give them that much satisfaction, it’s the stick they beat you with!’
And then I laughed (and I wasn’t comfortable at all, thinking my own thoughts, for that just about summed it up, never mind that we had such a wonderful sex life, Freddie and I), and she said, ‘I have been watching your face. I can see you think differently. But I can’t help it. And now all the time the newspapers, the magazines, the telly, sex, sex, sex, and I think sometimes, am I mad, are they mad?’
I laugh and laugh. She laughs too. But it is a wild unhappy laugh, not at all her girl’s laugh that I love to hear.
Such is the power of – ? – that Maudie refers to that awful husband of hers, even now, as My man. She has seen him half a dozen times in half a century. One day, a knock at the door, and there stood her husband. But this young man said, ‘Mother? I’m your son Johnnie.’ ‘Well, come in then,’ said she. ‘I had put it out of mind, you see. I had made myself ill with fretting. Once I had to go to the doctor, and he said, Mrs Fowler, you must either find your child or put him out of your mind. How could I find him? He might be in America or Timbuctoo! And slowly I did forget him. And so when he was there – I am your son Johnnie, he said – we became friends, because we took to each other. And then there was the war. He did well in the war, he was an engineer, and he married an Italian girl, but it came to no good, for she went off with another man, and do you know what I dreamed the other night? Oh, it was a doleful dream, so bad and low. I dreamed there was a wonderful cherry tree, like the cherry tree there was out the back here before it fell down in a big storm. Big black cherries, soft and lovely and shining. And I stood one side of it, and poor Johnnie stood on the other, and we were trying to lean up and reach the cherries, and we tried and tried, but no matter how we pulled the boughs down, they sprang back, and the cherries were out of reach … And we stood there, Johnnie and I, and we were crying.’
Long after Johnnie was a grown man and had gone to America, where he vanished, and forty years after Laurie had left her, stealing her child, Maudie wrote a letter to her husband, asking him to meet her. They met on a bench in Regent’s Park.
‘Well, what do you want?’ he said.
‘I was thinking, perhaps we could make a home for Johnnie,’ she said to him. She explained that they could find a house – for she knew he always had money, wheeling and dealing – and make it nice, and then an advertisement in the paper in America.
‘For Johnnie has never had a nice home,’ she explained to her husband.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He bought me a fish supper, and I didn’t see him for five years.’
A marvellous hot blue day.
I said to Phyllis, ‘Hold the fort,’ and I ran out of the office, to hell with it. I went to Maudie, and when she answered the door, slow, slow, and cross, I said, ‘I’m taking you to the park for a treat.’ She stared at me, furious. ‘Oh, don’t,’ I said to her. ‘Oh, darling Maudie, don’t, please, don’t let yourself get angry, just come.’
‘But how can I?’ she says. ‘Look at me!’
And she peers up at the sky past my head. It is so blue and nice, and she says, ‘But … but … but …’
Then suddenly she smiles. She puts on her thick black-beetle coat and her summer hat, black straw, and we go off to the Rose Garden Restaurant. I find her a table out of the way of people, with rose bushes beside her, and I pile a tray with cream cakes, and we sit there all afternoon. She ate and ate, in her slow, consuming way, which says, I’m going to get this inside me while it is here! – and then she sat, she simply sat and looked, and looked. She was smiling and delighted. Oh, the darlings, she kept crooning, the darlings … at the sparrows, at the roses, at a baby in a pram near her. I could see she was beside herself with a fierce, almost angry delight, this hot brightly coloured sunlit world was like a gorgeous present. For she had forgotten it, down in that ghastly basement, in those dreary streets.
I was worried that it would all be too much for her inside that thick black shell, and it was so hot and noisy. But she did not want to leave. She sat there until it closed.
And when I took her home she was singing dreamily to herself, and I took her to her door, and she said, ‘No, leave me, leave me, I want to sit here and think about it. Oh, what lovely things I have to think about.’
What did strike me, when I saw her out there in the full sunlight: how yellow she is. Bright blue eyes in a face that looks as if it has been painted yellow.
Three days later.
Another gorgeous afternoon. Went to Maudie, said, ‘Come to the park.’
She said irritably, ‘No, no, you go, I can’t.’
‘Oh come on,’ I said, ‘you know you like it once you get there.’
She stood holding to the door handle, distressed, angry, dishevelled. Then she said, ‘No, oh dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,’ and shut the door in my face.
I was furious. I had been thinking, as I drove to her, how she sat in the rose garden, crooning with delight. I went back to the office, furious. Worked till late. Did not go in to Maudie. Felt guilty, as I wallowed about with the hot water making me new again: kept seeing how she stood there, holding herself up, heard the mutter, Dreadful, dreadful …
A week has passed, it is dreary and chilly again. End of summer? Maudie seems to me, perhaps, really ill? … I know so little about old people! For all I know, all this is normal! I keep setting aside a time to think about her, but I am so busy, busy, busy. I rush in to her, at all hours, I say to her, I’m sorry, Maudie, I’ve got so much work. Last night I went in late and fell asleep in her chair. This morning I rang up the office and said I was not feeling well. In all my years there I think I’ve been ill twice, and I never take days off.
Phyllis said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll hold the fort!’
Maudie’s day.
She wakes inside a black smothering weight, she can’t breathe, can’t move. They’ve buried me alive, she thinks, and struggles. The weight shifts. Oh, it’s the cat, it’s my pretty, she thinks, and heaves. The weight lifts, and she hears a thud as the cat arrives on the floor. Petty? she asks, for she is not sure, it is so dark and her limbs are so stiff. She hears the cat moving about and knows she is alive. And warm … and in bed … Oh, oh, she says aloud, I must get to the toilet or I’ll wet the bed again. Panic! Have I wet the bed already? Her hand explores the bed. She mutters, Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, thinking how, a few days ago, she had wet the bed, and the trouble and difficulty of getting everything dry.
But it is as if her hand has disappeared, she can’t feel it. She clenches and unclenches her left hand, to know she has hands, and waits for the tingling to begin in her right. It takes a long time, and then she pulls out the half-numb right hand from under the clothes and uses the left to massage it awake. She still does not know if she has wet the bed. Almost she sinks back into the black bed, black sleep, but her bowels are moving and she smells a bad smell. Oh no, no, no, she whimpers, sitting there in the dark. No, dreadful, for she believes she might have shat in the bed. At last, with such effort and trouble, she climbs out of the bed, and stands beside it, feeling in it to see what is there. She can’t be sure. She turns, carefully, tries to find
