The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [31]
‘Sure you don’t want some lace for a frilly cap and apron?’ said Nellie tartly. ‘Then we could get you a job in the Kardomah.’
But Rita insisted. Nellie bought four yards of black, five of grey with a stripe in it and a piece of pink velvet.
They had a cup of tea standing up at a stall and Rita wanted to buy a meat pie.
‘You won’t, Miss,’ said Nellie.
‘It’s me own money.’
‘No.’
Nellie had always impressed on both Rita and Marge that there were two things they must never do: never sit down on somebody else’s lav and never eat a shop-bought meat pie. The girl seemed to go into a sulk. On her face a look of suffering as if she had been mortally wounded. She stood there, her face shut to all approaches. Only her eyes were alive, watching the crowd of shoppers in the market square with a peculiar intensity, as if she was searching for someone.
Mrs Mander told Margo that things had grown very serious between Chuck and Valerie. There just might be an engagement announcement soon. It would mean a new dress for Valerie if Nellie was up to it. Something romantic, embroidered with sequins to catch the light. She found the ravaged interest of Margo’s expression disconcerting: she looked like a woman gutted by fire – she was wearing a dress of a slightly charred texture, several sizes too large for her, with panels of silver let into the bodice. There was a scorch mark at the shoulder and a diamante clasp at the hip. Her fatigued eyes glittered with excitement as she told Mrs Mander how thrilled she was for Valerie. In the fulfilment of the girl’s dreams she imagined that she herself moved one step nearer to happiness. Nellie would make the dress, she was sure – why, no one could stop her. She lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and went to fetch the pattern books from under the stairs so that they could begin at once their search for the ideal gown. Forgotten were the preparations for the evening meal, and Mrs Mander was too polite to say it was Nellie’s opinion she had come for, even though Marge was younger and could be said to be more modern in her outlook. There were certain indications of hysteria in Marge’s appearance, a lack of judgement: the cocktail dress in which she had answered the door, the fur coat she wore to work with white wedge-heeled shoes. There was the occasion, never to be forgotten, when the Dutch seaman billeted on them in the first year of the war had given her a length of cloth from the East and she had gone secretly behind Nellie’s back and had it made up into a sarong – wearing it at a Women’s Guild night, with a slit right up the leg and all her suspenders showing beneath the baggy edge of her green silk drawers.
‘Nellie’s gone to get material for Rita from Birkenhead market. She’s suddenly taken an interest in clothes,’ said Margo.
‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ said Mrs Mander. ‘Valerie says she’s started courting. She saw them down town last Saturday.’
Margo stared at her. Once her mouth moved perceptibly, as if she was about to say something, but no words came; she wet her dry lips with her tongue. Mrs Mander was busy studying a three-quarter-length dress with a little matching bolero.
‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘We could put sequins on the coatee.’ She looked up sharply and asked: ‘What do you think of him?’
‘Well, we hardly know him – she’s only been going out with him a short time.’ She prayed she was accurate, that Mrs Mander wouldn’t catch on.
‘Well, you spoke to him at our house.’
‘What did you make of him?’ asked Margo, stalling for time, trying to remember which young man in particular Rita had sat with. It could only be the fellow in the wardrobe, the long bony lad with the big feet. She felt enormous relief at being able to visualise him – that it wasn’t some unknown brutal stranger doing nasty things to Rita.
‘Valerie says her Chuck doesn’t know him very well. He came along that night because he’d been seeing to Chuck’s jeep.’
She implied, Margo felt, that he was in some way inferior to Chuck, less of a catch.
‘He’s a nice lad,’ said Margo. ‘Very polite.