The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [55]
When she read it again she crossed out the bit about her mother’s head. It seemed out of place. She would go tomorrow to Valerie Mander and ask her to give Chuck the letter. It didn’t matter any more if Valerie thought she was chasing him. She couldn’t live another day waiting for that telephone to ring. She was worn out with waiting for the postman to come, worn out with tossing and turning in her bed trying to work out if Margo was telling the truth or not.
Rita waited till Monday to give Valerie the letter – in case he telephoned Monday morning. Again she stood in the front room holding her white envelope.
‘I know it’s a nuisance,’ she apologised, ‘but I’m desperate, Valerie.’
She stared deliberately at the older girl, her lip quivering. She needed to enlist sympathy.
‘But what’s up now?’ asked Valerie, puzzled. ‘Your Auntie Nellie said he rang last week.’
‘Yes, but he’s gone to Halifax on a course and he said he’d write, but he hasn’t. And he said he would probably see me on Saturday, but he didn’t come.’
‘On a course?’ said Valerie. ‘What sort of a course?’
‘In Halifax. He’s been chosen.’
‘They don’t go on courses. He’s maintenance. He looks after the boilers and the electricity.’
Rita was insistent. There was a stubborn set to her jaw; she was polite but firm.
‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but Chuck did give him the other letter.’
‘Well, he didn’t mind the one about meeting him at the pictures.’
Valerie saw the look on the girl’s face. Outside in the hall Mrs Mander was greeting someone from up the road, taking them up the hall, opening the kitchen door. The sound of the wireless was turned lower.
‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ said Valerie, ‘but Chuck told me about what was in the letter. He couldn’t help it. He had to read it to Ira.’
‘What d’you mean?’
Valerie was twisting the engagement ring round and round on her finger, feeling the three white diamonds in their setting of gold.
‘Didn’t you know?’ she said. ‘He can’t read or write.’
It was too dreadful to take in. It was unbelievable, like Auntie Margo saying he had called at the house. She fled from the Manders’, the letter crushed in her fist. She ran up the alleyway behind the houses. Once there had been meadows and trees, cows grazing, ducks on a pond – before they claimed the earth and built the wretched little houses: the industrial revolution, Uncle Jack called it, when they took the green and pleasant land and made it into a rubbish dump, with dwellings fit for pigs, the sky black with smoke from the factories, the houses built back-to-back to conserve room – more bricks to the acre; a time when not many went to school, when education was for the few, when only the privileged could read or write. Her mind spun excuses for him: he had been ill as a child, he had been born in a desert far from the city. She saw him lying on a couch like the death of Chatterton with his arms spread wide; she saw him hoeing the sandy earth with a trowel, not a tree in sight. It was like learning he was blind or a cripple or a criminal. She didn’t know how to cope with it. He was a dunce, her Ira, thick as a plank, not able to play cards, to read a book; he would never write her a letter. And at this thought hope surged up in her heart, she could have cried aloud with the enormous sense of relief. That was why he hadn’t written as he promised! He couldn’t. He had gone to visit Auntie Marge to tell her he wasn’t good enough for her. He knew Rita was clever at English, at composition. Nellie had boasted of the fact. He had come to Margo to say he was not worthy. Dear God, she thought, running