Kitabı oku: «In Pursuit of the English», sayfa 3

Chapter Two

I had already moved away from the counter when some instinct turned me back to ask: ‘I suppose you don’t know somewhere I could live?’ The girl behind the counter shrugged profoundly, sighed and said: ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure.’ I took this as a dismissal, but she looked at me shrewdly and said: ‘Depends on what you’re looking for, doesn’t it now?’

When I had first entered the shop the girl was standing motionless, hands resting palm downwards, while she gazed past me into the street, her face set into lines of melancholy resignation. She was a small girl, her face broad under very black and glossy hair that was piled into a dense and sculptured mound. Her hair, and her thin black crescent brows, made her look like a cockney Madame Butterfly, particularly as she was wearing a loose flowered wrap over her clothes. Her mouth might have been any shape; the one she had painted was another crescent in cherry pink, as deep as the half-circle eyebrows. Her voice toned with the sad lips and eyes.

I said: ‘I’ve been looking for six weeks.’ My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. ‘I’ve got a small child,’ I said.

Her face became shrewd as she examined me from this new point of view. Then she said, with confidence: ‘I don’t know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.’

‘How much?’

‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But she’s ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.’

‘What sort of a flat?’

‘It’s upstairs,’ she said, doubtful again. But added: ‘One room, but ever such nice furniture. It’s only a minute from here.’

I hesitated. My companion, who was directing this conversation with a skill I only learned to appreciate later, said, with casualness: ‘You just tell her Rose sent you. She’ll know it’s all right if you say Rose. Besides, she likes young people. She likes a bit of life about.’ She glanced at me, waited a moment, then raised her voice to shout: ‘Nina, are you busy?’ A woman appeared in the back. This was a jeweller’s shop, very dark and crowded, and she had to push her way through trestles burdened with clocks, watches, trinkets, rubbish of all kinds. She was fat and pale, with rusty dyed hair, but her look of puffy ponderousness was contradicted by her eyes, which were calculating. After a rapid summing-up look, she stood beside Rose, with the air of one putting herself completely at disposal.

‘Flo doesn’t take just anyone, does she, dear?’ suggested Rose, and the woman said promptly: ‘That’s right. She likes to pick and choose.’

‘I’ll give you the address,’ said Rose, and wrote it down.

Seeing she had served her purpose, the pale woman pulled her lips back and exposed her teeth in a sweet smile. Then she threaded her way back to the room she had emerged from. At the door she turned back and said: ‘How about that other place – you know, that you heard about this morning?’

Rose seemed displeased. She said unwillingly: ‘I don’t know anything about it – not to recommend.’

The pale woman’s submissive helpfulness vanished. She said to me with a ferocious smile: ‘I hope Rose is looking after you properly.’ She disappeared. Rose was annoyed. She raised her voice to say: ‘You come back tomorrow, dear, and your watch will be ready.’ She had been saying this every day for the past week.

‘What’s the address of this other place?’ I asked Rose.

‘I’ll write it for you. Mind you, I’m not recommending it.’ Then, the desire to do her friend Flo a service dissolved into the fellowship of the suffering, and she said: ‘Of course, these days, you grab what’s going.’

I thanked her and left. Glancing back, I saw she had taken up her former position, and her face was all lifeless curves.

I decided to try the second address immediately. About the first I felt like the horse dragged to water. I could have said, of course, that Rose’s insistence showed there must be something wrong with it. But there was more to it than that. For six weeks I had been tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards. Stoicism can reach a point where, if someone says: I’m sure you’ll be lucky sooner or later, one feels positively indignant. I was defensively rejecting possibilities in advance. This state of mind was not only mine. Talking to other home-hunters I learned it was an occupational disease. It means one cannot enter a house-agent’s office without an air of hostility; or open the advertisement columns of a newspaper without a cynical (and consciously cynical) smile, as if to say: You don’t imagine I’m going to be taken in by this, do you?

During those weeks I had formed alliances with various people I met in the agents’ offices, or under the advertisement boards. I remember, particularly, a lady with a grown-up daughter and a grand piano. The daughter was talented, come all the way from Australia to study in London. For three months these women had been looking for a shelter for their piano. At the time we met they had become so bitter that on several occasions, setting out for some possible address, they exclaimed: ‘What’s the use, they won’t have us!’ – and turned aside into a café to brood over a cup of tea.

It is a curious fact that at a time when we were all short of money, when getting a place to live was essential before we could start to live at all, we would spend the larger part of each working day (for me the hours that my son was in nursery school) sitting in teashops gripped by bitter lethargy. We used to discuss the various places we had lived in, the climate of this country or that, landladies, the woman who had affronted us the day before, the harpy who had offered one room and use of the kitchen at four guineas a week provided one agreed not ‘to walk on the floor before eight in the morning’. The teashop had become our home, our refuge, the bedclothes we pulled over our heads. We could no longer face another long walk, another set of dingy lodgings, another refusal. We could not face seeing our fantasies about what we hoped to find diminished to what we knew we would have to take.

I went in search of the second address with a grim and barbed gaiety. My by now highly-developed instinct told me it would be useless. Besides, the interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses that became half-effaced with fog at a distance of a hundred yards, the pale faces peering up from basements past rubbish cans, the innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness; had worked on me in a way I did not understand myself.

The street I wanted was not in my guidebook. I was directed back and forth by passers-by, each one saying helpfully, ‘It’s just around the corner,’ and looking impatient when I said: ‘Which corner?’ This business of the next corner is confusing to aliens, who will interpret it as the next intersection of the street. But to the Londoner, with his highly subjective attitude to geography, the ‘corner’ will mean, perhaps, a famous pub, or an old street whose importance dwarfs all the intervening streets out of existence, or perhaps the turning he takes every morning on his way to work.

The house I wanted was a broader, taller house than most, and separated from its neighbours by a six-inch space on either side. The steps were scrubbed white; the doorknob gleamed; the wood of the door was newly-varnished chocolate brown. While I waited for the bell to be answered, a young man came out, carrying suitcases, which he left on the bottom step. Soon a young woman followed him, vehemently slamming the door, and looking to him for approval of this action. But he said irritably: ‘Don’t give them grounds for complaint.’ She was a tall slender girl, wearing an enormous black picture hat, very high black heels, a deep black decolletage crowded with crimson roses, and furs slung over one shoulder. Because of her appearance I looked again at the man. He was as unfamiliar to me as she was. He wore a sharply-angled brown suit, and pointed brown shoes. He was tall, dark, slickly good-looking, with prominent brown eyes that were now suffused with uneasy anger. The door swung inwards, this time to show an elderly grey woman in a stiff white nurse’s uniform. She looked past me at the couple and said: ‘You must have all your things out in half an hour or I’ll call the police.’ The young woman gave a shrill laugh; the young man frowned and began to say something; but the nurse interrupted him by saying to me: ‘Come in.’ Her voice still held the sharpness which she had directed at the other two.

Inside there was a narrow hall carpeted with crimson. A grey satin wallpaper was sprinkled all over with small gilt coronets and harps. Small gilt-framed mirrors hung at various levels, chandelier, sprouting large electric bulbs.

The nurse left me in these surroundings of dispirited opulence, saying: ‘I’ll ask for the keys.’ Soon a very old lady, swathed in pink and mauve wool, wheeled herself in a chair across the hall, giving me a cold stare. Then she turned herself around and rolled back, with another prolonged stare. When the inspection was over the nurse came back with a bunch of keys, and led me up one, two, three, four, five flights of stairs, all muffled in crimson carpet, the walls thick with large brownish pictures. She unlocked a door that barred our way into a more bleak corridor. The stairs were now very narrow and twisted sharply after each short flight. There was no carpet. It was dark, save when we passed the windows, which shed a pallid glow over our heads on to more pictures, so that at short intervals the gloom was broken by a confusion of dimly inter-reflecting lights.

All the way up were doors with names written on cards beside the bells. I imagined vistas of passageways, opening on to yet more rooms, more lives. It was very silent, a humming breathing quiet, like listening to someone sleep. It was as if I had become a midget and was walking up the main gallery of a large antheap.

On the top landing it was completely dark; we were standing in a closed box. ‘Here we are,’ said the nurse briskly, and flung open a door. There was a dim space before us, filled with jostling furniture. The colours were dull crimson and purple, with a dark plummy wallpaper, and so many armchairs, buttoned pouffes and small hard tables that it was difficult for the nurse to move in a straight line to the window, where she jerked back heavy curtains. They were red damask lined with black silk, which absorbed the filtering light so that the room became only slightly less obscure than before.

‘There!’ she exclaimed with pride, turning to gaze lovingly at the oppressive room. ‘This used to be the old lady’s room before she got too ill to climb the stairs. She liked it for the view. It’s a lovely view.’ At the window I saw crowding roofs, and beyond them, the tops of trees shadowed with cold sunlight.

‘Has she been ill for long?’

‘Thirty years,’ said the nurse with pride. ‘Yes, I’ve been nursing her for thirty years. She won’t have anything changed up here, even though she can’t come up herself. It was her room she used to sit in when she first got married. She used to paint. No one was allowed up here, not even her husband.’

The way she spoke, diminishing those thirty years to the scale of a long convalescence, made the fruity room congeal around us; the thick curved surfaces thrust themselves out aggressively in affirmations of changeless comfort. ‘You won’t find many rooms like this at the price. Not good things like this. Can’t buy them these days.’ She gave a proud stiff glance around her. ‘She won’t have just anybody up here. Except when there are mistakes.’ The little foxy face stared at a point immediately before her; it was a table gleaming in the rufous light from the curtains. With an angry movement she jerked forward and picked up a brown, sticklike object which I took to be a cigar. ‘Incense,’ she said indignantly. ‘What next!’ Holding the thing between thumb and forefinger, little finger crooked away in disgust, she nosed her way warily through the angles and shoulders of the furniture like a fish at the bottom of a pool, and flung open another door. ‘I suppose you’ll want to see the bedroom,’ she said, as if this was unreasonable of me. ‘The other people aren’t properly out yet, remember.’ This was a tiny room, more like the usual run of let rooms. It had a large jangly bed with brass bedballs, a fireplace that was occupied by an electric fire, and a single yellowing chest of drawers. The climate of this room – a thin bleakness, with a narrow shaft of colourless light directed over the bare floor from a high window – was as if I had accidentally opened the door into the servants’ quarters from a lush passage in an old-fashioned hotel. The nurse was staring down at the bed, which was in disorder, the bottom sheet stained and crumpled, a single dent in the pillow, which held several glinting yellow hairs. Furs, flowers, dresses and underclothing lay everywhere. She picked up an empty scent bottle and flung it, together with the spill of incense, into an open drawer. ‘You can cook on this,’ she said grudgingly, pulling a gas-ring from behind a small curtain. ‘But this suite is not arranged for heavy cooking. My old lady won’t have cooking in the house. You’ll have to go out if you want to eat fancy.’

‘How much?’

‘Twelve guineas.’

‘A month?’

Her face creased into suspicion. ‘A week,’ she said affrontedly. ‘Where do you come from? I might as well say now that the old lady won’t take foreigners.’

‘What do you mean by foreigners?’

She looked me up and down, a practised, sly movement. ‘Where do you come from, then?’ She moved slowly backwards, her hand pressed against her chest, as if warding off something.

‘Africa.’

The hand slowly dropped, and at her side, the fingers clenched nervously. ‘You’re not a black?’

‘Do I look like one?’

‘One never knows. You’d be surprised what people try to get away with these days. We’re not having blacks. Across the road a black took to the bottle on the first floor. Such trouble they had. We don’t take Jews either. Not that that’s any protection.’ She sniffed sharply, looking over her shoulder at the bed. ‘Disgusting,’ she said. ‘Disgusting.’ In a prim fine voice she stated: ‘And I may as well say we’re particular about what goes on. Are you married?’

‘I’m not taking it,’ I said going into the living-room.

The nurse came after me; her whole attitude had changed. ‘Why not, don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘It’s very comfortable, only select people in this house …’ She glanced back at the room. ‘Except when there’s mistakes. You can’t help mistakes.’ She stood between me and the door, her hands clasped lightly at her waist, in an attitude of willing service, but with a look of affronted surprise on her face. It was clear that letting this place quickly was necessary as part of her revenge on the couple she had turned out. ‘If the old lady likes you she might put the rent down to eleven guineas.’

‘But I don’t like it,’ I repeated, moving past her to the door.

‘We don’t have any difficulty in letting it, I can tell you that,’ she sniffed challengingly, marching over to twitch the curtains back, so that now the room was absorbed back into its cavernous ruddy gloom. ‘You’re the second in half an hour – by the way, how did you hear of it? It hasn’t even gone to the agents yet.’

‘One hears of places, house-hunting.’

‘I suppose you are a friend of that precious pair downstairs.’ She grasped my arm, as if to pull me to the door. ‘I hear the bell. That’ll be someone else, I suppose, getting me up all these stairs for nothing. Come along now.’ She glanced at me, stiffened, stared: ‘If you’ll be so kind.’ She went on staring. At last, she said: ‘It’s much better when people are straightforward about things, that’s what I say.’

‘About what?’

Looking straight ahead, her hands lying down the folds of her stiff skirt, she descended the stairs with a consciously demure rectitude, and said: ‘If I’d known you were a foreigner, it would have saved me so much time, wouldn’t it? One must have thought for other people, these times.’

‘What kind of a foreigner do you think I am?’

‘I’ve known people before, calling it sunburn.’

In the hall the old lady was lurking in a doorway, leaning forward in her wheeled chair from a mist of pastel shawls. Her small beady eyes, like a bird’s, were fixed on me. Her face was twisted into a preparatory smile of stiff welcome, but a glance at the nurse caused her to give me a slight toss of the head instead. Leaning back, she daintily took a grape from a dish beside her, and held it to her mouth in a tiny bony hand, her eyes still regarding me sideways, so that she looked even more like a watchful parrot.

On the steps was the young man, alone. ‘How do you think I can leave when you won’t let us take our property?’ he asked the nurse.

‘I’m not having you set foot in this house.’

‘I’ve paid the rent, so if you take my wife’s things

‘Your wife!’

Immediately his attitude changed to one of confident challenge. ‘I’ll show you my marriage certificate, if that’s your attitude.’ His hand was already in his pocket, but she had slammed the door. There was a clinking noise, and the letterbox slit showed dark with a face hovering white behind it.

‘You deserve to be in prison,’ said the shrill voice through the slit.

‘If you don’t give me my things I’m going straight to a lawyer.’

‘You tell that woman of yours to come here this afternoon and I’ll have them bundled up for her in the hall.’ The metal flap dropped with a clatter.

‘I say!’ shouted the young man in an injured way. ‘Do you know that’s a legal offence?’ With one shoulder thrust forward, his chin stuck angrily out, he looked as if he were about to fling himself on the door.

Nothing happened. Slowly the young man straightened, letting his shoulders loosen. For a moment he stood gazing with sullen reflectiveness at the door; then he turned and his eyes came blankly to rest on me. The glowering anger left in him from the encounter with the nurse simmered in him, unreleased; but soon he smiled a statesman’s smile, bathing me in winning frankness. ‘It’s only right for me to warn you,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t want any friend of mine to live in that house.’ He swung his head to glare at it before going on. ‘Don’t take it. I’m warning you.’

‘I haven’t taken it,’ I said.

Disbelief congealed the smile. ‘Not fit for pigs,’ he said. ‘Better change your mind now, before it’s too late. Better late than never.’ This aphorism pleased him so much that he repeated it, and his smile was momentarily gratified. He leaned towards me, his eyes were anxiously penetrating. If I had said I had taken the rooms, he would now be as anxiously testing me for the lie. ‘Go in and cancel the contract now, better that way.’ The word contract in his mouth was loaded with suspicion. ‘But I haven’t taken it.’ He stared at me closely. ‘Mind, it’s not too bad at first sight. You see the snags when you’re in. You can’t call your life your own.’ I smiled. He grew uneasy. A genuine impatience must have shown itself in my face, for at once his body arranged itself into a new attitude, and he leaned forward with a gentle and disarming persuasiveness. ‘If you’re looking for a place to live, I’m your man.’

‘Do you know of somewhere?’

‘It’s my business. I’m an estate agent.’

‘Then you’re lucky. You won’t have difficulty in finding somewhere yourself, will you?’

At this he inspected me for some time, in silence, and with hostility. Thus it was that right at the beginning, the quality which he most valued in his victims – my naïvety – confused him. He could not believe that I was as green as I seemed. Looking back, I can’t believe it either.

Looking back it is clear that he believed I was putting on innocence to lead him on, to some dark goal, for reasons of my own. Yet there were moments when I was as gullible as a fish. I confused him. And he confused me. I disliked him at sight, but I saw no reason not to trust him. I had never met a con-man in my life.

‘I’ll have no trouble,’ he remarked at last. ‘I’ve nothing to worry about. And they can’t turn me into the street, just like that – not Andrew MacNamara.’

Envying him, I walked away down the steps, and found him striding beside me, giving me calculating glances from his large treacly brown eyes. He was still tortured by uncertainty as to whether I was lying. And what was important to him was not the fact, but whether he was being made a fool of. ‘If you don’t believe me, I can tell you things about that crowd in there that would put them into prison. It’s no place for decent people.’

‘Then it’s lucky I haven’t taken it.’

He changed ground. ‘If you don’t have to count the pennies, there’s flats for the asking.’ A pause. ‘I could fix you up tomorrow, today.’

‘But I have to count the pennies.’

‘That’s always a good line, to start with,’ he probed.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a small child.’

‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘It won’t make things any easier. But you can buy anything.’

We had reached a main street. Half a dozen large red buses lumbered past, concentrating all the colour and light there was in their cheerful and exuberant bodies. ‘Taxi?’ he suggested. ‘There’s a friend of mine in the rank over there.’ He raised his arm to wave.

‘No, a bus.’

He frowned. ‘A penny saved is a penny gained,’ he said.

‘Can you tell me the way to – ‘

‘It’s just around the corner.’

My head was, as usual in those early days in London, in a maze. To my right and left stretched that street which seemed exactly like all the main streets in London, the same names recurring at regular intervals, the same patterns of brick and plaster. It seemed to me impossible that the people walking past the decent little shops that were so alike, and the cold stone slabs decorated with pale gleaming fishes and vivid parsley, like giant plates of salad thrust forward into the street, could ever know one part of London from another.

‘I’m going that way myself,’ he said. He took my elbow in the urgency of unconcluded business. I got on to a bus and he leaped on to it beside me as it moved off. ‘Before you go, take the name of my agency. I said I’d fix you up,’ he reproved me.

‘Where is it?’

‘I’ve five rooms and a staff of nine,’ he said casually. ‘It’s over in Holborn. But for special customers I’ve a little office of my own. For private talking.’

‘Give me the address and I’ll come when I’ve got time.’

‘Never let the chance slip,’ he said reproachfully, giving me a lesson in living. ‘It might get snapped up before you get there. That’s not the way to do business.’

‘But I’m not doing business,’ I said, throwing him off balance again. He was also annoyed. ‘You want a flat, don’t you? You said so, didn’t you?’ Automatically, he looked around for witnesses. ‘I heard you say so. You want a flat.’

‘Tickets,’ said the conductor.

‘Allow me,’ said Mr MacNamara, taking out sixpence with such an air that I was surprised to find in myself the beginnings of gratitude commensurate with his having produced tickets for the front row of the stalls.

‘It’s a pleasure,’ he smiled, pocketing the tickets carefully. ‘Business. You decide what you want. You find what you want. You get what you want. You pay for what you want. Or you pay someone else to get it for you.’ We were sitting side by side on the long seats at the entrance of the bus. Four working women, in respectable hats, carrying crowded shopping bags, were sitting with us. ‘Pay,’ remarked one of them humorously, as if to the air. ‘That’s the co-operative word.’ Mr MacNamara flushed angrily. He struggled to ignore this woman. But vanity won. In a voice of furious hostility he said: ‘What you want you have to pay for. The thing is, who wants to pay too much?’

‘Not me, that’s for sure,’ she said. She glanced around at the other women, and winked. She did not look at Mr MacNamara. The conductor, who was leaning negligently against the steps, smiled tolerantly, and said: ‘Who’s for the Church?’

‘That’s me,’ said the woman, upheaving herself from beside me. Potatoes rolled from her bag into my lap, and she grabbed at them as they scattered. ‘Here,’ she shouted upwards, crouched among feet, ‘potatoes at sixpence a pound. Mind your great boots.’

‘Now, love,’ said the conductor indulgently, ‘get a move on or I’ll take them home to my missus.’

‘Try it,’ she retorted, and lurched off the bus, thrusting potatoes into her bag and her pockets. From the pavement she remarked in a detached voice: ‘Still, sixpence a pound is what you pay for new potatoes, when it’s right, and not like what some people I know try to get.’ Where this barb was directed could not easily be decided, for she was gazing absently at the back of the bus. One of the three women who remained took it up, saying: ‘That’s right dear, some people have no consciences.’ This exchange hung in the air as far as I was concerned, in spite of the gently-grinning faces all around me. I heard Mr MacNamara complain: ‘I say!’ The woman on the pavement, who must have been waiting for him to react, beamed directly at the conductor, and, indicating her bruised potatoes, said: ‘I won’t have to mash them now, will I?’

‘That’s right, love,’ he said. He had his thumb on the bell, and was looking up and down the street. A few paces off a well-dressed woman was running towards the bus. He pressed the bell; the bus began to move; and the woman fell back, annoyed. Now he had held up the bus over the affair of the potatoes as if he had all the time in the world. Once again Mr MacNamara exclaimed: ‘I say!’ Whistling under his breath, the conductor passed down the bus. The three working women opposite surveyed us with critical eyes, in which showed a calm triumph. The bond between them and the jaunty conductor could be felt.