Now although Rose made jokes about Dickie’s having another girl she believed that he was being as faithful to her as she to him.
‘You’d better not tell her that,’ I said.
‘No. With her ideas she’d throw him over, I wouldn’t be surprised. Mad. Well, if Rose wants to get him she’d better make up her mind to …’ She watched my face. ‘Now you’re shocked,’ she said. ‘That’s right, dear.’ And she added another juicy image like a chemist dropping a precipitant into a test-tube. ‘Go on, you must have the ’ump tonight. You are shocked, aren’t you?’ And she automatically glanced around for the necessary person to make this particular pleasure really satisfactory. But there was only Aurora. ‘What are you listening for?’ she demanded, slapping the child across the mouth. Aurora stretched her mouth across her face in a scream, and immediately fell silent, sucking at the bottle.
‘That girl doesn’t know nothing about life. A friend is what she needs to tell her. You don’t think that bastard downstairs’ d’ve married me if I’d hidden it, do you? Not he. They like to know what they’re getting. Beasts. That’s what they are. They’re not like us at all, dear, not really.’ She began to roar with laughter, holding both her hips and rocking side to side. ‘Well, it’s just as well they’re not — oh, don’t mind me, I like to laugh, and sometimes I think there’s nobody but me in the house knows how to, there’s you, all working and serious, and there’s Rose, like a wet rag, and there’s Jack, well, I really don’t know, so I like to laugh and make you happy.’
At this point Dan bellowed up the stairs for his dinner, and exactly as if I could not have heard him, Flo murmured politely: ‘Well, I can see you want to go on working. I don’t blame you, dear, not at ail.’ She grabbed Aurora by the arm and demanded: ‘What are you doing here stopping the lady from working?’ Aurora went quite limp, and Flo shook her like a rag doll, saying: ‘Ah, my Lord, and who would have a child?’ She pulled the unresisting child, who was still sucking at the bottle, along the floor and out of the room. Aurora took her bottle out to grin at me as she was pulled round the side of the door.
Rose came in. ‘What did Flo say about me?’
‘You know what she said.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘I told her to tell you herself.’
‘I suppose you agree with her. Well. I’m telling you both that if that’s all he cares about me, then he can lump it.’
‘Meanwhile, you haven’t seen each other in weeks and everyone takes it for granted you’ll get married.’
‘Well, so I should think. If he doesn’t I’ll take him to court for breach of promise.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t.’
‘I bet I wouldn’t either, I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. The trouble with him is, he doesn’t know what’s good for him. No one with sense likes living in a furnished room when they can have their own home. There he is, sharing a room with two other men, playing poker and never eating proper. That’s really why he cooled off, see? I told him it was time we got married Flo with her dirty mind, she thinks it’s because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.’
Rose’s unhappiness had now reached the point where she could not rouse herself to go down to the basement to eat. She drank cup after cup of tea in my room, heaping in the sugar and saying it was food. When hunger assailed her so that she really couldn’t ignore it, she went out for sixpence-worth of fish and chips. Even in this low condition her natural fastidiousness stayed with her: she was a connoisseur of fish-and-chip shops, knowing every shop within a mile. She would take a bus to a place that used good oil, and fried the fish the way she liked it. But having taken all this trouble, she would push across the packet to me, and say: ‘I don’t fancy it.’
‘But you’ve got to eat sometime.’
‘What for. I’d like to know?’
She had grown so thin that her skirts were folded at the back with safety-pins, and her face was set permanently into folds of grief, so that she looked like a woman of forty.
Meanwhile, Flo had worked on Dan, who had told Dickie that Rose was pining for him. One dinner time Dickie marched into the jeweller’s shop with a covered plate of salad and salad cream, which he knew Rose liked, and placed it aggressively on the counter in front of her. He told Dan afterwards he intended this as a peace-offering; but Rose, without looking at him, carefully wrapped plate and food in newspaper, and went to the back of the shop where she slid it into the rubbish bin. She then returned to the counter where Dickie was waiting, and resumed her former position, palms resting downwards, staring past him into the street. At which he swore at her and went out again.
That evening my radio was playing: ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and she burst into tears. ‘Men are all mad,’ she told me. ‘What’s he think he’s doing, throwing food at me like I was something in the zoo.’ She went into her room and tossed Dickie’s photograph into the waste-paper basket. Half an hour later she put it back on her table, saying: ‘Well. I suppose you’re born stupid, you can’t help it.’ Rose talked to that photograph as if to Dickie himself. When I went into her room, she might be sitting with a towel pinned around her shoulders, making up, chatting softly to him thus: ‘Yes. And here I sit, wasting my time powdering my nose. Do you even notice if I put a new dress on? Not you. All you notice is, if I don’t look well, you complain about that fast enough.’ The photograph was of a hard- faced, arrogant man — Dan without Dan’s good nature.
Night after night Rose sat slumped into my big leather chair, sometimes until long after everyone else had gone to bed, which in that house was very late. She would not bear if I spoke to her. She lay back with her eyes closed, and under her eyes were heavy black bruises. If she spoke, it was to grumble steadily in a monologue: ‘On my feet all day with that blasted Jewess. I said to her today. Look who does the work, you or me? Then get off that chair. Or buy another chair. Can’t you afford five bob for a chair? Can you believe it, she won’t get another chair into the shop in case I sit on it. She likes to think of me wearing out my feet for the money. And as for that husband of hers …’ Rose was always anti-Semitic, in a tired tolerant sort of way. She was convinced that ‘the Jews’ were all like her employers, who were the only Jewish people she had ever met. But now she was depressed, she talked like a minor Goebbels, and it was queer and frightening to hear the violent ugly phrases in Rose’s flat, good-natured, grumbling voice. ‘But I got even with him today. I called him a dirty Jew to his face. He didn’t like that. I said, I know about you, don’t think I don’t. You eat babies, you do, if the Government doesn’t keep an eye on you.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘I’ll believe it if I want to, I’d believe anything of that pair.’
‘Then I’m not going to listen.’
‘Please yourself. But I’ll sit here a bit, if you don’t mind. I’ve got the ’ump.’ Incidentally the aitch in ’ump was the only one she ever dropped; the radio had made her self-conscious. She even said: ‘I’ve got so silly, listening to those lardy-das on the wireless, if I drop an aitch I go right back and pick it up again.’ But having the ’ump was a recognized spiritual condition; Rose dropped the aitch humorously, as a middle-class person might.
I began to read. Rose watched me. I suggested it might be better if she read, instead of worrying about Dickie.
‘What I want is a book to tell me how to get sense into a man’s head.’
A few evenings later we were walking back from the pictures when she stooped to pick up a paperback that had been dropped on the pavement. ‘Oooh, look,’ she said derisively. The picture on the cover was of a woman in a low-cut white satin dress, leaning back against a table in a state of urgent defence, clutching at the folds of her dress. ‘Look at that,’ said Rose. ‘She’s as good as being raped, but she’s got time to worry about keeping her clothes clean.’ The man in the picture looked as if he were biting the woman’s ear. ‘That’s a man all over,’ Rose said. ‘He’s going to bite her ear off if she doesn’t give him what he wants. That’s love all right. I’m going to read it.’ She read the book as we walked home, remarking ‘Just push me the way I should go. I can’t keep my eyes off this, and that’s a fact.’
At home she arranged herself in my big chair and said: ‘Just make a nice cup of tea and don’t talk. I want to see if Lady Godiva gets into bed or not.’ From time to time she’d look up to say: ‘He’s just given her a watch with diamonds. He loves her for herself, he says.’ ‘Now she’s his secretary. She wants to help him with his career.’ Late that night she left my room saying: ‘We’re up to page 97, and he’s already given her chocolates, a watch, a car and a mink coat. She’d better watch out. Well, I’ll finish it tomorrow night, so don’t you decide to go out. I like to have company when I read.’
Next evening she snuggled herself into my chair with the book. I said: ‘If you like those books, why don’t you buy some?’
‘What, waste money on this silly stuff? No, it came my way, as you might say, so I don’t mind. Besides, it’s
