Rose took my elbow, and we went quietly to the door, ‘Quick,’ she whispered, ‘or the Lord knows what we’ll have to be witness to.’
Jack backed against the wall. Dan was on his feet. Jack shouted out to his mother, who had her hands over her face: ‘And you’re not my mother since you married him, you’ve not treated me right since …’ Dan slapped him across the face. Jack fell over and picked himself up, crouching under the powerful figure of the man towering over him. He was cut off from help in the corner. He shrieked: ‘Mum, mum, don’t let him hit me.’
‘Are you going to help me get that place straight or not?’ ‘No, no. I won’t. Why should I? You don’t pay me for my work.’
Rose and I had reached the bottom of the stairs. She was clinging on to me. I could feel her trembling again, as she had earlier in Court. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I feel sick. People shouting, people fighting, it makes me feel all sick.’
There was a silence in the room we had left. ‘Thank the Lord,’ whispered Rose. ‘They’ve stopped.’
There was a yell of pain from Dan. ‘He’s bitten me,’ he shouted. ‘Your precious son has bitten my thumb right through.’ Flo sobbed out: ‘Dan, Jack. Dan, Jack …’
Jack had rushed out and was in the dark passage with us. In a second Dan was after him. He picked up the boy in his arms and with one hand opened the outer door and flung him outside on to the cement of the passage. Jack got to his hands and knees, Dan was over him, and kicked him. Jack crawled up the steps out of sight, groaning, as Dan kicked at him, in a heavily-breathing silence.
There was a screech of brakes as a lorry swerved. Dan shouted: ‘And you needn’t come back, this isn’t your home any longer.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Rose, ‘help me, dear. Help me out of here.’ I got her up into the hallway, where she leaned against a wall, eyes shut, her hand at her stomach.
In a moment she opened her eyes, smiled and said grimly: ‘Well, Dan’s done it at last. He’s been trying to pick a fight long enough.’ Beside Rose a door stood open that I had always seen shut. ‘Go in and have a look,’ she said. ‘You’ll never see nothing like that again in your life.’
There were two rather large rooms, and a small glassed-in space that had once been a conservatory in a middle-class house. The rooms were high-ceilinged, well-proportioned. But it was not possible to see this at first glance, because the walls were not surfaced, but had a shaggy protuberant look, and the ceilings appeared as if they were growing fungus, or mosses. The window into the street was open, and all the surfaces were in movement. Damp paper hung in strips and shreds from above, stirring and writhing. All around the walls it looked as if soiled stuffing burst from cushions, and wriggled and coiled as it forced its way out through a dingy, yellowing-grey substance. The floors were so thick in dirt that pieces of string and paper and plaster were embedded in a hard gluelike lumpy surface. Shreds of dirty lace hung at the lower half of the windows. Everywhere were bits of newspaper, bits of rag, smelly scraps of food. The smell was a sour thick reek. There was a small iron bed, with a thin stained mattress, and some cardboard cartons, balanced on top of each other. A wash-basin was yellow with grease.
And that was all. I came out, shutting the door on the smell. Rose had recovered. Flo had come up the stairs. She said: ‘Why does everything have to happen together, can you tell me that?’
‘Because people make them happen together, that’s why,’ said Rose.
Chapter Six
Winning the case was the beginning of a revolution in that house; in a few weeks everything had changed, and I was looking for somewhere else to live. First: Dan and Flo bought themselves a television set on the hire- purchase to celebrate their victory. At the time this didn’t seem nearly as important as the second event — Dan went up to the War Damage people and made a successful scene; the workmen moved in next week.
‘It’ll be ever so nice to have a telly,’ said Flo. ‘We can all sit and watch in the evenings and have a good time.’
This did not happen; at least, not at first. We had a great inaugural party on the evening the set was installed, with Flo’s best spaghetti and a rich almond cake and beer. It wasn’t a success. Rose had given up a date with Dickie; I wanted to work; and Dan resented every minute he was taken away from his labours on the empty rooms on the first floor. ‘Besides,’ Flo kept saying, with defiant glances at Dan, who scowled every time the boy’s name was mentioned: ‘It’s not the same without Jack, is it?’
From one day to the next, the basement fell silent. The age of the radio was over, no longer was the house filled with the roar of sound — music and voices. The yapping and playing of the half-dozen puppies distracted Flo from her magic box, and she disposed of them. Soon the basement was inhabited by Flo, Aurora, a single sleep- drugged cat, and the television screen. Flo kept coming upstairs to say pathetically to Rose and myself: ‘Why don’t you like it, darling, why don’t you like our lovely telly?’
Rose said: ‘I do like it, but I’ve got better things to think of.’ Rose at that time was oblivious of everything but Dickie, hardly saw her, save in the mornings before she went to work, when she came into my room, to run a wetted finger over her eyebrows, smiling at herself contentedly in the mirror, and to say: ‘That Dickie, he makes me laugh. Do you know what he said last night? He said I’m like eating icecream. That’s when we was in bed. He made me have no clothes on, I could have died blushing, but he just laughed. Well, to think what I was missing so long, I could kick myself. But don’t hold it against me, because I don’t come and talk to you the way we used to have our nice times. I’m still your friend. You wait, when I and Dickie get married, you can come and see me when he’s out and we’ll have a good laugh.’
Flo said to me: ‘Married, she says? Is that what she says? Well, have you told her to get in the family way? And you call yourself her friend? You think men care about lipstick and hair this way and that way — well, she’ll find out.’
This was a reference to the revolution in Rose’s appearance. She had seen a fashion programme on Flo’s television; she brooded about it for some days; then suddenly went off and had her hair cut short and soft, and was wearing light make-up. Her eyebrows were no longer black half-circles; her mouth was its own shape. All this went well with her happiness, and she looked like a girl.
But Flo merely shrugged, and said: ‘We’ll see, you mark my words.’
Meanwhile the house was in chaos. What Flo referred to as ‘The War Damage’ were beginning at the top of the house and working downwards. The roof of the attic had collapsed under a weight of stagnant water, bringing down part of the walls.
‘Lucky I wasn’t in it,’ I said to Dan, but he was in too bad a mood to laugh. His quarrel with Jack was a disaster for him.
The War Damage people were responsible for structural damage, but not for repainting. Soon, they would have rebuilt the attic, and before it could be let, it must be decorated. The work on the old people’s flat was slow. Dan was stilt scraping the layer of filth off the floor, with long steel scrapers. He had poured gallons of boiling water on it; used all kinds of chemical, but the residue had to be taken off by hand. He had not begun on the walls and ceilings, which would have to be stripped right down and resurfaced. The rooms were still crawling with lice.
When the attic was done, the workmen needed to get into Miss Powell’s rooms; and she was angry because Flo had said to her: ‘But it won’t matter, sweetheart: they’re just going to pull down that wall that’s cracked a little, you can stay quite comfortable, if you go out in the days to see friends, the workmen won’t be there at night, and you’ll be ever so happy.’
Bobby Brent had said that if space had not been found for Miss Powell inside a week she would leave. This terrified both Flo and Dan, because relations were bad with Mr Brent for another reason. It had been agreed that Dan would do all the decorations for the night-club; it was now waiting for him.
‘Well,’ said Bobby Brent, when Dan made excuses: ‘If you’re no longer interested in our proposition, then I know what to do.’
Flo wanted to get rid of Mrs Skeffington so as to move Miss Powell down to her rooms. But Rose, who had never had one good word for Mrs Skeffington, told her she should be ashamed even to think of it: ‘You kick her out,
