Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

I had determined to tell her exactly what was going on in the office, but it was hard.

‘You must be quite a queen bee there then,’ she remarked.

I said, ‘I am the assistant editor.’

It was not that she didn’t take it in, but that she had to repudiate it – me – the situation. She sat with her face averted, and then put her hand up to shield it from me.

‘Oh well, so you won’t be wanting to come in to me then, will you?’ she said at last.

I said, ‘It’s just that this week it’s very difficult. But I’ll drop in tomorrow if you’ll have me.’

She made a hard sorrowful sort of shrug. Before I left I took a look at the kitchen; supplies very low. I said, ‘I’ll bring in stuff tomorrow, what you need.’

After a long, long silence which I thought she’d never break, she said, ‘The weather’s bad, or I’d go myself. It’s the usual – food for the cat, and I’d like a bit of fish …’ That she didn’t complete the list meant that she did accept me, did trust me, somehow. But as I left I saw the wide blank stare at me, something frantic in it, as if I had betrayed her.

In the office next day not a sign of Joyce, and I rang her at home. Her son answered. Measured. Careful. No, she’s in the kitchen, I think she’s busy.

Never has Joyce been ‘busy’ before. I was so angry. I sat there thinking, I can go in to Maudie Fowler and help her, but not to Joyce, my friend. And meanwhile Phyllis was attending to the letters. Not from Joyce’s table, but at a chair at the secretaries’ table. Full marks for tact. I said to her, ‘This is crazy. I’m going to see Joyce now. Hold the fort.’ And went.

I’ve been in Joyce’s home a hundred times, always, however, invited, expected. The door opened by the son, Philip. When he saw me he began to stammer, ‘She’s – she’s – she’s …’ ‘In the kitchen,’ I said for him. He had, as it were, gone in behind his eyes: absented himself. This look again! But is it that I didn’t notice it before? A prepared surface, of one kind or another; the defences well manned.

I went into the kitchen. The son came behind me, like a jailer, or so I felt it (rightly). In the kitchen, a proper family kitchen, all pine and earthenware, the daughter, sitting at the table, drinking coffee, doing homework. Joyce standing over the sink. She looked far from an expensive gipsy, more a poor one. Her hair hadn’t been brushed, was a dowdy tangle, careless make-up, nails chipped. She presented to me empty eyes and a dead face, and I said, ‘Joyce, it’s not good enough,’ and she was startled back into herself. Tears sprang into her eyes, she gasped, turned quickly away and stood with her back to me, trembling, like Maudie. I sat at the table and said to the two children, ‘I want to talk to Joyce, please.’ They exchanged looks. You could say insolent, you could say scared. I saw that it would take very little to make me very sorry for them: for one thing, having to leave their schools and go off to the States, everything new. But I was angry, angry.

‘Give me some coffee,’ I said, and she came with a cup, and sat down opposite me.

We looked at each other, straight and long and serious.

‘I can’t stand this business of nothing being said, nothing being said.’

‘Nothing is being said here either.’

‘Are they listening at the door?’

‘Don’t you see, Mother has been captured. Back from the office.’

‘Do you mean to say they have resented it, your being so successful and all that?’

‘No, they are proud of me.’

‘But.’

‘Everything has fallen apart around them, and they haven’t known for months if they are going to have Felicity for a mum or me. Now they know it is me, security, but they are terrified. Surely you can see that?’ She sounded exactly like my dear sister Georgie, talking to the delinquent – me – and I wasn’t going to take it.

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said, ‘but we are talking of a young man and a young woman, they are not little children.’

‘Dorothy is seventeen and Philip is fifteen.’

She looked hard and fierce at me, I looked angrily at her.

I said, ‘How did we get like this, so soft, so silly, so babyish? How?’

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God, oh God! Oh God – Janna!’

‘Oh God, Joyce ,’ I said to her. ‘But I mean it. And don’t patronize me. Is nothing that I say to anyone worth anything?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Now we were both furious and liking each other the better for it. Our voices were raised, we both imagined ‘the children’ listening.

‘I’m talking about these ghastly wet spoiled brats we produce.’

‘You haven’t produced any.’

‘Oh, thank you – and so that’s the end of that then, the end of me! Thank God I haven’t then. When I look at – ’

‘Listen, Janna …’ Spelling it out, as to an idiot. ‘Is nothing really due to them, owed to them? They have a father who has had what amounts to a second home for years. Recently they have had to accept their parents are going to divorce. Now the family is going to stay together …’

‘And what is due to us, your work, to me?’

She sat there, spoon in a coffee mug, and it tinkled against the side with her trembling.

‘A crisis in the family, a choice, you wonder if perhaps you might actually have to live alone at some time, along with x billion other women – and all you are in your work counts for nothing, falls to pieces.’

By then we were both shaking, and very ashamed. We could see ourselves, two women shouting at each other in a silent house.

‘Wait, Janna,’ she said, ‘Wait.’ And she made a business of getting up to put on the kettle again, and took her time about sitting down. And then, ‘Do you imagine I don’t feel bad about you, our friendship? I’m in pain.’ She was shouting again. ‘Do you understand? I am in pain. I’ve never in my life felt like this. I’m being split in half, torn apart. I want to howl and scream and roll about … and so I am cooking family meals and helping with the homework. Strangely enough.’

‘And I, strangely enough, am in pain too.’

And suddenly we began to laugh, in the old way; we put our heads down on the kitchen table and laughed. The ‘kids’ came in, hearing us: with scared smiles. I, Janna Somers, ‘the office’, had proved every bit as much of a threat as they had feared. Seeing those scared faces. I knew I was going to give in if I didn’t watch it: but my mind was saying, I am right, I am right, I am right …

And perhaps I am not right, after all.

I said, ‘I’d better get back to work.’

She said, ‘I know that you and Phyllis are doing quite well without me.’

‘Quite well.’

‘Well then.’

And I went back as fast as I could to the office. To my real home. Leaving Joyce in her real home.

Later.

I took the things in to Maudie and sat with her. I was very tired, and she saw it.

She said in a timid old voice, ‘You mustn’t think you have to come in here, if you’re tired.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You need some help, you know that.’ And I added, ‘I like you. I like knowing you, Maudie.’

She nodded, in a prim measuring way, and there was a small pleased smile. ‘I’m not saying I’m not the better for it, because I am.’

I went out for the second time to the shop opposite because I had forgotten tea.

It was sleeting. I got the bits of kindling from the skip. All along these streets, the houses are being ‘done up’. Four of them in Maudie’s very short street. Four skips loaded with ‘rubbish’. Including perfectly good chairs, mattresses, tables, and quantities of wood in good condition. People sneak out for the wood. There must still be quite a few fireplaces in these houses. But not for long, not when they are ‘done up’.