The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [21]
‘They sure do,’ he argued, looking at the windows empty of glass and the debris spilling on to the road.
‘I think people are daft. I’d rather live here than Anfield.’ And she ran into the nearest house, through the open doorway into a long hall that led into a back room overlooking the beach. ‘Come on,’ she shouted. ‘It’s nice in here.’
He followed her without enthusiasm, seeing the dog dirt on the floor and the human excrement and the soiled pieces of newspaper. Outside the window was a short garden with currant bushes and a broken wall tumbling down on to the sand.
Nellie had made her two sandwiches for her lunch and wrapped some biscuits. She took them out of her handbag and showed them to Ira. He held his hand out eagerly, but she put them away again, closing the clasp of her bag with a decisive little click.
‘Later,’ she said. ‘I never have my dinner till one o’clock.’
It was a way she had with her, sticking to routine. They found strawberries in the garden, huddled under grey-green leaves weighted by sand. These at least she didn’t own. She watched him as he strolled about the neglected garden, sitting on the faded square of lawn, and wished he would come near her. He leaned against the crumbling wall looking at the barbed-wire entanglements, rolling torn and rusted along the shore. In rows, the concrete bollards stood, planted to repel the landing craft.
‘You don’t talk much, do you?’ she said, stung by his indifference.
‘I guess I’m not much of a talker. Anyrate, I’m too hungry to think of words.’
She opened her handbag and took out the sandwiches and gave them to him. He lay down on his back full length upon the wall, tossing the paper wrapping on to the beach and holding the bread in both hands, his cap slipping sideways on to the grass. There was his ear, neat to his head and an inch of shaved scalp before his bleached hair began.
‘Your Auntie Margo make you these?’ he munched.
‘Never,’ she scoffed. ‘She wouldn’t give you the time of day.’
She felt uncomfortable being mean about Auntie Margo, and she could hardly credit that what she felt was jealousy.
‘Auntie Margo isn’t much good at shopping and stuff. Nellie does all that.’
‘Did you tell your auntie that you were meeting me?’
‘I didn’t like.’
‘Don’t they let you date?’
‘I don’t talk to them very much.’
He didn’t comment. He folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes.
After a while she opened her bag and took out her mother’s pearl beads and laid them on the grass. She looked round for something to dig in the soil, something sharp. In time, she found the jagged half of a slate fallen from the roof, and she knelt and scooped a hole in the sandy earth. When she was ready, she put the beads in the shallow depression and spooned the sand back into place. Finally, she threw the slate over the wall into the next garden and stamped the ground level with her shoes. She snapped a piece from the flowering currant bush growing by the wall and planted it on the spot where she had buried the necklace. Wiping her hand on her coat, she went and looked down at his face. His eyelids quivered.
‘You’re shamming,’ she said. ‘You’re never sleeping.’
There was a line of sweat beading his upper lip and the dull gleam of a tooth where his mouth lay slack. She shook him gently and felt his body tense so that he wouldn’t fall off the wall.
‘What were you putting in the earth?’
‘Secret. Mind your own business.’
He sat up then and shook her quite roughly by the shoulders, thrusting his narrow face at her. Suddenly he kissed her. So flat and hard her gums ached. She pulled away from his mouth and buried her face in his jacket to hide her wide smile of delight that it had happened at last. He swung her round and stood holding her by the hips, pushing himself against her. All her bones hurt and the top of her legs where the broken wall caught her. But it didn’t matter. Possession blazed up in her, consuming: someone belonged to her. After the war he would take her to the States, and they’d have a long black car