A relative telephoned. “It’s hard to find a job in a new city.”
“I have to go now,” I said, trying not to cry.
The movers had arrived, the maids were cheerfully cleaning, I was still putting books in boxes, and I went up to the attic to weep because I didn’t want to leave our old house. It was our modest version of Howards End. There was even an oak tree. (Not a wych-oak, though.)
Years later, I still miss that house. If only we could have brought it with us! In my favorite novel by E. M. Forster, Howards End, there is much angst about moving. The Schlegels’ house is about to be demolished, and though Margaret Schlegel looks at many houses, she can’t find affordable housing in London.
In Storm James’ novella, A Day off, published in a single volume or in a Virago collection of novellas, Women against Men, we encounter a different couple called the Schlegels. The unnamed heroine meets Mr. and Mrs. Schlegel while she is a maid at a hotel. Mr. Schlegel was reserved, but Mrs. Schlegel gently chatted with her. The next morning another employee discovers that the Schlegels have committed suicide in their room. The heroine is so overcome with grief that she leaves her job.
The Schlegels’ death is significant, not only because it shocks the heroine, but because suicide may be one of her options in her late forties. (Very unlikely, though: she has the gift of bouncing back.) But like Forster’s Schlegels, she worries about losing her home, a shabby rented room where she has lived for a number of years. George, the man who supports her (she is his mistress), hasn’t written or sent her a check in five weeks. Well, she puts a good face on it – an aging face – and she wills herself to believe the letter will arrive today.
Jameson’s prose is hard and unsentimental. This is not Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or The Provincial Lady in London. The heroine is a lower-class version of Jean Rhys’s heroines, sad women who don’t know how they’ll survive without men. Rhys and Jameson were both writing in the 1930s, but their styles are very different: Rhys’s prose is spare and sad, and her lost women have no one to turn to. Jameson’s style is vigorous and alert: she sees alternatives for her characters. The heroine of A Day Off may be going down – but not yet.
She decides to forget about George for a few hours and take a day off at Hampstead Heath. She enjoys the scenery, the deer and the wild flowers, and takes a long, much needed nap. But hers is not the sleep of youth; she drools and has lines of her face. A group of young people laugh at her, and when she wakes up, she scolds them, mostly because she realizes she isn’t young anymore.
She decides to spend the rest of her money on a meal. Her feet hurt, and she has blisters, but she walks slowly, painfully downhill to a tearoom she remembers. She sits at a table with a lonely older woman who shares her pastry and confides that she is splurging because she had a windfall of eight pounds. And then, alas, we see the ugly side of our heroine: she steals the purse while the woman is in the restroom.
Desperation has driven her, but she also is jumpy and afraid of her action. We despair for her. And then she commits another desperate act. But the heroine is resilient. Perhaps she’ll get back on her feet. Perhaps she’ll go into retail: she met George while she worked in a shop that sold gloves. We hope for the best. We know that whatever job she takes, her feet will be killing her! But it’s sad that George, or his successor, will never marry her.
