The Dressmaker - Beryl Bainbridge [9]
He closed his eyes again, and soon Nellie sat down at the sewing machine and spun the wheel, pressing the treadle up and down rapidly, running material under the stabbing needle, settling into the rhythm of it, in her element. As long as he could remember, Nellie had played the machine, for that’s how he thought of it. Like the great organ at the Palladium cinema before the war, rising up out of the floor and the organist with his head bowed, riddled with coloured lights, swaying on his seat in time to the opening number. Nellie sat down with just such a flourish, almost as if she expected a storm of applause to break out behind her back. And it was her instrument, the black Singer with the handpainted yellow flowers. She had been apprenticed when she was twelve to a woman who lived next door to Emmanuel Church School: hand sewing, basting, cutting cloth, learning her trade. When she was thirteen Uncle Wilf gave her a silver thimble. She wasn’t like some, plying her needle for the sake of the money, though that was important: it was the security the dressmaking gave her – a feeling that she knew something, that she was skilled, handling her materials with knowledge; she wasn’t a flibbertigibbet like some she could mention. For all that she lifted the tailor’s dummy out from its position under the stairs coquettishly, holding it in her arms like a dancing partner, circling the arm-holes with chalk, stroking the material down over the stuffed breast, standing back to admire her work with her mouth clamped full of little pins, tape measure about her neck.
When the knock came at the front door he was almost asleep. He opened his eyes in bewilderment and saw Marge on her chair by the grate, and Nellie, her foot arrested in mid-air trying to recognise the hand at the door. He rubbed his eyes and stood upright, smoothing his clothes to be respectable. They all listened. Rita opened the front door. A strange voice, like on the films, drawling. She brought him into the kitchen. He was well-fed, dressed in uniform and he had been drinking. A great healthy face, with two enquiring eyes, bright blue, and a mouth which when he spoke showed a long row of teeth, white and protruding. It was one of those Yanks. Jack was shocked. Till now he had never been that close. They were so privileged, so foreign; he had never dreamt to see one at close quarters in Nellie’s kitchen, taking Rita and Marge, one on each arm and bouncing them out of the house. He ran to the door to watch them go, linking arms, heads bowed, like they were doing the Palais Glide.
‘I didn’t know there would be Yanks,’ he said.
‘There’s no harm,’ said Nellie. ‘Valerie Mander knows how to conduct herself.’
But he was bothered. He couldn’t lie down and compose himself; the sheer fleshiness of the young American disturbed him – the steak they consumed, the prime pork chops, the volume of butter and bacon. He remembered all the things he had read: the money they earned, the food they digested, the equipment they possessed. He’d seen them down by Exchange Station, pressing young girls up against the wall, mouth to mouth as if eating them, and jeeps racing up Stanley Street full of military police and great dogs on metal chains with their jaws open and their pink gums exposed.
‘I didn’t know there’d be Yanks,’ he said again, walking up and down the room in his green waistcoat that Nellie had made and his gun metal trousers.
‘Did you notice what our Rita said about that necklace?’ he asked in astonishment.
But Nellie was placing the top half of Mrs Lyons’ grey costume under the steel clamp, her head bent and all her concentration on the lovely width of serge beneath her fingers.
3
In the circumstances Margo couldn