the stairs – she’d caught her red-handed with the bamboo stand – Rita going about the house heavy-eyed and dreamy, alternately singing to herself as she prepared for bed, and sitting on the sofa with a face like death, unable to speak, not troubling to turn the pages of her library book. Now and then Margo caught a glimpse of such vulnerability on her sallow features, such despair, that she was forced to look away. She would not interfere. Rita must come to her. It was almost a week since Ira had been to tea. Once he had gone from the house Margo forgot how threatening she had found him, how unsuitable. She remembered only that he was very young with not much to say for himself. Nellie had been over to visit Jack in the week. Jack said he was afraid Rita was going to get hurt – she was obsessed by her Ira. Nellie seemed to have other things to occupy her mind. She refused to explain why she was storing things in the boxroom. Since her turn in the car she had quietened considerably, the sting drawn from her character. She did her housework with an abstracted air as if she was planning something. Between the two of them, Margo felt the house to be depressing. Once or twice she went down the road to the Manders’. Prompt on seven o’clock the jeep came bouncing up the road. Valerie would run to the step. It made Margo laugh the way Chuck leapt from his vehicle almost before the engine had died, propelled into her waiting arms as if he was catapulted across the pavement – flowers in his arms, crushed against her blouse, roses, carnations, little feathery sprays of fern; burying her face in them, her cheeks glowing like the bouquet he had brought her; the two of them always laughing and cuddling, calling each other honey and baby, like on the pictures. He was always bringing them presents – he was a regular Santa Claus: packets of cigarettes, a gold lighter for Valerie, a wrist-watch for the absent George; always whisky on the sideboard, tins of food in the pantry, packets of real butter in the new fridge. Margo could see Jack’s point of view – it was a bit like the invasion troops looting the land and the Manders fraternising with the enemy. No wonder the rest of the neighbours looked askance at the jeep swinging up to the door. The contrast between life at Valerie’s and the gloom that pervaded Nellie’s house was almost too much for Margo to bear. It was as if she ran to shelter from a great black cloud that was gathering in the sky.
On Saturday night Rita didn’t get ready to go out. She lay upstairs in her room and told Margo she had a headache.
‘But won’t Ira be waiting for you?’
‘No, he won’t. He’s training this weekend.’
‘Training?’ said Margo.
But Rita closed her eyes and wouldn’t say another word. All week she had waited for the telephone to ring, though she knew it was useless. She was wallowing in self-pity and withdrawal. She had no friends, no hobbies, no interest beyond Ira. She hated him for being so cruel to her. She dreamed of revenge, of someone in the office telling him, when he did at last ring, that she had left to get married: one of those sudden romances, Alice Wentworth would tell him, a naval officer, a Dutchman. She recalled the seaman billeted on them in the first year of the war, his homely vacant face, the civilian suit he wore, dull and shabby, the little black suitcase he carried with his uniform inside. Auntie Margo had liked him. He bought her some material for a dress once. He took her to look at his ship, though she said she wasn’t allowed on board. She saw Ira in his mustard jacket, his black tie; under the jaunty angle of his cap he lowered golden eyelashes to cover eyes that were the colour of the sky. She lay moaning on her bed, wanting to hit at him with her fists.
‘She can’t go on like this,’ said Margo to Nellie, ‘lying up there fretting. She’s not eaten a thing all day.’
‘Give her time,’ replied Nellie. ‘She’ll come round.’
‘They’ve not had a tiff,’ Margo said. ‘He’s just training. There’s no call for her to act like this.’
Nellie was cutting out the body of Valerie Mander’s engagement