Oh, my thoughts are whirling through me, catch them …
I was sitting there with Joyce, both of us cold and sick, miserable, and I was examining us both, out of habit, as I had Phyllis. Two women editors, first-class women’s magazine (read by a lot of men), late nineteen-seventies going on to the eighties.
When I read diaries from the past, what fascinates me is what they wore, what they ate, all the details. It isn’t difficult to work out what people were likely to be thinking – not so different from us, I believe – but how did a woman make up her bed, or lay her table, or wash her underclothes; what did she have for breakfast, in 1780, in a middle-class household, in a provincial English town? What was a day in the life of a farmer’s wife, north of England, on the date Waterloo was fought?
When Joyce came to work here she made us all conscious we were tatty! The mid-sixties – tat! And yet her style was, as she said, high-class gipsy, which looks messy easily. She is tall, thin, with a mass of black curls and waves, careful disorder, and a thin pale face. Or that is how her face looks, emerging from all that hair. Black eyes that are really small, but made up huge and dramatic. Her clothes cost the earth. Today she wore a black and rust striped skirt and waistcoat and a black silk sweater and her thick silver chain with amber lumps. Her jewellery is very good, never any oriental semi-rubbish of the kind I can afford to wear, because of my style. She is beautiful: but it is a young woman’s style. She has kept her hair black. Soon she will have to change her style, to fit being not young.
I was still in mini-dresses, beads and gauds and frips, when Joyce took me in hand. Ever since, my style has been classical-expensive. I wear silk shirts and silk stockings, not nylon, and dresses that look at first glance as if I am not trying. I found a real dressmaker, who cares about every stitch, and I look for special buttons in markets, and handmade lace, and I get jerseys and jackets knitted for me. My style is that at first people don’t notice, and then their eyes come back and they examine detail, detail, the stitching on a collar, a row of pearl buttons. I am not thin, but solid. My hair is straight, and always perfect, a silvery gold. Grey eyes, large by nature and made larger.
We couldn’t be more different, Joyce and I, except in the trouble we take. But Joyce takes less than me because of her family.
Phyllis is a slight, strong girl, attractive. Fairish. She is always in the new fashion, and therefore there’s nothing to remark. I’ve seen her watching Joyce and, rightly, discarding that style for herself. I’ve seen her observing me: how does she do it? I’ll show her if she asks, take her to the dressmaker and the knitting woman, choose her hairdresser … that is what I was thinking as I sat there with Joyce, in all that misery: I was mentally abdicating, and expressing it through clothes, through a style!
Yet I have no conscious intention of giving up.
At lunchtime we drank coffee and smoked. Then she said, ‘I must go home,’ and I cried out, ‘Joyce!’ She said, ‘Don’t you see, I can’t do it, I can’t!’ And I said, ‘Joyce, you cannot just go off home like that, I have to know.’
She sighed, and sat down, made herself come together, and actually looked at me.
‘Know?’
‘Understand. I don’t understand how you can give all this up … what for?’
She said, ‘Have you had the experience, suddenly finding out that you didn’t know yourself?’
‘Indeed I have!’
‘I thought I would agree to a divorce easily.’
‘Has he got a girl?’
‘Yes, the same one, you know. He would take her instead of me.’
‘All this time he has really been married to the two of you, then?’
‘It amounts to that. He said to me at one stage, You have your job, I’m going to have Felicity.’
I was sitting there being careful, because I didn’t want her to fly off home, and I knew she could easily do that.
I was thinking what I call women’s lib thoughts. He has a job as a matter of course, but when she does, he has to bolster himself up with a girl on the side. But I have got so bored with these thoughts, they aren’t the point; they never were the point, not for me, not for Joyce. Phyllis is into women’s lib, consciousness-raising, and she makes it clear that Joyce and I are unliberated. Joyce and I have discussed this, but not often – because it isn’t the point! Once Joyce said to Phyllis, curious rather than combative, Phyllis, I hold down a very good, well-paid job. I have a husband and two children and I run my home and my family. Would you not say I am a liberated woman, then? Isn’t that enough? And Phyllis smiled the smile of one who knows better and allowed: A step in the right direction. And afterwards Joyce and I laughed. We had one of those sudden fits of laughing, music without words, that are among the best things in this friendship of ours.
‘If you don’t go to the States, he’ll take Felicity?’
‘He will marry her.’
‘Is that what you mind?’
She shook her head. Again she was not looking at me. I was confused, didn’t know what it was she feared, in facing me. At last she said, ‘You are such a self-sufficient one.’
This was the last thing I expected – the child-wife, child-daughter – and I said, ‘I, self-sufficient?’
And she just shook her head, oh, it’s all too much for me, and crouched holding on to the desk with both hands, looking in front of her, cigarette hanging from her lips. I saw her as an old crone, Mrs Fowler: fine sharp little face, nose and chin almost meeting. She looked ancient. Then she sighed again, pulled herself out, turned to me.
‘I can’t face being alone,’ she said, flat. ‘And that’s all there is to it.’
If I say my mind was in a whirl, that is how it was.
I wanted to say, But, Joyce – my husband died, it seems now overnight – what is it you are counting on? I could have said, Joyce, if you throw up this work and go with him, you might find yourself with nothing. I could have said … and I said nothing, because I was crying with a sort of amazed anger, at the impossibility of it, and worse than that, for I was thinking that I had not known Joyce at all! I would not have believed that she could say that, think it. More: I knew that I could not say to Joyce, Your attitude to death is stupid, wrong, you are like a child! It’s not like that, what are you afraid of? Being alone – what’s that!
For I had discovered that I had made a long journey away from Joyce, and in a short time. My husband had died, my mother had died: I had believed that I had not taken in these events, had armoured myself. And yet something had changed in me, quite profoundly. And there was Maudie Fowler, too.
It seemed to me, as I sat there, crying and trying to stop, biting on my (best-quality linen monogrammed) handkerchief, that Joyce was a child. Yes, she was a child, after all, and I could say nothing to her of what I had learned and of what I now was. That was why I was crying.
‘Don’t,’ said Joyce. ‘I didn’t mean to – open old wounds.’
‘You haven’t. That’s not it.’ But that was as near as I could come to talking. I mean by that, saying what was in my mind. For then we did talk, in a sensible dry sort of way, about all kinds of things, and it is not that I don’t value that. For we had not, or not for a long time, talked in this way. The way women communicate – in becks and nods and hints and smiles – it is very good, it is pleasurable and enjoyable and one of the best things I’ve had. But when the chips are down, I couldn’t say to Joyce why I had to cry.
She said, ‘You are different from