In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [16]
I said: ‘I’ve been looking for six weeks.’ My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. ‘I’ve got a small child.’ I said.
Her face became shrewd as she examined me from this 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 grownup daughter and a