he said, half to himself. Marge was going on and on in that way she had, stumbling over her words. She had a good voice, throaty – not like Nellie’s, strained and shrill. Whatever Nellie said came out like a criticism because of the lack of tone.
Marge said: ‘She said she was going out tonight. You never asked her where.’
‘I know where, that’s why.’
‘Well, where is she going?’
‘She’s going to the moving pictures with Cissie Baines,’ Nellie said grudgingly.
‘Well, she might say that, but you can’t be sure.’
‘Get away with you!’ Nellie said, twisting round in her seat to look at Marge. ‘D’you know what, Miss? I think you’re jealous, you’re blooming jealous.’
Jack tried to keep out of it. In a way it was easy, for he had heard all of it before, not the same subject, but the bitterness lying beneath the words. Nobody could keep young Rita chained up. If she said she was going out with Cissie Baines, he supposed she was. Marge wanted to know if it was Cissie Baines she had gone out with earlier in the week and come home with her stockings in a mess and her shoes all muddy. Jack wondered if the parents of Cissie were arguing about Rita at this moment.
‘We don’t even know who Cissie Baines is,’ cried Margo. ‘We’ve never set eyes on her. We don’t know where she lives or if she’s rough or anything.’
He could see Rita leaping about the path far below. She wore a mackintosh and a spotted scarf wound round her head. Beyond the river he thought he could make out the distant blue swell of the Cheshire hills. The voices went on around him, Marge attacking, Nellie defending. Sooner or later Marge would go too far and Nellie would take umbrage and they’d have a silent drive back and a silent tea of cold meat that he’d brought and half a tomato each. The thought of the little bowls of jam on the white cloth years ago nagged him.
‘D’you remember the plum jam,’ he said unwisely, ‘and the crab-apple jelly?’ His face was illuminated, his eyes round with longing under the shabby Homburg hat.
‘If I told you,’ said Margo, rounding on him in fury, ‘that your Rita was nicking things, I don’t suppose you’d take a blind bit of notice.’
‘Steady on!’ he said, sobered. ‘What d’you mean, Marge?’ He looked at Nellie for an explanation.
‘Take no notice. She’s touched.’
‘No, no, steady on.’ He was insistent. ‘What she mean by that?’
‘She’s lost that necklace and some book she had in a drawer.’
‘What necklace?’
‘That necklace I put on to go to Valerie Mander’s the other night. It’s gone,’ said Margo dramatically.
‘The state you came home in that night it’s a wonder you brought your clothes home, never mind a string of beads,’ snapped Nellie.
‘You grudge my going out, you do. You’d like me locked indoors pedalling away on a sewing machine and me mouth jammed full of pins. You’d like to keep me down—’
‘Keep you down!’ Nellie gave a little sarcastic laugh. ‘Who blacked the grate every morning of their life and who left me to nurse Mother and Uncle Wilf?’
‘You wouldn’t let me see him,’ wailed Margo, her eyes glittering, remembering George Bickerton dying upstairs.
Jack was trying to fathom what it had to do with Rita. They goaded each other with memories of the past and confused him with their bickering.
‘You stopped me going to the keep-fit classes,’ cried Margo.
‘I never—’
‘You rang up the fire-post behind me back and told them I was too poorly to fire-watch any more—’
They were spitting at each other like cats, arching their necks and clawing at the leather seating of the car.
Below in the cemetery Rita meandered between laurel and dusty rhododendron and frail spires of mountain ash.
‘By God!’ began Nellie, and he turned to look at her and watched her eyes open very wide as if she saw something outside on the road that surprised her. Above the little white muffler tucked about her neck her lips were turning a delicate shade of violet.
‘Hey-up, Nellie!’ he cried in alarm, as she slid downwards in her seat and fluttered her eyes. He couldn’t think what to do at first. Marge said it was sheer bad temper that made her go off in a faint. ‘Shut your gob!’ he shouted, out of his mind with fright, because he knew it was her heart.
He got out of the car and half laid her across the two front seats, taking his coat off and bundling it under her head. Something about her thick little ankles and the sensible shoes like boots he had worn as a boy caught in his throat. He tried to call Rita to come quickly, but the wind pulled his voice and she didn’t look round. He looked for a house so that he could get help, but there was only a row of half-demolished buildings on the far side of the road and he didn’t like to leave Nellie alone with Marge, who was crying now.
‘It’s your heart,’ he muttered, kneeling on the running board of the van and patting Nellie’s gloved hand so that she would know he was near.
‘Go and get Rita,’ he ordered Marge, wanting to get the sick woman home and in her bed.
After a moment Nellie opened her eyes and he told her to lie still. He looked back and he could see Marge running along the edge of the fencing, waving her arms and shouting, ‘Rita!’ A small girl came with great patches of hair missing from her head and stared into the van without expression.
‘It’s your heart,’ he told Nellie, over and over, for he wanted to reassure her that it wasn’t a road accident or a nightmare or something she couldn’t understand.
He gritted his teeth and prayed for Rita to hurry up. Marge was still swooping up and down the fence, like some gull crying in the wind. Nellie was conscious now, a little more composed. Struggling to sit up, she tried to ram her hat more securely on to her head.
‘Look at your good coat,’ she said weakly, and he flapped it straight and put it over her and the rug on top of that.
Rita and he put her to bed when they got home, taking her out of her tight dress and leaving her in her slip and her corsets. Marge went up the road to the Manders’ to use their telephone to send for Dr Bogle. To Rita, the house was exciting, full of whisperings and sudden knocks at the door.
‘She does too much,’ said Jack for the umpteenth time, striding back and forth with his hat still on his head, waiting for Dr Bogle to finish his examination.
Nellie was quiet enough when Dr Bogle had gone. She liked him: he was her generation, he never asked too many questions. He told her she should lie up for a day or two and not fret about the house.
‘After all,’ he said without malice, ‘it’ll still be here after you’re gone.’
He went downstairs to talk to Jack and left her moping in the chill little bedroom with the rain sliding down the window. She decided she would do as she was told, stay in her bed for a day or two and Marge could take time off work and keep house and make her a cup of tea when required. She needed time to think what she was going to do about the future. Marge had been right when she had cried out to Jack in the van that it was bad temper had made her turn dizzy. It had come on when Marge had accused her of stopping her from attending the keep-fit classes. It was a lie, and the anger she felt at Marge twisting the facts to suit herself had risen in her like bile, choking her. She would have to find some way of detaching herself from such irritations, until she had worked out what to do with the furniture. Rita would have to find a young man and settle down. Jack could find them a house somewhere, nothing fancy, and
the sideboard and the sofa and chairs and the bone china could be moved there, into the best front room, away from Marge and her slatternly ways. For the moment she would suggest as quietly as possible that Marge keep her underwear clean until she was up and about again, and pray to God that she wouldn’t be run over by a tram before she herself was fit to do the washing.
Margo was very chastened, the fire gone out of her. She didn’t even say much when Rita said she was off out if nobody needed her. Jack gave her a ten-shilling note and told her to be a good girl.
‘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.’
The Dressmaker Page 6
