The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [7]
‘Don’t you want to look nice?’ cried Nellie.
But Rita wouldn’t discuss it any further. She went upstairs on her own to bed, leaving them muttering by the fire.
2
Jack came promptly at four-thirty. He parked his van in the back alley and carried the Sunday joint wrapped in newspaper. He wore his Homburg hat and his overcoat.
‘Have you got a cold, then?’ asked Nellie, for it was a warm afternoon and the sun was shining somewhere beyond the dark little houses.
He had brought a piece of pork and some dripping and he put them on a plate high on the shelf so that the cat would leave it alone.
‘Where’s Rita?’ he asked, removing his coat and going into the hall to hang it over the banisters.
At the foot of the stairs he cracked his ankle bone against the little iron stand set in the floor.
‘That blooming thing,’ he said, hobbling into the kitchen. ‘God knows why they put the damn thing where you can trip over it.’
‘What thing?’ said Nellie, not understanding him.
‘That umbrella stand. One of these days I’ll break me blooming neck.’
‘I never trip over it,’ she said.
He lay down on the sofa with his feet on a newspaper and his hat still on his head. He always lay down when he came to Nellie’s; she was forever telling him to rest and he mostly felt tired as soon as he set eyes on her. He didn’t say much when Nellie told him Rita had gone with Marge to have her hair set for a party. But then it wasn’t his province any more. When his wife had died leaving him with Rita not five years old he had suggested that Nellie pack up the house in Bingley Road and come to live with him in Allerton. But she wouldn’t. She said Mother would never have approved and where would she put the furniture? She was right of course – she was too old to be uprooted. Nellie knew about death – she was his right-hand man, so to speak. Three sisters in infancy; Sally with the consumption, though Marge insisted it was a broken heart; Mother, Uncle Wilf, and George Bickerton, Marge’s husband, dying with influenza within six months of returning from France. The last four had passed away in the little back bedroom upstairs. It was not as if Nellie cared to leave a house that held so many memories of departure. Grieved as she had been to say good-bye to Mother, it was only in the nature of a temporary farewell. She had merely sent Mother ahead on a journey and would catch up with her later. It would never do to leave her post till her call came. So he sold his own home and moved with Rita into the two rooms above his butcher’s shop in Anfield. Nellie was a wonderful woman. She came every morning and did for them and took the child out for an airing and put her to bed at night. But several times she took her back to Bingley Road, because she couldn’t neglect the dressmaking, and it didn’t seem sensible to troop out after tea, in winter, on the tram, all that way. It became a regular thing. After a time the child copied her aunts and called him Uncle Jack. He tried sleeping in the little boxroom at weekends to see more of her, but it wasn’t convenient. And Nellie looked after her beautifully, making her little dresses, and always seeing she had clean white socks, and putting her hair in rags every night to make it curl. And later Nellie was very strict about her education and her homework – only the bombing was at its worst and the child was in the shelters at night, and then the school she attended had a direct hit and a lot of her friends were evacuated. Marge used to say it was all wrong for the child to live with them, they were too old, they hadn’t the patience. But that was nonsense. Nellie had never raised her voice to the girl, never said a bad thing to her. Marge had gone on about the nightmare Rita had from time to time. She said it wasn’t natural for a young girl to have such nasty dreams, at least not the same one every time. Nellie said it was growing pains. Dr Bogle said the same. Nellie was livid with Marge for taking the child to the doctor behind her back. Most of the