sentimental. Ken’s band dissolved and reformed under a succession of names. The Dixie Syncopaters, Jazzorola, Folkwise, Folkways, the Red Resolution, and back to Dixie Railroad; too many musicians chased too few gigs: that’s the way it was. Rhoda had to give up work, and no sickness benefit was available since Ken had never let her succumb to the system and pay national insurance. Not that she’d ever wanted to, as she told Apricot.
‘Better to live in the present, dear,’ she said, ‘while you can. That’s your father’s motto and he’s right, as usual.’
Apricot sometimes wished she lived in as ordinary a household as did her neighbours; though the more she considered the neighbours the less ordinary they seemed. Mr Rowse the healer at 93 Mafeking Street, a Miss Potter and sixteen cats at No. 95, themselves at No. 97, a Mr Hill in a ménage à trios at No. 90—perhaps all the normal people lived down another street? She had good friends at school: Brenda, Belinda and Liese. Brenda and Belinda, like herself, were scholarship girls, in a school where the others paid. Their names went up on a list on the school board as being entitled to free lunches. Liese’s father owned a chain of garages: he’d been a prisoner of war, had married an English girl. Liese was a vague, sweet girl who had all the pocket money she needed and kept Apricot, Brenda and Belinda in clothes and shoes. Belinda, short and fat, knew most of Keats by heart, and large chunks of Shelley. Brenda, tall and languid, was captain of the netball team. Apricot came top of everything. But they were still the scholarship girls, objects of envy because they were not ordinary, objects of pity because they were poor, their accomplishments scarcely the point.
‘You are all outsiders,’ said Liese’s father. ‘That’s why you stick together.’
‘Liese isn’t an outsider,’ said all but Liese. ‘She doesn’t have free dinners.’
‘She’s half-German,’ he said. ‘That’s more than enough.’
‘How do you win?’ asked Apricot.
‘Men never do,’ he said. ‘Once an outsider, always an outsider. But girls can marry in.’
His wife was Jewish, he had converted to Judaism. There’d be soft tomato sandwiches for tea, and chicken soup and dumplings for supper. The lights were soft, the carpets thick, hot water flowed from taps; everyone liked to be comfortable.
‘You English,’ he said, ‘hate to be comfortable. You think it will stop you getting to heaven. You would rather stand in the rain any day than in a bus shelter.’
‘Bloody foreigners,’ said Ken, though he mellowed when he heard Liese’s family was Jewish. Blacks, musicians and Jews, all victims of an oppressive society, were of the same family of misfortunates as himself. There were eleven taps in Liese’s house—Apricot had counted—including the garden tap. Taps, she reckoned, were the real symbol of wealth and success. At 97 Mafeking Street there were four; and think yourself lucky. Many of the houses had no bathrooms. Ken kept his sheet music in the one he had constructed in the small back bedroom, so fear of splashing kept it on the whole unused. There was carpet in the living room, lino elsewhere; gas fires downstairs and no heating in the bedrooms. The beds were damp and the floor cold when you put your bare feet out in the morning.
‘What do we want money for?’ asked Rhoda. Now she smoked eighty cigarettes a day. ‘You, your dad and me!’
‘So I can turn on the gas,’ said Apricot.
Gas flowed to cooker and fires when coins were put in the meter, not otherwise.
‘Put on your coat,’ said Rhoda, ‘if you feel the cold,’ but Apricot never would. She went round to Liese’s instead, where there was central heating. Brenda and Belinda went too. Belinda sucked sweets and read Tennyson aloud. Brenda talked about boys and Liese’s mother provided food.
‘That girl’s an opportunist,’ said Ken.
‘I don’t know what that means,’ whispered Rhoda, ‘but I’m sure you’re right.’ She lost her voice quite often. Mr Rowse said he was helpless in the face of the extravagance of her sin.
It was unusual for anything in particular to happen in Mafeking Street. The residents now took for granted the shuffling queue outside Mr Rowse’s surgery, or temple. Someone would get a new car, or a new cat: a tree would be lopped: the milkman’s horse bolt. A baby would get born and an upstairs window be lit at night: an old man would die and the hearse arrive, and a gap be felt