In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [40]
I knew all the tones of her voice before I ever saw her; but I found it impossible to form a picture of her. As soon as she had the child inside the door, the tussle began: the high, exasperated weary voice, and the child nagging back. Or sometimes there was exhausted sobbing – first the woman, and then the child. I would hear: ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Rosemary. I can’t help it.’
Once I heard her on the stairs, coming home from work in conversation with Flo. Her voice was now formal and bright: ‘Really I don’t know what I shall do with Rosemary, she’s so naughty.’ She gave a fond, light laugh.
From the child, sullenly: ‘I’m not naughty.’
‘Yes, you are naughty, Rosemary. How dare you answer me back.’ Although the voice was still social, sharpness had come into it.
From Flo, a histrionically resigned: ‘Yes. I know, dear. Mine’s the death of me, she drives me mad all day.’
From Aurora: ‘I don’t drive you mad.’
‘Yes, you do. Don’t answer your mother like that.’ There was the sound of a sharp slap.
Flo’s exchange with Aurora was an echo of Mrs Skeffington’s with her child, because Flo could not help copying the behaviour of whoever she was with. But the burst of wild sobs from Aurora was quite unconvincing; her tears were displays of drama adapted to the occasion. From one second to the next she would stop crying and her face beamed with smiles. Her crying was never the miserable frightened wailing of the other little girl.
One morning I met a woman on the landing who I thought must be new to the house. She said brightly: ‘Gracious me, I’m in your way. I’m so sorry,’ and skipped sideways. It was Mrs Skeffington – that ‘gracious me’ could be no one else. Under her arm she balanced a tiny child. She was a tall slight creature, with carefully fluffed out fair hair arranged in girlish wisps on her forehead and neck. Her large clear brown eyes were anxiously friendly; and her smile was tired. There were dark shadows around her eyes and at the corners of her nose. The baby who sounded so forlorn and defiant at night was about fifteen months old. She was a fragile child, with her mother’s wispy pretty hair and enormous brown eyes.
‘Get out of the lady’s way,’ said Mrs Skeffington to the baby, which she had set down – apparently for the purpose of being able to scold her. ‘Get out of the lady’s way, you naughty, naughty girl.’
‘But she’s not in my way.’
‘I do so hope Rosemary doesn’t keep you awake at nights,’ she said politely, just as if I did not hear every movement of her life, and she of mine.
‘Not at all,’ I said.
‘I’m so glad, she’s a real pickle,’ said Mrs Skeffington, injecting the teasing fondness into her voice that went with the words. She tripped upstairs, and as her door shut her voice rose into hysteria: ‘Don’t dawdle so, Rosemary, how many times must! tell you.’
‘I’m not doddling,’ said the baby, whose vocabulary was sharpened by need into terrifying precocity.
Mr Skeffington was an engineer and he went on business trips for his firm. He was nearly always away during the week. According to Rose: ‘He’s just as bad as she is, and that’s saying something. Their tempers fit each other, hand and glove. You wait till he comes back and you’ll hear something. He reminds me of my stepfather – pots and kettles flying and both of them screaming and the kid yelling its head off. It’s good as the pictures, if you don’t want to get some sleep.’
Rose’s stepfather haunted her conversations. She would sit moodily on my bed, listening to Mrs Skeffington nagging at the child overhead, saying from time to time: ‘You wait till he comes, you haven’t heard nothing yet’ And, inevitably, the next phrase would be – My stepfather.
‘Wasn’t he good to you?’
‘Good?’ A word as direct as that always made her uncomfortable. ‘I wouldn’t like to say