she buzzed, in came Phyllis, Joyce said, ‘I’m not happy about Wine, I’ve made the notes, please go and see our wine expert, what’s-his-name. What is his name – and his address, where is it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ says Phyllis, ‘I know where it is.’
She takes Joyce’s notes, smiles nicely, and out she goes.
And now Joyce allows me a brief smile, a grimace really, and actually looks at me. We laugh.
We look together at Phyllis, through the door into the filing room. We are taking in her clothes, her hair, her make-up, her shoes. Habit. Then Joyce loses interest in her, goes back into her thoughts.
Phyllis hasn’t got a style yet. Not as Joyce and I have. I sat there wondering if I could help Phyllis to a style, as Joyce helped me. It is only now as I sit writing this, I think how odd that I was analysing Phyllis and how she could look, when I was wild with misery about Joyce, wanting to say, For God’s sake, talk. I knew she had made up her mind to leave, and she felt bad about me: I needed for us to talk.
Joyce is the only person I have talked to in my life. And yet for the most part we talk in smiles, silences, signals, music without words, ’nuff said.
At last I couldn’t stand it, and said, ‘Joyce, I want to know why, you must see that.’
She was half turned from me, her cheek on her hand. She made a leave-me-alone irritable gesture.
I sit here, one in the morning, writing it down. My mind is so clear and sharp, whirling with thoughts. I’ve just had a new thought, it is this: writing is my trade, I write all the time, notes to myself, memos, articles, and everything is to present ideas, etc., if not to myself, then to others. I do not let thoughts fly away, I note them down, I present them, I postulate the outside eye. And that is what I am doing now. I see that as I write this diary, I have in mind that observing eye. Does that mean I really intend to publish this? It certainly wasn’t in my mind when I began writing it. It’s a funny thing, this need to write things down, as if they have no existence until they are recorded. Presented. When I listen to Maudie talk, I have this feeling, quick, catch it, don’t let it all vanish, record it. As if it is not valid until in print.
Oh, my thoughts are whirling through me, catch them …
I was sitting there with Joyce, both of us cold and sick, miserable, and I was examining us both, out of habit, as I had Phyllis. Two women editors, first-class women’s magazine (read by a lot of men), late nineteen-seventies going on to the eighties.
When I read diaries from the past, what fascinates me is what they wore, what they ate, all the details. It isn’t difficult to work out what people were likely to be thinking – not so different from us, I believe – but how did a woman make up her bed, or lay her table, or wash her underclothes; what did she have for breakfast, in 1780, in a middle-class household, in a provincial English town? What was a day in the life of a farmer’s wife, north of England, on the date Waterloo was fought?
When Joyce came to work here she made us all conscious we were tatty! The mid-sixties – tat! And yet her style was, as she said, high-class gipsy, which looks messy easily. She is tall, thin, with a mass of black curls and waves, careful disorder, and a thin pale face. Or that is how her face looks, emerging from all that hair. Black eyes that are really small, but made up huge and dramatic. Her clothes cost the earth. Today she wore a black and rust striped skirt and waistcoat and a black silk sweater and her thick silver chain with amber lumps. Her jewellery is very good, never any oriental semi-rubbish of the kind I can afford to wear, because of my style. She is beautiful: but it is a young woman’s style. She has kept her hair black. Soon she will have to change her style, to fit being not young.
I was still in mini-dresses, beads and gauds and frips, when Joyce took me in hand. Ever since, my style has been classical-expensive. I wear silk shirts and silk stockings, not nylon, and dresses that look at first glance as if I am not trying. I found a real dressmaker, who cares about every stitch, and I look for special buttons in markets, and handmade lace, and I get jerseys and jackets knitted for me. My style is that at first people don’t notice, and then their eyes come back and they examine detail, detail, the stitching on a collar, a row of pearl buttons. I am not thin, but solid. My hair is straight, and always perfect, a silvery gold. Grey eyes, large by nature and made larger.
We couldn’t be more different, Joyce and I, except in the trouble we take. But Joyce takes less than me because of her family.
Phyllis is a slight, strong girl, attractive. Fairish. She is always in the new fashion, and therefore there’s nothing to remark. I’ve seen her watching Joyce and, rightly, discarding that style for herself. I’ve seen her observing me: how does she do it? I’ll show her if she asks, take her to the dressmaker and the knitting woman, choose her hairdresser … that is what I was thinking as I sat there with Joyce, in all that misery: I was mentally abdicating, and expressing it through clothes, through a style!
Yet I have no conscious intention of giving up.
At lunchtime we drank coffee and smoked. Then she said, ‘I must go home,’ and I cried out, ‘Joyce!’ She said, ‘Don’t you see, I can’t do it, I can’t!’ And I said, ‘Joyce, you cannot just go off home like that, I have to know.’
She sighed, and sat down, made herself come together, and actually looked at me.
‘Know?’
‘Understand. I don’t understand how you can give all this up … what for?’
She said, ‘Have you had the experience, suddenly finding out that you didn’t know yourself?’
‘Indeed I have!’
‘I thought I would agree to a divorce easily.’
‘Has he got a girl?’
‘Yes, the same one, you know. He would take her instead of me.’
‘All this time he has really been married to the two of you, then?’
‘It amounts to that. He said to me at one stage, You have your job, I’m going to have Felicity.’
I was sitting there being careful, because I didn’t want her to fly off home, and I knew she could easily do that.
I was thinking what I call women’s lib thoughts. He has a job as a matter of course, but when she does, he has to bolster himself up with a girl on the side. But I have got so bored with these thoughts, they aren’t the point; they never were the point, not for me, not for Joyce. Phyllis is into women’s lib, consciousness-raising, and she makes it clear that Joyce and I are unliberated. Joyce and I have discussed this, but not often – because it isn’t the point! Once Joyce said to Phyllis, curious rather than combative, Phyllis, I hold down a very good, well-paid job. I have a husband and two children and I run my home and my family. Would you not say I am a liberated woman, then? Isn’t that enough? And Phyllis smiled the smile of one who knows better and allowed: A step in the right direction. And afterwards Joyce and I laughed. We had one of those sudden fits of laughing, music without words, that are among the best things in this friendship of ours.
‘If you don’t go to the States, he’ll take Felicity?’
‘He will marry her.’
‘Is that what you mind?’
