by P. D. James
The blonde shifted her eyes to Philippa, apparently to indicate that she was now prepared to do business. The bandy-legged man, taking the hint, made for the door.
“Well, see you.”
“See you,” the two women chorused together with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
Philippa said her piece. She was looking for a small, partly furnished, two-roomed flat for herself and her mother in central London for about two months.
“Until I go up to university. There’s just the two of us. I don’t mind doing something to it if it’s basically in good order and fairly central.”
“What sort of rent were you thinking of?”
“What sort of rents are there?”
“Depends. Fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred and more. We don’t usually get anything under fifty a week. It’s the Rent Act, you see. Doesn’t pay a landlord to rent when he can’t get the tenants out.”
“Yes, I know all about the Rent Act. I could pay cash in advance.”
The woman at the other desk looked up but didn’t speak.
The blonde went on: “Two months, you say? Most landlords look for a bit longer.”
“I thought they liked short lets. Isn’t that why they let to foreigners because they know they can get them out? I can promise we’ll be out by the autumn.”
The red-headed woman spoke.
“We don’t take promises. There’d be an agreement. Mr. Wade, the solicitor round the corner, draws it up for us. You did say cash?”
Philippa made herself look hard into the calculating eyes.
“For ten percent discount.”
The blonde laughed.
“Are you kidding? Anything we get to rent furnished we can let without a discount.”
The woman at the other desk said: “What about that two-roomed place with kitchen and shared bathroom in Delaney Street?”
“It’s taken, Mrs. Bealing. That young couple with the kid and the baby on the way. They viewed yesterday. I told you.”
“Let’s have a look at the card.”
The blonde opened the top left-hand drawer of her desk and flicked through a card index. The card was passed across. The red-headed woman looked at Philippa.
“Three months’ cash in advance. He won’t let it go for less than three months. He’s asking one hundred and ninety a month. Say five hundred and fifty for the three months, cash down, no cheques. And it’s what’s called a holiday letting. That means that the Rent Act doesn’t apply.”
She had just short of one thousand pounds in her bank account saved from birthday presents and holiday jobs. But money, although she never spent it without thought, had never been important to her. She had always believed that she could earn money. Of all her needs, it seemed to her the most easily acquired. She said with only a moment’s hesitation: “All right. But if it’s taken?”
“Please yourself. It’s up to you.”
The blonde glanced at Philippa with the amused, slightly contemptuous look of a woman who has long given up expecting people to behave well, but can still gain some satisfaction from watching them behave badly. Philippa nodded. The older woman picked up the telephone and dialled.
“Mr. Baker? The Raterite Agency here about the flat. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, the fact of the matter is that Mr. Coates isn’t happy. Yes, I know he’s in New York. He rang. He doesn’t like the idea of your wife managing those narrow stairs, not in her condition. And he doesn’t want a let with children. Yes, I know, but I’m the one who makes the decisions and I wasn’t here when you came in. And then there would be the pram in the hall. No, it wouldn’t be any good writing to him. I don’t know where he’ll be for the next month or two. Sorry. Yes, we’ll let you know. Up to forty pounds a week. Yes. I know, Mr. Baker. Yes. We’ve got all the details. Yes. Yes. I don’t think it’s very helpful to take that attitude. After all, nothing has been signed.”
She took up her cigarette again, and returned to her paper. Without looking at Philippa she said: “You can view it now if you like. Number 12, Delaney Street. It’s at the bottom of Mell Street off the Edgware Road just this side of Praed Street. Two rooms, one kitchen. Use of bathroom. The bathroom’s shared with the lock-up greengrocery on the ground floor. You won’t find anything cheaper, not in central London. It’s a snip. It’d be twice the price, but Mr. Coates went to New York in a hurry and he wants a short let.”
“Is it furnished?”
The blonde said: “Not so as you’d notice. Well, most people like to bring in their own bits and pieces. But it’s a furnished letting.”
“I’d like to view it now, please.”
She signed for the keys, but didn’t at once make her way to Delaney Street. It seemed to her that once there the decision would have been made. If she were going to reject the flat she must do so now. She felt the need to stride out vigorously, to co-ordinate thought with action. But the pavement was too crowded; the pressure of bodies, the tangle of pushchairs and trolleys forced her restless feet from the kerb into the stream of traffic. Almost without thinking she turned into the café about a hundred yards down Edgware Road and found a seat at a grubby formica-topped table near the window. A lank-haired waiter in a stained jacket slouched over from the counter and she ordered a coffee. The coffee when it arrived in a plastic cup, pale, lukewarm and tasteless, was literally undrinkable. Glancing round at her fellow customers who were not only managing to drink it—although with no apparent signs of pleasure—but had actually bought food, overcooked hamburgers, flabby chips, fried eggs curling brown at the edges and swimming in grease, she reflected that one at least of Maurice’s axioms was true: The poor always got worse value pound for pound than the rich.
The window was festooned with wicker baskets of dusty artificial flowers and trailing vineleaves. Against the glittering panorama of the traffic the pavement was heaving with life. From time to time, faces, grey, brown or black, moved momentarily from the glass to study the price list. They seemed to be staring in at her; face succeeded face like a peripatetic jury, mute witnesses of her moral dilemma.
Nothing she could recognize from her past had equipped her to deal with it. She slipped the key ring on her thumb so that the two keys, the Yale which must be for the shared front door, the Chubb for the door to the flat itself, lay cold and heavy against her palm, reinforcing symbolism. Her moral training—indoctrination, Maurice would have called it, smiling a self-satisfied acceptance of his own honesty—had been a matter of semantics, of the intellectualization of a comfortable, ethical conformity. You behaved reasonably well to other people in the interest of certain abstractions: good public order, a pleasant life, natural justice—whatever that meant—the greatest good of the greatest number. Most of all, you behaved well to others to ensure that they behaved well to you. The implication was that the clever, the witty, the beautiful or the rich had less need of these expedients; it was the more seemly in them to set an example.
She could find no answer in her schooling. The South London Collegiate was nominally a Christian foundation but the fifteen minutes’ corporate worship with which the school started the day had always seemed to her no more than a convenient celebration of tradition, a way of ensuring that the whole school was present when the headmistress read out the day’s notices. Some of the girls practised a religion. Anglicanism, particularly High Anglicanism, was accepted as a satisfying compromise between reason and myth, justified by the beauty of its liturgy, a celebration of Englishness; but essentially it was the universal religion of liberal humanism laced with ritual to suit each individual taste. She had never supposed that for Gabriel, professed High Anglican, it had ever been more. The small number of Roman Catholics, Christian Scientists and Noncomformists were regarded as eccentrics governed by family tradition. Nothing that any of them professed to believe interfered with the central dogma of the whole school, the supremacy of human intelligence. The girls, like their brothers at Winchester, Westminster and St. Paul’s, were conditioned from childhood to a fierce intell
ectual competitiveness. She herself had been so conditioned from the time of her entry to the lower school. They were marked for success as if with invisible stigmata; the blessed company of the redeemed, redeemed from monotony, from poverty, from inconsequence, from failure. The universities they would go to, the professions they would choose, the men they would marry, were ranked in a hierarchy, unstated but subtly understood. She didn’t feel that this was the only world in which she could find a place. She was a writer; all worlds were open to her. But it was the world into which Maurice had raised himself, into which she had been adopted, and she had no quarrel with it. After her foragings among the philistines this civilized city would always open its doors to her, not as an alien but as a freeman.
She supposed that Dame Beatrice, who visited the school once a week to teach moral philosophy, would have had an answer to her dilemma, if asking more questions and discussing their relevance, whether they had, in fact, any meaning, was an answer. She recalled the last weekly essay, which was in itself a diploma of superiority since only the upper sixth attended Dame Beatrice’s lectures.
“Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Discuss with reference to Hegel’s Criticism of Kant’s System of Moral Philosophy.”
And what relevance had that to the opposing claims to a cheap flat of an ex-convict who was a murderess and a pregnant wife? Except that the pregnant wife had got there first. There was a notice on the board in the school hall. The Chaplain is available to girls in his study by appointment or on Friday from twelve-thirty to two p.m. and on Wednesday from four to five-thirty. A spiritual stud. He was a humourless man and the girls had giggled at the infelicitous wording. But he would, she supposed, have had his answer: “Behold, I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”
But that wasn’t possible by an act of will. Surely the faithful were justified in replying, “But Lord, show us how”? And He, that itinerant man/God, whom no one would have heard of if he had died sane and in his bed would have had his answer too: “I have.”
The café was not the most suitable place for the resolution of a moral dilemma. The noise was appalling and there was a shortage of seats. Harassed women with folded pushchairs and children clutching at their coats were looking for a place. She had sat there long enough. She left a fivepenny tip under the saucer of unfinished coffee, dropped the keys in her shoulder bag and set off resolutely down the Edgware Road towards Mell Street.
14
Delaney Street was at the Lisson Grove end of Mell Street, a narrow street with, on the left, a terrace of small shops with living accommodation above. There was a pub at the end, the Grenadier, with a swinging sign of some splendour, then a betting shop, secretive behind painted glass, giving out a low murmur like a hive of angry bees. Then came a hairdresser, the front of his window strewn with advertisements for hair tonics and lotions, and the back occupied by four dummy heads. The dolls’ blank eyes turned upwards in the gaping sockets, and the wigs, dry as straw, gave the heads the look of guillotine victims of some ancient holocaust, needing only a jagged red line around each severed neck to complete the illusion. The door was open, and Philippa could see two customers awaiting their turn, and a wizened old man, comb poised, busying himself with the back of a customer’s neck.
A green door with “12” painted in black and a Victorian iron knocker and letter box was between a junk shop and a greengrocer whose open-fronted shop had once been the ground floor of the house. On the fascia was painted “Monty’s Fruit and Veg.” Both shops had spilled out onto the pavement. The greengrocer’s stall, covered with a mat of lurid artificial grass, was piled with fruit and vegetables, displayed with an eye to artistic effect. An intricate pyramid of oranges gleamed against the dimness of the inner shop; bunches of bananas and grapes hung from a rail above the back of the stall and the boxes of burnished apples, the carrots and tomatoes were arranged in a balanced pattern as if for a church harvest festival. A stocky young man with greasy fair hair straggling to his shoulders, a podgy, amiable face and huge hands, was pouring potatoes from the pan of his scales into the overstretched shopping bag held by the mittened hands of an elderly customer, so well-wrapped against the unkind summer that little of his face was visible between the flat cloth cap and the swathed woollen scarves.
Now that she was here she found herself torn between anxiety to see the flat and a curious reluctance to put the key in the door. It was almost as an exercise in self-control as well as a wish to postpone disappointment that she made herself take stock of her surroundings.
The junk shop looked exciting. Outside there was an assortment of old furniture: four bentwood chairs, two more with broken cane seats, a sturdy kitchen table bearing boxes of paperback novels and old magazines, an ancient treadle sewing machine, an enamel washtub filled with assorted crockery, most of it chipped, and a wooden mangle. Victorian prints and amateur watercolours in a variety of frames rested against the table legs. On the pavement was a square cardboard box of linen in which a couple of young women were rummaging happily. In the shop window every inch of space was occupied. Philippa gained an impression of articles jumbled together, irrespective of merit and, presumably, of price. She could see chipped Staffordshire, delicately painted cups and saucers, dishes and bowls, candlesticks and horse brasses, while an antique doll with a delicate china face and straw-filled bulging legs was perched in the pride of place.
She inserted the Yale key in the lock, aware as she did so of the interested glance of the greengrocer, and found herself in a narrow hall. The hall smelled of apples and loam, a strong rich tang which, she guessed, overlaid less-agreeable smells. It was very narrow—too narrow for a pram, she told herself—and obstructed by two sacks of potatoes and a meshed bag of onions. To the right an open door led into the shop; a second, with a glass panel, gave sight of a back yard. She decided to explore this later, although the glimpse of it immediately filled her mind with visions of climbing plants and geranium-filled tubs. A flight of steep, drugget-covered stairs led to a back room on a half landing. She opened the door gingerly and saw that this was the bathroom. The large old-fashioned bath was heavily stained round the waste pipe, but otherwise surprisingly clean. There was a small washbasin encrusted with grime and with a slimy face-flannel jammed into the soap dish. The lavatory had a heavy mahogany seat, a high cistern and a chain, lengthened by string. Another length of string was stretched across the bath. It sagged with the weight of a pair of jeans and two grubby towels.
She went up a further short flight of stairs to the flat door. The key turned in the Chubb lock without difficulty and she passed into a short hall. After the dimness of the stairway the flat seemed full of light, perhaps because the doors to the three rooms were all open. She moved first into the one at the front which she guessed would be the principal room running the whole width of the house. The curtains were drawn back and a single beam of sunlight shone through the dirty window panes so that the air was iridescent with dancing motes of dust. It wasn’t large, she judged about fifteen feet by ten, but was pleasantly proportioned with a carved cornice and with two windows facing over the street. On the left-hand wall was a Victorian grate, its hood patterned with a border of scallop shells and decorated with a design of beribboned grape vines; above it was a plain wooden overmantel. The grate was stuffed with brown and brittle old newspapers, and the tiled surround was littered with cigarette butts, but the air held no taint of cigarette smoke, only the faint autumnal smell of vegetables and apples. The room was shabby. The paint on the window frames had chipped and flaked to the bare wood. The carpet was a dull green, splodged and ringed in front of the fire as if the occupier had placed his hot cooking pans on the floor. But the wallpaper, patterned in small posies of rosebuds, had faded to a pleasant pinkish brown, and was surprisingly intact, and although the ceiling obviously hadn’t been painted for years, there were no ominous cracks, no hanging swathes of lining paper. A long cord
with a single unshaded light bulb on the end had been drawn from the middle of the ceiling and stretched over a hood so that the light was suspended over the single divan bed.
The divan was covered with a woollen blanket made of hand-knitted squares in different colours. Philippa drew it back and saw with relief that the mattress was clean, so clean that it looked new. There were two pillows, also new, but no other bedclothes. Between the windows was a small but sturdy oak wardrobe with carved doors. It stood firm when she pulled open the door. Inside were two empty hangers and, folded on the floor, three grey army blankets exuding a smell of mothballs. The only other items of furniture were a wicker chair with a limp fawn cushion, an oblong table with a centre drawer, and a bentwood rocking chair with a wicker seat.
The windows were curtained in a coarse unlined linen, slung from wooden hooks on an old-fashioned bamboo curtain rail. They had the creased, grubby look of curtains which had been laid aside, unused, but the material was good. Standing behind them she looked out over the narrow street. Opposite but about thirty yards to the left was another pub, the Blind Beggar. It was a high Dutch-fronted building with the date 1896 painted in heavy curved numerals on an oval plaque under the central gable. The swinging sign, which was competently painted and highly sentimental, was almost certainly the original. It showed a bent white-haired man with sightless eyes being led by a golden-haired child. A narrow passage ran down the side of the building, separating it from a wasteland bordered with a fence of high corrugated iron. It looked like a bomb site which had been neglected since the war but, she thought, more probably it had been cleared for some development which had been thwarted for lack of money. It had been concreted, but the surface had cracked and grass and weeds waist-high had burgeoned in the crevices. Three vehicles had been parked there, a van and two saloons. They had the isolated battered look of ramshackle rejects abandoned in a small oasis of decrepitude. Next to the car park was a second-hand bookshop. The window was half shuttered but two trestle tables outside the shop were bright with the green and orange of old paperbacks. Next came a small general store, the window plastered with notices of special offers. On the corner of Delaney Street and Mell Street was a launderette. As she watched, a coloured woman came out lugging two plastic bags, presumably of washed clothes, which she humped onto an empty pushchair. But otherwise the road was empty, lapped in a mid-morning lull.