I went out for the second time to the shop opposite because I had forgotten tea.
It was sleeting. I got the bits of kindling from the skip. All along these streets, the houses are being ‘done up’. Four of them in Maudie’s very short street. Four skips loaded with ‘rubbish’. Including perfectly good chairs, mattresses, tables, and quantities of wood in good condition. People sneak out for the wood. There must still be quite a few fireplaces in these houses. But not for long, not when they are ‘done up’.
I came out from the shop, and there on the pavement were two old women, wrapped up like parcels. I recognized a face: from the window opposite.
I was frozen. And wanted to get home.
But already I knew that these occasions cannot be rushed.
The conversation:
‘Excuse me, I wanted to ask, how is Maudie Fowler?’
‘She seems all right.’
‘Are you her daughter, dear? You do take good care of her.’
‘No. I am not her daughter.’
‘Are you a Good Neighbour?’
‘No, I am not that either.’ I laughed, and they allowed me small polite smiles.
I say ‘old women’, and that is a criticism of me, no individuality allowed them, just ‘old women’. But they seemed so alike, little plump old women, their faces just visible behind thick scarves, coats, hats.
‘Maudie Fowler has always kept herself so much to herself, and we were wondering.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘she’s over ninety, isn’t she?’
A reproving silence. ‘I am ninety-two dear, and Mrs Bates here is ninety-one.’
‘Well, I’d say Maudie was feeling her age.’
This was too direct and I knew it, but had started off like that and couldn’t change course. Oh yes, I know very well by now that these conversations should be allowed to develop.
‘You know Mrs Rogers, do you, dear?’
‘Mrs Rogers?’
‘She is one of The Welfare.’
‘No, I don’t.’
All this with the sleet blowing across us and our faces turning blue.
‘She wants to see you, so she says.’
‘Well, what about?’
‘Seeing as you are a Good Neighbour, then there’s another that needs it.’
‘Well, I’m not one,’ I said.
‘Then goodbye, dear. We mustn’t keep you in the cold.’ And they went together toddling along the pavement, arm in arm, very slowly.
Joyce came back next day, and sat at her desk and went through the motions of working, and did work, but she was not there. She is simply not with us. She looked awful, badly dressed, even dusty, her hair greying at the roots, and a greyish edge to her black sweater.
Looking at her, I made an appointment with the hairdresser at once. And determined to devote an evening to my own care.
This is that evening. I have had a real bath, hours of it. I’ve done my fingernails, my toenails, my eyebrows, my ears, my navel, the hard skin on my feet.
What has made me, for so many years, that perfectly groomed person, whom everybody looks at and thinks, how does she do it? has been my Sunday nights. Never did I allow anything to interfere with that. Freddie used to joke about it but I said, Make jokes, I don’t care, I have to do it. On Sunday nights, after supper, for years and years I’ve chosen my outfit for every day of the week ahead, made sure there has been not a wrinkle or a crease, attended to buttons and hems, cleaned shoes, emptied out and polished handbags, brushed hats, and put anything even slightly soiled for the cleaner’s and the launderette. Hours of it, every Sunday night, and when all those pairs of skilled and knowledgeable eyes examined me at work, there has never been, but literally, a hair out of place. Grooming. Well, if I can’t keep it up, my style is in the wastepaper basket, just as Joyce’s style is now. A high-class gipsy, turned slattern, is bizarre; if my style is neglected, there’s nothing left but a dowd.
And now I shall make myself do it: buttons, shoes, collars, ironing, ironing, ironing, and not so much as a thread of loosened lace on a petticoat.
Over three months have gone.
It has been a choice between proper baths and the diary. I’ve had to have something to hold on to.
Joyce came back to work, but she was a ghost, a zombie. Felicity announced she was pregnant, husband Jack asked Joyce to be ‘generous’, Joyce said she wished he would make up his mind, he said, You are vindictive, she said, I must be crazy to want you at all. The poor children are both going crazy and punishing Joyce – she says.
It isn’t that she doesn’t do the work as usual, but she’s not in it. As for what I used to rely on so much, the good atmosphere, the way we used to work together as if we were one person – no, gone. We – Phyllis and I – support her, all the time, tact, tact, tact, oh full marks to all of us, everyone in Editorial, and I watch all this, fascinated, because of how it works. The woman who made the mag, because she did, it was her push, is fading out. I saw a film on telly, elephants supporting with their trunks a dying friend. It reminded me. Because Joyce is fading out. It can’t go on like this, is the unspoken thought. Unspoken, too, is that I will be the new editor. Meanwhile, Joyce says that she will stay in London, with the children, and she will be divorced. The children for the first time ring up here, making demands. Ridiculous, like, where is the jam, where did you put my sweater? Joyce patient, and anguished. For them. Very well, but there are limits to the people one can be sorry for. I’m learning my limits: small ones. Maudie Fowler is all I can manage.
It’s been wet, cold, dismal. Nearly every evening after work I’ve been in to Maudie. I’ve given up even thinking that she ought to agree to be ‘rehoused’; I said it just once, and it took her three days to stop seeing me as an enemy, as one of ‘them’. I am housed, says she, cough, cough, cough from having to go out at the back all weathers into the freezing lavatory, from standing to wash in the unheated kitchen. But why do I say that? Women of ninety who live in luxury cough and are frail.
It is a routine now. I go in about seven, eight, after work, and bring in what she has said she needs the night before. Usually she’s forgotten something, and I go out again to the Indian shop. He, the Indian man, a large pale man, pale grey really, who suffers from this weather, always asks after her, and shakes his head, and gives me some little thing for her: some sweets or some biscuits. When I give these to Maudie, she looks fierce and angry: she’s proud, but she’s moved.
While I shop she makes us tea. She has had supper at six, when she eats cake and jam and biscuits. She says she can’t be bothered to cook properly. She doesn’t want me to waste time cooking for her, because ‘it would take away from our time’. When she said this I realized she valued our time of sitting and talking: for some reason I was not able to see that, for I am defensive and guilty with her, as if I am responsible for all the awful things that have happened. We sit there, in that fug and smell – but nearly always I can switch off as I go in, so that I don’t notice the smell, just as I refuse to notice the smeared cups. And she … entertains me. I did not realize it was that. Not until one day when she said, ‘You do so much for me, and all I can do for you is to tell you my little stories, because you like that, don’t you? Yes, I know you do.’ And of course I do. I tell her about what I have been doing, and I don’t have to explain much. When I’ve been at a reception for some VIP or cocktail party or something, I can make her see it all. Her experience has included the luxurious, and there was her father: ‘Sometimes,