After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  This sense of the destructive power of my own anger if I unleashed it may have come partly from my upbringing, the emphasis put on self-control in a middle-class English family of my period. A child forbidden to express rage freely is said to develop a neurotic fear of its own dark powers. But although my family aimed at self-control—it was high among the virtues we were told we must acquire—it was better at theory than practice. If I had become inhibited in expressing anger, what I had learnt about the emotion from my parents’ quarrels or the occasions on which my nails met in my brother’s flesh must have had as much to do with the inhibition as the precepts by which I was raised. The stronger restraint came, I believe, from the truth about Didi. Even when I was reacting on the surface as though towards a normal adult who happened to be behaving disagreeably, I never lost the sense that I was really faced with the terrible vulnerability of ‘a child of seven or eight’ masquerading as a man.

  I was not calm after these encounters. I would shake with anger and be condemned to hours of inward muttering: ‘The little bastard—how dare he!—Yugoslavia—the stairs, the job he wouldn’t even try for, the paint on my carpets, the book he isn’t finishing, the money he’s started borrowing from people who have almost none, the money he’s costing me [when I reached this one I became even angrier, so much did I detest catching myself at it], his boozing, the glass he broke last week without even saying he was sorry’: the whole list of his sins and inadequacies, large and small, would unreel through my head—and at the same time I would be smarting (‘Damn him, damn him!’) because it was rare for Didi’s ‘home truths’ to have no truth in them.

  If he led with hypocrisy—well, how could I persuade myself that he was wrong? I knew exactly what he meant. When I say I love my friends I am not insincere, but I am one of those people who are hardly ever totally involved in an emotion. There is almost always a ‘watcher’ in the back of my mind, and a pretty beady-eyed watcher at that. To Didi, who experienced emotions as blinding waves filling every corner of his being, how could this opposite kind of nature seem anything but artificial and cold? It is cold. It is all very well to abhor self-deception, to be more interested in how things are than in how they ought to be, to be capable of acting against an impulse because the impulse seems wrong or foolish, but it entails a lack of responsiveness to people and situations of which one cannot be proud.

  And certainly the cold and beady eye was fixed on Didi, and on myself in relation to him. Continuing to behave—or trying to behave—as though it wasn’t, and as though the affection which I thought he needed was the only motive of my behaviour: what was that, if not hypocrisy? Damn him, damn him, damn him!

  Didi could often draw blood of this kind, and I never felt free to stab back. I knew so well how even the mildest reproof (‘Oh Didi, why can you never remember to put the hammer back in the drawer?’) could keep him huddled in his room for an hour, certain that no one could ever stand him, so how could I possibly bring down on him the punishment he was asking for? It had never occurred to me before that the position of strength can be a weak one.

  No, I didn’t really win these games. We tied. He failed to achieve what he was driving for—getting me to scream at him, to flay him, to annihilate him. And I failed to achieve what I was driving for—annihilating him on my own terms, not his. I came nearest to winning on the one occasion when it seemed that he had won.

  A dear friend of mine had been very ill and was passing through London after a serious operation. She was staying with another friend who gave a dinner party for her, and we knew her well enough to realize that this must be a gay party with no evident concessions made to her illness: her sense of style would make anything but gaiety intolerable to her. I was asked to bring Didi to the party.

  As I entered the room I saw, with an agonizing shock, that my friend had not, as she insisted, recovered from the operation. As it turned out her condition at that time was misleading and she would live for three more years, but on that evening she looked as though she would be dead within months. I had no doubt of it. I obliterated the impression at once—it made it all the more important that the party should be a happy and natural one—and managed, as everyone else did, not only to ‘act’ as though the evening were enjoyable, but to enjoy it. Didi fell for my friend and her husband, who really did have the qualities of elegance and style he so loved, and was amusing and charming, we all drank a lot, and the party didn’t end till well after midnight.

  There was no sense of strain while it was going on. It was only on leaving and getting into Didi’s car that I understood I was exhausted. Suddenly all I could think of was my friend’s thread-like thinness lost in her dress, and what had happened to her face, and even my bones ached. Didi began to comment on her wit, and I said: ‘Yes, she’s marvellous—but she’s terribly terribly ill, much iller than I was expecting, and I feel so sad that I can hardly bear it. Do you mind, love, if we don’t talk.’

  He was silent for a few minutes, then began to talk again. Feeling that I ought to try to overcome my grief and fatigue—the situation was, after all, nothing to Didi, who had met her for the first time that evening—I answered briefly, hardly listening, until he said: ‘There was one thing which made me very angry—the way you told her I’d painted the stairs. It makes me very angry when you try to give the impression that I’m your lover like that.’

  I felt a double incredulity. It was impossible to believe that he could have interpreted my reference to his painting the stairs in that way, and it was impossible to believe that he could be so insensitive to what I was feeling about my friend that he could think me capable of forgetting it in order to spar with him. I said: ‘Oh please, Didi, not now. I asked if we could be quiet—I do really want to be.’

  He screamed at me: ‘You think that because you are in the position of power you can make me do anything you like. I can’t stand it, I won’t stand it.’

  I then did something I have never done before or since in my adult life. I burst into tears. On other occasions, of course, I have wept, but never has a storm of weeping overcome me suddenly and unexpectedly, as it did then. That at this moment, instead of being granted silence and understanding, I had to be goaded by this idiotic and irrelevant egotism—it was impossible to bear.

  I didn’t even try to stop crying. Huddling away from him, in the corner of my seat, I sobbed wildly all the way home. At one point he said in a subdued screech ‘Shut up!’ and I gasped back childishly ‘Shut up yourself! You aren’t even driving the right way.’—‘I am driving the right way,’ he said furiously (he wasn’t), and we were silent again except for my sobbing.

  When we got home I ran upstairs and into my room, where I fell on my bed and went on crying. Surprisingly, he came in after me, and after standing awkwardly beside me for a few moments, began to stroke my shoulder. He could offer me no comfort—it was horrible to feel the emptiness there, to know that the person standing by me who I had believed in spite of everything to be a friend, and who still in spite of everything believed himself to be a friend, just had nothing to offer in any situation which didn’t directly concern himself. ‘I’ll go and have a bath,’ I mumbled, to escape from him. He followed me across the hall, still dabbing at my shoulder, and feeling dimly the extent of his confusion and dismay I managed to say ‘Yes, I know you are trying to be kind, you didn’t mean it.’ Then at last I was alone in the bathroom and was able to recover.

  That evening Didi seemed to win by pushing me to the point of collapse, but because what I had collapsed over was to do with another person, not him, he felt it as defeat. I know this because it was the only evening in that period of which he left no record at all in his diary.

  It marked a turning point for me. It marked the point where I recognized that I must never—not even when he was ‘well’ again—expect from Didi what one normally expects from a friend. When he gave anything to other people—as he often did, as he had done earlier to me and was to do again—it was by the happy accide
nt of their chancing to appreciate what he chanced to be ‘giving off.’ If he happened to be in a mood to charm, to find things amusing, to respond lovingly, to use his intuition (which could be sharp) on people’s behaviour, to apply his intelligence, then whoever was around would benefit; but he was so hermetically walled up in himself that he was unable to discover in other people any constant reason to attend to them, still less to be considerate of them, and he couldn’t answer their demands. Let them stop reflecting back on him some aspect of himself that at the moment was important to him, and they would become unreal; and if they expected him to reflect back some aspect of them, they became intolerable, they were asking him to do something he couldn’t do, putting a painful strain on him from which he had to escape. I had expected him to understand what I was feeling about my friend’s illness, and to sink his self-absorption for a while in order to care about my condition…and it had been like asking a child to fill in your income-tax returns for you.

  Luke wrote: ‘If you are sure you don’t want him there any more, you must kick him out.’ If Luke had become an expert on Didi, he was even more an expert on me; other people simply said ‘You must kick him out.’

  I was not sure. Pleasure had vanished but the sense of responsibility had increased, and there is some kind of satisfaction in indulging a sense of responsibility—a suspect kind, no doubt, in that even if it is harmless it is not simply what it appears to be. Power? Was I enjoying a sense of power over another person? I think not. My inhibition against exercising the power I had in any practical way was absolute, and when I used the advantages of detachment and comparative sanity in order to ‘win’ our games, I was doing it in self-defence, to prevent the element of truth in Didi’s accusations from hurting me too much. What had trapped me, I am almost sure, was my acceptance of the role (my grabbing of the role?) of mother.

  I could imagine a scene during which I kicked Didi out, and I could imagine (I often did) enjoying such a scene, but as soon as I had to picture that forlorn little figure puttering away in his car—where to, and with what in his pocket?—my heart contracted with pain. It was as though I were physically incapable of causing that loneliness and hopelessness, and would be doing myself a violence if I caused it. If at any time he had enough cash on him to survive for a few weeks, or perhaps get back to Germany, I might be able to tell him to go, but not otherwise. I began to do what he himself did over the £75 which he would get from the publisher if he finished the children’s book, and various other sums of money (all of which either proved illusory, or were at once drunk and gambled) which he sometimes announced he might earn from this or that; I began to feel that if we named them firmly enough they were as good as real. ‘When I get paid for that translation I’m going to do…’ ‘When I do that talk for the BBC…’ of course I knew by now that this was only talk, but by making an act of faith in it I could keep my spirits up, as he did.

  Because Didi himself was loathing the situation even more than I was. There were times when he failed to record something in his diary because it was too shaming—perhaps he even failed to remember it—but every ‘borrowing’ which would never be repaid, every raid on my whisky or my cousin’s, every small lie to cover an evening’s gambling, every unjustified rudeness or coldness was recorded with bleak honesty. He was disgusted by these things, disgusted by the irrationality of the loathing he was feeling for me, disgusted and baffled by his own inability to do what thousands of exiles manage to do: earn their keep by buckling down to whatever work their persistence finds, however uncongenial. He wrote about this once, from a deep pit of despair when the only alternative to constant humiliation and guilt that he could envisage was death. How absurd this was, he wrote, when death was not the only alternative. He could restore his self-respect any day by finding a job and starting to earn his living; and although working was ‘something I absolutely loathe the prospect of,’ surely even he must admit that it would be less disagreeable than killing himself? If he could see this, he asked himself, why, why, why was he so totally unable to act on it?

  In spite of his crippling inertia, it was he, not I, who tried to end it. I gave a lunch party for eight people one Sunday, and he was there because he had been particularly hostile in the previous week so that I couldn’t exclude him without appearing to be punishing him. It must have been a good party, because at seven o’clock that evening they were still there, several of them—including Didi—very drunk. As there was a good deal of wine still unopened I could see that there was some time to go before it would end. For the first four hours I had enjoyed my guests, but now the drunk ones had slithered into that stage of fatuous argument in which each goes into whatever act he always goes into when drunk, and I became bored. With relief I remembered that a friend had asked me to her house that evening to watch a television programme about President Kennedy’s assassination, so at half past seven I looked at the clock, exclaimed with dismay, and said that I must go, thinking that this would break the party up. It didn’t. They hardly noticed what I said, or my departure, but the television programme was to last until after midnight, the level in the last demi-john had sunk, so it seemed reasonable to hope that by the time I returned they would be gone.

  At about eleven thirty my friend’s telephone rang and it was Didi, asking if I’d like a lift home. They had all gone on to a pub, he said, and had a splendid evening. We told him to come and watch the end of the programme, and he was with us in fifteen minutes.

  He held drink uncommonly well, so he must have consumed a vast amount to have become noisy and foolish, only a little way from falling about, as he was that night. As soon as he sat down in front of the television screen he began to barrack the speakers, shouting ‘Bloody Yanks—hypocritical bastards—boo—down with them!’ whenever a member of the Warren Commission appeared. My friend’s husband was ill with flu in the next room, trying to sleep—the sort of thing about which Didi was normally considerate—but he paid no attention to our attempts to hush him, so as soon as the programme ended I took him away. On the way to the car he went on shouting ‘That’s what I can’t stand about you bloody British, you have no passion, you sit there watching those bastards talking their shit, “listening to both sides,” “being fair”—it makes me want to vomit.’

  I had drunk a lot myself since lunchtime, and I was sleepy, longing to be at home and in bed. The remains of the drink in me stirred in reaction to his noise and folly, giving me a sharp impulse to smack his face, but the sleepiness won: better to humour him and get him home quickly. But when we were in the car he said: ‘How much money have you got on you?’

  ‘About £2, why?’

  ‘Because I haven’t any, need I say, and we’re going gambling.’

  ‘Oh no we’re not. I’ll need those £2 tomorrow, and anyway all I want is to be in bed.’

  ‘I didn’t really mean we’d gamble—only I’m out of ciggies and the only place I can get Gauloises this time of night is the club.’

  ‘Too bad, you’ll have to make do with mine till tomorrow.’

  He made no answer and started the car, and a few seconds later I saw we were driving away from home.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the club.’

  At that moment we were stopped by traffic lights. ‘You may be going to the club, but I’m not,’ I said, a violent wave of irritation sweeping through me, and I whisked out of the car and began walking fast down a street which I saw with satisfaction was one-way, so that he couldn’t follow me. It led towards Regent Street where, no doubt, I would find a taxi sooner or later.

  Drunk though he was, Didi noticed the one-way sign and saw how to get round it. He came after me in reverse, bumping the kerb, the car’s engine roaring, and flung open the passenger’s door saying ‘Stop this bloody nonsense, get in.’

  I hesitated, but it was after one o’clock on a Sunday night, much colder than I had thought, and so far the glimpse of Regent Street had shown no traffic at all. I knew that I had won
in that Didi would now drive home, so I got in.

  Glancing sideways without turning my head I could see his hands trembling on the steering wheel, and he was breathing heavily and slowly, deep shuddering breaths. Twice he took a wrong turning and I almost spoke to prevent his doing so, but it was as though the car were full of explosive gas and a word would have been a spark: I kept silent.

  Back in the flat, I found that my own temper had calmed and that I was only wearily annoyed with him for having got so stupidly drunk. Why let the sun go down on my wrath, I thought, and as I was going into my room I said: ‘Goodnight—thank you for coming to pick me up.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he said.

  I turned to look at him. His hair was on end, his mouth was trembling, his eyes were so wide that I could see the white above the iris.

  ‘Do you mean now?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, now. You must understand one thing—you must. I love you with all my heart. But don’t try to stop me because I just can’t stand one more second of all this.’

  All this? I thought. What ‘all this’? That I wouldn’t give him £2 to gamble with in the middle of the night? Jesus god! Have I got to deal with this now, when all I want is to be in bed? He had sprung it too suddenly for me to feel sure what to say, but I could see that we had moved on to ground where he had to be ‘managed.’

  What I said was: ‘I shan’t try to stop you, Didi. You’re quite right, we’ve been getting on each other’s nerves too long and it’s time you left. But you don’t have to go now, in the middle of the night. Tomorrow morning would be far better.’

  ‘No, it must be now, it will be too difficult tomorrow. Please don’t argue, sweetie. I’ll be out of here in an hour.’

  ‘Where will you go?’