that?’
She thought. Then she said: ‘You talk like he’s an animal in a zoo.’
‘If you went to a new country, you’d like to meet new kinds of people, too.’ She didn’t reply. I persisted: ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘What makes you think I’m going to any new countries?’ she said, with resentment. We walked on for a while in silence. Then she forgave me. She put her hands around my arm again, squeezed it, and said: ‘Well, never mind, it takes all sorts. I’ve been thinking. The reason I like you, well — apart from being friends now, it’s because you say things that make me think.’
We were in streets that differed from those behind me in a way I could not name. They were dingy and grey and dirty. There were gangs of noisy sharp-faced children. Youths lounged against corner-walls with their hands in their pockets. Here was the face, which comes as a shock to a colonial, used to broad, filled-in, sunburned faces. It is a face that is not pale so much as drained, peaked rather than thin, with an unfinished look, a jut in the bones of the jaw or the forehead. People were smaller. Rose was absorbed among her own kind and I saw her differently. I was thinking that there were miles and miles of such streets, marked only by a difference in shop-names or by the degree to which brick and stones had been stained and weathered — square miles full of deprived people. I felt alien to Rose, and as if it were dishonest to be here at all. I understood that I was dishonest because I had brought the colonial attitude to class with me. That it does not exist. I had not thought of Rose as working-class but as foreign to me. She must have been thinking me intolerably affected. Later on she said something that cleared my mind. ‘When you first came to live with us,’ she said, ‘you just made me sick. It wasn’t that you fancied yourself, it wasn’t that, but you were just plain ignorant about everything. You didn’t know nothing about anything, and you didn’t even know you were ignorant. You made me laugh, you did really.’
Rose stopped, pulled out a purse from her bag and peered into it. We were alongside a fruit-counter that projected into the street. The man serving nodded and said: ‘What are you a-doing of down here, Rosie?’
‘Just off for a walk. With my friend.’ She nodded at some cherries and handed over exactly the marked price for half a pound. She kept her eye on the money in the man’s hand, and smiled and nodded when threepence was handed back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And this is my friend, see? She’ll be coming down here I expect, so you treat her right.’
They smiled and nodded, then she took my arm and pulled me after her. ‘You go there for fruit, see? Now he knows you’re my friend it’ll be different. And don’t you go buying stuff on those barrows. That’s only for them who don’t know better. I mean you have to know which barrows are honest.’
She began spitting stones into the gutter, ‘See that?’ she said, giggling happily. ‘I used to be a winner at school every time.’ Now I was under her protection. She kept herself between me and the crowd, and at every moment she nodded and smiled at some man or woman leaning against a counter or a stall.
‘I was a kid down here,’ she said; and I saw that this part of the great city was home, to her; a different country from the street, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, where she now lived. Slowly the word
We turned into a narrow side street of short, low, damp, houses, a uniform dull yellow in colour, each with a single grey step. It was almost empty, though here and there in the failing light a woman leaned against a doorway. Rose said suddenly: ‘Let’s have a sit-down,’ and indicated a low wall that enclosed a brownish space of soil where a bomb had burst. There was a tree, paralysed down one side, and a board leaning in a heap of rubble that said: ‘Tea and Bun — One Penny.’
Rose settled herself on the wall and spat pips at a lamppost.
‘Who sold the tea?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that? He got hit. That was before the war.’ She spoke as if it was a different century. ‘You don’t get tea and a bun for a penny now.’ She looked lovingly around her. ‘I was born here. In that house down there. That one with the brown door. Many’s the time I’ve sat here with my little brother when he was driving my mother silly. Or sometimes my stepfather got into one of his moods and I’d clear out and come here for a rest, in a way of speaking. He used to make me mad, he did.’ She lapsed into a silence of nostalgic content. A man slowly cycled down the street, stopping at each lamp-post. Above him, while he paused, a small yellow glimmer pushed back the thick grey air. Soon the houses retired into shadow. Pools of dim light showed wet pavements. Rose was quiet beside me, a huddled little figure in her tight black coat and head-scarf.
It was long after the sky had gone thick and black behind the glimmering lamps that Rose came out of her dream of childhood, She stretched and said: ‘We’d better be moving.’ But she didn’t move without reluctance. ‘At any rate, the blitz didn’t get it. That’s something to be glad about. And the bombs fell around here. God knows what they thought they were trying to bomb!’ She spoke indifferently, without hate. ‘I expect the planes got lost one night and thought this would do as well as anything. The Americans do that, too, they say — they just get fed up flying around in the dark, so they drop their bombs and nip home for a cup of tea.’
As we walked back, she said: ‘I’ll have to get a hurry on. I’ve got to help Flo with the washing-up or she’ll get the pip.’
‘Do you have to help her?’
‘No. Not really. But I’ve got into the habit of it. She’s like that — I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t. But you just watch yourself and don’t let yourself get into the habit of doing things, I’m telling you for your own good.’
At the bombed site her gait and manner changed. She withdrew into herself and became suspicious, looking into people’s faces as they passed as if they might turn out to be enemies. I couldn’t imagine this Rose, all prim and tight-faced, spitting pips with a laugh. In our street of great decaying houses she clutched at my arm for a moment and said. ‘This place gives me the ’ump sometimes. It’s not friendly, not like what I’m used to. That’s why.’
Bobby Brent was coming out of the side door from the basement, a natty brown hat pulled down over his eyes. When he saw us, he frowned; then smiled. ‘You thought I’d forgotten our appointment,’ he said. ‘Well, you don’t know me.’ Then it struck him: he examined his watch and exclaimed. ‘I say! It’s half-past nine. We agreed eight-fifteen.’
‘Oh, come off it, Bobby,’ said Rose giggling. ‘You do make me laugh.’
He gritted his teeth; forced his lips back in a smile. ‘I’ll take you over now,’ he said to me. ‘Of course, the one I tried to get for you’s gone; nobody to blame but yourself. But there’s another. Just right for you.’
Rose was leaning against the gate-pillar, watching him satirically. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said to him, and pulled me inside the front door.
She took my handbag from me, opened it, and removed all the money from it. ‘I’Il keep this till you come back,’ she said. ‘I’ve left you two shillings, that’ll be enough. Now, if you want this room next to me, it’s a good thing you go off with Bobby. It’ll make Flo nervous. And they’re doing ever such a deal, the three of them.’
‘What sort of deal? Why don’t you stop Flo?’
‘Oh no, it’s like this. If Bobby wants, for argument’s sake, five pounds, then don’t let him have it. But if it’s a hundred and it looks all right, that’s different, see? Bobby’s got an idea for a club, a night-club or something. Dan is going to lend him a hundred. And they’re talking how to get money out of you.’
‘But I haven’t any.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, giggling. ‘Don’t mind me, but I did sort of keep my face straight, as if I thought you had money, because it makes me laugh, Flo and Dan, when they get the itch. There are two sorts of people in the world,’ she concluded, ‘the kind that get money, like Flo and Dan and Bobby. That’s because they think about it all the time. And people like us. Well, it takes all sorts. See you tomorrow. I’ll put your money under your pillow.’
Bobby Brent said as I joined him: ‘There’s just one kind of person that I can’t stand. The envious ones. Like Rose Jennings. She’s eaten up with it.’
‘Where’s the flat?’
‘Around the corner.’
