In Pursuit of the English (15 page)

‘What do you mean, only? She can afford to smoke eighty a day if she wants.’

‘Don’t be so angry. Rose.’

‘I am angry. You make me sick. I hate to see somebody getting something for nothing. And you let her get away
with it. Did you know, she even borrows from that dirty Miss Powell upstairs?’

‘The cigarettes are clean enough.’

‘If you think that’s a joke … don’t you let me catch you handing out free smokes to Flo again. What’s right is right.’ She began to smile, her anger all gone. ‘Do you know what?’

‘What?’

‘I paid Dickie out again today. I bought my cigarettes from the kiosk and not form him.’

All through this long period of estrangement. Rose had been going into the shop, as always, to get her ten from Dickie. He would see her come in; lift his eyebrows, hum a tune, to show indifference, and lay her favourite brand on the counter. She would lay the money beside the packet, wait for the change, and go out, like a stranger.

‘Do you know what? Dickie made me laugh today I paid for my cigarettes with a pound note today. Of course I had change, but I pretended not to. And I knew he wouldn’t because it was first thing Monday, And we’re not speaking, see? So he couldn’t say, he didn’t have change in the till. And I was standing there, waiting. So he took the change out of his pocket, and gave it to me. But I just took it all for granted, and sailed away, not even saying thanks.’

On days when she felt black-hearted, she waited until Dickie’s counter was clear of people, and he was looking out, to make an entrance into the kiosk next door. It was run by a good-looking youth who wanted to take Rose out. She would make a point of staying in there talking and flirting for as long as possible. At evening she would say: ‘I paid Dickie out today. But I think it hurts me more than it hurts him. Because I look forward to getting my fags from him. And I’m so soft, I don’t like to think he’s hurt, if he thinks I like Jim. Jim’s the one at the kiosk, see? Well. I don’t like to hurt him. And so when he sent his shirts and socks into my shop for me to do for him. I just slipped in a new pair of socks I knew he’d like.’

‘I’m damned if I’d wash and iron for a man who’s stood me up.’

‘The point is. I don’t care about nobody else, even if I try,
like when I go to the Palais, But the way I think is, he’ll feel different when we’re married and he settles down.’

‘But, meanwhile, he’s taking out someone else?’

At this her face hardened: she had the look of a deaf person, listening to his own thoughts, ‘He’ll be different when we’re married,’ she repeated, with anxiety.

Meanwhile, she was getting more and more depressed. Night after night, when she had had her bath, and was ready for bed, she would knock on my door and say: ‘I’ve got the ’ump. I’ve got to be with someone.’ And she sat, without waiting for me to speak.

I was depressed, too, because I was not writing. We weren’t good for each other, Flo might come in at midnight, to find out what the citizens of her kingdom were up to, and find us sitting on either side of the fire, smoking and silent. ‘God preseve us,’ she would say. ‘The Lord help me. Look at you both. Sorry for yourselves, that’s what.’ Rose would raise her eyes, and sigh, without words.

‘Yes,’ Flo said, examining her, good-natured and disapproving, ‘you think I don’t know. But I do know. What you want. Rose, is a man in your bed.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ commented Rose, blowing out fancy smoke patterns and watching them dissolve.

‘Maybe not, she says,’ said Flo to me. ‘Well, I’m right, aren’t I, darling? If you was a friend of Rose’s you’d tell her right. You can’t keep a man by playing hiding-pussy the way she does.’

Rose continued to puff out smoke. ‘We have different ideas,’ she said. ‘It takes all sorts.’

‘Your ideas’d be ever so much more better if you treated Dickie right.’

‘Huh – Dickie!’ said Rose, so that the message might be communicated to Dickie.

Flo said shrewdly: ‘You think you’re going to starve him into kissing your hand. Kiss your arse more likely.’

Rose sighed again, and shut her eyes.

‘Well, aren’t I right, dear?’ – to me. ‘And that goes for you too – if you don’t mind me saying it. A woman’s got no heart for sobbing and sighing when she’s got a man in her bed.’

‘We’re not in the mood for men,’ said Rose. ‘They’re more trouble than they’re worth, and that’s the truth.’

‘Trouble!’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, and I know it. But I know if you two was tucked up nice and close with a man you fancied you’d not be sitting here all hours, looking like death’s funeral.’

‘We’re talking,’ said Rose. ‘We’re talking serious.’

‘Don’t you fancy a little bit of supper. Rose?’

‘I’m not in the mood for doing your washing-up,’ said Rose, ungraciously, breaking all the rules of the house.

‘My God, who said anything about washing-up?’

‘I am.’

‘You’re not cross with your Flo?’

‘I don’t feel like talking dirty, that’s all.’

‘Dirty, she says?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Oh, my God! Well, I hope you will come to your senses and then you’ll be more pleasure to your friends. Give me a cigarette, darling.’

‘No.’

‘Give your Flo a cigarette?’

I gave her one.

‘That’s right,’ she said, satisfied. ‘And you come down on Sunday for dinner, you two, it’ll do you good.’

She went, genuinely concerned for us both.

‘She means well,’ Rose would say. ‘The thing is, now she’s got her man all safe, she’s not serious. Many’s the good times she and I had together, just like you and me now, before Dan came along. They just took one look and began to quarrel. Well, you can always tell by that, can’t you? Look at my mother and my stepfather. Fight, fight, fight. And in between they were warming up the bed.’

‘Well, you must be depressed if you’re on to your stepfather again.’

‘You can say that. I think of him often. Now I tell you what. You make us both a nice cup of tea, I could do with one, and then I won’t have to go down and listen to all that sex, it just gets me mad for nothing.’

When I had made the tea, she would watch me pouring, and say: ‘And now the sugar.’

‘But I keep telling you, I hate sugar in my tea.’

‘Yes? It’s no good trying to tell you anything, sugar is food, see? And it costs nothing to speak of it. I don’t like it either, but it’s food. I learned that from my mother. She’d pile the sugar into my tea and say: ‘That’ll keep you warm, even though the money’s short this week.’ Because that old so-and-so he was always out of work. And my mother, she’d go out charring, seven days in the week, to earn the money, but it was never enough, not for my lord, her husband.’

Rose at night, was so different from how she was in the day that I never tired of watching her. As she sat, dark hair loose around her face, eyes dark and brooding, her face soft, fluid and shapeless in her loose white dressing-gown, she was a dozen women. With each turn of her head, each movement of her hands, she changed, and races and peoples flowed through her. When she spoke of her mother, who had spent her life cleaning other people’s houses, she unconsciously smoothed down an imaginary apron; or she would fold her hands in a gesture of willing service, and she looked twenty years older – she was a working woman, with a tired body and ironic eyes. Then she would talk of Flo; and her whole pose changed, and became sceptical and knowing: Flo represented something she must fight, and so she was combative and watchful. Or she would speak of her mother’s parents, who had lived in the country, and whom she had visited as a child, before they died. At such times she assumed a sturdy and vigorous pose, placing work-thickened hands on her hips, and it seemed as if she might tie on a bonnet and step out into the country past which lay such a short time behind her, ‘My Gran,’ she would say. ‘she lived to be ninety, and I can remember her to this day, standing on a whacking great ladder as tall as a tree to pick cherries, and she was eighty then if she was a day. Well, none of us are going to live to be ninety. I can tell you that. The sorrow of the city’ll kill us off before her time.’

‘Would you like to live in the country?’

‘Me? Are you mad? I’m from London, as I told you. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not English. Not really. When I talk of English, what I mean is, my grandad and my grandma. That’s English. The country. They were quite different from us – I mean my mother and me. I liked visiting with them, but they didn’t really understand, not really, not what living was like. They were shut off, see? But I like to think of them when I get the ’ump. It cheers me up. And it cheered my mother up, too. When her man got her down, she’d go off to see her mother. And my stepfather got cross every time.’

‘Rose, he’s dead. Don’l go on about him all the time.’

‘I see what you mean. But I can’t help it. I had him around all the time I was growing up. I think of him often and often. Sometimes I think Dickie’s his living incarnation, as you might say.’

‘Then that’s not much good, is it?’

‘But I love him. Not that I loved that old so-and-so. You know what? He used to wait for me when I’d gone out with a boy, and if I was after ten o’clock he’d take the broom handle to me. He’d lay about me until my mother came at him. She stood up for me. She stood up for us all. I must say that for her, though he was mostly good to the boys. They didn’t get under his skin. Not that it makes sense, because they all upped and left home and they’re scattered all over now, one Liverpool, one Glasgow, and one away oft in Reading and we never see them. But I stayed, beatings and all. It was me he had it in for, all the time. But my mother was used to so-and-so’s. She go so-and-so’s every time. My own father was as bad. He was good to me, mind you, he used to take me driving with his fancy women, and all that, and then he used to beat my mother. Guilty conscience, as you might say. And then she went and married my stepfather – a real home from home, he was. And now he’s dead, and there’s an old stick hanging about, sugar and spice and presents, but, mark my words, if she marries him he’ll have his fists about her like the rest. She’s got no eye for a man. I’ve told her she can’t marry him, she won’t have my blessing if she does. But she will, and then Rose-the-mug will be down there, pouring oil and taking the consequences.’

‘But if Dickie’s the same, why go on waiting for him?’

‘I’ve thought of that, believe you me. I’ve tried to like the others. But it’s no good. And you upset me, saying that, because I don’t like thinking why. I give myself the ’ump. I do really.’

Her mood, for a few weeks, was so dark she dragged herself around work, the house, her shopping, and scarcely heard if I spoke to her. She made an impatient gesture, like someone listening to music, and said: ‘Don’t talk to me, dear, just let me sit.’

One evening I was reading, while Rose smoked and worried opposite me. Rosemary began to cry. Rose instantly lifted her head to listen, although she had not heard the last remark I made.

‘Leave her alone,’ said Ronnie Skeffington. ‘She’ll go to sleep again.’

‘I’ve got to stop her. Mrs Bolt’ll be complaining.’ Her feet dragged across the floor. ‘Oh, Rosemary, Rosemary,’ she said, as the child wailed.

‘Come to bed and leave her alone, she’ll be all right,’ said Ronnie Skeffington, in an efficient voice. ‘Let her cry.’

‘But where are we going to live, if they turn us out?’

‘Oh, we’ll find somewhere.’

‘We will? That’s good. Who wore their feet out for months trying to find a place that would take a kid?’

‘Don’t start that now.’

Rosemary cried herself to sleep again, and Mrs Skeffington crept back to bed.

‘Oh no, leave me alone, I’m so tired.’

‘Come on, don’t make a fuss.’

‘But. Ronnie, I’m so tired.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Oh, so you won’t!’ He laughed, and she cried miserably while the bed creaked. Rose said: ‘Listen to that! Just listen to it.’ At last, silence; and Rose said: ‘Thank God for that, perhaps we’ll have some peace.’ But she sat listening tensely.

A few minutes later Rosemary began crying again. We sat
still while the thing repeated itself. But when Mrs Skeffington got back into bed she cried out in hysteria: ‘No, I won’t, Ronnie. Don’t make me.’

‘Oh, come on, what fun is there in life?’

‘Fun for who?’ Then she screamed out: ‘You’ve bitten me.’ Rosemary and her mother wailed together.

Rose got up, her lips narrowed into a vindictive line.

‘Where are you going?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Leave them alone.’

‘They don’t leave us alone, do they?’

Rose went up and hammered on the door, ‘Let me in,’ she shouted.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Let me in.’ The door opened. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Rose. ‘Have you got to bite your wife just because she won’t sleep with you fifty times a night? You dirty beast. And what about Rosemary? What’s it like for her hearing all this nonsense. Give her to me.’

‘We’ll keep her quiet, we will really.’

‘Give her to me,’ said Rose again.

Rosemary began sobbing, as a child does when it finds a refuge.

‘Now you go to bed,’ said Rose. ‘You leave your wife alone. Anyway, why do you have to make love tonight? Friday and Saturday’s for making love. Everyone has to work tomorrow, and you just go on and on.’

Husband and wife crept into their bed. Rose took the child into the other room and covered her up on the sofa. She was upstairs a long time. When she came down her eyes were red.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘lf I had a kid I’d know what to do. But who gets them? Dirty beasts like them Skeffingtons.’

‘You’re hard on them.’

‘Now don’t you start on your talk. Just don’t talk. I don’t want to think about nothing at all. Because when I start thinking I begin to think about what might happen. Suppose I don’t marry Dickie, what then?’

‘You’ll marry someone else.’

‘Yes? They’re all the same, when you get down to it.’

‘Things are different from they used to be. You don’t have to get married.’

‘They might be different for you, but they’re not for me.’