Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

Joyce is going to America. She will give up a wonderful job. Very few women ever get a job like this one. She will give up family, friends, home. Her children are nearly grown up. She will be in a country that she will have to learn to like, alone with a man who would have been happy to go with another, younger girl. She has no choice.

Well, women’s lib, well, Phyllis, what do you have to say to that?

What, in your little manifestoes, your slamming of doors in men’s faces, your rhetoric, have you ever said that touches this? As far as I am concerned, nothing. And, believe me, Phyllis makes sure that all the propaganda is always available to me, spread on my desk.

The reason why girls these days get themselves together in flocks and herds and shoals and shut out men altogether, or as much as they can, is because they are afraid of – whatever the power men have that makes Joyce say, I have no choice.

I can live alone and like it. But then, I was never really married.

After I reached home, the telephone: Joyce, her voice breathless and small. Because she had cried herself dry, I knew that. She said, ‘Jan, we make our choices a long time before we think we do! My God, but it’s terrifying! Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

And I do. And it is terrifying. What choices have I already made that I am not yet conscious of?

I have not been in to Maudie Fowler since Friday evening.

Tuesday.

Joyce not at work. Phyllis and I held the fort. After work I went in to Maudie. She took a long time to answer the door, stood looking at me for a long time, not smiling, not pleased; at last stood aside so that I could come in, went ahead of me along the passage, without a word. She sat down on her side of the fire, which was blazing, and waited for me to speak.

I was already angry, thinking, well, and so she doesn’t have a telephone, is that my fault?

I said, ‘I did not get back on Sunday night until very late, and last night I was tired.’

‘Tired, were you?’ And then, ‘On Sunday evening I waited for you. I had a bit of supper for us both.’

I noted in myself the usual succession of emotions: the trapped feeling, then a need to escape, then – of course – guilt.

‘I am sorry, Maudie,’ I said.

She turned her head and stared at the fire, her mouth a little open, and gasping.

‘Have you been well?’

‘Well enough.’

I was thinking, look, I’ve washed you head to foot, of your stinking shit, and now you … but I had to think, too, that I made a promise and hadn’t kept it. I must never do that again.

It took nearly an hour before she softened, got up to make us tea. I had to stay another two hours. Before I left she was talking freely again. A long story about her father’s fancy-woman, who, her mother ‘properly and safely’ dead, had not only made a skivvy of her, Maudie – ‘though I’ve told you all about that, I know’ – but then set about poisoning her.

‘She poisoned my mother, I know she did, if no one else knew, and my Aunt Mary believed me. She said there was no point going to the police, they’d never take my word against my father, he was in with the police, he was always in with anyone who would do him good, he’d have the inspector in at Christmas for whisky and cake, and he and his fancy-woman’d send a cask of ale up to the boys at the station with a ham and pudding. If I went to them, just a girl, and terrified I was, and ill with it, and said, My father’s woman poisoned my mother and now she’s doing for me, it’s arsenic – well, would they listen? My Aunt Mary said, Look, you leave home and come to me when you can do it without making trouble. I’m not facing that brother of mine in a fight, he’s not one to cross, he’s one to get his own back. But when it’s the right time, you’ll find a bed and a bite with me. Well, I got sicker and weaker. Months it went on. I tried not to eat at home, I’d go running to my sister, the one that died – no, I’ve not mentioned her, she makes me feel too bad. She was always the weakly one, she got on their nerves. She married at fifteen. She married against my father, and he said, Never darken my doors. Her man was no good and couldn’t keep her. She had three little children, and my mother would send me with a pie or some bread, anything that wouldn’t be missed, and I’d see her, so pale and weak, the children hungry. She’d take a little nibble, to keep her strength up, and then make her children eat the rest. My mother died, and then there was no food in that house at all. I went to my father and said, My sister’s dying of lack of food and warmth. Said he, I told her not to marry him, and that was all he ever said. She died, and he didn’t go to the funeral. The husband took the one child still alive, and I never heard more. Before she died, I’d be sitting with her, I’d be faint with hunger because I was afraid to eat at home, and she dying of hunger because there was no food, and we were company. It was an awful time, awful – I don’t know why people say “the good old days”, they were bad days. Except for people like my father …’ And Maudie went on and on about her father.

When I asked, ‘How about your other sister?’ she said, ‘She’d married and gone, we did not hear of her much, she was keeping out of the way of Father, he didn’t like her man either. Once I went to her and said, Polly, our sister Muriel is starving, and her children with her, and all she said was, Well, I’ve got nothing to spare for her. Yet her food safe was stuffed with joints and pies and custards.

‘After Muriel died, I did not even have anywhere to go and sit, and I ate as little as I could because I knew there was poison in it. She would come up to my room – they’d put me up in the attic, just as if I was a servant – with milk and broth and say, Drink it, drink it, and I’d pour it into the slop pail and then creep down to empty the slop pail so she couldn’t know. I could taste the poison in it, I knew there was poison. Sometimes I went to pick up the bread that people threw to the birds, but I was afraid of being seen. We were known, you see, we were well thought of, Father with his goings and comings and his carriage and his free ways, and she with her pub. I was the daughter at home, the people envied me for my easy time. Yet I was on a thin bed at the top of the house in an attic, not a whisper of heat, never a new dress, or anything of my own, only her old clothes to cut down, and afraid to eat. Well, one evening it all came to a head, for I was in bed, too weak and sick to get up, and she had a glass full of sugared milk, and she said, I’m going to stay here till you drink it. I don’t want it, I said. I don’t want it. But she said, I’m going to sit here.

‘She had on a pink silk dressing gown with feathers that had grey velvet ruches around the neck, and high-heeled pink slippers. She had put on plenty of weight with all her liking for food and drink, and she was red in the face, and she was sighing and saying, Oh my God, the stairs, and Oh my God, it’s cold up here. Yet she never thought that I had to climb up and down the stairs, nor that I had to live in that cold. And yet there were two empty bedrooms on the same floor they had theirs. Later my Aunt Mary said to me, Of course they didn’t want you on that floor with them, they didn’t want you to hear their goings-on. What goings-on? I said, for I didn’t care about all that, I hated all that, I’m like my mother. I shut my mind to it. And besides, they weren’t married: she had a husband in a hospital somewhere, so she couldn’t marry my father. Now I look back and wonder at it all: people were strict in those days, and yet I don’t remember her suffering for her living out of the marriage bond with my father. But I wouldn’t have noticed: all I thought of was how not to eat in that house. That night, I had to drink the milk at last, though the taste in it sickened me. Then I pretended to sleep. And she went lumbering downstairs at last. I put my finger down my throat and brought up the milk. Then I put my other dress into my mother’s little bag and I crept out of the house.