‘No.’
Smiling with cruelty, he walked me right around the bombed space, watching my face all the time. Anxiety crept into him. At the bottom of the street he hesitated and said: ‘Do you know what I’ve just done?’
‘Not an idea.’
Half from pleasure at having tricked me, and half from anxiety I might find out, he said: ‘I’ve taken you a long way round. You never noticed it. Got to keep your eyes open in this city. But you’re all right with me. You can trust me.’
‘I know I can,’ I said. We were at the front door.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, tenderly.
I went inside and up the stairs. Rose appeared and said, ‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘I hope so.’
‘I hope so, too. I got ever so worried about you.’ She took my arm between her hands and gently tugged me into her room. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I feel real bad, what I’m doing, but you’re my friend now. I must tell you. Flo’s got all in a state about losing you – ’ She giggled, and adjusted her face. ‘Sorry, but it does make me laugh, when Flo sees the pennies slipping through her fingers. Well, because you went out with Bobby Brent, she thinks she’ll let you the room. But Bobby Brent wants it for his fancy woman. So now she’s all torn up, wondering who’ll pay the most.’
‘He will, I should think,’ I said.
‘You don’t know our Bobby.’
‘Is it true he was in the Commandos?’
‘Oh, yes. A real war hero and all. But listen! I’ll show you the room and you can see if you like it.’ She cautiously opened the door and listened. ‘No, Flo’s too busy quarrelling with Dan to snoop.’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft. They’re in love. They’ve only been married three years, see? When people are in love they quarrel. Dan got real mad about Bobby. She makes him jealous on purpose, see? Then he gets mad and they quarrel and they make it up in bed. See?’
I laughed. She giggled. ‘Shh,’ she said. We crept into the passage outside her room, and we listened again. Downstairs a din of shouting voices and music. Rose opened a door, and switched a light on. It was a very large room, with two long windows. There was a tiny fireplace at one end. The walls were cracked and the ceiling was stained.
‘Don’t notice the mess,’ Rose whispered. ‘It’s the war. The war damage people is coming in. They’ll fix it. But it’s a nice room, and Dan’ll paint it for you. He’s in the trade, and he’s good at those things, whatever else you can say about him. And if you’re clever with Flo, you’ll get it cheap because of the cracks and all. If you don’t mind me telling you, you don’t treat Flo right at all. I watched you. You’ve got to stand up to her. If you don’t, she’ll treat you bad.’
‘Tell me what to do?’ I asked.
At this direct appeal, she hesitated. ‘I do feel bad,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m Flo’s friend. But I’ll just give you advice in general. She’ll come and see you tomorrow. Don’t just say yes, and thank you. You must bargain with her. I know it’s not nice, how she is, but I put it down to her Italian blood. She likes to bargain.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will. And thank you.’
We crept back to her door, and she said: ‘Tomorrow night, when your kid’s asleep, we’ll go for a walk. It’ll be real nice to have company.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’d like it.’
‘And I’ll show you some ropes around here. You don’t mind me saying it, dear, but you don’t know how to look after yourself. You don’t really.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, never mind, Rome wasn’t built in a day, that’s what I always say. Sleep tight.’
When I got back to my room from taking my son to nursery school next morning, Flo was standing there, with a guilty look. ‘I’ve just put away some things for you,’ she said. ‘To show you how comfortable it is. It is really.’
I said involuntarily. ‘It’s very kind of you, Flo,’ and, as involuntarily she gave a little smile of victory, and said in a cheerful voice: ‘I told you you’d like it up here.’
I summoned the spirit of Rose to my aid, and said: ‘But I don’t want to unpack. Because if I get somewhere with more room, I’ll move.’
All the life went out of her, and she sat despondently on my bed. She sighed. She looked at a pack of cigarettes lying on the bed and said: ‘You’ve got so many lovely cigarettes, darling, aren’t you lucky.’ The sense of guilt which accompanied all colonials to England, in 1949, overcame me and I said: ‘Help yourself.’ Instantly she became happy again. She picked up the box and handled it, looking at me. Then she carelessly took out a handful, but dropping some in her anxiety lest I might be angry, and pushed them into her apron pockets. She understood that guilt very well by instinct, because later, when I learned to understand the role cigarettes played in that house she would say automatically: ‘We had such a hard time during the war, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’
‘I’ve put your things where you can find them,’ she said. I looked at the top drawer, unable to discover any logic in her arrangement of it, until she said: ‘You’ve got some lovely things, dear.’ She had put the more expensive things on top, in a layer over the cheap ones. In the second drawer she had laid out six pairs of nylons, side by side, as if in a showcase. I began rolling them up and stacking them in a corner. She said quickly, over and over again, ‘Sweetheart, darling, I’m sorry I didn’t do them nice for you.’ She was sitting on my bed, full of innocent concern; while one hand kept touching her apron pocket, to reassure her of the existence of the cigarettes. She looked like a child who has done its best to please and now expects a reprimand. ‘I was only trying to help you, darling.’ I said nothing, and she said: ‘Please, please, darling, give your Flo some nylons.’ With an enormous effort, invoking Rose again, I said: ‘Now why should I give you my nylons?’ Her face puckered with discouragement. Then she laughed with frank good-humour, and having lost that round of the game, she said, ‘I’ll go down and get my old man’s dinner.’ At the door she remarked innocently: ‘I’m glad you’re so happy up here.’
‘Flo, I told you, I must move when I find something better.’
In a wail of despair, she cried out: ‘But you wouldn’t like the other rooms we’ve got …’ She clapped her hand over her mouth; she had been instructed by Dan not to mention them. She waddled fast downstairs, with one hand nesting the cigarettes in her pocket.
That night Rose congratulated me. ‘You’re learning,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you’ll be lucky. Because Bobby Brent hasn’t been back. They’re arguing about it, Dan and Flo, now. About the rent.’
‘How much should I pay?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me feel bad – I’ve just been having supper with them, see? But when she says, bargain. Now, you’re coming out with me.’
She put her two hands around my arm, and walked me away down past the bombed site I had been made to go round last night by Mr MacNamara-Ponsonby-Brent. I told Rose of the incident, and she listened, without surprise. ‘He’s like that,’ she commented. ‘He was always like that. That’s why he frightens me, see? So don’t you have nothing to do with him.’
‘He said he was going to take me to see a flat tonight.’
She let her hands drop away from my arm. ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’
‘Yes, I did.’
She was silent. ‘Why?’ she asked at last timidly. ‘You don’t believe what he says. I know that.’
‘Well, it’s because I’ve never met anyone like him before.’ When she didn’t reply, I said: ‘Why don’t you like that?’
She thought. Then she said: ‘You talk like he’s an animal in a zoo.’
‘If you went to a new country, you’d like to meet new kinds of people, too.’ She didn’t reply. I persisted: ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘What makes you think I’m going to any new countries?’ she said, with resentment. We walked on for a while in silence. Then she forgave me. She put her hands around my arm again, squeezed it, and said: ‘Well, never mind, it takes all sorts. I’ve been thinking. The reason I like you, well – apart from being friends now, it’s because you say things that make me think.’
We were in streets that differed from those behind me in a way I could not name. They were dingy and grey and dirty. There were gangs of noisy sharp-faced children. Youths lounged against corner-walls with their hands in their pockets. Here was the face, which comes as a shock to a colonial, used to broad, filled-in, sunburned faces. It is a face that is not pale so much as drained, peaked rather than thin, with an unfinished look, a jut in the bones of the jaw or the forehead. People were smaller. Rose was absorbed among her own kind and I saw her differently. I was thinking that there were miles and miles of such streets, marked only by a difference in shop-names or by the degree to which brick and stones had been stained and weathered – square miles full of deprived people. I felt alien to Rose, and as if it were dishonest to be here at all. I understood that I was dishonest because I had brought the colonial attitude to class with me. That it does not exist. I had not thought of Rose as working-class but as foreign to me. She must have been thinking me intolerably affected. Later on she said something that cleared my mind. ‘When you first came to live with us,’ she said, ‘you just made me sick. It wasn’t that you fancied yourself, it wasn’t that, but you were just plain ignorant about everything. You didn’t know nothing about anything, and you didn’t even know you were ignorant. You made me laugh, you did really.’
Rose stopped, pulled out a purse from her bag and peered into it. We were alongside a fruit-counter that projected into the street. The man serving nodded and said: ‘What are you a-doing of down here, Rosie?’
‘Just off for a walk. With my friend.’ She nodded at some cherries and handed over exactly the marked price for half a pound. She kept her eye on the money in the man’s hand, and smiled and nodded when threepence was handed back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And this is my friend, see? She’ll be coming down here I expect, so you treat her right.’
They smiled and nodded, then she took my arm and pulled me after her. ‘You go there for fruit, see? Now he knows you’re my friend it’ll be different. And don’t you go buying stuff on those barrows. That’s only for them who don’t know better. I mean you have to know which barrows are honest.’
She began spitting stones into the gutter. ‘See that?’ she said, giggling happily. ‘I used to be a winner at school every time.’ Now I was under her protection. She kept herself between me and the crowd, and at every moment she nodded and smiled at some man or woman leaning against a counter or a stall.
‘I was a kid down here,’ she said; and I saw that this part of the great city was home, to her; a different country from the street, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, where she now lived. Slowly the word slum, which had for me a literary and fanciful quality, a dramatic squalor, changed; and at last I saw the difference between this city and the streets that held my new lodgings. Those had a decaying, down-at-heel respectability. This was hard and battling, raw and tough; showing itself in the scepticism of the watchful assessing glances from the shopmen and women, and the humour of the greetings that Rose took and gave. She was happily nostalgic. Passing these familiar places, which knew her, acknowledging her by a gleam from a lit window or the slant of a wall, like so many friendy glances or waves of the hand, reinstated her as a human being with rights of possession in the world. ‘I used to get all my shoes here,’ she said, passing a shop. Or: ‘Before the war they sold a bit of fried skate in this shop better than anything.’
