In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [107]
Then she said. ‘Now we should go. It’ll be dead in a minute, just streets.’
Unfortunately I did not go out again with her, for she left.
Her history, or rather, what she told me, was this: She was the daughter of a lawyer’s clerk from the Midlands. She worked as a shorthand-typist until the war began, when she married a pilot who was killed over Germany. Then she was lonely and had a number of affairs. She was sharing a flat with a girl-friend. This friend married and Miss Privet found herself alone with three months’ instalments due on the furniture. Coming home one evening from work, thinking about the money she owed, she was accosted by a CI, and took him home on an impulse. He gave her the equivalent of ten pounds. For a few weeks she worked in her office as usual, and walked home afterwards, slowly – ‘practising the walk and the look’. Then she gave up her work in the office.
She became friends with one of her clients who was a businessman, married. For a while she was his mistress. But he had other friends. For three years, she had been kept by four of them. They all liked racing, drinking and gambling. They used to go to the races together, all five of them.
One evening, she was walking home by herself, thinking as she put it, ‘of my own affairs, but I must have been sending out the allure out of sheer force of habit’ when she was accosted by an American. She took him home and was discovered by one of her regulars, who told the others. The four of them made a mass scene, in her flat, where they had complained she was nothing but a common whore and a tart. ‘Which they might have thought of before, mightn’t they? Bloody hypocrites they are,’ she said. So she told them to go to hell and went back to the streets.
Then she got sick, neglected it, and found herself in hospital with pneumonia. Out of hospital, she went back to her flat and discovered someone had informed on her, and she had been dispossessed. She managed to rescue some of her furniture which was in store. Now she was looking for another flat. She had had a letter from one of the four businessmen whose wife had died. ‘He’s offering me holy matrimony,’ she said, with a wink.
‘Are you going to marry him?’
‘We-ell, I don’t think he should many a common tart and prostitute, do you?’ she drawled.
‘Do you want to be married?’
‘The way I look at it is this. You get bored with one man, don’t you? You get just as bored with four. So you might as well settle for one. The trouble is, he’s not the one I like the best. That’s life, isn’t it? If the one I liked ditched his wife. I’d think about it. As it is. I think I’ll just get myself a flat, issue an invitation or two, and see what happens.’
I said: ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting old?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You’re really green, in some ways, aren’t you? Men don’t come to me for my looks. I’m not ugly, but I’m no oil-painting either. They come because I can cook. I can make a place comfortable, and I know what they like in bed. I’m not interested in sex. Any fool can learn to bite a man’s ear and moan like a high wind.’
‘Don’t you ever like sex?’ I enquired.
‘If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand dirty talk. Never could. I like you,’ she said, ‘but there’s things I can’t stand, and one’s sex-talk.’
Before she left, she made a formal visit, to say with the deliberate casualness that means someone has been planning a conversation: ‘Do you imagine you’re going to make a living out of writing?’
‘It’s a matter of luck.’
‘You don’t want to trust to luck. It’s a dreary existence, banging away all day, having to think up thoughts all the time. I’ve been thinking about you. Now listen. You’ll never have security. Now in my job you’ve got security if you’ve got a