In Pursuit of the English (12 page)

I knew all the tones of her voice before I ever saw her; but I found it impossible to form a picture of her. As soon as she had the child inside the door, the tussle began: the high, exasperated weary voice, and the child nagging back. Or sometimes there was exhausted sobbing – first the woman, and then the child. I would hear: ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Rosemary. I can’t help it.’

Once I heard her on the stairs, coming home from work in conversation with Flo. Her voice was now formal and bright: ‘Really I don’t know what I shall do with Rosemary, she’s so naughty.’ She gave a fond, light laugh.

From the child, sullenly: ‘I’m not naughty.’

‘Yes, you are naughty, Rosemary. How dare you answer me back.’ Although the voice was still social, sharpness had come into it.

From Flo, a histrionically resigned: ‘Yes. I know, dear. Mine’s the death of me, she drives me mad all day.’

From Aurora: ‘I don’t drive you mad.’

‘Yes, you do. Don’t answer your mother like that.’ There was the sound of a sharp slap.

Flo’s exchange with Aurora was an echo of Mrs Skeffington’s with her child, because Flo could not help copying the behaviour of whoever she was with. But the burst of wild sobs from Aurora was quite unconvincing; her tears were displays of drama adapted to the occasion. From one second to the next she would stop crying and her face beamed with smiles. Her crying was never the miserable frightened wailing of the other little girl.

One morning I met a woman on the landing who I thought must be new to the house. She said brightly: ‘Gracious me, I’m in your way. I’m so sorry,’ and skipped sideways. It was Mrs Skeffington – that ‘gracious me’ could be no one else. Under her arm she balanced a tiny child. She was a tall slight creature, with carefully fluffed out fair hair arranged in girlish wisps on her forehead and neck. Her large clear brown eyes were anxiously friendly; and her smile was tired. There were dark shadows around her eyes and at the corners of her nose. The baby who sounded so forlorn and defiant at night was about fifteen months old. She was a fragile child, with her mother’s wispy pretty hair and enormous brown eyes.

‘Get out of the lady’s way,’ said Mrs Skeffington to the baby, which she had set down – apparently for the purpose of being able to scold her. ‘Get out of the lady’s way, you naughty, naughty girl.’

‘But she’s not in my way.’

‘I do so hope Rosemary doesn’t keep you awake at nights,’ she said politely, just as if I did not hear every movement of her life, and she of mine.

‘Not at all,’ I said.

‘I’m so glad, she’s a real pickle,’ said Mrs Skeffington, injecting the teasing fondness into her voice that went with the words. She tripped upstairs, and as her door shut her voice rose into hysteria: ‘Don’t dawdle so, Rosemary, how many times must! tell you.’

‘I’m not doddling,’ said the baby, whose vocabulary was sharpened by need into terrifying precocity.

Mr Skeffington was an engineer and he went on business trips for his firm. He was nearly always away during the week. According to Rose: ‘He’s just as bad as she is, and that’s saying something. Their tempers fit each other, hand and glove. You wait till he comes back and you’ll hear something. He reminds me of my stepfather – pots and kettles flying and both of them screaming and the kid yelling its head off. It’s good as the pictures, if you don’t want to get some sleep.’

Rose’s stepfather haunted her conversations. She would sit moodily on my bed, listening to Mrs Skeffington nagging at the child overhead, saying from time to time: ‘You wait till he comes, you haven’t heard nothing yet’ And, inevitably, the next phrase would be – My stepfather.

‘Wasn’t he good to you?’

‘Good?’ A word as direct as that always made her uncomfortable. ‘I wouldn’t like to say anything against him, see.’ Then, after a moment: ‘He was a bad-tempered, lying, cheating swine of a bully – Cod rest his soul, I wouldn’t say bad things of the dead,’ she would conclude, apologetically.

She had no pity for Mrs Skeffington at all. I could never understand why Rose, who was so tender-hearted, shut her sympathy off from the threesome upstairs. Once I suggested we should tell the NSPCC, and she was so shocked that she could scarcely bring herself to speak to me for days. At last I went to her room and asked her why she was so angry. ‘I didn’t know you was one of them nosey-parkers,’ she said.

‘But, Rose, what’s going to happen to that poor baby?’

‘They’ll take it away from her, most like, and send her to prison. Not that it’s not a good place for her.’

‘Perhaps they might help her.’

‘How? Tell me? What she needs help for, is against her husband and what are they going to do about him? Not that she doesn’t deserve what she gets.’

‘All that’s wrong with her is she’s overworked and tired.’

‘Yes? Well, let me tell you, my mother brought up six of us, and she had no sense for men, real sods they were, but she never carried on like my lady upstairs.’

Meanwhile Miss Powell had moved into the two small
rooms above the Skeffingtons. She came down to see me about the child. She wore a red silk gown, trimmed with dark fur, and looked like a film star strayed on to the wrong set. She was very sensible. She suggested we should talk to Mr Skeffington when he came home and tell him his wife needed a holiday.

As soon as she had gone, Rose came in to demand what I though I was doing, talking to that whore.

I said we had agreed to tax Mr Skeffington, and Rose said: ‘You make me laugh, you do. At least the Skeffingtons are decently married, they aren’t a whore and Mr Bobby Brent.’

Flo said to me, her eyes dancing. ‘Mr Skeffington’s coming back tomorrow. You wait till you see him,’ she urged – for it was one of the days she did not like Mrs Skeffington. ‘You just lean over the banisters and have a look. Like a film star, he is. He’s got eyes that make me feel funny, just like Bobby Brent.’ For some days Mrs Skeffington was saying to the child: ‘Your daddy will beat you if you aren’t a good girl.’

‘I am a good girl.’

‘You’ll see, he’ll beat you. For God’s sake, keep quiet now, Rosemary.’

When he did come, I heard the following dialogue through the floor: ‘It’s always the same. As soon as I come home, you start complaining.’

‘But I can’t keep a home going on what I earn.’

‘I told you before I married you, I’ve got to pay alimony. Sometimes I’m sorry I ever did. Can’t you keep that kid quiet?’

‘I can’t help it if Rosemary’s a naughty girl.’

‘I’m not a naughty girl,’ wailed Rosemary.

‘Don’t start,’ he said aggressively. ‘Now don’t start, that’s all.’

The child wept. Mrs Skeffington wept, and Mr Skeffington went out, slamming the door, five minutes after he’d come home.

Rose came in. ‘You heard?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You still think you’re going to talk them into sense?’

‘No, not really.’

‘I told you. You’ve got a lot to learn…’

‘All the same, what about the baby?’

‘What you don’t know yet is, there’s some people you can’t do nothing about.’ She offered me a cigarette, as a sign she was forgiving me. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, dear. Your trouble is this. You think, all you’ve got to do is say something, and then things’ll be right. Well, they won’t be. You leave that pair of love-birds upstairs alone. Because I tell you what’s going to happen. He’s left one wife with kids already. He’s not one to stick. And he’ll leave her, too. And then she’ll be better off and her temper’ll improve. You’ll see.’

Later Mr Skeffington came in. Soon we heard her plead: ‘Oh not tonight, not tonight, Ron. I’m so tired. I was up with Rosemary all last night.’ Rose grinned at me, nodding, as if to say: There. I told you. He said: ‘I’ve been away two weeks and that’s what I get when I come home.’ ‘Oh, Ron, darling.’ A comparative silence. We heard his voice, adjusted to tenderness. Complete silence. Then the child started to cry. Mrs Skeffington wailed: ‘Oh, Rosemary. Rosemary, can’t you ever stop?’ She must have been up most of the night. At seven the alarm shrilled so long that most of the house was aroused. Finally there came a shock and a crash as the clock was flung across the room. ‘Oh. Ronnie,’ said Mrs Skeffington, ‘now you’ve woken Rosemary.’

He was a slight, fair, dandyish young man, with a jaunty moustache. If any of us women. Rose. Flo, myself. Miss Powell were carrying something on the stairs, we could not take two steps before we found him beside us: ‘A pleasure,’ he would say, assisting us on our way. His wife carried all her own burdens. She got up at seven every day, washed and dressed and fed the child, and took it to the council nursery school. She came back at lunchtime to cook her husband his meal. She finally collected the little girl at six, having spent her day cooking in a nearby café. Her evenings she spent cleaning and cooking.

At nine in the morning, Ronnie Skeffington, smelling of shaving soap and hair lotion, would emerge from the
bathroom in a silk dressing-gown, and proceed upstairs with the newspapers. His breakfast had been cooked for him and was waiting in the oven. At ten he went off to work, and came back at one, expecting to find his lunch ready. He usually did not come home until late at night.

‘Say what you like,’ said Flo, ‘that Ronnie, that Miss Powell, they give the house class. Imagine now, if you was to open the door and there was Mr Skeffington, all polite and brushed, you’d think this house has got nice flats in it, now wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t start putting up the rents yet,’ said Rose, dryly, after one such flight.

‘Rents. I didn’t say nothing about rents, dear.’

‘No, I’m just telling you not to start.’

There were two rooms beneath mine and Rose’s. An old couple lived there. I never heard them. I never saw them. When I asked Rose about them, her face would put on the sorrowful guilty look which meant that over this matter her loyalty was to Flo. She would say: ‘Don’t worry about them. There’s nothing to tell.’ When I asked Flo, she said: ‘They’re filthy old beasts, but they don’t worry you, do they?’

About a week after I moved down beside Rose, Flo came in to ask me down to supper that night. I thanked her. She lingered, looking hurt, ‘Don’t you want to come, darling?’ ‘But of course I do. I’d love to.’ She embraced me, saying: ‘There, I knew you would. I told Dan.’

My trouble with Flo was that she was uneasy unless she got exaggerated reactions of delight, complaint, or shock to her own dramatized emotions. If I did not at first react suitably, she would prod me until I did. ‘There! You’re laughing,’ she would say, in relief, ‘That’s right. Laugh.’ Or, hopefully; ‘Aren’t you shocked? Of course you are. I knew you would be.’

Rose said: ‘It’s no use your being all English with Flo. It gets her all upset.’

As for Rose, she could communicate a saga of sorrow with a slight droop of her mouth; the climax to a tale about her stepfather would be indicated by the folding together, in
resignation, of her two small hands in her lap, not a word spoken. Her single syllable, Yes? could silence anyone in the house.

Rose made Flo uneasy, too. When she wanted to punish Flo she would sit, impassive, listening, refusing to register emotion, offering me the faintest of malicious smiles, until Flo said: ‘Ah, my Lord, you’re cross with me. Why are you cross with your Flo?’

I knew that the invitation to supper meant more than I understood. I had to come to know that a complicated ritual governed what went on in the house. I did not at first think about it, out of an emotion which I now realize was a middle-class hypocrisy about the value of money, the value of time. But Rose made it impossible for me not to think.

About the supper invitation she said: ‘I thought she would. She feels bad about getting too much for your rooms. She was expecting you to make her clean your rooms.’

‘I asked her to.’

‘She doesn’t like housework.’

‘Who does? But she came up and gave me a lesson about dusting and cleaning and ironing.’

‘I’d like to have seen it,’ said Rose. ‘What was your mother thinking of, sending you out into the world so ignorant?’

‘That’s what Flo said, too.’

‘Yes. Well, now she thinks she’ll make up by inviting you to eat sometimes. And, believe you me, it’s better that way, because she’s a cook better than anyone, even my mother.’ But just before we prepared ourselves to go down to supper, she became uneasy, and said: ‘You mustn’t mind Flo when she gets dirty-mouthed. Just laugh to please her and take no notice.’

On weekdays, the family did not eat together until the men came in from work, about six. This meal was called tea. No one went to bed until late, after midnight. At about eleven was another meal, called supper. At both Flo served a rich variety of foods. There was always a basis of salads, cake, different kinds of bread and cheeses and fruit. Flo always cooked a different, fresh main dish for both meals. It might be spaghetti, some kind of meat, a pie, or chicken. The late
meal, just before everyone went to bed, was the one they most enjoyed and lingered over. Besides, it was by tradition what Flo called a dirt session.

On that evening when Rose and I went downstairs, the men were already waiting to be served at the table. They wore, as always after work, clean white singlets. The basement was always steaming hot from the stove and from the electric fire which was never turned off. Flo was making a cauldron of spaghetti which filled the steamy air full of the odours of garlic and olive oil and meat and cheese. We sat around the table, sprawling, our elbows resting, white Flo heaped our plates. Aurora, who never went to bed before her parents, was sitting on Dan’s lap. She had on a white tight nightgown, over which her black curls, Flo’s pride, cascaded to her waist. She had her arm around Dan’s thick neck, and was sucking her thumb. Although there were blue bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes, she continued to observe everything that went on, sleepily blinking, and nodding off, then forcing herself awake. Her smile seemed as full of sharp knowledgeable enjoyments as Flo’s.

Dan’s attitude to me was the same as his to Rose: he watched us appreciatively, savouring our possibilities, but with caution. Flo kept a sharp eye on his every glance.