Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge

was – all them rules, going to church.’
    ‘What rules?’
    ‘Don’t you think we were damaged?’
    ‘Don’t talk daft.’
    He sat up, clutching his belly, filled with irritation at the way she carried on. Whenever Marge started to talk in this fashion
     it made him angry: he was defending someone, something, but he didn’t know what. It was like when Lord Haw Haw had been on
     the wireless – he wanted to jump to his feet and wave the flag.
    ‘We were never given a chance,’ said Margo. ‘Never. All that church-going and being respectable – you can never get away from
     it.’
    ‘Church never did anyone any harm,’ he said hotly.
    ‘You haven’t been inside a church for donkey’s years.’
    ‘It never did any harm,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘It might have been better if you had listened to what the good book said.’
    ‘I did listen – I did nothing else. Always being told what to do, always being got at. Doing what Mother said was best.’
    ‘Mother was a wonderful woman,’ he cried, looking at her with hostility. ‘She brought us up never to owe a penny, never to
     ask anybody for anything.’
    ‘She asked Nellie for plenty. It was Nellie that did allthe work. She walked in Mother’s shadow. She still does.’
    ‘Oh, get off,’ he said, hating the sight of her: the naked face with the eyes like an actress on the stage, the mouth spitting
     rubbish.
    ‘And what about Rita?’ She knew she was annoying him – the trick he had of twisting his head sharply as if someone had fired
     an ack-ack gun behind his ear – but she had to say it. ‘She’s just like Nellie, really. Keeping herself to herself, never
     saying anything important, just being proper.’
    She hoped it was true: she couldn’t bear to think of Rita getting into trouble – the shame of it, the gossip in the street.
    ‘If our Rita is half the woman Nellie is, she’s got nothing to be ashamed of.’
    ‘But it’s different times,’ Margo cried. ‘It’s the war. People aren’t the same. That sort of person isn’t needed any more.
     The past is gone, Jack. Things are different now.’
    ‘What sort of person?’ he asked her, outraged, sensing Mother and Nellie relegated to the scrap heap.
    ‘People who had to be told what to do. There’s things happening now that nobody can tell you what to do about. You can’t act
     the same. That’s why our Nellie gets so bad-tempered – she knows it’s not the same.’
    ‘Where would you have been without our Nellie?’ he shouted, jumping to his feet.
    The small blue indentures on either temple, marks of the forceps at his birth, darkened as blood suffused his face.
    ‘God knows,’ she cried, facing him in the unlovely room, ‘but I mightn’t have been all on me own.’
    She trembled, filled with pity for herself and indignation that he thought so little of her. He was marching up and down
     the floor, twitching his head, struggling to contain his anger.
    Margo was spent. She sat down at the table, blinking her eyes to stop the tears from falling. She wanted to say: Your Rita,
     our Rita is going out with a foreigner, meeting him at this moment, going into shop doorways with him. She wanted to reproach
     him for stopping her belonging to Mr Aveyard, for the chances he had made her miss in the past. It was all his fault – his
     and Nellie’s. All the rubbish he talked about wanting to go and live on a boat after the war, travel, see how the other half
     lived – his remembrance of poetry, his sentimentality. It was all me eye and Peggy Martin. He was bound, like Nellie, hand
     and foot to the old way of life. It mattered to him what the neighbours said, if he caused gossip, if he owed money, if he
     seemed too much to be alive. He hated to have to look inside himself – the wicked women standing on Lime Street, the immorality,
     the heart beating raw and exposed like the pigs he slaughtered.
    ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I don’t need you blethering on,