I had come to England with pounds of tinned food in my trunk as to a starving country, prepared to tighten my belt and to suffer, as the newspapers back home continually assured us the British people were suffering. But I will always think of that house in terms of good eating. Not only was the whole place perfumed with the smells of feasting every evening. On Sundays there was a real feast, the emotional climax of the week.
On Sundays Mrs Skeffington cooked a roast and two veg for Mr Skeffington, On the floor above the Skeffingtons Miss Powell cooked a roast and two veg for Bobby Brent.
But in the basement preparations for Sunday dinne; began on Saturday afternoon when Flo went to the market, assisted by Jack, and came back with baskets laden with food. By now she had appropriated my meat coupons and Rose’s. It was understood we should all share Sunday’s food. ‘It’s only right.’ Flo said, ‘All them cigarettes, and I’ll never get round to paying you back, sweetheart. I don’t know why it is, but there’s something about cigarettes that’s too much for me. Well, you just give me your meat ration, and you’ll not be sorry, I swear it.’
On Sundays we all slept late. About twelve Flo knocked on my door and on Rose’s, and said, smiling with pleasure: ‘We’re starting now. Come on down.’
In the basement, the children played on the floor among the puppies and the kittens, the men sat in their white singlets over the Sunday newspapers, and Flo and I and Rose began work.
‘That Mrs Skeffington, that Miss Powell, they’re cooking their roasts again,’ Flo said. ‘That’s their week’s ration gone and Where’s the sense. I’ve told them. I’ve told them over and over. But Mrs Skeffington, she says her husband kills her without he gets his roast Sundays. And Miss Powell’s the same. Ah, my Lord, it’s enough to make you cry, the waste of it.’
Meanwhile, Rose and I were preparing vegetables and beating butter and sugar.
‘Ah, my Lord, but say what you like, I talk and I talk, but what can you do with this Government, no eggs, no meat, no fat, nothing but flour and water, and you expect me to cook with that?’ Rose winked at me; Dan smiled over the edges of his paper.
‘Yes, and look—’ Here Flo flung open the doors of her food cupboard. ‘See that? See that butter, for a whole week? The grocer couldn’t give me extra, well, it’s not my fault, is it now, if the food tastes of nothing at all.’
Flo had ‘cooked English’ until the year her Italian grandmother came on a visit. It so happened that her mother had to go off unexpectedly to visit a relation in hospital. Flo and her grandmother were alone in the house together.
‘And no sooner had she set foot on our soil, the old cow broke her leg. There she was, propped up stiff as a dead rabbit with her bum on one chair and her heels on another, groaning and carrying on, and saying: “I’m going to die.” Die, my fanny. She’d the energy for a fifty-year-old, though she was seventy-nine and she’d lived out two husbands and one or two men on the side. She said: You look after me, my girl, or I won’t give you permission to marry. I said: I’m married already, you old witch — that was my first husband, what died all those years ago — but I’ll look after you. I wouldn’t see ray worst enemy die of starvation. We liked each other, see?’ Flo interrupted herself in an explanatory way. ‘Well. I put on my apron and cleaned up for her and cooked her dinner and she began to wail like a baby with a pin stuck in it. She said: I don’t mind dying of a broken leg, if that’s God’s will — she was a Catholic, see? You mustn’t mind that, everyone is in Italy, so she said, it’s just a habit with them, like we have a Labour Government in with us. But I’m not going to die of your English cooking, she said. You must learn to cook or your husband will die of it.’
‘And what had you cooked?’ asked Rose, playing her part in the tale.
‘Fish and chips, like always.’
‘What’s wrong with fish and chips?’ asked Dan, obediently, as Flo looked at him, waiting for him to contribute.
‘What’s wrong? Why, that’s all I knew.’
‘Best food in the world,’ said Dan grinning.
‘Yes, but you know better now, don’t you, sweetheart?’
‘You’ve just broken me in,’ he said.
‘My God, the ingratitude.’ Flo said to me, ‘Do you hear? When we started courting, he knew nothing but fish and chips. And when I cooked real food, like my granny taught me, he’d grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble. He’d come to the back of my kitchen in Holborn, and I’d feed him all the best bits, and he’d carry on like he was being poisoned.’
Dan nodded, and went on with the News of the World.
‘But now he knows.’
‘Eat what I’m given,’ he said, grinning.
‘Ah, my Lord, listen. Well, you can talk if you like, but I know you wouldn’t go back to the old ways. Just as I wouldn’t, once my granny had taught me. When she left to go back to Italy, hung in between two great black slicks with the gammy leg all crooked, like a witch she was, she said: Flo, she said, now you’re fit to get married, she said. And I was married all the time. She didn’t like my first husband and I don’t blame her.’
Meanwhile, pots were bubbling all over the stove, and the oven was crammed.
‘It’s not going to be enough,’ Flo said, anxiously, counting the dishes on her fingers.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll burst as it is.’
‘No, it won’t. I think I’ll just run up a little pie, and if there’s no room for it, it’ll hot up for supper.’
At about half past two, the men cleared the long table of newspapers and laid places. The two children were sat up side by side, with napkins around their necks. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Flo would say. ‘Make Peter sit by Oar. Perhaps the way he eats’ll be an example to Oar. Oar, you see how Peter eats his food so nice? You do, too. Ah, my God, that I should be punished with a kid that won’t eat.’
It was true, Aurora did not eat. She sat through the long feasts, watching everyone else eat. When one of her parents pushed some food into her mouth, she let it stay there, until they shouted at her, when she might swallow it, but more often spat it out again.
We began with rich vegetable soup, flavoured with herbs. Flo never used a recipe book. Her soups were always invented out of whatever materials lay around. Then we ate great mounds of spaghetti, or ravioli, or giant macaroni sticks stuffed with meat and herbs. By then we were all groaning and saying we could not eat another mouthful.
‘There’s no hurry,’ Flo said, beaming with pleasure because of our enjoyment. ‘No hurry in the world. We’ll have a little rest now.’ We leaned our elbows on the table and smoked a while, while Flo cleared the table for the next course. That would always be a small piece of roasted meat, because as she said: ‘It’s a waste of good rations, but just once a week we must remember what Sunday dinner is.’ We all ate small herb-flavoured slices of meat; a kind of vestigial reminder of the traditional British Sunday meal.
Then came a great bowl of fresh salad.
‘Yes, you eat plenty of that, dear,’ Flo said. ‘There’s nothing like salad for emptying your stomach so there’s more room for what’s coming next.’
At the right moment, she whisked off the salad, and served delicate flaky pies, filled with creamed spinach, or leeks, or onions. These went with the weekly ration of tasteless corned beef, which she had cooked up with chips of potato and rich blackened onions. Or she would stuff cabbage and lettuce leaves with a paste made of rye bread and herbs and gravy and serve it with mounds of rice cooked so subtly flavoured one could have eaten it alone.
‘And now stop it. Flo.’ Rose said. We had all loosened our belts or undone our waist hooks, and sat helplessly, unable to move.
‘Ah, my Lord, but it’s Sunday — and, Dan, what’s that smell? You tell me.’
Dan would obediently sniff. ‘Rosemary? Thyme? Saffron? Garlic? Coriander?’
‘Ah, you make me laugh, that’s mint. Look I’ve got these new potatoes fresh from the market yesterday.’ And she would slide in before us a flat dish with tiny new potatoes, swimming in butter and mint. ‘Have some. Yes, you must. When’ll we see new potatoes like that again in our lives? What with this Government there might be no food at all, at any minute.’
Then, another lull. The smell of strong coffee began to overpower the other smells. The table was cleared for the coffee cups, and as Flo filled our cups and handed us cream, she put proudly before us her fruit tart that her grandmother had taught her. No English fruit tart this, but a flat base of rich buttery biscuit, piled high with raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants and sliced peaches.
‘Ma, I’m dead,’ Jack would announce, stuffing in fruit and gulping down coffee.
‘Well, Flo, you’ll never better today,’ Rose would say, caressing her stomach with both hands.
‘Flo, you’re the best cook I’ve ever known,’ I’d say.
And Dan would finally get up and stretch himself, and say: ‘And now for some real food. Where’s my fish and chips?’
‘Ah, get along,’ Flo said, delighted, absorbing our grateful admiration and smiling. ‘Get along with all of you. If you like what I cook, then that’s all I ask. And there sits Oar, all this time, not a mouthful taken, what shall I do?’
This would be the signal for either Rose or Dan to take the child on to their laps, and try and fill her mouth by force. Aurora sat, quite passive, watching her mother, who stood across the room, hands on her hips, anxiously watching this operation. When her two cheeks were bulging out tike a monkey’s, she leaned over and emptied her mouth on to a plate; then shut her lips tight against the invading spoon wielded by her father or by Rose.
‘Well, I don’t know, dear,’ Flo would say helplessly to me. ‘How do you acount? After all, I cook nice, don’t I?’
‘Flo, you’re the queen of cooks.’
‘Then why doesn’t my Oar ever eat a mouthful?’
‘Just don’t bother. If you don’t bother, she’ll eat.’
‘Ah, listen to you. Don’t bother, she says. Oar’d let herself die of starvation and not even notice. Oar, have a little mouthful of something, darling, sweetheart, just to please your mother, please. Oar.’ Aurora, already on the floor with my son and the puppies, would frown, stiffening up her mouth. If Flo persisted, she would let out her routine roar of protest, and go right on playing, her lips pinched together against the threat of food.
‘Oh, leave her,’ Rose said.
‘Then we’ll wash up.’
We women washed up. It was now about four or five in the afternoon. The men were putting on overalls and getting tools and paint out. Sunday was a hard-working day for everyone. Dan and Jack went off to paint the walls of the stairs, or fix a door. Meanwhile, Flo and Rose got out buckets and brushes and began scrubbing.
‘We’re too full to move.’ Flo said, every Sunday. ‘But all that food. We’ve got to work it off. That’s right, Rose. You clean out the oven. Because it’s not fit to cook in, the way it’s full of grease and smells, and how can I cook supper for tonight the way it is?’
‘You don’t think we’re going to eat again today?’ Rose said.
‘Those men’ll be down, you see, seven or eight, and they won’t say no to my fish stew, with ray garlic and my onions, you’ll see.’
And later that night, about eleven, there would be a second meal, and again we ate, and ate, and ate.
‘That’s right.’ Rose would say, as we staggered upstairs to bed. ‘You eat what’s offered. And besides, we’ve got to eat proper just once in the week. Though, of course, now you’re here all the time. I suppose Flo feeds you up in the week, too.’
‘No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t cook for herself.’
‘Then what does she do with herself, I’d like to know. Because if she’s not cooking, she’s too stupid to live.’
Rose was bitter about Flo at this time, on two counts. For one thing, because she herself was miserable and self-punishing, she was allowing herself to be exploited badly, Flo would come up the stairs at ten at night, and although Rose had bathed and was clean for bed, she would go down and scrub and wash for Flo when asked — grimly, silently, but without protest. ‘If she hasn’t got any conscience, making me slave for her, then that’s her lookout, not mine.’
The more Rose was depressed, the more she sank under Flo’s thumb.
The second reason was that now I had given up my job and was spending my time writing. Or trying to write; for I was discovering that coming to England had disturbed me, and it was going to take some time to get started again. But I was in the house with Flo, And Rose said: ‘So now it means you’ll be Flo’s friend, not my friend.’
‘I don’t see why,’ I said.
‘It stands to reason. Before you worked. You were like me. But now you’re like Flo, sitting around at home and talking.’
‘But I’m trying to work.’
‘Yes? Well, it’s not your fault. But all the same, it makes me sad. I used to like our talks at night, but now you’re not tired any more and you go off to the theatre.’
‘Why don’t you come too? I don’t like going by myself.’
‘Yes? Why should I go to the theatre? Yes, I know, I went to a play once. Dickie took me. Well, you can keep it. It had what they called a working woman in it, carrying on and making everyone laugh. Well, if you want to go and laugh at things you should know better about. I’m not stopping you. Besides, if I come with you. I might be out some evening when Dickie comes around to see me.’
‘It’d do him good to find you out.’
‘You think so? Well, I’m working on a plan for making him jealous, proper. When I’ve fixed everything I’ll tell you. But, meantime, don’t you let Flo turn you against me, I’m warning you.’
‘She never tries to turn me against you.’
‘Yes? I know the kind of thing she says. It makes me blush even to think.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Yes? I know Flo.’
‘Well, I know Flo, too, and she’s very fond of you.’
‘There you are, you’re on her side already. Fond! the words you use.’
‘But Rose, you know she is.’
‘Well, never mind. All I know is she makes me sick and so does everybody. Take no notice of me, dear. I just wish I was dead and buried and when she starts all winking and grinning out of the wrong side of her mouth about Dickie I wish I could hit her.’
Flo’s life was spent in the basement. She and Aurora were confined there, with the doors and windows shut, the fire burning winter and summer, the lights burning even at midday. The radio poured out words and music at full blast. When I turned the radio down, Flo became uneasy, although she never actively listened to any programme. I had understood by now that she was lonely; something hard to accept when one looked at these houses from outside, knowing them to be crammed with people.
But here she was, alone all day with the radio and Aurora. She took the child out every afternoon to do the shopping, but for the rest, they relied on each other for company. When I lived in similarly crowded places in that other continent, where every family, no matter how poor, has black servants, the woman and children flowed together like tadpoles the moment the men left for work; and the family units were only defined again by their return.
In the mornings I crept downstairs with my rubbish-can, hoping that the din from the radio would prevent her from hearing me. But it was not a question of hearing. Flo knew by instinct exactly what was happening everywhere in the house, and she flung open the door, spilling out cats and dogs like articles from an over-full cupboard and said, with the dramatic expression of one who expected to see a burglar: ‘Oh, it’s you, dear, is it? Come and have a nice cup of lea.’ If I said I was busy she looked so disappointed. I gave in.
Aurora was always standing on the table in her nightgown, crying with temper, with a plate of food at her feet. ‘You can stay up there until you eat it,’ Flo yelled. ‘I’m not having any of your nonsense.’ That was about ten in the morning, the time Flo got out of bed, Aurora, who had gone to sleep at eleven or twelve the night before, was still blinking and drowsy in between her fits of screaming. ‘It’s driving me nuts.’ Flo said every morning. ‘This kid never eats.’ And she would grab Aurora and hustle her into a chair, ‘Eat! Eat!’ she commanded, glaring down, her hands on her hips. The food was left over from the night before; warmed-over spaghetti perhaps, or a bit of meat pie with cold chips, Flo explained it was no use cooking anything proper for a child who didn’t eat it in any case. This daily scene once over — both sides took it as a necessary routine — Flo handed Aurora a bottle; and until mid-afternoon, when they went out to shop, the three-year-old child would wander about the basement in her night-gown, hair in curlers, sucking at her bottle, and taking no notice at all of her mother’s screams: ‘Get out of my way. For God’s sake, get out of my way.’ The place was so crowded that Aurora was in fact always ‘under Flo’s feet’. This pair of prisoners were bored to the point where they exploded several times a day in a violent scene, Flo cuffing and slapping Aurora and Aurora biting and scratching in self-defence so that the screams and yells reverberated through the building. Yet it seemed that this violence was of a different quality from Mrs Skeffington’s with her child; because beneath the apparent mutual hatred was a sub-stratum of something warm and friendly. Flo would look down at his scrap of humanity for whom she was responsible with a look of comic bewilderment, as if she were thinking: ‘What sort of trick has fate played on me?’ And she’d say: ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t really. All those years I was running that restaurant, no trouble at all, but this kid beats me and that’s a fact.’
It seemed to me that Aurora understood quite well this process that Flo herself referred to as ‘letting off steam’, because at one moment these two females would be screaming and tussling, and the next, exhausted but amicable, they rested in each other’s arms, Aurora grinning with a tear-smeared face; and Flo, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth over the child’s head saying over and over again: ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s all too much for me. Oar, I wish you’d grow up a bit and then we’d get on better, I’m telling you.’
At regular intervals a women referred to by Flo as ‘that interfering busybody from the Welfare’ would descend, to find Flo, bland as butter, serving tea and her wonderful cake, and Aurora dressed to kill in organdie and white ribbons. If anyone was there, Flo would direct, over the woman’s head, a profound and cynical wink. ‘Yes, dear; oh, yes, I know, dear,’ she said in response to every piece of advice from the expert. ‘I did what you said, but she’s so naughty …’ Her hand extended automatically towards a slap, and withdrew itself again; for Flo sensed that Welfare would not approve of slapping.
‘You don’t have to let her in,’ I said, watching her frantically getting herself and Aurora ready, for the enemy had been observed going into a house three doors down to visit the child whose name was on the list before Aurora’s.
‘What do you mean? She’s Government, isn’t she? It’s the Labour that inflicted all these bitches on us.’
‘The Tories, too, when they get back.’
‘Lord let me see the day. But they’d never want to wear us out with all them nosey-parkers.’
‘You wait and see. And, besides, aren’t you pleased about the Health Service?’
‘I never said anything against that, did I?’
‘That was Labour.’ She was sceptical. ‘It was, too.’
‘If you say so, dear,’ she said at last, with the weary good nature which meant she was going to humour me.
When we knew Welfare was on the way, Flo always waited until the last moment in her bedroom, clutching Aurora by the hand, so as to make an entrance while I opened the outer door, from a room which was the apotheosis of a bedroom. The suite had cost nearly two hundred pounds, was being paid for on hire purchase, and was all beige-coloured varnish, highlighted with gilt. As Flo said, it would give Welfare a nice impression, to see her and Oar, all in their best, coming out of a fancy room. ‘And I’ll leave the door so she can fill her eyes with our new eiderdown. That’ll show her.’
The eiderdown was electric-blue satin and about a yard thick. It was never used to sleep under. At nights Flo wrapped it in an old blanket and put it away until she made the bed next day.
When I had opened the door for Welfare, I was expected to excuse myself and go upstairs. ‘It makes me nervous,’ Flo said, ‘with you there, and me trying to keep her happy. The Lord knows what she’ll think up next. Do you know, she said it was wrong for Oar to sleep in the same room as Dan and me?’
‘Perhaps she’s right.’
‘Are you laughing at your Flo? My Lord, the things they think up. And she said last time Oar’s teeth had to come out, they were rotting in her head.’
‘Well, they are.’
‘Yes, dear, but they’re baby teeth and they’ll fall out of themselves, the trouble they give themselves these people. Well, she’s got to earn a living, hasn’t she, I don’t hold it against her.’
Once she asked Welfare if Aurora could go to a council nursery. But the reply was that Flo had a nice home and it was better for small children to be with their mothers. Besides, the council nurseries were closing down. ‘Women marry to have children,’ said the official when Flo said she was trained for restaurant work and wanted to go back to it — the truth was she planned to help with Bobby Brent’s night-club.
‘Women here and women there,’ said Flo, when Welfare had gone. ‘She’s a woman herself, so you might think, only if she’s got a pussy I bet she wouldn’t know what to do with it; and there she is, talking about women. Sometimes I wish there was another war, I do really. All sugar and spice then, they don’t talk about women then. Not them. Red-tape-and-scissors would be talking different. Are you doing your bit for your country, dear? she’d be saying to me. Don’t worry a little bit about your dear little baby, she’d say. We’ll look after her. I’d like to have her shut up here seven days a week with a saucepan in her hand and a brat driving her mad with not eating, and a husband at her day and night. Mind you, a man’d do her good. Take some of the starch out of her tongue, for one thing.’ She giggled, clapping her hand over her mouth. ‘Ah, my Lord, can you see her with her nice little voice and her nice little face all prim and straight telling her husband — Women get married to have children, poor man, well, I’m sorry for him.’
But as Flo could not get a place in a nursery, Welfare’s remark became ammunition against Mrs Skeffington. If Flo wanted to be unpleasant, she would climb the stairs to the Skeffingtons’ flat and say: ‘Some people get rid of their kids into a nursery. A decent woman looks after her children herself.’
Inside the flat immediately fell a defensive silence, the silence of the tenant who fears more than anything else in this world, a week’s notice.
Flo would then descend the two flights, fling open my door and say: ‘I didn’t mean you, darling. You’re different.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘It stands to reason. Did you see Mr Skeffington’s dressing-gown this morning? All purple and silk and everything?’
When I had finished drinking tea with Flo in the mornings I would begin the fight for my right to work.
‘I was ever so glad when I knew you were stopping working,’ she said, every morning, with sorrowful reproach. ‘I thought I would have some company for a change. Everybody works in this house, except that Miss Powell, if you can call that work.’ Here she grinned, delightedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if that was my only work, would you, dear?’ But Flo did not waste her gifts in the mornings. For enjoyment she must have a larger audience. There had not only to be someone capable of being shocked — and for that purpose I was useful, for when I didn’t show shock, she’d say impatiently: Now I’ve upset you, dear, I know it — go on, blush! — but there had also to be an accomplice with whom she could share amusement at the innocent’s discomfort. So now she contented herself with murmuring: ‘If someone would pay me for kicking up my heels.’
‘But now I really do have to work.’
‘Who’s to make you?’
Flo was incapable of understanding that ordinary people, whom she might know, could write something which would in due course become a book. She would finger a pile of typescript and say; ‘You say this is a book, dear?’ Then she fetched a pile of women’s magazines and said; ‘You mean a book like this?’ ‘No, a book like this,’ showing her one.
‘Well. I don’t hold it against you.’
When at last I got a book printed, she compared the lines of print with the words in a heap of typescript and crowed delightedly, ‘Why darling, it’s the same.’ ‘But. Flo. I kept telling you.’ ‘I don’t hold it against you, don’t think that.’
At first I thought the phrase ‘I don’t hold it against you’, was the same as the middle-class ‘Not at all’, or ‘Very well’. But I was wrong, because at that time I failed to understand the depths of her disapproval and disappointment in me.
Every morning when I had finished my tea, and was fighting my way backwards to the door, kicking puppies out of my way and defending myself with both hands against Flo’s imploring hands, which sought to grasp and hold me like a shield against the long day’s loneliness, she would eventually sigh out: ‘Well, I don’t really blame you.’ Whenever it was a question of me or anyone else working, even Dan, she didn’t really blame us. If I went to the theatre she didn’t hold it against me. But going to the library twice a week earned a long, incredulous silence and the words ‘I don’t blame you’ were brought out with real difficulty. But at last she forgave me for the books, because she took to fingering the books on my shelf and saying: ‘I suppose you’ve got to have all this rubbish to find plots. I wouldn’t have it in my place, it just collects dust, but I don’t hold it against you.’ In the course of the year I stayed in that house I went into most of the houses in the street, and there was not a book in one of them. That is not quite true. Two houses down on the opposite side lived an old man on the old-age pension, who was reading for the first time in his life. He was educating himself on the Thinker’s Library. He had been a bricklayer, his wife was dead and he was now halfcrazy with loneliness and the necessity to communicate what he had so slowly and belatedly learned. He lingered on the pavement at the time people were coming home from work, made a few routine remarks about the weather, and then whispered confidentially; ‘There’s no God. We aren’t anything but apes. They don’t tell the working man in case we get out of hand.’
Once it was Dan and he stared suspiciously and remarked: ‘There’s no God, you say?’ ‘That’s right, that’s right, I read it today.’ ‘Well, who cares, I don’t.’ Once it was Rose, and she said with good humour: ‘Well, if you want to be a monkey, I’m not stopping you.’
A sternly shut door was no protection against Flo. If I stopped typing for longer than five minutes, there were steps on the stairs, then a loud ‘Shut up. Oar!’ and then Flo’s face appeared around the angle of the door, Aurora’s face just beneath it, two faces, wreathed in smiles and apparently without bodies. Flo ran forward saying: ‘Don’t be cross, darling, I know it must be lonely for you here. Just give me a cigarette and I’ll sit and watch.’
At last I learned to work while she was there, or while Aurora played on the floor. She played differently from the normal child of her age. All her games were centred around the long mirror. She made faces at herself, sticking out her tongue and rolling up her eyes; or smiled sweetly, or with a leer. She look a cushion and held it to her stomach, or laid it to her behind and minced up and down the room, watching her reflection. She tried on my shoes, wrapped my clothes around herself, or took off her dress and stood examining her scrawny little body. She would take a pinch of flesh between thumb and finger on her chest and say to herself: ‘Titties, where are my titties, I can see them, yes,’ Or she would pull her long black corkscrew curls out one by one, like springs, and watch them leap back into position. This game she could play for an hour at a time, standing quite still, frowning with steady concentration at her image, watching the black curls lengthen, straighten, and spring back, again and again and again.
I tried to get her to eat, but without success. No matter how casual my preparations were — fetching tea and cake for us both, cooking eggs, handing her her plate without comment, she would stiffen up and watch me, with the small, knowing grown-up smile which was so disconcerting.
Or she would sit on the floor, sucking her thumb, without moving, her black, sharp eyes fixed on me. Once I came into the room and caught her mimicking me. She was sitting at the typewriter, frowning absorbedly, smoking an imaginary cigarette. When she saw me she smiled, a wise, amused smile, as if to say: We both know you’re funny. She jumped politely off the chair, and sat on the floor again, sucking her thumb, watching me.
It was through Aurora that I first understood Jack’s position in the family, I had taken him for granted, I suppose, because Rose did.
He used to wander in and out of my room like Aurora, or like the puppies and the cats. He took very little notice of me, or I of him. The only person he responded to was Rose, outside his parents. He was totally self-absorbed — that is, absorbed in fantasy, like Aurora; and, like her, spent a great deal of time in front of the looking-glass. He was very good-looking, sleek, smooth-fleshed, swarthy. His shoulders and arms were heavily muscled, but he was dissatisfied with his chest and with his legs. There was every opportunity of seeing all of him, because he never wore anything but a singlet and running shorts, once he was out of working clothes, even in the coldest weather. He wandered about the house, flexing and stretching himself, accosting people with remarks like: ‘If I got another half-inch on my calves I’d do all right, do you think so?’
He spent a good deal of time in Miss Powell’s room. She tolerated him, but look care Bobby Brent did not catch him there; he was, of course, very jealous of her. When Miss Powell was busy, he came to rest on my floor, surrounded by physical culture magazines. He never paid for these. If jack said he was going to the fish-and-chips this had nothing to do with food. He leaned on the counter of the shop, calm-eyed, gum-chewing, until the man turned his back to take the chips from the fat, and then Jack slipped out the physical culture magazines from the pile of old papers which were kept for wrapping the fish-and-chips. He paid threepence for a cornet of chips, and came home with a week’s reading matter.
When Rose was in my room he alternately watched her, with a despondent hopefulness, and read his magazines. Or he stood in front of the mirror measuring himself all over with a tape-measure, repeating: ‘If I had thirty shillings I could buy myself some weights.’
‘Who do you think’s going to give you thirty bob?’ Rose would say.
‘I only said, if I had thirty bob, that’s all, why do you pick on me, everybody does?’ he grumbled.
He went a great deal to the pictures, and came straight back to tell me the plots. Sometimes he saw two or three films in one evening. If the film was a musical, he sang the lyrics and showed me the steps of the dances. He was a natural dancer and had a good voice. Whether it was a musical or a gangster picture, he always ended: ‘And that showed she loved him, see?’ Or, with a pathetic look at Rose: ‘And then it was time for bed.’
Then he complained about his parents: Flo’s temper frightened him, she was a bad mother to him. And Dan hated him and wished he was dead.
The only person Aurora admitted to her fantasies was Jack, She would arrange a cushion on a chair in a convenient position, find some hard object, and stab to or beat it over and over again. ‘Dead. Dead. Dead,’ I heard her murmur viciously.
‘Who’s dead?’
She had the deaf look all the people in the house seemed to assume at such moments.
‘Dead. He’s dead. Dead, Jack’s dead. My daddy’s happy. Mommy’s crying. Jack’s dead.’
Once Rose came up at midnight, and said: ‘My God, are those two at it downstairs?’
‘What about?’
‘Jack. Dan’s silly about him. He says Jack doesn’t earn enough money.’
Jack was a sort of errand-boy for a big local shop. He earned five pounds a week. He referred to the firm as ‘my company’. He wanted to be a professional footballer. He had played football for ‘his company’ and for the army, too. He could get ten pounds a week as a professional, he said. If he became a swimming coach, then he could earn eleven, he knew a place. Or he could be a physical instructor. The sky was the limit for them, he said, all the money you liked.
‘It’s like this,’ said Rose. ‘Dan earns all that money, and he can’t see why Jack can’t. He doesn’t see, some people can earn money like other people breathe. Well, Jack just pays Flo thirty shillings, the way I do, and spends the rest on the pictures. But Flo keeps slipping him money when Dan’s not looking. And so they quarrel all the time. You should hear them. Dan says it’s a matter of principle. Ha, Dan talking about principles, its enough to make a queen laugh.’
Dan worked for the local gas board. But he regarded the money he earned there as peanuts. Going into people’s houses and flats to fit appliances or fix the gas was useful to him, and that was why he kept the job. The way he made his money was not exactly illegal — ‘Not really illegal, darling,’ as Flo said, anxious I should approve, ‘not so much that as using your intelligence.’ He went into bombed houses and stripped them of anything saleable, working at night, so as not to be noticed, and disposed of what he found. He would say casually to a householder: ‘That wash-basin, that bath, it’s not up to much, is it? — not for a house of this class. Now I tell you what, I can get you a new bath, three pounds cheaper than what you’d pay.’
He had connections with the building trade, because he had worked in all branches of it at various times. It was easy for him to get a bath, a wash-basin, a lavatory pan at cost price. This new object would be installed, and he’d make a small profit. ‘This old bath’s no good to you,’ he’d tell the householder, ‘you’d have to pay to get it taken away,’ The backyard was always full of baths, wash-basins, cisterns, lavatory pans, and tangles of piping. Then, while fixing a gas leak or mending a refrigerator. Dan would say: ‘That old bath of yours, it’s not up to the standard of the rest, is it? I tell you what. I’ll get you another. Just as good as new — a factory reject. It got a bit scratched in the enamel, and I’ll do it two-thirds of the usual price.’
One week I know for a fact Dan earned fifty-odd pounds in this way, over and above his wage and the rents for the house.
‘Do you know what?’ Rose said. ‘That Dan, he’s just working-dirt like me, and I know his mum and his dad live on the old age pension and nothing over. But he’s the new rich. Well, isn’t he? I don’t envy him his conscience and that’s the truth.’
For a week the quarrels in the basement were so bad that Jack and Rose spent all their evenings with me. Sometimes Jack went out to lean over the banisters and listen. ‘Still at it,’ he said, settling himself back on my floor. Rose went down on occasional reconnaissance trips and came back to say: ‘Hammer and tongs. Well, they’ve only been married three years, so what can you expect.’
‘It’s still about me,’ said Jack, with satisfaction.
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s about Bobby Brent. Flo wants to put Oar in a paying nursery, since they can’t get a Council nursery, but Dan says a woman’s place is in the home.’
At this we all laughed, even Jack.
‘The way I look at it is this. When married people quarrel about something, they’re usually quarrelling about something else they don’t like to mention, if you understand me. I bet I know what’s eating Dan.’
‘I know, too,’ said Jack. ‘All he wants is to kill me, but he can’t understand he wants me for witness for his case.’
‘What case?’ I said.
‘I spoke out of turn,’ said Rose. ‘I promised Flo. She’ll tell you in her own good time. And what makes it worse is, Flo’s flying the red flag this week, and so they can’t make it up in bed. So there’s no peace for any of us the next three days, the way I reckon it.’
‘Ah, shut up,’ said Jack.
‘And who’s talking? Prim and proper. Well, who was knocking at my door last night just because Flo set him on?’
A couple of days later the quarrels had got so bad that Jack was white-faced, and Rose softened enough to put her arms around him. ‘Poor little boy, poor baby,’ she said, half-derisive, half-tender, ‘Don’t cry. Peace will reign any minute now, you’ll see.’
It was a Sunday morning. Suddenly, from one moment to the next, silence fell downstairs, save for the sound of the radio.
Aurora came in. She was sucking her bottle.
‘You’re working,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Mommy and Daddy are working, too.’ She helped herself to a large handful of sweets, exactly as her mother helped herself to cigarettes, with a quick guilty look and a smile of triumph she could not suppress. ‘They’re working on the bed. Like this.’ She began bouncing up and down on her stomach on the floor. After a minute she turned her head to watch herself bouncing in the long mirror. ‘Like this,’ she murmured.
In about an hour Flo appeared. Her eyes were red with past crying, and she was lauding. ‘Why, is Oar with you?’ she exclaimed in beautiful surprise. But she couldn’t keep it up. She sat down, taking a cigarette, and said: ‘Dan and me nearly split up, but now it’s all over. Don’t go, I said to Dan. The trouble with you is, you’re not used to a decent woman and her ways. I’m not like the women you’re used to — he’s had black, white, green, pink, and yellow, all over the world, being in the Navy, dear. But I’m different, see? I said to him: If you shout at me, and use your fists, I’ll just go right out and get a job and leave you to manage Oar. That’d fix you, that would.’
Aurora seemed pleased at this possibility. ‘Is my Dad going to look after me,’ she enquired.
‘Oh, you,’ said Flo, slapping at her vaguely. Aurora sucked philosophically at her bottle and listened.
‘Give the bastards what they want, that’s all. He’s a hot one and no mistake. Have it every night if he could. But I play tired. Even when I wouldn’t mind. I think to myself, laughing away in the dark: Let the sod wait, do them good, or they take you for granted. I learned that with my first husband, not that he was much good, not a patch on Dan. Dan gets so mad I hear him wriggling and growling away on the other side of the bed.’ She laughed out loud, like a young girl, clapping her hands to her kneecaps. She noticed Aurora suddenly, and flung her arms out and gathered the child to her. ‘You love your mummy, darling, don’t you, sweetheart.’ Aurora went on sucking at the bottle. ‘Of course you love your mother,’ said Flo, firmly, letting her go again. She sat loosely, hands dangling, smiling peacefully to herself. ‘Well, and so now Dan and I are already laughing at ourselves for quarrelling. Now, if Rose had any sense …’
‘You tell her yourself.’
‘Oh, she won’t listen to me. She’s so grumpy these days, I can’t say a word. But Dickie’s Dan’s brother. They’re like as two peas, for all that Dickie’s a civilian, so to speak, just selling things behind a counter and my Dan’s from the Navy, and that makes a man, say what you like. But I keep telling Rose, when she’s listening, if you want a man you’ve got to go about it proper. She plays cold with Dickie so he gets fed-up. Now you tell her, any real friend of hers would do right and tell her.’
‘She doesn’t like talking about it,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t know anything, let alone talking, I know. Many the times I’ve gone to bed early with Dan and left them alone and sent Jack to the pictures, but all I hear is a giggle and a slap, and he goes home with his hands in his pockets. So she’s only got herself to blame he’s got another woman.’
Now although Rose made jokes about Dickie’s having another girl she believed that he was being as faithful to her as she to him.
‘You’d better not tell her that,’ I said.
‘No. With her ideas she’d throw him over, I wouldn’t be surprised. Mad. Well, if Rose wants to get him she’d better make up her mind to …’ She watched my face. ‘Now you’re shocked,’ she said. ‘That’s right, dear.’ And she added another juicy image like a chemist dropping a precipitant into a test-tube. ‘Go on, you must have the ’ump tonight. You are shocked, aren’t you?’ And she automatically glanced around for the necessary person to make this particular pleasure really satisfactory. But there was only Aurora. ‘What are you listening for?’ she demanded, slapping the child across the mouth. Aurora stretched her mouth across her face in a scream, and immediately fell silent, sucking at the bottle.
‘That girl doesn’t know nothing about life. A friend is what she needs to tell her. You don’t think that bastard downstairs’ d’ve married me if I’d hidden it, do you? Not he. They like to know what they’re getting. Beasts. That’s what they are. They’re not like us at all, dear, not really.’ She began to roar with laughter, holding both her hips and rocking side to side. ‘Well, it’s just as well they’re not — oh, don’t mind me, I like to laugh, and sometimes I think there’s nobody but me in the house knows how to, there’s you, all working and serious, and there’s Rose, like a wet rag, and there’s Jack, well, I really don’t know, so I like to laugh and make you happy.’
At this point Dan bellowed up the stairs for his dinner, and exactly as if I could not have heard him, Flo murmured politely: ‘Well, I can see you want to go on working. I don’t blame you, dear, not at ail.’ She grabbed Aurora by the arm and demanded: ‘What are you doing here stopping the lady from working?’ Aurora went quite limp, and Flo shook her like a rag doll, saying: ‘Ah, my Lord, and who would have a child?’ She pulled the unresisting child, who was still sucking at the bottle, along the floor and out of the room. Aurora took her bottle out to grin at me as she was pulled round the side of the door.
Rose came in. ‘What did Flo say about me?’
‘You know what she said.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I told her to tell you herself.’
‘I suppose you agree with her. Well. I’m telling you both that if that’s all he cares about me, then he can lump it.’
‘Meanwhile, you haven’t seen each other in weeks and everyone takes it for granted you’ll get married.’
‘Well, so I should think. If he doesn’t I’ll take him to court for breach of promise.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t.’
‘I bet I wouldn’t either, I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. The trouble with him is, he doesn’t know what’s good for him. No one with sense likes living in a furnished room when they can have their own home. There he is, sharing a room with two other men, playing poker and never eating proper. That’s really why he cooled off, see? I told him it was time we got married Flo with her dirty mind, she thinks it’s because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.’
Rose’s unhappiness had now reached the point where she could not rouse herself to go down to the basement to eat. She drank cup after cup of tea in my room, heaping in the sugar and saying it was food. When hunger assailed her so that she really couldn’t ignore it, she went out for sixpence-worth of fish and chips. Even in this low condition her natural fastidiousness stayed with her: she was a connoisseur of fish-and-chip shops, knowing every shop within a mile. She would take a bus to a place that used good oil, and fried the fish the way she liked it. But having taken all this trouble, she would push across the packet to me, and say: ‘I don’t fancy it.’
‘But you’ve got to eat sometime.’
‘What for. I’d like to know?’
She had grown so thin that her skirts were folded at the back with safety-pins, and her face was set permanently into folds of grief, so that she looked like a woman of forty.
Meanwhile, Flo had worked on Dan, who had told Dickie that Rose was pining for him. One dinner time Dickie marched into the jeweller’s shop with a covered plate of salad and salad cream, which he knew Rose liked, and placed it aggressively on the counter in front of her. He told Dan afterwards he intended this as a peace-offering; but Rose, without looking at him, carefully wrapped plate and food in newspaper, and went to the back of the shop where she slid it into the rubbish bin. She then returned to the counter where Dickie was waiting, and resumed her former position, palms resting downwards, staring past him into the street. At which he swore at her and went out again.
That evening my radio was playing: ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and she burst into tears. ‘Men are all mad,’ she told me. ‘What’s he think he’s doing, throwing food at me like I was something in the zoo.’ She went into her room and tossed Dickie’s photograph into the waste-paper basket. Half an hour later she put it back on her table, saying: ‘Well. I suppose you’re born stupid, you can’t help it.’ Rose talked to that photograph as if to Dickie himself. When I went into her room, she might be sitting with a towel pinned around her shoulders, making up, chatting softly to him thus: ‘Yes. And here I sit, wasting my time powdering my nose. Do you even notice if I put a new dress on? Not you. All you notice is, if I don’t look well, you complain about that fast enough.’ The photograph was of a hard-faced, arrogant man — Dan without Dan’s good nature.
Night after night Rose sat slumped into my big leather chair, sometimes until long after everyone else had gone to bed, which in that house was very late. She would not bear if I spoke to her. She lay back with her eyes closed, and under her eyes were heavy black bruises. If she spoke, it was to grumble steadily in a monologue: ‘On my feet all day with that blasted Jewess. I said to her today. Look who does the work, you or me? Then get off that chair. Or buy another chair. Can’t you afford five bob for a chair? Can you believe it, she won’t get another chair into the shop in case I sit on it. She likes to think of me wearing out my feet for the money. And as for that husband of hers …’ Rose was always anti-Semitic, in a tired tolerant sort of way. She was convinced that ‘the Jews’ were all like her employers, who were the only Jewish people she had ever met. But now she was depressed, she talked like a minor Goebbels, and it was queer and frightening to hear the violent ugly phrases in Rose’s flat, good-natured, grumbling voice. ‘But I got even with him today. I called him a dirty Jew to his face. He didn’t like that. I said, I know about you, don’t think I don’t. You eat babies, you do, if the Government doesn’t keep an eye on you.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘I’ll believe it if I want to, I’d believe anything of that pair.’
‘Then I’m not going to listen.’
‘Please yourself. But I’ll sit here a bit, if you don’t mind. I’ve got the ’ump.’ Incidentally the aitch in ’ump was the only one she ever dropped; the radio had made her self-conscious. She even said: ‘I’ve got so silly, listening to those lardy-das on the wireless, if I drop an aitch I go right back and pick it up again.’ But having the ’ump was a recognized spiritual condition; Rose dropped the aitch humorously, as a middle-class person might.
I began to read. Rose watched me. I suggested it might be better if she read, instead of worrying about Dickie.
‘What I want is a book to tell me how to get sense into a man’s head.’
A few evenings later we were walking back from the pictures when she stooped to pick up a paperback that had been dropped on the pavement. ‘Oooh, look,’ she said derisively. The picture on the cover was of a woman in a low-cut white satin dress, leaning back against a table in a state of urgent defence, clutching at the folds of her dress. ‘Look at that,’ said Rose. ‘She’s as good as being raped, but she’s got time to worry about keeping her clothes clean.’ The man in the picture looked as if he were biting the woman’s ear. ‘That’s a man all over,’ Rose said. ‘He’s going to bite her ear off if she doesn’t give him what he wants. That’s love all right. I’m going to read it.’ She read the book as we walked home, remarking ‘Just push me the way I should go. I can’t keep my eyes off this, and that’s a fact.’
At home she arranged herself in my big chair and said: ‘Just make a nice cup of tea and don’t talk. I want to see if Lady Godiva gets into bed or not.’ From time to time she’d look up to say: ‘He’s just given her a watch with diamonds. He loves her for herself, he says.’ ‘Now she’s his secretary. She wants to help him with his career.’ Late that night she left my room saying: ‘We’re up to page 97, and he’s already given her chocolates, a watch, a car and a mink coat. She’d better watch out. Well, I’ll finish it tomorrow night, so don’t you decide to go out. I like to have company when I read.’
Next evening she snuggled herself into my chair with the book. I said: ‘If you like those books, why don’t you buy some?’
‘What, waste money on this silly stuff? No, it came my way, as you might say, so I don’t mind. Besides, it’s giving me ideas about putting sense into Dickie’s head.’ At midnight she put the book down with a yawn, ‘Well, believe it or not, they got married in the end. They didn’t get into bed until the last page either. He said, your beautiful body, and she said: I want to feel your strong arms about me. I could do with a pair of strong arms myself, after all that. But I tell you what, I’ve got an idea. You remember I said about my policeman? But it’s all right thinking about it, when it gets to saying yes to going out with him, I can’t bring myself But if I get off a little with Jack, Flo’ll tell Dickie, and no harm done. I can handle Jack.’
‘Don’t you be too sure.’
‘He’s a kid. But I’ve learned a thing or two from this book. She got diamonds and mink coats all right, but no ring, not until she played him up proper.’
Rose descended thoughtfully to the basement. A few minutes later there were yells and raucous laughter from Flo. Rose ran upstairs, chased by Jack.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘what’re you scared of?’
‘Think I’d go to bed with a kid like you?’
‘Then why were you kissing and hugging me just now?’
Rose slammed the door. He swore. A few minutes later he scratched softly on my door and came in, ‘Lend me some money,’ he said in an offhand way, not from rudeness but because he was hardly aware I existed. He took a pound, thanked me perfunctorily and crept out, his terrified little-boy eyes fixed on the door where his stepfather might emerge.
Rose came in, ‘Flo’ll tell Dickie,’ she said, ‘so that’s all right.’
‘Not if she tells him the truth.’
Rose giggled. ‘Dan’ll be mad now. He always goes on and on about never having paid a woman yet, as an example to Jack, so as to keep down the cost of living.’
Next day Jack and Rose would not speak to each other, Flo watched the aloof faces with an appreciative grin. She kept winking at me and at Dan, and when Dan did not respond, raised her eyes and shrugged at the ceiling. She had not yet realized that Dan was really angry, particularly because she had taken her son aside and made him tell her the details of his night’s adventures. ‘Children have got to grow up,’ she kept saying, but Dan scowled and moved his feet under the table like a bull pawing at the earth. He sat in grim silence, his great powerful arms resting on the white cloth, and his heavy head turned to watch his wife, who flitted as usual at the stove end of the room, looking like a shaggy little dog with her bright inquisitive eyes under the tangle of hair. When he looked at Jack he was murderous. But Jack apparently did not notice, or pretended not to; he was glistening with triumph, taunting Rose, saying with an aggressive but pleased laugh: ‘Who’s a kid now?’
At last Rose, who had been quiet and listless, said: ‘I’m going out to get some fresh air.’ She went out without looking at Jack. Flo ran after her and kissed her with a simple affection rare in her and said: ‘Rose, don’t take on so about everything. You take everything so serious.’
‘I’m going to the pictures,’ said Jack. It was much too late for the pictures and Dan raised his head loweringly to ask: ‘And who’s paying?’
Jack said: ‘She lent me a pound.’
‘Who, Rose?’
Jack looked at me and laughed.
‘More fool you,’ said Dan to me. And to Jack: ‘If you do that again, you know what’ll you get.’
‘You’re not my father,’ said Jack, defying him.
Dan got up and slammed out of the basement. ‘I’ll kill the pair of you yet,’ he said.
Flo began to cry. ‘Oh, my God, he’s gone, he’s left me, and it’s your fault,’ she said to Jack.
‘We’ll do all right without him,’ said Jack.
‘My God,’ said Flo, ‘My God. And I’ll kill you if you upset him again.’
Later Jack came to knock on my door for some more money. I refused. He had expected this, and now knocked on Rose’s door.
‘Get away,’ came her muffled voice: she was crying.
‘Lend me a pound,’ said Jack, shaking with triumphant laughter.
‘Go and hang yourself.’
Next morning Flo was so angry she smashed a cup on the draining-board setting it down. ‘That kid. Last night he pretended to go to bed as usual, then he took my coal money and went out. I’ll give him women. But don’t tell Dan, darling. Please don’t. He’ll hit him again and then lack won’t be a nice witness for our case.’
‘What is this case you all keep talking about?’
‘Oh, my Lord!’ said Flo, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Dan’d kill me if he knew I’d said anything to you.’
‘Now you have, why don’t you tell me.’
‘Oh, don’t ask me. We’ll tell you. Really we will. But don’t ask me. There’s enough trouble with Jack and Dan without Dan’s getting angry with me for opening my mouth when I shouldn’t.’
That evening Rose asserted her rights as a neighbour by saying: ‘I’m going for a walk. And you’re coming, too.’ Her mood had changed. She was aggressive and challenging. ‘We’re going to take a bus, and then we’ll see.’
She got off the bus at the Bayswater Road. It was summer, and it was lined with dusty trees and so thick with prostitutes they stood in groups along the pavements. ‘I don’t like coming here most times,’ said Rose. ‘But tonight I feel different.’ We walked slowly along, and Rose glared angrily into the faces of the waiting girls until she got a defensive stare back.
‘What’s this for?’ I said.
‘They make me sick,’ said Rose. She was trembling with rage.
I tried to turn her off into the Gardens, but she held my arm tight and made me go with her. ‘Dirty beasts,’ she said. ‘Look at them, hanging about, a pound a time, when I think I want to vomit.’ At last she got tired, and turned spontaneously off into the Park. We went to the Round Pond, which was nearly deserted: a few small boys waded along its verges with nets and tins full of tiddlers. It was dusk now; the pond lay in a dull leaden sheet; the trees stood quiet and leafy; and Rose stared into the water and said: ‘Sometimes I think I’ll throw myself in.’
‘Better go down to the river,’ I said. ‘You’ll only hit your had on the bottom here.’
I’m not going to laugh. I don’t feel like it.’ She began walking around the edge, leaving me to follow. She walked right round the pond, until she got back to where she had started.
A policeman came sauntering towards us. ‘There’s a cop,’ said Rose. ‘Well, he needn’t think I’m scared of him now. Can’t they ever leave us alone? I suppose he thinks we’re those dirty beasts. Well. I know about cops now, since that one that’s chasing me, and they’re just like everyone else.’ When the policeman came up and looked keenly into our faces, Rose said, ‘We’re just having a walk, dear,’ and slipped him a shilling. ‘There go my cigarettes again,’ she said, as he remarked: ‘Good night, miss,’ and sauntered off again. We could see him standing in the dark under the great trees, watching us while we made another complete circuit of the pond. ‘Can’t ever leave us alone, can’t ever leave us in peace,’ Rose was muttering. ‘A shilling. Well, Jack can throw a pound away two nights running and what for … did I ever tell you about my Canadian?’ she enquired suddenly, as the policeman, deciding we were harmless, wandered off through the trees. ‘No. Well, I’ll tell you now. I’ve been thinking of him the last few days, thinking about life as you might say. Love, it’s all nonsense. I was really in love with him, too. I thought I’d never get over it when he got himself killed by those Germans, But I did get over it, and so what am I wasting good salt over Dickie for?’
‘What was he like?’
‘He was a sweet boy,’ she drawled, her voice changing. ‘He used to take me out every time I had a free evening from the factory or the blitz. If I said I was busy he’d hang about the house until I’d finished washing and ironing for my mother. Then he’d take me for a walk. He’d even do the ironing for me — can you believe it? — a man doing washing and ironing. He’d come right across London to wash and set my hair for me. He was a hairdresser in Canada. He’d go down on his knees to tie my shoelaces for me. Yes, it’s true. I used to unfasten my shoes sometimes before he came to watch him do it. Well, Dickie may be a bastard, but he’d never go down on his bloody knees to tie my shoes.’
‘You must have been in love.’
‘Oh, if you’re laughing, it’s your mistake. I was, too. I was so miserable when he was killed I committed suicide. First I cried and cried, and my stepfather said he’d beat me if I didn’t stop. That was before he threw me out. Well. I thought I might as well die, with my boy dead, so I put my head in the gas-oven but the gas ran out, and they found me and poured cold water on me. Then my stepfather said I was no good and threw me out.’
‘Lucky the gas ran out.’
‘Lucky nothing. I only put sixpence in. Well, it made that old so-and-so my step sit up and take notice, didn’t it? But what I mean is, I was so in love, just like the films, I even committed suicide, well nearly, and now I’m in love with Dickie, so what’s the sense in anything, can you tell me that? And so now I’ve decided. I’m going out with that bloody policeman. Still, I suppose someone has to be a policeman. I’m not going to hold it against him.’ By now the wind was stirring black branches, and pale clouds streamed across a black sky; it was not at all the domestic little pond of the daytime with small boys and toy boats. Rose gave a fearful look back as we left it and said: ‘So now that’s all done. I’m finished crying, and you’re not catching me committing suicide again for any bloody man, and I’m going to be hardhearted and on the make, just like that silly bitch in that book with the picture on it, well, it’s not my fault if men like to be treated bad, now is it?’
Next evening she spent two hours dressing herself, and came into my room to show off. She was wearing a new grey suit she had bought from her boss’s wife, high black ankle-strap shoes, and heavy brass jewellery on her wrists and ears. ‘Look at my bosom,’ she said, ‘I’ve stuffed it all out with cotton wool. Dickie hates it when I do that, but this one’s not going to get near my bosom, so it doesn’t matter.’
She crept to the window and looked over. ‘There he is,’ she said. ‘Come and see.’ A very tall spindly youth with a sad frog’s face stared up at the house. ‘You mustn’t laugh,’ she said accusingly, stuffing a fist against her mouth and giggling. ‘I know he’s nothing to look at, but he’s sweet.’ She took another look and reeled back, laughing. ‘When I compare him with Dickie … but I mustn’t say that. At least, he’s a proper gentleman. That’s what I like. When I first met Dickie and Dan I decided to go for Dan — that was before Flo. But Dan messed me about, and Dickie kept his hands to himself, for the first evening, any rate. So I decided to like Dickie instead.’ She began whirling around on her toes singing: ‘Kiss me sweet, kiss me simple,’ and dropped laughing on to a chair.
‘He’s waiting,’ I said.
‘Let him wait. I told you, I’m not going to treat any of them right from now on. I’ll wait until 7.15. I said seven. He’s a fool, like they all are, so he’ll think the more of me.’ At a quarter past seven she went downstairs, adjusting her face to languid boredom.
As soon as she had gone, Flo darted up the stairs to ask: ‘Is he good-looking?’
‘But I didn’t see.’
‘He’d better be, or Dickie won’t be jealous. Rose came down to me and said if I was a friend I’d got to go up to the shop tomorrow morning and tell Dickie, all casual, that Rose had another man. She’s coming on, isn’t she?’
When Rose came in that night, she was thoughtful. ‘I’ve got used to Dickie, that’s what it is,’ she said. She handed me five cigarettes. ‘Might as well take what’s going. He gave me twenty cigarettes. When a man starts giving you things it’s time to watch out. Except with the Americans and Canadians, they’re in the habit of giving girls presents, it’s different with them. This one says he’ll take me to the Pally tomorrow, but I’m not so sure.’
After work next day she was singing. ‘Dickie was standing at his door tonight giving me dagger looks, so I suppose Flo did her stuff the way I said. He said: Have a good time last night, and I said: What’s it to you? Believe it or not, he’s started liking me again. Can you beat it? Lot of kids they are, they make me laugh, imagine me crying over a stupid like that.’
She put on her only dance dress, pink with frills and artificial flowers. It did not suit her at alt. She kept glancing at herself in a dissatisfied way, and at the last moment took it off and flung it in a crumpled heap into the corner of my room. ‘Time marches on,’ she said grimly; and in a few moments appeared in her suit. She watched the clock until she was exactly fifteen minutes late, and then went downstairs, swinging her hips.
At three that morning I was awakened by a dim white shape creeping across my room to the window. ‘Hush,’ said Flo, ‘it’s me, dear. I didn’t mean to wake you,’ She craned out of the window. ‘Quick, come here,’ she said. Below, under the plane tree on the edge of the pavement, in a patch of moonlight, stood Rose and the policeman, closely embraced. ‘Look at that,’ said Flo, delighted. ‘I tried to see out of the basement, but all I could see was their feet all mixed up and wriggling like they was doing a dance, Shhhh.’ She fell back from the window, laughing, ‘They look so funny. He’s about four feet taller than she is, and look he’s got to bend right over to kiss her like a man who’s had it too often.’ She looked again, then, unable to stand it, said abruptly, ‘I’m cold,’ and rushed off downstairs to her husband.
Next day Rose was uneasy. She had begun by wanting to make Dickie jealous, but now she was half in love with love. ‘We was cuddling for hours last night,’ she said. ‘Nothing like cuddling, say what you like. It was ever so nice. He kisses nice, too. But not as nice as Dickie. There’s something about the way Dickie kisses that gets me. But there, I’m just silly. A kiss is a kiss, when all’s said and done, the beasts, all tongue and slobber … I’m getting upset, dear. After all that, believe it or not. I’m worried about Dickie being unhappy. Can you beat it? Men don’t understand, do they? It’s no good telling a man that something doesn’t mean anything, the way I look at it, it must always mean something for them, but it doesn’t for us, not unless we love a man. If I told Dickie that I kissed my policeman last night just because of him he wouldn’t see it that way at all. Well, I’m going out with him again tonight. He’s a bit soft, just like my Canadian boy that was killed, but he’s not bad. I suppose.’
Rose went out with her policeman for several weeks. Flo pestered me, almost in tears, for details of this affair, but even if I had been willing I couldn’t have obliged her, for Rose had withdrawn into silence. The trouble was, the policeman had one almost overwhelming attraction: his parents owned the house they lived in, and had promised half of it to him on his marriage. He wanted to marry Rose at once, and she longed for a home almost as much as she longed for a husband. But the more she tried to persuade herself she cared for the policeman and had forgotten Dickie, the sadder she became. She returned from the nightly embraces under the plane tree looking embarrassed and guilty, and sat staring into my fire until I told her she must go to bed. When I tried to talk to her she said: ‘It’s no good, dear. I know you mean well, but you’re here with us just because you’re hard-up for a time and because you like living here and living there. But it’s the rest of my life I’m thinking of Yes, all right, I know I’m getting you down, well, I get myself down, but I don’t care about nothing at ail, except to decide what’s the right thing to do.’
She was getting Flo down, too. This conscience-ridden romance was too much for her. ‘For the Lord’s sake,’ she said. ‘If you are going to have some fun with a man then have it, but Rose’d cry at her own wedding.’
‘From what I’ve seen of people married. I’d cry with good reason,’ said Rose.
‘But if Dickie said, come to church, you’d go.’
‘More fool me.’
‘But long faces don’t get the marriage bells ringing.’
‘Some people like my face long or short, if others don’t.’
‘Then make your bed and lie in it,’ said Flo, finally getting bored. She was now spending time with her enemy Mrs Skeffington. For two reasons. One, she needed her as a witness in the famous court case about which at last I was managing to get some details in the face of the apparent determination of everyone in the building that I should be kept in the dark. The other I understood when Flo came to my door, vivid with excitement, to ask in a hoarse whisper: ‘Have you any pills, dear?’
‘Don’t tell me she’s pregnant.’
‘Ah, my Lord, yes, poor thing. And now we must all be good to her.’
‘But she keeps herself to herself so much.’
‘She’ll be different now she’s in trouble.’
‘How far has she gone?’
‘Three months.’
‘Why did she leave it so long?’
‘I expect she was hoping the Lord would provide, but He doesn’t, does He? And Rosemary was a mistake, too. She says she can’t have children, not with her husband still supporting his first wife and her kids.’
I knew Rosemary was a mistake because I had heard Mrs Skeffington say so, in front of the child herself, not once, but again and again, and with each repetition Rosemary appeared more fragile, more hesitant, her eyes growing wide and anxious, as if she doubted her own right to live.
That night we heard Mrs Skeffington and her husband:
‘What the hell are you complaining about? You send Rosemary to a crèche, don’t you?’
‘Oh, but I’m that way, how can you, now?’
‘Why not, you did before?’
‘But I’m so tired, and those pills I took. And I was awake all night with Rosemary.’
‘She keeps me awake as well as you, doesn’t she?’
‘Who gets out of bed to her? You’ve never got out of bed to Rosemary once in your whole life.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘Yes, Rosemary starts crying and then you wake up and you can only think of one thing.’
‘Don’t you love me, then? Well, if it’s like that I know where to go.’
Silence. Then the woman’s tired anxious voice: ‘I didn’t say I didn’t love you. But I get so tired. Surely you can see that.’
‘Then show me you love me.’
Next day Mr Skeffington went on a business trip and we never saw him again. One morning I heard a crash outside my door. Mrs Skeffington had thrown herself down one flight of stairs, was on the point of flinging herself down a second. ‘Leave me atone,’ she muttered, and before I could stop her, she launched herself into space again. On the landing below she picked herself up, slowly, slowly, gasping and pale. ‘That ought to shift it,’ she said, with an attempt at a smile, and dragged herself, breathing heavily, up the stairs to Rosemary.
Flo and I went on a delegation to insist she should try a doctor.
‘Goodness gracious me,’ said Mrs Skeffington, ‘those doctors don’t care at all for us.’
‘Not all doctors are silly,’ said Flo. ‘Some are nice and kind.’
‘Show me one, then. I tried before, over Rosemary. He didn’t care. Besides, it’s too late for doctors. And I think I’m all right, because I’ve got a bad pain.’
She went to bed, and Rose and I took Rosemary for the night. That was the one time Mrs Skeffington permitted anyone to help her. Before and after that day, when we offered to take the child, she would say: ‘Goodness gracious, whatever for. I can manage quite well.’
Next day she looked very ill, but she went to work as usual. She was sent back at midday by her employer. I fetched Rosemary from the nursery, and when her mother saw her she opened her arms, and the two lay cuddled together on the pillow. They both looked extraordinarily frail, defenceless, pathetic. ‘And now how about a doctor?’ I asked.
‘You’re very kind,’ she said formally, ‘but Rosemary and I’ll manage.’
Flo said: ‘My God, what if she’s still sick for the case?’
‘That’s all you think of,’ said Rose.
‘But it’ll be to her advantage, too, to get rid of those filthy old people.’
‘Yes? They don’t bother nobody but you and Dan. I never hear them.’
‘Oh, my Lord, you’re not going to say that at the case?’
‘I’I! say the truth. I always told you. I’ll tell the truth and that’s all.’
‘The truth is bad enough, sweetheart, darling, isn’t it?’
‘And that’s a fact.’
‘I’ll tell you, darling,’ said Flo to me ‘I’ll tell you all about it. I swear.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ said Rose. ‘But just now I’ve got something she must do for me.’
‘But, sweetheart, the case, and time’s so short, and poor Mrs Skeffington so ill.’
‘Yes? Time enough. Come along,’ said Rose to me. ‘We’ll go into your room and you can make me a nice cup of tea.’
In my room she said: ‘Dickie and I have made it up. He was hanging around when I came out of the shop tonight. He said. Have you got a date tomorrow, and I said all casual. Yes, why?’ Rose thrust forward one hip and began patting at her hair, staring with studied indifference at a wall. ‘Why, yes. I said, not looking at him at all. He was so upset. You know I’ve told you. I can’t bear to see him unhappy. But I hardened my heart, because it was for his good, really, and I teased him, and then he said, would I break my date with my policeman? So I said No, I wouldn’t do a thing like that!’ Rose acted virtuous indignation for a moment, but it dissolved into simple good-heartedness: ‘I didn’t care to tease him any longer, so I said I’d go out with him.’
‘And how about the policeman?’
‘Oh, him?’ She let out an unscrupulous chuckle. ‘They can all go and pickle themselves for all I care, except for Dickie. And you can tell my policeman a nice little lie for me.’
‘I can?’
‘Yes, It won’t hurt you. You can type out what I write on your typewriter. It makes it look more official, doesn’t it, and besides, my spelling’s awful.’
‘So are you.’ I said.
‘Yes? But I don’t believe you think that because you’re laughing. All the last times you’ve been yawning and fed-up with me. Well, I don’t blame you, I was fed-up with myself. And now here’s the letter.’
She handed me a piece of paper on which she had written: ‘Dear Froggie, I’m sorry you had a spot of inconvenience over last night, but the truth was, I was engaged with my mother. Now I have to tell you something and I hope you won’t be disappointed. I’m afraid I will have to cancel all our dates, owing to a personal nature concerning my mother, and she has asked me to come with her. Of course, I don’t really want to go, but you can see she asked me to do her a favour and U can’t really refuse her, can I? I didn’t want to make you come all the way up here for nothing so I thought I would write. Come and tell me you don’t mind some time when you are passing the shop, because I will never be seeing you again.’
‘How should I end that? Yours sincerely sounds silly after all that kissing and cuddling, and when he’s bought the ring and everything. And Love won’t do, because he might think I meant it. You type that out for me nice. I don’t want him to think I’m ignorant.’
‘You could say, I’m breaking this off because I’m in love with another man,’ I said.
‘You could say it,’ she said. ‘I’m not. It’s nicer this way, because then his pride’s not hurt, see? And I’ve thought of another sentence. Put in: I know you will understand. That always sounds nice. It doesn’t mean anything either. I think you’d better end it just — Rose. No faithfully, that’d be silly, wouldn’t it?’
‘And there’s the ring, too.’
She looked guilty and then laughed. ‘You can’t be nice to two men at once. I’m doing it all for Dickie, aren’t I? Well, I’m stark mad. It’s not I don’t know what Dickie is, and there goes my last chance of a home I can call my own, and I don’t even care, and that proves I’m mad.’
She sighed the letter: Rose, Alexandra, Jane. Camellia. ‘My mother wanted girls, but all she got was boys, except for me. So I got all the fancy names she liked. A waste, isn’t it? Like wearing your fancy panties when there isn’t a man about?’ She giggled and went to post the letter. She came back singing, ‘And so tonight I’m going out with my Dickie again.’ Before she could even sit down, Flo came in to say Mrs Skeffington had procured an abortion for herself with an enema syringe. ‘I saw the baby,’ said Flo dramatically. ‘It was as big as this!’ She held out her fist. ‘Eyes, too. Like a fish it looked, Funny to think it’d grow up to be like us. But there, it’s down the drain now.’ She laughed. ‘Down the drain, that’s good. Well, it is. She pulled the plug and said: That’s the end of you.’
Rose got up and said: ‘You make me sick, Flo,’ She went into her room, slamming my door and hers.
‘Foolish virgin, that’s what Rose is,’ said Flo.
In the year I lived in that house Flo believed herself to be pregnant five times. Twice the scare came to nothing; but three times she dressed herself appropriately in her shabbiest clothes, and staggered to a chemist’s shop she had marked down for this purpose. There she copiously wept and talked about her family of seven and her drinking husband. She returned with pills, given her good-heartedly by ‘the manager himself.’ Instead of taking them as prescribed, she swallowed half a bottle at a time. I would find her rolling in agony on the floor of the kitchen exclaiming between groans: ‘Well, I’ve fixed that one, at any rate.’ Meanwhile, Aurora wandered about, sucking at her bottle, which she now wore tied around her neck like a St Bernard dog’s brandy flask, with bright pink ribbon.
As the doors slammed Flo shrugged and said: ‘Oh, well, she’ll think different when she’s got kids herself and no room to move and she can’t ever go out or nothing.’
‘How about a doctor for Mrs Skeffington?’
‘My Lord, are you crazy, do you want her to go to prison?’
‘She might die.’
‘She won’t die. There’s a time for doctors. Mrs Skeffington’s managed without, and good luck to her, and I didn’t think she had that much fight in her, she’s such a lady and all. I’ll give her that. But you call a doctor now, sweetheart, and you’ll do for her, you will really. I’ll go up again and see what I can do for help. You stay here and if I need you I’ll call.’
When Flo went. Rose came in. ‘I’m going out now,’ she said. ‘This would happen, just when I want to be happy and not think about anything. Can you hear?’
From above us came the sound of moaning.
‘Of course.’
‘Yes. I know you can. But I don’t want to. I’ll see you later.’
Soon afterwards Flo came to say Mrs Skeffington was asleep for the night. And Rosemary had been given a tablespoon of whisky to keep her quiet. We both made trips upstairs to listen outside the door; and Miss Powell made trips down. We couldn’t hear anything. Miss Powell said she had arranged to call a friend of hers who was a nurse, if anything went wrong. Flo approved of this; nurses weren’t doctors: they were friendly, they were women, they understood.
When Rose came back at midnight, soft-faced and smiling and happy, she seemed a visitor from another country. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘so that’s all fixed.’ She sat down in my big chair, and began to make herself comfortable. In five minutes she had changed herself from a pretty girl into a plain woman. First, straddled in the chair, she stripped the corset-belt from under her petticoat. Then she undid her brassière, and removed the carefully-bunched cotton-woo! with which it was stuffed. She stuck a cigarette in the corner of her mouth — a thing she would rather die than do in public — so that, with her eyes screwed up against the smoke she looked like a wise old sardonic woman. Finally she took a comb from her black packed hair, and reflectively scratched her scalp with it. No man present: she could be herself.
‘Have a good time?’
‘What do you think?’
‘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.’