I helped Mrs. Thompson take off her coat. For a woman of, I estimated, at least forty-five, she possessed a good figure, with a small waist and no tendency either to bulges or to stringiness. It was easy to imagine her as a young woman, though she made no attempt to disguise her age. I looked at her, however, without the least flicker of desire; I never wished at any time to make love to Mrs. Thompson, though I certainly wouldn't, to be perfectly frank, have thrown her out of my bed.
She looked at me again with that peculiarly steady gaze. "You're very like him," she murmured. Then she straightened her back, as if recalling herself. "I'm sorry, Joe. I'm forgetting my duties. I'll show you your room."
My room at Eagle Road was the first room of my own in the real sense of the word. I don't count my cubicle in the N.C.O.'s quarters at Compton Bassett because I hardly ever used it except for sleeping; and I always had the feeling that it had been made impersonal by the very number of others there before me, living on the verge of departure to another station or death. Nor do I count my room at my Aunt Emily's; it was strictly a bedroom. I suppose that I might have bought some furniture and had an electric fire installed, but neither my uncle nor my aunt would have understood the desire for privacy. To them a bedroom was a room with a bed - a brass-railed one with a flock mattress in my case - and a wardrobe and a hard-backed chair, and its one purpose was sleep. You read and wrote and talked and listened to the wireless in the living room. It was as if the names of rooms were taken quite literally.
Now, following Mrs. Thompson into my room, I was moving into a different world. "It's marvellous," I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words and yet not wanting to appear too impressed; after all, I hadn't been living in the slums. I looked at it with incredulous delight: wallpaper vertically striped in beige and silver, a bay window extending for almost the whole length of the room with fitted cushions along it, a divan bed that looked like a divan and not like a bed with its depressing daylight intimations of sleep and sickness, two armchairs, and a dressing table, wardrobe, and writing table all in the same pale satiny wood. On the cream-painted bookcase was a bowl of anemones and there was a fire burning in the grate, leaving an aromatic smell, faintly acid and faintly flowerlike, which I knew but couldn't quite place.
"Applewood," Mrs. Thompson said. "Thanks to the coal shortage we're becoming connoisseurs. There's an electric fire but I thought a real one would be more cheerful on a miserable day like this."
There were three small pictures hanging on the far walclass="underline" "The Harbour at Arles," a Breughel skating scene, and Manet's "Olympe."
"Especially chosen in your honour," Mrs. Thompson said. "Medici reproductions. We have quite a picture library - you just slip in new ones when you become tired of them."
"I like the skaters," I said, meaning I liked it best. It wasn't true; even as I said it I was looking at Olympe, white, plump, and coldly self-possessed. But my upbringing held me back; I couldn't bring myself to admit to a woman that I liked a nude.
Until that day I'd never really looked at a picture. I knew, for instance, that there were three water colours in Aunt Emily's living room, but outside the house I couldn't even remember their subjects. I'm normally observant and I'd used the living room daily for over two years; it was simply that in Dufton pictures were pieces of furniture, they weren't meant to be looked at. The Medicis quite definitely were. They belonged to a pattern of gracious living; to my surprise the worn phrase straight from the women's magazines accurately conveyed the atmosphere of the room - it was as if a ready-made suit fitted perfectly.
"I expect you'd like a wash," Mrs. Thompson said. "The bathroom's to the right and the usual offices next to it." She took a bunch of keys from the dressing table. "Your keys, Joe, before I forget. Front door, this room, wardrobe, bureau, and heaven knows what these two are for but I'll remember presently. There'll be some coffee in half an hour, by the way. Or would you prefer tea?"
I said that coffee would suit me splendidly (I would much rather have had tea but I had an instinctive feeling that it wasn't quite correct at that hour). When she'd left the room I opened my suitcase and unfolded my dressing gown. I'd never had one before; Aunt Emily thought not only that they were an extravagance (an overcoat would serve their purpose) but that they were the livery of idleness and decadence. As I looked at it I seemed to hear her voice. "I'd sooner see someone naked," she'd say. "Working people look daft in dressing gowns, like street women lounging about the house too idle to wash their faces ... Spend your money on something sensible, lad." I smiled; there was certainly nothing sensible about the garment. Its material was, I remember, a very thin rayon and the shop assistant had used the term shot silk, which meant that, according to the light, it looked either garish or drab. The stitching was poor and after one washing it became a shapeless rag. It was a typical example of the stuff turned out for a buyer's market in the early postwar period and I rather think that I was drunk when I bought it.
For all that, it gave me far more pleasure than the dressing gown I have now, which was bought from Sulka's in Bond Street. Not that I don't like the Sulka; it's the best, and I always wear the best. But sometimes I feel uncomfortably aware that I'm forced to be a living proof of the firm's prosperity, a sort of sandwich-board man. I've no desire to be ill dressed; but I hate the knowledge that I daren't be ill dressed if I want to. I bought the cheap rayon garment to please myself; I bought the expensive silk garment because always to wear clothes of that quality is an unwritten term of my contract. And I shall never be able to recapture that sensation of leisure and opulence and sophistication which came over me that first afternoon in Warley when I took off my jacket and collar and went into the bathroom wearing a real dressing gown.
The bathroom was the sort you'd expect to find in any middle-class home - green tiles, green enamel, chromium towel rails, a big mirror with toothmug and toothbrush holders, a steel cabinet, a flush-sided bath with a shower attachment, a steel cabinet, and a light operated by a cord instead of a switch. It was immaculately clean, smelling faintly of scented soap and freshly laundered towels: it was nothing except a bathroom, it had been designed as a bathroom.
The bathroom I'd used the night before I came to Warley had been adapted from a bedroom. At the time the houses in Oak Crescent were built it wasn't considered that the working classes needed baths. It was a small room with pitch-pine flooring (if you weren't careful you could pick up a nasty splinter) and brown wallpaper blotchy with splashes. Towels were kept in the cistern cupboard, which was generally full of drying undergarments. On the window sill were a razor, a stick of shaving soap, a tube of toothpaste, and a dingy mess of toothbrushes, used razor blades, face cloths, and no less than three cups with broken handles which were supposed to be used as shaving mugs but, obviously, from their encrusting of dust, never had been.
I'm not going to pretend that I spent all my time at Aunt Emily's in a state of outraged sensibility. Charles and I used to make it a point of honour not to be squeamish about anything; we didn't want to be like the grocery manager at the top of Oak Crescent who was perpetually professing his great regard for cleanliness and his disgust at other people's lack of it, Charles often used to mimic him - "Soap and water's cheap enough, goodness knows. A person doesn't have to be rich to be clean. I wouldn't be without my bath for anything ..." He talked of baths as if there was something commendable about the mere fact of immersing one's body in water. As Charles said, he made you want to yell at the top of your voice that you kept coal in your bath and only washed when you began to itch.