by Diana Athill
From the start, therefore, I knew that any ‘in love’ sensations I experienced over Didi must be treated as a passing fever, and I meant ‘treated’ in the medical sense. They must be cured as soon as possible.
There are some advantages in growing older. I have learnt from experience, for example, that the mere recognition (if it is real) of hopelessness in being in love, and of the necessity of curing it, works as an important step towards recovery. In this case recognition would probably be all the treatment necessary. Provided I kept it in the front of my mind I could go on seeing Didi, and enjoying him, and although I must expect to suffer twinges for some time they would gradually fade away. The words I used to myself were: ‘I shall be able to keep the pleasures of the friendship element, and make the rest change gear from the amorous to the maternal.’ And that, exactly, is what happened.
Didi helped me by more than his deception over his age. He answered warmly to my friendship but he made it clear that he wanted nothing more. I am not the type of woman to whom he was attracted. The quality which always caught him was what he called ‘elegance.’ Surprisingly, considering how good he was at being elegant himself, the women in whom he saw it were sometimes quite inelegant in other people’s eyes, but I learnt to recognize them. They had to give him the impression of being assured, cool, perhaps unattainable. Ideally they were dark and slim, deliberately ‘feminine,’ and wore a lot of black. Their clothes were important. A ‘little black suit,’ which in Western Europe deteriorated long ago to being the uniform of the tart on the one hand and the French governess on the other, and then all but disappeared, retained its status as a hallmark of elegance much longer on the shores of the Mediterranean—perhaps retains it still? A ‘little black suit’ on a dark slim woman was enough in itself to make Didi fall in love. I am not a ‘little black suit’ woman. I am fair, was already putting on weight by the time he met me, dress comfortably rather than smartly, and appear even more accessible than I am: few women have less ‘mystery’ than I have. Even if we had been the same age, Didi could not have fallen in love with me, and from the beginning he let me know him well enough to understand this.
A few weeks after we first met, on the last evening before he returned to Germany, we went out on a pub-crawl with friends of his and got drunk together. He was staying in my flat, after Dolly’s return to Egypt. He had been hesitant about accepting my invitation, having sensed at once that I was attracted to him and fearing complications, but I had then introduced him to Luke and he had taken the introduction as I meant him to take it: I was safely back on the right side of the line and this was the signal for friendship. It may have been partly this which made him hold my hand on the way home that last evening—any withdrawal by a woman, even one he didn’t want, was likely to make him advance—although by that time he had started to feel real affection for me, which was heightened by his misery at having to leave his beloved London next morning.
I had often noticed with rueful amusement his scrupulous avoidance of any physical touch, and I had drunk enough, and was enough moved by his unhappiness and the prospect of losing him to make much of this hand-holding. At that early stage the steadiness of my good sense depended almost entirely on its not being tested, and no more than this was needed to make it wobble. If he was prepared to hold my hand, perhaps…I turned my palm to his and allowed all the sensuality I could muster to flow into the contact.
‘Now then, sweetie,’ said Didi, laughing. ‘What would Luke think?’
‘I don’t care.’ Just this once, I was thinking. It can only be this once, after all, he’s going tomorrow, and I know I can get my balance back, so why shouldn’t I have this one delicious collapse into abandonment?
He dropped my hand as soon as we were in the house and let me go up the stairs ahead of him, while he switched off the lights behind me. That told me nothing more would follow, but I was unwilling to accept it. As soon as we were in the flat he went to the kitchen to prepare our last ‘midnight feast’—we had been forming a habit of late suppers of Egyptian food which he enjoyed cooking. We ate at a low table in front of the fire, sitting opposite each other, talking easily. I admonished myself to relax and not to mind that nothing more was going to happen, but I was still half hoping that the emotion of this farewell occasion might end in love-making.
After the meal he cleared it away, came back to his chair and sat in silence for a few moments, leaning back, his eyes half shut, his expression deeply sad. Then he said suddenly: ‘Oh god, Diana, I don’t know that I can stand losing all this.’
I was up and across to him in one movement, without any thought, down on my knees beside him with my arms round him, kissing him. He didn’t move, didn’t even turn his eyes to look at me.
‘Oh darling…’ I said, and kissed him again.
He still didn’t move, only said gently: ‘Sweetheart, you know I can’t make love to you, you know it.’
And I knew it. I went on holding him for a moment or two, stroking the hair away from his forehead with one finger, then I said: ‘Yes, I do know it. It’s a pity, though.’
He gave a little laugh, and I stood up. I felt horribly disappointed but hardly at all rebuffed. Whether because of his gentleness or my own resilience, it didn’t occur to me that his not wanting to go to bed with me when I wanted to go to bed with him would change our affection for each other.
‘Oh well, love, I suppose it’s time for bed,’ I said. ‘I shan’t get up early tomorrow to say goodbye, it would be too sad.’ Then I kissed him again and went to my room.
He thought that he had hurt me badly that night. ‘How terribly I must have hurt and humiliated her,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘How dreadful that night must have been for her.’ Later there were to be times when I would have taken a sardonic pleasure in telling him that he was wrong, but now I am glad that he never knew that I went to sleep at once, as I normally do, and woke next morning feeling grateful to him because thanks to him the cure had just taken a big step forward and at this rate I would soon be over it. He needed, sometimes, to feel that he had hurt people. He didn’t enjoy making people unhappy—he hated it—but at the same time the belief that against his will he had done so acted occasionally as a piece of string or a safety-pin in the groggy mechanism by which he hung on to his self-esteem.
I wasn’t over it so very soon. For almost all the first year I knew him, the sight of one of Didi’s letters on the doormat could make my heart jump in the way which only happens when one is in love, and certain things—the sound of a small Volkswagen’s motor, and the taste of salad as Didi dressed it, for instance—continued to move me as though they were significant long after I’d become thankful that there was nothing for them to signify (I still sometimes pause to salute them even now). By the time of our meeting in Bruges I knew that I had been right, and that a maternal kind of concern was quite certainly taking over from amorousness, but even then the latter flickered up and coloured my response to him. That was, however, its last flicker. Simultaneously I moved a step nearer to understanding how seriously disturbed his whole personality was, and that was the true end of ‘being in love.’
If my heart had never jumped at the sight of Didi’s letters, if I had never wanted him physically, if I had never romanticized him, our relationship would not have endured. Sex and the maternal impulse are closely interwoven, particularly in childless women of middle age. However much I had liked a girl, and however great the girl’s need, I would not have ‘taken her on’ as I was to take on Didi, nor would I have done it for a man to whom I had not, at first, been physically attracted.
The desire for children and sorrow at its frustration have never haunted me to the point of discomfort, but I am normal and healthy and I did at one time decide to have a child. Becoming pregnant early in my forties, I discovered that I wasn’t—as I had thought at first—dismayed, but was jubilant. I would be able to support a child and I loved this one’s father: I would let it be born. The months following this decision
were the most intensely happy I have ever known, and when for no apparent reason I miscarried, it was only the seriousness of the miscarriage which prevented me from suffering badly. As it happened it almost killed me: a curious event to see as lucky, but the joy I experienced on coming round from an operation and discovering that I was still alive after bleeding almost to death was so overwhelming that it did much to counter-balance my grief at losing the child.
This attempt seemed to purge me of any wish to repeat it, but no doubt it defined the area of emptiness in the emotional life of any childless woman, and I have been more subject since then than I was before to the attraction of other people’s need. To be able to feed, house and comfort someone: earlier I hadn’t much impulse to do these things, but now I enjoy them. I like being turned to and relied on, I like being seen as indulgent, understanding and reassuring—a motherly figure. Whenever I was pregnant I was always sure that I was either preventing or—that one time—expecting the birth of a boy, and it is men, not women, whom I tend to mother. Having never had a son I cannot be sure to what extent sex would have coloured motherhood, but judging by the extent to which motherliness now colours sex in my relations with young men whom I find attractive, I suspect that it would have done so strongly—that I might have been quite a Jocasta, given the chance.
Elderly women in love with younger men are usually seen as pathetically greedy old cunts, avid only for love-making, desperately trying to nurse a fantasy of continuing youth and desirability in order to get it. Some of them may be like this, but some, I am sure, are in pursuit of a different kind of satisfaction. The silly old woman who gives her gigolo a gold cigarette case or jewelled cufflinks is possibly not only bribing him to continue fucking her but is also indulging her own pleasure in making him happy as she once made—or would have liked to make—a child happy by a present of a bicycle or roller-skates.
The give-away, surely, is that it is rare for an old woman to take on an impeccable young man. She couldn’t do it, of course, since an impeccable young man would avoid being taken on, but she isn’t often moved to do it. An impeccable young man finishes the jobs he undertakes, gets to appointments on time, doesn’t buy silk shirts unless he can afford them, stays sober when he ought to, keeps himself clean. He is able to look after himself and creates no illusion that she is needed. The peccable young man, on the other hand, appears to create the state of affairs which exists between a mother and a child. She may at any moment have to rescue him because he has done something the equivalent of sticking his finger into a light socket, tearing his pants, skinning his knees, grabbing a toy which isn’t his, being run over, getting lost. He goes straight to her need to be needed. And in addition, here is a child who is not a child, with whom it is at least possible to express the incestuous impulse which has to be repressed with a real child. If he should let her take his head in her hands, smell his hair, kiss away the hurt, he might well respond—as she mustn’t let a child respond—by thrusting his way back towards her empty womb. That the situation is really far more complicated, and that she is the victim of illusion, makes it inevitable that if she becomes involved in such a relationship, much painful stumbling over knobbly truths will follow—but that, after all, is true of many forms of love.
Being less silly than some women, I was able to escape from falling too far into unseemly love with Didi, but it was a near thing, and that in spite of my being armed not only by his lie about his age and his sexual coolness towards me, but also—and far more strongly—by the existence of my real love for another man. It was impossible for me—and I always knew it—to go overboard for Didi in any fatal way; yet I found myself near enough to the edge to believe that I was given a glimpse of the nature of such affairs, and can now speak of them with some authority.
I know, therefore, that there was still a good deal of self-indulgence in my continuing affection for him after the last twinges of ‘being in love’ had died away. When I spent hours answering the desperate letters he wrote from Germany, counselling and consoling, encouraging and commiserating, I was certainly trying to help him but I was enjoying myself as I did so. I began to see how true this had been when answering his letters started to feel like a task. Counselling and consoling become fatiguing when you see that they aren’t doing any good, and even when all I had actually seen of Didi was contained in two visits he had made to London of a few weeks each and our meeting in Bruges, the difficulty of helping a depressive was becoming evident. There is not much satisfaction in being kind and wise if it’s all so much water off a duck’s back.
When this thought began to sneak out from the back of my mind, I stopped to take a look at my own motives. It appeared that I had landed myself with more than I had bargained for, but I had to admit that I had landed myself with it. Didi, once he felt he could trust me, had grasped eagerly at what I was offering, but he hadn’t forced it out of me, he had only accepted what I wanted to give.
That being so, I couldn’t withdraw it. I had been enjoying myself in trying to make him less unhappy, and I had been enjoying myself in behaving as the sort of woman I would like to be: concerned, affectionate, kind and reliable, someone to whom a desperate man could safely hold. So if I wasn’t going to puncture my own favoured image of myself, concerned, affectionate, kind and reliable I had damned well got to continue to be. It was an exhausting thought. I remember particularly being exhausted by it in my bath that Friday night when I admitted to myself that Didi was a ‘nut’: something which I kept out of the ‘portrait’ because that was supposed to be objective.
Didi’s depressive crises had to relate to a woman. There had been Inge, there had been Ursula, and now there was Gudrun. She had been appearing as a minor character in his letters for some time. She was ‘poor Gudrun’ because she was in love with him: a sweet-natured girl who stayed behind after parties to help him wash up, inadequate in the role of femme fatale. It must have been the lack of anyone ‘elegant’ which made him use her.
Gudrun was happy when they became lovers. She had no wish to be ‘complicated’ or to torment him, so he had to do what he had done with Inge: force her to reject him so that he could long for her. He didn’t do this consciously. Her compliance made her at first boring to him, then even sexually repulsive to a point where he found that she smelt disagreeable (he often found this about women: ‘Like so many women I have known, she suddenly breaks out in a horrible smell—her mouth, her body, everything—at the moment of her climax’). He would be unable to disguise his revulsion; hurt and unhappy, she would withdraw; then the agonizing longing could begin. This time even Didi himself was unable to pretend that the girl had much to do with the tedious ritual. He was beginning to see that the girls never had much more connection with it than those feminine names given to hurricanes have with hurricanes: ‘Inge,’ ‘Ursula,’ ‘Gudrun’—names for crises. So it didn’t much matter that the present girl was particularly inappropriate—poor Gudrun!—for the role, and it certainly didn’t prevent the crisis from being the worst yet.
Lying hour after hour, getting now and then, like a blow, a terrific crunch on my skull, a spasm of depression, of loneliness, of yearning, of absolute horror. I stand up, open the window, close it, walk up and down, close my eyes, open them, even feel nausea. As though caged, imprisoned in this infernal life. No one is to blame. This makes it even worse. A disease, an affliction…
To go mad—as eventually I must as a natural antidote to this—to go mad slowly, alone, and aware of it must surely be a terrible torment. Sometimes I think of the Jews in concentration camps and compare my state to theirs—but suffering is all relative I suppose…
I cannot foresee happiness any more. If this present depression is because of Gudrun, and if tomorrow Gudrun declared her love for me, that would still not make me happy…
This time he went to a doctor (‘He didn’t laugh because I had warned him, but he smiled’) who told him that his health insurance didn’t cover psychiatric treatment, but who tried to hel
p him with drugs. The pills worked for an hour or so at a time, but as soon as their effect wore off he was back in his pit, and he soon gave them up for the reason (an odd one in a man so given to addiction) that he feared becoming dependent on them. The doctor also encouraged him to probe his own condition, but this was no help.
Falling—falling—falling. Perhaps I have been unable to touch my diary lately, except in short fits, because at times I am repulsive to myself, I don’t want to touch me, to interest myself in me. It is horrible to dislike your own self so much and there must be a vestige of genuine madness in all this (we have, alas, used the word ‘mad’ again). I look here, I look there for the cause of this misery, but I know what it is, it is ‘love,’ this sickness. Anyone reading this diary will realize, as I do myself alas, the picture: a man in his thirties with the emotions of a schoolgirl. And very aware of it. But how to change? Is change possible now? Of course it isn’t.
On Saturday stopped at midday for a drink at a pub, with a meal in view at home later, a fag and then sleep. Drug myself to sleep simply because I do not want to be awake. I was in that pub and I picked up a magazine. In it was a quiz, by—I think—a psychologist, asking you questions which you answer and accord yourself points. The questions were about your ability to be in love—to love. So I answered the questions as truthfully as I could, added up my score and it came to 32. Then I turned to the summing up of your character according to your score. This is what it said: ‘It is impossible, it is unbelievable—anyone scoring 34 points or less is still in his puberty as far as love is concerned.’