Going Home - Doris May Lessing [93]
After Alice Wharton came out of hospital, they could not pay the hospital bills, or the doctor. Bob Wharton was too proud to ask for the relief hospitals give to poor people. They sold what furniture they had, or nearly all of it, and they moved to the Mansions, which was cheaper, being only two small rooms, and they sold their little motor-car.
At this time, things were like this: Bob Wharton held his job steadily, and worked all the overtime he could get. He was not afraid for his job, for he was strong, not fifty yet, a tall man, rather thin, bent a little at the shoulders, with a way of poking his head forward, chin up, to look into your face with anxious, serious eyes, as if he might find a reason there why he had come to such a permanent morass of worry and unhappiness. He was still an official of his union, and this was what he was most proud of in his life.
Alice Wharton went out to work for a time, not as a cleaner or a charwoman, as she probably would have done in Britain, because here there were black people to do such work: she found a job as saleswoman in one of the stores. But if she worked, she had to pay for someone to look after the sick child, who was inert all day, sitting where he was put. They would not let her take the child with her to the store: it might put customers off. So, finding that it cost more to pay for the child in a nursery than she earned, she stayed at home and earned a little extra making dresses for friends.
The baby was healthy, and no trouble to her. The two elder children were at school; and when they came home it was usually to go straight off to friends’ houses, where they were not shouted and nagged at. Alice Wharton used to come crying across the iron bridge to me, saying she did not mean to shout and nag at the two children, but she could not help it, something got into her and she could not help it.
So the family all day was Alice Wharton, making dresses and underclothes on her sewing machine, and the sick boy, laying beside her in a wheeled chair, never speaking, never moving, his big, loose head swaying on the top of a long, skeleton neck, looking vaguely around him with large painfully bright blue eyes, and the baby, who rolled and staggered around the two rooms, and terrified the mother by trying to climb out over the edge of the small porch where it met the iron bridge that came over to us.
In the evenings the family was also Bob Wharton, doing his trade-union books at another table, and the two elder children, trying to find some space to do their homework in.
Alice used to complain all the time to Bob that he was mad to waste his time on the union; hadn’t he got enough to do, didn’t he care about his family; if he wanted to spend his evenings working, then he might just as well get work that was paid for. But Bob would not give up his union. It was the one thing that held him in his idea of himself, and connected him with Britain, where he had had such hopes for the future.
He used to work under the lamp, while Alice nagged and grumbled, a tired woman, chained every moment of her life to the sick boy, until he would fling down his things and bang out to the bar around the corner, or shout at the servant, and then the whole flat would ring with quarrelling and complaints, and the two elder children shrank away to their beds.
Things were bad. But they might get better. Why not?
They could at least not get worse, provided there was work. For Bob Wharton, with the memory of the ‘thirties and unemployment behind him, there was always the terror of finding himself out of work.
And there was only one thing that could put him out of work, and that was if the blacks were allowed to do skilled work.
Of an evening he would come over to us, and say, ‘We don’t mind if the employers pay the blacks the same as us. That’s fair, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it fair?’ But he was always uneasy, always guilty about it. Here he was, a trade unionist with experience of trade unionism in Britain;