More recently, she had written to landlords and restaurateurs.
*
Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to be considered for the post of barmaid. I have no experience at all, but I have an abiding interest in bars. I like a nice glass of beer, from time to time. Some of my most memorable moments have occurred in bars, some of my most desperate humiliations and fleeting patches of pure claritas. So far she had been dismissed by every barman she met. Kindly, politely, but dismissed all the same.
A week ago — her finest hour — she had signed up for temping and gone along to a place where alcoholics rang to ask for help. She was put in reception and told to type letters. For the first day she was productive, working steadily through her in-tray, enjoying the flick of her fingers and her downright efficiency. She powered through a load of letters and cast them into her out-tray. By the next day, the novelty had worn off. Then she found the office air was stale and on the third day she was bothered by the conversations of the people to her left. It wasn’t fair, they were nice enough, friendly and clearly sane, but they did keep spilling out words. While she was typing up letters … Dear Sir, On July 21st we made an application for 20 purple box files with interior clips. These have as yet not arrived … they were pouring forth. Perhaps it was unkind to hate them by the end of the day. She knew it was. The following morning she realised they hated her. That hurt her feelings; she always preferred her hatred to be unreciprocated. They blanked her at lunch as she sat there with a plastic fork in her hand and a takeaway salad in a plastic box. Later she saw them queuing in the café, and it was hard not to feel sorry for them all, Rosa too, standing in their cheap clothes, waiting for a cup of coffee. When she got back to her desk her mood had darkened. She typed a few last letters … Dear Sir, On July 24th we ordered 504 brown envelopes and 10 million pencils and 30 trillion stamps and yet you have sent us 304 envelopes and only seven million pencils and only three trillion stamps please rectify this appalling oversight immediately before something terrible happens some unfathomable doom … and then she went home. The next morning she phoned to say she was ill. Her father called it lassitude. ‘You have to be able to get up in the morning,’ he said.
‘And I do,’ said his daughter, who was sitting in bed at the time with a cold compress on her head.
‘No one likes their job that much,’ said her father.
‘You liked yours. Mother liked hers,’ said Rosa.
‘Well, find something you like.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. She still hadn’t found a way to resolve it all. ‘It’s ridiculous. You think, would the knights on their grail quest, would they have been able to do it, find the grail and the rest, if the bank had been constantly telling them about their overdraft and how they weren’t getting any more money when they finished the hunt? Would Jesus have done so well, had he had Mr Sharkbreath ringing him up and asking him to discuss a debt repayment plan?’
‘Rosa,’ said her father. ‘Please don’t add a Messiah complex to your list of woes.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘If you don’t like the office, then do something else.’
‘I mean, there’s so little time, and how are you meant to consider anything at all, when there’s this constant thing at your back — not even time’s winged chariot, I mean that’s there too, but the imperative — the imperative to earn money. And for that you have to adopt a mask. Dress up. Mark time. Squander days.’
‘It’s a basic,’ he said. ‘There’s no escaping it.’
Successive nights like rolling waves convey them quickly who are bound for death, she quoted, whenever anyone would listen. ‘Melodrama,’ said Grace, when Rosa said this to Grace in July when she had been ignorant and they had still been friends. ‘Plain melodrama! Get a grip, Rosa! You’re acting like a child!’
‘But a child doesn’t know the horror! The horror!’ said Rosa.
‘Don’t try to quote your way out of it,’ said Grace. ‘Don’t drag literature into it. You’ve had a terrible time. But we have to work. We all have to work. You just have to grow up!’
With her back against the wall (and on the wall was a poster saying ARE YOU MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR SAVINGS?) Rosa knew they were right. All of them: Grace, her father, the Grail Knights, the whole lot of them. (And now she thought TEMP might mean the Knights Templar, that seemed quite probable as she sat there with her hand on her heart and a feeling as if her blood was fizzing through her veins. A local branch. A modern version. Galloping towards truth.) They were joined together in a rousing chorus, the refrain something about getting on with it, not festering. Sharkbreath was in there too, telling her she couldn’t borrow any more. We all have to work, they were singing, moving crabwise along the stage. We all have to work! Life was short, and indeterminate, the mysteries of the universe quite out of reach, but action was required. You had to play a part. Simply, you might as well join in! You couldn’t just fall off the horse at the first hedge! Your mother has died, but worse things would happen. Your father will die, your lover, your friends, everyone will die, you included! Still, whenever she saw something that suggested a return to the office she found she couldn’t tick it. So she had gone along to the local library and asked if they needed any help. There at least she could read, she thought. She could brush her hands over the soft spines of books, stack them on shelves and she could sit at a desk and direct people to the large-print novels. She was mobile and fairly bright, she explained. She knew a few jokes and she had once been a decent raconteur. She could definitely manage a stamping thing, she said, a book stamper, a stampe de livres, whatever it was called, and she knew how to talk about books. A woman with bright red lipstick had asked her for references. Rosa said she would supply some soon, and offered to show just how she could stack. She had read a lot of books, she said. Mostly modern classics, though she had recently begun a course of reading, from the Ancients to the present day. Meanwhile she had read a lot of Dickens and much of Dostoevsky. Some of Gogol. Most of the Eliots, George and T.S…. Ask me about a book, she said, any book, I’ll pretend I’ve read it. She was trying to look practical and efficient, like a woman with better things to do who happened to feel like working in a library. But the red-lipped woman turned Rosa down. Apparently she didn’t present the right qualifications. Then she applied for jobs as a farm worker. She had a soothing image of herself living it up on a Welsh farm, drinking cider in the evenings and falling in love with a boy called Glynn. But so far no one had written back to her.
Another waste of time had been her interview with Pennington, the other day. She had really thought that job might be the one, a thing she could commit to, but Pennington had sorely disappointed her. The auguries were bad, and when she saw Pennington’s house she knew they were doomed, both of them. She was up in Kensal Green, at a forgotten line of houses far from the tube, and she looked at the snagged gate and the paint-peeling walls and the dirt-flecked windows and she stopped on the pavement, her hand poised above the gate. She was irresolute for a few minutes, perhaps it was longer, and then she found she was knocking on the door. She regretted it when she saw Pennington standing there, a man with a thatch of grey hair and a booming voice. He was smiling at her, rubbing his hands. His glasses, which were smeared with grime, had been mended with sellotape. He was looking for a proofreader, his advert had explained. ‘I have been working for twenty years on a definitive history,’ he said, as he led her through the hall to the living room of his small, shabby house. ‘I have various theories to prove. I need someone who can work with me on it. I can’t pay much. You’ll find it adequate, as long as your expenses aren’t great. Your main motive would be the experience. You would be dedicated to the research itself.’