But I don’t want to find myself in the newspapers all of a sudden, Social Worker Leaves 90-Year-Old Woman to Die Alone of Cancer.’
‘Perhaps you could try a nurse again, to give her a wash? You could try her with a Home Help?’
‘If she’ll let us in at all,’ says Vera. And laughs. She says, ‘You have to laugh, or you’d go mad. They are their own worst enemies.’
‘And you must tell her I am ill, and that is why I can’t get in to her.’
Vera says, ‘You do realize she won’t believe it, she’ll think it is a plot?’
‘Oh no,’ I groan, for I couldn’t stop groaning, the pain was so dreadful (terrible, terrible, terrible!), ‘please, Vera, do try and get it into her head …’
And there I lie, with my back knotted, my back like iron, and me sweating and groaning, while Vera tells me that ‘they’ are all paranoid, in one way or another, always suspect plots, and always turn against their nearest and dearest. Since I am Maudie’s nearest, it seems, I can expect it.
‘You are very fond of her,’ announced Vera. ‘Well, I can understand it, she’s got something. Some of them have, even at their worst you can see it in them. Others of course …’ And she sighed, a real human, non-professional sigh. I’ve seen Vera Rogers, flying along the pavements between one ‘case’ and another, her hands full of files and papers, worried, frowning, harassed, and then Vera Rogers with a ‘case’, not a care in sight, smiling, listening, all the time in the world … and so she was with me, at least that first visit. But she has been in several times, and she stopped needing to cosset and reassure, we have been talking, really talking about her work, sometimes so funny I had to ask her to stop, I could not afford to laugh, laughing was so painful.
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.’
