The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [41]
‘You shouldn’t have been so underhand. You should have told us.’
She kept silent, rustling in her mackintosh, looking at the remains of the tripe supper on the table, an inch of brown hem showing beneath her coat.
‘Why you had to pick a Yank beats me,’ said Jack. And Nellie interrupted fiercely: ‘Be quiet, Jack. No need for a song and dance.’
He tossed his head like Flicka, dilating his nostrils as if he was a thoroughbred and offended into the bargain.
‘We’ll have to meet him,’ Nellie said. ‘You’ll have to ask him here.’
Margo came out of the scullery, her face waxen from her wash. She went out into the hall without speaking and they could hear her footsteps going upstairs. The cat brushed against Rita’s ankles. She bent and picked it up in her arms, rubbing her cheek against its fur.
‘Don’t do that, Rita. You don’t know where it’s been.’ But she took no notice.
‘Sit down, chickie,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘We only want to do what’s right,’ and he patted the sofa for her to sit beside him.
She struggled past the table and sat next to him with Nigger on her knee.
‘I believe his father has a business in Washington,’ said Nellie. ‘What would it be exactly?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, head down to the beautiful warmth of the cat.
‘How old is he?’
She shrugged her shoulders and shut her ears to the questions. Jack said they’d brought her up decent, he was sure she was a good girl. He laid his hand briefly on her knee and patted it. She looked down at Margo’s shoes. She thought she was a good girl, but she didn’t know for how much longer. He hadn’t talked about marriage. He had never said he loved her. The shoes were a size too small. Her toe hurt.
‘Are you listening, Rita?’
‘Yes, Auntie.’
Uncle Jack reached out his hand; the cat shifted its paw. He patted her knee again, trying to make contact. And she remembered. She had slipped on a piece of soap in Auntie Nellie’s bathroom. When she was small. Taken her nail off under the door. Moaning in the big bed that her footie hurt. Auntie Nellie slept and Marge grumbled in her sleep. ‘Be quiet, Rita. The sandman will get you.’ She clambered out of the bed and stood on the cold lino, wandering up and down the landing, whimpering, screwing up her face in case the sandman should throw his dust in her eyes, until Jack, waking on the sofa in the room below, called: ‘What’s up? Who’s that?’ He bathed her foot and wrapped it in a hankie lumpy with Germolene, tucking her up on the sofa with him for comfort. She snuggled close to him and it was as if a spark had leapt from the fire and seared her skin – only it was something damp and cold, like a small animal, that plopped from the front of his combinations and touched her wrist. She recoiled in shock, lying wide-eyed in the dark, and he said, ‘Is it still paining, chickie?’ And she said it was, holding herself stiffly in case the thing lolling on the sheet should touch her again. She turned her head from the cat and watched his face as he talked to her, the eyes under the hooded lids, the beak of his nose overshadowed by the brim of his black hat, the even curve of his imitation teeth. He was attempting to explain, with Nellie’s help, what troubled them.
‘All that bothers your Aunt Nellie and me – I think I can speak for Auntie Nellie—’
‘All that bothers us—’
‘—you don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for.’
‘I don’t want you led into temptation.’
She could only stare at him. She tried to make her expression docile; she tried to appear receptive.
‘We only want to do what’s best for you. You ask him round to the house and we’ll have a talk with him.’
‘What about?’ Rita asked.
‘Don’t play silly beggars,’ Nellie said. ‘We only want to be easy in our minds.’
‘You must see that,’ cried Jack. ‘You do, don’t you?’
‘What’s up with Auntie Margo?’ said Rita.
‘Just as long as he’s decent,’ Jack said.
He rose to his feet and said he must be away to his bed. He couldn’t quite leave – there was something he hadn’t made plain.