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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.’
