In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing

more trouble than they’re worth, and that’s the truth.’

      ‘Trouble!’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, and I know it. But I know if you two was tucked up nice and close with a man you fancied you’d not be sitting here all hours, looking like death’s funeral.’

      ‘We’re talking,’ said Rose. ‘We’re talking serious.’

      ‘Don’t you fancy a little bit of supper, Rose?’

      ‘I’m not in the mood for doing your washing-up,’ said Rose, ungraciously, breaking all the rules of the house.

      ‘My God, who said anything about washing-up?’

      ‘I am.’

      ‘You’re not cross with your Flo?’

      ‘I don’t feel like talking dirty, that’s all.’

      ‘Dirty, she says?’

      ‘You know what I mean.’

      ‘Oh, my God! Well, I hope you will come to your senses and then you’ll be more pleasure to your friends. Give me a cigarette, darling.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Give your Flo a cigarette?’

      I gave her one.

      ‘That’s right,’ she said, satisfied. ‘And you come down on Sunday for dinner, you two, it’ll do you good.’

      She went, genuinely concerned for us both.

      ‘She means well,’ Rose would say. ‘The thing is, now she’s got her man all safe, she’s not serious. Many’s the good times she and I had together, just like you and me now, before Dan came along. They just took one look and began to quarrel. Well, you can always tell by that, can’t you? Look at my mother and my stepfather. Fight, fight, fight. And in between they were warming up the bed.’

      ‘Well, you must be depressed if you’re on to your stepfather again.’

      ‘You can say that. I think of him often. Now I tell you what. You make us both a nice cup of tea, I could do with one, and then I won’t have to go down and listen to all that sex, it just gets me mad for nothing.’

      When I had made the tea, she would watch me pouring, and say: ‘And now the sugar.’

      ‘But I keep telling you, I hate sugar in my tea.’

      ‘Yes? It’s no good trying to tell you anything, sugar is food, see? And it costs nothing to speak of it. I don’t like it either, but it’s food. I learned that from my mother. She’d pile the sugar into my tea and say: ‘That’ll keep you warm, even though the money’s short this week.’ Because that old so-and-so he was always out of work. And my mother, she’d go out charring, seven days in the week, to earn the money, but it was never enough, not for my lord, her husband.’