In Pursuit of the English

All the way up were doors with names written on cards beside the bells. I imagined vistas of passageways, opening on to yet more rooms, more lives. It was very silent, a humming breathing quiet, like listening to someone sleep. It was as if I had become a midget and was walking up the main gallery of a large antheap.

On the top landing it was completely dark; we were standing in a closed box. ‘Here we are,’ said the nurse briskly, and flung open a door. There was a dim space before us, filled with jostling furniture. The colours were dull crimson and purple, with a dark plummy wallpaper, and so many armchairs, buttoned pouffes and small hard tables that it was difficult for the nurse to move in a straight line to the window, where she jerked back heavy curtains. They were red damask lined with black silk, which absorbed the filtering light so that the room became only slightly less obscure than before.

‘There!’ she exclaimed with pride, turning to gaze lovingly at the oppressive room. ‘This used to be the old lady’s room before she got too ill to climb the stairs. She liked it for the view. It’s a lovely view.’ At the window I saw crowding roofs, and beyond them, the tops of trees shadowed with cold sunlight.

‘Has she been ill for long?’

‘Thirty years,’ said the nurse with pride. ‘Yes, I’ve been nursing her for thirty years. She won’t have anything changed up here, even though she can’t come up herself. It was her room she used to sit in when she first got married. She used to paint. No one was allowed up here, not even her husband.’

The way she spoke, diminishing those thirty years to the scale of a long convalescence, made the fruity room congeal around us; the thick curved surfaces thrust themselves out aggressively in affirmations of changeless comfort. ‘You won’t find many rooms like this at the price. Not good things like this. Can’t buy them these days.’ She gave a proud stiff glance around her. ‘She won’t have just anybody up here. Except when there are mistakes.’ The little foxy face stared at a point immediately before her; it was a table gleaming in the rufous light from the curtains. With an angry movement she jerked forward and picked up a brown, sticklike object which I took to be a cigar. ‘Incense,’ she said indignantly. ‘What next!’ Holding the thing between thumb and forefinger, little finger crooked away in disgust, she nosed her way warily through the angles and shoulders of the furniture like a fish at the bottom of a pool, and flung open another door. ‘I suppose you’ll want to see the bedroom,’ she said, as if this was unreasonable of me. ‘The other people aren’t properly out yet, remember.’ This was a tiny room, more like the usual run of let rooms. It had a large jangly bed with brass bedballs, a fireplace that was occupied by an electric fire, and a single yellowing chest of drawers. The climate of this room – a thin bleakness, with a narrow shaft of colourless light directed over the bare floor from a high window – was as if I had accidentally opened the door into the servants’ quarters from a lush passage in an old-fashioned hotel. The nurse was staring down at the bed, which was in disorder, the bottom sheet stained and crumpled, a single dent in the pillow, which held several glinting yellow hairs. Furs, flowers, dresses and underclothing lay everywhere. She picked up an empty scent bottle and flung it, together with the spill of incense, into an open drawer. ‘You can cook on this,’ she said grudgingly, pulling a gas-ring from behind a small curtain. ‘But this suite is not arranged for heavy cooking. My old lady won’t have cooking in the house. You’ll have to go out if you want to eat fancy.’

‘How much?’

‘Twelve guineas.’

‘A month?’

Her face creased into suspicion. ‘A week,’ she said affrontedly. ‘Where do you come from? I might as well say now that the old lady won’t take foreigners.’

‘What do you mean by foreigners?’

She looked me up and down, a practised, sly movement. ‘Where do you come from, then?’ She moved slowly backwards, her hand pressed against her chest, as if warding off something.

‘Africa.’

The hand slowly dropped, and at her side, the fingers clenched nervously. ‘You’re not a black?’

‘Do I look like one?’

‘One never knows. You’d be surprised what people try to get away with these days. We’re not having blacks. Across the road a black took to the bottle on the first floor. Such trouble they had. We don’t take Jews either. Not that that’s any protection.’ She sniffed sharply, looking over her shoulder at the bed. ‘Disgusting,’ she said. ‘Disgusting.’ In a prim fine voice she stated: ‘And I may as well say we’re particular about what goes on. Are you married?’

‘I’m not taking it,’ I said going into the living-room.

The nurse came after me; her whole attitude had changed. ‘Why not, don’t you like it?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘It’s very comfortable, only select people in this house …’ She glanced back at the room. ‘Except when there’s mistakes. You can’t help mistakes.’ She stood between me and the door, her hands clasped lightly at her waist, in an attitude of willing service, but with a look of affronted surprise on her face. It was clear that letting this place quickly was necessary as part of her revenge on the couple she had turned out. ‘If the old lady likes you she might put the rent down to eleven guineas.’

‘But I don’t like it,’ I repeated, moving past her to the door.

‘We don’t have any difficulty in letting it, I can tell you that,’ she sniffed challengingly, marching over to twitch the curtains back, so that now the room was absorbed back into its cavernous ruddy gloom. ‘You’re the second in half an hour – by the way, how did you hear of it? It hasn’t even gone to the agents yet.’

‘One hears of places, house-hunting.’

‘I suppose you are a friend of that precious pair downstairs.’ She grasped my arm, as if to pull me to the door. ‘I hear the bell. That’ll be someone else, I suppose, getting me up all these stairs for nothing. Come along now.’ She glanced at me, stiffened, stared: ‘If you’ll be so kind.’ She went on staring. At last, she said: ‘It’s much better when people are straightforward about things, that’s what I say.’

‘About what?’

Looking straight ahead, her hands lying down the folds of her stiff skirt, she descended the stairs with a consciously demure rectitude, and said: ‘If I’d known you were a foreigner, it would have saved me so much time, wouldn’t it? One must have thought for other people, these times.’

‘What kind of a foreigner do you think I am?’

‘I’ve known people before, calling it sunburn.’

In the hall the old lady was lurking in a doorway, leaning forward in her wheeled chair from a mist of pastel shawls. Her small beady eyes, like a bird’s, were fixed on me. Her face was twisted into a preparatory smile of stiff welcome, but a glance at the nurse caused her to give me a slight toss of the head instead. Leaning back, she daintily took a grape from a dish beside her, and held it to her mouth in a tiny bony hand, her eyes still regarding me sideways, so that she looked even more like a watchful parrot.

On the steps was the young man, alone. ‘How do you think I can leave when you won’t let us take our property?’ he asked the nurse.

‘I’m not having you set foot in this house.’

‘I’ve paid the rent, so if you take my wife’s things

‘Your wife!’

Immediately his attitude changed to one of confident challenge. ‘I’ll show you my marriage certificate, if that’s your attitude.’ His hand was already in his pocket, but she had slammed the door. There was a clinking noise, and the letterbox slit showed dark with a face hovering white behind it.

‘You deserve to be in prison,’ said the shrill voice through the slit.

‘If you don’t give me my things I’m going straight to a lawyer.’

‘You tell that woman of yours to come here this afternoon and I’ll have them bundled up for her in the hall.’ The metal flap dropped with a clatter.

‘I say!’ shouted the young man in an injured way. ‘Do you know that’s a legal offence?’ With one shoulder thrust forward, his chin stuck angrily out, he looked as if he were about to fling himself on the door.

Nothing happened. Slowly the young man straightened, letting his shoulders loosen. For a moment he stood gazing with sullen reflectiveness at the door; then he turned and his eyes came blankly to rest on me. The glowering anger left in him from the encounter with the nurse simmered in him, unreleased; but soon he smiled a statesman’s smile, bathing me in winning frankness. ‘It’s only right for me to warn you,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t want any friend of mine to live in that house.’ He swung his head to glare at it before going on. ‘Don’t take it. I’m warning you.’

‘I haven’t taken it,’ I said.

Disbelief congealed the smile. ‘Not fit for pigs,’ he said. ‘Better change your mind now, before it’s too late. Better late than never.’ This aphorism pleased him so much that he repeated it, and his smile was momentarily gratified. He leaned towards me, his eyes were anxiously penetrating. If I had said I had taken the rooms, he would now be as anxiously testing me for the lie. ‘Go in and cancel the contract now, better that way.’ The word contract in his mouth was loaded with suspicion. ‘But I haven’t taken it.’ He stared at me closely. ‘Mind, it’s not too bad at first sight. You see the snags when you’re in. You can’t call your life your own.’ I smiled. He grew uneasy. A genuine impatience must have shown itself in my face, for at once his body arranged itself into a new attitude, and he leaned forward with a gentle and disarming persuasiveness. ‘If you’re looking for a place to live, I’m your man.’

‘Do you know of somewhere?’

‘It’s my business. I’m an estate agent.’

‘Then you’re lucky. You won’t have difficulty in finding somewhere yourself, will you?’

At this he inspected me for some time, in silence, and with hostility. Thus it was that right at the beginning, the quality which he most valued in his victims – my naïvety – confused him. He could not believe that I was as green as I seemed. Looking back, I can’t believe it either.

Looking back it is clear that he believed I was putting on innocence to lead him on, to some dark goal, for reasons of my own. Yet there were moments when I was as gullible as a fish. I confused him. And he confused me. I disliked him at sight, but I saw no reason not to trust him. I had never met a con-man in my life.

‘I’ll have no trouble,’ he remarked at last. ‘I’ve nothing to worry about. And they can’t turn me into the street, just like that – not Andrew MacNamara.’

Envying him, I walked away down the steps, and found him striding beside me, giving me calculating glances from his large treacly brown eyes. He was still tortured by uncertainty as to whether I was lying. And what was important to him was not the fact, but whether he was being made a fool of. ‘If you don’t believe me, I can tell you things about that crowd in there that would put them into prison. It’s no place for decent people.’

‘Then it’s lucky I haven’t taken it.’

He changed ground. ‘If you don’t have to count the pennies, there’s flats for the asking.’ A pause. ‘I could fix you up tomorrow, today.’

‘But I have to count the pennies.’

‘That’s always a good line, to start with,’ he probed.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a small child.’

‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘It won’t make things any easier. But you can buy anything.’

We had reached a main street. Half a dozen large red buses lumbered past, concentrating all the colour and light there was in their cheerful and exuberant bodies. ‘Taxi?’ he suggested. ‘There’s a friend of mine in the rank over there.’ He raised his arm to wave.

‘No, a bus.’

He frowned. ‘A penny saved is a penny gained,’ he said.

‘Can you tell me the way to – ‘

‘It’s just around the corner.’

My head was, as usual in those early days in London, in a maze. To my right and left stretched that street which seemed exactly like all the main streets in London, the same names recurring at regular intervals, the same patterns of brick and plaster. It seemed to me impossible that the people walking past the decent little shops that were so alike, and the cold stone slabs decorated with pale gleaming fishes and vivid parsley, like giant plates of salad thrust forward into the street, could ever know one part of London from another.

‘I’m going that way myself,’ he said. He took my elbow in the urgency of unconcluded business. I got on to a bus and he leaped on to it beside me as it moved off. ‘Before you go, take the name of my agency. I said I’d fix you up,’ he reproved me.

‘Where is it?’

‘I’ve five rooms and a staff of nine,’ he said casually. ‘It’s over in Holborn. But for special customers I’ve a little office of my own. For private talking.’

‘Give me the address and I’ll come when I’ve got time.’

‘Never let the chance slip,’ he said reproachfully, giving me a lesson in living. ‘It might get snapped up before you get there. That’s not the way to do business.’

‘But I’m not doing business,’ I said, throwing him off balance again. He was also annoyed. ‘You want a flat, don’t you? You said so, didn’t you?’ Automatically, he looked around for witnesses. ‘I heard you say so. You want a flat.’

‘Tickets,’ said the conductor.

‘Allow me,’ said Mr MacNamara, taking out sixpence with such an air that I was surprised to find in myself the beginnings of gratitude commensurate with his having produced tickets for the front row of the stalls.

‘It’s a pleasure,’ he smiled, pocketing the tickets carefully. ‘Business. You decide what you want. You find what you want. You get what you want. You pay for what you want. Or you pay someone else to get it for you.’ We were sitting side by side on the long seats at the entrance of the bus. Four working women, in respectable hats, carrying crowded shopping bags, were sitting with us. ‘Pay,’ remarked one of them humorously, as if to the air. ‘That’s the co-operative word.’ Mr MacNamara flushed angrily. He struggled to ignore this woman. But vanity won. In a voice of furious hostility he said: ‘What you want you have to pay for. The thing is, who wants to pay too much?’

‘Not me, that’s for sure,’ she said. She glanced around at the other women, and winked. She did not look at Mr MacNamara. The conductor, who was leaning negligently against the steps, smiled tolerantly, and said: ‘Who’s for the Church?’

‘That’s me,’ said the woman, upheaving herself from beside me. Potatoes rolled from her bag into my lap, and she grabbed at them as they scattered. ‘Here,’ she shouted upwards, crouched among feet, ‘potatoes at sixpence a pound. Mind your great boots.’

‘Now, love,’ said the conductor indulgently, ‘get a move on or I’ll take them home to my missus.’

‘Try it,’ she retorted, and lurched off the bus, thrusting potatoes into her bag and her pockets. From the pavement she remarked in a detached voice: ‘Still, sixpence a pound is what you pay for new potatoes, when it’s right, and not like what some people I know try to get.’ Where this barb was directed could not easily be decided, for she was gazing absently at the back of the bus. One of the three women who remained took it up, saying: ‘That’s right dear, some people have no consciences.’ This exchange hung in the air as far as I was concerned, in spite of the gently-grinning faces all around me. I heard Mr MacNamara complain: ‘I say!’ The woman on the pavement, who must have been waiting for him to react, beamed directly at the conductor, and, indicating her bruised potatoes, said: ‘I won’t have to mash them now, will I?’

‘That’s right, love,’ he said. He had his thumb on the bell, and was looking up and down the street. A few paces off a well-dressed woman was running towards the bus. He pressed the bell; the bus began to move; and the woman fell back, annoyed. Now he had held up the bus over the affair of the potatoes as if he had all the time in the world. Once again Mr MacNamara exclaimed: ‘I say!’ Whistling under his breath, the conductor passed down the bus. The three working women opposite surveyed us with critical eyes, in which showed a calm triumph. The bond between them and the jaunty conductor could be felt.

‘It should be reported,’ said Mr MacNamara belligerently. At once occurred that phenomenon which is inevitable, in an English crowd on such occasions. The women looked straight ahead of them, disassociating themselves, shaking gently with the shaking of the bus. Every face, every pair of shoulders expressed the same thing: This is no affair of mine. In this emotional vacuum, Mr MacNamara fumed alone.

My stop appeared and I stood up. ‘Good-bye,’ I said. At once he got up. ‘You haven’t got my address,’ he said.

‘I haven’t a pencil,’ I said. At this, there came indulgently pitying looks on to the faces of the women. I found a pencil in my hand. ‘Try that,’ urged Mr MacNamara, restored to normal by the familiar situation. ‘That’s a real pencil. I can get them for you from a friend in Brixton.’

‘Ah, Brixton’s the place for pencils now,’ said the conductor.

‘That’s enough,’ said Mr MacNamara, his eyes once more suffused with anger.

‘Temper, temper,’ remarked one of the women gazing out of the window. When Mr MacNamara said: ‘Here, what’s that?’ she turned her head with a look of calm unconcern, and rose to her feet. To the conductor she said: ‘Give the bell a shove for me, love.’ The conductor came right down the car to help her out. To the rest of us he said: ‘Hurry up now.’ As I stepped off, the conductor said to me, grinning, ‘Mind his pencil, lady.’ The women began to shriek. The bus departed in a tumult of good humour. Mr MacNamara, his fists squared, shouted after it: ‘I’ll report you,’ and the conductor shouted calmly back: ‘A sense of humour, that’s all I ask.’

‘That wouldn’t have been possible before the war,’ said Mr MacNamara.

‘What wouldn’t?’

‘They’re all out of hand.’

‘Who?’

‘The working-classes.’

‘Oh!’

‘Of course you wouldn’t know,’ he said after a moment’s suspicion. ‘In your part of the world there isn’t any trouble, is there? With niggers it’s easy. I’ve often thought of emigrating.’

‘Here I must leave you,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen.’ He glanced at his watch, frowning. ‘No, at nine-forty. I’ve an appointment at nine-fifteen.’

‘I’ll telephone you,’ I said. For I had already decided I would go back to Rose and take the flat she offered. I felt that this was where I would end up. Besides, it was the first time I had heard, in all those weeks of hunting, of a landlady who would welcome a child.

Mr MacNamara and I were facing each other on a street corner, while people surged past. We kept our places by sticking out our elbows into aggressive points. He was very irritated. ‘I work to strict business methods,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll constitute myself your agent, that’s what. I’ll work for you. I’ll get you a flat by tomorrow morning.’

‘That,’ I said with politeness, ‘is very kind of you.’ I was by now longing to be rid of him. He smiled suspiciously, ‘Good-bye,’ I said.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The fee is two guineas.’

‘What fee?’

‘I know of just the place. Three rooms, kitchen, pantry, bathroom. Hot and cold and all modern cons. Three guineas a week, inclusive.’ I thought that if this place existed it was cheaper than anything I had seen. ‘I promised it to someone else, but for a retainer I’ll give it to you. I got nothing out of him, all promises he was.’ A look of disgusted anger came on to his face. This look was genuine: the flat, therefore, must also be genuine? But this is an excuse. I felt as if I had been stung into torpor by a predatory spider. I was being impelled to hand over the money. I began fumbling in my handbag, and as I did so, I knew I was a fool. The thought must have shown on my face, for he said: ‘For you, I’ll make it pounds.’ The money melted into the air above the flesh of his palm. I could hardly believe I had given it to him. So strong was this feeling that I wanted to count the money I had left to see if I had given it to him.

A couple of policemen who had been standing against a wall, upshifted themselves with a stolid and determined movement and came towards us. Instinctively I looked around to see if Mr MacNamara had vanished. I was wrong, for he stood negligently beside me, gazing with impatience at the policemen. They, it seemed, had also expected him to vanish, for now they appeared uncertain. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ enquired Mr MacNamara efficiently. They hesitated. He turned his back and marched off.

‘Everything all right?’ asked one of the policemen.

‘I do hope so.’

They looked at each other, communed, and moved back to their wall, where they stood, feet apart, hands behind their backs, heads bent slightly forward, talking to each other with scarcely-moving lips, while their slow contemplative eyes followed the movements of the crowd.

I walked slowly towards the jeweller’s shop, thinking about Mr MacNamara. It had by now occurred to me that he was what they referred to as a spiv. But he was not in the least like any of the rogues and adventurers I had known in Africa. They had all had a certain frankness, almost a gaiety, in being rogues. Mr MacNamara had nothing whatsoever in common with them. His strength was – and I could feel just how powerful that strength was, now I was recovering from my moment of being mad – his terrible, compelling anxiety that he should be able to force someone under his will. It was almost as if he were pleading, silently, in the moment when he was tricking a victim: Please let me trick you; please let me cheat you; I’ve got to; it’s essential for me.

But the fact remained, that at a time when I had less than twenty pounds left, and counting every halfpenny, I had just parted with two pounds, knowing when I did it that I would never see it again. I was clearly much more undermined by England than I had known; and the sooner I got myself into some place I could call my own the better.

When I told Rose I had lost the piece of paper with the address she said it didn’t matter, she’d take me home with her. The pale woman entered from the back and said unpleasantly: ‘Closing early, aren’t you?’

Rose answered: ‘Half past five is closing time, isn’t it?’

‘Like your pound of flesh, don’t you, dear?’

‘I don’t get paid overtime.’ She added casually: ‘I worked three nights late last week. I didn’t notice any complaints.’

The pale woman said quickly: ‘I was only joking, dear.’

‘Oh no you wasn’t,’ said Rose. Without another glance at her employer, she began making up her face, not because there was any need to, but so she could stand negligently, back turned, absorbed in her reflection and her own affairs. Before leaving, however, she said ‘Goodnight’ quite amiably; and the pale woman returned, indifferently: ‘Sleep tight,’ just as if this exchange had not occurred.

Rose had said the house she lived in was just around the corner; it was half a mile off. She did not speak. I didn’t know if she was offended because I had lost the address; or whether she was irritated with her employer. She replied listlessly to my remarks: Yes, dear; or – Is that so? Her face was heavy, despondent. It was difficult to guess her age. In the dimly-lit shop, she looked like a tired girl. Here, though her skin was spread thick with dun-coloured powder, under her eyes were the purple hollows of a middle-aged woman. Yet she looked defenceless, and soft, like a girl.

At first it was all shops and kiosks; then towering gloomy Victorian houses; then a space where modern luxury flats confronted green grass and trees; then a couple of acres of rubble. ‘Bombs,’ said Rose dispassionately. ‘We had them around here something awful.’ It was as if the houses had shaken themselves to the ground. Thin shells of wall stood brokenly among debris; and from this desolation I heard a sound which reminded me of a cricket chirping with quiet persistence from sun-warmed grasses in the veld. It was a typewriter; and peering over a bricky gulf I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves, which were held neatly above the elbow by expanding bands, sitting on a tidy pile of rubble, the typewriter on a broken girder, clean white paper fluttering from the rim of the machine.