In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing

wasn’t built in a day, that’s what I always say. Sleep tight.’
    When I got back to my room from taking my son to nursery school next morning. Flo was standing there, with a guilty look. ‘I’ve just put away some things for you,’ she said. ‘To show you how comfortable it is. It is really.’
    I said involuntarily. ‘It’s very kind of you, Flo,’ and, as involuntarily she gave a little smile of victory, and said in a cheerful voice: ‘I told you you’d like it up here.’
    I summoned the spirit of Rose to my aid, and said: ‘But I don’t want to unpack. Because if I get somewhere with more room. I’ll move.’
    All the life went out of her, and she sat despondently on my bed. She sighed. She looked at a pack of cigarettes lying on the bed and said: ‘You’ve got so many lovely cigarettes,darling, aren’t you lucky.’ The sense of guilt which accompanied all colonials to England, in 1949, overcame me and I said: ‘Help yourself.’ Instantly she became happy again. She picked up the box and handled it, looking at me. Then she carelessly took out a handful, but dropping some in her anxiety lest I might be angry, and pushed them into her apron pockets. She understood that guilt very well by instinct, because later, when I learned to understand the role cigarettes played in that house she would say automatically: ‘We had such a hard time during the war, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’
    ‘I’ve put your things where you can find them,’ she said. I looked at the top drawer, unable to discover any logic in her arrangement of it, until she said: ‘You’ve got some lovely things, dear.’ She had put the more expensive things on top, in a layer over the cheap ones. In the second drawer she had laid out six pairs of nylons, side by side, as if in a showcase. I began rolling them up and stacking them in a corner. She said quickly, over and over again, ‘Sweetheart, darling. I’m sorry I didn’t do them nice for you.’ She was sitting on my bed, full of innocent concern; while one hand kept touching her apron pocket, to reassure her of the existence of the cigarettes. She looked like a child who has done its best to please and now expects a reprimand. ‘I was only trying to help you, darling.’ I said nothing, and she said: ‘Please, please, darling, give your Flo some nylons.’ With an enormous effort, invoking Rose again, I said: ‘Now why should I give you my nylons?’ Her face puckered with discouragement. Then she laughed with frank good-humour, and having lost that round of the game, she said, ‘I’ll go down and get my old man’s dinner.’ At the door she remarked innocently: ‘I’m glad you’re so happy up here.’
    ‘Flo. I told you, I must move when I find something better.’
    In a wail of despair, she cried out: ‘But you wouldn’t like the other rooms we’ve got …’ She clapped her hand over her mouth; she had been instructed by Dan not to mention them. She waddled fast downstairs, with one hand nesting the cigarettes in her pocket.
    That night Rose congratulated me, ‘You’re learning,’ shesaid. ‘And perhaps you’ll be lucky. Because Bobby Brent hasn’t been back. They’re arguing about it. Dan and Flo, now. About the rent.’
    ‘How much should I pay?’
    ‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me feel bad – I’ve just been having supper with them, see? But when she says, bargain. Now, you’re coming out with me.’
    She put her two hands around my arm, and walked me away down past the bombed site I had been made to go round last night by Mr MacNamara-Ponsonby-Brent. I told Rose of the incident, and she listened, without surprise. ‘He’s like that,’ she commented. ‘He was always like that. That’s why he frightens me, see? So don’t you have nothing to do with him.’
    ‘He said he was going to take me to see a flat tonight.’
    She let her hands drop away from my arm. ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’
    ‘Yes. I did.’
    She was