Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  Mick seated himself on the arm of a chair and lit a cigarette. The flare of the match reflected in his eyes, giving them a momentary flare of fierce intentness. “Can’t you guess? My noble daughter did a noble deed. Or so her comrades would say. A fine example of revolutionary firmness and initiative. Have I got the lingo right? She was told to raise four hundred pounds in a hurry. For the Good Cause. She went round to all her — what is it you call them, contacts? — and she beat the daylight out of them. How much did you tell me you’d got from them? A hundred and ninety pounds? Nice work! She tipped her own bank balance into the kitty, and sold a wristwatch I’d given her for a birthday present. No false sentiment about my daughter, you see. And she was still a hundred pounds short. Then — hard luck on you — she came across your blank cheque in her handbag. Ah, an inspiration! What more could a resourceful revolutionary want? No flinching! No silly softness! No cowardice. No bourgeois scruples! What is it they’re always telling you? Be hard! Be decisive! Be audacious! So she fills it in and cashes it.”

  Rose stood up and smoothed her costume down. “I can’t stay here all day. Well?” She addressed Jack. “What are you looking at me like that for?” Her voice was cool and amused. “I did nothing I hadn’t a right to. You gave me it. I used it. What’s wrong with that? Did you want a voice in the way I spent it? Was I supposed to sleep with you a certain number of times in return? You didn’t say so. I can’t remember any agreement being made.” She turned to her father. “Are you ready?”

  “You’re a hard one,” Jack said. “Haven’t you got any shame?”

  “On the contrary.” She spoke without defiance. Her expression was candid and pitying. “I feel very proud of my contribution. I have no doubt that I’m in the right. I know that whatever I do is for the good of all of you. It doesn’t disturb me in the least if I’m misunderstood sometimes. Why should it? Parents are misunderstood by their children.”

  “It’s no use,” Mick said. “Right and wrong don’t mean the same to her as they do to us. Anyway, Jack, I’m trusting you to keep your mouth shut. It’s best that nothing should get out. The more people know about Rose, the more they’ll ask about me. And the more they know about me, the more they’ll know about Kate. God knows, I don’t think she had anything to hide, but she thought different, and we’ve got to respect her wishes. It’s her memory we’ve got to protect. All right?”

  “All right, Mick.”

  Joyce opened the door. “Well, if you must go.”

  Rose flashed a gay and guileless smile at Jack. “Yes, we must run. No ill feelings, Jack?”

  Jack flushed, checked an impulse to glance at Joyce and mumbled, “No ill feelings.”

  There was an interchange of farewells. Joyce looked calmly past Rose and said, “Bye-bye, Mick.”

  Jack sat in a daze while Joyce ushered the visitors out. He felt no hostility for Rose. Her words and behaviour had drained him of all emotion and removed her far beyond his understanding. Even when she had been sitting face-to-face with him, she had not aroused any intensity of feeling in him. It was the first time that this had been the case. Where was the girl, ardent, impulsive, yet as fresh as petals, whose spirit was as elusive as a butterfly’s dance? The cast of the face was the same, the profile was the same, the eyes were as brilliant. Whoever had known the girl would recognize the woman. But the brightness in the eyes was of a changed quality. It was not a radiance that softened but an intensity that made the surrounding features seem firmer and more determined. The tenderness and promise of unmoulded youth were lost. He was sad, for he also remembered himself as he had been, his body slimmer and without the lumpy muscles with which years of work and war had thickened it, his forehead unlined, his hair thicker, more lustrous and more rebellious, the skin of his face less florid and youthfully soft, without its present enamelled hardness. He even recalled, in painful glimpses, how he had looked at her, his face uplifted and shining with a daft and pathetic innocence. And Chris had been alive, and Alf had been handsome, and Kate had been alive. The mysterious agony of change, of irredeemable time, weighed upon him.

  Rose was still beautiful in his eyes, but now she had no more impact upon him than a lovely image on a cinema screen. She was no longer clad in illusion. The magic of remembered youth had been stripped from her. She was no longer the faery being, always just beyond his reach, whom he had gazed after as the embodiment of all the poetry that real life lacked. She had gone out of his world, taking his own youth with her, and he did not gaze after her.

  Joyce came back into the room. “Let’s have some fresh air in the room.”

  Her violent and determined movements as she dragged the window open brought a flash of memory to him, poignant but ridiculous, of Rose making the same gesture against him in her bedroom, and he smiled vaguely.

  “Her sort of people,” Joyce said, “they make me sick to the stomach.”

  He looked at her in wonderment, but he did not protest.

  Chapter Four

  “Once upon a time —” Mick had taken Rose back to The Lamb, and they were sitting in the parlour. “Once upon a time I was courting an Irish girl, a parlourmaid. That was, oh, forty years ago. The gentry were still living hereabouts, and a young fellow like me spent half his nights creeping down their basement steps. I remember one day she stood at the other end of the kitchen, with her back to me, cutting bread. ‘D’ye love me, Mick?’ she asked, without turning round. I swore a terrible oath that I did. ‘D’ye really love me?’ she asked again, and she looked over her shoulder with one of those melting smiles. ‘To me dyin’ day,’ I said. ‘You don’t, you devil,’ she shouted all of a sudden, turnin’ on me with a face black and furious, her eyes glaring jealousy, ‘You’re lyin’ to me and I hate you!’ And — crash! — she threw the breadboard at me. And before I’d finished ducking, she was across the room with her arms round my neck, and smothering my face with kisses.”

  “Very interesting,” said Rose. “And why this particular tale at this particular time?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just being matey.”

  “You look about as matey as a tiger. You didn’t have a word to say walking up the street. The veins were standing up on your temples like flex.”

  “All right, I’m talking my temper away. Listen, you pride yourself on having a mind of your own. Are you sure you know your own mind any more than that skivvy did?”

  “Quite sure. Why?”

  “You’ve had crazes before. Different jobs. Different men. What makes you so sure you won’t blaze up tomorrow with some new lunacy you don’t even dream of today ?”

  “Lunacy?” She put her cigarette down in an ashtray and faced him didactically. “The trouble with you, Mick, is that you’re like most fathers. You still think I’m fifteen years old. You can only see me as I was, and you can’t understand what I’ve become. It hurts you because I’m not the little apple of your eye any more, but myself, a separate person, growing away from you. I suppose it hurts all parents when they realise it. But after all, why don’t you face facts, and give me credit for having some grown-up motives for taking the course I have? Why don’t you credit me with having developed a bit of purpose and intelligence. Because I have, you know.”

  “That’s all I need from you, a lecture. ‘Fathers Must Face the Facts of Life.’ You don’t have to tell me you’ve changed. It’s the way you’ve changed I don’t like.” A darker hue gathered beneath the weathered ruddiness of his face. “I wish I’d had the rearing of you!”

  “Mick!” She was gentle and mocking. “You’re getting angrier and angrier. You are!”

  “You’re trying to make me, aren’t you? To me, you haven’t become what you promised to be when you were a kiddie, but the opposite. You were a warm-hearted child. You used to give your spending money away to the first snotty-nosed little brat you saw crying in the street. I used to see generosity in you, and kindness. Where’s it all gone?”

  “It hasn’t gone. That’s why I’m what I am.”

/>   Mick uttered a grunt of disgust. “Away with you! You talk to me about grown-up motives, purpose, intelligence, and then I see you roll that boy for his money with as little scruple as some rotten old dockside trot friskin’ a drunk for his wallet. It’s not what you did with Jack’s money that I’m caring about. It’s what it shows up in you, your bloody cold, hard arrogance. It’s like polished granite. I can’t even scratch it. You just can’t see that anything’s wrong so long as it serves your purpose.”

  “Mick, is this a quarrel?”

  “Maybe. It will be if that smile stays on your face. Maybe not. We’ll see.”

  “I could face it, Mick. Though I’d be sorry.”

  “So should I.”

  She let the little ice-points of attack melt from her eyes. “You know,” she said quietly, “you’re building up a great deal from a very little thing. Yes, don’t interrupt, it is a very little thing. I only acted on an impulse. Not that I regret it, but that’s how I am. Our newspaper was in a pretty bad jam. It’s the most important thing in the world for us. It’s there to help everybody, Jackie Agass included, if he only knew it. And we had to raise the money quickly. I stripped myself to the last farthing, and so did every friend I went to. Whatever I did was entirely off my own bat. Nobody told me to. They might even have disapproved, if they’d known how I’d gone about it.” She pulled a little face. “I wouldn’t like to tell you how often I’ve been told off, for being opportunist, and reckless, and erratic, and all sorts of other things. Anyway, if I’d had the time, I might even have got around to paying him back. In fact I might even have got that watch you gave me out of pawn. I am still human, you know, whether you’re prepared to believe it or not.”

  “It’s a bit late in the day to tell me all this. You didn’t think of it when we were tearin’ each other up last night, and you didn’t have the good grace to say it to Jackie Agass.”

  For a second she seemed to blaze up again inside. “I will not make excuses for myself! Let them think what they like!”

  Mick’s manner was easier now. “D’you know what beats me about you, Rosie? What absolutely defeats me? It’s that granite certainty. You’re right. You’re always right. Everything you do is right. Your newspaper is doing good. You’ve no doubt of that. There’s no glimmer of fear in your mind that it might be doing harm. The truth is whatever you happen to tell other people. Anything they say to you is just a noise in your ears while you’re deciding what to say next. Rosie, nobody knows the outcome of what they are doing. I don’t speak from books. I only have sixty years of life to go from, but that’s a great deal more than you have. What we strive for is never what comes to pass. Nobody on earth has the right to be absolutely certain.”

  “We have.”

  “You imagine you have. An’ I don’t mind admitting, that’s your strength.”

  “I know we have. We’re the first people on earth to discover the laws of history. We’ve learned to control its speed and direction. Against all the so-called brains that have run the world so far, the people that are trying to stop us, we’re like astronomers compared with astrologers. We don’t claim to know everything, far from it, but it’s us who’s the scientists, and all the rest are guessers and whistlers in the dark. We know as much about the process of social birth and death as a doctor knows about birth and death in his hospital ward. The world is pregnant, it’s writhing with pain, and we’re prepared — I’ve no purpose in hiding it — we’re ready to be as ruthless in bringing about a quick and healthy birth as a doctor is when he has to bring a child from a diseased and dying mother. And our end is just as humane as his, whatever we have to resort to, on the big scale or on the tiny little personal scale, to attain it.”

  Mick preserved a daunted silence for a few moments. Then he said, “Well, I’ve never seen any personal gifts in you. Perhaps — I might as well be frank — that’s what’s wrong with you and others like you, having ambition but no talents, wanting to ride up to the top merely by turning the world upside down. Grabbing for the prize you can’t earn, and won’t drudge for. Anyway, your clever friends have certainly taught you one gift, and that’s the gift of the gab.”

  Rose’s smile returned. This time it was friendly. “If I’ve got it from anyone, you old blarney-monger, it’s you. Give me a drink.”

  Mick brought her a glass of brandy, and when she had finished it she relaxed peacefully back into her armchair, gazing reflectively up at the ceiling as if the liquor had stilled her agitation. “I’ve told you often enough what made me what I am,” she said. “It wasn’t any ‘clever friends’. It was my life. This dreadful little street — oh, I know it’s not a slum, but it’s a slum of the spirit. People in streets like this grow up like plants in cellars, away from the sunlight. They could flower into something beautiful, but they don’t. They could grow up to a wonderful stature, but they remain stunted. They are born and die without knowing what life might be. My mother stifled in this street. You’ve said yourself she was made for a life a thousand times better. I think, in a different world she could have found some place that would have allowed her to give to — oh, to everybody — what she gave to us. She wouldn’t have been locked in by ignorance and fear — yes, poor dear, I love her ten times as much as when she was alive, but she was an ignorant woman, and it wasn’t her fault, it was her inheritance. And in a different world there wouldn’t have been the war that killed her. Did she deserve that? And there wouldn’t have been the life that gave our Chris the consumption and denied him the conditions for getting better. You,” she said, “you’re the one to talk! You cared for her, didn’t you? But you can’t see farther than the end of your nose because you’ve got a vested interest in Lamb Street staying as it is. Oh, you’re the great man, you’re the good neighbour, aren’t you? Everybody’s friend. But you’ve been nice and comfortable this last thirty years, in your nice, warm pub, with a better living coming in than anyone else in the street ever saw, and never the dole to fear as they had for years. It suits you all right when they all come flocking into your saloon bar every night to swill your gin, and your mild-and-bitter, all trying to forget the blankness, and the aimless drudgery, and all the other things they’re frightened of outside.”

  “You’re very hard on me, old girl. You’re pretty snooty about them, too, considering that they’re your own people.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you, and I’m not sneering at them. You’re all prisoners. What’s more, I know it’s in them to be different. You don’t have to tell me about all the good in them. I haven’t forgotten it. And I’ve seen them show their strength, too, though they haven’t seen it themselves. When we used to go collecting for Spain, and in the war, and when they put Labour in. They can break out of their slum when they all learn to use their strength together, with everyone else like them. So for heaven’s sake don’t keep telling me that I don’t care about them, and that I only want to do myself a bit of good. If you think you know me, then please believe in me, and believe that I live for others as well as myself.”

  It was Mick’s turn to smile. “I could deny that, you know. I could remind you of the little girl who wouldn’t stay in one job long enough to learn it. I could remind you of the girl who couldn’t see anything wrong in borrowing a dress off the hook in the shop where she worked, just because she fancied it. I could remind you of the kid who gave herself airs and dreamed of being a princess. I could tell you that you’re just a self-appointed saviour, that you really think yourself better than those you want to lead, and that they don’t want to have people like you marching them in column of fours wherever you want them to go. I could ask you why you’ve never taken the chance of doing good in some humble and anonymous way — if you’re so keen to help others, you could do it on the quiet, nursing, or teaching, or doing welfare work, or going out to help the blacks —”

  “What, me?”

  “Listen to that ring in your voice! You couldn’t bear it, could you? I could tell you that you’re the worst little s
nob I know, that your one aim in life has been to escape from Lamb Street and live the kind of life that pleased you better. I’ve been watching you all this morning. You’ve had your nose in the air as if it was a sewage farm you were walking through, not the street your mother was content to live in. I could ask you why you think the life you lead — your flat, and your smart friends — very smart, from what you tell me, considering they’re supposed to represent the underdog — and your parties, and your love affairs, and your discussions about culture and whatnot — why d’you think it’s any less shabby than the poor old Lamb Street mums coming in here to knock back their bobsworths of gin? I could tell you that in my Church there are proud priests and humble priests, and the proud priests aren’t priests at all.”

  She was flushing now, and sitting upright. He put his glass down, and gave her a reassuring grin, as if he were able at last to feel some mastery over her. “But I won’t. I’ll assume you’re the genuine article. In that case, there’s only one thing wrong with you. You’re still young. Not enough has happened to you yet. When you’ve been bashed around a bit by the years, you’ll know you can’t change the world, because the world’s made of people, and people aren’t only made of flesh and bone and hope, but of savagery and envy and fear. All your lot’ll be able to do, even if you do win, is to pummel and pound the world around till you’ve changed the shape of it, but it’ll be the same world, with the same human beings in it, and the same yeast of good and evil breeding and bubbling among them. Why don’t you leave ’em alone? All right, they’re bloody cannibals sometimes — I haven’t forgotten Barmy — but that’s how it’s always been. Speaking for Lamb Street — I can’t tell about the rest — we don’t face up to the whole filthy muddle of it too badly. We manage to make a bit of a life out of it, and that’s an achievement, believe you me!”

  Rose sat for a moment, still flushed, with her head to one side, as if listening for echoes. Her lips were pursed.