was silenced. She stared at him with her mouth open. He had penetrated the layers of brashness and carelessness with which she cloaked herself and made her squirm inside. It was a cloak she had worn so long, it had become real; so real and so thick that the old Dora had all but shrivelled and died. No one of their acquaintance would ever have said Dora Symonds was anything but a cantankerous old bat with a tongue like a razor. She didn’t love anyone, didn’t know the meaning of the word, and if Rita had grown up to be like her, it was hardly surprising.
She looked away from him to Rita who stood with a plate of bread and margarine in her hand, looking from one to the other. The exchange between mother and husband was nothing new: she had heard it many times before, but not for the last seven years, and in that time memory had dulled the rancour. She had come to rely on her mother to look after Zita while she worked and, whatever she was or had been, she was far more reliable than an absent husband. She put the plate on the table. ‘I’ll not have you talking like that to Ma,’ she told him. ‘If you can’t be civil, then clear out.’
‘Oh, so it’s a choice you’re making, is it? I’m your husband, or had you forgot that?’
‘Yes, I had,’ she said. ‘Leastways, I did my best to. Ma was here, which was more than you were. How d’you think I managed? D’you think money grows on trees? You must do, for you never provided me with any.’
He fumbled in his pocket, withdrew a handful of crumpled five-pound notes and threw them on the table. Then he picked up another piece of bread and continued to mop up the ketchup on his plate. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’
Rita picked up the notes and began smoothing them out, counting them as she did so. ‘Seven,’ she said, laughing. ‘Five pounds a year. When do I get the next instalment, in another seven years?’
‘I’ll get work.’
‘Work!’ shrieked Dora. ‘Work, he says! My God, do you mean to say you’re expectin’ to settle down ’ere as if nothin’ ’ad ’appened? Rita, for Chris’ sake, send him packin’.’
‘It i’n’t nothin’ to do with you,’ he told her. ‘It’s for Rita to say.’
Dora looked at Rita and knew she had lost. Rita had always been as soft as butter where Colin Younger was concerned. God knows what she saw in him, apart from a handsome face, and even that had deteriorated over the years. There was grey in his hair and he had a pot belly that strained over the belt of his trousers.
Rita shrugged. ‘Ma, I gotta give it a try. For the sake of the kid.’ Which was a statement so palpably dishonest that it reduced Dora to helpless laughter and puzzled Zita who had been listening to the exchange with a great deal of curiosity and no understanding.
Dora shrugged. ‘OK. Have it your own way. I’ll be off home, then…’ Dora lived in a tiny hovel in Farrier’s Court, a cobbled yard just off the market, squashed between the blacksmith and a cobbler. It had no running water and no main drains. It was where Rita had been born and brought up in direst poverty and from which she had escaped to marry Colin.
‘Ma, you know I need you.’
‘No, you don’t. Let that ’usband of yourn look after his daughter.’
‘What does she mean by that?’ Colin queried, looking up at Rita, still standing by his chair, but doing nothing but gaze at her mother in helplessness.
‘Ma looks after Zita while I work evenings,’ she said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Barmaid at The Crown.’
He smiled. ‘No need to change your arrangements. I’ll come with you. See if the old place has changed.’ He got up and reached for his jacket which he had draped over the back of his chair.
Rita picked up her handbag and followed him. She didn’t know why she did. Her ma was right: he had brought her nothing but grief and yet there was something about him that could still tug at her insides. It was all very well to say she was better off without him, that she never wanted to set eyes on him again when he wasn’t around, but when he was in the same room, grinning at her, she seemed to lose her ability to say no. And there was the added