In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [60]
‘Why don’t you come too? I don’t like going by myself.’
‘Yes? Why should I go to the theatre? Yes, I know, I went to a play once. Dickie took me. Well, you can keep it. It had what they called a working woman in it, carrying on and making everyone laugh. Well, if you want to go and laugh at things you should know better about. I’m not stopping you. Besides, if I come with you. I might be out some evening when Dickie comes around to see me.’
‘It’d do him good to find you out.’
‘You think so? Well, I’m working on a plan for making him jealous, proper. When I’ve fixed everything I’ll tell you. But, meantime, don’t you let Flo turn you against me, I’m warning you.’
‘She never tries to turn me against you.’
‘Yes? I know the kind of thing she says. It makes me blush even to think.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Yes? I know Flo.’
‘Well, I know Flo, too, and she’s very fond of you.’
‘There you are, you’re on her side already. Fond! the words you use.’
‘But Rose, you know she is.’
‘Well, never mind. All I know is she makes me sick and so does everybody. Take no notice of me, dear. I just wish I was dead and buried and when she starts all winking and grinning out of the wrong side of her mouth about Dickie I wish I could hit her.’
Flo’s life was spent in the basement. She and Aurora were confined there, with the doors and windows shut, the fire burning winter and summer, the lights burning even at midday. The radio poured out words and music at full blast. When I turned the radio down, Flo became uneasy, although she never actively listened to any programme. I had understood by now that she was lonely; something hard to accept when one looked at these houses from outside, knowing them to be crammed with people.
But here she was, alone all day with the radio and Aurora. She took the child out every afternoon to do the shopping, but for the rest, they relied on each other for company. When I lived in similarly crowded places in that other continent, where every family, no matter how poor, has black servants, the woman and children flowed together like tadpoles the moment the men left for work; and the family units were only defined again by their return.
In the mornings I crept downstairs with my rubbish-can, hoping that the din from the radio would prevent her from hearing me. But it was not a question of hearing. Flo knew by instinct exactly what was happening everywhere in the house, and she flung open the door, spilling out cats and dogs like articles from an over-full cupboard and said, with the dramatic expression of one who expected to see a burglar: ‘Oh, it’s you, dear, is it? Come and have a nice cup of lea.’ If I said I was busy she looked so disappointed. I gave in.
Aurora was always standing on the table in her nightgown, crying with temper, with a plate of food at her feet. ‘You can stay up there until you eat it,’ Flo yelled. ‘I’m not having any of your nonsense.’ That was about ten in the morning, the time Flo got out of bed, Aurora, who had gone to sleep at eleven or twelve the night before, was still blinking and drowsy in between her fits of screaming. ‘It’s driving me nuts.’ Flo said every morning. ‘This kid never eats.’ And she would grab Aurora and hustle her into a chair, ‘Eat! Eat!’ she commanded, glaring down, her hands on her hips. The food was left over from the night before; warmed-over spaghetti perhaps, or a bit of meat pie with cold chips, Flo explained it was no use cooking anything proper for a child who didn’t eat it in any case. This daily scene once over – both sides took it as a necessary routine – Flo handed Aurora a bottle; and until mid-afternoon, when they went out to shop, the three-year-old child would wander about the basement in her night-gown, hair in curlers, sucking at her bottle, and taking no notice at all of her mother’s screams: ‘Get out of my way. For God’s sake, get out of my way.’ The place was so crowded that Aurora was in fact always ‘under