The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [8]
Even more like Nellie, he thought, when Rita came in with Marge, face flushed red from the dryer and her hair stuck dry as a bone to her small head.
‘My word,’ he said, ‘we do look a bobby dazzler!’ though secretly he wondered what had happened to her nice brown hair – so little of it left and that all curled up.
‘Have you had it cut then?’ he asked. But she had gone out into the back yard to look for the cat. ‘How much did it cost?’ he wanted to know, half sitting up and putting his hand in his pocket.
‘Never you mind,’ said Margo, ‘it’s my treat.’
There was something restless about her, agitated. She strode about the room picking things up and putting them down, forgetting about the cigarette she held between her fingers. She was forever going into the scullery to bend down and relight it at the gas jet under the kettle.
‘You’ll not have a hair left on your head one of these days,’ warned Nellie, putting the Saturday tea on the table.
He ate his tea lying down. Nellie propped his head up with pillows and balanced his plate on his chest. They had a tin of salmon that a customer had given him in return for a favour. He couldn’t tell Nellie how he got it because she didn’t approve of the black market. Instead he said he’d had it in the cupboard since the beginning of the war. They listened to Toytown on the wireless and Marge stood at the mantelpiece, covering her mouth with her hand, her eyes all screwed up as if she were in pain, pretending it was Ernest the policeman she found comic, though he knew it was him.
‘What’s so funny, Marge?’ he demanded, offended.
And she said: ‘Rigor mortis will set in if you stay like that much longer.’
He had to smile at that even though Nellie was tut-tutting. He struggled to sit upright on the sofa and put his dish down on the table. Marge had always had a sense of humour – dry, bitter at times – but she was good company. Sometimes it was as if Nellie was a damn sight too worthy for this world, making him feel he was perpetually in church, or remembering Mother who had died when he was seven, all lowered voices and pious talk. He looked at Rita, but she was stolidly eating – not a trace of a smile, the colour quite faded from her cheeks.
At seven Marge went upstairs and came down in a peach crêpe dress with a necklace round her neck that had belonged to his wife. He’d offered it to Nellie, but she said she had no need of such fripperies, and it was hardly suitable for Rita.
‘What’s all this, then?’ asked Nellie, and Marge said she was just popping round to the Manders’ with Rita, to keep an eye on her.
‘You weren’t asked,’ said Nellie.
‘Get away,’ Margo said, and proceeded to put powder on her cheeks.
He could tell Nellie was put out about something.
‘Do you want to go?’ he asked. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll put me feet up and listen to Saturday Night Theatre.’
At this she made a funny little gesture of contempt with her elbows, flapping them like a hen rising from its perch in alarm.
‘Not me,’ she said.
So he lay down again and placed the Saturday Echo over his eyes to be out of it. He could hear them talking in whispers out of deference to him, trying to get Rita to hurry up and change. ‘In a minute,’ she kept saying, ‘I’ll go in a minute.’ And before she went upstairs he distinctly heard her say, ‘That was my mam’s, wasn’t it?’ and he opened his eyes and she was at the fireplace staring at Marge’s neck, half reaching up her hand to touch the necklace about