In Pursuit of the English Page 25

  She sat down again and said briskly, in her normal voice, which was Midland-bred, as far as I could judge: ‘I know enough catch-phrases and put on an accent to spice it up for those who haven’t met any French. I knew a French girl once. But she had to pretend to be English when she went back to Lyons. Give the poor fools what they want, that’s my motto.’

  She never spoke of men in anything but tones of amiable contempt.

  That evening we discussed literature. Her tastes were decided. She liked Priestley. Dickens, and Defoe, particularly the Journal of the Plague Year, which she knew practically by heart. ‘And do you know that man called Pepys? He knew his London. I often read a bit of his Diary and then walk over the streets he walked and think about things. Nothing’s changed much, has it?’

  At that time I still had not learned to like London. I said so and she nodded and said it took time. But if I liked, she would show me things. Later she ran upstairs and fetched down a print of Monet’s ‘Charing Cross Bridge’. ‘That’s London,’ she said. ‘But you have to learn to look.’

  Before she went to bed, she said that if the light was right tomorrow she’d take me to her favourite place in London.

  Rose did not come to say good night to me that evening.

  Next evening, about five. Miss Privet came down to say: ‘Quick, get a coat on. I’ll take you now.’ She had already turned to go and get her things, when she gave me a shrewd glance and said: ‘What’s the matter, afraid I’ll be in my warpaint?’

  She came down wearing a straight cloth coat, flat shoes, and a scarf over her head. She saw me examining her, and smiled. Then she posed; and let her face assume a look of heavy-lided, sceptical, good-natured sensuality. This she held a few seconds; then switched it off, saying with contempt: ‘Easy, isn’t it? That and the shoes.’

  We took a bus to Trafalgar Square, and at six, with the bells rolling from St Martin’s, she grabbed my arm and raced me up the steps of the National Gallery.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  It was a wet evening, with a soft glistening light falling through a low golden sky. Dusk was gathering along walls, behind pillars and balustrades. The starlings squealed overhead. The buildings along Pall Mall seemed to float, reflecting soft blues and greens on to a wet and shining pavement. The fat buses, their scarlet softened, their hardness dissolved in mist, came rolling gently along beneath us, disembarking a race of creatures clad in light, with burnished hair and glittering clothes. It was a city of light I stood in, a city of bright phantoms. But Miss Privet was not one to harbour her pleasures beyond reasonable expectation. For ten minutes I was allowed to stand there, while the light changed and the thin clouds overhead sifted a soft, drenching golden atmosphere.

  Then she said. ‘Now we should go. It’ll be dead in a minute, just streets.’

  Unfortunately I did not go out again with her, for she left.

  Her history, or rather, what she told me, was this: She was the daughter of a lawyer’s clerk from the Midlands. She worked as a shorthand-typist until the war began, when she married a pilot who was killed over Germany. Then she was lonely and had a number of affairs. She was sharing a flat with a girl-friend. This friend married and Miss Privet found herself alone with three months’ instalments due on the furniture. Coming home one evening from work, thinking about the money she owed, she was accosted by a CI, and took him home on an impulse. He gave her the equivalent of ten pounds. For a few weeks she worked in her office as usual, and walked home afterwards, slowly – ‘practising the walk and the look’. Then she gave up her work in the office.

  She became friends with one of her clients who was a businessman, married. For a while she was his mistress. But he had other friends. For three years, she had been kept by four of them. They all liked racing, drinking and gambling. They used to go to the races together, all five of them.

  One evening, she was walking home by herself, thinking as she put it, ‘of my own affairs, but I must have been sending out the allure out of sheer force of habit’ when she was accosted by an American. She took him home and was discovered by one of her regulars, who told the others. The four of them made a mass scene, in her flat, where they had complained she was nothing but a common whore and a tart. ‘Which they might have thought of before, mightn’t they? Bloody hypocrites they are,’ she said. So she told them to go to hell and went back to the streets.

  Then she got sick, neglected it, and found herself in hospital with pneumonia. Out of hospital, she went back to her flat and discovered someone had informed on her, and she had been dispossessed. She managed to rescue some of her furniture which was in store. Now she was looking for another flat. She had had a letter from one of the four businessmen whose wife had died. ‘He’s offering me holy matrimony,’ she said, with a wink.

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  ‘We-ell, I don’t think he should many a common tart and prostitute, do you?’ she drawled.

  ‘Do you want to be married?’

  ‘The way I look at it is this. You get bored with one man, don’t you? You get just as bored with four. So you might as well settle for one. The trouble is, he’s not the one I like the best. That’s life, isn’t it? If the one I liked ditched his wife. I’d think about it. As it is. I think I’ll just get myself a flat, issue an invitation or two, and see what happens.’

  I said: ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting old?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You’re really green, in some ways, aren’t you? Men don’t come to me for my looks. I’m not ugly, but I’m no oil-painting either. They come because I can cook. I can make a place comfortable, and I know what they like in bed. I’m not interested in sex. Any fool can learn to bite a man’s ear and moan like a high wind.’

  ‘Don’t you ever like sex?’ I enquired.

  ‘If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand dirty talk. Never could. I like you,’ she said, ‘but there’s things I can’t stand, and one’s sex-talk.’

  Before she left, she made a formal visit, to say with the deliberate casualness that means someone has been planning a conversation: ‘Do you imagine you’re going to make a living out of writing?’

  ‘It’s a matter of luck.’

  ‘You don’t want to trust to luck. It’s a dreary existence, banging away all day, having to think up thoughts all the time. I’ve been thinking about you. Now listen. You’ll never have security. Now in my job you’ve got security if you’ve got a flat. It’s the only job that has real security for a woman. You can always be thrown out of a job. And take you – a spot of bad luck with your writing and where will you be – in some double bed you don’t like, I bet. Now you take my advice and get yourself a flat and set yourself up. Learn to cook. That’s the thing.’

  ‘I don’t really think the life would suit me.’

  ‘You’re a romantic. That’s your trouble. Well, I’ve no patience with those.’

  Miss Privet borrowed ten pounds from me when she left, and about three months later I got this letter: ‘I enclose your ten quid which saw me through, and thanks, my dear. No money troubles now as I’ve been doing overtime one way and another and my friends so pleased to see me, no talk of me being a common anything for the time being. Decided not to marry, no percentage in it. My flat very nice and I’ve paid for new furniture, and also all debts. Picked up a French chair, upholstered red stain. I have it in the bedroom where I can look at it. Well, that’s all for now. If you change your mind just let me know. Or if in any trouble – I never forget a friend who has helped me in time of need. You’ve only got one life, that’s the way I look at it. How goes the inspiration and if it fails, I’ve got a man might do. No good for me, doesn’t care for a flutter, and doesn’t like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said. Give my love to that sex maniac downstairs, and to stick-in-the-mud Rose. (I don’t think.) With best regards, E
mily Privet.’

  I tried to make it up with Rose in all kinds of ways. When I joked, saying: ‘Look, Rose, I’ll wash the cups in disinfectant in front of you,’ she said: ‘That doesn’t make me laugh, dear.’

  ‘But, Rose,’ I said, ‘have I changed in any way because I was friendly with Miss Privet?’

  ‘Miss Preevay,’ said Rose, with heavy sarcasm. ‘French, I don’t think.’

  ‘But she didn’t pretend to be.’

  ‘It’s no good trying to be friends. I can see you never did really like me.’

  ‘Then tell me why.’

  She hesitated and thought. ‘You know how I felt about Dickie, didn’t you? Well, then.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘Yes? I made myself cheap with him. I felt bad, and you knew that.’

  ‘You were very happy.’ I said.

  ‘Happy?’ she said derisively. ‘Love, you’ll say next. Well. I know just one thing. You were my friend. Then you were a friend to that dirty beast, and that means I’m just as bad as she is, as far as you’re concerned.’

  ‘But, Rose, I don’t feel like that.’

  ‘Yes? Well. I feel like it, and that’s what’s important.’

  Rose’s face was now set into lines of melancholy; it was hard even to imagine her as she had been a few weeks before. Flo told me she was being courted by a middle-aged man who ran the pub up at the corner, and had a bedridden wife. Sometimes Rose dropped into the Private Bar to drink a port-and-lemon with him: and returned to watch television with Flo, sadder than before. For a while she had taken a chair upstairs to sit in the corner of the Skeffingtons’ flat, watching Len and Mick paint, but her presence inhibited them and she gave it up.

  ‘Auntie, they call me,’ she told Flo. ‘Auntie Rose. That Borstal, it hasn’t taught Len any manners, whatever else it taught him.’

  ‘Time marches on,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, yes, and it’s true for us all. Don’t you turn up your nose at Charlie at the pub. His wife’ll die, and you’ll be set up nice for life. And there’s nothing to scorn in a man what’s broken in already – he won’t play you up like Dickie.’

  ‘You make me laugh,’ said Rose, heavily.

  On the last evening before I left. Flo invited me down to a farewell supper, telling me that I needn’t worry about Dan, she had admonished him to be polite. Dan had not spoken to me for weeks. As far as he was concerned, I was cheating him out of two pounds a week. He was now asking five-ten for my big room and that little one downstairs, and knew he would gel it. But not from me. And I had refused to pay the six pounds he demanded in compensation for an iron-mark on the table he had bought for fifteen shillings in a street market. He used to scowl and grind his teeth whenever he saw me.

  ‘It’s no sense quarrelling with her now,’ I heard Flo tell him. ‘Because if you put her in a bad mood, she won’t tell all her friends what a nice place this is, and we might lose tenants that way.’

  So I sat with them, and tried to remember the basement as it had been on that first evening.

  The great table, which had been the centre of the room, had been pushed to one side, to make room for a half-circle of chairs used for the television. Aurora was asleep next door, with the cat. Flo no longer cooked two meals an evening, but food that could be eaten off people’s knees as they watched. Len and Mick complained that her food was too rich; so she had banished herbs, garlic and oil from her cuisine. On that evening we ate undressed salad and cold meat.

  The television was on, of course, but Len and Mick only half-watched it, and kept up their usual back-chat – what Rose referred to as ‘talking silly’.

  Len was a thin, spike-boned, white-faced youth, with great black watchful eyes. Mick was light, easy, good-natured; concerned with his clothes and his girls – he had several.

  ‘Look,’ said Mick. ‘Look – what do I see?’ He was chasing something around his plate with a fork. ‘It’s a snail, no it’s a frog-leg. What my ma would say if she knew what I ate here, she’d have a fit.’

  Flo sighed and shrugged. Rose said tartly: ‘Don’t parade your ignorance.’

  ‘Ignorant,’ said Len. ‘Ignorance said Auntie.’

  ‘And don’t call me Auntie. I’m your sister.’

  ‘I’ve got a worrrm,’ said Len, holding up a piece of lettuce on a knife. ‘Worms those foreigners eat.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t like what I cook,’ said Flo.

  ‘It’s not bad now you’ve restrained yourself a little, ma,’ said Mick.

  ‘Cheek,’ said Rose.

  ‘Oh, let him talk,’ said Flo.

  ‘If he doesn’t know any better,’ said Dan.

  Dan, Flo and Rose had the same attitude towards the two boys: puzzled, and rather sad. This was a new generation and they did not understand it. Flo said once: ‘The way they talk – but they must get it from the telly, that’s what I think.’

  ‘Mind you, I’ve eaten stranger things in my time,’ said Mick. ‘Ever eaten a haggis, Len?’

  ‘Not since I saw one alive,’ said Len.

  ‘Alive, did you? I’ve never seen that. What’s it look like?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rose. ‘Haggis is sheep’s stomach.’

  ‘No, Auntie, you’ve got it wrong. A haggis is a little animal, covered with fur.’

  ‘Come to think of it I saw one, too, once,’ said Mick.

  ‘Where was it now? On the slopes of Ben Nevis, it was.’

  ‘I like old Ben, don’t you. Mick?’

  ‘My best friend. Mind you, he’s hard on those haggises.’

  ‘You have to understand a haggis. They need kindness.’

  ‘And sympathy.’

  ‘That’s what our old friend Ben Nevis hasn’t got. Sympathy.’

  ‘Those poor haggises’ll die out soon, the way he treats them.’

  Flo said, ‘There’s ever such a nice programme coming now.’

  The screen was filled with spangled girls and the air was loud with South American type music.

  Len raised his voice and said: ‘That’s why I hope I never see a mink. My favourite food, mink is.’

  ‘Who ever ate mink?’ enquired Rose.

  ‘Me,’ said Mick.

  ‘Me,’ said Len. ‘Dressed with salad cream, there’s nothing like mink.’

  ‘It has to be a mutation mink,’ said Mick. ‘Well-dressed.’

  ‘Better flavour,’ said Len.

  ‘You know what mutated mink is. Auntie – go on, you’re just ignorant,’ said Mick. ‘It’s mink that’s changed from those atom-bombs. Twice the meat it had before.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Len. ‘Like evolution.’

  ‘The first time, it happened by accident,’ said Mick, ‘but now they mutate them on purpose for the meat. Now where is it they have that mutated mink farm. Len? It slips my mind for the moment.’

  ‘Tibet,’ said Len.

  ‘That’s right, of course. I read it in the Reader’s Digest last week. Biggest mutated mink farm in the world, right up there in the Himalayas.’

  ‘Since they mutated them, they look rather like Hamas,’ said Len.

  Rose was staring hard at the television set. But her hands plucked at the arm-rests of the chair, and she looked as if she might cry.

  ‘The Dalai Lama breeds them,’ said Mick. ‘He’s not like old Ben Nevis, he has a real feeling for minks.’

  ‘Sympathy,’ said Len.

  ‘Peculiar habits they have since they mutated,’ said Mick. ‘What is it now? I’ve forgotten.

  ‘Monks’ habits,’ said Len.

  ‘Naah. You’ve got it wrong. I remember: each mink has to live inside a magic circle all its life. Because it mustn’t move too much or it’ll get thin and tough, no good for mink pie when they get like that.’

  ‘A magic circle drawn by spirits.’

  ‘Spirit of turpentine,’ said Mick.

  ‘And, of course, turps is hard to come by up there in Tibet.’

  ‘Poor Dalai
Lama, I wouldn’t be him, would you, Len?’

  ‘Rather be old Ben Nevis. Haggises is easier.’

  ‘And those minks, they’re getting a real taste for turps. Drink it day and night. As soon as the Dalai Lama draws the magic circle, those minks lick it up again.’

  ‘Not good for them at all.’

  ‘Spoils the meat.’

  ‘And they’re getting scarce, they’re dying out, mutated minks don’t tolerate turps. Not that rotten stuff they’ve got in Tibet.’

  ‘I’d put my money on haggises. For survival, that is. Wouldn’t you, Len?’

  ‘Too true. Give me a good haggis steak any day. You can keep your mutated minks.’

  ‘You think you’re funny,’ said Rose.

  ‘Ah, go on now – laugh, Auntie, laugh just once.’

  Mick whirled Rose up out of her chair and danced her around the basement, to the music from the television, while Rose cried: ‘Stop it, stop it.’

  ‘You’ve got no sense of humour, that’s your trouble, Auntie,’ said Mick, dropping her back in her chair.

  ‘No sense of humour at all,’ said Len.

  ‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘I laugh, don’t I? I laugh at plenty. How do you know what I laugh at isn’t as funny as what you laugh at?’

  ‘She’s got a point, mind you,’ said Mick to Len.

  ‘A pointed sense of humour,’ said Len to Mick.

  ‘Did I tell you about that pointed sense of humour I saw last week on the building site?’

  ‘Ah, shut up,’ said Rose, and her lips were quivering.

  Len shrugged. Mick shrugged.

  ‘Don’t you like watching our lovely telly?’ asked Flo pathetically.

  ‘Time for work,’ said Dan, rising and reaching for his overalls.

  ‘I’ll tell you about the pointed sense of humour upstairs,’ said Mick as the two boys got up and stretched, winking and laughing.

  ‘I read about its habits last week in the Mirror strange to relate.’

  ‘Related to the mink and the haggis?’

  ‘No, it’s a different kettle of fish.’

  ‘Fish, is it? Didn’t look like a fish to me when I saw it on the building site.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s because the one you saw’s different from the old lot. It’s got legs, since the atom bomb got at it.’