After a Funeral

by Diana Athill

  My drunkenness had been restricting the range of my consciousness, but it hadn’t been distorting it. Now, as activity gradually widened the range of what I could perceive, it was my ordinary self perceiving it and I knew that it would be a pity to spoil what was happening by letting it go on too long. Tenderness would soon be counteracted by the weariness of my unaroused body, so I had better end this love-making by faking a climax and bringing Didi to his. When that was done there was a moment of quite sober anxiety in which I feared that he might pass out and remain in my bed all night, but when I whispered ‘Bed too small’ he sat up and started to scrabble at something near his feet. ‘What you doing?’ I mumbled. ‘Trying to put on these bloody underpants,’ he said. ‘Why?’—‘Must observe the decencies.’ Yes—he certainly was very drunk indeed, perhaps even drunker than I was. I was asleep again within a few seconds of his leaving my room.

  I woke next morning without a hangover, which was mysterious, but full of anxiety. It was impossible to regret anything so pleasant and tender, but what would be the consequences? For me it would remain an isolated incident, something to remember as slightly mad, more than slightly comic and wholly delightful; but what would it be for Didi? Would he recoil from it in sick horror? Would he (oh lord!) choose to launch into fantasy passion from it? I’d better do what I could to control the situation without delay.

  It was a Saturday morning—the morning when Didi always, even during our worst hostilities, offered to take me shopping in his car. As soon as he heard me moving about he called from his room ‘Do you want to go shopping?’ I opened his door to say yes. He was lying in bed, looking a little sheepish but relaxed, and said: ‘I drank a whole bottle of rum last night after leaving the pub.’

  ‘You must have been even drunker than me,’ I said. ‘You’d better lay off rum in the future.’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say.’

  ‘I suppose not—but you know quite well how I mean it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps—’ and we went shopping together in a normal and friendly way. Didi made only two other references to our love-making that day. During lunch he said kindly ‘You’ve got an astonishingly young body for your age, you know,’ to which I answered ‘Thank you, love, it’s not too bad’ and after the meal, while I was washing up, he came quickly into the kitchen, looking tense, and said: ‘Promise me one thing. Promise that this is one thing you’ll never tell Luke about.’

  ‘Of course I won’t, I promise.’ (I was already mulling in my head the written account, as exact as possible, which I was going to show Luke one day.)

  ‘The trouble is, I know you…Look, tell him about a lover, if you want to, but don’t say it was me.’

  ‘I promise I won’t tell him.’

  Didi gave me a sceptical look, smiled crookedly, and went back to his room.

  After that I knew that he was going to make no more of the incident than I would, and the few references he made to it during the next few days were light and natural. He offered to put a bolt on my door in case, on another drunken night, he might come in again. He even bought a bolt, but we found that the moulding round the door prevented us from fixing it, and when I said ‘Never mind, you’ll never again catch me equally drunk, and if I just asked you to go away you would, wouldn’t you?’ he said ‘Yes, of course’ (which he did, the only other time he came in, about four days later). And on another occasion he said: ‘It’s a funny thing, you know, but since that night all the tension’s gone’—and it had.

  Less than a week afterwards I was having a drink with him in his room while he was preparing to go out, because such friendliness was now possible again. When he opened his cupboard I saw a jacket I had never seen before.

  ‘What’s that jacket?’

  ‘My mother sent it to me, X brought it when he came over.’

  ‘Why do you never wear it?’

  ‘It doesn’t fit—or at least, I don’t think it does.’

  ‘Put it on and let me see.’

  He took the jacket out and put it on, examining the fit in the mirror.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s a very nice jacket. I don’t know why I thought it was no good. It’s only that the sleeves need shortening, isn’t it? And the material is very good.’

  He stood there smoothing the material with his hand, looking at himself with pleasure, then turned and gave me a little display of how elegant he was, enjoying the jacket his mother had sent; and I thought suddenly: ‘Now that he’s at last been to bed with his mother, he can wear her jacket.’

  And if this were a work of fiction that would be the end of the story.

  ‘It had to happen…’ 6

  IT WAS, OF course, only the end of one chapter in the story: the chapter about Didi and myself. I may be right—I believe I am—in thinking that our relationship touched nerves close to the centre of his wound, but it would have been naive to suppose (and by then I knew Didi too well to suppose it) that resolving the tensions in that particular relationship could alter the pattern of his life as a whole.

  For the next year or so, however, Didi appeared to be better. Luke returned from abroad a few weeks after ‘Crisis Diana’ ended, I was happy, Didi plunged into a whirl of activity, and my flat seemed to have reverted to the cheerfulness of his first months in England. He started to accumulate new friends so fast that he had trouble keeping up with old ones, and running two or three girls simultaneously. He was still able to say primly, as a reproof to me, ‘I don’t understand people who are cynical and matter-of-fact about sex. It’s impossible for me to make love unless I’m madly in love—which is why I have to be madly in love so often,’ but during this period the alternative of being drunk served him well and often. It was a year before he was ‘madly in love’ again, and even then he managed, with a desperate struggle and help from a stroke of luck, not to topple over into the anguish which usually followed his full-blown passions.

  But his more casual affairs were less of a contradiction to his belief about himself than they appeared: he saw them as a clever ‘managing’ of the perils of his temperament. Every new girl he took to bed provided him with something he was starving for—reassurance as to his own attractiveness—and each time he ‘went off’ a girl before she ‘went off’ him, he saw it not as a failure of passion or as being unkind to that girl, but as a skilful avoidance of suffering. He had managed, this time, not to be ‘madly in love’—he had beaten it for once! And meanwhile he was able to avoid seeing himself as unfeeling because what we called ‘the Victorian maiden’ in him (‘It’s very complicated,’ he said one day, ‘to be a lecherous old Wog on the outside and a Victorian maiden inside’)—the ‘Victorian maiden’ was kept happy by the only unsexual passion I ever saw him go through.

  As soon as our crisis was over he began to adore a married friend of ours who had been extraordinarily kind to him. He was shy of her, even in awe of her, and never expected her to respond. He wanted only to see her and to please her, and that she should let him know that she knew he was in love with her, which she obligingly did. It was in a way the most unreal of all his loves, yet when I had read his full account of it I saw that in another way it was the most real. This woman was the only one he saw as existing in her own right, the only one on whose behalf he felt genuine concern. If she was sad, he truly wanted to cheer her up; if she was ill he went to considerable trouble to help her in practical ways. His usual method for conjuring up sympathy for other people’s suffering was to picture it as being like his own: ‘Poor so and so, he’s in a dep, how I feel for him’—‘Poor such and such, my heart bleeds for her, I know so well what it’s like not to be loved in return’ (the sufferers would sometimes have been surprised to learn what troubles were being attributed to them). But Didi recognized that his ‘pure love’ was a person very different from himself, and made genuine efforts to understand her. This wholly romantic and yet genuine love was too frail to last for long, but while it endured it did more than prevent him from
becoming self-disgusted when he considered his other affairs; it took him a little way out of himself and gave him many moments of happiness; and it was one of the very few loves in his life which tapered off with little more than reasonable regret, not anguish.

  This woman helped Didi to the one practical achievement of his last years. She was able to give him the necessary introductions and wise advice on how to use them when he decided to visit Israel after the Six Day War.

  When the war broke out, Didi’s surface reaction was to break into strident Egyptian chauvinism, screaming that Israel was the aggressor and that Nasser was right, it was the Americans and the British who were beating the Arabs, the combined forces of Western capitalism of which Israel was the willing pawn. He wrote otherwise in his diary.

  For ten long years Nasser has exhorted us to spend our money, our harvests, our goods on the Army. He has persuaded the Egyptian people that it was imperative for them to possess an Army. And we—or rather they—bled and bled to achieve this. Now he has challenged Israel to show her might. And she did. She overran us, Jordan and all the combined Arab armies (except Algerian) in twenty-four hours! Yes, just walked all over us. To cover this utter and complete humiliation Nasser invented the excuse that America and Britain supported Israel’s military force. I am no lover of those two countries’ policies, but even I felt disgusted, more humiliated and insulted, by this cheap lie. And so, after thirteen years or more, he has turned out to be unreliable, incompetent, dishonest. It is all disgusting, sad and full of shame…I loathe him absolutely.

  For a few weeks before, during and after the Six Day War Didi was living not in my flat but in a room for which I paid the rent, as I had suggested earlier. It came about easily enough now that the tension between us was over, as a result of a short and unimportant squabble which left no ill feelings, and he was prevented from being forlorn by his attachment to his ‘pure love.’ I therefore saw little of him while he was deciding to try to get to Israel, and his diary records only that he had made the decision and had, astonishingly, been granted a visa. There is a hailstorm of exclamation marks after the statement, the explanation that ‘it will be an Egyptian interviewing the Israelis gimmick,’ and the comment: ‘Since I have given up smoking I have become very much more active and alive, and I really don’t want to have to kill myself now…’

  This passage is embedded in page after page of writing on what really mattered to him: his casual adventures, and his love. And these pages suggest the truth of the matter. He was not so gay as he seemed to be. ‘The cafard’ was beginning to sneak up on him again and was driving him to seek refuge as usual in drunkenness, and he was terrified that this serene and idyllic love might at any moment turn and sink the usual poisonous fangs of misery into his heart. He had not the strength of will to break out of the situation without some extraordinary stimulus, and the drama of the plunging off to Israel at a time when no one believed it possible for an Egyptian to do so was heaven-sent.

  Once he had his visa, he would approach a newspaper and propose that it should commission him to write articles on what was happening in Israel after the war, from the Arab point of view. I was sceptical about his bringing it off, although I didn’t say so, and was therefore all the more delighted when he did. Both The Times and the Observer were prepared to put up money for his journey against articles which he would write when there, or after he came back.

  There were some dicy moments when he almost abandoned the idea because the money he was offered was less than his wildly exaggerated idea of what it might be, but his ‘pure love’ and I combined to persuade him that he was not being cheated, and he came back to my flat, quivering with exhilaration and nervousness and full of affection, for a family send-off. After we had eaten ‘a feast’ and helped him pack he relaxed a little. We had been lavish with encouragement and congratulation, and because he knew that we knew he felt the adventure to be something of a con, a larky atmosphere was distilled in which it could be admitted that it was funny that he was going to be ‘our correspondent’ for The Times. To me and his love he could admit that he had no idea of how to set about it, and he could even (for once!) ask for advice.

  By the end of the evening euphoria prevailed. This, he was sure, was the beginning of great things. It was true that the money now in his wallet would be consumed by the expenses of the trip, so that he would come home empty-handed, but if he sent back good stories other work would be sure to follow: he would become established as an expert on the Middle East.

  People have become established as experts after setting out with considerably less knowledge of their subject than Didi had, and without being able to write so well. Other articles, other work, could follow, and given the stimulus of success it was surely possible that he might become truly involved and be drawn almost in spite of himself out of his claustrophobic nightmare? Only the wings of illusion could carry him into such a project, but if they beat strongly enough they might—they just might—take him to a point where they ceased to be necessary.

  Late that night Didi turned to me and said: ‘Now I shall have some money at last, so I can come back to be your lodger, can’t I? I mean your proper, paying lodger—you wouldn’t mind me here if I was that?’

  I hesitated, and that was when the trite image of the wings of illusion came to me. I must not cause them to falter. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course you must come back here. You know quite well that of all the proper lodgers I could possibly have, you are the one I’d like best.’

  And oh dear oh dear, I thought as I went to bed, trying in shame to smother the thought but not succeeding: oh dear oh dear, this will turn out to be where we came in.

  Given Didi’s condition, he performed an heroic feat in Israel. He moved around, he interviewed people, he disciplined himself against prejudice, and he wrote the articles he had undertaken to write. They were not exceptionally good but they were presentable, and that was more of an achievement in Didi than a flash of brilliance would have been. There was never any question about his being able to write, and to write well, if he were moved by his own drives. The question lay in whether he could turn out a piece of writing as a job—a competent piece of writing taking into account requirements other than those dictated by his own emotions—and this he did. To anyone who didn’t know him well it must have seemed natural that an intelligent and gifted writer with a built-in concern for the Middle East should be able to write pieces like these, but to those who knew him best they, and the few other pieces he wrote and talks he gave after his return, were a joyful surprise, proof that if only—if only—certain elements in him could be overcome he could be grown-up, he could manage, he could live.

  To begin with Israel itself did much to overcome the destructive elements. It was a long time since Didi had looked outwards, and Jerusalem made him do so.

  I’d happened to jump on a bus which took me straight to the most fascinating place I have seen for years and years—to one of the gates of the Old City. A terminal for a thousand buses, Arab and Jewish, an agglomeration of faces, types, religions, languages, needs, trades, voices.

  There I stood, then. An avalanche of titillations enlivened me. Every face I saw I recognized, knew and had something in common with. The seller of [illegible], carrying his elaborate piece of glass and polished brass on a strap over his shoulders—the pathetic man standing behind five bottles of Coca Cola (the economics of such earnings are beyond me—absolutely) or the vendor of three maize cobs, boiling them away in a tin. The religious representatives, agents as it were of some central god, competing madly like so many branches of the same firm undercutting each other in the same square—rabbis, ugly and dirty—some youthful, beardless pre-rabbis (I suppose, I am so ignorant of all that) with a strand of hair curling down above each ear of which they perpetually try to make a ringlet—Greek Orthodox priests, Coptic Orthodox—which you recognise at once because you feel they haven’t washed for a year. A muslim muezzin, a Sunni—slightly cleaner, or anyway more ele
gant in his abayieh. Swedes, French, English, Irish, not belonging but watching on the outskirts. And I was suddenly in the midst of all this…

  For the first two of the three weeks he spent in Israel his diary remained full of portraits, reported conversations, descriptions of incidents, speculations on the significance of what he saw. It was lively, intelligent and objective. He was not, however, freed from the necessity to drink, and he found himself unable to sleep unless he took pills; and during the third week the spell stopped working. ‘The cafard’ began to re-appear: he started to find an old friend he’d come across with joy unbearably irritating; fits of heartache over his ‘pure love’ attacked him, so that ‘Why no letter from her?’ became more important than ‘Am I going to get an interview with Dayan?’ he began to leave undone things which he knew he ought to do, to get more drunk more often, to sniff around for gambling companions. At the end of the three weeks he left the country with a hangover, having lost £35 at poker the night before, and feeling—so he recorded in his diary—‘really glad to be leaving.’

  He came back to my flat and neither of us bothered to refer to—or even, on my side, to think much about—his being there as a ‘proper lodger.’ He worked on the articles resulting from his journey, and to his already numerous friends was added a group of left-wing Israeli expatriates who injected shots of unrealistic political activity into his social life so that he could often say that he was going to a meeting, not to a party. I felt that it must do him good to believe that some of his activities had a purpose beyond that of merely passing the time, but I know now that he didn’t really believe it. I hardly bothered to answer the telephone because calls were always for Didi, and so was the ringing of the front-door bell. The bathroom smelt fragrant almost every evening, his step was almost always brisk (with a little skip as he went through the front gate of the garden), and if he wasn’t with his pub cronies, his Israeli friends, an amusing-disgusting group of rich Egyptians who had turned up, an equally amusing-disgusting bunch of rich young English people, his other pub cronies, the old friends in Hampstead, the new friends in Richmond, the old friends in north Kensington, the new friends in Putney—if he wasn’t with one lot or another of this astonishing variety of friends, all of whom enjoyed him and many of whom were truly fond of him, he was with a girl.