by Diana Athill
Luckily for me, if Mrs. Weaver saw me as affected she thought it no disadvantage. It was Roxane who irritated her, sitting with her knees apart and betraying by her giggles the extent to which she had become a typical schoolgirl.
“Guess what the Maybug said about me,” Roxane was saying when her mother interrupted with, “You will knock over your cup if you are not careful.” Then, turning to me: “Did my tomboy tell you that I once visited your grandfather’s lovely place? Years ago, it was, before my darling husband died, but I’ve always remembered that little jewel of a Guardi they had in the dining-room. And your grandfather was such an engaging man. How you must all adore that house.”
“Uncle Guy is trying to sell it,” I told her. “He thinks it might do as a school, but the last person who saw it said it was no good because it’s impossible to heat.” There had been many paintings in the dining-room, all heavily framed and obscured by darkened varnish, several of them said to be valuable, and all of them now sold. I felt a fool for not knowing which of them was the Guardi. Our twice-yearly visits to the house had stopped with the old man’s death—the ordeals of teasing and persecution by my cousin Sally and her brothers, and the indifference of other cousins, had come to a blessed end. I had not been old enough, before then, to know about pictures, and I was old enough now to know that the rolling acres of park and the heavy Palladian façade represented decay and anxiety rather than loveliness. Mrs. Weaver’s interpretation of it was as bewildering as the rest of her talk.
“A school!” she exclaimed. “My dear child, what a tragedy! Death duties, I suppose, there’s nothing more heart-breaking. Your mother must be quite disconsolate.”
“She says that if it’s got to go it had better go soon.”
“How brave of her,” said Mrs. Weaver. “She’s quite right, of course, it’s simply debilitating to brood on the past.” And then she added something which astonished me more than all the rest put together. “Breeding always tells,” she said.
For a moment I thought she was using the words in inverted commas, as my father sometimes used out-of-date slang. She was so clearly more elegant, richer, more sophisticated, and more assured than anyone in my family; so obviously someone who, if she were kind to me, was kind out of graciousness—and who, if she dismissed me as a drab little nobody, would be justified in dismissing me. Such a woman could not be a snob, or not a snob of the vulgar sort who would use those words. I stared at her. She betrayed no sign of facetiousness or jocularity. She had picked up her embroidery and was stitching away with an expression of approval on her monkey face. I remembered my mother’s saying, “At last you have made a nice friend,” and it occurred to me suddenly that Roxane might have “made a nice friend” too, that my grandfather shed a lustre across the years which in some curious way was capable of dazzling Mrs. Weaver. That was the first time I realized that I might, one day, see her as a joke.
I was too scared by her to do more than note this as a possibility. Escape from the drawing-room was all I wanted, and my relief was great when Roxane and I were upstairs in her room again. It had a desk in it, and an armchair, and the bed was a divan with a tailored cover; it was a room of her own for living in as well as for sleeping, where she could listen to her own record-player and be alone with her friends. She seemed very worldly to me, surrounded by possessions and talking about going to plays and parties, but I was not cowed because her worldliness was neutralized by the childish books she still kept on her shelves and the old toys which she preserved as familiars. I thought it foolish of her to keep a Teddy bear among the cushions on her bed, but I was glad of its presence. It made it possible for me to be less grown-up than she was without losing face.
When dinner-time came it was reassuring to find that Lise, the maid, had gone out and that we had to finish cooking dinner ourselves. At home I sulked my way out of household tasks whenever I could, but here they became comforting—which was lucky, because Mrs. Weaver had changed into a long housecoat of purple velvet, and began to tell us what we would be doing next day.
“Leo Pomfret will be coming to lunch,” she said, “so you mustn’t let my child make you late—show her Queen’s library, darling, don’t forget, and the Grinling Gibbons carvings in Trinity chapel. It’s so good for Roxane to become a guide from time to time, she never looks at things otherwise, the little Philistine. You will love Leo. I always say that he’s the only real wit left in Oxford—and such a scholarly musician. I expect you know his life of Thomas Arne?”
Although I had not had the courage to give up attending services in my father’s church, I had stopped praying a year earlier and I had resolved to give up vestigial prayer as well as serious prayer: no more “Oh, God, please don’t let it rain tomorrow,” and so on. Such superstitious appeals were unbecoming in an agnostic. But now I lapsed. “Please, God,” I prayed, shaking my head in ignorance for what seemed like the twentieth time, “make her tell without asking.” But all through the meal, blandly disregarding my inadequacy, Mrs. Weaver went on referring to books, paintings, buildings, and people exactly as though she were conversing with someone of her own age and experience. Bubbles of flattery rose from this, but each one was instantly pricked by my failure to be worthy of it, and by the time dinner was over I could not believe that this constant deflation was free of malice.
Clearing the table and washing up eased the tension again—if she had asked me to clean the silver or to darn a pillow-case I would have accepted the task gratefully. I did well in the kitchen, guessing correctly the drawer in which the cutlery was kept and using the right cloth for drying the glasses; but it was in the kitchen that Mrs. Weaver’s malice put out a claw. The huskiness of her voice was usually caressing, but it suddenly became brusque when she said, “I’ll put some prunes to soak for your breakfast, Meg. We must rid your pretty face of those constipation spots.”
“Oh Mummy!” said Roxane. “Meg’s hardly got any spots at all.”
“There’s no reason why she or anyone else should have a single one, darling.”
“Mummy’s a fanatic about things like that, you mustn’t mind her.”
But my secret enjoyment of the time when I would be alone in that lovely bedroom, and of my luxurious scented bath and my cigarette, had been swept away. Now I could only look at myself miserably in the mirror and remember that tomorrow night I would have to expose my uncouthness to the full by going to a dance.
3
One of the boys who was going to the dance with us didn’t sound too alarming: Wilfred Yardley, son of the Weavers’ doctor, to whom Mrs. Weaver referred as “the Yardley boy” in a voice which suggested that he would be dull and would present no worse problem than his silence and my own. The other was not a boy at all. He was an undergraduate. His name was Richard Sherlock and he was a second cousin of Roxane’s.
“Dick’s an angel,” said Roxane, slipping as she often did into her mother’s kind of speech. “He’s too old for us, but he doesn’t mind. His parents are divorced and Mummy has always been marvellous to him, so he’d do anything for her and he’s always been a pet to me. He used to take me to the zoo and things like that when I was small, and now he dances divinely and he’s the funniest person I know. You’ll adore him.”
Oh, God, I thought. Dick Sherlock and the witty Mr. Pomfret in one day: I could feel myself withering almost physically because of how I would appear to them.
But I was able to forget my forebodings during the morning because of Oxford. It felt like freedom to leave the house with Roxane, knowing that we would see no more of Mrs. Weaver until lunch and would have coffee in a restaurant, but I did not know how much I was going to enjoy it. My father had an old engraving of Oxford High Street in his study—a grey vista with a hansom cab small in the distance and two little gowned figures the only other sign of life. This, and his rare talk of his days as an undergraduate, had given the place a dusty smell. I thought of it as I thought of his leather-bound set of the novels of Sir Walter Scott: something worth
y, which I didn’t want to know.
So it was strange to see the same vista on this cold, sunny December morning, under a blue sky, with buses in it and crowds of people on the pavements looking at the Christmas things in the shops. I had not thought of Oxford’s having shops. And the stone of the buildings between the shops—the barley-sugar pillars of St. Mary’s church, the lodge of Queen’s College, and, at the bottom of the street, Magdalen’s silvery tower—had beautiful soft colours in the pure light. Roxane laughed when I asked whether it was all right to go into the colleges, and when we came out into a quadrangle through a porter’s lodge it didn’t feel like a cathedral even though it was as lovely. The atmosphere was different from the atmosphere in the street, but it was real and easy. In Magdalen two young men left over from the term just ended were talking to each other, one standing in the quad, one leaning out of his window, and I suddenly felt, “But they live here!” People could run up those narrow stone stairs as naturally as I ran up the stairs at home, and once in their rooms they lived their own lives.
I couldn’t understand how Roxane, who knew it so well, had never wanted to become part of it.
“Why don’t you want to go to college here?” I asked her.
“Old nitwit me?” she said. “What a hope! And I get all the fun anyway, by living here. But you could get in if you wanted to. Why not?”
“My parents couldn’t afford it, and I’m going to art school.”
“There’s one here, you could go to that. Oh Meg, why don’t you? You could live with us. Mummy’s always said that when I’m older I can have the spare room for friends.”
The thought of living in Mrs. Weaver’s house took the edge off my enthusiasm, but still I felt that these were streets in which it was natural for me to be walking.
* * *
We were late back for lunch. I could hear a man’s voice in the drawing-room and was angry with Roxane when she pushed me ahead of her through the door. Mrs. Weaver, more the enthusiastic hostess than ever, caught my hand and led me over to the plump man standing on the hearthrug, saying, “Here’s Roxane’s sweet little friend, Meg Bailey. She’s as clever as she’s pretty, always top of everything, and she paints too charmingly.”
I couldn’t believe that my blushing was visible only in my face; I felt as though my hair were becoming dishevelled and my clothes were twisting awry because of it. But Mr. Pomfret, putting his glass of sherry on the chimneypiece, shook hands and smiled as though he noticed nothing, saying, “Nothing will cure Dodo of that American habit of describing her guests to each other; I can’t think where she picked it up. She has probably told you already that I play the organ like Saint Cecilia and solve the Times crossword puzzle in five minutes every morning.”
“In five minutes,” I said, although I could hardly breath. “Goodness, I thought Daddy was good at it and he takes twenty.”
“So do I, and that’s on my good days,” said Mr. Pomfret. “It’s just that Dodo in her generosity exaggerates our achievements.” It was the complicity in his smile rather than the benevolence which made me feel better, and I felt better still when he turned away from me and went on with the conversation about the Master of Balliol which Roxane and I had interrupted.
So lunch was easier than I had expected it to be. They talked about people I didn’t know and about events which meant nothing to me, but Mr. Pomfret never asked me anything I couldn’t answer and sometimes told me things to fill in the picture. When he was funny he looked at me and I could see in his eyes that he was pleased when I laughed. He was a man who liked to touch people. He put his hand on my arm when we were going into the dining-room, and on Roxane’s when we were leaving it, and he even rested it on my knee for a moment when he picked up my table napkin for me. I hated to be touched, but I still found him an easier person to be in the same room with than Mrs. Weaver.
* * *
“I wish Mummy would marry Leo,” said Roxane after lunch, when we were up in her room. “She’s much too young to be a widow, but she adored Daddy so much that I don’t think she will.”
I hoped that I didn’t look surprised. It was childish to think of marriage and parents on such different levels that they could not be brought together without jarring, and it was old-fashioned never to have referred to any friend of my parents’ by his first name.
“Do you remember your father?” I asked.
“Some things, sort of. He died ten years ago when I was six. It’s awful to think of poor Mummy all alone for ten years—she’s so brave, but things are terribly difficult for her, you know. Sometimes I wish I was a boy so that I could look after her better.”
Her voice, when she said that, had an artificial sound which surprised and embarrassed me—I had never heard it before. It was hard to think of Mrs. Weaver as “poor,” but I told myself that Roxane was with her mother all the time and must understand her better than a stranger could. Besides, her father had died, and how could I, who couldn’t even imagine the death of mine, tell what happened to people in such circumstances. “Poor Mrs. Weaver,” I thought dutifully; but, “Look after her better”? It might have been said by some despicable little “good girl” in a children’s story. Did Roxane really think of this formidable woman as “poor little Mummy”? I swallowed my doubts because I could not identify what had caused them, but that was the first clue I noticed to the extent of Mrs. Weaver’s power over Roxane.
“She’s got lots of friends, though,” I said to be comforting. “You know so many people compared to us.”
“Mummy says being alone is no excuse for being insignificant. And she’s a marvellous hostess. Leo calls her Sunday tea-parties her salon, and when Dick wants to tease her he calls her Madame de Staël.”
Dick: a young man sophisticated enough to tease Mrs. Weaver, and who was to be faced with me that evening. His name brought back my dread of the impending dance.
* * *
Dressing for a dance was supposed to be an acutely pleasureable experience. I knew that from things my mother had said, from the way other girls talked, and because I had read War and Peace and Anna Karenina a short time ago. And perhaps I could also sense it from the nature of my own disturbance. The curtains of my room had been drawn, the fire lit. In the seconds before I switched on the light the warm, shifting shadows of the room suggested the dazzle into which the evening might unfold, and when I could see, there was the regalia laid out as Roxane, who enjoyed every minute of the preparations, had insisted. The velvet dress was spread on the counterpane with clean underclothes, carefully rolled stockings, and my mother’s evening bag beside it, and my new silver sandals stood neatly beside the bed. “You must leave yourselves plenty of time, darlings,” Mrs. Weaver had said, “so that you don’t have pink faces from your baths.” I felt the spirit of the thing enough to use a big handful of the bath-salts this time, and to twist up my hair in a towel to avoid damp ends. Afterwards, enjoying the luxury of thick carpet under bare feet and of being able to sit at the dressing-table in nothing but pants and brassière without feeling cold, I would have been elated if it had not been for the two spots on my chin, so magnified by Mrs. Weaver’s prunes. My mother had forbidden me to use make-up until I was seventeen. Would a little talcum powder disguise them? I shook some onto a handkerchief and dabbed it over my face, and when Roxane came in to help me hook up my dress I was nearly in tears at the white streaks.
She made me wash it off, promising me that no one would notice the spots.
“Heavens, how I wish I was as thin as you are,” she said. “You undress so marvellously.”
I answered, “Don’t be silly—look how terribly I dress,” but as I felt my skirt settling round my legs, and Roxane’s cold fingers on my back, nibbling at the hooks, I realized that at least what she said about my figure was true. The dress’s long skirt and low neck made the shape reflected in the looking-glass quite different from my usual skirt-and-jersey shape. It looked slim and pliable instead of gawky. If I could have stayed in the privacy
of the bedroom I would have enjoyed looking at that shape, moving backwards and forwards, making my skirt whirl, seeing what happened if I piled my hair on top of my head.
Going downstairs behind the rustle of Roxane’s taffeta skirt, seeing the drawing-room door open onto a pinkish glow, and smelling the scent of the huge pink and white chrysanthemums which Mrs. Weaver favoured, I began to pray that Dick Sherlock had slipped and broken his ankle. The shape I had seen in the looking-glass might be able to impress the “Yardley boy,” but “adorable Dick”—“Oh God,” I prayed, “don’t kill him, but let something happen to him for tonight.”
* * *
No wonder being young was so often a torment: no drink. To be dressed up, meeting new people, embarking on a long evening of “gaiety,” and to have to stand in Mrs. Weaver’s drawing-room with dangling hands, not even knowing the difference a few mouthfuls of alcohol would have made! There was a decanter of sherry on a round silver tray, with three glasses. When the two boys arrived at the same time Mrs. Weaver offered it to them, but neither Roxane nor I envisaged such an offer being made to us.
Dick Sherlock was just twenty: tall, thin, elegant in his dinner jacket, with an amusing monkey face not unlike that of Mrs. Weaver, whom he called “darling Dodo” and whom he kissed on both cheeks.
“I’ve been in despair,” he said. “Roxane—what a delicious dress—I thought I would have to disgrace you by coming in white socks. I can’t think why I had them—Mummy must have put them in my trunk, she never knows the time of day, still less the time of year—but there they were, the only clean socks left because a monstrous person called (can you believe it?) Bunter has stolen my evening ones. I thought, shall I dip them in ink …” Fluently, he embroidered the story of his socks, to the laughter of Roxane and Mrs. Weaver, to my dumb gaze, and to the lowered eyes of Wilfred Yardley, who was wearing a blue suit and had said nothing but good evening.