In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [47]
Flo’s London did not even include the West End, since she had left the restaurant in Holborn. It was the basement she lived in; the shops she was registered at; and the cinema five minutes’ walk away. She had never been inside a picture gallery, a theatre or a concert hall. Flo would say: ‘Let’s go to the River one fine afternoon and take Oar.’ She had not seen the Thames, she said, since before the war. Rose had never been on the other side of the river. Once, when I took my son on a trip by river bus. Rose played with the idea of coming too for a whole week. Finally she said: ‘I don’t think I’d like those parts, not really. I like what I’m used to. But you go and tell me about it after.’
On the evenings when Rose decided life owed her some fun, she would say to me: ‘You’re coming with me to the West End tonight, whether you like it or not.’ She began to dress a good hour before it was time to start. I could hear her bath running downstairs, and the smell of her bath powder drifted up through the house. Soon afterwards she came in, without make-up, looking young and excited. I never found out how old she was. She used to say, with a laugh, she was twenty-three, but I think she was about thirty.
‘Rose. I wish you wouldn’t put on so much make-up.’
‘Don’t be silly. If I don’t wear plenty, Dickie says to me, what’s up with you, are you flying the red flag?’
‘But you haven’t seen Dickie for weeks.’
‘But we might run into him. That’s one of the reasons I’m taking you. He always takes me where we’re going, and if he’s got another woman, then I’ll catch him out and have a good laugh.’
Soon she had painted her daytime face over her real face, and had moulded her hair into a solid mass of black scrolls and waves. When Rose was dressed and made-up she always looked the same. She was conforming to some image of herself that was not the fashionable image for that year, but about three years ago. She took fashion papers, but the way we were supposed to look that year struck her as being extreme. She used to laugh at the pictures of fashion models, say: ‘They do look silly, don’t they?’ and go off to her room to make herself into something that seemed to her safe and respectable, because she was used to it.
‘Come on, get yourself dressed.’
‘But I am dressed.’
‘If you’re coming out with me, then you’ve got to dress up.’
She pulled out the dress she wanted me to wear, and stood over me till I put it on. She knew I did not like the Corner House, but tolerated my dislike. She was only exerting her rights as a neighbour, exactly as I might go into her and say: ‘I’m depressed, please come and sit with me.’ At such times she put aside whatever she was occupied with, and came at once; she recognized a tone in my voice; she knew what was due to communal living.
We always walked to the bus-stop, and it had to be the same bus-stop, and the same bus, though there were several which would have done. She kept pulling me back, saying: ‘No, not that bus. That’s not the number I like.’ And if the bus did not have seats free, downstairs, on the left-hand side, she would wait until one came that had. She made me sit near the window. She liked to sit on the aisle, and she held her exact fare in her hand, watching the conductor until he came for it. She handed it over with a firm look, as if to say: ‘I’m not trying to get away with anything.’ And she put away the ticket in a certain pocket in her handbag – one could not be too careful.
But this ritual was for when we went out, because on ordinary occasions she would take the first bus that came, and sit anywhere and was not above diddling the company out of tuppence on the fare if she could. Pleasure was different, and part of pleasure was to pay for it.
At the Corner House there was always a queue. I might say: ‘It’ll be half an hour at least.’ I regarded queueing as tedious. Rose did not. On one occasion, after we had been twenty minutes in the queue, and were nearly at its head, a woman tried