by Diana Athill
‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘I shall.’ I loathed her at that moment. She’s worth about a quarter of a million on her own.
She left, and I took her mother’s car to do the shopping. The house overlooks the park. Overlooks? It’s in the bloody park and is littered with Picasso, Utrillo, Chagall, Kokoshka, one Matisse, one Degas, one Renoir…and when I tell her mother that I need some whisky for cooking (to drink, of course) she goes and opens a bar and comes back with a bottle of Martell.
‘Is this whisky?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
Half feverishly, miserably, hating myself, I spend six hours in their kitchen and cook them food they never even knew existed.
‘What’s that?’
‘Courgettes.’
‘And that?’
‘CELERY.’
‘Oh.’
Gave me 70s for my work and I walked home wondering whether really it isn’t time I effaced myself. Nothing but a sponger, a liar, hypocrite, weak-minded spoilt idiot. Friday I had a bath, pinched some sleeping pills from downstairs and slept well—to awake rather refreshed, blast me. Saturday I quarrelled with Margaret. She, no wonder, was slightly patronizing and—no wonder—despising. Told her to bugger off and leave me alone. This was my life and if she didn’t like it she could lump it.
‘But my life is involved with yours,’ she pleaded.
‘Well I’m not going to be converted into a dowdy, middle-class mediocrity’ I shouted back—oh unfair, unfair—again blast me.
Sunday I wouldn’t see her. Monday I phoned up B and told that woman I’m editing for I was in a mess and she said she’d pay for the work I’m doing for her (more of that later)—gave me a cheque for £20. That night I went to B’s office, and he gave me a cheque for £110.
There is no moral in the story, of course. Never has been. I pick myself up, work for three or four days, arrange things slightly and I don’t even despise myself any more. The only morality which is correct, as far as I am concerned, is that it would be immoral to take all this from my friends and be miserable at the same time. That would be terribly immoral.
Margaret said she’d part from me and I agreed it was right. I really am too fond of her to want to see her life buggered. So she did leave me for two days, but came back again.
And last Saturday I bought…a car! Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Yes, a car. Reg gave it to me for £10. Nice little Ford, so there. Sunday was invited to a party, but although there were some nice people there I was bored, so drove back early to bed. Have been working quite hard on the editing—mustn’t fail to describe that woman tomorrow. Et voilà—
Didi drove me to the station in his new car on Christmas Eve. I had left a note for him in the hall the night before—he was out late, as usual—saying ‘Will you be able to drive me to the station? Just scribble “yes” or “no” and leave this out for me.’ He didn’t leave the note out, but emerged from his room next morning to say that of course he would do it. Later I was to find the note on his desk with a great drunken ‘no’ scrawled on it—he must have woken early, or been unable to sleep, and retrieved it before I got up.
He looked exhausted and complained of the number of parties he had been asked to during the Christmas holiday. ‘It’s this bloody not-sleeping,’ he said. I said why not take one day off from parties, anyway, and have a restful domestic time at home. ‘Yes, I think I will do that,’ he said—and perhaps he did. There were six pairs of socks drying—or rather, thoroughly dry—in the bathroom when I got back. He carried my suitcase into the train for me and put it on the rack, and we said goodbye in the compartment. He gave me a kiss and a smile so loving that I thought ‘Bless him, he is still my old Didi and not just a bore, in spite of everything.’
Didi went to two of the parties and impressed the people he was with as being cheerful in a relaxed way and as drinking less than usual. The evening of Boxing Day, however, was different. Where he went I do not know, but what is certain is that he got very drunk, went to a gambling club and lost everything that was left of his recently ‘borrowed’ money. He came home with a friend—people downstairs heard them talking and laughing—and a bottle of whisky. When his friend had gone he went downstairs to my cousin’s flat and crept into her kitchen, where she keeps her medicine chest. He knew that she used sleeping pills on prescription and sometimes sneaked one or two when his own strictly limited supply was inadequate. This time he took the whole bottle.
This is the last entry in his diary, five volumes of which he left stacked neatly on a kitchen stool in my bedroom:
I am going to kill myself tonight. The beginning of this diary said ‘I must write this record as I am going to kill myself’ [It didn’t]. The time has come. I am, of course, drunk. But then sober it would have been very very very difficult (—I acknowledge the drunken writing myself). But what else could I do, sweethearts? loved ones? Nothing, really. Nothing. Diana sweetheart, I cannot apologize because that would be just too hypocritical. Of course I should not have left this scene behind. But I am lazy, I am spoilt. I am leaving you my diary, luv. Well-edited, it could be a good piece of literature. If it is, the following are my debts.
He then listed all his major debts, going back five years.
It all amounts to less than £1000—what I owe you I don’t even mention. Whatever I have—post-earn—is yours with the hope that you will first if possible pay those above debts.
It had to happen, sweetheart. My life is simply a matter of postponing—putting it off, off, and really at last it was time, and rather convenient at this time.
Diana, to you I do not have to write very much. You understood, and of course realized that I had to end up like this. I leave you my last four–five years’ diary (my life)—which, obviously, you understand I would leave to the person I love most—you.
Sweetheart Margaret, there are actual real tragedies in life and the obvious tragedy is that of despair. I have lied, sponged, been hypocritical, dished out impossible cheques—but I have also, in spite of all that, sometimes been terribly honest and even very sincere. All my books, my fluffy gorilla [a toy-mascot he kept in his room] belong to you—and I am sure Diana will give them to you (except for some books which actually belong to Diana).
And the most dramatic moment of my life—the only authentic one—is a terrible let-down.—I have already swallowed my death. I could vomit it out if I wanted to. Honestly and sincerely, I really don’t want to. It is a pleasure. I am doing this not in a sad, unhappy way; but on the contrary, happily and even (a state of being and a word I have always loved) serenely…serenely.
He added an almost illegible four-line postscript about what to do with his car, then he must have taken the diary into my room, and written the note the police found pinned to the door of his own: ‘diana, don’t come in. phone 999.’
Because he made that telephone call to a friend—made it, I guess, after he had written the words ‘a terrible let-down,’ where a break occurs—he was found and taken to hospital within an hour. They pumped him out. I was telephoned, but was snowed in with twelve miles of impassable country lanes between me and the railway station, which I couldn’t reach for three days. It didn’t matter, they said, he was still unconscious and unable to recognize anyone—even if he survived it would be days before he fully recovered consciousness. The hospital would say little, but Margaret, who was with him all the time, gave full and honest reports. The chances of his living were small, but they existed.
They were strange, grey days, those days before I was able to get back to London. There was little shock in them. Once I had imagined him shooting himself in front of me as his cousin had done in front of his mother, and myself thinking coldly ‘Poor little bastard, now he’s done it,’ and when I got the first telephone call it wasn’t so very different, only softer: ‘My poor little love, he’s done it at last.’ I hadn’t been expecting him to do it now—not this time—not yet…but he was right, of course. It had been an optimistic joke, the image of my old ma
n in carpet slippers. No other end was imaginable for him, and I had known it. Chiefly, during those days before I could get back to London, I concentrated on the possibility of his recovery, plans for getting him to a psychiatrist (he couldn’t dodge it now), efforts to brace myself to the fact that if he lived the future couldn’t be anything but difficult and exhausting. I saw that it could be managed. It would be a matter of doing what had to be done, first one thing, then the next thing, as they came up—that, I saw, is how people get through situations much worse than this one, such as having their husbands felled by a stroke, or their children crippled. They don’t, when it comes to it, expend their energy on plumbing the horror of their situation, they simply do what has to be done.
When at last I got to the hospital there was hope in the air. Margaret greeted me with the news that he was better. At first, she said, they’d had to strap him down because his body was thrashing and heaving, and he was howling all the time, but now he was quiet, and for the first time he was recognizing people.
I think he was, too. When someone bent over him and touched him, his eyes, after swimming about, would gradually fix on the face above him, and slowly expression would dawn in them: a sweet smile, followed by a look of distress, sometimes by tears. He seemed to recognize me, and I like to imagine that when the expression of distress gave way to one of peace while I was very softly stroking his hand and murmuring to him, he knew that I was there. (Later, on that same visit, when I touched him again, he pushed my hand away as though it were hurting him, twisting and turning on his pillow.)
But that was his last ‘good’ day. Two days later examination by a specialist revealed great and increasing damage to his brain, and we knew that even if he survived physically his mind was lost.
They said he was deeply unconscious. How can they be sure? If a body moans endlessly for ten days, twisting itself this way and that, it must still be exchanging messages of some sort with the brain. It is true that a hand or a light could be passed before his eyes without their reacting, and he didn’t know whether people were there or not, speaking to him or touching him or not; but his body still protested pitifully when they did painful things to it such as inserting up his nostril the tube through which he was drip-fed. Perhaps it was only the dimmest dream of pain which still existed in his skull, but watching him I was unable to be convinced that there was nothing there. On the Sunday morning when the ward-sister telephoned to say that he was gone, the whole house, the trees and grass outside my window, seemed suddenly to go still with relief. They may have been right. He may have been ‘gone’ long before he died. But what had been lying in that bed had seemed to me to be Didi in profound agony.
I am not often able to grieve fully. The watcher is usually there, noting what is inadequate or incongruous, observing the unexpected, wondering at the odd. For Didi I grieved fully, though not when I most appeared to be doing so. That must have been when they were lowering him into his grave, and I wept. But my tears surprised me. It had been going on for so long—the ten days of his dying, and then another fifteen for the autopsy, the inquest and lining up for a place in a cemetery—that I thought all feeling must be exhausted and that the funeral itself would be meaningless. When I found myself unable to move forward to the edge of the grave, the tears running down my face and the sobs mounting so that I had to clench my teeth or I would have howled, it was something which was happening to me rather than something I was doing.
The grieving came before that, not as an emotional convulsion but as a long stare at the intolerable after I had read the diary he left me from beginning to end. It was not intolerable that he had killed himself. It was intolerable that he had been right to do so—that he had no alternative. It was intolerable that a man should be so crippled by things done to him in his defenceless childhood that he had been made, literally and precisely, unendurable to himself. He had tried to change. All through his adult life the part of him which he thought of as his ‘mental sanity’ had stood in the wings and watched the part he called ‘emotional insanity’—watched and judged, in vain. His intelligence, his gifts—useless to him. Other people’s patience, kindness, affection, understanding—useless to him. Love? Too late, and equally useless. I for one could have loved Didi more and better than I did, but all that would have happened then would have been that he’d have had more love to disbelieve in. He was certain at too deep a level, in the very fibres of his being, that he was unworthy of love. Being unworthy of love, he must be punished; and the only way he could secure this was by plunging out to the point where he was driven to punish himself. To be murdered would be a fate much simpler, and less sad.
This record has been written for him, and for people who are going to have children.
Author photograph by Jillian Edelstein
About the Author
BORN IN 1917 and educated at Oxford University, Diana Athill is one of the great book editors of the twentieth century. For more than five decades, she published the likes of V. S. Naipaul, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. She is the author of several memoirs, including the New York Times bestseller Somewhere Towards the End (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After a Funeral, and Stet, a New York Times Notable Book about her fifty-year career in publishing. In 2008, the Queen of England appointed her an Officer of the British Empire. She lives in London.
ALSO AVAILABLE
Instead of a Letter
A Memoir
As a young woman, Diana Athill was engaged to an air force pilot—Instead of a Letter tells with profound honesty how everything fell apart in the cruelest way possible.
Raised in a picturesque country setting, Diana Athill experiences all the comforts and inherits all the tastes of British gentility. At only fifteen she is catapulted into a passionate affair with Paul, her first love. Just as life seems to culminate in her fairy-tale dreams, Paul breaks off the engagement, marries someone else, and—worst of all—dies overseas before she can confront or forgive him. This classic memoir is a bold and revolutionary examination of love and modern womanhood, and marks the beginning of Athill’s brilliant literary career as writer, editor, and memoirist.
“The most absorbing and original essay in autobiography to have come my way in the last two decades…. Miss Athill [has achieved] devastating frankness…over the most intimate details of her private life.”
—Peter Green
“Miss Athill writes very well…she has courage, humor, literacy, and a sense of fun.”
—The New Yorker
Somewhere Towards the End
A Memoir
A prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging—“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro).
Hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book reflects candidly, sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old. Charming readers, writers, and critics alike, the memoir won the Costa Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, making Athill a surprising literary star in her ninth decade.
“There is something terrifically comforting about a nonagenarian writing with clarity, wit, and verve about getting old and facing death…. [Athill] evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice: last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing.”
—N. Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle
“Unusually appealing…. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
“A great gift…. This is a warm, inspiring book.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
* £150 then was the equivalent of about £1,500 in 2008.