The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
First published in 1978, and widely considered to be the sequel to her masterpiece ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’, this remarkable book further established Smart’s reputation as a brave and inspirational writer.A still beautiful woman, 31 years old with four children by a faithless lover, cannot break the habit of expectation. She must learn to submit to the cold, bare, unglamorous tenets of reality – the untenable position of love. She must learn to deflect Grand Passion into an acceptance of the rogues and rascals with their radiant faces, who buy her a bitter with borrowed cash. Out of a passionate youth, through pain and harsh revelation, she has attained a maturity – a certain knowledge that the cost of rapture is high and that there is no looking back.Hers is a voice that distils a woman’s determination for survival – a voice that rises up from everyday life, from the bus queue, the Underground, the pub – and in Elizabeth Smart’s hand is wrought into something magnificent.
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Elizabeth Smart
The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
Paperback previously published by Panther Books 1980 and Paladin 1991
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd in association with Polytantric Press 1978
Copyright © the literary estate of Elizabeth Smart
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Charles Hewitt / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Author photograph © Georgina Barker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008155742
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008155759
Version: 2015-07-10
Table of Contents
Part Two: Signed on for the Duration
Part Five: The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals
Part Six: Kinship Is Established
Paving-Stones Play the Part of the Water Snakes in the Ancient Mariner
Sometimes Pity Seeps in Even for the Self-Pitying
A Publican’s Wife Tells Her Story
Part Eight: Caught Up With the People and the Dangers They Have Passed
Part Nine: The Story of Our Life
Wandering in the wastes of Kensington, the mean mad faces pass like derelict paper bags. The neat ruins of the war lie like a boring scar, whose history is all of the repetitive future, and all that memory can retain.
It is the autumnal equinox that blows out the pleats of my old tweed skirt. The moon races behind the tall and interminable wilderness of Onslow Gardens. All that was held in by courage and the ardour of people’s prayer to be good is loose now, and makes a lunatic and evil ghost to lurk in the trodden Squares.
There is no gas; there is no fuel; there is very little food. Also, there is still the demand for our pity for the poorer, the colder, the hungrier.
Cats are the freest beings, for very few people bear them any resentment. The foolish dogs waddle and trot about, unaware of how indelicately they expose the regrets and longings of their owners. The cheap sparrows peck about in the dust.
This is the scene for the drama which we are now too tired to perform. Christ how tired we are. Every article in the great cold room of the landlady’s flat has a different floral design. There are only remnants left over from her previous lives. She is making a fresh start in a rehabilitated house, which was only slightly damaged by blast, and now is made into flats. But really she is unable to make a fresh start, and her tired heart spends its holiday from the queues moping about her daughter who is in Leeds, waiting for her second baby to be born and her husband to be demobbed. The appearance of my landlady’s hope is only reflex action.
Women with strained faces are slapping their babies for relief.
The time of repentance is come. Soon even the most obtuse will be able to observe the wickedness of war. Repentance – but also reparation. We will REPAY. It is guilt that blows icily around corners with the autumnal equinox. The predatory suspicion is dogging us that we cannot, can never, escape the consequences of our orgies. When the door slams during the cinema we realize that there is no retreat. We are meek when bus-girls admonish us, because we are aware of how wrong we have been. But our mildness and our inconspicuous behaviour and our passive resignation will not deceive the Furies. They are adamant, oncoming, and, I fear, we fear, we know, will be overpowering.
For we are not massed for victory, and our subjective passions have not made a large image of righteous indignation to be our mirage and our guide. O Führer of self-love and self-hate, whose false moustaches fooled us into thinking he was not us: where is your twin enemy with the terrible banner of peace?
But even this invocation sounds too highfalutin for the times – out of place. I am, after all, just a woman in a fish queue, with her bit of wrapping paper, waiting for her turn. I wouldn’t budge an inch out of line for faith, for hope, or for glory. History is in the fishmonger’s hands, and I will be grateful for the stale allotment he allows.
