The Diaries of Jane Somers

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

‘He will marry her.’

‘Is that what you mind?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Or think they can.’

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

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

‘You are prepared to be a faculty wife?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am sorry, Maudie,’ I said.

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

‘Have you been well?’

‘Well enough.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday.

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

I write that, and wonder at it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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