In Pursuit of the English (19 page)

‘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.