In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing

suddenly to Rose, who had loosened her waist-band.

      Rose gave me a glance which said: This was what I meant, don’t take any notice. She said to Flo, with careful unconcern: ‘What of it, after all that food?’

      ‘You look seven months. Doesn’t she, Jack? Doesn’t she, Dan?’

      Dan grinned; Jack’s smile was eager and timid. Flo drew our attention to Jack, and said: ‘Look at him. He’d like to have a little bit with Rose.’ Jack blushed and looked eagerly, in spite of himself, at Rose. Who said good-naturedly: ‘Who, me? I don’t want a little boy in my bed.’

      ‘He’s got to learn sometime,’ Flo said.

      ‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘Then why pick on me? I’ve got to learn, too.’

      ‘That’s what I keep telling you,’ Flo said. ‘How old are you now? And as innocent as a baby.’

      ‘She’s twenty-three,’ said Dan to me, nodding and winking.

      ‘You shut up,’ said Rose to him, ‘you’re as old as you feel.’

      ‘It’s time you did feel,’ said Flo. ‘I keep telling you, Dan’s brother is like Dan, he likes a woman who knows a thing.’

      Rose, who was suffering because of the long quarrel, which I still knew nothing about, with Dickie, Dan’s brother, looked annoyed and put a stop to this hare – ‘Then if Dickie wants it, regardless, he can pay for it.’

      Jack sniggered. He sat listening, shocked, delighted, suffering, turning his eyes from one to another. Against the open, savage sensuality of Dan and Flo, and the heavy immobile good-nature Rose put on for these occasions, he looked defenceless and pathetic.

      ‘Yes. And he will, too, if he can get better.’ Suddenly she screamed at Dan: ‘Go on, Dan, tell her. Tell Rose about that dirty French girl. Tell what she did to you, the dirty beast.’

      Dan smiled, and sat silent. Flo, aroused and angry, yet delighted; screamed again: ‘Well, tell her, go on.’

      ‘I don’t want to hear,’ said Rose primly, who had heard it often before.

      ‘Oh, yes you do. And you do too, don’t you, darling?’ – This to me, in a hasty aside. ‘Go on, Dan.’

      Dan began. At first he kept his eyes on Rose, who sighed continuously with prepared digust. But soon he turned his glistening yellow gaze at his wife, who glanced back at him, terrified and squealing with delight.

      ‘And now you two had better go to bed,’ commented Rose, heavily, when the story was over.

      ‘What for, darling, we’re not sleepy, are we, Dan?’ Flo said, very innocent, catching our eyes one after another around the table.

      Dan remained, heavily sitting and smiling and watching his wife, while Aurora sat smiling sleepily in his arms.

      ‘For God’s sake, put Aurora to bed,’ said Rose, disgusted. ‘Put her to sleep at least.’

      Flo said: ‘Yes. Poor little girl, she’s sleepy.’ She whisked Aurora out of her father’s arms. Aurora let out a single howl of routine protest, and let her head fall on her mother’s shoulder.

      ‘Yes, she’s sleepy all right,’ said Flo, looking down at the child with a sort of malicious satisfaction. She took Aurora next door, while Rose grimaced at me, the corners of her mouth turned down, her eyebrows raised. Dan, now Flo was gone, was openly inciting both of us, grinning at us, his yellow eyes flaring.

      Flo came back and saw him. ‘Ah, my Lord,’ she said sighing, ‘it’s a crime for a man like him to be wasted on one woman.’

      ‘Lend him to me tonight,’ said Rose, smiling and full of mischief at Dan.

      ‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘Listen to you. And what would I get if I even so much as touched Rose?’

      ‘You try it and see,’ said Flo, giggling. She yawned, dramatically, and said: ‘Oh, I’m ever so sleepy. And there’s all that washing-up.’

      ‘I’ll do it,’ said Rose.

      ‘Then I’ll just pop off into bed,’ said Flo, lingering in the bedroom door, her eyes on Dan. She went in and shut the door, while Dan sat a moment, smiling in appreciation. Jack was breathing heavily, looking at his stepfather with resentment, with wonder, with admiration, with hate. After a moment Dan rose and said to Jack: ‘You turn off the lights. Don’t forget now.’ He followed his wife into the bedroom, loosening his belt.

      Jack, Rose and I remained. Now Rose’s attitude became brisk and maternal, encouraging no nonsense. She whisked through the washing and drying, while I helped her, and the boy sat despondently at the table, caressing a puppy, smiling at us, hoping for Rose to soften. He even made a sad little attempt to restore the sexy atmosphere by saying: ‘You do look seven months gone, Rose, like Flo said.’ But she said calmy: ‘And what do you know about it?’ When we left him, she patted his shoulder with triumphant patronage, and said: ‘Sleep tight. And keep your dreams clean.’

      He slept in the kitchen on a stretcher, beside a box full of puppies. He was like a puppy himself – sleek, eager, and wistful.

      I thought Rose treated him badly. When I said so, she gave me her heavy-lidded look, half-triumphant, half-sardonic, and said: ‘And why’s that? He’s a kid.’

      ‘Then don’t tease him.’

      She was indignant. She did not understand me. I did not understand her. She was shocked because Jack, later, wandered in and out of my room, to talk about a film he’d just seen, or about his boxing. She was shocked when Bobby Brent dropped in at midnight with a business proposition before going upstairs to Miss Powell. No man was ever allowed inside her room. But she would go down to the basement in a waist slip and brassière, and if either Dan or Jack looked at her she would say scathingly: ‘Nothing better to polish your eyes on?’ in precisely the same way a fashionable woman might pointedly draw a cloak over her naked arms and shoulders at an over-direct stare from a man. I remember once Jack knocked on my door when I had a petticoat on, and I put on a dressing-gown before answering the door and letting him in. Rose said, amused: ‘You think he’s never seen a woman in a slip before?’ and teased me about being prudish. One night she was sitting in front of my fireplace in her nightgown, and Jack was lying on the floor turning over the physical culture magazines he read, when she unconcernedly lifted a bare arm to scratch where her brassiere had left a red mark under her breast. Jack said bitterly: ‘Oh, don’t mind me, please. I’m nothing but a bit of furniture.’

      ‘What’s biting you?’ she enquired, and when he blundered to his feet and slammed out of my room, swearing, she said to me, with perfect sincerity: ‘He’s a funny boy, isn’t he, all full of moods.’

      ‘But Rose, how can you tantalize him like that?’

      ‘Well, I don’t know, dear. I don’t really, the things you say, they’d make me blush if I didn’t know you. I can see I’m going to have to tell you about life.’

      She had now taken my education over. It had begun over money, and when I got a job with a small engineering firm as secretary. I was earning seven pounds a week. I said something to Rose about living on seven pounds a week; and she gave me her heavy-lidded smile. ‘You make me laugh,’ she said.

      ‘But I do,’ I said. I was paying the fees for the council nursery, the rent, and the food out of that money. I found it hard, but it gave me pleasure to be able to do it.

      ‘For one thing,’ said Rose, settling down to the task of instructing me. ‘For one thing, there’s clothes. You and the kid, you have all the clothes you brought with you. Now suppose there was a fire tomorrow, what’d you use for money for clothes?’

      ‘But there isn’t going to be a fire.’

      ‘Why not? Look how you live. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. You say to yourself, well I’m having some bad luck just now, so you pull your belt a bit