To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

‘Rose!’ he shouted miserably.

‘What?’ She sounded unhappy but stubborn; and she was unreachable, shut off from him behind a barrier of – what? He did not know. ‘Oh, go to hell then,’ he muttered, and got up and stamped out of the kitchen. At the door he gave her an appealing glance, but she was not looking at him. He slammed the door hard. Afterwards he thought guiltily: She’s upset, and then I treat her bad.

But Rose did not think of him when he had gone. She remained where she was, for some time, looking vaguely at the calendar with the yellow roses. Then she got up, washed her hands, hung her apron on the hook behind the door, as usual, and went to bed. ‘That’s over,’ she said to herself, meaning George. She began to cry. She knew she would not marry him – rather, could not marry him. She did not know why this was impossible or why she was crying: she could not understand her own behaviour. Up till so few hours before she had been going to marry George, live with him in the little flat: everything was settled. Yet, from the moment she had heard the shocked voices saying outside in the street: Mrs Johnson’s dead, she’s been killed – from that moment, or so it seemed now, it had become impossible to marry George. One day he had meant everything to her, he represented her future, and the next, he meant nothing. The knowledge was shocking to her; above all she prided herself on being a sensible person; the greatest praise she could offer was: ‘You’ve got sense,’ or ‘I like people to behave proper, no messing about.’ And what she felt was not sensible, therefore, she could not think too closely about it. She cried for a long time, stifling her sobs so that her father could not hear them where he lay through the wall. Then she lay awake and stared at the square of light that showed chimney-pots and the dissolving yellowish clouds of a rainy London dawn, scolding herself scornfully: What’s the good of crying? while she mopped up the tears that rose steadily under her lids and soaked down her cheeks to the already damp pillow.

Next morning when her father asked over breakfast cups: ‘Rosie, what are you going to do about George?’ she replied calmly, ‘It’s all right, he came last night and I told him.’

‘You told him what?’ He spoke cautiously. His round, fresh face looked troubled, the clear, rather childlike blue eyes were not altogether approving. His workmates knew him as a jaunty, humorous man with a warm, quick laugh and ingrained opinions about life and politics. In his home he was easy and uncritical. He had been married for twenty-five years to a woman who had outwardly let him do as he pleased while taking all the responsibility on herself. He knew this. He used to say of his wife: ‘Once she’s got an idea into her head you might as well whistle at a wall!’ And now he was looking at his daughter as he had at the mother. He did not know what she had planned, but he knew nothing he said would make any difference.

‘Everything’s all right, Dad,’ Rose said quietly.

I daresay, he thought; but what’s it all about? He asked: ‘You don’t have to get ideas into your head about not getting married. I’m easy.’ Without looking at him she filled his cup with the strong, brown, sweet tea he loved, and said again: ‘It’s all right.’ He persisted: ‘You don’t want to make any mistakes now, Rosie, you’re upset, and you want to give yourself time to have a good think about things.’

To this there was no reply at all. He sighed and took his newspaper to the fire. It was Sunday. Rosie was cooking the dinner when George came in. Jem, the father, turned his back on the couple, having nodded at George, thus indicating that as far as he was concerned they were alone. He was thinking: George’s a good bloke, she’s a fool if she gives him up.

‘Well, Rosie?’ said George, challengingly, the misery of the sleepless night bursting out of him.

‘Well what?’ temporized Rose, wiping dishes. She kept her head lowered and her face was pale and set hard. Confronted thus, with George’s unhappiness, her decision did not seem so secure. She wanted to cry. She could not afford to cry now, in front of him. She went to the window so that her back might be turned to him. It was a deep basement, and she looked up at the rubbish-can and railings showing dirty black against the damp, grey houses opposite. This had been her view of the world since she could remember. She heard George saying, uncertainly: ‘You marry me on Wednesday, the way we fixed it, and your Dad’ll be all right, he can stay here or live with us, just as you like.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rose after a pause.

‘But why, Rosie, why?’

Silence. ‘Don’t know,’ she muttered. She sounded obstinate but unhappy. Grasping this moment of weakness in her, he laid his hand on her shoulder and appealed. ‘Rosie girl, you’re upset, that’s all it is.’ But she tensed her shoulder against him and then, since his hand remained there, jerked herself away and said angrily: ‘I’m sorry. It’s no good. I keep telling you.’

‘Three years,’ he said slowly, looking at her in amazed anger. ‘Three years! And now you throw me over.’

She did not reply at once. She could see the monstrousness of what she was doing and could not help herself. She had loved him then. Now he exasperated her. ‘I’m not throwing you over,’ she said defensively.

‘So you’re not!’ he shouted in derision, his face clenched in pain and rage. ‘What are you doing then?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.

He stared at her, suddenly swore under his breath and went to the door: ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said, ‘you’re just playing the fool with me, Rosie. You shouldn’t’ve treated me like this. No one’d stand for it, and I’m not going to.’ There was no sound from Rose, and so he went out.

Jem slowly let down the paper and remarked: ‘You want to think what you’re doing, Rosie.’

She did not reply. The tears were pouring down her face, but she wiped them impatiently away and bent to the oven. Later that day Jem watched her secretly over the top of the paper. There was a towel-rail beside the dresser. She was unscrewing it and moving it to a different position. She rolled the dresser itself into the opposite corner and then shifted various ornaments on the mantelpiece. Jem remembered that over each of these things she had bickered with her mother: the women could not agree about where the dresser would stand best, or the height of the towel-rail. So now Rose was having her own way, thought Jem, amazed at the sight of his daughter’s quiet but determined face. The moment her mother was dead she moved everything to suit herself … Later she made tea and sat down opposite him, in her mother’s chair. Women, thought Jem, half humorous, half shocked at the persistence of the thing. And she was throwing over a nice, decent chap just because of – what? At last he shrugged and accepted it; he knew she would have her way. Also, at the bottom of his heart, he was pleased. He would never have put any pressure on her to give up marriage, but he was glad that he did not have to move, that he could stay in his old ways without disturbance. She’s still young, he comforted himself; there’s plenty of time for her to marry.

A month later they heard George had married someone else. Rose had a pang of regret, but it was the kind of regret one feels for something inevitable, that could not have been otherwise. When they met in the street, she said, ‘Hullo, George,’ and he gave her a curt, stiff nod. She even felt a little hurt because he would not let bygones be; that he felt he had to store resentment. If she could greet him nicely, as a friend, then it was unkind of him to treat her coldly … She glanced with covert interest at the girl who was his wife, and waited for a greeting; but the girl averted her face and stared coldly away. She knew about Rose; she knew she had got George on the rebound.

This was in 1938. The rumours and the fear of war were still more an undercurrent in people’s minds than a part of their thinking. Vaguely, Rose and her father expected that everything would continue as they were. About four months after the mother’s death, Jem said one day: ‘Why don’t you give up your work now. We can manage without what you earn, if we’re careful.’

‘Yes?’ said Rose, in the sceptical way which already told him his pleading was wasted. ‘You’ve got too much,’ he persisted. ‘Cleaning and cooking, and then out all day at work.’

‘Men,’ she said simply, with a good-natured but dismissing sniff.

‘There’s no sense in it,’ he protested, knowing he was wasting his breath. His wife had insisted on working until Rose was sixteen and could take her place. ‘Women should be independent,’ she had said. And now Rose was saying: ‘I like to be independent.’

Jem said: ‘Women. They say all women want is a man to keep them, but you and your mother, you go on as if I’m trying to do you out of something when I say you mustn’t work.’

‘Women here and women there,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know about women. All I know is what I think.’

Jem was that old type of Labour man who has been brought up in the trade union movement. He went to meetings once or twice a week, and sometimes his friends came in for a cup of tea and an argument. For years he had been saying to his wife: ‘If they paid you proper, it’d be different. You work ten hours a day, and it’s all for the bosses.’ Now he used the argument on Rose, and she said: ‘Oh, politics, I’m not interested.’ Her father said: ‘You’re as stubborn as a mule, like your mother.’

‘Then I am,’ said Rose, good-humouredly. She would have said she had not ‘got on’ with her mother; she had had to fight to become independent of that efficient and possessive woman. But in this she agreed with her: it had been instilled into her ever since she could remember, that women must look after themselves. Like her mother, who was indulgent about the trade union meetings, as if they were a childish amusement that men should be allowed: and she voted Labour to please him, as her mother had done. And every time her father pleaded with her to give up her job at the bakery she inexorably replied: ‘Who knows what might happen? It’s silly not to be careful.’ And so she continued to get up early in order to clean the basement kitchen and the two little rooms over it that was their home; then she made the breakfast, and went out to shop. Then she went to the bakery, and at six o’clock came back to cook supper for her father. At weekends she had a grand clean-up of the whole place, and cooked puddings and cakes. They were in bed most nights by nine. They never went out. They listened to the radio while they ate, and they read the newspapers. It was a hard life, but Rose did not think of it as hard. If she had ever used words like happiness she would have said she was happy. Sometimes she thought wistfully, not of George, but of the baby his wife was going to have. Perhaps, after all, she had made a terrible mistake? Then she squashed the thought and comforted herself: There’s plenty of time, there’s no hurry, I couldn’t leave Dad now.

When the war started she accepted it fatalistically, while her father was deeply upset. His vision of the future had been the old socialist one: everything would slowly get better and better; and one day the working man would get into power by the automatic persuasion of common sense, and then – but his picture of that time was not so clear. Vaguely he thought of a house with a little garden and a holiday by the sea once a year. The family had never been able to afford a proper holiday. But the war cut right across this vision.

‘Well, what did you expect?’ asked Rose satirically.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded aggressively. ‘If Labour’d been in, it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘You’re just like your mother,’ he complained again. ‘You haven’t got any logic.’

‘Well, you’ve been going to meetings for years and years, and you make resolutions, and you talk, but there’s a war just the same.’ She felt as if this ended the argument. She felt, though she could never have put it into words, that there was a deep basic insecurity, that life itself was an enemy to be placated and humoured, liable at any moment to confront her, or people like her, with death or destitution. The only sensible thing to do was to gather together every penny that came along and keep it safe. When her mother had been alive, she paid thirty shillings of the two pounds a week she earned towards the housekeeping. Now that thirty shillings went straight into the post office. When the newspapers and the wireless blared war and horror at her, she thought of that money, and it comforted her. It didn’t amount to much, but if something happened … What that something might be, she did not clearly know. But life was terrible, there was no justice – had not her own mother been killed by a silly lorry crossing the street she had crossed every day of her life for twenty-five years … that just proved it. And now there was a war, and all sorts of people were going to be hurt, all for nothing – that proved it too, if it needed any proof. Life was frightening and dangerous – therefore, put money into the post office; hold on to your job, work, and – put money into the post office.

Her father sat over the wireless set, bought newspapers, argued with his cronies, trying to make sense of the complicated, cynical movements of power politics, while the family pattern of life dissolved into the slogans and noise of war, and the streets filled with uniforms and rumours. ‘It’s all Hitler,’ he would say aggressively to Rose.

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘Well, he started it, didn’t he?’

‘I’m not interested who started it. All I know is, ordinary people don’t want war. And there’s war all the time. They make me sick if you want to know – and you men make me sick, too. If you were young enough, you’d be off like the rest of them,’ she said accusingly.

‘But, Rosie,’ he said, really shocked. ‘Hitler’s got to be stopped, hasn’t he?’

‘Hitler,’ she said scornfully. ‘Hitler and Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt – they all make me sick, if you want to know. And that goes for your Attlee too.’

‘Women haven’t got any logic,’ he said, in despair.

So they came not to discuss the war at all, they merely suffered it. Slowly, Rose came to use the same words and slogans as everyone else; and like everyone else, with the deep, sad knowledge that it was all talk, and what was really happening in the world was something vast and terrible, beyond her comprehension; and perhaps it was wonderful, too, if she only knew – but she could never hope to understand. Better get on with the job, live as best she could, try not to be afraid and – put money in the post office.

Soon she switched to a job in a munitions factory. She felt she ought to do something for the war, and also, she was paid much better than in the bakery. She did fire-watching, too. Often she was up till three or four and then woke at six to clean and cook. Her father continued as a bricklayer and did fire-watching three or four nights a week. They were both permanently tired and sad. The war went on, month after month, year after year, food was short, it was hard to keep warm, the searchlights wheeled over the dark wilderness of London, the bombs fell screaming, and the black-out was like a weight on their minds and spirits. They listened to the news, read the newspapers, with the same look of bewildered but patient courage; and it seemed as if the war was a long, black, noisome tunnel from which they would never emerge.

In the third year Jem fell off a ladder one cold, foggy morning and injured his back. ‘It’s all right, Rose,’ he said. ‘I can get back to work all right.’

‘You’re not working,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re sixty-seven. That’s enough now, you’ve been working since you was fourteen.’

‘There won’t be enough coming in every week.’

‘Won’t there?’ she said triumphantly. ‘You used to go on at me for working. Aren’t you glad now? With your bit of pension and what I get, I can still put some away every week if I try. Funny thing,’ she said reflectively, not without grim humour: ‘It was two pounds a week when there was peace, and I was supposed to be grateful for it. Comes a war and they pay you like you was a queen. I’m getting seven pounds a week now, one way and another. So you take things easy, and if I find you getting back to work, with your back as it is, and your rheumatism, you’ll catch it from me, I’m telling you.’

‘It’s not right for me to sit at home, with the war and all,’ he said uneasily.

‘Well, did you make the war? No! You have some sense now.’