The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [33]
‘People who had to be told what to do. There’s things happening now that nobody can tell you what to do about. You can’t act the same. That’s why our Nellie gets so bad-tempered – she knows it’s not the same.’
‘Where would you have been without our Nellie?’ he shouted, jumping to his feet.
The small blue indentures on either temple, marks of the forceps at his birth, darkened as blood suffused his face.
‘God knows,’ she cried, facing him in the unlovely room, ‘but I mightn’t have been all on me own.’
She trembled, filled with pity for herself and indignation that he thought so little of her. He was marching up and down the floor, twitching his head, struggling to contain his anger.
Margo was spent. She sat down at the table, blinking her eyes to stop the tears from falling. She wanted to say: Your Rita, our Rita is going out with a foreigner, meeting him at this moment, going into shop doorways with him. She wanted to reproach him for stopping her belonging to Mr Aveyard, for the chances he had made her miss in the past. It was all his fault – his and Nellie’s. All the rubbish he talked about wanting to go and live on a boat after the war, travel, see how the other half lived – his remembrance of poetry, his sentimentality. It was all me eye and Peggy Martin. He was bound, like Nellie, hand and foot to the old way of life. It mattered to him what the neighbours said, if he caused gossip, if he owed money, if he seemed too much to be alive. He hated to have to look inside himself – the wicked women standing on Lime Street, the immorality, the heart beating raw and exposed like the pigs he slaughtered.
‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I don’t need you blethering on, the way I feel.’
And he went. Tying his muffler about his neck in a paddy, squashing his worn Homburg hat on to his head.
‘Why d’you think we’re sitting here in the cold?’ she shouted, following him up the hall, ashamed she was driving him away. ‘All because Nellie won’t have a fire in summer! I’m sick of it. Don’t you blame me, Jack, if there’s trouble.’
Out he went, slamming the door behind him, leaving her exhausted in the hall.
Rita came back before Nellie – like a dog that had been whipped, her face asking for help.
‘Oh dear,’ said Margo, going through to put on the kettle. ‘You silly little twerp, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I want to die,’ said Rita, dropping her coat to the floor and gazing about the room as if she was demented. He hadn’t turned up at the station, he hadn’t come to the bus stop, he hadn’t said he would see her again. He walked away to the sound of the dance-band and she never saw him again.
‘What happened?’ asked Margo, wanting a full explanation before Nellie returned home full of talk about Valerie and her glowing secure future.
‘He said I was a drowned rat.’
‘Oh, he didn’t!’
‘He said: “Don’t you ever wear nothing pretty, no dresses with frills?”’
‘Oh, luv.’
‘He said I was pretty as a picture, pretty as a rose garden.’
‘Oh you are, little lamb, little pet, you are.’
‘He never – he said I was a drowned rat.’
There was a storm of weeping, Margo crying with her, recalling other words from other men, time after time, years ago. They clung to each other, voices resonant with grief.
‘When we were in the country, in the garden … he tried to – touch me. I pushed him away.’
‘What did he do to you?’
‘He tried to – well, he touched me – here.’ She indicated with her hand the small swell of her breast. ‘I pushed him away, Auntie.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Margo, rising to her feet, feeling old and responsible. She made tea and told Rita to wipe her eyes in case Nellie came back. Like something she had heard on the wireless, one of those educational talks late at night, she lectured her: ‘Now look here, our Rita,’ putting her heart into it, as if there was one more chance, the very last chance. ‘You got to be decent, you got to have respect, but if you love him you have to give.’
In her mind a picture of George Bickerton undoing the buttons of his jacket, the