In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing
her or me, I said to Flo.’
Next day negotiations began. Flo took me into the big room and said I wouldn’t like it, not really, not with all those cracks in the walls. I said I would like it. There was a small room on the landing below, with a concealed cooker in it. My son could sleep in that. The two rooms would suit me very well.
‘And what,’ asked Flo, ‘were you thinking of paying?’
‘But it’s the landlord’s business to fix the rent,’ I said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Flo. ‘Oh dear, oh dear! Drat it. Oh, my Lord, and Dan’s at work, too, and I’m on my own.’
‘Well, you could discuss it with him.’
‘Poor Miss Powell, she needs a big room for herself.’
‘If a single woman wants a big room, then a woman with a child surely does?’
‘But you wouldn’t call her single,’ said Flo. She began to laugh. ‘Oh, that Bobby, he’s a case. And those great big eyes of his. When he looks at me, I go all funny where Dan would kill me if he knew.’
‘Well, I’m quite sure his beautiful eyes make it easy for him to get a room for Miss Powell.’
‘Ah, that poor Miss Powell. The landlord where she is is being ever so nasty. I’m not nasty, am I, dear? And look how nice my Oar and your Peter play.’
‘Yes, I know. He loves being here.’
And you do, too, I can tell. Ah, my Lord, what shall I do, I shall have to talk to Dan.’
‘That would be a good idea.’
For a week I stayed at the top of the house, hoping for the room next to Rose, waiting for my job to start. Under the roof I was cut off from the rest of the house. The two rooms under me were empty. They were still full of rubble and mess from the bombing. The plan now was that Dan should clean them out and distemper them, and then either I or Miss Powell would take them. I said I didn’t like them. Flo said that was because I couldn’t imagine them cleaned up and painted. Dan was going to start work, in his evenings. Then I would see. I said, either the big room or nothing. It was a war of nerves.
Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth, that seems abandoned, but which sounds, when one puts one’s ear to it, with a continuous vibrant humming. Even when the door shut, it was not long before the silence grew into an orchestra of sound. Beneath my floor a tap dripped softly all day, in a blithe duet with the dripping of the tap on the landing. Two floors down, where the Skeffingtons lived, was a radio. Sometimes she forgot it when she went to work, and, as the hours passed, the wavelength slipped, so that melodies and voices flowed upwards, blurring and mingling. This sound had for accompaniment the splashing water, like conversation heard through music and dripping rain. In the darkening afternoons I was taken back to a time when I lay alone at night and listened to people talking through several walls, while the rain streamed from the eves. Sometimes it was as if the walls had dissolved, and I was left sitting under a tree, listening to birds talking from branch to branch while the last fat drops of a shower spattered on the leaves, and a ploughman yelled encouragement to his beasts in the field over the hill. Sometimes I put my ear to the wall and heard how, as the trains went past and the buses rocked their weight along the street, shock after shock came up through brick and plaster, so that the solid wall had the fluidity of dancing atoms, and I felt the house, the street, the pavement, and all the miles and miles of houses and streets as a pattern of magical balances, a weightless structure, as if this city hung on water, or on sound. Being alone in that little box of ceiling board and laths frightened me.
At last Flo came up and said that the two rooms beneath me were ready, and I could move down when I liked. I examined them and said no. They were very small. She said: ‘You can have the big room for five pounds a week.’ She sounded offhand, because of her fright at my probable reaction.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.
She laughed and said, ‘Then you say.’
‘Two pounds,’ I said.
‘Ah, my Lord, are you laughing at me?’
‘You say,’ I said.
‘Four pounds fifteen.’
‘Two pounds ten.’
‘Darling, sweetheart, you’re laughing at your poor Flo.’
‘You say, then.’
At last we settled for three-ten, a sum which caused Rose to be angry with me. ‘You could have got it for three-five,’ she said. ‘You make me cross, you really do.’
‘Well, I shall be next to you, and Peter will be very happy that we’re staying.’
‘All the same, why throw five bob a week into the dustcan? Well, you make Flo clean your room for you, then.’
‘Is it likely?’
‘Well, I’m not going to, and someone must – where was you dragged up, I’d like to know, you don’t even know how to clean a floor?’
‘We were spoiled. We had servants.’
‘You had something. Because to watch you sweeping is enough to make a cat laugh.’
Flo and Dan and Rose and I stood in the empty big room that evening. ‘It’s such a lovely room,’ said Flo. ‘And you can hardly notice them cracks.’
‘What we’re here for, is furniture,’ said Rose.
‘You can have that lovely bed from upstairs.’
‘She’ll want somewhere for her clothes,’ said Rose.
‘You can have that lovely cupboard from the landing.’
Rose said: ‘You make me sick.’
‘But we want to furnish her nice, dear.’
‘You do, do you? Then I’ll show you how.’ With which Rose ran all over the house, marking out pieces to be put in my room. Dan did her bidding, silently; while Flo stood, unconsciously wringing her hands as one bit of furniture after another came to rest in my room, and the little room downstairs. Rose told me afterwards that she had said in the basement that if they didn’t treat me right, she’d be so ashamed she’d leave. Since Rose did half of Flo’s work for her, this was effective. When the rooms were ready, Rose said: ‘That’s a bit more like.’ Dan gave her a grudging look of admiration. By this time we were all in good humour. Flo saw Dan looking, and said sharply, but laughing: ‘And you keep your eyes off poor Rose. I know what you’re thinking. Can’t look at a woman without thinking of it!’ Dan gave her his bared-teeth grin. Rose said: ‘Oh, shut up. And now I’ll help you get the supper, Flo.’
‘I should think so,’ said Flo. ‘Dear me, oh, dear me, life is so hard these days.’
Rose gave me a wink as she went out, and whispered, ‘Now you settle yourself, and don’t you let Flo take any of this stuff back tomorrow. I’m telling you for your own good. I’ll be in after supper for a nice chat.’
Now I was in the heart of the house. Immediately above me, in two large rooms, were the Skeffingtons. I had not yet seen them. He was away most of the time. She left for work before I did, and once she was in her rooms, seldom came out. I knew about them from Flo, through a succession of nods, winks, and hoarse whispers. Her: ‘She’s ever such a sweet woman’ – made, as these remarks always were, as if a sweet tenant were something I was getting extra, thrown in, for the rent, was sometimes: ‘Poor thing, she’s brave, and she pays her rent so regular.’ And sometimes: ‘What she has to put up with, no one would believe. Men are all the same, beasts, every one.’ On the other hand, she often observed with lip-licking smile that Mr Skeffington was just like a film star, and Mrs Skeffington didn’t appreciate him. These two states of mind were determined by whether we got a good night’s sleep or not. Usually not. There were few nights I was not woken by the persistent frightened