‘You want to work in Lilith, become part of my smart and elegant and amazing life?’
‘I’m eighteen. I don’t want to go to university, you didn’t, did you?’
‘You mean, with me as your passport to better things, you don’t need a degree?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘You’ve done well in your exams?’
‘I will do well, I promise. I’m taking them in the summer.’
‘Well, let’s think about it then.’
I didn’t think about it. It was all too bizarre: Sister Georgie ensconced in my life, that was how I saw it.
But Jill came again, and I made a point of taking her with me to visit Maudie, saying only that she was an old friend. Maudie has been in better health recently. Her main misery, the incontinence, is checked, she is doing her own shopping, she is eating well. I have been enjoying flying in and out to gossip over a cup of tea. But I am so used to her, have forgotten how she must strike others. Because of this stranger, the beautiful clean girl, Maudie was stiff, reproachful for exposing her. A cold aloof little person, she said yes and no, did not offer us tea, tried to hide the stains down the front of her dress where she has spilled food.
Niece Jill was polite, and secretly appalled. Not at old age; Sister Georgie’s good works will have seen to it that her children will not find that a surprise; but because she had to associate old age and good works with glamorous Aunt Jane.
That evening, eating supper together, she studied me with long covert shrewd looks, while she offered prattle about her siblings and their merry ways.
‘How often do you go in to see her?’ she inquired delicately enough; and I knew how important a moment this was.
‘Every day and sometimes twice,’ I said at once, with firmness.
‘Do you have a lot of friends in, do you go out for parties, dinner parties?’
‘Hardly ever. I work too hard.’
‘But not too hard to visit that old … to visit …’
‘Mrs Fowler. No.’
I took her shopping to buy some decent clothes. She wanted to impress me with her taste, and she did.
But at the time Sister Georgie and her offspring were a very long way down on my agenda.
I have worked, oh how I have worked this year, how I have enjoyed it all. They made me editor. I did not say I would only take it for a year or so, was accepting it only for the perks, the better pension, had other plans. Have finally understood that I am not ambitious, would have been happy to work for ever, just as things were, with Joyce.
Joyce left to live in America. Before she went, a dry, indifferent telephone call.
I said to Phyllis, You’d better have Joyce’s desk, you have done her work long enough. She was installed in half an hour. Her looks of triumph. I watched her, had my face shielded with my hand. (Like Maudie.) Hiding my thoughts.
Cut your losses, Janna, cut your losses, Jane!
I said, When you are settled, we should discuss possible changes. Her sharp alert lift of the head: danger. She does not want changes. Her dreams have been of inheriting what she was wanting so long and envying.
Envy. Jealousy and envy, I’ve always used them interchangeably. A funny thing: once a child would have been taught all this, the seven deadly sins, but in our charming times a middle-aged woman has to look up envy in a dictionary. Well, Phyllis is not jealous, and I don’t believe she ever was. It was not the closeness and friendship of Joyce and me she wanted, but the position of power. Phyllis is envious. All day, her sharp cold criticisms, cutting everyone, everything, down. She started on Joyce. I found myself blazing up into anger, Shut up, I said, you can be catty about Joyce to other people, not me.
Discussions for months, enjoyable for us all, about whether to change Lilith for Martha. Is Lilith the girl for the difficult, anxious eighties?
Arguments for Martha. We need something more workaday, less of an incitement to envy, an image of willing, adaptable, intelligent service.
Arguments for Lilith. People are conditioned to need glamour. In hard times we need our fun. People read fashion in fashion magazines as they read romantic novels, for escape. They don’t intend to follow fashion, they enjoy the idea of it.
I did not have strong opinions one way or the other. Our circulation is only slightly falling. Lilith it will remain.
The contents won’t change.
I brought home the last twelve issues of Lilith to analyse them.
It is a funny thing, while Joyce and I were Lilith, making everything happen, our will behind it, I did not have uneasy moments, asking, Is the life going out of it, is the impetus still there, is it still on a rising current? I know that the impetus is not there now, Lilith is like a boat being taken on a wave, but what made the wave is far behind.
Two thirds of Lilith is useful, informative, performs a service.
In this month’s issue: One. An article about alcoholism.
Nearly all our ideas are filched from New Society and New Scientist. (But then this is true of most of the serious mags and papers.) I once fought a battle with Joyce for us to acknowledge our sources, but failed: Joyce said it would put off our readers. Phyllis rewrote the article, and called it: The Hidden Danger to You and Your Family. Two. An article about abortion laws in various countries. Three. My article about the Seventeenth-Century Kitchen. All garlic and spices! Fruit and meat mixed. Salads with everything in the garden in them. And then the usual features, fashion, food, drink, books, theatre.
I have started my historical novel. Oh, I know only too well why we need our history prettied up. It would be intolerable to have the long heavy weight of the truth there, all grim and painful. No, my story about the milliners of London will be romantic. (After all, when Maudie comes to die she won’t be thinking of trailing out to that freezing smelly lavatory, but of the joyous green fields of Kilburn, and of her German boy, and of the larks the apprentices got up to as they made their lovely hats, good enough for Paris. She will, too, I suppose, be thinking of ‘her man’. But that is an intolerable idea, I can’t stand for that.)
Yesterday, as I drove home, I saw Maudie in the street, an ancient crone, all in black, nose and chin meeting, fierce grey brows, muttering and cursing as she pushed her basket along, and some small boys baiting her.
The thing that at the time I thought was going to be worst turned out not bad at all. Even useful. Even, I believe, pleasurable.
I was standing at the counter of the radio and TV shop down the road, buying a decent radio for Maudie. Beside me, waiting patiently, was an old woman, her bag held open while she muddled inside it, looking for money.
The Indian assistant watched her, and so did I. I was at once matching what I saw with my first meeting with Maudie.
‘I don’t think I’ve got it here, I haven’t got what it costs,’ she said in a frightened hopeless way, and she pushed a minute radio towards him. She meant him to take it to pay for repairs he had done on it. She turned, slowly and clumsily, to leave the shop.
I thought it all out fast, as I stood there. This time I was not helpless in front of an enormous demand because of inexperience, I had known at first look about the old thing. The dusty grey grimy look. The sour reek. The slow carefulness.
I paid for her radio, hastened after her, and caught her up as she was standing waiting to be helped across the street. I went home with her.
For the pleasure of the thing, I rang