In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [45]
‘Then don’t tease him.’
She was indignant. She did not understand me. I did not understand her. She was shocked because Jack, later, wandered in and out of my room, to talk about a film he’d just seen, or about his boxing. She was shocked when Bobby Brent dropped in at midnight with a business proposition before going upstairs to Miss Powell. No man was ever allowed inside her room. But she would go down to the basement in a waist slip and brassière, and if either Dan or lack looked at her she would say scathingly: ‘Nothing better to polish your eyes on?’ in precisely the same way a fashionable woman might pointedly draw a cloak over her naked arms and shoulders at an over-direct stare from a man. I remember once Jack knocked on my door when I had a petticoat on, and I put on a dressing-gown before answering the door and letting him in. Rose said, amused: ‘You think he’s never seen a woman in a slip before?’ and teased me about being prudish. One night she was sitting in front of my fireplace in her nightgown, and Jack was lying on the floor turning over the physical culture magazines he read, when she unconcernedly lifted a bare arm to scratch where her brassière had left a red mark under her breast. Jack said bitterly: ‘Oh, don’t mind me, please. I’m nothing but a bit of furniture.’
‘What’s biting you?’ she enquired, and when he blundered to his feet and slammed out of my room, swearing, she said to me, with perfect sincerity; ‘He’s a funny boy, isn’t he, all full of moods.’
‘But Rose, how can you tantalize him like that?’
‘Well. I don’t know, dear. I don’t really, the things you say, they’d make me blush if I didn’t know you. I can see I’m going to have to tell you about life.’
She had now taken my education over. It had begun over money, and when I got a job with a small engineering firm as secretary. I was earning seven pounds a week, I said something to Rose about living on seven pounds a week; and she gave me her heavy-lidded smile. ‘You make me laugh,’ she said.
‘But I do,’ I said. I was paying the fees for the council nursery, the rent, and the food out of that money. I found it hard, but it gave me pleasure to be able to do it.
‘For one thing,’ said Rose, settling down to the task of instructing me. ‘For one thing, there’s clothes. You and the kid, you have all the clothes you brought with you. Now suppose there was a fire tomorrow, what’d you use for money for clothes?’
‘But there isn’t going to be a fire.’
‘Why not? Look how you live. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. You say to yourself, well I’m having some bad luck just now, so you pull your belt a bit tighter, while it lasts. That’s not being poor. You always go on as if you’ll win the pools tomorrow.’
‘Well, I hate having to worry all the time about what might happen.’
‘Yes?’ said Rose, silencing me.
‘All right, then, you show me.’
‘Yes, I’m going to. Because you worry me, you do really. Suppose you don’t get married, suppose that book of yours isn’t any good?’
I was ready to listen, because this was one of the times when I believed I might not write again. I found I was too tired at night to write. My day, for some weeks, went like this. My son woke early, and I dressed and fed him and took him to the nursery before going to work. At lunchtime I went to the shops, took food home and cleaned the place out. I picked him up from the nursery at five; and by the time he was fed and bathed and read to, and he was ready for sleep, it was about nine. Then, in theory, was my time for writing. But not only could I not write. I could not even imagine myself writing. The personality ‘writer’ was so far removed from me, it was like thinking about another person, not myself. As it turned out, after two months or so, I got an advance from a publisher on a previously-written book, and my troubles were over. But during that time. I was ready to listen to Rose’s strictures.
‘No,’ she would say patiently, as she took the match from my fingers and replaced