A curving terrace. Decaying, unpainted, enormous, ponderous, graceless. When I stand and look up, the sheer weight of the building oppresses me. The door looks as if it could never be opened. The hall is painted a dead uniform cream, that looks damp. It has a carved chest in it that smells of mould. Everything smells damp. The stairs are wide, deep, oppressive. The carpets are thick and shabby. Walking on them is frightening no sound at all. All the way up the centre of this immense, heavy house, the stairs climb, silent and ugly, flight after flight, and all the walls are the same dead, dark cream colour. At last another hostile and heavy door, I am in a highly varnished little hall, with wet mackintoshes and umbrellas. Another dark door. Inside, a great heavy room, full of damp shadow. The furniture is all heavy and dead, and the surfaces are damp. The flat has six rooms, all painted this heavy darkening cream, all large, with high ceilings, no sound anywhere, the walls are so thick. I feel suffocated. Out of the back windows, a vista of wet dark roofs and dingy chimneys. The sky is pale and cold and unfriendly.
My arrangements for living here had been made with great intelligence by a friend. The idea was, I should share this flat with another woman, an Australian, who had a small child. We should share the rent and expenses, and the children would share each other.
They took to each other at sight and went off to play.
The Australian lady and I had now to make acquaintance.
She was a woman of inveterate sensibility. Her name was Brenda. She was sitting in a huddled mass in a deep chair by an empty grate. She was a large woman, of firm swarthy flesh. She had a large sallow face, and black hair cut doll-like across her forehead. She wore artistic clothes. She had been crying, and was still damp. Almost the first thing she said was, I do hope your child is sensitive. My Daphne is very sensitive. A highly-strung child. I knew then that the whole thing was doomed.
Daphne was three, a strapping, lively-eyed child with a healthy aggressiveness. Peter was two and a half. They were well-matched. They began to fight, with much enjoyment. Brenda went next door, pulled Daphne to her, and said in a weak voice: Oh, darling, hes such a nice little boy, dont hit him. She set Daphne in a chair with a picture book.
Daphne was three, a strapping, lively-eyed child with a healthy aggressiveness. Peter was two and a half. They were well-matched. They began to fight, with much enjoyment. Brenda went next door, pulled Daphne to her, and said in a weak voice: Oh, darling, hes such a nice little boy, dont hit him. She set Daphne in a chair with a picture book.
Then she said everything was too much for her, and so I went out and bought the rations and had some keys cut. While I did this, I reflected on the value of helplessness. During the next weeks I reflected about this often. Brenda was renting the flat for seven guineas a week. I dont know how she managed it. Ive never since seen a flat of such size, class, and solid furnishing going at such a low rent. She had already let two rooms in it, at three and a half guineas each. That left four rooms. The largest room was her sitting-room, because she had to have privacy. The children had a room each, because Daphne could not sleep unless she was by herself. The largest room upstairs was Brendas bedroom. That left one for me. She had put the dining-room table in it, where we would all eat, as she said this would be more convenient for all of us. She intended to charge me seven guineas a week. I did all the shopping and the washing-up and the tidying, because life was too much for her, particularly in England. Also I had to keep my son away from Daphne, because they would play together, and in the most insensitive manner.
I have often wondered about that remarkable phenomenon that for sheer innate delicacy and appreciation of the finer sides of life, one has to seek for a certain type of Colonial.
Piet for instance. Robust is the word I would use to describe him. Yet his tastes in art, save when he was painting pondokkies, were all exquisite. Corot he liked. Turner he liked. A passage of nature description in Chekhov would make him screw back the tears from his eyes. A couple of the more oblique sentences in Katherine Mansfield would send him into a melancholy ecstasy. But Balzac was coarse, and Rubens had no poetry. A letter from Piet would end something like this: the exquisite veil of translucent twilight drawn gently down to the horizon, and I sit, pen in hand, and dream. The fire crepitates in the grate, and the shadows deepen on the wall. Ach, my God, and life is passing. Your old friend. Piet. P.S. We went to the Bay this afternoon and swam and bought three crayfish for sixpence each. I boiled them till they squeaked and we ate them in our fingers with melted butter. My God, man, they were good. I bet you dont get crayfish in that godforsaken colony full of English. Christ but youre crazy, Im telling you.
For real perception into the side-channels of British culture, one has to go to a university in Australia or South Africa. The definitive thesis on Virginia Woolf will come, not from Cambridge, but from Gape Town. Brenda was writing a thesis on: Proust a nature poet manqué.
In short, we were temperamentally unsuited. I began looking for somewhere to live. Besides. I still had not met the English.
Chapter Two
I had already moved away from the counter when some instinct turned me back to ask: I suppose you dont know somewhere I could live? The girl behind the counter shrugged profoundly, sighed and said: I dont know, dear, Im sure. I took this as a dismissal, but she looked at me shrewdly and said: Depends on what youre looking for, doesnt it now?
When I had first entered the shop the girl was standing motionless, hands resting palm downwards, while she gazed past me into the street, her face set into lines of melancholy resignation. She was a small girl, her face broad under very black and glossy hair that was piled into a dense and sculptured mound. Her hair, and her thin black crescent brows, made her look like a cockney Madame Butterfly, particularly as she was wearing a loose flowered wrap over her clothes. Her mouth might have been any shape; the one she had painted was another crescent in cherry pink, as deep as the half-circle eyebrows. Her voice toned with the sad lips and eyes.
I said: Ive been looking for six weeks. My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. Ive got a small child. I said.
Her face became shrewd as she examined me from this new point of view. Then she said, with confidence: I dont know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.
How much?
I dont know, dear, Im sure. But shes ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.
What sort of a flat?
Its upstairs, she said, doubtful again. But added: One room, but ever such nice furniture. Its only a minute from here.
I hesitated. My companion, who was directing this conversation with a skill I only learned to appreciate later, said, with casualness: You just tell her Rose sent you. Shell know its all right if you say Rose. Besides, she likes young people. She likes a bit of life about. She glanced at me, waited a moment, then raised her voice to shout: Nina, are you busy? A woman appeared in the back. This was a jewellers shop, very dark and crowded, and she had to push her way through trestles burdened with clocks, watches, trinkets, rubbish of all kinds. She was fat and pale, with rusty dyed hair, but her look of puffy ponderousness was contradicted by her eyes, which were calculating. After a rapid summing-up look, she stood beside Rose, with the air of one putting herself completely at disposal.
Flo doesnt take just anyone, does she, dear? suggested Rose, and the woman said promptly: Thats right. She likes to pick and choose.
Ill give you the address, said Rose, and wrote it down.
Seeing she had served her purpose, the pale woman pulled her lips back and exposed her teeth in a sweet smile. Then she threaded her way back to the room she had emerged from. At the door she turned back and said: How about that other place you know, that you heard about this morning?
Rose seemed displeased. She said unwillingly: I dont know anything about it not to recommend.
The pale womans submissive helpfulness vanished. She said to me with a ferocious smile: I hope Rose is looking after you properly. She disappeared. Rose was annoyed. She raised her voice to say: You come back tomorrow, dear, and your watch will be ready. She had been saying this every day for the past week.
Whats the address of this other place? I asked Rose.
Ill write it for you. Mind you, Im not recommending it. Then, the desire to do her friend Flo a service dissolved into the fellowship of the suffering, and she said: Of course, these days, you grab whats going.
I thanked her and left. Glancing back, I saw she had taken up her former position, and her face was all lifeless curves.
I decided to try the second address immediately. About the first I felt like the horse dragged to water. I could have said, of course, that Roses insistence showed there must be something wrong with it. But there was more to it than that. For six weeks I had been tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards. Stoicism can reach a point where, if someone says: Im sure youll be lucky sooner or later, one feels positively indignant. I was defensively rejecting possibilities in advance. This state of mind was not only mine. Talking to other home-hunters I learned it was an occupational disease. It means one cannot enter a house-agents office without an air of hostility; or open the advertisement columns of a newspaper without a cynical (and consciously cynical) smile, as if to say: You dont imagine Im going to be taken in by this, do you?
During those weeks I had formed alliances with various people I met in the agents offices, or under the advertisement boards. I remember, particularly, a lady with a grownup daughter and a grand piano. The daughter was talented, come all the way from Australia to study in London, For three months these women had been looking for a shelter for their piano. At the time we met they had become so bitter that on several occasions, setting out for some possible address, they exclaimed: Whats the use, they wont have us! and turned aside into a café to brood over a cup of tea.