The Diaries of Jane Somers

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.