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

in London, in a maze. To my right and left stretched that street which seemed exactly like all the main streets in London, the same names recurring at regular intervals, the same patterns of brick and plaster. It seemed to me impossible that the people walking past the decent little shops that were so alike, and the cold stone slabs decorated with pale gleaming fishes and vivid parsley, like giant plates of salad thrust forward into the street, could ever know one part of London from another.
    ‘I’m going that way myself,’ he said. He took my elbow in the urgency of unconcluded business. I got on to a bus andhe leaped on to it beside me as it moved off, ‘Before you go, take the name of my agency. I said I’d fix you up,’ he reproved me.
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘I’ve five rooms and a staff of nine,’ he said casually. ‘It’s over in Holborn. But for special customers I’ve a little office of my own. For private talking.’
    ‘Give me the address and I’ll come when I’ve got time.’
    ‘Never let the chance slip,’ he said reproachfully, giving me a lesson in living. ‘It might get snapped up before you get there. That’s not the way to do business.’
    ‘But I’m not doing business,’ I said, throwing him off balance again. He was also annoyed. ‘You want a flat, don’t you? You said so, didn’t you?’ Automatically, he looked around for witnesses. ‘I heard you say so. You want a flat.’
    ‘Tickets,’ said the conductor.
    ‘Allow me,’ said Mr MacNamara, taking out sixpence with such an air that I was surprised to find in myself the beginnings of gratitude commensurate with his having produced tickets for the front row of the stalls.
    ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he smiled, pocketing the tickets carefully. ‘Business. You decide what you want. You find what you want. You get what you want. You pay for what you want. Or you pay someone else to get it for you.’ We were sitting side by side on the long seats at the entrance of the bus. Four working women, in respectable hats, carrying crowded shopping bags, were sitting with us. ‘Pay,’ remarked one of them humorously, as if to the air. ‘That’s the co-operative word.’ Mr MacNamara flushed angrily. He struggled to ignore this woman. But vanity won. In a voice of furious hostility he said: ‘What you want you have to pay for. The thing is, who wants to pay too much?’
    ‘Not me, that’s for sure,’ she said. She glanced around at the other women, and winked. She did not look at Mr MacNamara. The conductor, who was leaning negligently against the steps, smiled tolerantly, and said: ‘Who’s for the Church?’
    ‘That’s me,’ said the woman, upheaving herself from beside me. Potatoes rolled from her bag into my lap, and shegrabbed at them as they scattered. ‘Here,’ she shouted upwards, crouched among feet, ‘potatoes at sixpence a pound. Mind your great boots.’
    ‘Now, love,’ said the conductor indulgently, ‘get a move on or I’ll take them home to my missus.’
    ‘Try it,’ she retorted, and lurched off the bus, thrusting potatoes into her bag and her pockets. From the pavement she remarked in a detached voice: ‘Still, sixpence a pound is what you pay for new potatoes, when it’s right, and not like what some people I know try to get.’ Where this barb was directed could not easily be decided, for she was gazing absently at the back of the bus. One of the three women who remained took it up, saying: ‘That’s right dear, some people have no consciences.’ This exchange hung in the air as far as I was concerned, in spite of the gently-grinning faces all around me. I heard Mr MacNamara complain: ‘I say!’ The woman on the pavement, who must have been waiting for him to react, beamed directly at the conductor, and, indicating her bruised potatoes, said: ‘I won’t have to mash them now, will I?’
    ‘That’s right, love,’ he said. He had his thumb on the bell, and was looking up and down the street.