I know now is so characteristic, a fierce pondering look that really wants to understand. Trying to grasp it all.
I adjusted my pace to hers and went out of the shop with her. On the pavement she did not look at me, but there was an appeal there. I walked beside her. It was hard to walk so slowly. Usually I fly along, but did not know it till then. She took one step, then paused, examined the pavement, then another step. I thought how I rushed along the pavements every day and had never seen Mrs Fowler, but she lived near me, and suddenly I looked up and down the streets and saw – old women. Old men too, but mostly old women. They walked slowly along. They stood in pairs or groups, talking. Or sat on the bench at the corner under the plane tree. I had not seen them. That was because I was afraid of being like them. I was afraid, walking along there beside her. It was the smell of her, a sweet, sour, dusty sort of smell. I saw the grime on her thin old neck, and on her hands.
The house had a broken parapet, broken and chipped steps. Without looking at me, because she wasn’t going to ask, she went carefully down the old steps and stopped outside a door that did not fit and had been mended with a rough slat of wood nailed across it. Although this door wouldn’t keep out a determined cat, she fumbled for a key, and at last found it, and peered for the keyhole, and opened the door. And I went in with her, my heart quite sick, and my stomach sick too because of the smell. Which was, that day, of over-boiled fish. It was a long dark passage we were in.
We walked along it to the ‘kitchen’. I have never seen anything like it outside our Distress File, condemned houses and that sort of thing. It was an extension of the passage, with an old gas cooker, greasy and black, an old white china sink, cracked and yellow with grease, a cold-water tap wrapped around with old rags and dripping steadily. A rather nice old wood table that had crockery standing on it, all ‘washed’ but grimy. The walls stained and damp. The whole place smelled, it smelled awful … She did not look at me while she set down bread, biscuits and cat food. The clean lively colours of the grocery packages and the tins in that awful place. She was ashamed, but wasn’t going to apologize. She said in an offhand but appealing way, ‘You go into my room, and find yourself a seat.’
The room I went into had in it an old black iron stove that was showing a gleam of flames. Two unbelievably ancient ragged armchairs. Another nice old wood table with newspaper spread over it. A divan heaped with clothes and bundles. And a yellow cat on the floor. It was all so dirty and dingy and grim and awful. I thought of how all of us wrote about decor and furniture and colours – how taste changed, how we all threw things out and got bored with everything. And here was this kitchen, which if we printed a photograph of it would get us donations by return from readers.
Mrs Fowler brought in an old brown teapot, and two rather pretty old china cups and saucers. It was the hardest thing I ever did, to drink out of the dirty cup. We did not speak much because I did not want to ask direct questions, and she was trembling with pride and dignity. She kept stroking the cat – ‘My lovely, my pretty,’ in a hard but appealing sort of way – and she said without looking at me, ‘When I was young my father owned his own shop, and later we had a house in St John’s Wood, and I know how things should be.’
And when I left she said, in her way of not looking at me, ‘I suppose I won’t be seeing you again?’ And I said, ‘Yes, if you’ll ask me.’ Then she did look at me, and there was a small smile, and I said, ‘I’ll come on Saturday afternoon for tea, if you like.’
‘Oh I would like, yes I would.’ And there was a moment between us of intimacy: that is the word. And yet she was so full of pride and did not want to ask, and she turned away from me and began petting the cat: Oh, my little pet, my little pretty.
When I got home that evening I was in a panic. I had committed myself. I was full of revulsion. The sour, dirty smell was in my clothes and hair. I bathed and washed my hair and did myself up and rang Joyce and said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner.’ We had a good dinner at Alfredo’s and talked. I said nothing about Mrs Fowler, of course, yet I was thinking of her all the time: I sat looking around at the people in the restaurant, everyone well dressed and clean, and I thought, if she came into this restaurant … well, she couldn’t. Not even as a cleaner, or a washer-up.
On the Saturday I took her some roses and carnations, and a cake with real cream. I was pleased with myself, and this carried me over her reaction – she was pleased, but I had overdone it. There was no vase for the flowers. I put them in a white enamel jug. She put the cake on a big old cracked plate. She was being rather distant. We sat on either side of the iron stove, and the brown teapot was on it to warm, and the flames were too hot. She was wearing a silk blouse, black dots on white. Real silk. Everything is like this with her. A beautiful flowered Worcester teapot, but it is cracked. Her skirt is of good heavy wool, but it is stained and frayed. She did not want me to see in her ‘bedroom’, but I took a peep when she was in the ‘kitchen’. The furniture was part very good: bookcases, a chest of drawers, then a shoddy dressing table and a wardrobe like a varnished packing case. The bed had on it an old-fashioned quilt, plump, of chintz. She did not sleep in the bed, I realized, but on the divan next door, where we sat. Everywhere in the room were piles of rubbish, what looked like rags, bundles of newspapers, everything you can think of: this was what she did not want me to see.
When we ate the cake, she said, ‘Oh, this is real cream,’ and told me about how, in the summers, she and her sisters were sent to an old woman in Essex.
‘Every day of the summer we were out of doors. Lovely hot summers, not like the ones we have now. We got as brown as toffee. The old woman had a little cottage but no kitchen. She built a tripod under a cock of thatch in the yard, and she had a great iron pot on chains and she cooked everything for our dinners in the pot. First she put in the piece of beef, and around it the carrots and potatoes, and she had the pudding rolled in a floured cloth and that went in to boil at the same time. I used to wonder how it was the pudding tasted of jam and fruit and not the meat, but of course it was the flour the cloth had on it. And then she gave us great soup plates, and sat us on the steps, and we ate the meat and the vegetables, and then she peeled the cloth off the pudding, and it came out all crusty and rich, and gave us slices in the same plate we ate the meat off – but we had licked that clean as washed. And then she said, Off with you – and she boiled up water in the iron pot to wash our plates, and to wash herself, after, and we went off into the fields to pick flowers. Oh, I like to sit here and think of all that.’
‘And how old were you then?’
‘Children. We were children. We went every summer – several summers. That was before my poor mother died, you see.’
She talked about the old woman, who was so kind, and the little cottage, that had no running water, and only an outside lavatory in a little brick shed, and those hot summers, all afternoon. She talked and I listened. I did not leave till nearly seven. I came home, and switched on the fire, and thought it was time I did some cleaning. I sat by myself and thought of Mrs Fowler, by herself, the flames showing in the open front of her grate. I opened a tin of soup, and I watched television.
Next Saturday I took her a little pot of African violets and another cake.
Everything the same: the fire burning, the yellow cat, and her dirty white silk spotted blouse.
There was a reticence in her, and I thought it was because she had talked last Saturday for three hours, hardly stopping.
But it wasn’t that. It came out almost when I was leaving.
‘Are you a good neighbour?’ she said.
‘I hope perhaps I may become one,’ I said, laughing.
‘Why, have they put you on probation, then?’
I
