Читать книгу The Diaries of Jane Somers - Doris Lessing - Страница 7

I went in to Maudie on the way home: her door was on the latch. Fire blazing. Cat on bed asleep. Maudie, asleep. An empty teacup on the arm of her chair. I took the cup to safety, left a note: See you tomorrow, and fled hoping she wouldn’t wake before I left.

I am sitting here in my dressing gown by the electric fire. I should clean out this flat. I should really wash my hair.

I am thinking of how Maudie Fowler one day could not trouble herself to clean out her front room, because there was so much junk in it, and then she left it and left it; going in sometimes, thinking, well, it’s not so bad. Meanwhile she was keeping the back room and the kitchen spotless. Even now she does her own chimney once a week, and then scrubs the grate, brushes up the dust and cinders – though less and less thoroughly. She wasn’t feeling well, and didn’t bother, once, twice – and then her room was not really cleaned, only the floor in the middle of the room sometimes, and she learned not to look around the edges or under the bed. Her kitchen was last. She scrubbed it and washed shelves, but then things began to slide. But through it all she washed herself, standing at the kitchen table, heating water in the kettles. And she kept her hair clean. She went sometimes to the public bath-houses, for she had told me she liked going there. Then she left longer and longer between washing her hair … and then she did not wash her clothes, only took out the cleanest ones there were, putting them back grubby, till they were the cleanest; and so it went on. And at last, she was upright in her thick shell of black, her knickers not entirely clean, but not so bad, her neck dirty, but she did not think about it, her scalp unwashed. When they took her to hospital, they washed her all over and washed her hair too. She sometimes thought humorously, when they cart me off back to hospital, I’ll get another proper wash! But she, Maudie Fowler, was still there, alert, very much all there, on guard inside that old witch’s appearance. She is still there, and everything has collapsed around her, it’s too difficult, too much.

And I, Janna, am sitting here, in my clean, scented dressing gown, just out of my bath. I should do my nails again, though. I should clean my flat, or ask someone in to clean it. I was in my bath for only a few minutes tonight.

By this time next year my whole life will have changed. I know it, though I don’t know how.

I shall go down and visit Georgie next weekend. If I dare leave Maudie. It is ridiculous. Where is that one person?

Friday.

I went in on my way to work. She was better. Had been out to shop for herself. She looked quite nice and fresh – so I see her now, I no longer see the old witch. I said I was going to visit my sister Georgie. She laughed at the name. She said, ‘One of these days I’ll visit my sister, I expect.’ I already knew what that meant, and I said, ‘I’ll take you, Maudie.’ ‘Janna and Georgie,’ she said. ‘My sister and I, we were Maudie and Polly, and when we went out dressed up in our white coats and little hats, we were a picture.’ I said, ‘Georgie and I were a picture too, I expect. I remember pink dresses and berets. I’ll see you Sunday night when I come back.’ ‘If you have the time,’ she said. I noted that I could have given her a nice sharp slap, but laughed and said, ‘I’ll see you.’

Sunday Night.

The train was very late. Did not go in to Maudie. Now it is midnight. I have done the usual Sunday-night things, seeing my clothes are ready for the week, hair, make-up, nails.

Well, it has been a painful weekend. When I got there Georgie was alone, because Tom and the children had gone off on some visit. Was very pleased, can’t stand those brats of hers. Tom is all right, but a married couple is a married couple. I wanted to talk to Georgie. My thought was, specifically: now I am grown up, perhaps she will take me seriously? For years I used to go down, when I did go down, rather princessing it. Good old Georgie and good old Tom. She has never bothered about her clothes and things much. I used to wear my most outrageous clothes and take copies of the mag and enjoyed telling her about my life and times. She listened in her way of no-comment. Clever little sister Janna. Correction, Jane. She wasn’t going to call me Janna, Jane it was and Jane it will be, to the end. How many times I have said to her, Georgie, no one calls me Jane, no one, I want to be Janna. I can’t remember to, says she, making a point, and that’s that. She thinks Janna is a smart little name to go with a smart little job. I used to sit through those weekends, when I did go, wondering how she stuck it, but of course she was thinking the same of me. It is not that she despises me, exactly, though she certainly thinks what I do pretty peripheral, it is that she cannot imagine any sane person doing it.

When I went into the house I was very alert to everything, the way I am at the moment – contrasts. Because of Maudie Fowler. Georgie’s house is exactly the house my parents lived in always. I call it country-suburban, comfortable, conventional, conservative, all of a piece from the landscapes on the walls to the books on the bed table. My flat is, Freddie’s and mine was, both international-contemporary. On the rare occasions Georgie has stayed a night, she has made a point of saying she has enjoyed my things. They are such fun, says she.

Georgie had a cold supper for us and seemed at a loss what to do after it. We were in her living room, curtains drawn, some snow outside, not enough for my taste but more than she wanted. She says it makes work. She works hard, Georgie does, the house, the cooking, looks after husband, four children, chairwoman of this, patron of that, secretary of the local reading circle, good works. I sat one side of the fire, she on the other. I tried to talk about Mother. I need to know about her. I never talked to her, a bit more to Father. But Georgie has put me into the category of the irresponsible one who doesn’t care about family. And that’s that. I kept giving her openings, even asked once, I wonder what Mother would have thought?

At last I talked about my trip to Munich. She liked that. Your glamorous goings-on, she calls all that. She wanted to know how the hotel was, my friends, how the fashion shows are organized, how this is done and that is done. I recognize myself in all this. Not a word about the styles and the fashions, but how it all works. So we are like each other after all. Suddenly, when I was in bed, I had a thought that made me sit up again and turn on the light. It was this. Before Granny died, she was ill for about two or three years, can’t remember (which is a point in itself), and she was at home with Mother, who was looking after her. I was working like a demon then, it was the first rebirth of the mag, and I simply behaved as if Granny being ill had nothing to do with me. Not my affair! I can remember switching off from the moment I heard the news. But Mother had her at home there, and Father wasn’t too well either. Granny had diabetes, heart trouble, bad eyes with operations for cataract, kidney trouble. I used to hear news of all this, relayed in Mother’s brisk letters: and I haven’t kept the letters, and I remember not wanting to read them. Now I know what it costs, looking after the very old, the helpless. I find myself exhausted after an hour or two, and want only to run away somewhere out of it. But where did Mother run to? Who helped her? Not me! Not once, I never went near her.

Sunday morning, Georgie and I had breakfast alone together. Some snow outside. Pretty. Trees and bushes full of snow and birds feeding off stuff Georgie hangs in the branches. She said Tom was coming back with the kids, because the weather was frightful where they were. I said to her, quite desperate because I knew once they had got back, that was that, ‘Georgie, were you around much when Granny was dying?’

She gave me a surprised look at this. She said, ‘No, I didn’t get home much. I was pregnant twice while that was going on, and Kate was a baby.’ She was now looking at me in an impatient sort of way.

‘I want to know about it,’ I said. ‘I have been thinking that I did nothing to help.’

She said finally, ‘No, you didn’t,’ and she wouldn’t have said another word. I had to digest that she and Tom had attitudes about me, my behaviour, that were established and set, Jane was this and that and the other; and probably these were Mother’s attitudes too, and Father’s.

I said, ‘It has only recently occurred to me that I never lifted a finger all the time Granny was dying.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ she said, in the same shutting-you-out way.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘recently I’ve had a little to do with an old person, and I know now what Mother had to cope with.’

‘I suppose better late than never,’ said Sister Georgie.

This was much worse than I had expected. I mean, what she thought of me was so much worse that I was burning with – no, alas, not shame, but it was embarrassment. Not wanting to be so badly thought of. I said to her, ‘Can you tell me anything about it?’

‘Well, what on earth do you want to know?’ She was exasperated. Exactly as if some small child had said to her, she having hit her thumb with a hammer, Does it hurt?

‘Look, Georgie,’ I said, ‘all right, I’ve seen recently that … I could have done more than I did. All right? Do you want me to grovel? It is better late than never. I want to know more about Mother.’

‘She was in your flat for two years before she died,’ said Sister Georgie, making a great amazed incredulous astonishment out of it.

‘Yes, I know. But it was since then that I …’

Georgie said, ‘Look, Jane, I’m sorry but … you just turn up here after all that, and say, I’d like a nice little chat about Mother. Jane, it simply isn’t on,’ she said. She was literally inarticulate with anger. And I, with surprise. I realized that there were years of resentment here, criticism of little sister Jane.

I made a last try. ‘Georgie,’ I said, ‘I am sorry. I am sorry I didn’t help Mother with Granny, and I want very much to discuss it all.’

‘I suppose one of these weekends I’ll get a telephone call, when you’ve got nothing better to do, and you’ll turn up, all fine and fancy free, not a hair out of place, and you’ll say, Oh, Georgie, I was wondering what was it like having Mother here for ten years, with four kids, no help, and she becoming an invalid …’

At which point the telephone rang outside and she went to answer it. I sat there, I was numb. That was the word. Not that I hadn’t felt bad about Mother living with Georgie all that time, for after all I was working, and we did only have a small flat, Freddie and I, and … and … and. But it had never occurred to me that Georgie was not going to talk to me this weekend. If ever. She was too angry. She was, and she is, so angry and bitter about me.

When she came back, she said, ‘I’m going down to the station to get Tom and the kids.’ She said to me, ‘I’m sorry Jane, but if you are beginning to get some sort of sense of responsibility into you at last, it might perhaps occur to you that it isn’t easy to have you just turning up with a light question or two: How about Granny dying? How was it? Did it hurt? It was all awful, Jane. Do you understand? It was dreadful. I went down there when I could, pregnant as hell or with the baby, and found Mother coping. Granny was bedridden at the end. For months. Can you imagine? No, I bet you can’t. Doctors all the time. In and out of hospital. Mother was doing it all. Father couldn’t help much, he was an invalid himself … Anyway, I’ve got to go to the station.’

And off she went.

I nearly ran after her, to ask to be put on a train home, but stuck it out. Tom and the kids filled the house with clatter and clang, the record players went on at once of course, a radio, the house vibrating with din. Tom came in and said. How are you? – and went. The kids banged into the kitchen, where I was, Jilly, Bob, Jasper, Kate. Hi, hi, hi, hi, all round. It is established that I think Georgie’s kids are awful and spoiled brats, but they might be all right when they grow up. I am the glamorous Aunt from London and the High Life. I send them presents of money at Christmas. When we meet I tell them I think they are awful and good for nothing. They tell me it is because I don’t understand them. It is a cheerful game of mutual insult. But I do think they are awful. I cannot understand how they are allowed to do as they like, have what they like, go where they like. I have never heard either Georgie or Tom say once, No, you can’t have that. Never. The whole house is crammed with their possessions, clothes, toys, gear, mostly unused or used once or twice. I keep thinking of growing up during the war and having nothing. And recently I have been thinking about the Third World having nothing. Of course, Georgie would say It is trendy to have such thoughts, but, as she would say, Better late than never.

Anyway, I sat in the kitchen and listened to the sheer din of those kids all over the house, and Georgie came back and I could see she was ready to talk, if I wanted, but suddenly I found myself saying, ‘Georgie, you are ready enough with criticism of me, but look at those children of yours.’

‘Yes, I know what you think,’ she said, her back turned to me. And I knew at once that this was a sore point.

‘Tell me,’ I said to her, ‘when have they ever done anything they didn’t want to do? Have you and Tom ever tried to teach them that the world isn’t a celestial milk bar with milk shakes and cream topping for ever there at the touch of a button?’

‘You may well be right. I’m not saying you are not,’ said she, making it humorous, ‘and now I have to get the lunch. If you want to help, stay, and if not, go and talk to Tom.’

I took her at her word, went to find Tom, but he did not want to talk to me, being busy at something. I found the decibel level in the house intolerable, pulled on my big boots and went for a walk in the snow, came back for lunch. As usual, the parents were like appendages to the scene of the four children, who did not let them finish a conversation if they had the temerity to start one, or talked across them at each other, and behaved exactly as if Georgie and Tom were useful servants they could treat as they liked.

How has it come about that this is what families are like now? In the living room, afternoon, this was the scene. Jilly, seventeen, nagging because she had wanted to visit a friend and couldn’t for some reason, so she was sulking and making the whole family pay for it. Bob, sixteen, an over-fat good-looking boy, practising the guitar as if no one else existed. Jasper, fifteen, whining and nagging at his father to go with him to some local football match. Kate, thirteen, cheeks flaming, hair wild, tarting around the room in one of Georgie’s dresses, in a sort of locked hysteria, the way teenage girls get. This was for my benefit, because she wants to come to London and ‘be a model’. Poor girl! Tom was sitting in a corner trying to read, and answering questions from his offspring in an abstracted irritable voice, and Georgie was waiting on all of them, in perfect good humour and patience; shouting to make herself heard from time to time, Yes, all right, Kate. Yes, Jilly, I’ll do it tomorrow. Yes, Jasper, it’s under the spare-room bed. And so on.

I said at last, ‘Well, this wicked Aunt is about to leave. No, don’t bother, I shall go to the station by myself.’

With what relief did I turn my back on this scene of happy contemporary family life and went out to the front door, followed by Georgie.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘don’t say it, I don’t understand what children are, and I am not entitled to say a word, because of my selfish childishness, but all I can say is …’

‘And you are probably right,’ she said, in exactly the same humorous self-denying voice she uses for the children.

I walked through the already slushy snow to the station, waited a little. I like stations, the anonymity, the freedom of being alone in a crowd. I like being alone. Period.

And here I am alone. I should go to Maudie.

I should, very soon, think all this out.

But what I do know is this. When people die, what we regret is, not having talked to them enough. I didn’t talk to Granny, I don’t know what she was like. I can hardly remember Grandpa. Ditto Mother. I don’t know what she thought about anything, except that I am selfish and silly. (Which is what I think about Georgie’s brats.) What did she think about Tom? Georgina? The grandchildren? What did it mean to her, having to nurse Granny, and her own husband, for – I am afraid it was probably four years. What was she like when she was young? I don’t know. I shall never know now. And of course, there is Freddie: I lie awake sometimes, and what I want is, not that he should be there to make love to me, though I miss that dreadfully, I want to talk to him. Why didn’t I talk to him while he was there?

I didn’t want to, that is the answer. I didn’t want to know.

Monday Night.

I woke this morning in a panic, heart pounding, eyes prickling, mouth dry. I said to myself, a bad dream, that’s all; but it stayed. On the way to work, I realized it was because of Joyce probably going to the States. Apart from missing her, everything at work will change. I shall be offered the editorship, but that isn’t the point.

As I walked through the secretaries’ room, Phyllis looked sharply at me, then came after me and asked, Are you all right? Full marks for noticing. I knew of course that she knew I am anxious about Joyce leaving. But when I sat in a heap at my table, and Phyllis brought me black coffee and said if I liked she would do the photographers’ session, I saw that she had thought it all out. She took a heap of files from my table, and I saw her look, long and cool, at Joyce’s table, Joyce’s place, and she was thinking, that will be mine.

And why not?

Because she isn’t Joyce. I mean, specifically, that she is thirty years old, a hard, clever, noticing girl, but that she isn’t – cooked. I know perfectly well I don’t like her because she makes me think of how I was. But there’s more than that. I ask myself, trying to be fair, never mind about what you need, has she got what Lilith needs?

I sat there in that office of ours, Joyce’s and mine, and decided not to think about Phyllis, I can’t cope with that yet. I was thinking about Joyce: what was it I had not seen in her that only a month ago I would have taken it for granted that she wouldn’t go to America! But I’ve been judging her marriage by mine. Of course, she has children; but no, that isn’t it. He’s a nice enough man. I don’t know him. Have never talked to him: we have a joking relationship.

I was wanting Joyce to come in early, but it was nearly lunchtime. She looked dreadful, ill, unkempt. She sat down, got up again to fetch herself coffee, came back with it, sat in a sprawl, lit cigarettes and let them go out, messed with her work, watered the plants on her windowsill, did everything but let herself look at me.

Then she buzzed, in came Phyllis, Joyce said, ‘I’m not happy about Wine, I’ve made the notes, please go and see our wine expert, what’s-his-name. What is his name – and his address, where is it?’

‘Don’t worry,’ says Phyllis, ‘I know where it is.’

She takes Joyce’s notes, smiles nicely, and out she goes.

And now Joyce allows me a brief smile, a grimace really, and actually looks at me. We laugh.

We look together at Phyllis, through the door into the filing room. We are taking in her clothes, her hair, her make-up, her shoes. Habit. Then Joyce loses interest in her, goes back into her thoughts.

Phyllis hasn’t got a style yet. Not as Joyce and I have. I sat there wondering if I could help Phyllis to a style, as Joyce helped me. It is only now as I sit writing this, I think how odd that I was analysing Phyllis and how she could look, when I was wild with misery about Joyce, wanting to say, For God’s sake, talk. I knew she had made up her mind to leave, and she felt bad about me: I needed for us to talk.

Joyce is the only person I have talked to in my life. And yet for the most part we talk in smiles, silences, signals, music without words, ’nuff said.

At last I couldn’t stand it, and said, ‘Joyce, I want to know why, you must see that.’

She was half turned from me, her cheek on her hand. She made a leave-me-alone irritable gesture.

I sit here, one in the morning, writing it down. My mind is so clear and sharp, whirling with thoughts. I’ve just had a new thought, it is this: writing is my trade, I write all the time, notes to myself, memos, articles, and everything is to present ideas, etc., if not to myself, then to others. I do not let thoughts fly away, I note them down, I present them, I postulate the outside eye. And that is what I am doing now. I see that as I write this diary, I have in mind that observing eye. Does that mean I really intend to publish this? It certainly wasn’t in my mind when I began writing it. It’s a funny thing, this need to write things down, as if they have no existence until they are recorded. Presented. When I listen to Maudie talk, I have this feeling, quick, catch it, don’t let it all vanish, record it. As if it is not valid until in print.

Oh, my thoughts are whirling through me, catch them …

I was sitting there with Joyce, both of us cold and sick, miserable, and I was examining us both, out of habit, as I had Phyllis. Two women editors, first-class women’s magazine (read by a lot of men), late nineteen-seventies going on to the eighties.

When I read diaries from the past, what fascinates me is what they wore, what they ate, all the details. It isn’t difficult to work out what people were likely to be thinking – not so different from us, I believe – but how did a woman make up her bed, or lay her table, or wash her underclothes; what did she have for breakfast, in 1780, in a middle-class household, in a provincial English town? What was a day in the life of a farmer’s wife, north of England, on the date Waterloo was fought?

When Joyce came to work here she made us all conscious we were tatty! The mid-sixties – tat! And yet her style was, as she said, high-class gipsy, which looks messy easily. She is tall, thin, with a mass of black curls and waves, careful disorder, and a thin pale face. Or that is how her face looks, emerging from all that hair. Black eyes that are really small, but made up huge and dramatic. Her clothes cost the earth. Today she wore a black and rust striped skirt and waistcoat and a black silk sweater and her thick silver chain with amber lumps. Her jewellery is very good, never any oriental semi-rubbish of the kind I can afford to wear, because of my style. She is beautiful: but it is a young woman’s style. She has kept her hair black. Soon she will have to change her style, to fit being not young.

I was still in mini-dresses, beads and gauds and frips, when Joyce took me in hand. Ever since, my style has been classical-expensive. I wear silk shirts and silk stockings, not nylon, and dresses that look at first glance as if I am not trying. I found a real dressmaker, who cares about every stitch, and I look for special buttons in markets, and handmade lace, and I get jerseys and jackets knitted for me. My style is that at first people don’t notice, and then their eyes come back and they examine detail, detail, the stitching on a collar, a row of pearl buttons. I am not thin, but solid. My hair is straight, and always perfect, a silvery gold. Grey eyes, large by nature and made larger.

We couldn’t be more different, Joyce and I, except in the trouble we take. But Joyce takes less than me because of her family.

Phyllis is a slight, strong girl, attractive. Fairish. She is always in the new fashion, and therefore there’s nothing to remark. I’ve seen her watching Joyce and, rightly, discarding that style for herself. I’ve seen her observing me: how does she do it? I’ll show her if she asks, take her to the dressmaker and the knitting woman, choose her hairdresser … that is what I was thinking as I sat there with Joyce, in all that misery: I was mentally abdicating, and expressing it through clothes, through a style!

Yet I have no conscious intention of giving up.

At lunchtime we drank coffee and smoked. Then she said, ‘I must go home,’ and I cried out, ‘Joyce!’ She said, ‘Don’t you see, I can’t do it, I can’t!’ And I said, ‘Joyce, you cannot just go off home like that, I have to know.’

She sighed, and sat down, made herself come together, and actually looked at me.

‘Know?’

‘Understand. I don’t understand how you can give all this up … what for?’

She said, ‘Have you had the experience, suddenly finding out that you didn’t know yourself?’

‘Indeed I have!’

‘I thought I would agree to a divorce easily.’

‘Has he got a girl?’

‘Yes, the same one, you know. He would take her instead of me.’

‘All this time he has really been married to the two of you, then?’

‘It amounts to that. He said to me at one stage, You have your job, I’m going to have Felicity.’

I was sitting there being careful, because I didn’t want her to fly off home, and I knew she could easily do that.

I was thinking what I call women’s lib thoughts. He has a job as a matter of course, but when she does, he has to bolster himself up with a girl on the side. But I have got so bored with these thoughts, they aren’t the point; they never were the point, not for me, not for Joyce. Phyllis is into women’s lib, consciousness-raising, and she makes it clear that Joyce and I are unliberated. Joyce and I have discussed this, but not often – because it isn’t the point! Once Joyce said to Phyllis, curious rather than combative, Phyllis, I hold down a very good, well-paid job. I have a husband and two children and I run my home and my family. Would you not say I am a liberated woman, then? Isn’t that enough? And Phyllis smiled the smile of one who knows better and allowed: A step in the right direction. And afterwards Joyce and I laughed. We had one of those sudden fits of laughing, music without words, that are among the best things in this friendship of ours.

‘If you don’t go to the States, he’ll take Felicity?’

‘He will marry her.’

‘Is that what you mind?’

She shook her head. Again she was not looking at me. I was confused, didn’t know what it was she feared, in facing me. At last she said, ‘You are such a self-sufficient one.’

This was the last thing I expected – the child-wife, child-daughter – and I said, ‘I, self-sufficient?’

And she just shook her head, oh, it’s all too much for me, and crouched holding on to the desk with both hands, looking in front of her, cigarette hanging from her lips. I saw her as an old crone, Mrs Fowler: fine sharp little face, nose and chin almost meeting. She looked ancient. Then she sighed again, pulled herself out, turned to me.

‘I can’t face being alone,’ she said, flat. ‘And that’s all there is to it.’

If I say my mind was in a whirl, that is how it was.

I wanted to say, But, Joyce – my husband died, it seems now overnight – what is it you are counting on? I could have said, Joyce, if you throw up this work and go with him, you might find yourself with nothing. I could have said … and I said nothing, because I was crying with a sort of amazed anger, at the impossibility of it, and worse than that, for I was thinking that I had not known Joyce at all! I would not have believed that she could say that, think it. More: I knew that I could not say to Joyce, Your attitude to death is stupid, wrong, you are like a child! It’s not like that, what are you afraid of? Being alone – what’s that!

For I had discovered that I had made a long journey away from Joyce, and in a short time. My husband had died, my mother had died: I had believed that I had not taken in these events, had armoured myself. And yet something had changed in me, quite profoundly. And there was Maudie Fowler, too.

It seemed to me, as I sat there, crying and trying to stop, biting on my (best-quality linen monogrammed) handkerchief, that Joyce was a child. Yes, she was a child, after all, and I could say nothing to her of what I had learned and of what I now was. That was why I was crying.

‘Don’t,’ said Joyce. ‘I didn’t mean to – open old wounds.’

‘You haven’t. That’s not it.’ But that was as near as I could come to talking. I mean by that, saying what was in my mind. For then we did talk, in a sensible dry sort of way, about all kinds of things, and it is not that I don’t value that. For we had not, or not for a long time, talked in this way. The way women communicate – in becks and nods and hints and smiles – it is very good, it is pleasurable and enjoyable and one of the best things I’ve had. But when the chips are down, I couldn’t say to Joyce why I had to cry.

She said, ‘You are different from me. I’ve been watching you and I can see that. But if he goes to the States, I’ll be alone. I’ll not marry again, I know that. And anyway, if you have been married to a man, you can’t just throw him aside and take up another – they can do that …’

‘Or think they can.’

‘Yes, or think they can, without penalties, I mean. And so I don’t see myself marrying someone else. The kids, they don’t want to go to the States, but if he went and I stayed, they’d commute and I know that pretty soon they’d be there rather than here, more opportunities, probably better for the young. I’d be alone. I don’t know how to be alone, Jan.’

And I could not say to her, Joyce, your husband is fifty-five, he’s a workaholic …

‘You are prepared to be a faculty wife?’

She grimaced at this. ‘I shan’t get anything like this job, of course not. But I expect there’d be something.’

As she left, she said, ‘No, and I haven’t even finally made up my mind. I know how I’m going to miss all this – and you, Jan. But I have no choice.’ And with that she went out, not looking at me.

And that is what I was left with, the I have no choice. For I do not know what it is, in that marriage of hers – I would never have suspected – the existence of anything that would make it inevitable she would say, I have no choice.

Joyce has been the best editor this magazine has ever had. She has never put her home and family first … and yet … I see how, when she came in, the flexibility began that everyone welcomed: working at home from the telephone, working late or early when necessary. We all said, It’s a woman’s way of dealing with things, not office hours, but going along with what was necessary. And now I am thinking that what was necessary was Joyce’s marriage, her home.

She would easily stay after work to eat supper with me, in the office, in a restaurant: working meals. And yet there were times when she had to be at home. I was what made all this possible: I have never said, No, I can’t stay in the office late as usual, I have to get home. Or only when Freddie and I did our dinner parties. I’ve never ever said, This afternoon, I have to go early, Freddie will be in early. But it seems to me that something like that has been going on with Joyce: her marriage, her children, her work. She incorporated all of it, in a marvellous flexible way. ‘Can you hold the fort this afternoon, Jan?’ In a sense, I’ve been part of her marriage, like that girl Felicity! These wholes we are part of, what really happens, how things really work … it is what has always fascinated me, what interests me most. And yet I have only just had the thought: that I have been, in a sense, part of Joyce’s marriage.

Joyce is going to America. She will give up a wonderful job. Very few women ever get a job like this one. She will give up family, friends, home. Her children are nearly grown up. She will be in a country that she will have to learn to like, alone with a man who would have been happy to go with another, younger girl. She has no choice.

Well, women’s lib, well, Phyllis, what do you have to say to that?

What, in your little manifestoes, your slamming of doors in men’s faces, your rhetoric, have you ever said that touches this? As far as I am concerned, nothing. And, believe me, Phyllis makes sure that all the propaganda is always available to me, spread on my desk.

The reason why girls these days get themselves together in flocks and herds and shoals and shut out men altogether, or as much as they can, is because they are afraid of – whatever the power men have that makes Joyce say, I have no choice.

I can live alone and like it. But then, I was never really married.

After I reached home, the telephone: Joyce, her voice breathless and small. Because she had cried herself dry, I knew that. She said, ‘Jan, we make our choices a long time before we think we do! My God, but it’s terrifying! Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

And I do. And it is terrifying. What choices have I already made that I am not yet conscious of?

I have not been in to Maudie Fowler since Friday evening.

Tuesday.

Joyce not at work. Phyllis and I held the fort. After work I went in to Maudie. She took a long time to answer the door, stood looking at me for a long time, not smiling, not pleased; at last stood aside so that I could come in, went ahead of me along the passage, without a word. She sat down on her side of the fire, which was blazing, and waited for me to speak.

I was already angry, thinking, well, and so she doesn’t have a telephone, is that my fault?

I said, ‘I did not get back on Sunday night until very late, and last night I was tired.’

‘Tired, were you?’ And then, ‘On Sunday evening I waited for you. I had a bit of supper for us both.’

I noted in myself the usual succession of emotions: the trapped feeling, then a need to escape, then – of course – guilt.

‘I am sorry, Maudie,’ I said.

She turned her head and stared at the fire, her mouth a little open, and gasping.

‘Have you been well?’

‘Well enough.’

I was thinking, look, I’ve washed you head to foot, of your stinking shit, and now you … but I had to think, too, that I made a promise and hadn’t kept it. I must never do that again.

It took nearly an hour before she softened, got up to make us tea. I had to stay another two hours. Before I left she was talking freely again. A long story about her father’s fancy-woman, who, her mother ‘properly and safely’ dead, had not only made a skivvy of her, Maudie – ‘though I’ve told you all about that, I know’ – but then set about poisoning her.

‘She poisoned my mother, I know she did, if no one else knew, and my Aunt Mary believed me. She said there was no point going to the police, they’d never take my word against my father, he was in with the police, he was always in with anyone who would do him good, he’d have the inspector in at Christmas for whisky and cake, and he and his fancy-woman’d send a cask of ale up to the boys at the station with a ham and pudding. If I went to them, just a girl, and terrified I was, and ill with it, and said, My father’s woman poisoned my mother and now she’s doing for me, it’s arsenic – well, would they listen? My Aunt Mary said, Look, you leave home and come to me when you can do it without making trouble. I’m not facing that brother of mine in a fight, he’s not one to cross, he’s one to get his own back. But when it’s the right time, you’ll find a bed and a bite with me. Well, I got sicker and weaker. Months it went on. I tried not to eat at home, I’d go running to my sister, the one that died – no, I’ve not mentioned her, she makes me feel too bad. She was always the weakly one, she got on their nerves. She married at fifteen. She married against my father, and he said, Never darken my doors. Her man was no good and couldn’t keep her. She had three little children, and my mother would send me with a pie or some bread, anything that wouldn’t be missed, and I’d see her, so pale and weak, the children hungry. She’d take a little nibble, to keep her strength up, and then make her children eat the rest. My mother died, and then there was no food in that house at all. I went to my father and said, My sister’s dying of lack of food and warmth. Said he, I told her not to marry him, and that was all he ever said. She died, and he didn’t go to the funeral. The husband took the one child still alive, and I never heard more. Before she died, I’d be sitting with her, I’d be faint with hunger because I was afraid to eat at home, and she dying of hunger because there was no food, and we were company. It was an awful time, awful – I don’t know why people say “the good old days”, they were bad days. Except for people like my father …’ And Maudie went on and on about her father.

When I asked, ‘How about your other sister?’ she said, ‘She’d married and gone, we did not hear of her much, she was keeping out of the way of Father, he didn’t like her man either. Once I went to her and said, Polly, our sister Muriel is starving, and her children with her, and all she said was, Well, I’ve got nothing to spare for her. Yet her food safe was stuffed with joints and pies and custards.

‘After Muriel died, I did not even have anywhere to go and sit, and I ate as little as I could because I knew there was poison in it. She would come up to my room – they’d put me up in the attic, just as if I was a servant – with milk and broth and say, Drink it, drink it, and I’d pour it into the slop pail and then creep down to empty the slop pail so she couldn’t know. I could taste the poison in it, I knew there was poison. Sometimes I went to pick up the bread that people threw to the birds, but I was afraid of being seen. We were known, you see, we were well thought of, Father with his goings and comings and his carriage and his free ways, and she with her pub. I was the daughter at home, the people envied me for my easy time. Yet I was on a thin bed at the top of the house in an attic, not a whisper of heat, never a new dress, or anything of my own, only her old clothes to cut down, and afraid to eat. Well, one evening it all came to a head, for I was in bed, too weak and sick to get up, and she had a glass full of sugared milk, and she said, I’m going to stay here till you drink it. I don’t want it, I said. I don’t want it. But she said, I’m going to sit here.

‘She had on a pink silk dressing gown with feathers that had grey velvet ruches around the neck, and high-heeled pink slippers. She had put on plenty of weight with all her liking for food and drink, and she was red in the face, and she was sighing and saying, Oh my God, the stairs, and Oh my God, it’s cold up here. Yet she never thought that I had to climb up and down the stairs, nor that I had to live in that cold. And yet there were two empty bedrooms on the same floor they had theirs. Later my Aunt Mary said to me, Of course they didn’t want you on that floor with them, they didn’t want you to hear their goings-on. What goings-on? I said, for I didn’t care about all that, I hated all that, I’m like my mother. I shut my mind to it. And besides, they weren’t married: she had a husband in a hospital somewhere, so she couldn’t marry my father. Now I look back and wonder at it all: people were strict in those days, and yet I don’t remember her suffering for her living out of the marriage bond with my father. But I wouldn’t have noticed: all I thought of was how not to eat in that house. That night, I had to drink the milk at last, though the taste in it sickened me. Then I pretended to sleep. And she went lumbering downstairs at last. I put my finger down my throat and brought up the milk. Then I put my other dress into my mother’s little bag and I crept out of the house.

‘I had no money, he never gave me any, ever, though I kept the house for him, cleaned it, did it all. I walked out to the village my auntie was in. It’s part of London now, you’d not know it was a village so recently, it was beyond Neasden. I got there as the streets filled with carts and horses and noise. I was nearly falling as I walked. I got to her house and rang and rang and when she came she caught me as I fell. She said I could stay with her, and pay her back when I was well enough to earn. She wrote to my father that Maudie had come to stay with her for a little, that was how she put it. And my father said nothing at all, though I waited and waited for a sign. Not for years did he acknowledge my existence. And my aunt fed me up and made me eat. She was poor herself. She couldn’t give me what she said I should have, cream and wine and stuff, but she did what she could. I was so thin and small I used to start shaking if I walked a few steps, but I got better, and then Auntie apprenticed me to a milliner in the West End. She got the money from my father. I don’t know what she said, but she got it.’

It was nearly ten before I got home. I was full of the strong black tea Maudie drinks and feeling a bit sick myself, and so I couldn’t eat. Sympathy, no doubt with anorexia, for I suppose that was what poor Maudie was suffering from after her mother died. I have had a brief and efficient bath, and have finished writing this, and now I must go to bed. But I really wanted to write down the thoughts I have been having about the office.

I told Maudie that I would not be in tomorrow night, but that I would definitely come and have tea with her Thursday.

Wednesday.

Joyce was not in the office and there was no message. That has never happened. The atmosphere in the office restless, a bit giggly, like school when there’s uncertainty. Phyllis and I worked together all day, and without a word being said how to behave so as to calm things down. We were brisk and efficient and kept at it. We will work easily together. But oh, she is so young, so young, so black and white and either/or and take it or leave it. Her cool crisp little mouth. Her crisp competent little smile. Phyllis has bought her own flat, we – the firm – helped her. She lives for her work, who should know better how than I? She sees herself editing the mag. Why not?

I write that, and wonder at it.

Now I shall write about my career, for I am very clear in my mind about it all because of the shocks and strains of the last few days, with Joyce, and then having to be alert and awake all the time with Phyllis.

I came straight into the office from school. No university, there wasn’t the money; and I wasn’t good enough for university! It just didn’t present itself as a possibility.

When I started work for Little Women – Joyce and I so christened that phase of the mag, a shorthand – I was so pleased and relieved at getting this glamorous job, in journalism, I wasn’t looking for anything higher. 1947, still a war atmosphere. It was a graceless production, bad paper, because of the war: full of how to use cheap cuts of meat and egg powder. How to make anything into something else – Joyce’s description of it. I, like everyone else, was sick sick sick of it all. How we all longed to throw off the aftermath of war, the rationing, the dreariness. There was a woman editor then too. I wasn’t into criticizing my superiors then, my sights went no higher than being secretary to the production manager. I just didn’t think about Nancy Westringham. They were all gods and goddesses up there. Now I see she was just right for that phase of the mag. Old-style, like my mother and my sister, competent, dutiful, nice – but I mean it, nice, kind, and my guess is never an original thought in her life. My guess it has to be: if there is one thing I regret, it is that I wasn’t awake enough during that phase to see what was going on. But of course then I hadn’t learned how to see what was going on: what is developing inside a structure, what to look for, how things work.

They were changing the mag all right, better paper, brighter features, but it wasn’t enough. There had to be a new editor, and I should have seen it, should have been watching. It wasn’t only that I didn’t know how to observe: I was too drunk on being young, attractive and successful. At school no one had ever even suggested I might have capacities, and certainly my parents never did. But in the office, I was able to turn my hand to anything. I was soon just the one person who was able to take over from anyone sick or incapable. I cannot remember any pleasure in my life to match that: the relief of it, the buoyancy, tackling a new job and knowing that I did it well. I was in love with cleverness, with myself. And this business of being good at clothes. Of course, the fifties were not exactly an exciting time for clothes, but even so I was able to interest everyone in what I wore. My style then was sexy, but cool and sexy, just a little bit over the edge into parody: in that I anticipated the sixties and the way we all slightly mocked the styles we wore.

I would give a lot now to know how it happened that Boris became editor. But it is too late now. When I ask the oldies who are still with us, they don’t know what I am asking because they don’t think like that.

At any rate, Boris became editor in 1957, and he represented ‘the new wave’. But he didn’t have it in him. I was by then in the position Phyllis is now: the bright girl everyone expects great things of. The difference is, I didn’t know it. I liked being good at everything, and I didn’t mind working all hours. I adored everything I had to do. I was already doing all kinds of work well beyond what I was paid for, beyond what I was described as being. I was a secretary in Production. By then I had begun to watch what was really happening. The immediately obvious fact was that Boris was not very effective. Amiable, affable, trendy – all that, yes. He had been appointed by the Board when Nancy resigned; was asked to leave. He had the large room that is used now by the photographers, a large desk, a secretary who had a secretary, and a PR girl. He was always in conference, on the telephone, at lunch, giving interviews on the role and function of women’s magazines. ‘Women’s Lib’ hadn’t been born, though not till I came to write this did I remember that.

What was really happening was that other people were doing his work for him, me among them. The formal structure of the office did not correspond at all with what was happening. The mag had brightened up a little, but not much, and Mr Right was implicit in everything. We did not think clearly about it, but carried on much as before, with better paper and some decent photographs.

The moment Joyce arrived, we all became conscious of exactly what we were doing, and for whom. Market Analysis, reports from experts; we certainly took notice of all that, but we had our own ideas. The backbone and foundation of the mag, what interests us most, is information. Birth control, sex, health, social problems generally. Nearly all the articles we have on these topics would have been impossible in Little Women, everything had to be wrapped up. This is the part of the mag I do. As for clothes, food, wine, decor, what has changed is the level of the photography. Not what is said, fashion is fashion is fashion, and food is food, but how it is presented. When I first began working, there were a lot of articles like ‘I Am a Widow: How I Brought Up Two Girls’, or ‘I Am Married to a Paraplegic’, or ‘Alice Is Blind But She Runs a Business School’. All those have gone: too downmarket! Lilith deliberately set out to take a step up in the world, and we made that happen.

I’ve said that when Joyce came in, mid-sixties, she changed me: she changed everything else. What interests me now is that the change took place against the apparent structure. She was Production Manager and I was her assistant. We were together in the office we have now. It was we two who ran the mag. It was obvious to us that we ran it, but Boris didn’t notice. Joyce used to say that in her last job she did all the work for her boss, who had to be allowed to think he was doing it. So nothing had changed for her. Far from resenting it all, we were worried that people would notice. And of course they did. Now we wonder why we thought that they wouldn’t. The point was, we loved the work, we loved transforming the mag. We used to go to the Board Meetings, once a fortnight, sit quietly there, on one side, with Boris at the top of the table, and the Board Reps at the other end, and we hardly opened our mouths. I used to brief Boris before meetings, about what he should say.

The actual structure during that time was Joyce and me running everything, with the photographers coming into prominence, because it was really in the sixties that they did. All the decisions were made in our office, it was always full of people. Suddenly – and Joyce had been there only a couple of years – she was made editor and given complete freedom. New format, new everything. She was clever: several mags that were too Swinging Sixties bit the dust, but the format Joyce created – that we created – survives.

Almost at once the real structure became the same as the formal, the official structure. When Boris left, his great awful dead office was turned over to the photographers, and it came to life at once; and the room Joyce and I had been using became the Editors’ Room. Then I realized how much effort and nervous strain had gone into everything when what was really happening didn’t match with the formal organization. Now, looking around at other offices, other businesses, I see how often there is a discordance.

And what has been growing up inside this structure, what is the future? Now I know it is not Joyce and me! But I wonder if it is really me and Phyllis? What is it I am not seeing because I am too involved with what is now? It seems to me that things change suddenly, overnight, or seem to: but the change has been growing up inside. I cannot see any change inside: and yet I think about it a good deal.

All I can see is that there is so much less money around for spending, and so our glossy lively even impudent format, or formula, may have to go, and something sterner and more dedicated supplant it.

Dedicated to what? Well, if I could foresee that! I do not get any feeling of pleasure or wanting to be part of it when I think that perhaps we will be into ‘making everything into something else’. Clothes to last – well, that has already begun – beef as a luxury instead of a staple, buying jewellery as an investment … the last issue but one, we printed recipes from wartime, as a joke, but to those of us who were young during the war and just after it, it wasn’t a joke. I heard the girls in the typists’ pool laughing, Phyllis making fun of stretching meat with forcemeat balls. I could do a feature on the food Maudie remembers. I expect the typists’ pool would fall about if they could hear Maudie on how, when she was a child, the mother of a family made a big batter pudding to ‘fill them up’ before the meat course, so they were satisfied with a little bit of meat, and then after the meat, batter pudding again, with jam. When I think of the war, of that contriving and making-do, the dreary dreary dreary boredom of it, oh I can’t face it all again, I can’t, I can’t … but so far no one has said that we must.

I married in 1963. It was shortly before Joyce came. I have written all that history, and only now have thought to mention that I married.

A week since the last – no, ten days.

I went in to Maudie as promised, though I was frantic with work. Did not stay long, in and out. Then, into the office: Joyce not there, no message either again. Phyllis and I coped. Everyone coped. An elegiac mood, for lost lovely times. She made Lilith, but if she doesn’t come in to work, for days at a time, the waters close over her. She is hardly mentioned. But certainly thought of, by me at least. By me, by me! I have been raging with sorrow. I was uneasy, ashamed, thinking Freddie dies, my mother dies, hardly a tear, just a frozen emptiness, but Joyce slides out of my life and I grieve. At first I thought, look at me, what a wicked woman, but then I knew that since I could allow myself to mourn for Joyce, I have admitted – mourning, have admitted grief. I have been waking in the morning soaked in tears. For Freddie, my mother, for God knows what else.

But I haven’t the time for it. I’m working like a demon. Meanwhile I rage with sorrow. I do not think this is necessarily a step forward into maturity. A good deal to be said for a frozen heart.

When I went in to Maudie next I found her angry and cold. With me? No, it came out that ‘the Irish woman’ upstairs had again been turning on the refrigerator to ‘insult’ her. Because I had just come from an atmosphere where things are dealt with, not muttered and nitpicked, I said, ‘I’m going upstairs to talk to her,’ and went, with Maudie shouting at me, ‘Why do you come here to interfere?’ I knocked upstairs, ground floor. A lanky freckled boy let me in, I found the large beautiful Irish girl with the tired blue eyes, and three more lean golden freckled children watching TV. The refrigerator is a vast machine, bought probably at the second-hand shop down the street, and it came on while I was there, a trundling grinding that shook the whole flat. I could not say, Please sell the fridge. You could see that this was poverty. I mean poverty nineteen-seventies. I have a different criterion now, knowing Maudie. Everything cheap, but of course the kids properly fed and clean clothes.

I said, Mrs Fowler seemed to me to be ill, had they seen her?

On the girl’s face came that look I seem to see everywhere now, a determined indifference, an evasion: ‘Oh well, but she’s never been one for asking, or offering, and so I’ve given up.’

All the time, she was listening – and in fact the husband came in, a thin dark explosive Irishman, and very drunk. The kids exchanged wide looks and faded away into the inner room. They were scared, and so was she. I saw that she had bruises on her forearms.

I thanked them and went off, and heard the angry voices before I had closed the door. Downstairs I sat down opposite that tiny angry old woman, with her white averted little face, and said, ‘I’ve seen the fridge. Have you never had one? It is very old and noisy.’

‘But why does she make it come on at one in the morning, or even three or four, when I’m trying to get my rest?’

Well, I sat there explaining. Reasonable. I had been thinking about Maudie. I like her. I respect her. And so I’m not going to insult her by babying her … so I had decided. But faced with her that night, as she sat in a sort of locked white tremble, I found myself softening things up.

‘Very well then, if it’s as you say, why does she have to put it just over where I sleep?’

‘But probably it has to go where there’s an electric point.’

‘And so much for my sleep, then, is that it?’

And as we sat there, the thing came on, just above us. The walls shook, the ceiling did, but it wasn’t a really unbearable noise. At least, I could have slept through it.

She was sitting there looking at me in a way part triumphant; see, you can hear it now, I’m not exaggerating! and part curious – she’s curious about me, can’t make me out.

I had determined to tell her exactly what was going on in the office, but it was hard.

‘You must be quite a queen bee there then,’ she remarked.

I said, ‘I am the assistant editor.’

It was not that she didn’t take it in, but that she had to repudiate it – me – the situation. She sat with her face averted, and then put her hand up to shield it from me.

‘Oh well, so you won’t be wanting to come in to me then, will you?’ she said at last.

I said, ‘It’s just that this week it’s very difficult. But I’ll drop in tomorrow if you’ll have me.’

She made a hard sorrowful sort of shrug. Before I left I took a look at the kitchen; supplies very low. I said, ‘I’ll bring in stuff tomorrow, what you need.’

After a long, long silence which I thought she’d never break, she said, ‘The weather’s bad, or I’d go myself. It’s the usual – food for the cat, and I’d like a bit of fish …’ That she didn’t complete the list meant that she did accept me, did trust me, somehow. But as I left I saw the wide blank stare at me, something frantic in it, as if I had betrayed her.

In the office next day not a sign of Joyce, and I rang her at home. Her son answered. Measured. Careful. No, she’s in the kitchen, I think she’s busy.

Never has Joyce been ‘busy’ before. I was so angry. I sat there thinking, I can go in to Maudie Fowler and help her, but not to Joyce, my friend. And meanwhile Phyllis was attending to the letters. Not from Joyce’s table, but at a chair at the secretaries’ table. Full marks for tact. I said to her, ‘This is crazy. I’m going to see Joyce now. Hold the fort.’ And went.

I’ve been in Joyce’s home a hundred times, always, however, invited, expected. The door opened by the son, Philip. When he saw me he began to stammer, ‘She’s – she’s – she’s …’ ‘In the kitchen,’ I said for him. He had, as it were, gone in behind his eyes: absented himself. This look again! But is it that I didn’t notice it before? A prepared surface, of one kind or another; the defences well manned.

I went into the kitchen. The son came behind me, like a jailer, or so I felt it (rightly). In the kitchen, a proper family kitchen, all pine and earthenware, the daughter, sitting at the table, drinking coffee, doing homework. Joyce standing over the sink. She looked far from an expensive gipsy, more a poor one. Her hair hadn’t been brushed, was a dowdy tangle, careless make-up, nails chipped. She presented to me empty eyes and a dead face, and I said, ‘Joyce, it’s not good enough,’ and she was startled back into herself. Tears sprang into her eyes, she gasped, turned quickly away and stood with her back to me, trembling, like Maudie. I sat at the table and said to the two children, ‘I want to talk to Joyce, please.’ They exchanged looks. You could say insolent, you could say scared. I saw that it would take very little to make me very sorry for them: for one thing, having to leave their schools and go off to the States, everything new. But I was angry, angry.

‘Give me some coffee,’ I said, and she came with a cup, and sat down opposite me.

We looked at each other, straight and long and serious.

‘I can’t stand this business of nothing being said, nothing being said.’

‘Nothing is being said here either.’

‘Are they listening at the door?’

‘Don’t you see, Mother has been captured. Back from the office.’

‘Do you mean to say they have resented it, your being so successful and all that?’

‘No, they are proud of me.’

‘But.’

‘Everything has fallen apart around them, and they haven’t known for months if they are going to have Felicity for a mum or me. Now they know it is me, security, but they are terrified. Surely you can see that?’ She sounded exactly like my dear sister Georgie, talking to the delinquent – me – and I wasn’t going to take it.

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said, ‘but we are talking of a young man and a young woman, they are not little children.’

‘Dorothy is seventeen and Philip is fifteen.’

She looked hard and fierce at me, I looked angrily at her.

I said, ‘How did we get like this, so soft, so silly, so babyish? How?’

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God, oh God! Oh God – Janna!’

‘Oh God, Joyce,’ I said to her. ‘But I mean it. And don’t patronize me. Is nothing that I say to anyone worth anything?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Now we were both furious and liking each other the better for it. Our voices were raised, we both imagined ‘the children’ listening.

‘I’m talking about these ghastly wet spoiled brats we produce.’

‘You haven’t produced any.’

‘Oh, thank you – and so that’s the end of that then, the end of me! Thank God I haven’t then. When I look at – ’

‘Listen, Janna …’ Spelling it out, as to an idiot. ‘Is nothing really due to them, owed to them? They have a father who has had what amounts to a second home for years. Recently they have had to accept their parents are going to divorce. Now the family is going to stay together …’

‘And what is due to us, your work, to me?’

She sat there, spoon in a coffee mug, and it tinkled against the side with her trembling.

‘A crisis in the family, a choice, you wonder if perhaps you might actually have to live alone at some time, along with x billion other women – and all you are in your work counts for nothing, falls to pieces.’

By then we were both shaking, and very ashamed. We could see ourselves, two women shouting at each other in a silent house.

‘Wait, Janna,’ she said, ‘Wait.’ And she made a business of getting up to put on the kettle again, and took her time about sitting down. And then, ‘Do you imagine I don’t feel bad about you, our friendship? I’m in pain.’ She was shouting again. ‘Do you understand? I am in pain. I’ve never in my life felt like this. I’m being split in half, torn apart. I want to howl and scream and roll about … and so I am cooking family meals and helping with the homework. Strangely enough.’

‘And I, strangely enough, am in pain too.’

And suddenly we began to laugh, in the old way; we put our heads down on the kitchen table and laughed. The ‘kids’ came in, hearing us: with scared smiles. I, Janna Somers, ‘the office’, had proved every bit as much of a threat as they had feared. Seeing those scared faces. I knew I was going to give in if I didn’t watch it: but my mind was saying, I am right, I am right, I am right …

And perhaps I am not right, after all.

I said, ‘I’d better get back to work.’

She said, ‘I know that you and Phyllis are doing quite well without me.’

‘Quite well.’

‘Well then.’

And I went back as fast as I could to the office. To my real home. Leaving Joyce in her real home.

Later.

I took the things in to Maudie and sat with her. I was very tired, and she saw it.

She said in a timid old voice, ‘You mustn’t think you have to come in here, if you’re tired.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You need some help, you know that.’ And I added, ‘I like you. I like knowing you, Maudie.’

She nodded, in a prim measuring way, and there was a small pleased smile. ‘I’m not saying I’m not the better for it, because I am.’

I went out for the second time to the shop opposite because I had forgotten tea.

It was sleeting. I got the bits of kindling from the skip. All along these streets, the houses are being ‘done up’. Four of them in Maudie’s very short street. Four skips loaded with ‘rubbish’. Including perfectly good chairs, mattresses, tables, and quantities of wood in good condition. People sneak out for the wood. There must still be quite a few fireplaces in these houses. But not for long, not when they are ‘done up’.

I came out from the shop, and there on the pavement were two old women, wrapped up like parcels. I recognized a face: from the window opposite.

I was frozen. And wanted to get home.

But already I knew that these occasions cannot be rushed.

The conversation:

‘Excuse me, I wanted to ask, how is Maudie Fowler?’

‘She seems all right.’

‘Are you her daughter, dear? You do take good care of her.’

‘No. I am not her daughter.’

‘Are you a Good Neighbour?’

‘No, I am not that either.’ I laughed, and they allowed me small polite smiles.

I say ‘old women’, and that is a criticism of me, no individuality allowed them, just ‘old women’. But they seemed so alike, little plump old women, their faces just visible behind thick scarves, coats, hats.

‘Maudie Fowler has always kept herself so much to herself, and we were wondering.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘she’s over ninety, isn’t she?’

A reproving silence. ‘I am ninety-two dear, and Mrs Bates here is ninety-one.’

‘Well, I’d say Maudie was feeling her age.’

This was too direct and I knew it, but had started off like that and couldn’t change course. Oh yes, I know very well by now that these conversations should be allowed to develop.

‘You know Mrs Rogers, do you, dear?’

‘Mrs Rogers?’

‘She is one of The Welfare.’

‘No, I don’t.’

All this with the sleet blowing across us and our faces turning blue.

‘She wants to see you, so she says.’

‘Well, what about?’

‘Seeing as you are a Good Neighbour, then there’s another that needs it.’

‘Well, I’m not one,’ I said.

‘Then goodbye, dear. We mustn’t keep you in the cold.’ And they went together toddling along the pavement, arm in arm, very slowly.

Joyce came back next day, and sat at her desk and went through the motions of working, and did work, but she was not there. She is simply not with us. She looked awful, badly dressed, even dusty, her hair greying at the roots, and a greyish edge to her black sweater.

Looking at her, I made an appointment with the hairdresser at once. And determined to devote an evening to my own care.

This is that evening. I have had a real bath, hours of it. I’ve done my fingernails, my toenails, my eyebrows, my ears, my navel, the hard skin on my feet.

What has made me, for so many years, that perfectly groomed person, whom everybody looks at and thinks, how does she do it? has been my Sunday nights. Never did I allow anything to interfere with that. Freddie used to joke about it but I said, Make jokes, I don’t care, I have to do it. On Sunday nights, after supper, for years and years I’ve chosen my outfit for every day of the week ahead, made sure there has been not a wrinkle or a crease, attended to buttons and hems, cleaned shoes, emptied out and polished handbags, brushed hats, and put anything even slightly soiled for the cleaner’s and the launderette. Hours of it, every Sunday night, and when all those pairs of skilled and knowledgeable eyes examined me at work, there has never been, but literally, a hair out of place. Grooming. Well, if I can’t keep it up, my style is in the wastepaper basket, just as Joyce’s style is now. A high-class gipsy, turned slattern, is bizarre; if my style is neglected, there’s nothing left but a dowd.

And now I shall make myself do it: buttons, shoes, collars, ironing, ironing, ironing, and not so much as a thread of loosened lace on a petticoat.

Over three months have gone.

It has been a choice between proper baths and the diary. I’ve had to have something to hold on to.

Joyce came back to work, but she was a ghost, a zombie. Felicity announced she was pregnant, husband Jack asked Joyce to be ‘generous’, Joyce said she wished he would make up his mind, he said, You are vindictive, she said, I must be crazy to want you at all. The poor children are both going crazy and punishing Joyce – she says.

It isn’t that she doesn’t do the work as usual, but she’s not in it. As for what I used to rely on so much, the good atmosphere, the way we used to work together as if we were one person – no, gone. We – Phyllis and I – support her, all the time, tact, tact, tact, oh full marks to all of us, everyone in Editorial, and I watch all this, fascinated, because of how it works. The woman who made the mag, because she did, it was her push, is fading out. I saw a film on telly, elephants supporting with their trunks a dying friend. It reminded me. Because Joyce is fading out. It can’t go on like this, is the unspoken thought. Unspoken, too, is that I will be the new editor. Meanwhile, Joyce says that she will stay in London, with the children, and she will be divorced. The children for the first time ring up here, making demands. Ridiculous, like, where is the jam, where did you put my sweater? Joyce patient, and anguished. For them. Very well, but there are limits to the people one can be sorry for. I’m learning my limits: small ones. Maudie Fowler is all I can manage.

It’s been wet, cold, dismal. Nearly every evening after work I’ve been in to Maudie. I’ve given up even thinking that she ought to agree to be ‘rehoused’; I said it just once, and it took her three days to stop seeing me as an enemy, as one of ‘them’. I am housed, says she, cough, cough, cough from having to go out at the back all weathers into the freezing lavatory, from standing to wash in the unheated kitchen. But why do I say that? Women of ninety who live in luxury cough and are frail.

It is a routine now. I go in about seven, eight, after work, and bring in what she has said she needs the night before. Usually she’s forgotten something, and I go out again to the Indian shop. He, the Indian man, a large pale man, pale grey really, who suffers from this weather, always asks after her, and shakes his head, and gives me some little thing for her: some sweets or some biscuits. When I give these to Maudie, she looks fierce and angry: she’s proud, but she’s moved.

While I shop she makes us tea. She has had supper at six, when she eats cake and jam and biscuits. She says she can’t be bothered to cook properly. She doesn’t want me to waste time cooking for her, because ‘it would take away from our time’. When she said this I realized she valued our time of sitting and talking: for some reason I was not able to see that, for I am defensive and guilty with her, as if I am responsible for all the awful things that have happened. We sit there, in that fug and smell – but nearly always I can switch off as I go in, so that I don’t notice the smell, just as I refuse to notice the smeared cups. And she … entertains me. I did not realize it was that. Not until one day when she said, ‘You do so much for me, and all I can do for you is to tell you my little stories, because you like that, don’t you? Yes, I know you do.’ And of course I do. I tell her about what I have been doing, and I don’t have to explain much. When I’ve been at a reception for some VIP or cocktail party or something, I can make her see it all. Her experience has included the luxurious, and there was her father: ‘Sometimes, listening to you, it makes me remember how he used to come home and tell us he’d been to Romano’s or the Cafe Royal or the music hall, and he’d tell us what all the nobs ate and drank.’ But I don’t like reminding her of her father, for she sits with her face lowered, her eyes down and hidden, picking in distress at her skirt. I like it when her fierce alive blue eyes are sparkling and laughing; I like looking at her, for I forget the old crone and I can see her so easily as she was, young.

She is wearing these nights a cornflower-blue cotton with big white spots: an apron, made from a dress she had when she was young. I said I liked it so much, so she tore out the sleeves and cut down the back: an apron. The black thick clothes I threw into the dustbin were retrieved by her. I found them rolled into newspaper in the front room. Stinking. She had not worn them, though. There is a photograph of her, a young woman before she was married, a little wedge of a face, combative eyes, a great mass of shiny hair. She has a piece of her hair before it went grey. It was a rich bright yellow.

We sit on either side of the black stove, the flames forking up and around, a teapot on the top, with a filthy grey cosy that was once … why do I go on and on about the dirt? Our cups on the arms of our chairs, a plate of biscuits on a chair between us. The cat sits about washing herself, or sleeps on her divan. Cosy, oh yes. Outside, the cold rain, and upstairs, the Irish family, quarrelling, the feet of the kids banging on the uncarpeted floors, the fridge rumbling and shaking.

She tells me about all the times in her life she was happy. She says she is happy now, because of me (and that is hard to accept, it makes me feel angry, that so little can change a life), and therefore she likes to think of happy times.

A Happiness.

‘My German boy, the one I should have married but I was silly, we used to spend Sundays. We took a penny bus ride up to where we are sitting now, or perhaps a stage further. Green fields and streams and trees. We’d sit on the edge of a little bridge and watch the water, or find a field without cows and eat our food. What did we eat? I’d cut cold meat from the joint, as much as I liked, because Mother wasn’t dead then, and clap it between two bits of bread. But I liked his food best, because his parents were bakers. Did you know the bakers were often Germans then? Well, his parents could just read and write, but he was a real clever one, he was a scholar. He did well later, more fool me, I could have had my own house and a garden. But I didn’t marry him, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Of course, my father wouldn’t have liked a foreigner, but he didn’t like what I did marry, he could never say yes to any choice of ours, so what would have been the difference? No, I don’t want to think of that, I spent enough time when I was younger thinking, Oh what a fool – when I’d come to understand what men were. You see, I didn’t know then. Hans was so kind, he was a gentleman, he treated me like a queen. He’d lift me down from the stiles so gently and nice, and we spread a little white cloth and put out the lovely white rolls and the cakes from the bakery. I used to say, No, I must eat mine, and you eat yours, and mine always ended up being given to the birds.

‘I think of those days, those Sundays. And who would believe it now? Where we sit in these streets, running streams, and birds … What happened to the streams? you are thinking. I know, I know how to read your face now. Well, you might well wonder where all that water is. It is underneath the foundations of half the houses along here, that’s where. When they built this all up, and covered the fields, I used to come by myself and watch the builders. By myself. My German boy had gone off by then because I wouldn’t marry him. The builders scamped everything then, as they do now; some things never change. They were supposed to make the water run in proper conduits, away from the houses, but they didn’t trouble themselves. Sometimes, even now, when I walk along, I stop at a house and I think, yes, if your basements are damp, it’s because of the water from those old streams. There’s a house, number seventy-seven it is, it changes hands, it can’t keep an owner, it’s because it’s where two little streams met, and the builders put the bricks of the foundation straight into the mud and let the water find its way. They did make a real channel for the water lower down, it runs along the main road there, but the little baby streams we used to sit by and put our feet in, they were left to make their own way. And after those Sundays, when the dusk came, oh, how lovely it all was, he’d say, May I put my arm around your waist? And I’d say, No, I don’t like it – what a fool. And he’d say, Put your arm in mine then, at least. So we’d walk arm in arm through the fields to the bus, and come home in the dark. He’d never come in, because of Father. He’d kiss my hand, and he’d say, Maudie, you are a flower, a little flower.’

A Happiness.

Maudie was apprenticed to a milliner’s and worked for them off and on for years. The apprenticeship was very hard. Living with her aunt, who was so poor, and gave her breakfast and supper, but not much more, Maudie had to do without a midday meal or walk most of the way to work. The workshop was near Marylebone High Street. She would calculate whether shoe leather would cost more than her fare. She said she could beg cast-off shoes from her cousin, who never got all the wear out of them, or pick up second-hand boots from a market. But she had to be neatly dressed for her work, and that was her biggest trouble. Her aunt did not have money for Maudie’s clothes.

Her employer’s wife gave her a skirt and a blouse once. ‘She valued me, you see. We had to have a decent appearance because the buyers would come into the workrooms. Oh, don’t think it was from a good heart, she didn’t have one. She didn’t want to lose me. It was years before I could buy myself a nice brown cloth dress of my own, and my own shoes. And when I did, oh, I’ll not forget that day. I went without so much for that dress. And I wore it on the Sunday first so Laurie could see it. And who gave you that? he said, for that was what he was like, tugging at my arm and hurting it. Who was it, tell me? It wasn’t you, I said to him, and as I pulled my arm from him, it tore under the arm. Not much, but the dress was spoiled. Oh yes, a person has his stamp all through him. You know what I’m saying? But I didn’t know that then. It wasn’t long before I knew that in everything he did, it was the same: a new dress I’d saved and gone without for, but he tore it the first time I put it on. But it didn’t matter, I mended it, it didn’t show, and I went into the workroom and peacocked around, and the girls all clapped and sang “A Little Bit of What You Fancy Does You Good”.

‘That was just before I was promoted, and soon I got another dress, a blue foulard, but I never loved another dress as I loved that first one I paid for myself.

‘Oh what times we did have in that workroom. There were fifteen of us, apprentices and milliners. We sat all around a long table, with the boxes of trimmings on trestles behind us, and the hats and bonnets we were working on on their forms in front of us. We used to sing and lark about. Sometimes when I got a bit carried away, she used to come up and say, Who’s making all that noise? It’s Maudie! The rule is, silence when you work. But I had to sing, I was so enjoying myself, and soon we were all singing, but she didn’t want to lose me, you see.

‘Did I tell you how I learned to know that I was a value to her? If I did, I’ll tell you again, because I love to think of it. You see, he used to go off to Paris, and see the new season’s hats in the shops, and sometimes in the workrooms of the Paris milliners, for he knew people who could snatch him a glimpse. He knew how to remember a hat or a bonnet that would do for us. He used to keep it all in his mind, and nip out quick and draw it. He couldn’t draw really, but he’d have the main things, a shape or the set of a ribbon. And then he’d come back and say, You do this, see, it’s this shape and that colour, made of velvet or satin, you do what you can. Well, it was as if I could see the real hat behind the scribble on the paper, and I’d work away there, and finish it, and I’d say to him, Is that anywhere near it, Mr Rolovsky? And he’d take it up and stare and say, Well, it’s not too bad, Maudie. That pleased me. But then I saw how he’d come and stand behind me and watch while I worked, always me, not the others, and then the way he snatched up the hat when I’d done, for he was so greedy, you see, he couldn’t hide it. I saw then I’d come near what he’d seen in Paris. And the girls all knew too, and we’d give each other winks. She saw us at it, and she said, That’s enough, I don’t see what there is to wink at. For she was clever, the missus was, but she wasn’t clever at anything but her job, which was making the workroom pay. Have you noticed that at all? A person can be clever as can be, in one direction, and stupid in another. She thought we didn’t know what she was trying to cover up, and yet it was all plain to us. I had a gift, you see, I had it in my fingers and in my mind’s eye, and it was worth everything to them, because when the buyers came in, he always showed them my work first, and it was always my work that he charged the most for.

‘I’ve stood outside the showrooms, just off Bond Street they were, and looked at the hats in the window, only two or three of course, not crammed the way the windows for cheap hats were done, and the hats were always mine. And snapped up as soon as I could do them.

‘Yes, I can see from your face what you’re wanting to say, and you’re right. I never got paid extra for it. I got the top wages for the job, but that was never much, never enough to free my mind of worrying about the future. Yes, you are right again, don’t think I haven’t thought and thought about why I didn’t go somewhere else, or say, Give me what I am worth to you or I’ll leave. But for one thing, I loved that work so, I loved it all, the colours and the feel of the materials; and then the other girls, we had worked together so long by then, and we knew each other and all our troubles, and then … Well, of course there was more to it. For one thing, it was partly my fault. He wanted me to go to Paris. Oh no, if he had anything else in mind, he couldn’t let it be that. He said, The wife’ll come too, don’t you worry, it will all be fair and right. What he wanted was for me to come with him into the workrooms when he could sneak himself in, and look at the hats for myself. He was really getting carried away by it all, he imagined my coming back to London and copying all those hats and bonnets, hundreds of them, I daresay, not just the few he could keep in his mind. And he said he would pay me properly for it. Well, being him, being that pair, I knew better than to think it would be much, but it would be a lot for me. And yet I couldn’t bring myself, I said no.

‘That was twice I was invited to France, when I was a girl, once with Mrs Privett and once with that pair of … One a real lady and then two nasty penny-pinchers, the good and the bad.

‘Yes, I know what you are thinking. It was Laurie. He’d never have let me hear the end of it if I’d gone to Paris, even if I’d gone with a regiment of guards to look after me, he’d have taken it out of me. And it was bad enough as it was, before we even married, I had bruises on my arms, and it was always: Who was it? Who looked at you? Who gave you that handkerchief? – because I used to pinch and save for proper linen hankies with real lace, I loved them, I loved pretty things. But he never knew I could have gone to Paris then. And if I had, perhaps I might have stayed, I might have married a Frenchie. I could have married a German, couldn’t I? Sometimes I look back and I see that my life had these chances, leading to something wonderful, who knows? And yet I never took them, I always said, No, no, to what was offered.

‘And yet I had such happy times, I think except for Johnnie they were the best in my life, better even than Hans and our Sundays. I like to sit here and think back to us girls, sitting around those lovely hats, oh they were so beautiful those hats, singing and larking and telling stories, and she always around, Maudie here and Maudie there, it’s always you who are the ringleader, she’d say, but I was her best and she knew it, and though she’d like to have seen the last of me, because he had his eye on me, and everyone knew it, she had to put up with me, didn’t she? And I didn’t care. I’d sing away, I’d sing – shall I sing you one of my songs? Yes, I will …’

And Maudie sits singing the old music-hall songs, some I’ve never heard of. Her voice is off pitch now, keeps cracking, but you can hear what it was like in her laugh.

A Happiness.

‘I must have got pregnant the night of our wedding. Nine months to the day, it was. And Laurie was so pleased once we knew. Would you believe it, I was so silly, I didn’t know what was wrong with me! I crept off to the doctor and said, I am sickening, I’m dying, I feel so ill, and I feel this and that. And I lay down and he felt my stomach, and he sat down behind his table and he laughed. Oh, it was a nice laugh, it didn’t make me feel bad, but I did feel silly. He said, Mrs Fowler, didn’t it occur to you that you are pregnant? What’s that? said I. You are going to have a baby, said he. Oh go on, I said, it can’t be – for I hadn’t got the expectation of it into my mind at all.

‘And then I told Laurie and he cried, he was so pleased. We were in the front room of a house in the next street to this. He painted the room beautifully, for he was a good tradesman, no one could say otherwise, he painted it a lovely shining cream, and the garlands on the ceiling he painted gold and blue, and the skirting boards and the picture rail blue. And he bought a little chest and made that blue, and kept buying little coats and hats – oh, sizes too big, Johnnie didn’t get into them for two or three years after Laurie left me. But I was so happy, I thought I was a queen for those few months. He treated me like I was a piece of crystal or a new cup. He kept buying me all sorts of fancies, for I was after pickles and chocolate and ginger and stuff, and they cost him.

‘And then the baby was born, my Johnnie. And you’ll never guess. From that moment on there was never a kind word for me. How is it a grown man behaves like a little boy? He was jealous, jealous of a baby! But I didn’t know then that was how it was going to be. I used to tease him, and then he hit me. All the good times were over. I used to sit there in my nursing chair, which he had made for me, and nurse the baby, and look at the lovely painted ceiling, and think, oh I’m so hungry, so hungry, because Johnnie was such a feeding baby, he sucked and sucked. I’d say, Laurie, get me a bit of lamb for a stew, buy me some bacon, we’ll have it with dumplings. And he’d say, What am I going to use for money? And he was in work. Well, I’ll not fill your ears with the misery of it when I understood what the future was to be, because what I like is, to look back and think of me sitting like a queen in that lovely room, in my lovely chair, with Johnnie, and thinking how when Laurie got used to it we’d all be so happy.’

A month later.

I’ve never worked as hard as this! If I keep a skeleton of this diary going, then perhaps later …

Joyce is just holding herself together, but she is not with us. I am doing all the interviewing, parties, running about, lunches, conferences. We keep her out of sight mostly. Her defences are well inside herself, not where mine are, outside in clothes, hair, etc. She looks awful, a mess. In addition, this series of articles on clothes as an expression of the mood of the seventies, sixties, fifties. They wanted more. I seem never to be able to lose it, undervaluing myself. I would not have thought of myself as able to write for a serious sociological mag, but here I am. So I get up at six to do the work for that.

And I see Maudie every evening, or if not I make sure she knows I’m not coming. I go in, exhausted, but then I shop and do a little bit of cleaning, and then I slump and listen, and listen. Sometimes she tells it well, and laughs, and knows she is pleasing me. Others, she mutters and is fierce and won’t look at me, sitting there in my lovely clothes. I have bought a whole new outfit, madly expensive, I feel it as a bulwark against chaos. She leans over and feels the silk of my shirt, none of this cheap Chinese stuff, no. She strokes my skirt, and then looks up into my face, with a sigh, for she knows how good my things are, who better? And then she will turn away her little face and put her hand up to her cheek to shield it, and stare into the fire. Shuts me out. And then she starts again, forgiving me with a little laugh: So what have you been doing today? But she doesn’t want to know, my world is too much for her, she wants to talk …

‘And then one day he left me, he said, You don’t care for me now you’ve got him, and he took up his tools and he left. I didn’t believe it. I was waiting for him to come back, for years as it turned out. But there I was, with nothing to pay the rent with. I went to the Rolovskys and asked – oh, that was hard, I’d never begged of them before. I had said I was getting married, you see, and she had given me a hard time, making me work all hours, to get as much out of me as she could before she lost me. And here I was again, after not even two years. Well, she made a favour of it. And someone else was forewoman now. And it wasn’t the same in the workroom. For one thing, I didn’t have the heart to sing and dance. I put Johnnie with a baby-minder. She wasn’t a bad woman, but it wasn’t what I wanted for him. I’d be sick worrying, has she given him his medicine, or his milk? For he was delicate, he always had a cough. But I had enough to keep us. Then the people where I was said they wanted my room. They didn’t want a baby, that was what they meant. And they did want all that lovely blue and gold for themselves. And so I came here. The woman who had the house didn’t mind a baby, but I had to keep him quiet, she said. I was on the top floor then, the little room at the back. It was cheap, and we looked out at the trees there, lovely it was. But I found it hard to pay for everything. I went to my aunt, but she could only just manage for herself. She said, Go to your father. But he had said if I married Laurie I should never darken his door. And he was right, for once … Did I tell you about my wedding?’

And Maudie sat laughing, laughing, and pulled out a drawer and showed me a photograph. A tiny woman, under an enormous flowered hat, in a neat tight dress. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘I looked a proper mess. I had been saying yes and no, yes and no, because what would happen was, I’d say, No, and then he’d start his squeezing and wanting, and I’d say, Yes, and he’d say, I suppose Harry (there was another boy who fancied me) won’t have you, so I’d say, No. But at last we got to say yes at the same time. I borrowed my cousin Flo’s best hat and her church gloves. My dress was my own. I sent a message to Father and said I was getting married on Sunday. He came over to Auntie’s and Laurie was there, and he stood in the doorway and said to me, If you marry him that is the last time you’ll see me. Well, I hadn’t seen him for nearly ten years as it was. I said, Will you come and see me married at least?

‘On that morning Laurie was worse than I’d ever seen him, fit to burst with black looks and pinches and grumbles. We walked to church with my Auntie, and we were quarrelling all the way. There was Father, all in his best striped clothes and top hat, oh what a dresser he was! And she was there too, she had got so fat, and I couldn’t help crowing secretly, she could hardly walk, all in purple and black feathers, and by then I’d come to know what was really good and what wasn’t, and I could see she was nothing, we wouldn’t have her in our workroom. But I was nothing too, that day, I could have got a hat from the workroom for the wedding to marry in, but I didn’t want a favour from the Rolovskys. And so we were married, sulking and not looking at each other. After the wedding, there was a photographer who took this, and then when Father went off towards the carriage with her, I ran after them and said, Can I come with you? But you’ve just got married, said she, really astonished she was, and I don’t blame her. And Father said, That’s right, you come home and don’t waste time on him. So I got into the carriage and left Laurie at the church …’ And at this Maudie laughs and laughs, her strong, girl’s laugh.

‘After I’d enjoyed myself at home for a little, and eaten my fill of everything, I thought, Well, I have a husband, and I said to them, Thanks, but I’d better be off home, and I went, Father saying, Never darken my doors. And I didn’t, for he died soon after of a stroke. And they didn’t tell me about the funeral.

‘But my sister was there, right enough. Suddenly she began showing herself off and buying herself clothes, and then they moved to a better house. I knew Father had left something to us both, and I went to her and said, Where is what Father left me? And she couldn’t look me in the face. What makes you think you had anything coming? she said. You never came to see us, did you? But who threw me out? I said. And we quarrelled and quarrelled and she shrieked at me. I went to my sister, willing myself to do it because she always treated me so bad, and I said, Polly, where’s my share of the money? She has got it, my sister said. You’ll have to go to a lawyer. Well, how could I do that? You need money for lawyers. I and Laurie were all lovey-dovey just then, and we both of us found it such a nice change, we didn’t want to waste any of it.

‘Much later, when I was so down and poor and in need of everything, I went to my sister, and she must have told her, for one day when I got back from work the landlady said a big woman in feathers and scarlet had been and left me a parcel. It was some of my mother’s clothes, that’s all, and her old purse with two gold guineas in it. And that’s all I ever had from my father. For I never saw her again.’

Maudie’s very bad time.

‘I worked so hard and so hard. I used to get up so early and take Johnnie to the minder’s, and then to work, and work all day till six or seven. And then back to pick up Johnnie, and she’d be cross, often, because I was late and she wanted to be rid of him. And I’d get home and find not enough food for him and me. I was earning badly then. Mrs Rolovsky never forgave me for leaving when I married and then coming back. I wasn’t the pet any longer, and she was always taking her chance to fine me, or give me a hat that would take twice as long as the others. We were paid by what we’d got done, you see. And I never was able to scamp my work. I had to do it properly even if I was to suffer. And then we were put off. We were put off most summers. Oh, no security then, no pensions, nothing. She’d say, Pick up your cards as you go out, and leave your address, and we’ll contact you when there’s work.

‘That war was coming, it was nearly on us, and times were bad. I didn’t know what to do. I had a little saved, but not much. I had Johnnie home from the minder’s, that was something because I hardly ever saw him awake when I was working, but how to feed him? The landlady said, No, no credit on the rent. I kept the rent paid, but often and often I went to bed on cold water so Johnnie could have a cup of milk. It went on and on, and that was such a wonderful summer. I was wild with hunger. I’d go into the gardens and see if there was bread lying there the birds hadn’t eaten. But others had the same idea, and I’d be there first, hanging around, pretending I wasn’t watching while the people spread out the bread for the birds. Once I said to an old woman, I need that more than the birds. Then earn it, said she. I never forgot that, and I’ll never forget it. For there was no work. I tried to get a cleaning job, but they wouldn’t have me cleaning with a child hanging around. I didn’t know what I would do.

‘Then suddenly Laurie turns up, and finds me in bed on a Sunday afternoon, with my arms around Johnnie. I felt so faint and sick, you see. Oh, what a commotion, what a to-do! First, of course, it was all shouts, Why did you move without telling me? And then it was, You know I’d never let you go without! Then prove it, I said, and off he went and came back with groceries. I could have done with biscuits and tea and dried peas and stuff I could have kept, but no, being Laurie, it was all fancy cakes and ham. Well, I ate and Johnnie ate, and after all that he took us out for some food. I’m your Daddy, says he to Johnnie, and of course the little boy is pleased. And then, he went off. Back tomorrow, says Laurie, but I didn’t see him for months.

‘Meanwhile I’d hit the bottom. I went to Relief. In those days there was a Board stuffed with snobby ladies and gentlemen, and you’d stand there, and they’d say, Why don’t you sell your locket, if you’re so poor – it was my mother’s – have you got any personal belongings, we can’t keep people who have their own resources. Their own resources! You say you have a little boy, and they say, Then you must force your husband to contribute. You couldn’t explain to the likes of them about the likes of Laurie. Well, they said I could have two shillings a week. That was high summer still, and no end to it in sight. They sent a man around. I’d pawned everything, except a blanket for Johnnie, for I was sleeping under my coat. He came into our room. Bed with a mattress but no bedclothes, a wooden table – this one here, that you like. Two wooden chairs. A shelf that had on it a bit of sugar and half a loaf of bread. He stood there, in his good clothes, and looked at me and Johnnie, and then he said, Have you sold everything you can? And I had, even my mother’s locket. And he leaned forward and pointed to this …’ Maudie showed me the long dark wood stick with which she pushes back and opens the curtains. ‘What about this? he said. How am I to open and close my curtains? I said. Are you expecting me to sell my curtains as well? Shall I sell the bed and sleep on the floor, then?

‘He was a little ashamed then, not much, it wasn’t his job to be ashamed of what he had to do. And that was how I got my two shillings a week.’

‘And could you live on it?’

‘You would be surprised what you can live on. Johnnie and I, we ate bread, and he got some milk, and so we lived until the autumn and there was a note from the Rolovskys: they’d take me on but at less money. Because of the hard times. I would have worked for half what they gave. I slowly got back the blankets from the pawnshop, for the winter, and I got my pillows, and then … One day, when I got to the baby-minder’s, no Johnnie. Laurie had come and taken him away. I begged and screamed and begged, but she said he was the child’s father, she couldn’t refuse a child to his father – and I went mad, running about the streets, and going everywhere. No one had heard anything. No one knew. I was very ill then. I lay in bed, I didn’t care, I thought I would die and I would have welcomed it. I lost my job at the Rolovskys’, and that was the end of them, for me. When I was up, I got myself a job cleaning, to tide me over, because without a child they’d employ me. And when I saved up enough I went to a lawyer. I said, How can I get my child back? But where is your husband? he said. I don’t know, I said. Then how can I help you? he said. I don’t know, I said. You must advertise for him, he said. But where? I said. Isn’t there a way of finding out where people are? Yes, but it costs money, he said. And I haven’t got any, I said.

‘And then he came over to me and put his hands all over me, and he said, Very well, Maudie, you know what you can do if you want me to help you. And I ran, and I ran, out of that office, and I was scared to go near a lawyer again.

‘All this time, Laurie had Johnnie down in the West Country with a woman he had then. Much later, when I met Johnnie again, he told me she was good to him. Not his father, for his father was off soon, to another woman, he could never stay with one woman. No, this woman brought him up. And he did not know he had a mother, he didn’t know about me. Not till quite recently, but I’ll tell you another time, another time, I’m all roiled up and upset with thinking about it all, and I meant to tell you something nice tonight, one of the times I like to think about, not a bad time …’

A nice time.

Maudie was walking down the High Street, and she saw some hats in a window. She was appalled at the way the hats were made. She went in and said to a woman who was making a hat, Don’t you know how to put a hat together? And the woman said, No, she had been left a widow with a bit of money and thought she would make hats. Well, said Maudie, you have to learn how to make a hat, as you have to learn to scrub a floor or bake a loaf. I’ll show you. She was a bit huffy at first, but she wanted to learn.

‘I used to go in there, and she’d show me what she’d done, and I’d make her pick it to pieces again, or I’d make her whole hat, for the skill was in my fingers still, and it is now, I know. And yes, I can see from your face what you are thinking, and you’re right. No, she didn’t pay me. But I loved it, you see. Of course, it wasn’t like the Rolovskys’, not the West End, nothing in the way of real good silks and satins, just cheap stuff. But all the same, between us, we made some lovely hats and she got a name for it. And soon she sold the shop for the goodwill – but the goodwill was me, really, and that wasn’t in any contract and so I don’t know what happened afterwards …’

A nice time.

Maudie was working for an actress who was at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. She was prepared to take an hour’s journey there, and an hour back, because this woman was so gay and laughing and always had a joke. ‘She lived alone, no man, no children, and she worked. Oh, they work so, these poor actresses, and I used to make her supper ready for the oven, or a good big salad on a plate, and get her fire laid, and go home thinking how she’d be so happy to come in and see everything so nice. And sometimes after a matinée she’d say, Sit down, Maudie, share my supper, I don’t know what I’d do without you. And she’d tell me all about the theatre. She wasn’t a star, she was what they call a character actress. Well, she was a character all right. And then she died. What of? I was so upset I didn’t want to know. It was a sudden death. I got a letter one day, and it was, she had died, sudden. So I didn’t go back, though I was owed a fortnight’s money.’

‘When was that?’

For all the time I am trying to get her life mapped, dated.

‘When? Oh, it was after the war. No, the other war, the second war.’

Maudie doesn’t talk about the first war as a war. She was sick with worrying about Johnnie, for she thought that her husband would be in the army, and where was Johnnie? She went ‘to the Army’ and asked, did they know anything about a Laurie Fowler, and they said, But what part of the country does he come from?

‘I was so desperate, I went on my knees. I didn’t know I was going to, but there I was, with all those officers around me. Please, please, I said. They were embarrassed, and I don’t blame them. I was crying like a river. They said, We’ll see what we can do. We’ll let you know.

‘And a long time afterwards, and I was waiting for every visit of the postman, a card: We have been unable to trace Laurence Fowler. And the reason was, he joined up from Scotland, not England, for there was a woman in Scotland he was living with he needed to get away from.’

So that is what a month of visiting Maudie looks like, written down! But what of the evening when I said to myself, I am so tired, I am so tired, I can’t, but I went? It was an hour later than usual. I stood outside that crumbling door, knock knock, then bang bang bang. Faces in the upper windows. Then at last she stood there, a little fury with blazing blue eyes.

‘What do you want?’

‘I am here to visit you.’

She shrieked, ‘I haven’t got time, and dragging down this passage, getting the coal, is bad enough.’

I said to her, hearing myself with some surprise, ‘Then go to hell, Maudie,’ and went off without looking back. This was without real anger on my part, almost like reading lines in a play. Nor was I worried that evening, but made good use of my spare time having a real bath.

Next day, she opened the door on my second knock, and said, ‘Come in,’ standing aside with an averted unhappy face. Later she said, ‘You don’t have to take any notice of my nonsense.’

‘Yes, I do, Maudie, of course I do. If you say a thing, I have to believe you mean it.’

And, a few days later, she was stiff and silent. ‘What’s wrong, Maudie?’

‘I’m not going to, I’m not leaving here, they can’t make me.’

‘Who’s been this time?’

‘She has.’

‘Who is she?’

‘As if you don’t know.’

‘Oh, so you’re back at that, then. I’m plotting against you!’

‘Of course you are, you all do.’

We were shrieking at each other. I am not at all ashamed of this, yet I’ve never, or not since I was a child, quarrelled in this way: quarrelled without spite or passion, even with a certain enjoyment. Though I know it is not enjoyable to Maudie. She suffers afterwards.

‘But was there someone else to see you, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

With a blazing blue look, she said, ‘Rogers, Bodgers, Plodgers, something like that.’ And, later, ‘They can’t make me move, can they? This house is privately owned?’

I sent for the information. If the flat is condemned, then she’ll have to move. By any current housing standard, it should be condemned. By any human standard, she should stay where she is. I want to contact this Mrs Rogers. I know I can ring up the ‘Welfare’ and ask, but this isn’t how things happen – oh, no! You have to let things work themselves out, you must catch something at the right time.

I found the two old women again waiting for me the other day. Mrs Boles and Mrs Bates. Bundles of coats and scarves, but their hats had flowers and bright ribbon. Spring.

‘Oh, you do run about,’ says Mrs Bates. ‘And how is Maudie Fowler?’

‘She is the same.’

‘Mrs Rogers was asking after you,’ she said.

‘Do you know what about?’

‘Oh, she’s ever so good, Mrs Rogers, running about, just like you.’

That is how things happen. Now I am waiting to run into Mrs Rogers somewhere.

Another five weeks have gone. Nothing has changed … and yet of course it must have. Same in the office, with Joyce, same with Maudie. But I’ve met Vera Rogers. On the pavement, she was talking to the old women. They called, she turned, an anxious friendly smile, she was across the street and with me. She is a smallish thin girl. I was actually going to write: a size twelve. When am I going to stop thinking of people first in terms of what they wear? Phyllis asked me recently, what was my sister like, and I said, She wears good jersey suits and good shoes and cashmere. Phyllis laughed exactly the sort of laugh I’d have meant her to, only a year ago.

Vera stood in front of me on the windy pavement, smiling an anxious, warm, apologetic smile. Brown friendly eyes. Pink nail varnish, but chipped. Yes, of course this says something about her: she’s overworked. Clothes down-market Jaeger, pleasant, not exciting. I knew that here she was, ‘the one’. There was not much need for all the opening moves. I said, ‘I was hoping to run into you.’ She said, ‘Yes, I would so much like to talk to you about Mrs Fowler.’ I said, ‘She’s terrified she will be forcibly rehoused.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we can stave it off a bit.’ I said, ‘Meanwhile, what would help her most is Meals on Wheels.’ She said, ‘She’s active, you see, she can get about, she’s not really entitled … but if you think …’ I said, ‘She can’t make herself cook any more, you see, she lives on bits and pieces.’

She began to laugh. She said, ‘I must tell you something really funny, it happened to me last week. I went to see one of my cases, she’s ninety-four. Deaf, arthritic, but she does everything for herself, cooks, cleans, shops. There I was, watching her prepare her lunch. A meat pie, cabbage cooked in soda, and then cream cake. I said to her, Do you ever eat any fresh stuff, fruit or salad? What? she shouted at me.’

Vera took such pleasure in telling me this, but she was anxious too, in case I wouldn’t find it funny, and she touched my arm once or twice, as if to say, Oh, I hope you’ll laugh.

‘You must eat fruit and vegetables, I shouted at her. You need vitamins. Every time I come to see you, I never see a vestige of green, or an apple or an orange. And she said, What, what, what? though I knew she could hear, and then when I repeated it, she said, And how old did you say you were, dear? And then I thought about all my aches and pains, and I’ve been eating all the right things since I was a child.’

And so we laughed, and she looked relieved.

‘I’ve got to get home to the old man,’ said she. ‘I’ll fix the Meals on Wheels. But if we could get a free moment at the same time we could have a real talk.’ And she went running along the street to a yellow VW and nipped off, smartly, into the traffic.

Maudie is so pleased about the meals coming in every midday, though they aren’t very nice. Stodgy and badly cooked.

I have realized how heavy everything is for her. Yes, I knew this before, but not really, until I saw her delight when I said she was on the list for Meals. She thanked me over and over again.

‘You see, you did it, but she wouldn’t, oh no, not she!’

‘Did you ask her?’ I said.

‘What’s the use, I’ve asked often enough, but they say I need a Home Help.’

‘And so you do.’

‘Oh well, if that’s it, then say it! I’ve looked after myself before and I can do without you.’

‘Oh, you are so difficult, Maudie. What’s the matter with a Home Help?’

‘Have you ever had one?’

At which I laughed, and then she laughed.

Now we are nearly into summer.

What has happened since I sat down last to this unfortunate diary of mine? But I don’t want to give it up.

I’ve met Vera Rogers several times, and we talk – on the pavement, once for a snatched half-hour in a cafe. We talk in shorthand, because we neither of us have time.

Once she asked how I got involved with Maudie, and when she heard, said, with a sigh, ‘I had hoped you were really a Good Neighbour, because I know someone who I think might accept a Good Neighbour. She’s difficult, but she’s lonely.’

This was a request, put delicately and with embarrassment, but I said that Maudie was enough.

‘Yes, of course she is,’ she said at once.

I told her what work I do, and then she had to be told why. As if I understood it myself! Why am I bound to this Maudie Fowler as I am? I said, ‘I like her, I really do.’

‘Oh yes, she’s wonderful, isn’t she?’ said Vera warmly. ‘And some of them, you’d like to strangle. I used to feel wicked when I started this work, I believed I had to like them all. And then, when I’d been with some difficult old cat for an hour, and I couldn’t get anywhere, I’d find myself thinking, God, I’ll hit her one of these days, I will.’

‘Well, I’ve felt that about Maudie often enough.’

‘Yes, but there’s something else.’

‘Yes, there is.’

I told Maudie how much Vera likes her, and she closed up in an angry pinched mask.

‘But why, Maudie?’

‘She didn’t lift a finger to help.’

‘But how can she if you don’t tell her what you want?’

‘All I want is to be left alone.’

‘There you are, you see.’

‘Yes, here I am alone, except for you.’

‘Vera Rogers doesn’t just have one person to visit, she has sometimes ten or more in a day, and she’s on the telephone arranging and getting things done. I see you every day, so I know what you want.’

‘They’ll have to carry me out screaming,’ said she.

‘She’s on your side, she’s trying to prevent you from being moved.’

‘That’s what she tells you. They were around here again today.’

‘Who?’

‘Do you know what he said, that Greek? You can stay in one room, and we’ll do up the other, he said. And then when we’ve finished that, you can move in. Me, here in all that dust and mess. And it’s months they take to improve a place.’

‘Then that must have been the landlord, mustn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s what I said. They are all in it together.’

At the Indian shop, I hung around until the owner, Mr Patel, said, ‘Mrs Fowler was out on the street yesterday, screaming and shouting.’

‘Oh yes, what did she say?’

‘She was screaming, None of you were around trying to get me hot water and a bath when I had a baby, none of you cared when I didn’t have food to give him. I’ve lived all my life without running hot water and a bath, and if you come back I’ll get the police.’

Mr Patel says all this slowly, his grave concerned eyes on my face, and I didn’t dare smile. He keeps his eyes on my face, reproachful and grave, and says, ‘When I was in Kenya, before we had to leave, I thought everyone in this country was rich.’

‘You know better now, then.’

But he wants to say something else, something different. I waited, picked up some biscuits, put them back, considered a tin of cat food.

At last he says, in a low voice, ‘Once, with us, we would not let one of our old people come to such a life. But now – things are changing with us.’

I feel I personally should apologize. At last I say, ‘Mr Patel, there can’t be very many like Mrs Fowler left.’

‘I have six, seven, every day in my shop. All like her, with no one to care for them. And I am only one shop.’

He sounds as if he is accusing me. He is accusing my clothes, my style. I am out of place in this little corner shop. And then, feeling as if he has wronged me, he takes a cake from the shelves, one that Maudie likes, and says, ‘Give it to her.’

Our eyes meet again, and this time differently: we are appalled, we are frightened, it is all too much for us.

That was eight days ago.

Joyce may go after all to the States. The girlfriend had an abortion. Husband Jack took this badly: he wanted her to have the baby. He has been having a sort of breakdown, and Joyce has been comforting him. This has been going on for weeks.

When she told me:

‘It appears he has been longing for us to have another child.’

‘Did you know?’

‘Well, I knew he wouldn’t mind, but not that he cared so much.’

‘If you had known?’

‘Yes, I think I would.’

‘So now you are both blaming the other?’

‘Yes.’

Joyce with a cigarette dangling, eyes screwed up, holding up photographs, one after another, Yes, to this one, No to that. Her hair dyed again, but with the dusty look. Her hands unkept. She looks fifty. There is something weird and witchlike about her. I’ve said to her, ‘Joyce, you must change your style, it’s too young.’ And she said, ‘When I know if I’m going or not, I’ll know which to choose, won’t I?’

Joyce is always on the verge of tears. A word, a joke, a tone of voice – she’ll turn her head sharply, screw up her eyes, peer at me, at Phyllis, at whomever, the tears welling up. But she shakes them away, pretends there’s nothing. Phyllis and I have this unspoken thing: we watch every syllable, word, suggestion, so that Joyce will not suddenly betray herself, and start crying.

Later. How long? I forget. Some days.

Joyce said to me today that she said to Jack, Your trouble is, you want to take this situation with you to the States. Home, children, wife the sympathetic comforter – and girlfriend as well, in a separate place. You can’t choose. That’s why you are so ill.

And he said to her she was heartless and cold.

Four months before he leaves. He should have told them over there if a wife, or no wife, children or not.

‘Perhaps he will go by himself in the end,’ I mused, forgetting about not upsetting her.

She turned her head in that quick startled way she has now, she leans forward frowning, peering at me. My old friend Joyce, she is a thousand miles away, in some sort of black place, and she peers out at me, thinking, who is this quacking idiot?

‘Alone!’ she said, in a brisk schoolmistress voice.

‘Why not?’

‘There’s something missing in you, I’ve always said so,’ she says, coldly, filing me away.

‘Or perhaps there is in you.’

I told her about Maudie Fowler, who has lived alone now for something like sixty years. Joyce got up as I spoke, picked up her bag, her briefcase, collected things from her desk.

‘How did you get to know her?’

I told her. Joyce listened.

‘Guilt,’ she said at last. ‘Guilt. If you want to let it get to you, that’s your affair.’

She was on her way to the door. I said, ‘Joyce, I want to tell you about it, properly, I really do. I want to talk about it.’

She said, ‘Well, not now.’

It is summer. Not that I am seeing much of it.

When did Joyce get ill? It must be over a month now. The truth was, we were all relieved, because it made what really was the truth official. I have been running around from morning to night. In the hospital, this scene: Joyce’s husband, the two children, husband’s ex-mistress, her new boyfriend. Joyce lying back, looking at them all from inside this black place she is in, smiling when she remembers to. Now he wants her to go to America, but she says she doesn’t have the energy to think about it. But of course she will go.

Because of all this, I don’t stay so long at Maudie’s, though I have not missed one day. She understands why, I have told her. But the way she feels it is, I’m letting her down. I sit there, trying not to look at my watch, and she is remembering only bad things. I say, ‘Tell me about the day you went to the Heath with Johnnie, and you found blackberries and made a pie with them?’ But she sighs, and sits rubbing those old fingers up and down her (filthy) skirts. Then she tells me about …

Her sister, Polly, who has had seven children, always summoned Maudie to look after her, each childbed. Maudie was always delighted, even gave up whatever job she might have, and took herself to her sister’s, and looked after everything for weeks, more than once months. Then, says Maudie, it was always the same, the sister got jealous, because Maudie loved the children and they loved her. She found an excuse to say, You are turning my children against me, you are after my husband. Is it likely, says Maudie, the nasty scrimping thing, he grudged me the food I ate while I was working as a slavey. He’d say, if I put a bit of meat on my plate, We’ll have to buy an extra bit of beef on Sunday, while Maudie honours us with her presence. Meanwhile, I was working eighteen hours a day for them. Between births, Maudie heard nothing of her sister, but she wasn’t worried: There’d be another baby, I knew that, because he had to have what he had to have.

Now Maudie talks a lot about sex, and I see that it has been enormous and awful to her, and she has never understood it or ceased to be tormented by it. She says her husband, while he was still treating her like a queen, would leap on her like a tiger, like a wild beast. She says she can’t understand it, one moment all lovey-dovey, and the next they have their nails into you. Her husband has been with one woman after another, and she has been brooding about it all her life: why? For Maudie has slept with one man, her awful husband. She knows that there are women who like it, and she looks at me while she talks, with a certain modesty and diffidence, because I might be offended if I knew she was wondering if I was ‘like that’.

Yet, she has had other experiences. Upstairs, for some years, there was a woman who became her friend, and this woman ‘liked it’. She used to tell Maudie how she would wait all day until the night, because another life began at night, and it was her real life. Maudie said to me, ‘She told me that when they had finished all that, she had to sleep lying behind his back, so that she could hold his thing. That thing …’ cries Maudie, almost weeping with disgust, wonder, and disbelief. ‘Yes, it was out of respect, she said to me.’ And Maudie sits there, amazed, after thirty or forty years of thinking about it. Suddenly: ‘I wouldn’t give them that much satisfaction, it’s the stick they beat you with!’

And then I laughed (and I wasn’t comfortable at all, thinking my own thoughts, for that just about summed it up, never mind that we had such a wonderful sex life, Freddie and I), and she said, ‘I have been watching your face. I can see you think differently. But I can’t help it. And now all the time the newspapers, the magazines, the telly, sex, sex, sex, and I think sometimes, am I mad, are they mad?’

I laugh and laugh. She laughs too. But it is a wild unhappy laugh, not at all her girl’s laugh that I love to hear.

Such is the power of – ? – that Maudie refers to that awful husband of hers, even now, as My man. She has seen him half a dozen times in half a century. One day, a knock at the door, and there stood her husband. But this young man said, ‘Mother? I’m your son Johnnie.’ ‘Well, come in then,’ said she. ‘I had put it out of mind, you see. I had made myself ill with fretting. Once I had to go to the doctor, and he said, Mrs Fowler, you must either find your child or put him out of your mind. How could I find him? He might be in America or Timbuctoo! And slowly I did forget him. And so when he was there – I am your son Johnnie, he said – we became friends, because we took to each other. And then there was the war. He did well in the war, he was an engineer, and he married an Italian girl, but it came to no good, for she went off with another man, and do you know what I dreamed the other night? Oh, it was a doleful dream, so bad and low. I dreamed there was a wonderful cherry tree, like the cherry tree there was out the back here before it fell down in a big storm. Big black cherries, soft and lovely and shining. And I stood one side of it, and poor Johnnie stood on the other, and we were trying to lean up and reach the cherries, and we tried and tried, but no matter how we pulled the boughs down, they sprang back, and the cherries were out of reach … And we stood there, Johnnie and I, and we were crying.’

Long after Johnnie was a grown man and had gone to America, where he vanished, and forty years after Laurie had left her, stealing her child, Maudie wrote a letter to her husband, asking him to meet her. They met on a bench in Regent’s Park.

‘Well, what do you want?’ he said.

‘I was thinking, perhaps we could make a home for Johnnie,’ she said to him. She explained that they could find a house – for she knew he always had money, wheeling and dealing – and make it nice, and then an advertisement in the paper in America.

‘For Johnnie has never had a nice home,’ she explained to her husband.

‘And what did he say?’

‘He bought me a fish supper, and I didn’t see him for five years.’

A marvellous hot blue day.

I said to Phyllis, ‘Hold the fort,’ and I ran out of the office, to hell with it. I went to Maudie, and when she answered the door, slow, slow, and cross, I said, ‘I’m taking you to the park for a treat.’ She stared at me, furious. ‘Oh, don’t,’ I said to her. ‘Oh, darling Maudie, don’t, please, don’t let yourself get angry, just come.’

‘But how can I?’ she says. ‘Look at me!’

And she peers up at the sky past my head. It is so blue and nice, and she says, ‘But … but … but …’

Then suddenly she smiles. She puts on her thick black-beetle coat and her summer hat, black straw, and we go off to the Rose Garden Restaurant. I find her a table out of the way of people, with rose bushes beside her, and I pile a tray with cream cakes, and we sit there all afternoon. She ate and ate, in her slow, consuming way, which says, I’m going to get this inside me while it is here! – and then she sat, she simply sat and looked, and looked. She was smiling and delighted. Oh, the darlings, she kept crooning, the darlings … at the sparrows, at the roses, at a baby in a pram near her. I could see she was beside herself with a fierce, almost angry delight, this hot brightly coloured sunlit world was like a gorgeous present. For she had forgotten it, down in that ghastly basement, in those dreary streets.

I was worried that it would all be too much for her inside that thick black shell, and it was so hot and noisy. But she did not want to leave. She sat there until it closed.

And when I took her home she was singing dreamily to herself, and I took her to her door, and she said, ‘No, leave me, leave me, I want to sit here and think about it. Oh, what lovely things I have to think about.’

What did strike me, when I saw her out there in the full sunlight: how yellow she is. Bright blue eyes in a face that looks as if it has been painted yellow.

Three days later.

Another gorgeous afternoon. Went to Maudie, said, ‘Come to the park.’

She said irritably, ‘No, no, you go, I can’t.’

‘Oh come on,’ I said, ‘you know you like it once you get there.’

She stood holding to the door handle, distressed, angry, dishevelled. Then she said, ‘No, oh dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,’ and shut the door in my face.

I was furious. I had been thinking, as I drove to her, how she sat in the rose garden, crooning with delight. I went back to the office, furious. Worked till late. Did not go in to Maudie. Felt guilty, as I wallowed about with the hot water making me new again: kept seeing how she stood there, holding herself up, heard the mutter, Dreadful, dreadful …

A week has passed, it is dreary and chilly again. End of summer? Maudie seems to me, perhaps, really ill? … I know so little about old people! For all I know, all this is normal! I keep setting aside a time to think about her, but I am so busy, busy, busy. I rush in to her, at all hours, I say to her, I’m sorry, Maudie, I’ve got so much work. Last night I went in late and fell asleep in her chair. This morning I rang up the office and said I was not feeling well. In all my years there I think I’ve been ill twice, and I never take days off.

Phyllis said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll hold the fort!’

Maudie’s day.

She wakes inside a black smothering weight, she can’t breathe, can’t move. They’ve buried me alive, she thinks, and struggles. The weight shifts. Oh, it’s the cat, it’s my pretty, she thinks, and heaves. The weight lifts, and she hears a thud as the cat arrives on the floor. Petty? she asks, for she is not sure, it is so dark and her limbs are so stiff. She hears the cat moving about and knows she is alive. And warm … and in bed … Oh, oh, she says aloud, I must get to the toilet or I’ll wet the bed again. Panic! Have I wet the bed already? Her hand explores the bed. She mutters, Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, thinking how, a few days ago, she had wet the bed, and the trouble and difficulty of getting everything dry.

But it is as if her hand has disappeared, she can’t feel it. She clenches and unclenches her left hand, to know she has hands, and waits for the tingling to begin in her right. It takes a long time, and then she pulls out the half-numb right hand from under the clothes and uses the left to massage it awake. She still does not know if she has wet the bed. Almost she sinks back into the black bed, black sleep, but her bowels are moving and she smells a bad smell. Oh no, no, no, she whimpers, sitting there in the dark. No, dreadful, for she believes she might have shat in the bed. At last, with such effort and trouble, she climbs out of the bed, and stands beside it, feeling in it to see what is there. She can’t be sure. She turns, carefully, tries to find the light switch. She has a torch by the bed, but the batteries ran low, she meant to ask Janna to get new ones, and forgot. She thinks, surely Janna would think to look for herself, she knows how I need the torch! She finds the switch, and there is light … and anxiously she inspects the bed, which is dry. But she has to get to the toilet. She never uses the commode for more than a pee. She must get herself to the outside toilet. But there is a hot wet thrusting in her bowels and she gets herself to the commode, just in time. She sits there, rocking herself, keening. Dreadful, dreadful, for now she will have to take the pot out, and she feels so low and bad.

She sits there a long time, too tired to get up. She even sleeps a little. Her bottom is numb. She pulls herself up, looks for the paper. No lav paper, because she doesn’t use it in here. She cannot find anything to use … At last she struggles to the cupboard, her bottom all wet and loathsome, finds an old petticoat, rips off a piece, uses it to clean herself, and shuts down the lid on the smell – and worse, for while she does allow herself a fearful peep, she refuses to let her mind acknowledge that there is something wrong with her stool. Dreadful, she mutters, meaning the stuff her bowels seem to produce these days, and shoves the curtains back off the windows.

It is light outside. But it is summer, it could be the middle of the night still. She cannot bear to think of the difficulties of getting back into bed, and then out of it again. Her little clock has its face turned away from her, she doesn’t want to cross the room to it. She pulls around herself an old shawl, and huddles in the chair by the dead fire. No birds yet, she thinks: has the dawn chorus been and gone or am I waiting for it? She thinks of how, a child, she lay with her sisters in the bed in the cottage of the old woman in the summers, and woke to the shrill violence of the dawn chorus and slept again, thinking of the lovely hot day ahead, a day that had no end to it, all play and pleasure and plentiful tasty meals.

And so Maudie drifts off to sleep, but wakes, and sleeps and wakes for some hours, each time remembering to move her hands so that they don’t stiffen up too much. At last she wakes to the cat rubbing and purring around her legs. Which are stiff. She tests her hands. The right one gone again. With the left she caresses the cat, Pretty, petty, pretty pet, and with the right she tries to flex and unflex fingers until she is whole again.

Morning … oh, the difficulties of morning, of facing the day … each task such a weight to it … She sits there, thinking, I have to feed the cat, I have to … I have to … At last, she drags herself up, anxious, because her bowels are threatening again, and, holding on to door handles, chair backs, she gets herself into the kitchen. There is a tin of cat food, half empty. She tries to turn it on to a saucer, it won’t come out. It means she has to get a spoon. A long way off, in the sink, are her spoons and forks, she hasn’t washed up for days. She winkles out the cat food with her forefinger, her face wrinkled up – is it smelling perhaps? She lets the saucer fall from a small height on to the floor, for bending forward makes her faint. The cat sniffs at it and walks away, with a small miaow. Maudie sees that under the table are saucers, bone dry and empty. The cat needs milk, she needs water. Slowly, slowly, Maudie gets herself to the sink, pulls out of it a dirty saucer which she has not got the energy to wash, runs water into it. Finds a half bottle of milk. Has it gone off? She sniffs. No. She somehow gets the saucer on to the floor, holding on to the table and nearly falling. The cat drinks all the milk, and Maudie knows she is hungry.

Under the table not only the saucers, one, two, three, four, five, but a cat mess. This reminds Maudie she has to let the cat out. She toils to the door, lets out the cat, and stands with her back to the door, thinking. A general planning a campaign could not use more cleverness than Maudie does, as she outwits her weakness and her terrible tiredness. She is already at the back door: the toilet is five steps away; if she goes now it will save a journey later … Maudie gets herself to the toilet, uses it, remembers there is the commode full of dirt and smell in her room, somehow gets herself along the passage to her room, somehow gets the pot out from under the round top, somehow gets herself and the pot to the toilet. She splashes a bit as she empties it, and, looking, smelling, her mind has to acknowledge that there is something very wrong. But she thinks, as long as she (meaning Janna) does not see what I am making, no one will know. And they won’t put me away …

When all that is done it seems to her that a long time has passed, yet she knows that it is still early, for she cannot hear those noisy Irish brats. She needs a cup of tea very badly, all her energy has gone into the cat.

She stands by her kitchen table, holding on to it, thinking of how she will carry the cup of hot reviving tea next door. But hot tea makes you run, no, better cold milk. She gets the cold milk into the glass. That is the end of the milk. She needs: milk, toilet paper, cat food, matches, tea, and probably a lot else, if she could think of it.

Perhaps Janna will come soon and …

She looks sternly at the cat mess, which seems to her a long way down, measuring it in her mind with the need to stoop, and thinks, Janna will …

She gets herself and the milk next door. Sits down. But she is cold now, summer or not. She sits in that old chair of hers, by the cold grate, and feels the heat leaking out of her. She has to get the fire made. Should she plug in the heater? But it takes so much electricity, she is only just balancing her needs with her pension. She at last struggles up and plugs it in. The room has the warm red glow of the heater, her legs seem to loosen and become themselves. She sits there, sipping her milk, and muttering, Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.

Then she drifts off into a dream that Janna has taken her into her own home and is looking after her. She is fiercely possessive of this dream, and cuddles and cossets it, taking it out and adding to it whenever she sits there by herself, but she knows it will not happen. Cannot happen. But why not? It was impossible that Janna should fly into her life the way she did, who would ever have thought of it? And then how she comes in and out, with her jokes and her flowers and cakes and stuff, all her stories about her office, she is probably making it up, after all, how can she, a poor old woman, know better, if Janna chooses to embellish it all a little? So why, then, should not another impossible thing happen, that she should be taken into a lovely warm flat and there she would be looked after, things done for her …

Or Janna would come and live here. There is that room next door … That is what Maudie really wants. She does not want to leave here. Get yourself your own place and never let go of it: Maudie repeats this whenever she is tempted – as now – to leave here and go and live with Janna. No, no, she mutters, she will have to come here. And she sits there, sometimes dozing, thinking of how Janna is living there, looking after her, and of how, when she wakes in the night, alone and frightened that she is in the grave, she can call out, and hear Janna’s reply.

But soon her bowels force her to get up. Although she emptied the pot she did not wash it out, and it is disgusting to her. So she goes outside to the toilet, letting in the cat, who is waiting and who goes to the saucer with the smelly food in it, and disdains it, and patiently comes into the room with Maudie. Who, now she is up, decides to make a fire. It takes her over an hour, the crawling along the corridor to get the coal, the crawling back, the raking of the ashes, the lighting of the fire. She blows at it in small shallow puffs, because she gets dizzy, so it takes a long time to get going. Then she sits again, longing for a cup of tea, but refusing herself, because above all else she dreads the demands of her bladder, her bowels. She thinks, the Meals on Wheels will be here soon … it is only eleven, though. Perhaps they will be early today? She is hungry, she is so hungry she cannot now distinguish between her hunger pangs and the possibility that she must go again to the toilet. Before the cheerful young Meals on Wheels woman, who has a key, slams in and out, calling, Hello, Mrs Fowler, you all right – she has had to go out to the lavatory again.

It is early. Only half past twelve. Maudie at once takes the two small foil containers to the table and, hardly looking at what is in them, eats everything. She feels much better. She thinks, oh, if Janna would come now, and if she said. Come to the park, I’d not growl and grumble at her, I’d love to go. But she sees out of the window that it is raining. What a summer, she mutters. The cat is on the table sniffing at the empty containers, and Maudie is distressed at her greed, for she knows the cat is hungry and she should have shared.

Out she goes to the cold smelling kitchen and reaches about – yes, oh joy, there is a full unopened tin. So happy is Maudie that she even does a little dance there, clutching the tin to her chest. Oh, petty, petty, she cries, I can feed you. At last the tin is opened, though Maudie cuts her forefinger on the tin opener. The cat eats every bit. Maudie thinks, and now she should go out, to save me letting her out later … but the cat won’t go out, she takes herself back into the room with the fire, sinks to sleep on Maudie’s bed. Which has not been made. Maudie should make up her bed – she thinks, it’s not nice for Janna. She does not, but sits in the chair by the fire, and leans forward to stack it up with coal, and then sleeps like the dead for three hours. Though she does not know what time it is, five in the afternoon, when she wakes, for her clock has stopped.

The cat is still asleep, the fire is out … she builds it up again. She could do with something. She has to have a cup of tea. She makes herself a full pot, brings the biscuits, and has a little feast at her table. She feels so much better for the tea that it is easy to disregard how she has to go out to the toilet once more, twice, three times. Her bowels are like an angry enemy down there, churning and demanding. What’s wrong with you then? she cries, rubbing her hand round and round on the little mound of her belly. Why won’t you leave me alone?

She ought to have a wash … she ought … she ought … but Janna will come, Janna will …

But Maudie sits there, waiting, and Janna does not come, and Maudie gets up to let out the insistent cat, and Maudie fetches the coal, and Maudie attends to the fire, and Maudie searches about to see if there is a little brandy, for suddenly she feels bad, she feels trembly, she could fall to the ground and lie there, she is so empty and tired … No brandy. Nothing.

She can go out to the off-licence? No, no, she could not possibly get herself up the steps. Janna has not come and it is getting dark. That means it must be getting on for ten. Janna is not coming … and there is no milk, no tea, no food for poor petty, nothing.

And Maudie sits by her roaring furious fire thinking bitterly of Janna, who does not care, wicked unkind cruel Janna … In the middle of all this, loud knocks at the door, and Maudie’s relief explodes into a raucous shout: Oh, all right, I’m coming. And scrambles along the passage, crabwise, to the door, afraid Janna might fly off before she gets there. Terrible, terrible, she mutters, and her face, as she opens the door, is fierce and accusing.

‘Oh my God, Maudie,’ cries Janna, ‘let me in, I’m dead. What a day.’

Oh then, if she’s tired I can’t ask her … thinks Maudie, and stands aside as Janna comes crashing in, all energy and smiles.

In the room, Maudie sees Janna smile as she sees the wonderful fire, and sees, too, a wrinkling of her nose, which is at once suppressed.

Janna says, ‘I said to the Indian man, Don’t close, because he was closing, wait, I must get Mrs Fowler some things.’

‘Oh, I don’t need anything,’ says Maudie, at once reacting to the news that she has to be beholden to the Indian man, with whom she quarrels nearly every time she goes in … he overcharges, he is cheating her over her change …

Janna, thank goodness, has taken no notice, but is whirling around in the kitchen, to see what is missing, and out she rushes with a basket, before poor Maudie can remember the batteries. In such a hurry, she always is! And they are all like that, rushing in, rushing out, before I have time to turn myself round.

In no time Janna comes crashing back, slam the outside door, slam-bang this door, with a basket full of stuff which Maudie checks, with such relief and thankfulness. Everything is here, nice fresh fish for the cat and a tin of Ovaltine. Janna has thought of everything.

Has she noticed the cat mess, the unwashed stuff in the sink … ?

Maudie goes quietly to sit by the fire, on a smile from Janna which says, It is all right. Janna cleans up the cat mess, does the washing-up, puts away the crockery, and does not think, because she is young and so healthy, to leave out on the kitchen table some saucers and a spoon and the tin opener so that Maudie won’t have to bend and peer and rummage about.

Maudie sits listening to Janna working away, looking after me – and thinks, oh, if she doesn’t remember about the commode …

But when Janna comes in, she brings a small bottle of brandy and two glasses, and, having handed Maudie her brandy, she says, ‘I’ll just …’ and whisks out the dirty pot and takes it away.

I hope there is nothing left in it for her to notice, Maudie worries, but when Janna brings back the scoured pot, smelling nicely of pine forests, she says nothing.

Janna lets herself crash down into the chair near the fire, smiles at Maudie, picks up her glass of brandy, swallows it in a mouthful, says: ‘Oh, Maudie, what a day, let me tell you …’ And she sighs, yawns – and is asleep. Maudie sees it, can’t believe it, knows it is so, and is in a rage, in a fury. For she has been waiting to talk, to listen, to have a friend and some ordinary decent communication, perhaps a cup of tea in a minute, never mind about her bowels, and her bladder … And here is Janna, fast asleep.

It is so dark outside. Maudie pulls the curtains over. Maudie goes out to the back door and sees that all the dirty saucers are gone from under the table, and the cat mess gone, and there is a smell of disinfectant. She lets in the cat, and takes the opportunity for a quick visit to the lavatory. She comes back, and pokes up the fire, and sits down opposite Janna, who is sleeping like … the dead.

Maudie has not had this opportunity before, of being able to stare and look and examine openly, to pore over the evidence, and she sits leaning forward, looking as long as she needs into the face of Janna, which is so nicely available there.

It’s an agreeable face, thinks Maudie, but there’s something … Well, of course, she’s young, that’s the trouble, she doesn’t understand yet. But look at her neck there, folded up, you can see the age there, and her hands, for all they are so clean and painted, they aren’t young hands.

Her clothes, oh her lovely clothes, look at that silk there, peeping out, that’s real silk, oh I know what it’s worth, what it is. And her pretty shoes … No rubbish on her, ever. And she didn’t get any change out of what she paid for that hat of hers! Look at it, she flings it down on the bed, that lovely hat, the cat is nearly on top of it.

Look at those little white quills there … the Rolovskys used to say that they never had anyone to touch me for making those little quills. I could do them now, it is all here still, the skill of it in my fingers … I wonder if …

Maudie carefully gets up, goes to the bed, picks up the lovely hat, goes back to her chair with it. She looks at the satin that lines the hat, the way the lining is stitched in – blown in, rather; oh yes, the one who did this hat knew her work all right! And the little white quills …

Maudie dozes off, and wakes. It is because the fridge upstairs is rumbling and crashing. But almost at once it stops – that means it has been on for a long time, because it runs for an hour or more. Janna is still asleep. She hasn’t moved. She is breathing so lightly that Maudie is afraid, and peers to make sure …

Janna is smiling in her sleep? Or is it the way she is lying? Oh, she’s going to have a stiff neck all right … is she going to stay here all night then? Well, what am I expected to do? Sit up here while the night goes? That’s just like them, they think of nobody but themselves, they don’t think of me …

Rage boils in Maudie Fowler, as she sits caressing the lovely hat, looking at sleeping Janna.

Maudie sees Janna’s eyes are open. She thinks, oh my Gawd, has she died? No, she is blinking. She hasn’t moved anything else, but she is lying there in the chair, eyes open, looking past Maudie at the window that has hours ago shut out the wet and blowy night with old greasy yellow curtains.

Maudie thinks, she is taking a long time to come to herself, surely? And then Janna’s eyes move to her face, Maudie’s: Janna looks, suddenly, terrified, as if she will get up and run – and for a moment all her limbs gather together in a spring, as if she will be off. And then the horrible moment is past, and Janna says, ‘Oh, Maudie, I have been asleep, why didn’t you wake me?’

‘I have been looking at this gorgeous hat,’ says Maudie, stroking it delicately with her thick clumsy fingers.

Janna laughs.

Maudie says, ‘You could stay the night next door, if you like.’

Janna says, ‘But I have to be home to let in a man to do the electricity.’

Maudie knows this is a lie, but does not care.

She thinks, Janna has been asleep here half the night, as if this is her place!

She says, ‘I have been thinking, this is the best time of my life.’

Janna sits straight up in her chair, because, being young, her limbs don’t stiffen up, and she leans forward and looks into Maudie’s face, serious, even shocked.

‘Maudie,’ she says, ‘you can’t say that!’

‘But it’s true,’ says Maudie. ‘I mean, I’m not talking about the short joyful days, like carrying my Johnnie, or a picnic here and a picnic there, but now, I know you will always come and we can be together.’

Janna has tears filling up her eyes, and she blinks them back and says, ‘For all that, Maudie …’

‘Will you remember to bring me in some batteries for my torch?’ says Maudie, in the humble but aggressive way she makes requests.

Janna says, ‘I tell you what, I’ll bring in my torch from the car, and you can have that.’

She goes out, in her usual striding way, but then comes back to say, ‘Maudie, it’s morning, the sky is alight.’

The two women stand in Maudie’s entrance and see the grey light in the streets.

Maudie does not like to say that now she will probably lie on her bed, with the curtains drawn, and stay there for some hours. She suspects Janna of intending not to sleep again that night. Well, she’s young, she can do it. She would so much like to have Janna’s torch, because after all Janna might not come in tomorrow – no, today.

But Janna kisses her, laughs, and goes rushing off down the dingy wet pavements. She has forgotten her hat.

Janna’s day.

The alarm makes me sit up in bed. Sometimes I switch it off, sink back, today not: I sit in the already bright morning, five o’clock, and look through the day ahead: I cannot believe that by the time I end it I shall have done so much. I make myself jump out of bed, I make myself coffee, I am at my typewriter ten minutes after I am awake. I should have put in: I emptied my bladder, but I am still ‘young’ and do not count that among the things that have to be done! But today I shall write down the visits to the loo, otherwise how can I compare my day with Maudie’s? The articles I wrote, so tentatively, and without confidence, last year, have become a book. It is nearly finished. I said it would be done by the end of this month. It will be. Because I said it would be. That I do what I say gives me such strength! And then, there is a project no one knows about: a historical novel. It was Maudie gave me the idea. I think of that time as quite recent, my grandmother’s; but Vera Rogers speaks of it as I might speak of, I don’t know, let’s say Waterloo. I plan a historical novel, conceived and written as one, about a milliner in London. I long to begin it.

I work hard until eight. Then I drink coffee and eat an apple, shower, am into my clothes, am off, in half an hour. I like to be there by nine, and I always am. Today, Phyllis was late. No Joyce. I collected mail for the three of us and called the secretary and it was done and out of the way by ten and the Conference. Phyllis most apologetic: she is like me, never late, never away, never ill. The Conference is as usual, lively and wonderful. It was Joyce who said it would be like a Think Tank. Everyone, from the PRs and the photographers’ assistants to Editorial, encouraged to have ideas, no matter how wild, how crazy, because you never know. As usual, Phyllis writes it all down. It was she who volunteered to do it, and both Joyce and I knew, when she did, that she was thinking, it is a key position. Phyllis does not let these ideas disappear, she lists them, she has them duplicated on all our desks through all the departments. An idea that drops out of sight might emerge again a year later. Today somebody revived one, that the ‘uniforms for women’ series should include the types of clothes worn, for instance, by female television announcers or women going out to dinners with their husbands for career reasons. That is, a certain kind of dinner gown, or style, as uniform … that makes my style a uniform! But I knew that! I wear it all the time. Even, said Freddie, in bed. I never wear anything but real silk, fine cotton, lawn, in bed … he used to joke that if I were to wear a nylon nightie, it would be the same for me as if I committed a crime.

Thinking about Freddie in the office, I surprised myself in tears, and was glad that I had said I would interview Martina, and got to Brown’s Hotel just in time. I am never late. She easy to interview, professional, competent, no time wasted, full marks. I got back at twelve thirty, asked Phyllis if she would do the Eminent Women Luncheon. She said firmly no, she could not, I must. I am a stand-in for Joyce, who is the eminent woman, but she is ill, and Phyllis is of course right, was right to look surprised: for it would not be appropriate for Phyllis to do it. Once I would not have made such a slip, but the truth is, my mind is more and more on my two books, the one nearly finished, my lovely historical novel soon to be started.

I look at myself in the washroom. I forgot this morning about the Luncheon, no marks for that, I am slipping! A button hanging on its thread, and my nails were not perfect. I did my nails in the taxi. The Luncheon agreeable, I made a speech on behalf of Joyce.

On the way back from the Luncheon I go into Debenhams and up to the top floor, and there I look for Maudie’s kind of vests, real wool, modest high petticoats, and long close-fitting knickers. I buy ten knickers, and three vests, three petticoats – because she wets her knickers now, and sometimes worse. Rush, rush, rush, but I’m back by three thirty. I phone to make an appointment with the hairdresser, another for the car. Phyllis said she felt awful. She looked it. So apologetic, such a criminal! For God’s sake, go to bed, I said, and swept all her work from her desk to mine. I did the recipes, summer food, I did Young Fashion, went off with the photographers to Kenwood for a session, came back and worked by myself in the office, no one else there, until nine. I love being by myself, no telephones, nothing, only the watchman. He went out for Indian take-away, I asked him to join me, we had a quick supper on the corner of my desk. He’s nice, George, I encouraged him to talk about his problems, won’t go into that, but we can help, he needs a loan.

I was tired by then and suddenly longing for bed. I did some more work, rang Joyce in Wales, heard from her voice that she was better, but she was noncommittal. I don’t give a damn, she said, when I asked if she were going to the States. She is saying, too, I don’t give a damn about you either. This made me think about the condition of not giving a damn. On my desk, in the ‘Too difficult’ basket, an article about stress, how enough stress can cause indifference. It is seen in war, in hard times. Suffer, suffer, emote, emote, and then suddenly, you don’t care. I wanted this published. Joyce said. No, not enough people would recognize it. Irony!

I said good night to George at nine thirty, and got a taxi to where I leave my car, and drove up towards home, thinking, no, no, I can’t go in to Maudie, I simply cannot. When I banged, I was irritable, I was tired, I was thinking, I hope she is in the lavatory and doesn’t hear. But when she opened, I could see by her face … I switched on everything I have, and made myself crash in, all gaiety and liveliness, because I am afraid of her black moods, for once she starts I can’t shift her out of them. That is why I arrived, female Father Christmas, HM the Queen Mum, all radiant, I have to stop her muttering and raging.

When I reach her back room, it is hot and smelly, the smell hits me, but I make myself smile at the fire. I see from her face what is needful, and I go into the kitchen. I was nearly sick. I whirl around the kitchen, because I know the Indian grocer is about to close, and I run across the road, saying, ‘Please, just another minute, I need stuff for Mrs Fowler.’ He is patient and kind, but he is a grey-violet colour from tiredness. Sometimes he is in here from eight until eleven at night. Often by himself. He is educating three sons and two daughters … He asks, ‘How is she?’ I say, ‘I think she isn’t well.’ He says, as always, ‘It is time her people looked after her.’

When I get back, I cut up fish for the cat. It is no good, I cannot make myself appreciate cats, though that makes me an insensitive boor. I clean up the cat’s mess, I get the brandy and glasses. I realize I have forgotten the vests and knickers in the office. Well, tomorrow will do. I take out her commode, because she is not looking at it, with a trembling pride on her face I know only too well by now. As I wash it, I think, here’s something very wrong. I shall have to tell Vera Rogers. I rinse the inside of the commode carefully and use a lot of disinfectant.

When I sit down opposite her, with brandy for her and me, I fully mean to tell her about the Luncheon, with all the famous women, she’d like that, but – that was the last I remember, until I came to myself, out of such a deep sleep I could not find myself when I woke. I was looking at a yellow little witch in a smelly hot cave, by her roaring fire, her yellow shanks showing, for she had no knickers on and her legs were apart, and on her lap she held my hat, and she was using it for some bad purpose … I was terrified, and then suddenly I remembered, I am Jane Somers, I am here, in Maudie’s back room, and I fell asleep.

She did not want me to go. She made an excuse about batteries for her torch. I went to the door into the street, and it was morning. We stood there, looking up – oh, England, dismal and drear, a grey wet dawn. It was four thirty when I got home. I had a long, long proper bath, and then to my book again.

But I cannot concentrate on it. I am thinking about Maudie’s ‘This is the best time of my life’. What I cannot stand is, that I believe she means it. My running in at the end of the day, an hour, two hours, so little, is enough to make her say that. I want to howl when I think of it. And too, I feel so trapped. She might live for years and years, people live to be a hundred these days, and I am a prisoner of her ‘This is the best time of my life’, lovely gracious Janna, running in and out, with smiles and prezzies.

I wrote Maudie’s day because I want to understand. I do understand a lot more about her, but is it true? I can only write what I have experienced myself, heard her say, observed … I sometimes wake with one hand quite numb … But what else is there I cannot know about? I think that just as I could never have imagined she would say, ‘This is the best time of my life’, and the deprivation and loneliness behind it, so I cannot know what is behind her muttered ‘It is dreadful, dreadful’, and the rages that make her blue eyes blaze and glitter.