The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [29]
She was in the back of the Wolsely car, the green card table in position … they were driving down the long road of detached houses. Early evening … she looked through the glass at the gardens. The silver lamp post … the stretch of fencing … now the house. Windows closed to the air … the wire basket full of lobelia hanging from the roof of the porch. Inside were the people she cared for … never seen … they sat somewhere inside on high polished chairs. In the upstairs window a plaster girl patting the ears of a dog with a feathery tail … sweet peas cut from the garden in a bowl on the hall table … grandfather clock with the hands at eight o’clock … a statue in bronze of two men wrestling with an angel … a row of tins on the pantry shelf, salmon, soup, pears. A round window cut like a porthole in the front door … a little frilly skirt of curtain … they passed the house and drove into darkness.
She stirred in the bed, brought her arm up over her face. She was watching the sky roll down into place at the end of the road. The painted poplars straightened and stood still. The engine of the car ticked over … waiting … the red penny sun slid into view … she tapped the glass partition with a little stick … the car drove slowly towards the fence. The house deserted … the people gone away on holiday … the locks broken on the door … the garden gate swinging. Silver gone from the sideboard … knives ripped from the green baize box … decanters of cut glass torn from the back of the dark cupboard … the statue of the naked men toppled from its stand … jewellery missing from the upstairs room … the good diamond ring, the watch with the platinum bracelet, the glass beads from Venice. And a hat with a pin, speared like a roasting chicken on the banister rail in the hall.
She almost woke now, she tried, she fought to get out of the darkness, opening her mouth and beginning to whimper.
The car crawled to the edge of the kerb … slowed to a halt beyond the silver lamp post … out on the front lawn among the dahlias the pieces of furniture … the polished chairs … the grandfather clock … the wrestling men flashing fire from the sun … a body flung like a doll among the sweet williams … a man hanging over the fence with his head dripping blood … the people she knew … the loved ones …
She screamed, trying to get out of the bed, drowning in waves of sleep. A long moment of pressure, heart beating, the blood pounding in her ears, dizzy like a heat wave.
‘It’s all right, our Rita, it’s all right, Lamb, hush up, our Rita, it’s all right.’
She woke, trying to focus the dark cold bedroom, seeing the dull cylinders of Margo’s curlers touched by a rind of light at the window.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s not my fault.’
When Nellie had recovered, she made one or two adjustments to the front room. She moved upstairs to the boxroom the little rosewood table and the china figure of a rustic boy resting his chin on his hand. She would have liked to store the sideboard too, but she felt Marge would notice, and it was too heavy to shift without help. She wasn’t entirely sure in her mind why it was important to make such a change, to disturb articles of furniture that had taken up their allotted space in the best front room for so many years – whether it was to decrease their chance of decay or to test her reaction to the disappearance of familiar objects. Either way she felt that she had accomplished something. Apart from the truckle bed that had always been there, the boxroom, though small, could accommodate other pieces: the shelved mirror with the curved frame, the foot-stool embroidered in faded silks, the bamboo stand which displayed the aspidistra plant. She fully intended to remove all these items – gradually, so as not to cause comment, over a period of months. And to help Rita to find a nice young man and settle down she would make her a whole new wardrobe of clothes, dresses for the winter, a costume, a new coat with a fur collar. She had expected the child to be less than