The Diaries of Jane Somers. Doris Lessing

– they can do that …’

      ‘Or think they can.’

      ‘Yes, or think they can, without penalties, I mean. And so I don’t see myself marrying someone else. The kids, they don’t want to go to the States, but if he went and I stayed, they’d commute and I know that pretty soon they’d be there rather than here, more opportunities, probably better for the young. I’d be alone. I don’t know how to be alone, Jan.’

      And I could not say to her, Joyce, your husband is fifty-five, he’s a workaholic …

      ‘You are prepared to be a faculty wife?’

      She grimaced at this. ‘I shan’t get anything like this job, of course not. But I expect there’d be something.’

      As she left, she said, ‘No, and I haven’t even finally made up my mind. I know how I’m going to miss all this – and you, Jan. But I have no choice.’ And with that she went out, not looking at me.

      And that is what I was left with, the I have no choice. For I do not know what it is, in that marriage of hers – I would never have suspected – the existence of anything that would make it inevitable she would say, I have no choice.

      Joyce has been the best editor this magazine has ever had. She has never put her home and family first … and yet … I see how, when she came in, the flexibility began that everyone welcomed: working at home from the telephone, working late or early when necessary. We all said, It’s a woman’s way of dealing with things, not office hours, but going along with what was necessary. And now I am thinking that what was necessary was Joyce’s marriage, her home.

      She would easily stay after work to eat supper with me, in the office, in a restaurant: working meals. And yet there were times when she had to be at home. I was what made all this possible: I have never said, No, I can’t stay in the office late as usual, I have to get home. Or only when Freddie and I did our dinner parties. I’ve never ever said, This afternoon, I have to go early, Freddie will be in early. But it seems to me that something like that has been going on with Joyce: her marriage, her children, her work. She incorporated all of it, in a marvellous flexible way. ‘Can you hold the fort this afternoon, Jan?’ In a sense, I’ve been part of her marriage, like that girl Felicity! These wholes we are part of, what really happens, how things really work … it is what has always fascinated me, what interests me most. And yet I have only just had the thought: that I have been, in a sense, part of Joyce’s marriage.

      Joyce is going to America. She will give up a wonderful job. Very few women ever get a job like this one. She will give up family, friends, home. Her children are nearly grown up. She will be in a country that she will have to learn to like, alone with a man who would have been happy to go with another, younger girl. She has no choice.

      Well, women’s lib, well, Phyllis, what do you have to say to that?

      What, in your little manifestoes, your slamming of doors in men’s faces, your rhetoric, have you ever said that touches this? As far as I am concerned, nothing. And, believe me, Phyllis makes sure that all the propaganda is always available to me, spread on my desk.

      The reason why girls these days get themselves together in flocks and herds and shoals and shut out men altogether, or as much as they can, is because they are afraid of – whatever the power men have that makes Joyce say, I have no choice.

      I can live alone and like it. But then, I was never really married.

      After I reached home, the telephone: Joyce, her voice breathless and small. Because she had cried herself dry, I knew that. She said, ‘Jan, we make our choices a long time before we think we do! My God, but it’s terrifying! Do you know what I mean?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

      And I do. And it is terrifying. What choices have I already made that I am not yet conscious of?

      I have not been in to Maudie Fowler since Friday evening.

      

      Tuesday.

      Joyce not at work. Phyllis and I held the fort. After work I went in to Maudie. She took a long time to answer the door, stood looking at me for a long time, not smiling, not pleased; at last stood aside so that I could come in, went ahead of me along the passage, without a word. She sat down on her side of the fire, which was blazing, and waited for me to speak.

      I was already angry, thinking, well, and so she doesn’t have a telephone, is that my fault?

      I said, ‘I did not get back on Sunday night until very late, and last night I was tired.’

      ‘Tired, were you?’ And then, ‘On Sunday evening I waited for you. I had a bit of supper for us both.’

      I noted in myself the usual succession of emotions: the trapped feeling, then a need to escape, then – of course – guilt.

      ‘I am sorry, Maudie,’ I said.

      She turned her head and stared at the fire, her mouth a little open, and gasping.

      ‘Have you been well?’

      ‘Well enough.’

      I was thinking, look, I’ve washed you head to foot, of your stinking shit, and now you … but I had to think, too, that I made a promise and hadn’t kept it. I must never do that again.

      It took nearly an hour before she softened, got up to make us tea. I had to stay another two hours. Before I left she was talking freely again. A long story about her father’s fancy-woman, who, her mother ‘properly and safely’ dead, had not only made a skivvy of her, Maudie – ‘though I’ve told you all about that, I know’ – but then set about poisoning her.

      ‘She poisoned my mother, I know she did, if no one else knew, and my Aunt Mary believed me. She said there was no point going to the police, they’d never take my word against my father, he was in with the police, he was always in with anyone who would do him good, he’d have the inspector in at Christmas for whisky and cake, and he and his fancy-woman’d send a cask of ale up to the boys at the station with a ham and pudding. If I went to them, just a girl, and terrified I was, and ill with it, and said, My father’s woman poisoned my mother and now she’s doing for me, it’s arsenic – well, would they listen? My Aunt Mary said, Look, you leave home and come to me when you can do it without making trouble. I’m not facing that brother of mine in a fight, he’s not one to cross, he’s one to get his own back. But when it’s the right time, you’ll find a bed and a bite with me. Well, I got sicker and weaker. Months it went on. I tried not to eat at home, I’d go running to my sister, the one that died – no, I’ve not mentioned her, she makes me feel too bad. She was always the weakly one, she got on their nerves. She married at fifteen. She married against my father, and he said, Never darken my doors. Her man was no good and couldn’t keep her. She had three little children, and my mother would send me with a pie or some bread, anything that wouldn’t be missed, and I’d see her, so pale and weak, the children hungry. She’d take a little nibble, to keep her strength up, and then make her children eat the rest. My mother died, and then there was no food in that house at all. I went to my father and said, My sister’s dying of lack of food and warmth. Said he, I told her not to marry him, and that was all he ever said. She died, and he didn’t go to the funeral. The husband took the one child still alive, and I never heard more. Before she died, I’d be sitting with her, I’d be faint with hunger because I was afraid to eat at home, and she dying of hunger because there was no food, and we were company. It was an awful time, awful – I don’t know why people say “the good old days”, they were bad days. Except for people like my father …’ And Maudie went on and on about her father.

      When I asked, ‘How about your other sister?’ she said, ‘She’d married and gone, we did not hear of her much, she was keeping out of the way of Father, he didn’t like her man either. Once I went to her and said, Polly, our sister Muriel is starving, and her children with her, and all she said was, Well, I’ve got nothing to spare for her. Yet her food safe was stuffed with