it. It had what they called a working woman in it, carrying on and making everyone laugh. Well, if you want to go and laugh at things you should know better about. I’m not stopping you. Besides, if I come with you. I might be out some evening when Dickie comes around to see me.’
‘It’d do him good to find you out.’
‘You think so? Well, I’m working on a plan for making him jealous, proper. When I’ve fixed everything I’ll tell you. But, meantime, don’t you let Flo turn you against me, I’m warning you.’
‘She never tries to turn me against you.’
‘Yes? I know the kind of thing she says. It makes me blush even to think.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Yes? I know Flo.’
‘Well, I know Flo, too, and she’s very fond of you.’
‘There you are, you’re on her side already. Fond! the words you use.’
‘But Rose, you know she is.’
‘Well, never mind. All I know is she makes me sick and so does everybody. Take no notice of me, dear. I just wish I was dead and buried and when she starts all winking and grinning out of the wrong side of her mouth about Dickie I wish I could hit her.’
Flo’s life was spent in the basement. She and Aurora were confined there, with the doors and windows shut, the fire burning winter and summer, the lights burning even at midday. The radio poured out words and music at full blast. When I turned the radio down, Flo became uneasy, although she never actively listened to any programme. I had understood by now that she was lonely; something hard to accept when one looked at these houses from outside, knowing them to be crammed with people.
But here she was, alone all day with the radio and Aurora. She took the child out every afternoon to do the shopping, but for the rest, they relied on each other for company. When I lived in similarly crowded places in that other continent, where every family, no matter how poor, has black servants, the woman and children flowed together like tadpoles the moment the men left for work; and the family units were only defined again by their return.
In the mornings I crept downstairs with my rubbish-can, hoping that the din from the radio would prevent her from hearing me. But it was not a question of hearing. Flo knew by instinct exactly what was happening everywhere in the house, and she flung open the door, spilling out cats and dogs like articles from an over-full cupboard and said, with the dramatic expression of one who expected to see a burglar: ‘Oh, it’s you, dear, is it? Come and have a nice cup of lea.’ If I said I was busy she looked so disappointed. I gave in.
Aurora was always standing on the table in her nightgown, crying with temper, with a plate of food at her feet. ‘You can stay up there until you eat it,’ Flo yelled. ‘I’m not having any of your nonsense.’ That was about ten in the morning, the time Flo got out of bed, Aurora, who had gone to sleep at eleven or twelve the night before, was still blinking and drowsy in between her fits of screaming. ‘It’s driving me nuts.’ Flo said every morning. ‘This kid never eats.’ And she would grab Aurora and hustle her into a chair, ‘Eat! Eat!’ she commanded, glaring down, her hands on her hips. The food was left over from the night before; warmed-over spaghetti perhaps, or a bit of meat pie with cold chips, Flo explained it was no use cooking anything proper for a child who didn’t eat it in any case. This daily scene once over — both sides took it as a necessary routine — Flo handed Aurora a bottle; and until mid-afternoon, when they went out to shop, the three-year-old child would wander about the basement in her night-gown, hair in curlers, sucking at her bottle, and taking no notice at all of her mother’s screams: ‘Get out of my way. For God’s sake, get out of my way.’ The place was so crowded that Aurora was in fact always ‘under Flo’s feet’. This pair of prisoners were bored to the point where they exploded several times a day in a violent scene, Flo cuffing and slapping Aurora and Aurora biting and scratching in self-defence so that the screams and yells reverberated through the building. Yet it seemed that this violence was of a different quality from Mrs Skeffington’s with her child; because beneath the apparent mutual hatred was a sub-stratum of something warm and friendly. Flo would look down at his scrap of humanity for whom she was responsible with a look of comic bewilderment, as if she were thinking: ‘What sort of trick has fate played on me?’ And she’d say: ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t really. All those years I was running that restaurant, no trouble at all, but this kid beats me and that’s a fact.’
It seemed to me that Aurora understood quite well this process that Flo herself referred to as ‘letting off steam’, because at one moment these two females would be screaming and tussling, and the next, exhausted but amicable, they rested in each other’s arms, Aurora grinning with a tear-smeared face; and Flo, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth over the child’s head saying over and over again: ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s all too much for me. Oar, I wish you’d grow up a bit and then we’d get on better, I’m telling you.’
At regular intervals a women referred to by Flo as ‘that interfering busybody from the Welfare’ would descend, to find Flo, bland as butter, serving tea and her wonderful cake, and Aurora dressed to kill in organdie and white ribbons. If anyone was there, Flo would direct, over the woman’s head, a profound and cynical wink. ‘Yes, dear; oh, yes, I know, dear,’ she said in response to every piece of advice from the expert. ‘I did what you said, but she’s so naughty …’ Her hand extended automatically towards a slap, and withdrew itself again; for Flo sensed that Welfare would not approve of slapping.
‘You don’t have to let her in,’ I said, watching her frantically getting herself and Aurora ready, for the enemy had been observed going into a house three doors down to visit the child whose name was on the list before Aurora’s.
‘What do you mean? She’s Government, isn’t she? It’s the Labour that inflicted all these bitches on us.’
‘The Tories, too, when they get back.’
‘Lord let me see the day. But they’d never want to wear us out with all them nosey-parkers.’
‘You wait and see. And, besides, aren’t you pleased about the Health Service?’
‘I never said anything against that, did I?’
‘That was Labour.’ She was sceptical. ‘It was, too.’
‘If you say so, dear,’ she said at last, with the weary good nature which meant she was going to humour me.
When we knew Welfare was on the way, Flo always waited until the last moment in her bedroom, clutching Aurora by the hand, so as to make an entrance while I opened the outer door, from a room which was the apotheosis of a bedroom. The suite had cost nearly two hundred pounds, was being paid for on hire purchase, and was all beige-coloured varnish, highlighted with gilt. As Flo said, it would give Welfare a nice impression, to see her and Oar, all in their best, coming out of a fancy room. ‘And I’ll leave the door so she can fill her eyes with our new eiderdown. That’ll show her.’
The eiderdown was electric-blue satin and about a yard thick. It was never used to sleep under. At nights Flo wrapped it in an old blanket and put it away until she made the bed next day.
When I had opened the door for Welfare, I was expected to excuse myself and go upstairs. ‘It makes me nervous,’ Flo said, ‘with you there, and me trying to keep her happy. The Lord knows what she’ll think up next. Do you know, she said it was wrong for Oar to sleep in the same room as Dan and me?’
‘Perhaps she’s right.’
‘Are you laughing at your Flo? My Lord, the things they think up. And she said last time Oar’s teeth had to come out, they were rotting in her head.’
‘Well, they are.’
‘Yes, dear, but they’re baby teeth and they’ll fall out of themselves, the trouble they give themselves these people. Well, she’s got to earn a living, hasn’t she, I don’t hold it against her.’
Once she asked Welfare if Aurora could go to a council nursery. But the reply was that Flo had a nice home and it was better for small children to be with their mothers. Besides, the council nurseries were closing down. ‘Women marry to have children,’ said the official when Flo said she was trained for restaurant work and wanted to go back to it — the truth was she planned to help with Bobby Brent’s night-club.
‘Women here and women there,’ said Flo, when Welfare had gone. ‘She’s a woman herself, so you might think, only if she’s got a pussy I bet she wouldn’t know what to do with it; and there she is, talking about women. Sometimes I wish there was another war, I do really. All sugar and spice then, they don’t talk about women then. Not them. Red-tape-and-scissors would be talking different. Are you doing your bit for your country, dear? she’d be saying to me. Don’t worry a little bit about your dear little baby, she’d say. We’ll look after her. I’d like to have her shut up here seven days a week with a saucepan in her hand and a brat driving her mad with not eating, and a husband at her day and night. Mind you, a man’d do her good. Take some of the starch out of her tongue, for one
