The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [42]
‘All right then, Nellie,’ he said, awkwardly touching her shoulder; and she nodded her head at him, her face bleak.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ he told her, trying to make light of it, and she nodded again, her eyes mournful as if she had known bad weather all her life.
8
Uncle Jack came into the office at lunchtime to take her out for a sandwich.
‘But I’ve got my sandwiches,’ she said, ‘in my handbag.’
‘Never mind. Give them to one of the other girls.’
She went into the cloakroom to get her coat, upset at his arrival. Ira had promised to telephone her one day at work and she dreaded leaving the building lest he should call while she was gone. She didn’t know any of the girls well enough to offer them her sandwiches, so she left them on the ledge under the wall mirror.
‘Get in the lift,’ said Jack; but she refused, preferring to run down the five flights of stairs to the tiled entrance, watching the lift with its ornamental gates creaking and winding down the well of the building.
‘What’s all this, then?’ she asked, when they were walking to a public house that he knew.
‘I was in the town,’ he said, ‘on business. No harm is there?’
He wanted to get to know her better; he felt he had neglected her in the past. With her new awareness, she recognised the fact and resented him. He had left her alone too much – he hadn’t been a good father, or a good uncle. He’d just stuck to the edges like the frieze on the wallpaper.
‘I mustn’t be late back,’ she said, hearing the ring of the telephone in her head. Every step they walked took her further away from his voice.
‘Get on,’ he said. ‘You’ve a good hour.’
They cut across the bomb site beside the Corn Exchange. There was a crowd of people watching a man lying down in the dust, with a lump of rock balanced on his bare chest. He was quite old. He had a piece of string tied about the waist of his trousers. On his arm was tattooed the figure of a woman with a red mouth. His partner was carrying round a trilby hat, shaking it, asking for pennies before he began his act.
‘Go on, Uncle Jack,’ said Rita. ‘Give him some money.’
She was curious to see what the man intended to do. But Jack kept his hands out of his pockets.
‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ he said.
‘I want to watch.’
Stubbornly she pressed forward to take a closer look. The man put down his trilby hat and went towards a mallet lying in the rubble.
‘I intend,’ he shouted, making a great show of spitting into his palms, ‘to break that piece of rock before your very eyes.’
Grasping the handle of the mallet in his hands, he swung it in an arc above his head and brought it down. The man on the ground gave a low groan. He pointed his boots towards the sky and arched his back.
‘It’s a trick,’ said Jack. ‘It’s all me eye and Peggy Martin.’
‘Shhh,’ she said, watching the man’s clenched fists as he lay in the dirt.
The man with the mallet gritted his teeth and swung again. Down came the mallet head. The man beneath the rock shuddered. The boulder split into three pieces. The mouth of the tattooed lady opened as the man’s fist relaxed.
‘Come on,’ said Jack, not wanting the hat to be passed round again.
In shop doorways, in windows, Rita sought a glimpse of her reflection. She was constantly on the lookout for herself, to see if she was worthy of Ira. She had taken to wearing her hair brushed back to one side, showing an ear. It made her feel womanly to touch the fine strands of hair that freed themselves and swung across her cheek.
‘You might have combed your hair,’ Jack said. ‘You look as if you’ve come out of Scotland Road.’ She walked sullenly behind him into the Caernarvon Castle.
He kept looking about for people he might know, fellow butchers, men in the meat trade. He sat facing the doors with a look of expectancy in his eyes. It embarrassed her, the eagerness with which he watched each new arrival, the disappointment when he was not recognised. She drank