In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

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 don’t get crayfish in that godforsaken colony full of English. Christ but you’re crazy, I’m 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 don’t know somewhere I could live?’ The girl behind the counter shrugged profoundly, sighed and said: ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure.’ I took this as a dismissal, but she looked at me shrewdly and said: ‘Depends on what you’re looking for, doesn’t 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: ‘I’ve been looking for six weeks.’ My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. ‘I’ve 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 don’t know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But she’s ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.’
    ‘What sort of a flat?’
    ‘It’s upstairs,’ she said, doubtful again. But added: ‘One room, but ever such nice furniture. It’s 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. She’ll know it’s 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 jeweller’s 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