After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘Oh Didi, don’t be such a fool. You’re stinking drunk, you can hardly drive—why on earth go charging off like this?’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘Look—go to bed now’—I took him by the arm and steered him into his room, pushing him down on to his bed—‘have a bit of sleep, anyway, to sober you up.’

  ‘I’m not drunk.’

  ‘You’re stinking drunk—literally stinking, the fumes are horrible. You’re in no state to drive and you know it.’

  ‘You mustn’t think it’s because I don’t love you, you mustn’t think that.’

  This repetition of his love for me almost brought my temper back again. Meaningless idiocy, it sounded, at this moment when his revulsion had finally broken right out; and at the same time the tone of his voice and the way his head had started to loll made me think: ‘God, he’s reached the maudlin stage, he never does that, he must be very near passing out—he can’t be allowed to drive now, I must stop him somehow.’

  Anger, I thought. Reasoning is useless—bully him.

  ‘Didi!’ I said sharply. ‘Pull yourself together, you’re behaving like an hysterical idiot,’ and I grabbed his shoulders—he was sitting on the bed—and shook him. His head waggled.

  ‘Didi!’ and I slapped him fairly hard on his left cheek, my hand moved more by the accumulated annoyance of the evening than by the need of the moment.

  A smug smile swam to the surface of his decomposed face—it was decomposed in that ugly way which occurs in advanced drunkenness, when the features seem to have lost their relationship to each other.

  ‘It’s you who are hysterical,’ he said, ‘not me.’

  I stood and looked at him. He stared straight ahead, still smiling smugly. I realized that I would have to battle with him for hours if I was to prevent his going, and that I didn’t want to prevent it.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘If you want to go now, you’d better go. I shall have a bath.’

  I said it simply because it had occurred to me that I would now be unable to sleep if I went to bed straight away, but once I was in the bathroom I remembered that his shaving and washing things were there and that he would want to pack them: if I took a long time over my bath he might pass out while waiting for me to finish. I spent over half an hour in the bathroom, but as soon as I was out I heard him crossing the hall to fetch his things. He packed very quickly and quietly, considering how drunk he was, and before another half hour had passed there was the bumping of suitcases on the stairs, the click of the flat door, and then, a minute later, the familiar sound of the little car starting up and tock-tocking off down the street.

  I lay awake for a long time. The flat felt empty. How foolish to think I could feel its emptiness—if Didi had been asleep next door the silence would have been no different, I was only imagining its sadness. And tomorrow—or if not tomorrow, the next day—what a relief it would be to know that I was rid of Didi.

  The emptiness which had seemed sad did, indeed, soon become a luxury. There was a lightness in having my flat to myself again, in re-arranging the kitchen to my own taste, in leaving the bathroom door open if I felt like it, in breathing the absence of thunder in the air. It was this pleasure in being alone which made me, I thought, postpone plans to let the spare room. I ought to do so soon, because I had been getting into debt to my cousin for the rent, but I would have a few days’—perhaps a few weeks’—holiday first. So I told myself.

  But Didi hadn’t left his key behind, and on the second day after he left I realized that he was creeping in to wash and shave while I was out at work. He thought he removed all traces of it, but a towel was damp, there was a black hair on the soap. He had not found anywhere else to live.

  My cousin reported that he was coming to her for food. Sheila, for whom he was working, reported that he was distilling despair of such strength that her office appeared to have gone dark. Neither to them nor to anyone else did he say what had happened, beyond that he was no longer living in my flat. He didn’t tell them that he was sleeping in his car and had nothing to eat but what they gave him, and it was his silence which worked on them.

  ‘You should be thankful to be rid of him,’ changed to ‘You would be silly to take him back, of course—yes, of course that’s out of the question, you mustn’t do it,’ and then to ‘He’s suffering terribly, poor little creature.’ Finally it became ‘If you could bear it, don’t you think that perhaps you ought to take him back?’

  What these kind friends were feeling reflected my own reactions too accurately for me to hold out against them. It was wonderful to be without Didi, but not wonderful enough to obscure the image I had dreaded, the image of Didi alone, hopeless and helpless—and faced with that image I acknowledged that I was making no plans for the room chiefly because I knew he would soon be back in it.

  I went through the motions of being sensible. I wrote to him at Sheila’s office saying that he had been right, and that it was obviously impossible for us to live together after we had frayed each other’s nerves so badly, but that if he had not yet found anywhere else he could, if he liked, come back to the flat while he was looking. He would have, now, to concentrate on finding work which paid him a living wage, and as soon as he found it he must leave and take another room somewhere else; but meanwhile, if he needed a place ‘for the next three or four weeks,’ the room was there. He returned on the day he got my letter, and I knew at once (although I tried not to admit it) that the reservations it contained might not have been written for all the attention he had given them. I knew too, within a very short time, that the explosion had done nothing to relieve the tension between us.

  I wasn’t acting only out of determination to help Didi if I could. That motive existed, but when I saw it as the only one I was rationalizing. Disagreeable though our situation was, I was as much hooked on it as he was.

  This kind of ‘hooking’ can only seem extraordinary when viewed from outside. The innumerable married couples who live year after year in mutual torture: how puzzling they appear, because surely any amount of trouble (looking for somewhere else to live, making decisions about the children or about money, upsetting families and all the rest of it) would be better than the endless pain and distress some of them cause each other. One can only assume that they are engaged in a deadly but absorbing game without which they would be bored or frightened, and that the pain it inflicts gives each of them a sharper sense of his or her own reality—or perhaps simply something with which to fill emptiness?

  In an amateurish way, with only half our minds on it (compared with married couples), Didi and I had become involved in such a game. If he was obsessed, so was I. The degree to which I was aware of him betrayed it.

  I never passed his door on coming in without noticing whether or not a crack of light showed under it, as though his presence or absence made a difference in the orientation of my own mood; I noted the briskness of his tread as he moved about the flat, the way he handled things in the kitchen, whether he was coughing or not, whether he got into bed as soon as he came in, or paced his room. There was a language of faint creaks, thuds or clinks, the opening and shutting of doors, the time spent in the lavatory, the smell left in the bathroom (Cologne? He’s out with a girl tonight), by which I was able to interpret his state. Brisk steps, deft movements, a scented bathroom, noises neither unnaturally subdued nor unusually clumsy, and my heart lightened: the pressure was off, he had turned towards some outside activity and was taking a rest from being a thunder cloud. Mouselike creepings contradicted by his aggressively painful cough, and my heart sank: here we go again. Although a heavy sleeper, I doubt whether I missed any of his homecomings. My flat is remarkably soundproof for noises made above floor level, but its floors are bad. A lodger can talk, laugh, type, make love on a creaky bed (provided it’s standing on a sound bit of floor) without my hearing, but when he walks about I know it. I would wake with one eye, just enough to register that Didi was home,
had gone to the kitchen to eat, had crossed the hall to his room—thump thump, his shoes were off, the creak of the board beside his bed which meant that he was getting into it—yes, he was in bed now, I could go to sleep again. The amount of time I gave to these observations and the interest I took in them were disproportionate—mad—and so was the intensity, whether amused or appalled, with which I brooded over our encounters, analysed his moves and my own in the home-truths game, and fretted at the annoyances he caused me. Although Luke was still away my days were full—my work is demanding, I have good friends, I was writing—yet there I was, making an almost full-time occupation of Didi.

  This did not prevent my being taken by surprise when he struck his climactic blow.

  About once every six weeks I spent a weekend in the country with my mother, leaving on Friday night and getting back to the flat at about ten fifteen on Sunday evening. My mother takes no Sunday papers, so taking my own to bed with me when I got home, and reading them in lazy comfort, had become a ritual. Didi knew this ritual well. If he was in when I returned he always came out of his room to give me the papers, and if he was going to be out he would leave them in the hall for me, because our wretched ‘game’ had not prevented the development of the kind of domestic routine which builds up between people living in the same house.

  Before I left, on this particular weekend, he checked on the time of my return. When he did this it meant, usually, that he would take advantage of my absence by inviting a woman to the flat (it was only later that he overcame an inhibition against doing this, however discreetly, while I was there), and didn’t want me to catch him at it. He was out when I got back—no line of light under his door—but there were no papers in the hall. I looked in my sitting-room and the kitchen, thought ‘Bother him, he’s forgotten I want them,’ then knocked at his door, thinking he might be there but had gone early to bed. There was no answer, so I went in and switched on the light.

  I was delighted by what I saw. For some time Didi’s room had been in a state of incoherent mess which reflected his mood. He was precise and tidy when he was happy, arranging favourite objects in special ways, and taking a pride in his room, but since we had come back from Yugoslavia he had been leaving dirty clothes on the floor, letting papers drift everywhere, and failing to make his bed. Tonight the room was immaculate. He had obviously spent much time over the weekend in giving it a thorough cleaning. The Sunday papers were on the neatly made bed, and his desk was clear except for one notebook, lying open.

  My instant reaction was pleasure at how much better he must be feeling to have restored order in this way, and the pleasure was increased by the sight of the notebook. It was the same size and shape as the book in which he had started his story for children, and I thought ‘At last he’s decided to finish that story! Hurrah!’ As I crossed the room to pick up the papers I paused by the desk and looked at the open page to see whether I was right.

  The first words I saw—the last on the page—were: ‘I haven’t had a woman for over five months!!!!! It is unbelievable, but there you are. It is killing me. The frustration is enormous. If only I weren’t so particular—so bloody capricious.’ It was his diary.

  Those words astounded me. It meant that he hadn’t had a woman, for all his party-going and late nights, since we’d returned from our holiday. But even more interesting than this revelation was the possibility of discovering what he had felt about bolting from the flat. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘he’s asked for it. He knows our agreement—anything that isn’t put away is likely to be read, and here he is absolutely presenting it to me’ and I began to turn back the pages to find the record of that incident.

  My own name jumped out at me at once. ‘My last entry was getting Diana off my chest and with this entry I am off her back (figuratively I am pleased to say. Literally is too repulsive to even think about).’

  The blood rushed up into my face and my hands went cold. It was the same shock as that which follows opening an envelope which looks harmless and finding that it contains an obscene anonymous letter: an unreasonable reaction, considering that I was reading the private diary of someone who, as I knew, had been finding me intolerably irritating for several months, but the difference between deducing Didi’s feelings from his behaviour and seeing them written down was going to prove surprisingly great.

  ‘My last entry was getting Diana off my chest…’ I turned quickly to the last entry.

  There is no point in lying or being a hypocrite. I have started to detest her. I find her unbearable. Now, I am obviously diseased. Part of this disease, or one of my many diseases if you wish (you—who?) is that my mental reactions are dependent on my physical response to things. For instance I am always talking about love, yet love to me is physical desire pure and simple. This is leading to the fact that my reactions to Diana are sparked by my physical antipathy to Diana. I find it impossible to live in the same flat as someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe. This has led me to detest everything she does, says, or writes. I am trying hard to understand the monstrosity of my attitude and I can really only explain it by accepting the fact that I am diseased, abnormal, sick…

  I’d be sitting in my room watching a stupid thing on telly and annoyed with myself for not switching it off and working—writing letters, working on the novel or writing my diary. In her sitting-room her typewriter would go tick tick tick tick tick. ‘Christ,’ I’d tell myself, ‘there she is, hammering away at that bloody mediocre muck—dishing out one tedious stupid sentence after another, and thinking—no, pretending it is writing.’ And this mood would seize me. Then I would remember all she has done and is still doing for me, so I knock on her door. ‘Cup-a-tea, luv?’ I say. She’s so engrossed (pretending) she hardly hears me. Finishes a sentence, looks at me—very much ‘unaware of her environment,’ so taken up she is by her ‘art.’ ‘I’d love a cup, luv.’ Afterwards I go back to my room. ‘What a bastard I am,’ I keep whispering, ‘what a bastard I am.’

  Didi would be coming in soon. The sensations of shock returned when I realized how sure I was of this, how certain that whether he knew it or not he had left this diary out on purpose for me to read, and was now agog to know whether I had. I must hurry—let me flick back to Yugoslavia.

  Since the beginning of the journey Diana started being collante—sticky. Terribly tender, forgiving and loving. She will touch me with her finger and my whole being absolutely cringes in revulsion. If someone I find unattractive suddenly gets this consuming crush on me [Crush on him? Good God!] I become a pole of repulsion. I can’t stand it, I get the equivalent of chair de poule right inside me. I then become terribly unfair, critical and unwillingly nasty. And then there is this suspicion that she often tries to pass me off as her boyfriend, her lover. This angers me very much indeed…

  I can’t blame myself more than I would blame someone who is allergic to a plant or a smell…

  They were sitting down to lunch and no sooner did I sit down than Diana starts her strange chatter, uttered in a peculiar way, being absolutely imbecile. Being ‘jolly’ in an English way. She raises her head as though in ecstasy, looks at the horizon, smiles maddeningly, and all this with both a running commentary and statements of things done and to be done. ‘I think I shall have another glass of this delicious wine’—the wine is ’orrible—‘with some soda water to make a spritze.’ She always ends a statement with a particular force—‘a spritza.’ ‘Didi shall drive us home and have his siesta.’ She then looks at my arm, comments on its tan, and rubs it with her hand, being coy. She is as red as a lobster, and sticky, and to be coy in that state and being in her fifties is to me unbearable [this slight exaggeration of my age—I was forty-eight—made me shudder with rage]…

  In the evening I opened my door slowly and tiptoed down to sit with the others. There we are, talking and laughing, when suddenly a loud voice from upstairs shouts ‘Didi!’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, angry at this terrible imposition.

  ‘What
time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say in a terrible rage.

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

  And she came—she came down…

  I don’t know what the Yugoslavs make of her—they must be slightly amused by this strange figure among them, this ‘jolly good sort’ who plays darts with abandon, running backwards and forwards and screaming and trying to be funny in an unnatural way…

  It was an extraordinary and frightening experience, these fragments of things I remembered reappearing in distorted form, another ‘reality’ (and one in which I was grotesque) jangling with my own. I had a clear memory of that lunch when I ordered a spritze. It was an agreeable one until Didi joined us halfway through, and was then only slightly spoilt by his martyred refusal to try the wine. My cousin and I exchanged looks of mock despair behind his back. Coy? I had only tried to disregard his mood and behave as I would have done if he had been cheerful, commenting enviously on his tan and comparing it ruefully with my own arm which was still red, not brown. In retrospect I see that my manner of speaking, my voice, my expression were probably betraying the artificiality of this attempt—be coy! And that evening when I had called out of my window to ask what time it was: of course I knew by then that he saw my joining the party in the garden as spoiling it, but ‘this terrible imposition’…‘And she came—she came down,’ as though I had done something outrageous…It was monstrous to see myself so reflected.

  A greater shock was to come when I reached the entry (written after we were back in London) in which he described our dinner together in the restaurant he had found.

  I had taken a date with B [my cousin] for supper together that evening. I was looking forward to that. First, as usual, because she is always well dressed, elegant and beautiful, so I am proud to go out with her. And then she is shy, and I am not embarrassed to be with her, whereas with Diana, particularly in a foreign country, she is apt to be very loud, very jolly, and it embarrasses me. Anyway, I asked Diana if she was hungry and she said no. That day, looking forward to the supper with B, I had cruised the district for the nicest restaurant and had found it. So, Diana having said she wasn’t hungry, I told her that I was going out with B. To which she very nonchalantly said ‘I shall come too.’ I had a feeling, absolutely not based on fact, but a feeling nevertheless, that since Diana was paying for my holiday she allowed herself to disregard what I wanted or felt like doing. As I say, this is not true, but it was this sudden feeling which angered.