by Diana Athill
It was a shock, but enough time had passed since Dick had kissed me and then dropped me for it to be exciting as well, simply as something to watch, and after that I used to feel adult and knowing because I was able to follow Mrs. Weaver’s tactics.
They were simple. She provided Roxane with a great many agreeable things to do (she must have invested hundreds of pounds in it), and she saw that Dick was always there for the best of them. They spent Christmas at Davos and Dick went too; she gave Roxane a box at the Chelsea Arts Ball and Dick was her partner; they went to hear Callas and Dick was with them. Soon an occasion would have been spoilt for Roxane if Dick had not been there, and he would have been at least surprised if not offended if he had been left out.
Dick and Roxane were only second cousins, but their mothers had known each other well all their lives, so the pursuit could be camouflaged as family closeness. Dick could be treated more familiarly than anyone else—asked to mix the drinks or to fetch a book from Mrs. Weaver’s bedroom—without danger of scaring him off. “Darling boy, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Mrs. Weaver would say as she handed him the martini jug. It was she who laughed first at his jokes, she who exclaimed most at his common sense and reliability. She built him up, and although he still used to mock her behind her back, he enjoyed it. The two of them had a genuine rapport. She tickled his vanity and offered him good entertainment with snob-appeal, and she did more than that. His own family was split up. She provided a substitute family intimacy which had the easiness of being at home without its pressures. She drew him closer and closer—and so, I suppose, did Roxane.
Socially Roxane was more assured than I was. She was pretty in a way I thought more fetching than my own, she was charmingly dressed, she was gay, she was sweet-natured. A few months earlier I would have accepted any man’s preference for her as natural. But now I was beginning to suspect that men could perceive in me things which schoolgirls and parents had distorted. Wilfred Yardley did, and one or two of the boys at the art school seemed ready to. If Dick chose to prefer Roxane, then perhaps Dick was being obtuse? He was rather silly in some ways….
So by the end of that first year I had withdrawn without much difficulty from the position of “loving” Dick, and without being so much shaken as I usually was by failure. I was lucky, perhaps, in feeling so little of the physical side of attraction.
* * *
And by the end of that first year I had also withdrawn, though not so painlessly, from an idea of myself as a painter.
The art school was not as I had expected it to be. To begin with we had to draw from casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, and this I found boring, as I did still life. Other people seemed to look forward to beginning life classes, so I did too, but when I began them they disappointed me. There was something missing. I thought at first that it was from the way we were taught (which was, indeed, old-fashioned and casual) but it was missing from me. It was not that I was unable to do the things I had to do; it was that I did them too easily and soon began to suspect that this meant I wasn’t doing them right. If a model was resting her weight on her right foot, that was what she appeared to be doing in my drawing: I was not one of those students whose sketched figures seemed to be made of plasticine. But a quick and neat appearance was all that I ever seemed able to achieve. When I looked at the work of serious artists, or even when I watched the struggles of some of the other students, I knew that they had a genuine impulse to wrestle something out of an appearance, and that I lacked it. I was ashamed to admit it, but I had enjoyed Mrs. Fitz’s classes at school better than I was enjoying the real thing.
The principal was a kind, worried man who had once expected to become known as a painter. It was said to upset him that so many students applied for places in the school: he knew that most of them shared his own earlier expectations and that most of them would fail to make a living from painting even in the indirect way he himself had achieved. Because of this he worked hard on his board of governors to develop a commercial side to the school: textile design, fashion drawing, book illustration, and so on. He was still kept short of equipment and could employ only second-rate teachers, but he was building it up. The students who took these courses were not, in fact, much more likely to be able to earn a living than those who concentrated on easel painting, but the principal could at least feel that the school was sending them out in a direction where a market existed.
At the end of my first year he asked me to come and see him in his office.
“‘Commercial’ isn’t a dirty word,” he said. “Not if it has ‘art’ tagged on to it, at any rate. Very few painters in any generation produce outstanding work—it’s always been like that. There’s nothing disgraceful about not being one of them, and there’s a lot that’s admirable about being one of the people who work seriously in an attempt to improve design in objects people use every day. We are very lucky to have Miss Leopold with us to teach textile design and fashion drawing. There are more applicants than there are vacancies in the school—you know that—so it’s not wholly a student’s business if he or she is wasting his time, it’s my business too. I know this must sound rather harsh, but the talent you have shown so far is decidedly decorative rather than anything else…. I presume you will need to earn your living when you finish your course?”
“Yes,” I said, my eyes on the calendar hanging behind his left shoulder.
“Well, you’re never likely to be one of the few who can do it as a painter, but you have a nice little talent for design. You would be wise to go on to the design side at this stage, without wasting more time. You think it over—you don’t have to decide straight away—and let me know before the start of next term.”
He would have gone on to wish me a pleasant holiday, but I stood up so quickly that his politeness was cut short. I walked fast down the stone-flagged corridor with walls bottle-green to shoulder height and cement-coloured above, and stopped abruptly at the end of it. I stared through dirty glass into a yard where dustbins were kept. Soon there would be footsteps in the corridor or a door would open, but for the moment I was in one of those odd pockets of silence which can occur in crowded buildings, as though there were nothing behind the doors but spiders and mice. I wanted it to stay like that.
It was because I knew that he was right that I was so shocked, as though I had been suddenly and brutally exposed. I had had my own suspicions but I had repressed them: while no one else noticed anything I might be mistaken. And now this bony man with grey hairs on his cheekbones had been noticing all the time. I hated him violently, and was convinced that I would leave the school.
Someone dragged a chair across the floor in one of the rooms opening off the corridor, and voices and movement began again. I went to the cloakroom to collect my things, and by the time I had my coat on I realized that I was almost in tears at the thought of leaving, not the school, but Oxford and the Weavers. Was I really going to tell them that I would not be coming back next term?
I did not do so. I came back to classes on textile design and book illustration and I began to enjoy my work—and also, though always with some reserve, the art school as a whole. I still darted back into the shelter of the Weavers’ household if any relationship showed signs of becoming complicated—by which I meant if any boy began to press me to make love with him—but I ventured further than I had done before, and I began to envisage a life which I could enjoy.
6
It is odd that friendships with women are unimportant compared to friendships with men, when they are so much pleasanter. Women are more enjoyable to look at, for one thing. Roxane’s skin had a slight downiness and was as pretty as a child’s. Her hair needed nothing but washing and cutting. She used to grumble because it couldn’t easily be adapted to different styles: if the fashion magazines said, “Heads, this spring, must be small and sleek,” she hadn’t a chance, whereas straight fine hair like mine could be made to do things. But I liked to see the way hers found its own shape in crisp spring
y waves, ending in a duck’s tail on the nape of her neck. And women’s clothes, their cosmetics—I felt no confidence about my own until I was in London and earning enough to buy things I liked, but I was never really bored by them, as I pretended to be when I was living with the Weavers. It was Mrs. Weaver who taught me that women can use themselves as artifacts, creating something out of the colours and materials they wear, and the way they can make themselves smell. She took the whole business seriously, giving to unnecessary ugliness or clumsiness almost the weight of a moral offense, and although I told myself I was scoffing, I was impressed. Roxane, of course, accepted her attitude as uncritically as she accepted so much else. She was therefore unusually good at appearances, always wearing fresh, simple, appropriate clothes with an extra fillip of prettiness, and the way she looked gave me satisfaction.
And then intimacy with a woman has the advantage that it doesn’t have to be physical. Roxane and I never touched each other except, perhaps, to give each other a hand out of a punt or to zip up the back of a dress. Our closeness didn’t entail mauling each other’s bodies any more than it did rooting about in each other’s emotions—for although, if anything terrible or splendid had happened, we could have shared it, we rarely went below the surface in our talk. Detached admiration instead of lust, agreeable trivialities instead of intensities, and a solid affection underlying them: why does such a companionship, so easy and agreeable, fail to take precedence over the tensions and agonies of relationships with men? Particularly when women are so often kinder, more sensitive, more sensible, and more honest than men? Perhaps Lesbians are lucky, although I suppose they would not be Lesbians unless they found in other women just those tensions and agonies that I resent.
It would be true, I think, to say that I loved Roxane; although as I came to know her better I also despised her a little. Slowly understanding that her admired “worldliness” was an unconscious mimicry of her mother, I became aware that she was less intelligent than I was. She didn’t enjoy Dostoevski or Joyce, for instance; books which demanded concentration bored her, and books which exploded in the imagination frightened her. And when she did enjoy or admire something she often expressed it in catch-phrases. She used to say that she adored Mozart because he was “the most civilized composer that ever lived.” Perhaps I am being unfair—how can I tell, after all, what went on in her head while we listened to her records of The Magic Flute? But she used to be able to talk about it so immediately after the last note had died away. “God, what bliss,” she would say. “I’m sure I’d have fallen in love with him. Anyone who can invent noises like that …!” and in half a minute she would be painting her nails and wondering whether Dick would be able to join them at Salzburg.
After I had withdrawn to the safety of detachment I often wondered what Roxane and Dick would have to talk about after they were married—that they would get married I hardly doubted. What would they have in common when Mrs. Weaver wasn’t with them? They had known each other for a long time and their manners towards each other were familiar and affectionate, but I never heard them exchange a word which didn’t depend on things they had done or seen, or people they had met, within the framework which Mrs. Weaver provided. I felt that they ought to try more often to make occasions for being alone together, but they seemed satisfied with the few which offered. Watch them for clues as I might, I found it impossible to imagine anything very intimate passing between them, and I suspected that my ignorance of love must be blinding me to subtleties.
Once I almost asked Roxane whether she was in love with Dick—she had just told me with proprietorial pride how some eminent acquaintance of her mother’s had said that he was unusually able—but the telephone rang as I was forming the question and during the interruption my curiosity floated away. It didn’t seem urgent. Perhaps it even seemed slightly absurd, like asking someone whether she loved her brother, or perhaps I let it go because I sensed that Roxane would not have known the answer.
* * *
Soon afterwards the vacation during which the Weavers went to Salzburg began, and I, as usual, went home. It was the first vacation of my last year at the art school, and my chief concern was to accustom my parents to the prospect of my working in London. I didn’t yet know what job I would find, or whether I would be able to find one at all, but I knew that there was nowhere else to go but London. I can only remember the names of three of the friends I made in my last two years at the school, and if I met those three again I should be only mildly interested in what had become of them, but they had at least shown me that Mrs. Weaver’s “civilized” life was as narrow, in its way, as my parents’.
The first day at home was always the worst because it should have been the best. It is impossible to go back to a place where you have lived all your life without expecting something from it. Every turn in the road, every hedge, every tree, every house on the way back from the station was more familiar to me than anything else would ever become. “How big Mr. Fosdyke’s new apple trees are getting,” I could say, or, “Good heavens, the Smiths have painted their gate!” The country’s beauty always hit me when I came back to it. (Living in it, it had been the detail rather than the whole which mattered: whether the primroses were thicker down by the stream or in the copse behind our house, whether the spindleberries in the farm lane were pink yet.) When the roof of the house first showed, one gable and the top of the copper beech appearing beyond a hump of meadow …
It’s odd, the feeling which comes over me when I try to think of my home and family. Roxane once said, “Meg doesn’t shut up when she doesn’t want to talk about something, she just fades out,” and I can feel myself fading out. Or shrinking up, perhaps: what are those jelly-creatures which shrivel when you touch them? It seems unfair to my parents and to the house.
Everybody says, “How pretty the rectory is,” and so it is: a low brick house, L-shaped, with a garden so well laid out and planted by some rich rector in the past that even though my parents have never had the time or money to keep it up properly, cars still slow down as they pass the gate so that people can get a glimpse. But I never wanted to show the place off, and the few times I asked Roxane to stay it was my mother who suggested it. I was nervous because there was so little for us to do. Now that I have been in London so long I realize that to people who live in a town just “being in the country” is delightful, but it didn’t occur to me then that an afternoon spent picking raspberries and red currants for jam might seem an entertainment to Roxane.
Yet I can still remember one of those afternoons. Our fruit cage is in a hollow at the bottom of the garden, where a wood shelters it on one side and the orchard straggles away and becomes a field on the other. It was a windy day, although the sun was brilliant. We had tried to read on the lawn up by the house, but the wind had flicked the pages over and blown hair in our eyes, and it hadn’t been quite warm enough; so we fetched china bowls and went down to the fruit cage, and there the full warmth of the sun flowed in on us, and wood pigeons were cooing in the trees. The raspberry canes were full of fruit, the ripest down low and hidden by leaves. We edged along between the rows, and perhaps it was Roxane’s pleasure which made me suddenly love parting the leaves with their hairy undersides and finding the garnet-coloured berries, soft yet firm, the ripe ones pulling so neatly off their little white cones. I was wearing a pink cotton frock with white braid round the skirt—I had so few dresses that I can remember them all—and Roxane was in dark blue, her hair tousled from stooping and her face cheerful. At one moment we both stopped to rest our backs and I said suddenly, “You do look pretty today,” and she said, “I was just going to say that to you,” and we laughed, feeling shy. We talked about the possibility of hitch-hiking in France later that summer. We knew, really, that Mrs. Weaver would not let Roxane go. My parents would have agreed if I had insisted and if Mrs. Weaver had said yes—they had developed an awe of her—but she always had her plans for Roxane. We were in a day-dreaming mood, though, not bothering about whethe
r it would come off, saying, “Let’s take a tent and camp on the banks of the Loire,” and “We needn’t cook, we can eat peaches and bread and cheese.” There was nothing special in what we said to each other that day, but now it seems to me that we were happy.
But I used to be embarrassed by my mother when Roxane was there. At first it would be all right because of my mother’s prettiness and her gentle manner, and because she could turn her plaintiveness into a joke well enough to fool people for a time. She would say, “And then, of course, I found that Will had lent the jack to someone, so I had to leave the car and walk two miles to the garage,” making her eyes big and smiling ruefully—her “it would happen to me” act—and it was some time before strangers saw that however lightly she told such a story she was always showing herself as my father’s victim, or mine. Or she would say, “What a pretty sweater—how I wish I’d chosen that colour, mine is such a dreary blue.” When someone else was there I noticed much more often how my mother would turn another person’s possessions or adventures or jokes or sadness into an introduction to her own. “You must tell me all about Switzerland—I do so envy you, I never get abroad”; “How clever of you to make that blouse—I’m such a fool, I’ve never been able to sew.” Yet to call her selfish was impossible. There was nothing in her life but doing things for my father and me, and compared to many mothers she was indulgent. She used to look stricken or to cry when I wanted to do something of which she disapproved, but once I had learnt to disregard her tears she would always give in—having made my father miserable and me guilty.