‘No! Look at Maudie Fowler! She was always like that, I expect. Recently I met a cousin after twenty years – nothing changed, not a syllable or a habit.’
‘Good God, Vera, you’re enough to make one want to jump off a cliff!’
‘I don’t see that at all. No, people are what they are all through them.’
‘Then why are you trying so hard with Annie?’
‘You’ve got me there. I don’t think she’ll change. I’ve seen it before, she’s decided to give up. But let’s try a bit longer, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll know we’ve done our best.’
Our campaign for Annie is everything that is humane and intelligent. There she is, a derelict old woman, without friends, some family somewhere but they find her condition a burden and a scandal and won’t answer her pleas; her memory going, though not for the distant past, only for what she said five minutes ago; all the habits and supports of a lifetime fraying away around her, shifting as she sets a foot down where she expected firm ground to be … and she, sitting in her chair, suddenly surrounded by well-wishing smiling faces who know exactly how to set everything to rights.
Look at Eliza Bates – everyone cries. See how she has so many friends, goes on so many trips, is always out and about … But Annie will not try to walk properly, go out, start a real life again. ‘Perhaps when summer comes,’ she says.
Because of Eliza Bates I have understood how many trips, jaunts, bazaars, parties, meetings Maudie could be enjoying, but does not. I thought it all over. I rang Vera, whose voice at once, when she knew what I was asking, became professionally tactful.
‘What are you saying?’ I asked at last. ‘You mean, there’s no point in Maudie Fowler starting anything new because she’s not likely to stay as well as she is for long?’
‘Well, it is a bit of a miracle, isn’t it? It must be getting on for a year now, she’s holding her own, but …’
I went off to Maudie one Saturday, with some cherry liqueur I brought back from Amsterdam, where I was for the spring show. Like Eliza, Maudie knows, and enjoys, the best. We sat opposite each other drinking, and the room smelled of cherry. Outside drawn curtains a thin spring rain trickled noisily from a broken gutter. She had refused to let the Greek’s workmen in to mend it.
‘Maudie, I want to ask you something without your getting cross with me.’
‘Then I suppose it’s something bad?’
‘I want to know why you didn’t ever go on these trips to country places the Council organizes? Did you ever go on one of their holidays? What about the Lunch Centre? There are all these things …’
She sat shading her little face with a hand grimed with coal dust. She had swept out her chimney that morning. Fire: she tells me she has nightmares about it. ‘I could die in my bed here,’ says she, ‘from smoke, not knowing.’
She said, ‘I’ve kept myself to myself and I see no reason to change.’
‘I can’t help wondering about all the good times you could have had.’
‘Did I tell you about the Christmas party, it was before I met you? The Police have a party. I got up on the stage and did a knees-up. I suppose they didn’t like me showing my petticoats.’
I imagined Maudie, lifting her thick black skirts to show her stained knickers, a bit tipsy, enjoying herself.
‘I don’t think it would be that,’ I said.
‘Then why haven’t they asked me again? Oh, don’t bother, I wouldn’t go now, anyway.’
‘And all these church things. You used to go to church, didn’t you?’
‘I’ve been. I went once to a tea, and then I went again because that Vicar said I wasn’t fair to them. I sat there, drinking my tea in a corner, and all of them, not so much as saying welcome, chatter chatter among themselves, I might as well have not been there.’
‘Do you know Eliza Bates?’
‘Mrs Bates? Yes, I know her.’
‘Well then?’
‘If I know her why do I have to like her? You mean, we are of an age, and that’s a reason for sitting gossiping together. I wouldn’t have liked her young, I’m sure of that, I didn’t like her married, she gave her poor man a hard time of it she did, couldn’t call his home his own, I don’t like what I’ve seen of her since, she’s never her own woman, she’s always with ten or more of them, chitter-chatter, gibble-gabble, so why should I like her now enough to spend my dinners and teatimes with her? I’ve always liked to be with one friend, not a mess of people got together because they’ve got nowhere else to go.’
‘I was only thinking you might have had an easier time of it.’
‘I’m not good enough for Eliza Bates. And I haven’t been these last twenty years. Oh, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have enjoyed a bit of an outing here or there, I sometimes go up to the church when they’ve got a bazaar on, I look out for a scarf or a good pair of boots, but I might not be there at all for all the notice those church women take of me.’
‘Why don’t you come out again to the park? Or I could take you for a trip on the river. Why not, it’s going to be summer soon?’
‘I’m happy as I am, with you coming in to sit with me. I think of that afternoon in the Rose Garden, and that’s enough.’
‘You’re stubborn, Maudie.’
‘I’ll think my own thoughts, thank you!’
Some weeks after she had left, a telephone call from Joyce, at five in the morning.
‘Are you ill?’ was what came out of me; as if I’d written her off somewhere inside me.
‘No, should I be?’
‘Ringing so early.’
‘I’m just off to bed. Oh, of course, the time difference.’
‘It’s all right, I’m just getting up to start work.’
‘Good old Janna,’ says Joyce, in a new vague way, and it is derisive.
‘Oh, Joyce, are you drunk?’
‘You certainly are not!’
‘Did you ring me up actually to tell me how it is all going? Flat? Husband? Children? Job?’
‘Certainly not. I thought to myself, how is Janna, how is my old mate, Janna? So how are you? And how is that old woman?’
I said, ‘As far as I can make out, she is suspected of having cancer.’
‘Congratulations,’ says Joyce.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Cancer. It’s all over the place. Well, I don’t see that it’s worse than anything else. Do you? I mean, TB, meningitis, multiple sclerosis …’ And Joyce went on, a long list of diseases, and I sat there thinking, she can’t be all that drunk. No, she’s pretending to be for some reason. Soon she was talking about how diseases fall out of use. Her very odd phrase. ‘If you read Victorian novels, they died like flies of diseases we don’t have now at all. Like diphtheria. Like scarlet fever. Like, for that matter, TB.’
And so we went on, for half an hour or more. At last I said, ‘Joyce, this is costing you a fortune.’
‘So it is. Good old Janna. Everything has to be paid for?’
‘Well, yes, it has been my experience.’
‘Because you have made it your experience.’ And she rang off.
Soon she rang again. Five in the