In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [33]
That night Rose congratulated me, ‘You’re learning,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you’ll be lucky. Because Bobby Brent hasn’t been back. They’re arguing about it. Dan and Flo, now. About the rent.’
‘How much should I pay?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me feel bad – I’ve just been having supper with them, see? But when she says, bargain. Now, you’re coming out with me.’
She put her two hands around my arm, and walked me away down past the bombed site I had been made to go round last night by Mr MacNamara-Ponsonby-Brent. I told Rose of the incident, and she listened, without surprise. ‘He’s like that,’ she commented. ‘He was always like that. That’s why he frightens me, see? So don’t you have nothing to do with him.’
‘He said he was going to take me to see a flat tonight.’
She let her hands drop away from my arm. ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’
‘Yes. I did.’
She was silent. ‘Why?’ she asked at last timidly. ‘You don’t believe what he says. I know that.’
‘Well, it’s because I’ve never met anyone like him before.’ When she didn’t reply, I said: ‘Why don’t you like that?’
She thought. Then she said: ‘You talk like he’s an animal in a zoo.’
‘If you went to a new country, you’d like to meet new kinds of people, too.’ She didn’t reply. I persisted: ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘What makes you think I’m going to any new countries?’ she said, with resentment. We walked on for a while in silence. Then she forgave me. She put her hands around my arm again, squeezed it, and said: ‘Well, never mind, it takes all sorts. I’ve been thinking. The reason I like you, well – apart from being friends now, it’s because you say things that make me think.’
We were in streets that differed from those behind me in a way I could not name. They were dingy and grey and dirty. There were gangs of noisy sharp-faced children. Youths lounged against corner-walls with their hands in their pockets. Here was the face, which comes as a shock to a colonial, used to broad, filled-in, sunburned faces. It is a face that is not pale so much as drained, peaked rather than thin, with an unfinished look, a jut in the bones of the jaw or the forehead. People were smaller. Rose was absorbed among her own kind and I saw her differently. I was thinking that there were miles and miles of such streets, marked only by a difference in shop-names or by the degree to which brick and stones had been stained and weathered – square miles full of deprived people. I felt alien to Rose, and as if it were dishonest to be here at all. I understood that I was dishonest because I had brought the colonial attitude to class with me. That it does not exist. I had not thought of Rose as working-class but as foreign to me. She must have been thinking me intolerably affected. Later on she said something that cleared my mind. ‘When you first came to live with us,’ she said, ‘you just made me sick. It wasn’t that you fancied yourself, it wasn’t that, but you were just plain ignorant about everything. You didn’t know nothing about anything, and you didn’t even know you were ignorant. You made me laugh, you did really.’
Rose stopped, pulled out a purse from her bag and peered into it. We were alongside a fruit-counter that projected into the street. The man serving nodded and said: ‘What are you a-doing of down here, Rosie?’
‘Just off for a walk. With my friend.’ She nodded at some cherries and handed over exactly the marked price for half a pound. She kept her eye on the money in the man’s hand, and smiled and nodded when threepence was handed back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And this is my friend, see? She’ll be coming down here I expect, so you treat her right.’
They smiled and nodded, then she took my arm and pulled me after her. ‘You go there for fruit, see? Now he knows you’re my friend it’ll be different. And don’t you go buying stuff on those barrows. That’s only for them who don’t know better. I mean you have to know