Читать книгу The Diaries of Jane Somers - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

And I see that I did not write down, in Janna’s day, about going to the loo, a quick pee here, a quick shit, washing one’s hands … All day this animal has to empty itself, you have to brush your hair, wash your hands, bathe. I dash a cup under a tap and rinse out a pair of panties, it all takes a few minutes … But that is because I am ‘young’, only forty-nine.

What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance. I was going to say, For me it is nothing; but the fact is, once I did have my real proper baths every night, once every Sunday night I maintained and polished my beautiful perfect clothes, maintained and polished me, and now I don’t, I can’t. It is too much for me.

Late summer, how I hate it, blowzy and damp, dowdy and dusty, dull green, dull skies; the sunlight, when there is any, a maggot-breeder; maggots under my dustbin, because I hadn’t touched my own home for days.

Maudie has been ill again. Again I’ve been in, twice a day, before going to work and after work. Twice a day, she has stood by the table, leaning on it, weight on her palms, naked, while I’ve poured water over her till all the shit and smelly urine has gone. The stench. Her body, a cage of bones, yellow, wrinkled, her crotch like a little girl’s, no hair, but long grey hairs in her armpits. I’ve been worn out with it. I said to her, ‘Maudie, they’d send you in a nurse to wash you,’ and she screamed at me, ‘Get out then, I didn’t ask you.’

We were both so tired and overwrought, we’ve been screeching at each other like … what? Out of literature, I say ‘fishwives’, but she’s no fishwife, a prim, respectable old body, or that’s what she’s been in disguise for three decades. I’ve seen a photograph, Maudie at sixty-five, the image of disapproving rectitude … I don’t think I would have liked her then. She had said to herself, I like children, they like me, my sister won’t let me near her now she’s not breeding, she doesn’t need my services. So Maudie put an advert in the Willesden paper, and a widower answered. He had three children, eight, nine, ten. Maudie was given the sofa in the kitchen, and her meals, in return for: cleaning the house, mending his clothes, the children’s clothes, cooking three meals a day and baking, looking after the children. He was a fishmonger. When he came in at lunchtime, if he found Maudie sitting having a rest, he said to her, Haven’t you got anything to do? He gave her two pounds a week to feed them all on, and when I said it was impossible, she said she managed. He brought home the fish for nothing, and you could buy bread and potatoes. No, he wasn’t poor, but, said Maudie, he didn’t know how to behave, that was his trouble. And Maudie stuck it, because of the children. Then he said to her, Will you come to the pictures with me? She went, and she saw the neighbours looking at them. She knew what they were thinking, and she couldn’t have that. She cleaned the whole house, top to bottom, made sure everything was mended, baked bread, put out things for tea, and left a note: I am called to my sister’s, who is ill, yours truly, Maude Fowler.

But then she took her pension, and sometimes did small jobs on the side.

The Maudie who wore herself ‘to a stick and a stone’ was this judging, critical female, with a tight cold mouth.

Maudie and I shouted at each other, as if we were family, she saying, ‘Get out then, get out, but I’m not having those Welfare women in here,’ and I shouting, ‘Maudie, you’re impossible, you’re awful, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’

And then, once, I burst out laughing, it seemed so ridiculous, she there, stark naked, spitting anger at me, and I, rinsing off her shit and saying, ‘And what about your ears?’

She went silent and trembling. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

‘I’m not, I’m laughing at us. Look at us, screaming at each other!’

She stepped back out of the basin she had been standing in, gazing at me, in angry appeal.

I put the big towel around her, that I’d brought from my bathroom, a pink cloud of a towel, and began gently drying her.

Tears finding their way through her wrinkles …

‘Come on, Maudie, for God’s sake, let’s laugh, better than crying.’

‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,’ she muttered, looking in front of her, eyes wide and bright. Trembling, shivering … ‘It’s terrible, terrible.’

These last three weeks I’ve thrown away all the new knickers I bought her, filthy and disgusting, bought two dozen more, and I’ve shown her how to fill them full of cotton wool as she puts them on.

So, she’s back in napkins.

Terrible, terrible, terrible …

It is the end of August.

I am lying in bed writing this with the diary propped on my chest.

Just after writing the last terrible, I woke in the night, and it was as if my lower back had a metal bar driven into it. I could not move at all from my waist down, the pain was so awful.

It was dark, the window showed confused dull light, and when I tried to shift my back I screamed. After that I lay still.

I lay thinking. I knew what it was, lumbago: Freddie had it once, and I knew what to expect. I did not nurse him, of course, we employed someone, and while I shut it out, or tried to, I knew he was in awful pain, for he could not move at all for a week.

I have not been ill since the children’s things, like measles. I have never been really ill. At the most a cold, a sore throat, and I never took any notice of those.

What I was coming to terms with is that I have no friends. No one I can ring up and say, Please help, I need help.

Once, it was Joyce: but a woman with children, a husband, a job, and a house … I am sure I would never have said, ‘Please come and nurse me.’ Of course not. I could not ring my sister – children, house, husband, good works, and anyway she doesn’t like me. Phyllis: I kept coming back to Phyllis, wondering why I was so reluctant, and thinking there is something wrong with me that I don’t want to ask her, she’s quite decent and nice really … But when I thought of Vera Rogers, then I knew Vera Rogers is the one person I know who I could say to, ‘Please come and help.’ But she has a husband, children, and a job, and the last thing she wants is an extra ‘case’.

I managed, after half an hour of agonized reaching and striving, to get the telephone off the bed table and on to my chest. The telephone book was out of reach, was on the floor, I could not get to it. I rang Inquiries, got the number of my doctors, got their night number, left a message. Meanwhile, I was working everything out. The one person who would be delighted – at last – to nurse me was Mrs Penny. Over my dead body. I am prepared to admit I am neurotic, anything you like, but I cannot admit her, will not …

I would have liked a private doctor, but Freddie was always a bit of a socialist, he wanted National Health. I didn’t care since I don’t get ill. I wasn’t looking forward to the doctor’s visit, but he wasn’t bad. Young, rather anxious, tentative. His first job, probably.

He got the key from the downstairs flat, waking Mrs M., but she was nice about it. He let himself in, came into my room, ‘Well, and what is wrong?’ I told him, lumbago; and what I wanted: he must organize a nurse, twice a day, I needed a bedpan, I needed a thermos – I told him exactly.

He sat on the bottom of my bed, looking at me, smiling a little. I was wondering if he was seeing: an old woman, an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman? I know now it depends entirely on the age of a person, what they see.

‘For all that, I think I’d better examine you,’ he said, and bent over, pulled back the clothes which I was clutching to my chin, and after one or two prods and pushes, to which I could not help responding by groaning, he said, ‘It’s lumbago all right, and as you know there’s nothing for it, it will get better in its own good time. And do you want pain-killers?’

‘Indeed I do,’ I said, ‘and soon, because I can’t stand it.’

He produced enough to go on with. He wrote out a prescription, and then said that it was unlikely he could get a nurse before evening, and what did I propose to do in the meantime? I said that if I didn’t pee soon I would wet the bed. He thought this over, then offered to catheterize me. He did – quickly, painlessly. He had to find a kilner jar in the kitchen, no pot of course, and as there seemed no end to the stream of pee, he ran into the kitchen and searched frantically for anything, came back with a mixing bowl, into which the end of the rubber tube was transferred. Just in time. ‘Goodness,’ said he, admiring the quarts of pee.

‘How are you going to manage,’ he asked, ‘if there’s no nurse? Isn’t there a neighbour? How about someone on this floor?’

‘No,’ I said. I recognized on his face the look I’ve seen on, for instance, Vera’s, and have felt on mine: toleration for unavoidable eccentricity, battiness.

‘I could get you into hospital …’

‘No, no, no,’ I moaned, sounding like Maudie.

‘Oh, very well.’

Off he went, cheerful, tired, professional. You’d not know he was a doctor at all, he could be an accountant or a technician. Once I would not have liked this, would have wanted bedside manner and authority – but now I see Freddie’s point.

From the door, he said, ‘You were a nurse, weren’t you?’

This made me laugh, and I said, ‘Oh, don’t make me laugh, I shall die.’

But if he can say that, then it is Maudie I have to thank for it.

What would Freddie think of me now?

A nurse came in about ten, and a routine was established – around the animal’s needs. The animal has to get rid of x pints of liquid and a half pound of shit; the animal has to ingest so much liquid and so much cellulose and calories. For two weeks, I was exactly like Maudie, exactly like all these old people, anxiously obsessively wondering, am I going to hold out, no, don’t have a cup of tea, the nurse might not come, I might wet the bed … At the end of the two weeks, when at last I could dispense with bedpans (twice a day) and drag myself to the loo, I knew that for two weeks I had experienced, but absolutely, their helplessness. I was saying to myself, like Maudie, Well, I never once wet the bed, that’s something.

Visitors: Vera Rogers, on the first day, for I rang her saying she had to get someone to Maudie. She came in first before going to Maudie. I looked at her from where I lay absolutely flat, my back in spasm, her gentle, humorous pleasant little face, her rather tired clothes, her hands – a bit grubby, but she had been dealing with some old biddy who won’t go into hospital, though she has flu.

I told her that I thought there is more wrong with Maudie than the runs, found myself telling her about her awful slimy smelly stools. And I said that it was no good expecting Maudie to go into hospital, she would die rather.

‘Then,’ said Vera, ‘that is probably what she will do.’

I saw she was anxious, because she had said that: sat watching my face. She made us some tea, though I didn’t dare drink more than a mouthful, and we talked. She talked. I could see, being tactful. Soon I understood she was warning me about something. Talking about how many of the old people she looks after die of cancer. It is an epidemic of cancer, she said – or that is what it feels like to her.

At last I said to her, ‘Do you think Maudie has cancer?’

‘I can’t say that, I’m not a doctor. But she’s so thin, she’s just bones. And sometimes she looks so yellow. And I’ve got to call in her doctor. I must, to cover myself, you see. They are always jumping on us, for neglect or something. If I didn’t have to consider that, I’d leave her alone. But I don’t want to find myself in the newspapers all of a sudden, Social Worker Leaves 90-Year-Old Woman to Die Alone of Cancer.’

‘Perhaps you could try a nurse again, to give her a wash? You could try her with a Home Help?’

‘If she’ll let us in at all,’ says Vera. And laughs. She says, ‘You have to laugh, or you’d go mad. They are their own worst enemies.’

‘And you must tell her I am ill, and that is why I can’t get in to her.’

Vera says, ‘You do realize she won’t believe it, she’ll think it is a plot?’

‘Oh no,’ I groan, for I couldn’t stop groaning, the pain was so dreadful (terrible, terrible, terrible!), ‘please, Vera, do try and get it into her head …’

And there I lie, with my back knotted, my back like iron, and me sweating and groaning, while Vera tells me that ‘they’ are all paranoid, in one way or another, always suspect plots, and always turn against their nearest and dearest. Since I am Maudie’s nearest, it seems, I can expect it.

‘You are very fond of her,’ announced Vera. ‘Well, I can understand it, she’s got something. Some of them have, even at their worst you can see it in them. Others of course …’ And she sighed, a real human, non-professional sigh. I’ve seen Vera Rogers, flying along the pavements between one ‘case’ and another, her hands full of files and papers, worried, frowning, harassed, and then Vera Rogers with a ‘case’, not a care in sight, smiling, listening, all the time in the world … and so she was with me, at least that first visit. But she has been in several times, and she stopped needing to cosset and reassure, we have been talking, really talking about her work, sometimes so funny I had to ask her to stop, I could not afford to laugh, laughing was so painful.

Phyllis visited, once. There she was (my successor?), a self-sufficient cool young woman, rather pretty, and I had only to compare her with Vera. I took the opportunity of doing what I know she’s been wanting and needing. She has been attempting my ‘style’, and I’ve told her, no, never never compromise, always the best, and if you have to pay the earth, then that’s it. I looked carefully at her dress: a ‘little dress’, flowered crêpe, skimpy, quite nice, and I said to her, ‘Phyllis, if that’s the kind of dress you want, then at least have it made, use decent material, or go to …’ I spent a couple of hours, gave her my addresses, dressmaker, hairdresser, knitters. She was thoughtful, concentrated, she very much wanted what I was offering. Oh, she’ll do it all right, and with intelligence, no blind copying. But all the time she was there, I was in agony, and I could no more have said to her, ‘Phyllis, I’m in pain, please help, perhaps we could together shift me a centimetre, it might help …’ than Freddie or my mother could have asked me for help.

And as for asking for a bedpan …

Mrs Penny saw my door open, and crept in, furtive with guilt, smiling, frowning, and sighing by turns. ‘Oh, you’re ill, why didn’t you tell me, you should ask, I’m always only too ready to …’

She sat in the chair Phyllis had just vacated, and began to talk. She talked. She talked. I had heard all of it before, word by word she repeats herself: India, how she and her husband braved it out when the Raj crumbled; her servants, the climate, the clothes, her dogs, her ayah. I could not keep my attention on it, and, watching her, knew that she had no idea whether I was listening or not. Her eyes stared, fixed, in front of her at nothing. She spilled out words, words, words. I understood suddenly that she was hypnotized. She had hypnotized herself. This thought interested me, and I was wondering how often we all hypnotize ourselves without knowing it, when I fell asleep. I woke, it must have been at least half an hour later, and she was still talking compulsively, eyes fixed. She had not noticed I had dropped off.

I was getting irritated, and tired. First Phyllis, now Mrs Penny, both energy-drainers. I tried to interrupt, once, twice, finally raised my voice: ‘Mrs Penny!’ She went on talking, heard my voice retrospectively, stopped, looked scared.

‘Oh dear,’ she murmured.

‘Mrs Penny, I must rest now.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear …’ Her eyes wandered off from me, she looked around the room, from which she feels excluded because of my coldness, she sighed. A silence. Then, like a wind rising in the distance, she murmured, ‘And then when we came to England …’

‘Mrs Penny,’ I said firmly.

She stood up, looking as if she had stolen something. Well, she had.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear. But you must let me know any time you need anything …’ And she crept out again, leaving the door open.

I made sure after that, that whoever went out, shut it; and I took no notice when the handle turned, timid but insistent, and I heard her call, Mrs Somers, Mrs Somers, can I get you anything?

Supposing I were to write Mrs Penny’s day? Oh no, no, no, I really can’t face that, I can’t.

I have been on the telephone for hours with Joyce in Wales. We have not been able to talk at all, not for months. But now she rings me, I ring her, and we talk. Sometimes we are quiet, for minutes, thinking of all the fields, the hedges, the mountains, the time between us. We talk about her marriage, her children, my marriage, my mother, our work. We do not talk about Maudie. She makes it absolutely clear, no. She has said that she is going to the States. Not, now, because she is afraid of being alone when she is old, because she knows she is alone and does not care. But it is the children, after all the insecurity, the misery, they want two parents in one house. Even though they are nearly grown up? I cannot help insisting, and Joyce laughs at me.

I said to her, ‘Joyce, I want to tell you about Maudie, you know, the old woman.’

And Joyce said, ‘Look, I don’t want to know, do you understand?’

I said to her, ‘You don’t want to talk about the one real thing that has happened to me?’

‘It didn’t happen to you’ – fierce and insistent – ‘for some reason or other you made it happen.’

‘But it is important to me, it is.’

‘It must be to her, that’s for certain,’ said she, with that dry resentment you hear in people’s voices when sensing imposition.

I said to her, ‘Don’t you think it is odd, Joyce, how all of us, we take it absolutely for granted that old people are something to be outwitted, like an enemy, or a trap? Not that we owe them anything?’

‘I don’t expect my kids to look after me.’

And I felt despair, because now I feel it is an old gramophone record. ‘That’s what you say now, not what you will say then.’

‘I’m going to bow out, when I get helpless, I’m going to take my leave.’

‘That’s what you say now.’

‘How do you know, why are you sure about me?’

‘Because I know now that everyone says the same things, at stages in their lives.’

‘And so I’m going to end up, some crabby old witch, an incontinent old witch – is that what you are saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can tell you this, I am pleased about one thing, I’m putting thousands of miles between myself and my father. He’s an old pet, but enough’s enough.’

‘Who’s going to look after him?’

‘He’ll go into a Home, I expect. That what I shall expect.’

‘Perhaps.’

And so we talk, Joyce and I, for hours, I lying flat on my back in London, trying to outwit the next spasm that will knot my back up, she in an old chintz chair in a cottage on a mountainside, ‘on leave’ from Lilith. But she has sent in her resignation.

I do not ring up my sister. I do not ring up my sister’s children. When I think about them I feel angry. I don’t know why. I feel about these infantile teenagers as Joyce does about me and Maudie: Yes, all right, all right, but not now, I’ll think about it later, I simply haven’t the energy.

Four weeks of doing nothing …

But I have been thinking. Thinking. Not the snap, snap, intuitions-and-sudden-judgements kind, but long slow thoughts. About Maudie. About Lilith. About Joyce. About Freddie. About those brats of Georgie’s.

Before I went back into the office, I visited Maudie. Her hostile little face, but it was a white face, not a yellow one, and that made me feel better about her at once. ‘Hello,’ I said, and she gave me a startled look because I have lost so much weight.

‘So you really have been ill, then, have you?’ said she, in a soft troubled voice, as we sat opposite each other beside that marvellous fire. When I think of her, I see the fire: that sordid horrible room, but the fire makes it glow and welcome you.

‘Yes, of course I have, Maudie. Otherwise I’d have been in.’

Her face turned aside, her hand up to shield it from me.

‘That doctor came in,’ she said at last, in a small lost voice. ‘She called him in.’

‘I know, she told me.’

‘Well, if she is a friend of yours!’

‘You are looking better than you were, so it might have something to do with the doctor!’

‘I put the pills in the toilet!’

‘All of them?’

A laugh broke through her anger. ‘You’re sharp!’

‘But you are looking better.’

‘So you say.’

‘Well,’ I said, taking the risk, ‘it could be a question of your dying before you have to.’

She stiffened all over, sat staring away from me into the fire. It seemed a long time. Then she sighed and looked straight at me. A wonderful look, frightened but brave, sweet, pleading, grateful, and with a shrewd humour there as well.

‘You think that might be it?’

‘For the sake of a few pills,’ I said.

‘They deaden my mind so.’

‘Make yourself take what you can of them.’

And that was a year ago. If I had had time to keep this diary properly, it would have seemed a builder’s yard, bits and odds stacked up, lying about, nothing in place, one thing not more important than another. You wander through (I visited one for an article last week) and see a heap of sand there, a pile of glass here, some random steel girders, sacks of cement, crowbars. That is the point of a diary, the bits and pieces of events, all muddled together. But now I look back through the year and begin to know what was important.

And the most important of all was something I hardly noticed. Niece Kate turned up one night, looking twenty and not fifteen, the way they can these days, but seemed crazy, stammering and posing and rolling her eyes. She had run away from home to live with me, she said; and she was going to be a model. Firm but kind (I thought and think), I said she was going right back home, and if she ever came to spend so much as an afternoon with me, she could be sure I wasn’t going to be like her mother, I wouldn’t wash a cup up after her. Off she went, sulking. Telephone call from Sister Georgie: How can you be so lacking in ordinary human sympathies? Rubbish, I said. Telephone call from niece Jill. She said, ‘I’m ringing you to tell you that I’m not at all like Kate.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

‘If I lived with you, you wouldn’t have to baby me. Mother makes me tired, I’m on your side.’

‘Not as tired as she must permanently be.’

‘Aunt Jane, I want to come and spend the weekend.’

I could easily hear, from her tone, how she saw glamorous Aunt Jane, in Trendy London, with her smart goings-on.

She came. I like her, I admit. A tall, slim, rather lovely girl. Willowy is the word, I think. Will droop if she’s not careful. Dark straight hair: could look lank and dull. Vast grey eyes: mine.

I watched her eyes at work on everything in my flat: to copy in her own home, I wondered? – teenage rebellion, perhaps; but no, it was to plan how she would fit in here, with me.

‘I want to come and live here with you, Aunt Jane.’

‘You want to work in Lilith, become part of my smart and elegant and amazing life?’

‘I’m eighteen. I don’t want to go to university, you didn’t, did you?’

‘You mean, with me as your passport to better things, you don’t need a degree?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You’ve done well in your exams?’

‘I will do well, I promise. I’m taking them in the summer.’

‘Well, let’s think about it then.’

I didn’t think about it. It was all too bizarre: Sister Georgie ensconced in my life, that was how I saw it.

But Jill came again, and I made a point of taking her with me to visit Maudie, saying only that she was an old friend. Maudie has been in better health recently. Her main misery, the incontinence, is checked, she is doing her own shopping, she is eating well. I have been enjoying flying in and out to gossip over a cup of tea. But I am so used to her, have forgotten how she must strike others. Because of this stranger, the beautiful clean girl, Maudie was stiff, reproachful for exposing her. A cold aloof little person, she said yes and no, did not offer us tea, tried to hide the stains down the front of her dress where she has spilled food.

Niece Jill was polite, and secretly appalled. Not at old age; Sister Georgie’s good works will have seen to it that her children will not find that a surprise; but because she had to associate old age and good works with glamorous Aunt Jane.

That evening, eating supper together, she studied me with long covert shrewd looks, while she offered prattle about her siblings and their merry ways.

‘How often do you go in to see her?’ she inquired delicately enough; and I knew how important a moment this was.

‘Every day and sometimes twice,’ I said at once, with firmness.

‘Do you have a lot of friends in, do you go out for parties, dinner parties?’

‘Hardly ever. I work too hard.’

‘But not too hard to visit that old … to visit …’

‘Mrs Fowler. No.’

I took her shopping to buy some decent clothes. She wanted to impress me with her taste, and she did.

But at the time Sister Georgie and her offspring were a very long way down on my agenda.

I have worked, oh how I have worked this year, how I have enjoyed it all. They made me editor. I did not say I would only take it for a year or so, was accepting it only for the perks, the better pension, had other plans. Have finally understood that I am not ambitious, would have been happy to work for ever, just as things were, with Joyce.

Joyce left to live in America. Before she went, a dry, indifferent telephone call.

I said to Phyllis, You’d better have Joyce’s desk, you have done her work long enough. She was installed in half an hour. Her looks of triumph. I watched her, had my face shielded with my hand. (Like Maudie.) Hiding my thoughts.

Cut your losses, Janna, cut your losses, Jane!

I said, When you are settled, we should discuss possible changes. Her sharp alert lift of the head: danger. She does not want changes. Her dreams have been of inheriting what she was wanting so long and envying.

Envy. Jealousy and envy, I’ve always used them interchangeably. A funny thing: once a child would have been taught all this, the seven deadly sins, but in our charming times a middle-aged woman has to look up envy in a dictionary. Well, Phyllis is not jealous, and I don’t believe she ever was. It was not the closeness and friendship of Joyce and me she wanted, but the position of power. Phyllis is envious. All day, her sharp cold criticisms, cutting everyone, everything, down. She started on Joyce. I found myself blazing up into anger, Shut up, I said, you can be catty about Joyce to other people, not me.

Discussions for months, enjoyable for us all, about whether to change Lilith for Martha. Is Lilith the girl for the difficult, anxious eighties?

Arguments for Martha. We need something more workaday, less of an incitement to envy, an image of willing, adaptable, intelligent service.

Arguments for Lilith. People are conditioned to need glamour. In hard times we need our fun. People read fashion in fashion magazines as they read romantic novels, for escape. They don’t intend to follow fashion, they enjoy the idea of it.

I did not have strong opinions one way or the other. Our circulation is only slightly falling. Lilith it will remain.

The contents won’t change.

I brought home the last twelve issues of Lilith to analyse them.

It is a funny thing, while Joyce and I were Lilith, making everything happen, our will behind it, I did not have uneasy moments, asking, Is the life going out of it, is the impetus still there, is it still on a rising current? I know that the impetus is not there now, Lilith is like a boat being taken on a wave, but what made the wave is far behind.

Two thirds of Lilith is useful, informative, performs a service.

In this month’s issue: One. An article about alcoholism.

Nearly all our ideas are filched from New Society and New Scientist. (But then this is true of most of the serious mags and papers.) I once fought a battle with Joyce for us to acknowledge our sources, but failed: Joyce said it would put off our readers. Phyllis rewrote the article, and called it: The Hidden Danger to You and Your Family. Two. An article about abortion laws in various countries. Three. My article about the Seventeenth-Century Kitchen. All garlic and spices! Fruit and meat mixed. Salads with everything in the garden in them. And then the usual features, fashion, food, drink, books, theatre.

I have started my historical novel. Oh, I know only too well why we need our history prettied up. It would be intolerable to have the long heavy weight of the truth there, all grim and painful. No, my story about the milliners of London will be romantic. (After all, when Maudie comes to die she won’t be thinking of trailing out to that freezing smelly lavatory, but of the joyous green fields of Kilburn, and of her German boy, and of the larks the apprentices got up to as they made their lovely hats, good enough for Paris. She will, too, I suppose, be thinking of ‘her man’. But that is an intolerable idea, I can’t stand for that.)

Yesterday, as I drove home, I saw Maudie in the street, an ancient crone, all in black, nose and chin meeting, fierce grey brows, muttering and cursing as she pushed her basket along, and some small boys baiting her.

The thing that at the time I thought was going to be worst turned out not bad at all. Even useful. Even, I believe, pleasurable.

I was standing at the counter of the radio and TV shop down the road, buying a decent radio for Maudie. Beside me, waiting patiently, was an old woman, her bag held open while she muddled inside it, looking for money.

The Indian assistant watched her, and so did I. I was at once matching what I saw with my first meeting with Maudie.

‘I don’t think I’ve got it here, I haven’t got what it costs,’ she said in a frightened hopeless way, and she pushed a minute radio towards him. She meant him to take it to pay for repairs he had done on it. She turned, slowly and clumsily, to leave the shop.

I thought it all out fast, as I stood there. This time I was not helpless in front of an enormous demand because of inexperience, I had known at first look about the old thing. The dusty grey grimy look. The sour reek. The slow carefulness.

I paid for her radio, hastened after her, and caught her up as she was standing waiting to be helped across the street. I went home with her.

For the pleasure of the thing, I rang Puss-in-Boots when I got home.

‘You are the person I saw with Mrs Fowler?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

A silence.

‘Do you mind if I say something?’ said she, efficient, but not without human sympathy. ‘So often we find well-meaning people making things so much worse without intending to.’

‘Worse for whom?’

I was hoping she might laugh, but she is not Vera Rogers.

‘What I mean is, specifically, that often well-meaning people take an interest in some geria – … some old person, but really it is a hang-up of their own, you see they are working out their own problems, really.’

‘I would say that that is almost bound to be true, in one way or another,’ said I, enjoying every minute of this. ‘But while it might or might not be bad for me, the poor old geriatric in question is likely to be pleased, since she is obviously friendless and alone.’

Another silence. Evidently she felt obliged to think out my remarks to their conclusions, in the light of her training. At length she said, ‘I wonder if you’d find an Encounter Group helpful?’

‘Miss Whitfield,’ I said, ‘there’s this old woman, don’t you think you should drop in and visit her?’

‘If she’s so bad, why hasn’t her doctor referred her?’

‘As you know, most of these doctors never go near the old people on their lists, and the old people don’t go near the doctors, because they are afraid of them. Rightly or wrongly. Afraid of being sent away.’

‘That is really a very old-fashioned concept.’

‘The fact is, at some point they do get sent away.’

‘Only when there is no other alternative.’

‘Well, in the meantime, there’s poor Annie Reeves.’

‘I’ll look into it,’ said she. ‘Thank you so much for involving yourself when you must be so busy.’

I then rang Vera.

Vera said, What was her name, her address, her age, her condition. Yes, she knew about Mrs Bates, who lived downstairs, but Annie Reeves had always refused any of the Services.

‘She won’t refuse them now,’ I said.

Vera and I met at the house. I took a morning off work. The door was opened by Mrs Bates, in her fluffy blue dressing gown, and her hair in a blue net.

She looked severely at me, and at Vera. ‘They took Mrs Reeves to hospital last night,’ she said. ‘She fell down. Upstairs. It’s not for the first time. But she hurt her knees. So it would seem.’

Between Vera and me and Mrs Bates vibrated all kinds of comprehension, and Mrs Bates’s disapproving looks were meant to be seen by us.

‘Well, perhaps it’s a good thing, we can get her rooms cleaned.’

‘If you think you can do thirty years’ cleaning in a morning,’ she stated, standing aside to let us in.

The house was built about 1870. Nothing cramped or stinted. A good staircase, with decent landings. Annie Reeves’s place at the top full of light and air. Nice rooms, well proportioned, large windows.

The front room, overlooking the street, larger than the other. Fireplace, blocked up. A brownish wallpaper, which, examined, showed a nice pattern of brown and pink leaves and flowers, very faded and stained. Above the picture rail the paper was ripping off and flapping loose because water had run in from the roof. There was an old hard chair, with torn blue cushions where the stuffing showed, near the fire. Some dressing tables and a chest of drawers. Linoleum, cracked and discoloured. And the bed – but I feel I cannot really do justice to that bed. Double bed, with brown wood headboard and footboard – how can I describe it? The mattress had been worn by a body lying on it always in one place so that the ticking had gone, and the coarse hair inside was a mass of rough lumps and hollows. The pillows had no covers, and were like the mattress, lumps of feathers protruding. There was a tangle of filthy dirty blankets. It was dirty, it was disgusting. And yet we could see no lice in it. It was like a very old bird’s nest, that had been in use for many years. It was like – I cannot imagine how anyone could sleep in it, or on it.

We opened the drawers. Well, that I had seen before, with Maudie, though these were worse. And I wondered, and I wonder now, how are these hoards of rubbish seen by those who let them accumulate?

One of Annie Reeves’s drawers contained – and I make this list for the record: half an old green satinet curtain, with cigarette holes in it; two broken brass curtain rings; a skirt, stained, ripped across the front, of white cotton; two pairs of men’s socks, full of holes; a bra, size 32, of a style I should judge was about 1937, in pink cotton; an unopened packet of sanitary towels, in towelling – never having seen these, I was fascinated, of course; three white cotton handkerchiefs spotted with blood, the memory of a decades-old nosebleed; two pairs of pink celanese knickers that had been put away unwashed, medium size; three cubes of Oxo; a tortoise-shell shoehorn; a tin of dried and cracked whiting for ladies’ summer shoes; three chiffon scarves, pink, blue, and green; a packet of letters postmarked 1910; a cutting from the Daily Mirror announcing World War Two; some bead necklaces, all broken; a blue satin petticoat which had been slit up both sides to the waist to accommodate increasing girth; some cigarette ends.

This had been stirred around and around, it seemed, so that the mess would have to be picked apart, strand by strand. Well, we didn’t have time to deal with that: first things first.

Vera and I went into action. I drove to the first furniture shop and bought a good single bed and a mattress. I had luck, they were delivering that morning. I came back behind the van with two young men to make sure they did deliver, and they carried it upstairs. When they saw what was there, they looked incredulous. As well they might. I bribed them to take the old bed down, with the mattress, to the dustbins. Meanwhile, Vera had bought blankets, sheets, pillows, towels. There was exactly half of one old towel in the place, and it was black. Looking out of the filthy windows, we could see neighbours in their gardens speculating over the mattress, with shakes of the head and tight lips. Vera and I wrestled the mattress to the top of my car, and we took it to the municipal rubbish heap.

When we got back the Special Cleaning Team were on the doorstep. Since the place was far beyond the scope of ordinary Home Helps, this flying squad of intrepid experts had been called in by Vera. They were two weedy young men, amiable and lackadaisical, probably from too much take-away junk. They stood about upstairs in the front room, smiling and grimacing at the filth, and saying, ‘But what can we do?’

‘You can start with buckets of hot water and soda,’ I said. Vera was already looking humorous.

I have not yet mentioned the kitchen. When you went into it, it seemed normal. A good square wooden table in the middle, an adequate gas stove, two very good wooden chairs, each worth at present prices what I would pay for a month’s food, ripped and faded curtains, now black, once green. But the floor, the floor! As you walked over it, it gave tackily, and on examination there was a thick layer of hardened grease and dirt.

The two heroes winced about on the sticky lino, and said, How could they use hot water when there wasn’t any?

‘You heat it on the stove,’ said Vera, mildly.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘aren’t you for the rough work the Home Helps can’t do?’

‘Yes, but there are limits, aren’t there?’ said one of them reproachfully.

‘Someone has got to do it,’ I said.

They did sweep the front room, and pushed a mop hastily over the floor. But over the kitchen floor, they went on strike. ‘Sorry,’ said they, and went off, good-natured to the end.

Vera and I pushed the big table out, with the dresser and the chairs, though they were stuck to the lino with decades of grease. We prised up the lino: it would not come up easily. Under this layer was another, and between them was a half-inch layer of grease and dirt. In all we prised up three layers of lino.

Then Vera had to go home to her family problems.

That weekend I scrubbed the floors, washed down walls and ceilings, emptied drawers, scrubbed them, cleaned a stove encrusted with thirty years of dirt. Finally, I filled plastic bags with this silent story, the detritus of half a lifetime, and took them to the municipal dump.

Mrs Bates marked my comings and goings up and down the stairs, sitting in her little parlour, drinking tea, and from time to time offering me a cup.

‘No, I haven’t been up there, not for ten years,’ she said. ‘If you give her an inch, it’s make me a cup of tea, fetch me this and that. I’m nearly ten years older than she is. Are you going to be her Good Neighbour, may I ask? No?’

Her rosy old face was distressed, reproachful. ‘You had her old mattress out there for everyone to see. Outside my place – they’ll think … And your hands, all in that dirt and muck …’

What was upsetting her as much as anything was that it was not for me, such a lady and all, to do this filthy work.

She gave me a key. I took it knowing she was offering me more than I was ready to take. Oh, I’m under no illusions now! Every street has in it several, perhaps a dozen, old women, old men, who can only just cope, or suddenly can’t cope; who dream of absent daughters and sons and granddaughters, and anyone coming near them must beware, beware! For into that terrible vacuum you can be sucked before you know it. No, I shall not put myself, again, into the situation I am with Maudie, who has only one friend in the world.

I drop in, for a few minutes, in the character they assigned me, because I am not in any of their categories, am unexplainable, of wayward impulsive benevolence. My main problem is that Maudie should never know I am visiting anyone else, for it would be a betrayal. Eliza Bates, Annie Reeves, live around the corner from Maudie.

If I take Annie a present, I have to take Eliza one, for Eliza watches me as I go up past her to the top floor. Eliza was in service, and knows what is good, and gets it, thus exemplifying, I suppose, To those who have will be given. I take her bread from the good bakery, a new romantic novel, a certain brand of Swiss chocolate, chaste white roses with green fern. Annie knows what she likes and that British is best, and I take her chocolate like sweet mud, a sickening wine that is made specially for old ladies, and small pretty flowers tied with satin ribbon.

Annie Reeves was in hospital for six weeks. She bruised a leg, but although they tell her she could walk again properly, she is on a walking frame and refuses. She is now a prisoner at the top of that house, with a commode that must be emptied, and Meals on Wheels, Home Help, a nurse.

Eliza Bates disapproves utterly of Annie Reeves, who let herself go, who was drinking up there by herself – oh yes, Eliza Bates knew what went on! – who let the dirt accumulate until Eliza sat imagining she could hear the bugs crawling in the walls and the mice scuttling. ‘I’m not like her,’ says Eliza, firmly, to me, with a little churchy sniff.

‘I’m not like her,’ says Annie, meaning that Eliza is a hypocrite, she never was interested in church until her husband died, and now look at her.

Annie yearns for the friendship of Eliza. Eliza has spent years isolating herself from the woman upstairs who has so rapidly gone to pieces, and who is not ashamed now of stumping about on a frame when there’s no need, and of getting an army of social workers in to her every day. They call each other Mrs Bates, Mrs Reeves. They have lived in this house forty years.

The Welfare are trying to ‘rehabilitate’ Annie. I would have reacted, only a few weeks ago, to the invitation to this campaign, with derision, even with cries of But it is cruelty! Since then, I’ve seen Eliza’s life, and understand why these experts with the old will fight the lethargy of age even in a man or woman of ninety or more.

I have become fond of Eliza; this quite apart from admiring her. If I am like that at ninety! we all exclaim; and feel the threats of the enemy ahead weakened.

Eliza Bates’s day.

She wakes at about eight, in the large front that was where she slept in the big double bed with her husband. But she has a nice single bed now, with a bedside table, and a little electric fire. She likes to read in bed, romantic novels mostly. The room has old-fashioned furniture: again this mixture of ‘antiques’ and stuff that wouldn’t fetch fifty pence. It is very cold, but she is used to it, and goes to bed with a shawl around her and hot bottles.

She makes herself a real breakfast, for she learned long ago, she says, never to let yourself get sloppy with meals. Then she does out one of her three rooms, but not as thoroughly as she once did. About eleven she makes herself coffee. Perhaps one of her many friends comes in. She has a special friend, a much younger woman, of about seventy, from opposite, who is ‘very young for her age’, wears fancy hats and clothes, and is a tonic for Eliza, always running over with something she has cooked, or making Eliza go out to the pictures. Every day Eliza goes to a lunch club, run by the Welfare for old people, and may afterwards detail everything, such as that the meat was boiled to rags, the sprouts too hard, or the rice pudding had just the right amount of nutmeg. For she was once a cook in a family. Until recently she stayed for a couple of hours to ‘work’: old people make calendars, paint Christmas cards, do all kinds of small jobs, some very well, for they may use skills of a lifetime. But now, says Eliza, she feels she must begin to cut down a little, she is not as strong as she was. After the lunch, and a cup of tea and a chat, she and one, or two, or three friends will go shopping. These are the old ladies I once did not see at all but, since Maudie, have watched creeping about the streets with their bags and their baskets – and I could never have guessed the companionableness, the interest of their lives, the gaiety. They love shopping, it is clear; and what shop they will patronize and what not on a given day is the result of the most intricate and ever-shifting tides of feeling. That Indian doesn’t keep a clean shop, but he was observed sweeping out yesterday, so they’ll give him a second chance. They’ll go to the supermarket this week, because there’s a new girl with a lovely smile who puts things into their baskets for them. The man at the hardware spoke roughly to one of them last week, and so he will lose the custom of five or six people for weeks, if not for ever. All this is much more to their point than cheap lines of biscuits or a reduction in the price of butter for old-age pensioners. After shopping, Eliza brings one of them home with her to tea, or goes to them. When she gets home she sits down for a little at the kitchen window, where she can see all the washing lines that dance about the sky when there’s a wind, and she looks down into the jungle of the garden, and remembers how the lilac there was planted on that afternoon thirty-five years ago, and that corner now so overgrown that used to be such a picture.

She is rather afraid of early evening, so I have discovered. Once, going past to Annie, I saw her, her cheek on her hand. She turned her face away as I said, Oh, Eliza, good evening! – and then, when I went in, concerned, she gestured at the other wooden chair and I sat down.

‘You see,’ said she, ‘you should keep busy, because if you don’t, the grumps lie in wait for you …’ And she wiped her eyes and made herself laugh.

And then, amazingly, she put on her hat again.

‘Eliza, you aren’t going out? Shouldn’t you rest?’

‘No. I should not. I must keep moving if I feel low …’ And she went off again, creeping around the block, a dumpy brave little figure in the dusk.

She does not bother with supper, perhaps a piece of cake, or a salad. She is often visited by her friend from opposite after supper, or she listens to the radio. She doesn’t like the telly. And so she spends her evening, until she goes off to bed, very late, often after midnight.

And, two or three times a week, from spring to late autumn, she is off on coach trips to famous places, or beauty spots, organized by the Welfare or one of the two churches she uses. For Eliza is very religious. She is a Baptist, and she also goes to the Church of England church. She goes to church on Sundays twice, mornings and evenings, and to church teas and bazaars and jumble sales, to lectures on Missionary Endeavour in India and in Africa. She is continually attending weddings and christenings.

When she asked me what I did and I told her, toning it down a little, she understood everything, for she has worked for people in positions of responsibility, and asked me all kinds of questions that had never occurred to me, such as: Did I think it right, having no children, taking the job of a man who might have a family to keep? And loves to talk about – not the clothes she wore half a century ago – but the fashions she sees on the streets on the young girls, which make her laugh, she says, they seem so crazy, they seem as if the girls are having such a good time. She likes to see them, but she wonders if they know what it is like not ever to have a new dress, only what could be got in their sizes at the pawnshop.

For her poor mother had been left by her husband one day. He went off and was never heard of again. She had three small children, two girls and a boy. The boy, says Eliza, was not up to anything, he was born lazy, and would never work to help out, and he too went off when he was fourteen, and never sent back so much as a card at Christmas. Eliza’s mother had worked for the two of them. The pawnshop at the corner had their sheets, and often their clothes, from the Mondays to the Fridays, when they were redeemed again. And the woman who kept it used to put aside a good coat for the girls, or a pair of shoes she knew would fit. And she would say, ‘Well, if that poor soul can’t get in in time to redeem it, you’ll have first chance.’

Eliza brought out one evening an old postcard, circa World War One, of a ragged orphan girl with bare feet. When I had examined it, thinking how romantic, for that was how the poor girl was presented, all the harshness taken away from the truth, Eliza said, ‘That girl was me – no, I mean, I was like that. When I was twelve I was out scrubbing steps for the gentry for a penny. And I had no shoes, and my feet were sick with the cold and blue, too … They were wicked times,’ says Eliza, ‘wicked. And yet I seem to remember we were happy. I can remember laughing and singing with my sister, though we were often enough hungry. And my poor little mother crying because she could not keep up with herself …’

Eliza, disliking television, will go across the road to watch Upstairs, Downstairs. This makes me cross; but then I ask myself, Why then am I into writing romantic novels? The truth is intolerable, and that is all there is to it!

Gracious Lady!

It occurred to me that Hermione Whitfield and the rest of them (male and female) and Vera and myself are in fact the legitimate descendants of the Victorian philanthropist lady, and have taken her place.

Here is my new romantic novel:

My heroine is no titled lady, but the wife of a well-off man in the City. She lives in Bayswater, one of the big houses near Queensway. She has five children, to whom she is a devoted mother. Her husband is not a cruel man, but insensitive. I described him using language frankly stolen from a letter in one of the virulent Women’s Movement newspapers Phyllis used to leave on my desk. He is incapable of understanding her finer points. He has a mistress, whom he keeps in Maida Vale, much to our heroine’s relief. As for her, she occupies herself in visiting the poor, of whom there are very many. Her husband does not resent these activities, because it takes her mind off his. Every day she is out and about, dressed in her simple but beautiful clothes, accompanied by a sweet little maid who helps her carry containers of soup and nourishing puddings.

Of course, I do not allow that these invalids and old people she sustains are in any way difficult (though one, an ancient who carries wounds from the Crimean War, she describes with a small deprecating smile as difficile). None of them screams and rages, like Maudie, or repeats the same ten or twelve sentences for an hour or two hours of a visit, as if you haven’t heard them before hundreds of times, or gets sulky and sullen. No, they may be living in dreadful poverty, never knowing where their next crust is coming from, living on tea and marge and bread and potatoes (except for the offerings of the Gracious Lady), they may have not enough coal, and have vile or brutal husbands or wives dying of tuberculosis or childbed fever, but they are always fine and gallant human beings, and they and Margaret Anstruther enjoy friendships based on real appreciation of each other’s qualities. Margaret A. certainly does not have the vapours, the languors, the faints; I do not permit a suggestion of the dreadful psychosomatic illnesses those poor women actually suffered from. For she does not allow herself to be bored, which was the real cause of lying for years on a sofa with a bad back or the migraine. (I have been brooding about writing a critical book called The Contribution of Boredom to Art. Using Hedda Gabler, whose peculiar behaviour was because she was crazy with boredom, as exemplar.) No, Margaret suffers nothing but unspoken love for the young doctor whom she meets often in those poor homes, and who loves her. But he has a difficile invalid wife, and of course these fine souls would never dream of transgressing. They meet over deathbeds, and sickbeds, and alleviate the human condition together, their eyes occasionally meeting, songs without words, and even glistening, very rarely, with the unshed tear.

What a load of old rubbish! Rather like Upstairs, Downstairs, and I adored that and so did everyone else.

But the research I’ve done (extensive) has led me to a real respect for those unsung heroines, the Victorian philanthropist ladies, who were patronized then, probably (how do we know, really?) by their husbands, and despised now. A pity they were so often silent about what they did, are so often written about rather than speaking for themselves. For they must have been a really tough breed, knowing by every-day, year-in-year-out slog and effort what Jack London and Dickens and Mayhew got by brief excursions into poverty and then retreating again, enough facts garnered. When I think of what it must have been like for them, going into those homes, late nineteenth century, early twentieth, the sheer, threadbare, cold, grim, grimy dreadfulness of it, worn-out women, rickety children, brutalized men – no, no, I won’t go on. But I know one thing very well, and that is that Maudie and Annie and Eliza are rich and happy compared with those people.

Annie will say, as the helpers go flying in and out, ‘I think of my poor old mum, she had none of this.’

‘What happened to her, then, who looked after her?’

‘She looked after herself.’

‘Did she have her health?’

‘She had shaky hands, she dropped cups and plates a lot. She used to push a chair around as a support when she fell and broke her hip. And we took her in some food and a bit of stout sometimes.’

‘Was she alone then?’

‘She was alone – years. She lived to seventy. I’ve done better than her, haven’t I? By ten years and more!’

I know very well that what I hear from Eliza about her life is not all the truth, probably nothing like it; and I commend her, as I would the writer of a tale well-told. Those long hot summers, with never a cloud! Those outings with her husband! Those picnics in the park! Those Christmases! That group of loving chums, always meeting, never a cross word!

Occasionally there are moments when the veil is lifted, oh only for a moment. She is very condemning, poor Eliza, full of morality, cannot understand how this woman can do that, or that this. She was angry for days over a newspaper story about an elderly woman who left her husband for a young man. It’s filthy, she said, filthy. And, a few moments later, in another voice, a hurrying light dream-voice: If it’d been now I could have left, I could have left him, and been rid of …

I am very much afraid that, yet again, what it was she wanted to be rid of was sex …

Eliza has not had children. She wanted them.

Did she ever go to the doctor and ask?

‘Oh yes, I did, and he said there was nothing wrong with me, I should ask my husband to come.’

‘I suppose he wouldn’t?’

‘Oh, you couldn’t ask him a thing like that, he wouldn’t have heard of it,’ she cried. ‘Oh no, Mr Bates knew his rights, you see …’

Downstairs, Eliza, an example to us all …

Upstairs, the deplorable Annie Reeves.

Vera Rogers and I have lunch, half an hour as we fly past each other.

I say to Vera, ‘What interests me is this: when did Annie make that decision to become as she is now? For we make decisions before we know it.’

‘Oh no, it’s not like that at all. Eliza has always been like that, Annie has always been like that!’

‘What a pessimist. We don’t change, then?’

‘No! Look at Maudie Fowler! She was always like that, I expect. Recently I met a cousin after twenty years – nothing changed, not a syllable or a habit.’

‘Good God, Vera, you’re enough to make one want to jump off a cliff!’

‘I don’t see that at all. No, people are what they are all through them.’

‘Then why are you trying so hard with Annie?’

‘You’ve got me there. I don’t think she’ll change. I’ve seen it before, she’s decided to give up. But let’s try a bit longer, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll know we’ve done our best.’

Our campaign for Annie is everything that is humane and intelligent. There she is, a derelict old woman, without friends, some family somewhere but they find her condition a burden and a scandal and won’t answer her pleas; her memory going, though not for the distant past, only for what she said five minutes ago; all the habits and supports of a lifetime fraying away around her, shifting as she sets a foot down where she expected firm ground to be … and she, sitting in her chair, suddenly surrounded by well-wishing smiling faces who know exactly how to set everything to rights.

Look at Eliza Bates – everyone cries. See how she has so many friends, goes on so many trips, is always out and about … But Annie will not try to walk properly, go out, start a real life again. ‘Perhaps when summer comes,’ she says.

Because of Eliza Bates I have understood how many trips, jaunts, bazaars, parties, meetings Maudie could be enjoying, but does not. I thought it all over. I rang Vera, whose voice at once, when she knew what I was asking, became professionally tactful.

‘What are you saying?’ I asked at last. ‘You mean, there’s no point in Maudie Fowler starting anything new because she’s not likely to stay as well as she is for long?’

‘Well, it is a bit of a miracle, isn’t it? It must be getting on for a year now, she’s holding her own, but …’

I went off to Maudie one Saturday, with some cherry liqueur I brought back from Amsterdam, where I was for the spring show. Like Eliza, Maudie knows, and enjoys, the best. We sat opposite each other drinking, and the room smelled of cherry. Outside drawn curtains a thin spring rain trickled noisily from a broken gutter. She had refused to let the Greek’s workmen in to mend it.

‘Maudie, I want to ask you something without your getting cross with me.’

‘Then I suppose it’s something bad?’

‘I want to know why you didn’t ever go on these trips to country places the Council organizes? Did you ever go on one of their holidays? What about the Lunch Centre? There are all these things …’

She sat shading her little face with a hand grimed with coal dust. She had swept out her chimney that morning. Fire: she tells me she has nightmares about it. ‘I could die in my bed here,’ says she, ‘from smoke, not knowing.’

She said, ‘I’ve kept myself to myself and I see no reason to change.’

‘I can’t help wondering about all the good times you could have had.’

‘Did I tell you about the Christmas party, it was before I met you? The Police have a party. I got up on the stage and did a knees-up. I suppose they didn’t like me showing my petticoats.’

I imagined Maudie, lifting her thick black skirts to show her stained knickers, a bit tipsy, enjoying herself.

‘I don’t think it would be that,’ I said.

‘Then why haven’t they asked me again? Oh, don’t bother, I wouldn’t go now, anyway.’

‘And all these church things. You used to go to church, didn’t you?’

‘I’ve been. I went once to a tea, and then I went again because that Vicar said I wasn’t fair to them. I sat there, drinking my tea in a corner, and all of them, not so much as saying welcome, chatter chatter among themselves, I might as well have not been there.’

‘Do you know Eliza Bates?’

‘Mrs Bates? Yes, I know her.’

‘Well then?’

‘If I know her why do I have to like her? You mean, we are of an age, and that’s a reason for sitting gossiping together. I wouldn’t have liked her young, I’m sure of that, I didn’t like her married, she gave her poor man a hard time of it she did, couldn’t call his home his own, I don’t like what I’ve seen of her since, she’s never her own woman, she’s always with ten or more of them, chitter-chatter, gibble-gabble, so why should I like her now enough to spend my dinners and teatimes with her? I’ve always liked to be with one friend, not a mess of people got together because they’ve got nowhere else to go.’

‘I was only thinking you might have had an easier time of it.’

‘I’m not good enough for Eliza Bates. And I haven’t been these last twenty years. Oh, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have enjoyed a bit of an outing here or there, I sometimes go up to the church when they’ve got a bazaar on, I look out for a scarf or a good pair of boots, but I might not be there at all for all the notice those church women take of me.’

‘Why don’t you come out again to the park? Or I could take you for a trip on the river. Why not, it’s going to be summer soon?’

‘I’m happy as I am, with you coming in to sit with me. I think of that afternoon in the Rose Garden, and that’s enough.’

‘You’re stubborn, Maudie.’

‘I’ll think my own thoughts, thank you!’

Some weeks after she had left, a telephone call from Joyce, at five in the morning.

‘Are you ill?’ was what came out of me; as if I’d written her off somewhere inside me.

‘No, should I be?’

‘Ringing so early.’

‘I’m just off to bed. Oh, of course, the time difference.’

‘It’s all right, I’m just getting up to start work.’

‘Good old Janna,’ says Joyce, in a new vague way, and it is derisive.

‘Oh, Joyce, are you drunk?’

‘You certainly are not!’

‘Did you ring me up actually to tell me how it is all going? Flat? Husband? Children? Job?’

‘Certainly not. I thought to myself, how is Janna, how is my old mate, Janna? So how are you? And how is that old woman?’

I said, ‘As far as I can make out, she is suspected of having cancer.’

‘Congratulations,’ says Joyce.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Cancer. It’s all over the place. Well, I don’t see that it’s worse than anything else. Do you? I mean, TB, meningitis, multiple sclerosis …’ And Joyce went on, a long list of diseases, and I sat there thinking, she can’t be all that drunk. No, she’s pretending to be for some reason. Soon she was talking about how diseases fall out of use. Her very odd phrase. ‘If you read Victorian novels, they died like flies of diseases we don’t have now at all. Like diphtheria. Like scarlet fever. Like, for that matter, TB.’

And so we went on, for half an hour or more. At last I said, ‘Joyce, this is costing you a fortune.’

‘So it is. Good old Janna. Everything has to be paid for?’

‘Well, yes, it has been my experience.’

‘Because you have made it your experience.’ And she rang off.

Soon she rang again. Five in the morning.

‘I like to think of you working away there, me old pal, while I fiddle at parties …’

‘I’ve done a romantic novel,’ I told her. ‘You’re the first I’ve told. And they like it.’

‘Romance … quite right. I, for one, have never had enough of it. I look back and what I see is, me always working too hard for any fun. And that’s what you see when you look back, Janna. Obviously.’

‘I’m having fun now.’

A long, long silence.

‘Don’t tell me, because I won’t believe it.’

‘I enjoy writing these romantic novels. I’ve started another. Gracious Lady, do you like it?’

‘Gracious. That’s a word I’ve understood. I’ve come on an important clue to the American female character. Graciousness. It comes from Snow White. Generations of American girls see Snow White, model themselves on her … bestow themselves graciously on this one and on that one thereafter …’

‘And I enjoy writing serious articles.’

‘You must be working too hard to enjoy yourself.’

‘Nonsense. It’s because I am working so hard. And I enjoy the old ladies. I enjoy that world, what goes on, I never suspected it even existed before.’

‘Good for you.’

Joyce again: ‘Another party?’ I asked.

And she said, ‘That’s what one does, here.’

I always ask her what she is wearing, so as to get a picture of her, and she always says, Exactly what everyone else is.

For she says the Americans are the most conforming people on earth, and even when they rebel they do it in droves, and always wear the same as the other non-conformers. She was taken to task several times for her style. She thought it was because she was really too old for it, but no, she was asked severely why the British ‘always look like gipsies’. It is our wild romantic nature, said she, but abandoned her style, cut her hair, and now has a wardrobe full of well-cut trousers, shirts, sweaters, and variations on the little dress. When you enter a room, she says, the eyes of everyone present give you the once-over to make sure you are inside the prescribed limits.

She is enjoying herself, because that is what one does. Her husband is enjoying himself: he has a new girlfriend, who happens to be Joyce’s colleague. Good God! cries Joyce, at one, two, three in the morning (there) before she goes to bed, to me surrounded by early-morning cups of coffee (here), when I think of all that ridiculous anguish before I left! Here no one dreams of staying married for one second after one of them has stopped enjoying it.

The children too are enjoying themselves, and look on their native land as backward and barbarous, because we are poor and do not have such well-stocked refrigerators.

There has been a new development in the office: politics.

I don’t know whether to count it as serious, or not. I think, probably, serious. There is something in the air, something new, I don’t like it, but then, I am getting on, and I don’t like change … because of this was tolerant, to start with. Patronizing? But I saw them as patronizing. Revolutions are hardly my line, but they have after all not been absent in my lifetime, and it seems to me that I do not deserve to be tolerated as I am being. As I was being. For I have put my foot down. Suddenly, as I moved about the office, it seemed that I was met by groups or couples who fell silent, as if their exchanges were too deep for understanding by this outsider. Yet what they say we have all heard a thousand times; the political cliches scattered about, I could not take them seriously. Most of all I could not take it seriously when these young ones, all middle-class, go on about middle-class values, the destruction of, the replacement by, the rottenness of, the necessity to expose of. There is, actually, one really working-class young man in the place, a photographer, and his father is a printer: which remark could lead me into a long analysis of what is and isn’t working class in this our so middle-class land. But I am not going to follow these schoolmen into hair-splitting. What is real about them is not the infinite variety of their religious stances, their dogmatism, but the passions they bring to their arguments. There is a spirit in the office that was never there before, a snarling, envious nasty atmosphere, which makes it inevitable that everyone has to criticize, to diminish anyone not aligned in precisely the same way as themselves; and, as well, to criticize and condemn most of the time everyone in the same group who temporarily or otherwise disagrees with them. What gets me about all this is that we have learned about all this from a thousand sources, books, TV, radio, and yet these youngsters go on as if they are doing something for the first time, as if they have invented all these stale phrases.

It was about the time I was becoming really perturbed by all this that I understood what Vera had been telling me.

Vera and I enjoy our lunches, baked beans or an omelette and a cup of coffee, as we fly around. We enjoy what we do, or rather, to be accurate, we enjoy being able to do it, and do it well.

‘Gawd,’ says Vera, sitting down with a flop, letting a pile of files two feet thick drop to the floor as she reaches for a cigarette, ‘Gawd, Janna, I tell you, if I had only known when I applied, no you sit there and let me blow off steam, you’ll never believe it …’

‘I wouldn’t have,’ I say, ‘if I hadn’t been watching it in my own office.’

What I would never believe is that it is now Thursday, and there have been seven meetings already that week which she ought to have attended.

‘These meetings are about nothing, nothing, Janna, please believe me, any sensible person could fix whatever it is up in five minutes with a few words. There are so many meetings because they adore meetings, meetings are their social life, honestly, Janna, it is the truth. It took me a long time to cotton on, but once I saw it … What is the matter with them? To begin with, when I started, I asked myself if there was something wrong with me. You know how it is when you are new? They’d say, Aren’t you going to come to this meeting, that meeting? I’d go. Do you know, they actually set up meetings where they act out each other’s roles, can you beat it? They say, Now you be an old woman, you be her husband. Or they discuss this and that. Do you know, there are some part-time workers who are never out of the office at all actually working with the clients? My assistant, so-called, she’s part-time, and she hasn’t been out of the office since Monday morning, she’s been at meetings. I believe she thinks that is what her job is. And it’s every evening after work, every blasted night. And then they go off to the pub together, exactly the same lot of people. They can’t bear to separate. And if you think that’s the end of it, no, the birthdays, the anniversaries, I tell you, if they could hire a bed of Ware large enough, they’d spend all their lives together in it, having a meeting. Well, I did go to some, I did my best, and then I said, Count me out. So they think I’m very odd now. They are always saying to me, as if I were peculiar, and perhaps I am, though I doubt it, There’s this meeting tonight, aren’t you going to come? I say, Tell me all about it in the morning. You can explain it all to me, I’m stupid, you see, I don’t seem to be able to understand politics.’

I went back to the office armed by this new insight. It was all true. They call meetings every day, to discuss work hours, lunch hours, work loads, management, the policy of the mag, me, the political bias of the mag, the state of the nation. Many of them in working time. I called Ted Williams, the Trade Union representative, and said as far as I was concerned he was the only sensible person among the lot and I was going to forbid all meetings except for those which he called. He laughed. He thinks these middle-class revolutionaries a joke. (Let’s hope they don’t have the last laugh.)

I called a meeting of the entire staff, nearly a hundred present, and I said this was the last meeting permitted in working hours except for those convened by the Trade Union representative. And from now on, they could conduct their social lives outside the office. Shock. Horror. But of course they were thoroughly enjoying this confrontation with the Enemy, namely me, namely the Force of Reaction.

I had lunch with Vera, and I said to her, as she moaned about that week’s ten meetings, ‘Hold your horses. You seem to think this is a disease peculiar to your Welfare Workers. No, it’s a national disease. It’s everywhere, like a plague. Meetings, talking, it’s a way of not getting anything done. It’s their social life. They are lonely people, most of them, without adequate social outlets. Therefore, meetings. Anyway, I’ve forbidden them in Lilith.’

‘You haven’t!’

‘I’ve instituted one meeting a week. Everyone has to come. No one can speak at all for more than a minute unless it is extremely urgent. I mean urgent. And so they go to the pub to have meetings about me.’

‘The thing is, poor creatures, they don’t know it’s their social lives, they really believe it’s politics.’

I sit here, conscientiously looking back over my year … I look at that word, conscientiously. I am not going to repudiate it! As I look I think of Joyce’s lazy, affectionate: Good old Janna.

Well, all right. As I sit here, conscientiously looking over the year, I note again how hard I have worked, how hard. And yet, as I said to my dear niece Jill when she rang to inquire, ‘I hope you aren’t working too hard, Aunt Jane?’ meaning, Oh, don’t work too hard, don’t be boring, don’t do difficult and dutiful things, what will happen to my dream of glamour and easy fun? – ‘I’ve never in my life worked as hard as your mother, and that would be true if I worked twenty hours a day.’

‘Can I come and stay the weekend?’

‘Please do. You can help me with something.’

She came. That was only a month ago.

I told her to write an article about the influence of two world wars on fashion. I watched her face. I had already tried the idea out in the think session. I said that, in the First World War, everyone in the world became used to pictures of masses of people in uniform. For the first time on that scale. Conditioned to the idea of uniforms, you are more amenable to following fashion; following fashion, you are more amenable to uniforms. In the Second World War, everyone in the world saw millions of people in uniform. The boss nation wore tight sexually provocative trousers, buttocks emphasized. Since the Second World War, everyone over the world wears tight sexually emphatic uniforms. A world fashion. Because of a world war.

I made this dry and factual, no excitement in it. I wanted to see how she would react. She listened. I watched her. Strained she was, but trying.

‘I don’t think I can write an article like that.’

‘Yet, or not at all?’

‘Yet.’

‘When are you sitting your exams?’

‘In a few weeks. Are you still seeing Mrs … ?’

‘Mrs Fowler? Yes, I am.’

Suddenly her passionately rejecting face, her real distress, which told me how threatened she felt.

Just as I would have done – alas, so recently – she cried out: ‘Why doesn’t her family look after her? Why doesn’t the Welfare put her into a Home? Why does she have to impose on you?’

I’ve just taken three weeks’ leave. I have a lot owed to me. I’ve never taken all that I could, even when Freddie was alive. Nor did Freddie. It has occurred to me: was Freddie’s office his home? If so, it was only because of what he had to put up with from me. We went for short motoring holidays, usually in France, and ate and slept well. We were pleased to get home.

Phyllis was, of course, delighted to be left in charge. She has a look of satisfaction, which she has to keep hidden. Why? Everything has always been given to her so freely and easily. Take her clothes. Her style, mine adapted, couldn’t be better for her. Soft silky clothes, everything sleek and subtle, golden brown hair. Sometimes little frills at wrists and throat – I could never wear those, alas, I’m too solid. Slim good gold jewellery showing in the opening of a plain coffee shirt that has the gentlest shine to it, a fine chain visible under a cuff whose thin stripes echo it. She goes to my dressmaker, my hairdresser, my knitter, she uses the shops I told her about. And yet it is as if she has had to steal all this expertise from me: because I unfairly kept it from her. Thus, when she sees me observing her new outfit, thinking, oh well done, Phyllis!, she has the need to hide the small superior smile that goes with: That’s right, I’ve got one over on you! Amazing girl.

It is not only I who am wondering if Phyllis’s new lusciousness mirrors something inward. I watch her in the photographers’ rooms. They, their working areas, have always been the pole, the balance, to our office, Joyce’s and mine – Phyllis’s and mine. Two power centres. Michael, who never took any notice of the girl, is now interested. And she in him. Quite different from me and Freddie: slapdash, casual, equal. At any rate, neither of them ever concedes an inch. I watch them in a characteristic scene. He is slanted back against a trestle table, legs crossed at the ankle, thus exposing the full length of his front in soft corduroy, the promising bulge on show. His head is slightly averted, so that he smiles at her across the curve of his cheek. He is good-looking, this Michael, but until just recently I haven’t been faced with it. And Phyllis has one buttock on a desk, the other leg a long angled curve. In something pretty and soft, like black suede, or an unexpected bright colour, she presents the length of herself to him, and her hair slips about her face as they discuss – and oh how competently – their work. He lets his eyes travel up her body in a sober appreciation that mocks itself, and she opens her eyes in sardonic appraisal of the soft bulge presented to her. Then they go off to lunch, where, more often than not, they discuss layout or advertising.

I enjoy watching this game, but could not let my enjoyment be evident, for Phyllis would feel something was being stolen from her. Oh, Joyce, I have no one with whom to share these moments.

How I have enjoyed my three weeks. I did not go away, because I could not bear to leave Maudie for so long: if that is crazy, then let it be.

Joyce rang up. She is drinking far too much.

‘Why do you never ring me, Janna?’

‘It is your place to ring me. It was you who went away.’

‘God, you’re relentless.’

‘Very well, I am.’