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’.
I came out from the shop, and there on the pavement were two old women, wrapped up like parcels. I recognized a face: from the window opposite.
I was frozen. And wanted to get home.
But already I knew that these occasions cannot be rushed.
The conversation:
‘Excuse me, I wanted to ask, how is Maudie Fowler?’
‘She seems all right.’
‘Are you her daughter, dear? You do take good care of her.’
‘No. I am not her daughter.’
‘Are you a Good Neighbour?’
‘No, I am not that either.’ I laughed, and they allowed me small polite smiles.
I say ‘old women’, and that is a criticism of me, no individuality allowed them, just ‘old women’. But they seemed so alike, little plump old women, their faces just visible behind thick scarves, coats, hats.
‘Maudie Fowler has always kept herself so much to herself, and we were wondering.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘she’s over ninety, isn’t she?’
A reproving silence. ‘I am ninety-two dear, and Mrs Bates here is ninety-one.’
‘Well, I’d say Maudie was feeling her age.’
This was too direct and I knew it, but had started off like that and couldn’t change course. Oh yes, I know very well by now that these conversations should be allowed to develop.
‘You know Mrs Rogers, do you, dear?’
