In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [46]
She would say: ‘I have a friend, you don’t know her. She went into the chemist at the corner for a lipstick. But she could have got the same lipstick along the road for tuppence less. There’s no sense in that. She’s got no sense at all. She dropped some tea on her skirt. Well, round the corner there’s a cleaner would’ve done it for one-and-nine. But she just goes into the nearest and pays two-and-six. Where’s the sense in it? Can you tell me?’
Rose earned four pounds a week. She was underpaid, and knew it. The managers of shops in the neighbourhood were always offering her better-paid jobs; but she wanted to stay where she was because Dickie, Dan’s brother, worked in a cigarette shop across the street. Nor would she ask her employer for a rise. ‘I do alt the work in that place,’ she said. ‘She just runs off to shop and carry-on, leaving me there alone. That husband of hers, at) he knows about is the inside of watches. If a customer comes in, he diddles about, and loses everything and then shouts Rose, Rose. And I know how much money they make because I see the books. Well, if they don’t know the right way to behave, the way I look at it, it’s their funeral. Let them enjoy their guilty consciences. They know I’m worth twice that money to them. Well, if they think I’m going down on my knees to ask for it, I’m not going to give them that pleasure, they needn’t think it.’
Rose lived well inside her four pounds a week. What it cost her to do it were time and leisure, commodities she knew the value of, but which she did not consider to be her right. Half an hour’s skilled calculations might go into working out whether it was worth taking a bus to another part of London where she knew there was a nail varnish at sixpence less than where we lived. She would muse aloud, like this: ‘If I go by bus, that’s three-halfpence. Threepence altogether. I’d save threepence on the varnish. If I walk there’s shoe-leather, and what repairs cost these days, it’s not worth it. I know,’ she concluded, triumphant. ‘I’I! wear those shoes of mine that pinch me, and then it won’t cost nothing at all.’ We would walk together to the shop where the nail varnish was sixpence cheaper, and she would snatch up her prize from the rich market of London, saying: ‘There, see, what did I tell you? Now I’m sixpence to the good.’ But walking back she would stop on an impulse to buy half a pound of cherries from one of the despised barrow-boys, against whom she was continually warning me, so that the saved sixpence was thrown to the winds; but that was different, that was pleasure. ‘I’ll have to go easy on cigarettes tomorrow,’ she would say, smiling delightedly. ‘But it’s worth it.’
All her carefuly handling of money was to this end – that she might buy pleasure: that once in six months she could take a taxi instead of walking, and tip the taxi driver threepence more than was necessary; that she could buy a pair of good nylons once a week; that she could throw money away on fruit when the fancy took her, instead of walking down to the street markets and getting it cheap.
Inside this terrible, frightening city. Rose had created for herself a sort of tunnel, shored against danger by habit, known buildings, and trusted people. Rose’s London was the half-mile of streets where she had been born and brought up, populated by people she trusted; the house where she now lived, surrounded by them – mostly hostile people; and the West End. She knew every face we saw in the area we lived in, and if she did not, made it her business to find out. She knew every policeman and plain-clothes man who might pounce on her if she did not do right; she would nudge me and point out some man on a pavement, saying: ‘See ’im? He’s a copper in civvies, Makes me sick. Well. I wonder who he’s after this time.’ She spoke with a melancholoy respect, almost pride.
Rose’s West End was a fixed journey, on a certain bus route, to a certain Corner