In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ new point of view. Then she said, with confidence: ‘I don’t know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.’

      ‘How much?’

      ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But she’s ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.’

      ‘What sort of a flat?’

      ‘It’s upstairs,’ she said, doubtful again. But added: ‘One room, but ever such nice furniture. It’s only a minute from here.’

      I hesitated. My companion, who was directing this conversation with a skill I only learned to appreciate later, said, with casualness: ‘You just tell her Rose sent you. She’ll know it’s all right if you say Rose. Besides, she likes young people. She likes a bit of life about.’ She glanced at me, waited a moment, then raised her voice to shout: ‘Nina, are you busy?’ A woman appeared in the back. This was a jeweller’s shop, very dark and crowded, and she had to push her way through trestles burdened with clocks, watches, trinkets, rubbish of all kinds. She was fat and pale, with rusty dyed hair, but her look of puffy ponderousness was contradicted by her eyes, which were calculating. After a rapid summing-up look, she stood beside Rose, with the air of one putting herself completely at disposal.

      ‘Flo doesn’t take just anyone, does she, dear?’ suggested Rose, and the woman said promptly: ‘That’s right. She likes to pick and choose.’

      ‘I’ll give you the address,’ said Rose, and wrote it down.

      Seeing she had served her purpose, the pale woman pulled her lips back and exposed her teeth in a sweet smile. Then she threaded her way back to the room she had emerged from. At the door she turned back and said: ‘How about that other place – you know, that you heard about this morning?’

      Rose seemed displeased. She said unwillingly: ‘I don’t know anything about it – not to recommend.’

      The pale woman’s submissive helpfulness vanished. She said to me with a ferocious smile: ‘I hope Rose is looking after you properly.’ She disappeared. Rose was annoyed. She raised her voice to say: ‘You come back tomorrow, dear, and your watch will be ready.’ She had been saying this every day for the past week.

      ‘What’s the address of this other place?’ I asked Rose.

      ‘I’ll write it for you. Mind you, I’m not recommending it.’ Then, the desire to do her friend Flo a service dissolved into the fellowship of the suffering, and she said: ‘Of course, these days, you grab what’s going.’

      I thanked her and left. Glancing back, I saw she had taken up her former position, and her face was all lifeless curves.

      I decided to try the second address immediately. About the first I felt like the horse dragged to water. I could have said, of course, that Rose’s insistence showed there must be something wrong with it. But there was more to it than that. For six weeks I had been tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards. Stoicism can reach a point where, if someone says: I’m sure you’ll be lucky sooner or later, one feels positively indignant. I was defensively rejecting possibilities in advance. This state of mind was not only mine. Talking to other home-hunters I learned it was an occupational disease. It means one cannot enter a house-agent’s office without an air of hostility; or open the advertisement columns of a newspaper without a cynical (and consciously cynical) smile, as if to say: You don’t imagine I’m going to be taken in by this, do you?

      During those weeks I had formed alliances with various people I met in the agents’ offices, or under the advertisement boards. I remember, particularly, a lady with a grown-up daughter and a grand piano. The daughter was talented, come all the way from Australia to study in London. For three months these women had been looking for a shelter for their piano. At the time we met they had become so bitter that on several occasions, setting out for some possible address, they exclaimed: ‘What’s the use, they won’t have us!’ – and turned aside into a café to brood over a cup of tea.

      It is a curious fact that at a time when we were all short of money, when getting a place to live was essential before we could start to live at all, we would spend the larger part of each working day (for me the hours that my son was in nursery school) sitting in teashops gripped by bitter lethargy. We used to discuss the various places we had lived in, the climate of this country or that, landladies, the woman who had affronted us the day before, the harpy who had offered one room and use of the kitchen at four guineas a week provided one agreed not ‘to walk on the floor before eight in the morning’. The teashop had become our home, our refuge, the bedclothes we pulled over our heads. We could no longer face another long walk, another set of dingy lodgings, another refusal. We could not face seeing our fantasies about what we hoped to find diminished to what we knew we would have to take.

      I went in search of the second address with a grim and barbed gaiety. My by now highly-developed instinct told me it would be useless. Besides, the interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses that became half-effaced with fog at a distance of a hundred yards, the pale faces peering up from basements past rubbish cans, the innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness; had worked on me in a way I did not understand myself.

      The street I wanted was not in my guidebook. I was directed back and forth by passers-by, each one saying helpfully, ‘It’s just around the corner,’ and looking impatient when I said: ‘Which corner?’ This business of the next corner is confusing to aliens, who will interpret it as the next intersection of the street. But to the Londoner, with his highly subjective attitude to geography, the ‘corner’ will mean, perhaps, a famous pub, or an old street whose importance dwarfs all the intervening streets out of existence, or perhaps the turning he takes every morning on his way to work.

      The house I wanted was a broader, taller house than most, and separated from its neighbours by a six-inch space on either side. The steps were scrubbed white; the doorknob gleamed; the wood of the door was newly-varnished chocolate brown. While I waited for the bell to be answered, a young man came out, carrying suitcases, which he left on the bottom step. Soon a young woman followed him, vehemently slamming the door, and looking to him for approval of this action. But he said irritably: ‘Don’t give them grounds for complaint.’ She was a tall slender girl, wearing an enormous black picture hat, very high black heels, a deep black decolletage crowded with crimson roses, and furs slung over one shoulder. Because of her appearance I looked again at the man. He was as unfamiliar to me as she was. He wore a sharply-angled brown suit, and pointed brown shoes. He was tall, dark, slickly good-looking, with prominent brown eyes that were now suffused with uneasy anger. The door swung inwards, this time to show an elderly grey woman in a stiff white nurse’s uniform. She looked past me at the couple and said: ‘You must have all your things out in half an hour or I’ll call the police.’ The young woman gave a shrill laugh; the young man frowned and began to say something; but the nurse interrupted him by saying to me: ‘Come in.’ Her voice still held the sharpness which she had directed at the other two.

      Inside there was a narrow hall carpeted with crimson. A grey satin wallpaper was sprinkled all over with small gilt coronets and harps. Small gilt-framed mirrors hung at various levels, chandelier, sprouting large electric bulbs.

      The nurse left me in these surroundings of dispirited opulence, saying: ‘I’ll ask for the keys.’ Soon a very old lady, swathed in pink and mauve wool, wheeled herself in a chair across the hall, giving me a cold stare. Then she turned herself around and rolled back, with another prolonged stare. When the inspection was over the nurse came back with a bunch of keys, and led me up one, two, three, four, five flights of stairs, all СКАЧАТЬ