by Diana Athill
“It was just that—well, you see, I didn’t know what it would be like.”
“You mean …” The question seemed grotesque, so certain had I always been that, whatever Roxane’s limitations, she was more assured than I was in every kind of relationship. “You mean … being in bed?”
Roxane nodded, still fiddling with her shoe.
“But Roxane, you must have known! You were always miles more sophisticated than me, even at school.”
“Sophisticated!” said Roxane. “Of course I looked as though I knew things; I’d always heard grown-ups talking. I thought I knew. Mummy asked me, the day before the wedding. She said did I want a book about it or anything. She was madly embarrassed, and you know what she’s like, never embarrassed about anything, so it seemed—oh, it was awful, and I just wanted her to shut up, so I said I knew, and I thought I did. Meg, I thought it would be lovely and cosy, like going into Mummy’s bed when I was ill.”
On the last words her voice became that of a querulous child, and I felt myself blushing violently. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I was feeling: pity, certainly, a strong surge of pity—and distaste. That babyish voice!
“Poor Roxane,” I said. “Oh, poor you.”
My horror checked Roxane.
“Silly me, you mean,” she said more normally. “Poor Dick. He was sweet. He didn’t make me—well, do anything, for a whole week. I felt such a fool.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if it was all right now, but I dared not. If it had not become all right—and wouldn’t Roxane have said so if it had?—I couldn’t bear to hear it. Marriage was something about which I thought people made too much fuss; sex was something to which I thought people gave too much weight; and I was intelligent enough not to think of marriage as only a matter of sex: if I was like I thought I was, then I ought not to have been dumbfounded by Roxane’s words, but I was. I felt that I couldn’t grasp the extent of such a disaster—that I was watching a life tottering and that the crash when it fell would be terrifying. I could feel love for Roxane like a physical lump in my chest; and like the taste of acid I could feel hate for Mrs. Weaver. “That bloody woman,” I thought. “That bloody, selfish vampire of a woman, what has she done?” Serene, enviable Roxane, become an object of pity and even (it was shameful to feel it, but it was true) of distaste. (“Like going into Mummy’s bed …” Oh no!)
And what was it that Roxane had found that she “didn’t like”? Suddenly there emerged the memory of reading Ulysses: of Molly Bloom describing a man’s rigid penis. It had disgusted me —it still disgusted me. (Dick? With that thing “like a crowbar”?) But if I married a man, if I went to bed with a man, I would do it knowing he would be like that, and if you loved someone … Did Roxane love Dick? Poor silly Roxane, sitting on the bed almost in tears, wearing her new ear-rings. For the first time in my life I wanted to comfort someone as one wants to comfort a child, and at the same time I thought, “I must never be like that. I must sleep with a man soon.”
We were silent for a moment, Roxane out of embarrassment and I because I was overwhelmed by the tragedy of the situation. I took it for granted that the next step must be Roxane’s escape from it, and that she had turned to me for help. I must say something practical, make some suggestion—but how could I? To cancel a marriage—the wedding ceremony, Mrs. Weaver, Dick and his father and mother, all the people, a faceless crowd in auntlike hats and dark suits surged up in my mind…. How could Roxane even begin to contend with them, and what was I to say?
But Roxane wriggled her foot into her shoe again, and got up from the bed. Just as I was going to say the only words I could muster—“What are you going to do?”—she said, “I must show you my brooch. I’ll get it.”
I was shocked, and at the same time saved. In the half-minute she was out of the room I groped towards the fact that the faceless crowd of people was, indeed, real, and that there was no answer for her to give to the question, “What are you going to do?” And it wasn’t only the people (Mrs. Weaver foremost among them) but the things as well: the dining-room table, old Mr. Sherlock’s carpet—the thing had been done. When Roxane put the brooch into my hand I bent my head over it and stroked the stones, saying nothing but what was appropriate and knowing that Roxane had accepted the situation’s nature. Roxane had accepted something which I had never before thought of: that life could be as it ought not to be, and that one still had to live it. Desolation.
“There’s Mummy, I think,” said Roxane at the sound of movement downstairs. “Let’s go and have a drink.”
* * *
I knew that Mrs. Weaver would advance across the room for a kiss and that I could not avoid it. I knew that I would go stiff with distaste. She noticed nothing, however. I always seemed shy at any time when shyness could be experienced, and presumably my recoil from her now that I felt her to be responsible for Roxane’s plight looked no different from my shyness.
“Dearest Meg,” she croaked, off at once on her usual exaggeration. “How good of you to tear yourself away from London. It means so much to poor, bereft Roxane.”
“Really Mummy,” said Roxane, laughing. “I’m not widowed!”
Mrs. Weaver ignored her. “It’s so sad for her,” she went on, “that Dick had to run off the moment they got back. But his father, poor old man, has been paralysed with sciatica for days, and darling Dick always does the right thing, he has such a good heart.”
I recognized a habit of hers: that of writing off those of her contemporaries whom she disliked by suggesting that they were fuddy-duddies, thus implying that she was different and younger. Feebly I tried to spike it.
“Mr. Sherlock looked quite young at the wedding,” I said. “Only about fifty.”
“Blasé child,” she said. “What have you been up to in London to make you see men of fifty as quite young? It’s terrifying, how you catch up with us. You must sit down with a glass of sherry at once and tell me all about it.”
And I couldn’t even mark my dislike by not complying, because I was not expected to: it was clear who was going to do the talking. Mrs. Weaver was radiant with energy, looking more elegant and younger than I had ever seen her. There had been a moment at the end of the wedding reception when her face had matched her mourning garments and I had felt sorry for her, wondering what would keep her going now that she had brought this marriage off, but now she was animated and benevolent, and much as I resented responding to her mood I couldn’t help doing so. Besides, I still felt the offer of a drink as a sign of my emancipation from childhood. The drawing-room was so comfortable, the intimacy with which she welcomed me was so warming; “I hate her,” I told myself, but there I sat, sipping her sherry and enjoying listening to her voice.
She was full of her plans for finding the couple a house, and referred to Dick so often and so fondly that she herself might have been the bride. What a blessing it was that he had such impeccable taste—had Roxane shown me the brooch? How resourceful he had been when their reservations on the plane had gone wrong—had Roxane described that contretemps? Had I heard how impressed the head of his department was with him, had I been told how amusing Sir Shackleton had found him at dinner? And wasn’t it lucky that he would be back in time for her party next week. I glanced at Roxane while this was going on, and saw that she was looking cheerful and proud. Dick as her mother presented him was the man she had married, and instead of disliking this take-over of her husband she was looking happier for it, apparently reassured that the man she had married was still Dick as her mother presented him.
I wondered again what Roxane and Dick talked about when Mrs. Weaver was not manipulating them—and I wondered still more whether she knew about the “not liking.” And then, since the outward aspect of the marriage as it was now being discussed was obviously so pleasing to Roxane, I asked myself for the first time whether what I had learnt was really so much of a disaster after all.
The possibility—and as the weekend went by it began to look li
ke a probability—that Roxane liked her new status well enough to be able to endure disliking love-making, gave my simplified image of marriage a sharp jolt. I began to see, though still with astonishment, that the two things were not one. It occurred to me that perhaps it was not necessary to like love-making. Perhaps it was possible simply to get used to it. And if that were so, I concluded on the journey back to London, I had been right at the moment when I remembered Molly Bloom: the thing to do was to get used to it in advance, so that if marriage ever happened to me, no one would be able to see me as I had seen Roxane.
PART THREE
8
It was one thing to make resolutions about my sex life and another to carry them out. I didn’t know how to escape from Miss Shaw’s bed-sitter. London never seemed to me hostile, but its size and complexity daunted me so that every day my morning decision to start looking for another room would give way by lunchtime to the argument that any place cheap enough for me would be as depressing as this one. Once again I would group my reproductions and Roxane’s mug full of flowers where they caught the light and made a little island of colour and ownership, and would get into bed and hide in a book.
It was Miss Shaw who, at the end of the second month, shifted me. She told me that her sister was coming to share the flat with her and would need my room as bedroom. At the time I was sure that this was a lie and that she was getting rid of me because she disliked me, but it may have been true: I probably saw her as resenting me only because of my own discomfort with her.
Forced to act, I consulted the girl whose drawing-board stood next to mine in the studio. Tinka Wheately was a dramatic-looking girl with red hair who had been kind in an off-hand way from the beginning and whom I admired because of the number of telephone calls she received from men during office hours. “My cousin may still have a room going,” she said. “I’ll call her if you like—if you don’t mind living in bedlam, that is.”
“What kind of bedlam?” I asked, thinking what a fool my shyness made of me. I hadn’t mentioned my plight to Tinka before because I felt boring enough already without making demands on her.
“Oh, kids and absconding husbands and Polish lovers and things,” she said. “Poor Lucy is always in a pickle, but it’s a nice room and she’s very sweet. Don’t start paying her bills, though.”
Lucy da Silva (the absconding husband was Spanish) lived in Fulham. Her front door had been painted mauve by an amateur and was standing open when I called to see the room. A voice called from the basement, “Down here, be careful of the steps,” and I found her in the big, untidy kitchen: a skinny girl in skinny trousers, feeding a baby.
“Sit down,” she said. “Have a drink—there’s some Campari on the dresser. I’m sorry I couldn’t come up but he goes on strike if I break off in the middle of a meal. He’ll be finished soon and then we can go upstairs and be civilized.”
I refused the Campari because I didn’t know if it was drunk neat or with water, saved a plate which the baby sent skidding across the table, and decided that I would take the room whatever it was like. Everything about the kitchen suggested that it would not be like Miss Shaw’s. There was orange paint behind the shelves of the dresser with pink cups hanging against it. There were sea-shells in a glass jar next to the sugar, a string of sprouting onions hanging from the ceiling, children’s paintings tacked to the walls, and an Edwardian postcard of a simpering nude in a feathery hat propped against the egg-timer.
“Isn’t she obscene?” said Lucy when I looked at the postcard. “She’s encased in pink stockinette from head to foot—you can see the wrinkles round her crotch. She’s Rodney’s pin-up.” She didn’t explain who Rodney was.
The room she was letting, on the top floor, was light and clean, furnished with little more than a divan and a Victorian scrapbook screen. On the landing outside it there were a sink and a decrepit gas cooker, “but everyone seems to use the kitchen,” said Lucy resignedly. She went downstairs ahead of me, her baby on her hip, pushing open doors with “This is the bathroom” and “This is the children’s room.” Her own sitting-room on the first floor rose almost to elegance of a shabby, rakish kind, in spite of the litter of toys and the child’s chamberpot in a corner.
“It’s all a bit exhausting,” said Lucy, dumping the baby in his pen. “I don’t know whether Tinka told you, but my husband took off with a merry widow and lodgers are all I can think of to keep the wolf. They’re always leaving. I do hope you won’t leave but I can’t say I’d blame you if you did.”
She was older than she had looked at first: about thirty, I decided. Her pony-tailed hair and lack of make-up exposed an anxious plainness, but she had friendly brown eyes, a generous mouth, and sketchy indications of style—the trousers, the bright pink ballet slippers on thin feet. I liked her and arranged to move in at the weekend.
* * *
It was not easy to establish who lived in Lucy’s house, because it was her habit to assume that you knew people if she did. If I asked who someone was when she mentioned a name she would always look slightly surprised. Her random references to people gave me at first an impression of a teeming household, but it really consisted of only Tomas, the baby; seven-year-old twins called Sebastian and Kate; an art student, Rodney Carter, who rented the small back room in the basement; and Henry Page, who had the room next to mine.
On the first day I felt nervous about going down to the kitchen for breakfast, but Lucy sent Kate up to fetch me. The men, whom I then saw for the first time, were disappointing. Rodney was younger than I was, and Henry, a free-lance journalist said to be writing a novel, had a face like a bespectacled camel and a north country accent. I told myself that I noticed the accent only because it was ugly, but I expect I was still being a snob.
I had been there five days when I first found Lucy in tears, slumped at the kitchen table with her head buried in her arms. My impulse was to back quietly out of the door, but if something terrible had happened flight would be cowardly, so I went in and hovered behind her, whispering, “Oh Lucy, what is it?”
She pushed two pieces of paper at me, sobbing. “Look at these!” One was the telephone bill, the other a letter from Paulo, her husband, saying that he would come for the two older children at their half-term to take them to the circus. “Adam and I have tickets for them already,” wailed Lucy, “and I never make trunk calls.” I was soon to learn that Lucy cried as easily as my mother, though at different kinds of things, but now I thought that there must be some disastrous significance greater than I understood in these two pieces of paper, and when I heard steps on the stairs I turned to block the door and prevent further intrusion on the tragedy. It was Henry Page, who disregarded me and came straight into the room.
It was clear at once that neither he nor Lucy saw anything embarrassing in the situation. “It was the Yank,” he said, picking up the telephone bill. “Your predecessor, Meg. He used to call his boy friend in Paris once a week. Cheer up, Lucy, it’s not even the final notice.” On being handed Paulo’s letter he became even brisker. “I know he’s a bastard,” he said, “but you can’t call this one of his tricks. They are his kids, after all, and it’s only for an evening. Come on, sweetie, where’s the coffee. I’m late.”
“You really don’t think he’s up to something?” asked Lucy, raising her head.
“I don’t see any reason for assuming he is. Give him a drink and be nice to him—put him in a friendly mood.”
“But what shall I do with Adam? He’ll be here then.”
“He can lurk in my room, if you like.”
Seeing Lucy’s collapse treated by both of them as a common occurrence, I sat down to my breakfast. Adam, I supposed, must be the Polish lover, whom I was eager to see. The bill upset me more than Paulo’s letter, because although I had often seen my parents exclaim over a bill, I had never seen one cause such despair. What happened, I wondered, if you simply did not have the money to pay a bill? What if Lucy still had no money when the final notice came in? I decide
d that I had better give her a lump of rent in advance.
Lucy said, “Oh, angel Meg, could you really?” when I suggested this, but she was not a cadger. It was simply that she hardly ever had enough money. Paulo gave her some for the children, but he was not reliable and he used it as a weapon in their skirmishes. Neither Lucy nor the merry widow was a Catholic, but Paulo was: another weapon, I learnt as time went by. Sometimes he wanted to bully the widow, sometimes Lucy, and either way his Catholic scruples about divorce came in useful. And Lucy was a weapon too, against the widow. Every now and then he would threaten to return to his family—he sometimes even did so for a week or so, and those were occasions when the household suffered severely. Lucy was a rabbit to Paulo’s snake: she didn’t want him back but she couldn’t take a stand on it, partly because of the children and partly because of whatever had once existed between them. Her helpless panic whenever he began to suggest a rapprochement was infuriating but pitiable, and her lodgers would become hoarse with lecturing her.
All this I was still to discover. To begin with it was only Lucy’s financial plight which distressed me. She couldn’t afford to furnish the rooms she let well enough to charge much for them, and that made her so conscious of their inadequacy that she charged even less than she could have done. I asked one day whether Adam could help her—I felt daring, mentioning someone’s lover casually like that, but of course Lucy thought it normal—and she told me he often had to fall back on washing up in Lyons to meet his own expenses. He was an as yet unrecognized composer. I didn’t want to pay Lucy’s bills, having only just enough money for myself; but if someone has no money at all and you yourself have even a little, it is impossible not to help. Tinka Wheately used to say, “It’s like that callous thing in the New Testament—evil will always be done but woe unto him that does it. Lucy will always be helped, so it needn’t be you who helps her.” But Tinka didn’t live in the house.