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.
Ira gathered up the skirt of her dress; he was crumpling it into the palm of his hand like paper. She sat as if she was not aware of what he was doing. The whole cinema was filled with the noise of her rustling dress, drowning the music, the man’s voice as he called to the dog.
Ira slid his hand across the top of her stocking and touched her leg. She shivered with apprehension and shame, knowing all the people in the cinema were watching her, waiting for the lady with her torch to catch the glint of her suspender. There was a finger like a stick, poking at her, scratching her skin. She had to bite her lip to stop from pushing him away.
The blond boy was nuzzling his head against the belly of the horse, stroking its flanks slowly and reassuringly. He slid in his blue overalls over the neck of the animal, holding loosely the beautiful chestnut mane. Now the boy rode the horse towards the hills. Its tail streamed in the wind. The boy’s bleached hair blew back from his face and he smiled in the sunshine.
‘Stop it,’ whispered Rita. ‘Just you stop it.’ And she gripped the skin of his wrist between finger and thumb and gave a vicious little pinch.
He withdrew his hand and they sat without moving for a long time.
On the screen the boy was crying, standing at a five-barred gate with his knuckles clenched, tears rolling down his cheeks, wood smoke in the air behind him, Mom in her long dress and little tendrils of hair curling about her face.
Ira reached for her hand, clamped in her lap with the nails dug into her palm. He uncurled her fingers one by one, held them loosely in his own.
She watched the boy move with dejected shoulders towards the house – dragging his boots in the dust, passing his mother without looking at her, head hung low.
In her lap she could see Ira’s watch, luminous in the dark, feel his little finger move like a snail in the palm of her hand. Round and round. She thought of the girl at school who had told her what it meant; she knew what the signal for acceptance was; she had only to move her thumb back and forth across his. But she could not bring herself to do it. Maybe it meant something else in America, maybe she had misunderstood. She shivered. It was more disturbing to her, this minute sensation in her palm, than anything he had done before.
Face down on his cot the boy lay. His mother sat down on the patchwork counterpane and said: ‘Don’t fret, son. Reckon it’s no use.’
Ira was shifting in his seat, fiddling at his belt to get comfortable. He was lifting her hand in his and guiding it down somewhere in the dark; she felt the edge of a button, a fold of cloth, something cool like putty, adhesive under her touch. She tore free her hand and sat with pounding heart, watching a blur of land with sun shimmering on a field of corn.
When she got home Uncle Jack was still there – sitting on the edge of the sofa with his hat and coat on as if he had been waiting. Auntie Nellie sat on her chair with her knees bunched together. Margo came to stand in the doorway of the scullery with her flannel in her hand and her eyes red as if she had been crying.
‘I’ve told them,’ she said. ‘I had to, it was my duty.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Rita, and she meant it. She thought it was outside her control. She stood there waiting, with her hair hanging down and her face composed.
‘You’ve lost an earring,’ Nellie said.
‘I haven’t. It’s in me pocket.’ She drew out the gold button and laid it on the mantelpiece alongside a reel of grey cotton.
‘You shouldn’t have been so underhand. You should have told us.’
She kept silent, rustling in her mackintosh, looking at the remains of the tripe supper on the table, an inch of brown hem showing beneath her coat.
‘Why you had to pick a Yank beats me,’ said Jack. And Nellie interrupted fiercely: ‘Be quiet, Jack. No need for a song and dance.’
He tossed his head like Flicka, dilating his nostrils as if he was a thoroughbred and offended into the bargain.
‘We’ll have to meet him,’ Nellie said. ‘You’ll have to ask him here.’
Margo came out of the scullery, her face waxen from her wash. She went out into the hall without speaking and they could hear her footsteps going upstairs. The cat brushed against Rita’s ankles. She bent and picked it up in her arms, rubbing her cheek against its fur.
‘Don’t do that, Rita. You don’t know where it’s been.’ But she took no notice.
‘Sit down, chickie,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘We only want to do what’s right,’ and he patted the sofa for her to sit beside him.
She struggled past the table and sat next to him with Nigger on her knee.
‘I believe his father has a business in Washington,’ said Nellie. ‘What would it be exactly?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, head down to the beautiful warmth of the cat.
‘How old is he?’
She shrugged her shoulders and shut her ears to the questions. Jack said they’d brought her up decent, he was sure she was a good girl. He laid his hand briefly on her knee and patted it. She looked down at Margo’s shoes. She thought she was a good girl, but she didn’t know for how much longer. He hadn’t talked about marriage. He had never said he loved her. The shoes were a size too small. Her toe hurt.
‘Are you listening, Rita?’
‘Yes, Auntie.’
Uncle Jack reached out his hand; the cat shifted its paw. He patted her knee again, trying to make contact. And she remembered. She had slipped on a piece of soap in Auntie Nellie’s bathroom. When she was small. Taken her nail off under the door. Moaning in the big bed that her footie hurt. Auntie Nellie slept and Marge grumbled in her sleep. ‘Be quiet, Rita. The sandman will get you.’ She clambered out of the bed and stood on the cold lino, wandering up and down the landing, whimpering, screwing up her face in case the sandman should throw his dust in her eyes, until Jack, waking on the sofa in the room below, called: ‘What’s up? Who’s that?’ He bathed her foot and wrapped it in a hankie lumpy with Germolene, tucking her up on the sofa with him for comfort. She snuggled close to him and it was as if a spark had leapt from the fire and seared her skin – only it was something damp and cold, like a small animal, that plopped from the front of his combinations and touched her wrist. She recoiled in shock, lying wide-eyed in the dark, and he said, ‘Is it still paining, chickie?’ And she said it was, holding herself stiffly in case the thing lolling on the sheet should touch her again. She turned her head from the cat and watched his face as he talked to her, the eyes under the hooded lids, the beak of his nose overshadowed by the brim of his black hat, the even curve of his imitation teeth. He was attempting to explain, with Nellie’s help, what troubled them.
‘All that bothers your Aunt Nellie and me – I think I can speak for Auntie Nellie—’
‘All t
hat bothers us—’
‘—you don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for.’
‘I don’t want you led into temptation.’
She could only stare at him. She tried to make her expression docile; she tried to appear receptive.
‘We only want to do what’s best for you. You ask him round to the house and we’ll have a talk with him.’
‘What about?’ Rita asked.
‘Don’t play silly beggars,’ Nellie said. ‘We only want to be easy in our minds.’
‘You must see that,’ cried Jack. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘What’s up with Auntie Margo?’ said Rita.
‘Just as long as he’s decent,’ Jack said.
He rose to his feet and said he must be away to his bed. He couldn’t quite leave – there was something he hadn’t made plain. It was as if he hoped miraculously the words he needed would come to him. The habit of speech was lost to him, he could only talk platitudes.
‘All right then, Nellie,’ he said, awkwardly touching her shoulder; and she nodded her head at him, her face bleak.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ he told her, trying to make light of it, and she nodded again, her eyes mournful as if she had known bad weather all her life.
8
Uncle Jack came into the office at lunchtime to take her out for a sandwich.
‘But I’ve got my sandwiches,’ she said, ‘in my handbag.’
‘Never mind. Give them to one of the other girls.’
She went into the cloakroom to get her coat, upset at his arrival. Ira had promised to telephone her one day at work and she dreaded leaving the building lest he should call while she was gone. She didn’t know any of the girls well enough to offer them her sandwiches, so she left them on the ledge under the wall mirror.
‘Get in the lift,’ said Jack; but she refused, preferring to run down the five flights of stairs to the tiled entrance, watching the lift with its ornamental gates creaking and winding down the well of the building.
‘What’s all this, then?’ she asked, when they were walking to a public house that he knew.
‘I was in the town,’ he said, ‘on business. No harm is there?’
He wanted to get to know her better; he felt he had neglected her in the past. With her new awareness, she recognised the fact and resented him. He had left her alone too much – he hadn’t been a good father, or a good uncle. He’d just stuck to the edges like the frieze on the wallpaper.
‘I mustn’t be late back,’ she said, hearing the ring of the telephone in her head. Every step they walked took her further away from his voice.
‘Get on,’ he said. ‘You’ve a good hour.’
They cut across the bomb site beside the Corn Exchange. There was a crowd of people watching a man lying down in the dust, with a lump of rock balanced on his bare chest. He was quite old. He had a piece of string tied about the waist of his trousers. On his arm was tattooed the figure of a woman with a red mouth. His partner was carrying round a trilby hat, shaking it, asking for pennies before he began his act.
‘Go on, Uncle Jack,’ said Rita. ‘Give him some money.’
She was curious to see what the man intended to do. But Jack kept his hands out of his pockets.
‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ he said.
‘I want to watch.’
Stubbornly she pressed forward to take a closer look. The man put down his trilby hat and went towards a mallet lying in the rubble.
‘I intend,’ he shouted, making a great show of spitting into his palms, ‘to break that piece of rock before your very eyes.’
Grasping the handle of the mallet in his hands, he swung it in an arc above his head and brought it down. The man on the ground gave a low groan. He pointed his boots towards the sky and arched his back.
‘It’s a trick,’ said Jack. ‘It’s all me eye and Peggy Martin.’
‘Shhh,’ she said, watching the man’s clenched fists as he lay in the dirt.
The man with the mallet gritted his teeth and swung again. Down came the mallet head. The man beneath the rock shuddered. The boulder split into three pieces. The mouth of the tattooed lady opened as the man’s fist relaxed.
‘Come on,’ said Jack, not wanting the hat to be passed round again.
In shop doorways, in windows, Rita sought a glimpse of her reflection. She was constantly on the lookout for herself, to see if she was worthy of Ira. She had taken to wearing her hair brushed back to one side, showing an ear. It made her feel womanly to touch the fine strands of hair that freed themselves and swung across her cheek.
‘You might have combed your hair,’ Jack said. ‘You look as if you’ve come out of Scotland Road.’ She walked sullenly behind him into the Caernarvon Castle.
He kept looking about for people he might know, fellow butchers, men in the meat trade. He sat facing the doors with a look of expectancy in his eyes. It embarrassed her, the eagerness with which he watched each new arrival, the disappointment when he was not recognised. She drank her shandy and thought her nails were growing longer.
He asked her if she’d heard from her young man yet, and she quite bit his head off, snapping at him like Marge.
He tried to be patient. He told her he’d noticed the way she looked at the necklace Marge was wearing the night of Valerie Mander’s party.
‘What necklace?’
‘The pearl one your auntie was wearing.’
‘What of it?’
Disturbed by the truculent way the girl spoke to him, he managed to control his bad temper. God knows, he was only trying to be affectionate. She’d gone all sly, twisted inwards away from him, slouching there with her mouth sulky and her hair all over the place.
‘I just noticed the way you looked at it. I’ve got one or two pieces of your mam’s tucked away at home. I thought you might want them.’
She almost laughed, the way he put it. It sounded as if he’d cut her into squares and hidden her about the place. After all he was a butcher.
‘What pieces?’ she said.
‘There’s an engagement ring and a watch I gave her. A brooch – nothing valuable – but you’re getting to an age.’
‘I don’t want them.’
He couldn’t make her out. She had grown all flushed in the face, as if he had said something to annoy her.
‘I only thought it would be nice for you,’ he said.
‘Leave me alone.’ She was violent. ‘You’re always wanting to do what’s nice for me just lately – I didn’t notice you bothered much before.’
He was stunned. She was a different girl. He had nourished a viper in his bosom.
A man in a black overcoat, a newspaper under his arm, came into the saloon. He stopped when he saw Jack, bent to take a closer look, and put his arm about his shoulder like a brother.
‘Well, I never!’ he said. ‘It’s Jack!’
‘Walter!’ cried Jack, jumping to his feet, his whole face illuminated in welcome. ‘Walter Price!’
Rita thought it absurd the fuss he was making, the way he shook hands repeatedly, the way he murmured the man’s name, over and over as if they were sweet-hearts. Walter had a little moustache that had turned grey at the edges. He kept darting glances at her, not sure who she was.
‘It’s Rita,’ said Jack finally. ‘You remember young Rita, surely?’
Walter didn’t remember, Rita could tell, but he shook hands with her, unbuttoning his grubby leather gloves and holding her fingers tightly. Jack and he had an argument as to who should buy the first drink.
‘Let me, Jack.’
‘No, Walter, no, no, I insist.’
Off he went to the bar leaving Walter alone with Rita.
She wondered what she should do if Ira had telephoned while she was here. She didn’t know where to phone him back. She didn’t like to ask Valerie Mander – it would make her look as if she was doing all the running. Walter Price was telling her something, bending forward intently in his seat.
�
��Why, I remember. You’re Nellie’s girl!’
She looked at him coldly.
‘I last saw you when you were a little lass no bigger than that,’ and he held his hand out above the floor on a level with the table edge. She stared at the lino and the space between his spread fingers, gazing at an image of herself when small.
‘Just a little slip of a thing
‘I’m not Nellie’s girl,’ she said. ‘I’m Jack’s daughter.’
Walter had a lot to tell Jack about his business in Allerton. He’d expanded, done well for himself.
‘Three vans!’ said Jack. ‘My word, you have done well!’
At the back of his mind he was hearing what Rita had said to him about the past. It hurt him, it stuck like a thorn in his flesh, the memory of her words. As soon as Walter went to the bar to buy his round, he said: ‘I can’t make you out, Rita.’
‘What have I done now?’
‘What you said before. I’m very hurt.’ He drew in his mouth as if to stop his lips from trembling.
‘Oh yes,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘What do you know about anything?’ he hissed, hating the look on her face. ‘What do you know about my life ever since your mam passed on. D’you think I liked being on me own, giving up me house and me family?’
She gazed down at the floor, impressed by his show of emotion.
The presence of the girl inhibited Walter Price. And Jack was not himself. When he mentioned the old days in Allerton, he could swear the man’s eyes filled with tears. The girl sat watching them, holding her head disdainfully. After a time the conversation died away. Rita excused herself and went into the lav beyond the bar. She leaned her head against the tiled wall and prayed he hadn’t rung – rehearsed what she would say when he did: ‘Hello, Ira! Yes, luv, it’s me – by the way, Auntie Nellie wants you to come to tea – she wants a little talk—’
She was filled with despair; she knew he wouldn’t come. What would she tell them at home? It would make her seem despised, as if he wasn’t serious about her. He won’t come? Why ever not? Auntie Margo would give that laugh of hers, contemptuous, looking at her with pity. For all her chat about giving and the importance of not holding back, she would be the first to sneer, to lash out with her tongue: ‘Couldn’t you hold him then, Rita? Let him slip through your fingers, did you?’ He was telephoning now, the bell was going in the outer office and Alice Wentworth, the one with the big chests, was answering it, talking to Ira, bold as brass, saying no Rita wasn’t in, but would she do – making an arrangement to meet him, sitting in the pictures and not bothering to push his hand away. She started to cry, screwing up her eyes to make the tears flow. It eased her. She thought of Uncle Jack, all alone in the rooms above the butcher’s shop, wearing his funeral tie, giving his little girl away. She thought of the picnic by the cornfield, the way he bandaged her sore foot, the visit to the house in the woods. Before Ira, nothing hurt, nothing saddened to this extent. If there had been less space in her life before his coming, he would not have taken up so much room.
The Dressmaker Page 10
