The Diaries of Jane Somers

‘Well,’ I said, taking the risk, ‘it could be a question of your dying before you have to.’

She stiffened all over, sat staring away from me into the fire. It seemed a long time. Then she sighed and looked straight at me. A wonderful look, frightened but brave, sweet, pleading, grateful, and with a shrewd humour there as well.

‘You think that might be it?’

‘For the sake of a few pills,’ I said.

‘They deaden my mind so.’

‘Make yourself take what you can of them.’

And that was a year ago. If I had had time to keep this diary properly, it would have seemed a builder’s yard, bits and odds stacked up, lying about, nothing in place, one thing not more important than another. You wander through (I visited one for an article last week) and see a heap of sand there, a pile of glass here, some random steel girders, sacks of cement, crowbars. That is the point of a diary, the bits and pieces of events, all muddled together. But now I look back through the year and begin to know what was important.

And the most important of all was something I hardly noticed. Niece Kate turned up one night, looking twenty and not fifteen, the way they can these days, but seemed crazy, stammering and posing and rolling her eyes. She had run away from home to live with me, she said; and she was going to be a model. Firm but kind (I thought and think), I said she was going right back home, and if she ever came to spend so much as an afternoon with me, she could be sure I wasn’t going to be like her mother, I wouldn’t wash a cup up after her. Off she went, sulking. Telephone call from Sister Georgie: How can you be so lacking in ordinary human sympathies? Rubbish, I said. Telephone call from niece Jill. She said, ‘I’m ringing you to tell you that I’m not at all like Kate.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

‘If I lived with you, you wouldn’t have to baby me. Mother makes me tired, I’m on your side.’

‘Not as tired as she must permanently be.’

‘Aunt Jane, I want to come and spend the weekend.’

I could easily hear, from her tone, how she saw glamorous Aunt Jane, in Trendy London, with her smart goings-on.

She came. I like her, I admit. A tall, slim, rather lovely girl. Willowy is the word, I think. Will droop if she’s not careful. Dark straight hair: could look lank and dull. Vast grey eyes: mine.

I watched her eyes at work on everything in my flat: to copy in her own home, I wondered? – teenage rebellion, perhaps; but no, it was to plan how she would fit in here, with me.

‘I want to come and live here with you, Aunt Jane.’

‘You want to work in Lilith, become part of my smart and elegant and amazing life?’

‘I’m eighteen. I don’t want to go to university, you didn’t, did you?’

‘You mean, with me as your passport to better things, you don’t need a degree?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You’ve done well in your exams?’

‘I will do well, I promise. I’m taking them in the summer.’

‘Well, let’s think about it then.’

I didn’t think about it. It was all too bizarre: Sister Georgie ensconced in my life, that was how I saw it.

But Jill came again, and I made a point of taking her with me to visit Maudie, saying only that she was an old friend. Maudie has been in better health recently. Her main misery, the incontinence, is checked, she is doing her own shopping, she is eating well. I have been enjoying flying in and out to gossip over a cup of tea. But I am so used to her, have forgotten how she must strike others. Because of this stranger, the beautiful clean girl, Maudie was stiff, reproachful for exposing her. A cold aloof little person, she said yes and no, did not offer us tea, tried to hide the stains down the front of her dress where she has spilled food.

Niece Jill was polite, and secretly appalled. Not at old age; Sister Georgie’s good works will have seen to it that her children will not find that a surprise; but because she had to associate old age and good works with glamorous Aunt Jane.

That evening, eating supper together, she studied me with long covert shrewd looks, while she offered prattle about her siblings and their merry ways.

‘How often do you go in to see her?’ she inquired delicately enough; and I knew how important a moment this was.

‘Every day and sometimes twice,’ I said at once, with firmness.

‘Do you have a lot of friends in, do you go out for parties, dinner parties?’

‘Hardly ever. I work too hard.’

‘But not too hard to visit that old … to visit …’

‘Mrs Fowler. No.’

I took her shopping to buy some decent clothes. She wanted to impress me with her taste, and she did.

But at the time Sister Georgie and her offspring were a very long way down on my agenda.

I have worked, oh how I have worked this year, how I have enjoyed it all. They made me editor. I did not say I would only take it for a year or so, was accepting it only for the perks, the better pension, had other plans. Have finally understood that I am not ambitious, would have been happy to work for ever, just as things were, with Joyce.

Joyce left to live in America. Before she went, a dry, indifferent telephone call.

I said to Phyllis, You’d better have Joyce’s desk, you have done her work long enough. She was installed in half an hour. Her looks of triumph. I watched her, had my face shielded with my hand. (Like Maudie.) Hiding my thoughts.

Cut your losses, Janna, cut your losses, Jane!

I said, When you are settled, we should discuss possible changes. Her sharp alert lift of the head: danger. She does not want changes. Her dreams have been of inheriting what she was wanting so long and envying.

Envy. Jealousy and envy, I’ve always used them interchangeably. A funny thing: once a child would have been taught all this, the seven deadly sins, but in our charming times a middle-aged woman has to look up envy in a dictionary. Well, Phyllis is not jealous, and I don’t believe she ever was. It was not the closeness and friendship of Joyce and me she wanted, but the position of power. Phyllis is envious. All day, her sharp cold criticisms, cutting everyone, everything, down. She started on Joyce. I found myself blazing up into anger, Shut up, I said, you can be catty about Joyce to other people, not me.

Discussions for months, enjoyable for us all, about whether to change Lilith for Martha. Is Lilith the girl for the difficult, anxious eighties?

Arguments for Martha. We need something more workaday, less of an incitement to envy, an image of willing, adaptable, intelligent service.

Arguments for Lilith. People are conditioned to need glamour. In hard times we need our fun. People read fashion in fashion magazines as they read romantic novels, for escape. They don’t intend to follow fashion, they enjoy the idea of it.

I did not have strong opinions one way or the other. Our circulation is only slightly falling. Lilith it will remain.

The contents won’t change.

I brought home the last twelve issues of Lilith to analyse them.

It is a funny thing, while Joyce and I were Lilith, making everything happen, our will behind it, I did not have uneasy moments, asking, Is the life going out of it, is the impetus still there, is it still on a rising current? I know that the impetus is not there now, Lilith is like a boat being taken on a wave, but what made the wave is far behind.

Two thirds of Lilith is useful, informative, performs a service.

In this month’s issue: One. An article about alcoholism.