Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

I did not ask what to get, but as I left she shouted after me about fish for the cat. I got a lot of things, put them on her kitchen table, boiled up some milk, took it to her.

‘You ought to be in bed,’ I said.

She said, ‘And the next thing, you’ll be fetching the doctor.’

‘Well, is that so terrible?’

‘He’ll send me away,’ she said.

‘Where to?’

‘Hospital, where else?’

I said to her, ‘You talk as if hospital is a sort of prison.’

She said, ‘I have my thoughts, and you keep yours.’

Meanwhile, I could see she was really ill. I had to fight with her, to help her to bed. I was looking around for a nightdress, but I understood at last she did not use one. She goes to bed in vest and drawers, with an old cardigan pinned at the throat by a nice garnet brooch.

She was suffering because I saw that her bed was not clean, and that her underclothes were soiled. The sweet stench was very strong: I know now it is urine.

I put her in, made her tea, but she said, ‘No, no, I’ll only be running.’

I looked around, found that a chair in the corner of the room was a commode and dragged it close to the bed.

‘Who’s going to empty it?’ she demanded, furious.

I went out of the kitchen to see what the lavatory was like: a little cement box, with a very old unlidded seat, and a metal chain that had broken and had string extending it. It was clean. But very cold. No wonder she has a cough. It is very cold at the moment, February – and I only feel how cold it really is when I think of her, Maudie, for everywhere I am is so well heated and protected. If she is going out to that lavatory from the hot fire …

I said to her, ‘I’ll drop in on my way to work.’

I am sitting here, in bed, having bathed and washed every scrap of me, hair too, writing this and wondering how it is I am in this position with Maudie.

Wednesday.

Booked for Munich. Went in to Maudie after work. The doctor was there. Dr Thring. An old man, fidgety and impatient, standing by the door, I knew because he was farther from the heat and smell of the place, and he was saying, to an angry, obstinate, tiny old woman, who stood in the middle of her floor as if she was in front of the firing squad, ‘I won’t go into hospital, I won’t, you can’t make me,’ ‘Then I won’t come in to look after you, you can’t make me do that.’ He was shouting. When he saw me, he said, in a different voice, relieved, desperate, ‘Tell her, if you’re a friend, she should be in hospital.’

She was looking at me quite terrified.

‘Mrs Fowler,’ I said, ‘why don’t you want to go into hospital?’

She turned her back on us both, and picked up the poker, and jabbed the flames with it.

The doctor looked at me, scarlet with anger and the heat of the place, and then shrugged. ‘You ought to be in a Home,’ he said. ‘I keep telling you so.’

‘You can’t force me.’

He exclaimed angrily and went into the passage, summoning me to follow. ‘Tell her,’ he said.

‘I think she should be in hospital,’ I said, ‘but why should she be in a Home?’

He was quite at the end of his tether with exasperation and – I could see – tiredness. ‘Look at it all,’ he said. ‘Look at it. Well, I’ll ring up the Services.’ And off he went.

When I got back, she said, ‘I suppose you’ve been arranging with him.’

I told her exactly what I said, and while I was speaking she was coughing, mouth closed, chest heaving, eyes watering, and was thumping her chest with the heel of her fist. I could see that she didn’t want to listen to what I said.

Thursday.

Went in on my way to work. She was up, dressed, in front of the fire, face glittering with fever. Her cat was yowling, unfed.

I took out her commode, full of strong stinking urine, and emptied it. I gave the cat food on a clean dish. I made her tea and some toast. She sat with her face averted from me, ashamed and sick.

‘You should have a telephone,’ I said. ‘It’s ridiculous, having no telephone. I could ring you from the office.’

She did not answer.

I went off to work. There was no social thing I had to do today, no luncheon, etc., and the photographers’ session was cancelled – the trains are on strike. I said to Joyce I’d work at home, and she said she’d stay in the office, it was all right. She let me understand home is difficult for her at the moment: her husband wants a divorce, she does not know what to do, she is seeing lawyers. But she is pleased to be in the office, though in better times she does a lot of work at home too.

I went in to Maudie on my way home, and found there Hermione Whitfield, from what she refers to as ‘Geriatrics’.

We understood each other at first glance: being alike, same style, same clothes, same image. She was sitting in the chair opposite Maudie, who was bundled up in all her black. She was leaning forward, smiling, charming, humorous.

‘But, Mrs Fowler, there are so many things we could do for you, and you won’t co- …’ But she dropped ‘co-operate’ in favour of ‘ … let us.’

‘And who are you?’ she asked me, in the same charming, almost playful style, but heard it herself, and said, in the chummy democratic mode of our kind (but I had not thought at all about these distinctions till today), ‘Are you a Good Neighbour? No one told me anything about that. ’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I am not a Good Neighbour, I am Mrs Fowler’s friend.’

This was quite outrageous, from about ten different viewpoints, but most of all because I was not saying it in inverted commas, and it was only then that I thought how one did not have friends with the working classes. I could be many things to Mrs Fowler, including a Good Neighbour, but not a friend.

She sat there, blinking up at me, the firelight on her hair. Masses of soft golden hair, all waves and little ringlets. I know what all that careful disorder costs. Her soft pink face, with wide blue eyes, done up with grey and blue paints and powders. Her white fluffy sweater, her grey suede trousers, her dark blue suede boots, her … I was thinking, either ‘the welfare’ get paid more than I had believed or she has a private income. It occurred to me, standing there, in that long moment of pure discordance, for what I had said did not fit, could not be taken easily, that I was examining her like a fashion editress, and for all I knew she might be quite different from her ‘image’.

Meanwhile, she had been thinking. ‘Mrs Fowler,’ said she, getting up, smiling prettily, radiating helpfulness and light, ‘very well, you won’t go into hospital. I don’t like hospital myself. But I can get a nurse in to you every morning, and I can send in a Home Help and …’

‘I don’t want any of those,’ said Maudie, her face averted, poking savagely at the flames.

‘Well, remember what there is available for you,’ she said, and gave me a look which meant I should follow her.

I was then in a position where I had to talk about Maudie behind her back, or say to Hermione, ‘No, we will talk here.’ I was weak, and followed Hermione.

‘My name is …’ etc., and so forth, giving me all her credentials, and she waited for mine.

‘My name is Janna Somers,’ I said.

‘You are perhaps a neighbour?’ she said, annoyed.

‘I have become fond of Mrs Fowler,’ I said; and at last this was right, it enabled her to let out an involuntary sigh of relief, because the categories were back in place.

‘Oh yes,’ she cried, ‘I do so agree, some of these old things, they are so lovable, so …’ But her face was saying that Maudie is far from lovable, rather a cantankerous old nuisance.