by Diana Athill
‘Wash my hair,’ I snapped with a viciousness in my voice which astonished me. ‘What the hell else is there to do in this bloody place?’
Up in my room I tried to be genuinely glad of this chance to wash my hair, but bad temper wrestled with shame, and the water was cold. I lay on my bed reading a novel which I had earlier decided was too trivial to finish. I would go down at seven o’clock, and see how Didi was doing in his campaign on the landlady. It had better be successful after all this absurd carry-on.
When I went down Didi and Ana were standing at the bar drinking schnapps—he must have had a good many by then—the landlady was talking to them, and there was a man sitting to one side with a ledger in front of him.
‘Ah, here you are,’ said Didi. ‘What will you have? You remember our landlady—and this,’ he added in a carefully colourless voice, ‘is our landlord, who was away the last time we were here.’ The French pouffer dans son mouchoir is more expressive than the English ‘stifle one’s laughter.’ J’ai pouffé dans mon mouchoir. I struggled to hide it, but whatever the resulting expression, Didi could read it. He had read it in advance, for that matter, the moment he himself had been introduced to the husband. Quickly, quickly, I thought, I must talk of something, talk about anything…and I can’t remember what I said. All I can remember is Didi’s suddenly turning on me and shouting at the top of his voice: ‘You don’t know anything about it! shut up!’
There was silence in the bar. Ana stared into her glass, the landlady, who understood English, raised her eyebrows, and the landlord looked up, startled.
The forms for registration were lying on the bar. I picked one up, said to Ana ‘I think I’ll fill this in now,’ and went over to a table on the far side of the room. How were we going to eat? I was wondering. How could we sit down to the same table—but to insist on being served separately would look too absurd.
A few minutes later this problem was solved by the entrance of the American sergeant whom Didi and Ana had met when we were last there. He greeted them warmly, took in my presence, said ‘So your friend is here tonight, why don’t you all join me for dinner,’ and herded them over to where I was sitting.
Clearly the pub didn’t often have visitors so exotic as an Egyptian man travelling with a Yugoslav girl and an Englishwoman, and the sergeant, who had a room there, considered us entertainment for the evening. He was a friendly man and under his influence we got on well enough for about half an hour, until he reverted to a conversation he’d had with Didi when they first met.
‘So you’re a Communist,’ he said. ‘You know something? I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you’re any more of a Communist than I am.’
Ana and I spoke simultaneously, she to say ‘Of course he isn’t, he knows nothing about it,’ and I to say ‘How did you size him up so quickly?’ It was on me that Didi turned.
‘How dare you!’ he screamed—people who had come in and were standing at the bar swivelled round in astonishment. ‘How dare you say anything about Communism! You’re ignorant, it’s all hypocrisy with you—being left-wing, being progressive, a lot of shit…Look,’ he screamed at the sergeant, ‘there are these people in England, they live in a part of London called Hampstead where she lives and they think they’re left-wing because it’s the smart thing to be, but it’s nothing but fashion with them, nothing but fashion, they’ve no knowledge, no feeling, no passion—don’t take any notice of the silly bitch, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’
The grounds he had hit on for attack were too mad, I couldn’t retaliate. I hadn’t been talking about Communism, and I have never pretended to any political position. I have even stated clearly in a book which I supposed Didi to have read, even if he didn’t like it, my own feeling of guilt at never having been politically engaged. I stared at Didi, dumbfounded, and saw pure hatred staring back at me.
I was aware of the sergeant’s astonishment and of the gaping people at the bar. The hatred in Didi’s eyes called up an instant desire to strike back as viciously as possible and I was trembling with rage, but I couldn’t embark on a screaming match in front of these strangers. Instead I got to my feet and said, my voice shaking, ‘I’m going upstairs’—then, to the sergeant: ‘The trouble with us is that we’ve been cooped up in the same car too long.’
‘No, no,’ said Didi, jumping up. ‘You stay, Ana and I will go out,’ and he hustled her away.
‘Yes, you sit down,’ said the sergeant. ‘Have another drink. Looks like your friend is quite an excitable guy.’
I took some deep breaths, gulped a schnapps, and managed (to my own surprise) to spend quite an agreeable further half-hour with the sergeant before going to my room. I knew that what I should do was part with Didi at once. He couldn’t be more than a long day’s drive from Düsseldorf, where he had friends; it would be far better to leave him here in Germany rather than have to send him back later.
But when I counted what was left of my money my heart sank. I would have to give Didi enough for his petrol, and Ana and I would have to get ourselves to wherever we could pick up a train for Ostende, pay for rail tickets—and then, would our tickets as passengers on a car ferry be valid for an ordinary boat? I didn’t think so. We had only just enough money on us for the journey as we were making it, and were going to arrive home with only a shilling or two left, so any extra expense was impossible. I was stuck with Didi.
The next day’s drive was silent. I chose to sit in the back all the way, and we had to concentrate so hard on covering too great a distance in too short a time that lack of talk seemed natural. Twelve hours to Ostende, then the crossing, then the night drive from Dover to London during which we ran into thick fog: it was a gruelling day, but at least it allowed me to feel genuine admiration and gratitude for the way Didi drove. Not once in that long day did he gamble on his quick reflexes, but became instead more careful the more tired he was. Home at last, we were all too fatigued for more than ‘Goodnight.’
The Game 5
SO THAT WINTER’S crisis began, the crisis called ‘Diana’—for that’s what it turned out to be in spite of the lack of the customary love affair.
Although we patched up our quarrel, Didi and I avoided each other as much as possible. This was not difficult, because my spare room now became free and he was able to move into it, but I didn’t want to appear to be rejecting him. The more hostile he became, the more evident it was that he was sick and that he needed not punishment but support, so although I steered clear of him for most of the time I tried to make it seem a matter of chance. If, for instance, I had people to dinner whom he liked, and whom earlier I would have asked him to join, it would now seem pointed if I left him out so I didn’t do so. If I had roasted a chicken and was unable to finish it because I was going out, I would say as I would have said before, ‘There’s half a chicken in the fridge, love, do finish it up.’ If he was having a drink with my cousin when I dropped in to see her (he liked her more as he liked me less), I would tell the kind of gossip he normally enjoyed as though I expected him still to enjoy it. I wanted him to feel that when his black mood lifted he would find me still there as he used to see me—someone on whom he could depend for affection and security—because it seemed to me that when he turned against people of whom he was fond, as he was doing against me, he was in some way challenging them to go on loving him; and that perhaps if he were able to feel that one of them had at last met the challenge, however far he pushed it, his pattern of hopelessness might break. At this stage it was only by hoping that I might conceivably end by doing him some good that I could continue to endure him.
Meanwhile a friend of mine had offered him a part-time job, to be paid out of petty cash for so long as she could get away with it. It was little more than typing envelopes for a few hours a day, and she could pay him only £5 a week, but I suspected by then that anything more demanding would be beyond Didi. The truth was that he had no conception of what a real job of any kind entailed, and that many more people th
an I knew about must have contributed to his keep in the past. Sometimes he asked me ‘What do you do all day in your office?’ and a description of it which suggested that it might be hard work brought a sceptical look to his face as though he were recognizing a kind of play-acting indulged in by ‘grown-up’ people: he knew, of course, that jobs were simply a method of conning money and status without risk.
He had started occasionally to look at ‘Situations Vacant’ columns, and two or three times he applied for something and I wrote him a glowing reference. I did it with no hesitation, but with a twinge of guilt. I had to tell myself repeatedly that he could do this particular job if he wanted to, that it was true that (if he liked his colleagues—no, forget that)—true that he would be agreeable and amusing to work with, and might well have bright ideas. And he had, after all, stuck the Pay Corps for about eighteen months…Supposing there was someone in this office who took to him at once (and that could easily happen), so that the display of competence and energy which he put up to start with was confirmed by an audience and he began to take real pleasure in it, wasn’t it possible that he might become genuinely involved in his work? Surely it must be, so the chance mustn’t be missed. But secretly I was almost relieved when each time the troublesome business of applying for a labour permit made them decide on someone else. By far the most likely result of Didi’s getting work, and I knew it, was a whole series of new complications.
For some weeks he had a partiality for advertisements for secretaries: ‘Editor of progressive new magazine needs secretary with initiative and a sense of humour,’ and so on.
‘But Didi, he wants a girl,’ I would say. ‘A girl who is trained as a shorthand-typist.’
‘How do you know? It doesn’t say so.’ (Anything I said was suspect.)
‘I know because that’s what “secretary” means.’
‘It doesn’t always.’
He had lived in Europe for a long time and many of his girlfriends must have worked in offices, but he was choosing to see a secretary as an urbane young man in an impeccable suit hovering at the elbow of some potentate: the homme de confidence, the one who deals with tiresome mistresses and through whom people seeking favours attempt to approach his employer.
I came across one real job within his range: assistant in a bookshop. It was a new shop and the salary was only £10 a week to start with, but £10 a week was £10 more than Didi had, and he loved books, could charm anyone he chose to charm and was quick with figures: he would have made a good assistant in a bookshop. I hurried home to tell him about it, thinking that surely this was news good enough to cheer him up.
‘How much do they pay?’ he asked, his voice suspicious.
‘£10 a week.’
‘An eight-hour day for that! Are you mad? It’s not worth my while to go and see him.’
I was so angry that I was speechless, and I was baffled too. Surely there was one un-neurotic element in his depression: his humiliation at depending on me for his roof and food, and on my cousin (as he had started to do at that time) for pocket-money? Surely he was genuinely longing to be rid of this? I had not yet realized how much the hungry maw of his illness demanded humiliation (agonizingly sensitive to it though he felt himself to be), and that the one kind of job he would always shy away from was the ‘real’ one he was capable of doing.
The little job offered by my friend wasn’t ‘real.’ He could see it half as a joke and half as generosity on his part in helping her out, besides which she was an amusing woman whose company he enjoyed. Typing envelopes was a bore, but spending several hours a day with Sheila was a pleasure. He started cheerfully, as he had started the stairs and the plans for our holiday, insisting on reorganizing her filing system for her; and by the time he gave up, leaving it half done and in a state of chaos, she had become another of those people so concerned for him that they put up with his ways. From the point of view of the job, she told me later, she was thankful when her accountant began to ask awkward questions and she had to tell Didi that she could no longer employ him, but she missed him badly. Even when he was ‘in a dep,’ Didi enjoying someone and wishing to please them exercised a charm which was far more than a superficial or deliberate trick.
Another hopeful event on the material level was that he was commissioned to write a children’s book for which he would get £75 on signature of the contract and another £75 when he delivered the book. He wrote the first half quickly, and it was excellent; but the publisher was slow in sending him the first cheque, failed to answer his letters and dodged his telephone calls. It was carelessness and inefficiency, not villainy, but I couldn’t convince Didi of this, and by the time the cheque arrived he was determined to ‘have no more to do with those crooks.’ I tried to smother my certainty that although the writing had come to him pleasantly and easily, and the second £75 would have been as welcome as the first (which had vanished overnight), the book would never be finished.
I tried to be optimistic because I needed optimism. If I could believe that Didi’s morale might gradually be built up by going to an office every day and by getting back to his typewriter, I could believe that he might become a happy presence again—and even that one day he might be able to pay rent for his room. I had recently made some extra money from my writing, so at present the rent wasn’t crucial to me, but it would become important again. A happy and independent Didi would be the lodger of my choice, so I went on hoping for him.
But Didi was unable, even if we saw nothing of each other for as much as six or seven days at a time, to forget the irritation I was causing him, and every now and then he would be compelled to scratch the itch. He would have a few drinks, bringing himself up to the point where he experienced an illusion of mellowness, and would knock at my door with apparent amiability to offer me his car for shopping or something of the kind. I would be pleased. I never learnt not to respond to these peace moves, partly because I was so much hoping for peace, and partly—I think—because at the moment when they were made they were genuine as far as Didi consciously knew. I would greet him warmly, offer him a drink, ask him for news of Sheila, or how the children’s book was going.
Didi would answer my questions (shrugging off the subject of the book) and would then begin to wander about the room in an elaborately nonchalant way, using his hands a lot as he spoke: slow, graceful gestures as though he were manipulating words which floated invisibly in the air around him. He would smile often—an irritatingly ‘knowing’ smile—but he would avoid looking at me, and sooner or later he would launch on what I came to call ‘the home-truth game’: the game he had started in the restaurant in Yugoslavia.
‘Sweetheart Diana,’ he would say (he was always lavish with endearments, so it took me a little while to see that on these occasions he was extra-lavish); ‘Sweetheart Diana, I am going to say something rather horrible.’
‘Oh dear, must you?’
‘Perhaps I oughtn’t to say it, sweetie, but I only do it because I love you. What’s the point of being friends if we can’t say the truth? Normally I’d keep my mouth shut, but now I’m a little drunk so I’m able to say it, and I’m going to take the chance. You know how I love you, you know how grateful I am to you—I don’t have to tell you that. [‘Here it comes!’ I’d think.] You’re a very good person, a generous person, but I can’t help seeing that you’ve got one fault which spoils it all. You are a terrible hypocrite.’
‘In what way?’
‘I think you probably can’t help it, love, it’s in your nature. You’re not capable of genuine feeling—except with Luke, of course [he never risked a dig of any sort connected with Luke because he knew it was too dangerous]. I’m beginning to notice it more and more, and it makes me sad because it’s so sad for you. None of your relationships are sincere, not even with your cousin, or with X or Y [mentioning my two oldest friends]. It’s a pity, because it spoils your goodness.’
Anger would have started churning in me at once—even if every word he said was true, what
damnable impertinence to say it!—but if he was playing this game, so was I, and I scored by not letting him see when he hurt or angered me. Clamping down on my rage (and simultaneously realizing that in clamping down I was, indeed, being hypocritical), I would neatly take the wind out of his sails by asking: ‘But if it’s in my nature, what can I do about it?’
He would always avoid such questions, waving his hands, smiling—his smile intolerably smug—and staring over my shoulder.
‘What ought I to do about it?’ I’d insist. ‘If I’m a hypocrite I’m sorry. I don’t want to be, and my feelings feel genuine to me.’
He would side-step: ‘It’s cruel of me to have said it, I know. It must hurt you…’
‘No, it doesn’t hurt me, but…’
‘I expect it’s just my horrible supersensitiveness, and I ought to shut up. I’ve no right to say such things to you.’
‘You haven’t really, have you?’—and at that he would look stricken and would go quickly and silently out of the room.
I always won these games because I held all the trumps. If it were to become an exchange of home truths, it was I who commanded the murderous ones. It was I who could have said: ‘Hypocrite? What about you, swallowing your bile so that you can continue living for free in this flat—continue to be nothing more than a parasite? What about you, saying you “love” me when your every word and gesture since we were in Yugoslavia makes it clear that I irritate you to distraction? Who are you to accuse me of anything?’
But my victory could never be conclusive because of the very strength of my hand. All I needed to do was show a corner of a card—‘You haven’t really, have you?’—and he was in retreat, going out to get even drunker, or retiring to his room to lie on his bed in the dark. What would have happened to him if I had slammed down my whole hand? I was certain that he would be destroyed.