Phyllis visited, once. There she was (my successor?), a self-sufficient cool young woman, rather pretty, and I had only to compare her with Vera. I took the opportunity of doing what I know she’s been wanting and needing. She has been attempting my ‘style’, and I’ve told her, no, never never compromise, always the best, and if you have to pay the earth, then that’s it. I looked carefully at her dress: a ‘little dress’, flowered crêpe, skimpy, quite nice, and I said to her, ‘Phyllis, if that’s the kind of dress you want, then at least have it made, use decent material, or go to …’ I spent a couple of hours, gave her my addresses, dressmaker, hairdresser, knitters. She was thoughtful, concentrated, she very much wanted what I was offering. Oh, she’ll do it all right, and with intelligence, no blind copying. But all the time she was there, I was in agony, and I could no more have said to her, ‘Phyllis, I’m in pain, please help, perhaps we could together shift me a centimetre, it might help …’ than Freddie or my mother could have asked me for help.
And as for asking for a bedpan …
Mrs Penny saw my door open, and crept in, furtive with guilt, smiling, frowning, and sighing by turns. ‘Oh, you’re ill, why didn’t you tell me, you should ask, I’m always only too ready to …’
She sat in the chair Phyllis had just vacated, and began to talk. She talked. She talked. I had heard all of it before, word by word she repeats herself: India, how she and her husband braved it out when the Raj crumbled; her servants, the climate, the clothes, her dogs, her ayah. I could not keep my attention on it, and, watching her, knew that she had no idea whether I was listening or not. Her eyes stared, fixed, in front of her at nothing. She spilled out words, words, words. I understood suddenly that she was hypnotized. She had hypnotized herself. This thought interested me, and I was wondering how often we all hypnotize ourselves without knowing it, when I fell asleep. I woke, it must have been at least half an hour later, and she was still talking compulsively, eyes fixed. She had not noticed I had dropped off.
I was getting irritated, and tired. First Phyllis, now Mrs Penny, both energy-drainers. I tried to interrupt, once, twice, finally raised my voice: ‘Mrs Penny!’ She went on talking, heard my voice retrospectively, stopped, looked scared.
‘Oh dear,’ she murmured.
‘Mrs Penny, I must rest now.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear …’ Her eyes wandered off from me, she looked around the room, from which she feels excluded because of my coldness, she sighed. A silence. Then, like a wind rising in the distance, she murmured, ‘And then when we came to England …’
‘Mrs Penny,’ I said firmly.
She stood up, looking as if she had stolen something. Well, she had.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear. But you must let me know any time you need anything …’ And she crept out again, leaving the door open.
I made sure after that, that whoever went out, shut it; and I took no notice when the handle turned, timid but insistent, and I heard her call, Mrs Somers, Mrs Somers, can I get you anything?
Supposing I were to write Mrs Penny’s day? Oh no, no, no, I really can’t face that, I can’t.
I have been on the telephone for hours with Joyce in Wales. We have not been able to talk at all, not for months. But now she rings me, I ring her, and we talk. Sometimes we are quiet, for minutes, thinking of all the fields, the hedges, the mountains, the time between us. We talk about her marriage, her children, my marriage, my mother, our work. We do not talk about Maudie. She makes it absolutely clear, no. She has said that she is going to the States. Not, now, because she is afraid of being alone when she is old, because she knows she is alone and does not care. But it is the children, after all the insecurity, the misery, they want two parents in one house. Even though they are nearly grown up? I cannot help insisting, and Joyce laughs at me.
I said to her, ‘Joyce, I want to tell you about Maudie, you know, the old woman.’
And Joyce said, ‘Look, I don’t want to know, do you understand?’
I said to her, ‘You don’t want to talk about the one real thing that has happened to me?’
‘It didn’t happen to you’ – fierce and insistent – ‘for some reason or other you made it happen.’
‘But it is important to me, it is.’
‘It must be to her, that’s for certain,’ said she, with that dry resentment you hear in people’s voices when sensing imposition.
I said to her, ‘Don’t you think it is odd, Joyce, how all of us, we take it absolutely for granted that old people are something to be outwitted, like an enemy, or a trap? Not that we owe them anything?’
‘I don’t expect my kids to look after me.’
And I felt despair, because now I feel it is an old gramophone record. ‘That’s what you say now, not what you will say then.’
‘I’m going to bow out, when I get helpless, I’m going to take my leave.’
‘That’s what you say now.’
‘How do you know, why are you sure about me?’
‘Because I know now that everyone says the same things, at stages in their lives.’
‘And so I’m going to end up, some crabby old witch, an incontinent old witch – is that what you are saying?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can tell you this, I am pleased about one thing, I’m putting thousands of miles between myself and my father. He’s an old pet, but enough’s enough.’
‘Who’s going to look after him?’
‘He’ll go into a Home, I expect. That what I shall expect.’
‘Perhaps.’
And so we talk, Joyce and I, for hours, I lying flat on my back in London, trying to outwit the next spasm that will knot my back up, she in an old chintz chair in a cottage on a mountainside, ‘on leave’ from Lilith. But she has sent in her resignation.
I do not ring up my sister. I do not ring up my sister’s children. When I think about them I feel angry. I don’t know why. I feel about these infantile teenagers as Joyce does about me and Maudie: Yes, all right, all right, but not now, I’ll think about it later, I simply haven’t the energy.
Four weeks of doing nothing …
But I have been thinking. Thinking. Not the snap, snap, intuitions-and-sudden-judgements kind, but long slow thoughts. About Maudie. About Lilith. About Joyce. About Freddie. About those brats of Georgie’s.
Before I went back into the office, I visited Maudie. Her hostile little face, but it was a white face, not a yellow one, and that made me feel better about her at once. ‘Hello,’ I said, and she gave me a startled look because I have lost so much weight.
‘So you really have been ill, then, have you?’ said she, in a soft troubled voice, as we sat opposite each other beside that marvellous fire. When I think of her, I see the fire: that sordid horrible room, but the fire makes it glow and welcome you.
‘Yes, of course I have, Maudie. Otherwise I’d have been in.’
Her face turned aside, her hand up to shield it from me.
‘That doctor came in,’ she said at last, in a small lost voice. ‘She called him in.’
‘I know, she told me.’
‘Well, if she is a friend of yours!’
‘You are looking better than you were, so it might have something to do with the doctor!’
‘I put the pills in the toilet!’
‘All of them?’
A laugh broke through her anger. ‘You’re sharp!’
‘But you are looking better.’
‘So you say.’
