The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [19]
‘Good afternoon. Lovely day, isn’t it?’
The woman said it was a grand day but she only kept cigarettes for her regular customers. She wore a pink turban with some wax grapes pinned to left of centre, and drop earrings with purple clusters. Nellie’s eyes rounded in wonder. She put her fingers on the counter and explained that Marge was regular, always bought her ciggies here, but she was going to be late home and she’d come instead, ‘to fetch them for her’.
‘I’m sorry love, I don’t know you from Laurel and Hardy.’
‘She comes every night. She’s thin and she’s got a green coat and …’
But Nellie couldn’t really say what Marge looked like, couldn’t for the life of her describe her features. After all those years. Her eyes travelled the rows of glass jars half filled with sweets, such pretty colours, on shelves rising clear to the ceiling, among advertisements for tobacco, for chocolates, a naval man with sea spray on his cheeks, a dandy in an opera cloak smiling down at her with eyes like Rudolf Valentino. She stood in a circle of light, dazed by the flecks of white at the centre of his eyes and the dust-filled rays of the sun that shone through the topmost window of the shop.
‘She always has ten Abdullah. Every night.’
‘Sorry, luv. I told you.’
Nellie was deafened by her own heartbeats. She clutched the counter for support, unable to move. There was a jar of liquorice laces on the counter, coiled like snakes. Nellie wanted to pick up the jar and smash it in the woman’s face – there, where the edge of her dusty hair caught fire in the sun and the little grapes dangled.
‘I’m sorry, luv, but you see how I’m placed.’
Nellie saw her placed – painted like Carmen Miranda on a pantomime backcloth that bulged outwards and wavered as if a gust of wind swept the shop. Faint with anger, Nellie went out of the door and started for home. It was the third time in one month that she had made herself ill with ungovernable rage over a trivial incident.
They were sitting at the edge of the cornfield. Apart. He hadn’t held her hand or tried to kiss her. He squatted on his haunches above the ground damp from the rain and the narrow ditch that ran beside the field. She had asked him about books, and he said he didn’t read much, and when she mentioned poetry he had looked at her curiously, not commenting.
‘My Auntie Margo is a great reader.’
‘Is that so?’
‘She reads all sorts. I found a book once. She hid it in a drawer.’
‘She did?’
‘It was awful. You know, it was rude.’
‘What kind of rude?’ he asked, his eyes not quite so sleepy.
‘You know, men and women.’ She wished she hadn’t told him.
‘How come you know it was that kind of a book?’
‘Don’t be daft. You only had to read the first page. You must have seen books like that, you being in the army.’
‘I don’t have no call to read them kind of books,’ he said. ‘I seen pictures in magazines, but I ain’t read none of them books.’
She felt he was criticising her, blaming her alongside Auntie Margo.
‘I only read a bit of it,’ she said defensively. ‘I don’t know where she got it from.’
‘She didn’t look to me like a woman who would read them sort of books.’
‘Oh, she’s deep, is Auntie Margo. She was married once to a soldier, but he died from the gas in France.’
He swung his hands between his knees and gazed out across the flat countryside, following the ribbon of highway that wound like a river into the distance.
‘She was courting once when I was small, but she gave him up.’
‘Courting?’
‘She didn’t care enough, she didn’t fight for him.’
He wasn’t comfortable with her, she could tell. Every time she looked at him it hurt that she couldn’t finger his hair or touch his cheek. She wished he would put down the stick that he dug into the yellow earth, poking the soil, not paying her attention.
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘The sea’s over there.’
‘If you like.’
He moved carefully, trying not to dirty his beautifully polished shoes, treading the marshy path alongside a black ploughed field. When they came to a lane she held the strands of barbed wire wide for him so that he