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‘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.
