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That is how things happen. Now I am waiting to run into Mrs Rogers somewhere.
Another five weeks have gone. Nothing has changed … and yet of course it must have. Same in the office, with Joyce, same with Maudie. But I’ve met Vera Rogers. On the pavement, she was talking to the old women. They called, she turned, an anxious friendly smile, she was across the street and with me. She is a smallish thin girl. I was actually going to write: a size twelve. When am I going to stop thinking of people first in terms of what they wear? Phyllis asked me recently, what was my sister like, and I said, She wears good jersey suits and good shoes and cashmere. Phyllis laughed exactly the sort of laugh I’d have meant her to, only a year ago.
Vera stood in front of me on the windy pavement, smiling an anxious, warm, apologetic smile. Brown friendly eyes. Pink nail varnish, but chipped. Yes, of course this says something about her: she’s overworked. Clothes down-market Jaeger, pleasant, not exciting. I knew that here she was, ‘the one’. There was not much need for all the opening moves. I said, ‘I was hoping to run into you.’ She said, ‘Yes, I would so much like to talk to you about Mrs Fowler.’ I said, ‘She’s terrified she will be forcibly rehoused.’ She said, ‘Yes, but we can stave it off a bit.’ I said, ‘Meanwhile, what would help her most is Meals on Wheels.’ She said, ‘She’s active, you see, she can get about, she’s not really entitled … but if you think …’ I said, ‘She can’t make herself cook any more, you see, she lives on bits and pieces.’
She began to laugh. She said, ‘I must tell you something really funny, it happened to me last week. I went to see one of my cases, she’s ninety-four. Deaf, arthritic, but she does everything for herself, cooks, cleans, shops. There I was, watching her prepare her lunch. A meat pie, cabbage cooked in soda, and then cream cake. I said to her, Do you ever eat any fresh stuff, fruit or salad? What? she shouted at me.’
Vera took such pleasure in telling me this, but she was anxious too, in case I wouldn’t find it funny, and she touched my arm once or twice, as if to say, Oh, I hope you’ll laugh.
‘You must eat fruit and vegetables, I shouted at her. You need vitamins. Every time I come to see you, I never see a vestige of green, or an apple or an orange. And she said, What, what, what? though I knew she could hear, and then when I repeated it, she said, And how old did you say you were, dear? And then I thought about all my aches and pains, and I’ve been eating all the right things since I was a child.’
And so we laughed, and she looked relieved.
‘I’ve got to get home to the old man,’ said she. ‘I’ll fix the Meals on Wheels. But if we could get a free moment at the same time we could have a real talk.’ And she went running along the street to a yellow VW and nipped off, smartly, into the traffic.
Maudie is so pleased about the meals coming in every midday, though they aren’t very nice. Stodgy and badly cooked.
I have realized how heavy everything is for her. Yes, I knew this before, but not really, until I saw her delight when I said she was on the list for Meals. She thanked me over and over again.
‘You see, you did it, but she wouldn’t, oh no, not she!’
‘Did you ask her?’ I said.
‘What’s the use, I’ve asked often enough, but they say I need a Home Help.’
‘And so you do.’
‘Oh well, if that’s it, then say it! I’ve looked after myself before and I can do without you.’
‘Oh, you are so difficult, Maudie. What’s the matter with a Home Help?’
‘Have you ever had one?’
At which I laughed, and then she laughed.
Now we are nearly into summer.
What has happened since I sat down last to this unfortunate diary of mine? But I don’t want to give it up.
I’ve met Vera Rogers several times, and we talk – on the pavement, once for a snatched half-hour in a cafe. We talk in shorthand, because we neither of us have time.
Once she asked how I got involved with Maudie, and when she heard, said, with a sigh, ‘I had hoped you were really a Good Neighbour, because I know someone who I think might accept a Good Neighbour. She’s difficult, but she’s lonely.’
This was a request, put delicately and with embarrassment, but I said that Maudie was enough.
‘Yes, of course she is,’ she said at once.
I told her what work I do, and then she had to be told why. As if I understood it myself! Why am I bound to this Maudie Fowler as I am? I said, ‘I like her, I really do.’
‘Oh yes, she’s wonderful, isn’t she?’ said Vera warmly. ‘And some of them, you’d like to strangle. I used to feel wicked when I started this work, I believed I had to like them all. And then, when I’d been with some difficult old cat for an hour, and I couldn’t get anywhere, I’d find myself thinking, God, I’ll hit her one of these days, I will.’
‘Well, I’ve felt that about Maudie often enough.’
‘Yes, but there’s something else.’
‘Yes, there is.’
I told Maudie how much Vera likes her, and she closed up in an angry pinched mask.
‘But why, Maudie?’
‘She didn’t lift a finger to help.’
‘But how can she if you don’t tell her what you want?’
‘All I want is to be left alone.’
‘There you are, you see.’
‘Yes, here I am alone, except for you.’
‘Vera Rogers doesn’t just have one person to visit, she has sometimes ten or more in a day, and she’s on the telephone arranging and getting things done. I see you every day, so I know what you want.’
‘They’ll have to carry me out screaming,’ said she.
‘She’s on your side, she’s trying to prevent you from being moved.’
‘That’s what she tells you. They were around here again today.’
‘Who?’
‘Do you know what he said, that Greek? You can stay in one room, and we’ll do up the other, he said. And then when we’ve finished that, you can move in. Me, here in all that dust and mess. And it’s months they take to improve a place.’
‘Then that must have been the landlord, mustn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said. They are all in it together.’
At the Indian shop, I hung around until the owner, Mr Patel, said, ‘Mrs Fowler was out on the street yesterday, screaming and shouting.’
‘Oh yes, what did she say?’
‘She was screaming, None of you were around trying to get me hot water and a bath when I had a baby, none of you cared when I didn’t have food to give him. I’ve lived all my life without running hot water and a bath, and if you come back I’ll get the police.’
Mr Patel says all this slowly, his grave concerned eyes on my face, and I didn’t dare smile. He keeps his eyes on my face, reproachful and grave, and says, ‘When I was in Kenya, before we had to leave, I thought everyone in this country was rich.’
‘You know better now, then.’
But he wants to say something else, something different. I waited, picked up some biscuits, put them back, considered a tin of cat food.
At last he says, in a low voice, ‘Once, with us, we would not let one of our old people come to such a life. But now – things are changing with us.’
I feel I personally should apologize. At last I say, ‘Mr Patel, there can’t be very many like Mrs Fowler left.’
‘I have six, seven, every day in my shop. All like her, with no one to care for them. And I am only one shop.’
He sounds as if he is accusing me. He is accusing my clothes, my style. I am out of place in this little corner shop. And then, feeling as if he has wronged me, he takes a cake from the shelves, one that Maudie likes, and says, ‘Give it to her.’
Our eyes meet again, and this time differently: we are appalled, we are frightened, it is all too much for us.
That was eight days ago.
Joyce may go after all to the States. The girlfriend had an abortion. Husband Jack took this badly: he wanted her to have the baby. He has been having a sort of breakdown, and Joyce has been comforting him. This has been going on for weeks.
When she told me:
‘It appears he has been longing for us to have another child.’
‘Did you know?’
‘Well, I knew he wouldn’t mind, but not that he cared so much.’
‘If you had known?’
‘Yes, I think I would.’
‘So now you are both blaming the other?’
‘Yes.’
Joyce with a cigarette dangling, eyes screwed up, holding up photographs, one after another, Yes, to this one, No to that. Her hair dyed again, but with the dusty look. Her hands unkept. She looks fifty. There is something weird and witchlike about her. I’ve said to her, ‘Joyce, you must change your style, it’s too young.’ And she said, ‘When I know if I’m going or not, I’ll know which to choose, won’t I?’
Joyce is always on the verge of tears. A word, a joke, a tone of voice – she’ll turn her head sharply, screw up her eyes, peer at me, at Phyllis, at whomever, the tears welling up. But she shakes them away, pretends there’s nothing. Phyllis and I have this unspoken thing: we watch every syllable, word, suggestion, so that Joyce will not suddenly betray herself, and start crying.
Later. How long? I forget. Some days.
Joyce said to me today that she said to Jack, Your trouble is, you want to take this situation with you to the States. Home, children, wife the sympathetic comforter – and girlfriend as well, in a separate place. You can’t choose. That’s why you are so ill.
And he said to her she was heartless and cold.
Four months before he leaves. He should have told them over there if a wife, or no wife, children or not.
‘Perhaps he will go by himself in the end,’ I mused, forgetting about not upsetting her.
She turned her head in that quick startled way she has now, she leans forward frowning, peering at me. My old friend Joyce, she is a thousand miles away, in some sort of black place, and she peers out at me, thinking, who is this quacking idiot?
‘Alone!’ she said, in a brisk schoolmistress voice.
‘Why not?’
‘There’s something missing in you, I’ve always said so,’ she says, coldly, filing me away.
‘Or perhaps there is in you.’
I told her about Maudie Fowler, who has lived alone now for something like sixty years. Joyce got up as I spoke, picked up her bag, her briefcase, collected things from her desk.
‘How did you get to know her?’
I told her. Joyce listened.
‘Guilt,’ she said at last. ‘Guilt. If you want to let it get to you, that’s your affair.’
She was on her way to the door. I said, ‘Joyce, I want to tell you about it, properly, I really do. I want to talk about it.’
She said, ‘Well, not now.’
It is summer. Not that I am seeing much of it.
When did Joyce get ill? It must be over a month now. The truth was, we were all relieved, because it made what really was the truth official. I have been running around from morning to night. In the hospital, this scene: Joyce’s husband, the two children, husband’s ex-mistress, her new boyfriend. Joyce lying back, looking at them all from inside this black place she is in, smiling when she remembers to. Now he wants her to go to America, but she says she doesn’t have the energy to think about it. But of course she will go.
Because of all this, I don’t stay so long at Maudie’s, though I have not missed one day. She understands why, I have told her. But the way she feels it is, I’m letting her down. I sit there, trying not to look at my watch, and she is remembering only bad things. I say, ‘Tell me about the day you went to the Heath with Johnnie, and you found blackberries and made a pie with them?’ But she sighs, and sits rubbing those old fingers up and down her (filthy) skirts. Then she tells me about …
Her sister, Polly, who has had seven children, always summoned Maudie to look after her, each childbed. Maudie was always delighted, even gave up whatever job she might have, and took herself to her sister’s, and looked after everything for weeks, more than once months. Then, says Maudie, it was always the same, the sister got jealous, because Maudie loved the children and they loved her. She found an excuse to say, You are turning my children against me, you are after my husband. Is it likely, says Maudie, the nasty scrimping thing, he grudged me the food I ate while I was working as a slavey. He’d say, if I put a bit of meat on my plate, We’ll have to buy an extra bit of beef on Sunday, while Maudie honours us with her presence. Meanwhile, I was working eighteen hours a day for them. Between births, Maudie heard nothing of her sister, but she wasn’t worried: There’d be another baby, I knew that, because he had to have what he had to have.
Now Maudie talks a lot about sex, and I see that it has been enormous and awful to her, and she has never understood it or ceased to be tormented by it. She says her husband, while he was still treating her like a queen, would leap on her like a tiger, like a wild beast. She says she can’t understand it, one moment all lovey-dovey, and the next they have their nails into you. Her husband has been with one woman after another, and she has been brooding about it all her life: why? For Maudie has slept with one man, her awful husband. She knows that there are women who like it, and she looks at me while she talks, with a certain modesty and diffidence, because I might be offended if I knew she was wondering if I was ‘like that’.
Yet, she has had other experiences. Upstairs, for some years, there was a woman who became her friend, and this woman ‘liked it’. She used to tell Maudie how she would wait all day until the night, because another life began at night, and it was her real life. Maudie said to me, ‘She told me that when they had finished all that, she had to sleep lying behind his back, so that she could hold his thing. That thing …’ cries Maudie, almost weeping with disgust, wonder, and disbelief. ‘Yes, it was out of respect, she said to me.’ And Maudie sits there, amazed, after thirty or forty years of thinking about it. Suddenly: ‘I wouldn’t give them that much satisfaction, it’s the stick they beat you with!’
And then I laughed (and I wasn’t comfortable at all, thinking my own thoughts, for that just about summed it up, never mind that we had such a wonderful sex life, Freddie and I), and she said, ‘I have been watching your face. I can see you think differently. But I can’t help it. And now all the time the newspapers, the magazines, the telly, sex, sex, sex, and I think sometimes, am I mad, are they mad?’
I laugh and laugh. She laughs too. But it is a wild unhappy laugh, not at all her girl’s laugh that I love to hear.
Such is the power of – ? – that Maudie refers to that awful husband of hers, even now, as My man. She has seen him half a dozen times in half a century. One day, a knock at the door, and there stood her husband. But this young man said, ‘Mother? I’m your son Johnnie.’ ‘Well, come in then,’ said she. ‘I had put it out of mind, you see. I had made myself ill with fretting. Once I had to go to the doctor, and he said, Mrs Fowler, you must either find your child or put him out of your mind. How could I find him? He might be in America or Timbuctoo! And slowly I did forget him. And so when he was there – I am your son Johnnie, he said – we became friends, because we took to each other. And then there was the war. He did well in the war, he was an engineer, and he married an Italian girl, but it came to no good, for she went off with another man, and do you know what I dreamed the other night? Oh, it was a doleful dream, so bad and low. I dreamed there was a wonderful cherry tree, like the cherry tree there was out the back here before it fell down in a big storm. Big black cherries, soft and lovely and shining. And I stood one side of it, and poor Johnnie stood on the other, and we were trying to lean up and reach the cherries, and we tried and tried, but no matter how we pulled the boughs down, they sprang back, and the cherries were out of reach … And we stood there, Johnnie and I, and we were crying.’
Long after Johnnie was a grown man and had gone to America, where he vanished, and forty years after Laurie had left her, stealing her child, Maudie wrote a letter to her husband, asking him to meet her. They met on a bench in Regent’s Park.
‘Well, what do you want?’ he said.
‘I was thinking, perhaps we could make a home for Johnnie,’ she said to him. She explained that they could find a house – for she knew he always had money, wheeling and dealing – and make it nice, and then an advertisement in the paper in America.
‘For Johnnie has never had a nice home,’ she explained to her husband.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He bought me a fish supper, and I didn’t see him for five years.’
A marvellous hot blue day.
I said to Phyllis, ‘Hold the fort,’ and I ran out of the office, to hell with it. I went to Maudie, and when she answered the door, slow, slow, and cross, I said, ‘I’m taking you to the park for a treat.’ She stared at me, furious. ‘Oh, don’t,’ I said to her. ‘Oh, darling Maudie, don’t, please, don’t let yourself get angry, just come.’
