Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  * * *

  The first time Roxane asked me to stay I tried to make my mother refuse for me. Roxane had said that we would be going to a dance and although I was sixteen by then it terrified me. My only party dress was ugly, I couldn’t dance, I didn’t know what to say to strangers, and people would wish that I wasn’t there. Even if I had been more confident, the few dances I had been to at home had made me think them overrated: drawing-rooms cleared of furniture, a record-player in a corner, and one or two silent boys backing me round the room. I had always been thankful when the evening ended. And a dance in Oxford, where the Weavers lived, would be more alarming. The people there would be older and smarter—I was sure that anyone who lived in a town was older and smarter—and I, in comparison, would be even gawkier and more at a loss.

  But my mother would not refuse the invitation. She had a helpless, slightly distraught expression, forerunner of tears, which she rarely used with anyone but me and which meant that I was being “difficult.”

  “One of the reasons why we send you to school,” she said, “is so that you can make nice friends. And now you have done it at last, and been asked to a lovely dance, and you don’t want to go. I know how bad I am at finding friends for you, and arranging parties, but what am I to do if you won’t help me?”

  “I haven’t got a dress. I can’t wear that old one of Sally’s any more, it’s got a tear in it.” (Most of my clothes were cast-offs from more prosperous cousins.)

  “We’ll buy one,” said my mother, and turned to my father. “She’s got to have one sooner or later, Will, so it might as well be now.”

  My father looked slightly surprised, as he often did when she used him instead of herself to argue with. He would not have questioned her decision on a matter concerning my clothes, and his own instinct was to give people anything they wanted.

  My cousins were different from me in colouring and shape, and the alterations my mother made to their garments before I could wear them were not skilful. I had decided long ago that I hated clothes and had worked up a disdain for girls who gave much thought to them. I wouldn’t know how to choose a dress myself, and I would certainly dislike anything chosen by my mother, so the prospect of buying one made me more nervous rather than less.

  I sulked as we drove into the cathedral town, and I must have looked like an overgrown ten-year-old as I dragged my feet on my way into the one “smart” shop. A woman with thin, veiny legs came to meet us when we reached the dress department—an alarming woman who could certainly tell how little we had paid for our coats and skirts. But she saved the situation: she had taste, and she must have been kind. My mother went towards a rack of pale pinks and blues, net ruffles and satin bows, but this woman said, “I have something which has just come in, madam, which I think would suit the young lady,” and fetched a simple, full-skirted dress of night-blue velvet.

  “Isn’t it rather old for her?” said my mother.

  “When you see it on, madam, I think you will like it,” said the woman; and so for the first time I stood before a mirror looking at myself in a dress which suited me.

  It was more disconcerting than delightful because I thought I must be imagining the effect the dress had on my appearance.

  “Is it all right?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Turn round and stop hunching your shoulders,” said my mother. “Yes, you look very nice—but oh, darling, you do look so grown-up!”

  “A lot of young ladies are wearing darker colours this year,” said the woman soothingly.

  “Are you sure it isn’t too sophisticated?”

  “Oh no, madam. It’s a very simple dress really, quite a young girl’s dress.”

  My mother was still doubtful, but she was beginning to enjoy the purchase. She bought things almost as rarely as I did and was becoming flushed and pretty with the excitement of it. She bought the dress, and although I tried to keep up a sulky front for what I thought was dignity’s sake, our return home was gay. When my mother was enjoying herself she could be funny and charming.

  * * *

  I am going to say something now which I have never said before; and something which, when it has been said to me, I have usually half-pretended not to hear. I am a pretty woman. I have known this for years—of course I have known it! But even so, to write it down seems more like indecency than honesty.

  My parents saw vanity as a trap for a girl. Sometimes my mother would say, “You look very nice in that colour” or “with your hair like that,” but more often her comments on my appearance were critical: “Don’t slouch”; “Go and brush your hair”; “You look ridiculous with your belt pulled in so tight.” Roxane had made envious remarks about my looks, but because of her sweet nature and her affection for me I hardly felt they counted. At sixteen the things I knew about my appearance were that my hair was straight, that my hands and feet were too big, and that I had horrible, pale eyes. In my family blue eyes were considered the most beautiful, and I myself admired dark eyes—there was an Indian girl at school with eyes so dark that pupil could not be distinguished from iris, and she was the most beautiful person I knew. I have never seen anyone else with eyes of so pale a grey as mine. They would indeed be horrible if my hair was fair. I know now that they are saved—made an “asset,” as the women’s magazines say—by the darkness of my eyebrows and eyelashes, and that when they startle people it is with pleasure rather than with distaste, but when I was sixteen I still hated them. At the time of my first visit to the Weavers my looks were wasted on me.

  2

  Mrs. Weaver had written to say which train she would meet, using a postcard with a Sicilian mosaic on it. (“But the postmark is Oxford,” said my father, puzzled, when my mother handed it to him across the breakfast table.) It was a simple journey, but I had never travelled alone except to school, so I felt sick before it. I was afraid that my father, who drove me to the station, would ask someone on the train to look after me, but he confined himself to seeking out a nonsmoking compartment with an elderly woman in it. Then I had to stand by the window while he stood on the platform with his hat in his hand—he would never have kept it on while seeing-off a woman, daughter or no—and I could think of nothing to say. He looked less tall than usual as he stood there, and very thin. The cold wind blowing down the platform lifted tufts of his hair, and I wished it were not so flimsy, and that his knuckles were not so red, and that the veins didn’t show so clearly through the skin on his nose and cheekbones. Having to kiss that thin skin which revealed so much of what lay beneath it was something I had disliked doing for a long time.

  “We’ll meet the four-thirty on Monday,” he said. “Enjoy yourself, dear. I am sure you will.”

  “It’s cold, Daddy. Don’t wait any longer.”

  “Nonsense, dear, I like being with you. We have so little time together now that you’re at school.”

  When I was small I used to be with him a great deal—I loved him. And his anxious, affectionate smile had not changed since then. Why he had started to make me irritable and impatient I couldn’t tell, and I found it hard to forgive him the guilt which accompanied these feelings.

  No doubt part of the guilt came from no longer believing in God. My father did, although, being shy and having very good manners, he rarely talked about it outside church for fear of embarrassing people. One convenient thing about a rectory is that religion is taken for granted in it. Most of the time it’s a matter of remembering to change the altar cloth to the right one for the season, or of arbitrating between the women who volunteer to do the flowers for the altar each month. (None of them want January or February, when there are no flowers.) In our house, anyway, although the business of the parish was always intruding, it was rare for spiritual matters to be referred to, and while I continued to attend services it didn’t occur to my father to doubt my faith. I was uneasy at the time of this visit to the Weavers because of taking Communion. Matins and evensong were routine, like Sunday lunch, but I knew I ought not to partake of a sacr
ament when I didn’t believe in it because it would be such an insult to God, supposing that He did exist after all in spite of my unbelief. I had tried to find the courage to refuse, but it couldn’t be done; it would have distressed my father too much. He would not have been angry. He would have been tormented by anxiety for me and by a feeling that my lack of faith was his failure, although all that had happened was that first I had caught my mother’s suppressed resentment at the claims made by the machinery of the Church, and then, since going to school and reading more, I had become astonished at the lack of connection between the Church and what went on outside it. I can see now that I must have continued the distasteful business of taking Communion because I still loved my father, but doing so made me feel angry with him, and when he said, “We have so little time together,” I was embarrassed, not touched.

  * * *

  The nearer I got to Oxford, the surer I became that no one would be there to meet me. It was the same irrational feeling that I had experienced as a very small child when my mother left me in the car while she went into a shop: she will not come back, I used to think; she will go out of the shop by the back door, and I will be left here alone, abandoned. Even in those days I would try to reason with myself, asking myself why she should do such a thing, but it was never any good. I simply knew that it was going to happen and would sit there growing more and more afraid until I began to cry—and oh, the relief when she came back and was cross and scolded me for being so silly!

  Naturally, the feeling as I approached Oxford was not so bad as it had been when I was little. My father had given me two pounds, so if I was stranded I could take a taxi, or even spend a night in a hotel … and when I caught myself thinking like that I was able to start laughing at myself. To suppose that the Weavers’ house might not be where they said it was, or that Mrs. Weaver and Roxane might have flitted, was too absurd. But I was not surprised when I saw that they were not waiting for me on the platform.

  It didn’t occur to me that they would wait outside. I was still so unaccustomed to making journeys that I expected to be treated like a child, put into a train and taken out of it as though I were incapable of managing by myself. I stood on the platform for several minutes until everyone else had gone through the barrier and there were only two porters left, discussing a bicycle which had lost its label. Then I thought, “Come on, now. You will have to take a taxi,” and was stimulated because having to do something was less alarming than thinking about it. So when I heard Roxane calling my name as I came out of the station, and saw her getting out of their car, which was parked opposite the door, I was almost disappointed.

  She was wearing a pretty tartan coat and skirt which made me conscious of my own clothes: my school top-coat over a green tweed skirt and a pink jersey. She told me later that her mother liked me because she enjoyed looking at me, but as I crossed the station yard I was sure that the impression I was making was one of awkwardness and dowdiness. Mrs. Weaver watched me as I came with no expression on her face, then suddenly gave an enthusiastic hostess’s smile and stuck her face out of the window so that a cheek was presented for me to kiss. I smelt her scent and heard again, which I had forgotten, how husky her voice was. “You dear talented thing,” she said. “Come and sit in front with me.” Her words, her voice, and her face startled me so much that I snatched my suitcase from Roxane and pushed it into the back of the car so that I could follow it, blushing at my own rudeness.

  Mrs. Weaver didn’t seem to mind. As soon as we were out of the station yard she began to talk to me again, speaking to my reflection in the driving mirror. “Talented” was explained when she said, “How I wish sweet Roxane could paint—it’s a sad thing for me to have a daughter with no elegant accomplishments. Your parents must be so proud of those pretty little whimsical things of yours I saw hanging about the school at half-term.”

  The bitch! I thought—or could she be a fool and mean those words as a compliment? I mumbled that my parents didn’t much mind what I did in my painting lessons, and I felt almost dizzy. Parents might be bad at making their children’s friends feel at ease, but that was what they were supposed to attempt and Mrs. Weaver was breaking the rules. I was uncertain whether I was more frightened or fascinated.

  Roxane gave no sign of feeling humiliated at her mother’s regretting her lack of talent. She even leant against the woman’s shoulder when she twisted round to talk to me, telling me where the dance would be and who would go to it with us. “I wanted Mummy to come,” she said. “She’s got a dreamy emerald-green dress and she hardly ever wears it, but she’s gone on strike.” Thank God, I thought, but Mrs. Weaver sounded more parent-like when she said, “Silly one! What would you do with me at your party?” If Roxane could treat her with such affectionate familiarity and she could make a remark like that one, perhaps she was less dangerous than she seemed.

  The first thing I noticed about Mrs. Weaver’s house was that it was warm. The second thing was that she had a maid. “Lise,” she called, “we’re back; we’ll have tea as soon as it’s ready.” Then there was the lack of sound as Roxane took me upstairs, because of the thickness of the carpet, and then the colour and softness of my bedroom.

  There was nothing remarkable in the furnishing of Mrs. Weaver’s house: it was only that when her husband died, which happened early in their marriage, he left her a good income so that she was able to choose things for comfort and prettiness. But on that first visit I thought my bedroom in that house was beautiful, luxurious, and exotic. There was a fire lit in it, and the curtains were of red velvet—not plum, but a bright, gay red. There was a little armchair by the fire covered with a rose-printed chintz, and on the bed there were four cushions covered with taffeta: red, mauve, pink, and striped black-and-pink. (I was to come to know them well.) Soon I would despise pointless cushions on a bed and this kind of chintzy, velvety furnishing, but then it seemed delicious.

  “Your bathroom is that door opposite,” said Roxane. My bathroom? Only one set of fleecy towels, no one else’s sponge or toothbrush to be seen—yes, this must be just for me, the “spare-room’s bathroom.” It was all black and white and there was a bowl full of bath-salts. But what impressed me most was the discovery, on my return to my bedroom, that the china box on the bedside table contained cigarettes and matches. I didn’t suppose that Mrs. Weaver expected me to smoke, so her gesture in putting them there seemed all the more generously urbane.

  I decided that when I came up to bed that night I would have the hottest, deepest bath of my life, the water cloudy with scented crystals, and that afterwards, having heaped the cushions behind my shoulders, I would smoke a cigarette.

  When I went downstairs I was excited. I was enjoying staying away from home. When doors opened I would see rooms I had never seen before, and I would not know exactly what was going to happen next. I could feel on those stairs that a pattern extended through the house, through the town; the pattern of other people’s lives, inevitable and ordinary to them but still unknown to me. And Roxane, who was laughing at something I had just said, was pleased to have me there; she liked me, we could catch each other’s eyes and giggle at things which other people didn’t recognize as jokes, and no one would know what we meant if we said, “What a totty way of going on.” (At school we called girls who played games earnestly “the Hottentots,” “totty” for short.) The luxury of Roxane’s affection was greater than the luxury of the cushions on the bed and the bath-salts in the black-and-white bathroom.

  But behind her drawing-room door Mrs. Weaver was waiting, with a tray of tea things on a low table in front of her and a tangle of embroidery wools on the sofa beside her.

  “You must help me, Meg,” she said as soon as we came into the room. “Am I right to put this blue next to that one? It’s only gros point I’m afraid—I’m sure you think it very coarse. Your sweet mother must do the most exquisite embroidery.”

  About the blue wool I could have spoken, but the rest of her speech silenced me. I didn’t know
what gros point was, and my mother had never done a stitch of embroidery in her life. She picked up a needle only to mend or to alter, did the work clumsily, and detested it.

  “Mummy doesn’t have much time,” I said.

  “No?” said Mrs. Weaver. “Of course, country life always is such a whirl compared to a provincial town like Oxford. And I expect she helps your father a great deal in the parish. I only met him for a moment at half-term but I could see at a glance that the man was a saint, and they can be such a trial.”

  The elation I had felt on the stairs vanished. I might have been peering into a gallery of distorting mirrors: myself talented, my mother an exquisite embroideress, my father a saint. It was unlikely that Mrs. Weaver had the deliberate intention of confusing and embarrassing me; kindness must be what she was intending; but if she continued making remarks to which I could give no answer the weekend would be worse than I had expected even in my most apprehensive moments. I turned towards Roxane for help, asking her what her end-of-term report had been like.

  I can guess what I must have looked like in my nervousness because I have so often been teased about it, and sometimes accused. My manner at such moments was the source of the hateful adjective “affected.” My expression became haughty, and I stared over people’s shoulders instead of looking at their faces as they talked. If I caught myself at it, then it would become worse because I would force myself to be unnaturally polite and attentive to a point where, sometimes, I would feel my eyebrows rising or my head shaking as though I were a reflection of the raised eyebrows or shaking head I was watching.