When I went in after work on Wednesday, I took in a copy of our magazine. I was ashamed of it, so glossy and sleek and slick, so clever – that is how it is presented, its image. But she took it from me with a girl’s mischievous smile, and a sort of prance of her head – what remained of a girl’s tossed hair – and said, ‘Oh, I love these, I love looking at these things they think up.’
Because it was seven, I did not know how to fit myself in to her. When did she eat her supper? Or go to bed? On the newspapers on the table was a bottle of milk stout and a glass.
‘I’ve drunk it or I’d offer you some,’ said she.
I sat down in the chair opposite hers and saw that the room, with the curtains drawn and the electric light, seemed quite cosy, not so dreadfully dirty and grim. But why do I go on about dirt like this? Why do we judge people like this? She was no worse off for the grime and the dust, and even the smells. I decided not to notice, if I could help it, not to keep judging her, which I was doing, by the sordidness. I saw that the electric switches were broken, and made an excuse to go out to the ‘kitchen’: frayed cords trailing over the walls, only one switch for the whole room, up on the light itself, which she could hardly reach.
She was looking at the magazine, with a smile that was all pleasure.
‘I work for that magazine,’ I said, and she let the thing fall shut and sat looking at me in that way of hers, as if she is trying to make things fit, make sense.
‘Do you? And what do you …’ But she did not know what questions to ask. I could not bring myself to say I was the assistant editor. I said, ‘I do typing and all sorts.’ Which is true enough.
‘That’s the main thing,’ she said, ‘training. It stands between you and nothing. That, and a place of your own.’
That evening she talked about how she had fought to get into this flat, for at first she had been on the top floor back, in one room, but she had her eye on the basement flat, and wanted it, and waited for it, and schemed for it, and at last, got it. And they aren’t going to get me out, and they needn’t think it. She spoke as if all this happened yesterday, but it was about the time of the First World War.
She talked about how she had not had the money for the rent of these rooms, and how she had saved it up, penny by penny, and then it was stolen, two years’ scrimping and saving, by the wicked woman on the first floor, and she saved again, and at last she went to the landlord and said, You let me in down there. I’ve got the money for it. He said to me, And how are you going to keep the rent paid? You are a milliner’s girl, aren’t you? I said, You leave that to me. When I stop paying, then you can throw me out. ‘And I have never not paid, not once. Though, I’ve gone without food. No, I learned that early. With your own place, you’ve got everything. Without it, you are a dog. You are nothing. Have you got your own place?’ – and when I said yes, she said, nodding fiercely, angrily, ‘That’s right, and you hold on to it, then nothing can touch you.’
Mrs Fowler’s ‘flat’ is rent-controlled, twenty-two shillings a week. About a pound in new money, but of course she doesn’t think in terms of the new currency, she can’t cope with it. She says the house was bought by ‘that Greek’ after the war – the new war, you know, not the old one – for four hundred pounds. And now it’s worth sixty thousand. ‘And he wants me out, so he can get his blood money for this flat. But I know a trick or two. I always have it here, always. And if he doesn’t come I go to the telephone box and I ring his office and I say, Why haven’t you come for your rent?’
I knew so little that I said to her, ‘But, Mrs Fowler, twenty-two shillings is not worth the trouble of his collecting it,’ and her eyes blazed up, and her face was white and dreadful and she said, ‘Is that how you see it, is that it? Has he sent you here, then? But it is what the rent is, by law, and I am going to pay it. Worth nothing, is it? It is worth the roof over my head.’
The three floors above all have Irish families, children, people coming and going, feet tramping about: Mrs Fowler says that ‘she’ makes the refrigerator door rattle to keep her awake at night because ‘she’ wants this flat … Mrs Fowler lives in a nightmare of imagined persecutions. She told me of the ten-years-long campaign, after the first war, not the new one, when ‘that bitch from Nottingham’ was trying to get her rooms, and she … She, it seems, did everything, there was nothing she did not do, and it all sounds true. But now upstairs there is an Irish couple, four children, and I saw the woman on the steps. ‘How is the old lady?’ she asked, her periwinkle Irish eyes tired and lonely, for her husband is leaving her, apparently for another woman. ‘I keep meaning to go down, but she doesn’t seem all that pleased when I do, and so I don’t go.’
I showed Mrs Fowler the issue of Lilith that has Female Images. She took it politely, and let it lie on her lap. It was only when it was ready to go to press that it occurred to me there was no old woman among the Images. I said this to Joyce, and I watched a series of reactions in her: first, surprise. Then shock, small movements of head and eyes said she was alerting herself to danger. Then she, as it were, switched herself off, became vague, and her eyes turned away from me. She sighed: ‘Oh, but why? It’s not our age group.’ I said, watching myself in her, ‘They all have mothers or grandmothers.’ How afraid we are of age: how we avert our eyes! ‘No,’ she said, still rather vague, with an abstracted air, as if she were doing justice to an immensely difficult subject to which she had given infinite thought. ‘No, on the whole not, but perhaps we’ll do a feature on Elderly Relations later. I’ll make a note.’ And then she flashed me a smile, a most complex smile it was: guilt, relief, and – it was there still – surprise. Somewhere she was wondering, what has got into Janna? And there was in it a plea: don’t threaten me, don’t! And, though she had been meaning to sit down and join me in a cup of tea while we discussed the issue after next, she said, Must fly. And flew.
Something interesting has just occurred to me.
Joyce is the innovator, the iconoclast, the one who will throw an issue we’ve just got set up into the wastepaper basket, and start again, working all night, to get it down just so; Joyce presents herself – she is – this impulsive, dashing, daring soul, nothing sacred.
I, Janna, am classical and cautious, conservative and careful – this is my appearance, and how I think of myself.
Yet there are so often these moments between us, there always have been. Joyce says, ‘We can’t do that, our readers won’t like it.’
Me, I have always believed our readers – and everybody else’s readers for that matter – would take much more than they are offered.
I say, ‘Joyce, can we try it?’
But more often than not, whatever it is lands in the file I have labelled Too Difficult and which I leave out on my desk so that Joyce will see it and – so I hope, but most often in vain – be prompted to have another think.
The Images. (a) A girl of twelve or thirteen, and she gave us the most trouble. We discarded a hundred photographs, and finally got Michael to photograph Joyce’s niece, aged fifteen actually but rather childish. We got a frank healthy sensuality, not Lolita at all, we were careful to avoid that. Miss Promise. (b) A girl about seventeen, emphasizing independence and confidence. Still at home but you are ready to leave the nest. (c) Leading your own life. Mid-twenties. Since in our experience women living their own lives, sharing flats, keeping down jobs, feel as if they are walking a tightrope, we chose something pretty and vulnerable. Needing Mr Right but able to do without. (d) Young married woman, with a child. Emphasizing the child. (e) Married woman with part-time job, two children, running home and husband.
And that was that.
Before a few weeks ago, I did not see old people at all. My eyes were pulled towards, and I saw, the young, the attractive, the well-dressed and handsome. And now it is as if a transparency has been drawn across that