In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [63]
Every morning when I had finished my tea, and was fighting my way backwards to the door, kicking puppies out of my way and defending myself with both hands against Flo’s imploring hands, which sought to grasp and hold me like a shield against the long day’s loneliness, she would eventually sigh out: ‘Well, I don’t really blame you.’ Whenever it was a question of me or anyone else working, even Dan, she didn’t really blame us. If I went to the theatre she didn’t hold it against me. But going to the library twice a week earned a long, incredulous silence and the words ‘I don’t blame you’ were brought out with real difficulty. But at last she forgave me for the books, because she took to fingering the books on my shelf and saying: ‘I suppose you’ve got to have all this rubbish to find plots. I wouldn’t have it in my place, it just collects dust, but I don’t hold it against you.’ In the course of the year I stayed in that house I went into most of the houses in the street, and there was not a book in one of them. That is not quite true. Two houses down on the opposite side lived an old man on the old-age pension, who was reading for the first time in his life. He was educating himself on the Thinker’s Library. He had been a bricklayer, his wife was dead and he was now halfcrazy with loneliness and the necessity to communicate what he had so slowly and belatedly learned. He lingered on the pavement at the time people were coming home from work, made a few routine remarks about the weather, and then whispered confidentially; ‘There’s no God. We aren’t anything but apes. They don’t tell the working man in case we get out of hand.’
Once it was Dan and he stared suspiciously and remarked: ‘There’s no God, you say?’ ‘That’s right, that’s right, I read it today.’ ‘Well, who cares, I don’t.’ Once it was Rose, and she said with good humour: ‘Well, if you want to be a monkey, I’m not stopping you.’
A sternly shut door was no protection against Flo. If I stopped typing for longer than five minutes, there were steps on the stairs, then a loud ‘Shut up. Oar!’ and then Flo’s face appeared around the angle of the door, Aurora’s face just beneath it, two faces, wreathed in smiles and apparently without bodies. Flo ran forward saying: ‘Don’t be cross, darling, I know it must be lonely for you here. Just give me a cigarette and I’ll sit and watch.’
At last I learned to work while she was there, or while Aurora played on the floor. She played differently from the normal child of her age. All her games were centred around the long mirror. She made faces at herself, sticking out her tongue and rolling up her eyes; or smiled sweetly, or with a leer. She look a cushion and held it to her stomach, or laid it to her behind and minced up and down the room, watching her reflection. She tried on my shoes, wrapped my clothes around herself, or took off her dress and stood examining her scrawny little body. She would take a pinch of flesh between thumb and finger on her chest and say to herself: ‘Titties, where are my titties, I can see them, yes,’ Or she would pull her long black corkscrew curls out one by one, like springs, and watch them leap back into position. This game she could play for an hour at a time, standing quite still, frowning with steady concentration at her image, watching the black curls lengthen, straighten, and spring back, again and again and again.
I tried to get her to eat, but without success. No matter how casual my preparations were – fetching tea and cake for us both, cooking eggs, handing her her plate without comment, she would stiffen up and watch me, with the small, knowing grown-up smile which was so disconcerting.
Or she would sit on the floor, sucking her thumb, without moving, her black, sharp eyes fixed on me. Once I came into the room and caught her mimicking me. She was sitting at the typewriter, frowning absorbedly, smoking an imaginary cigarette. When she saw me she smiled, a wise, amused smile, as if to say: We both know you’re funny. She jumped politely off the chair, and sat on the floor again, sucking her