The Diaries of Jane Somers

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‘Did you ring me up actually to tell me how it is all going? Flat? Husband? Children? Job?’

‘Certainly not. I thought to myself, how is Janna, how is my old mate, Janna? So how are you? And how is that old woman?’

I said, ‘As far as I can make out, she is suspected of having cancer.’

‘Congratulations,’ says Joyce.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Cancer. It’s all over the place. Well, I don’t see that it’s worse than anything else. Do you? I mean, TB, meningitis, multiple sclerosis …’ And Joyce went on, a long list of diseases, and I sat there thinking, she can’t be all that drunk. No, she’s pretending to be for some reason. Soon she was talking about how diseases fall out of use. Her very odd phrase. ‘If you read Victorian novels, they died like flies of diseases we don’t have now at all. Like diphtheria. Like scarlet fever. Like, for that matter, TB.’

And so we went on, for half an hour or more. At last I said, ‘Joyce, this is costing you a fortune.’

‘So it is. Good old Janna. Everything has to be paid for?’

‘Well, yes, it has been my experience.’

‘Because you have made it your experience.’ And she rang off.

Soon she rang again. Five in the morning.

‘I like to think of you working away there, me old pal, while I fiddle at parties …’

‘I’ve done a romantic novel,’ I told her. ‘You’re the first I’ve told. And they like it.’

‘Romance … quite right. I, for one, have never had enough of it. I look back and what I see is, me always working too hard for any fun. And that’s what you see when you look back, Janna. Obviously.’

‘I’m having fun now.’

A long, long silence.

‘Don’t tell me, because I won’t believe it.’

‘I enjoy writing these romantic novels. I’ve started another. Gracious Lady, do you like it?’

‘Gracious. That’s a word I’ve understood. I’ve come on an important clue to the American female character. Graciousness. It comes from Snow White. Generations of American girls see Snow White, model themselves on her … bestow themselves graciously on this one and on that one thereafter …’

‘And I enjoy writing serious articles.’

‘You must be working too hard to enjoy yourself.’

‘Nonsense. It’s because I am working so hard. And I enjoy the old ladies. I enjoy that world, what goes on, I never suspected it even existed before.’

‘Good for you.’

Joyce again: ‘Another party?’ I asked.

And she said, ‘That’s what one does, here.’

I always ask her what she is wearing, so as to get a picture of her, and she always says, Exactly what everyone else is.

For she says the Americans are the most conforming people on earth, and even when they rebel they do it in droves, and always wear the same as the other non-conformers. She was taken to task several times for her style. She thought it was because she was really too old for it, but no, she was asked severely why the British ‘always look like gipsies’. It is our wild romantic nature, said she, but abandoned her style, cut her hair, and now has a wardrobe full of well-cut trousers, shirts, sweaters, and variations on the little dress. When you enter a room, she says, the eyes of everyone present give you the once-over to make sure you are inside the prescribed limits.

She is enjoying herself, because that is what one does. Her husband is enjoying himself: he has a new girlfriend, who happens to be Joyce’s colleague. Good God! cries Joyce, at one, two, three in the morning (there) before she goes to bed, to me surrounded by early-morning cups of coffee (here), when I think of all that ridiculous anguish before I left! Here no one dreams of staying married for one second after one of them has stopped enjoying it.

The children too are enjoying themselves, and look on their native land as backward and barbarous, because we are poor and do not have such well-stocked refrigerators.

There has been a new development in the office: politics.

I don’t know whether to count it as serious, or not. I think, probably, serious. There is something in the air, something new, I don’t like it, but then, I am getting on, and I don’t like change … because of this was tolerant, to start with. Patronizing? But I saw them as patronizing. Revolutions are hardly my line, but they have after all not been absent in my lifetime, and it seems to me that I do not deserve to be tolerated as I am being. As I was being. For I have put my foot down. Suddenly, as I moved about the office, it seemed that I was met by groups or couples who fell silent, as if their exchanges were too deep for understanding by this outsider. Yet what they say we have all heard a thousand times; the political cliches scattered about, I could not take them seriously. Most of all I could not take it seriously when these young ones, all middle-class, go on about middle-class values, the destruction of, the replacement by, the rottenness of, the necessity to expose of. There is, actually, one really working-class young man in the place, a photographer, and his father is a printer: which remark could lead me into a long analysis of what is and isn’t working class in this our so middle-class land. But I am not going to follow these schoolmen into hair-splitting. What is real about them is not the infinite variety of their religious stances, their dogmatism, but the passions they bring to their arguments. There is a spirit in the office that was never there before, a snarling, envious nasty atmosphere, which makes it inevitable that everyone has to criticize, to diminish anyone not aligned in precisely the same way as themselves; and, as well, to criticize and condemn most of the time everyone in the same group who temporarily or otherwise disagrees with them. What gets me about all this is that we have learned about all this from a thousand sources, books, TV, radio, and yet these youngsters go on as if they are doing something for the first time, as if they have invented all these stale phrases.

It was about the time I was becoming really perturbed by all this that I understood what Vera had been telling me.

Vera and I enjoy our lunches, baked beans or an omelette and a cup of coffee, as we fly around. We enjoy what we do, or rather, to be accurate, we enjoy being able to do it, and do it well.

‘Gawd,’ says Vera, sitting down with a flop, letting a pile of files two feet thick drop to the floor as she reaches for a cigarette, ‘Gawd, Janna, I tell you, if I had only known when I applied, no you sit there and let me blow off steam, you’ll never believe it …’

‘I wouldn’t have,’ I say, ‘if I hadn’t been watching it in my own office.’

What I would never believe is that it is now Thursday, and there have been seven meetings already that week which she ought to have attended.

‘These meetings are about nothing, nothing, Janna, please believe me, any sensible person could fix whatever it is up in five minutes with a few words. There are so many meetings because they adore meetings, meetings are their social life, honestly, Janna, it is the truth. It took me a long time to cotton on, but once I saw it … What is the matter with them? To begin with, when I started, I asked myself if there was something wrong with me. You know how it is when you are new? They’d say, Aren’t you going to come to this meeting, that meeting? I’d go. Do you know, they actually set up meetings where they act out each other’s roles, can you beat it? They say, Now you be an old woman, you be her husband. Or they discuss this and that. Do you know, there are some part-time workers who are never out of the office at all actually working with the clients? My assistant, so-called, she’s part-time, and she hasn’t been out of the office since Monday morning, she’s been at meetings. I believe she thinks that is what her job is. And it’s every evening after work, every blasted night. And then they go off to the pub together, exactly the same lot of people. They can’t bear to separate. And if you think that’s the end of it, no, the birthdays, the anniversaries, I tell you, if they could hire a bed of Ware large enough, they’d spend all their lives together in it, having a meeting. Well, I did go to some, I did my best, and then I said, Count me out. So they think I’m very odd now. They are always saying to me, as if I were peculiar, and perhaps I am, though I doubt it, There’s this meeting tonight, aren’t you going to come? I say, Tell me all about it in the morning. You can explain it all to me, I’m stupid, you see, I don’t seem to be able to understand politics.’

I went back to the office armed by this new insight. It was all true. They call meetings every day, to discuss work hours, lunch hours, work loads, management, the policy of the mag, me, the political bias of the mag, the state of the nation. Many of them in working time. I called Ted Williams, the Trade Union representative, and said as far as I was concerned he was the only sensible person among the lot and I was going to forbid all meetings except for those which he called. He laughed. He thinks these middle-class revolutionaries a joke. (Let’s hope they don’t have the last laugh.)

I called a meeting of the entire staff, nearly a hundred present, and I said this was the last meeting permitted in working hours except for those convened by the Trade Union representative. And from now on, they could conduct their social lives outside the office. Shock. Horror. But of course they were thoroughly enjoying this confrontation with the Enemy, namely me, namely the Force of Reaction.

I had lunch with Vera, and I said to her, as she moaned about that week’s ten meetings, ‘Hold your horses. You seem to think this is a disease peculiar to your Welfare Workers. No, it’s a national disease. It’s everywhere, like a plague. Meetings, talking, it’s a way of not getting anything done. It’s their social life. They are lonely people, most of them, without adequate social outlets. Therefore, meetings. Anyway, I’ve forbidden them in Lilith.’

‘You haven’t!’

‘I’ve instituted one meeting a week. Everyone has to come. No one can speak at all for more than a minute unless it is extremely urgent. I mean urgent. And so they go to the pub to have meetings about me.’

‘The thing is, poor creatures, they don’t know it’s their social lives, they really believe it’s politics.’

I sit here, conscientiously looking back over my year … I look at that word, conscientiously. I am not going to repudiate it! As I look I think of Joyce’s lazy, affectionate: Good old Janna.

Well, all right. As I sit here, conscientiously looking over the year, I note again how hard I have worked, how hard. And yet, as I said to my dear niece Jill when she rang to inquire, ‘I hope you aren’t working too hard, Aunt Jane?’ meaning, Oh, don’t work too hard, don’t be boring, don’t do difficult and dutiful things, what will happen to my dream of glamour and easy fun? – ‘I’ve never in my life worked as hard as your mother, and that would be true if I worked twenty hours a day.’

‘Can I come and stay the weekend?’

‘Please do. You can help me with something.’

She came. That was only a month ago.

I told her to write an article about the influence of two world wars on fashion. I watched her face. I had already tried the idea out in the think session. I said that, in the First World War, everyone in the world became used to pictures of masses of people in uniform. For the first time on that scale. Conditioned to the idea of uniforms, you are more amenable to following fashion; following fashion, you are more amenable to uniforms. In the Second World War, everyone in the world saw millions of people in uniform. The boss nation wore tight sexually provocative trousers, buttocks emphasized. Since the Second World War, everyone over the world wears tight sexually emphatic uniforms. A world fashion. Because of a world war.

I made this dry and factual, no excitement in it. I wanted to see how she would react. She listened. I watched her. Strained she was, but trying.

‘I don’t think I can write an article like that.’

‘Yet, or not at all?’

‘Yet.’

‘When are you sitting your exams?’

‘In a few weeks. Are you still seeing Mrs … ?’

‘Mrs Fowler? Yes, I am.’

Suddenly her passionately rejecting face, her real distress, which told me how threatened she felt.

Just as I would have done – alas, so recently – she cried out: ‘Why doesn’t her family look after her? Why doesn’t the Welfare put her into a Home? Why does she have to impose on you?’

I’ve just taken three weeks’ leave. I have a lot owed to me. I’ve never taken all that I could, even when Freddie was alive. Nor did Freddie. It has occurred to me: was Freddie’s office his home? If so, it was only because of what he had to put up with from me. We went for short motoring holidays, usually in France, and ate and slept well. We were pleased to get home.

Phyllis was, of course, delighted to be left in charge. She has a look of satisfaction, which she has to keep hidden. Why? Everything has always been given to her so freely and easily. Take her clothes. Her style, mine adapted, couldn’t be better for her. Soft silky clothes, everything sleek and subtle, golden brown hair. Sometimes little frills at wrists and throat – I could never wear those, alas, I’m too solid. Slim good gold jewellery showing in the opening of a plain coffee shirt that has the gentlest shine to it, a fine chain visible under a cuff whose thin stripes echo it. She goes to my dressmaker, my hairdresser, my knitter, she uses the shops I told her about. And yet it is as if she has had to steal all this expertise from me: because I unfairly kept it from her. Thus, when she sees me observing her new outfit, thinking, oh well done, Phyllis!, she has the need to hide the small superior smile that goes with: That’s right, I’ve got one over on you! Amazing girl.

It is not only I who am wondering if Phyllis’s new lusciousness mirrors something inward. I watch her in the photographers’ rooms. They, their working areas, have always been the pole, the balance, to our office, Joyce’s and mine – Phyllis’s and mine. Two power centres. Michael, who never took any notice of the girl, is now interested. And she in him. Quite different from me and Freddie: slapdash, casual, equal. At any rate, neither of them ever concedes an inch. I watch them in a characteristic scene. He is slanted back against a trestle table, legs crossed at the ankle, thus exposing the full length of his front in soft corduroy, the promising bulge on show. His head is slightly averted, so that he smiles at her across the curve of his cheek. He is good-looking, this Michael, but until just recently I haven’t been faced with it. And Phyllis has one buttock on a desk, the other leg a long angled curve. In something pretty and soft, like black suede, or an unexpected bright colour, she presents the length of herself to him, and her hair slips about her face as they discuss – and oh how competently – their work. He lets his eyes travel up her body in a sober appreciation that mocks itself, and she opens her eyes in sardonic appraisal of the soft bulge presented to her. Then they go off to lunch, where, more often than not, they discuss layout or advertising.

I enjoy watching this game, but could not let my enjoyment be evident, for Phyllis would feel something was being stolen from her. Oh, Joyce, I have no one with whom to share these moments.

How I have enjoyed my three weeks. I did not go away, because I could not bear to leave Maudie for so long: if that is crazy, then let it be.

Joyce rang up. She is drinking far too much.

‘Why do you never ring me, Janna?’

‘It is your place to ring me. It was you who went away.’

‘God, you’re relentless.’

‘Very well, I am.’