The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [27]
‘’Scuse me,’ she said politely, edging her way in and resting her handbag on the ledge.
Her head scarf was saturated with the rain. Underneath, her hair was limp, crushed to her skull as if oiled. There was a girl with a paper bag full of sand, one leg on the leather seating of the bench. She was rubbing the yellow grains into her skin trying to simulate stockings. The sand fell in a little heap to the floor. Rita wiped her face with a handkerchief and squeezed Crème Simone on to her nose and her cheeks. She had found the cream and a box of orange powder in Auntie Marge’s drawer, but there wasn’t a powder puff. Carefully she dipped the end of her hankie into the box and dabbed it on her face. When she was finished she didn’t know that she liked herself. If her hair would only dry it would give her a softer look, less exposed.
Ira wasn’t outside, under the clock, as they had arranged, but then it was raining and he was possibly near the taxi rank or by the barrier, or in the main hall, or the lavatory, combing his hair to look nice for her. She looked everywhere and stood outside the gentlemen’s convenience for almost ten minutes until a sailor came out, with his collar flapping upwards behind his head like a blue sail, and stared at her as if he knew her. He was small and quite old and she didn’t want Ira to see her with him – he might think she was man-crazy. She went back into the waiting room and sat down. There was a different batch of women, newly arrived off the Warrington train. They slumped dishevelled on the black-leather seating, smoking cigarettes, chewing gum. There was a woman that reminded her of Aunt Nellie: the droop to the mouth, the expression in her eyes beneath a tangle of wet black hair. She wore a bow of crumpled white satin, one end hanging forlornly over her plucked eyebrow. She never took her eyes off Rita, not even when children ran in screaming through the open doorway, banging sticks on the oil-cloth of the centre table. When they rolled on the floor, Rita could see the marks of insect bites, pin-points of scarlet clear up the thin legs to the gape of their torn knickers. She could smell the children: a mixture of damp old clothing and dirt, and something sickly like the stored grain in the warehouses; and she sat quite still with one hand curled into a fist as the lavatory lady ran in from the wash-room and ordered them out.
The woman with the bow in her hair made Rita feel uncomfortable. She imagined that it was written all over her face that she had found someone to love her, that she had Ira. She longed for him to come to the door and call her name and she would run to him and all the tired and mucky women on the benches would realise she was different from them. But he didn’t come, and after a while she walked out into the station, which was crowded now with soldiers and airman and shrieking women, for the trains ran to and fro between the American base outside Warrington and the army barracks at Freshfield and the aerodrome at Woodvale. The military police patrolled in pairs, swaggering in their white helmets, swinging their truncheons from their wrists on little bands of leather. She went down the steps past the taxi-rank under the arch of the station entrance into Stanley Street. For a time she stood in the doorway of the philately shop, sheltered from the rain, absorbed in a page of German stamps imprinted with Hitler’s head. But for him, she thought, she would never have met Ira, never been happy. Uncle Jack said he was a maniac, the monster of the world. She thought he looked rather neat and gentlemanly with his smart black tie and his hair slicked down over one eye. Now and then she popped her head out of the doorway and stared down the road at the station. She went lower down the street to the chemist’s, looking