In Pursuit of the English

‘Ah, Brixton’s the place for pencils now,’ said the conductor.

‘That’s enough,’ said Mr MacNamara, his eyes once more suffused with anger.

‘Temper, temper,’ remarked one of the women gazing out of the window. When Mr MacNamara said: ‘Here, what’s that?’ she turned her head with a look of calm unconcern, and rose to her feet. To the conductor she said: ‘Give the bell a shove for me, love.’ The conductor came right down the car to help her out. To the rest of us he said: ‘Hurry up now.’ As I stepped off, the conductor said to me, grinning, ‘Mind his pencil, lady.’ The women began to shriek. The bus departed in a tumult of good humour. Mr MacNamara, his fists squared, shouted after it: ‘I’ll report you,’ and the conductor shouted calmly back: ‘A sense of humour, that’s all I ask.’

‘That wouldn’t have been possible before the war,’ said Mr MacNamara.

‘What wouldn’t?’

‘They’re all out of hand.’

‘Who?’

‘The working-classes.’

‘Oh!’

‘Of course you wouldn’t know,’ he said after a moment’s suspicion. ‘In your part of the world there isn’t any trouble, is there? With niggers it’s easy. I’ve often thought of emigrating.’

‘Here I must leave you,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen.’ He glanced at his watch, frowning. ‘No, at nine-forty. I’ve an appointment at nine-fifteen.’

‘I’ll telephone you,’ I said. For I had already decided I would go back to Rose and take the flat she offered. I felt that this was where I would end up. Besides, it was the first time I had heard, in all those weeks of hunting, of a landlady who would welcome a child.

Mr MacNamara and I were facing each other on a street corner, while people surged past. We kept our places by sticking out our elbows into aggressive points. He was very irritated. ‘I work to strict business methods,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll constitute myself your agent, that’s what. I’ll work for you. I’ll get you a flat by tomorrow morning.’

‘That,’ I said with politeness, ‘is very kind of you.’ I was by now longing to be rid of him. He smiled suspiciously, ‘Good-bye,’ I said.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The fee is two guineas.’

‘What fee?’

‘I know of just the place. Three rooms, kitchen, pantry, bathroom. Hot and cold and all modern cons. Three guineas a week, inclusive.’ I thought that if this place existed it was cheaper than anything I had seen. ‘I promised it to someone else, but for a retainer I’ll give it to you. I got nothing out of him, all promises he was.’ A look of disgusted anger came on to his face. This look was genuine: the flat, therefore, must also be genuine? But this is an excuse. I felt as if I had been stung into torpor by a predatory spider. I was being impelled to hand over the money. I began fumbling in my handbag, and as I did so, I knew I was a fool. The thought must have shown on my face, for he said: ‘For you, I’ll make it pounds.’ The money melted into the air above the flesh of his palm. I could hardly believe I had given it to him. So strong was this feeling that I wanted to count the money I had left to see if I had given it to him.

A couple of policemen who had been standing against a wall, upshifted themselves with a stolid and determined movement and came towards us. Instinctively I looked around to see if Mr MacNamara had vanished. I was wrong, for he stood negligently beside me, gazing with impatience at the policemen. They, it seemed, had also expected him to vanish, for now they appeared uncertain. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ enquired Mr MacNamara efficiently. They hesitated. He turned his back and marched off.

‘Everything all right?’ asked one of the policemen.

‘I do hope so.’

They looked at each other, communed, and moved back to their wall, where they stood, feet apart, hands behind their backs, heads bent slightly forward, talking to each other with scarcely-moving lips, while their slow contemplative eyes followed the movements of the crowd.

I walked slowly towards the jeweller’s shop, thinking about Mr MacNamara. It had by now occurred to me that he was what they referred to as a spiv. But he was not in the least like any of the rogues and adventurers I had known in Africa. They had all had a certain frankness, almost a gaiety, in being rogues. Mr MacNamara had nothing whatsoever in common with them. His strength was – and I could feel just how powerful that strength was, now I was recovering from my moment of being mad – his terrible, compelling anxiety that he should be able to force someone under his will. It was almost as if he were pleading, silently, in the moment when he was tricking a victim: Please let me trick you; please let me cheat you; I’ve got to; it’s essential for me.

But the fact remained, that at a time when I had less than twenty pounds left, and counting every halfpenny, I had just parted with two pounds, knowing when I did it that I would never see it again. I was clearly much more undermined by England than I had known; and the sooner I got myself into some place I could call my own the better.

When I told Rose I had lost the piece of paper with the address she said it didn’t matter, she’d take me home with her. The pale woman entered from the back and said unpleasantly: ‘Closing early, aren’t you?’

Rose answered: ‘Half past five is closing time, isn’t it?’

‘Like your pound of flesh, don’t you, dear?’

‘I don’t get paid overtime.’ She added casually: ‘I worked three nights late last week. I didn’t notice any complaints.’

The pale woman said quickly: ‘I was only joking, dear.’

‘Oh no you wasn’t,’ said Rose. Without another glance at her employer, she began making up her face, not because there was any need to, but so she could stand negligently, back turned, absorbed in her reflection and her own affairs. Before leaving, however, she said ‘Goodnight’ quite amiably; and the pale woman returned, indifferently: ‘Sleep tight,’ just as if this exchange had not occurred.

Rose had said the house she lived in was just around the corner; it was half a mile off. She did not speak. I didn’t know if she was offended because I had lost the address; or whether she was irritated with her employer. She replied listlessly to my remarks: Yes, dear; or – Is that so? Her face was heavy, despondent. It was difficult to guess her age. In the dimly-lit shop, she looked like a tired girl. Here, though her skin was spread thick with dun-coloured powder, under her eyes were the purple hollows of a middle-aged woman. Yet she looked defenceless, and soft, like a girl.

At first it was all shops and kiosks; then towering gloomy Victorian houses; then a space where modern luxury flats confronted green grass and trees; then a couple of acres of rubble. ‘Bombs,’ said Rose dispassionately. ‘We had them around here something awful.’ It was as if the houses had shaken themselves to the ground. Thin shells of wall stood brokenly among debris; and from this desolation I heard a sound which reminded me of a cricket chirping with quiet persistence from sun-warmed grasses in the veld. It was a typewriter; and peering over a bricky gulf I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves, which were held neatly above the elbow by expanding bands, sitting on a tidy pile of rubble, the typewriter on a broken girder, clean white paper fluttering from the rim of the machine.

‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

‘An optimist,’ said Rose grimly. ‘Thinks he’s going to be rebuilt, I shouldn’t be surprised. Well, it takes all sorts, that’s what I say.’

We turned finally into a street of tall narrow grey houses. I understood, from our quickening steps, that we were going downhill. I was almost running. Rose was moving along the street without seeing it, her feet quick and practised on the pavement. I asked: ‘Have you always lived in London?’

There was a short pause before she answered; and I understood it was because she found it difficult to adapt herself to the idea of London as a place on the map and not as a setting for her life. There was a small grudging note in her voice when she said: ‘Yes, dear, since I was born.’ I was to hear that reserved, non-judging voice often in the future – the most delicate of snubs, as if she were saying: It’s all very well for you . . .

Rose stopped in front of a wooden gate slung loosely between pillars where the plaster was flaking, and said: ‘Here we are.’ The wood of the gate was damp, and in the cracks were traces of green that I thought at first were remains of paint. Looking closer I saw it was that fine spongy fur that one finds, in the veld, cushioning the inside of a rotting tree trunk where the sun never reaches. Rose led the way down steps, along the side of the house, into a narrow gulf of thick damp brick with water underfoot. She let herself in at the door, and we were at once in darkness that smelt strongly of ammonia. A stairway led up, through darkness, to a closed door. In front was another door outlined in yellow light. There was a blare of noise. The door opened violently and out spilled puppies which scrambled and snapped around our feet. Rose said: ‘Come in.’ She went forward into the room, abandoning me, indicating why I was there to the other with a brief meaningful nod of the head.

It was a long, narrow room with a tall window at one end. Towards the top of the window one could see a frieze of dustbins and watering cans. A single very strong electric bulb filled the room with a hard shadowless light. The place was divided into two by curtains – or rather, curtains looped back high against the walls indicated a division. One half was the kitchen, the other a living-room, which seemed crammed with people, puppies, children, kittens. At a table under the light bulb sat two men reading newspapers, and they lifted their heads together, and stared with the same open, frank curiosity at me. They both wore very white cotton singlets, hanging loose. One was a man of about forty, forty-five, who gave an immediate impression of a smouldering but controlled violence. His body was lean and long, swelling up into powerful shoulders and neck, a strong, sleek, close-cropped head. His hair was yellowish, his eyes flat and yellowish, like a goat’s, and the smooth heavy flesh of his shoulders rather yellow against the white singlet. But he was going soft; he paunched under his singlet. The other was very young, eighteen, twenty, a dark, glossy, sleek young animal with very black eyes. A woman came forward from the kitchen end. She was short and plump, with a small pointed face in a girlish mass of greying black curls. Her mouth was opening and shutting and she was gesticulating angrily at the puppies under her feet and at a small child who was grabbing at her apron. The radio was blaring and she was trying to shout through the music: the noise was so great that my eardrums were receiving it as a dull crashing roar, like a great silence. The older man reached out a hand, turned a knob, and at once a shrill voice assailed me, rising through the snapping and yapping of the dogs and the whining of the child. ‘Shut up,’ she screeched. ‘Shut up, I tell you.’ The older man rose and pushed the puppies outside into the passage with his foot. There was a sudden startling quiet. The room seemed empty because of the absence of sound and of dogs.

Rose said: ‘Flo, this lady here wants to see your flat.’

‘Does she, dear?’ screeched Flo, who had grown so used to shouting through noise that she was unable to lower her voice. ‘Drat you!’ This was to the child, as she slapped down its hands. There was, in fact, only one child there, a little girl who seemed at first glance to be a dwarfed seven or eight, because of her sharp old face, but was three years old. ‘Drat you,’ shouted Flo again. ‘Can’t you shut up when I’m talking?’ The husband got up and lifted the child on to his lap with the patient forbearance of a man married to a termagant. ‘So you want to see our nice flat, dear?’ She smiled ingratiatingly; her eyes were calculating. ‘You’ll be very happy with us, dear. We’re just a big happy family, aren’t we, Rose?’

‘That’s right,’ said Rose, flatly.

‘Dan will show you the way,’ screeched Flo. ‘My name’s Flo. You must call him Dan. You needn’t stand on ceremony with us, dear.’

‘She hasn’t taken it yet,’ commented Rose, in her flat expressionless voice.

‘She’ll like the flat,’ shouted Flo persuasively. ‘The rooms are ever so nice, aren’t they, dear?’

‘That’s right,’ said Rose. She began smoothing down her eyebrows in front of a small wall mirror, with a forefinger wetted with spit, exactly as she had turned herself away to make up her face in the shop: she was saying: ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Let’s all go up,’ shouted Flo. But although she had conducted the interview until this point, she now gave her husband an uncertain, almost girlish look, and waited for him. He rose. ‘That’s right, dear,’ she said to him, her voice softening, and she offered an arch, intimate, merry smile. He responded with a direct, equally intimate flash of his eyes, and a baring of very white, prominent teeth. Even at that early stage I was struck by the boy’s sullen look at the couple. He was Jack, Flo’s son by her first marriage. But they had already adjusted their faces, and returned to the harsh business of life. Dan picked up the little girl and dropped her into Jack’s arms. At once she began to wail. Her mother grabbed her, exclaiming: ‘Oh, you’ll be the death of me.’ She yelled even louder. Automatically the father reached for her, and set her on his shoulders where she sat smiling, triumphant. He did not do this in a way which was critical of his wife; it was an habitual thing.

All of us, the son included, filed into the dark well at the foot of the stairs. The smell of ammonia was so strong it took the breath. We began to ascend the stairs, which were narrow, of bare wood. I was at the head of the procession, and could see nothing. Flo shouted: ‘Mind the door.’ I came into collision with it, a hand reached under my arm, and we all moved backwards down the steep incline as the door swung in over our heads, letting in a shaft of dull light. We were now in the hall. There was a puddle near the stairs. ‘Drat these dogs,’ shouted Flo.

‘Last time it was Aurora,’ commented Rose.

At once Flo slapped the child where she sat on her father’s shoulders. Aurora let out a single bellow and immediately became silent, and watched us all with her black sharp eyes. ‘Don’t you do that again,’ shouted Flo. The child’s mouth opened and she let out another loud roar as if a button had been pushed. Again she fell to watching us. Nobody took the slightest notice of this scene; and indeed Flo beamed encouragingly at me as if to say: Look at the trouble I’m taking on your behalf.

‘Oh dear, oh dear me,’ she grumbled, smiling, ‘that child will be the death of me yet.’