After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  But this was not all. She drank a wine, went upstairs to B, returned at once and said ‘B won’t come, we shall go together.’ Well, the terrible temper rose at once, of course. It was controlled, but it was boiling without an outlet. Unconsciously she started to irritate me to shouting point. I say unconsciously because poor Diana has no inkling of what goes on in me at times and how the most innocent remark is apt, mysteriously, to infuriate me. I am writing in retrospect, months later, when I think I know her as she really is, and not as how I thought she was. It took this holiday to make me know her (and her me, of course).

  So there we were. I said, since she was not hungry, we’d just go and have a quick snack. ‘No,’ she said, ‘let’s go where you were taking B. I am hungry now.’ She held my hand and caressed my arm as we went up the steps to the restaurant. Earlier, in front of the Yugoslavs, she again insinuated we were lovers, things like ‘Didi and I, when we are in London’ or ‘It’s nice living with Didi because he’s such a good cook.’ Because of my fastidiousness and terrible sensitivity I was irritated.

  Now at the restaurant I couldn’t stand it any longer. What I told her was simple and brief. But it was enough to change our relationship at once. ‘Diana,’ I told her, ‘I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself. You must not get emotionally involved with me. It would be nice if we could have an affair, but we can’t, and it shall never happen.’ She must have wriggled with pain, but didn’t show it. That was all. I gave her a kiss later, but she must have been very humiliated, and understandably so.

  This was horrifying because while in all the other entries I recognized the actual happenings, however disconcerting Didi’s interpretation of them, in this one I couldn’t. The preliminaries to his suggestion that we should dine alone together, so important to him, had vanished from my mind. All I could be sure of—absolutely sure—was my own surprise and the words ‘A peace move!’ which had come to my mind, from which I could also be sure that I did not, in fact, force myself on him in the way he described. In his room that night, skimming quickly, listening for his steps on the stairs, all I could think was ‘But it’s not true! He’s mad—he’s quite mad!’ but later my own failure of memory was to worry me: how much had I, too, been distorting events in favour of my own interpretation? Something of what he described must have gone on, and I have since constructed (not remembered) it in such a way that it could meet both his recollection of it and mine; but such a construction is valueless, and I have to leave it that Didi remembered it his way, and I as I have described it earlier, with the modification that I could have experienced that sensation of surprise from his appearing to wish to dine with me in spite of my cousin’s decision not to come, and not from his inviting me out of the blue.

  At the time, while I was reading, there was no room for such speculation. There was only shock at what seemed to be a fantasy version of what I was sure had happened. It was only madness that I was seeing, and I went on seeing it.

  A few pages later the word ‘Esplanade’ caught my eye and puzzled me. ‘In Zagreb we stayed at the Esplanade, a very luxurious hotel, exactly what I had always imagined Central European elegance to be.’ In Zagreb, we stayed in the Intercontinental. Didi went into raptures over the ‘Central European elegance’ of the bar and I agreed, saying that it was sensible of the Americans not to have modernized it, at which he snubbed me fiercely. How could Americans possibly run a hotel in a Communist country—and even if they could ‘the bloody Yanks’ would never have the good taste to leave it like this. So I went up to my room and fetched the Intercontinental leaflet, with its New York address, from the drawer in the desk, and sulkily Didi accepted the truth. Later I would find it funny and pathetic that he could reject it again so quickly in favour of the hotel of his imagination, but while I read I could only repeat ‘Christ, but he’s mad—he really is!’

  There was much more, including a fantasy of my stealing and hiding the keys of his car, which he had lost near the beginning of his stay with me. He had recently come across them in a drawer in my sitting-room, and had wiped out of his mind the fact that this was the drawer I had emptied for him when he was sleeping in that room, as he was doing when the keys were lost. When he had moved into the spare room I had refilled the drawer with the odds and ends of old material and a bundle of papers which I usually stored there, and hadn’t seen the keys, which had—I suppose—slipped under the crumpled lining paper. Now he had been digging about in that drawer (and why, when it again contained my things?), and as soon as he saw the keys became convinced that I had hidden them there. They locked the steering of the car, and it had been a tedious and expensive business getting a locksmith to it (I paid!)—and I, he was sure, had been gloating in mysterious malice through it all. He had the grace to express himself puzzled at my behaviour, but his puzzlement made his certainty of it all the more alarming because all the madder.

  There were also times when, he was sure, I had deliberately humiliated him. If there were people for drinks I poured for them and then said as an afterthought ‘Oh Didi—help yourself’—as no doubt I did, since treating him as ‘family’ had become a habit in the first happy three months, and his not helping himself would have surprised me. And I took it for granted that he would clean the flat, didn’t thank him when he did so, and spitefully spilt face-powder on the table he had dusted the day before.

  This grievance about the cleaning was almost as alarming as the keys for what it showed of his power to repress aspects of what had happened, even in his private account. He had suggested that he should clean the flat. If he couldn’t pay me rent, he had said, let him at least save me money by taking on this job. He had persisted until I got rid of the cleaning woman I then employed (I thought it encouraging that he wanted to earn his keep to some extent, and that it would be a good thing to foster the idea). He cleaned for one week, very well for the first two days, more and more sketchily for the remaining five, then stopped, and I had been doing it ever since. It is true that after the first day I didn’t thank him, because as he had said that he wanted to do the job in order to feel less dependent, I took it that he was thinking of it as a job…and now here was this incident converted into ungrateful exploitation! When the first shock of seeing his physical revulsion for me expressed in words was over, his interpretation of the lost keys and the cleaning angered me more than anything else.

  I spent half an hour or more standing by his desk, leafing backwards and forwards in the diary, with the door open so that I could hear his feet on the stairs if he came in. Then I took the newspapers and went to my bedroom, leaving everything else in his room exactly as I had found it.

  I was shaken enough by the contents of the diary, and even more shaken by his having left it there in that ritually tidied room baited with the Sunday papers—left it there for me to read. Not for an instant did I doubt this. Later he was to insist that it had been pure accident, and this in spite of writing, when he was describing the incident for himself, that during the weekend he had reread parts of an autobiographical book of mine and had been struck by my account of reading my sister’s diary when I was young and finding in it something which made me ‘shrivel.’ He also described how when he came home that evening he had run upstairs fast ‘in order to catch her in the act.’ I was not to see these words until after his death, but his behaviour made their confirmation of my belief unnecessary. My only doubt concerned the degree of consciousness at work, and my fear was that he had managed to suppress it entirely. That he should be unconsciously ‘possessed’ by such a strong destructive impulse seemed to me truly frightening.

  He returned soon after I had shut myself into my room. He came thumping up the stairs, crashed into the flat and threw open the door of his room. ‘Oh god, he has flipped,’ I thought—he was even beyond working out that he would have had a better chance to catch me at it if he had crept in quietly.

  There was then silence for a few moments, followed by a creaking board in the hall and a gentle knock on my
bedroom door.

  ‘You’re back?’ he said, without opening the door.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Oh…good. Goodnight.’

  I couldn’t speak to him that night. I was trembling with anger, frozen with distaste, and more conscious than ever of the burden of responsibility. He must go, of course. That was perfectly clear. But he was sick, he was as near complete disintegration as he had ever been, and I mustn’t throw him out (as I would have done if we had spoken then) with a violence which would push him further. I would wait until tomorrow, when I had calmed down, and would then write him a letter which I would give him when I came home from work.

  The next morning he telephoned me at my office, while I was writing this letter.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said again.

  ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

  ‘I’m glad—you see, I thought you might have read my diary.’ His voice was tense, almost as though he might giggle. It made me think of a child poking at something with a stick, half fearing that it might jump at him, half challenging it to do so.

  Better get it over, I thought, so I said: ‘I did.’

  ‘Oh my god!’

  ‘It’s all right, no panic. I’m writing you a letter about it and I’ll leave it in the hall for you this evening. We needn’t go on about it.’

  ‘Oh my god, my god,’ and he rang off.

  Didi was a hoarder—so much of a hoarder that I am now convinced that he didn’t destroy the manuscript of a novel at the time of the ‘Henry Miller revelation,’ as he told me he did. He kept many drafts of everything he wrote, every letter he received, and sometimes—when he was particularly pleased with them—copies of letters he sent. He knew that as a writer he had only one subject, himself, and he saw his life as raw material for a work of literature which had only begun in his first novel. In hoarding this material he didn’t cheat: he kept painful things as well as agreeable ones, and after his death I found among his papers the two letters I wrote him at this time, and one he wrote me (the last not a copy but the original; he asked for it back after our relations improved to ensure that I wouldn’t show it to Luke, or so I assumed).

  The letter I left in the hall for him read as follows.

  You know that after you plunged off I, having simmered down, said I understood why you did it. Well, in fact I didn’t understand enough. I’d done that thing of estimating another person’s feelings from my own—attributed to you the kind of irritation and annoyance I’d been feeling about you, added an extra pinch because of your wretched position, and thought that was it.

  I know now that this was underestimating. The explanation of my knowing is simple. Came back on the Sunday, wanted the Sunday papers as usual, went into your room to get them, saw open notebook on table, thought ‘Good, he’s been working on the children’s book,’ and had a peep—and then, of course, read on. For which I don’t apologize since it’s the kind of thing you’d do too (and most other people for that matter). And anyway, it’s a good thing I did.

  Because now it’s quite obvious that not only were you right to feel you must go, but also you must go. The situation is simply intolerable for both of us. For you because you are in the nightmare situation of having to be disgusting whatever you do—if you behave and speak as you are feeling you are disgusting because of your disagreeableness, and if you don’t you are even more disgusting because of your hypocrisy. And for me because it has now become impossible for me ever to behave naturally with you, now that I know fully, instead of sensing partially, what is going on in your head.

  There’s only one thing I want to take up—the car keys. I’ve never set eyes on the bloody things. Your notion that I’d recently been through the drawer you found them in is a figment of your imagination—haven’t been through that drawer since clearing it for you when you came. Your supposing that I had monkeyed with the keys is a very clear symptom of how essential it is that this situation should end. It’s making you too mad.

  As soon as your £75 comes you must go, whether back to Germany or elsewhere, as you decide. If you want to go sooner I can lend you £20 on the £75 (haven’t got more—sorry) but from my point of view it would be all right for you to stay a bit—it would be manageable if we left each other to our own devices and knew definitely that it was only for this short time. And when you go, you must go properly, leaving the keys and a forwarding address, but dropping any other contact—letter writing will be pointless for quite a while. What I hope—and indeed expect—is that sooner or later your mood will change and it will be possible for friendliness to go on again, but let’s have no sham version of it from now on. I needn’t say, need I, that I’ll be glad when and if it can exist again? I know you can’t help being how you are, however hard you struggle, and I’m still very fond of a good many aspects of you—it’s just that it’s absurd to pretend that the present aspect is anything but impossible to have around.

  So let me know which version of going you prefer—when the cheque comes, or now, so that if the latter I can get the £20 for you. And I expect enough that this will become ancient history sooner or later, and at least some of the niceness of the past will reappear, still to want to say love from Diana.

  That last sentence was a lie. I hesitated for a long time over how to end the letter, bleakly sure that whereas I might come to tolerate him again I could never in any way love him. I used those words out of what he stigmatized as my hypocrisy because I knew he was a ‘case’ and believed that the more destructively he behaved the more he needed to feel that love had—or could—survive.

  Having read that letter he came home very drunk at one o’clock in the morning, stormed into my bedroom and started to shout at me. Didi when he lost control did literally shout, his normally attractive voice becoming a loud, hysterical barking. For the fifteen minutes or so that he was in my room it never fell to the tones of ordinary speech.

  ‘You have done a terrible thing,’ he shouted. ‘A wicked and cruel thing—you’ve never in your life done anything so terrible as when you read my diary. It will be your fault now if I go insane, and you know it—you know how near I am to it and now you’ve pushed me over.’ He looked like a madman—entirely distraught, decomposed, everything about him awry, his eyes glaring, his gestures frantic. His words ran together and became incoherent as he flung himself about my room.

  ‘So why did you leave it there for me to read?’ I asked. I felt cold, as though I were watching the scene from a distance. If at that moment he had pulled out a revolver and shot himself, as the cousin he liked to tell about had shot himself in front of his mother, I believe I would only have felt ‘Poor little bastard, now he’s done it.’

  ‘That’s idiotic, shut up with those psychological clichés,’ he screamed. ‘How could I put it away—Ana telephoned to say she was ready to go out to the pub, I had no time.’

  That, I thought, would have been the first time he had ever put himself out half a minute for Ana, and so it would have been. He was fond of her and kind to her, but in the casual way of a brother towards a younger sister.

  I expected his screaming to end with a dramatic exit not just from my room but from my flat. Instead, his last words were: ‘And anyway, I can’t possibly go, I haven’t a penny’—and he was out of the room before I could remind him that I had offered him £20.

  There had been one recurrent theme in his screaming which had increased my coldness—by which I mean not so much the coldness of hostility as an almost literally physical coldness which left me unable to do more than watch him without feeling. ‘You have driven me insane and you have hurt and humiliated yourself unbearably.’

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ I interrupted at one point. ‘I know you were doing something you couldn’t help—’

  ‘You must be hurt, it’s impossible, you must, you must be hurt…’ and I understood then that what he really meant was not that I couldn’t help being hurt, bu
t that I had to be, because that was what he wanted.

  When I said ‘I’m not hurt’ I thought that I was bestirring myself out of my coldness to reassure this poor little demented creature that he had not done as much damage as he feared. Understanding his response, I recognized that not only was such reassurance pointless, but also its motive was suspect. I hadn’t been thinking of this horrible moment as part of our ‘game,’ but now I saw that both of us were still following its rules: I wasn’t trying to reassure him, I was scoring. I shut up.

  After a few days in which the flat was very quiet, with Didi as still as a mouse in his room until I went out, and out when I came in, I found the following letter on the hall table.

  This business is having a terrible effect on me—very very much more than you can imagine, and don’t say ‘I know’ because you don’t. I shall try to explain that my diary is one thing and anyone else reading it is entirely different—there is no relationship whatever between what I am writing and what would be read by anyone reading it. By reading this diary you have pained and humiliated yourself—and also by reading it you have automatically made me a monster and pushed me very much towards what I have been trying to avoid—desperately, these last fifteen years or so—towards insanity as you well know—and whenever you repeat what you have read you are pushing me further towards what now seems inevitable, mental disorder.