Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge

understanding her problems. 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? Had it deteriorated in the
     small hours of the night? There was dry rot, wet rot, woodworm. 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. She was indolent. She had sewn Rita into her vest when the child was small and the winter
     particularly bitter. She could confide to Mr Barnes her weariness of spirit over the endless making-do with the rations, the
     queueing at the shops; but to admit herslavery to mahogany and rosewood was difficult, when he continually admonished her from the pulpit to consider the lilies
     of the field. Had they been her very own lilies she would have spent a lifetime ensuring that they too retained their glory.
     Brooding, she walked the length of the road, smiling briefly at one or two neighbours who nodded in her direction, clutching
     her shopping bag to the breast of her black tailored coat. The thought of Mother’s things in a sale-room, or worse in the
     junk shop on Breck Road, caused her pain in the region of her heart. She hoped she wasn’t about to suffer a decline. She would
     wake at night with Marge lying beside her and remember quite vividly episodes of the past, unconnected: an outing as a child
     to the birthplace of Emily Bronte; Father in his broadcloth suit; Mother faded, sepia-coloured against the sky, sitting in
     the sparse grass on the moors, squinting into sunshine. Or she was at a desk at school with her mouth open watching a fly
     caught in a spiral of light, beating its wings against the panes of glass. She lay moistening her dry lips with her tongue,
     staring out into the dark little bedroom.
    She had walked the length of Priory Road and turned at the Cabbage Hall into Breck Road and not known it, not recorded one
     tree or shop or item of traffic. Of course it had changed. There were bomb craters and rubble and old landmarks cleared away,
     but still it bewildered her that she had come so far in her mind and not been conscious of the route. Inside the corner shop
     she asked for Marge’s ciggies.
    ‘Good afternoon. Lovely day, isn’t it?’
    The woman said it was a grand day but she only kept cigarettes for her regular customers. She wore a pink turban with some
     wax grapes pinned to left of centre, and drop earrings with purple clusters. Nellie’s eyes rounded in wonder. She put her
     fingers on the counter and explained that Marge was regular, always bought her ciggies here, but she was going to be late
     home and she’d come instead, ‘to fetch them for her’.
    ‘I’m sorry love, I don’t know you from Laurel and Hardy.’
    ‘She comes every night. She’s thin and she’s got a green coat and …’
    But Nellie couldn’t really say what Marge looked like, couldn’t for the life of her describe her features. After all those
     years. Her eyes travelled the rows of glass jars half filled with sweets, such pretty colours, on shelves rising clear to
     the ceiling, among advertisements for tobacco, for chocolates, a naval man with sea spray on his cheeks, a dandy in an opera
     cloak smiling down at her with eyes like Rudolf Valentino. She stood in a circle of light, dazed by the flecks of white at
     the centre of his eyes and the dust-filled rays of the sun that shone through the topmost window of the shop.
    ‘She always has ten Abdullah. Every night.’
    ‘Sorry, luv. I told you.’
    Nellie was deafened by her own heartbeats. She clutched the counter for support, unable to move. There was a jar of liquorice
     laces on the counter, coiled like snakes. Nellie wanted to pick up the jar and