In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [52]
‘Well, you must be depressed if you’re on to your stepfather again.’
‘You can say that. I think of him often. Now I tell you what. You make us both a nice cup of tea, I could do with one, and then I won’t have to go down and listen to all that sex, it just gets me mad for nothing.’
When I had made the tea, she would watch me pouring, and say: ‘And now the sugar.’
‘But I keep telling you, I hate sugar in my tea.’
‘Yes? It’s no good trying to tell you anything, sugar is food, see? And it costs nothing to speak of it. I don’t like it either, but it’s food. I learned that from my mother. She’d pile the sugar into my tea and say: ‘That’ll keep you warm, even though the money’s short this week.’ Because that old so-and-so he was always out of work. And my mother, she’d go out charring, seven days in the week, to earn the money, but it was never enough, not for my lord, her husband.’
Rose at night, was so different from how she was in the day that I never tired of watching her. As she sat, dark hair loose around her face, eyes dark and brooding, her face soft, fluid and shapeless in her loose white dressing-gown, she was a dozen women. With each turn of her head, each movement of her hands, she changed, and races and peoples flowed through her. When she spoke of her mother, who had spent her life cleaning other people’s houses, she unconsciously smoothed down an imaginary apron; or she would fold her hands in a gesture of willing service, and she looked twenty years older – she was a working woman, with a tired body and ironic eyes. Then she would talk of Flo; and her whole pose changed, and became sceptical and knowing: Flo represented something she must fight, and so she was combative and watchful. Or she would speak of her mother’s parents, who had lived in the country, and whom she had visited as a child, before they died. At such times she assumed a sturdy and vigorous pose, placing work-thickened hands on her hips, and it seemed as if she might tie on a bonnet and step out into the country past which lay such a short time behind her, ‘My Gran,’ she would say. ‘she lived to be ninety, and I can remember her to this day, standing on a whacking great ladder as tall as a tree to pick cherries, and she was eighty then if she was a day. Well, none of us are going to live to be ninety. I can tell you that. The sorrow of the city’ll kill us off before her time.’
‘Would you like to live in the country?’
‘Me? Are you mad? I’m from London, as I told you. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not English. Not really. When I talk of English, what I mean is, my grandad and my grandma. That’s English. The country. They were quite different from us – I mean my mother and me. I liked visiting with them, but they didn’t really understand, not really, not what living was like. They were shut off, see? But I like to think of them when I get the ’ump. It cheers me up. And it cheered my mother up, too. When her man got her down, she’d go off to see her mother. And my stepfather got cross every time.’
‘Rose, he’s dead. Don’l go on about him all the time.’
‘I see what you mean. But I can’t help it. I had him around all the time I was growing up. I think of him often and often. Sometimes I think Dickie’s his living incarnation, as you might say.’
‘Then that’s not much good, is it?’
‘But I love him. Not that I loved that old so-and-so. You know what? He used to wait for me when I’d gone out with a boy, and if I was after ten o’clock he’d take the broom handle to me. He’d lay about me until my mother came at him. She stood up for me. She stood up for us all. I must say that for her, though he was mostly good to the boys. They didn’t get under his skin. Not that it makes sense, because