The Dressmaker

by Beryl Bainbridge

  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.

  6

  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 tarpauli
n, 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.