by Diana Athill
Didi made no attempt to conceal this love, which lasted for about three weeks. He brought the girl home to show her off to my cousin, they met in espresso bars and held hands, he gave her a rose, they walked on Hampstead Heath. It was like a very old-fashioned affair between teenagers, until one evening when he kept her in his room all night—the first time he had spent a night in the flat with a woman while I was there. That was the end.
She spent the night with me, in my arms, and apart from anything else I looked ten years younger next morning. But this is going too fast, because we did have words in my bed, and it wasn’t very satisfactory. In the morning she was rather cold and I had to change the wheel of her car and it wasn’t very friendly really. Anyway, I didn’t make a date with her. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘that’s it. Let me end it, not she.’ Pauvre Didi. I think of the end before it even starts—and this, in a way, makes the end happen.
From this girl he went on to others, although without imagining love: the mood of ‘fastidiousness’ was over and he was fucking anyone he could lay hands on with manic energy and almost no pleasure (‘My eyes on the alarm clock over her shoulder to see how long I lasted’), and drinking more and more heavily. He was out every evening, came home at three or four in the morning, began to look like Lazarus, and the line of empty whisky bottles on his bookshelf grew by one every day. He had managed to struggle through a piece of translation from the German, a boring and badly written article of which he made a good job (he could always make a good job of anything written if only he could bring himself to do it), and had been paid £40, all of which went on whisky. He was supporting a feverish euphoria entirely on alcohol, and with every day the means came nearer to defeating the end as his hangovers plunged him deeper and deeper. I didn’t then know that every sober moment brought him thoughts of suicide, but I suspected it, and after a week or so of this I knew that I must at least try to force him into a situation where he might sober up. If he were out of the house and on his own again it might do it—and anyway I would be rid of my old man in carpet slippers, I can’t deny the presence of that thought. So one evening when, unusually, he was in his room when I came home from work, I found myself able to do what until then I had been unable to do.
I knew that unless I spoke at once my courage would fail, so I spoke as soon as I was in his room, without preliminaries, although I made my voice as gentle as I could.
‘Didi,’ I said, ‘you know when I said in that letter that I wanted you to leave and that I would pay the rent of a room for you? Well, I really did mean that.’
We were at opposite sides of the room, he sitting on his bed. He stood up and turned his head sideways, his chin up, his eyes hooded—a forced moment of intense and haughty composure—and then, without warning, he stumbled across the room, threw his arms round me, and was sobbing with his head on my shoulder.
‘I don’t want to die,’ he sobbed. ‘I don’t want to die—life can be so beautiful, oh god why do I do this, why do I always have to destruct everything I love, why must I die?’ The ‘child of eight’ was crying hopelessly in my arms. The truth of the situation had emerged.
There was nothing for it but to accept it, and to comfort him. The lack of alternative was so obvious that I experienced something like relief. It was easy to stroke him and to murmur ‘Hush darling, hush—never mind, love, it’ll be all right, you’re not going to die’—easy because natural, the only answer. I steered him to a chair, sat him down, fetched him a handkerchief, kissed him (careful to do so very lightly, and only on his forehead, because in spite of the abandon of his tears I had felt something come alert in him at the touch of my hands, whether the old repugnance or something new I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to find out). I went to make a pot of tea, and he sat waiting for it in trusting docility, all defences down.
Now, I thought, the moment had come when I could do something with him. Now I could get him to agree to see a doctor. I had made enquiries about the treatment of depression and I knew that the chances of its being successful were only slight, but if a chance existed it should be taken, and at least he might become interested in the treatment and pass the time during which he was receiving it more profitably than he was doing at present.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘it’s silly to pretend that you aren’t iller than ever, isn’t it?’
‘I know, I know.’
‘You don’t have any faith in psychiatrists, I know, but I’ve heard of an unorthodox kind which sounds much more sensible than any other—’ and I told him what I knew about the work of Drs Laing and Cooper. Whether either of them would take on a depressive I was unsure, but they would at least be kind. A friend of Didi’s who was training to be a psychiatrist had recently become so worried for him that she had telephoned me and told me that I ought to get him hospitalized, and although I knew that her concern was justified I had jibbed at the idea of forcing him (how, anyway?) into a psychiatric ward where, I was convinced, his resentful misery would be far too intense for him to benefit from any treatment he received. He wouldn’t stay in such a place for a day unless he were forcibly restrained, and that I would subject no one to. No doctor could help him unless he met him as an intelligent being, by his own consent. Until this moment he had refused to let me speak more than two words on the subject without going out of the room, but now at last he might be ready to listen to news of doctors who would think of him as him, and not as a mad person.
He consented to listen, even asking questions, although he kept returning to ‘But I know they can’t do any good.’ Then I said: ‘Listen, I want to make a bargain with you. If you will agree to try seeing a doctor, at least, then you can stay here. It’s simply not fair on me to refuse—you know how awful it’s been—so will you promise, and I’ll make an appointment for you?’
Didi then did something of which he was too ashamed to write in his diary, although his description of this occasion was otherwise full and accurate. He told me that why he was so sure that a psychiatrist couldn’t help him was because he had a tumour on the brain. I asked him how he knew, and he said that X-rays had shown it.
I knew that sometimes—twice so far, since he had been staying with me—he had appalling headaches which continued for two or three days, increasing all the time, and that he dealt with them by going to the out-patients’ department of a hospital and having, he said, a lumbar puncture. I had naturally thought with horror of a brain tumour the first time this happened, and had urged him to have an X-ray taken. He had pooh-poohed my anxiety and had explained the trouble by saying that after one of his car smashes a small fragment of skull-bone stuck out, like a splinter from a plank, and that from time to time pressure had to be relieved as a result. He swore that he had taken medical advice on it both in Germany and in London, and that he had been told that unless it got much worse it was wiser to put up with it than to have an operation. Now he said that he had told me this to spare me, and that in fact a tumour had been diagnosed.
What the truth was I do not know (nothing was reported after his autopsy), but there were certainly times when he feared that he had a tumour. Once, in his diary, when for some reason he decided that his headaches were the result of sexual frustration, he expressed great relief at this conclusion; and on another occasion he wrote: ‘At times I literally want to open my head, put my hands inside and squeeze and push and make a paste of the whole lot. Hope this is not going to be the reality—not my hands, someone else’s. I am, alas, often very sure that there is something very wrong and fatal in my brain.’ What was certainly untrue was the story he now produced of the X-ray which had shown a tumour. This was no more than an inspired embroidery on his fears to make sure that my sympathy was captured for good.
It neither worked nor failed to work. I went through the motions of concern, pointing out that if he had a tumour it was even more necessary to see a doctor, but I was inclined not to believe him. I must allow for this being the truth, I thought, but it was probably a safe bet not to become a
nguished over it because it was—if only marginally—more likely to be an invention than the reality, and an unnecessary invention at that. Given the mental mess he was in, no physical trouble was needed to keep me hooked.
One of the few things I laughed at when I came to read the whole of Didi’s diary was the last word on this incident, which belongs to him: ‘I didn’t cry solely because of my miserable insanity and plight, but I cried for Diana too. I could see that she would never shake this awful burden of myself away from her.’
‘Crisis Diana’ ended for good about a week later. There had been affection between Didi and me in the intervening days. I had written to Dr Cooper and had received a kind answer (although this was to come to nothing, because after half promising that he would visit the doctor, Didi slithered out of it), and Didi had again collapsed into tears and been comforted. He was drinking no less frantically, but he had suddenly become willing to bring his hangovers home to me openly instead of hiding them in his room.
I was more worried over him than I had ever been, but at the same time I felt ‘better in myself.’ Instead of making him ‘cringe,’ my physical presence had suddenly become benign to him, so that he sought it as a hurt child runs for comfort to its nurse or mother, and it was a relief to be rid of the disgusting image of myself which he had been reflecting, even though I hadn’t believed in it. It was also a relief of a different kind—an unstoppering, as opposed to the removal of pressure from outside—to be able to indulge myself again in expressions of affection and gestures of comfort, even though I was unable to see how they could do any good.
This feeling of relief from pressure may have been the reason why I enjoyed far more than I expected a literary cocktail party to which I had to go. I went straight from my office, and expected to be back in the flat by about 8.30. I had not mentioned the party to Didi.
Instead of leaving early I stayed till the end, and went on after the party to have supper with friends. We sat talking until after midnight, and we drank a great deal. I didn’t realize how drunk I was until I was in the taxi on the way home and noticed that things were rocking slightly. ‘Heavens!’ I thought, ‘it’s at least twenty years since things last rocked—I must be hugely drunk,’ and this was confirmed when I reached the flat by a mad burst of domestic energy. On the few occasions when I am so drunk that there is a chance I’ll end by passing out, I usually go through a stage of euphoric energy during which I suddenly and perfectly efficiently do something like washing my hair or preparing a stew, knowing as I do it that I must be brisk and get it finished before the next stage sets in.
This time the energy went into doing the laundry—next day was clean-sheet day. Didi was out, so after I had stripped and made my bed I did his, wrote out the laundry list and packed up the box, pleased with myself at making such practical use of this stage of the drunkenness. Then I decided that there was enough of the energy left to see me through my bath, and I got myself undressed and bathed with undiminished competence. Coming out of the bathroom I bumped the wall and thought ‘Oho, here we go! We’re nearly into stage two,’ and it occurred to me that although I was still feeling well and cheerful, I might be drunk enough to vomit later on.
I remembered—although I hadn’t thought of it for several years—that a previous lodger had once had a sick child to stay and had bought a chamber-pot for this emergency, which he had left behind and which had been at the back of my storage cupboard ever since. Infinitely clever, I felt, at remembering this pot, and cleverer still as I went down on hands and knees and burrowed my way into the cupboard to find it. I would put it beside my bed. Then, supposing I had to be sick and proved to be too far gone to get to the lavatory, it wouldn’t matter. I knew that I was grinning and wagging my head in fatuous pride at having thought up this precaution, and the more I knew it the more I grinned. It was an amusing and agreeable drunkenness.
Indeed it was so agreeable that I was spared not only nausea, but even what had seemed the inevitable vertigo on lying down. I was ready to sit up again and to stare hard at my chest of drawers in order to keep the bed still, but instead I was out as soon as my head touched the pillow.
The next thing I knew was that my bedroom door had opened and that the light had been switched on. ‘People are coming into my room,’ I thought distinctly, without moving or opening my eyes because I couldn’t. Then the light went off and the door clicked shut, and with relief I thought ‘People gone away again—good.’ I didn’t even speculate as to who ‘people’ were or what they were doing. I was sunk so deep in a deliciously warm and dark well of sleep that anything beyond the registering of a sound or movement was impossible.
Perhaps—very likely—it was only a few seconds later that the side of my mattress was depressed, but I had been down to the bottom of the lovely well again, so it might have been hours for all I knew. ‘People’ hadn’t gone away again, it seemed: they were in my room and had just sat down on my bed at a level with my waist. After what may have been quite a long time it occurred to me that I ought to open my eyes and try to see who ‘they’ were. I sleep with my curtains open and it was not a dark night, so I recognized the silhouette of the silent figure at once, and with a renewal of relief. It was Didi—I needn’t do anything about him. He appeared to be naked, which was odd, but I couldn’t be bothered with details and I shut my eyes again.
Then, tiresomely, he spoke.
‘What’s that horrible thing doing there?’ he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about. What horrible thing? He was drunk, of course, and I needn’t answer.
‘What’s that horrible thing doing there?’ he said again. ‘What’s it doing?’ And no sooner had I sunk back into oblivion than his voice dragged me up again—‘that horrible thing’? What a bore he was being.
At last I heaved my eyelids up again, and this time he made a movement with his foot as he asked his parrotlike question, kicking the chamber-pot. Understanding enlivened me a little, and for the first time I spoke.
‘I’m drunk,’ I said. ‘Thought I might be sick.’
There was the sound of a match: Didi had lit a cigarette. He was going to stay there. It didn’t seem that he wanted to cry, but perhaps he was going to talk. He’d been talking a lot lately.
‘What do you want to talk about?’ I asked. I still hadn’t moved a muscle and I had opened my eyes only twice. If he wanted to talk, let him; I could sink back into the well while he was doing so. He said: ‘Sh, don’t talk.’
He must have smoked all his cigarette because there was only a tiny butt in the chamber-pot next morning. Then I felt my mattress rise as he stood up, and I heard him say: ‘I’m glad you’re drunk. Let me get in.’
I found that I could move after all. It was possible to edge myself over a few inches to make room for him, and the effort enlivened me again so that when he was lying beside me I repeated ‘What do you want to talk about?’ Again he said ‘Sh, don’t talk.’ And a few moments later he turned towards me, put an arm over me, and began to stroke my naked back very slowly, from the nape of my neck down to my buttocks. God bless my soul, I thought dreamily, he’s going to make love to me!
The sensation of his stroking was delicious, perfectly in tune with the relaxation of my body. I was too nearly out to experience any specifically sexual reaction, but warmth and softness, softness and warmth—let them go on, part of the softness and warmth I was in already. The utter physical relaxation which is supposed to enable a drunk person to fall down a flight of stairs without hurting himself: that was what I was in, and it was blissful. When Didi moved to lie on top of me and pushed my legs apart with his, it came to me dimly that I was so far from being sexually excited that he might not be able to get further, but I didn’t see what I could do about that, and anyway he managed it after a while, and there we were, Didi and I, making love.
It was entirely agreeable, gentle and tender. As it went on more of my consciousness surfaced, but not much of it, only enough for me to move my hands
so that I was holding his shoulders and caressing his head and neck, and to know that I was glad that he didn’t want to kiss me on the mouth—we must both be smelling disgustingly of stale drink and smoke. He gave me light kisses round the face and on the neck and breasts, murmuring ‘You’re so beautiful, so beautiful’—ritual words, nothing to do with me, I understood and accepted them as such. And I understood, too, that I mustn’t murmur in return the words which would have come out if I had opened my mouth, which would have been: ‘My little one, my baby.’ It was, however, pleasant to say them to myself, to let tenderness move my hands, and to feel with sleepy amusement that what I had once wanted was now happening, and that although I no longer wanted it, it was in some mysterious way not without meaning: that this once, at least, Didi and I were expressing in a loving way—were perhaps dreaming?—the secret which lay between us.