The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [49]
‘I thought you said you didn’t talk much,’ Ira said, ‘you and your folks. Seems like they never stop talking.’
‘It’s my dad,’ she said, ‘he’s gone barmy. I’ve never known him like that.’
‘What he want to talk to you about? He was out here some time.’
He lounged against the wall of the alleyway, watching her push the back gate ajar with her foot.
‘I didn’t think you noticed.’
‘I guess I better go,’ he said. ‘I got to catch the train.’
She didn’t want him sleeping on the settee, not with Auntie Margo and Valerie in the house. It was all spoilt – there seemed nowhere they could be without her feeling miserable.
‘It’s a lovely ring, isn’t it?’ she said, seeing the little white diamonds pale above the curved red nails.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, staring at her in the gloom.
‘Seventeen. How old are you?’
‘Older.’
‘Not much.’
Someone was tapping on the window. She let the yard gate swing back and block them from view.
‘Will you telephone me at work?’
‘Sure I will.’
‘You didn’t last week. I waited. If you don’t, shall I just come to the station?’
‘I guess not. I may have no furlough. I don’t have every Saturday.’
He’d turned his back on her. He was pulling at a weed growing in the cracks of the wall.
‘But when will I see you?’ Her voice was breaking in despair.
‘I’ll call you. I’ll do that. But I guess I won’t make next Saturday.’
‘Couldn’t we go to the country again? I could take time off work. We could go to that place again.’
She was begging and she knew it. She was saying she would go to the empty house on the shore and lie down with him. She might have a baby. It was practically sure she would, but she’d take the risk; she’d do anything as long as he would see her.
‘I guess I don’t have no furlough next week.’
‘Rita, Rita.’ It was Nellie calling from the back door. She didn’t want them like a couple of cats yowling in the back alley.
Rita had a melancholy feeling she would never see him again, never love him, never be given the chance to show how much she cared. All her life she had been waiting for him, beyond the house in the woods with the stuffed hen in the window. He was the people in her dream that caused her so much fear. He was the loved one who could come to harm. When she screamed in the night it was for him; when she saw the naked statue in the flower-bed it was an image of him wrestling with an angel. He had to love her. Give her time, she would prove to him how much she had to share, beyond the dirtiness, the scrabbling at the elastic of her knickers. She would die for him if he would let her.
‘I’ll call,’ he said. ‘Reckon I’ll telephone tomorrow.’
He left the house before Valerie Mander, not kissing Rita, sprinting down the road to the Cabbage Hall to catch his tram to the station.
9
At work Margo put her name down on the list for the Dramatics Society. They wanted extra people for the Christmas Pantomime. Ever since she was a child, people had told her she should go on the stage. There was no end to the facilities in the factory for recreation: football and snooker for the men and keep-fit for the ladies; lectures in the dinner break on how to make the food more interesting, how to make old stockings into novelties for birthdays. She hadn’t participated before, but with the winter coming and the approach of the festive season it would be nice to be with a lively bunch of people, larking about and rehearsing songs. She wouldn’t tell Nellie right away, not until she was accepted; there had been words between them over the way she had behaved to Rita’s young man. She protested indignantly: she said she wasn’t going to sit in silence all evening, not with everyone else acting as if the cat had got their tongue. It would be a relief to get out of the house one evening a week. Maybe it was that summer was ending, the thought of the winter to be endured, that made the house seem charged with emotion and tension: Nellie carting bits of furniture up