to tell you. What’s eating Dan and Flo, I don’t have to tell you, is that eighteen shillings. They could get four or five pounds for that flat if it was done up. Don’t worry, I heard Flo and Dan talking. They’re coming up to tell you, all crocodile tears, about what they suffer, so you’ll know.’
‘Who’s right and who’s wrong?’
‘Who can say now? I’m sorry for the old people, they’re on the old age pension, and when they’re kicked out they’ll have to go to a Home. But if Dan and Flo go on like a pair of wild beasts, then so does the old lady. The old man’s neither here nor there, he’s too old for anything but being silly in the head. Now if you keep your eyes open along the streets you’ll catch sight of her, lurking and hiding behind her curtains. And that’s all I shall say.’
The street was full of old ladies. Sometimes it seemed as if the cliff of grey wall opposite, jutting with balconies and irregularly hung with greenery and flowers, was the haunt of some species of gaunt and spectral bird. As soon as pale sunlight came creeping along the street, each window, each balcony, was settled with its old lady, reading newspapers, knitting, or peering over the barriers of sill and railing down at the pavements where the children played among the screeching wheels and protesting horns of cars and lorries. No child was hurt while I lived there; but every time I looked out of the window I was terrified: the old ladies were considerably tougher than I. They sat immobile, the light glancing from their spectacles and their working needles; and between them and the children was a bond that appeared like pure hatred. From time to time, like a flock of birds propelled into space by some impulse, the old ladies would rise and screech warnings and imprecations into the street. Brakes screamed, horns wailed, and the children set up a chorus of angry Yahs and Boos. Slowly the grey crones settled into their nooks, slowly the traffic flowed on, and the children continued to play, ignoring their guardians above. Sometimes an old lady would descend from her perch and stalk cautiously down the street, laden with shopping bags, baskets, handbags, purses, umbrellas, ration books. She would stop at the edge of a group of children and hold out a bag of sweets. The children, cheeky and affectionate, approached as cautiously as small birds to an apparently harmless old hawk. They darted forward, grabbed the sweets, and ran off laughing; while the old lady grumbled and scolded and smiled: ‘You’ll get yourself run over, you’ll get yourselves killed, you’ll be the death of me yet.’ Immediately forgetting her, they resumed their play and she her progress to the shops or the market, smiling gently to herself because of the children.
From time to time, the anxiety boiled over into a shower of angry protesting notes carried across from the old ladies to the harassed mothers of the children, by the children themselves. The whole street fomented spite and resentment; fathers, back from work, were pressed into battle; and for a day or two the children, who had acquired a sense which enabled them to evade lorries and cars, had their attention continually distracted by their mothers who would appear in the windows and balconies beside the old ladies, in order to call out: ‘Do look out there!’ or ‘Goodness gracious me!’ Futilely wringing their hands, or waving dishcloths, they agitatedly peered into the street where their offspring flirted so lightly with danger, gave the old ladies a glare of frustrated irritation, and finally returned to their housework hoping to be allowed to forget an anxiety which was useless, since irremediable.
For a time I thought of our side of the street, as opposed to the cliff of elderly ladies, as one of ordinary family life; but one sunny day I came up the other pavement and saw that every house, almost every layer of windows, held its vigilant spectator, peering sharply down over the knitting needles. When I came to our house there, sure enough, half-obscured by a dirty lace curtain, was a very old, yellowing, papery lady.
I waited some days for Flo and Dan, but it was Rose again who approached me. She told me what had happened downstairs.
‘I really don’t know what she’ll say about the old people,’ Flo had said, with resignation, ‘it’s not nice for a nice girl, is it, but someone has to tell her.’
‘That’s right,’ said Rose.
‘I don’t like telling her,’ said Flo with a shrinking and fastidious air. ‘I don’t even like talking about it, it’s so horrible.’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s all right for you, but it’s me who’s unhappy, you are out all day. It’s me what has to put up with their noise and their smells and their banging on the floor and all.’
‘Yes?’
‘Sometimes I think I’ll never bear it out, and I’ll have to go and live with my grandmother in Italy.’
At this Rose had laughed, in spite of herself, and Dan, who was still black-tempered, said: ‘If you do I’ll know where to find myself another woman.’
‘There,’ Flo said. ‘You see? Now you just go upstairs and tell her.’
‘And so here I am telling you,’ said Rose. ‘And what do I care? Because last night I let Dickie in.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘How? We was ever so quiet.’
‘Because you look so happy.’
‘Well, I am. Why didn’t you tell me how nice it was?’
‘But we did.’
‘Well, I suppose no one can properly tell in words about it, but if I’d known what I was missing I wouldn’t have held out so long. But don’t you tell Flo. I can’t stand all her winks and nods.’
‘She was up this morning to try and find out.’
‘No! How does she smell these things, I’d like to know?’
Flo had come toiling up that morning with Aurora and the puppies at her heels, the moment Rose left for work, to remark in an offhand voice: ‘Friends should tell their friends the nice things that happen, shouldn’t they?’
During the course of the visit, a prolonged one, she said that you could see Rose was learning sense at last, but that if she wanted to hook Dickie, there was only one way to do it, and if I was a friend of Rose I’d tell her to let an accident happen. ‘You don’t think I’d have got Dan except by being sensible, do you? And Rose doesn’t listen to me these days.’
With the puppies and Aurora cavorting around my room, I tried to preserve my belongings from destruction, and Rose’s privacy, while from time to time Flo shrieked for effect: ‘Drat those dogs. Drat that child!’ and kept her anxious eyes fixed on my face. She was suffering torments of curiosity. And I knew it was no use, because it was always useless to lie to Flo. Being a purely instinctual creature she knew what most of us have to learn by experience, if ever, that in order to judge whether people are telling the truth, one doesn’t listen to the words they use.
I kept repeating that I slept like a log and never woke at night. I said no. I hadn’t seen Rose’s face that morning. Flo kept nodding lugubriously; she had sensed the truth. Now she was wondering whether to ask me straight out if Rose had had Dickie in her room. But I said No, I would be committed to the lie, and she might later lose the advantage of my being in a better mood. With Flo, everything was a question of mood.
‘Well, dear,’ she had remarked, finally departing, ‘I like to believe you are a friend of mine, but how can I think it when you’re like this?’
‘My God,’ said Rose, when I told her all this. ‘We call Flo stupid and she is, we know she is. But for all that she knows what’s true through her skin from what I can see.’
‘And now tell me what they said downstairs.’
First she laughed, irrepressibly. ‘The trouble is, with Flo and Dan, you always have to laugh, even when they’re up to no good … Wait. I’ll get my face straight.’
She put on a prim and sorrowful face and said: ‘Life is hard, things is not easy. It’s hard for poor Flo. What she goes through is enough to make a queen cry. Those dirty old people, nothing but criminals.’
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Don’t make me laugh, dear. Wait. No, it’s no use. I can’t take an interest. They’ll come up tomorrow themselves.’
Tomorrow I had Flo and Dan, separately, and together, all through the day. They had decided the time was now ripe for my initiation, and they never did anything by halves, whereas previously I could find out nothing at all, now I couldn’t get to speak of anything else.
It seemed that the feud had begun good-naturedly. When Flo first entered the house, she was confronted by an ancient, black-garbed, white-faced crone with burning angry eyes. ‘What are you bloody foreigners doing in my house?’ she demanded. Flo laughed, and said they had bought the house, and anyway, she had been born and bred not half a mile away. The door slammed in her face when she asked to see the flat. She had to call a policeman to
