In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing

been thinking about you, dear. Your trouble is this. You think, all you’ve got to do is say something, and then things’ll be right. Well, they won’t be. You leave that pair of love-birds upstairs alone. Because I tell you what’s going to happen. He’s left one wife with kids already. He’s not one to stick. And he’ll leave her, too. And then she’ll be better off and her temper’ll improve. You’ll see.’

      Later Mr Skeffington came in. Soon we heard her plead: ‘Oh not tonight, not tonight, Ron. I’m so tired. I was up with Rosemary all last night.’ Rose grinned at me, nodding, as if to say: There. I told you. He said: ‘I’ve been away two weeks and that’s what I get when I come home.’ ‘Oh, Ron, darling.’ A comparative silence. We heard his voice, adjusted to tenderness. Complete silence. Then the child started to cry. Mrs Skeffington wailed: ‘Oh, Rosemary, Rosemary, can’t you ever stop?’ She must have been up most of the night. At seven the alarm shrilled so long that most of the house was aroused. Finally there came a shock and a crash as the clock was flung across the room. ‘Oh, Ronnie,’ said Mrs Skeffington, ‘now you’ve woken Rosemary.’

      He was a slight, fair, dandyish young man, with a jaunty moustache. If any of us women, Rose, Flo, myself, Miss Powell were carrying something on the stairs, we could not take two steps before we found him beside us: ‘A pleasure,’ he would say, assisting us on our way. His wife carried all her own burdens. She got up at seven every day, washed and dressed and fed the child, and took it to the council nursery school. She came back at lunchtime to cook her husband his meal. She finally collected the little girl at six, having spent her day cooking in a nearby cafe. Her evenings she spent cleaning and cooking.

      At nine in the morning, Ronnie Skeffington, smelling of shaving soap and hair lotion, would emerge from the bathroom in a silk dressing-gown, and proceed upstairs with the newspapers. His breakfast had been cooked for him and was waiting in the oven. At ten he went off to work, and came back at one, expecting to find his lunch ready. He usually did not come home until late at night.

      ‘Say what you like,’ said Flo, ‘that Ronnie, that Miss Powell, they give the house class. Imagine now, if you was to open the door and there was Mr Skeffington, all polite and brushed, you’d think this house has got nice flats in it, now wouldn’t you?’

      ‘Don’t start putting up the rents yet,’ said Rose, dryly, after one such flight.

      ‘Rents, I didn’t say nothing about rents, dear.’

      ‘No, I’m just telling you not to start.’

      There were two rooms beneath mine and Rose’s. An old couple lived there. I never heard them. I never saw them. When I asked Rose about them, her face would put on the sorrowful guilty look which meant that over this matter her loyalty was to Flo. She would say: ‘Don’t worry about them. There’s nothing to tell.’ When I asked Flo, she said: ‘They’re filthy old beasts, but they don’t worry you, do they?’

      About a week after I moved down beside Rose, Flo came in to ask me down to supper that night. I thanked her. She lingered, looking hurt. ‘Don’t you want to come, darling?’ ‘But of course I do. I’d love to.’ She embraced me, saying: ‘There, I knew you would. I told Dan.’

      My trouble with Flo was that she was uneasy unless she got exaggerated reactions of delight, complaint, or shock to her own dramatized emotions. If I did not at first react suitably, she would prod me until I did. ‘There! You’re laughing,’ she would say, in relief. ‘That’s right. Laugh.’ Or, hopefully: ‘Aren’t you shocked? Of course you are. I knew you would be.’

      Rose said: ‘It’s no use your being all English with Flo. It gets her all upset.’

      As for Rose, she could communicate a saga of sorrow with a slight droop of her mouth; the climax to a tale about her stepfather would be indicated by the folding together, in resignation, of her two small hands in her lap, not a word spoken. Her single syllable, Yes? could silence anyone in the house.

      Rose made Flo uneasy, too. When she wanted to punish Flo she would sit, impassive, listening, refusing to register emotion, offering me the faintest of malicious smiles, until Flo said: ‘Ah, my Lord, you’re cross with me. Why are you cross with your Flo?’

      I knew that the invitation to supper meant more than I understood. I had to come to know that a complicated ritual governed what went on in the house. I did not at first think about it, out of an emotion which I now realize was a middle-class hypocrisy about the value of money, the value of time. But Rose made it impossible for me not to think.

      About the supper invitation she said: ‘I thought she would. She feels bad about getting too much for your rooms. She was expecting you to make her clean your rooms.’

      ‘I asked her to.’

      ‘She doesn’t like housework.’

      ‘Who does? But she came up and gave me a lesson about dusting and cleaning and ironing.’

      ‘I’d like to have seen it,’ said Rose. ‘What was your mother thinking of, sending you out into the world so ignorant?’

      ‘That’s what Flo said, too.’

      ‘Yes. Well, now she thinks she’ll make up by inviting you to eat sometimes. And, believe you me, it’s better that way, because she’s a cook better than anyone, even my mother.’ But just before we prepared ourselves to go down to supper, she became uneasy, and said: ‘You mustn’t mind Flo when she gets dirty-mouthed. Just laugh to please her and take no notice.’

      On weekdays, the family did not eat together until the men came in from work, about six. This meal was called tea. No one went to bed until late, after midnight. At about eleven was another meal, called supper. At both Flo served a rich variety of foods. There was always a basis of salads, cake, different kinds of bread and cheeses and fruit. Flo always cooked a different, fresh main dish for both meals. It might be spaghetti, some kind of meat, a pie, or chicken. The late meal, just before everyone went to bed, was the one they most enjoyed and lingered over. Besides, it was by tradition what Flo called a dirt session.

      On that evening when Rose and I went downstairs, the men were already waiting to be served at the table. They wore, as always after work, clean white singlets. The basement was always steaming hot from the stove and from the electric fire which was never turned off. Flo was making a cauldron of spaghetti which filled the steamy air full of the odours of garlic and olive oil and meat and cheese. We sat around the table, sprawling, our elbows resting, while Flo heaped our plates. Aurora, who never went to bed before her parents, was sitting on Dan’s lap. She had on a white tight nightgown, over which her black curls, Flo’s pride, cascaded to her waist. She had her arm around Dan’s thick neck, and was sucking her thumb. Although there were blue bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes, she continued to observe everything that went on, sleepily blinking, and nodding off, then forcing herself awake. Her smile seemed as full of sharp knowledgeable enjoyments as Flo’s.

      Dan’s attitude to me was the same as his to Rose: he watched us appreciatively, savouring our possibilities, but with caution. Flo kept a sharp eye on his every glance.

      She served herself last, and sat down, sighing, saying: ‘After all that gammon I ate before I haven’t room for a bite.’ We all ate enormously and praised Flo’s art from time to time, which she took as her due with a modest and satisfied smile. Dan chewed in ferocious mouthfuls, his white teeth glistening through the sauce, strands hanging from the corners of his lips. From time to time he pushed a spoonful into Aurora’s mouth, but she always made a face, chewed once or twice, and sat with the food, unswallowed, in her mouth.

      ‘That kid’s too sleepy to eat,’ Rose said.

      ‘It’s no good putting her to sleep until we go,’ said Flo. ‘She’ll just scream and scream.’

      ‘She needs a good spanking,’ said Rose. There was always a touch of sullenness in her voice when she mentioned Aurora. She disapproved of how she was brought up.

      ‘But I spank her, I do,’ said Flo eagerly, with a warm loving smile at Aurora, to which the child