The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [35]
‘Sam, Sam,’ said Rita, ‘pick up thy musket,’ and she and Nellie broke into little trills of laughter, the room filling with the smell of melting dripping.
Jack’s shop was in Moss Street on the other side of the park. When he saw Nellie, his eyes widened with concern at her having made the journey.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ he scolded. ‘Bogle told you to take it easy.’
‘I wanted the exercise,’ she said. ‘I’m that busy on Rita’s new clothes I had to force meself out of the house. I was straining me back.’
He sat her in the little cubicle at the back of the shop, perched on the stool behind the cash register, while he served his customers. He wore an apron that Nellie had made him, over his suit, with his coat sleeves rolled up. His small hands were always red and chapped from continually being doused under the cold tap in the back – he couldn’t bear the contamination of the raw meat. He would have taken Nellie upstairs to rest, but he knew when his back was turned she would be washing his breakfast pots and tidying his bed.
‘Was that Ethel Morrisey?’ she called, when an old woman wearing carpet slippers had gone shuffling across the sawdust to the door.
‘That’s right.’
‘By gum, she’s aged.’
‘We all have,’ he said, dipping his head, in his Homburg hat, to avoid contact with the two rabbits hanging on a rail above the counter, bending over the marble slab industriously with a wet cloth in his hand.
Outside the window the errand boy balanced his bicycle against the kerbstone and came in whistling. He had red hair and a great bulging forehead over which his cap wouldn’t fit.
‘Hello, Tommy,’ Nellie called, smiling and nodding at him through the glass of the cubicle. ‘How’s your mother keeping?’
‘Me mam’s fine,’ he said, keeping his eyes down to his boots, hating to be noticed.
Jack told him to skin one of the rabbits, while he took Nellie upstairs and made her a cup of tea. He thought it would be nice to wrap one up for her and pop it in her shopping bag without her knowing. He had some difficulty bringing her down from the stool; she clutched at him as if she was drowning, leaving a pale dusting of talcum powder on the upper sleeve of his jacket.
She tried to shut her eyes to the state of the living room. She couldn’t expect a man to keep it decent, and she supposed he did his best. It made her a little sad, the disarray, the neglect, as if he was homeless, about to move on; there were some things still in boxes and never unwrapped. And he never would move on, not now. It was a funny way to end up – he was a bigoted man in his views, and his surroundings were such a contradiction. He couldn’t stand gipsies or Jews, or Catholics for that matter, and here he was in a pigsty. In his person he was very particular, though: his ears, his nails, the round collars he took himself to be washed and starched at the Chinese laundry over the road.
‘Whatever are you doing with that?’ she asked, looking in bewilderment at the wind-up gramophone removed from its place behind the door and set in the centre of the hearthrug.
‘I was thinking maybe our Rita could use it. You know, when she’s got friends in, now she’s of an age.’
It was just an idea he had. He didn’t think it would come to anything. He had never met any friends she might have had. Watching Nellie turning over the pile of heavy records, wrinkling her nose as he held one or two to the light to read the labels.
‘They’re a bit old,’ he said, ‘not very up to date.’
She was touched by his attempt to do something nice for Rita.
‘Does it still go?’ she wanted to know, wiping her hands together to free them of dust; and he told her it might, when he’d tinkered with it a bit – the spring seemed sound and that was the important part.
He made the tea and she sipped it, holding her cup with her little finger extended, as Mother had taught her. She told him about Valerie Mander’s imminent engagement, what Cyril Mander thought about it, when they were going to buy the ring, how they would have to celebrate. He nodded his head expressing interest, but