In Pursuit of the English Page 12

  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 form 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.’

  Rose at night, was so different from how she was in the day that I never tired of watching her. As she sat, dark hair loose around her face, eyes dark and brooding, her face soft, fluid and shapeless in her loose white dressing-gown, she was a dozen women. With each turn of her head, each movement of her hands, she changed, and races and peoples flowed through her. When she spoke of her mother, who had spent her life cleaning other people’s houses, she unconsciously smoothed down an imaginary apron; or she would fold her hands in a gesture of willing service, and she looked twenty years older – she was a working woman, with a tired body and ironic eyes. Then she would talk of Flo; and her whole pose changed, and became sceptical and knowing: Flo represented something she must fight, and so she was combative and watchful. Or she would speak of her mother’s parents, who had lived in the country, and whom she had visited as a child, before they died. At such times she assumed a sturdy and vigorous pose, placing work-thickened hands on her hips, and it seemed as if she might tie on a bonnet and step out into the country past which lay such a short time behind her, ‘My Gran,’ she would say. ‘she lived to be ninety, and I can remember her to this day, standing on a whacking great ladder as tall as a tree to pick cherries, and she was eighty then if she was a day. Well, none of us are going to live to be ninety. I can tell you that. The sorrow of the city’ll kill us off before her time.’

  ‘Would you like to live in the country?’

  ‘Me? Are you mad? I’m from London, as I told you. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not English. Not really. When I talk of English, what I mean is, my grandad and my grandma. That’s English. The country. They were quite different from us – I mean my mother and me. I liked visiting with them, but they didn’t really understand, not really, not what living was like. They were shut off, see? But I like to think of them when I get the ’ump. It cheers me up. And it cheered my mother up, too. When her man got her down, she’d go off to see her mother. And my stepfather got cross every time.’

  ‘Rose, he’s dead. Don’l go on about him all the time.’

  ‘I see what you mean. But I can’t help it. I had him around all the time I was growing up. I think of him often and often. Sometimes I think Dickie’s his living incarnation, as you might say.’

  ‘Then that’s not much good, is it?’

  ‘But I love him. Not that I loved that old so-and-so. You know what? He used to wait for me when I’d gone out with a boy, and if I was after ten o’clock he’d take the broom handle to me. He’d lay about me until my mother came at him. She stood up for me. She stood up for us all. I must say that for her, though he was mostly good to the boys. They didn’t get under his skin. Not that it makes sense, because they all upped and left home and they’re scattered all over now, one Liverpool, one Glasgow, and one away oft in Reading and we never see them. But I stayed, beatings and all. It was me he had it in for, all the time. But my mother was used to so-and-so’s. She go so-and-so’s every time. My own father was as bad. He was good to me, mind you, he used to take me driving with his fancy women, and all that, and then he used to beat my mother. Guilty conscience, as you might say. And then she went and married my stepfather – a real home from home, he was. And now he’s dead, and there’s an old stick hanging about, sugar and spice and presents, but, mark my words, if she marries him he’ll have his fists about her like the rest. She’s got no eye for a man. I’ve told her she can’t marry him, she won’t have my blessing if she does. But she will, and then Rose-the-mug will be down there, pouring oil and taking the consequences.’

  ‘But if Dickie’s the same, why go on waiting for him?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, believe you me. I’ve tried to like the others. But it’s no good. And you upset me, saying that, because I don’t like thinking why. I give myself the ’ump. I do really.’

  Her mood, for a few weeks, was so dark she dragged herself around work, the house, her shopping, and scarcely heard if I spoke to her. She made an impatient gesture, like someone listening to music, and said: ‘Don’t talk to me, dear, just let me sit.’

  One evening I was reading, while Rose smoked and worried opposite me. Rosemary began to cry. Rose instantly lifted her head to listen, although she had not heard th
e last remark I made.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ said Ronnie Skeffington. ‘She’ll go to sleep again.’

  ‘I’ve got to stop her. Mrs Bolt’ll be complaining.’ Her feet dragged across the floor. ‘Oh, Rosemary, Rosemary,’ she said, as the child wailed.

  ‘Come to bed and leave her alone, she’ll be all right,’ said Ronnie Skeffington, in an efficient voice. ‘Let her cry.’

  ‘But where are we going to live, if they turn us out?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘We will? That’s good. Who wore their feet out for months trying to find a place that would take a kid?’

  ‘Don’t start that now.’

  Rosemary cried herself to sleep again, and Mrs Skeffington crept back to bed.

  ‘Oh no, leave me alone, I’m so tired.’

  ‘Come on, don’t make a fuss.’

  ‘But. Ronnie, I’m so tired.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, so you won’t!’ He laughed, and she cried miserably while the bed creaked. Rose said: ‘Listen to that! Just listen to it.’ At last, silence; and Rose said: ‘Thank God for that, perhaps we’ll have some peace.’ But she sat listening tensely.

  A few minutes later Rosemary began crying again. We sat still while the thing repeated itself. But when Mrs Skeffington got back into bed she cried out in hysteria: ‘No, I won’t, Ronnie. Don’t make me.’