by Diana Athill
Dick behaved like the favourite and precocious nephew of an indulgent aunt. He sometimes looked at me but he rarely spoke to me. I felt as I had never felt before the impossibility of speaking naturally at a parent’s dinner table, and Wilfred Yardley obviously felt the same, but Dick moved gaily onto adult ground.
“What a dear thing you are,” said Mrs. Weaver, “to come this evening after all the exhausting gaiety of your term. Has it been sparkling?”
“But monastic! So monastic I can’t tell you; I was quite in a flutter at getting into evening dress again. They’ve been persecuting me, Dodo, for not working. My tutor has been making the most sadistic prophecies—but Dodo, have you ever read Beowulf?”
“Dear heaven, no! The Chanson de Roland was enough for me.”
“Can’t you use your subtle influence to bring about a revolution in the English school? If you refuse I shall have to change horses in midstream, I swear it. What is the point of learning a language that sounds like coughing and spitting, just to read about those tedious old people wading around in a lot of Scandinavian bogs?”
“Well, darling boy, it must give you a sense of the structure of the language, I suppose, and it’s a discipline, like learning Greek. I’ve never used my Greek, but I think I’m less of a dunce for having had it hammered into my head.”
“How can you compare them …” and they were off on a discussion of the beauties of Greek, Mrs. Weaver even quoting a line from Sappho.
“Do you know Greek?” I asked Wilfred Yardley in a low voice.
“No, I’m on the science side.” He took a quick gulp of water, and his lips left a greasy mark on the glass.
Roxane bobbed through dinner serenely, admiring her mother and Dick as the clever ones, laughing at them as the witty ones, unabashed by her own limitations and unashamed by her own trivial interventions in the talk. “What happened to the canoe?” she asked Dick, and, “Did they find out about your climbing in that night?” and he answered her kindly and with animation. She was unambitious, and she was not vain. But I knew that in my own head I could talk just as lightly and absurdly as Dick and Mrs. Weaver did, and I had read several of the books to which they referred. It was hateful to be so tongue-tied simply because I was not used to life.
* * *
I never thought about my brother, who died when he was seven and I was five, except when I had to avoid using the name Julian in front of my mother. For years she had wept when she heard it and my father and I felt that even now she still might. But that evening I felt a grudge against Julian for dying. If he had lived he might have brought friends like Dick to the house and I would have learnt how to talk to them. His friends would not have been dull. He was a beautiful child in his photographs, and everyone always said that he was a very imaginative little boy, loved by everyone who saw him. All the stories I knew about him illustrated how lovable he was. My mother had loved him so much that after his death she nearly went mad. She shut herself into her bedroom for three weeks and wouldn’t let them take me in to see her. She had remembered it once, on Julian’s birthday, and told me about it. My father looked after me, she said, and I was very good. “Poor little girl,” she said, crying. “I was wicked to you. Will ought not to have let me do it.” I could remember nothing about it except playing with my father’s slippers and pretending they were cats—and I think he had told me about that.
My mother’s tears and her self-blame made me feel ill with embarrassment, but I was sorry for her. I saw for the first time that Julian’s death was not simply a piece of the past history of our family but was an atrocious happening: a mother losing her child, and her son at that—something too terrible to be borne, which my mother had been forced to bear. Sitting at Mrs. Weaver’s table, thinking that if Julian had not died I might have been able to acquit myself better, I felt guilty towards my mother for playing with his name like that.
4
“The ball was just beginning when Kitty and her mother mounted the grand staircase brilliantly lighted and adorned with flowers, on which stood flunkeys in red livery…. They could hear a noise like the humming of a bee-hive and the scraping of violins as the orchestra was tuning up for the first waltz.” That, in spite of my experience, was what a dance meant to me. The dances I had been to I did not think of as real dances, but now I was in another place, with other people. If I had been questioned I would have answered that of course I did not expect flunkeys, any more than I expected “ladies covered with tulle, ribbons, lace, and flowers,” Anna standing out among them in her black velvet dress, but at some level I still felt that a dance in a town, to which an invitation for a weekend had been the prelude, must have a magical, and therefore (to me) an especially alarming, quality.
So I was half relieved and half disappointed when I followed Roxane into an ordinary drawing-room cleared of furniture, and saw the record-player in a corner by the Christmas tree. This was no ball, but simply a party given for a family of children between fourteen and nineteen years old, and only six boys beside Dick Sherlock were wearing dinner jackets. The room was large, the lights were bright, the walls were swagged with holly and paper garlands, the smell of french chalk and fir tree was festive: the heightened atmosphere which heralds the simplest dance was perceptible. But there was nothing here beyond my experience: nothing able, on the one hand, to overwhelm me, or on the other hand, by some mysterious power inherent in its nature, to transfigure me.
For a minute or two Wilfred Yardley and I shuffled behind Roxane and Dick as they greeted people they knew, then a record was put on and Dick, the grown-up man helping to make a children’s party go, whirled Roxane into the still-empty centre of the floor.
“Let’s wait until some more of them begin,” said Wilfred. “I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer.”
“Neither am I,” I said. I ought to have felt grateful to him as an ally, but I did not. I felt scornful. I had been right. He was the kind of boy who usually came my way at parties: the shy, the dull, the awkward, my lot because I was unable to claim the attention of the assured and interesting.
After a while he began to steer me cautiously round the room, making a jerky turn at each corner, and I could see the fair down glinting on his hot cheek. Many girls at school claimed they were in love with boys of their acquaintance, and I thought them absurd. To be in love with Vronsky, or with Mr. Rochester, or with someone real but as remote as Dick Sherlock: that I could imagine easily enough, although it was too private and silly to be discussed. But I knew that I would never marry because it was the Wilfreds who existed on my level, and how could I want to marry one of them?
During the first dance I was thinking only of the second one, because that would almost certainly have to be with Dick. I wondered if I could tell Roxane that I must go home at once because I was feeling sick. I was feeling sick, although not in a way which suggested that I would actually vomit; but there would be a fuss, Roxane would have to tell our hostess so that a taxi could be called, the humiliation would be too painful. It was better to fall back on my usual technique and remind myself that whatever Dick might think of me I was probably cleverer than most of the girls there, and could paint better, and despised them.
I was almost in a trance of nervousness when he said, “Come on, Meg, let’s go.” He must have felt my stiffness and my lack of practice at once, because to begin with he kept his steps very simple. I had not understood before that a good dancer would be easier to follow than a bad one, and could hardly believe it when my feet seemed to know when he was going to hesitate, when turn. I had a good sense of rhythm, and before we had been three times round the room I had realized that I was not going to make a fool of myself and had even begun to understand the pleasure of dancing: I felt an incredulous delight when Dick twirled me; my skirt flowed out, and my feet came back into the place where they were meant to be, ready to move in the right direction.
When he felt that I had relaxed, Dick began to talk. “Look at that girl,” he said, “just l
ike a Christmas pudding.” A fat girl was standing against the wall in such a way that a sprig of the decorating holly seemed to sprout from the top of her head. I laughed. “What do you see people as?” he asked. “Animals?”
“Yes, sometimes,” I said.
“Look, there’s a camel,” he said, and I laughed again. Then he held me away from him, looked into my eyes and said, “You’re not an animal, you’re a mermaid. Did you know?”
The blush seemed to be pumped up in a great gush straight from my heart, almost blinding me, but thank God I could bend my head forward and turn it sideways, my cheek almost touching his shoulder, and perhaps he couldn’t see. I told myself, “You fool, I could kill you,” but even my shame at my scarlet face could not cancel the feeling of being a balloon which had broken its string.
Dick was gentle with me. As Roxane had said, he was kind, and as I was to learn, he was vain: he could easily imagine himself overwhelming a sixteen-year-old girl and was pleased with himself for being able to carry it off gracefully. He gave me a minute in which to recover from his compliment, then began to tell me about his tutor, who wore a waistcoat cut from brown paper in the winter and drank lime-flower tea in summer. When he left me, to dance enthusiastically with a grown-up girl, I did not feel forlorn (what more could I expect from him?) but restored, able to talk naturally to Wilfred Yardley and even to put him at his ease.
Dick’s “What do you see people as?” had given me a clue. The thing to do was to leap-frog those dull where-do-you-lives and do-you-know-many-people-heres which always came at once to a dead end, and begin with something you might say to a person you knew well. Earlier that day Roxane and I had talked about what we would do if we had a thousand pounds, so “What would you do,” I asked Wilfred, “if you had a thousand pounds?”
He would buy a second-hand racing car, he said. Cars were his chief interest, and his father’s hobby too. Cars bored me, but here was Wilfred talking: the trick had worked, and I felt proud of it. Going into much detail about engine parts and the construction of a chassis, Wilfred told me how he and his father had been building a car. It was to be his own as soon as he had passed his driving test, which he would do during these holidays, and now it was finished, all but the last touches to the paintwork.
“Dad wanted her to be green,” he said, “but I thought that was rather ordinary so I’ve made her a smashing yellow and I’m going to call her ‘The Yellow Peril.’ I want to paint a dragon on the driver’s door—you know, very fierce-looking, with flames coming out of its mouth, but the trouble is that I can’t draw and neither can Dad. I say …” He broke off, going pink.
“What?”
“Well, would you think it awful cheek—I mean, you paint, don’t you? Roxane was saying something about it. Do you think you could sort of begin a dragon for me, anyway?”
A dragon. A Chinese dragon like the blue one on my father’s breakfast cup. It would be fun to do, and to think of its being exhibited far and wide on the door of a car. Although the next day was Sunday, Mrs. Weaver’s salon day, and I half wished to see her in action, I asked Roxane if we could go to tea at Wilfred’s house and was pleased when she said, “Why not?” From being a symbol of my social failure, Wilfred had turned into an unexciting but not disagreeable acquaintance for whom I was going to do something which I would enjoy.
I began to show off a little. I didn’t go so far as to say to myself, “Wilfred thinks I’m pretty and sure of myself,” but when I was with him I felt in control of the situation. Until that point in the weekend, if anyone had asked me how I liked school I would not have expected them to be interested in the answer and would have replied, “It’s all right.” When Wilfred asked I said, “I hate it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s much worse than any other school, really, but I think all school is like prison, don’t you?”
Wilfred disagreed. He enjoyed his school. He even looked slightly shocked, but he looked admiring too. I told him how Roxane and I called hearty girls “totties,” and I began to use the words we thought amusing—“withering” and “blissful”—and when he said that his father was organizing an exhibition of veteran cars to raise funds for the Conservatives, I said that when I could vote I would vote Labour. He argued with me, but he didn’t laugh at me. He made me feel that I was an original and slightly reckless girl.
When I was with Wilfred, or with the few other boys to whom I was introduced, I was watching for Dick. He joined us from time to time, but always as part of a group, and it was not until towards the end of the evening that he danced with me again. This time he flattered and startled me by asking, “What do you make of our Dodo? Poor dear, how she longs to be Oxford’s leading hostess.”
“But isn’t she?”
“Oxford doesn’t have such things. But it does have its characters and I suppose old Dodo might qualify as one of them.”
“But I thought you liked her,” I said, astonished that he should speak like this about someone to whom he had been so effusively affectionate.
“My dear, I adore her. She’s my favourite woman. She’s a worse show-off than I am and that’s a great bond—and she does provide delicious meals, you must grant her that.”
Shock and titillation jumbled together. That I should be discussing Mrs. Weaver so irreverently was surely an advance in sophistication, but was it not also treacherous? Perhaps it was naïve of me to think so. Perhaps if Dick behaved like this, this was the way to behave … but I was at sea again, the Wilfred-charmer had evaporated. Clearly, while I was with Dick, listening was safer than speaking.
The party ended at one o’clock, and Dick took us home in a taxi for which Mrs. Weaver had paid. A vacuum flask of Ovaltine was waiting for us in the kitchen, and sitting at the scrubbed table alone with Roxane, my dress unhooked and my shoes kicked off, I began to relish the occasion with full enjoyment. “Dressing for the dance” had been poisoned by fear; the dance itself had been too complicated by nervousness and exhilaration to be savoured while it was going on; but this—to be up so late, the clocks ticking loudly in the silent house, no one there to tell us to go to bed—this was “coming home from the dance” as it ought to be. Our sleepiness gave an almost drunken warmth to our talk and giggling, and before we went upstairs Roxane said, “You know, I think Wilfred has fallen for you.”
“You’re mad,” I said, trying to look unconcerned. “All he’s in love with is his old car.” But when I went to clean my teeth I saw in the mirror that I was smiling, and I whispered, “Mermaid?” When I was trying to persuade my mother to refuse the invitation she had said, “You’ll enjoy it when you get there.” It was unlikely to last, but at that moment she was right.
* * *
Wilfred Yardley asked me if he could write to me. He asked it when we went back to his father’s workshop to see how the dragon was drying, after tea. It had gone well. At first I had been anxious because I had to squat on the floor while I was painting and Wilfred kept throwing my shadow on the door, holding a glaring, naked bulb in the wrong position on the end of a long flex. My hand wobbled and I thought I had ruined the dragon’s snout, but when it turned out that the wobble had improved its expression I began to trust my hand, and everybody laughed and praised what I had done. The Yardleys were a totty family—two boys younger than Wilfred and a little girl—but they were friendly. They had a private slang, and nicknames which they used all the time, even for Dr. and Mrs. Yardley, and they were noisy, and pushed a loaf of bread round the tea table, everyone sawing at it in turn, and they ate jam out of the pot it was sold in. I had never wanted to belong to a large family—my cousins had put me off it—but I could see that this one enjoyed itself; and Wilfred, being the eldest and having, after all, a car of his own already, seemed more important on his home ground than he had been the evening before.
When we went out of the bright, rowdy sitting-room onto the lawn our feet crunched because the grass was stiff with frost. It seemed very dark and quie
t, and it was odd to be suddenly so alone with Wilfred. Neither of us knew what to say, but luckily there was the cold to exclaim about. In the workshop we were even more alone, our huge shadows running over the ceiling as we inspected the dragon and wiped off a dribble of paint which had run down from its belly. I was flustered because of the way in which I felt Wilfred standing near me even though he was several inches from touching me. He was putting the turpentiny rag away, with his back to me, when he asked about writing, and I was surprised at how calmly I said, “Yes, if you want to.” I didn’t blush. Given what I had to endure from other people’s disregard or dislike, it almost seemed as though I were owed this attention from Wilfred.
* * *
“Now, darling, tell us all about it,” said my mother, putting a dish of baked eggs on the table for supper on the Monday evening, when I had got home. I could feel myself prickle with irritation, although if she had not asked I should have been hurt.
“It was all right,” I said, knowing that I sounded sullen and that she would become justifiably plaintive.
“Surely you can say more about it than that!” she said, and I pulled myself together and outlined the weekend’s events.
“What is Mrs. Weaver like?”
“She’s rather odd.”
“In what way odd?”
“Well, she’s richer than us, I suppose, and she knows lots of people. When she has them to tea they call it her salon.”
“Was she nice to you?”
“She was all right. She put cigarettes beside my bed.”
“That was odd,” said my father. “I don’t see why she did that. I hope you didn’t start smoking, dear?”