The Diaries of Jane Somers. Doris Lessing

I see that I did not write down, in Janna’s day, about going to the loo, a quick pee here, a quick shit, washing one’s hands … All day this animal has to empty itself, you have to brush your hair, wash your hands, bathe. I dash a cup under a tap and rinse out a pair of panties, it all takes a few minutes … But that is because I am ‘young’, only forty-nine.

      What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance. I was going to say, For me it is nothing; but the fact is, once I did have my real proper baths every night, once every Sunday night I maintained and polished my beautiful perfect clothes, maintained and polished me, and now I don’t, I can’t. It is too much for me.

      Late summer, how I hate it, blowzy and damp, dowdy and dusty, dull green, dull skies; the sunlight, when there is any, a maggot-breeder; maggots under my dustbin, because I hadn’t touched my own home for days.

      Maudie has been ill again. Again I’ve been in, twice a day, before going to work and after work. Twice a day, she has stood by the table, leaning on it, weight on her palms, naked, while I’ve poured water over her till all the shit and smelly urine has gone. The stench. Her body, a cage of bones, yellow, wrinkled, her crotch like a little girl’s, no hair, but long grey hairs in her armpits. I’ve been worn out with it. I said to her, ‘Maudie, they’d send you in a nurse to wash you,’ and she screamed at me, ‘Get out then, I didn’t ask you.’

      We were both so tired and overwrought, we’ve been screeching at each other like … what? Out of literature, I say ‘fishwives’, but she’s no fishwife, a prim, respectable old body, or that’s what she’s been in disguise for three decades. I’ve seen a photograph, Maudie at sixty-five, the image of disapproving rectitude … I don’t think I would have liked her then. She had said to herself, I like children, they like me, my sister won’t let me near her now she’s not breeding, she doesn’t need my services. So Maudie put an advert in the Willesden paper, and a widower answered. He had three children, eight, nine, ten. Maudie was given the sofa in the kitchen, and her meals, in return for: cleaning the house, mending his clothes, the children’s clothes, cooking three meals a day and baking, looking after the children. He was a fishmonger. When he came in at lunchtime, if he found Maudie sitting having a rest, he said to her, Haven’t you got anything to do? He gave her two pounds a week to feed them all on, and when I said it was impossible, she said she managed. He brought home the fish for nothing, and you could buy bread and potatoes. No, he wasn’t poor, but, said Maudie, he didn’t know how to behave, that was his trouble. And Maudie stuck it, because of the children. Then he said to her, Will you come to the pictures with me? She went, and she saw the neighbours looking at them. She knew what they were thinking, and she couldn’t have that. She cleaned the whole house, top to bottom, made sure everything was mended, baked bread, put out things for tea, and left a note: I am called to my sister’s, who is ill, yours truly, Maude Fowler.

      But then she took her pension, and sometimes did small jobs on the side.

      The Maudie who wore herself ‘to a stick and a stone’ was this judging, critical female, with a tight cold mouth.

      Maudie and I shouted at each other, as if we were family, she saying, ‘Get out then, get out, but I’m not having those Welfare women in here,’ and I shouting, ‘Maudie, you’re impossible, you’re awful, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’

      And then, once, I burst out laughing, it seemed so ridiculous, she there, stark naked, spitting anger at me, and I, rinsing off her shit and saying, ‘And what about your ears?’

      She went silent and trembling. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

      ‘I’m not, I’m laughing at us. Look at us, screaming at each other!’

      She stepped back out of the basin she had been standing in, gazing at me, in angry appeal.

      I put the big towel around her, that I’d brought from my bathroom, a pink cloud of a towel, and began gently drying her.

      Tears finding their way through her wrinkles …

      ‘Come on, Maudie, for God’s sake, let’s laugh, better than crying.’

      ‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,’ she muttered, looking in front of her, eyes wide and bright. Trembling, shivering … ‘It’s terrible, terrible.’

      These last three weeks I’ve thrown away all the new knickers I bought her, filthy and disgusting, bought two dozen more, and I’ve shown her how to fill them full of cotton wool as she puts them on.

      So, she’s back in napkins.

      Terrible, terrible, terrible …

      It is the end of August.

      I am lying in bed writing this with the diary propped on my chest.

      Just after writing the last terrible, I woke in the night, and it was as if my lower back had a metal bar driven into it. I could not move at all from my waist down, the pain was so awful.

      It was dark, the window showed confused dull light, and when I tried to shift my back I screamed. After that I lay still.

      I lay thinking. I knew what it was, lumbago: Freddie had it once, and I knew what to expect. I did not nurse him, of course, we employed someone, and while I shut it out, or tried to, I knew he was in awful pain, for he could not move at all for a week.

      I have not been ill since the children’s things, like measles. I have never been really ill. At the most a cold, a sore throat, and I never took any notice of those.

      What I was coming to terms with is that I have no friends. No one I can ring up and say, Please help, I need help.

      Once, it was Joyce: but a woman with children, a husband, a job, and a house … I am sure I would never have said, ‘Please come and nurse me.’ Of course not. I could not ring my sister – children, house, husband, good works, and anyway she doesn’t like me. Phyllis: I kept coming back to Phyllis, wondering why I was so reluctant, and thinking there is something wrong with me that I don’t want to ask her, she’s quite decent and nice really … But when I thought of Vera Rogers, then I knew Vera Rogers is the one person I know who I could say to, ‘Please come and help.’ But she has a husband, children, and a job, and the last thing she wants is an extra ‘case’.

      I managed, after half an hour of agonized reaching and striving, to get the telephone off the bed table and on to my chest. The telephone book was out of reach, was on the floor, I could not get to it. I rang Inquiries, got the number of my doctors, got their night number, left a message. Meanwhile, I was working everything out. The one person who would be delighted – at last – to nurse me was Mrs Penny. Over my dead body. I am prepared to admit I am neurotic, anything you like, but I cannot admit her, will not …

      I would have liked a private doctor, but Freddie was always a bit of a socialist, he wanted National Health. I didn’t care since I don’t get ill. I wasn’t looking forward to the doctor’s visit, but he wasn’t bad. Young, rather anxious, tentative. His first job, probably.

      He got the key from the downstairs flat, waking Mrs M., but she was nice about it. He let himself in, came into my room, ‘Well, and what is wrong?’ I told him, lumbago; and what I wanted: he must organize a nurse, twice a day, I needed a bedpan, I needed a thermos – I told him exactly.

      He sat on the bottom of my bed, looking at me, smiling a little. I was wondering if he was seeing: an old woman, an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman? I know now it depends entirely on the age of a person, what they see.

      ‘For all that, I think I’d better examine you,’ he said, and bent over, pulled back the clothes which I was clutching to my chin, and after one or two prods and pushes, to which I could not help responding by groaning, he said, ‘It’s lumbago all right, and as you know there’s nothing for it, it will get better in its own good time. And do you want pain-killers?’

      ‘Indeed I do,’ I said, ‘and soon, because I can’t stand it.’

      He