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By Root 589 0

apology and subterfuge – he was wholly himself. At no time while he was among them, answering their questions in his flat laconic way, did she receive the impression that he was stirred by any chord of memory – no longing for mum or dad, for home and country, the things he had left behind. She looked down at the blue tablecloth – not Nellie’s best, she hadn’t gone overboard – at the plates from the sideboard in the front room, each covered with a small portion of tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. The tomatoes Nellie had grown herself in a seed tray on the back wall – ripened them on the shelf in the hall, above the door. He took it all for granted, he would never be grateful. Suddenly she wanted to gather up the seed cake and the plums and milk and tell him to go away and never come back. Instead she listened to Jack, in his best suit, talking about the other war and all the brave young men gone in France.

He didn’t flicker a lid; he let his eye slide over Jack as if he was a reflection on the water. He ate his salad and his plums and spooned jam on to his bread. After a time his callousness excited her. She was wearing a plain brown skirt and a cream blouse – Nellie had told her not to overdo it. She leaned her elbow on the table, fingering the buttons at her throat. She wanted him to know that she saw through him, she wanted him to notice her. Jack said he must find it strange being in England after the bigness of America.

‘Don’t you find the British are insular, being an island race?’

And Margo said quickly: ‘Whatever does insular mean, Jack?’ because she knew Ira wasn’t educated; she could tell by the set of his face that he was untouched by schooling. Nellie always said that the church was an education in itself – the rhetoric, the vocabulary it gave the ordinary working men and women, the hymns with their warlike phrases that expressed so much: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, ‘Fight the Good Fight with All Thy Might’. You could tell by his conversation just how lacking in scripture he was, how ungodly – there was no ring to his speech, no cadence. She felt sorry for Rita, fiddling with the remains of her meal, crushed under the weight of her infatuation for him. She was disappointed for herself; it would have been nice if he had been like Chuck, warm and bouncing, bringing whisky into the house and manliness, making life rosy, every day like Christmas.

‘Marge,’ said Nellie sharply, ‘help clear the salad dishes.’

In the scullery she was fierce with her. ‘Pull yourself together! What’s got into you?’

‘He’s no good,’ Marge said, slapping the best plates into the bowl with gaiety.

‘He’s a nice enough lad.’

‘Get off. He’s no good.’ And she rammed the tap of the cold water full on, drowning Nellie’s protests. Margo felt as if she had been drinking, she found his company so unsettling. She was tired to death of them all being so polite to each other.

‘Now, Ira,’ she said, when she had rinsed the plates and the bowls, ‘I’m sure Nellie and Jack are anxious to know how you live in America.’ And he smiled at her, slow and casual, lounging back on the settee with Rita huddled beside him, her face solemn with pride and ownership.

Nellie thought he was a nice boy: remote and shy perhaps, but that was better than him being brash as she had feared, flinging his weight about and playing the conqueror. Jack said they were invaders; they followed a long line beginning with the Vikings. Instead of the longboat they used the jeep: roaring about Liverpool as if they were the SS. But Ira wasn’t like that. It would be easy to steer Rita from him. He wasn’t a threat to mother’s furniture.

‘I believe your dad has a business in Washington,’ she said; and he said he reckoned he had. He wasn’t a show off. He didn’t elaborate. God knows how Marge knew, but she said his dad was in real estate.

‘That’s right, Mam, I guess he’s in real estate.’

He helped himself to another round of bread. Jack had always maintained that they fed their army like pigs for the market, but he was wrong. Ira seemed starved of homely food, the sort his mother might