by Diana Athill
ALSO BY DIANA ATHILL
Fiction
An Unavoidable Delay
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse
Memoirs
Stet
Instead of a Letter
After a Funeral
Make Believe
Yesterday Morning
Somewhere Towards the End
Life Class (Omnibus)
Alive, Alive Oh!
A Florence Diary
Letters
Instead of a Book
Copyright © 1967 Diana Athill
First published in Great Britain by the Viking Press in 1967
Published in Great Britain by Granta Books in 2001 and 2019
Published in Canada by House of Anansi Press in 2020
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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natural environment. This book is made of material from well-managed FSC®-certified forests, recycled materials, and other controlled sources.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Don’t look at me like that / Diana Athill.
Other titles: Do not look at me like that
Names: Athill, Diana, author.
Description: Previously published: London, Chatto & Windus, 1967.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200153595 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200153609 | ISBN 9781487008451 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487008468 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487008475 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PR6051.T45 D66 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
Cover design: Luke Bird
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
Contents
Title Page
Part One
1
2
3
4
Part Two
5
6
7
Part Three
8
9
10
Part Four
11
12
13
14
15
16
Part Five
17
18
19
20
21
Part Six
22
23
About the Author
Also by Diana Athill
About the Publisher
Copyright
DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT
PART ONE
1
When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true. I had one friend, Roxane Weaver, but her affection was easy to discount because she was so good-natured. She would be critical of girls who smelt of sweat or had greasy hair, or spots, but that was because her mother deplored uncouthness so strongly rather than from dislike. Mrs. Weaver had French ancestors. They were far back but she thought of them as being close in spirit, which was why she had given her daughter a French name. She used to say, “If Roxane starts talking hockey in the holidays I shall know I have failed. I shall go instantly into a nunnery.” Mrs. Weaver had a face like a monkey and wore scent, while my mother had a face like a pretty, tired horse, and for a week or two after Christmas put eau-de-Cologne on her handkerchief because my father gave it to her every year. When I watched them exchanging polite talk for a moment, at half-term, I understood why Roxane admired her mother more than I did mine.
One other person at school liked me, or seemed to: the headmistress. I was flattered by her interest, enjoyed the books she lent me, and found her impressive, but I was a hypocrite when I was with her because I didn’t want to resemble her. She was a scrupulous and austere woman with a Gothic face like Edith Sitwell’s, an admirer of pure scholarship and of dedication to causes, and she wanted her school to turn out girls who would do great but unselfish things. I could see that she hoped I might be such a girl, and I knew that she was wrong.
Miss Potter’s favours did me no good with the other girls, nor with the mistresses, and I knew that the adjectives most often used in connection with my name were “conceited,” “superior,” and “affected.” That was why Mrs. Fitzgerald was a comfort. She rolled down from London twice a week like a great whale, to teach us painting, and she was oblivious of the currents of feeling within the school.
Mrs. Fitz smelt so strongly of cigarettes, and sometimes of gin, that you knew she had come if you crossed the hall fifteen minutes after she had passed through it. People used to think it open-minded of Miss Potter to employ someone so unlike a schoolmistress. “She looks very odd,” parents said, “but she is an R.A.” Mrs. Fitz regularly had two small canvases hung in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, but although Miss Potter realized the value of this in the eyes of parents, she had probably thought beyond it and recognized the truth that the old woman was a good teacher.
I liked the smell of Mrs. Fitz because of its incongruity with the smells of school, and I liked her appearance. She wore robelike black garments, not as an affectation but because she had become too bulky for vivid colours and fashion. She knew that she was huge and ugly and didn’t want to offend the sight, but because she loved gaiety she couldn’t resist draping bright things on the shapeless black: scarves, handkerchiefs, stoles of peasant embroidery, chains and necklaces. She displayed them without coquetry, for their own sakes, not hers, and the effect was both comic and splendid. She was patient with her class in the half-embarrassed, half-indulgent way in which a big dog is patient with puppies, but she was bored by most of the girls she taught, and I was gratified that she was less bored by me than she was by the others. It pleased me more than Miss Potter’s more elaborate interest.
* * *
I enjoyed painting and drawing, but I didn’t paint as Mrs. Fitz wanted me to, so to begin with we were at loggerheads. She equipped us with large sheets of paper, broad brushes, and a few pots of poster paint, trying to tempt us into breadth and freedom, and I couldn’t work like that. I liked outline and intricacy. “Painting is painting, girl, not story-telling,” she used to say when I was still too young and ignorant to see what she meant, but for me painting was day-dreaming. I needed to paint because certain things gave me a vague ache in my stomach and a feeling of longing combined with an itch to do something about them: groups of people seen from far away did it, and walled gardens, and the idea of forests, or rather of going quietly through a forest and coming on a small sunlit clearing; animals did it too, especially cats and birds, and most fairy-tale imagery—moated castles, glass mountains, and so on. For years my favourite painting—and I still love it—was Benozzo Gozzoli’s “Nativity” in the Medici chapel, although I had only seen bad reproductions of it then.
So I did my fanciful fairy-tale paintings, and Mrs. Fitz used to rage at me. Few of the other girls could make their hands obey them so well as I could, or could manage their medium so well, and she thought it a waste that I was deft to such ends. I used to tease her. Instead of “blocking in” a painting (she was a great one for “blocking in”) I would start at the top left-hand corner and work down and across, detail by finished detail. The results were not good paintings but they were odd, and they were decorative because I did have a knack for pattern and colour and I did have (or where would I be now?) this funny kind of imaginat
ion.
Mrs. Fitz used to end by laughing her wheezy laugh, which always submerged in a fit of coughing, and saying, “What am I to do with this girl?” She was too good a teacher to go on bullying. She saw that whatever kind of talent I had, it was my own, and since few of the others had any talent at all she finally let me get on with it and became mildly fond of me, which I knew because she let down her guard with me a little—inadvertently said “bloody,” or told a story with the word “mistress” in it. I didn’t want to resemble Mrs. Fitz any more than I wanted to resemble Miss Potter, but I did suspect that the life from which she surfaced each week was a life I might enjoy.
* * *
It wasn’t easy to envisage a life which I might enjoy unless I went far beyond the bounds of probability, but I knew well two lives which I could not enjoy: school and my home. School was hateful and humiliating because at the time I couldn’t understand why they tagged “conceited,” “superior,” and “affected” onto my name, being unable to see myself in the attitudes they forced me to assume. I felt hurt and frightened by their dislike and attributed it to specific things which were not my fault but of which I was ashamed, such as the woollen combinations which I had to wear during my first term.
None of the other girls had even seen combinations. They were vests and pants in one, made of porridge-coloured wool, with sleeves reaching halfway down the upper arm and legs reaching halfway down the thigh. They buttoned over the chest, had an obscene vent between the legs, and were very warm. My maternal grandmother had always worn them, my mother had two pairs in her drawer against cold weather, and for me they had been bought during the war.
I was nine years old when the war began, fourteen when it ended, and I remember it as a time when everyone expected it to be even colder than usual, which was saying a good deal at home. If it had not been for the war I might have had vests and pants like other girls, but because of it my mother saw it as necessary to provide me with the warmest garment she knew; perhaps she imagined us sleeping in ditches as we fled before the invading Germans. She bought the combinations on the large side and of good quality, so there was plenty of wear in them when the war ended and I first went to boarding-school, and in my family we couldn’t buy new clothes unless old ones had worn out. If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too—during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other—but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s and because I, having probably started the fight by being disobedient and rude, would feel as though I were in the wrong. The battle of the combinations was a terrible one but they went into my trunk, and before the first week of my first term was over, girls were chanting, “Here comes Meg Bailey in her combs.” I didn’t blame my parents for lacking money, but I hated them for results of it such as that one.
My father was—still is—a Church of England parson with a small country living which brought him in four hundred pounds a year, and he and my mother had unearned incomes which between them came to another four hundred pounds or so. These incomes had once been larger, but my parents took their dwindling as an act of God. The only idea about money which ever crossed their minds was the idea that capital is sacred, not to be touched even in an emergency for fear that a worse emergency might occur later. Reinvesting capital counted as touching it. My grandfathers on both sides had been comparatively well-to-do, sons of men who were almost rich and who were, in their turn, sons of men who had made money. The older generations had “known what they were doing” when they decided to invest in this or that, and it would have been impious to go against them. And anyway, to my mother it was axiomatic that women knew nothing about managing money, and my father didn’t care.
Because of this our house went on being like a wartime house even when the war was over. Perhaps wartime conditions had not been disagreeable to either of my parents. Rationing and austerity in general deprived my father of nothing he valued. (He even felt guilty at what he still had and would always refuse a second helping of cabbage and potatoes grown in his own garden, by his own labour, because it was wrong to eat well when others were eating badly.) And my mother, who had suffered because of their poverty, hating the drab life they were compelled to lead, felt a release of tension when everyone’s life became equally drab. In wartime it was normal to eat small, dull meals, to allow fires to die when you left a room, and to use a car only for essential journeys: such things no longer labelled her, and she was happier. So they were in no hurry to change wartime habits, even when my maternal grandfather’s death in 1946 increased their income a little.
This frightening old man, of whom I had seen little but whom I imagined, from stories about him, to smell of the blood of pheasants, partridges, and hares, was a baronet. In middle life he inherited the title and a cumbersome house, and he lived fairly well in a rural way, but he had six children, so his death was the end of the family’s prosperity. The house, so inconvenient that no school or institution wanted to buy it, became a burden to my eldest uncle, and the days of butlers, horses, fine linen sheets, and wine in the cellar, of which my mother would talk fondly, always seemed remote to me. I was unfair when I was irritated by her nostalgic talk. The girlhood she had spent in that house must really have been far more comfortable and agreeable than her present life, and instead of thinking her absurd for regretting the past a little I should have admired her for tackling the present so bravely—which she did. But although she tackled the present, she emphasized its meagreness. When she had to replace a pair of sheets (which she never did, of course, until they had been turned sides to middle) she would not have bought quite such coarse, furry cotton ones if she had not been haunted by the fine linen which she could not afford—or at least I would not have noticed their coarseness if she had not talked about it so much. And I am sure that on the rare occasions when my parents invited someone to a meal they would more often have served beer or cider, as my father would suggest, if my mother had not inevitably remembered my grandfather discussing wine with his butler. She felt that in a life lived according to the natural order of things, such a discussion must precede a dinner party. If it couldn’t do so—well, put a jug of water on the table and have done with it.
There were some pretty things in our house, particularly in the drawing-room, but none of them had been bought: they were either wedding presents or legacies. Everything else was both cheap and ugly, and all the colours were “practical,” which meant dark blue, plum, buff, or grey. Apart from the reading-lamps in the drawing-room the lights were dim: to use a hundred-watt bulb when a sixty-watt would do was felt to be immoral. The light in the dining-room used especially to depress me. Above the sideboard where my father carved there were two graceful wall lights, and the room looked pleasant enough when they were on, but he always switched them off when he had finished serving us. Then there would only be the light hanging from the ceiling above the table, a weak bulb struggling against a shade gone brown with age. I used to think I could distinguish the particles of darkness swimming in the mustard-yellow illumination of the room, and glitter and sparkle became my idea of wealth.
And besides being drab, the house was without privacy or order. There always seemed to be a dustpan left on the stairs by my mother (or by me, when I was old enough to help her with the housework) because the telephone had rung or Mr. Munn, the verger, had knocked at the back door to say that they’d delivered the wrong kind of anthracite for the church boiler. Or there were stacks of envelopes on the dining-room table, where someone had been addressing them because some notice had to be sent out, or chairs still stood in a circle in the drawing-room after a meeting of the Mothers’ Union. It was a small and uneventful parish, but any parish invades its rectory, particularly if the parson is liked, as my father was. My mother, who was liked much less (people sensed that she was dutiful rather than interested), made regular attempts to seal off the drawing-room—“Will, I must have somewhere for myself—and you too, you’re worn out, you mus
t get away from them sometimes”—but it was never more than a week or so before some old woman was sitting there at the most inconvenient time of the day, offering to copy out the parts for the Easter anthem.
I don’t think my mother regretted marrying my father, or that he was a clergyman. She knew he was a good man—she was even proud of it in a long-suffering way—and she took the Church’s importance for granted—but her role as his wife was bad for her nerves because it didn’t come naturally to her. The few people in the parish who lived in big houses approved of her, because country gentry set great store by their parson and his wife being gentry too, but the village thought her condescending and she found it wearying to have so much to do with people who didn’t respond to her and in whom she wasn’t interested. And I suppose I caught from her this feeling that all the coming and going in our house, which some children might have found agreeable, was a bore.
As a child I didn’t criticize any of this because I couldn’t imagine my home being otherwise. It is with hindsight that I am thinking of it. The house was a pretty one, in beautiful country, and I ran more freely than many children because in some ways I was spoilt. Much of my feeling that my home was dull and restricting must have come from the effect on my senses of the lack of visual charm indoors, and much of it from my mother’s plaintive awareness of how she was unable to live and from her only partly hidden irritation at the claims made on her by her role. If she had been easy-going I might have enjoyed the feeling of being tied in with the village, and if she had been the kind of woman who, if she must buy a cheap chair, would choose a wicker one and put a bright pink cushion on it just because it looked pretty, I would hardly have known we were poor. But a wicker chair in the house—“What an extraordinary idea!” she would have said, and the new chair would have been a sad, badly made, conventional one with a dark blue cushion because there was dark blue in the carpet. How different was Mrs. Weaver’s house!