In Pursuit of the English Page 18

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘The pictures. I didn’t care where we went, so long as I was with him. He wouldn’t talk to me at first, not a cheep out of him. I didn’t take any notice; I talked nice about whatever came past, so to speak. Then, after the pictures he look my hand and squeezed it ever so hard.’ She showed me, with satisfaction, and creased red flesh on her wrist. ‘And he said, look if you’re going out with me, you’re not going out with other men, see? I said; Going out with you, am I? Haven’t noticed it recently. He said. As far as I’m concerned, you’re coming out with me. So I smiled, secret-like, and played I didn’t care either way. Then, when he got mad, I looked at him straight and said; No fooling now. You’re not playing me up again, understand? Then I patted his cheek, like that …’ Rose patted the chair in a brisk maternal way. ‘I said; I’m telling you straight. If you don’t want me, there are those who do. You can take it or leave it. When we got to the gate, he kissed me proper …’ She smiled, and immediately her face dimmed to worry. ‘He said he wanted to come in. But I wouldn’t let him, I don’t know what I ought to do. If I let him come in …’

  ‘Oh God, oh God!’ said a terrible voice from upstairs.

  ‘Serves her right,’ said Rose.

  ‘You’re a hard-hearted little beast,’ I said.

  ‘Yes? You listen to me. My mother had eight children. Well, some of them died early. She’s only fifty now. And if she’d done away with one or two before they was born, she didn’t start when she’d only one. She liked kids. It wouldn’t hurt my lady upstairs to have another kid. What’s she complaining about? My mother went out to work, cleaning places for people like you, excuse me saying it, people who didn’t know how to keep a place clean, and she brought us up, and she had two no-good men, one after the other, aggravating her all the time, I’ve no patience.’

  ‘Your mother had a house to put the children in.’

  ‘Is that so? My mother had us in two rooms until she married that bastard my step. She had us all in two rooms. And we were always clean and nice. She only got a house if you can call it a house. I know you wouldn’t, when she married and then it was four rooms for ten people.’

  ‘Yes, well I’ve heard you say you wouldn’t have kids until you had a proper house to put them in.’

  Anxiety gripped her face. ‘Yes. I know. Why do you have to remind me? Dickie’s not going to give me Buckingham Palace, if he ever gives me anything. Oh, why did all this happen tonight when I’m trying to be happy?’

  ‘Oh, my God, my God!’ came from upstairs.

  ‘Oh, drat her,’ said Rose, almost in tears. ‘Why does she have to go on, I don’t want to think about everything. They’re always talking about new houses and new this and new that, I always used to think of myself living in a nice place of my own. But when I left school, all I did was go into a shop, just like my mother did before she had kids. What’s new about that? And there was the war. All through the war, they kept saying, everything’s going to be different. Who’s it different for – Flo and Dan, not me. Half the girls I was at school with are in one room and two rooms with kids. And now they’re cooking up another war. I know what that means. I don’t care about Russia or Timbuctoo. All I know is, I want to start getting married before they begin again and kill all the men off in their bloody wars while we sing God Save the King.’

  ‘Oh, my God, God. God!’ came from upstairs.

  Rose got up and said: ‘I’ll take her up a cup of tea.’

  She came down and said: ‘She’s got a bleeding, all over the sheets. Lucky Rosemary’s lost to the world. And that Miss Powell’s getting a friend of hers that’s a nurse. So she won’t die this time. Miss Powell says, will you go upstairs and lend a hand. That’s because she doesn’t like me, and I don’t care, I’ve no patience. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Chapter Five

  During the next few days, while Rose was occupied by her worry about whether she should go to bed with Dickie or not. I think she would have been pleased to have some of Flo’s crude advice, but the family downstairs was occupied plotting for the court case. She was aggrieved about it. ‘My life’s hanging on a thread,’ she’d say; ‘and no one cares except about their dirty money.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re different.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Yes? Well, if you haven’t learned by now my worries about life are different from yours then I haven’t taught you much.’

  ‘Then tell me what’s going on about the case.’

  ‘What’s the use? What I tell you will be different from what Flo and Dan tell you.’

  ‘That’s why I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘Yes, but they’ve made me promise. And, anyway, the whole thing makes me so sick … money, money, money; well, I didn’t have to tell you that, you know Flo and Dan.’

  ‘You know you’re going to tell me sometime.’

  ‘Then I’ll be careful what I say, just facts, and not what I think, and then I won’t be breaking my promise to Flo.’

  The facts were these. Two very old people lived in two rooms on the ground floor. They had been there for years before the war. When the house was bombed, they stayed in it, although the basement was filled with water, and the floors over their heads filled with debris. There was no running water, electricity, no sanitation. They fetched in water from a house down the street; used the backyard as a lavatory at night; burned candles; went to the public bathhouse once a week. Flo and Dan had bought the half-ruined house without even knowing the old couple were in it. They paid eighteen shillings a week rent, and could not be got out.

  ‘You don’t know about the Rent Act,’ said Rose. ‘That keeps them safe. Flo and Dan didn’t understand it either, at first, and they tried to throw the old people out. Then they barricaded themselves in. That’s all I’m going to tell you. What’s eating Dan and Flo, I don’t have to tell you, is that eighteen shillings. They could get four or five pounds for that flat if it was done up. Don’t worry, I heard Flo and Dan talking. They’re coming up to tell you, all crocodile tears, about what they suffer, so you’ll know.’

  ‘Who’s right and who’s wrong?’

  ‘Who can say now? I’m sorry for the old people, they’re on the old age pension, and when they’re kicked out they’ll have to go to a Home. But if Dan and Flo go on like a pair of wild beasts, then so does the old lady. The old man’s neither here nor there, he’s too old for anything but being silly in the head. Now if you keep your eyes open along the streets you’ll catch sight of her, lurking and hiding behind her curtains. And that’s all I shall say.’

  The street was full of old ladies. Sometimes it seemed as if the cliff of grey wall opposite, jutting with balconies and irregularly hung with greenery and flowers, was the haunt of some species of gaunt and spectral bird. As soon as pale sunlight came creeping along the street, each window, each balcony, was settled with its old lady, reading newspapers, knitting, or peering over the barriers of sill and railing down at the pavements where the children played among the screeching wheels and protesting horns of cars and lorries. No child was hurt while I lived there; but every time I looked out of the window I was terrified: the old ladies were considerably tougher than I. They sat immobile, the light glancing from their spectacles and their working needles; and between them and the children was a bond that appeared like pure hatred. From time to time, like a flock of birds propelled into space by some impulse, the old ladies would rise and screech warnings and imprecations into the street. Brakes screamed, horns wailed, and the children set up a chorus of angry Yahs and Boos. Slowly the grey crones settled into their nooks, slowly the traffic flowed on, and the children continued to play, ignoring their guardians above. Sometimes an old lady would descend from her perch and stalk cautiously down the street, laden with shopping bags, baskets, handbags, purses, umbrellas, ration books. She would stop at the edge of a group of children and hold out a bag of sweets. The children, cheeky an
d affectionate, approached as cautiously as small birds to an apparently harmless old hawk. They darted forward, grabbed the sweets, and ran off laughing; while the old lady grumbled and scolded and smiled: ‘You’ll get yourself run over, you’ll get yourselves killed, you’ll be the death of me yet.’ Immediately forgetting her, they resumed their play and she her progress to the shops or the market, smiling gently to herself because of the children.

  From time to time, the anxiety boiled over into a shower of angry protesting notes carried across from the old ladies to the harassed mothers of the children, by the children themselves. The whole street fomented spite and resentment; fathers, back from work, were pressed into battle; and for a day or two the children, who had acquired a sense which enabled them to evade lorries and cars, had their attention continually distracted by their mothers who would appear in the windows and balconies beside the old ladies, in order to call out: ‘Do look out there!’ or ‘Goodness gracious me!’ Futilely wringing their hands, or waving dishcloths, they agitatedly peered into the street where their offspring flirted so lightly with danger, gave the old ladies a glare of frustrated irritation, and finally returned to their housework hoping to be allowed to forget an anxiety which was useless, since irremediable.

  For a time I thought of our side of the street, as opposed to the cliff of elderly ladies, as one of ordinary family life; but one sunny day I came up the other pavement and saw that every house, almost every layer of windows, held its vigilant spectator, peering sharply down over the knitting needles. When I came to our house there, sure enough, half-obscured by a dirty lace curtain, was a very old, yellowing, papery lady.

  I waited some days for Flo and Dan, but it was Rose again who approached me. She told me what had happened downstairs.

  ‘I really don’t know what she’ll say about the old people,’ Flo had said, with resignation, ‘it’s not nice for a nice girl, is it, but someone has to tell her.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Rose.

  ‘I don’t like telling her,’ said Flo with a shrinking and fastidious air. ‘I don’t even like talking about it, it’s so horrible.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s all right for you, but it’s me who’s unhappy, you are out all day. It’s me what has to put up with their noise and their smells and their banging on the floor and all.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ll never bear it out, and I’ll have to go and live with my grandmother in Italy.’

  At this Rose had laughed, in spite of herself, and Dan, who was still black-tempered, said: ‘If you do I’ll know where to find myself another woman.’

  ‘There,’ Flo said. ‘You see? Now you just go upstairs and tell her.’

  ‘And so here I am telling you,’ said Rose. ‘And what do I care? Because last night I let Dickie in.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘How? We was ever so quiet.’

  ‘Because you look so happy.’

  ‘Well, I am. Why didn’t you tell me how nice it was?’

  ‘But we did.’

  ‘Well, I suppose no one can properly tell in words about it, but if I’d known what I was missing I wouldn’t have held out so long. But don’t you tell Flo. I can’t stand all her winks and nods.’

  ‘She was up this morning to try and find out.’

  ‘No! How does she smell these things, I’d like to know?’

  Flo had come toiling up that morning with Aurora and the puppies at her heels, the moment Rose left for work, to remark in an offhand voice: ‘Friends should tell their friends the nice things that happen, shouldn’t they?’

  During the course of the visit, a prolonged one, she said that you could see Rose was learning sense at last, but that if she wanted to hook Dickie, there was only one way to do it, and if I was a friend of Rose I’d tell her to let an accident happen. ‘You don’t think I’d have got Dan except by being sensible, do you? And Rose doesn’t listen to me these days.’

  With the puppies and Aurora cavorting around my room, I tried to preserve my belongings from destruction, and Rose’s privacy, while from time to time Flo shrieked for effect: ‘Drat those dogs. Drat that child!’ and kept her anxious eyes fixed on my face. She was suffering torments of curiosity. And I knew it was no use, because it was always useless to lie to Flo. Being a purely instinctual creature she knew what most of us have to learn by experience, if ever, that in order to judge whether people are telling the truth, one doesn’t listen to the words they use.

  I kept repeating that I slept like a log and never woke at night. I said no. I hadn’t seen Rose’s face that morning. Flo kept nodding lugubriously; she had sensed the truth. Now she was wondering whether to ask me straight out if Rose had had Dickie in her room. But I said No, I would be committed to the lie, and she might later lose the advantage of my being in a better mood. With Flo, everything was a question of mood.

  ‘Well, dear,’ she had remarked, finally departing, ‘I like to believe you are a friend of mine, but how can I think it when you’re like this?’

  ‘My God,’ said Rose, when I told her all this. ‘We call Flo stupid and she is, we know she is. But for all that she knows what’s true through her skin from what I can see.’

  ‘And now tell me what they said downstairs.’

  First she laughed, irrepressibly. ‘The trouble is, with Flo and Dan, you always have to laugh, even when they’re up to no good … Wait. I’ll get my face straight.’

  She put on a prim and sorrowful face and said: ‘Life is hard, things is not easy. It’s hard for poor Flo. What she goes through is enough to make a queen cry. Those dirty old people, nothing but criminals.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t make me laugh, dear. Wait. No, it’s no use. I can’t take an interest. They’ll come up tomorrow themselves.’

  Tomorrow I had Flo and Dan, separately, and together, all through the day. They had decided the time was now ripe for my initiation, and they never did anything by halves, whereas previously I could find out nothing at all, now I couldn’t get to speak of anything else.

  It seemed that the feud had begun good-naturedly. When Flo first entered the house, she was confronted by an ancient, black-garbed, white-faced crone with burning angry eyes. ‘What are you bloody foreigners doing in my house?’ she demanded. Flo laughed, and said they had bought the house, and anyway, she had been born and bred not half a mile away. The door slammed in her face when she asked to see the flat. She had to call a policeman to make them open the door. Afterwards the policeman had said: ‘Crazy as they come. You’d better get them out before they do damage.’ This pronouncement from the Law itself, or so Dan and Flo saw it, had confused them; for a time they had believed all they would have to do was to call a policeman and get the couple turned into the street. Meanwhile, they could not go anywhere near the first floor without shouts and imprecations being hurled at them from behind the locked door. Dan went to a lawyer and was told he could not turn them out so easily. It had been decided between them to go to Court and complain the flat was kept in a disgusting condition. Rose, who had actually been inside it, said this was true. It contained a single bed, with stained bedding; a cupboard made of boxes, and a couple of gas rings. Rose said the filth and the smell was so she was nearly sick. But a week before the Court case, Dan lost his temper and threw a flat-iron at the door with all the strength of his enormous arms and shoulders. The door splintered inwards, the old lady brought a counter-claim, and both parties had been bound over to good behaviour in Court.

  From that time, they behaved as if they regarded each other as a species of wild animal.

  When I said to Flo that such and such an action might have killed the old lady, she replied: ‘Yes, but she threw a saucepan full of boiling potatoes at me the week before. That might have killed me, mightn’t it?’ Or: ‘Well, dear, if I had, she wouldn’t be much loss to the world, would she? She might just as welt be dead for all the good it does her.’

  But ther
e had been long spells of comparative peace. Flo would make a point of raising her voice in insulting remarks as she passed their door; the old lady inside would retaliate by shrieking like a parrot. And before Dan went to bed every night he had made a point of climbing up to the room I was now in where he stamped up and down for a good ten minutes. The old lady, if she got the chance, emptied her dustpan or shook her duster down Flo’s stairs. Or she would summon a policeman to say: ‘That bitch is trying to kill me.’ The policeman knew her; and would take down her tale in the book, and then drop down for a cup of tea with Flo. This stale of affairs might continue for weeks. And then everything flared up into open war.

  A few months after the binding over, Dan applied to have the couple removed to a lunatic asylum. The old lady had screamed that her tap was broken and it was the landlord’s responsibility, Dan at once went to mend it; he was longing to get his capable hands on to the disorder inside that flat. But he was met with a locked door and silence. Soon there came a lawyer’s letter demanding that he should mend the tap at once, Dan attempted to enter the flat in the presence of the police and failed. He pointed out that no one but a crazy woman would behave like that. At once the old lady attempted to prove he was mad because he would not let them use the lavatory or bathroom, but complained because they emptied their slops into the wash-basin in their room.

  The rent collecting was a weekly drama. Every Friday at about six. Dan looked meaningfully at the clock, set his teeth and climbed the stairs, followed by Flo, Aurora and jack, Dan banged on their door and shouted. Silence, He banged again, threatening lawyers, asylums, court cases. Unpredictably, perhaps after five minutes, perhaps after fifty, the door opened an inch, and a handful of silver scattered into the hall, followed by a scream of rage. The door slammed, and continued to shake and vibrate as the old lady hammered on it with both fists and shouted that he must take himself off her premises. Sometimes Dan grinned, shrugged and pointed an ominous forefinger to his head. Sometimes his face swelled purple with anger, and he pounded on the door till he was sobbing with exertion.