In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing
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‘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.