In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [67]
At this point Dan bellowed up the stairs for his dinner, and exactly as if I could not have heard him, Flo murmured politely: ‘Well, I can see you want to go on working. I don’t blame you, dear, not at ail.’ She grabbed Aurora by the arm and demanded: ‘What are you doing here stopping the lady from working?’ Aurora went quite limp, and Flo shook her like a rag doll, saying: ‘Ah, my Lord, and who would have a child?’ She pulled the unresisting child, who was still sucking at the bottle, along the floor and out of the room. Aurora took her bottle out to grin at me as she was pulled round the side of the door.
Rose came in. ‘What did Flo say about me?’
‘You know what she said.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I told her to tell you herself.’
‘I suppose you agree with her. Well. I’m telling you both that if that’s all he cares about me, then he can lump it.’
‘Meanwhile, you haven’t seen each other in weeks and everyone takes it for granted you’ll get married.’
‘Well, so I should think. If he doesn’t I’ll take him to court for breach of promise.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t.’
‘I bet I wouldn’t either, I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. The trouble with him is, he doesn’t know what’s good for him. No one with sense likes living in a furnished room when they can have their own home. There he is, sharing a room with two other men, playing poker and never eating proper. That’s really why he cooled off, see? I told him it was time we got married Flo with her dirty mind, she thinks it’s because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.’
Rose’s unhappiness had now reached the point where she could not rouse herself to go down to the basement to eat. She drank cup after cup of tea in my room, heaping in the sugar and saying it was food. When hunger assailed her so that she really couldn’t ignore it, she went out for sixpence-worth of fish and chips. Even in this low condition her natural fastidiousness stayed with her: she was a connoisseur of fish-and-chip shops, knowing every shop within a mile. She would take a bus to a place that used good oil, and fried the fish the way she liked it. But having taken all this trouble, she would push across the packet to me, and say: ‘I don’t fancy it.’
‘But you’ve got to eat sometime.’
‘What for. I’d like to know?’
She had grown so thin that her skirts were folded at the back with safety-pins, and her face was set permanently into folds of grief, so that she looked like a woman of forty.
Meanwhile, Flo had worked on Dan, who had told Dickie that Rose was pining for him. One dinner time Dickie marched into the jeweller’s shop with a covered plate of salad and salad cream, which he knew Rose liked, and placed it aggressively on the counter in front of her. He told Dan afterwards he intended this as a peace-offering; but Rose, without looking at him, carefully wrapped plate and food in newspaper, and went to the back of the shop where she slid it into the rubbish bin. She then returned to the counter where Dickie was waiting, and resumed her former position, palms resting downwards, staring past him into the street. At which he swore at her and went out again.
That evening my radio was playing: ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and she burst into tears. ‘Men are all mad,’ she told me. ‘What’s he think he’s doing, throwing food at me like I was something in the zoo.’ She went into her room and tossed Dickie’s photograph into the waste-paper basket. Half an hour later she put it back on her table, saying: ‘Well. I suppose you’re born stupid, you can’t help it.’ Rose talked to that photograph as if to Dickie himself. When I went into her room, she might be sitting with a towel pinned around her shoulders,