Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

We couldn’t be more different, Joyce and I, except in the trouble we take. But Joyce takes less than me because of her family.

Phyllis is a slight, strong girl, attractive. Fairish. She is always in the new fashion, and therefore there’s nothing to remark. I’ve seen her watching Joyce and, rightly, discarding that style for herself. I’ve seen her observing me: how does she do it? I’ll show her if she asks, take her to the dressmaker and the knitting woman, choose her hairdresser … that is what I was thinking as I sat there with Joyce, in all that misery: I was mentally abdicating, and expressing it through clothes, through a style!

Yet I have no conscious intention of giving up.

At lunchtime we drank coffee and smoked. Then she said, ‘I must go home,’ and I cried out, ‘ Joyce! ’ She said, ‘Don’t you see, I can’t do it, I can’t!’ And I said, ‘Joyce, you cannot just go off home like that, I have to know.’

She sighed, and sat down, made herself come together, and actually looked at me.

‘Know?’

‘Understand. I don’t understand how you can give all this up … what for?’

She said, ‘Have you had the experience, suddenly finding out that you didn’t know yourself?’

‘Indeed I have!’

‘I thought I would agree to a divorce easily.’

‘Has he got a girl?’

‘Yes, the same one, you know. He would take her instead of me.’

‘All this time he has really been married to the two of you, then?’

‘It amounts to that. He said to me at one stage, You have your job, I’m going to have Felicity.’

I was sitting there being careful, because I didn’t want her to fly off home, and I knew she could easily do that.

I was thinking what I call women’s lib thoughts. He has a job as a matter of course, but when she does, he has to bolster himself up with a girl on the side. But I have got so bored with these thoughts, they aren’t the point; they never were the point, not for me, not for Joyce. Phyllis is into women’s lib, consciousness-raising, and she makes it clear that Joyce and I are unliberated. Joyce and I have discussed this, but not often – because it isn’t the point! Once Joyce said to Phyllis, curious rather than combative, Phyllis, I hold down a very good, well-paid job. I have a husband and two children and I run my home and my family. Would you not say I am a liberated woman, then? Isn’t that enough? And Phyllis smiled the smile of one who knows better and allowed: A step in the right direction. And afterwards Joyce and I laughed. We had one of those sudden fits of laughing, music without words, that are among the best things in this friendship of ours.

‘If you don’t go to the States, he’ll take Felicity?’

‘He will marry her.’

‘Is that what you mind?’

She shook her head. Again she was not looking at me. I was confused, didn’t know what it was she feared, in facing me. At last she said, ‘You are such a self-sufficient one.’

This was the last thing I expected – the child-wife, child-daughter – and I said, ‘ I , self-sufficient?’

And she just shook her head, oh, it’s all too much for me, and crouched holding on to the desk with both hands, looking in front of her, cigarette hanging from her lips. I saw her as an old crone, Mrs Fowler: fine sharp little face, nose and chin almost meeting. She looked ancient. Then she sighed again, pulled herself out, turned to me.

‘I can’t face being alone,’ she said, flat. ‘And that’s all there is to it.’

If I say my mind was in a whirl, that is how it was.

I wanted to say, But, Joyce – my husband died, it seems now overnight – what is it you are counting on? I could have said, Joyce, if you throw up this work and go with him, you might find yourself with nothing. I could have said … and I said nothing, because I was crying with a sort of amazed anger, at the impossibility of it, and worse than that, for I was thinking that I had not known Joyce at all! I would not have believed that she could say that, think it. More: I knew that I could not say to Joyce, Your attitude to death is stupid, wrong, you are like a child! It’s not like that, what are you afraid of? Being alone – what’s that!

For I had discovered that I had made a long journey away from Joyce, and in a short time. My husband had died, my mother had died: I had believed that I had not taken in these events, had armoured myself. And yet something had changed in me, quite profoundly. And there was Maudie Fowler, too.

It seemed to me, as I sat there, crying and trying to stop, biting on my (best-quality linen monogrammed) handkerchief, that Joyce was a child. Yes, she was a child, after all, and I could say nothing to her of what I had learned and of what I now was. That was why I was crying.

‘Don’t,’ said Joyce. ‘I didn’t mean to – open old wounds.’

‘You haven’t. That’s not it.’ But that was as near as I could come to talking. I mean by that, saying what was in my mind. For then we did talk, in a sensible dry sort of way, about all kinds of things, and it is not that I don’t value that. For we had not, or not for a long time, talked in this way. The way women communicate – in becks and nods and hints and smiles – it is very good, it is pleasurable and enjoyable and one of the best things I’ve had. But when the chips are down, I couldn’t say to Joyce why I had to cry.

She said, ‘You are different from me. I’ve been watching you and I can see that. But if he goes to the States, I’ll be alone. I’ll not marry again, I know that. And anyway, if you have been married to a man, you can’t just throw him aside and take up another – they can do that …’

‘Or think they can.’

‘Yes, or think they can, without penalties, I mean. And so I don’t see myself marrying someone else. The kids, they don’t want to go to the States, but if he went and I stayed, they’d commute and I know that pretty soon they’d be there rather than here, more opportunities, probably better for the young. I’d be alone. I don’t know how to be alone, Jan.’

And I could not say to her, Joyce, your husband is fifty-five, he’s a workaholic …

‘You are prepared to be a faculty wife?’

She grimaced at this. ‘I shan’t get anything like this job, of course not. But I expect there’d be something.’

As she left, she said, ‘No, and I haven’t even finally made up my mind. I know how I’m going to miss all this – and you, Jan. But I have no choice.’ And with that she went out, not looking at me.

And that is what I was left with, the I have no choice. For I do not know what it is, in that marriage of hers – I would never have suspected – the existence of anything that would make it inevitable she would say, I have no choice.

Joyce has been the best editor this magazine has ever had. She has never put her home and family first … and yet … I see how, when she came in, the flexibility began that everyone welcomed: working at home from the telephone, working late or early when necessary. We all said, It’s a woman’s way of dealing with things, not office hours, but going along with what was necessary. And now I am thinking that what was necessary was Joyce’s marriage, her home.

She would easily stay after work to eat supper with me, in the office, in a restaurant: working meals. And yet there were times when she had to be at home. I was what made all this possible: I have never said, No, I can’t stay in the office late as usual, I have to get home. Or only when Freddie and I did our dinner parties. I’ve never ever said, This afternoon, I have to go early, Freddie will be in early. But it seems to me that something like that has been going on with Joyce: her marriage, her children, her work. She incorporated all of it, in a marvellous flexible way. ‘Can you hold the fort this afternoon, Jan?’ In a sense, I’ve been part of her marriage, like that girl Felicity! These wholes we are part of, what really happens, how things really work … it is what has always fascinated me, what interests me most. And yet I have only just had the thought: that I have been, in a sense, part of Joyce’s marriage.