In Pursuit of the English

Chapter Seven

Soon the rooms on the ground floor were done. Because Dan was pressed for time and money, none of Flo’s ideas for decorating were put into effect: she had wanted dadoes, hiezes and tinted mouldings. The walls and ceilings were white; and the floors black. The conservatory end, now a place of shining glass and polished stone, had potted plants from Flo’s backyard. No money for fine curtains: they had to use the cheapest thing they could find, government silk, in dull white. No money for the heavy varnished furniture Flo had planned. Neither Rose nor I would give up our furniture, as of course Dan expected us to do; they had to take down stuff from Miss Powell’s and the Skeffingtons’ flats, which they had picked up at sales and which was mostly unobtrusive and even at times pleasant. Flo mourned over the flat, which was large, light, and pretty. ‘We’ll never be able to let it for what we wanted,’ she said. Rose had a student in her shop asking for a place, and brought her home; she was so enthusiastic over the rooms that Flo raised the rent from five pounds to eight pounds a week and got it. Four Australian drama students moved in, and at once the ground floor, which had been the unspeakable hidden sore of the house, became its pride. The girls were pretty and self-possessed; had insisted on a proper lease; paid their rent; and merely looked impatient when Flo and Dan tried to play them up.

‘You’ll have to behave yourselves now,’ Rose commented, when Flo complained the girls had no sense of humour: they had not been amused at her heavy hints about their boy-friends. ‘You can’t carry on the way you do, not with decent people, or they’ll leave.’

Flo and Dan realized at last that this was true; and left all negotiations with the girls to Rose, who, when approaching them, used a manner of ingratiating propriety. She copied it, as she explained to me, from her favourite television announcer. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘it stands to reason it must be the right way the upper-class people carry on, or he wouldn’t be paid all that money for smirking and smiling and minding his manners, would he now?’

On the strength of the eight pounds a week, Dan hired labour. Mick, a building apprentice, and Len, Rose’s brother, moved into the Skeffingtons’ flat, for their food, a bed, and pocket money. They soon finished the top flat; Rose was negotiating to let it to a woman who had come into her shop; when Flo announced, with a mixture of guilt and furtive delight — that she had let it to ‘an ever so nice lady who’s French.’ Rose noted Flo’s expression, made her own enquiries, and told Flo she should be ashamed. ‘And who’s talking? Little miss prim-and-proper? And what was you doing with Dickie not a month back, may I ask you?’ This shaft hit Rose so hard that even Flo was ashamed. ‘I didn’t mean it, sweetheart, I didn’t really,’ she kept shouting, as Rose stood silent, trembling; and finally crept upstairs to cry in her room.

Rose said to me: ‘Do you know what? Flo’s let the top flat lo one of them dirty beasts. And why? Because she gets twice the rent from her. And just now when I’ve got my little brother here who needs a good example set.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How can you ask? Through my old boy-friend who’s a policeman. He came into my shop to pass the time of day and he knew about her. And now there’ll be men in and out day and night, and what about my Len?’

Flo said, licking her lips: ‘I’ve put a nice chair beside her bed, and she can entertain her friends ever so nice when they come.’

In the event, when Miss Privet — pronounced by Flo as Preevay — arrived, she was just out of hospital after a bout of pneumonia and she went straight to bed and stayed there. Once or twice she called the lads working in the rooms below to go out and buy her food; but Rose went straight up to her and said that if she ever so much as looked at Len she. Rose, would call the police.

‘My God, Rose.’ I said, ‘the poor woman’s hungry.’

‘Poor woman, you say? With all the money them beasts earn she could pay for a restaurant to send it in.’ She gave me a shrewd, hard, sorrowful look, nodded and said: ‘Yes. I know. So you’re going up. Curiosity killed the cat.’

Miss Privet’s brief stay in the house was to cost me Rose’s friendship; I did not understand how deep her feeling was.

I went upstairs, knocked, and saw a plain middle-aged woman sitting up in bed reading. I asked if she needed anything. She replied coldly: ‘I have no need of anything, thank you,’ and returned to her book.

For a week she stayed in bed, brought food and drink by Mick. Then I passed her on the stairs on her way out. She wore a fur coat, a small black hat with a veil, and a hard make-up. Her handbag was enormous, of shiny black. I could not keep my eyes off her shoes. They were black patent, with wide black ankle-straps. The soles were platforms two inches deep, the toes were thick and square; but the instep was displayed in a deep curve, giving an effect of brutal intimacy. She saw me looking, remarked coolly: ‘Interesting, aren’t I?’ and walked out, pulling on her gloves.

She came back an hour later with flowers, food, and some library books.

I wrote her a letter as follows, drawing upon past experience: ‘Dear Miss Privet. I shall be very happy to have the pleasure of your company to coffee this evening at nine o’clock,’ and pushed it under her door.

Rose saw me. ‘You’re not going to have her down in your room?’

‘I’ve invited her to coffee.’

‘Then you’ll never have me in your room again.’

‘Oh. Rose, don’t be silly. Why not?’

‘She’s filthy, a filthy beast.’

‘But what she does doesn’t affect you or me.’

‘I’ll tell you something, if she drinks out of your cups, you’ll have to sterilize them before I use them.’

A note came down by Micky, saying: ‘I shall be very happy to join you. Yours sincerely, Emily Privet.’

At five to nine Rose came in to say she was going out to the pictures by herself. She went, with a look of sorrowful reproach.

At nine Miss Privet arrived, wearing slacks and a sweater and without make-up. The first thing she said was: ‘I see your friend has gone out to avoid the contagion.’

‘She’s just gone to the pictures.’

‘Yes?’ she said, in exactly the way Rose did. Then she shrugged and said: ‘But I’m glad of a bit of company, I’m getting the pip up there in that box.’

‘I was there for a bit myself.’

‘Your kid, too? How much?’

I told her, and she put her head back and laughed. ‘Yes, we have to pay for our sins,’ she said. ‘I’m paying that old tart downstairs four quid a week.’

‘You’re mad,’ I said.

‘Is that so?’ she said. ‘And why did you pay? If you’ve got a kid, or you’re on the wrong side of the Law you’ve got to pay. But I’m not staying. That old floozie downstairs’ll see my back before the week’s out.’

‘You don’t seem to like Flo.’

‘She’s sex-mad,’ said Miss Privet. ‘Makes me sick.’

‘She told me you were French.’

Miss Privet got out of the big chair, and hippily walked about the room, saying in a throaty voice: ‘Cheri, I love you, le t’aime. Ça va? Ah, cheri, cheri, come — for — a little — walk avec moi …’

She sat down again and said briskly, in her normal voice, which was Midland-bred, as far as I could judge: ‘I know enough catch-phrases and put on an accent to spice it up for those who haven’t met any French. I knew a French girl once. But she had to pretend to be English when she went back to Lyons. Give the poor fools what they want, that’s my motto.’

She never spoke of men in anything but tones of amiable contempt.

That evening we discussed literature. Her tastes were decided. She liked Priestley. Dickens, and Defoe, particularly the Journal of the Plague Year, which she knew practically by heart. ‘And do you know that man called Pepys? He knew his London. I often read a bit of his Diary and then walk over the streets he walked and think about things. Nothing’s changed much, has it?’

At that time I still had not learned to like London. I said so and she nodded and said it took time. But if I liked, she would show me things. Later she ran upstairs and fetched down a print of Monet’s ‘Charing Cross Bridge’. ‘That’s London,’ she said. ‘But you have to learn to look.’

Before she went to bed, she said that if the light was right tomorrow she’d take me to her favourite place in London.

Rose did not come to say good night to me that evening.

Next evening, about five. Miss Privet came down to say: ‘Quick, get a coat on. I’ll take you now.’ She had already turned to go and get her things, when she gave me a shrewd glance and said: ‘What’s the matter, afraid I’ll be in my warpaint?’

She came down wearing a straight cloth coat, flat shoes, and a scarf over her head. She saw me examining her, and smiled. Then she posed; and let her face assume a look of heavy-lided, sceptical, good-natured sensuality. This she held a few seconds; then switched it off, saying with contempt: ‘Easy, isn’t it? That and the shoes.’

We took a bus to Trafalgar Square, and at six, with the bells rolling from St Martin’s, she grabbed my arm and raced me up the steps of the National Gallery.

‘Now,’ she said.

It was a wet evening, with a soft glistening light falling through a low golden sky. Dusk was gathering along walls, behind pillars and balustrades. The starlings squealed overhead. The buildings along Pall Mall seemed to float, reflecting soft blues and greens on to a wet and shining pavement. The fat buses, their scarlet softened, their hardness dissolved in mist, came rolling gently along beneath us, disembarking a race of creatures clad in light, with burnished hair and glittering clothes. It was a city of light I stood in, a city of bright phantoms. But Miss Privet was not one to harbour her pleasures beyond reasonable expectation. For ten minutes I was allowed to stand there, while the light changed and the thin clouds overhead sifted a soft, drenching golden atmosphere.

Then she said. ‘Now we should go. It’ll be dead in a minute, just streets.’

Unfortunately I did not go out again with her, for she left.

Her history, or rather, what she told me, was this: She was the daughter of a lawyer’s clerk from the Midlands. She worked as a shorthand-typist until the war began, when she married a pilot who was killed over Germany. Then she was lonely and had a number of affairs. She was sharing a flat with a girl-friend. This friend married and Miss Privet found herself alone with three months’ instalments due on the furniture. Coming home one evening from work, thinking about the money she owed, she was accosted by a CI, and took him home on an impulse. He gave her the equivalent of ten pounds. For a few weeks she worked in her office as usual, and walked home afterwards, slowly — ‘practising the walk and the look’. Then she gave up her work in the office.

She became friends with one of her clients who was a businessman, married. For a while she was his mistress. But he had other friends. For three years, she had been kept by four of them. They all liked racing, drinking and gambling. They used to go to the races together, all five of them.

One evening, she was walking home by herself, thinking as she put it, ‘of my own affairs, but I must have been sending out the allure out of sheer force of habit’ when she was accosted by an American. She took him home and was discovered by one of her regulars, who told the others. The four of them made a mass scene, in her flat, where they had complained she was nothing but a common whore and a tart. ‘Which they might have thought of before, mightn’t they? Bloody hypocrites they are,’ she said. So she told them to go to hell and went back to the streets.

Then she got sick, neglected it, and found herself in hospital with pneumonia. Out of hospital, she went back to her flat and discovered someone had informed on her, and she had been dispossessed. She managed to rescue some of her furniture which was in store. Now she was looking for another flat. She had had a letter from one of the four businessmen whose wife had died. ‘He’s offering me holy matrimony,’ she said, with a wink.

‘Are you going to marry him?’

‘We-ell, I don’t think he should many a common tart and prostitute, do you?’ she drawled.

‘Do you want to be married?’

‘The way I look at it is this. You get bored with one man, don’t you? You get just as bored with four. So you might as well settle for one. The trouble is, he’s not the one I like the best. That’s life, isn’t it? If the one I liked ditched his wife. I’d think about it. As it is. I think I’ll just get myself a flat, issue an invitation or two, and see what happens.’

I said: ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting old?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You’re really green, in some ways, aren’t you? Men don’t come to me for my looks. I’m not ugly, but I’m no oil-painting either. They come because I can cook. I can make a place comfortable, and I know what they like in bed. I’m not interested in sex. Any fool can learn to bite a man’s ear and moan like a high wind.’

‘Don’t you ever like sex?’ I enquired.

‘If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand dirty talk. Never could. I like you,’ she said, ‘but there’s things I can’t stand, and one’s sex-talk.’

Before she left, she made a formal visit, to say with the deliberate casualness that means someone has been planning a conversation: ‘Do you imagine you’re going to make a living out of writing?’

‘It’s a matter of luck.’

‘You don’t want to trust to luck. It’s a dreary existence, banging away all day, having to think up thoughts all the time. I’ve been thinking about you. Now listen. You’ll never have security. Now in my job you’ve got security if you’ve got a flat. It’s the only job that has real security for a woman. You can always be thrown out of a job. And take you — a spot of bad luck with your writing and where will you be — in some double bed you don’t like, I bet. Now you take my advice and get yourself a flat and set yourself up. Learn to cook. That’s the thing.’

‘I don’t really think the life would suit me.’

‘You’re a romantic. That’s your trouble. Well, I’ve no patience with those.’

Miss Privet borrowed ten pounds from me when she left, and about three months later I got this letter: ‘I enclose your ten quid which saw me through, and thanks, my dear. No money troubles now as I’ve been doing overtime one way and another and my friends so pleased to see me, no talk of me being a common anything for the time being. Decided not to marry, no percentage in it. My flat very nice and I’ve paid for new furniture, and also all debts. Picked up a French chair, upholstered red stain. I have it in the bedroom where I can look at it. Well, that’s all for now. If you change your mind just let me know. Or if in any trouble — I never forget a friend who has helped me in time of need. You’ve only got one life, that’s the way I look at it. How goes the inspiration and if it fails, I’ve got a man might do. No good for me, doesn’t care for a flutter, and doesn’t like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said. Give my love to that sex maniac downstairs, and to stick-in-the-mud Rose. (I don’t think.) With best regards, Emily Privet.’

I tried to make it up with Rose in all kinds of ways. When I joked, saying: ‘Look, Rose, I’ll wash the cups in disinfectant in front of you,’ she said: ‘That doesn’t make me laugh, dear.’

‘But, Rose,’ I said, ‘have I changed in any way because I was friendly with Miss Privet?’

‘Miss Preevay,’ said Rose, with heavy sarcasm. ‘French, I don’t think.’

‘But she didn’t pretend to be.’

‘It’s no good trying to be friends. I can see you never did really like me.’

‘Then tell me why.’

She hesitated and thought. ‘You know how I felt about Dickie, didn’t you? Well, then.’

‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘Yes? I made myself cheap with him. I felt bad, and you knew that.’

‘You were very happy.’ I said.

‘Happy?’ she said derisively. ‘Love, you’ll say next. Well. I know just one thing. You were my friend. Then you were a friend to that dirty beast, and that means I’m just as bad as she is, as far as you’re concerned.’

‘But, Rose, I don’t feel like that.’

‘Yes? Well. I feel like it, and that’s what’s important.’

Rose’s face was now set into lines of melancholy; it was hard even to imagine her as she had been a few weeks before. Flo told me she was being courted by a middle-aged man who ran the pub up at the corner, and had a bedridden wife. Sometimes Rose dropped into the Private Bar to drink a port-and-lemon with him: and returned to watch television with Flo, sadder than before. For a while she had taken a chair upstairs to sit in the corner of the Skeffingtons’ flat, watching Len and Mick paint, but her presence inhibited them and she gave it up.

‘Auntie, they call me,’ she told Flo. ‘Auntie Rose. That Borstal, it hasn’t taught Len any manners, whatever else it taught him.’

‘Time marches on,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, yes, and it’s true for us all. Don’t you turn up your nose at Charlie at the pub. His wife’ll die, and you’ll be set up nice for life. And there’s nothing to scorn in a man what’s broken in already — he won’t play you up like Dickie.’

‘You make me laugh,’ said Rose, heavily.

On the last evening before I left. Flo invited me down to a farewell supper, telling me that I needn’t worry about Dan, she had admonished him to be polite. Dan had not spoken to me for weeks. As far as he was concerned, I was cheating him out of two pounds a week. He was now asking five-ten for my big room and that little one downstairs, and knew he would gel it. But not from me. And I had refused to pay the six pounds he demanded in compensation for an iron-mark on the table he had bought for fifteen shillings in a street market. He used to scowl and grind his teeth whenever he saw me.

‘It’s no sense quarrelling with her now,’ I heard Flo tell him. ‘Because if you put her in a bad mood, she won’t tell all her friends what a nice place this is, and we might lose tenants that way.’

So I sat with them, and tried to remember the basement as it had been on that first evening.

The great table, which had been the centre of the room, had been pushed to one side, to make room for a half-circle of chairs used for the television. Aurora was asleep next door, with the cat. Flo no longer cooked two meals an evening, but food that could be eaten off people’s knees as they watched. Len and Mick complained that her food was too rich; so she had banished herbs, garlic and oil from her cuisine. On that evening we ate undressed salad and cold meat.

The television was on, of course, but Len and Mick only half-watched it, and kept up their usual back-chat — what Rose referred to as ‘talking silly’.

Len was a thin, spike-boned, white-faced youth, with great black watchful eyes. Mick was light, easy, good-natured; concerned with his clothes and his girls — he had several.

‘Look,’ said Mick. ‘Look — what do I see?’ He was chasing something around his plate with a fork. ‘It’s a snail, no it’s a frog-leg. What my ma would say if she knew what I ate here, she’d have a fit.’

Flo sighed and shrugged. Rose said tartly: ‘Don’t parade your ignorance.’

‘Ignorant,’ said Len. ‘Ignorance said Auntie.’

‘And don’t call me Auntie. I’m your sister.’

‘I’ve got a worrrm,’ said Len, holding up a piece of lettuce on a knife. ‘Worms those foreigners eat.’

‘Well, if you don’t like what I cook,’ said Flo.

‘It’s not bad now you’ve restrained yourself a little, ma,’ said Mick.

‘Cheek,’ said Rose.

‘Oh, let him talk,’ said Flo.

‘If he doesn’t know any better,’ said Dan.

Dan, Flo and Rose had the same attitude towards the two boys: puzzled, and rather sad. This was a new generation and they did not understand it. Flo said once: ‘The way they talk — but they must get it from the telly, that’s what I think.’

‘Mind you, I’ve eaten stranger things in my time,’ said Mick. ‘Ever eaten a haggis, Len?’

‘Not since I saw one alive,’ said Len.

‘Alive, did you? I’ve never seen that. What’s it look like?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rose. ‘Haggis is sheep’s stomach.’

‘No, Auntie, you’ve got it wrong. A haggis is a little animal, covered with fur.’

‘Come to think of it I saw one, too, once,’ said Mick.

‘Where was it now? On the slopes of Ben Nevis, it was.’

‘I like old Ben, don’t you. Mick?’

‘My best friend. Mind you, he’s hard on those haggises.’

‘You have to understand a haggis. They need kindness.’

‘And sympathy.’

‘That’s what our old friend Ben Nevis hasn’t got. Sympathy.’

‘Those poor haggises’ll die out soon, the way he treats them.’

Flo said, ‘There’s ever such a nice programme coming now.’

The screen was filled with spangled girls and the air was loud with South American type music.

Len raised his voice and said: ‘That’s why I hope I never see a mink. My favourite food, mink is.’

‘Who ever ate mink?’ enquired Rose.

‘Me,’ said Mick.

‘Me,’ said Len. ‘Dressed with salad cream, there’s nothing like mink.’

‘It has to be a mutation mink,’ said Mick. ‘Well-dressed.’

‘Better flavour,’ said Len.

‘You know what mutated mink is. Auntie — go on, you’re just ignorant,’ said Mick. ‘It’s mink that’s changed from those atom-bombs. Twice the meat it had before.’

‘That’s right,’ said Len. ‘Like evolution.’

‘The first time, it happened by accident,’ said Mick, ‘but now they mutate them on purpose for the meat. Now where is it they have that mutated mink farm. Len? It slips my mind for the moment.’

‘Tibet,’ said Len.

‘That’s right, of course. I read it in the Reader’s Digest last week. Biggest mutated mink farm in the world, right up there in the Himalayas.’

‘Since they mutated them, they look rather like Hamas,’ said Len.

Rose was staring hard at the television set. But her hands plucked at the arm-rests of the chair, and she looked as if she might cry.

‘The Dalai Lama breeds them,’ said Mick. ‘He’s not like old Ben Nevis, he has a real feeling for minks.’

‘Sympathy,’ said Len.

‘Peculiar habits they have since they mutated,’ said Mick. ‘What is it now? I’ve forgotten.

‘Monks’ habits,’ said Len.

‘Naah. You’ve got it wrong. I remember: each mink has to live inside a magic circle all its life. Because it mustn’t move too much or it’ll get thin and tough, no good for mink pie when they get like that.’

‘A magic circle drawn by spirits.’

‘Spirit of turpentine,’ said Mick.

‘And, of course, turps is hard to come by up there in Tibet.’

‘Poor Dalai Lama, I wouldn’t be him, would you, Len?’

‘Rather be old Ben Nevis. Haggises is easier.’

‘And those minks, they’re getting a real taste for turps. Drink it day and night. As soon as the Dalai Lama draws the magic circle, those minks lick it up again.’

‘Not good for them at all.’

‘Spoils the meat.’

‘And they’re getting scarce, they’re dying out, mutated minks don’t tolerate turps. Not that rotten stuff they’ve got in Tibet.’

‘I’d put my money on haggises. For survival, that is. Wouldn’t you, Len?’

‘Too true. Give me a good haggis steak any day. You can keep your mutated minks.’

‘You think you’re funny,’ said Rose.

‘Ah, go on now — laugh, Auntie, laugh just once.’

Mick whirled Rose up out of her chair and danced her around the basement, to the music from the television, while Rose cried: ‘Stop it, stop it.’

‘You’ve got no sense of humour, that’s your trouble, Auntie,’ said Mick, dropping her back in her chair.

‘No sense of humour at all,’ said Len.

‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘I laugh, don’t I? I laugh at plenty. How do you know what I laugh at isn’t as funny as what you laugh at?’

‘She’s got a point, mind you,’ said Mick to Len.

‘A pointed sense of humour,’ said Len to Mick.

‘Did I tell you about that pointed sense of humour I saw last week on the building site?’

‘Ah, shut up,’ said Rose, and her lips were quivering.

Len shrugged. Mick shrugged.

‘Don’t you like watching our lovely telly?’ asked Flo pathetically.

‘Time for work,’ said Dan, rising and reaching for his overalls.

‘I’ll tell you about the pointed sense of humour upstairs,’ said Mick as the two boys got up and stretched, winking and laughing.

‘I read about its habits last week in the Mirror strange to relate.’

‘Related to the mink and the haggis?’

‘No, it’s a different kettle of fish.’

‘Fish, is it? Didn’t look like a fish to me when I saw it on the building site.’

‘Ah, but that’s because the one you saw’s different from the old lot. It’s got legs, since the atom bomb got at it.’

‘Mutated, too, has it?’

‘There are two kinds of pointed sense of humour now. The mutated kind and the old kind. Mind you, it’s not a bad thing. I like to see a pointed sense of humour on land now and then.’

‘Wasted down there in the sea, I grant you.’

‘Even the sea kind have got different shaped waists since the atom bomb.’

‘A sad thing, a pointed sense of humour without a waist.’

‘They’re sad, too. Need sympathy.’

‘Plenty of sympathy.’

‘Yes, Len, that’s what we need, you and me and the waistless pointed sense of humour. Sympathy.’

‘We’re not going to get it here, are we. Mick?’

‘No, Len. Not here.’

‘Good-bye, Auntie.’

‘Good-bye, Auntie Rose.’

‘They went upstairs.

‘Think they’re funny,’ said Rose. To me she said accusingly; ‘And you were laughing. Yes. I saw you. Don’t think I didn’t. You don’t want to encourage them.’

‘Yes, she was laughing,’ said Flo. ‘Well, I don’t blame you, dear.’

‘Yes? I blame her. Them kids. Go on and on for hours. You’d think there was nothing in the world to worry about the way they go on.’

‘That’s right,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, the way my life’s going, and Dan’s no time for some fun. I might as well go to my granny in Italy.’

‘But she’s dead,’ said Rose.

‘Yes, she died. And now I’ve nowhere to go if Dan doesn’t treat me right. Perhaps I’ll go to live with Jack in Australia.’

‘But he hasn’t sent you his address.’

‘Ah, my Lord, nobody cares for me no more and Doris is not our friend because she’s going.’

‘She has to go some time, it stands to reason. The way I look at it, some people have an itch in their feet, that moves them on from place to place.’

‘I don’t blame you, dear,’ said Flo to me. ‘But we’ve been good to you, haven’t we, darling?’

‘You make me sick,’ said Rose. ‘Do you want her to say sweet things, and all this time Dan’s as good as killing her because she has the sense to say no to your fancy rent?’

‘But I don’t understand these things, you know that, dear.’

‘Yes?’ said Rose.

‘But we have been good to your little boy, haven’t we, darling?’

‘Very,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

‘That’s right. We should all be kind to each other. If we was all kind to each other all over the world it would be different, wouldn’t it now?’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘A likely story.’