In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [42]
He was a slight, fair, dandyish young man, with a jaunty moustache. If any of us women. Rose. Flo, myself. Miss Powell were carrying something on the stairs, we could not take two steps before we found him beside us: ‘A pleasure,’ he would say, assisting us on our way. His wife carried all her own burdens. She got up at seven every day, washed and dressed and fed the child, and took it to the council nursery school. She came back at lunchtime to cook her husband his meal. She finally collected the little girl at six, having spent her day cooking in a nearby café. Her evenings she spent cleaning and cooking.
At nine in the morning, Ronnie Skeffington, smelling of shaving soap and hair lotion, would emerge from the bathroom in a silk dressing-gown, and proceed upstairs with the newspapers. His breakfast had been cooked for him and was waiting in the oven. At ten he went off to work, and came back at one, expecting to find his lunch ready. He usually did not come home until late at night.
‘Say what you like,’ said Flo, ‘that Ronnie, that Miss Powell, they give the house class. Imagine now, if you was to open the door and there was Mr Skeffington, all polite and brushed, you’d think this house has got nice flats in it, now wouldn’t you?’
‘Don’t start putting up the rents yet,’ said Rose, dryly, after one such flight.
‘Rents. I didn’t say nothing about rents, dear.’
‘No, I’m just telling you not to start.’
There were two rooms beneath mine and Rose’s. An old couple lived there. I never heard them. I never saw them. When I asked Rose about them, her face would put on the sorrowful guilty look which meant that over this matter her loyalty was to Flo. She would say: ‘Don’t worry about them. There’s nothing to tell.’ When I asked Flo, she said: ‘They’re filthy old beasts, but they don’t worry you, do they?’
About a week after I moved down beside Rose, Flo came in to ask me down to supper that night. I thanked her. She lingered, looking hurt, ‘Don’t you want to come, darling?’ ‘But of course I do. I’d love to.’ She embraced me, saying: ‘There, I knew you would. I told Dan.’
My trouble with Flo was that she was uneasy unless she got exaggerated reactions of delight, complaint, or shock to her own dramatized emotions. If I did not at first react suitably, she would prod me until I did. ‘There! You’re laughing,’ she would say, in relief, ‘That’s right. Laugh.’ Or, hopefully; ‘Aren’t you shocked? Of course you are. I knew you would be.’
Rose said: ‘It’s no use your being all English with Flo. It gets her all upset.’
As for Rose, she could communicate a saga of sorrow with a slight droop of her mouth; the climax to a tale about her stepfather would be indicated by the folding together, in resignation, of her two small hands in her lap, not a word spoken. Her single syllable, Yes? could silence anyone in the house.
Rose made Flo uneasy, too. When she wanted to punish Flo she would sit, impassive, listening, refusing to register emotion, offering me the faintest of malicious smiles, until Flo said: ‘Ah, my Lord, you’re cross with me. Why are you cross with your Flo?’
I knew that the invitation to supper meant more than I understood. I had to come to know that a complicated ritual governed what went on in the house. I did not at first think about it, out of an emotion which I now realize was a middle-class hypocrisy about the value of money, the value of time. But Rose made it impossible for me not to think.
About the supper invitation she said: ‘I thought she would. She feels bad about getting too much for your rooms. She was expecting you to make her clean your rooms.’
‘I asked her to.’
‘She doesn’t like housework.’
‘Who does? But she came up and gave me a lesson about dusting and cleaning and