In Pursuit of the English
Doris Lessing
In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail. But the English she pursued - and found - were living in working-class homes in East London. They were lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded - quite unlike what they were supposed to be.In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail – a life of glamour and refinement that she naively believed England offered everyone. A fascinating, hilarious memoir of her first impressions of her adopted country, 'In Pursuit of the English' brilliantly captures Lessing's constant wonder at and growing affection for the people she came to know: the working-class of the East End of London. Lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded, they were quite unlike the English she had expected to find…
In Pursuit of the English
Doris Lessing
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u1404bfc4-b4a4-5a0b-9c4d-c75c2c43e5d6)
Title Page (#ubdc1a26a-3fd3-566a-8868-188a4ff3e3b1)
Chapter One (#uddec8191-8895-572b-a4a9-9b8a7f620c9e)
Chapter Two (#udaa9172e-d334-5613-b4ed-7c296465b5a8)
Chapter Three (#ud3db0cb5-6fbe-57a2-a23c-0c0020d96e6a)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)
Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ulink_5c5f7ce7-4041-5683-964e-5f05d1b5b443)
I came into contact with the English very early in life, because as it turns out, my father was an Englishman. I put it like this, instead of making a claim or deprecating a fact, because it was not until I had been in England for some time that I understood my father.
I wouldn’t like to say that I brooded over his character; that would be putting it too strongly, but I certainly spent a good part of my childhood coming to terms with it. I must confess, to be done with confessions right at the start, that I concluded at the age of about six my father was mad. This did not upset me. For a variety of reasons, none of which will be gone into here, the quintessential eccentricity of the human race was borne in upon me from the beginning. And aside from whatever deductions I might have come to for myself, verbal confirmation came from outside, continuously, and from my father himself. It was his wont to spend many hours of the day seated in a rickety deck-chair on the top of the semi-mountain on which our house was built, surveying the African landscape which stretched emptily away on all sides for leagues. After a silence which might very well have lasted several hours, he would start to his feet, majestically splenetic in shabby khaki, a prophet in his country, and, shaking his fist at the sky, shout out: ‘Mad! Mad! Everyone! Everywhere Mad!’ With which he would sink back, biting his thumb and frowning, into sombre contemplation of his part of the universe; quite a large part, admittedly, compared to what is visible to, let us say, an inhabitant of Luton. I say Luton because at one time he lived there. Reluctantly.
My mother was not English so much as British, an intrinsically efficient mixture of English, Scottish and Irish. For the purposes of this essay, which I take it is expected to be an attempt at definitions, she does not count. She would refer to herself as Scottish or Irish according to what mood she was in, but not, as far as I can remember, as English. My father on the other hand called himself English, or rather, an Englishman, usually bitterly, and when reading the newspapers: that is, when he felt betrayed, or wounded in his moral sense. I remember thinking it all rather academic, living as we did in the middle of the backveld. However, I did learn early on that while the word English is tricky and elusive enough in England, this is nothing to the variety of meanings it might bear in a Colony, self-governing or otherwise.
I decided my father was mad on such evidence as that at various times and for varying periods he believed that (a) One should only drink water that has stood long enough in the direct sun to collect its invisible magic rays. (b) One should only sleep in a bed set in such a position that those health-giving electric currents which continuously dart back and forth from Pole to Pole can pass directly through one’s body, instead of losing their strength by being forced off course, (c) The floor of one’s house should be insulated, probably by grass matting, against the invisible and dangerous emanations from the minerals in the earth. Also because he wrote, but did not post, letters to the newspapers on such subjects as the moon’s influence on the judgment of statesmen; the influence of properly compounded compost on world peace; the influence of correctly washed and cooked vegetables on the character (civilized) of a white minority as against the character (uncivilized) of a black, indigenous, non-vegetable-washing majority.
As I said, it was only some time after I reached England, I understood that this – or what I had taken to be – splendidly pathological character would merge into the local scene without so much as a surprised snarl from anyone.
It is, then, because of my early and thorough grounding in the subject of the English character that I have undertaken to write about this business of being an exile. First one has to understand what one is an exile from. And unfortunately I have not again succeeded in getting to know an Englishman. That is not because, as the canard goes, they are hard to know, but because they are hard to meet.
An incident to illustrate. I had been in London two years when I was rung up by a friend newly-arrived from Cape Town. ‘Hey, Doris, man,’ she says, ‘how are you doing and how are you getting on with the English?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘the thing is, I don’t think I’ve met any. London is full of foreigners.’ ‘Hell, yes, I know what you mean. But I met an Englishman last night.’ ‘You didn’t?’ ‘I did. In a pub. And he’s the real thing.’ At first glance I knew he was the real thing. Tall, asthenic, withdrawn; but above all, he bore all the outward signs of the inward, intestine-twisting prideful melancholy. We talked about the weather and the Labour Party. Then, at the same moment, and from the same impulse – he was remarking that the pub was much too hot, my friend and I laid delighted hands on him. At last, we said, we are meeting the English. He drew himself up. His mild blue eyes flashed at last. ‘I am not,’ he said, with a blunt but basically forgiving hauteur, ‘English. I have a Welsh grandmother.’
The sad truth is that the English are the most persecuted minority on earth. It has been so dinned into them that their cooking, their heating arrangements, their love-making, their behaviour abroad and their manners at home are beneath even contempt, though certainly not comment, that like Bushmen in the Kalahari, that doomed race, they vanish into camouflage at the first sign of a stranger.
Yet they are certainly all round us. The Press, national institutions, the very flavour of the air we breathe indicate their continued and powerful existence. And so, whenever confounded by some native custom, I consider my father.
For instance. It is the custom in Africa to burn fireguards for dwelling-houses and outhouses against the veld fires which rage across country all through the dry season. My father was burning a fireguard for the cow shed. It was a windless day. The grass was short. The fire would burn slowly. Yet it was in the nature of things that any small animal, grounded bird, insect or reptile in the two-hundred-yard-wide, mile-long stretch of fire would perish, not, presumably, without pain. My father stood, sombrely contemplating the creeping line of small flames. The boss-boy stood beside him. Suddenly there fled out from the smoke-filled grass at their feet, a large fieldmouse. The boss-boy brought down a heavy stick across the mouse’s back. It was dying. The boss-boy picked up the mouse by the tail, and swinging the still-twitching creature, continued to stand beside my father, who brought down his hand in a very hard slap against the boss-boy’s face. So unprepared was he for this, that he fell down. He got up, palm to his cheek, looking at my father for an explanation. My father was rigid with incommunicable anger. ‘Kill it at once,’ he said, pointing to the mouse, now dead. The boss-boy flung the mouse into a nest of flames, and stalked off, with dignity.
‘If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s cruelty of any kind,’ my father said afterwards, in explanation of the incident.
Which is comparatively uncomplicated, not to say banal. More obliquely rewarding in its implications was the affair with the Dutchman. My father was short of money, and had undertaken to do, in his spare time, the accounting for the small goldmine two miles away. He went over three times a week for this purpose. One day, several hundred pounds were missing. It was clear that Van Reenan, who managed the mine for a big company, had stolen it, and in such a way that it looked as if my father had. My father was whitely silent and suffering for some days. At any moment the company’s auditors would descend, and he would be arrested. Suddenly, without a word to my mother, who had been making insensitively practical suggestions, such as going to the police, he stalked off across the veld to the mine, entered the Dutchman’s office, and knocked him down. My father was not at all strong, apart from having only one leg, the other having been blown off in the First World War. And the Dutchman was six-foot, a great, red-faced, hot-tempered trekox of a man. Without saying one word my father returned across country, still silent and brooding, and shut himself into the dining-room.
Van Reenan was entirely unmanned. Although this was by no means the first time he had embezzled and swindled, so cleverly that while everyone knew about it the police had not been able to lay a charge against him, he now lost his head and voluntarily gave himself up to the police. Where he babbled to the effect that the Englishman had found him out. The police telephoned my father. Who, even whiter, more silent, more purposeful than before, strode back across the veld to the mine, pushed aside the police sergeant, and knocked Van Reenan down again. ‘How dare you suggest,’ he demanded, with bitter reproach, ‘how dare you even imagine, that I would be capable of informing on you to the police?’
The third incident implies various levels of motive. The first time I heard about it was, when very young indeed, from my mother, thus: ‘Your governess is not suited to this life here, she is going back to England.’ Pause. ‘I suppose she is going back to the smart set she came from.’ Pause. ‘The sooner she gets married the better.’
Later, from a neighbour who had been confidante to the governess. ‘That poor girl who was so unhappy with your mother and had to go back to England in disgrace.’
Later, from my father: ‘… that time I had to take that swine Baxter to task for making free with Bridget’s name in the bar.’
What happened was this. My mother, for various reasons unwell, and mostly bedridden, had answered an advertisement from ‘Young woman, educated finishing school, prepared to teach young children in return for travel.’ The Lord knows what she, or my mother, expected. It was the midtwenties, Bridget was twenty-five, and had ‘done’ several London seasons. Presumably she wanted to see a bit of the world before she married, or thought of some smart Maugham-ish colonial plantation society. Later she married an Honourable something or other, but in the meantime she got a lonely maize farm, a sick woman, two spoiled children, and my father, who considered that any woman who wore lipstick or shorts was no better than she ought to be. On the other hand, the district was full of young farmers looking for wives, or at least entertainment. They were not, she considered, of her class, but it seemed she was prepared to have a good time. She had one, and danced and gymkhana’d whenever my parents would let her. This was not nearly as often as she would have liked. She was being courted by a farmer called Baxter, a tough ex-policeman from Liverpool. My father did not like him. He didn’t like any of her suitors. One evening, he went into the bar at the village and Baxter came over and said: ‘How’s Bridget?’ My father instantly knocked him down. When the bewildered man stood up and said: ‘What the f~ing hell’s that for?’ my father said: ‘You will kindly refer, in my presence at least, to an innocent young girl many thousands of miles from her parents and to whom I am acting as guardian, as Miss Fox.’
Afterwards, he said: ‘I must not allow myself to lose my temper so easily. Quite obviously, I don’t know my own strength.’
When stunned by The Times or the Telegraph; when – yes, I think the word is interested, by the Manchester Guardian; when unable to discover the motive behind some dazzlingly stupid stroke of foreign policy; when succumbing to that mood which all of us foreigners are subject to, that we shall ever be aliens in an alien land, I recover myself by reflecting, in depth, on the implications of incidents such as these.
Admittedly at a tangent, but in clear analogy, I propose to admit, and voluntarily at that, that I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone’s, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does not mean, simply, those people who can be found by walking out of one’s front door and turning down a side-street. Not at all. Like love and fame it is a platonic image, a grail, a quintessence, and by definition, unattainable. It took me a long time to understand this. When I lived in Africa and was learning how to write, that group of mentors who always voluntarily constitute themselves as a sort of watch committee of disapprobation around every apprentice writer, used to say that I could never write a word that made sense until I had become pervaded by the cultural values of the working-class. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, these mentors claimed that not one truthful word could ever be written until it was first baptized, so to speak, by the working-class. I remember even now the timidity with which, just as I was about to leave Africa, I suggested that having spent twenty-five years of my life in the closest contact with the black people, who are workers if nothing else, some knowledge, or intimation, or initiation by osmosis must surely have been granted me. And I remember even now the indignant tone of the reply: ‘The Africans in this country are not working-class in the true sense. They are semi-urbanized peasants.’ I should have understood by the tone, which was essentially that of a defender of a faith, that I must stick by my guns. But it always did take me a long time to learn anything.
I came to England. I lived, for the best of reasons, namely, I was short of money, in a household crammed to the roof with people who worked with their hands. After a year of this, I said with naïve pride to a member of the local watch committee that now, at last, I must be considered to have served my apprenticeship. The reply was pitying, but not without human sympathy: ‘These are not the real working-class. They are the lumpen proletariat, tainted by petty bourgeois ideology.’ I rallied. I said that, having spent a lot of my time with Communists, either here or in Africa, a certain proportion of whom, even though a minority, are working-class, surely some of the magic must have rubbed off on me? The reply came: ‘The Communist Party is the vanguard of the working-class and obviously not typical.’ Even then I didn’t despair. I went to a mining village, and returned with a wealth of observation. It was no good. ‘Miners, like dockworkers, are members of a very specialized, traditionalized trade; mining is already (if you take the long view) obsolete. The modes of being, mores and manners of a mining community have nothing whatsoever to do with the working-class as a whole.’ Finally, I put in some time in a housing estate in a New Town, and everyone I met was a trade unionist, a member of the Labour Party, or held other evidence of authenticity. It was then that I realized I was defeated. ‘The entire working-class of Britain has become tainted by capitalism or has lost its teeth. It is petit bourgeois to a man. If you really want to understand the militant working-class, you have to live in a community in France, let’s say near the Renault works, or better still, why don’t you take a trip to Africa where the black masses are not yet corrupted by industrialism.’
The purpose of this digression, which is not nearly so casual as it might appear, is to make it plain that when set on something I don’t give up easily. Also to – but I must get back to why it took me so long to get started for England in the first place.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England. This was because, to use the word in an entirely different sense, I was English. In the colonies or Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent. This definition is sentimental and touching. When used by people not English, it is accusatory. My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition. They hated Rhodesia because of its newness, lack of tradition, of culture. They were English, also, because they were middle-class in a community mostly working-class. This use of the word can be illustrated by the following incident. Scene: the local tennis club. The children are playing tennis, watched by their mothers. The hostess for the afternoon is a woman from the Cape, a member of an old Dutch family, newly married to a Scots farmer. She is shy, dignified, and on her guard. Mrs Mathews, a loquacious Scots farmer’s wife, attempts to engage her in conversation. She fails. She turns to my mother, and says: ‘That one’s got no small-talk to change with a neighbour. She’s too good for us. She’s real English and that’s a fact.’ Then she blushes and says: ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean …’ thus revealing how often she has made the same criticism of my mother.
My parents were, now I come to think of it, grail-chasers of a very highly developed sort. I cannot even imagine a country in which they would have been definitively ready to settle down without criticism. The nearest I can get to it would be a combination of the best parts of Blackheath or Richmond, merged, or mingled with a really large ranch, let’s say about fifty thousand acres, in the Kenyan Highlands. This would have to be pervaded by a pre-1914 atmosphere, or ambience, like an Edwardian after-glow. Their Shangri-La would be populated thickly, for my mother, with nice professional people who were nevertheless interesting; and sparsely, for my father, with scamps, drunkards, eccentrics and failed poets who were nevertheless and at bottom decent people.
I would, of course, be the first to blame my parents for my own grail-seeking propensities.
England was for me a grail. And in a very narrowly-defined way. Not long ago people set foot for the colonies – the right sort of people, that is – in a spirit of risking everything and damning the cost. These days, a reverse immigration is in progress. The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London, determined to conquer it, but on their own terms.
I have an anecdote to illustrate this. I had been in England for about five years, and was just beginning to understand that I had got the place whacked, when an old acquaintance telephoned to say that he had arrived in London to write a book. He had forever turned his back on his old life, which consisted of making enormous sums of money out of gold mines, drinking a lot, and marrying a succession of blonde and beautiful girls. I visited him in his flat. It was in Mayfair, furnished at immense expense in the most contemporary taste, with two refrigerators. He was very excited that at last he had had the strength of mind to cut all his profits and tackle England. I remember on the whole without regret, the strong, involuntary moral disapprobation that I radiated as he talked. Finally, and the remark welled up from the depths of my being, from the perfervid heart of the myth itself: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you are going to live in a flat that costs twenty-two guineas a week, in Mayfair, with a refrigerator, to write a novel?’
Looking back, I can see that there were several occasions when I could have come to England years before I did. For instance, there was talk of my being sent to school here. That would have meant my being taken on by a section of my family which I detested – I see now quite rightly – by instinct, and without ever having met them. I used to get ill with mysterious spontaneity every time this plan was discussed. I would lie in bed and dream about England, which of course had nothing in common with that place inhabited by my cousins. That England was almost entirely filled with rather dangerous night-clubs, which had a strong literary flavour. I was then fourteen. I think the only person I would have allowed to bring me to England at that time was a father-figure in appearance like Abraham Lincoln, with strong white-slaving propensities, yet fundamentally decent, and with an untutored taste for the novel Clarissa. My most powerful fantasy was of how I would gently release the captives, all of them misunderstood girls of about fourteen, all of them incredibly beautiful, but full of fundamental decency. I would press enough money into their hands (willingly given me by my master for this purpose) to enable them to find themselves, and set them free. At the same time I would be explaining to my master the real and inner significance of the novel Clarissa, while he gently toyed with my breasts, and, kissing me on the brow, willingly handed me large sums of money which would enable me to find myself.
The other occasions when nothing prevented me from coming to England but enough energy to do it, were the same: a powerful inner voice said it was not yet the time. The time, finally, was in 1949, when England was at its dingiest, my personal fortunes at their lowest, and my morale at zero. I also had a small child.
I have it on the highest secular authority that this propensity of mine to do things the hard way amounts to nothing less than masochism, but a higher authority still, the voice of the myth itself, tells me that this is nonsense.
By the time I came, things had been satisfactorily arranged in such a way that the going would be as hard as possible.
For instance. The ships for years after the war were booked months in advance. Yet I know now – and it would have been obvious to anyone but me – that the simple process of bribing someone would have got me a passage on one of the big regular boats. Instead I decided on a much cheaper, but slower, Dutch boat for which I would have to wait in Cape Town. Of course, by the time I had hung about in Cape Town, and spent money for four weeks on that terrible slow boat, it would have been much cheaper to fly.
The moment of arriving in England, for the purposes of the myth, would be when I got to Cape Town. This is because the Cape is English, or, as the phrase goes, is pervaded by the remnants of the old English liberal spirit.
It so happened that the first people I met in Cape Town were English. This was an immediately disturbing experience. They were a university professor and his wife, who had been, the last time I saw them, bastions of the local Communist Party. That had been eighteen months before. Now they had left the Communist Party. Things have now changed so that it is quite possible to leave the Communist Party and retain a sense of balance. In those days, one was either an eighteen-carat, solid, unshakable red, or, if an exred, violently, and in fact professionally anti-Communist. The point was, that this volte-face had taken place about six weeks before, and in a blinding moment of illumination at that, like on the road to Damascus. I went into their beautiful house, which was on one of the hills overlooking the bay. I was full of comradely emotions. The last time I had seen it, it was positively the area office for every kind of progressive activity. I was greeted with an unmistakable atmosphere of liberal detachment, and the words: ‘Of course we have left the Party and we are no longer prepared to be made use of.’ Now I was hoping I might be asked to stay a few days while looking for a room; in fact I had been invited to stay any time I liked. I became even more confused as the conversation proceeded, because it seemed that not only had they changed, I had, too. Whereas, previously, I had been fundamentally sound, with my heart in the right place, yet with an unfortunate tendency towards flippancy about serious matters which ought to be corrected, now I was a dogmatic red with a closed mind and a dangerous influence on the blacks who were ever prey to unscrupulous agitators. I was trying to discuss this last bit reasonably, when I was informed that Cape Town was overflowing, that no one but a lunatic would arrive without arranging accommodation, and there was no hope of my finding a room. My situation was, in short, admirably deplorable. While my son has always been the most delightful, amiable and easy-going person, yet, being two years old, he needed to sleep and eat. My total capital amounted to £47. I was informed that the prices for even bad accommodation were astronomical. They telephoned some boarding houses which turned out, much to their satisfaction, to be full. They then summoned a taxi. On my suggestion.
The taxi-driver was an Afrikaner and he had an aunt who ran a boarding house. He instantly took me there, refused payment for the trip, arranged matters with his aunt, carried in my luggage – which was extensive, because I had not yet learned how to travel – taught my son some elementary phrases in Afrikaans, gave me a lot of good advice, and said he would come back to see how I was getting on. He was a man of about sixty, who said he had forty-four grandchildren, but had it in his heart to consider my son the forty-fifth. He was a Nationalist. It was not the first time I had been made to reflect on that sad political commonplace that one’s enemies are so often much nicer than one’s friends.
Sitting in the taxi outside Mrs Coetzee’s boarding house, the mirage of England was still strong. While features like the white-slaving father-figure and the night-clubs had disappeared, and it was altogether more adjusted to my age, it can’t be said to have had much contact with fact – at least, as experienced. The foundation of this dream was now a group of loving friends, all above any of the minor and more petty human emotions, such as envy, jealousy, spite, etc. We would be devoted to changing the world completely, and very fast, at whatever cost to ourselves, while we simultaneously produced undying masterpieces, and lived communally, with such warmth, brilliance, generosity of spirit and so on that we would be an example to everyone.
The first thing I saw from the taxi was that the place was full of English. That is, English, not South African British. Several English girls were sitting on the wooden steps, their famed English complexions already darkened, looking disconsolate. The boarding house was on one of the steep slopes of the city, and overpowered by a great many dazzlingly new hotels that rose high above it on every side. It was very old, a ramshackle wandering house of wood, with great wooden verandahs, a roof hidden by dense green creeper, and surrounded by a colourful garden full of fruit-trees and children. It had two storeys, the upper linked to the lower only by an outside wooden staircase. The place was filthy, unpainted, decaying; a fire-trap and a death-trap – in short, picturesque to a degree. A heavy step upstairs made the whole structure tremble to its foundations. My room was in the front, off the verandah, and it had bare wooden floors, stained pink walls, stained green ceiling, a wardrobe so large I could take several strides up and down inside it, two enormous sagging double beds, and four single beds. My friend the grandfather had gone, so I went in search of authority, my feet reverberating on the bare boards. It was mid-afternoon. Towards the back of the house was a small room painted dingy yellow, with a broken wood-burning stove in it, a large greasy table dotted with flies, a hunk of cold meat under a great fly-cover, and the fattest woman I have ever seen in my life dozing in a straight-backed chair. It was as if a sack of grain was supported by a matchbox. Her great loose body strained inside a faded orange cotton dress. Her flesh was dull yellow in colour, and her hair dragged in dull strands on her neck. I thought she must be the coloured cook; but when I learned this was Mrs Coetzee herself, suppressed the seditious thought. I went back to my room, where a small, thin, chocolate-coloured girl who looked about twelve, but was in fact eighteen, was engaged in replacing the dirty sheets on the biggest of the beds with slightly less dirty sheets. She was bare-footed, and wore a bright pink dress, rent under the arm. Her name was Jemima. She did all the housework of the boarding house, which had between fifty and sixty people in it, and helped Mrs Coetzee in the kitchen. She earned three pounds a month, and was the most exploited human being I have known. To watch her do my room out was an education in passive resistance. She would enter without knocking, and without looking at me, carrying a small dustpan and brush, which she dropped on an unmade bed and did not use again. She would direct her small sharp body in a straight line to my bed, while her completely expressionless round black eyes glanced about her, but unseeing. With one movement she twitched the bedclothes up over the rumpled pillows. She then smoothed the surface creases on the faded coverlet out with the right hand, while already turning her body to the next bed, in which my son slept. She twitched up the bedclothes on that with her left hand, while she reached out the other for the dustpan and brush. She was already on her way to the door before her right hand, left behind, had picked up the dustpan. She then turned herself around in such a way that at the door she was facing into the room. She used the edge of the dustpan to pull the doorknob towards her. The door slammed. The room, as far as she was concerned, was done.
Mrs Coetzee and she carried on warfare in shrill Afrikaans which I did not understand. But like all wars that have been going on for a long time, it sounded more like a matter of form than of feeling.
I got all the information I needed as soon as I approached the loaded staircase. A dozen resigned voices told me the facts. These were all brides of South African soldiers. They were all waiting for some place to live in. They had all arrived on recent ships. Mrs Coetzee was a disgusting war profiteer. For horrible food and conditions she charged the same as that charged by respectable boarding houses on the beach. If one could get into them. And if they would take children without making a fuss – which Mrs Coetzee did. But the fact that she was easy about the children did not outweigh her hatred of the English, about which she made no secret.
I rang up the shipping offices who said there was no sign of the ship, which was well known for taking its time at ports around the coast. It might be next week or the week after, but of course they would let me know. I was sitting on one of the beds, waving the flies off my cheerfully sleeping child, when a crisp white envelope slid under the door. It said: ‘I and my husband would be very happy if you would care to join us for a drink after dinner. Yours sincerely, Myra Brooke-Benson. (Room 7.)’ Room 7 was opposite mine, and I could hear English voices male and female, from behind the closed door. A high voice, clearly at the end of its tether: ‘But, my dear, I really do think that this DDT must have lost its strength.’ And a low voice, firm and in command. ‘Nonsense, my dear, I bought it this morning.’
Towards five in the evening I went again in search of the landlady. Mrs Coetzee was now awake, seated at the kitchen table, slicing pale yellowish slices off an enormous golden pumpkin. Her arms stuck out at her sides like wings, supported by wads of shaking fat. Great drops of sweat scattered off her in all directions. Jemima stood beside her, rapidly squeezing pale pink ground meat into flat cakes between her palms. I coughed. Mrs Coetzee nodded. She returned to her work. She had no English.
The supper was served in a room into which refinement had been injected in the shape of a dozen small tables that were covered with red tissue paper, and set with a knife, fork and spoon at each place. A coloured paper lantern was tied with string to the naked light bulb. We ate roast pumpkin, fried meat cakes, and fried potato hash. Afterwards, there were fried pumpkin fritters. Everyone was eating avidly from starvation. The portions were no larger than necessary to maintain life. I immediately pinpointed my hosts for after dinner. They were a small, fair pretty woman, looking incredibly clean and neat; and a bald, fierce-looking man with a well-brushed moustache. I smiled at them, but as they stiffened and merely nodded back, I imagined I must be mistaken. When I presented myself at the door of No. 7, however, they were smiling and full of welcome. They had been here for three weeks, and were waiting for a flat to fall vacant in Ndola, where he was to work on the copper mines. ‘I will not, I simply will not stay here, Timothy,’ she kept saying, with crisp plaintiveness. And he kept saying, with bluff reassurance: ‘But, my dear, of course we are not going to stay here.’ We drank brandy, and made small talk. We offered each other many commiserations. We said goodnight, smiling. As far as I was concerned the evening had passed without any of that vital communication essential to real human relationships. I imagined it had been a failure.
Next morning, when I woke, the double bed opposite had two elderly women in it. They were asleep. I shushed my son and we waited. They woke, good-natured, smiling and unembarrassed when Jemima came in, without knocking, and slopped down four cups of tea on the floor just inside the door. They smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded. Conversing in smiles and nods, we all dressed, and they departed in an ancient dust-covered car in a direction away from Cape Town.
I went into the kitchen. Mrs Coetzee was slicing pumpkin. Jemima was slicing beef into pale strips. I said: ‘Mrs Coetzee, I would like to ask what those two strange women were doing in my room last night.’ Jemima spoke to Mrs Coetzee. Mrs Coetzee spoke to Jemima. Jemima said: ‘Says they are cousins from Constantia.’ ‘But why in my room?’ ‘Says boarding house is full.’ ‘Yes, but it was my room.’ ‘Says you can go.’
I retired. Myra Brooke-Benson was just going into No. 7. She gave me a pretty but measured smile, appropriate to our having bumped into each other, with apologies, on the pavement a week ago. Nevertheless, I told her what had happened. ‘My dear, anything is possible here,’ she said. ‘As for me, I simply will not have it. I have been trying to get her to give me a carafe for drinking water for a week, and if I don’t get it, I shall report her to the city authorities.’
I gave the question of my correct relations with the Brooke-Bensons some thought, and at last hit upon the right mode, or method. I found a piece of writing paper, and a clean envelope, and wrote: ‘Dear Mrs Brooke-Benson. I would be so happy if you and your husband would join me tonight after dinner for a drink. Yours sincerely.’ This I pushed under her door. I was sitting on my bed waiting for her reply, in another envelope, to insinuate itself under my door, when she knocked, and said: ‘Timothy and I would be delighted to accept your kind invitation for this evening. It is so very kind of you.’
Meanwhile, it was observable from my windows that a great deal of human energy was being misapplied. The deeply lush garden was teeming with small children, and about two dozen young mothers were perched on the outside stairs, on the front steps, or on the grass, each anxiously watching her own offspring. I knew that they were all waiting for that blessed moment when these children would be sleepy, so they could put them to bed and rush off down into the city in order to interview housing agents and employment agents. For my part, I wanted to look up friends. I therefore approached a woman sitting rather apart from the rest, a small, plump, dark, fiery-cheeked person, who was guarding a small girl, and said it would be a good idea if we all took turns to look after the children, thus freeing the others. ‘You’ve just come,’ she said. ‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘This is not a place I would leave my child alone in,’ she said. ‘But surely, they wouldn’t be alone,’ I said. She said: ‘Some of these girls here I wouldn’t trust a dog with, let alone a child.’ I went to my room and considered this. It was only afterwards I realized she was middle-class and most of the other women were not. Believing that Myra Brooke-Benson’s knock on my door entitled me to the same intimacy, I knocked on hers. She opened it with annoyance. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was trying to get the baby to sleep.’ I apologized and withdrew.
After dinner, at what was the right time, I put my plan to her. She thought it was admirable. ‘The trouble is, there’s only one other woman here I’d trust with my poor little boy. She has a delightful little girl. Some of these women here are quite appallingly careless with their children.’ I realized she meant Mrs Barnes, the red-cheeked woman in the garden. I still did not know what was the matter with the others, but suggested that in that case we three might take turns with the children. ‘I should be quite delighted to keep an eye on your charming little boy,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid that mine doesn’t take easily to strangers.’
We spent the evening discussing the carafe. It turned out that Mrs Coetzee didn’t have a carafe. Through Jemima, Mrs Brooke-Benson had insisted she should buy one. Mrs Coetzee had said, through Jemima, that if Mr Brooke-Benson wanted a carafe so badly he could buy one for himself.
We all went to bed early. The boarding house resounded until late every night with people coming in, going out, shouting good-bye and singing. Noises in the passage sounded as if they were in my room. I did hear furtive sounds in the night, but imagined they were made by some lucky reveller creeping in so as not to disturb the rest of us. As if this were likely. When I woke in the morning there was a young man asleep in the double bed opposite. My son was watching him with much interest. I got up, shook him, and demanded what he was doing in my room. He started awake, let out a furious exclamation in Afrikaans, shook his fist, exclaimed some more, and strode out to the bathroom. Luckily, the taxi-driver dropped in to see his aunt after breakfast, so I stopped him and explained what was happening. He sat on the edge of my unmade bed, picked up my son, set him on his knee and said: ‘You have the best room in the house. It is too big for you and your child.’ ‘But I’d be quite happy to have a smaller one.’ ‘But there is no smaller one.’ ‘Well, that isn’t my fault.’ ‘But my Aunt Marie has a kind heart and is not happy to turn away a man who has no place to sleep.’ ‘But you must see I can’t go to bed every night not knowing who I’m going to find when I wake in the morning. Besides, it’s not good for my son.’ ‘Ach, he is a very fine child, your son.’ ‘You must talk to your aunt.’ ‘Ya, man, but this terrible war we have had, the English started it, and now we are all suffering.’ ‘But please talk to your aunt.’ ‘Ach, Gott, she has had a hard life. Her husband – you’ve seen him by this time – he is no good for any woman.’ I had seen a furtive little man around the back of the premises but not connected him with Mrs Coetzee. ‘Ya, ya, God is unkind to many women sometimes. He could not even give her a child. Now your husband gave you a child. You should thank God for it.’ ‘Please will you speak to your aunt.’ ‘A poor woman, without a man to help her and without children. She is a brave woman and she works hard.’ By this time my son was clambering all over him, and Mr Coetzee was chuckling and smiling with pleasure. ‘I will tell her what you said. But it is a hard world for a woman without a man. If you are uncomfortable, I have a cousin who keeps a boarding house in Oranjezicht.’ ‘No, no, I’m very happy here, if you could just explain to your aunt.’ ‘This is a very good child you have here, and when he grows up he will be a good strong man.’ With which we went into the passage, my son on his shoulder. There stood Mr Brooke-Benson, scarlet with anger, scarlet even over his bald pate. ‘That bloody woman,’ he said, ‘she will not give me a carafe.’ ‘And what is this?’ enquired Mr Coetzee. I explained. He nodded. ‘Ach. Ya. I will speak to her.’ That afternoon he came in with a carafe which he presented to the Brooke-Bensons. They were furious, and kept saying it was a question of principle. He suggested, with courtesy, that to buy a carafe was a small thing to do for a woman who had no man to look after her, and it was a pleasure for him to do things for his auntie. He gave me a great bag of peaches, and my son a pound of sweets. Then he took my son for a drive in his taxi to visit his cousin Stella.
That night, the envelope slipped under my door contained an invitation to morning tea next day. Myra Brooke-Benson was equipped with every kind of instinct for domesticity. She had a spirit lamp, a silver teapot, and some fine china teacups. Her room, every bit as unpromising as mine, had flowers, clean linen, even cushions. She said there was a most unfortunate misunderstanding which she felt bad about even having to mention. It appeared that Mrs Barnes said she was going to complain to Mrs Coetzee that I had been observed to have a man, not my husband, in my bedroom. She, Myra Brooke-Benson, had explained the situation to Mrs Barnes, but Mrs Barnes had said that if a strange man entered her room in the night she wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all. Her sixth sense would have warned her. But the point was, any plan for guarding each other’s children was now out of the question.
I now resigned myself. The days, and then the weeks passed. I wrote notes of invitation for after-dinner drinks and morning tea with the Brooke-Bensons, and they wrote them to me. We ate pumpkin and fried meat for every meal. Mr Coetzee came to see me and my son often, and we talked about his children and his grandchildren. I rang up the shipping agents daily. Only once was my room invaded again, and that was when a man and a wife and five children arrived, apologetically, at three one morning, explaining they were maternal relatives of Mrs Coetzee. Mrs Barnes coloured and stiffened whenever she saw me. She spoke only to the Brooke-Bensons. My son had a nice time playing in the garden. I found one of the English girls who was prepared to let her children out of her sight occasionally, and we took turns to relieve each other. The English girls continued to sit on the stairs and to talk, with bitter homesickness, about England. I was bored to death, but consoled myself by dreaming about England which I knew by now would not actually begin until the moment I set foot on its golden soil.
Suddenly I got a letter from an old friend, an Afrikaans painter, who had been out of Cape Town on a painting trip. While I was reading the letter he arrived in my room with flowers, fruit and an enormous fish, which he had just caught.
‘Ya,’ he said, looking at me severely, ‘you must get the management to cook it for you. I can tell you, you need feeding up. I can see it. The English can’t cook. They can’t eat. You look very bad.’
‘The management,’ I said, ‘is Afrikaans.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I will go and make enquiries.’ I heard him stride over the bare boards of the passage. A silence. He came back, still swinging the fish by a loop of string through his forefinger. ‘I can’t give her this fish,’ he said. ‘She would not cook it as it should be cooked. And what are you doing here? This place is going to be pulled down, and instead we shall have a fine modern hotel with all conveniences for the tourists.’ He laid the fish on the floor. The room was pervaded with a loud smell of salt, sea and fish. It was an extremely hot afternoon.
‘Piet, I wish you’d take that fish away. People are very sensitive in this place. You’d be surprised.’
He nodded, with solemnity. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘It’s that English colony you’ve been living in. It makes people suspicious and conventional. In a minute you will be telling me not to speak so loudly.’
Piet did not look himself at all. Or rather, he was wearing his smug look, which went with his public personality. He was a tall man, rangy, with a high bounding stride. He had a long, pale portentous face. He wore his hair rather long. He also wore, for the benefit of his trade, flapping and colourful clothes. He had the ability to appear, by slightly tightening the muscles of his face, like a pale and enduring Christ. This is not at all what his character was. In fact I have never known a man who enjoyed himself more wholeheartedly than he did. He had a smile that spread, wicked and sly, from cheekbone to cheekbone, and eyes that crinkled amusement. Not, however, at the moment.
‘You have come at a bad time,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. I have realized that in three months I shall be forty. I have only ten years to live. I have always known that I shall die at fifty. It is a terrible thing to understand suddenly – death is approaching in great silent strides.’ He smiled, slightly, sideways, his eyes narrowed, as it were listening to the footsteps of death. ‘Ya,’ he said. ‘Ya. Ten years. So much to do, so little done.’ With a great effort he prevented himself from laughing, and sighed deeply instead.
Piet is not the only man I’ve known who has sentenced himself to death in advance. I know a doctor, for instance, a man of the highest intelligence moreover, who decided when he was thirty-six that he had ten years to live, and planned his life accordingly. It seems the Medical Association, or some such body, had announced that the average age for doctors to die was at forty-six, and from coronary thrombosis. Meeting this man after an interval, I pointed out that he now had only five years to live, and I trusted he was making good use of his time. But the BMA had meanwhile raised the statistical life of a doctor by ten years, and so things were not so urgent after all.
‘But there will be a silver lining to my personal tragedy,’ said Piet. ‘When my death is announced in the Press, for the first time in her history South Africa will be united.’
‘How is that?’
‘Surely you can imagine for yourself? Ya, think of it. Think of that morning. It will be very hot. The pigeons will be cooing in the trees. Then the news will come. The pigeons will stop cooing. In every town, in every village, in every little dorp, there will be a silence like the end of the world. Then there will rise into the still air a single cry of agony. Then from every house will come wailing and weeping. From every house will rush weeping women, old women, young women, wives, mothers, the Mayor’s daughter and the wife of the linesman. They will look at each other. By their tears they will know each other as sisters. They will run into each other’s arms. English and Afrikaans, Jewish and Greek, they will weep and cry: Piet is dead. Our Piet is dead.’
‘And the men?’
‘Ya, the men. Well, they will be united by the inconsolable grief of the women.’ He sighed again. ‘I have been thinking of that day all the way back in my car. I have had a terrible trip this time, because of my new understanding of my approaching death. But I have made a lot of money this time. I have been painting pondokkies all over the Free State. Thank God, now I can pay my debts.’
Piet was a man of talent. He had even painted in Paris and London. But he had been unable to make a living in the Cape. Therefore, whenever short of money, he drove off into the interior, his clothing subdued and his expression mournful. He introduced himself to the Mayor or some bigwig in each city, as a sound son of the Afrikaans nation, and explained that it was a terrible thing that this great people should be so uncultured as not to support its talented child. He painted them, their houses, their children, and their wives. He also painted points of local interest, which, as he explained, always turned out to consist of pondokkies. In other words, African huts, slums, broken-down villages, shabby sheds and picturesque houses.
‘And why do you come on holiday to Cape Town when I am not even here? My poor child, with no one to look after you. But as it happens now I must rush off, because I must take this beautiful fish home to my wife. I shall cook it myself. No woman can cook as well as I do. I caught it in a pool where I caught its brother last year. That is probably the most beautiful pool in the whole world. I’ll take you there tomorrow.’
‘I can’t. My son isn’t the right age for fishing.’
‘A child? Of course, I forgot. Where is he?’
I pointed out of the window.
‘A fine child.’ He almost groaned. ‘Ya, ya, and when I am dead he will be a fine young man, enjoying life, and I will be forgotten.’
‘No, not that one, that one.’
‘They are all fine children. And all of them, they will be fishing and – painting pondokkies when I am dead. But now you have this child you will be very dull and full of responsibility. Why is it, all women have children. Sometimes I think you do it to spite me.’
‘All the same. And besides, my morale is very low due to living in this Afrikaans boarding house. I am weak from malnutrition and haven’t the heart for fishing.’
‘And why do you put me and my nation at a disadvantage by taking a holiday in such a place?’
‘I am not on holiday. I am waiting for my boat to England.’
He groaned. ‘England. So that’s it. Ya, that’s it. Well, you’ll be sorry, I am telling you. And what will you do, in a country full of these Englishmen? They are no good for women. I know this. When I arrived in London all those poor women, they rushed out with their arms extended saying: “Piet, Piet, is that you? Thank God you’ve come at last.”’
‘We shall see,’ I said.
‘Ya, it is a terrible thing.’
‘It’s a fact that men of all nations are convinced that men of any other nation are no good for women. I’m sure a statistically significant number of women would be able to vouch for this.’
‘And listen to how you talk. You are bitter already. When I hear a woman use words like statistics, I know she is bitter. It is that English colony. It has very likely marked you for life. Ya. I shall come tomorrow and cheer you up. Now I shall take my fish. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and I can tell it is time.’
With which he left, jerking the fish after him along the floor and saying: ‘Come, come, little fish, come with me, come and leap into the great black pot where you will die another death for me.’ Over his shoulder he said: ‘And I shall bring you a real picture I have painted, to show you that all these pondokkies have not ruined my talent.’
Mrs Barnes knocked. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I am afraid I really must ask you not to have fish in your room. This place is bad enough without fish as well.’
‘It was caught this morning,’ I said.
‘The whole building smells.’
‘I didn’t invite the fish.’
‘Is your friend a fisherman?’ Her soft English cheeks were a clear red, and her full brown eyes, that had no whites to them, were glazed with suspicious fascination.
‘He is a painter,’ I said. ‘He has won prizes in Paris, not to mention London.’
‘How interesting,’ she said.
Next day Piet arrived in a severe black suit. He looked like a predicant. His face was a solemn yard long. He carried a very large picture of a nude girl. He lifted it past the miserable English girls on the steps with an air of critical detachment. He put down the nude, and said: ‘There, you see I can still paint. And what is more, this afternoon I have been furthering the cause of art in this continent. I am now, you must know, a leading representative of the Council for Art. I am very respectable. There is an exhibition on. It is by a homosexual poor boy. He wrote to me and asked for my encouragement and patronage. His pictures are all of male nudes and in very great detail. The arts teacher at the school here for nice English girls wrote to me and asked for my help and encouragement. So this afternoon I met this teacher, poor woman, at the door, wearing my beautiful black suit and an expression of cultural integrity. I lowered my voice to an official note. And I entered the hall followed by the teacher and a hundred and fifty pretty girls, all in search of artistic experience. And I escorted them around for an hour, all around those pictures on one subject only, pointing out the technique and the line and the quality of the paint. With severity. He is a bad painter. And not once did I smile. Not once did that poor English teacher smile. Not once did all those little girls smile. We were in the presence of art.’ He flung himself across my bed and laughed. The whole building shook.
‘For the Lord’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t shout.’
‘There, what did I tell you? Already you are asking me to lower my voice. The English will finish you, man. Ya.’
‘All the same, I wish you could hurry on that boat. I’ve been here six weeks, and I’m very unhappy. Apart from anything else, there’s an English couple across the passage and we have morning tea together all the time. And as soon as I say anything at all, about anything, they look very nervous and change the subject. It’s a bad augury for my life in England.’
‘Poor little one. Poor child. There, what did I tell you?’ He roared with delight. I heard a door open on to the passage.
‘Piet. And there’s a woman called Mrs Barnes. She’s very bad-tempered.’
‘Poor woman,’ he said. He took two large soundless strides to the door, opened it with a jerk, and there was Mrs Barnes in the passage. She frowned. He smiled. Slowly, unwillingly, and hating every second of it, she smiled. Then, furious, she went dark plum colour, glared at us both, and went into her room, slamming the door hard.
‘It is a terrible thing,’ said Piet sentimentally. ‘A bad-tempered woman. It is all the fault of her husband. I suppose he’s English.’
‘Scottish.’
‘It is all the same thing. That reminds me …’ He told a story. By the time he had ended I was laughing too hard to ask him to lower his voice. He was rolling in an agony of laughter back and forth over the floor. The whole boarding house was hushed.
‘That reminds me,’ said Piet again. He talked, listening with delight to the silence of his invisible audience. Then he told his story about his visit to a brothel in Marseilles. Unfortunately it is too indecent to write down. It was not too indecent for him to shout at the top of his voice. The end of the story was: ‘Imagine me, in her room, in such a predicament, and the boat was leaving. It was giving out long, sad hoots of pain, to warn us all there was no time to waste. And there I was. My friends came in. They bandaged me. And I walked down to the ship through the streets of Marseilles, cheered on by the onlookers, with a bloodstained bandage a foot and a half long sticking out in front of me. I climbed up the gangway, supported on either side by my loyal friends, watched by the captain, a very fine fellow, and at least five thousand women. That was the proudest day of my life. That afternoon they gave me the gold medal for my artistic talent was nothing compared to it.’
Mrs Barnes came in. ‘I am afraid I have to tell you that I have had no alternative but to complain to the management.’ She went out.
‘Poor woman,’ said Piet. ‘It is a very sad thing, a woman like that. Don’t worry. I shall now go to Mrs Coetzee and tell her I’ll paint a picture for her.’
Half an hour later I went to the kitchen. Mrs Coetzee was wheezing out helpless, wet laughter. Jemima, her face quite straight, her eyes solemn, had her hand cupped over her mouth, to catch any laughter that might well up and press it back again. Her narrow little body shook spasmodically. ‘I told you,’ said Piet. ‘It is all right. I have explained to her that she must have a picture of this fine boarding house. I shall paint it for her, at a medium cost. I shall also make a copy and donate it to the city’s archives, for the memory of a building such as this must not be lost to mankind. I feel it will be the finest pondokkie I have ever painted. Poor woman, she is very bitter. The war makes her unhappy.’
‘She’s doing very nicely out of it.’
‘No, the Boer War. Those concentration camps you had. Ya, ya, the English were never anything but savages. Now, please, think no more about it. I have made everything right for you.’
He went. Almost at once Mrs Coetzee came in, with Jemima. It was a visit of goodwill. She was smiling. Then she noticed the picture, which unfortunately Piet had forgotten. Her face sagged into folds of disapproval.
She spoke to Jemima. Jemima said: ‘Says will not picture her house.’ ‘Tell her it’s not my picture.’ ‘Says take it away.’ ‘I’ll tell my friend to take it tomorrow.’ ‘Says your picture, not his picture.’ ‘But it is his.’ ‘Says he is Afrikaans. A good boy.’ ‘It is a picture of his wife. She is a very good Afrikaans girl.’ ‘Says good boy does not make bad picture like that.’ Jemima’s face was expressionless, but her body shook. I tried to catch her eye. It was blank. Only her body was amused. ‘Says you bad woman, says you go,’ said Jemima.
That evening, the shipping agents rang to say the boat would be in tomorrow. As a favour, Mrs Coetzee allowed me to stay for the one night. Mrs Barnes came in to say she was sorry there had been this unpleasantness. If she had known she would not have complained to Mrs Coetzee. I have never been able to understand this. But my chief problem was to find the right way to say good-bye to the Brooke-Bensons. At last, my suppressed instinct for communication blossomed into a large bunch of flowers. I presented these, not so much to the Brooke-Bensons, as to a failed relationship. I shook hands. I noticed Myra’s eyes were wet. She said, with formality: ‘I will be so sorry when you’ve gone. I feel I have made a real friend in you.’ Her husband said: ‘And please keep in touch. Now that we’ve got to know each other.’ I shook hands again and we said good-bye.
The boat was full of English. That is, South African British, going home. I had no time to meet them. My son was so excited by the experience of being on the boat that he woke at five every morning and did not sleep until eleven at night. In between, he rushed, hurled himself, bounded and leaped all over the boat. I arrived in England exhausted. The white cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The Thames looked dirty. I had better confess at once that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me a city of such appalling ugliness that I wanted only to leave it. Besides, I had no money, I could have got some by writing to my family, of course, but it had to be the bootstraps or nothing.
The first place I stayed in was a flat off the Bayswater Road. I passed the house the other day, and it now seems quite unremarkable. This is how it struck me at the time:
‘A curving terrace. Decaying, unpainted, enormous, ponderous, graceless. When I stand and look up, the sheer weight of the building oppresses me. The door looks as if it could never be opened. The hall is painted a dead uniform cream, that looks damp. It has a carved chest in it that smells of mould. Everything smells damp. The stairs are wide, deep, oppressive. The carpets are thick and shabby. Walking on them is frightening – no sound at all. All the way up the centre of this immense, heavy house, the stairs climb, silent and ugly, flight after flight, and all the walls are the same dead, dark cream colour. At last another hostile and heavy door. I am in a highly varnished little hall, with wet mackintoshes and umbrellas. Another dark door. Inside, a great heavy room, full of damp shadow. The furniture is all heavy and dead, and the surfaces are damp. The flat has six rooms, all painted this heavy darkening cream, all large, with high ceilings, no sound anywhere, the walls are so thick. I feel suffocated. Out of the back windows, a vista of wet dark roofs and dingy chimneys. The sky is pale and cold and unfriendly.’
My arrangements for living here had been made with great intelligence by a friend. The idea was, I should share this flat with another woman, an Australian, who had a small child. We should share the rent and expenses, and the children would share each other.
They took to each other at sight and went off to play.
The Australian lady and I had now to make acquaintance.
She was a woman of inveterate sensibility. Her name was Brenda. She was sitting in a huddled mass in a deep chair by an empty grate. She was a large woman, of firm swarthy flesh. She had a large sallow face, and black hair cut doll-like across her forehead. She wore artistic clothes. She had been crying, and was still damp. Almost the first thing she said was, ‘I do hope your child is sensitive. My Daphne is very sensitive. A highly-strung child.’ I knew then that the whole thing was doomed.
Daphne was three, a strapping, lively-eyed child with a healthy aggressiveness. Peter was two and a half. They were well-matched. They began to fight, with much enjoyment. Brenda went next door, pulled Daphne to her, and said in a weak voice: ‘Oh, darling, he’s such a nice little boy, don’t hit him.’ She set Daphne in a chair with a picture book.
Then she said everything was too much for her, and so I went out and bought the rations and had some keys cut. While I did this, I reflected on the value of helplessness. During the next weeks I reflected about this often. Brenda was renting the flat for seven guineas a week. I don’t know how she managed it. I’ve never since seen a flat of such size, class, and solid furnishing going at such a low rent. She had already let two rooms in it, at three and a half guineas each. That left four rooms. The largest room was her sitting-room, because she had to have privacy. The children had a room each, because Daphne could not sleep unless she was by herself. The largest room upstairs was Brenda’s bedroom. That left one for me. She had put the dining-room table in it, where we would all eat, as she said this would be more convenient for all of us. She intended to charge me seven guineas a week. I did all the shopping and the washing-up and the tidying, because life was too much for her, particularly in England. Also I had to keep my son away from Daphne, because they would play together, and in the most insensitive manner.
I have often wondered about that remarkable phenomenon – that for sheer innate delicacy and appreciation of the finer sides of life, one has to seek for a certain type of Colonial.
Piet for instance. Robust is the word I would use to describe him. Yet his tastes in art, save when he was painting pondokkies, were all exquisite. Corot he liked. Turner he liked. A passage of nature description in Chekhov would make him screw back the tears from his eyes. A couple of the more oblique sentences in Katherine Mansfield would send him into a melancholy ecstasy. But Balzac was coarse, and Rubens had no poetry. A letter from Piet would end something like this: … the exquisite veil of translucent twilight drawn gently down to the horizon, and I sit, pen in hand, and dream. The fire crepitates in the grate, and the shadows deepen on the wall. Ach, my God, and life is passing. Your old friend, Piet. P.S. – We went to the Bay this afternoon and swam and bought three crayfish for sixpence each. I boiled them till they squeaked and we ate them in our fingers with melted butter. My God, man, they were good. I bet you don’t get crayfish in that godforsaken colony full of English. Christ but you’re crazy, I’m telling you.
For real perception into the side-channels of British culture, one has to go to a university in Australia or South Africa. The definitive thesis on Virginia Woolf will come, not from Cambridge, but from Cape Town. Brenda was writing a thesis on: Proust – a nature poet manqué.
In short, we were temperamentally unsuited. I began looking for somewhere to live. Besides, I still had not met the English.
Chapter Two (#ulink_915733dd-4efd-5b85-9fcc-fe48439acfe2)
I had already moved away from the counter when some instinct turned me back to ask: ‘I suppose you don’t know somewhere I could live?’ The girl behind the counter shrugged profoundly, sighed and said: ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure.’ I took this as a dismissal, but she looked at me shrewdly and said: ‘Depends on what you’re looking for, doesn’t it now?’
When I had first entered the shop the girl was standing motionless, hands resting palm downwards, while she gazed past me into the street, her face set into lines of melancholy resignation. She was a small girl, her face broad under very black and glossy hair that was piled into a dense and sculptured mound. Her hair, and her thin black crescent brows, made her look like a cockney Madame Butterfly, particularly as she was wearing a loose flowered wrap over her clothes. Her mouth might have been any shape; the one she had painted was another crescent in cherry pink, as deep as the half-circle eyebrows. Her voice toned with the sad lips and eyes.
I said: ‘I’ve been looking for six weeks.’ My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. ‘I’ve got a small child,’ I said.
Her face became shrewd as she examined me from this new point of view. Then she said, with confidence: ‘I don’t know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But she’s ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.’
‘What sort of a flat?’
‘It’s upstairs,’ she said, doubtful again. But added: ‘One room, but ever such nice furniture. It’s only a minute from here.’
I hesitated. My companion, who was directing this conversation with a skill I only learned to appreciate later, said, with casualness: ‘You just tell her Rose sent you. She’ll know it’s all right if you say Rose. Besides, she likes young people. She likes a bit of life about.’ She glanced at me, waited a moment, then raised her voice to shout: ‘Nina, are you busy?’ A woman appeared in the back. This was a jeweller’s shop, very dark and crowded, and she had to push her way through trestles burdened with clocks, watches, trinkets, rubbish of all kinds. She was fat and pale, with rusty dyed hair, but her look of puffy ponderousness was contradicted by her eyes, which were calculating. After a rapid summing-up look, she stood beside Rose, with the air of one putting herself completely at disposal.
‘Flo doesn’t take just anyone, does she, dear?’ suggested Rose, and the woman said promptly: ‘That’s right. She likes to pick and choose.’
‘I’ll give you the address,’ said Rose, and wrote it down.
Seeing she had served her purpose, the pale woman pulled her lips back and exposed her teeth in a sweet smile. Then she threaded her way back to the room she had emerged from. At the door she turned back and said: ‘How about that other place – you know, that you heard about this morning?’
Rose seemed displeased. She said unwillingly: ‘I don’t know anything about it – not to recommend.’
The pale woman’s submissive helpfulness vanished. She said to me with a ferocious smile: ‘I hope Rose is looking after you properly.’ She disappeared. Rose was annoyed. She raised her voice to say: ‘You come back tomorrow, dear, and your watch will be ready.’ She had been saying this every day for the past week.
‘What’s the address of this other place?’ I asked Rose.
‘I’ll write it for you. Mind you, I’m not recommending it.’ Then, the desire to do her friend Flo a service dissolved into the fellowship of the suffering, and she said: ‘Of course, these days, you grab what’s going.’
I thanked her and left. Glancing back, I saw she had taken up her former position, and her face was all lifeless curves.
I decided to try the second address immediately. About the first I felt like the horse dragged to water. I could have said, of course, that Rose’s insistence showed there must be something wrong with it. But there was more to it than that. For six weeks I had been tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards. Stoicism can reach a point where, if someone says: I’m sure you’ll be lucky sooner or later, one feels positively indignant. I was defensively rejecting possibilities in advance. This state of mind was not only mine. Talking to other home-hunters I learned it was an occupational disease. It means one cannot enter a house-agent’s office without an air of hostility; or open the advertisement columns of a newspaper without a cynical (and consciously cynical) smile, as if to say: You don’t imagine I’m going to be taken in by this, do you?
During those weeks I had formed alliances with various people I met in the agents’ offices, or under the advertisement boards. I remember, particularly, a lady with a grown-up daughter and a grand piano. The daughter was talented, come all the way from Australia to study in London. For three months these women had been looking for a shelter for their piano. At the time we met they had become so bitter that on several occasions, setting out for some possible address, they exclaimed: ‘What’s the use, they won’t have us!’ – and turned aside into a café to brood over a cup of tea.
It is a curious fact that at a time when we were all short of money, when getting a place to live was essential before we could start to live at all, we would spend the larger part of each working day (for me the hours that my son was in nursery school) sitting in teashops gripped by bitter lethargy. We used to discuss the various places we had lived in, the climate of this country or that, landladies, the woman who had affronted us the day before, the harpy who had offered one room and use of the kitchen at four guineas a week provided one agreed not ‘to walk on the floor before eight in the morning’. The teashop had become our home, our refuge, the bedclothes we pulled over our heads. We could no longer face another long walk, another set of dingy lodgings, another refusal. We could not face seeing our fantasies about what we hoped to find diminished to what we knew we would have to take.
I went in search of the second address with a grim and barbed gaiety. My by now highly-developed instinct told me it would be useless. Besides, the interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses that became half-effaced with fog at a distance of a hundred yards, the pale faces peering up from basements past rubbish cans, the innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness; had worked on me in a way I did not understand myself.
The street I wanted was not in my guidebook. I was directed back and forth by passers-by, each one saying helpfully, ‘It’s just around the corner,’ and looking impatient when I said: ‘Which corner?’ This business of the next corner is confusing to aliens, who will interpret it as the next intersection of the street. But to the Londoner, with his highly subjective attitude to geography, the ‘corner’ will mean, perhaps, a famous pub, or an old street whose importance dwarfs all the intervening streets out of existence, or perhaps the turning he takes every morning on his way to work.
The house I wanted was a broader, taller house than most, and separated from its neighbours by a six-inch space on either side. The steps were scrubbed white; the doorknob gleamed; the wood of the door was newly-varnished chocolate brown. While I waited for the bell to be answered, a young man came out, carrying suitcases, which he left on the bottom step. Soon a young woman followed him, vehemently slamming the door, and looking to him for approval of this action. But he said irritably: ‘Don’t give them grounds for complaint.’ She was a tall slender girl, wearing an enormous black picture hat, very high black heels, a deep black decolletage crowded with crimson roses, and furs slung over one shoulder. Because of her appearance I looked again at the man. He was as unfamiliar to me as she was. He wore a sharply-angled brown suit, and pointed brown shoes. He was tall, dark, slickly good-looking, with prominent brown eyes that were now suffused with uneasy anger. The door swung inwards, this time to show an elderly grey woman in a stiff white nurse’s uniform. She looked past me at the couple and said: ‘You must have all your things out in half an hour or I’ll call the police.’ The young woman gave a shrill laugh; the young man frowned and began to say something; but the nurse interrupted him by saying to me: ‘Come in.’ Her voice still held the sharpness which she had directed at the other two.
Inside there was a narrow hall carpeted with crimson. A grey satin wallpaper was sprinkled all over with small gilt coronets and harps. Small gilt-framed mirrors hung at various levels, chandelier, sprouting large electric bulbs.
The nurse left me in these surroundings of dispirited opulence, saying: ‘I’ll ask for the keys.’ Soon a very old lady, swathed in pink and mauve wool, wheeled herself in a chair across the hall, giving me a cold stare. Then she turned herself around and rolled back, with another prolonged stare. When the inspection was over the nurse came back with a bunch of keys, and led me up one, two, three, four, five flights of stairs, all muffled in crimson carpet, the walls thick with large brownish pictures. She unlocked a door that barred our way into a more bleak corridor. The stairs were now very narrow and twisted sharply after each short flight. There was no carpet. It was dark, save when we passed the windows, which shed a pallid glow over our heads on to more pictures, so that at short intervals the gloom was broken by a confusion of dimly inter-reflecting lights.
All the way up were doors with names written on cards beside the bells. I imagined vistas of passageways, opening on to yet more rooms, more lives. It was very silent, a humming breathing quiet, like listening to someone sleep. It was as if I had become a midget and was walking up the main gallery of a large antheap.
On the top landing it was completely dark; we were standing in a closed box. ‘Here we are,’ said the nurse briskly, and flung open a door. There was a dim space before us, filled with jostling furniture. The colours were dull crimson and purple, with a dark plummy wallpaper, and so many armchairs, buttoned pouffes and small hard tables that it was difficult for the nurse to move in a straight line to the window, where she jerked back heavy curtains. They were red damask lined with black silk, which absorbed the filtering light so that the room became only slightly less obscure than before.
‘There!’ she exclaimed with pride, turning to gaze lovingly at the oppressive room. ‘This used to be the old lady’s room before she got too ill to climb the stairs. She liked it for the view. It’s a lovely view.’ At the window I saw crowding roofs, and beyond them, the tops of trees shadowed with cold sunlight.
‘Has she been ill for long?’
‘Thirty years,’ said the nurse with pride. ‘Yes, I’ve been nursing her for thirty years. She won’t have anything changed up here, even though she can’t come up herself. It was her room she used to sit in when she first got married. She used to paint. No one was allowed up here, not even her husband.’
The way she spoke, diminishing those thirty years to the scale of a long convalescence, made the fruity room congeal around us; the thick curved surfaces thrust themselves out aggressively in affirmations of changeless comfort. ‘You won’t find many rooms like this at the price. Not good things like this. Can’t buy them these days.’ She gave a proud stiff glance around her. ‘She won’t have just anybody up here. Except when there are mistakes.’ The little foxy face stared at a point immediately before her; it was a table gleaming in the rufous light from the curtains. With an angry movement she jerked forward and picked up a brown, sticklike object which I took to be a cigar. ‘Incense,’ she said indignantly. ‘What next!’ Holding the thing between thumb and forefinger, little finger crooked away in disgust, she nosed her way warily through the angles and shoulders of the furniture like a fish at the bottom of a pool, and flung open another door. ‘I suppose you’ll want to see the bedroom,’ she said, as if this was unreasonable of me. ‘The other people aren’t properly out yet, remember.’ This was a tiny room, more like the usual run of let rooms. It had a large jangly bed with brass bedballs, a fireplace that was occupied by an electric fire, and a single yellowing chest of drawers. The climate of this room – a thin bleakness, with a narrow shaft of colourless light directed over the bare floor from a high window – was as if I had accidentally opened the door into the servants’ quarters from a lush passage in an old-fashioned hotel. The nurse was staring down at the bed, which was in disorder, the bottom sheet stained and crumpled, a single dent in the pillow, which held several glinting yellow hairs. Furs, flowers, dresses and underclothing lay everywhere. She picked up an empty scent bottle and flung it, together with the spill of incense, into an open drawer. ‘You can cook on this,’ she said grudgingly, pulling a gas-ring from behind a small curtain. ‘But this suite is not arranged for heavy cooking. My old lady won’t have cooking in the house. You’ll have to go out if you want to eat fancy.’
‘How much?’
‘Twelve guineas.’
‘A month?’
Her face creased into suspicion. ‘A week,’ she said affrontedly. ‘Where do you come from? I might as well say now that the old lady won’t take foreigners.’
‘What do you mean by foreigners?’
She looked me up and down, a practised, sly movement. ‘Where do you come from, then?’ She moved slowly backwards, her hand pressed against her chest, as if warding off something.
‘Africa.’
The hand slowly dropped, and at her side, the fingers clenched nervously. ‘You’re not a black?’
‘Do I look like one?’
‘One never knows. You’d be surprised what people try to get away with these days. We’re not having blacks. Across the road a black took to the bottle on the first floor. Such trouble they had. We don’t take Jews either. Not that that’s any protection.’ She sniffed sharply, looking over her shoulder at the bed. ‘Disgusting,’ she said. ‘Disgusting.’ In a prim fine voice she stated: ‘And I may as well say we’re particular about what goes on. Are you married?’
‘I’m not taking it,’ I said going into the living-room.
The nurse came after me; her whole attitude had changed. ‘Why not, don’t you like it?’
‘No, I do not.’
‘It’s very comfortable, only select people in this house …’ She glanced back at the room. ‘Except when there’s mistakes. You can’t help mistakes.’ She stood between me and the door, her hands clasped lightly at her waist, in an attitude of willing service, but with a look of affronted surprise on her face. It was clear that letting this place quickly was necessary as part of her revenge on the couple she had turned out. ‘If the old lady likes you she might put the rent down to eleven guineas.’
‘But I don’t like it,’ I repeated, moving past her to the door.
‘We don’t have any difficulty in letting it, I can tell you that,’ she sniffed challengingly, marching over to twitch the curtains back, so that now the room was absorbed back into its cavernous ruddy gloom. ‘You’re the second in half an hour – by the way, how did you hear of it? It hasn’t even gone to the agents yet.’
‘One hears of places, house-hunting.’
‘I suppose you are a friend of that precious pair downstairs.’ She grasped my arm, as if to pull me to the door. ‘I hear the bell. That’ll be someone else, I suppose, getting me up all these stairs for nothing. Come along now.’ She glanced at me, stiffened, stared: ‘If you’ll be so kind.’ She went on staring. At last, she said: ‘It’s much better when people are straightforward about things, that’s what I say.’
‘About what?’
Looking straight ahead, her hands lying down the folds of her stiff skirt, she descended the stairs with a consciously demure rectitude, and said: ‘If I’d known you were a foreigner, it would have saved me so much time, wouldn’t it? One must have thought for other people, these times.’
‘What kind of a foreigner do you think I am?’
‘I’ve known people before, calling it sunburn.’
In the hall the old lady was lurking in a doorway, leaning forward in her wheeled chair from a mist of pastel shawls. Her small beady eyes, like a bird’s, were fixed on me. Her face was twisted into a preparatory smile of stiff welcome, but a glance at the nurse caused her to give me a slight toss of the head instead. Leaning back, she daintily took a grape from a dish beside her, and held it to her mouth in a tiny bony hand, her eyes still regarding me sideways, so that she looked even more like a watchful parrot.
On the steps was the young man, alone. ‘How do you think I can leave when you won’t let us take our property?’ he asked the nurse.
‘I’m not having you set foot in this house.’
‘I’ve paid the rent, so if you take my wife’s things
‘Your wife!’
Immediately his attitude changed to one of confident challenge. ‘I’ll show you my marriage certificate, if that’s your attitude.’ His hand was already in his pocket, but she had slammed the door. There was a clinking noise, and the letterbox slit showed dark with a face hovering white behind it.
‘You deserve to be in prison,’ said the shrill voice through the slit.
‘If you don’t give me my things I’m going straight to a lawyer.’
‘You tell that woman of yours to come here this afternoon and I’ll have them bundled up for her in the hall.’ The metal flap dropped with a clatter.
‘I say!’ shouted the young man in an injured way. ‘Do you know that’s a legal offence?’ With one shoulder thrust forward, his chin stuck angrily out, he looked as if he were about to fling himself on the door.
Nothing happened. Slowly the young man straightened, letting his shoulders loosen. For a moment he stood gazing with sullen reflectiveness at the door; then he turned and his eyes came blankly to rest on me. The glowering anger left in him from the encounter with the nurse simmered in him, unreleased; but soon he smiled a statesman’s smile, bathing me in winning frankness. ‘It’s only right for me to warn you,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t want any friend of mine to live in that house.’ He swung his head to glare at it before going on. ‘Don’t take it. I’m warning you.’
‘I haven’t taken it,’ I said.
Disbelief congealed the smile. ‘Not fit for pigs,’ he said. ‘Better change your mind now, before it’s too late. Better late than never.’ This aphorism pleased him so much that he repeated it, and his smile was momentarily gratified. He leaned towards me, his eyes were anxiously penetrating. If I had said I had taken the rooms, he would now be as anxiously testing me for the lie. ‘Go in and cancel the contract now, better that way.’ The word contract in his mouth was loaded with suspicion. ‘But I haven’t taken it.’ He stared at me closely. ‘Mind, it’s not too bad at first sight. You see the snags when you’re in. You can’t call your life your own.’ I smiled. He grew uneasy. A genuine impatience must have shown itself in my face, for at once his body arranged itself into a new attitude, and he leaned forward with a gentle and disarming persuasiveness. ‘If you’re looking for a place to live, I’m your man.’
‘Do you know of somewhere?’
‘It’s my business. I’m an estate agent.’
‘Then you’re lucky. You won’t have difficulty in finding somewhere yourself, will you?’
At this he inspected me for some time, in silence, and with hostility. Thus it was that right at the beginning, the quality which he most valued in his victims – my naïvety – confused him. He could not believe that I was as green as I seemed. Looking back, I can’t believe it either.
Looking back it is clear that he believed I was putting on innocence to lead him on, to some dark goal, for reasons of my own. Yet there were moments when I was as gullible as a fish. I confused him. And he confused me. I disliked him at sight, but I saw no reason not to trust him. I had never met a con-man in my life.
‘I’ll have no trouble,’ he remarked at last. ‘I’ve nothing to worry about. And they can’t turn me into the street, just like that – not Andrew MacNamara.’
Envying him, I walked away down the steps, and found him striding beside me, giving me calculating glances from his large treacly brown eyes. He was still tortured by uncertainty as to whether I was lying. And what was important to him was not the fact, but whether he was being made a fool of. ‘If you don’t believe me, I can tell you things about that crowd in there that would put them into prison. It’s no place for decent people.’
‘Then it’s lucky I haven’t taken it.’
He changed ground. ‘If you don’t have to count the pennies, there’s flats for the asking.’ A pause. ‘I could fix you up tomorrow, today.’
‘But I have to count the pennies.’
‘That’s always a good line, to start with,’ he probed.
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a small child.’
‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘It won’t make things any easier. But you can buy anything.’
We had reached a main street. Half a dozen large red buses lumbered past, concentrating all the colour and light there was in their cheerful and exuberant bodies. ‘Taxi?’ he suggested. ‘There’s a friend of mine in the rank over there.’ He raised his arm to wave.
‘No, a bus.’
He frowned. ‘A penny saved is a penny gained,’ he said.
‘Can you tell me the way to – ‘
‘It’s just around the corner.’
My head was, as usual in those early days in London, in a maze. To my right and left stretched that street which seemed exactly like all the main streets in London, the same names recurring at regular intervals, the same patterns of brick and plaster. It seemed to me impossible that the people walking past the decent little shops that were so alike, and the cold stone slabs decorated with pale gleaming fishes and vivid parsley, like giant plates of salad thrust forward into the street, could ever know one part of London from another.
‘I’m going that way myself,’ he said. He took my elbow in the urgency of unconcluded business. I got on to a bus and he leaped on to it beside me as it moved off. ‘Before you go, take the name of my agency. I said I’d fix you up,’ he reproved me.
‘Where is it?’
‘I’ve five rooms and a staff of nine,’ he said casually. ‘It’s over in Holborn. But for special customers I’ve a little office of my own. For private talking.’
‘Give me the address and I’ll come when I’ve got time.’
‘Never let the chance slip,’ he said reproachfully, giving me a lesson in living. ‘It might get snapped up before you get there. That’s not the way to do business.’
‘But I’m not doing business,’ I said, throwing him off balance again. He was also annoyed. ‘You want a flat, don’t you? You said so, didn’t you?’ Automatically, he looked around for witnesses. ‘I heard you say so. You want a flat.’
‘Tickets,’ said the conductor.
‘Allow me,’ said Mr MacNamara, taking out sixpence with such an air that I was surprised to find in myself the beginnings of gratitude commensurate with his having produced tickets for the front row of the stalls.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ he smiled, pocketing the tickets carefully. ‘Business. You decide what you want. You find what you want. You get what you want. You pay for what you want. Or you pay someone else to get it for you.’ We were sitting side by side on the long seats at the entrance of the bus. Four working women, in respectable hats, carrying crowded shopping bags, were sitting with us. ‘Pay,’ remarked one of them humorously, as if to the air. ‘That’s the co-operative word.’ Mr MacNamara flushed angrily. He struggled to ignore this woman. But vanity won. In a voice of furious hostility he said: ‘What you want you have to pay for. The thing is, who wants to pay too much?’
‘Not me, that’s for sure,’ she said. She glanced around at the other women, and winked. She did not look at Mr MacNamara. The conductor, who was leaning negligently against the steps, smiled tolerantly, and said: ‘Who’s for the Church?’
‘That’s me,’ said the woman, upheaving herself from beside me. Potatoes rolled from her bag into my lap, and she grabbed at them as they scattered. ‘Here,’ she shouted upwards, crouched among feet, ‘potatoes at sixpence a pound. Mind your great boots.’
‘Now, love,’ said the conductor indulgently, ‘get a move on or I’ll take them home to my missus.’
‘Try it,’ she retorted, and lurched off the bus, thrusting potatoes into her bag and her pockets. From the pavement she remarked in a detached voice: ‘Still, sixpence a pound is what you pay for new potatoes, when it’s right, and not like what some people I know try to get.’ Where this barb was directed could not easily be decided, for she was gazing absently at the back of the bus. One of the three women who remained took it up, saying: ‘That’s right dear, some people have no consciences.’ This exchange hung in the air as far as I was concerned, in spite of the gently-grinning faces all around me. I heard Mr MacNamara complain: ‘I say!’ The woman on the pavement, who must have been waiting for him to react, beamed directly at the conductor, and, indicating her bruised potatoes, said: ‘I won’t have to mash them now, will I?’
‘That’s right, love,’ he said. He had his thumb on the bell, and was looking up and down the street. A few paces off a well-dressed woman was running towards the bus. He pressed the bell; the bus began to move; and the woman fell back, annoyed. Now he had held up the bus over the affair of the potatoes as if he had all the time in the world. Once again Mr MacNamara exclaimed: ‘I say!’ Whistling under his breath, the conductor passed down the bus. The three working women opposite surveyed us with critical eyes, in which showed a calm triumph. The bond between them and the jaunty conductor could be felt.
‘It should be reported,’ said Mr MacNamara belligerently. At once occurred that phenomenon which is inevitable, in an English crowd on such occasions. The women looked straight ahead of them, disassociating themselves, shaking gently with the shaking of the bus. Every face, every pair of shoulders expressed the same thing: This is no affair of mine. In this emotional vacuum, Mr MacNamara fumed alone.
My stop appeared and I stood up. ‘Good-bye,’ I said. At once he got up. ‘You haven’t got my address,’ he said.
‘I haven’t a pencil,’ I said. At this, there came indulgently pitying looks on to the faces of the women. I found a pencil in my hand. ‘Try that,’ urged Mr MacNamara, restored to normal by the familiar situation. ‘That’s a real pencil. I can get them for you from a friend in Brixton.’
‘Ah, Brixton’s the place for pencils now,’ said the conductor.
‘That’s enough,’ said Mr MacNamara, his eyes once more suffused with anger.
‘Temper, temper,’ remarked one of the women gazing out of the window. When Mr MacNamara said: ‘Here, what’s that?’ she turned her head with a look of calm unconcern, and rose to her feet. To the conductor she said: ‘Give the bell a shove for me, love.’ The conductor came right down the car to help her out. To the rest of us he said: ‘Hurry up now.’ As I stepped off, the conductor said to me, grinning, ‘Mind his pencil, lady.’ The women began to shriek. The bus departed in a tumult of good humour. Mr MacNamara, his fists squared, shouted after it: ‘I’ll report you,’ and the conductor shouted calmly back: ‘A sense of humour, that’s all I ask.’
‘That wouldn’t have been possible before the war,’ said Mr MacNamara.
‘What wouldn’t?’
‘They’re all out of hand.’
‘Who?’
‘The working-classes.’
‘Oh!’
‘Of course you wouldn’t know,’ he said after a moment’s suspicion. ‘In your part of the world there isn’t any trouble, is there? With niggers it’s easy. I’ve often thought of emigrating.’
‘Here I must leave you,’ I said.
‘Tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen.’ He glanced at his watch, frowning. ‘No, at nine-forty. I’ve an appointment at nine-fifteen.’
‘I’ll telephone you,’ I said. For I had already decided I would go back to Rose and take the flat she offered. I felt that this was where I would end up. Besides, it was the first time I had heard, in all those weeks of hunting, of a landlady who would welcome a child.
Mr MacNamara and I were facing each other on a street corner, while people surged past. We kept our places by sticking out our elbows into aggressive points. He was very irritated. ‘I work to strict business methods,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll constitute myself your agent, that’s what. I’ll work for you. I’ll get you a flat by tomorrow morning.’
‘That,’ I said with politeness, ‘is very kind of you.’ I was by now longing to be rid of him. He smiled suspiciously, ‘Good-bye,’ I said.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The fee is two guineas.’
‘What fee?’
‘I know of just the place. Three rooms, kitchen, pantry, bathroom. Hot and cold and all modern cons. Three guineas a week, inclusive.’ I thought that if this place existed it was cheaper than anything I had seen. ‘I promised it to someone else, but for a retainer I’ll give it to you. I got nothing out of him, all promises he was.’ A look of disgusted anger came on to his face. This look was genuine: the flat, therefore, must also be genuine? But this is an excuse. I felt as if I had been stung into torpor by a predatory spider. I was being impelled to hand over the money. I began fumbling in my handbag, and as I did so, I knew I was a fool. The thought must have shown on my face, for he said: ‘For you, I’ll make it pounds.’ The money melted into the air above the flesh of his palm. I could hardly believe I had given it to him. So strong was this feeling that I wanted to count the money I had left to see if I had given it to him.
A couple of policemen who had been standing against a wall, upshifted themselves with a stolid and determined movement and came towards us. Instinctively I looked around to see if Mr MacNamara had vanished. I was wrong, for he stood negligently beside me, gazing with impatience at the policemen. They, it seemed, had also expected him to vanish, for now they appeared uncertain. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ enquired Mr MacNamara efficiently. They hesitated. He turned his back and marched off.
‘Everything all right?’ asked one of the policemen.
‘I do hope so.’
They looked at each other, communed, and moved back to their wall, where they stood, feet apart, hands behind their backs, heads bent slightly forward, talking to each other with scarcely-moving lips, while their slow contemplative eyes followed the movements of the crowd.
I walked slowly towards the jeweller’s shop, thinking about Mr MacNamara. It had by now occurred to me that he was what they referred to as a spiv. But he was not in the least like any of the rogues and adventurers I had known in Africa. They had all had a certain frankness, almost a gaiety, in being rogues. Mr MacNamara had nothing whatsoever in common with them. His strength was – and I could feel just how powerful that strength was, now I was recovering from my moment of being mad – his terrible, compelling anxiety that he should be able to force someone under his will. It was almost as if he were pleading, silently, in the moment when he was tricking a victim: Please let me trick you; please let me cheat you; I’ve got to; it’s essential for me.
But the fact remained, that at a time when I had less than twenty pounds left, and counting every halfpenny, I had just parted with two pounds, knowing when I did it that I would never see it again. I was clearly much more undermined by England than I had known; and the sooner I got myself into some place I could call my own the better.
When I told Rose I had lost the piece of paper with the address she said it didn’t matter, she’d take me home with her. The pale woman entered from the back and said unpleasantly: ‘Closing early, aren’t you?’
Rose answered: ‘Half past five is closing time, isn’t it?’
‘Like your pound of flesh, don’t you, dear?’
‘I don’t get paid overtime.’ She added casually: ‘I worked three nights late last week. I didn’t notice any complaints.’
The pale woman said quickly: ‘I was only joking, dear.’
‘Oh no you wasn’t,’ said Rose. Without another glance at her employer, she began making up her face, not because there was any need to, but so she could stand negligently, back turned, absorbed in her reflection and her own affairs. Before leaving, however, she said ‘Goodnight’ quite amiably; and the pale woman returned, indifferently: ‘Sleep tight,’ just as if this exchange had not occurred.
Rose had said the house she lived in was just around the corner; it was half a mile off. She did not speak. I didn’t know if she was offended because I had lost the address; or whether she was irritated with her employer. She replied listlessly to my remarks: Yes, dear; or – Is that so? Her face was heavy, despondent. It was difficult to guess her age. In the dimly-lit shop, she looked like a tired girl. Here, though her skin was spread thick with dun-coloured powder, under her eyes were the purple hollows of a middle-aged woman. Yet she looked defenceless, and soft, like a girl.
At first it was all shops and kiosks; then towering gloomy Victorian houses; then a space where modern luxury flats confronted green grass and trees; then a couple of acres of rubble. ‘Bombs,’ said Rose dispassionately. ‘We had them around here something awful.’ It was as if the houses had shaken themselves to the ground. Thin shells of wall stood brokenly among debris; and from this desolation I heard a sound which reminded me of a cricket chirping with quiet persistence from sun-warmed grasses in the veld. It was a typewriter; and peering over a bricky gulf I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves, which were held neatly above the elbow by expanding bands, sitting on a tidy pile of rubble, the typewriter on a broken girder, clean white paper fluttering from the rim of the machine.
‘Who’s he?’ I asked.
‘An optimist,’ said Rose grimly. ‘Thinks he’s going to be rebuilt, I shouldn’t be surprised. Well, it takes all sorts, that’s what I say.’
We turned finally into a street of tall narrow grey houses. I understood, from our quickening steps, that we were going downhill. I was almost running. Rose was moving along the street without seeing it, her feet quick and practised on the pavement. I asked: ‘Have you always lived in London?’
There was a short pause before she answered; and I understood it was because she found it difficult to adapt herself to the idea of London as a place on the map and not as a setting for her life. There was a small grudging note in her voice when she said: ‘Yes, dear, since I was born.’ I was to hear that reserved, non-judging voice often in the future – the most delicate of snubs, as if she were saying: It’s all very well for you . . .
Rose stopped in front of a wooden gate slung loosely between pillars where the plaster was flaking, and said: ‘Here we are.’ The wood of the gate was damp, and in the cracks were traces of green that I thought at first were remains of paint. Looking closer I saw it was that fine spongy fur that one finds, in the veld, cushioning the inside of a rotting tree trunk where the sun never reaches. Rose led the way down steps, along the side of the house, into a narrow gulf of thick damp brick with water underfoot. She let herself in at the door, and we were at once in darkness that smelt strongly of ammonia. A stairway led up, through darkness, to a closed door. In front was another door outlined in yellow light. There was a blare of noise. The door opened violently and out spilled puppies which scrambled and snapped around our feet. Rose said: ‘Come in.’ She went forward into the room, abandoning me, indicating why I was there to the other with a brief meaningful nod of the head.
It was a long, narrow room with a tall window at one end. Towards the top of the window one could see a frieze of dustbins and watering cans. A single very strong electric bulb filled the room with a hard shadowless light. The place was divided into two by curtains – or rather, curtains looped back high against the walls indicated a division. One half was the kitchen, the other a living-room, which seemed crammed with people, puppies, children, kittens. At a table under the light bulb sat two men reading newspapers, and they lifted their heads together, and stared with the same open, frank curiosity at me. They both wore very white cotton singlets, hanging loose. One was a man of about forty, forty-five, who gave an immediate impression of a smouldering but controlled violence. His body was lean and long, swelling up into powerful shoulders and neck, a strong, sleek, close-cropped head. His hair was yellowish, his eyes flat and yellowish, like a goat’s, and the smooth heavy flesh of his shoulders rather yellow against the white singlet. But he was going soft; he paunched under his singlet. The other was very young, eighteen, twenty, a dark, glossy, sleek young animal with very black eyes. A woman came forward from the kitchen end. She was short and plump, with a small pointed face in a girlish mass of greying black curls. Her mouth was opening and shutting and she was gesticulating angrily at the puppies under her feet and at a small child who was grabbing at her apron. The radio was blaring and she was trying to shout through the music: the noise was so great that my eardrums were receiving it as a dull crashing roar, like a great silence. The older man reached out a hand, turned a knob, and at once a shrill voice assailed me, rising through the snapping and yapping of the dogs and the whining of the child. ‘Shut up,’ she screeched. ‘Shut up, I tell you.’ The older man rose and pushed the puppies outside into the passage with his foot. There was a sudden startling quiet. The room seemed empty because of the absence of sound and of dogs.
Rose said: ‘Flo, this lady here wants to see your flat.’
‘Does she, dear?’ screeched Flo, who had grown so used to shouting through noise that she was unable to lower her voice. ‘Drat you!’ This was to the child, as she slapped down its hands. There was, in fact, only one child there, a little girl who seemed at first glance to be a dwarfed seven or eight, because of her sharp old face, but was three years old. ‘Drat you,’ shouted Flo again. ‘Can’t you shut up when I’m talking?’ The husband got up and lifted the child on to his lap with the patient forbearance of a man married to a termagant. ‘So you want to see our nice flat, dear?’ She smiled ingratiatingly; her eyes were calculating. ‘You’ll be very happy with us, dear. We’re just a big happy family, aren’t we, Rose?’
‘That’s right,’ said Rose, flatly.
‘Dan will show you the way,’ screeched Flo. ‘My name’s Flo. You must call him Dan. You needn’t stand on ceremony with us, dear.’
‘She hasn’t taken it yet,’ commented Rose, in her flat expressionless voice.
‘She’ll like the flat,’ shouted Flo persuasively. ‘The rooms are ever so nice, aren’t they, dear?’
‘That’s right,’ said Rose. She began smoothing down her eyebrows in front of a small wall mirror, with a forefinger wetted with spit, exactly as she had turned herself away to make up her face in the shop: she was saying: ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Let’s all go up,’ shouted Flo. But although she had conducted the interview until this point, she now gave her husband an uncertain, almost girlish look, and waited for him. He rose. ‘That’s right, dear,’ she said to him, her voice softening, and she offered an arch, intimate, merry smile. He responded with a direct, equally intimate flash of his eyes, and a baring of very white, prominent teeth. Even at that early stage I was struck by the boy’s sullen look at the couple. He was Jack, Flo’s son by her first marriage. But they had already adjusted their faces, and returned to the harsh business of life. Dan picked up the little girl and dropped her into Jack’s arms. At once she began to wail. Her mother grabbed her, exclaiming: ‘Oh, you’ll be the death of me.’ She yelled even louder. Automatically the father reached for her, and set her on his shoulders where she sat smiling, triumphant. He did not do this in a way which was critical of his wife; it was an habitual thing.
All of us, the son included, filed into the dark well at the foot of the stairs. The smell of ammonia was so strong it took the breath. We began to ascend the stairs, which were narrow, of bare wood. I was at the head of the procession, and could see nothing. Flo shouted: ‘Mind the door.’ I came into collision with it, a hand reached under my arm, and we all moved backwards down the steep incline as the door swung in over our heads, letting in a shaft of dull light. We were now in the hall. There was a puddle near the stairs. ‘Drat these dogs,’ shouted Flo.
‘Last time it was Aurora,’ commented Rose.
At once Flo slapped the child where she sat on her father’s shoulders. Aurora let out a single bellow and immediately became silent, and watched us all with her black sharp eyes. ‘Don’t you do that again,’ shouted Flo. The child’s mouth opened and she let out another loud roar as if a button had been pushed. Again she fell to watching us. Nobody took the slightest notice of this scene; and indeed Flo beamed encouragingly at me as if to say: Look at the trouble I’m taking on your behalf.
‘Oh dear, oh dear me,’ she grumbled, smiling, ‘that child will be the death of me yet.’
‘Perhaps it was the old people,’ said Jack, regarding the puddle.
‘Oh,’ said Flo, ‘so it must be. Dirty, filthy old swine …’ She caught a glance from her husband and smiled guiltily. ‘But they won’t bother you, dear. They sit by themselves in there, getting up to their mischief and their tricks …’ Again Dan glared at her, and she smiled. ‘They won’t bother you at all, dear,’ she said, and hastily went upstairs. We followed her, flight after flight, past shut doors. Nearing the top of the house was a shallow grey cement sink, with a tap which was making a happy tinkling noise, like a celesta. ‘This tap,’ said Flo in an offhand voice to her husband. Dan frowned. He heaved violently on the tap, his great shoulder muscles bulging, and a steady splash-splashing resulted. ‘Look,’ said Dan to me. ‘If you turn it round like this it’s quite all right.’ Once again he heaved with all his strength. We stood at varying heights on the stairs above and below the obstinate tap, gazing at it in suspense. Dan slowly, warily, straightened himself. A single heavy drop of water gathered weight on the lip of the tap and hung, trembling. It flew downwards to the puddle in the sink with a defiant tinkle, and at once another followed.
Flo decided to shrug. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘there’s the bathroom downstairs for real washing, it only costs fourpence for a real good deep bath, and you can use this just for washing up. If you turn it good and tight, it will be quite all right, you’ll see.’
‘She’ll need some strength,’ said Rose. ‘It runs all over the landing some days, when Mrs Skeffington doesn’t turn it hard enough. It needs a man.’
Flo nudged her to be quiet, and Rose shrugged. ‘We’ve only just moved in,’ said Flo, ‘and we haven’t got everything fixed right yet.’ We started climbing again.
‘Two years,’ said Rose’s voice from the flight below. ‘Oh, you shut up,’ said Flo in a loud whisper down past my head; as if the act of lowering her voice and directing it to Rose made it inaudible to everyone else. Then she screeched gaily to me: ‘We’re nearly there now.’
We climbed two more flights in silence. Flo was ascending in front of me with the phlegmatic calm of a mountaineer who has only an hour to the summit; her fat flanks moved regularly up and down; her feet were planted wide for balance; and her hands pushed down on each knee in turn, for greater propulsion.
We came to another door, which Flo opened saying: ‘You’ll be nice and private in here, see?’ There was one more short, sharp flight, very steep, ending in an abrupt twist that brought us to a handkerchief-sized landing. ‘Here we are,’ said Flo, with an anxious glance at me. It was a small room under the roof, with double skylights slanting inwards for illumination. A vast double bed took up most of the floor space, with a glossy toffee-coloured wardrobe. There was a minute kitchen that held a gas cooker, and a set of food canisters ranged on the floor. They all stood around me, smiling encouragingly, even Rose, whose desire for accuracy and fairness was momentarily quenched by the necessities of the occasion. She said: ‘It’s ever so private up here.’ She thought, and added: ‘There’s a lot of room, really.’ She was tiny, as I’ve said, and as she spoke she moved in from the wall, straightening herself painfully, for she had been bent in a curve, because the roof slanted down almost to the floor. Then, having done what was expected of her, she said: ‘Excuse me,’ and escaped downstairs, looking embarrassed.
Flo said: ‘We don’t know what we’d do without Rose, and that’s a fact. We get all our people through her. They come into the shop and ask if she knows, when they’re stuck for a flat – like you did.’ She offered me this information as if Rose’s compliance was an additional attraction of the house.
‘I have a small boy,’ I said, with dread.
‘That’s right,’ said Flo instantly. ‘Rose said so, when she phoned us. That’s nice, dear. He can play with Oar. We like kids. Don’t we, Dan?’
Dan said, ‘That’s right,’ and meant it.
‘And Rose likes kids, too. We all do.’
‘Is Rose a relation?’
‘Oh no. She lives here, see, because she’s going to marry Dan’s brother.’ But here Dan frowned; glances were exchanged and Dan said: ‘Well, how do you like it?’
‘How much?’ I said. Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances. At last Flo asked: ‘How much did you think of paying?’
Dan was calculating, his yellow eyes on my clothes. ‘Have you got a lot of cases?’ he enquired.
‘Far too many.’ At this, the three faces became extremely businesslike, and Flo said: ‘You wouldn’t think four pounds too much, would you, dear?’ At once she grinned in an abashed way, when Dan glared at her.
‘Yes, I would,’ I said, and picked up my handbag from the bed.
‘She’s made a mistake,’ said Dan scowling. He was furious with Flo, and she instinctively wrung her hands and appealed to him with her eyes for forgiveness like a small girl. ‘The price is thirty-five shillings,’ he said.
‘Of course it is,’ said Flo apologetically. ‘I was thinking of the rooms downstairs.’
‘One pound fifteen,’ I said.
‘Thirty-five shillings,’ corrected Flo. They waited again, their eyes fixed anxiously on my face.
‘I’ll get my things over,’ I said. ‘And I’ll fetch my son.’
For the next few minutes I was the passive victim of their exclamations of delight and welcome. They showed me how to use the gas-stove. And Flo kept saying: ‘Look, it’s ever so easy, dear,’ as she pulled the shoelace that had been suspended from the electric light, ‘look, it just goes on and off as you pull it, see?’
Finally they went downstairs, smiling at each other.
I heard Flo say in an offended offhand voice to Dan: ‘Oh, shut up, she’s taken it, hasn’t she?’
I got over my luggage and stacked it in the slant under the roof. By climbing on to a trunk in the middle of the room I could see over through the skylights into a brick channel between the outer wall and the roof which was filled with damp and blackened refuse – fragments of brick, bits of paper, scraps of rag. From this channel were propped some planks which shored up the roof. Flo, who had come up with the luggage, sat on the bed watching me anxiously, and anticipating any criticism I might have been tempted to make with defensive or encouraging remarks. ‘We had the blitz, dear,’ she kept saying. ‘We had it ever so bad. It was right through this part, because of that station, see? The Government’s going to mend everything for us, when they get around to it. I don’t know what they’re doing, we’ve filled in the forms and all, over and over again.’
I fetched my son, and at once he vanished into the basement with Aurora. Later, exhausted with the warmth and the welcome of the family downstairs, he fell asleep, saying he liked this house and he wanted to stay in it.
This upset me, because in the meantime I had decided it was impossible; in spite of my having suddenly understood that this was indubitably a garret, and that I had fulfilled the myth to its limit, and without any conscious intention on my part. There was no room in this garret to put a typewriter, let alone to unpack my things. I would have to start again.
Then I remembered Flo had said something about rooms downstairs. I went down to see Rose about it.
When she opened her door to me I at first did not recognize her; she looked like her own daughter. She had just taken a bath, and wore a white wool dressing-gown. Her black hair was combed loose, and her face was pale, soft and young, with dark smudges of happiness under the eyes. Her mouth, revealed, was small and sad. She said, with formality, ‘Come in, dear. I’m sorry the room is untidy.’ The room was very small and neat; it had a look of intense privacy, as a room does when every article means a great deal to the person living in it. Rose had brought her bed and her small easy chair and her linen from her own home. The curtains and bedcover had pink and blue flowers; and there was a cherry-pink rug on the black-painted floor. That everything she touched or wore should be perfectly clean and tidy was important to her; she was one of the most instinctively fastidious people I have ever known. Now she pushed forward her little blue-covered armchair, waited until I had sat down, and said, smiling with pleasure: ‘I’m glad you came. I like some company.’
‘I came to ask about the room Flo mentioned – is there another one free in the house?’
At once she looked sorrowful and guilty; and by now I knew her well enough to understand why. Her loyalties were in conflict. She said: ‘I don’t rightly know. You’d better ask Flo.’ She blushed and said hastily: ‘Of course that place upstairs isn’t fit for a pet cat, let alone a woman with a kid.’ She added: ‘But Flo and Dan’ll be good to that kid of yours. They really like kids.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘That’s the trouble.’ ‘I see your trouble,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘If there was a room going, and I’m not saying because I don’t know – it’s like this, see – Flo and Dan are new in this house business, they have fancy ideas about the rent they’re going to get. And they never thought they’d let that dump upstairs at all – see, at least, not for so much. Of course, you’re a foreigner, and don’t know yet.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask Flo, then.’
‘Yes, that would be better for me. I’m a friend of hers, see?’
‘Of course.’
‘About that other place you saw – did you see it?’
‘Yes.’ I began to tell her, but she knew about the house. ‘I know because I get to know all sorts of things, working in that shop. But was there anything about someone kicked out?’
‘A Mr MacNamara,’ I said. Her face changed with rich suddenness into a delighted appreciation.
‘Mr MacNamara, is he? The son of a rich lord from Ireland?’
‘I don’t know about the lord.’
She sat on the bed, and regarded me patiently.
‘There’s a lot you don’t,’ she said. ‘If he’s Mr MacNamara to you, then watch out. You didn’t give him money, did you?’
I admitted it. To my surprise, she was not scornful, but worried for me. ‘Then watch out. He’ll be after some more. Didn’t you see what he was like?’
‘Yes, I did. It’s hard to explain …’ I began, but she nodded and said: ‘I know what you mean. Well, don’t you feel too bad. He’s got a real gift for it. You’d be surprised the people he diddles. He did my boss out of twenty quid once, and to this day she wonders what came over her. And now you take my advice and have nothing to do with him. Mr MacNamara. Well I remember when he was a barrow-boy, and he knows I remember it, selling snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails for what he could get. But even then he had his head on the right way, for the next thing was, he had his own car and it was paid for. That’s the trouble with him – it’s not what you call a spiv; at least, not all the time. One minute he’s got his hand in the gas-meter and the next he’s doing real business.’
‘Well, thank you for telling me.’
She hesitated. Then she said in a rush: ‘I like you, see. We can be friends. And not everyone’s like Flo – I don’t want you to be thinking that.’ She added guiltily – ‘It’s because she’s a foreigner, it’s not her fault.’
‘What kind of a foreigner?’
‘I’m not saying anything against her; don’t think it. She’s English really. She was born here. But her grandmother was Italian, see? She comes from a restaurant family. So she behaves different. And then the trouble is, Dan, isn’t a good influence – not that I’m saying a word against him.’
‘Isn’t he English?’
‘Not really, he’s from Newcastle. They’re different from us, up in places like that. Oh no, he’s not English, not properly speaking.’
‘And you?’
She was confused at once. ‘Me, dear? But I’ve lived in London all my life. Oh, I see what you mean – I wouldn’t say I was English so much as a Londoner, see? It’s different.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘You going out?’ she asked, offhand.
‘I thought of wandering about and having a look.’
‘I understand.’
I did not know she wanted to come with me. Coming to a new country, you don’t think of people being lonely, but having full lives into which you intrude. But she was looking forlorn, and I said: ‘Don’t you go out in the evenings?’
‘Not much. Well, not these days I don’t. It gives me the ’ump, sitting around.’
‘Flo said you were engaged to Dan’s brother.’
She was very shocked. ‘Engaged!’ She blushed. ‘Oh no, dear. You mustn’t say things like that, you’ll put ideas into my head.’
‘I’m sorry. Flo said you might be marrying him.’
‘Yes, that’s so. I might be, you could say that.’ She sighed. Then she giggled, and gave me a playful nudge with her elbow. ‘Engaged! The things you say, you make me laugh.’
Flo’s voice sounded up the stairs: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you. Rose, tell her there’s a gentleman.’
‘How does she know I’m with you?’
She said: ‘It’s easy to think Flo’s stupid. Because she is. But not about knowing what goes on.’
‘But I don’t know anyone,’ I said.
‘Oh, go on. Don’t you know who it is?’
‘How should I?’
‘It’s Mr Bobby Brent, Mr MacNamara to you. Silly.’
‘Oh!’ I got up from the chair.
‘You’re not going,’ she said, shocked. ‘Tell Flo to send him off.’
‘But I think I’m interested, after what you’ve said.’
‘Interested?’
‘I mean, I’ve never met anyone like him before.’
She was puzzled. Then, unmistakably hurt. I did not understand why. ‘Yes?’ was all she said. She turned back to her dressing-table and began brushing her hair out.
Rose’s yes was the most expressive of monsyllables. It could be sceptical, give you the lie direct, accuse you, reject you. This time it meant: Interested, are you? Well, I can’t afford to be interested in scoundrels. Fancy yourself, don’t you?
Whenever, in the future, I was interested in a person or a situation which did not have her moral approval, she would repudiate me with precisely that – Yes?
But her good heart overcame her disapproval, for she said as I left the room: ‘If you must you must. But don’t let him get his hands on to your money.’
Flo was in the hall with Mr MacNamara. As I came down the stairs he was saying: ‘It’s a little matter. A hundred nicker. And it’d double itself in a year.’ He had the full force of his hard brown stare on her. She was bashfully languishing, like a peasant girl. She tore her gaze away from his face, to say almost absently: ‘I told your friend. I told him for you. You’ve got a flat with us.’
‘Yes, I have,’ I said. Flo was again looking up into his face. ‘Dan’d know best,’ she said. ‘You must talk to Dan.’
‘I’ll talk it over with him. But I want you to talk it over with him first, Mrs Bolt. You’ve got a real head for business, I can see at a glance.’
‘Well, dear, I ran a restaurant over in Holborn right through the war, dear. I ought to know my way about. A real big restaurant. I had three girls working for me. Dan was in the navy. But I did all right, I can tell you.’
‘I’m sure you did, Mrs Bolt. Ah yes, the war was a difficult time.’
‘We carried on and did our best.’
‘Excuse me,’ I said, and began to go upstairs. Instantly Mr MacNamara came after me.
‘There’s a little matter we should discuss,’ he said.
‘But she’s fixed up, dear. Ever so nice, with us.’
‘Four rooms, kitchen and bath and a telephone, three and a half a week.’ I came downstairs again. ‘And there’s another matter.’
‘Can we see it now?’
‘I’ll take you.’
I said to Flo: ‘If I can get it, I will. I really do need more room, you know.’
She nodded, her eyes, now thoughtful, on Mr MacNamara.
We two went to the door, and I heard her shrieking as we went out: Rose. Dan. Rose. Dan . . .
‘You know Miss Jennings?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You’ll meet her,’ he said darkly. ‘You mustn’t believe all you hear.’
‘Rose Jennings?’
‘People are not to be trusted. Not since the war.’
Now he had me on the pavement, he was thinking out his tactics, while making a pretence at examining his watch. ‘My man won’t be in for fifteen minutes. I’ll take you to a pub near here. The best pub in London. They have nothing but vintage beers.’
‘That would be nice.’
He began walking me fast down the street, into an area that had been laid flat. About five acres of earth had been cleared of rubble, and was waiting for the builders. ‘Nice job, that,’ said Mr MacNamara, nodding at it. ‘One bomb – did the lot. All that damage. Nice work.’
We walked past it. Mr MacNamara began sending me furtive glances, sideways.
‘Know where you are?’ he asked casually.
I had, because Rose had walked me past here, but I said, ‘No, I’ve no idea.’ His furtiveness cleared into triumph and he said: ‘These bombed areas are confusing.’ We had now walked three sides of the square, and he hesitated. ‘It’s not so far now,’ he said, and turned to complete the fourth side, which would take us back to our starting point at the bottom of the street the house was in. I walked willingly beside him, feeling him watch me. He was anxious. We had now made the full square, and he said: ‘Now do you know where you are?’ For a moment I did not answer; and at once a baffled angry look filled his eyes. His body was tense with violence. Nothing was more important to him, just then, than that I should not have seen through his trick.
‘It seems miles,’ I said.
‘That’s because you don’t know the ropes,’ he said, relaxing, the violence all gone. ‘Seen that building before?’ – pointing to a house a couple of hundred yards away from Flo’s and Dan’s house.
‘They all seem alike,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Mind you, I’ve been thinking, it might not be possible for you to see that flat this evening. But I’ll telephone to make sure.’ He strode into a telephone box, and went through the motions of telephoning. He emerged with a brisk air. ‘My client isn’t in, after all.’
‘That seems a pity.’
‘I’ll take you for the drink I promised, in any case.’ He applied a tender pressure to my upper arm; but lost interest in the gesture almost at once; his face was already dark with another pressure.
‘I’m taking you to this pub,’ he said, ‘because it’s famous.’
We went into a glossy lounge bar, and he said casually to the barman: ‘I’ll have two of the usual.’
‘What’s your usual?’ said the barman.
‘I’m used to service,’ he began, but the barman had turned away, as if accidentally, to serve someone else. Mr MacNamara took me to a free corner table, and said, ‘This is the best firm in England. Their liquors are all vintage. You know what vintage is?’
‘No, not really.’
Delighted, he said: ‘I do. I mix with the best people. I’m going to marry the daughter of a member of parliament.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Yes. Her father is a lord.’
‘Rose told me your father was a lord, too, from Ireland.’
His body tensed with anger. He narrowed his eyes, and clenched his teeth. Then he controlled himself. The violence in him so strong his whole body quivered as he damped it down. ‘I told you, you shouldn’t believe Rose Jennings. She can’t tell truth from falsehood. Some people are like that.’ He thought a moment and came out with: ‘Actually, my real name’s not MacNamara. It’s Ponsonby. I use MacNamara for business. But I’m Irish all right. Yes, from the Emerald Isle.’
‘I hope you’ve managed to get Mrs MacNamara somewhere to sleep tonight.’
‘Well of course she’d not really Mrs MacNamara. To tell you the truth, I don’t quite know what to do with her. She was going to marry a client of mine. He rang me up this morning – he’s off to Hong-Kong, on business. He left her in my charge.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘I’ve fixed her up for the night in a hotel in Bayswater.’
‘Good.’
‘But perhaps Mrs Bolt can fix her up tomorrow. She said she had a room.’
‘Oh, she did, did she?’
‘Of course it’s not what Miss Powell is used to. But then these days we take what we can get. Like you, for instance. You could afford much better if you were offered it.’
The barman now came over and said: ‘What’ll you have.’
‘Two light ales,’ said Mr Ponsonby.
When the barman brought the ales, Mr Ponsonby said: ‘I say. You’re not going to serve me that? I’m used to the best.’
The barman studied him a moment, his good-humoured eyebrows raised. Then he picked up the glasses, set them on the counter, interposed his back between him and Mr Ponsonby, and after whistling a soft tune between his teeth, lifted them round and set them down again.
‘That’s better,’ said Mr Ponsonby. He handed the barman silver, and gave him a shilling tip.
‘Some mothers do ’ave ’em,’ remarked the barman to the air, still whistling, as he returned behind the bar.
Mr Ponsonby was saying to me: ‘I could put you on to a good thing. A hundred nicker. That’s all.’
‘I haven’t got it,’ I said.
He examined me for some time, in silence. It was extraordinary how frankly he did this, as if the necessity to do so made him invisible to me; as if he scrutinized me from behind a barricade.
‘Mr MacNamara,’ I said. ‘You’re making a mistake about me. I really don’t have any money.’
This remark seemed to reassure him. ‘Ponsonby,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll show you you can trust me.’ He reached his hands into his pockets. From one he brought out military medals, about a dozen of them. From another a packet of papers. Matching one to another on the table he showed me citation after citation for bravery, etc., to Alfred Ponsonby. Among them was the DSO.
‘I was in the Commandos,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Yes, they were the best days of my life.’ He replaced the medals in one pocket and the papers in the other and said: ‘I keep fit, just in case. Ju-jitsu. There’s nothing like it.’
‘I think it’s time I got back.’
He examined me again. Then he leaned himself forward to me, the surface of his brown eyes glazed with solicitude. ‘I would really like to see you fixed up. I can see you are a little disappointed with me. Oh, don’t deny it. I could see, when I telephoned and my client wasn’t in. But I’ve a special interest in you.’ His gaze went blank while he searched for words. Then he smiled intimately into my eyes with a brown treacly pressure. ‘Now I want to put something to you. I can get that flat for you tonight – just like that!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘But I must put something down for the landlord. It would cost five pounds and it would be worth it.’
‘I must get back,’ I said and got up.
Without a change of tone, he said: ‘I’ll take you over tomorrow night.’ Consulted his watch. ‘Eight o’clock.’ And again, narrowing his eyes. ‘No, an appointment at eight. Eight-fifteen. I’ll make an appointment.’
‘Good.’
To get from the pub back to the house was five minutes walking. He faced towards the house. His face was twisted with conflict. ‘Know where we are?’
‘No.’
Smiling with cruelty, he walked me right around the bombed space, watching my face all the time. Anxiety crept into him. At the bottom of the street he hesitated and said: ‘Do you know what I’ve just done?’
‘Not an idea.’
Half from pleasure at having tricked me, and half from anxiety I might find out, he said: ‘I’ve taken you a long way round. You never noticed it. Got to keep your eyes open in this city. But you’re all right with me. You can trust me.’
‘I know I can,’ I said. We were at the front door.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, tenderly.
I went inside and up the stairs. Rose appeared and said, ‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘I hope so.’
‘I hope so, too. I got ever so worried about you.’ She took my arm between her hands and gently tugged me into her room. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I feel real bad, what I’m doing, but you’re my friend now. I must tell you. Flo’s got all in a state about losing you – ’ She giggled, and adjusted her face. ‘Sorry, but it does make me laugh, when Flo sees the pennies slipping through her fingers. Well, because you went out with Bobby Brent, she thinks she’ll let you the room. But Bobby Brent wants it for his fancy woman. So now she’s all torn up, wondering who’ll pay the most.’
‘He will, I should think,’ I said.
‘You don’t know our Bobby.’
‘Is it true he was in the Commandos?’
‘Oh, yes. A real war hero and all. But listen! I’ll show you the room and you can see if you like it.’ She cautiously opened the door and listened. ‘No, Flo’s too busy quarrelling with Dan to snoop.’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft. They’re in love. They’ve only been married three years, see? When people are in love they quarrel. Dan got real mad about Bobby. She makes him jealous on purpose, see? Then he gets mad and they quarrel and they make it up in bed. See?’
I laughed. She giggled. ‘Shh,’ she said. We crept into the passage outside her room, and we listened again. Downstairs a din of shouting voices and music. Rose opened a door, and switched a light on. It was a very large room, with two long windows. There was a tiny fireplace at one end. The walls were cracked and the ceiling was stained.
‘Don’t notice the mess,’ Rose whispered. ‘It’s the war. The war damage people is coming in. They’ll fix it. But it’s a nice room, and Dan’ll paint it for you. He’s in the trade, and he’s good at those things, whatever else you can say about him. And if you’re clever with Flo, you’ll get it cheap because of the cracks and all. If you don’t mind me telling you, you don’t treat Flo right at all. I watched you. You’ve got to stand up to her. If you don’t, she’ll treat you bad.’
‘Tell me what to do?’ I asked.
At this direct appeal, she hesitated. ‘I do feel bad,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m Flo’s friend. But I’ll just give you advice in general. She’ll come and see you tomorrow. Don’t just say yes, and thank you. You must bargain with her. I know it’s not nice, how she is, but I put it down to her Italian blood. She likes to bargain.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will. And thank you.’
We crept back to her door, and she said: ‘Tomorrow night, when your kid’s asleep, we’ll go for a walk. It’ll be real nice to have company.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’d like it.’
‘And I’ll show you some ropes around here. You don’t mind me saying it, dear, but you don’t know how to look after yourself. You don’t really.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, never mind, Rome wasn’t built in a day, that’s what I always say. Sleep tight.’
When I got back to my room from taking my son to nursery school next morning, Flo was standing there, with a guilty look. ‘I’ve just put away some things for you,’ she said. ‘To show you how comfortable it is. It is really.’
I said involuntarily. ‘It’s very kind of you, Flo,’ and, as involuntarily she gave a little smile of victory, and said in a cheerful voice: ‘I told you you’d like it up here.’
I summoned the spirit of Rose to my aid, and said: ‘But I don’t want to unpack. Because if I get somewhere with more room, I’ll move.’
All the life went out of her, and she sat despondently on my bed. She sighed. She looked at a pack of cigarettes lying on the bed and said: ‘You’ve got so many lovely cigarettes, darling, aren’t you lucky.’ The sense of guilt which accompanied all colonials to England, in 1949, overcame me and I said: ‘Help yourself.’ Instantly she became happy again. She picked up the box and handled it, looking at me. Then she carelessly took out a handful, but dropping some in her anxiety lest I might be angry, and pushed them into her apron pockets. She understood that guilt very well by instinct, because later, when I learned to understand the role cigarettes played in that house she would say automatically: ‘We had such a hard time during the war, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’
‘I’ve put your things where you can find them,’ she said. I looked at the top drawer, unable to discover any logic in her arrangement of it, until she said: ‘You’ve got some lovely things, dear.’ She had put the more expensive things on top, in a layer over the cheap ones. In the second drawer she had laid out six pairs of nylons, side by side, as if in a showcase. I began rolling them up and stacking them in a corner. She said quickly, over and over again, ‘Sweetheart, darling, I’m sorry I didn’t do them nice for you.’ She was sitting on my bed, full of innocent concern; while one hand kept touching her apron pocket, to reassure her of the existence of the cigarettes. She looked like a child who has done its best to please and now expects a reprimand. ‘I was only trying to help you, darling.’ I said nothing, and she said: ‘Please, please, darling, give your Flo some nylons.’ With an enormous effort, invoking Rose again, I said: ‘Now why should I give you my nylons?’ Her face puckered with discouragement. Then she laughed with frank good-humour, and having lost that round of the game, she said, ‘I’ll go down and get my old man’s dinner.’ At the door she remarked innocently: ‘I’m glad you’re so happy up here.’
‘Flo, I told you, I must move when I find something better.’
In a wail of despair, she cried out: ‘But you wouldn’t like the other rooms we’ve got …’ She clapped her hand over her mouth; she had been instructed by Dan not to mention them. She waddled fast downstairs, with one hand nesting the cigarettes in her pocket.
That night Rose congratulated me. ‘You’re learning,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you’ll be lucky. Because Bobby Brent hasn’t been back. They’re arguing about it, Dan and Flo, now. About the rent.’
‘How much should I pay?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me feel bad – I’ve just been having supper with them, see? But when she says, bargain. Now, you’re coming out with me.’
She put her two hands around my arm, and walked me away down past the bombed site I had been made to go round last night by Mr MacNamara-Ponsonby-Brent. I told Rose of the incident, and she listened, without surprise. ‘He’s like that,’ she commented. ‘He was always like that. That’s why he frightens me, see? So don’t you have nothing to do with him.’
‘He said he was going to take me to see a flat tonight.’
She let her hands drop away from my arm. ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’
‘Yes, I did.’
She was silent. ‘Why?’ she asked at last timidly. ‘You don’t believe what he says. I know that.’
‘Well, it’s because I’ve never met anyone like him before.’ When she didn’t reply, I said: ‘Why don’t you like that?’
She thought. Then she said: ‘You talk like he’s an animal in a zoo.’
‘If you went to a new country, you’d like to meet new kinds of people, too.’ She didn’t reply. I persisted: ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘What makes you think I’m going to any new countries?’ she said, with resentment. We walked on for a while in silence. Then she forgave me. She put her hands around my arm again, squeezed it, and said: ‘Well, never mind, it takes all sorts. I’ve been thinking. The reason I like you, well – apart from being friends now, it’s because you say things that make me think.’
We were in streets that differed from those behind me in a way I could not name. They were dingy and grey and dirty. There were gangs of noisy sharp-faced children. Youths lounged against corner-walls with their hands in their pockets. Here was the face, which comes as a shock to a colonial, used to broad, filled-in, sunburned faces. It is a face that is not pale so much as drained, peaked rather than thin, with an unfinished look, a jut in the bones of the jaw or the forehead. People were smaller. Rose was absorbed among her own kind and I saw her differently. I was thinking that there were miles and miles of such streets, marked only by a difference in shop-names or by the degree to which brick and stones had been stained and weathered – square miles full of deprived people. I felt alien to Rose, and as if it were dishonest to be here at all. I understood that I was dishonest because I had brought the colonial attitude to class with me. That it does not exist. I had not thought of Rose as working-class but as foreign to me. She must have been thinking me intolerably affected. Later on she said something that cleared my mind. ‘When you first came to live with us,’ she said, ‘you just made me sick. It wasn’t that you fancied yourself, it wasn’t that, but you were just plain ignorant about everything. You didn’t know nothing about anything, and you didn’t even know you were ignorant. You made me laugh, you did really.’
Rose stopped, pulled out a purse from her bag and peered into it. We were alongside a fruit-counter that projected into the street. The man serving nodded and said: ‘What are you a-doing of down here, Rosie?’
‘Just off for a walk. With my friend.’ She nodded at some cherries and handed over exactly the marked price for half a pound. She kept her eye on the money in the man’s hand, and smiled and nodded when threepence was handed back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And this is my friend, see? She’ll be coming down here I expect, so you treat her right.’
They smiled and nodded, then she took my arm and pulled me after her. ‘You go there for fruit, see? Now he knows you’re my friend it’ll be different. And don’t you go buying stuff on those barrows. That’s only for them who don’t know better. I mean you have to know which barrows are honest.’
She began spitting stones into the gutter. ‘See that?’ she said, giggling happily. ‘I used to be a winner at school every time.’ Now I was under her protection. She kept herself between me and the crowd, and at every moment she nodded and smiled at some man or woman leaning against a counter or a stall.
‘I was a kid down here,’ she said; and I saw that this part of the great city was home, to her; a different country from the street, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, where she now lived. Slowly the word slum, which had for me a literary and fanciful quality, a dramatic squalor, changed; and at last I saw the difference between this city and the streets that held my new lodgings. Those had a decaying, down-at-heel respectability. This was hard and battling, raw and tough; showing itself in the scepticism of the watchful assessing glances from the shopmen and women, and the humour of the greetings that Rose took and gave. She was happily nostalgic. Passing these familiar places, which knew her, acknowledging her by a gleam from a lit window or the slant of a wall, like so many friendy glances or waves of the hand, reinstated her as a human being with rights of possession in the world. ‘I used to get all my shoes here,’ she said, passing a shop. Or: ‘Before the war they sold a bit of fried skate in this shop better than anything.’
We turned into a narrow side street of short, low, damp, houses, a uniform dull yellow in colour, each with a single grey step. It was almost empty, though here and there in the failing light a woman leaned against a doorway. Rose said suddenly: ‘Let’s have a sit-down,’ and indicated a low wall that enclosed a brownish space of soil where a bomb had burst. There was a tree, paralysed down one side, and a board leaning in a heap of rubble that said: ‘Tea and Bun – One Penny.’
Rose settled herself on the wall and spat pips at a lamp-post.
‘Who sold the tea?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that? He got hit. That was before the war.’ She spoke as if it was a different century. ‘You don’t get tea and a bun for a penny now.’ She looked lovingly around her. ‘I was born here. In that house down there. That one with the brown door. Many’s the time I’ve sat here with my little brother when he was driving my mother silly. Or sometimes my stepfather got into one of his moods and I’d clear out and come here for a rest, in a way of speaking. He used to make me mad, he did.’ She lapsed into a silence of nostalgic content. A man slowly cycled down the street, stopping at each lamp-post. Above him, while he paused, a small yellow glimmer pushed back the thick grey air. Soon the houses retired into shadow. Pools of dim light showed wet pavements. Rose was quiet beside me, a huddled little figure in her tight black coat and head-scarf.
It was long after the sky had gone thick and black behind the glimmering lamps that Rose came out of her dream of childhood. She stretched and said: ‘We’d better be moving.’ But she didn’t move without reluctance. ‘At any rate, the blitz didn’t get it. That’s something to be glad about. And the bombs fell around here. God knows what they thought they were trying to bomb!’ She spoke indifferently, without hate. ‘I expect the planes got lost one night and thought this would do as well as anything. The Americans do that, too, they say – they just get fed up flying around in the dark, so they drop their bombs and nip home for a cup of tea.’
As we walked back, she said: ‘I’ll have to get a hurry on. I’ve got to help Flo with the washing-up or she’ll get the pip.’
‘Do you have to help her?’
‘No. Not really. But I’ve got into the habit of it. She’s like that – I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t. But you just watch yourself and don’t let yourself get into the habit of doing things. I’m telling you for your own good.’
At the bombed site her gait and manner changed. She withdrew into herself and became suspicious, looking into people’s faces as they passed as if they might turn out to be enemies. I couldn’t imagine this Rose, all prim and tightfaced, spitting pips with a laugh. In our street of great decaying houses she clutched at my arm for a moment and said, ‘This place gives me the ’ump sometimes. It’s not friendly, not like what I’m used to. That’s why.’
Bobby Brent was coming out of the side door from the basement, a natty brown hat pulled down over his eyes. When he saw us, he frowned; then smiled. ‘You thought I’d forgotten our appointment,’ he said. ‘Well, you don’t know me.’ Then it struck him: he examined his watch and exclaimed. ‘I say! It’s half-past nine. We agreed eight-fifteen.’
‘Oh, come off it, Bobby,’ said Rose giggling. ‘You do make me laugh.’
He gritted his teeth; forced his lips back in a smile. ‘I’ll take you over now,’ he said to me. ‘Of course, the one I tried to get for you’s gone; nobody to blame but yourself. But there’s another. Just right for you.’
Rose was leaning against the gate-pillar, watching him satirically. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said to him, and pulled me inside the front door.
She took my handbag from me, opened it, and removed all the money from it. ‘I’ll keep this till you come back,’ she said. ‘I’ve left you two shillings, that’ll be enough. Now, if you want this room next to me, it’s a good thing you go off with Bobby. It’ll make Flo nervous. And they’re doing ever such a deal, the three of them.’
‘What sort of deal? Why don’t you stop Flo?’
‘Oh no, it’s like this. If Bobby wants, for argument’s sake, five pounds, then don’t let him have it. But if it’s a hundred and it looks all right, that’s different, see? Bobby’s got an idea for a club, a night-club or something. Dan is going to lend him a hundred. And they’re talking how to get money out of you.’
‘But I haven’t any.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, giggling. ‘Don’t mind me, but I did sort of keep my face straight, as if I thought you had money, because it makes me laugh, Flo and Dan, when they get the itch. There are two sorts of people in the world,’ she concluded, ‘the kind that get money, like Flo and Dan and Bobby. That’s because they think about it all the time. And people like us. Well, it takes all sorts. See you tomorrow. I’ll put your money under your pillow.’
Bobby Brent said as I joined him: ‘There’s just one kind of person that I can’t stand. The envious ones. Like Rose Jennings. She’s eaten up with it.’
‘Where’s the flat?’
‘Around the corner.’
We walked half a mile in silence. ‘How’s Miss Powell?’ I asked. ‘I don’t mind telling you, she’s a real problem to me. She’s got it into her head she wants to marry me.’ ‘Bad luck,’ I said. ‘The trouble with women is, they’re monogamous.’ ‘I know. It’s all very badly arranged.’ ‘What do you mean – my arrangements aren’t crystallized.’ ‘Never mind, you’ll feel different when you’re married to the daughter of the lord.’ ‘I’m not so sure. Women never understand. They tie a man down. They expect him to live the same life, day after day. Well, I was in the Commandos three years, and now I expect to call my life my own.’ ‘Cheer up. It looks as if there might very well be a war soon.’ ‘You can’t count on it,’ he said.
We were now in a hushed and darkened square, and outside a large house. The name on the doorbell we pushed was Colonel Bartowers. The door opened to show a martial old man, with protruding stomach, red face, and an aggressive blue stare.
‘We’re here on business. My name’s Ponsonby – Alfred Ponsonby.’ He thrust a card into the Colonel’s hand. The Colonel stood his ground, looking at him up and down, raising his white eyebrows in a terrifying way. ‘We understand you have premises to let.’
The Colonel fell back, astonished, and we were in the hall. The Colonel looked at me, and said blankly: ‘Well, come inside, now you’re here. How on earth – I haven’t even sent it to an agent – ’ He pulled himself together. ‘Well, I don’t know, these days you can’t even think of moving without getting in hordes of … however, I’m very glad. Come in.’
He showed us into a living-room. It was charming. This was the England I had read about in novels.
‘As a matter of interest,’ said the Colonel to me, ‘how did you hear about this flat?’
Mr Ponsonby strode forward and announced: ‘My cousin from Africa asked me to find her a flat.’ I tried to catch the Colonel’s eye, but Mr Ponsonby was in the way. ‘I’m in the business, as my card shows. There would be no fee to either lessor or lessee.’
‘A question of philanthropy,’ said the Colonel gravely; and Mr Ponsonby fell back, spelling out the word to himself. ‘Blood is blood,’ he offered at last.
‘Oh, quite,’ said Colonel Bartowers. He sighed and said: ‘Well, I suppose I might as well show you the flat, in case I decide to go abroad. You mentioned Africa?’ he said to me.
‘My cousin has just come,’ said Mr Ponsonby, trying to get between the Colonel and me, but he was brushed aside, and the Colonel took my arm.
‘I was myself in Southern Rhodesia for ten years. A little before your time, I expect. I left in 1905. Do you remember …’ And he began reciting names which are part of the history of the Empire. ‘This is the kitchen,’ he said, waving his hand at it. It was equipped like an American kitchen. ‘All the things one needs in a kitchen, I believe. So my wife said. She ran off with someone else last year. No loss. Not really. But I don’t use the kitchen. I eat out. Now, tell me, did you ever meet Jameson? I suppose not.’
In the bedroom he absently opened one cupboard after another, all filled with lush blankets and tinted linen of all kinds, shutting the doors before I could properly savour them. ‘All the usual things for bedrooms – hot bottles, electric bottles and so on. Never use the things myself. Now, tell me, did you ever go shooting down Gwelo way?’ He told a story of how he had shot a lion in the chicken-run, in the good old days. ‘But perhaps things have changed,’ he remarked at last.
‘I think they have, rather.’
‘Yes, so I hear.’ He threw open another door. ‘The bathroom,’ he announced, before shutting it. I caught a glimpse of a very large room with a black and white tiled floor, and a pale pink bath. ‘A bit cramped,’ he said, ‘but in these days.’
‘Well, I think that’s all,’ he said at last. ‘Shall we have a drink on it?’ He produced a bottle of Armagnac; then he looked at Mr Ponsonby, for the first time in minutes, and frowned. ‘There’s a pub round the corner,’ he said putting back the bottle. In the pub he ordered two drinks for me and for him, added a third as a calculated afterthought, and turned his back on Mr Ponsonby. ‘Now,’ he said, his fat red face relaxing. ‘We can talk.’ For the space of several drinks I said yes and no; and in the intervals of his monologue, the Colonel ordered, with brusque dislike, another for Mr Ponsonby, who was reacting to this situation in a way which disconcerted me. I expected him to be angry; but his eyes were focused on some plan. He watched the Colonel’s face for some time while he pretended to be listening to his talk. Then he turned away and got into conversation with a man sitting next to him. I heard phrases like ‘a good investment’ and ‘thirty per cent’ spoken in a discreet, almost winning voice.
‘That Bulawayo campaign. The best days of my life. I remember lying on the kopje behind my house and taking pot-shots at the nigs as they came to the river for water. I was a damned good shot, though I say it myself. Of course, I still shoot a bit, grouse chiefly, but it’s not the same. It was a good life, say what you like.’ He shot a pugnacious blue glance at me and demanded: ‘From what I hear they’ll be taking pot-shots at us soon, getting their own back, hey? This idea seemed to cause him a detached and almost kindly amusement, for he guffawed and said: ‘I used to get good fun with those nigs. Damn good fellows some of them. Sportsmen. Good fighters. Ah, well.’ He sighed and put down his glass. ‘Two more of the same.’
‘Closing time, sir.’
‘Blast. This damned country. Can’t stand it. It’s a nation of old women these days. It’s the Labour Government. Petticoat government, that’s what I call it. That’s why I’m thinking of getting out again. To Kenya, I thought. I’ve got a cousin. I’d go back to Rhodesia, but my wife, blast her, is there with her new husband. Not big enough for both of us. The trouble is, though, once you’ve lived out of England, you can’t really settle in it. Too small. I expect you’ll find that, too. I remember I came back on leave after that Bulawayo campaign and asking myself, How the hell did I stick England all those years. I still ask myself.’
I heard Mr Ponsonby say: ‘A nice little sideline for a man with a few hundred to spare.’
The Colonel, peevishly fiddling with his empty glass, listened.
‘Needs doing up. But it’s in good repair. All it really needs is some paint and a bar.’
‘Your cousin …’
‘He’s not my cousin.’
‘Of course not. Ah, well, these people have their uses, I suppose! He appears to have irons in the fire.’
‘Dozens. He’s a man of enterprise.’
‘That’s what this country lacks, these days.’
‘He was in the Commandos, too.’
But the Colonel’s face expressed nothing but distaste. ‘Was he? I like clean fighting myself. Still, I suppose those fellows were necessary.’
‘My principal needs a quick decision,’ said Mr Ponsonby. ‘You can give me a ring in the morning.’ He got off his stool and turned to us, not immediately recognizing us, so great was his preoccupation. ‘Well,’ he asked. ‘Everything fixed?’ He spoke as if this little matter could only be kept in the forefront of his attention by the greatest concentration.
‘About the rent,’ I asked.
‘Well, my dear,’ said the Colonel, ‘I know one can get anything one asks these days, but I don’t like to take advantage. For you I’d make it ten guineas.’
‘You could easily get fifteen or twenty,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know. Those Yanks’d pay that. But I don’t like ’em.’
‘But I haven’t got the money to pay that, anyway.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t really want to let it. It’s an idea that came into my head last week. But I suppose I’ll have to end my days here. In the old country. The trouble is, it isn’t the old country any longer. I used to be proud to call myself English. I’m damned if I am these days.’
Mr Ponsonby was examining his watch.
‘This proposition you were discussing with that fellow,’ said the Colonel.
‘A night-club. Perhaps you might be interested?’
‘A night-club?’ said the Colonel, livening up. ‘Well, I might be interested to have some details.’
Mr Ponsonby had by now replaced me beside the Colonel. His manner with him was quite different than with me. He looked, perhaps, like a sergeant-major in mufti, rather bluff and responsible. ‘My principal,’ he said, ‘is very concerned about the hands it might get into. Needs decent people, you know.’
‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, a trifle suspiciously.
‘Shall I ring you in the morning, sir?’
‘Yes, you could do that.’
We parted, the Colonel wishing me well, but without much confidence, because, as he said, I should have come to England before the First World War, it had never been the same since.
Walking home, I was offered a share in the night-club. He also said that if I had four hundred he would double it for me in a month. There was a house for sale for one thousand five hundred; and he knew a man he could sell it to for two thousand three hundred. ‘And what would you get out of it?’ I asked.
‘Your confidence in me,’ he said. ‘Of course, I’d charge a small commission. There’s nothing in it. I can’t understand it, people slaving away, when it’s so easy to make money. All you have to do, is use your intelligence.’
‘All I want at the moment is a flat.’
‘You’ll never find another flat like the Colonel’s, at that price.’
‘But he didn’t want to let it.’
‘That’s not my fault.’ We were now at the house, and he said: ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll drop around tomorrow and take you to another little place I know about.’
‘Goodnight,’ I said.
‘I like a person like you, who thinks twice about risking their money. I’ll be in touch,’ he said.
Chapter Three (#ulink_3436391f-2ae7-5f11-beae-867828ac5cad)
Next day I began to look for a job, and the attitude of the household changed. Rose said: ‘Now you’re going to be a working girl like me. I’m glad.’ But Flo was disappointed in me, even offended. ‘You should have told us, shouldn’t you,’ she said. ‘Told you what?’ ‘Now you’re nice and comfortable up in that little flat that’s so nice.’ ‘Flo, I’m looking for a real flat, I told you.’ ‘Ah, my God!’ I heard her complain, as she descended the stairs. ‘Ah, my Lord, she’ll be the death of me yet, they all will.’
‘You just stick it out,’ said Rose ‘And I’ve told Flo, I’m not having that dirty Miss Powell in the room next to me. Either her or me, I said to Flo.’
Next day negotiations began. Flo took me into the big room and said I wouldn’t like it, not really, not with all those cracks in the walls. I said I would like it. There was a small room on the landing below, with a concealed cooker in it. My son could sleep in that. The two rooms would suit me very well.
‘And what,’ asked Flo, ‘were you thinking of paying?’
‘But it’s the landlord’s business to fix the rent,’ I said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Flo. ‘Oh dear, oh dear! Drat it. Oh, my Lord, and Dan’s at work, too, and I’m on my own.’
‘Well, you could discuss it with him.’
‘Poor Miss Powell, she needs a big room for herself.’
‘If a single woman wants a big room, then a woman with a child surely does?’
‘But you wouldn’t call her single,’ said Flo. She began to laugh. ‘Oh, that Bobby, he’s a case. And those great big eyes of his. When he looks at me, I go all funny where Dan would kill me if he knew.’
‘Well, I’m quite sure his beautiful eyes make it easy for him to get a room for Miss Powell.’
‘Ah, that poor Miss Powell. The landlord where she is is being ever so nasty. I’m not nasty, am I, dear? And look how nice my Oar and your Peter play.’
‘Yes, I know. He loves being here.’
And you do, too, I can tell. Ah, my Lord, what shall I do, I shall have to talk to Dan.’
‘That would be a good idea.’
For a week I stayed at the top of the house, hoping for the room next to Rose, waiting for my job to start. Under the roof I was cut off from the rest of the house. The two rooms under me were empty. They were still full of rubble and mess from the bombing. The plan now was that Dan should clean them out and distemper them, and then either I or Miss Powell would take them. I said I didn’t like them. Flo said that was because I couldn’t imagine them cleaned up and painted. Dan was going to start work, in his evenings. Then I would see. I said, either the big room or nothing. It was a war of nerves.
Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth, that seems abandoned, but which sounds, when one puts one’s ear to it, with a continuous vibrant humming. Even when the door shut, it was not long before the silence grew into an orchestra of sound. Beneath my floor a tap dripped softly all day, in a blithe duet with the dripping of the tap on the landing. Two floors down, where the Skeffingtons lived, was a radio. Sometimes she forgot it when she went to work, and, as the hours passed, the wavelength slipped, so that melodies and voices flowed upwards, blurring and mingling. This sound had for accompaniment the splashing water, like conversation heard through music and dripping rain. In the darkening afternoons I was taken back to a time when I lay alone at night and listened to people talking through several walls, while the rain streamed from the eves. Sometimes it was as if the walls had dissolved, and I was left sitting under a tree, listening to birds talking from branch to branch while the last fat drops of a shower spattered on the leaves, and a ploughman yelled encouragement to his beasts in the field over the hill. Sometimes I put my ear to the wall and heard how, as the trains went past and the buses rocked their weight along the street, shock after shock came up through brick and plaster, so that the solid wall had the fluidity of dancing atoms, and I felt the house, the street, the pavement, and all the miles and miles of houses and streets as a pattern of magical balances, a weightless structure, as if this city hung on water, or on sound. Being alone in that little box of ceiling board and laths frightened me.
At last Flo came up and said that the two rooms beneath me were ready, and I could move down when I liked. I examined them and said no. They were very small. She said: ‘You can have the big room for five pounds a week.’ She sounded offhand, because of her fright at my probable reaction.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.
She laughed and said, ‘Then you say.’
‘Two pounds,’ I said.
‘Ah, my Lord, are you laughing at me?’
‘You say,’ I said.
‘Four pounds fifteen.’
‘Two pounds ten.’
‘Darling, sweetheart, you’re laughing at your poor Flo.’
‘You say, then.’
At last we settled for three-ten, a sum which caused Rose to be angry with me. ‘You could have got it for three-five,’ she said. ‘You make me cross, you really do.’
‘Well, I shall be next to you, and Peter will be very happy that we’re staying.’
‘All the same, why throw five bob a week into the dustcan? Well, you make Flo clean your room for you, then.’
‘Is it likely?’
‘Well, I’m not going to, and someone must – where was you dragged up, I’d like to know, you don’t even know how to clean a floor?’
‘We were spoiled. We had servants.’
‘You had something. Because to watch you sweeping is enough to make a cat laugh.’
Flo and Dan and Rose and I stood in the empty big room that evening. ‘It’s such a lovely room,’ said Flo. ‘And you can hardly notice them cracks.’
‘What we’re here for, is furniture,’ said Rose.
‘You can have that lovely bed from upstairs.’
‘She’ll want somewhere for her clothes,’ said Rose.
‘You can have that lovely cupboard from the landing.’
Rose said: ‘You make me sick.’
‘But we want to furnish her nice, dear.’
‘You do, do you? Then I’ll show you how.’ With which Rose ran all over the house, marking out pieces to be put in my room. Dan did her bidding, silently; while Flo stood, unconsciously wringing her hands as one bit of furniture after another came to rest in my room, and the little room downstairs. Rose told me afterwards that she had said in the basement that if they didn’t treat me right, she’d be so ashamed she’d leave. Since Rose did half of Flo’s work for her, this was effective. When the rooms were ready, Rose said: ‘That’s a bit more like.’ Dan gave her a grudging look of admiration. By this time we were all in good humour. Flo saw Dan looking, and said sharply, but laughing: ‘And you keep your eyes off poor Rose. I know what you’re thinking. Can’t look at a woman without thinking of it!’ Dan gave her his bared-teeth grin. Rose said: ‘Oh, shut up. And now I’ll help you get the supper, Flo.’
‘I should think so,’ said Flo. ‘Dear me, oh, dear me, life is so hard these days.’
Rose gave me a wink as she went out, and whispered, ‘Now you settle yourself, and don’t you let Flo take any of this stuff back tomorrow. I’m telling you for your own good. I’ll be in after supper for a nice chat.’
Now I was in the heart of the house. Immediately above me, in two large rooms, were the Skeffingtons. I had not yet seen them. He was away most of the time. She left for work before I did, and once she was in her rooms, seldom came out. I knew about them from Flo, through a succession of nods, winks, and hoarse whispers. Her: ‘She’s ever such a sweet woman’ – made, as these remarks always were, as if a sweet tenant were something I was getting extra, thrown in, for the rent, was sometimes: ‘Poor thing, she’s brave, and she pays her rent so regular.’ And sometimes: ‘What she has to put up with, no one would believe. Men are all the same, beasts, every one.’ On the other hand, she often observed with lip-licking smile that Mr Skeffington was just like a film star, and Mrs Skeffington didn’t appreciate him. These two states of mind were determined by whether we got a good night’s sleep or not. Usually not. There were few nights I was not woken by the persistent frightened crying of a child in nightmare. The words ‘I’m not naughty, I’m not naughty’, were wailed over and over again. I heard the sharp release of bedsprings, bare feet sliding on the floor, then several loud slaps. ‘You’re naughty. You’re a naughty girl.’ The voice was high and hysterical. This duet might keep up for an hour or more. At last the child would fall asleep; soon afterwards an alarm clock vibrated; and I would hear Mrs Skeffington’s voice: ‘Oh, my God, my God,’ and the tired release of a weighted bed. The kettle shrieked, cups clattered, and her voice: ‘Crying half the night and now I can’t wake you. Oh, goodness, gracious me, what shall I do with you, Rosemary?’
I knew all the tones of her voice before I ever saw her; but I found it impossible to form a picture of her. As soon as she had the child inside the door, the tussle began: the high, exasperated weary voice, and the child nagging back. Or sometimes there was exhausted sobbing – first the woman, and then the child. I would hear: ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Rosemary. I can’t help it.’
Once I heard her on the stairs, coming home from work in conversation with Flo. Her voice was now formal and bright: ‘Really I don’t know what I shall do with Rosemary, she’s so naughty.’ She gave a fond, light laugh.
From the child, sullenly: ‘I’m not naughty.’
‘Yes, you are naughty, Rosemary. How dare you answer me back.’ Although the voice was still social, sharpness had come into it.
From Flo, a histrionically resigned: ‘Yes, I know, dear. Mine’s the death of me, she drives me mad all day.’
From Aurora: ‘I don’t drive you mad.’
‘Yes, you do. Don’t answer your mother like that.’ There was the sound of a sharp slap.
Flo’s exchange with Aurora was an echo of Mrs Skeffington’s with her child, because Flo could not help copying the behaviour of whoever she was with. But the burst of wild sobs from Aurora was quite unconvincing; her tears were displays of drama adapted to the occasion. From one second to the next she would stop crying and her face beamed with smiles. Her crying was never the miserable frightened wailing of the other little girl.
One morning I met a woman on the landing who I thought must be new to the house. She said brightly: ‘Gracious me, I’m in your way, I’m so sorry,’ and skipped sideways. It was Mrs Skeffington – that ‘gracious me’ could be no one else. Under her arm she balanced a tiny child. She was a tall slight creature, with carefully fluffed out fair hair arranged in girlish wisps on her forehead and neck. Her large clear brown eyes were anxiously friendly; and her smile was tired. There were dark shadows around her eyes and at the corners of her nose. The baby who sounded so forlorn and defiant at night was about fifteen months old. She was a fragile child, with her mother’s wispy pretty hair and enormous brown eyes.
‘Get out of the lady’s way,’ said Mrs Skeffington to the baby, which she had set down – apparently for the purpose of being able to scold her. ‘Get out of the lady’s way, you naughty, naughty girl.’
‘But she’s not in my way.’
‘I do so hope Rosemary doesn’t keep you awake at nights,’ she said politely, just as if I did not hear every movement of her life, and she of mine.
‘Not at all,’ I said.
‘I’m so glad, she’s a real pickle,’ said Mrs Skeffington, injecting the teasing fondness into her voice that went with the words. She tripped upstairs, and as her door shut her voice rose into hysteria: ‘Don’t dawdle so, Rosemary, how many times must I tell you.’
‘I’m not doddling,’ said the baby, whose vocabulary was sharpened by need into terrifying precocity.
Mr Skeffington was an engineer and he went on business trips for his firm. He was nearly always away during the week. According to Rose: ‘He’s just as bad as she is, and that’s saying something. Their tempers fit each other, hand and glove. You wait till he comes back and you’ll hear something. He reminds me of my stepfather – pots and kettles flying and both of them screaming and the kid yelling its head off. It’s good as the pictures, if you don’t want to get some sleep.’
Rose’s stepfather haunted her conversations. She would sit moodily on my bed, listening to Mrs Skeffington nagging at the child overhead, saying from time to time: ‘You wait till he comes, you haven’t heard nothing yet.’ And, inevitably, the next phrase would be – My stepfather.
‘Wasn’t he good to you?’
‘Good?’ A word as direct as that always made her uncomfortable. ‘I wouldn’t like to say anything against him, see.’ Then, after a moment: ‘He was a bad-tempered, lying, cheating swine of a bully – God rest his soul, I wouldn’t say bad things of the dead,’ she would conclude, apologetically.
She had no pity for Mrs Skeffington at all. I could never understand why Rose, who was so tender-hearted, shut her sympathy off from the threesome upstairs. Once I suggested we should tell the NSPCC, and she was so shocked that she could scarcely bring herself to speak to me for days. At last I went to her room and asked her why she was so angry. ‘I didn’t know you was one of them nosey-parkers,’ she said.
‘But, Rose, what’s going to happen to that poor baby?’
‘They’ll take it away from her, most like, and send her to prison. Not that it’s not a good place for her.’
‘Perhaps they might help her.’
‘How? Tell me? What she needs help for, is against her husband and what are they going to do about him? Not that she doesn’t deserve what she gets.’
‘All that’s wrong with her is she’s overworked and tired.’
‘Yes? Well, let me tell you, my mother brought up six of us, and she had no sense for men, real sods they were, but she never carried on like my lady upstairs.’
Meanwhile Miss Powell had moved into the two small rooms above the Skeffingtons. She came down to see me about the child. She wore a red silk gown, trimmed with dark fur, and looked like a film star strayed on to the wrong set. She was very sensible. She suggested we should talk to Mr Skeffington when he came home and tell him his wife needed a holiday.
As soon as she had gone, Rose came in to demand what I though I was doing, talking to that whore.
I said we had agreed to tax Mr Skeffington, and Rose said: ‘You make me laugh, you do. At least the Skeffingtons are decently married, they aren’t a whore and Mr Bobby Brent.’
Flo said to me, her eyes dancing. ‘Mr Skeffington’s coming back tomorrow. You wait till you see him,’ she urged – for it was one of the days she did not like Mrs Skeffington. ‘You just lean over the banisters and have a look. Like a film star, he is. He’s got eyes that make me feel funny, just like Bobby Brent.’ For some days Mrs Skeffington was saying to the child: ‘Your daddy will beat you if you aren’t a good girl.’
‘I am a good girl.’
‘You’ll see, he’ll beat you. For God’s sake, keep quiet now, Rosemary.’
When he did come, I heard the following dialogue through the floor: ‘It’s always the same. As soon as I come home, you start complaining.’
‘But I can’t keep a home going on what I earn.’
‘I told you before I married you, I’ve got to pay alimony. Sometimes I’m sorry I ever did. Can’t you keep that kid quiet?’
‘I can’t help it if Rosemary’s a naughty girl.’
‘I’m not a naughty girl,’ wailed Rosemary.
‘Don’t start,’ he said aggressively. ‘Now don’t start, that’s all.’
The child wept. Mrs Skeffington wept, and Mr Skeffington went out, slamming the door, five minutes after he’d come home.
Rose came in. ‘You heard?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You still think you’re going to talk them into sense?’
‘No, not really.’
‘I told you. You’ve got a lot to learn …’
‘All the same, what about the baby?’
‘What you don’t know yet is, there’s some people you can’t do nothing about.’ She offered me a cigarette, as a sign she was forgiving me. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, dear. Your trouble is this. You think, all you’ve got to do is say something, and then things’ll be right. Well, they won’t be. You leave that pair of love-birds upstairs alone. Because I tell you what’s going to happen. He’s left one wife with kids already. He’s not one to stick. And he’ll leave her, too. And then she’ll be better off and her temper’ll improve. You’ll see.’
Later Mr Skeffington came in. Soon we heard her plead: ‘Oh not tonight, not tonight, Ron. I’m so tired. I was up with Rosemary all last night.’ Rose grinned at me, nodding, as if to say: There. I told you. He said: ‘I’ve been away two weeks and that’s what I get when I come home.’ ‘Oh, Ron, darling.’ A comparative silence. We heard his voice, adjusted to tenderness. Complete silence. Then the child started to cry. Mrs Skeffington wailed: ‘Oh, Rosemary, Rosemary, can’t you ever stop?’ She must have been up most of the night. At seven the alarm shrilled so long that most of the house was aroused. Finally there came a shock and a crash as the clock was flung across the room. ‘Oh, Ronnie,’ said Mrs Skeffington, ‘now you’ve woken Rosemary.’
He was a slight, fair, dandyish young man, with a jaunty moustache. If any of us women, Rose, Flo, myself, Miss Powell were carrying something on the stairs, we could not take two steps before we found him beside us: ‘A pleasure,’ he would say, assisting us on our way. His wife carried all her own burdens. She got up at seven every day, washed and dressed and fed the child, and took it to the council nursery school. She came back at lunchtime to cook her husband his meal. She finally collected the little girl at six, having spent her day cooking in a nearby cafe. Her evenings she spent cleaning and cooking.
At nine in the morning, Ronnie Skeffington, smelling of shaving soap and hair lotion, would emerge from the bathroom in a silk dressing-gown, and proceed upstairs with the newspapers. His breakfast had been cooked for him and was waiting in the oven. At ten he went off to work, and came back at one, expecting to find his lunch ready. He usually did not come home until late at night.
‘Say what you like,’ said Flo, ‘that Ronnie, that Miss Powell, they give the house class. Imagine now, if you was to open the door and there was Mr Skeffington, all polite and brushed, you’d think this house has got nice flats in it, now wouldn’t you?’
‘Don’t start putting up the rents yet,’ said Rose, dryly, after one such flight.
‘Rents, I didn’t say nothing about rents, dear.’
‘No, I’m just telling you not to start.’
There were two rooms beneath mine and Rose’s. An old couple lived there. I never heard them. I never saw them. When I asked Rose about them, her face would put on the sorrowful guilty look which meant that over this matter her loyalty was to Flo. She would say: ‘Don’t worry about them. There’s nothing to tell.’ When I asked Flo, she said: ‘They’re filthy old beasts, but they don’t worry you, do they?’
About a week after I moved down beside Rose, Flo came in to ask me down to supper that night. I thanked her. She lingered, looking hurt. ‘Don’t you want to come, darling?’ ‘But of course I do. I’d love to.’ She embraced me, saying: ‘There, I knew you would. I told Dan.’
My trouble with Flo was that she was uneasy unless she got exaggerated reactions of delight, complaint, or shock to her own dramatized emotions. If I did not at first react suitably, she would prod me until I did. ‘There! You’re laughing,’ she would say, in relief. ‘That’s right. Laugh.’ Or, hopefully: ‘Aren’t you shocked? Of course you are. I knew you would be.’
Rose said: ‘It’s no use your being all English with Flo. It gets her all upset.’
As for Rose, she could communicate a saga of sorrow with a slight droop of her mouth; the climax to a tale about her stepfather would be indicated by the folding together, in resignation, of her two small hands in her lap, not a word spoken. Her single syllable, Yes? could silence anyone in the house.
Rose made Flo uneasy, too. When she wanted to punish Flo she would sit, impassive, listening, refusing to register emotion, offering me the faintest of malicious smiles, until Flo said: ‘Ah, my Lord, you’re cross with me. Why are you cross with your Flo?’
I knew that the invitation to supper meant more than I understood. I had to come to know that a complicated ritual governed what went on in the house. I did not at first think about it, out of an emotion which I now realize was a middle-class hypocrisy about the value of money, the value of time. But Rose made it impossible for me not to think.
About the supper invitation she said: ‘I thought she would. She feels bad about getting too much for your rooms. She was expecting you to make her clean your rooms.’
‘I asked her to.’
‘She doesn’t like housework.’
‘Who does? But she came up and gave me a lesson about dusting and cleaning and ironing.’
‘I’d like to have seen it,’ said Rose. ‘What was your mother thinking of, sending you out into the world so ignorant?’
‘That’s what Flo said, too.’
‘Yes. Well, now she thinks she’ll make up by inviting you to eat sometimes. And, believe you me, it’s better that way, because she’s a cook better than anyone, even my mother.’ But just before we prepared ourselves to go down to supper, she became uneasy, and said: ‘You mustn’t mind Flo when she gets dirty-mouthed. Just laugh to please her and take no notice.’
On weekdays, the family did not eat together until the men came in from work, about six. This meal was called tea. No one went to bed until late, after midnight. At about eleven was another meal, called supper. At both Flo served a rich variety of foods. There was always a basis of salads, cake, different kinds of bread and cheeses and fruit. Flo always cooked a different, fresh main dish for both meals. It might be spaghetti, some kind of meat, a pie, or chicken. The late meal, just before everyone went to bed, was the one they most enjoyed and lingered over. Besides, it was by tradition what Flo called a dirt session.
On that evening when Rose and I went downstairs, the men were already waiting to be served at the table. They wore, as always after work, clean white singlets. The basement was always steaming hot from the stove and from the electric fire which was never turned off. Flo was making a cauldron of spaghetti which filled the steamy air full of the odours of garlic and olive oil and meat and cheese. We sat around the table, sprawling, our elbows resting, while Flo heaped our plates. Aurora, who never went to bed before her parents, was sitting on Dan’s lap. She had on a white tight nightgown, over which her black curls, Flo’s pride, cascaded to her waist. She had her arm around Dan’s thick neck, and was sucking her thumb. Although there were blue bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes, she continued to observe everything that went on, sleepily blinking, and nodding off, then forcing herself awake. Her smile seemed as full of sharp knowledgeable enjoyments as Flo’s.
Dan’s attitude to me was the same as his to Rose: he watched us appreciatively, savouring our possibilities, but with caution. Flo kept a sharp eye on his every glance.
She served herself last, and sat down, sighing, saying: ‘After all that gammon I ate before I haven’t room for a bite.’ We all ate enormously and praised Flo’s art from time to time, which she took as her due with a modest and satisfied smile. Dan chewed in ferocious mouthfuls, his white teeth glistening through the sauce, strands hanging from the corners of his lips. From time to time he pushed a spoonful into Aurora’s mouth, but she always made a face, chewed once or twice, and sat with the food, unswallowed, in her mouth.
‘That kid’s too sleepy to eat,’ Rose said.
‘It’s no good putting her to sleep until we go,’ said Flo. ‘She’ll just scream and scream.’
‘She needs a good spanking,’ said Rose. There was always a touch of sullenness in her voice when she mentioned Aurora. She disapproved of how she was brought up.
‘But I spank her, I do,’ said Flo eagerly, with a warm loving smile at Aurora, to which the child responded, like an accomplice.
When we could eat not another mouthful of spaghetti, or salad or cake, Flo took away the plates, and sat down again, her eyes bright and black, looking for an opening.
‘Look at your belly,’ she said suddenly to Rose, who had loosened her waist-band.
Rose gave me a glance which said: This was what I meant, don’t take any notice. She said to Flo, with careful unconcern: ‘What of it, after all that food?’
‘You look seven months. Doesn’t she, Jack? Doesn’t she, Dan?’
Dan grinned; Jack’s smile was eager and timid. Flo drew our attention to Jack, and said: ‘Look at him. He’d like to have a little bit with Rose.’ Jack blushed and looked eagerly, in spite of himself, at Rose. Who said good-naturedly: ‘Who, me? I don’t want a little boy in my bed.’
‘He’s got to learn sometime,’ Flo said.
‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘Then why pick on me? I’ve got to learn, too.’
‘That’s what I keep telling you,’ Flo said. ‘How old are you now? And as innocent as a baby.’
‘She’s twenty-three,’ said Dan to me, nodding and winking.
‘You shut up,’ said Rose to him, ‘you’re as old as you feel.’
‘It’s time you did feel,’ said Flo. ‘I keep telling you, Dan’s brother is like Dan, he likes a woman who knows a thing.’
Rose, who was suffering because of the long quarrel, which I still knew nothing about, with Dickie, Dan’s brother, looked annoyed and put a stop to this hare – ‘Then if Dickie wants it, regardless, he can pay for it.’
Jack sniggered. He sat listening, shocked, delighted, suffering, turning his eyes from one to another. Against the open, savage sensuality of Dan and Flo, and the heavy immobile good-nature Rose put on for these occasions, he looked defenceless and pathetic.
‘Yes. And he will, too, if he can get better.’ Suddenly she screamed at Dan: ‘Go on, Dan, tell her. Tell Rose about that dirty French girl. Tell what she did to you, the dirty beast.’
Dan smiled, and sat silent. Flo, aroused and angry, yet delighted; screamed again: ‘Well, tell her, go on.’
‘I don’t want to hear,’ said Rose primly, who had heard it often before.
‘Oh, yes you do. And you do too, don’t you, darling?’ – This to me, in a hasty aside. ‘Go on, Dan.’
Dan began. At first he kept his eyes on Rose, who sighed continuously with prepared digust. But soon he turned his glistening yellow gaze at his wife, who glanced back at him, terrified and squealing with delight.
‘And now you two had better go to bed,’ commented Rose, heavily, when the story was over.
‘What for, darling, we’re not sleepy, are we, Dan?’ Flo said, very innocent, catching our eyes one after another around the table.
Dan remained, heavily sitting and smiling and watching his wife, while Aurora sat smiling sleepily in his arms.
‘For God’s sake, put Aurora to bed,’ said Rose, disgusted. ‘Put her to sleep at least.’
Flo said: ‘Yes. Poor little girl, she’s sleepy.’ She whisked Aurora out of her father’s arms. Aurora let out a single howl of routine protest, and let her head fall on her mother’s shoulder.
‘Yes, she’s sleepy all right,’ said Flo, looking down at the child with a sort of malicious satisfaction. She took Aurora next door, while Rose grimaced at me, the corners of her mouth turned down, her eyebrows raised. Dan, now Flo was gone, was openly inciting both of us, grinning at us, his yellow eyes flaring.
Flo came back and saw him. ‘Ah, my Lord,’ she said sighing, ‘it’s a crime for a man like him to be wasted on one woman.’
‘Lend him to me tonight,’ said Rose, smiling and full of mischief at Dan.
‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘Listen to you. And what would I get if I even so much as touched Rose?’
‘You try it and see,’ said Flo, giggling. She yawned, dramatically, and said: ‘Oh, I’m ever so sleepy. And there’s all that washing-up.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Rose.
‘Then I’ll just pop off into bed,’ said Flo, lingering in the bedroom door, her eyes on Dan. She went in and shut the door, while Dan sat a moment, smiling in appreciation. Jack was breathing heavily, looking at his stepfather with resentment, with wonder, with admiration, with hate. After a moment Dan rose and said to Jack: ‘You turn off the lights. Don’t forget now.’ He followed his wife into the bedroom, loosening his belt.
Jack, Rose and I remained. Now Rose’s attitude became brisk and maternal, encouraging no nonsense. She whisked through the washing and drying, while I helped her, and the boy sat despondently at the table, caressing a puppy, smiling at us, hoping for Rose to soften. He even made a sad little attempt to restore the sexy atmosphere by saying: ‘You do look seven months gone, Rose, like Flo said.’ But she said calmy: ‘And what do you know about it?’ When we left him, she patted his shoulder with triumphant patronage, and said: ‘Sleep tight. And keep your dreams clean.’
He slept in the kitchen on a stretcher, beside a box full of puppies. He was like a puppy himself – sleek, eager, and wistful.
I thought Rose treated him badly. When I said so, she gave me her heavy-lidded look, half-triumphant, half-sardonic, and said: ‘And why’s that? He’s a kid.’
‘Then don’t tease him.’
She was indignant. She did not understand me. I did not understand her. She was shocked because Jack, later, wandered in and out of my room, to talk about a film he’d just seen, or about his boxing. She was shocked when Bobby Brent dropped in at midnight with a business proposition before going upstairs to Miss Powell. No man was ever allowed inside her room. But she would go down to the basement in a waist slip and brassière, and if either Dan or Jack looked at her she would say scathingly: ‘Nothing better to polish your eyes on?’ in precisely the same way a fashionable woman might pointedly draw a cloak over her naked arms and shoulders at an over-direct stare from a man. I remember once Jack knocked on my door when I had a petticoat on, and I put on a dressing-gown before answering the door and letting him in. Rose said, amused: ‘You think he’s never seen a woman in a slip before?’ and teased me about being prudish. One night she was sitting in front of my fireplace in her nightgown, and Jack was lying on the floor turning over the physical culture magazines he read, when she unconcernedly lifted a bare arm to scratch where her brassiere had left a red mark under her breast. Jack said bitterly: ‘Oh, don’t mind me, please. I’m nothing but a bit of furniture.’
‘What’s biting you?’ she enquired, and when he blundered to his feet and slammed out of my room, swearing, she said to me, with perfect sincerity: ‘He’s a funny boy, isn’t he, all full of moods.’
‘But Rose, how can you tantalize him like that?’
‘Well, I don’t know, dear. I don’t really, the things you say, they’d make me blush if I didn’t know you. I can see I’m going to have to tell you about life.’
She had now taken my education over. It had begun over money, and when I got a job with a small engineering firm as secretary. I was earning seven pounds a week. I said something to Rose about living on seven pounds a week; and she gave me her heavy-lidded smile. ‘You make me laugh,’ she said.
‘But I do,’ I said. I was paying the fees for the council nursery, the rent, and the food out of that money. I found it hard, but it gave me pleasure to be able to do it.
‘For one thing,’ said Rose, settling down to the task of instructing me. ‘For one thing, there’s clothes. You and the kid, you have all the clothes you brought with you. Now suppose there was a fire tomorrow, what’d you use for money for clothes?’
‘But there isn’t going to be a fire.’
‘Why not? Look how you live. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. You say to yourself, well I’m having some bad luck just now, so you pull your belt a bit tighter, while it lasts. That’s not being poor. You always go on as if you’ll win the pools tomorrow.’
‘Well, I hate having to worry all the time about what might happen.’
‘Yes?’ said Rose, silencing me.
‘All right, then, you show me.’
‘Yes, I’m going to. Because you worry me, you do really. Suppose you don’t get married, suppose that book of yours isn’t any good?’
I was ready to listen, because this was one of the times when I believed I might not write again. I found I was too tired at night to write. My day, for some weeks, went like this. My son woke early, and I dressed and fed him and took him to the nursery before going to work. At lunchtime I went to the shops, took food home and cleaned the place out. I picked him up from the nursery at five; and by the time he was fed and bathed and read to, and he was ready for sleep, it was about nine. Then, in theory, was my time for writing. But not only could I not write, I could not even imagine myself writing. The personality ‘writer’ was so far removed from me, it was like thinking about another person, not myself. As it turned out, after two months or so, I got an advance from a publisher on a previously-written book, and my troubles were over. But during that time, I was ready to listen to Rose’s strictures.
‘No,’ she would say patiently, as she took the match from my fingers and replaced it carefully in the box. ‘Not like that. Why, when there’s a fire burning?’ She tore a strip of newspaper, made a spill, and lit her cigarette and mine.
She would say: ‘I have a friend, you don’t know her. She went into the chemist at the corner for a lipstick. But she could have got the same lipstick along the road for tuppence less. There’s no sense in that. She’s got no sense at all. She dropped some tea on her skirt. Well, round the corner there’s a cleaner would’ve done it for one-and-nine. But she just goes into the nearest and pays two-and-six. Where’s the sense in it? Can you tell me?’
Rose earned four pounds a week. She was underpaid, and knew it. The managers of shops in the neighbourhood were always offering her better-paid jobs; but she wanted to stay where she was because Dickie, Dan’s brother, worked in a cigarette shop across the street. Nor would she ask her employer for a rise. ‘I do all the work in that place,’ she said. ‘She just runs off to shop and carry-on, leaving me there alone. That husband of hers, all he knows about is the inside of watches. If a customer comes in, he diddles about, and loses everything and then shouts Rose, Rose. And I know how much money they make because I see the books. Well, if they don’t know the right way to behave, the way I look at it, it’s their funeral. Let them enjoy their guilty consciences. They know I’m worth twice that money to them. Well, if they think I’m going down on my knees to ask for it, I’m not going to give them that pleasure, they needn’t think it.’
Rose lived well inside her four pounds a week. What it cost her to do it were time and leisure, commodities she knew the value of, but which she did not consider to be her right. Half an hour’s skilled calculations might go into working out whether it was worth taking a bus to another part of London where she knew there was a nail varnish at sixpence less than where we lived. She would muse aloud, like this: ‘If I go by bus, that’s three-halfpence. Threepence altogether. I’d save threepence on the varnish. If I walk there’s shoe-leather, and what repairs cost these days, it’s not worth it. I know,’ she concluded, triumphant. ‘I’ll wear those shoes of mine that pinch me, and then it won’t cost nothing at all.’ We would walk together to the shop where the nail varnish was sixpence cheaper, and she would snatch up her prize from the rich market of London, saying: ‘There, see, what did I tell you? Now I’m sixpence to the good.’ But walking back she would stop on an impulse to buy half a pound of cherries from one of the despised barrow-boys, against whom she was continually warning me, so that the saved sixpence was thrown to the winds; but that was different, that was pleasure. ‘I’ll have to go easy on cigarettes tomorrow,’ she would say, smiling delightedly. ‘But it’s worth it.’
All her carefuly handling of money was to this end – that she might buy pleasure: that once in six months she could take a taxi instead of walking, and tip the taxi driver threepence more than was necessary; that she could buy a pair of good nylons once a week; that she could throw money away on fruit when the fancy took her, instead of walking down to the street markets and getting it cheap.
Inside this terrible, frightening city, Rose had created for herself a sort of tunnel, shored against danger by habit, known buildings, and trusted people. Rose’s London was the half-mile of streets where she had been born and brought up, populated by people she trusted; the house where she now lived, surrounded by them – mostly hostile people; and the West End. She knew every face we saw in the area we lived in, and if she did not, made it her business to find out. She knew every policeman and plain-clothes man who might pounce on her if she did not do right; she would nudge me and point out some man on a pavement, saying: ‘See ‘im? He’s a copper in civvies. Makes me sick. Well, I wonder who he’s after this time.’ She spoke with a melancholoy respect, almost pride.
Rose’s West End was a fixed journey, on a certain bus route, to a certain Corner House and one of half a dozen cinemas. It was walking back up Regent Street for window shopping.
Flo’s London did not even include the West End, since she had left the restaurant in Holborn. It was the basement she lived in; the shops she was registered at; and the cinema five minutes’ walk away. She had never been inside a picture gallery, a theatre or a concert hall. Flo would say: ‘Let’s go to the River one fine afternoon and take Oar.’ She had not seen the Thames, she said, since before the war. Rose had never been on the other side of the river. Once, when I took my son on a trip by river bus, Rose played with the idea of coming too for a whole week. Finally she said: ‘I don’t think I’d like those parts, not really. I like what I’m used to. But you go and tell me about it after.’
On the evenings when Rose decided life owed her some fun, she would say to me: ‘You’re coming with me to the West End tonight, whether you like it or not.’ She began to dress a good hour before it was time to start. I could hear her bath running downstairs, and the smell of her bath powder drifted up through the house. Soon afterwards she came in, without make-up, looking young and excited. I never found out how old she was. She used to say, with a laugh, she was twenty-three, but I think she was about thirty.
‘Rose, I wish you wouldn’t put on so much make-up.’
‘Don’t be silly. If I don’t wear plenty, Dickie says to me, what’s up with you, are you flying the red flag?’
‘But you haven’t seen Dickie for weeks.’
‘But we might run into him. That’s one of the reasons I’m taking you. He always takes me where we’re going, and if he’s got another woman, then I’ll catch him out and have a good laugh.’
Soon she had painted her daytime face over her real face, and had moulded her hair into a solid mass of black scrolls and waves. When Rose was dressed and made-up she always looked the same. She was conforming to some image of herself that was not the fashionable image for that year, but about three years ago. She took fashion papers, but the way we were supposed to look that year struck her as being extreme. She used to laugh at the pictures of fashion models, say: ‘They do look silly, don’t they?’ and go off to her room to make herself into something that seemed to her safe and respectable, because she was used to it.
‘Come on, get yourself dressed.’
‘But I am dressed.’
‘If you’re coming out with me, then you’ve got to dress up.’
She pulled out the dress she wanted me to wear, and stood over me till I put it on. She knew I did not like the Corner House, but tolerated my dislike. She was only exerting her rights as a neighbour, exactly as I might go into her and say: ‘I’m depressed, please come and sit with me.’ At such times she put aside whatever she was occupied with, and came at once; she recognized a tone in my voice; she knew what was due to communal living.
We always walked to the bus-stop, and it had to be the same bus-stop, and the same bus, though there were several which would have done. She kept pulling me back, saying: ‘No, not that bus. That’s not the number I like.’ And if the bus did not have seats free, downstairs, on the left-hand side, she would wait until one came that had. She made me sit near the window. She liked to sit on the aisle, and she held her exact fare in her hand, watching the conductor until he came for it. She handed it over with a firm look, as if to say: ‘I’m not trying to get away with anything.’ And she put away the ticket in a certain pocket in her handbag – one could not be too careful.
But this ritual was for when we went out, because on ordinary occasions she would take the first bus that came, and sit anywhere and was not above diddling the company out of tuppence on the fare if she could. Pleasure was different, and part of pleasure was to pay for it.
At the Corner House there was always a queue. I might say: ‘It’ll be half an hour at least.’ I regarded queueing as tedious. Rose did not. On one occasion, after we had been twenty minutes in the queue, and were nearly at its head, a woman tried to push in front of us. And then Rose the meek, Rose the resigned, Rose, who would spend a whole evening on her knees with a bucket and a brush because she could not say No to Flo; Rose who would stay up till two in the morning ironing and washing Dickie’s shirts, and then redamp and re-iron them if there was the slightest crease in the collar – and all this devotion at a time when she was not even seeing him; this patient and enduring woman suddenly set her feet apart, put her hands on her hips, and allowed her eyes to flash. ‘Excuse me!’ she began in a belligerent voice, glancing at the rest of the queue for support. Every one was, of course, on her side; every one had been schooled by years of practice in queue-ethics, and had been watching, just as she had, with ox-eyed impassivity for some imposter to push forward. Rose pulled the offender by the elbow and said: ‘Here, you haven’t queued, get to the back.’ The woman smiled in uncertain bravado, opened her mouth to fight, saw the hostile faces all around her, and then, with a pert shrug of her shoulders, went to the back of the queue.
Rose said loudly: ‘People trying to get away with things.’ And she stood triumphantly, standing up for her rights.
When at last our group, which had stood on the fringe of the table-packed space for at least ten minutes, were waved forward by a waiter like a policeman directing traffic, Rose tipped him and whispered, and we were taken to a table immediately by the band. Rose liked to sit just there; it meant she could lean over and ask for the tunes she wanted. She said: ‘You can get the music you want without tipping the waiter to ask for you.’ But that was not the reason. It was that it gave her a feeling of homely satisfaction to be able to smile at the drummer, and get a nod and a smile back again.
She did not like the food much. She used to say: ‘Flo’s spoiled me, she has really.’ But she always ordered the same: beans on toast, with chips and spaghetti. I could not understand why until she said: ‘That’s what we used to get during the war in the canteen. It reminds me, see?’
We used to stay for about two hours, eating and submitting to the music. Then she stretched herself and said: ‘Thanks for coming, dear. I haven’t seen that so-and-so Dickie, but I’ve enjoyed it ever so much.’
Then we walked up Regent Street, very slowly, stopping at each window, criticizing every dress or pair of shoes. Rose had a different standard for these clothes than for the ones she wore herself. She judged these against the current fashions and was critical. She chose dresses for film stars she liked, not for herself. Sometimes we went the whole street without her approving of anything. She would say: ‘Lot of rubbish today, isn’t there? Not anything I’d like to see Betty Grable in. Sometimes I think those fashion-men think we’re fools, with more money than sense.’
Going home on the bus we played her favourite game – spending the money she was going to win in the football pools. She never had less than ten thousand pounds to spend. She was going to buy herself a mink coat, some expensive clothes, and a little restaurant for herself and Dickie. She had chosen the house she wanted. It had a garden for the children she intended to have, and was about ten minutes from where we lived, with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. We often went there in the evenings to look at it. ‘I hope it won’t be sold too soon,’ she’d say, ‘not before I win the pools.’ And then – ‘Listen to me, talking silly. Still, someone’s got to win it, haven’t they?’
‘When autumn comes,’ she said, ‘I’ll teach you about the pools. I look forward to the pools all the summer. It gives you some excitement in life, doing the pools every week and waiting to hear who’s won.’
She paid Flo thirty shillings a week for her room. It was understood that for this sum she could eat Sunday dinner with the family. It was also understood that if she was invited to another meal during the week, she must pay for it in washing-up or scrubbing or ironing. Her rent included an early morning cup of tea. Rose never drank this, because she slept till the last minute before rushing off to work, so that the tea, left outside her room by Jack, who left for work an hour before she did, was always cold. But if he forgot to leave it there, she made a state trip downstairs, to say: ‘I like people to keep their word. If I pay for a thing, then it’s my affair what I do with it afterwards.’ So every morning the cup of tea cooled outside her door, and was later emptied into the sink by Flo, who grumbled good-naturedly: ‘Some people!’
Rose did not eat breakfast. ‘Why waste money eating when you’re still full of sleep, anyway?’ She ate a sausage roll or a sandwich at midday. These odd snacks during the day cost her ten shillings; she did not eat seriously unless invited by Flo. Two pounds left out of her earnings. She smoked ten cigarettes a day – another ten shillings.
That left her thirty shillings. On pay-day she arranged this balance on her dressing-table and played with it, frowning and smiling, talking of how she might spend it.
She did not plan for holidays: when she had time off she went down to stay with her mother. Nor did she go to parties. Sometimes she dropped down to the Palais at Hammersmith on a Wednesday evening, and came back dispirited: ‘None of them were as good as Dickie, say what you like. They just make me laugh.’
In the end, the money always went on clothes. And in a way which was richly satisfactory to Rose, because she seldom bought in shops, only things like gloves and nylons. She got her clothes from her employer. That fat pale woman spent a great deal on her clothes, and luckily for Rose had only just put on weight. Her cupboards were full of things she would never wear again. Rose would haggle over a dress or a suit she coveted for months, until at last she came in, victorious, saying: ‘I’ve got it for twenty-seven-and-six, there go my cream cakes for a month, not to mention the pictures, but look, this dress cost that fat bitch twenty-five guineas.’ So it was, when Rose was dressed to go out, she looked as if what she wore had cost her six months’ wages. She would stand for a long time in front of the tall looking-glass in my room, surveying herself with grim satisfaction. Finally she would say: ‘Well, it only goes to show, doesn’t it?’ a remark into which was concentrated her attitute towards the rich and the talented, an attitude without envy or sourness, but which was full of self-respect, and implicit in everything she said or did.
And yet, although she dressed herself through these means, she was upset when I said I was going to sell some of my clothes to the second-hand shops. ‘You don’t want to do that,’ she protested.
‘They’re too big for you, or you could have them.’
‘And what would I be doing with all those evening dresses?’ She examined them, and said: ‘Well, you must have had a good time where you came from.’
‘Everyone dances there. It’s a place where people dance a lot.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s not expensive to dance.’
‘Yes?’
‘But it’s true.’
‘Yes? All I know is, dancing is floor-space and a band and things to eat and drink. That’s money. Who pays for it? Someone does.’
‘All the same, I want to sell these things, they’re no good to me.’
‘Well, don’t sell them around here, that’s all.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not nice, is it. People might see, and say things.’
‘Why should I care?’
‘Yes? Well, I do. People see you and me together. Then they see you selling clothes, to those old shops. Yes, I know – you’ll go off one of these days, but I’m living here. So to please me you can just take a bus ride and sell them somewhere else.’
When I had sold them, she enquired: ‘And how much did you get? Enough for cigarettes for a couple of weeks? Oh, I know, don’t tell me. And so you’ve gone and lowered yourself in those dirty old shops, just for that. It’s all right for film stars and models, it stands to reason, everyone knows they can wear a thing once, but not for people like us. You’d do better to keep them and look at them sometimes and remember the good times you had than sell them for cigarette money.’
‘You can talk about cigarettes, going without food to smoke.’
‘And who’s talking, I’d like to know?’
Both of us suffered over cigarettes. I came from a country where they were cheap. I had always smoked a lot. Now I was cut down to half my usual allowance. Rose and I made complicated rules for ourselves, to keep within limits. We tried to smoke as few as possible in the day, to leave plenty for our long gossip sessions at nights. But our plans were always being upset by Flo. There was more rancour created in that house over cigarettes than over anything else. Rose might grumble a little if Flo had forgotten to ask her to supper on an evening when ‘she felt like eating’. She would say: ‘All very well for her, licking and tasting away all day over her stove,’ but shrug it off. For food was something one could do without. But if Flo borrowed a cigarette and forgot to pay it back, Rose would sulk. And, of course, with Flo it was never a question of one cigarette. She would cadge from me, from Rose, from Miss Powell, beg from the milkman or the gas-man. ‘I’ll give it to you next time you come,’ she would say, anxiously grabbing at the offered cigarette.
She could afford to buy as many as she liked. But she never bought enough. Five minutes after she returned from a shopping trip she would come up to Rose’s room, and say: ‘Give your Flo a fag, dear.’
‘But you’ve just gone out shopping.’
‘But I forgot.’
‘I’ve got four left for the evening.’
‘I’ll pay you back tomorrow.’
‘What you mean is, I’ve got to do without this evening.’
‘I’m dying for a smoke.’
‘You owe me nine cigarettes as it is.’
At which Flo hastily thrust into Rose’s hands her sweet coupons for the week.
‘I don’t like sweets, you know that,’ said Rose, handing them back. ‘Why don’t you ask Dan – he’ll be in in five minutes.’
‘Oh, but he gets so cross with me, he gets so he won’t talk to me, if I ask. I owe him so many already.’
‘Flo. What you mean is, I’ve got to go without, then?’
‘Look, darling! Look, sweetheart, here’s one and six. That’s nine cigarettes. I had it in my pocket all ready. You thought I’d forgotten. Well, I don’t forget like that. Here, take the money.’
‘I don’t want the money. I’m not going to get dressed and go out again just because you get more fun out of cadging than out of buying them, straight and sensible.’
‘Oh, my God, you’re cross with me, darling, you’re cross with your Flo.’ A few seconds later, a knock on my door.
‘Darling, sweetheart, give your Flo a cigarette.’
I used to give her cigarettes. That is, I used to at the beginning. But I could not withstand Rose’s fury. She would get beside herself with rage when Flo had helped herself, and crept out, victorious, flushed with guilt, trying to get past Rose’s door without being heard.
Rose came into me. ‘You mean, you gave her some?’
‘It’s only some cigarettes.’
‘What do you mean, only? She can afford to smoke eighty a day if she wants.’
‘Don’t be so angry, Rose.’
‘I am angry. You make me sick. I hate to see somebody getting something for nothing. And you let her get away with it. Did you know, she even borrows from that dirty Miss Powell upstairs?’
‘The cigarettes are clean enough.’
‘If you think that’s a joke … don’t you let me catch you handing out free smokes to Flo again. What’s right is right.’ She began to smile, her anger all gone. ‘Do you know what?’
‘What?’
‘I paid Dickie out again today. I bought my cigarettes from the kiosk and not from him.’
All through this long period of estrangement, Rose had been going into the shop, as always, to get her ten from Dickie. He would see her come in; lift his eyebrows, hum a tune, to show indifference, and lay her favourite brand on the counter. She would lay the money beside the packet, wait for the change, and go out, like a stranger.
‘Do you know what? Dickie made me laugh today. I paid for my cigarettes with a pound note today. Of course I had change, but I pretended not to. And I knew he wouldn’t because it was first thing Monday. And we’re not speaking, see? So he couldn’t say, he didn’t have change in the till. And I was standing there, waiting. So he took the change out of his pocket, and gave it to me. But I just took it all for granted, and sailed away, not even saying thanks.’
On days when she felt black-hearted, she waited until Dickie’s counter was clear of people, and he was looking out, to make an entrance into the kiosk next door. It was run by a good-looking youth who wanted to take Rose out. She would make a point of staying in there talking and flirting for as long as possible. At evening she would say: ‘I paid Dickie out today. But I think it hurts me more than it hurts him. Because I look forward to getting my fags from him. And I’m so soft, I don’t like to think he’s hurt, if he thinks I like Jim. Jim’s the one at the kiosk, see? Well, I don’t like to hurt him. And so when he sent his shirts and socks into my shop for me to do for him, I just slipped in a new pair of socks I knew he’d like.’
‘I’m damned if I’d wash and iron for a man who’s stood me up.’
‘The point is, I don’t care about nobody else, even if I try, like when I go to the Palais. But the way I think is, he’ll feel different when we’re married and he settles down.’
‘But, meanwhile, he’s taking out someone else?’
At this her face hardened; she had the look of a deaf person, listening to his own thoughts. ‘He’ll be different when we’re married,’ she repeated, with anxiety.
Meanwhile, she was getting more and more depressed. Night after night, when she had had her bath, and was ready for bed, she would knock on my door and say: ‘I’ve got the ’ump. I’ve got to be with someone.’ And she sat, without waiting for me to speak.
I was depressed, too, because I was not writing. We weren’t good for each other. Flo might come in at midnight, to find out what the citizens of her kingdom were up to, and find us sitting on either side of the fire, smoking and silent. ‘God preseve us,’ she would say. ‘The Lord help me. Look at you both. Sorry for yourselves, that’s what.’ Rose would raise her eyes, and sigh, without words.
‘Yes,’ Flo said, examining her, good-natured and disapproving, ‘you think I don’t know. But I do know. What you want, Rose, is a man in your bed.’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ commented Rose, blowing out fancy smoke patterns and watching them dissolve.
‘Maybe not, she says,’ said Flo to me. ‘Well, I’m right, aren’t I, darling? If you was a friend of Rose’s you’d tell her right. You can’t keep a man by playing hiding-pussy the way she does.’
Rose continued to puff out smoke. ‘We have different ideas,’ she said. ‘It takes all sorts.’
‘Your ideas’d be ever so much more better if you treated Dickie right.’
‘Huh – Dickie!’ said Rose, so that the message might be communicated to Dickie.
Flo said shrewdly: ‘You think you’re going to starve him into kissing your hand. Kiss your arse more likely.’
Rose sighed again, and shut her eyes.
‘Well, aren’t I right, dear?’ – to me. ‘And that goes for you too – if you don’t mind me saying it. A woman’s got no heart for sobbing and sighing when she’s got a man in her bed.’
‘We’re not in the mood for men,’ said Rose. ‘They’re more trouble than they’re worth, and that’s the truth.’
‘Trouble!’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, and I know it. But I know if you two was tucked up nice and close with a man you fancied you’d not be sitting here all hours, looking like death’s funeral.’
‘We’re talking,’ said Rose. ‘We’re talking serious.’
‘Don’t you fancy a little bit of supper, Rose?’
‘I’m not in the mood for doing your washing-up,’ said Rose, ungraciously, breaking all the rules of the house.
‘My God, who said anything about washing-up?’
‘I am.’
‘You’re not cross with your Flo?’
‘I don’t feel like talking dirty, that’s all.’
‘Dirty, she says?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Oh, my God! Well, I hope you will come to your senses and then you’ll be more pleasure to your friends. Give me a cigarette, darling.’
‘No.’
‘Give your Flo a cigarette?’
I gave her one.
‘That’s right,’ she said, satisfied. ‘And you come down on Sunday for dinner, you two, it’ll do you good.’
She went, genuinely concerned for us both.
‘She means well,’ Rose would say. ‘The thing is, now she’s got her man all safe, she’s not serious. Many’s the good times she and I had together, just like you and me now, before Dan came along. They just took one look and began to quarrel. Well, you can always tell by that, can’t you? Look at my mother and my stepfather. Fight, fight, fight. And in between they were warming up the bed.’
‘Well, you must be depressed if you’re on to your stepfather again.’
‘You can say that. I think of him often. Now I tell you what. You make us both a nice cup of tea, I could do with one, and then I won’t have to go down and listen to all that sex, it just gets me mad for nothing.’
When I had made the tea, she would watch me pouring, and say: ‘And now the sugar.’
‘But I keep telling you, I hate sugar in my tea.’
‘Yes? It’s no good trying to tell you anything, sugar is food, see? And it costs nothing to speak of it. I don’t like it either, but it’s food. I learned that from my mother. She’d pile the sugar into my tea and say: ‘That’ll keep you warm, even though the money’s short this week.’ Because that old so-and-so he was always out of work. And my mother, she’d go out charring, seven days in the week, to earn the money, but it was never enough, not for my lord, her husband.’
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