After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  He knew this about himself, was always ashamed of it, and during his depressive crises was appalled by it, but he couldn’t change it and at bottom he didn’t want to change it. No other experience was so ravishing to his whole being as that quick flash of illusion, that momentary dazzle of being intensely alive, and it seemed to him that if he loved in any other way he would forfeit the very essence of joy.

  Those early readings of passages here and there in his diaries were chilling. It was impossible not to see that my first idea of his illness had been inaccurate, and that he was to a large extent crippled even when he was ‘well.’ The question ‘What will become of him?’ now concerned me more closely than it had done before: he was in my house and on my hands—for how long? I could envisage no acceptable answer to it when I looked at the diary, so I preferred to look at Didi in the flesh: tiresome at times, of course, but healthy and gay, amusing and amused, a pleasure to have about and perhaps on the way to a real recovery. This was, after all, the first time for many years that he had lived in a place which could become his home, with people whose affection he might learn to trust. If he found a job in which he could use his languages and his intelligence, all might be well.

  I began, therefore, to shy away from the diaries, although my shameless inquisitiveness would draw me back to them from time to time for a quick peep. It was a relief when one day Didi said that he’d started to feel uncomfortable at the thought of me and Luke reading them, and that he would rather we didn’t any more.

  I said all right, but we’d have to make a rule. Anything left lying about I was likely to look at—I might try not to, but I knew the strength of my impulse to pry and I couldn’t count on controlling it. He knew that very well because he was the same, admit it now! He admitted it—we were both laughing—and we agreed that from then on we must both put away anything we wished to keep private. I could trust myself not to open a drawer or dig about in a suitcase. Whether I could trust Didi on that I was not so sure, but as I was unlikely to have any vital secrets I didn’t mind.

  From that day he kept his diaries hidden and I didn’t read them again. Sometimes, when I suspected him of making a more than usually strange or comic ‘adjustment’ in his account of events, there would be a twinge of temptation to see how it compared with his private record, but I was able to withstand it. I was so familiar by then with his patterns of behaviour that they had lost their savour, so my restraint was not particularly honourable.

  A Holiday Companion 4

  THAT SEPTEMBER, WHEN Didi had been with me three months, we went to Yugoslavia. It was a holiday conceived in a moment of gaiety when we were having a drink with my cousin. Neither she nor I had yet decided where to go, and a Yugoslav friend of ours suddenly said: ‘Why don’t you all come to my place? There’s plenty of room and I know my parents would like it very much.’

  ‘Wonderful idea!’ said Didi. ‘I’ll drive you all there in my little car.’

  My cousin’s husband couldn’t get away, so the party was my cousin and her two-year-old son, our friend Ana, Didi and myself. In the end only Ana, Didi and I went by car, and the other two flew out to join us. Our plans were made in an effervescent mood, Didi cheerful and bustling as he had been at the prospect of painting the stairs.

  This holiday suited me well, because I was in for a long cold winter. Luke had taken a job which would keep him abroad for eight months from the middle of September, and I was going to miss him badly: we had been lovers for seven years by then, seeing each other at least once a week and sometimes more, and in the peculiarly unromantic way we share, we had come to love each other more and more solidly. I would miss him badly, and I was thankful that we could leave for Yugoslavia the day after he went away, so that my mind would be taken off my loneliness. ‘I’m glad,’ he said, at our goodbye meeting, ‘that you’re off on this gay holiday tomorrow and that you’ll go on having Didi here to keep you cheerful.’

  I had misgivings about Didi’s pleasure in the holiday once we got there. The picture in his mind of the Mediterranean (as he insisted on calling the Adriatic) was coloured by memories of Cannes and Alexandria, and I remembered that in Belgium the places he had responded to most enthusiastically had been Ostende and Zeebrugge (nightmare places to me, but to him temptingly packed with bars and restaurants). Suspecting that his idea of what a small coastal town in Yugoslavia would be like was hazy, I thought I had better warn him that the only really good food we were likely to eat would be fish, which he happened to detest, and that the place would be stronger on nature than it would be on elegance.

  He looked dismayed for a moment about the fish, but quickly pooh-poohed me. He was expert, he said, at finding delicious little restaurants, and there would always be the drink.

  ‘But I thought you said slivovitz was the one drink you couldn’t take?’

  ‘It is, but what about the wine?’

  ‘It will be all right, but not special.’

  ‘Oh well, I can always be happy so long as there’s draught beer.’

  ‘I don’t think…’ I began, but he interrupted me. ‘Nonsense, of course there’ll be draught beer…Ana, what’s the beer like in your town? Is there a good draught beer?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Ana, who didn’t know what draught beer was. ‘I didn’t drink beer much at home, but I expect there is.’

  ‘There you are!’ said Didi.

  Weakly, I dropped the subject of beer, but I went on to warn him that he might find the holiday dull in other ways: ‘A holiday with two middle-aged women and a very small child—we’ll have to gear our activities to the child, do you realize that?’ Sweetly he answered that he could imagine no holiday more delightful than a restful one with my cousin and me and the child; and since he did, after all, know us and our ways very well, I could only assume that he knew what he was saying.

  Didi had often driven from London to Dover, so we left our starting plans to him. We must be ready to start at three o’clock in the morning, he said, so as to catch the early car ferry. With a considerable effort of will—I am very bad at early starts—I was up and ready in time, hoping that the others felt as little like talking as I did, and off we went.

  Didi had surprised me by becoming fussed and old-maidish over packing and loading the car—I had expected him, after his nomad life, to be casual about such things—and he surprised me again as soon as we had started by asking how we got out of London on to the Dover Road.

  ‘Surely you know? You’ve done it lots of times, and you know how hopeless I am about roads. Look at the map.’

  He refused to look at the map, and took us out over the wrong Thames bridge. We saw from the signposts what had happened and I suggested the map again, realizing from the reluctance with which Didi gave way that he was going to be one of those tiresome drivers who see it as humiliating to admit ignorance of the route. We were becoming a touch irritable, but I put it down to the ungodly hour, and was glad to notice that we hadn’t lost enough time to matter, and could be back over the river and on to the correct route within ten minutes. It was astonishing, therefore, when as we approached Westminster Bridge Didi jammed on the brakes and said ‘Oh my god, look at that!’

  ‘That’ was the signpost on the bridge saying ‘dover 78m.’ ‘Seventy-eight miles!’ said Didi indignantly, as though this had been sprung on him as a malicious trick. ‘We can’t possibly do it in the time. We’ll have to go back home and take the next ferry.’

  I remember thinking of a row of asterisks and exclamation marks such as were used in old copies of Punch to indicate bad language. I couldn’t explode—it would be too ill-tempered, too stupid to explode, what did it matter really, make yourself see it as funny for god’s sake, and anyway keep silent. But the silence was crackling with ****!!!****** ****!! ***** ******* *********!!!!!

  Didi offered no apology. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘it will be nice to get a bit more sleep,’ and he seemed to emerge from his state of fluster into one of calm superiority to my si
lent rage.

  We caught the next ferry and decided to make the first drive a short one and stay the night in Bruges. On the surface the day went by cheerfully, but I had started on a spell of inward muttering that morning, and I couldn’t stop it. I was tired after a long year’s work and had the depression following Luke’s departure to contend with, so it was not surprising that my temper wasn’t at its best, but still I felt ashamed of myself and that made it worse.

  I already knew that the authoritative way in which Didi gave opinions or told facts didn’t always mean that his opinions were sound or the facts true, and I was usually amused when I caught myself automatically believing him in spite of this, paying tribute to his masterly way of ‘knowing best.’ Now the kind of unreliability peculiar to him was becoming more evident with every minute, and it was mortifying to find myself suddenly unable to be amused.

  To Didi in certain moods the trimmings of life were of serious importance: the quality of a restaurant, the way a meal was served. He could live happily on bread and cheese for weeks, and reacted with quick distaste to snobbery or vulgarity, but some aspects of good living held a special place in a corner of his imagination and he believed himself—declared himself—to have a special sensitivity to such things. He thought he could recognize at a glance the authentically good restaurant and the bar with genuine character, and it mattered to him that this was so. Shadows of his rich and cosmopolitan uncles stood behind him in these moods; he was proving himself as ‘elegant’ and ‘worldly’ as they were—or more so, because they had worked from experience while he was inspired only by the fineness of his ‘aristocratic’ instinct.

  Now he was ‘on the Continent’ with two ignorant women. He had spent a good deal of time in Paris and had travelled widely, apart from living for ten years in Germany, while Ana had never left Croatia till she came to London, and I (I noticed with distinctly sour amusement) was automatically disqualified from being ‘sophisticated’ by being English. He felt that he could show us the places we were passing through, open our eyes to their true character—and he was almost always (oh my poor Didi!) wrong.

  Neither Ana nor I was allowed much say in choosing the places where we would eat or sleep, and the restaurant in which we ended in Bruges was a good example of what we got. ‘Now!’ Didi had said, ‘we are going to trust my instinct,’ and he led us into the most obvious tourist trap in the town, its walls invisible behind reproduction copper warming-pans, blue and white china windmills and folksy sayings in poker-work, and the waiters peevish and overworked. When I ordered steak and chips I was thinking, the Belgians live on chips, so they can’t go far wrong on those, but the chips were soggy and the steak had that repulsive cottony texture which betrays that its toughness has been beaten out of it with a heavy spiked instrument. It was impossible for Didi not to have recognized this—he had demonstrated his true feeling for food over and over again—but tonight he was knowing best and his ‘instinct’ had led us to this place, so the food had to be first-rate. He had the prudence to leave me out of it, but he turned to Ana: ‘Just taste this, Ana! You see—now we are in a place where they really know food!’

  Later that evening my bad temper surfaced and I couldn’t resist saying to Ana ‘That restaurant!’

  ‘Let him enjoy himself,’ said that kind, wise girl; and I agreed, feeling even more ashamed of myself. How could Didi be expected to know about such things? He had lived in Europe only as an impoverished student and a penniless exile, so he can hardly ever have eaten in a good restaurant—and what a pathetic and harmless little dream he was trying to bring to life. I resolved to ‘let him enjoy himself’ by keeping my mouth shut.

  In the four days of the journey this resolution was put severely to the test. Not only was Didi naive about quality in restaurants and inns, but he was also (again not surprisingly) ignorant about European history and blind to European art forms and architecture. The authority with which he pronounced on whatever we saw remained unshaken on the surface, but he must have been uneasy underneath because he was prickly whenever I betrayed that I knew anything. This didn’t happen often, because many things I didn’t know, and a number of the things I did know I kept to myself once I had seen how he reacted; but whenever I was able to answer a question of Ana’s, or said ‘Oh look, there’s such-and-such,’ I could feel him bristling. I was soon looking forward eagerly to the relaxation which would follow when at last we were released from the car, and our intimacy would be diluted by the presence of my cousin and her son.

  I failed to realize at once that if I was becoming edgy it was nothing to what Didi was becoming, but I did see that the place disappointed him as much as I had feared it would. An austere and rocky landscape had no charms for him. Like most people raised in a country where nature is hostile, he disliked the wild and the barren and saw the typically English romantic response to it as a tiresome affectation. To my cousin and me, discovering ‘a lovely beach’ meant discovering a place where land went into sea with a special grandeur, and where there was nobody else; to Didi it meant discovering one where the amenities were conveniently and prettily arranged and where the other people looked attractive. There were plenty of our ‘lovely beaches’ in the neighbourhood, and none of his except for the pine-shaded town beach with its gay kiosks and umbrellas—and that was populated almost entirely by fleshy, middle-aged Germans and their children. Away from the beaches the country was poor, the villages shabby, the people—naturally enough!—peasants. Didi felt ashamed of himself for seeing only the drabness—he wanted to be excited by Yugoslavia because it was a Communist country—but drabness was what he saw; and he had so little sense of history, topography or the realities of politics that he could extract no interest from it. He was ‘very disappointed’ by Yugoslavia.

  He found the women ugly, too. We were not in a part of the country where they are famed for their beauty, as they are in the region of Dubrovnik, and in Montenegro. Here they tended to be swarthy and stocky, and most of them were dressed in the dark and shapeless clothes of peasant women anywhere. There were some fine faces, but there was no ‘elegance.’ After one stroll round the town it was apparent that Didi had written the place off as far as women went.

  Three weeks without romance and sex in a place where the sun was hot and the sea was blue would be sad for him, I could see; but I hoped he might not be too upset by it because until just before we had left London he had been having a high old time, and had seemed to be proving himself in a period of stability by taking it lightly. He had been running two simultaneous affairs with women who knew each other, one of which involved much daring husband-dodging—had, in fact, been behaving outrageously for the sheer sport of it, doing no harm to anyone more by luck than by judgment—and I had felt pleased about it. Because I myself, at times, had enjoyed just such light-hearted ‘naughtiness’ I saw it as sane compared to Didi’s usual catastrophic romanticism, and congratulated myself that bringing him to London had already done him good. He ought to be able to survive for three weeks on the fat of these entertaining affairs.

  But something had happened. It had happened very suddenly, showing itself first in his fluster at the start of our journey. I had been too full of my own irritation and my attempts to control it to notice it on the journey, and for the first two days after we arrived it was concealed by his reactions to the place. It was not until some time during the third day that I realized Didi had become abruptly unable to live on the fat of anything, and that he had also started to find me unendurable. I had, almost overnight, become so maddening to him that he could hardly bring himself to speak to me. If I asked a question he would answer it to my cousin or to Ana, and if he was unable to avoid addressing me he would do so briefly and often rudely, with averted eyes.

  It was disconcerting, even shocking. Until only a few days before we had been on terms so easy and affectionate that they could not possibly have been based on anything but a genuine affinity, and I had been counting on him to understand my lonelines
s at Luke’s departure and to cheer me up with his particular kind of loving gaiety. And now this!

  I decided that my irritability on the journey must have penetrated my efforts to conceal it, and abraded his nerves. The best thing to do was for us to keep apart as much as possible for some days, and no doubt the mood would pass.

  It was easy to go our separate ways. Each morning my cousin and I would decide which beach we wanted to go to. If it was one of the more distant ones we would ask Didi to drive us there and to fetch us later if he didn’t want to stay, and we would spend the day swimming and sunning and playing with the child: not an exciting holiday, but a restful and pleasant one. In the evenings we would stroll into the town for a drink, asking Didi if he would like to come too because we were trying to overcome his mood by pretending not to notice it, and (since it showed no signs of lifting) feeling relieved when he said no. He spent much time in his room—‘I have some writing to do’—and went for lonely drives. On the few occasions when he came to the beach with us he would talk a little with my cousin and play with the child—he was consistently charming to the child, even on his worst days—but more often he would wander off and sit by himself, an aloof little figure with an expression of haughty melancholy on his face. ‘Oh dear, what a bore he is,’ said my cousin. ‘It’s like carrying round a little portable thunder cloud,’ and it was. Didi’s power of mood-projection was at its strongest. Even when he was shut in his room we could feel him there—and hear him, because he developed a raucous and tortured cough (he always did this when he was disturbed) with which to signal his gloom.