Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  If I felt embarrassed about my mother I felt ashamed about my father, and that was worse. Roxane loved him, and I knew that she was right. “Your father is a darling man,” she said, “so unselfish and good”; and he was, so it was terrible that he irritated me. When he was slow and vague and my mother said, “Oh Will!” in an exhausted, angry voice I used to detest her but I knew what she felt. His driving, for instance: during the war he had been told that thirty-eight miles an hour was the most economical speed for his car, and he never drove faster than that. Between our house and the town where we did our shopping there were fifteen miles of good road, most of it straight. Although the car was old, it could have gone at forty-five or fifty miles an hour without falling to pieces, but trundle, trundle he would go at thirty-eight until I could have screamed. I used to become so rigid with irritation that my muscles ached, and when Roxane once asked me, as we went into the coffee-shop, “Does your father always drive so slowly?” I snapped, “Oh God, don’t talk about it, sometimes I think I’ll go mad.” She looked startled, and after that I could feel her noticing all my unkindness to my father, such as answering him without raising my voice although he was already beginning to be deaf, and then raising it impatiently and too obviously. And when I tried to be nice to him I knew she noticed that my voice became affected and artificial.

  When I tried to pin down what it was about my father which got on my nerves it always ended by seeming a physical thing. Even when I was small and used to love him I felt embarrassed if I saw him in pyjamas, or coming out of the lavatory, and I used to dislike going into my parents’ bedroom in the morning to sit on their bed while they were drinking their tea. They looked wrong in their night things and the smell of their room was unpleasant—I remember being pleased when they stopped sharing a bedroom. I asked Roxane if she used to go into her parents’ room before her father died, and she said yes, she could just remember it. “Did you like it?” I asked, and she said, “Yes, I loved it. Daddy used to make tents for me in the bed.” I didn’t say any more after that. I knew that I would have been horrified at the idea of being tangled in sheets smelling of my parents’ bodies and for the first time I began to wonder why I felt this distaste. Had my mother decided on separate bedrooms because she felt it too? I had always taken it for granted that they slept in separate rooms because that was what people did when they became old, but now it occurred to me that in a number of houses I knew there was a double bed or twin beds in the main bedroom although the people were as old as or older than my father and mother. And my mother’s irritation, which, although I hated it, seemed so like my own; her way of saying “Oh Will!”…. She was a fastidious woman physically, and had never been a toucher. But because I reacted against her attitudes in so many ways I found it hard to believe that I had caught my squeamishness about my poor father from her, and I still find it so. Probing into things you can’t remember is a profitless business, anyway—except, I suppose, for sick people.

  7

  I cried at Roxane’s wedding. It was disconcerting, because, watching the sniffling women at weddings in my father’s church, I had always thought them absurd. If two people married it was because they wanted to marry, and what was sad about that? The whole performance irritated me—I was thirteen when I decided that I would pare my own wedding down to the minimum if I ever had one—and the emotions considered suitable for the performance were worse than irritating: almost disgusting. I may have been unusually backward about sex but I was not a fool about it. In theory, apart from my dislike of being touched and my distaste for too much intimacy, I knew how it should be treated. I knew that to dress a girl up in white and weep over her, when all she was doing was going to live with the man of her choice, was primitive nonsense.

  Yet when Roxane came into the college chapel where her wedding took place, holding the arm of an uncle whom I had never seen, reason gave way under me like thin ice and there I was, splashing about in sentimentality like everyone else. It was a sunny day, and light flooded in through the tall windows so that the stone of the pillars and vaulting opposite, which I was facing, looked ethereal. It seemed to ripple every now and then, and at first I didn’t understand why. Then I saw that faint shadows were passing over it, and I realized that they were the shadows of the pigeons coming and going outside the windows through which the sun was shining. Stone, sunlight, wings, and music (Mrs. Weaver could be trusted for the music) were beautiful, and then Roxane was there, carefully dignified in an exquisite wedding-dress, her face as pink as usual but stiff with gravity under the veil. I half expected her to catch my eye as she passed—she knew where I was sitting—and there was a slight shock at seeing how remote she had suddenly become from such an exchange. I was afraid to blink in case the silly tears might escape from my eyes.

  Dick did catch my eye during the wedding: earlier, at the moment when Mrs. Weaver made her entrance. He was standing by the altar rail waiting with his best man, watching the door of the chapel with a composed, alert expression, when I saw a flicker of amusement cross his face. I turned to see what had caused it. Mrs. Weaver was sweeping up the aisle. Although she had been triumphant rather than mournful about the whole thing, it was the entrance of a widow bravely enduring the loss of her only child. She was in black from head to foot: an aggressively black dress, an enormous black hat, long black gloves, touched into elegance by diamond ear-rings and a spray of pinkish orchids. No doubt other people who knew her were also amused by her attempt to steal the scene, but for a moment I felt that Dick and I were sharing a secret joke.

  * * *

  I knew by then that I had the job at Skeffingtons’: three trial months designing patterns for furnishing fabrics. It was a big, public-relations-conscious firm, and I had been lucky: the end of my schooling coincided with the beginning of their much-advertised policy of discovering talent in provincial art schools. I also knew that I would be living in a bed-sitter near Edgware Road Station, although I had not yet seen it. A girl I disliked, daughter of the rector of the next parish to my father’s, had spent a year there. Her parents had told mine that although they had wanted her safe in a hostel, they had ended by preferring Miss Shaw’s flat: more comfortable, more independent, and Miss Shaw had been so kind and friendly. I was not pleased. Because of this connection I imagined that Miss Shaw would be auntlike, and I wasn’t going to London for anything I could get at home. But at least my main point had been won and I was going to London. I went the week after Roxane’s wedding.

  As soon as Miss Shaw opened the door I disliked her, and not because she was auntlike but because she frightened me. She was stocky, with short grizzled hair, and her clothes and manner were so commonsensical that I instantly felt vague and foolish. Her flat was ugly. I had learnt enough from my fellow art students to have become disgusted by the idea of being a snob: it had become important to me not to be a snob, just as it had become important to me never to be shocked. Drinking an introductory cup of coffee in Miss Shaw’s sitting-room, however, I was a snob. She called it her lounge, not her sitting-room, and she talked about “going out to business” instead of going to work, or to the office. She had antimacassars on her chairs, lace doilies under her ashtrays, and two green pottery Scotties on her mantelpiece. I felt as distinctly as my parents would have felt it that she was “not my kind of person,” and I was ashamed of it. The brisk way she went through the forms of welcome did not disguise her boredom: she wished she didn’t have to let her room and was hoping that I would be out a lot. Alarm at her briskness and her boredom, and guilt at my snobbish feelings, increased my customary shyness. I could feel myself smiling obliquely in elaborate propitiation, hear myself agreeing with absurd effusiveness to whatever she said, apologizing when there was nothing to apologize for, thanking her—for what? And as though I were watching my own reflection becoming distorted, I knew that she was thinking, “What a tiresome, affected girl.”

  My room, when at last she showed it me, was a shock. It was eleven feet long and nine f
eet wide. The window, hung with thick cotton net and beige mock-damask, looked out onto a well. The well was lined up to the second floor with white tiles to reflect the light, but not enough light reached the tiles. I found that at no time of day could I do without electric light. When it rained—this I learnt on my third night—a tile would sometimes become detached from the wall and would smash on the paving outside my window. The first time this happened I sprang awake sweating—it sounded like a fist being thrust through glass—and it was an hour before lack of further noise reassured me. Looking out of the window when I opened it next morning—it was a struggle and left my hands dirty—I saw the many fragments of tile on the ground, observed the brown squares on the sides of the well, and deduced the cause of the noise. Another sound which startled me at first was the release of bathwater in the flats above and opposite: a loud cascading, ending in a glugging diminuendo. I resented this intrusion from neighbouring households until I began to learn the hours they kept and to recognize some of them, such as the extra-full bath always released by the third floor opposite at seven-thirty in the morning. Then there was at least the comfort of human activity in the sounds.

  I did not expect to be able to fit my possessions into the room, but it turned out to be possible. The things I needed least often could be left in my suitcases on top of the narrow whitewood closet, and papers and my few cooking utensils could be kept in cardboard boxes under the table at which I both wrote and ate. There was a gas ring standing on an asbestos mat for my cooking, with a notice saying NO FRYING, PLEASE pinned to the wall above it. I found that I could disregard the clutter by concentrating on the fireplace and the hanging shelf above it. I put my books on the shelf, propped reproductions of Crivelli’s “Annunciation” and Picasso’s “Absinthe Drinker” on the mantelpiece, and put some flowers between them in a blue mug which Roxane had given me. I was nervous about using my radio for fear of disturbing Miss Shaw, and kept its volume so low that I myself could hardly hear it. After I had boiled an egg for my supper and got into bed with a book, the radio purring in my ear and the reading lamp throwing a circle of light on the ceiling, I told myself that I felt snug enough. But was I going to spend every evening like this, forever?

  I began to be humiliated as well as chilled by Miss Shaw’s lack of friendliness. I tried to imagine what the other girl could have done to charm her into kindness, and soon only my failure to do so prevented me from sinking to imitation. The way Miss Shaw turned a look of irritation into a jolly smile if she happened to meet me on the way to the bathroom was so depressing that I started listening at my door before leaving my room in an attempt to avoid encounters, and I was soon appearing furtive as well as affected.

  “At least,” I wrote to Roxane on her honeymoon, “it makes the studio seem nicer.” And the studio was not at all bad. I could prevent my voice from rusting in my throat from lack of use by speaking to people, and after the first lost days in which no one seemed to know what to give me to do and I felt it was my fault, I was kept busy. The studio I was going to like, I could feel that; but Miss Shaw’s flat was a low-toned but nevertheless horrifying nightmare.

  * * *

  I almost cried with gratitude when, at the end of a month, I had a letter from Roxane inviting me to Oxford for a weekend. Dick was about to begin a job in a widely ramified firm dealing with chemicals which had a branch at Oxford. I was unable to imagine what he would do in it—obviously nothing technical—but I knew it was a good job and that it had been a great piece of luck that Sir Shackleton Fitch, an old friend of his mother’s and Mrs. Weaver’s, was on the board. Dick and Roxane had come back to Mrs. Weaver’s house, from which they were to find themselves a flat or house. There was no hurry, Mrs. Weaver had decided: they could have the top floor to themselves and lead their own lives. Now Dick had to spend a few days with his father, who had not been well, so would I come for the weekend.

  My feelings at approaching that house had always been mixed. Even when I was “coming home” from the art school, knowing every paving stone and lamp standard in the street, anticipating the smell of the hall and the subdued sound of my feet on the stairs, I had still felt echoes of my first awestruck arrival there. “How odd,” I used to think, “that I’m not nervous any more.” And this time it was different again. This time I was approaching it to visit someone of my own age who had become a married woman: it was as though Roxane’s wedding had moved our whole generation forward onto a new square in the game. I didn’t seriously believe that a ceremony and the passing of a few weeks would have made her a different person, and I was half laughing at my respect for the words “a married woman”; but I still felt uncertain at the prospect of this meeting. Whatever had or had not happened to Roxane as a result of her marriage, I knew that I could not expect, as a mere friend, to have my old importance in her eyes.

  I had told her not to meet me: as a sign of my new independence I had only a light bag with me and could take a bus from the station. If I had set out from home instead of from London my mother would have said, “Have you packed a thick jersey … your walking-shoes … your macintosh?” and I would have answered, “Oh Mummy, I’m only going to Oxford for two days.” I enjoyed the lightness of my bag, and my uncertainty was not preventing me from expecting to enjoy the weekend. But as I stood on the doorstep in the twilight and touched a remembered blister in the paint, near the knocker, I thought, “It ought to be like stepping back into last year—how strange that it won’t be.”

  It was only chance that Mrs. Weaver was out to tea, so that Roxane was alone to welcome me, but it made her seem like the mistress of the house. Her hair was done in a new way which showed a pair of small garnet ear-rings which were unfamiliar to me.

  “Those are nice,” I said when we were upstairs. The room’s now familiar luxury gave me a holiday feeling after Miss Shaw’s room, but I was still shy.

  “Aren’t they?” said Roxane. “Dick bought them for me on the way home, and a brooch which goes with them. I’ll show you in a minute.”

  The way she said, “Dick bought them for me,” matter-of-fact yet a trifle smug, was very “married.”

  “Doesn’t it seem odd,” I asked, “being back here instead of in a house of your own?”

  Her answer demolished my new image of her. “It’ll seem much odder,” she said, “being in a house of my own. Mummy’s got lots of things lined up for us and we went to see one of them yesterday, and all I could think was how enormous and empty it looked—I couldn’t imagine living in it. Luckily Mummy and Dick are so good at houses. He’s bought us a dining-room table already, and his father is giving us a carpet and all sorts of bits and pieces.”

  “Don’t you want to choose things yourself?”

  “I don’t think I’m much good at it, really.”

  I began to feel more sure of myself. Disinclined though I was for any involvement in domesticity, I could have done better at this part of getting married than Roxane was doing. I knew that I would have used it as a chance to start living in my own way.

  When I began to unpack Roxane lay on the bed, as she had always done when I was unpacking.

  “Tell about London,” she said.

  I looked at her in surprise. Everyone knew about London, but she had just come back from Rome, Florence, Paris—from getting married. Our long-established reserve about love and sex prevented me from asking the question I most wanted to ask—“What is being married like?”—but even if that question was taboo, surely she was the one who ought to be telling?

  “London’s all right,” I said. “But what about you? Where did you go? What did you see?” I all but said, “What did you do?” but changed it with a stammer because of the absurd consciousness of the double bed which was underlying our meeting.

  “What didn’t we see!” she exclaimed, laughing, and began to prattle about churches, museums, opera, tired feet, sunburn, enchanting little restaurants—all the paraphernalia of holidays abroad. She might have been describing one of their
pre-marriage holidays, and as I listened and questioned I chided myself for my naïveté in expecting anything different.

  “It was great fun, really,” she said. “The second half, anyway.”

  “Why not the first half?” From what had gone before I was expecting some story of bad weather or indifferent hotels.

  “I don’t know,” she said, sitting up and taking off one shoe. Her tone of voice was not conclusive, so I looked at her questioningly. “Well, I do know, really,” she went on, beginning to pick at the heel of the shoe. “It was just that I was silly.”

  “In what way, silly?”

  “Well—I found that I didn’t like being married very much.”

  Her voice was as light as ever, but she had flushed. I turned away and carefully put my hairbrush on the dressing-table. “Not the weather …” I thought quickly. Surely it was the lightness of the voice that was real, not what might be meant by the words? It was strange how instantly I caught at implications of disaster, how tuned I must have been for it. In a flash I had switched from surprise at the ordinariness of our reunion to a scared impulse to behave as though I hadn’t heard what she had said. Should I ask—what?—oh, whether Leo Pomfret was around. But I knew that if Roxane had said this much she needed to say more.

  “What was wrong with it?” I asked, almost in a whisper.