In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary

by Doris Lessing

  Dan said, looking steadily at Jack: ‘And now I’m going right upstairs, to start work. It’ll take a month or more. And you’re going to do something for your keep for once.’

  ‘Oh, not tonight,’ cried Flo, ‘not tonight, sweetheart. It’ll do tomorrow.’

  He shouted at her: ‘You get me my supper. And then I’m to start.’ And at Jack: ‘Well, are you coming?’

  Jack shrilled up; ‘Why should I? When I work for you it’s for nothing. I can work every night till one or two in the morning, and I don’t get a penny for it.’

  Flo said: ‘Jack, don’t talk back to Dan.’

  Dan said: ‘So you don’t? And who feeds you? Do you think you’d get the food you get from your mother on thirty bob a week?’

  Flo said: ‘Oh. Dan, oh. Jack – but the food’s nothing, I just make it up as I go along …’

  Dan said: ‘You know the restaurant business. Tell me what it’d cost for Jack to get fed as he gets fed here.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart…’ began Flo, and burst into tears.

  Rose took my elbow, and we went quietly to the door, ‘Quick,’ she whispered, ‘or the Lord knows what we’ll have to be witness to.’

  Jack backed against the wall. Dan was on his feet. Jack shouted out to his mother, who had her hands over her face: ‘And you’re not my mother since you married him, you’ve not treated me right since …’ Dan slapped him across the face. Jack fell over and picked himself up, crouching under the powerful figure of the man towering over him. He was cut off from help in the corner. He shrieked: ‘Mum, mum, don’t let him hit me.’

  ‘Are you going to help me get that place straight or not?’ ‘No, no. I won’t. Why should I? You don’t pay me for my work.’

  Rose and I had reached the bottom of the stairs. She was clinging on to me. I could feel her trembling again, as she had earlier in Court. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I feel sick. People shouting, people fighting, it makes me feel all sick.’

  There was a silence in the room we had left. ‘Thank the Lord,’ whispered Rose. ‘They’ve stopped.’

  There was a yell of pain from Dan. ‘He’s bitten me,’ he shouted. ‘Your precious son has bitten my thumb right through.’ Flo sobbed out: ‘Dan, Jack. Dan, Jack …’

  Jack had rushed out and was in the dark passage with us. In a second Dan was after him. He picked up the boy in his arms and with one hand opened the outer door and flung him outside on to the cement of the passage. Jack got to his hands and knees, Dan was over him, and kicked him. Jack crawled up the steps out of sight, groaning, as Dan kicked at him, in a heavily-breathing silence.

  There was a screech of brakes as a lorry swerved. Dan shouted: ‘And you needn’t come back, this isn’t your home any longer.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Rose, ‘help me, dear. Help me out of here.’ I got her up into the hallway, where she leaned against a wall, eyes shut, her hand at her stomach.

  In a moment she opened her eyes, smiled and said grimly: ‘Well, Dan’s done it at last. He’s been trying to pick a fight long enough.’ Beside Rose a door stood open that I had always seen shut. ‘Go in and have a look,’ she said. ‘You’ll never see nothing like that again in your life.’

  There were two rather large rooms, and a small glassed-in space that had once been a conservatory in a middle-class house. The rooms were high-ceilinged, well-proportioned. But it was not possible to see this at first glance, because the walls were not surfaced, but had a shaggy protuberant look, and the ceilings appeared as if they were growing fungus, or mosses. The window into the street was open, and all the surfaces were in movement. Damp paper hung in strips and shreds from above, stirring and writhing. All around the walls it looked as if soiled stuffing burst from cushions, and wriggled and coiled as it forced its way out through a dingy, yellowing-grey substance. The floors were so thick in dirt that pieces of string and paper and plaster were embedded in a hard gluelike lumpy surface. Shreds of dirty lace hung at the lower half of the windows. Everywhere were bits of newspaper, bits of rag, smelly scraps of food. The smell was a sour thick reek. There was a small iron bed, with a thin stained mattress, and some cardboard cartons, balanced on top of each other. A wash-basin was yellow with grease.

  And that was all. I came out, shutting the door on the smell. Rose had recovered. Flo had come up the stairs. She said: ‘Why does everything have to happen together, can you tell me that?’

  ‘Because people make them happen together, that’s why,’ said Rose.

  Chapter Six

  Winning the case was the beginning of a revolution in that house; in a few weeks everything had changed, and I was looking for somewhere else to live. First: Dan and Flo bought themselves a television set on the hire-purchase to celebrate their victory. At the time this didn’t seem nearly as important as the second event – Dan went up to the War Damage people and made a successful scene; the workmen moved in next week.

  ‘It’ll be ever so nice to have a telly,’ said Flo. ‘We can all sit and watch in the evenings and have a good time.’

  This did not happen; at least, not at first. We had a great inaugural party on the evening the set was installed, with Flo’s best spaghetti and a rich almond cake and beer. It wasn’t a success. Rose had given up a date with Dickie; I wanted to work; and Dan resented every minute he was taken away from his labours on the empty rooms on the first floor. ‘Besides,’ Flo kept saying, with defiant glances at Dan, who scowled every time the boy’s name was mentioned: ‘It’s not the same without Jack, is it?’

  From one day to the next, the basement fell silent. The age of the radio was over, no longer was the house filled with the roar of sound – music and voices. The yapping and playing of the half-dozen puppies distracted Flo from her magic box, and she disposed of them. Soon the basement was inhabited by Flo, Aurora, a single sleep-drugged cat, and the television screen. Flo kept coming upstairs to say pathetically to Rose and myself: ‘Why don’t you like it, darling, why don’t you like our lovely telly?’

  Rose said: ‘I do like it, but I’ve got better things to think of.’ Rose at that time was oblivious of everything but Dickie, hardly saw her, save in the mornings before she went to work, when she came into my room, to run a wetted finger over her eyebrows, smiling at herself contentedly in the mirror, and to say: ‘That Dickie, he makes me laugh. Do you know what he said last night? He said I’m like eating icecream. That’s when we was in bed. He made me have no clothes on, I could have died blushing, but he just laughed. Well, to think what I was missing so long, I could kick myself. But don’t hold it against me, because I don’t come and talk to you the way we used to have our nice times. I’m still your friend. You wait, when I and Dickie get married, you can come and see me when he’s out and we’ll have a good laugh.’

  Flo said to me: ‘Married, she says? Is that what she says? Well, have you told her to get in the family way? And you call yourself her friend? You think men care about lipstick and hair this way and that way – well, she’ll find out.’

  This was a reference to the revolution in Rose’s appearance. She had seen a fashion programme on Flo’s television; she brooded about it for some days; then suddenly went off and had her hair cut short and soft, and was wearing light make-up. Her eyebrows were no longer black half-circles; her mouth was its own shape. All this went well with her happiness, and she looked like a girl.

  But Flo merely shrugged, and said: ‘We’ll see, you mark my words.’

  Meanwhile the house was in chaos. What Flo referred to as ‘The War Damage’ were beginning at the top of the house and working downwards. The roof of the attic had collapsed under a weight of stagnant water, bringing down part of the walls.

  ‘Lucky I wasn’t in it,’ I said to Dan, but he was in too bad a mood to laugh. His quarrel with Jack was a disaster for him.

  The War Damage people were responsible for structural damage, but not for repainting. Soon, they would have rebuilt the attic, and before it could be let, it must be decorated. The wor
k on the old people’s flat was slow. Dan was stilt scraping the layer of filth off the floor, with long steel scrapers. He had poured gallons of boiling water on it; used all kinds of chemical, but the residue had to be taken off by hand. He had not begun on the walls and ceilings, which would have to be stripped right down and resurfaced. The rooms were still crawling with lice.

  When the attic was done, the workmen needed to get into Miss Powell’s rooms; and she was angry because Flo had said to her: ‘But it won’t matter, sweetheart: they’re just going to pull down that wall that’s cracked a little, you can stay quite comfortable, if you go out in the days to see friends, the workmen won’t be there at night, and you’ll be ever so happy.’

  Bobby Brent had said that if space had not been found for Miss Powell inside a week she would leave. This terrified both Flo and Dan, because relations were bad with Mr Brent for another reason. It had been agreed that Dan would do all the decorations for the night-club; it was now waiting for him.

  ‘Well,’ said Bobby Brent, when Dan made excuses: ‘If you’re no longer interested in our proposition, then I know what to do.’

  Flo wanted to get rid of Mrs Skeffington so as to move Miss Powell down to her rooms. But Rose, who had never had one good word for Mrs Skeffington, told her she should be ashamed even to think of it: ‘You kick her out, Flo, and you can go looking for someone for my room, too.’

  ‘Ah, my Lord,’ said Flo. ‘what’s come over Rose? Little miss never-say-boo-to-a-goose, and now look at her – she gets herself a man in her bed and she says Do this and Do that.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Rose to me, winking: ‘Flo doesn’t know it but Mrs Skeffington’ll be going of her own accord any minute.’

  ‘How do you know.’

  ‘It stands to reason. Have you heard Rosemary crying at nights?’

  ‘No. I haven’t, come to think of it.’

  ‘The way I look at it is this. My lady upstairs knows she’s had that precious husband of hers for good. She’s stopped fretting. Or at least she’s slopped working herself up, and she doesn’t have to fetch and carry for the lazy beast. So she’s not taking it out on Rosemary.’

  Rose was right. Mrs Skeffington said that she was going to live with her married sister, because ‘My husband has got a nice engineering job in Canada.’ She said good-bye to us all with pretty formality, shaking us by the hands and saying: ‘It was nice knowing you.’

  ‘Can you beat it?’ said Rose. ‘There she was, and we holding her hands while she was rolling and screaming with half her inside gone, and now she says: Good-bye, good gracious me, but it was nice knowing you. Some people.’

  Dan perfunctorily cleared the Skeffington rooms and invited Miss Powell to move her things down. She said she must ask Mr Ponsonby. That evening there was a terrible row just over my head; with Dan and Bobby Brent shouting each other down, and Flo and Miss Powell sighing and complaining in counterpoint. Dan stamped, swearing, downstairs. Flo waddling after him.

  ‘Ah, my Lord,’ she was saying, ‘all we ask is, she should move into those lovely big rooms till the Damage has finished in hers. Then she can move back up, and the rent the same.’

  ‘Rent,’ shouted Dan. ‘rent you say? We’re not going to have money to put food into our mouths, all our tenants leaving because you’re too stupid to live.’

  Dan had given up his job with the Gas Board, on grounds of urgent family illness. He spent his days over in the nightclub, and his evenings on his house. The hundreds of pounds he had made on the side during the past two years were already re-invested. He was joint owner, with Bobby Brent, of two slum houses in Notting Hill Gate. But there was little cash coming in. Flo was serving fish and chips and corned beef hash at every meal.

  Over my head Bobby Brent was now quarrelling with Miss Powell. I had never heard them quarrel in all the months I had been there. Soon, she came downstairs, tear-stained but soignee in a slim black suit and furs. At the turn of the stairs she hesitated. Then she called up the well of the staircase in her refined voice, now plaintive: ‘Raymond – Raymond?’ No reply from Mr Brent. ‘I shall be staying at the X Hotel, if you want me.’ No reply. She waited a little, then went on down. In a moment I saw her driving away in a taxi. Bobby Brent now entered my room, with dignity. Our relations had formalized themselves into mutual insult. Yet he was always a little wary of me; and I was unable to prevent myself being frightened of him. He knew it.

  ‘And good riddance,’ he said.

  ‘It would seem short-sighted to quarrel with Dan, so much satisfactory bread and butter, just because you want to get rid of Miss Powell.’

  ‘Dan Bolt,’ said he with a heavy sneer. ‘He’s not my class.’

  ‘But with such a talent for making money!’

  ‘People never understand a man has to better himself Women never understand that.’

  ‘Now you can marry the daughter of the Member of Parliament who is a lady.’

  ‘I could, if I wanted to, but as it happens I can do better.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Marry, marry, marry. That’s all women ever think of. And why should I get married?’

  ‘Why indeed?’

  ‘Raymond Ponsonby,’ he said, ‘has no need of any blasted women.’

  ‘But how about Bobby Brent?’ I said.

  ‘I say! You’d better be careful what you say. Just because I have a friend, and come to see her, it needn’t mean more than that. Miss Powell’s a friend of mine, and she needn’t go preventing any banns being called.’

  ‘Good Lord.’ I said, ‘are you married to her all this time?’

  He made an involuntary startled movement, as if to go. He looked at me some time, frowning. Then the impulse to boast bettered him.

  ‘With a lawyer who knows his way about, you’d be surprised.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes you would if I told you. And I will. I put it this way. You hit the thing on the head, as it happens. Raymond Ponsonby is married, but Robert Brent isn’t.’

  ‘And Miss Powell?’

  He laughed triumphantly. ‘How can she be married to a name that’s not on any registers the law would recognize?’

  ‘I see.’

  Suddenly he went black with anger at the thought of how he’d given himself away. He poked his chin out at me, half-shut his eyes, and said: ‘Blackmail’s a game two could play.’

  ‘As a matter of interest, how would you blackmail me if you set about it?’

  He smiled, considering the thing on its merits. ‘Ah,’ he breathed. ‘Ah!’ He began stalking back and forth across my room, vibrant because of some scheme he had just thought of; or perhaps had had up his sleeve for some time – or perhaps because he was waiting for inspiration.

  Looking back, I think I gave it to him, by what I said next.

  ‘I’ve often wondered,’ he remarked, ‘what you think of me. We could be friends, but you don’t give yourself away. I like that. Yes, I like you for it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘I think you’re a psychopath and a sadist, but luckily for you, in this society it won’t even be noticed. The sky’s your limit as far as I can see.’

  ‘I say!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s libel. That’s slander …’ He took a few more turns up and down, his eyes narrowed on some increasingly delightful thought.

  ‘I say!’ he exclaimed, finally, sitting on the arm of a chair. He offered me a classy cigarette out of a gold cigarette case and said: ‘Have you ever been to the 400 Club?’

  ‘No, but I’d love to go there with you.’

  ‘I’ll take you now.’

  ‘Give me five minutes to change.’ I was wearing a skirt and a sweater.

  ‘No need. They know me there. And when we’re there I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine. He’ll interest you. There’s a lot of money to be made out of writing best-sellers.’

  ‘So you keep telling me.’

  ‘On the other hand, there’s no sense in living in a room like t
his if you’ve a best-seller in your pocket?’

  We looked around my room together. War Damage would have a good deal to do in it. There was a great crack up one wall which widened blackly across the ceiling to end in a great hole through which dust fell lightly day and night. The floorboards were at varying levels. Two big brown rexine chairs, bought by Flo at five bob each at a sale, had strips of pink sticking plaster across the backs where they had split. The suite of fine new utility furniture, wardrobe and dressing-table, for which Flo and Dan would be paying weekly for a year yet, already lacked handles: they had been stuck on originally with glue. The door of the wardrobe had warped and would not shut. The glass in the big french windows which must once, years ago, have opened into a fine tall, cheerful room kept clean by the labours of heaven knows how many housemaids, had cracked and were pasted over with paper.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bobby Brent thoughtfully. ‘Yes. Well, are you coming? Aren’t you even going to put some lipstick on?’

  ‘I very likely would, if we were going to the 400 Club.’

  ‘The trouble with you is, you can’t take a joke.’

  On the pavement he hesitated, and said: ‘I tell you what. I’ll take you to the 400 by taxi. I’ll do that for you.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. You’ve still got the two pounds I gave you.’

  ‘I say! You’ve had far more than two pounds’ worth of service out of me.’

  ‘Yes. Tell me, how are you and Colonel Bartowers getting on these days?’

  We were now heading West fast in a taxi. Bobby Brent straightened himself, looking every inch an honest soldier.

  ‘The Colonel and I have a sound working agreement.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He trusted me. Unlike some I might mention. I made a cool hundred for him only last week. Yes. And would Dan Bolt own two properties, two gold mines at Notting Hill without me? You’ve got to trust people. That’s your trouble. You don’t.’

  We got out half a mile beyond Notting Hill, ouside a corner building whose street windows were still boarded up from war damage. But there were lights in the upper windows.