In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing
‘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.
‘Come on, get yourself dressed.’
‘But I am dressed.’
‘If you’re coming out with me, then you’ve got to dress up.’
She pulled out the dress she wanted me to wear, and stood over me till I put it on. She knew I did not like the Corner House, but tolerated my dislike. She was only exerting her rights as a neighbour, exactly as I might go into her and say: ‘I’m depressed, please come and sit with me.’ At such times she put aside whatever she was occupied with, and came at once; she recognized a tone in my voice; she knew what was due to communal living.
We always walked to the bus-stop, and it had to be the same bus-stop, and the same bus, though there were several which would have done. She kept pulling me back, saying: ‘No, not that bus. That’s not the number I like.’ And if the bus did not have seats free, downstairs, on the