This is by Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010). It is set in the Liverpool of World War II, but was published in 1973. It was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize, but lost out to J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. (Bainbridge's novels were Booker-shortlisted five times, without ever actually winning, which seems a bit hard.)

I read this book purely because it was set in Liverpool, where we've just spent a few days, but I enjoyed it immensely... It's observant, funny, and totally tragic. Suspenseful, too, because you know at the beginning -- from Chapter 0, whose first word is "Afterwards" -- that SOMETHING has happened, but you don't know quite what. "She", the first character we meet, doesn't seem too upset by whatever it is: In the little front room, where "everything was ordered, secure", she "allowed herself a glass of port... She had to bite on her lip to keep from smiling." Her main concern seems to be the impeccable state of the carpet, and the fact that there was nothing her late mother could take umbrage at (even the crack in the mirror, "as she could prove, was war damage, not neglect or carelessness").

She's Nellie, the dressmaker of the title. Her younger sister is Margo. First complication: Margo is also referred to as Marge. I found this confusing, and wondered at first if they were two different characters. Then I wondered if the discrepancy was a function of old typesetting (where e's can easily splodge into o's), so I checked in a more modern edition for clarification. No, not a typeface issue; still the same two renderings of the same character's name. (And interestingly, in my excursion into that newer edition, I found that the cat's original, politically incorrect name had been changed to Pudding...) John Self also found the two names confusing, and speculated that Margo is how she sees herself, while "the plainer Marge" is how the rest of the family see her. "This," he says, "is an example of the gaps Bainbridge leaves for the reader to fill in. 'Well, I don't like to be obvious or spell things out,' she told the Paris Review..."


Available from Internet Archive. Fabulous cover!

Anyway, Margo/Marge, despite her status as a widow, is regarded by Nellie as "a foolish girl", whom their mother had "always warned her to keep an eye on". A romantic inkling for a certain Mr Aveyard had had to be nipped in the bud a while ago...

Then we meet 17-year-old Rita. She's the niece of Nellie and Margo, and she's worried about her young man, an American soldier, who hasn't been seen for a week. Rita's father is the older women's brother, but Rita has been brought up by her aunts since the death of her mother, and refers to Dad for some reason as Uncle Jack. She's puzzled that he has called on them today. He's a butcher, and usually came on a Saturday to bring the Sunday joint. Today is obviously different. Nellie is not puzzled, though. "By now," she thinks to herself, "Jack would be on the dock road, heading towards Bootle."

So it's all extremely mysterious, but the streaks of foreboding are anchored by domestic detail. This could definitely be used for a "how to write a first chapter" course.


Beryl Bainbridge, 1998

***

Beware, because the remainder of the post is full of spoilers...

Rita's GI is called Ira. He's a flaky kind of character, and rather uncouth, and we're pretty sure he's not right for her. He's not nearly as satisfactory as Valerie Manders's Chuck, for example, and we suspect Rita is more in love with the idea of love and marriage than with the man himself. She has had a very sheltered, strict upbringing, and doesn't quite know what to do with an actual boyfriend. She has a nondescript job in Dale Street (the site of our current hotel), and would prefer to work with her Auntie Margo in the munitions factory at Speke, but "Auntie Nellie said they weren't a nice class of girl". This is Nellie all over: Protective, a little snobbish, and very much a damper on a young woman's life.


All the photos are from this week's visits to Liverpool and New Brighton.
This is Dale Street, where our hotel was located. Maybe Rita worked here...

Nellie's heart is a bit dodgy, and she's sometimes overcome by "ungovernable rage over a trivial incident", which she knows doesn't help matters. Plus, she really is getting obsessed with that furniture of her late mother's... "She was concerned that when she woke each morning to the alarm clock on the bedside table, her first thoughts were not thankfulness that she had been spared breath, but worry over mother's furniture. Did the damp warp it in winter, the sun expand it in summer?... She lived in dread that she would be taken ill and begin to die. Marge wouldn't bother to wipe with vinegar the sideboard, or draw the blinds against the warmth of a summer afternoon to ensure the carpet wouldn't fade."

Marge, meanwhile, is the woman who has never really grown up. She's attractive to men even now, thinks Jack, when she's "getting past her prime". Hearing about the likelihood of Valerie's engagement, "her fatigued eyes glittered with excitement... In the fulfilment of the girl's dreams she imagined that she herself moved one step nearer to happiness... There were certain indications of hysteria in Marge's appearance, a lack of judgement..."

Jack, like Nellie, has a puritanical streak. He describes as "wicked women" the hopefuls who press round the American bases, "mad for the money the Yanks threw about". He doesn't realize, in the way Margo clearly does, that the siblings had had "a rum childhood", all rules, and going to church, and being respectable: "Always being told what to do, always being got at. Doing what Mother said was best." Nellie, she says, is still in their mother's shadow. And Rita is just like Nellie: "Keeping herself to herself, never saying anything important, just being proper."



At this stage, it's only Marge who knows that Rita and Ira are an item. Marge is the only one the young woman can confide in. She keeps repulsing Ira's physical advances, but good old Marge suggests that's not the right way to go: "Now look here, our Rita... You got to be decent, you got to have respect, but if you love him, you have to give." She realizes how twisted their upbringing has been (she'd known nothing during her first encounters with her late husband: "She didn't know what to do, and neither did he. Never been talked to, never read any books... A mist of ignorance, of guilty fumblings... There was no excitement, no joy..."). And she doesn't want that for Rita: "You mustn't lose him because you're feared... I've read books since -- it's natural, you shouldn't listen to Nellie."

Poor Rita does her best, but she's swimming upstream against all her upbringing. Her encounters with Ira sound the very reverse of fun.

And Marge is reaching the end of her tether: "She looked out at Jack and Nellie in the yard, silent now, isolated in the little square of brick. Their complacency filled her with a kind of frenzy, the way they had of being content together, shielding each other from the outside world. Out there, over the network of decayed alleyways and the stubby houses, the city had turned into Babel, the clubs and halls filled with foreigners, the Free French and the Americans, the Dutch and the Poles, gliding cheek to cheek with Liverpool girls to the music of the dance bands, while Jack and Nellie sat through their Saturday evening talking about funerals. No wonder Rita had taken a leap in the dark."


Memories of war

It's at this point, primarily to shake her brother and sister up a bit, that she informs them that Rita's courting. Ira is duly invited for tea. On which occasion he talks mainly to Marge... She picks up far more clues than Rita. She realizes that the young American is entirely uneducated. Nellie, meanwhile, has come to the conclusion that he's "a nice boy", but what she means is this: "It would be easy to steer Rita from him. He wasn't a threat to mother's furniture."

Ira's interest in Marge doesn't even pass Jack by... So, of course, Rita notices: "She hated the way he watched Margo. As if she was something special." Inspired by one of Marge's stories, he laughs -- for the first time in Rita's hearing.

Jack tries to reassure his daughter. Marge has always been different, he says: "She questioned everything. She made it difficult for herself... She doesn't mean to bewitch your Ira. It's just her way." He tells Rita how he and Marge were beaten regularly as children: "But your Auntie Marge would never learn. She wouldn't give in. She wanted to get married again, you know, when you were little." Yes, says Rita, pointing out that Marge had given her suitor up. "She didn't want to," says Jack. "We made her. It didn't suit your Auntie Nellie and me."

Rita is now desperate. She writes to Ira suggesting that they go out together again: "She was begging and she knew it." She's basically making clear that he could have whatever he wanted.


Our characters would have been familiar with the Liverpool Overhead Railway (LOR)

But then Ira calls at the house at a time when he knows he'll find Marge, not Rita. He tells Marge he's not planning to see Rita again. She's too young, he says: "And she's kind of joyless. She don't want no fun, no drinking nor dancing." Marge explains how Nellie never taught her how to enjoy herself.

But Marge knows her own limitations, too. "It was precisely the glitter that drew them at the start that drove them away in the end."

Via Valerie, Rita learns that Chuck had to read her letter to Ira, because he can't read or write. She's shocked, but she still thinks there's hope. He's illiterate... He might need her... But hope dies when he's not under the clock waiting for her. She knows it's over.



***

But we're not finished... Because Nellie catches Ira and Marge... Up in the box-room where she's been squirrelling away bits of Mother's furniture.

And what really incenses her is not the surprise discovery or the betrayal of Rita, but the fact that he drags his coat along the table, the buttons scratching against the wood: "How dare he scratch Mother's furniture? A lifetime of sacrifice, of detailed care. What right had he to drag his clothing across the polished wood?"

She stabs him with her scissors... Surprised, he misses his footing on the stairs, falls, bangs his head on the iron curve of the umbrella stand. Game over... "She felt she had done wrong, but there were mitigating circumstances. He shouldn't have touched the furniture... He had come into their lives and caused nothing but trouble -- upsetting Rita, making a liar out of her... It would be better if children stayed small, never grew up, never knew how deep the sea could be..."

Marge thinks they should tell someone, feels that what has happened is "wicked". But Nellie says she doesn't see why they should "pay for him". So they swing into action. They wrap him up in a curtain. They send for Jack. They move the body temporarily into the washhouse: "Margo got the giggles when they had difficulty getting him through the door."

Jack arrives. Nellie tells him he'll have to take the body down to the docks, tip it in the river. But it's the two women who have to do the loading. Jack, the butcher, is retching in the scullery.

"Afterwards she went through into the little front room... and allowed herself a glass of port..."

And we're back at the beginning.

Afterwards...


An LOR worker in an air raid shelter near Pier Head in 1941. "Rita," thinks Valerie, "was so put down, so without passion, living all her life with the old women down the road... In the air raid shelter she wore a hat belonging to Auntie Nellie as if she was in church"

***

I think this novel is so good on so many levels. So good, in fact, that I feel the story is its own analysis.

The narrative is a comedy of manners (and is often very funny), and yet it's laced with a big bucketload of Gothic. (Hilary Mantel cites it as the book she wishes she'd written: "Witty, chilling, every word in place.")

It gives us a penetrating social history of a particular class, a particular generation, a particular era. I'm not old enough to remember that wartime period, but its cultural hangover was still very much present as I was growing up in the sixties. Much of the language, and many of the ideas and mental habits, were still in circulation in my childhood. And Bainbridge captures it all perfectly.


Post-WWII Liverpool. Amateur photographer Bob Howells's snaps of the 1950s

There's definitely autobiography in there, too. Born in Liverpool, and 13 when the war ended, she "returned again and again to the landscape, emotions, people and experiences of her childhood". As Self explains: "Bainbridge considered herself almost a chronicler more than an inventor of stories: her books were all inspired by fact, although the animating spark of invention on every page is unmistakable. Her early novels were drawn from family life: on The Dressmaker, she said 'the sole purpose of the book was to chronicle my family' -- Nellie and Margo were her own aunts, and Rita stood in place of Bainbridge herself."

Her concision is admirable: "She wrote on an old black typewriter, which she felt helped to slow her down, and perfected each page before moving to the next. 'I write twelve pages to get one page, and I cut all the time.' Thus she ended up with books that left space for the reader to do some work, books that didn’t talk down to us, and stories that she covered in 180 pages where other writers might take 400. 'I love narrative bumps and shocks. Nowadays, unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.'"

Mavis Cheek expresses Bainbridge's gift really well: "What makes The Dressmaker so easily readable is that underpinning the spareness and the bleak, funny prose is her ability to tell a story. The narrative whips along, there are no sidetracks, no grace notes of writing style; it is simply a story told through characters and situations that feel entirely real. This world existed and Bainbridge knew it."

Call me old-fashioned, but this is very refreshing after a few recent encounters with novels that just feel too clever for their own good...

Definitely more Bainbridge on the cards, then...