are all right: they don’t do much, but keep an eye on them. They are called Good Neighbours and they are paid so little they can’t be doing it for the money. I made it my business to find out all this through the office. On the third Saturday I took her some fruit, and saw it was the wrong thing. She said nothing, again, till later, when she remarked that her teeth made it impossible for her to eat fruit.
‘Can’t you eat grapes? Bananas?’
She said, with humour, that the pension did not run to grapes.
And she was off, on the subject of the pension, and what coal cost, and what food cost, and ‘that Council woman who doesn’t know what she is talking about’. I listened, again. I have not pieced it all together yet. I see that it will be a long time before my ignorance, my lack of experience, and her reticence, and her rages – for now I see how they simmer there, making her eyes light up with what you’d think, at first, must be gaiety or even a sense of comedy – a long time before how she is, her nature, and how I am, my rawness, can make it possible for me to form a whole picture of her.
The ‘Council woman’, a Mrs Rogers, wanted her, Mrs Fowler, to have a Home Help. But the Home Help cheated her and didn’t do any work, and wouldn’t wash her floors. The Home Help was just the way all these young women are now, lazy, too good for work. She, Mrs Fowler, was not too good to wash floors, she carries her own coal all along the passage, she sweeps her own chimney once a week as far up as she could reach with her brushes, because she is afraid of fire. And so she went on, about the social workers, and Home Helps, and – a Good Neighbour, she was kind enough to come once, and she said it was time I was in a Home, so I said to her, You know your way out.
‘But, Mrs Fowler, you and I met in the chemist’s, how could I be a Good Neighbour – I mean, an official?’
‘They get up to anything,’ she said, bitter but distressed, for she was afraid I would be offended and not come back.
She went with me to the outside door when I left, and she was doing something I have seen on the stage or written in novels. She wore an old striped apron, because she had put it on to make the tea, and she stood pleating it with both hands, and letting it go smooth, then pleating it again.
‘Shall I drop in during the week?’ I asked.
‘If you have time,’ she said. And could not resist, ‘And it will make a bit extra for you.’ Yet she almost gasped as she said this: she did not want to say it, because she wanted to believe I was not an official, paid person, but just a human being who likes her.
When I went in after work on Wednesday, I took in a copy of our magazine. I was ashamed of it, so glossy and sleek and slick, so clever – that is how it is presented, its image. But she took it from me with a girl’s mischievous smile, and a sort of prance of her head – what remained of a girl’s tossed hair – and said, ‘Oh, I love these, I love looking at these things they think up.’
Because it was seven, I did not know how to fit myself in to her. When did she eat her supper? Or go to bed? On the newspapers on the table was a bottle of milk stout and a glass.
‘I’ve drunk it or I’d offer you some,’ said she.
I sat down in the chair opposite hers and saw that the room, with the curtains drawn and the electric light, seemed quite cosy, not so dreadfully dirty and grim. But why do I go on about dirt like this? Why do we judge people like this? She was no worse off for the grime and the dust, and even the smells. I decided not to notice, if I could help it, not to keep judging her, which I was doing, by the sordidness. I saw that the electric switches were broken, and made an excuse to go out to the ‘kitchen’: frayed cords trailing over the walls, only one switch for the whole room, up on the light itself, which she could hardly reach.
She was looking at the magazine, with a smile that was all pleasure.
‘I work for that magazine,’ I said, and she let the thing fall shut and sat looking at me in that way of hers, as if she is trying to make things fit, make sense.
‘Do you? And what do you …’ But she did not know what questions to ask. I could not bring myself to say I was the assistant editor. I said, ‘I do typing and all sorts.’ Which is true enough.
‘That’s the main thing,’ she said, ‘training. It stands between you and nothing. That, and a place of your own.’
That evening she talked about how she had fought to get into this flat, for at first she had been on the top floor back, in one room, but she had her eye on the basement flat, and wanted it, and waited for it, and schemed for it, and at last, got it. And they aren’t going to get me out, and they needn’t think it. She spoke as if all this happened yesterday, but it was about the time of the First World War.
She talked about how she had not had the money for the rent of these rooms, and how she had saved it up, penny by penny, and then it was stolen, two years’ scrimping and saving, by the wicked woman on the first floor, and she saved again, and at last she went to the landlord and said, You let me in down there. I’ve got the money for it. He said to me, And how are you going to keep the rent paid? You are a milliner’s girl, aren’t you? I said, You leave that to me. When I stop paying, then you can throw me out. ‘And I have never not paid, not once. Though, I’ve gone without food. No, I learned that early. With your own place, you’ve got everything. Without it, you are a dog. You are nothing. Have you got your own place?’ – and when I said yes, she said, nodding fiercely, angrily, ‘That’s right, and you hold on to it, then nothing can touch you.’
Mrs Fowler’s ‘flat’ is rent-controlled, twenty-two shillings a week. About a pound in new money, but of course she doesn’t think in terms of the new currency, she can’t cope with it. She says the house was bought by ‘that Greek’ after the war – the new war, you know, not the old one – for four hundred pounds. And now it’s worth sixty thousand. ‘And he wants me out, so he can get his blood money for this flat. But I know a trick or two. I always have it here, always. And if he doesn’t come I go to the telephone box and I ring his office and I say, Why haven’t you come for your rent?’
I knew so little that I said to her, ‘But, Mrs Fowler, twenty-two shillings is not worth the trouble of his collecting it,’ and her eyes blazed up, and her face was white and dreadful and she said, ‘Is that how you see it, is that it? Has he sent you here, then? But it is what the rent is, by law, and I am going to pay it. Worth nothing, is it? It is worth the roof over my head.’
The three floors above all have Irish families, children, people coming and going, feet tramping about: Mrs Fowler says that ‘she’ makes the refrigerator door rattle to keep her awake at night because ‘she’ wants this flat … Mrs Fowler lives in a nightmare of imagined persecutions. She told me of the ten-years-long campaign, after the first war, not the new one, when ‘that bitch from Nottingham’ was trying to get her rooms, and she … She, it seems, did everything, there was nothing she did not do, and it all sounds true. But now upstairs there is an Irish couple, four children, and I saw the woman on the steps. ‘How is the old lady?’ she asked, her periwinkle Irish eyes tired and lonely, for her husband is leaving her, apparently for another woman. ‘I keep meaning to go down, but she doesn’t seem all that pleased when I do, and so I don’t go.’
I showed Mrs Fowler the issue of Lilith that has Female Images. She took it politely, and let it lie on her lap. It was only when it was ready to go to press that it occurred to me there was no old woman among the Images. I said this to Joyce, and I watched a series of reactions in her: first, surprise. Then shock, small movements of head and eyes said she was alerting herself to danger. Then she, as it were, switched herself off, became vague, and her eyes turned
