In Pursuit of the English

‘Don’t start,’ he said aggressively. ‘Now don’t start, that’s all.’

The child wept. Mrs Skeffington wept, and Mr Skeffington went out, slamming the door, five minutes after he’d come home.

Rose came in. ‘You heard?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You still think you’re going to talk them into sense?’

‘No, not really.’

‘I told you. You’ve got a lot to learn …’

‘All the same, what about the baby?’

‘What you don’t know yet is, there’s some people you can’t do nothing about.’ She offered me a cigarette, as a sign she was forgiving me. ‘I’ve been thinking about you, dear. Your trouble is this. You think, all you’ve got to do is say something, and then things’ll be right. Well, they won’t be. You leave that pair of love-birds upstairs alone. Because I tell you what’s going to happen. He’s left one wife with kids already. He’s not one to stick. And he’ll leave her, too. And then she’ll be better off and her temper’ll improve. You’ll see.’

Later Mr Skeffington came in. Soon we heard her plead: ‘Oh not tonight, not tonight, Ron. I’m so tired. I was up with Rosemary all last night.’ Rose grinned at me, nodding, as if to say: There. I told you. He said: ‘I’ve been away two weeks and that’s what I get when I come home.’ ‘Oh, Ron, darling.’ A comparative silence. We heard his voice, adjusted to tenderness. Complete silence. Then the child started to cry. Mrs Skeffington wailed: ‘Oh, Rosemary, Rosemary, can’t you ever stop?’ She must have been up most of the night. At seven the alarm shrilled so long that most of the house was aroused. Finally there came a shock and a crash as the clock was flung across the room. ‘Oh, Ronnie,’ said Mrs Skeffington, ‘now you’ve woken Rosemary.’

He was a slight, fair, dandyish young man, with a jaunty moustache. If any of us women, Rose, Flo, myself, Miss Powell were carrying something on the stairs, we could not take two steps before we found him beside us: ‘A pleasure,’ he would say, assisting us on our way. His wife carried all her own burdens. She got up at seven every day, washed and dressed and fed the child, and took it to the council nursery school. She came back at lunchtime to cook her husband his meal. She finally collected the little girl at six, having spent her day cooking in a nearby cafe. Her evenings she spent cleaning and cooking.

At nine in the morning, Ronnie Skeffington, smelling of shaving soap and hair lotion, would emerge from the bathroom in a silk dressing-gown, and proceed upstairs with the newspapers. His breakfast had been cooked for him and was waiting in the oven. At ten he went off to work, and came back at one, expecting to find his lunch ready. He usually did not come home until late at night.

‘Say what you like,’ said Flo, ‘that Ronnie, that Miss Powell, they give the house class. Imagine now, if you was to open the door and there was Mr Skeffington, all polite and brushed, you’d think this house has got nice flats in it, now wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t start putting up the rents yet,’ said Rose, dryly, after one such flight.

‘Rents, I didn’t say nothing about rents, dear.’

‘No, I’m just telling you not to start.’

There were two rooms beneath mine and Rose’s. An old couple lived there. I never heard them. I never saw them. When I asked Rose about them, her face would put on the sorrowful guilty look which meant that over this matter her loyalty was to Flo. She would say: ‘Don’t worry about them. There’s nothing to tell.’ When I asked Flo, she said: ‘They’re filthy old beasts, but they don’t worry you, do they?’

About a week after I moved down beside Rose, Flo came in to ask me down to supper that night. I thanked her. She lingered, looking hurt. ‘Don’t you want to come, darling?’ ‘But of course I do. I’d love to.’ She embraced me, saying: ‘There, I knew you would. I told Dan.’

My trouble with Flo was that she was uneasy unless she got exaggerated reactions of delight, complaint, or shock to her own dramatized emotions. If I did not at first react suitably, she would prod me until I did. ‘There! You’re laughing,’ she would say, in relief. ‘That’s right. Laugh.’ Or, hopefully: ‘Aren’t you shocked? Of course you are. I knew you would be.’

Rose said: ‘It’s no use your being all English with Flo. It gets her all upset.’

As for Rose, she could communicate a saga of sorrow with a slight droop of her mouth; the climax to a tale about her stepfather would be indicated by the folding together, in resignation, of her two small hands in her lap, not a word spoken. Her single syllable, Yes? could silence anyone in the house.

Rose made Flo uneasy, too. When she wanted to punish Flo she would sit, impassive, listening, refusing to register emotion, offering me the faintest of malicious smiles, until Flo said: ‘Ah, my Lord, you’re cross with me. Why are you cross with your Flo?’

I knew that the invitation to supper meant more than I understood. I had to come to know that a complicated ritual governed what went on in the house. I did not at first think about it, out of an emotion which I now realize was a middle-class hypocrisy about the value of money, the value of time. But Rose made it impossible for me not to think.

About the supper invitation she said: ‘I thought she would. She feels bad about getting too much for your rooms. She was expecting you to make her clean your rooms.’

‘I asked her to.’

‘She doesn’t like housework.’

‘Who does? But she came up and gave me a lesson about dusting and cleaning and ironing.’

‘I’d like to have seen it,’ said Rose. ‘What was your mother thinking of, sending you out into the world so ignorant?’

‘That’s what Flo said, too.’

‘Yes. Well, now she thinks she’ll make up by inviting you to eat sometimes. And, believe you me, it’s better that way, because she’s a cook better than anyone, even my mother.’ But just before we prepared ourselves to go down to supper, she became uneasy, and said: ‘You mustn’t mind Flo when she gets dirty-mouthed. Just laugh to please her and take no notice.’

On weekdays, the family did not eat together until the men came in from work, about six. This meal was called tea. No one went to bed until late, after midnight. At about eleven was another meal, called supper. At both Flo served a rich variety of foods. There was always a basis of salads, cake, different kinds of bread and cheeses and fruit. Flo always cooked a different, fresh main dish for both meals. It might be spaghetti, some kind of meat, a pie, or chicken. The late meal, just before everyone went to bed, was the one they most enjoyed and lingered over. Besides, it was by tradition what Flo called a dirt session.

On that evening when Rose and I went downstairs, the men were already waiting to be served at the table. They wore, as always after work, clean white singlets. The basement was always steaming hot from the stove and from the electric fire which was never turned off. Flo was making a cauldron of spaghetti which filled the steamy air full of the odours of garlic and olive oil and meat and cheese. We sat around the table, sprawling, our elbows resting, while Flo heaped our plates. Aurora, who never went to bed before her parents, was sitting on Dan’s lap. She had on a white tight nightgown, over which her black curls, Flo’s pride, cascaded to her waist. She had her arm around Dan’s thick neck, and was sucking her thumb. Although there were blue bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes, she continued to observe everything that went on, sleepily blinking, and nodding off, then forcing herself awake. Her smile seemed as full of sharp knowledgeable enjoyments as Flo’s.

Dan’s attitude to me was the same as his to Rose: he watched us appreciatively, savouring our possibilities, but with caution. Flo kept a sharp eye on his every glance.

She served herself last, and sat down, sighing, saying: ‘After all that gammon I ate before I haven’t room for a bite.’ We all ate enormously and praised Flo’s art from time to time, which she took as her due with a modest and satisfied smile. Dan chewed in ferocious mouthfuls, his white teeth glistening through the sauce, strands hanging from the corners of his lips. From time to time he pushed a spoonful into Aurora’s mouth, but she always made a face, chewed once or twice, and sat with the food, unswallowed, in her mouth.

‘That kid’s too sleepy to eat,’ Rose said.

‘It’s no good putting her to sleep until we go,’ said Flo. ‘She’ll just scream and scream.’

‘She needs a good spanking,’ said Rose. There was always a touch of sullenness in her voice when she mentioned Aurora. She disapproved of how she was brought up.

‘But I spank her, I do,’ said Flo eagerly, with a warm loving smile at Aurora, to which the child responded, like an accomplice.

When we could eat not another mouthful of spaghetti, or salad or cake, Flo took away the plates, and sat down again, her eyes bright and black, looking for an opening.

‘Look at your belly,’ she said suddenly to Rose, who had loosened her waist-band.

Rose gave me a glance which said: This was what I meant, don’t take any notice. She said to Flo, with careful unconcern: ‘What of it, after all that food?’

‘You look seven months. Doesn’t she, Jack? Doesn’t she, Dan?’

Dan grinned; Jack’s smile was eager and timid. Flo drew our attention to Jack, and said: ‘Look at him. He’d like to have a little bit with Rose.’ Jack blushed and looked eagerly, in spite of himself, at Rose. Who said good-naturedly: ‘Who, me? I don’t want a little boy in my bed.’

‘He’s got to learn sometime,’ Flo said.

‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘Then why pick on me? I’ve got to learn, too.’

‘That’s what I keep telling you,’ Flo said. ‘How old are you now? And as innocent as a baby.’

‘She’s twenty-three,’ said Dan to me, nodding and winking.

‘You shut up,’ said Rose to him, ‘you’re as old as you feel.’

‘It’s time you did feel,’ said Flo. ‘I keep telling you, Dan’s brother is like Dan, he likes a woman who knows a thing.’

Rose, who was suffering because of the long quarrel, which I still knew nothing about, with Dickie, Dan’s brother, looked annoyed and put a stop to this hare – ‘Then if Dickie wants it, regardless, he can pay for it.’

Jack sniggered. He sat listening, shocked, delighted, suffering, turning his eyes from one to another. Against the open, savage sensuality of Dan and Flo, and the heavy immobile good-nature Rose put on for these occasions, he looked defenceless and pathetic.

‘Yes. And he will, too, if he can get better.’ Suddenly she screamed at Dan: ‘Go on, Dan, tell her. Tell Rose about that dirty French girl. Tell what she did to you, the dirty beast.’

Dan smiled, and sat silent. Flo, aroused and angry, yet delighted; screamed again: ‘Well, tell her, go on.’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ said Rose primly, who had heard it often before.

‘Oh, yes you do. And you do too, don’t you, darling?’ – This to me, in a hasty aside. ‘Go on, Dan.’

Dan began. At first he kept his eyes on Rose, who sighed continuously with prepared digust. But soon he turned his glistening yellow gaze at his wife, who glanced back at him, terrified and squealing with delight.

‘And now you two had better go to bed,’ commented Rose, heavily, when the story was over.

‘What for, darling, we’re not sleepy, are we, Dan?’ Flo said, very innocent, catching our eyes one after another around the table.

Dan remained, heavily sitting and smiling and watching his wife, while Aurora sat smiling sleepily in his arms.

‘For God’s sake, put Aurora to bed,’ said Rose, disgusted. ‘Put her to sleep at least.’

Flo said: ‘Yes. Poor little girl, she’s sleepy.’ She whisked Aurora out of her father’s arms. Aurora let out a single howl of routine protest, and let her head fall on her mother’s shoulder.

‘Yes, she’s sleepy all right,’ said Flo, looking down at the child with a sort of malicious satisfaction. She took Aurora next door, while Rose grimaced at me, the corners of her mouth turned down, her eyebrows raised. Dan, now Flo was gone, was openly inciting both of us, grinning at us, his yellow eyes flaring.

Flo came back and saw him. ‘Ah, my Lord,’ she said sighing, ‘it’s a crime for a man like him to be wasted on one woman.’

‘Lend him to me tonight,’ said Rose, smiling and full of mischief at Dan.

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘Listen to you. And what would I get if I even so much as touched Rose?’

‘You try it and see,’ said Flo, giggling. She yawned, dramatically, and said: ‘Oh, I’m ever so sleepy. And there’s all that washing-up.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Rose.

‘Then I’ll just pop off into bed,’ said Flo, lingering in the bedroom door, her eyes on Dan. She went in and shut the door, while Dan sat a moment, smiling in appreciation. Jack was breathing heavily, looking at his stepfather with resentment, with wonder, with admiration, with hate. After a moment Dan rose and said to Jack: ‘You turn off the lights. Don’t forget now.’ He followed his wife into the bedroom, loosening his belt.

Jack, Rose and I remained. Now Rose’s attitude became brisk and maternal, encouraging no nonsense. She whisked through the washing and drying, while I helped her, and the boy sat despondently at the table, caressing a puppy, smiling at us, hoping for Rose to soften. He even made a sad little attempt to restore the sexy atmosphere by saying: ‘You do look seven months gone, Rose, like Flo said.’ But she said calmy: ‘And what do you know about it?’ When we left him, she patted his shoulder with triumphant patronage, and said: ‘Sleep tight. And keep your dreams clean.’

He slept in the kitchen on a stretcher, beside a box full of puppies. He was like a puppy himself – sleek, eager, and wistful.

I thought Rose treated him badly. When I said so, she gave me her heavy-lidded look, half-triumphant, half-sardonic, and said: ‘And why’s that? He’s a kid.’

‘Then don’t tease him.’

She was indignant. She did not understand me. I did not understand her. She was shocked because Jack, later, wandered in and out of my room, to talk about a film he’d just seen, or about his boxing. She was shocked when Bobby Brent dropped in at midnight with a business proposition before going upstairs to Miss Powell. No man was ever allowed inside her room. But she would go down to the basement in a waist slip and brassière, and if either Dan or Jack looked at her she would say scathingly: ‘Nothing better to polish your eyes on?’ in precisely the same way a fashionable woman might pointedly draw a cloak over her naked arms and shoulders at an over-direct stare from a man. I remember once Jack knocked on my door when I had a petticoat on, and I put on a dressing-gown before answering the door and letting him in. Rose said, amused: ‘You think he’s never seen a woman in a slip before?’ and teased me about being prudish. One night she was sitting in front of my fireplace in her nightgown, and Jack was lying on the floor turning over the physical culture magazines he read, when she unconcernedly lifted a bare arm to scratch where her brassiere had left a red mark under her breast. Jack said bitterly: ‘Oh, don’t mind me, please. I’m nothing but a bit of furniture.’

‘What’s biting you?’ she enquired, and when he blundered to his feet and slammed out of my room, swearing, she said to me, with perfect sincerity: ‘He’s a funny boy, isn’t he, all full of moods.’

‘But Rose, how can you tantalize him like that?’

‘Well, I don’t know, dear. I don’t really, the things you say, they’d make me blush if I didn’t know you. I can see I’m going to have to tell you about life.’

She had now taken my education over. It had begun over money, and when I got a job with a small engineering firm as secretary. I was earning seven pounds a week. I said something to Rose about living on seven pounds a week; and she gave me her heavy-lidded smile. ‘You make me laugh,’ she said.

‘But I do,’ I said. I was paying the fees for the council nursery, the rent, and the food out of that money. I found it hard, but it gave me pleasure to be able to do it.

‘For one thing,’ said Rose, settling down to the task of instructing me. ‘For one thing, there’s clothes. You and the kid, you have all the clothes you brought with you. Now suppose there was a fire tomorrow, what’d you use for money for clothes?’

‘But there isn’t going to be a fire.’

‘Why not? Look how you live. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. You say to yourself, well I’m having some bad luck just now, so you pull your belt a bit tighter, while it lasts. That’s not being poor. You always go on as if you’ll win the pools tomorrow.’

‘Well, I hate having to worry all the time about what might happen.’

‘Yes?’ said Rose, silencing me.

‘All right, then, you show me.’

‘Yes, I’m going to. Because you worry me, you do really. Suppose you don’t get married, suppose that book of yours isn’t any good?’

I was ready to listen, because this was one of the times when I believed I might not write again. I found I was too tired at night to write. My day, for some weeks, went like this. My son woke early, and I dressed and fed him and took him to the nursery before going to work. At lunchtime I went to the shops, took food home and cleaned the place out. I picked him up from the nursery at five; and by the time he was fed and bathed and read to, and he was ready for sleep, it was about nine. Then, in theory, was my time for writing. But not only could I not write, I could not even imagine myself writing. The personality ‘writer’ was so far removed from me, it was like thinking about another person, not myself. As it turned out, after two months or so, I got an advance from a publisher on a previously-written book, and my troubles were over. But during that time, I was ready to listen to Rose’s strictures.

‘No,’ she would say patiently, as she took the match from my fingers and replaced it carefully in the box. ‘Not like that. Why, when there’s a fire burning?’ She tore a strip of newspaper, made a spill, and lit her cigarette and mine.

She would say: ‘I have a friend, you don’t know her. She went into the chemist at the corner for a lipstick. But she could have got the same lipstick along the road for tuppence less. There’s no sense in that. She’s got no sense at all. She dropped some tea on her skirt. Well, round the corner there’s a cleaner would’ve done it for one-and-nine. But she just goes into the nearest and pays two-and-six. Where’s the sense in it? Can you tell me?’

Rose earned four pounds a week. She was underpaid, and knew it. The managers of shops in the neighbourhood were always offering her better-paid jobs; but she wanted to stay where she was because Dickie, Dan’s brother, worked in a cigarette shop across the street. Nor would she ask her employer for a rise. ‘I do all the work in that place,’ she said. ‘She just runs off to shop and carry-on, leaving me there alone. That husband of hers, all he knows about is the inside of watches. If a customer comes in, he diddles about, and loses everything and then shouts Rose, Rose. And I know how much money they make because I see the books. Well, if they don’t know the right way to behave, the way I look at it, it’s their funeral. Let them enjoy their guilty consciences. They know I’m worth twice that money to them. Well, if they think I’m going down on my knees to ask for it, I’m not going to give them that pleasure, they needn’t think it.’

Rose lived well inside her four pounds a week. What it cost her to do it were time and leisure, commodities she knew the value of, but which she did not consider to be her right. Half an hour’s skilled calculations might go into working out whether it was worth taking a bus to another part of London where she knew there was a nail varnish at sixpence less than where we lived. She would muse aloud, like this: ‘If I go by bus, that’s three-halfpence. Threepence altogether. I’d save threepence on the varnish. If I walk there’s shoe-leather, and what repairs cost these days, it’s not worth it. I know,’ she concluded, triumphant. ‘I’ll wear those shoes of mine that pinch me, and then it won’t cost nothing at all.’ We would walk together to the shop where the nail varnish was sixpence cheaper, and she would snatch up her prize from the rich market of London, saying: ‘There, see, what did I tell you? Now I’m sixpence to the good.’ But walking back she would stop on an impulse to buy half a pound of cherries from one of the despised barrow-boys, against whom she was continually warning me, so that the saved sixpence was thrown to the winds; but that was different, that was pleasure. ‘I’ll have to go easy on cigarettes tomorrow,’ she would say, smiling delightedly. ‘But it’s worth it.’

All her carefuly handling of money was to this end – that she might buy pleasure: that once in six months she could take a taxi instead of walking, and tip the taxi driver threepence more than was necessary; that she could buy a pair of good nylons once a week; that she could throw money away on fruit when the fancy took her, instead of walking down to the street markets and getting it cheap.

Inside this terrible, frightening city, Rose had created for herself a sort of tunnel, shored against danger by habit, known buildings, and trusted people. Rose’s London was the half-mile of streets where she had been born and brought up, populated by people she trusted; the house where she now lived, surrounded by them – mostly hostile people; and the West End. She knew every face we saw in the area we lived in, and if she did not, made it her business to find out. She knew every policeman and plain-clothes man who might pounce on her if she did not do right; she would nudge me and point out some man on a pavement, saying: ‘See ‘im? He’s a copper in civvies. Makes me sick. Well, I wonder who he’s after this time.’ She spoke with a melancholoy respect, almost pride.

Rose’s West End was a fixed journey, on a certain bus route, to a certain Corner House and one of half a dozen cinemas. It was walking back up Regent Street for window shopping.

Flo’s London did not even include the West End, since she had left the restaurant in Holborn. It was the basement she lived in; the shops she was registered at; and the cinema five minutes’ walk away. She had never been inside a picture gallery, a theatre or a concert hall. Flo would say: ‘Let’s go to the River one fine afternoon and take Oar.’ She had not seen the Thames, she said, since before the war. Rose had never been on the other side of the river. Once, when I took my son on a trip by river bus, Rose played with the idea of coming too for a whole week. Finally she said: ‘I don’t think I’d like those parts, not really. I like what I’m used to. But you go and tell me about it after.’

On the evenings when Rose decided life owed her some fun, she would say to me: ‘You’re coming with me to the West End tonight, whether you like it or not.’ She began to dress a good hour before it was time to start. I could hear her bath running downstairs, and the smell of her bath powder drifted up through the house. Soon afterwards she came in, without make-up, looking young and excited. I never found out how old she was. She used to say, with a laugh, she was twenty-three, but I think she was about thirty.

‘Rose, I wish you wouldn’t put on so much make-up.’

‘Don’t be silly. If I don’t wear plenty, Dickie says to me, what’s up with you, are you flying the red flag?’

‘But you haven’t seen Dickie for weeks.’

‘But we might run into him. That’s one of the reasons I’m taking you. He always takes me where we’re going, and if he’s got another woman, then I’ll catch him out and have a good laugh.’

Soon she had painted her daytime face over her real face, and had moulded her hair into a solid mass of black scrolls and waves. When Rose was dressed and made-up she always looked the same. She was conforming to some image of herself that was not the fashionable image for that year, but about three years ago. She took fashion papers, but the way we were supposed to look that year struck her as being extreme. She used to laugh at the pictures of fashion models, say: ‘They do look silly, don’t they?’ and go off to her room to make herself into something that seemed to her safe and respectable, because she was used to it.