The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [16]
They were leaving the town altogether now, the miles of docks that carried on into Bootle and beyond, winding inland away from the camouflaged depots and goods yards – not entirely countryside yet, but fields here and there separating the groups of houses; allotments growing vegetables; washing hanging on a line strung between two leafy trees. They went over a little hump-backed bridge and there were water lilies floating.
‘Oooh,’ she went, as the bus accelerated and dipped down sharply.
‘It’s not far now,’ she said, darting a glance at him, seeing his eyes closed as if he slept.
She hoped she had remembered the place rightly, had not mistaken its situation: a cornfield and ornamental gates guarding a big estate, a small lodge house with a cherry tree growing against the wall. Uncle Jack had shown it to her when she was a child, on the way to a farmer he knew, to slaughter pigs. And again at the beginning of the war, to a picnic at the side of the cornfield. ‘When the Germans come,’ he said, ‘which they will, mark my words, they’ll smash the house down, quick as a flash.’ ‘How?’ she asked, mouth open that such a thing could happen, looking in through the mullioned windows and seeing a potted geranium and a round stuffed hen with stippled breast and legs set wide apart. ‘Tanks,’ he had said darkly. ‘Armoured tanks, drive straight at the gate and through, and Bob’s your uncle.’ And she saw it all, the bricks giving and the stairway collapsing, one wall with a picture still hanging on a nail, and the hen with its stuffing coming out lying under the cherry tree.
When they came to Ince Blundell and the roundabout planted with pink and mauve flowers, she thought they were near. The bus swung round the curve of the road, hugging the pavement, nudging the branches of a tree that brushed its leaves the length of the windows.
‘Jesus,’ said Ira, waking in alarm, his eyes filled with a blur of green whipping across the glass.
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ she said, and could have bitten her tongue.
‘Are we there?’ he asked, yawning, and stretching his long arms above his head.
So eager was she not to miss the place that they left the bus a mile too soon, plodding along the main road lined with red-brick bungalows, the sun coming out, not strongly but shining all the same.
‘Look,’ she said ‘at the gardens.’
And he looked, though she couldn’t tell what he made of the neat hedges, the shrub roses, the crazy-paving spotted with small rock plants, white, blue and buttercup yellow. Isn’t it pretty, she thought; it’s so pretty. She remembered the back yard under soot in Bingley Road and the one lump of lupins coming up each year by the wash-house wall.
The road cut clear through the woods. They were forced to walk single-file because the path was so narrow. On the films she had seen women wandering down deserted country roads, dappled by sunshine, about to meet lovers or strangers, and they all swayed with a particular motion of the hips, as if they were bare under their clothes. She herself moved stiffly, she felt, like a nailed-up box. She had wanted to wear a thin summer dress under her mackintosh, but Auntie Nellie would have commented, and she hadn’t known when she dressed that she had intended to meet the American. She wasn’t clear in her mind whether it was fear on her part or a belief that he wouldn’t be there, at the bus terminal, as they had arranged. She wished it could be hot and dazzling in the heat – walking hand in hand through the green glade and a rush of words because they were so close. At the moment they were