17
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Ada Lumb arrived on the nine o'clock train. Sarah met her at the station, and they spent the morning looking round the shops. Or rather Sarah looked round the shops, while her mother, by a mixture of bullying, wheedling, cajoling, questions, speculations, wild surmises and sudden, bitter silences, extracted the whole story of Sarah's relationship with Billy Prior. By twelve, Sarah was glad to rest her feet, if not her ears, in a café, where they sat at a table for two by the window and ordered ham and chips. The alternative was steak and kidney pie, but Ada was having none of that. 'You can't trust anything with pastry wrapped round it,' she said. 'What they find to put in it, God knows. You've only got to look in the butchers to see there is nowt.'
Sarah was not deceived. She knew once the waitress was out of earshot she was in for a dollop of advice on rather more serious matters. She wiped a hole in the condensation on the window. Outside the people were moving shadows, the pavements of Princes Street jumped and streamed with rain. 'Just in time,' she said.
'I suppose you let him in?'
'What?'
'You don't say "what", Sarah. You say "pardon".'
'What?'
'I said, I suppose you let him in?'
'Isn't that my business, Mam?'
'Would be if you were gunna cope with the consequences.'
'There aren't going to be any consequences.'
'You think you know it all, don't you? Well, let me tell you something, something you don't know. In every one of them factories there's a bloke with a pin. Every tenth one gets a pin stuck in it. Not every other one, they know we're not fools. Every tenth.'
'Nice work, if you can get it.'
'Easier than bringing up the kid.' Ada speared a chip. 'The point is you gotta put a value on yourself. You don't, they won't. You're never gunna get engaged till you learn to keep your knees together. Yeh, you can laugh, but men don't value what's dished out free. Mebbe they shouldn't be like that, mebbe they should all be different. But they are like that and your not gunna change them.'
The waitress came to remove their plates. 'Anything else, madam?'
Ada switched to her genteel voice. 'Yes, we'd like to see the menu, please.' She waited till the waitress had gone, then leant forward to deliver the knock-out blow. 'No man likes to think he's sliding in on another man's leavings.'
Sarah collapsed in giggles. 'Mam.'
'Aye, well, you can laugh.' She looked round the café, then down at the table, smoothing the white table cloth with brown-spotted hands. 'Nice, isn't it?'
Sarah stopped giggling. 'Yeh, Mam, it's nice.'
'I wish you worked somewhere like this.'
'Mam, the wages are rubbish. That girl didn't live at home, she wouldn't eat.'
'She's not bright yellow, though, is she?'
'She not bright anything. She looks anaemic to me.'
'But you meet nice people, Sarah. I mean I know some of the women you work with, and I'm not saying they're not good sorts – some of them – but you got to admit, Sarah, they're rough.'
'I'm rough.'
'You could've been a lady's maid if you'd stuck in. That's what gets me about you, you can put it on as well as anybody when you like, but it's too much bloody bother.'
