The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [38]
She kissed Ira on the lips, standing on tiptoe and screwing her eyes up – out of gratitude and to show she wasn’t prudish.
‘You got my letter, then?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘That guy gave it to me.’
‘Don’t you know him, then? Isn’t he a friend of yours?’
‘I don’t reckon I know him that well,’ and he looked at her hair and away again and touched her throat with one finger and said, ‘You didn’t bury this one, then?’ and she said ‘No,’ and was glad for once it was not raining or the wind blowing a gale up the dusty street. He said he wanted to take her to the movies: there was a film in Technicolor about a boy and a horse called My Friend Flicka. She took his hand and after a moment withdrew her own and took off her glove, stuffing it into her pocket, so that she would feel the warm clasp of his fingers.
They had to queue up for the cinema on Lime Street, even though they weren’t going in the one-and-nines. She had never been treated to the pictures before by a boy, never gone in the back row among the courting couples. She was going to canoodle with him – she didn’t care if it was common. But she dreaded lest the usherette came and shone a torch on them.
He was so tall, so neat in his clothes, the black tie tucked into his shirt just like Hitler, the crisp edge to his collar; she thought how well her brown frock toned with his uniform. All the same, it was agony to be with him, shuffling nearer and nearer to the entrance of the cinema, trying to make conversation, trying not to ask him why he had failed to come last Saturday. The way he looked at the drunk woman weaving across the road through the traffic, the insolent gaze of his eyes, the pressure of his hand on her shoulder. Every time he spoke to her, colour flooded her cheeks. She wondered how anyone survived being in love, let alone got married – condemned to live for ever in this state of quivering uncertainty. She had never been so aware of herself; she didn’t know what to do with her hands, with her feet. There was grit in the corners of her eyes, in her nostrils, she could feel the lipstick caked at the corner of her mouth. How vulnerable she felt, how miserable and happy by turns. The pain of being with him was almost as dreadful as living life without him.
Seeing it was such a fine evening, Jack carried the kitchen chairs into the back yard for him and Nellie to sit on. Marge refused; she said it was mutton dressed as lamb to be sitting out there in all that concrete. They’d be asking next for a striped umbrella to sit under. She opened the kitchen window and sat at the table watching them, Nellie with her hands folded piously in her lap, Jack smoking his pipe full of tea leaves. The tilt of the yard as it sloped down to the back alley gave them a precarious look. Any moment, she thought, they might slide slowly and uncomplaining into the brick wall. She could hear fragments of their conversation.
‘… in a good way of doing.’
‘At the masonic dinner … well thought of …’
Murmuring together in the evening air and a lone Spitfire, high in the washed-out space of sky, banking in a wide circle before heading out to sea.
‘Ah well … comes to us all in the …’
‘God rest his soul.’
Margo shouted through the open window: ‘Did Rita say she was meeting Cissie Baines again?’
They both ignored her, placidly arranged in the back yard with little particles of soot floating down from next door’s chimney.