In Pursuit of the English (18 page)

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.