She powdered her nose and went back to the two men. They had been talking about her.
Walter said: ‘I believe you’re courting. An American, too.’
She blushed, though she liked what he implied. She smiled at him and he wondered what he had done to please. She shook hands with him, told him it had been nice meeting him. Jack went with her to the door. Across the street there was an old woman in a black shawl selling flowers. He wished he could buy Rita some carnations.
‘I’m sorry I was nasty,’ she said, looking away from him.
‘That’s all right, chickie.’ But his voice was unsteady.
They stood for a time in silence. Jack cleared his throat and asked: ‘Is your Aunt Marge behaving herself lately?’
‘It’s Auntie Nellie you want to watch. She’s gone on a vinegar trip.’
His mouth opened in surprise. ‘What’s up, what’s she done?’
‘Auntie Margo says she’s selling the furniture.’
‘She’s what?’
‘There’s things gone from the front room.’
‘What things?’
‘I don’t know. Auntie Margo says a table’s gone and a bit of china.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
He slapped his thigh hard and a woman turned to look. He couldn’t credit it. Nellie would never part with Mother’s bits and pieces. Why, that front room was like the British Museum to Nellie.
‘There’s an explanation,’ he said. ‘She’s having you on.’
She had to go, it was past her dinner break. He kissed the edge of her hair and she brushed her mouth against the collar of his coat and ran across the street away from him – passing the flower-seller all in black, with her shawl wound about her body, and the silver earrings dangling from the pierced lobes of her ears.
Margo knew him as soon as she saw him. It wasn’t just fancy. She couldn’t claim really to know men – she wasn’t sophisticated like Valerie Mander. But as soon as she saw the boy’s eyes, blue and incurious, she knew what sort of a man he was. For he was a man, for all his lanky limbs and the smooth cheeks that he obviously didn’t shave. The way he entered the kitchen and saw them all standing there, devouring him with their eyes. It was as if he was on a hill-top, lazily watching a distant landscape. He was empty inside, he used no charm, he wasn’t out to please; he passed his hand over the pale stubble of his hair and sat where he was placed. Nothing touched him: unlike Marge he had been washed clean of apology and subterfuge – he was wholly himself. At no time while he was among them, answering their questions in his flat laconic way, did she receive the impression that he was stirred by any chord of memory – no longing for mum or dad, for home and country, the things he had left behind. She looked down at the blue tablecloth – not Nellie’s best, she hadn’t gone overboard – at the plates from the sideboard in the front room, each covered with a small portion of tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. The tomatoes Nellie had grown herself in a seed tray on the back wall – ripened them on the shelf in the hall, above the door. He took it all for granted, he would never be grateful. Suddenly she wanted to gather up the seed cake and the plums and milk and tell him to go away and never come back. Instead she listened to Jack, in his best suit, talking about the other war and all the brave young men gone in France.
He didn’t flicker a lid; he let his eye slide over Jack as if he was a reflection on the water. He ate his salad and his plums and spooned jam on to his bread. After a time his callousness excited her. She was wearing a plain brown skirt and a cream blouse – Nellie had told her not to overdo it. She leaned her elbow on the table, fingering the buttons at her throat. She wanted him to know that she saw through him, she wanted him to notice her. Jack said he must find it strange being in England after the bigness of America.
‘Don’t you find the British are insular, being an island race?’
And Margo said quickly: ‘Whatever does insular mean, Jack?’ because she knew Ira wasn’t educated; she could tell by the set of his face that he was untouched by schooling. Nellie always said that the church was an education in itself – the rhetoric, the vocabulary it gave the ordinary working men and women, the hymns with their warlike phrases that expressed so much: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, ‘Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might’. You could tell by his conversation just how lacking in scripture he was, how ungodly – there was no ring to his speech, no cadence. She felt sorry for Rita, fiddling with the remains of her meal, crushed under the weight of her infatuation for him. She was disappointed for herself; it would have been nice if he had been like Chuck, warm and bouncing, bringing whisky into the house and manliness, making life rosy, every day like Christmas.
‘Marge,’ said Nellie sharply, ‘help clear the salad dishes.’
In the scullery she was fierce with her. ‘Pull yourself together! What’s got into you?’
‘He’s no good,’ Marge said, slapping the best plates into the bowl with gaiety.
‘He’s a nice enough lad.’
‘Get off. He’s no good.’ And she rammed the tap of the cold water full on, drowning Nellie’s protests. Margo felt as if she had been drinking, she found his company so unsettling. She was tired to death of them all being so polite to each other.
‘Now, Ira,’ she said, when she had rinsed the plates and the bowls, ‘I’m sure Nellie and Jack are anxious to know how you live in America.’ And he smiled at her, slow and casual, lounging back on the settee with Rita huddled beside him, her face solemn with pride and ownership.
Nellie thought he was a nice boy: remote and shy perhaps, but that was better than him being brash as she had feared, flinging his weight about and playing the conqueror. Jack said they were invaders; they followed a long line beginning with the Vikings. Instead of the longboat they used the jeep: roaring about Liverpool as if they were the SS. But Ira wasn’t like that. It would be easy to steer Rita from him. He wasn’t a threat to mother’s furniture.
‘I believe your dad has a business in Washington,’ she said; and he said he reckoned he had. He wasn’t a show off. He didn’t elaborate. God knows how Marge knew, but she said his dad was in real estate.
‘That’s right, Mam, I guess he’s in real estate.’
He helped himself to another round of bread. Jack had always maintained that they fed their army like pigs for the market, but he was wrong. Ira seemed starved of homely food, the sort his mother might put on the table.
‘Have you any brothers and sisters, Ira?’
‘Two brothers and four sisters.’
Up came Rita’s head as if hearing it for the first time.
‘Are you Catholics?’ asked Jack, and Nellie waited with baited breath because she knew what Jack felt about Romans, but he said no, they weren’t anything special, and Jack relaxed and sat back on his chair fumbling for his tobacco.
‘My word,’ said Margo, ‘that’s quite a family.’
She had a certain yellowish pallor that irritated Nellie, a melancholy look in her eyes that gave her the air of a tragedy queen. She was always putting herself in the limelight. The young man never took his eyes off her. He kept his hands away from Rita. He never put his arm round her. Nellie had been at the Manders’ earlier in the week and seen the way Chuck behaved with Valerie. Valerie knew how to take care of herself, of course, but it was dreadful the way he couldn’t keep his hands off her – sitting on the sofa, imprisoning her in his arms, with everyone looking, and Mrs Mander smiling and looking through the pattern books as if it was something to shout about.
Jack wavered between hatred and pride – pride in his daughter that she had got herself a young man, and hatred of the blond stranger in his tell-tale uniform, a product of a race of mongrels, the blood of every nation in the world mingling in his veins – nothing aristocratic, nothing pure. It was astonishing he hadn’t a touch of the Jew or the black in him. And that drawl of his – bastard English, with its lazy vowels and understatement. Jack didn’t care for the way he looked at Marge – familia
r, as if they came from the same back yard. He was probably only pretending not to be the least bit interested in Rita, to throw them off the scent. He hated to to think what he was like when he was alone with her. He wished Rita’s mam could be here. She would know how to cope with it. He had a dim recollection of her determined sickly face, peppered with freckles, her sharp eyes that missed nothing, watching which way the wind blew.
Marge was telling one of her stories about her experiences in the factory.
‘—you wouldn’t believe what some of them get up to. In the explosives room behind the main building. It’s a regular thing—’
They all watched her, drained by her vitality, the tea finished with, all the bread used up and the jam in its bowl.
Rita wanted to be down town with him, kissing in the pictures. He was so far away from her, sitting on the sofa next to her, listening to Aunt Margo. She had been surprised how easy it had been getting him to come home for tea. He hadn’t telephoned – she lied, she said he had; she had fled to the station with her heart in her boots in case he should not be there under the clock. The trouble the family had gone to, the tins of food, the polishing of the front-door knocker, the pressing of clothes ready for his arrival. Fancy having all those brothers and sisters. She daydreamed they were married, going up soon to the little back bedroom together with everyone’s blessing – no raised eyebrows, or telling them to be back before dark. They wouldn’t go up to do anything dirty – just lie there under the eiderdown with Nigger stretched out across her feet. It wouldn’t be like it was now. They’d be more like friends. They’d like each other. She hated the way he watched Margo. As if she was something special.
They played cards after tea. He didn’t really get the hang of it; he said he’d never played rummy before.
‘You just collect one of three and two of three and one of four and so on,’ explained Rita.
But he held the cards in his hand as if he was blind. Jack thought it a point in his favour, he wasn’t the gambling type.
‘Let him keep the score,’ said Nellie, fetching pencil and paper.
But he was loath to do it. In the end Jack ruled lines and wrote their names upon the paper in his beautiful copperplate.
Valerie Mander came at nine o’clock, holding her white arm out above the table, fluttering her fingers to show off her engagement ring.
‘Oh, how lovely,’ cried the aunts, catching her hand and taking a closer look at the small white stones. Rita didn’t introduce her to Ira; she wished she hadn’t called. She looked so beautiful standing there in a blue costume with her long red nails and her ring that proved Chuck cared for her.
Chuck was going to buy them a fridge.
‘A what?’ said Nellie.
‘For food,’ explained Valerie, ‘to keep it fresh, like.’
‘What food?’ said Margo comically; and they all laughed, thinking of the meagre rations inside the coldness of the lovely new machine come all the way from America, sitting round the table, sharing her good fortune, as if it was normal to have a crowd in on a Saturday night – drinking tea, dropping cake crumbs on the carpet with a fine display of carelessness. The light began to fade from the room; the yellow drained out of the beige wallpaper. From next door’s yard came the grieved sounds of pigeons calling.
Rita was restless and unhappy again. She took the milk jug and pretended it needed refilling, going away from the voices and the clattering cups into the scullery, leaning her head against the back door. She could hear Marge’s voice, full of vivacity and nerve.
‘When we were guarding the Cunard Building he said he could never get on with his wife. If you ask me—’
As she ended the story her voice rose in raucous vulgarity: a storm of hilarity, little trills of noise from the women, a man tittering strangely – not Uncle Jack – like a sheep running across a field. With shock she realised it was Ira. She had never heard him laugh before. It wasn’t even a conversation, it was a monologue, the demanding tones of a giddy girl being the centre of attraction. And she wasn’t a girl any more. Auntie Margo was an old woman with hollow cheeks and little veins that bled under her skin.
Uncle Jack came into the scullery looking for matches. He wore a delighted grin; he was good-humoured with the jokes and the company. He saw Rita against the door, her head on the stained roller towel, her face turned to him with the eyes wounded, like some animal at bay.
‘Ah, chickie,’ he said softly, ‘come on, what’s wrong?’
He was distressed by the sight of her. It was easy to comfort her; she was like a little child again.
‘I’m not going back in there.’
‘Don’t be a silly girl. You don’t want to be upset by your Auntie Marge.’
The urgency of the situation made him sensitive. He did see in a flash what ailed her.
He unbolted the back door and took her out into the yard, mellow with the last rays of the sun. They might have been in the country, the soft clouds in the sky, the cooing of the pigeons. He put his arm about her shoulder, leading her up and down the slope of the yard. He surprised himself, pacing the slate squares with the lupin plant wilting at the wash-house wall.
‘You’ve got to take into account the fact that your Auntie Marge was a married woman. You’re a big girl now, you’re not a little lass – you know what I’m getting at—’
His fingers stroked her shoulders in the black dress with the white collar. ‘The little maid,’ Nellie had called her, but she did suit it. It gave a dignity, a simplicity that you couldn’t help noticing. A little collar like a cobweb – cream lace, and cuffs to match. She was like something in a picture frame, an echo of the past. He was moved by her suffering, he wanted to pass on experience. He hadn’t lived that long; he hadn’t been through much, beyond death, his wife, and the hell of the trenches.
‘What’s she going on at Ira for?’ wailed Rita, tired of his meanderings.
‘She’s not, our Rita,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’
He could see Nellie peeping at them through the lace curtains, her face puzzled, not knowing what he was doing, walking Rita up and down the yard.
‘He keeps looking at her.’
‘He doesn’t. Don’t be daft. Listen, your Auntie Marge is a remarkable woman.’ Till he said it, he didn’t know it himself.
‘She’s not like Nellie and me; she’s a different cross to bear. I can only surmise—’
It was a lovely word, he dwelt on it, turn about turn up the brick yard, till Rita said, ‘What do you mean?’ plaintive like those damn birds next door.
‘When she was little, she wasn’t like your Auntie Nellie and me. It was more difficult for her. She had a hell of a time. She never took what Mother said for gospel. If Mother told her to do anything she had to know why. Nellie and I used to think she was daft. She questioned everything. She made it difficult for herself. You’re like her, pet.’
And again with the utterance, he felt it to be true.
‘I’m not, I’m not,’ she said, shouting the words like someone demented.
God knows what the people next door thought. They’d probably seen the American arrive and thought the very worst. Rita in the family way and he trying to make sense of it.
‘You haven’t done nothing with him, have you?’ he asked, but she didn’t seem to hear.
‘Why am I like her?’
‘Well, she wouldn’t accept what was right and proper. I used to think she put it on, just to be awkward. But it’s real enough. Nellie understands her, you know. You mustn’t take any notice of their upsets. Marge has got more feeling than the rest of us.’
‘What feelings?’ she asked weakly, like a lamb left out in the snow.
‘She always thinks the best is yet to come. It isn’t. She never gives up.’
‘She does.’ Her voice was spiteful, but he continued: ‘She doesn’t mean to bewitch your Ira. It’s just her way.’ He stumbled over the phrase; he felt he was echoing what she already feared. Bewitched was suc
h a bold word: it had overtones. ‘When we were little she caught on quicker than the rest of us. I don’t want to burden you, but I could tell you things about when we were little that would curl your hair.’
‘What’s up, Jack? What’s going on?’ Nellie was at the back step.
‘Nothing, woman. We’re just chatting.’
She went away unconvinced. He knew she would be upset, leaving their guests that way.
‘What things?’ Rita was puzzled by him. The weight of his arm across her shoulders bore her down.
‘It was strict then. It was different those days. Spare the rod and spoil the child. I was beat on me bare flesh with a belt. Marge was beat regular. You don’t realise. I didn’t.’
He took in the window of the house alongside Nellie’s, the fall of a curtain as somebody hid from view. All along the street, the curtains tight drawn across the windows although it wasn’t yet dark – a row of boxes bursting with secrets.
‘But your Auntie Marge would never learn. She wouldn’t give in. She wanted to get married again, you know, when you were little.’
The Dressmaker Page 11
