In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [108]
‘I don’t really think the life would suit me.’
‘You’re a romantic. That’s your trouble. Well, I’ve no patience with those.’
Miss Privet borrowed ten pounds from me when she left, and about three months later I got this letter: ‘I enclose your ten quid which saw me through, and thanks, my dear. No money troubles now as I’ve been doing overtime one way and another and my friends so pleased to see me, no talk of me being a common anything for the time being. Decided not to marry, no percentage in it. My flat very nice and I’ve paid for new furniture, and also all debts. Picked up a French chair, upholstered red stain. I have it in the bedroom where I can look at it. Well, that’s all for now. If you change your mind just let me know. Or if in any trouble – I never forget a friend who has helped me in time of need. You’ve only got one life, that’s the way I look at it. How goes the inspiration and if it fails, I’ve got a man might do. No good for me, doesn’t care for a flutter, and doesn’t like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said. Give my love to that sex maniac downstairs, and to stick-in-the-mud Rose. (I don’t think.) With best regards, Emily Privet.’
I tried to make it up with Rose in all kinds of ways. When I joked, saying: ‘Look, Rose, I’ll wash the cups in disinfectant in front of you,’ she said: ‘That doesn’t make me laugh, dear.’
‘But, Rose,’ I said, ‘have I changed in any way because I was friendly with Miss Privet?’
‘Miss Preevay,’ said Rose, with heavy sarcasm. ‘French, I don’t think.’
‘But she didn’t pretend to be.’
‘It’s no good trying to be friends. I can see you never did really like me.’
‘Then tell me why.’
She hesitated and thought. ‘You know how I felt about Dickie, didn’t you? Well, then.’
‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Yes? I made myself cheap with him. I felt bad, and you knew that.’
‘You were very happy.’ I said.
‘Happy?’ she said derisively. ‘Love, you’ll say next. Well. I know just one thing. You were my friend. Then you were a friend to that dirty beast, and that means I’m just as bad as she is, as far as you’re concerned.’
‘But, Rose, I don’t feel like that.’
‘Yes? Well. I feel like it, and that’s what’s important.’
Rose’s face was now set into lines of melancholy; it was hard even to imagine her as she had been a few weeks before. Flo told me she was being courted by a middle-aged man who ran the pub up at the corner, and had a bedridden wife. Sometimes Rose dropped into the Private Bar to drink a port-and-lemon with him: and returned to watch television with Flo, sadder than before. For a while she had taken a chair upstairs to sit in the corner of the Skeffingtons’ flat, watching Len and Mick paint, but her presence inhibited them and she gave it up.
‘Auntie, they call me,’ she told Flo. ‘Auntie Rose. That Borstal, it hasn’t taught Len any manners, whatever else it taught him.’
‘Time marches on,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, yes, and it’s true for us all. Don’t you turn up your nose at Charlie at the pub. His wife’ll die, and you’ll be set up nice for life. And there’s nothing to scorn in a man what’s broken in already – he won’t play you up like Dickie.’
‘You make me laugh,’ said Rose, heavily.
On the last evening before I left. Flo invited me down to a farewell supper, telling me that I needn’t worry about Dan, she had admonished him to be polite. Dan had not spoken to me for weeks. As far as he was concerned, I was cheating him out of two pounds a week. He was now asking five-ten for my big room and that little one downstairs, and knew he would gel it. But not from me. And I had refused to pay the six pounds he demanded in compensation for an iron-mark