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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!’
