In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [78]
For a time I thought of our side of the street, as opposed to the cliff of elderly ladies, as one of ordinary family life; but one sunny day I came up the other pavement and saw that every house, almost every layer of windows, held its vigilant spectator, peering sharply down over the knitting needles. When I came to our house there, sure enough, half-obscured by a dirty lace curtain, was a very old, yellowing, papery lady.
I waited some days for Flo and Dan, but it was Rose again who approached me. She told me what had happened downstairs.
‘I really don’t know what she’ll say about the old people,’ Flo had said, with resignation, ‘it’s not nice for a nice girl, is it, but someone has to tell her.’
‘That’s right,’ said Rose.
‘I don’t like telling her,’ said Flo with a shrinking and fastidious air. ‘I don’t even like talking about it, it’s so horrible.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s all right for you, but it’s me who’s unhappy, you are out all day. It’s me what has to put up with their noise and their smells and their banging on the floor and all.’
‘Yes?’
‘Sometimes I think I’ll never bear it out, and I’ll have to go and live with my grandmother in Italy.’
At this Rose had laughed, in spite of herself, and Dan, who was still black-tempered, said: ‘If you do I’ll know where to find myself another woman.’
‘There,’ Flo said. ‘You see? Now you just go upstairs and tell her.’
‘And so here I am telling you,’ said Rose. ‘And what do I care? Because last night I let Dickie in.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘How? We was ever so quiet.’
‘Because you look so happy.’
‘Well, I am. Why didn’t you tell me how nice it was?’
‘But we did.’
‘Well, I suppose no one can properly tell in words about it, but if I’d known what I was missing I wouldn’t have held out so long. But don’t you tell Flo. I can’t stand all her winks and nods.’
‘She was up this morning to try and find out.’
‘No! How does she smell these things, I’d like to know?’
Flo had come toiling up that morning with Aurora and the puppies at her heels, the moment Rose left for work, to remark in an offhand voice: ‘Friends should tell their friends the nice things that happen, shouldn’t they?’
During the course of the visit, a prolonged one, she said that you could see Rose was learning sense at last, but that if she wanted to hook Dickie, there was only one way to do it, and if I was a friend of Rose I’d tell her to let an accident happen. ‘You don’t think I’d have got Dan except by being sensible, do you? And Rose doesn’t listen to me these days.’
With the puppies and Aurora cavorting around my room, I tried to preserve my belongings from destruction, and Rose’s privacy, while from time to time Flo shrieked for effect: ‘Drat those dogs. Drat that child!’ and kept her anxious eyes fixed on my face. She was suffering torments of curiosity. And I knew it was no use, because it was always useless to lie to Flo. Being a purely instinctual creature she knew what most of us have to learn by experience, if ever, that in order to judge whether people are telling the truth, one doesn’t listen to the words they use.
I kept repeating that I slept like a log and never woke at night. I said no. I hadn’t seen Rose’s face that morning. Flo kept nodding lugubriously; she had sensed the truth. Now she was wondering whether to ask me straight out if Rose had had Dickie in her room. But I said No, I would be committed to the lie, and she might later lose the advantage of my being in a better mood. With Flo, everything was a question of mood.
‘Well, dear,’ she had remarked, finally departing, ‘I like to believe you are a friend of mine, but how can I think it when you’re like this?’
‘My God,’ said Rose, when I told her all this. ‘We call Flo stupid and she is, we know she is. But for all that she knows what’s true through her skin from what I can see.’
‘And now tell me what they said downstairs.