Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

When I get back, I cut up fish for the cat. It is no good, I cannot make myself appreciate cats, though that makes me an insensitive boor. I clean up the cat’s mess, I get the brandy and glasses. I realize I have forgotten the vests and knickers in the office. Well, tomorrow will do. I take out her commode, because she is not looking at it, with a trembling pride on her face I know only too well by now. As I wash it, I think, here’s something very wrong. I shall have to tell Vera Rogers. I rinse the inside of the commode carefully and use a lot of disinfectant.

When I sit down opposite her, with brandy for her and me, I fully mean to tell her about the Luncheon, with all the famous women, she’d like that, but – that was the last I remember, until I came to myself, out of such a deep sleep I could not find myself when I woke. I was looking at a yellow little witch in a smelly hot cave, by her roaring fire, her yellow shanks showing, for she had no knickers on and her legs were apart, and on her lap she held my hat, and she was using it for some bad purpose … I was terrified, and then suddenly I remembered, I am Jane Somers, I am here, in Maudie’s back room, and I fell asleep.

She did not want me to go. She made an excuse about batteries for her torch. I went to the door into the street, and it was morning. We stood there, looking up – oh, England, dismal and drear, a grey wet dawn. It was four thirty when I got home. I had a long, long proper bath, and then to my book again.

But I cannot concentrate on it. I am thinking about Maudie’s ‘This is the best time of my life’. What I cannot stand is, that I believe she means it. My running in at the end of the day, an hour, two hours, so little, is enough to make her say that. I want to howl when I think of it. And too, I feel so trapped. She might live for years and years, people live to be a hundred these days, and I am a prisoner of her ‘This is the best time of my life’, lovely gracious Janna, running in and out, with smiles and prezzies.

I wrote Maudie’s day because I want to understand. I do understand a lot more about her, but is it true? I can only write what I have experienced myself, heard her say, observed … I sometimes wake with one hand quite numb … But what else is there I cannot know about? I think that just as I could never have imagined she would say, ‘This is the best time of my life’, and the deprivation and loneliness behind it, so I cannot know what is behind her muttered ‘It is dreadful, dreadful’, and the rages that make her blue eyes blaze and glitter.

And I see that I did not write down, in Janna’s day, about going to the loo, a quick pee here, a quick shit, washing one’s hands … All day this animal has to empty itself, you have to brush your hair, wash your hands, bathe. I dash a cup under a tap and rinse out a pair of panties, it all takes a few minutes … But that is because I am ‘young’, only forty-nine.

What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance. I was going to say, For me it is nothing; but the fact is, once I did have my real proper baths every night, once every Sunday night I maintained and polished my beautiful perfect clothes, maintained and polished me , and now I don’t, I can’t. It is too much for me.

Late summer, how I hate it, blowzy and damp, dowdy and dusty, dull green, dull skies; the sunlight, when there is any, a maggot-breeder; maggots under my dustbin, because I hadn’t touched my own home for days.

Maudie has been ill again. Again I’ve been in, twice a day, before going to work and after work. Twice a day, she has stood by the table, leaning on it, weight on her palms, naked, while I’ve poured water over her till all the shit and smelly urine has gone. The stench. Her body, a cage of bones, yellow, wrinkled, her crotch like a little girl’s, no hair, but long grey hairs in her armpits. I’ve been worn out with it. I said to her, ‘Maudie, they’d send you in a nurse to wash you,’ and she screamed at me, ‘Get out then, I didn’t ask you.’

We were both so tired and overwrought, we’ve been screeching at each other like … what? Out of literature, I say ‘fishwives’, but she’s no fishwife, a prim, respectable old body, or that’s what she’s been in disguise for three decades. I’ve seen a photograph, Maudie at sixty-five, the image of disapproving rectitude … I don’t think I would have liked her then. She had said to herself, I like children, they like me, my sister won’t let me near her now she’s not breeding, she doesn’t need my services. So Maudie put an advert in the Willesden paper, and a widower answered. He had three children, eight, nine, ten. Maudie was given the sofa in the kitchen, and her meals, in return for: cleaning the house, mending his clothes, the children’s clothes, cooking three meals a day and baking, looking after the children. He was a fishmonger. When he came in at lunchtime, if he found Maudie sitting having a rest, he said to her, Haven’t you got anything to do? He gave her two pounds a week to feed them all on, and when I said it was impossible, she said she managed. He brought home the fish for nothing, and you could buy bread and potatoes. No, he wasn’t poor, but, said Maudie, he didn’t know how to behave, that was his trouble. And Maudie stuck it, because of the children. Then he said to her, Will you come to the pictures with me? She went, and she saw the neighbours looking at them. She knew what they were thinking, and she couldn’t have that. She cleaned the whole house, top to bottom, made sure everything was mended, baked bread, put out things for tea, and left a note: I am called to my sister’s, who is ill, yours truly, Maude Fowler.

But then she took her pension, and sometimes did small jobs on the side.

The Maudie who wore herself ‘to a stick and a stone’ was this judging, critical female, with a tight cold mouth.

Maudie and I shouted at each other, as if we were family, she saying, ‘Get out then, get out, but I’m not having those Welfare women in here,’ and I shouting, ‘Maudie, you’re impossible, you’re awful, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’

And then, once, I burst out laughing, it seemed so ridiculous, she there, stark naked, spitting anger at me, and I, rinsing off her shit and saying, ‘And what about your ears?’

She went silent and trembling. ‘ Why are you laughing at me ?’

‘I’m not, I’m laughing at us. Look at us, screaming at each other!’

She stepped back out of the basin she had been standing in, gazing at me, in angry appeal.

I put the big towel around her, that I’d brought from my bathroom, a pink cloud of a towel, and began gently drying her.

Tears finding their way through her wrinkles …

‘Come on, Maudie, for God’s sake, let’s laugh, better than crying.’

‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,’ she muttered, looking in front of her, eyes wide and bright. Trembling, shivering … ‘It’s terrible, terrible.’

These last three weeks I’ve thrown away all the new knickers I bought her, filthy and disgusting, bought two dozen more, and I’ve shown her how to fill them full of cotton wool as she puts them on.

So, she’s back in napkins.

Terrible, terrible, terrible …

It is the end of August.

I am lying in bed writing this with the diary propped on my chest.

Just after writing the last terrible , I woke in the night, and it was as if my lower back had a metal bar driven into it. I could not move at all from my waist down, the pain was so awful.

It was dark, the window showed confused dull light, and when I tried to shift my back I screamed. After that I lay still.