How about Mrs Penny, a nuisance to her children, to everyone in this building, and particularly to me – something I simply cannot face? Silly woman with her plummy I-was-in-India-in-the-old-days vowels, her secret drinking, her ‘refinement’, her dishonesty.
Well, how about Mrs Penny? There’s not a soul in the world who’d shed a tear if she died.
When I had paid off Jim I had another of my long baths. It is as if, in such a bath, my old self floats away, is drowned, a new one emerges from the Pine-Needle Foam, the Satin-Self Gel, the Sea-Breeze Ions.
I went to bed that night saying I had made a contribution to Mrs Fowler’s welfare that was more than she could possibly expect. And that it was enough. I simply would not go near her again.
In the morning I woke feeling ill, because of being so trapped, and I thought about how I was brought up. Very interesting: you’d say it was a moral household. Religion, of a mild kind. But the atmosphere was certainly one of self-approbation: we did the right things, were good. But what, in practice, did it amount to? I wasn’t taught anything in the way of self-discipline, self-control. Except for the war, but that was from outside. I wasn’t taught how to control my eating, I had to do that for myself. Or how to get up in the morning, and that was the hardest thing I ever had to do, when I started work. I’ve never known how to say no to myself, when I want something. We were never denied anything, if it was there. The war! Was it because of that, because so little was available, that children were allowed anything they wanted? But there is one thing I can thank Mother for, just one: and I lay in bed saying to her that morning, ‘Thank you for that. At least you taught me that if I make promises, I must keep them. That if I say I will do a thing, then I must do it. It isn’t much to build on, but it’s something.’
Thank you.
And I went back to Mrs Fowler after work.
I had been thinking all day about my marvellous bathroom, my baths, my dependence on all that. I was thinking that what I spent on hot water in a month would change her life.
But when I went in, taking six milk stouts and some new glasses, and I cried out from the door, ‘Hello, I’m here, let me in, look what I’ve got!’ and I strode in down that awful passage while she stood to one side, her face was a spiteful little fist. She wanted to punish me for her new electricity and her new comfort, but I wasn’t going to let her. I went striding and slamming about, and poured out stout and showed her the glasses, and by the time I sat down, she did too, and she was lively and smiling.
‘Have you seen my new boots?’ I asked her, thrusting them forward. She bent to peer at them, her mouth trembling with laughter, with mischief.
‘Oh,’ she half whispered, ‘I do like the things you wear, I do think they are lovely.’
So we spent the evening, me showing her every stitch I had. I took off my sweater and stood still so she could walk round me, laughing. I had on my new camisole, crêpe de Chine. I pulled up my skirts so she could see the lace in it. I took off my boots so she could handle them.
She laughed and enjoyed herself.
She told me about clothes she had worn when she was young.
There was a dress that was a favourite, of grey poplin with pink flowers on it. She wore it to visit her auntie. It had been the dress of her father’s fancy-woman, and it was too big for her, but she took it in.
‘Before my poor mother died, nothing was too good for me, but then, I got the cast-offs. But this was so lovely, so lovely, and I did love myself in it.’
We talked about the dresses and knickers and petticoats and camisoles and slippers and boas and corsets of fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. Mrs Fowler is over ninety.
And she talked most about her father’s woman, who owned her own pub. When Mrs Fowler’s mother died … ‘She was poisoned, dear! She poisoned her – oh yes, I know what you are thinking, I can see your face, but she poisoned her, just as she nearly did for me. She came to live in our house. That was in St John’s Wood. I was a skivvy for the whole house, I slaved day and night, and before they went to bed I’d take up some thin porridge with some whisky and cream stirred in. She would be on one side of the fire, in her fancy red feathered bed jacket, and my father on the other side, in his silk dressing jacket. She’d say to me, Maudie, you feeling strong tonight? And she’d throw off all that feathered stuff and stand there in her corsets. They don’t make corsets like that now. She was a big handsome woman, full of flesh, and my father was sitting there in his armchair smiling and pulling at his whiskers. I had to loosen those corset strings. What a job! But it was better than hauling and tugging her into her corsets when she was dressing to go out. And they never said to me, Maudie, would you fancy a spoonful of porridge yourself? No, they ate and drank like kings, they wanted for nothing. If she felt like a crab or a sole or a lobster, he’d send out for it. But it was never Maudie, would you like a bit? But she got fatter and fatter and then it was: Do you want my old blue silk, Maudie? I wanted it right enough! One of her dresses’d make a dress and a blouse for me, and sometimes a scarf. But I never liked wearing her things, not really. I felt as if they had been stolen from my poor mother.’
I did not get home till late, and I lay in the bath wondering if we could do a feature on those old clothes. I mentioned it to Joyce and she seemed quite interested.
She was looking at me curiously. She did not like to ask questions, because something about me at the moment warns her off. But she did say, ‘Where did you hear about these clothes?’ while I was describing the pink silk afternoon dress of a female bar owner before the First World War – who, according to Mrs Fowler, poisoned her lover’s wife and tried to poison her lover’s daughter. And the plum-coloured satin peignoir with black ostrich feathers.
‘Oh, I have a secret life,’ I said to her, and she said, ‘So it seems,’ in a careless, absent way that I am beginning to recognize.
I went back to Maudie last night. I said to her, ‘Can I call you Maudie?’ But she didn’t like that. She hates familiarity, disrespect. So I slid away from it. When I left I said, ‘Then at least call me Janna, please.’ So now she will call me Janna, but it must be Mrs Fowler, showing respect.
I asked her to describe to me all those old clothes, for the magazine: I said we would pay for her expertise. But this was a mistake, she cried out, really shocked and hurt, ‘Oh no, how can you … I love thinking about those old days.’
And so that slid away too. How many mistakes I do make, trying to do the right thing.
Nearly all my first impulses are quite wrong, like being ashamed of my bathroom, and of the mag.
I spent an hour last night describing my bathroom to her in the tiniest detail, while she sat smiling, delighted, asking questions. She is not envious. No. But sometimes there is a dark angry look, and I know I’ll hear more, obliquely, later.
She talked more about that house in St John’s Wood. I can see it! The heavy dark furniture, the comfort, the good food and the drink.
Her father owned a little house where ‘they’ wanted to put the Paddington railway line. Or something to do with it. And he got a fortune for it. Her father had had a corner shop in Bell Street, and sold hardware and kept free coal and bread for the poor people, and in the cold weather there was a cauldron of soup for the poor. ‘I used to love standing there, so proud of him, helping those poor people …’ And then came the good luck, and all at once, the big house and warmth and her father going out nearly every night, for he loved going where the toffs were, he went to supper and the theatre, and the music hall and there he met her, and Maudie’s mother broke her heart, and was poisoned.
Maudie says that she had a lovely childhood, she couldn’t wish a better to anyone, not the Queen herself. She keeps talking of a swing in a garden under apple trees, and long uncut grass. ‘I used to sit and swing myself, for hours at a time, and swing, and swing, and I sang all the songs I knew, and