The Dressmaker Read online

  ‘I met Valerie Mander on the tram,’ said Rita, collecting plates from the shelf above the cooker. ‘They’re having a party on Saturday.’

  She took the plates into the kitchen and left them on the sideboard, while she removed the table runner and the yellow vase full of dressmaking pins.

  ‘I know,’ Nellie said. ‘Well, it’s more of a sing-song, really. What was she wearing?’

  ‘She asked me.’

  Rita unfolded the white cloth and smoothed it flat on the table. Aunt Nellie was so surprised she came through from the scullery with the frying pan in her hand.

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I said thank you very much.’

  ‘Oh dear, I don’t know that it’s wise. I’m not at all sure.’

  She shook her head and went to put the pan back on the stove. Rita arranged the plates, the knives and forks, the china salt cellar, a memento from Blackpool, the water jug, the pudding spoons and the three Woolworth glasses. Still Nellie kept silent. Only the fat hissing in the pan as the fish cooked. Rita sat on a chair sideways to the table, fingering the edge of the cloth embroidered with daisies, staring at the wall with her pale eyes patient. There was a picture of a landscape above the sewing machine: a blue lake and a swan sitting on the water and the green grass fading into a cloudy sky. There was also the window framed in blackout curtains showing a brick wall and a wooden door that opened on to the alleyway, through which Auntie Margo would come presently to persuade Nellie. She watched Nigger the cat crawl silently along the wall of the roof of the outhouse where her aunt kept the dolly tub and the mangle.

  Nellie called: ‘What about your Uncle Jack coming?’

  ‘Valerie Mander said to tell him I was a big girl now.’

  She looked at her aunt and saw she was smiling. She was all admiration for the lovely girl, so outspoken. She nodded her head wonderingly, jiggling the frying pan about to stop the fish from sticking. ‘That Valerie,’ she observed, ‘she’s a card.’

  As soon as Margo came in, the food was put on the table. She sat at the edge of the hearth like a man, splaying her knees wide and rolling a cigarette.

  ‘Sit decent,’ said Auntie Nellie, scraping margarine from a dish and covering her bread sparingly.

  It was one of Marge’s irritating habits to ignore what was on her plate till it had gone like ice and then she would say, ‘By heck, Nellie, this is blooming cold.’ Some nights she was quite dry about her day at the factory, telling them in accurate detail the remarks screamed by her fellow-workers above the noise of the machines. She said she couldn’t repeat everything they said because she had to be guarded as careless talk cost lives. Nellie got all exasperated and said that was foolishness, it was more like some of those women needed their mouths washing out with carbolic soap. Marge said that ten minutes before the whistle blew for the end of the day shift, the disabled left by the side gate, two hundred of them, in chairs, on crutches, limping and lurching down the invalid ramp on to the pavement – like a hospital evacuating at the start of a fire. Shortly afterwards came the speed merchants on bicycles, streams of them, ringing the little bells on their handlebars, wheeling in formation out of the main gates and swooping away down the hill to the town. How rough they were, how quick to take offence and come to blows. The women were worse than the men. Mr Newall, the foreman of her section, was given the glad eye by a different girl each week. But tonight Margo had nothing to tell them. She sat gloomily at the side of the empty grate, rubbing the tips of her fingers through her sparse sand-coloured hair, jerking her neck from side to side as if she were keeping time to some tune in her head. She listened to the six o’clock news before joining them at the table. She stirred her tea so savagely that some spilled into the saucer.

  ‘What’s up with you, then?’ asked Nellie aggressively, as if it were a personal affront to her that Marge was out of sorts.

  ‘It’s the machines, they get on my nerves. Everyone complains of their nerves.’

  ‘Well, it’s your own fault,’ Nellie said with satisfaction. ‘You had no need to go into munitions in the first place.’

  ‘Get away. I was requisitioned.’

  ‘That job at Belmont Road Hospital was quite good enough.’

  They stared at each other with hostility, their mouths munching food.

  Rita said: ‘Was that where those naughty girls were?’ They both turned and looked at her, sitting in her pink frock with the white cotton collar that could be removed and washed separately. ‘The girls with the shaved heads – to stop them running away?’

  She had a picture in her head of a green tiled hall and a long corridor with its floor shining with beeswax and two figures walking towards her in dressing-gowns and slippers. Above the thin stalks of their necks two naked heads with lidless eyes and sunken mouths and on each fragile curve of skull nothing but a faint down that quivered as they moved. Like birds fallen from a nest.

  ‘Who told her that?’ Margo demanded, though she knew.

  Nellie held her to one side as if she were listening to the wireless.

  ‘Who told her a daft thing like that?’ persisted Marge.

  ‘Auntie Nellie said they had things in their hair.’ She wished she had not spoken.

  ‘You don’t go to hospital for nits, Rita.’

  Auntie Nellie stiffened in disgust.

  ‘You’re so common, Marge. That factory has coarsened you beyond belief.’

  A shred of potato dropped from her lips to the plate. Mortified, she dabbed at her chin with a serviette, shaking her head sorrowfully.

  ‘You’re a foolish girl. I thank God Mother has been spared from seeing the way you’ve turned out.’

  It was as if she were talking about a cake that hadn’t risen properly. Rita could tell Auntie Margo was giddy with indignation. It wasn’t a tactful remark to make to someone who had spent ten hours on the factory floor, clad in cumbersome protective clothing, grease daubed on her face and a white cloth bound about her head. It was all right for Auntie Nellie to live grimly through each day, doing the washing, trying to find enough nourishment to give them, sewing her dresses – she was only marking time for the singing to come in the next world and her reunion with Mother. It was different for Margo, a foolish girl of fifty years of age; she needed to come home, now, and find that somebody waited. How colourless were her lips, how dark the shadows beneath her eyes.

  ‘Rita,’ cried her aunt, looking at her across the table severely, ‘those naughty girls, as your Auntie Nellie saw fit to call them, had a flipping sight more wrong with them than nits. It wasn’t only their heads they shaved neither.’

  And she broke into a cackle of laughter, eyes growing moist, leaning back in her chair at the joke. She was silent then, having gone as far as she dared, contenting herself with a mocking grin worn for the benefit of Nellie, tears of amusement at the corners of her glittering eyes.

  When the meal was finished Nellie said: ‘Rita, tell your Auntie Marge about Valerie Mander.’

  She spoke coldly, on her dignity, making a great show of siding the table before taking the dishes to the sink. Margo half rose to help, because Nellie, when put out, could appear to be suffering, her white hair plastered to her head in waves and a Kirby grip to keep it neat, and that disappointed droop to her mouth. But she sat down again at this.

  ‘What about Valerie Mander?’

  ‘She asked me to a party.’

  ‘She never,’ said her aunt, looking at her in astonishment.

  ‘She did. On Saturday.’

  ‘What does your Auntie Nellie say?’

  ‘She doesn’t know if it’s wise.’

  They both looked down at the surface of the white tablecloth, thinking it over. On the beige wall the eight-day clock chimed the half-hour. In the kitchen they could hear Nellie swishing her hands about in the water to make it seem she was above listening.

  ‘Do you want to go, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Won’t you
be shy?’

  ‘I’m not shy.’

  She met her aunt’s eye briefly, and away again, looking at the dull black sewing machine with its iron treadle still tilted from the pressure of the dressmaker’s foot.

  ‘She’s not got anything to wear,’ Nellie said, coming to stand in the doorway, twisting her hands about in her apron to dry them.

  ‘If that doesn’t beat the band! You put dresses on the backs of half the women in the street and you say our Rita’s got nothing to wear.’

  Nellie had to see the fairness of that. She was never unreasonable. She supposed she could alter something in time if the child was really keen. Neither of them looked at Rita to see what she felt. Or they could pool their clothing coupons and go to George Henry Lees’ for a new frock. That might be best.

  They were interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Lyons, come for her fitting. Rita curled herself up on the sofa with a library book and the cat. She murmured ‘Goodevening’ to Mrs Lyons, keeping her eyes down to the printed page as the stout lady stepped out of her skirt and stood in her slip on the rug.

  Nellie put a match to the fire so that Mrs Lyons wouldn’t catch her death. She grudged every morsel of coal burned in summer time, but she couldn’t afford to lose her customers. Even so, the room took some time to warm, and it wasn’t till Mrs Lyons had left that the benefit could be felt. Nellie made a pot of tea before getting ready for bed, spooning the sugar into Marge’s cup and hiding the basin before Marge could help herself. The aunts put on their flannel nightgowns over their clothes and then undressed, poking up the fire to make a blaze before removing their corsets. The girl sat withdrawn on the sofa, stroking the spine of the cat, while the two women grunted and twisted on the hearth rug, struggling to undo the numerous hooks that confined them, until, panting and triumphant, they tore free the great pink garments and dropped them to the floor, where they lay like cricket pads, still holding the shape of their owners, and the little dangling suspenders sparkling in the firelight. Dull then after such exertions, mesmerised by the heat of the fire, the aunts stood rubbing the flannel nightgowns to and fro across their stomachs, breathing slow and deep. After a while they sat down on either side of the fender and removed their stockings. Out on the woollen rug, lastly, came their strange yellow feet, the toes curled inwards against the warmth.

  ‘Rita,’ said Nellie, picking up the half-furled corsets, rolling them tidily like schoolroom maps, ‘what sort of dress shall it be for the party?’

  ‘It’s not a party,’ said Rita. ‘It’s just a bit of a singsong.’

  She said she didn’t know what the fuss was about. She didn’t want anything altered nor did she need a new frock. She knew she would have to go, if only for the sake of Margo. Left to herself, she mightn’t have bothered. But at some point on Saturday Margo would start to apply rouge and powder, saying she was thinking of popping along to the Manders’ to keep the child company. And Nellie would say she was pushing herself, and they would start to argue, until turning to her they would remind each other of the time, telling her she must hurry, comb her hair, change her frock.

  ‘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 time he too forgot that Rita was not Nellie’s daughter, but his. And she did favour the aunts in appearance. She was in their mould – nothing of his dead wife that he could see: like Marge in feature, with a mouth so pale that the upper lip seemed outlined in brown pencil, making it prominent, and with Marge’s slightly frantic eyes, startled, owing to the width between brow and lid. But she was Nellie’s creation. It was as if the dressmaker had cut out a pattern and pinned it exactly, placing it under the sewing machine and sewing it straight as a die, over and over, so that there was no chance of a gap in the seams.

  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.