“Lucky, she is. When I was twenty-one they didn’t give me any han’-bag. You don’t know you’re born.”
Mrs. Royer fished for a tea-leaf with the tip of her little finger and flicked it on to the rag rug.
“Where was it from?” she asked, her disapproval of modern practices forgotten.
“Walker’s . . . oh, but they had a real bag, Ma. Morocco with a gold chain handle. Three quid!” Ivy rolled her blue eyes. “By God, wait till my twenty-first . . .”
Flo did not speak but she watched her sister’s expressive face and her mother’s slow eating. How many teeth her mother had Flo did not know, but it was not many. Mrs. Royer continually shifted her food from one side to the other trying to get it to where she could deal with it.
“Three quid for a bag! I’d never pay that.” She took a slow drink. “If I had it, I’d buy a costoom as I saw in Dickie’s; green, with a kind of speck, darker than what the rest were.”
“I saw it. Gosh, Ma, but you’d look like a mountaineer,” Ivy exclaimed. “But did you see . . .?”
For ten minutes they talked like that while Flo sat quiet. She had not seen the things, though ordinarily she would have joined in, but now she did not feel like it. Then the meal was finished and she began to side. Ivy said she’d help to wash up, only then she went upstairs and apparently forgot. When she came down she had a bundle of clothes on her arm and at once asked where the kettle was.
“I washed up with it, of course,” said Flo.
“You would. What the hell do I do for a wash?” asked Ivy.
She began to change on the rug, stripping to her vest while Mrs. Royer sat and watched and drank more tea and asked her about the sailcloth works.
“Jenny got a needle through her finger . . . put her finger right underneath, the mug.”
“Jenny who . . . not Bob Milsom’s girl?”
“Yes,” said Ivy. “I wish they’d put me on a machine instead of the damn rope job. But they sacked three more to-day, so what a bloody hope . . .”
“What happened to her?” asked Mrs. Royer.
“Oh, pulled the needle right through, so they said, an’ sent her off . . . infirmary, I suppose. She fainted.”
Mrs. Royer said “Oo!” and lifted her hand and stared at it, as though afraid that there might be a steel needle through one of her fingers. “I must tell Mrs. Dower; she knows Milsom’s wife. Went to school together.”
She stirred on her chair. Flo sat on the fender and Ivy in a brown creased cotton petticoat went to the washing-up tin and ran a little cold water into it and dabbed gingerly with her finger tips.
“Uh, I’ll not bother; I’ll get a wash when I get there . . . they’ll have some hot water. Not like this hole.”
Mrs, Royer did not seem to hear.
Ivy dried her fingers and then with the damp place of the grey-looking towel rubbed round her neck. Her dress was a deep red velvet, paler where she sat and where the insides of her elbows rubbed. But it suited her, and when she had brushed her hair, which was fine and stood out with a natural waviness, she had a distinct, though rather untidy, attractiveness.
“I think I’ll come with you,” said Mrs. Royer all at once. “I could do with a bit of a jollification.”
“You . . . you’ll only spoil it. I thought you said you were goin’ to tell Mrs. Dower about Jenny,” said Ivy. “They won’t want you at a twenty-first. And you’ve not had an invite.”
“I don’t suppose Ted’s ma would mind. It’s usually the more the merrier at those doos. I’d see that you didn’t get too gay, then, my girl. You’d do with a . . .”
Flo, who had been hoping that her mother would stay in for their last Saturday night together, was about to add her protest to Ivy’s when the thought occurred to her in time that if her mother learned that both of them were set against her going, there was nothing more likely to make her determine to go.
“Well, I’m off,” Ivy announced. “You can do what you like. But I hope to God you don’t come.”
She snicked the door latch decisively and they heard her steps die away up the pavement.
“She hasn’t taken any of the daffs and I’m glad. I thought you’d like them,” said Flo, to take her mother’s thoughts off the party. “It was good of Mrs. Mawson; I hope Mrs. . . . what is it? Mrs. Nadin’s like her. What a funny name, isn’t it?”
“Who?” asked Mrs. Royer vaguely.
“Nadin, isn’t it? You know, where I’m going . . .”
“Oh, ay.
Flo sat on the little three-legged wooden stool on the right by the fire and looked up at her mother’s face which was pink in the glow.
“I don’t know. . . . Mrs. Mawson says it’s just a way of getting girls to go cheap. D’you really . . .?”
“Oh, that’s what she give ’em you for, is it? To upset you,” said Mrs. Royer. “Well, tell her to mind her own business and keep ’er flowers next time.”