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By Root 594 0

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 plush 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