In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [94]
In a moment she opened her eyes, smiled and said grimly: ‘Well, Dan’s done it at last. He’s been trying to pick a fight long enough.’ Beside Rose a door stood open that I had always seen shut. ‘Go in and have a look,’ she said. ‘You’ll never see nothing like that again in your life.’
There were two rather large rooms, and a small glassed-in space that had once been a conservatory in a middle-class house. The rooms were high-ceilinged, well-proportioned. But it was not possible to see this at first glance, because the walls were not surfaced, but had a shaggy protuberant look, and the ceilings appeared as if they were growing fungus, or mosses. The window into the street was open, and all the surfaces were in movement. Damp paper hung in strips and shreds from above, stirring and writhing. All around the walls it looked as if soiled stuffing burst from cushions, and wriggled and coiled as it forced its way out through a dingy, yellowing-grey substance. The floors were so thick in dirt that pieces of string and paper and plaster were embedded in a hard gluelike lumpy surface. Shreds of dirty lace hung at the lower half of the windows. Everywhere were bits of newspaper, bits of rag, smelly scraps of food. The smell was a sour thick reek. There was a small iron bed, with a thin stained mattress, and some cardboard cartons, balanced on top of each other. A wash-basin was yellow with grease.
And that was all. I came out, shutting the door on the smell. Rose had recovered. Flo had come up the stairs. She said: ‘Why does everything have to happen together, can you tell me that?’
‘Because people make them happen together, that’s why,’ said Rose.
Chapter Six
Winning the case was the beginning of a revolution in that house; in a few weeks everything had changed, and I was looking for somewhere else to live. First: Dan and Flo bought themselves a television set on the hire-purchase to celebrate their victory. At the time this didn’t seem nearly as important as the second event – Dan went up to the War Damage people and made a successful scene; the workmen moved in next week.
‘It’ll be ever so nice to have a telly,’ said Flo. ‘We can all sit and watch in the evenings and have a good time.’
This did not happen; at least, not at first. We had a great inaugural party on the evening the set was installed, with Flo’s best spaghetti and a rich almond cake and beer. It wasn’t a success. Rose had given up a date with Dickie; I wanted to work; and Dan resented every minute he was taken away from his labours on the empty rooms on the first floor. ‘Besides,’ Flo kept saying, with defiant glances at Dan, who scowled every time the boy’s name was mentioned: ‘It’s not the same without Jack, is it?’
From one day to the next, the basement fell silent. The age of the radio was over, no longer was the house filled with the roar of sound – music and voices. The yapping and playing of the half-dozen puppies distracted Flo from her magic box, and she disposed of them. Soon the basement was inhabited by Flo, Aurora, a single sleep-drugged cat, and the television screen. Flo kept coming upstairs to say pathetically to Rose and myself: ‘Why don’t you like it, darling, why don’t you like our lovely telly?’
Rose said: ‘I do like it, but I’ve got better things to think of.’ Rose at that time was oblivious of everything but Dickie, hardly saw her, save in the mornings before she went to work, when she came into my room, to run a wetted finger over her eyebrows, smiling at herself contentedly in the mirror, and to say: ‘That Dickie, he makes me laugh. Do you know what he said last night? He said I’m like eating icecream. That’s when we was in bed. He made me have no clothes on, I could have died blushing, but he just laughed. Well, to think what I was missing so long, I could kick myself. But don’t hold it against me, because I don’t come and talk to you the way we used to have our nice times. I’m still your friend. You wait, when I and Dickie get married, you can come and see me when he’s out and we’ll have a