In Pursuit of the English Page 15

  Flo would then descend the two flights, fling open my door and say: ‘I didn’t mean you, darling. You’re different.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘It stands to reason. Did you see Mr Skeffington’s dressing-gown this morning? All purple and silk and everything?’

  When I had finished drinking tea with Flo in the mornings I would begin the fight for my right to work.

  ‘I was ever so glad when I knew you were stopping working,’ she said, every morning, with sorrowful reproach. ‘I thought I would have some company for a change. Everybody works in this house, except that Miss Powell, if you can call that work.’ Here she grinned, delightedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if that was my only work, would you, dear?’ But Flo did not waste her gifts in the mornings. For enjoyment she must have a larger audience. There had not only to be someone capable of being shocked – and for that purpose I was useful, for when I didn’t show shock, she’d say impatiently: Now I’ve upset you, dear, I know it – go on, blush! – but there had also to be an accomplice with whom she could share amusement at the innocent’s discomfort. So now she contented herself with murmuring: ‘If someone would pay me for kicking up my heels.’

  ‘But now I really do have to work.’

  ‘Who’s to make you?’

  Flo was incapable of understanding that ordinary people, whom she might know, could write something which would in due course become a book. She would finger a pile of typescript and say; ‘You say this is a book, dear?’ Then she fetched a pile of women’s magazines and said; ‘You mean a book like this?’ ‘No, a book like this,’ showing her one.

  ‘Well. I don’t hold it against you.’

  When at last I got a book printed, she compared the lines of print with the words in a heap of typescript and crowed delightedly, ‘Why darling, it’s the same.’ ‘But. Flo. I kept telling you.’ ‘I don’t hold it against you, don’t think that.’

  At first I thought the phrase ‘I don’t hold it against you’, was the same as the middle-class ‘Not at all’, or ‘Very well’. But I was wrong, because at that time I failed to understand the depths of her disapproval and disappointment in me.

  Every morning when I had finished my tea, and was fighting my way backwards to the door, kicking puppies out of my way and defending myself with both hands against Flo’s imploring hands, which sought to grasp and hold me like a shield against the long day’s loneliness, she would eventually sigh out: ‘Well, I don’t really blame you.’ Whenever it was a question of me or anyone else working, even Dan, she didn’t really blame us. If I went to the theatre she didn’t hold it against me. But going to the library twice a week earned a long, incredulous silence and the words ‘I don’t blame you’ were brought out with real difficulty. But at last she forgave me for the books, because she took to fingering the books on my shelf and saying: ‘I suppose you’ve got to have all this rubbish to find plots. I wouldn’t have it in my place, it just collects dust, but I don’t hold it against you.’ In the course of the year I stayed in that house I went into most of the houses in the street, and there was not a book in one of them. That is not quite true. Two houses down on the opposite side lived an old man on the old-age pension, who was reading for the first time in his life. He was educating himself on the Thinker’s Library. He had been a bricklayer, his wife was dead and he was now halfcrazy with loneliness and the necessity to communicate what he had so slowly and belatedly learned. He lingered on the pavement at the time people were coming home from work, made a few routine remarks about the weather, and then whispered confidentially; ‘There’s no God. We aren’t anything but apes. They don’t tell the working man in case we get out of hand.’

  Once it was Dan and he stared suspiciously and remarked: ‘There’s no God, you say?’ ‘That’s right, that’s right, I read it today.’ ‘Well, who cares, I don’t.’ Once it was Rose, and she said with good humour: ‘Well, if you want to be a monkey, I’m not stopping you.’

  A sternly shut door was no protection against Flo. If I stopped typing for longer than five minutes, there were steps on the stairs, then a loud ‘Shut up. Oar!’ and then Flo’s face appeared around the angle of the door, Aurora’s face just beneath it, two faces, wreathed in smiles and apparently without bodies. Flo ran forward saying: ‘Don’t be cross, darling, I know it must be lonely for you here. Just give me a cigarette and I’ll sit and watch.’

  At last I learned to work while she was there, or while Aurora played on the floor. She played differently from the normal child of her age. All her games were centred around the long mirror. She made faces at herself, sticking out her tongue and rolling up her eyes; or smiled sweetly, or with a leer. She look a cushion and held it to her stomach, or laid it to her behind and minced up and down the room, watching her reflection. She tried on my shoes, wrapped my clothes around herself, or took off her dress and stood examining her scrawny little body. She would take a pinch of flesh between thumb and finger on her chest and say to herself: ‘Titties, where are my titties, I can see them, yes,’ Or she would pull her long black corkscrew curls out one by one, like springs, and watch them leap back into position. This game she could play for an hour at a time, standing quite still, frowning with steady concentration at her image, watching the black curls lengthen, straighten, and spring back, again and again and again.

  I tried to get her to eat, but without success. No matter how casual my preparations were – fetching tea and cake for us both, cooking eggs, handing her her plate without comment, she would stiffen up and watch me, with the small, knowing grown-up smile which was so disconcerting.

  Or she would sit on the floor, sucking her thumb, without moving, her black, sharp eyes fixed on me. Once I came into the room and caught her mimicking me. She was sitting at the typewriter, frowning absorbedly, smoking an imaginary cigarette. When she saw me she smiled, a wise, amused smile, as if to say: We both know you’re funny. She jumped politely off the chair, and sat on the floor again, sucking her thumb, watching me.

  It was through Aurora that I first understood Jack’s position in the family, I had taken him for granted, I suppose, because Rose did.

  He used to wander in and out of my room like Aurora, or like the puppies and the cats. He took very little notice of me, or I of him. The only person he responded to was Rose, outside his parents. He was totally self-absorbed – that is, absorbed in fantasy, like Aurora; and, like her, spent a great deal of time in front of the looking-glass. He was very good-looking, sleek, smooth-fleshed, swarthy. His shoulders and arms were heavily muscled, but he was dissatisfied with his chest and with his legs. There was every opportunity of seeing all of him, because he never wore anything but a singlet and running shorts, once he was out of working clothes, even in the coldest weather. He wandered about the house, flexing and stretching himself, accosting people with remarks like: ‘If I got another half-inch on my calves I’d do all right, do you think so?’

  He spent a good deal of time in Miss Powell’s room. She tolerated him, but look care Bobby Brent did not catch him there; he was, of course, very jealous of her. When Miss Powell was busy, he came to rest on my floor, surrounded by physical culture magazines. He never paid for these. If jack said he was going to the fish-and-chips this had nothing to do with food. He leaned on the counter of the shop, calm-eyed, gum-chewing, until the man turned his back to take the chips from the fat, and then Jack slipped out the physical culture magazines from the pile of old papers which were kept for wrapping the fish-and-chips. He paid threepence for a cornet of chips, and came home with a week’s reading matter.

  When Rose was in my room he alternately watched her, with a despondent hopefulness, and read his magazines. Or he stood in front of the mirror measuring himself all over with a tape-measure, repeating: ‘If I had thirty shillings I could buy myself some weights.’

  ‘Who do you think’s going to give you thirty bob?’ Rose would say.

  ‘I only said, if I had thirty bob, that’s all, why do you pick on me,
everybody does?’ he grumbled.

  He went a great deal to the pictures, and came straight back to tell me the plots. Sometimes he saw two or three films in one evening. If the film was a musical, he sang the lyrics and showed me the steps of the dances. He was a natural dancer and had a good voice. Whether it was a musical or a gangster picture, he always ended: ‘And that showed she loved him, see?’ Or, with a pathetic look at Rose: ‘And then it was time for bed.’

  Then he complained about his parents: Flo’s temper frightened him, she was a bad mother to him. And Dan hated him and wished he was dead.

  The only person Aurora admitted to her fantasies was Jack, She would arrange a cushion on a chair in a convenient position, find some hard object, and stab to or beat it over and over again. ‘Dead. Dead. Dead,’ I heard her murmur viciously.

  ‘Who’s dead?’

  She had the deaf look all the people in the house seemed to assume at such moments.

  ‘Dead. He’s dead. Dead, Jack’s dead. My daddy’s happy. Mommy’s crying. Jack’s dead.’

  Once Rose came up at midnight, and said: ‘My God, are those two at it downstairs?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Jack. Dan’s silly about him. He says Jack doesn’t earn enough money.’

  Jack was a sort of errand-boy for a big local shop. He earned five pounds a week. He referred to the firm as ‘my company’. He wanted to be a professional footballer. He had played football for ‘his company’ and for the army, too. He could get ten pounds a week as a professional, he said. If he became a swimming coach, then he could earn eleven, he knew a place. Or he could be a physical instructor. The sky was the limit for them, he said, all the money you liked.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Rose. ‘Dan earns all that money, and he can’t see why Jack can’t. He doesn’t see, some people can earn money like other people breathe. Well, Jack just pays Flo thirty shillings, the way I do, and spends the rest on the pictures. But Flo keeps slipping him money when Dan’s not looking. And so they quarrel all the time. You should hear them. Dan says it’s a matter of principle. Ha, Dan talking about principles, its enough to make a queen laugh.’

  Dan worked for the local gas board. But he regarded the money he earned there as peanuts. Going into people’s houses and flats to fit appliances or fix the gas was useful to him, and that was why he kept the job. The way he made his money was not exactly illegal – ‘Not really illegal, darling,’ as Flo said, anxious I should approve, ‘not so much that as using your intelligence.’ He went into bombed houses and stripped them of anything saleable, working at night, so as not to be noticed, and disposed of what he found. He would say casually to a householder: ‘That wash-basin, that bath, it’s not up to much, is it? – not for a house of this class. Now I tell you what, I can get you a new bath, three pounds cheaper than what you’d pay.’

  He had connections with the building trade, because he had worked in all branches of it at various times. It was easy for him to get a bath, a wash-basin, a lavatory pan at cost price. This new object would be installed, and he’d make a small profit. ‘This old bath’s no good to you,’ he’d tell the householder, ‘you’d have to pay to get it taken away,’ The backyard was always full of baths, wash-basins, cisterns, lavatory pans, and tangles of piping. Then, while fixing a gas leak or mending a refrigerator. Dan would say: ‘That old bath of yours, it’s not up to the standard of the rest, is it? I tell you what. I’ll get you another. Just as good as new – a factory reject. It got a bit scratched in the enamel, and I’ll do it two-thirds of the usual price.’

  One week I know for a fact Dan earned fifty-odd pounds in this way, over and above his wage and the rents for the house.

  ‘Do you know what?’ Rose said. ‘That Dan, he’s just working-dirt like me, and I know his mum and his dad live on the old age pension and nothing over. But he’s the new rich. Well, isn’t he? I don’t envy him his conscience and that’s the truth.’

  For a week the quarrels in the basement were so bad that Jack and Rose spent all their evenings with me. Sometimes Jack went out to lean over the banisters and listen. ‘Still at it,’ he said, settling himself back on my floor. Rose went down on occasional reconnaissance trips and came back to say: ‘Hammer and tongs. Well, they’ve only been married three years, so what can you expect.’

  ‘It’s still about me,’ said Jack, with satisfaction.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s about Bobby Brent. Flo wants to put Oar in a paying nursery, since they can’t get a Council nursery, but Dan says a woman’s place is in the home.’

  At this we all laughed, even Jack.

  ‘The way I look at it is this. When married people quarrel about something, they’re usually quarrelling about something else they don’t like to mention, if you understand me. I bet I know what’s eating Dan.’

  ‘I know, too,’ said Jack. ‘All he wants is to kill me, but he can’t understand he wants me for witness for his case.’

  ‘What case?’ I said.

  ‘I spoke out of turn,’ said Rose. ‘I promised Flo. She’ll tell you in her own good time. And what makes it worse is, Flo’s flying the red flag this week, and so they can’t make it up in bed. So there’s no peace for any of us the next three days, the way I reckon it.’

  ‘Ah, shut up,’ said Jack.

  ‘And who’s talking? Prim and proper. Well, who was knocking at my door last night just because Flo set him on?’

  A couple of days later the quarrels had got so bad that Jack was white-faced, and Rose softened enough to put her arms around him. ‘Poor little boy, poor baby,’ she said, half-derisive, half-tender, ‘Don’t cry. Peace will reign any minute now, you’ll see.’

  It was a Sunday morning. Suddenly, from one moment to the next, silence fell downstairs, save for the sound of the radio.

  Aurora came in. She was sucking her bottle.

  ‘You’re working,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Mommy and Daddy are working, too.’ She helped herself to a large handful of sweets, exactly as her mother helped herself to cigarettes, with a quick guilty look and a smile of triumph she could not suppress. ‘They’re working on the bed. Like this.’ She began bouncing up and down on her stomach on the floor. After a minute she turned her head to watch herself bouncing in the long mirror. ‘Like this,’ she murmured.

  In about an hour Flo appeared. Her eyes were red with past crying, and she was lauding. ‘Why, is Oar with you?’ she exclaimed in beautiful surprise. But she couldn’t keep it up. She sat down, taking a cigarette, and said: ‘Dan and me nearly split up, but now it’s all over. Don’t go, I said to Dan. The trouble with you is, you’re not used to a decent woman and her ways. I’m not like the women you’re used to – he’s had black, white, green, pink, and yellow, all over the world, being in the Navy, dear. But I’m different, see? I said to him: If you shout at me, and use your fists, I’ll just go right out and get a job and leave you to manage Oar. That’d fix you, that would.’

  Aurora seemed pleased at this possibility. ‘Is my Dad going to look after me,’ she enquired.

  ‘Oh, you,’ said Flo, slapping at her vaguely. Aurora sucked philosophically at her bottle and listened.

  ‘Give the bastards what they want, that’s all. He’s a hot one and no mistake. Have it every night if he could. But I play tired. Even when I wouldn’t mind. I think to myself, laughing away in the dark: Let the sod wait, do them good, or they take you for granted. I learned that with my first husband, not that he was much good, not a patch on Dan. Dan gets so mad I hear him wriggling and growling away on the other side of the bed.’ She laughed out loud, like a young girl, clapping her hands to her kneecaps. She noticed Aurora suddenly, and flung her arms out and gathered the child to her. ‘You love your mummy, darling, don’t you, sweetheart.’ Aurora went on sucking at the bottle. ‘Of course you love your mother,’ said Flo, firmly, letting her go again. She sat loosely, hands dangling, smiling peacefully to herself. ‘Well, and
so now Dan and I are already laughing at ourselves for quarrelling. Now, if Rose had any sense …’

  ‘You tell her yourself.’

  ‘Oh, she won’t listen to me. She’s so grumpy these days, I can’t say a word. But Dickie’s Dan’s brother. They’re like as two peas, for all that Dickie’s a civilian, so to speak, just selling things behind a counter and my Dan’s from the Navy, and that makes a man, say what you like. But I keep telling Rose, when she’s listening, if you want a man you’ve got to go about it proper. She plays cold with Dickie so he gets fed-up. Now you tell her, any real friend of hers would do right and tell her.’

  ‘She doesn’t like talking about it,’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t know anything, let alone talking, I know. Many the times I’ve gone to bed early with Dan and left them alone and sent Jack to the pictures, but all I hear is a giggle and a slap, and he goes home with his hands in his pockets. So she’s only got herself to blame he’s got another woman.’

  Now although Rose made jokes about Dickie’s having another girl she believed that he was being as faithful to her as she to him.

  ‘You’d better not tell her that,’ I said.

  ‘No. With her ideas she’d throw him over, I wouldn’t be surprised. Mad. Well, if Rose wants to get him she’d better make up her mind to …’ She watched my face. ‘Now you’re shocked,’ she said. ‘That’s right, dear.’ And she added another juicy image like a chemist dropping a precipitant into a test-tube. ‘Go on, you must have the ’ump tonight. You are shocked, aren’t you?’ And she automatically glanced around for the necessary person to make this particular pleasure really satisfactory. But there was only Aurora. ‘What are you listening for?’ she demanded, slapping the child across the mouth. Aurora stretched her mouth across her face in a scream, and immediately fell silent, sucking at the bottle.

  ‘That girl doesn’t know nothing about life. A friend is what she needs to tell her. You don’t think that bastard downstairs’ d’ve married me if I’d hidden it, do you? Not he. They like to know what they’re getting. Beasts. That’s what they are. They’re not like us at all, dear, not really.’ She began to roar with laughter, holding both her hips and rocking side to side. ‘Well, it’s just as well they’re not – oh, don’t mind me, I like to laugh, and sometimes I think there’s nobody but me in the house knows how to, there’s you, all working and serious, and there’s Rose, like a wet rag, and there’s Jack, well, I really don’t know, so I like to laugh and make you happy.’