In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [79]
First she laughed, irrepressibly. ‘The trouble is, with Flo and Dan, you always have to laugh, even when they’re up to no good … Wait. I’ll get my face straight.’
She put on a prim and sorrowful face and said: ‘Life is hard, things is not easy. It’s hard for poor Flo. What she goes through is enough to make a queen cry. Those dirty old people, nothing but criminals.’
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Don’t make me laugh, dear. Wait. No, it’s no use. I can’t take an interest. They’ll come up tomorrow themselves.’
Tomorrow I had Flo and Dan, separately, and together, all through the day. They had decided the time was now ripe for my initiation, and they never did anything by halves, whereas previously I could find out nothing at all, now I couldn’t get to speak of anything else.
It seemed that the feud had begun good-naturedly. When Flo first entered the house, she was confronted by an ancient, black-garbed, white-faced crone with burning angry eyes. ‘What are you bloody foreigners doing in my house?’ she demanded. Flo laughed, and said they had bought the house, and anyway, she had been born and bred not half a mile away. The door slammed in her face when she asked to see the flat. She had to call a policeman to make them open the door. Afterwards the policeman had said: ‘Crazy as they come. You’d better get them out before they do damage.’ This pronouncement from the Law itself, or so Dan and Flo saw it, had confused them; for a time they had believed all they would have to do was to call a policeman and get the couple turned into the street. Meanwhile, they could not go anywhere near the first floor without shouts and imprecations being hurled at them from behind the locked door. Dan went to a lawyer and was told he could not turn them out so easily. It had been decided between them to go to Court and complain the flat was kept in a disgusting condition. Rose, who had actually been inside it, said this was true. It contained a single bed, with stained bedding; a cupboard made of boxes, and a couple of gas rings. Rose said the filth and the smell was so she was nearly sick. But a week before the Court case, Dan lost his temper and threw a flat-iron at the door with all the strength of his enormous arms and shoulders. The door splintered inwards, the old lady brought a counter-claim, and both parties had been bound over to good behaviour in Court.
From that time, they behaved as if they regarded each other as a species of wild animal.
When I said to Flo that such and such an action might have killed the old lady, she replied: ‘Yes, but she threw a saucepan full of boiling potatoes at me the week before. That might have killed me, mightn’t it?’ Or: ‘Well, dear, if I had, she wouldn’t be much loss to the world, would she? She might just as welt be dead for all the good it does her.’
But there had been long spells of comparative peace. Flo would make a point of raising her voice in insulting remarks as she passed their door; the old lady inside would retaliate by shrieking like a parrot. And before Dan went to bed every night he had made a point of climbing up to the room I was now in where he stamped up and down for a good ten minutes. The old lady, if she got the chance, emptied her dustpan or shook her duster down Flo’s stairs. Or she would summon a policeman to say: ‘That bitch is trying to kill me.’ The policeman knew her; and would take down her tale in the book, and then drop down for a cup of tea with Flo. This stale of affairs might continue for weeks. And then everything flared up into open war.
A few months after the binding over, Dan applied to have the couple removed to a lunatic asylum. The old lady had screamed that her tap was broken and it was the landlord’s responsibility, Dan at once went to mend it; he was longing to get his capable hands on to the disorder inside that flat. But he was met with a locked door and silence. Soon there came a lawyer’s letter demanding that he should mend the tap at once, Dan attempted to enter the flat in the presence of the police and failed. He pointed out that no one but a crazy