The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [26]
‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t argued with Nellie,’ said Margo, when they were alone.
‘You’ve got a vicious tongue in your head, Marge. Mind you, she’s not the easiest of women to get on with. She’s a good woman, and they’re the worst.’
He sat dangling his small hands between his knees, sitting on Nellie’s chair beside the grate. Bogle had said there wasn’t much to worry about, it was only a little warning that she should take it easy. It would be best in future not to upset her, not to cause scenes likely to bring on an attack.
‘How long has she been moody?’ he asked Marge; and she replied more or less since the beginning of the week when she’d gone to a friend after work and not come straight home. Nellie said she’d get her ciggies for her, only she forgot; and when Marge spoke out of turn Nellie flew up in a paddy and had hardly uttered a civil word since.
‘Ah well,’ he said and turned on the wireless to relieve the gloom.
He made Nellie a cup of cocoa, but she didn’t want it, and he brought it downstairs and drank it himself. Though there was still daylight outside the window, inside the kitchen it had grown dark. The dimensions of the room were mean, depressing without the glow of a fire. All the good furniture had been removed into the front room – dining-room table, sideboard, the oak chair that father had sat in. Nellie had replaced them with cheap utility stuff bought at Lewis’s.
‘By heck,’ he said, ‘I’ll get the electric put in before another winter passes.’
‘She won’t like that,’ said Margo. ‘You know what she’s like about the house being shook up.’
Jack went and lit the oven in the scullery for warmth. Margo sat in her coat feeling sorry for herself; the sausage curls above her ears hung bedraggled from all her running about in the rain. Jack put the tea on the table but neither of them felt up to eating.
‘I’m that cold,’ he complained, standing up at the table, hugging himself with his arms.
About his brow was a red mark where the band of his hat had bitten too tight. If the calendar said it was summer, even if there was snow on the wash-house roof, Nellie wouldn’t light a fire. She said they needed the coal for the winter. In vain he told her that things were going to get better, now the Allies had landed in Europe. She’d read of people being extravagant and having to burn the furniture to stop themselves from freezing to death.
Some lady on the wireless was singing a song about ‘Tomorrow, When the World was Free’:
There’ll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see …
He joined in the chorus, but his voice broke with emotion and he cleared his throat several times to get over it. Margo was watching him with contemptuous eyes.
‘It’s something to do with the word,’ he said. ‘It always chokes me up.’
‘What word, you soft beggar?’
‘Blue.’ He emptied his nose vigorously into his handkerchief. ‘I remember a bit of poetry at St Emmanuel’s, something about the old blue faded flower of day.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, mocking him.
‘And there’s bluebird, bluebell—’
‘Blue-bottle,’ said Marge, and he had to laugh.
There was a great storm of applause on the wireless to greet the end of the song. They both glanced up at the ceiling, hoping Nellie wouldn’t think they were making a holy show of themselves.
When it was quite dark in the kitchen he went again up the stairs and whispered: ‘Nellie, Nellie, anything you want?’
She didn’t reply. He tiptoed to her bed and she was lying with her hand tucked under her cheek, her body tidy under the counterpane – beneath the bed, half peeping, her shoes with the laces spread.
There was a row of women standing in front of the long mirror in the ladies’ waiting room, spitting into little boxes and stabbing eye-black on their lashes. Uncle Jack said they came from all over England, hitch-hiking, making for the American army bases. He said they were mad for the money the Yanks threw about. ‘They’re wicked women,’ he said, spitting the words out through puritanical