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By Root 593 0

She thought of Rita meeting her young man. She thought of Mr Aveyard and her old job at the dairy where he was the manager – sneaking out to meet him when Nellie was busy at her dressmaking, making excuses on a Sunday afternoon for not going with her and little Rita to feed the ducks in the park: the time Nellie had given her daffodils to put on Mother’s grave and she gave them to Mr Aveyard instead. He hadn’t known what to do with them, you could tell by his face. He held them upside down at the side of his trouser leg like a sunshade that was partially open. They’d pulled down the byre for the cows in Allsops Lane, and in a way it was a blessing. When they had made her give him up she’d had to leave her job at the dairy, and it was unsettling to hear the sound of the cows mooing in the early morning, waiting to be milked; it reminded her of him. He was getting tired of her long before Jack put the kybosh on things. He couldn’t stand the way she had to slip out behind Nellie’s back. He used to say, ‘Why, you’re a grown woman, Margo, what ails you?’ and he was so set in his ways, so careful about money – no go in him at all. There was a certain coldness about him, a detachment in his wary brown eyes. Jack said anyone who had survived the trenches in France was bound to be touched – they’d been to hell and back again. In the end she was grateful for Jack’s interference, though she would never give him the satisfaction of knowing. When she had run to Mr Aveyard in tears, telling him Jack had said she had to give him up, he had stood like a statue in the little office behind the dairy, as if he didn’t know that he should say, ‘Come to me, you stay by me, Margo.’

There was something very like alarm in his eyes. He never put his arms about her as she clung to him. ‘I’m not going back home,’ she cried. ‘I’m never going back there.’ ‘It’s a bit awkward, Marge,’ he said. ‘Our Nora’s coming next week with the children. You can’t stay with me.’ So she sat on Lime Street Station all night, telling the policeman she had missed her train to London, walking back to Bingley Road in the dawn, seeing Nellie asleep at the front window with Rita on her lap. Nellie said the child had fretted all night, but when Margo held her arms out to her, she whimpered and hung back. She wouldn’t go to her at all.

She looked out at Jack and Nellie in the yard, silent now, isolated in the little square of brick. Their complacency filled her with a kind of frenzy, the way they had of being content together, shielding each other from the outside world. Out there, over the network of decayed alleyways and the stubby houses, the city had turned into Babel, the clubs and halls filled with foreigners, the Free French and the Americans, the Dutch and the Poles, gliding cheek to cheek with Liverpool girls to the music of the dance bands, while Jack and Nellie sat through their Saturday evening talking about funerals. No wonder Rita had taken a leap in the dark.

She rose and went through to the scullery, standing on the back step, arms folded across her chest.

‘Young Rita’s courting,’ she said. ‘She’s been meeting him for weeks.’ And was rewarded by the turn of Nellie’s head, her face shocked as if Margo had just broken something in the front room.

She was watching the boy running through the yellow grasses – a thin boy, bleached by the sun, all the music swelling up, as he ran like a deer under the blue sky to the horse beneath the willow trees.

Ira kissed her. Kirby grips slid from her piled-up hair. The boy slowed to a walk and held his hand out; the horse quivered against the green leaves, its coat chestnut-coloured in the sunlight.

The little brown bow slipped sideways from her hair and fell under the seat. He put his hand over her ear and all the sounds became confused, receding beyond his spread fingers, the boy’s hoarse voice coaxing the animal, the music of the orchestra, the rustling of their clothes. Her neck ached with the effort of keeping her face turned to his.

When he let her go she touched her mouth curiously with the tips of her fingers.