I sold the flat and got this one. A room to sleep in, a room to live in, a study. A large expensive block of flats. But I am hardly ever here. When I am, I think a lot.
This way of thinking … it is not so much thinking as holding things in your mind and letting them sort themselves out. If you really do that, slowly, surprising results emerge. For instance, that your ideas are different from what you had believed they were.
There are things I need to think out, which I haven’t got around to yet.
Joyce, for one. That office of ours, top floor, sunlight and weather all around it. Her long table with her behind it, my long table with me behind it, facing each other. We’ve sat there for years now, opposite, making the magazine work. Then the long trestle down one side, with all the things we need on it, the machines, the drawing boards, the photographs. And the small table on the other where the secretaries sit when they come in to take notes, or anyone we want to talk to. It gives me pleasure to think of it, because it is so right, so apt, fits so exactly with what goes on. But I must think, must think … there is a feeling of discomfort, as if there is something not quite right.
After I moved into the new flat I soon saw that my life was entirely in the office. I had no life at home. Home. What a word! It was the place I prepared myself for the office, or rested after work.
One of the things I am thinking is that if I lost my job, there wouldn’t be much left of me. I look at the clever girls, fighting their way up. I find myself looking at one, Phyllis, for instance, and reflecting. Yes, she’s the right material, she can fit words together, interview anyone, edit, she has a mind like scissors, she never panics.
Does she understand how things really work? What do I mean by that? A great deal. Everything. She’s pushy and impatient, you’ve got to know how to let things happen.
What I was thinking most of all was that I had let Freddie down and had let my mother down and that was what I was like. If something else should turn up, something I had to cope with, like illness or death, if I had to say to myself, Now, you will behave like a human being and not a little girl – then I couldn’t do it. It is not a question of will, but of what you are.
That is why I decided to learn something else.
I saw in the paper the advertisement, Would you like to befriend an old person? The picture of a dear old lady. A dear, sweet old thing. Everybody’s favourite granny. Ha! I rang up and went to see them. Miss Snow. Philanthropist. I went with her to visit Mrs York. We all three had tea together in a little flat in Kensington. It seemed to me false and awful. I thought Miss Snow was condescending but didn’t know it. Mrs York, a large slow invalid, pale and with a puffy doughy face. Little complaining eyes. I could see she didn’t like Miss Snow. I sat there and thought, what the hell am I doing here? What good does this do Mrs York? Am I to visit her once a week on Sundays and bring her cake and ask how her rheumatism is? Miss Snow knew I felt like this, and when we said goodbye on the pavement she was perfunctory. Yes, give me a ring, Mrs Somers, if you feel you want to do this work, and she got into her Mini and was off. A failure. Well, all in the day’s work, she was thinking.
Someone else would have to be found for Mrs York. But I did not feel lacking this time. Mrs York was simply not for me. I used to look at the advertisement with the dear sweet old lady and think of awful Mrs York and feel a sort of jeer.
Meanwhile, opposite me, on the landing, Mrs Penny. She is seventy, she is alone, and she is longing for me to befriend her. I know this. I don’t want to. She knows it. She would take over my life. I feel smothered and panicky at the idea of being at her beck and call.
But then I was in the chemist’s and this happened.
I saw an old witch. I was staring at this old creature and thought, a witch. It was because I had spent all day on a feature, Stereotypes of Women, Then and Now. Then not exactly specified, late Victorian, the gracious lady, the mother of many, the invalid maiden aunt, the New Woman, missionary wife, and so on. I had about forty photographs and sketches to choose from. Among them, a witch, but I had discarded her. But here she was, beside me, in the chemist’s. A tiny bent-over woman, with a nose nearly meeting her chin, in black heavy dusty clothes, and something not far off a bonnet. She saw me looking at her and thrust at me a prescription and said, ‘What is this? You get it for me.’ Fierce blue eyes, under grey craggy brows, but there was something wonderfully sweet in them.
I liked her, for some reason, from that moment. I took the paper and knew I was taking much more than that. ‘I will,’ I said. ‘But why? Isn’t he being nice to you?’ Joking: and she at once responded, shaking her old head vigorously.
‘No, oh he’s no good, I never know what he’s saying.’
He was the young chemist, and he stood, hands on the counter, alert, smiling: he knew her well, I could see.
‘The prescription is for a sedative,’ I said.
She said, ‘I know that,’ and jabbed her fingers down on to the paper where I had spread it against my handbag. ‘But it’s not aspirin, is it?’
I said, ‘It’s something called Valium.’
‘That’s what I thought. It’s not a pain-killer, it’s a stupefier,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘But it’s not as bad as that,’ he said.
I said, ‘I’ve been taking it myself.’
She said, ‘I said to the doctor, aspirin – that’s what I asked for. But they’re no good either, doctors.’
All this fierce and trembling, with a sort of gaiety. Standing there, the three of us, we were laughing, and yet she was so very angry.
‘Do you want me to sell you some aspirin, Mrs Fowler?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m not going to take this stuff that stupefies you.’
He handed her the aspirin, and took her money, which she counted out slowly, coin by coin, from the depths of a great rusty bag. Then he took the money for my things – nail varnish, blusher, eye liner, eye shadow, lipstick, lip gloss, powder, mascara. The lot: I had run low of everything. She stood by watching, with a look I know now is so characteristic, a fierce pondering look that really wants to understand. Trying to grasp it all.
I adjusted my pace to hers and went out of the shop with her. On the pavement she did not look at me, but there was an appeal there. I walked beside her. It was hard to walk so slowly. Usually I fly along, but did not know it till then. She took one step, then paused, examined the pavement, then another step. I thought how I rushed along the pavements every day and had never seen Mrs Fowler, but she lived near me, and suddenly I looked up and down the streets and saw – old women. Old men too, but mostly old women. They walked slowly along. They stood in pairs or groups, talking. Or sat on the bench at the corner under the plane tree. I had not seen them. That was because I was afraid of being like them. I was afraid, walking along there beside her. It was the smell of her, a sweet, sour, dusty sort of smell. I saw the grime on her thin old neck, and on her hands.
The house had a broken parapet, broken and chipped steps. Without looking at me, because she wasn’t going to ask, she went carefully down the old steps and stopped outside a door that did not fit and had been mended with a rough slat of wood nailed across it. Although this door wouldn’t keep out a determined cat, she fumbled for a key, and at last found it, and peered for the keyhole, and opened the door. And I went in with her, my heart quite sick, and my stomach sick too because of the smell. Which was, that day, of over-boiled fish. It was a long dark passage we were in.
We walked along it to the ‘kitchen’. I have never seen anything like it outside our Distress File, condemned houses and that sort of thing. It was an extension of the passage, with an old gas cooker, greasy and black, an old white china sink, cracked and yellow with grease, a cold-water tap wrapped around with old rags and dripping steadily. A rather nice old wood table that had crockery standing on it, all ‘washed’ but grimy. The