In Pursuit of the English Read online

‘Eat what I’m given,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Ah, my Lord, listen. Well, you can talk if you like, but I know you wouldn’t go back to the old ways. Just as I wouldn’t, once my granny had taught me. When she left to go back to Italy, hung in between two great black slicks with the gammy leg all crooked, like a witch she was, she said: Flo, she said, now you’re fit to get married, she said. And I was married all the time. She didn’t like my first husband and I don’t blame her.’

  Meanwhile, pots were bubbling all over the stove, and the oven was crammed.

  ‘It’s not going to be enough,’ Flo said, anxiously, counting the dishes on her fingers.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll burst as it is.’

  ‘No, it won’t. I think I’ll just run up a little pie, and if there’s no room for it, it’ll hot up for supper.’

  At about half past two, the men cleared the long table of newspapers and laid places. The two children were sat up side by side, with napkins around their necks. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Flo would say. ‘Make Peter sit by Oar. Perhaps the way he eats’ll be an example to Oar. Oar, you see how Peter eats his food so nice? You do, too. Ah, my God, that I should be punished with a kid that won’t eat.’

  It was true, Aurora did not eat. She sat through the long feasts, watching everyone else eat. When one of her parents pushed some food into her mouth, she let it stay there, until they shouted at her, when she might swallow it, but more often spat it out again.

  We began with rich vegetable soup, flavoured with herbs. Flo never used a recipe book. Her soups were always invented out of whatever materials lay around. Then we ate great mounds of spaghetti, or ravioli, or giant macaroni sticks stuffed with meat and herbs. By then we were all groaning and saying we could not eat another mouthful.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ Flo said, beaming with pleasure because of our enjoyment. ‘No hurry in the world. We’ll have a little rest now.’ We leaned our elbows on the table and smoked a while, while Flo cleared the table for the next course. That would always be a small piece of roasted meat, because as she said: ‘It’s a waste of good rations, but just once a week we must remember what Sunday dinner is.’ We all ate small herb-flavoured slices of meat; a kind of vestigial reminder of the traditional British Sunday meal.

  Then came a great bowl of fresh salad.

  ‘Yes, you eat plenty of that, dear,’ Flo said. ‘There’s nothing like salad for emptying your stomach so there’s more room for what’s coming next.’

  At the right moment, she whisked off the salad, and served delicate flaky pies, filled with creamed spinach, or leeks, or onions. These went with the weekly ration of tasteless corned beef, which she had cooked up with chips of potato and rich blackened onions. Or she would stuff cabbage and lettuce leaves with a paste made of rye bread and herbs and gravy and serve it with mounds of rice cooked so subtly flavoured one could have eaten it alone.

  ‘And now stop it. Flo.’ Rose said. We had all loosened our belts or undone our waist hooks, and sat helplessly, unable to move.

  ‘Ah, my Lord, but it’s Sunday – and, Dan, what’s that smell? You tell me.’

  Dan would obediently sniff. ‘Rosemary? Thyme? Saffron? Garlic? Coriander?’

  ‘Ah, you make me laugh, that’s mint. Look I’ve got these new potatoes fresh from the market yesterday.’ And she would slide in before us a flat dish with tiny new potatoes, swimming in butter and mint. ‘Have some. Yes, you must. When’ll we see new potatoes like that again in our lives? What with this Government there might be no food at all, at any minute.’

  Then, another lull. The smell of strong coffee began to overpower the other smells. The table was cleared for the coffee cups, and as Flo filled our cups and handed us cream, she put proudly before us her fruit tart that her grandmother had taught her. No English fruit tart this, but a flat base of rich buttery biscuit, piled high with raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants and sliced peaches.

  ‘Ma, I’m dead,’ Jack would announce, stuffing in fruit and gulping down coffee.

  ‘Well, Flo, you’ll never better today,’ Rose would say, caressing her stomach with both hands.

  ‘Flo, you’re the best cook I’ve ever known,’ I’d say.

  And Dan would finally get up and stretch himself, and say: ‘And now for some real food. Where’s my fish and chips?’

  ‘Ah, get along,’ Flo said, delighted, absorbing our grateful admiration and smiling. ‘Get along with all of you. If you like what I cook, then that’s all I ask. And there sits Oar, all this time, not a mouthful taken, what shall I do?’

  This would be the signal for either Rose or Dan to take the child on to their laps, and try and fill her mouth by force. Aurora sat, quite passive, watching her mother, who stood across the room, hands on her hips, anxiously watching this operation. When her two cheeks were bulging out tike a monkey’s, she leaned over and emptied her mouth on to a plate; then shut her lips tight against the invading spoon wielded by her father or by Rose.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, dear,’ Flo would say helplessly to me. ‘How do you acount? After all, I cook nice, don’t I?’

  ‘Flo, you’re the queen of cooks.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t my Oar ever eat a mouthful?’

  ‘Just don’t bother. If you don’t bother, she’ll eat.’

  ‘Ah, listen to you. Don’t bother, she says. Oar’d let herself die of starvation and not even notice. Oar, have a little mouthful of something, darling, sweetheart, just to please your mother, please. Oar.’ Aurora, already on the floor with my son and the puppies, would frown, stiffening up her mouth. If Flo persisted, she would let out her routine roar of protest, and go right on playing, her lips pinched together against the threat of food.

  ‘Oh, leave her,’ Rose said.

  ‘Then we’ll wash up.’

  We women washed up. It was now about four or five in the afternoon. The men were putting on overalls and getting tools and paint out. Sunday was a hard-working day for everyone. Dan and Jack went off to paint the walls of the stairs, or fix a door. Meanwhile, Flo and Rose got out buckets and brushes and began scrubbing.

  ‘We’re too full to move.’ Flo said, every Sunday. ‘But all that food. We’ve got to work it off. That’s right, Rose. You clean out the oven. Because it’s not fit to cook in, the way it’s full of grease and smells, and how can I cook supper for tonight the way it is?’

  ‘You don’t think we’re going to eat again today?’ Rose said.

  ‘Those men’ll be down, you see, seven or eight, and they won’t say no to my fish stew, with ray garlic and my onions, you’ll see.’

  And later that night, about eleven, there would be a second meal, and again we ate, and ate, and ate.

  ‘That’s right.’ Rose would say, as we staggered upstairs to bed. ‘You eat what’s offered. And besides, we’ve got to eat proper just once in the week. Though, of course, now you’re here all the time. I suppose Flo feeds you up in the week, too.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t cook for herself.’

  ‘Then what does she do with herself, I’d like to know. Because if she’s not cooking, she’s too stupid to live.’

  Rose was bitter about Flo at this time, on two counts. For one thing, because she herself was miserable and self-punishing, she was allowing herself to be exploited badly, Flo would come up the stairs at ten at night, and although Rose had bathed and was clean for bed, she would go down and scrub and wash for Flo when asked – grimly, silently, but without protest. ‘If she hasn’t got any conscience, making me slave for her, then that’s her lookout, not mine.’

  The more Rose was depressed, the more she sank under Flo’s thumb.

  The second reason was that now I had given up my job and was spending my time writing. Or trying to write; for I was discovering that coming to England had disturbed me, and it was going to take some time to get started again. But I was in the house with Flo, And Rose said: ‘So now it means you’ll be Flo’s friend, not my friend.’
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  ‘I don’t see why,’ I said.

  ‘It stands to reason. Before you worked. You were like me. But now you’re like Flo, sitting around at home and talking.’

  ‘But I’m trying to work.’

  ‘Yes? Well, it’s not your fault. But all the same, it makes me sad. I used to like our talks at night, but now you’re not tired any more and you go off to the theatre.’

  ‘Why don’t you come too? I don’t like going by myself.’

  ‘Yes? Why should I go to the theatre? Yes, I know, I went to a play once. Dickie took me. Well, you can keep it. It had what they called a working woman in it, carrying on and making everyone laugh. Well, if you want to go and laugh at things you should know better about. I’m not stopping you. Besides, if I come with you. I might be out some evening when Dickie comes around to see me.’

  ‘It’d do him good to find you out.’

  ‘You think so? Well, I’m working on a plan for making him jealous, proper. When I’ve fixed everything I’ll tell you. But, meantime, don’t you let Flo turn you against me, I’m warning you.’

  ‘She never tries to turn me against you.’

  ‘Yes? I know the kind of thing she says. It makes me blush even to think.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Yes? I know Flo.’

  ‘Well, I know Flo, too, and she’s very fond of you.’

  ‘There you are, you’re on her side already. Fond! the words you use.’

  ‘But Rose, you know she is.’

  ‘Well, never mind. All I know is she makes me sick and so does everybody. Take no notice of me, dear. I just wish I was dead and buried and when she starts all winking and grinning out of the wrong side of her mouth about Dickie I wish I could hit her.’

  Flo’s life was spent in the basement. She and Aurora were confined there, with the doors and windows shut, the fire burning winter and summer, the lights burning even at midday. The radio poured out words and music at full blast. When I turned the radio down, Flo became uneasy, although she never actively listened to any programme. I had understood by now that she was lonely; something hard to accept when one looked at these houses from outside, knowing them to be crammed with people.

  But here she was, alone all day with the radio and Aurora. She took the child out every afternoon to do the shopping, but for the rest, they relied on each other for company. When I lived in similarly crowded places in that other continent, where every family, no matter how poor, has black servants, the woman and children flowed together like tadpoles the moment the men left for work; and the family units were only defined again by their return.

  In the mornings I crept downstairs with my rubbish-can, hoping that the din from the radio would prevent her from hearing me. But it was not a question of hearing. Flo knew by instinct exactly what was happening everywhere in the house, and she flung open the door, spilling out cats and dogs like articles from an over-full cupboard and said, with the dramatic expression of one who expected to see a burglar: ‘Oh, it’s you, dear, is it? Come and have a nice cup of lea.’ If I said I was busy she looked so disappointed. I gave in.

  Aurora was always standing on the table in her nightgown, crying with temper, with a plate of food at her feet. ‘You can stay up there until you eat it,’ Flo yelled. ‘I’m not having any of your nonsense.’ That was about ten in the morning, the time Flo got out of bed, Aurora, who had gone to sleep at eleven or twelve the night before, was still blinking and drowsy in between her fits of screaming. ‘It’s driving me nuts.’ Flo said every morning. ‘This kid never eats.’ And she would grab Aurora and hustle her into a chair, ‘Eat! Eat!’ she commanded, glaring down, her hands on her hips. The food was left over from the night before; warmed-over spaghetti perhaps, or a bit of meat pie with cold chips, Flo explained it was no use cooking anything proper for a child who didn’t eat it in any case. This daily scene once over – both sides took it as a necessary routine – Flo handed Aurora a bottle; and until mid-afternoon, when they went out to shop, the three-year-old child would wander about the basement in her night-gown, hair in curlers, sucking at her bottle, and taking no notice at all of her mother’s screams: ‘Get out of my way. For God’s sake, get out of my way.’ The place was so crowded that Aurora was in fact always ‘under Flo’s feet’. This pair of prisoners were bored to the point where they exploded several times a day in a violent scene, Flo cuffing and slapping Aurora and Aurora biting and scratching in self-defence so that the screams and yells reverberated through the building. Yet it seemed that this violence was of a different quality from Mrs Skeffington’s with her child; because beneath the apparent mutual hatred was a sub-stratum of something warm and friendly. Flo would look down at his scrap of humanity for whom she was responsible with a look of comic bewilderment, as if she were thinking: ‘What sort of trick has fate played on me?’ And she’d say: ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t really. All those years I was running that restaurant, no trouble at all, but this kid beats me and that’s a fact.’

  It seemed to me that Aurora understood quite well this process that Flo herself referred to as ‘letting off steam’, because at one moment these two females would be screaming and tussling, and the next, exhausted but amicable, they rested in each other’s arms, Aurora grinning with a tear-smeared face; and Flo, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth over the child’s head saying over and over again: ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s all too much for me. Oar, I wish you’d grow up a bit and then we’d get on better, I’m telling you.’

  At regular intervals a women referred to by Flo as ‘that interfering busybody from the Welfare’ would descend, to find Flo, bland as butter, serving tea and her wonderful cake, and Aurora dressed to kill in organdie and white ribbons. If anyone was there, Flo would direct, over the woman’s head, a profound and cynical wink. ‘Yes, dear; oh, yes, I know, dear,’ she said in response to every piece of advice from the expert. ‘I did what you said, but she’s so naughty …’ Her hand extended automatically towards a slap, and withdrew itself again; for Flo sensed that Welfare would not approve of slapping.

  ‘You don’t have to let her in,’ I said, watching her frantically getting herself and Aurora ready, for the enemy had been observed going into a house three doors down to visit the child whose name was on the list before Aurora’s.

  ‘What do you mean? She’s Government, isn’t she? It’s the Labour that inflicted all these bitches on us.’

  ‘The Tories, too, when they get back.’

  ‘Lord let me see the day. But they’d never want to wear us out with all them nosey-parkers.’

  ‘You wait and see. And, besides, aren’t you pleased about the Health Service?’

  ‘I never said anything against that, did I?’

  ‘That was Labour.’ She was sceptical. ‘It was, too.’

  ‘If you say so, dear,’ she said at last, with the weary good nature which meant she was going to humour me.

  When we knew Welfare was on the way, Flo always waited until the last moment in her bedroom, clutching Aurora by the hand, so as to make an entrance while I opened the outer door, from a room which was the apotheosis of a bedroom. The suite had cost nearly two hundred pounds, was being paid for on hire purchase, and was all beige-coloured varnish, highlighted with gilt. As Flo said, it would give Welfare a nice impression, to see her and Oar, all in their best, coming out of a fancy room. ‘And I’ll leave the door so she can fill her eyes with our new eiderdown. That’ll show her.’

  The eiderdown was electric-blue satin and about a yard thick. It was never used to sleep under. At nights Flo wrapped it in an old blanket and put it away until she made the bed next day.

  When I had opened the door for Welfare, I was expected to excuse myself and go upstairs. ‘It makes me nervous,’ Flo said, ‘with you there, and me trying to keep her happy. The Lord knows what she’ll think up next. Do you know, she said it was wrong for Oar to sleep in the same room as Dan and me?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s right.’
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  ‘Are you laughing at your Flo? My Lord, the things they think up. And she said last time Oar’s teeth had to come out, they were rotting in her head.’

  ‘Well, they are.’

  ‘Yes, dear, but they’re baby teeth and they’ll fall out of themselves, the trouble they give themselves these people. Well, she’s got to earn a living, hasn’t she, I don’t hold it against her.’

  Once she asked Welfare if Aurora could go to a council nursery. But the reply was that Flo had a nice home and it was better for small children to be with their mothers. Besides, the council nurseries were closing down. ‘Women marry to have children,’ said the official when Flo said she was trained for restaurant work and wanted to go back to it – the truth was she planned to help with Bobby Brent’s night-club.

  ‘Women here and women there,’ said Flo, when Welfare had gone. ‘She’s a woman herself, so you might think, only if she’s got a pussy I bet she wouldn’t know what to do with it; and there she is, talking about women. Sometimes I wish there was another war, I do really. All sugar and spice then, they don’t talk about women then. Not them. Red-tape-and-scissors would be talking different. Are you doing your bit for your country, dear? she’d be saying to me. Don’t worry a little bit about your dear little baby, she’d say. We’ll look after her. I’d like to have her shut up here seven days a week with a saucepan in her hand and a brat driving her mad with not eating, and a husband at her day and night. Mind you, a man’d do her good. Take some of the starch out of her tongue, for one thing.’ She giggled, clapping her hand over her mouth. ‘Ah, my Lord, can you see her with her nice little voice and her nice little face all prim and straight telling her husband – Women get married to have children, poor man, well, I’m sorry for him.’

  But as Flo could not get a place in a nursery, Welfare’s remark became ammunition against Mrs Skeffington. If Flo wanted to be unpleasant, she would climb the stairs to the Skeffingtons’ flat and say: ‘Some people get rid of their kids into a nursery. A decent woman looks after her children herself.’

  Inside the flat immediately fell a defensive silence, the silence of the tenant who fears more than anything else in this world, a week’s notice.