where they had complained she was nothing but a common whore and a tart. ‘Which they might have thought of before, mightn’t they? Bloody hypocrites they are,’ she said. So she told them to go to hell and went back to the streets.
Then she got sick, neglected it, and found herself in hospital with pneumonia. Out of hospital, she went back to her flat and discovered someone had informed on her, and she had been dispossessed. She managed to rescue some of her furniture which was in store. Now she was looking for another flat. She had had a letter from one of the four businessmen whose wife had died. ‘He’s offering me holy matrimony,’ she said, with a wink.
‘Are you going to marry him?’
‘We-ell, I don’t think he should many a common tart and prostitute, do you?’ she drawled.
‘Do you want to be married?’
‘The way I look at it is this. You get bored with one man, don’t you? You get just as bored with four. So you might as well settle for one. The trouble is, he’s not the one I like the best. That’s life, isn’t it? If the one I liked ditched his wife. I’d think about it. As it is. I think I’ll just get myself a flat, issue an invitation or two, and see what happens.’
I said: ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting old?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You’re really green, in some ways, aren’t you? Men don’t come to me for my looks. I’m not ugly, but I’m no oil-painting either. They come because I can cook. I can make a place comfortable, and I know what they like in bed. I’m not interested in sex. Any fool can learn to bite a man’s ear and moan like a high wind.’
‘Don’t you ever like sex?’ I enquired.
‘If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand dirty talk. Never could. I like you,’ she said, ‘but there’s things I can’t stand, and one’s sex-talk.’
Before she left, she made a formal visit, to say with the deliberate casualness that means someone has been planning a conversation: ‘Do you imagine you’re going to make a living out of writing?’
‘It’s a matter of luck.’
‘You don’t want to trust to luck. It’s a dreary existence, banging away all day, having to think up thoughts all the time. I’ve been thinking about you. Now listen. You’ll never have security. Now in my job you’ve got security if you’ve got a flat. It’s the only job that has real security for a woman. You can always be thrown out of a job. And take you — a spot of bad luck with your writing and where will you be — in some double bed you don’t like, I bet. Now you take my advice and get yourself a flat and set yourself up. Learn to cook. That’s the thing.’
‘I don’t really think the life would suit me.’
‘You’re a romantic. That’s your trouble. Well, I’ve no patience with those.’
Miss Privet borrowed ten pounds from me when she left, and about three months later I got this letter: ‘I enclose your ten quid which saw me through, and thanks, my dear. No money troubles now as I’ve been doing overtime one way and another and my friends so pleased to see me, no talk of me being a common anything for the time being. Decided not to marry, no percentage in it. My flat very nice and I’ve paid for new furniture, and also all debts. Picked up a French chair, upholstered red stain. I have it in the bedroom where I can look at it. Well, that’s all for now. If you change your mind just let me know. Or if in any trouble — I never forget a friend who has helped me in time of need. You’ve only got one life, that’s the way I look at it. How goes the inspiration and if it fails, I’ve got a man might do. No good for me, doesn’t care for a flutter, and doesn’t like Art either. But he has
I tried to make it up with Rose in all kinds of ways. When I joked, saying: ‘Look, Rose, I’ll wash the cups in disinfectant in front of you,’ she said: ‘That doesn’t make me laugh, dear.’
‘But, Rose,’ I said, ‘have I changed in any way because I was friendly with Miss Privet?’
‘Miss Preevay,’ said Rose, with heavy sarcasm. ‘French, I don’t think.’
‘But she didn’t pretend to be.’
‘It’s no good trying to be friends. I can see you never did really like me.’
‘Then tell me why.’
She hesitated and thought. ‘You know how I felt about Dickie, didn’t you? Well, then.’
‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Yes? I made myself cheap with him. I felt bad, and you knew that.’
‘You were very happy.’ I said.
‘Happy?’ she said derisively. ‘Love, you’ll say next. Well. I know just one thing. You were my friend. Then you were a friend to that dirty beast, and that means I’m just as bad as she is, as far as you’re concerned.’
‘But, Rose, I don’t feel like that.’
‘Yes? Well. I feel like it, and that’s what’s important.’
Rose’s face was now set into lines of melancholy; it was hard even to imagine her as she had been a few weeks before. Flo told me she was being courted by a middle-aged man who ran the pub up at the corner, and had a bedridden wife. Sometimes Rose dropped into the Private Bar to drink a port-and-lemon with him: and returned to watch television with Flo, sadder than before. For a while she had taken a chair upstairs to sit in the corner of the Skeffingtons’ flat, watching Len and Mick paint, but her presence inhibited them and she gave it up.
‘Auntie, they call me,’ she told Flo. ‘Auntie Rose. That Borstal, it hasn’t taught Len any manners, whatever else it taught him.’
‘Time marches on,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, yes, and it’s true for us all. Don’t you turn up your nose at Charlie at the pub. His wife’ll die, and you’ll be set up nice for life. And there’s nothing to scorn in a man what’s broken in already — he won’t play you up like Dickie.’
‘You make me laugh,’ said Rose, heavily.
On the last evening before I left. Flo invited me down to a farewell supper, telling me that I needn’t worry about Dan, she had admonished him to be polite. Dan had not spoken to me for weeks. As far as he was concerned, I was cheating him out of two pounds a week. He was now asking five-ten for my big room and that little one downstairs, and knew he would gel it. But not from me. And I had refused to pay the six pounds he demanded in compensation for an iron-mark on the table he had bought for fifteen shillings in a street market. He used to scowl and grind his teeth whenever he saw me.
‘It’s no sense quarrelling with her now,’ I heard Flo tell him. ‘Because if you put her in a bad mood, she won’t tell all her friends what a nice place this is, and we might lose tenants that way.’
So I sat with them, and tried to remember the basement as it had been on that first evening.
The great table, which had been the centre of the room, had been pushed to one side, to make room for a half-circle of chairs used for the television. Aurora was asleep next door, with the cat. Flo no longer cooked two meals an evening, but food that could be eaten off people’s knees as they watched. Len and Mick complained that her food was too rich; so she had banished herbs, garlic and oil from her cuisine. On that evening we ate undressed salad and cold meat.
The television was on, of course, but Len and Mick only half-watched it, and kept up their usual back-chat — what Rose referred to as ‘talking silly’.
Len was a thin, spike-boned, white-faced youth, with great black watchful eyes. Mick was light, easy, good- natured; concerned with his clothes and his girls — he had several.
‘Look,’ said Mick. ‘Look — what do I see?’ He was chasing something around his plate with a fork. ‘It’s a snail, no it’s a frog-leg. What my ma would say if she knew what I ate here, she’d have a fit.’
Flo sighed and shrugged. Rose said tartly: ‘Don’t parade your ignorance.’
‘Ignorant,’ said Len. ‘Ignorance said Auntie.’
‘And don’t call me Auntie. I’m your sister.’
‘I’ve got a worrrm,’ said Len, holding up a piece of lettuce on a knife. ‘Worms those foreigners eat.’
‘Well, if you don’t like what I cook,’ said Flo.
‘It’s not bad now you’ve restrained yourself a little, ma,’ said Mick.
‘Cheek,’ said Rose.
‘Oh, let him talk,’ said Flo.
‘If he doesn’t know any better,’ said Dan.
Dan, Flo and Rose had the same attitude towards the two boys: puzzled, and rather sad. This was a new
