Supposing I were to write Mrs Penny’s day? Oh no, no, no, I really can’t face that, I can’t.
I have been on the telephone for hours with Joyce in Wales. We have not been able to talk at all, not for months. But now she rings me, I ring her, and we talk. Sometimes we are quiet, for minutes, thinking of all the fields, the hedges, the mountains, the time between us. We talk about her marriage, her children, my marriage, my mother, our work. We do not talk about Maudie. She makes it absolutely clear, no. She has said that she is going to the States. Not, now, because she is afraid of being alone when she is old, because she knows she is alone and does not care. But it is the children, after all the insecurity, the misery, they want two parents in one house. Even though they are nearly grown up? I cannot help insisting, and Joyce laughs at me.
I said to her, ‘Joyce, I want to tell you about Maudie, you know, the old woman.’
And Joyce said, ‘Look, I don’t want to know, do you understand?’
I said to her, ‘You don’t want to talk about the one real thing that has happened to me?’
‘It didn’t happen to you’ – fierce and insistent – ‘for some reason or other you made it happen.’
‘But it is important to me, it is.’
‘It must be to her, that’s for certain,’ said she, with that dry resentment you hear in people’s voices when sensing imposition.
I said to her, ‘Don’t you think it is odd, Joyce, how all of us, we take it absolutely for granted that old people are something to be outwitted, like an enemy, or a trap? Not that we owe them anything?’
‘I don’t expect my kids to look after me.’
And I felt despair, because now I feel it is an old gramophone record. ‘That’s what you say now, not what you will say then.’
‘I’m going to bow out, when I get helpless, I’m going to take my leave.’
‘That’s what you say now.’
‘How do you know, why are you sure about me?’
‘Because I know now that everyone says the same things, at stages in their lives.’
‘And so I’m going to end up, some crabby old witch, an incontinent old witch – is that what you are saying?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can tell you this, I am pleased about one thing, I’m putting thousands of miles between myself and my father. He’s an old pet, but enough’s enough.’
‘Who’s going to look after him?’
‘He’ll go into a Home, I expect. That what I shall expect.’
‘Perhaps.’
And so we talk, Joyce and I, for hours, I lying flat on my back in London, trying to outwit the next spasm that will knot my back up, she in an old chintz chair in a cottage on a mountainside, ‘on leave’ from Lilith. But she has sent in her resignation.
I do not ring up my sister. I do not ring up my sister’s children. When I think about them I feel angry. I don’t know why. I feel about these infantile teenagers as Joyce does about me and Maudie: Yes, all right, all right, but not now, I’ll think about it later, I simply haven’t the energy.
Four weeks of doing nothing …
But I have been thinking. Thinking. Not the snap, snap, intuitions-and-sudden-judgements kind, but long slow thoughts. About Maudie. About Lilith. About Joyce. About Freddie. About those brats of Georgie’s.
Before I went back into the office, I visited Maudie. Her hostile little face, but it was a white face, not a yellow one, and that made me feel better about her at once. ‘Hello,’ I said, and she gave me a startled look because I have lost so much weight.
‘So you really have been ill, then, have you?’ said she, in a soft troubled voice, as we sat opposite each other beside that marvellous fire. When I think of her, I see the fire: that sordid horrible room, but the fire makes it glow and welcome you.
‘Yes, of course I have, Maudie. Otherwise I’d have been in.’
Her face turned aside, her hand up to shield it from me.
‘That doctor came in,’ she said at last, in a small lost voice. ‘She called him in.’
‘I know, she told me.’
‘Well, if she is a friend of yours!’
‘You are looking better than you were, so it might have something to do with the doctor!’
‘I put the pills in the toilet!’
‘All of them?’
A laugh broke through her anger. ‘You’re sharp!’
‘But you are looking better.’
‘So you say.’
‘Well,’ I said, taking the risk, ‘it could be a question of your dying before you have to.’
She stiffened all over, sat staring away from me into the fire. It seemed a long time. Then she sighed and looked straight at me. A wonderful look, frightened but brave, sweet, pleading, grateful, and with a shrewd humour there as well.
‘You think that might be it?’
‘For the sake of a few pills,’ I said.
‘They deaden my mind so.’
‘Make yourself take what you can of them.’
And that was a year ago. If I had had time to keep this diary properly, it would have seemed a builder’s yard, bits and odds stacked up, lying about, nothing in place, one thing not more important than another. You wander through (I visited one for an article last week) and see a heap of sand there, a pile of glass here, some random steel girders, sacks of cement, crowbars. That is the point of a diary, the bits and pieces of events, all muddled together. But now I look back through the year and begin to know what was important.
And the most important of all was something I hardly noticed. Niece Kate turned up one night, looking twenty and not fifteen, the way they can these days, but seemed crazy, stammering and posing and rolling her eyes. She had run away from home to live with me, she said; and she was going to be a model. Firm but kind (I thought and think), I said she was going right back home, and if she ever came to spend so much as an afternoon with me, she could be sure I wasn’t going to be like her mother, I wouldn’t wash a cup up after her. Off she went, sulking. Telephone call from Sister Georgie: How can you be so lacking in ordinary human sympathies? Rubbish, I said. Telephone call from niece Jill. She said, ‘I’m ringing you to tell you that I’m not at all like Kate.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.
‘If I lived with you, you wouldn’t have to baby me. Mother makes me tired, I’m on your side.’
‘Not as tired as she must permanently be.’
‘Aunt Jane, I want to come and spend the weekend.’
I could easily hear, from her tone, how she saw glamorous Aunt Jane, in Trendy London, with her smart goings-on.
She came. I like her, I admit. A tall, slim, rather lovely girl. Willowy is the word, I think. Will droop if she’s not careful. Dark straight hair: could look lank and dull. Vast grey eyes: mine.
I watched her eyes at work on everything in my flat: to copy in her own home, I wondered? – teenage rebellion, perhaps; but no, it was to plan how she would fit