In Pursuit of the English (30 page)

At five o’clock, they knocked off. Wally refilled my coal-box, swept out my room, dusted it, asked for another cup of tea. We talked until it was time for me to go to the nursery to fetch my son.

‘You might not know it,’ I said, ‘hut outside this country I know newspapers which say the working people here are getting big wages and are better off than the middle class.’

‘Is that so? Well you know better now, don’t you? Yes. I know your sort – no harm meant. I’ve seen the books on your shelves. You’re an intellectual, you are. You mean well. But what this country needs is a strong-man government. Oh, not that Hitler stuff and all that about the Jews. I don’t hold with it. But we’ve got all these blacks coming in, taking the bread out of our mouths. And what the Government gives with one hand and it takes back with the other. Before we know it, we’ll have unemployment again. Oh. I know. Well, I’ve enjoyed our little talk. See you tomorrow, miss, and if you greet us with a cuppa we’ll not say no. And none of your lugging coal up behind my back. Don’t hold with women on that kind of caper. Wouldn’t let my wife carry coal and lug furniture about. No, any dirty work about, you let me know, and I’ll fix it.’

When the paper was stripped off, if could be seen that
bombing had loosened the walls so that they stood apart at the angles from half-way up to the ceiling, between a quarter and a half inch. They pasted strips of paper over the cracks, and wallpapered over the whole. The great crack across the ceiling was filled in with putty and papered over. ‘It’s a crying shame,’ said Wally. ‘Such a nice house it must have been once. Well, these swine I’m working for, if they could use old newspapers for building materials and get away with it, they would. Don’t you hold it against me, miss. I know what’s good work and what’s not. Well, it’ll hold together. Hundreds of these houses, you’d be surprised – you’d think they’d fall down if someone gave a shout in the street. But they keep on standing out of sheer force of habit, as far as I can see.’

Chapter Seven

Soon the rooms on the ground floor were done. Because Dan was pressed for time and money, none of Flo’s ideas for decorating were put into effect: she had wanted dadoes, hiezes and tinted mouldings. The walls and ceilings were white; and the floors black. The conservatory end, now a place of shining glass and polished stone, had potted plants from Flo’s backyard. No money for fine curtains: they had to use the cheapest thing they could find, government silk, in dull white. No money for the heavy varnished furniture Flo had planned. Neither Rose nor I would give up our furniture, as of course Dan expected us to do; they had to take down stuff from Miss Powell’s and the Skeffingtons’ flats, which they had picked up at sales and which was mostly unobtrusive and even at times pleasant. Flo mourned over the flat, which was large, light, and pretty. ‘We’ll never be able to let it for what we wanted,’ she said. Rose had a student in her shop asking for a place, and brought her home; she was so enthusiastic over the rooms that Flo raised the rent from five pounds to eight pounds a week and got it. Four Australian drama students moved in, and at once the ground floor, which had been the unspeakable hidden sore of the house, became its pride. The girls were pretty and self-possessed; had insisted on a proper lease; paid their rent; and merely looked impatient when Flo and Dan tried to play them up.

‘You’ll have to behave yourselves now,’ Rose commented, when Flo complained the girls had no sense of humour: they had not been amused at her heavy hints about their boy-friends. ‘You can’t carry on the way you do, not with decent people, or they’ll leave.’

Flo and Dan realized at last that this was true; and left all
negotiations with the girls to Rose, who, when approaching them, used a manner of ingratiating propriety. She copied it, as she explained to me, from her favourite television announcer. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘it stands to reason it must be the right way the upper-class people carry on, or he wouldn’t be paid all that money for smirking and smiling and minding his manners, would he now?’

On the strength of the eight pounds a week, Dan hired labour. Mick, a building apprentice, and Len, Rose’s brother, moved into the Skeffingtons’ flat, for their food, a bed, and pocket money. They soon finished the top flat; Rose was negotiating to let it to a woman who had come into her shop; when Flo announced, with a mixture of guilt and furtive delight – that she had let it to ‘an ever so nice lady who’s French.’ Rose noted Flo’s expression, made her own enquiries, and told Flo she should be ashamed. ‘And who’s talking? Little miss prim-and-proper? And what was you doing with Dickie not a month back, may I ask you?’ This shaft hit Rose so hard that even Flo was ashamed. ‘I didn’t mean it, sweetheart, I didn’t really,’ she kept shouting, as Rose stood silent, trembling; and finally crept upstairs to cry in her room.

Rose said to me: ‘Do you know what? Flo’s let the top flat lo one of them dirty beasts. And why? Because she gets twice the rent from her. And just now when I’ve got my little brother here who needs a good example set.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How can you ask? Through my old boy-friend who’s a policeman. He came into my shop to pass the time of day and he knew about her. And now there’ll be men in and out day and night, and what about my Len?’

Flo said, licking her lips: ‘I’ve put a nice chair beside her bed, and she can entertain her friends ever so nice when they come.’

In the event, when Miss Privet – pronounced by Flo as Preevay – arrived, she was just out of hospital after a bout of pneumonia and she went straight to bed and stayed there. Once or twice she called the lads working in the rooms below to go out and buy her food; but Rose went straight up
to her and said that if she ever so much as looked at Len she. Rose, would call the police.

‘My God, Rose.’ I said, ‘the poor woman’s hungry.’

‘Poor woman, you say? With all the money them beasts earn she could pay for a restaurant to send it in.’ She gave me a shrewd, hard, sorrowful look, nodded and said: ‘Yes. I know. So you’re going up. Curiosity killed the cat.’

Miss Privet’s brief stay in the house was to cost me Rose’s friendship; I did not understand how deep her feeling was.

I went upstairs, knocked, and saw a plain middle-aged woman sitting up in bed reading. I asked if she needed anything. She replied coldly: ‘I have no need of anything, thank you,’ and returned to her book.

For a week she stayed in bed, brought food and drink by Mick. Then I passed her on the stairs on her way out. She wore a fur coat, a small black hat with a veil, and a hard make-up. Her handbag was enormous, of shiny black. I could not keep my eyes off her shoes. They were black patent, with wide black ankle-straps. The soles were platforms two inches deep, the toes were thick and square; but the instep was displayed in a deep curve, giving an effect of brutal intimacy. She saw me looking, remarked coolly: ‘Interesting, aren’t I?’ and walked out, pulling on her gloves.

She came back an hour later with flowers, food, and some library books.

I wrote her a letter as follows, drawing upon past experience: ‘Dear Miss Privet. I shall be very happy to have the pleasure of your company to coffee this evening at nine o’clock,’ and pushed it under her door.

Rose saw me. ‘You’re not going to have her down in your room?’

‘I’ve invited her to coffee.’

‘Then you’ll never have me in your room again.’

‘Oh. Rose, don’t be silly. Why not?’

‘She’s filthy, a filthy beast.’

‘But what she does doesn’t affect you or me.’

‘I’ll tell you something, if she drinks out of your cups, you’ll have to sterilize them before I use them.’

A note came down by Micky, saying: ‘I shall be very
happy to join you. Yours sincerely, Emily Privet.’

At five to nine Rose came in to say she was going out to the pictures by herself. She went, with a look of sorrowful reproach.

At nine Miss Privet arrived, wearing slacks and a sweater and without make-up. The first thing she said was: ‘I see your friend has gone out to avoid the contagion.’

‘She’s just gone to the pictures.’

‘Yes?’ she said, in exactly the way Rose did. Then she shrugged and said: ‘But I’m glad of a bit of company, I’m getting the pip up there in that box.’

‘I was there for a bit myself.’

‘Your kid, too? How much?’

I told her, and she put her head back and laughed. ‘Yes, we have to pay for our sins,’ she said. ‘I’m paying that old tart downstairs four quid a week.’

‘You’re mad,’ I said.

‘Is that so?’ she said. ‘And why did you pay? If you’ve got a kid, or you’re on the wrong side of the Law you’ve got to pay. But I’m not staying. That old floozie downstairs’ll see my back before the week’s out.’

‘You don’t seem to like Flo.’

‘She’s sex-mad,’ said Miss Privet. ‘Makes me sick.’

‘She told me you were French.’

Miss Privet got out of the big chair, and hippily walked about the room, saying in a throaty voice: ‘Cheri, I love you, le t’aime. Ça va? Ah, cheri, cheri, come – for – a little – walk avec moi …’

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.