The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [40]
The mother of the boy stood on the verandah of the clapboard house, shielding her eyes from the sun. A dog ran among the scratching hens, and she flapped her apron angrily. The dog grovelled on its belly, its tail sweeping the dust. The hens squawked, dipping their beaks in search of the uncovered grains of corn. At the boundary fence a man in overalls was driving posts into the ground. He raised his sunburnt face and called to the woman: ‘Ain’t no sign of him yet?’ and she shook her head. ‘Don’t you fret, woman,’ he said. There was a close up of her face, the back of her hand rubbing at her rosy cheek, her eyes on the land and the blue hills beyond the fields.
Ira gathered up the skirt of her dress; he was crumpling it into the palm of his hand like paper. She sat as if she was not aware of what he was doing. The whole cinema was filled with the noise of her rustling dress, drowning the music, the man’s voice as he called to the dog.
Ira slid his hand across the top of her stocking and touched her leg. She shivered with apprehension and shame, knowing all the people in the cinema were watching her, waiting for the lady with her torch to catch the glint of her suspender. There was a finger like a stick, poking at her, scratching her skin. She had to bite her lip to stop from pushing him away.
The blond boy was nuzzling his head against the belly of the horse, stroking its flanks slowly and reassuringly. He slid in his blue overalls over the neck of the animal, holding loosely the beautiful chestnut mane. Now the boy rode the horse towards the hills. Its tail streamed in the wind. The boy’s bleached hair blew back from his face and he smiled in the sunshine.
‘Stop it,’ whispered Rita. ‘Just you stop it.’ And she gripped the skin of his wrist between finger and thumb and gave a vicious little pinch.
He withdrew his hand and they sat without moving for a long time.
On the screen the boy was crying, standing at a five-barred gate with his knuckles clenched, tears rolling down his cheeks, wood smoke in the air behind him, Mom in her long dress and little tendrils of hair curling about her face.
Ira reached for her hand, clamped in her lap with the nails dug into her palm. He uncurled her fingers one by one, held them loosely in his own.
She watched the boy move with dejected shoulders towards the house – dragging his boots in the dust, passing his mother without looking at her, head hung low.
In her lap she could see Ira’s watch, luminous in the dark, feel his little finger move like a snail in the palm of her hand. Round and round. She thought of the girl at school who had told her what it meant; she knew what the signal for acceptance was; she had only to move her thumb back and forth across his. But she could not bring herself to do it. Maybe it meant something else in America, maybe she had misunderstood. She shivered. It was more disturbing to her, this minute sensation in her palm, than anything he had done before.
Face down on his cot the boy lay. His mother sat down on the patchwork counterpane and said: ‘Don’t fret, son. Reckon it’s no use.’
Ira was shifting in his seat, fiddling at his belt to get comfortable. He was lifting her hand in his and guiding it down somewhere in the dark; she felt the edge of a button, a fold of cloth, something cool like putty, adhesive under her touch. She tore free her hand and sat with pounding heart, watching a blur of land with sun shimmering on a field of corn.
When she got home Uncle Jack was still there – sitting on the edge of the sofa with his hat and coat on as if he had been waiting. Auntie Nellie sat on her chair with her knees bunched together. Margo came to stand in the doorway of the scullery with her flannel in her hand and her eyes red as if she had been crying.
‘I’ve told them,’ she said. ‘I had to, it was my duty.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Rita, and she meant it. She thought it was outside her control. She stood there waiting, with her hair hanging down and her face composed.
‘You’ve lost an earring,’ Nellie said.
‘I haven