Free Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge

like something a kiddie had drawn with a blue crayon.
    ‘That would be a fat lot of good,’ he said, half to himself. Marge was going on and on in that way she had, stumbling over
     her words. She had a good voice, throaty – not like Nellie’s, strained and shrill. Whatever Nellie said came out like a criticism
     because of the lack of tone.
    Marge said: ‘She said she was going out tonight. You never asked her where.’
    ‘I know where, that’s why.’
    ‘Well, where is she going?’
    ‘She’s going to the moving pictures with Cissie Baines,’ Nellie said grudgingly.
    ‘Well, she might say that, but you can’t be sure.’
    ‘Get away with you!’ Nellie said, twisting round in her seat to look at Marge. ‘D’you know what, Miss? I think you’re jealous,
     you’re blooming jealous.’
    Jack tried to keep out of it. In a way it was easy, forhe had heard all of it before, not the same subject, but the bitterness lying beneath the words. Nobody could keep young
     Rita chained up. If she said she was going out with Cissie Baines, he supposed she was. Marge wanted to know if it was Cissie
     Baines she had gone out with earlier in the week and come home with her stockings in a mess and her shoes all muddy. Jack
     wondered if the parents of Cissie were arguing about Rita at this moment.
    ‘We don’t even know who Cissie Baines is,’ cried Margo. ‘We’ve never set eyes on her. We don’t know where she lives or if
     she’s rough or anything.’
    He could see Rita leaping about the path far below. She wore a mackintosh and a spotted scarf wound round her head. Beyond
     the river he thought he could make out the distant blue swell of the Cheshire hills. The voices went on around him, Marge
     attacking, Nellie defending. Sooner or later Marge would go too far and Nellie would take umbrage and they’d have a silent
     drive back and a silent tea of cold meat that he’d brought and half a tomato each. The thought of the little bowls of jam
     on the white cloth years ago nagged him.
    ‘D’you remember the plum jam,’ he said unwisely, ‘and the crab-apple jelly?’ His face was illuminated, his eyes round with
     longing under the shabby Homburg hat.
    ‘If I told you,’ said Margo, rounding on him in fury, ‘that your Rita was nicking things, I don’t suppose you’d take a blind
     bit of notice.’
    ‘Steady on!’ he said, sobered. ‘What d’you mean, Marge?’ He looked at Nellie for an explanation.
    ‘Take no notice. She’s touched.’
    ‘No, no, steady on.’ He was insistent. ‘What she mean by that?’
    ‘She’s lost that necklace and some book she had in a drawer.’
    ‘What necklace?’
    ‘That necklace I put on to go to Valerie Mander’s the other night. It’s gone,’ said Margo dramatically.
    ‘The state you came home in that night it’s a wonder you brought your clothes home, never mind a string of beads,’ snapped
     Nellie.
    ‘You grudge my going out, you do. You’d like me locked indoors pedalling away on a sewing machine and me mouth jammed full
     of pins. You’d like to keep me down—’
    ‘Keep you down!’ Nellie gave a little sarcastic laugh. ‘Who blacked the grate every morning of their life and who left me
     to nurse Mother and Uncle Wilf?’
    ‘You wouldn’t let me see him,’ wailed Margo, her eyes glittering, remembering George Bickerton dying upstairs.
    Jack was trying to fathom what it had to do with Rita. They goaded each other with memories of the past and confused him with
     their bickering.
    ‘You stopped me going to the keep-fit classes,’ cried Margo.
    ‘I never—’
    ‘You rang up the fire-post behind me back and told them I was too poorly to fire-watch any more—’
    They were spitting at each other like cats, arching their necks and clawing at the leather seating of the car.
    Below in the cemetery Rita meandered between laurel and dusty rhododendron and frail spires of mountain ash.
    ‘By God!’ began Nellie, and he turned to look at her