Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

I went back to the office armed by this new insight. It was all true. They call meetings every day, to discuss work hours, lunch hours, work loads, management, the policy of the mag, me, the political bias of the mag, the state of the nation. Many of them in working time. I called Ted Williams, the Trade Union representative, and said as far as I was concerned he was the only sensible person among the lot and I was going to forbid all meetings except for those which he called. He laughed. He thinks these middle-class revolutionaries a joke. (Let’s hope they don’t have the last laugh.)

I called a meeting of the entire staff, nearly a hundred present, and I said this was the last meeting permitted in working hours except for those convened by the Trade Union representative. And from now on, they could conduct their social lives outside the office. Shock. Horror. But of course they were thoroughly enjoying this confrontation with the Enemy, namely me, namely the Force of Reaction.

I had lunch with Vera, and I said to her, as she moaned about that week’s ten meetings, ‘Hold your horses. You seem to think this is a disease peculiar to your Welfare Workers. No, it’s a national disease. It’s everywhere, like a plague. Meetings, talking, it’s a way of not getting anything done. It’s their social life. They are lonely people, most of them, without adequate social outlets. Therefore, meetings. Anyway, I’ve forbidden them in Lilith. ’

‘You haven’t!’

‘I’ve instituted one meeting a week. Everyone has to come. No one can speak at all for more than a minute unless it is extremely urgent. I mean urgent. And so they go to the pub to have meetings about me.’

‘The thing is, poor creatures, they don’t know it’s their social lives, they really believe it’s politics.’

I sit here, conscientiously looking back over my year … I look at that word, conscientiously. I am not going to repudiate it! As I look I think of Joyce’s lazy, affectionate: Good old Janna.

Well, all right. As I sit here, conscientiously looking over the year, I note again how hard I have worked, how hard. And yet, as I said to my dear niece Jill when she rang to inquire, ‘I hope you aren’t working too hard, Aunt Jane?’ meaning, Oh, don’t work too hard, don’t be boring, don’t do difficult and dutiful things, what will happen to my dream of glamour and easy fun? – ‘I’ve never in my life worked as hard as your mother, and that would be true if I worked twenty hours a day.’

‘Can I come and stay the weekend?’

‘Please do. You can help me with something.’

She came. That was only a month ago.

I told her to write an article about the influence of two world wars on fashion. I watched her face. I had already tried the idea out in the think session. I said that, in the First World War, everyone in the world became used to pictures of masses of people in uniform. For the first time on that scale. Conditioned to the idea of uniforms, you are more amenable to following fashion; following fashion, you are more amenable to uniforms. In the Second World War, everyone in the world saw millions of people in uniform. The boss nation wore tight sexually provocative trousers, buttocks emphasized. Since the Second World War, everyone over the world wears tight sexually emphatic uniforms. A world fashion. Because of a world war.

I made this dry and factual, no excitement in it. I wanted to see how she would react. She listened. I watched her. Strained she was, but trying.

‘I don’t think I can write an article like that.’

‘Yet, or not at all?’

‘Yet.’

‘When are you sitting your exams?’

‘In a few weeks. Are you still seeing Mrs … ?’

‘Mrs Fowler? Yes, I am.’

Suddenly her passionately rejecting face, her real distress, which told me how threatened she felt.

Just as I would have done – alas, so recently – she cried out: ‘Why doesn’t her family look after her? Why doesn’t the Welfare put her into a Home? Why does she have to impose on you?’

I’ve just taken three weeks’ leave. I have a lot owed to me. I’ve never taken all that I could, even when Freddie was alive. Nor did Freddie. It has occurred to me: was Freddie’s office his home? If so, it was only because of what he had to put up with from me. We went for short motoring holidays, usually in France, and ate and slept well. We were pleased to get home.

Phyllis was, of course, delighted to be left in charge. She has a look of satisfaction, which she has to keep hidden. Why? Everything has always been given to her so freely and easily. Take her clothes. Her style, mine adapted, couldn’t be better for her. Soft silky clothes, everything sleek and subtle, golden brown hair. Sometimes little frills at wrists and throat – I could never wear those, alas, I’m too solid. Slim good gold jewellery showing in the opening of a plain coffee shirt that has the gentlest shine to it, a fine chain visible under a cuff whose thin stripes echo it. She goes to my dressmaker, my hairdresser, my knitter, she uses the shops I told her about. And yet it is as if she has had to steal all this expertise from me: because I unfairly kept it from her. Thus, when she sees me observing her new outfit, thinking, oh well done, Phyllis!, she has the need to hide the small superior smile that goes with: That’s right, I’ve got one over on you! Amazing girl.

It is not only I who am wondering if Phyllis’s new lusciousness mirrors something inward. I watch her in the photographers’ rooms. They, their working areas, have always been the pole, the balance, to our office, Joyce’s and mine – Phyllis’s and mine. Two power centres. Michael, who never took any notice of the girl, is now interested. And she in him. Quite different from me and Freddie: slapdash, casual, equal. At any rate, neither of them ever concedes an inch. I watch them in a characteristic scene. He is slanted back against a trestle table, legs crossed at the ankle, thus exposing the full length of his front in soft corduroy, the promising bulge on show. His head is slightly averted, so that he smiles at her across the curve of his cheek. He is good-looking, this Michael, but until just recently I haven’t been faced with it. And Phyllis has one buttock on a desk, the other leg a long angled curve. In something pretty and soft, like black suede, or an unexpected bright colour, she presents the length of herself to him, and her hair slips about her face as they discuss – and oh how competently – their work. He lets his eyes travel up her body in a sober appreciation that mocks itself, and she opens her eyes in sardonic appraisal of the soft bulge presented to her. Then they go off to lunch, where, more often than not, they discuss layout or advertising.

I enjoy watching this game, but could not let my enjoyment be evident, for Phyllis would feel something was being stolen from her. Oh, Joyce , I have no one with whom to share these moments.

How I have enjoyed my three weeks. I did not go away, because I could not bear to leave Maudie for so long: if that is crazy, then let it be.

Joyce rang up. She is drinking far too much.

‘Why do you never ring me, Janna?’

‘It is your place to ring me. It was you who went away.’

‘God, you’re relentless.’

‘Very well, I am.’

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