‘I’ve seen four men visit a woman in one night and I asked her next day and she said they were her uncles. Uncles! I’ve never heard the like! And one of them with his pants off! I saw it with my own eyes and so did Perce. At the top of the stairs it was. Perce pulled me back into the kitchen. I felt sick and I mustn’t ever be upset. The doctor told me, “Don’t you get excited,” he said. “With an ulcerated stomach like that, keep calm,” he said.
‘Perce kept saying, “Don’t get excited”, but I wasn’t excited; I was disgusted.
‘This man was terrible. He kept singing:
I’ll roll her in the heather yet,
As sure as my name’s John,
When I get back again
To Bonny Scotland.
‘Perce said he must have come from Scotland but I say if they’re like that over there I never want to go there.
‘But that’s only one of the things that’s happened. I could go on all day telling you of the terrible things that have happened here, Mr Marshall. You are young and don’t understand people so you keep coming to me if you want to know anything. Don’t go to anyone else. I’ll watch them for you.’
It was necessary for me to have someone responsible for answering the door when I was at work. There was a notice displayed on the veranda, ‘Rooms Vacant’, and this brought people seeking accommodation who had to be shown over the flats and persuaded that it would be difficult to get better ones at the price.
During the weekend when I was available to answer the door to callers I found myself incapable of stating more than the bare facts applicable to the flats I wished to let. I was conscious of the solitary lavatory, the inadequate bathroom with its notice attached to the gas bath-heater, ‘Baths Threepence Extra’.
I accompanied couples round the house answering briefly the questions put to me but making no attempt to persuade them that these characterless rooms were better than the hundreds of others lying empty in Albert Park.
I let them make up their own minds, took the week’s rent paid in advance if they decided to stay then retreated to my room.
But tenants were hard to get and people calling during the week would get no response from their knocking unless Mrs Scrubbs could be persuaded to take over the responsibility of receiving them.
I offered her a reduction of five shillings a week in her rent provided she acted for me when I was not there. The prospect pleased her. It placed the selection of tenants in her hands; it gave her a feeling of importance and power.
She agreed to do this and in a week the two remaining flats were occupied. I now felt confident and cleaned the bathroom and lavatory each morning without feeling such tasks were futile.
The notice, ‘Baths Threepence Extra’, was intended to bring in enough money to meet the cost of the gas consumed by the use of the bath heater. But it was ignored by every tenant.
‘What about baths?’ I asked each tenant paying his rent.
‘No baths last week, Mr Marshall,’ they invariably replied.
I realised that I was either accommodating a group of people who never bathed or a group of liars. Men or women emerging from the bathroom, clad in dressing-gowns, with wet hair hanging limp on their heads sometimes explained, as if in defence against an accusation, that they were just washing their hair under the tap.
I also suspected that the tenants of the two top flats were emptying their chamber pots into the bath each morning, a suspicion based on my seeing them enter the bathroom with the vessels full then returning to their rooms with them empty.
Chamber pots were emptied to the noise of water gushing from the bath tap and the sound made me recoil as I crawled backwards down the stairs removing the dust of the day from the uncovered areas of each step with a damp cloth.
I scrubbed the bath religiously each morning, remembering the agent’s emphasis on the word, but became sickened at the need to do this with disinfectant, and the feeling it brought me of associating with filthy people.
Mrs Scrubbs’ selection of tenants must have pleased her since their behaviour over the next few months enriched her life with ‘scandalous goings-on’ that brightened her eye and sharpened her tongue and sent her scuttling to me with tales of quarrels and violence.
One of the women she had introduced into the house was young, about twenty. She had appeared with a powerful, healthy young husband who worked as an engineer on a coastal steamer. He was away from the flat for weeks at a time.
The girl was strong and plump. Her lips were full and her cheeks were smooth with youth. She was generally placid and went about her work humming the latest popular tune to herself but there were times when she was seized with restlessness. At such times she paced about the house, going to the door and looking out on to the street or standing motionless near my door as if gripped by some dream fantasy that held her there in silent tension.
In these moods that flushed her face and sometimes sent her out walking into the night, the ambivalence of her emotions compelled her to loiter in the hall when men were present while also demanding she avoid them.
There was a knock at my door one evening and when I opened it she was standing there wearing a dressing-gown. The taut expression on her face pictured a resolve she was probably finding difficulty in retaining. She was holding a rent book. From between its pages projected the ends of two pound notes.
‘I’ve brought you the rent,’ she said.
I turned and walked back into my room to get a pen to sign her book. She followed me and when I turned round she stood there with her dressing-gown open.
She held the book towards me and I took it and walked to the table to sign it. She drew her dressing-gown round her and watched me but now with eyes in which anger had rushed to rescue pride.
When I had signed the book she jerked it from my hand and hurried away.
The remaining tenant of my house was a stout, taciturn woman of about forty who desired to remain hidden. I rarely saw her but I saw her husbands.
When Mrs Scrubbs had accepted her as a tenant she was accompanied by a thickset working man carrying a suitcase. He remained silent during the short discussion his companion had with Mrs Scrubbs and it was understood they were married.
But after a fortnight he disappeared and another husband arrived. He was an ageing jockey who gave me two winners at Flemington when he was leaving the house one Saturday. He never came back.
The third husband arrived a fortnight later. He was a heavy, plodding man who looked at life in a detached way. His working clothes were always dirty with clay. He had thick, short hands with clumsy fingers and he smoked a pipe. He settled in and I accepted him as a permanent husband.
I liked him.
‘You’ve got to take it as it comes,’ he said to me one day. ‘The only bloke who knows why is yourself.’
16
One evening the plodding man did not return to the flat. The taciturn woman waited for two days then left late one evening with a brown paper parcel containing one of my eiderdown quilts. In the suitcase she carried were a number of knives and forks and the shepherdess with the broken arm.
A check with the inventory she had signed revealed this and I sat holding it in my hand in her deserted flat, pondering over her dishonesty.
I always felt it degraded me to check the contents of a flat with the inventory of tenants who had announced they were leaving. It would reveal something grasping in me and be a reflection on their character. I always accepted their word and in consequence was constantly buying second-hand cutlery to replace those items that were missing.
‘Most people,’ the plodding man had told me, ‘will do you for your socks.’
With some satisfaction I decided to do him for his boots. They were left in the wardrobe, a brand new pair of Hugh Thompson’s bluchers, the Thistle Brand stamped on the soles, the leather mellow from perfect tanning, the hand-stitching even and tight. They were the Rolls Royce of heavy boots, hob-nailed, horseshoe-heeled and smelling of new leather. T
o hell with the shepherdess!
I took them down to my flat and placed them in the wardrobe where I intended holding them in part payment of the two weeks rent the taciturn woman owed me, justifying my attitude on the assumption that a husband, legal or otherwise, was responsible for his wife’s debts.
But the plodding man thought otherwise. He visited me at the end of the week to pick up his boots. I admitted I had them but pointed out that as an acting husband who had slept in my flat he was responsible for the rent.
‘If every bloke who’s slept with a woman becomes her husband what would happen to all of us?’ he asked, raising eloquent hands.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘We’d all be in jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Bigamy.’
‘Let that slide,’ I said. ‘What about this rent you owe me?’
‘I don’t owe it.’
‘You lived here.’
‘No, I didn’t. I visited here.’
‘You stayed a bloody long time for a visitor.’
‘Yair, that’s right. A bloke’s got to stay somewhere.’
‘What about all the stuff she’s knocked off?’ I went on.
He was surprised. ‘Go on! Did she get away with some of the knives?’
‘She pinched an ornament too.’
‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘That bloody thing! You were lucky to get rid of it.’
He was silent then said thoughtfully, ‘I never thought she was like that. They say you never know a woman till you’ve slept with her. You don’t know her then either, by the looks of it. She never took anything of mine anyway. I’ll say that for her.’
‘No, she didn’t,’ I said. ‘I wondered why she didn’t take the boots.’
‘Well, she’d have to explain them away to the next bloke. They’d be no use to her. Now what about them? I can’t pay that bloody rent. I gave her all the spare cash I had. Come on now, hand them over. They’re no bloody good to you. You landlords are all the same; you’d skin a flea for its fat.’
‘Who in the hell are you calling a landlord!’ I said angrily. ‘I’m battling for a crust like you. I’ll get your bloody boots. You’re after something for nothing. All right, you can have them.’
I brought them from the wardrobe and placed them on the table. ‘There they are.’
My outburst had disconcerted him but he drew himself together and took them in his hands. ‘They’re good boots, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Cost me fifteen bob.’
‘They’re the best water-tight made,’ I said. ‘Show me.’ I took them from him. ‘Look at the stitching round the tongue. See? It goes right to the top. You could stand in water up to your ankles with these boots and never get your feet wet.’
‘That’s what I want,’ he said. ‘I’m working in mud all day.’
‘Rub some neatsfoot oil into them,’ I said. ‘It’ll keep the leather soft.’
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
When he was leaving he said, ‘Look, I don’t go round asking for anything for nothing. I’d sink a hole for you any time you like. And I wouldn’t be asking anything for it either. We’ve both taken a knock from her. I’m down a few quid; so are you. Well … That’s how it is.’
A barmaid was the next occupant of the flat. She was a woman with a full figure, black hair and uncritical eyes. She had the tranquillity of one who, knowing the truth, was content with it. She knew the pipes playing beyond the hill were not coming from a fair of dancing and romance. She watched people hurrying there, watched them return. Her name was Jean Oxford and she worked in a city hotel.
She sat in my room while I filled in some details in a rent book she would retain as a record of her payments.
While I was writing she observed me. It was not an active appraisal; it was a passive observation. It was not concerned with providing a guide to her future attitude towards me. She was typing me with no other motive than that of interest. Because of this I felt comfortable with her.
‘You’d better put your signature here,’ I said.
She rose and came to the table over which she bent to sign it. She was wearing a low-necked blouse. A crucifix suspended by a gold chain that had been hanging concealed beneath her blouse fell through the V-opening at her neck and dangled above the table, a guard secretly beckoning an invitation.
When she signed the book she paused a moment as if anticipating conversation. I offered her a cigarette.
‘You have an interesting job,’ I said as I held a match against its tip.
‘Yes, I have,’ she said sitting down again, her cigarette alight. ‘I’ve tried most jobs. It suits me.’
‘Why, I wonder?’
‘Well, you’re in it; in the swim.’
‘Meeting lots of people, talking a lot—that sort of thing?’
‘Yes. You’re never bored. I’ve worked in an office, in a factory, I’ve been a waitress. I ran a little shop of my own for a while—mixed goods, that was the worst job of them all.’
‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘I’d hate it.’
‘It was an education of sorts,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I tried it.’
She grew reflective. ‘Men are different in a shop.’
‘In what way?’
‘The men you meet in these little corner shops come there to do a job they think should be done by their wives. They’ve got a chip on their shoulder from the start. They want two bottles of milk, a packet of Aspros and a quarter of a pound of corned beef. They’ve got to dip into their pocket to pay for it—beer and cigarette money. The wife’s hanging on to the housekeeping money so they’re often rude. They’re in a hurry. You’re a nobody. You’re out to rob them. They never thank you.
‘ “Look, I’m in a hurry,” they say. You wouldn’t recognise these same men in a bar. They treat the barmaid with respect. If she’s got a cold they tell her what to take. Their wives cure their own colds.’
‘By Jove, this is interesting!’ I said with enthusiasm. ‘Tell me some more.’
‘Tell you some more what?’ she asked, her eyes seeking explanation as she looked at me.
‘About men, how they act in bars an’ that. I like hearing about people. You seem to know so much. That’s all there is to it. Nothing else. I’m not putting over a line.’
‘It would be a funny sort of line.’ She was smiling.
‘Yes, wouldn’t it!’
‘Well, start me off. What do you want to know?’
‘The bar is a place of escape, isn’t it?’
‘Not for all men. For most of them I suppose. It’s not only beer that brings them there; they could drink at home. It’s a place where they can talk to other men. They feel wanted in a bar. They’re after companionship. They meet their mates there. They forget their worries. If they bring their worries with them they soon unload them. They can always find a man who will listen to them.
‘It puts off going home too. Most homes are not really happy, you know. Most husbands and wives live side by side each believing they have been cheated of some other life they deserve. The life they are leading is an act most times.’
‘I don’t think I would go along with that,’ I said, thinking about it.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘Most men would sooner talk to a man than a woman. Even their wives. Their wives know all their stories, know their weaknesses. Wives never sit down to listen. They’ve got too much on their minds anyway. Children get sick, or they might be working out what to say to him or what not to say to him to keep him in a good mood. When they do listen they’ve got blank eyes.
‘These men need an “ear”. Everyone does for that matter. You’re one now. But men find it in pubs. It becomes the best part of the day.
‘They always go to the same place in the bar. They get annoyed if anyone else is standing there. They think this place belongs to them.’
‘Like men who think they own the same seat in a suburban train,’ I put in.
‘Yes
. A regular comes into a bar and walks straight up to his place. His mates will be there. I’ve noticed that if a man’s mate is in a different place when he walks in he won’t go up to him. He’ll walk to their special place and wait for his mate to join him there. He often doesn’t look at him; he just waits.’
‘You’d get to know the regulars of course?’
‘Know them! You know them all right. You know what they drink so you never ask them. It pleases most men to have their drinks pushed to them without waiting for them to say what they want. It’s like being recognised by a waiter. It makes them feel important.
‘But there are some regulars who don’t like this. You get to know them. You know what they drink but you always ask them first. There’s not many of them but when you get to know a man’s like that you play along with him.’
‘You’d never treat a newcomer quite the same as a regular, would you?’ I asked.
‘If you know your job you’ll treat him better. When a stranger comes in you speak to him. “Here’s a clear space up here,” you might say. “Push in here where we can talk. Move over Harry.” He likes that. He comes again. That’s how you make a regular.
‘You see they want the barmaid to like them so they treat her with respect. If a waitress spills some soup on a man’s suit he’ll tell her off, just as likely as not. Saying you’re sorry makes no difference. If a barmaid knocks over a glass of beer and it spills on a man’s trousers he’ll take her apology smiling. “Don’t worry; it’ll wash off” He’ll thank her for the cloth she hands him to wipe it off.’
‘What about those who can’t carry drink—the bad-tempered ones?’
‘You soon learn how drink affects different men. When you see a man’s had enough and is likely to become nasty you slow down on serving him. You’d be surprised how you can cut his drinks down without him knowing what you’re up to.
‘Those men who become abusive when they’re drunk take some handling. They don’t abuse the barmaid; there’s not a man in the bar who wouldn’t defend her. They abuse their mates or strangers. The bar might be noisy with talk but once two men start quarrelling there is silence. Everyone listens. You can feel the tension.
In Mine Own Heart Page 15
