Cotter's England Read Free Page B

her sat Ellen Cook, slouching, her elbow on the chair arm, her fingers to the cigarette, her nose and hair sprout in the air, the other hand on her hips. She spread her legs jauntily apart, in their gray knee-length bloomers, wrinkled black stockings. She wore pointed black shoes, the toes turned up, the thin heels turned down with wear. The light fell on the hollows in face, neck, chest and bony arm and darkened the exhausted skin. Her small eyes, dark blue, looking out sharp between half-closed lids, were tired. She sat smoking, drinking tea and nonchalantly ruminating. At length, she mentioned that she had had a budget of mail that morning, something from George. He had been to Geneva, looking for a job in the I.L.O. office, and was back in France. He was not coming home yet but was going on with the dear old elf, Bob Bobsey, to Florence. Bob had the money.
    "He promised it to her long ago, and she says this may be the last time. Eh, old age is a high wall you can't climb and she's coming to the foot of it."
    To save money George and old Bob had taken one room with two beds in their travels through France. George went to the Gare du Nord to meet old Bob and brought her to the hotel. Everyone in the hotel ran forward to have a look: Mon Dieu, ces anglais! George thought it was a great joke. When they went out for breakfast in the morning again everyone ran to look at them. George thought they admired him for being above prejudice.
    After a pause Nellie said that she also had a letter from a sweet friend Caroline, she wanted Camilla to meet.
    "She's known the tragedy of failure and the dead end on the lonely road."
    Not long before, Nellie had been working in the offices of the Roseland Estate Development in Buckinghamshire. Nothing had developed. There they all sat in the naked old villa, with grass growing over the old avenues; but no new house had yet been built.
    "It's all bourgeois waste and caprice anyway. Someone taking the ideas of some Frenchman, great blocks of flats with angles and courtyards, a brick prison, it won't suit England; no fireplaces, no chimney and everything laid on from a center. Suppose there's a strike! The whole place can be without fire or water or heating; the mothers and children sick and the fathers grousing. All they have to do is sabotage and hundreds of families can't get their tea or wash their faces. I've seen pictures of it in France. It's the home turned upside down. The British, Camilla, will never give up their fireplaces and their cosy little back rooms. You sit in front of the fire and look into it and you begin to relax after the day's work. You throw in your cigarette ends and your rubbish. How will they keep the place clean? You'll have matches and cigarette butts all over the floor, and where will you relax? Ah, Camilla love, there's nothing better than to come home when you can't go on anymore and brew your pot of tea and sit before the blaze and dream. With this Corbusier there'll be no relaxing and no dreaming; only a soulless measured-off engineer's world with no place for us."
    She lit a fresh cigarette. Through it she murmured, "Caroline, aye! There's a beautiful soul, Camilla, who didn't see the wrongs of it. She believes in the world, she wants the world to be beautiful. She's lonely, aye, living there in a wretched room with a wicked old landlady. Ah, the landladies! And what rooms can you get in a one-street country village? So the only reality to Roseland is a broken-down villa with grassy rises and a landlady's damp cell with peeling walls. I've made her see it. You won't help the world, I said, with building stony streets of barracks with stone cells for the soul of man. They're tearing down the tenements, I said, to put the workers into prison; won't it be easy to isolate and machine-gun a workers' prison? There'll be no freedom then; and no desire for it, I said. Just watch your step and watch your neighbor. She's leaving it. She's coming here for a few days.