In Pursuit of the English

‘About the rent,’ I asked.

‘Well, my dear,’ said the Colonel, ‘I know one can get anything one asks these days, but I don’t like to take advantage. For you I’d make it ten guineas.’

‘You could easily get fifteen or twenty,’ I said.

‘Yes, I know. Those Yanks’d pay that. But I don’t like ’em.’

‘But I haven’t got the money to pay that, anyway.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t really want to let it. It’s an idea that came into my head last week. But I suppose I’ll have to end my days here. In the old country. The trouble is, it isn’t the old country any longer. I used to be proud to call myself English. I’m damned if I am these days.’

Mr Ponsonby was examining his watch.

‘This proposition you were discussing with that fellow,’ said the Colonel.

‘A night-club. Perhaps you might be interested?’

‘A night-club?’ said the Colonel, livening up. ‘Well, I might be interested to have some details.’

Mr Ponsonby had by now replaced me beside the Colonel. His manner with him was quite different than with me. He looked, perhaps, like a sergeant-major in mufti, rather bluff and responsible. ‘My principal,’ he said, ‘is very concerned about the hands it might get into. Needs decent people, you know.’

‘Ah,’ said the Colonel, a trifle suspiciously.

‘Shall I ring you in the morning, sir?’

‘Yes, you could do that.’

We parted, the Colonel wishing me well, but without much confidence, because, as he said, I should have come to England before the First World War, it had never been the same since.

Walking home, I was offered a share in the night-club. He also said that if I had four hundred he would double it for me in a month. There was a house for sale for one thousand five hundred; and he knew a man he could sell it to for two thousand three hundred. ‘And what would you get out of it?’ I asked.

‘Your confidence in me,’ he said. ‘Of course, I’d charge a small commission. There’s nothing in it. I can’t understand it, people slaving away, when it’s so easy to make money. All you have to do, is use your intelligence.’

‘All I want at the moment is a flat.’

‘You’ll never find another flat like the Colonel’s, at that price.’

‘But he didn’t want to let it.’

‘That’s not my fault.’ We were now at the house, and he said: ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll drop around tomorrow and take you to another little place I know about.’

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘I like a person like you, who thinks twice about risking their money. I’ll be in touch,’ he said.

Chapter Three (#ulink_3436391f-2ae7-5f11-beae-867828ac5cad)

Next day I began to look for a job, and the attitude of the household changed. Rose said: ‘Now you’re going to be a working girl like me. I’m glad.’ But Flo was disappointed in me, even offended. ‘You should have told us, shouldn’t you,’ she said. ‘Told you what?’ ‘Now you’re nice and comfortable up in that little flat that’s so nice.’ ‘Flo, I’m looking for a real flat, I told you.’ ‘Ah, my God!’ I heard her complain, as she descended the stairs. ‘Ah, my Lord, she’ll be the death of me yet, they all will.’

‘You just stick it out,’ said Rose ‘And I’ve told Flo, I’m not having that dirty Miss Powell in the room next to me. Either her or me, I said to Flo.’

Next day negotiations began. Flo took me into the big room and said I wouldn’t like it, not really, not with all those cracks in the walls. I said I would like it. There was a small room on the landing below, with a concealed cooker in it. My son could sleep in that. The two rooms would suit me very well.

‘And what,’ asked Flo, ‘were you thinking of paying?’

‘But it’s the landlord’s business to fix the rent,’ I said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Flo. ‘Oh dear, oh dear! Drat it. Oh, my Lord, and Dan’s at work, too, and I’m on my own.’

‘Well, you could discuss it with him.’

‘Poor Miss Powell, she needs a big room for herself.’

‘If a single woman wants a big room, then a woman with a child surely does?’

‘But you wouldn’t call her single,’ said Flo. She began to laugh. ‘Oh, that Bobby, he’s a case. And those great big eyes of his. When he looks at me, I go all funny where Dan would kill me if he knew.’

‘Well, I’m quite sure his beautiful eyes make it easy for him to get a room for Miss Powell.’

‘Ah, that poor Miss Powell. The landlord where she is is being ever so nasty. I’m not nasty, am I, dear? And look how nice my Oar and your Peter play.’

‘Yes, I know. He loves being here.’

And you do, too, I can tell. Ah, my Lord, what shall I do, I shall have to talk to Dan.’

‘That would be a good idea.’

For a week I stayed at the top of the house, hoping for the room next to Rose, waiting for my job to start. Under the roof I was cut off from the rest of the house. The two rooms under me were empty. They were still full of rubble and mess from the bombing. The plan now was that Dan should clean them out and distemper them, and then either I or Miss Powell would take them. I said I didn’t like them. Flo said that was because I couldn’t imagine them cleaned up and painted. Dan was going to start work, in his evenings. Then I would see. I said, either the big room or nothing. It was a war of nerves.

Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth, that seems abandoned, but which sounds, when one puts one’s ear to it, with a continuous vibrant humming. Even when the door shut, it was not long before the silence grew into an orchestra of sound. Beneath my floor a tap dripped softly all day, in a blithe duet with the dripping of the tap on the landing. Two floors down, where the Skeffingtons lived, was a radio. Sometimes she forgot it when she went to work, and, as the hours passed, the wavelength slipped, so that melodies and voices flowed upwards, blurring and mingling. This sound had for accompaniment the splashing water, like conversation heard through music and dripping rain. In the darkening afternoons I was taken back to a time when I lay alone at night and listened to people talking through several walls, while the rain streamed from the eves. Sometimes it was as if the walls had dissolved, and I was left sitting under a tree, listening to birds talking from branch to branch while the last fat drops of a shower spattered on the leaves, and a ploughman yelled encouragement to his beasts in the field over the hill. Sometimes I put my ear to the wall and heard how, as the trains went past and the buses rocked their weight along the street, shock after shock came up through brick and plaster, so that the solid wall had the fluidity of dancing atoms, and I felt the house, the street, the pavement, and all the miles and miles of houses and streets as a pattern of magical balances, a weightless structure, as if this city hung on water, or on sound. Being alone in that little box of ceiling board and laths frightened me.

At last Flo came up and said that the two rooms beneath me were ready, and I could move down when I liked. I examined them and said no. They were very small. She said: ‘You can have the big room for five pounds a week.’ She sounded offhand, because of her fright at my probable reaction.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

She laughed and said, ‘Then you say.’

‘Two pounds,’ I said.

‘Ah, my Lord, are you laughing at me?’

‘You say,’ I said.

‘Four pounds fifteen.’

‘Two pounds ten.’

‘Darling, sweetheart, you’re laughing at your poor Flo.’