by Diana Athill
Lucy’s moments of despair were counterbalanced by moments of triumph. “Come on down,” shouted Henry Page one evening, when I had been there about three weeks. “God has provided, we’re celebrating.” Everyone was in the kitchen, with a stocky, bald stranger, and there was a bottle of whisky on the table. “Look at this!” cried Lucy, pointing to the egg-timer. Propped in front of the stockinette nude, with candles lit on either side of it, was a cheque for fifty pounds. “My father-in-law, believe it or not, the horrid old toad,” said Lucy joyfully. She had still not explained why her father-in-law was an old toad, nor what Paulo’s “tricks” might be, but I had already accepted the da Silvas as enemies against whom all of us were in league.
The stranger was Adam. I had supposed that a Polish lover would be tall, haggard, and haunted-looking, so a chunky, merry middle-aged man in a boiler-suit was a let-down. But he was very friendly, sitting there with Tomas on his knee, crinkling his little blue eyes at me. It was impossible not to feel comfortable with him. We finished the whisky and half a dozen bottles of beer, and that was the best evening I had spent since I came to London. I was beginning to discover drink, but even without it the evening would have been good.
“Meg,” said Lucy half-way through it, “one of the things I must do with that money is buy curtains for your room. It’s your room so you must help me choose.”
The art school and the studio had begun to teach me that I could trust my eye enough to stand up for it. The art school had demolished my pretensions as a painter, but no one had ever attacked my sense of decoration; it had earned me a job and it was proving adequate in it. In the studio I had not yet argued when compelled to do something of which I didn’t approve, but I had thought of arguments and my thoughts had not been diffident. Hesitant though I was about most things, I was not hesitant about colour and pattern; so to walk with Lucy into a room full of colour and pattern and to know within a few minutes that of the materials we could afford the turquoise, black, and white deck-chair canvas was the thing, to be made into blinds, not curtains, gave me a delicious feeling of assurance.
“It’s an inspiration, Meg,” said Lucy admiringly.
“Would you mind if I painted the floor black?” I asked. “With the screen and your divan cover and those blinds, and perhaps a dark sea-blue on the end wall …”
I broke off, feeling rude at dictating to Lucy the decoration of one of her rooms, but she didn’t mind. So I bought the paint and spent a week of evenings working on the room, going to sleep in a heavy smell of paint, my bed islanded in floor-stain.
To see it turning into my room—to stand first in the door to admire it from there, then by the window; to move things about until something clicked and I knew they were in the right place; to run out on Saturday to buy a piece of stuff for a cushion—all this delighted me. As my room changed, so I felt myself changing. I had never of my own accord invited anyone to anything, but when the room was finished I asked Lucy, Adam, Henry, Rodney, and Tinka to a wine party because I truly wanted them to come. I felt like a different person, and the men looked at me as though I had become different.
* * *
After my party Henry Page began leaving his door open in the evenings. It was hot, and he pretended he wanted a through draught. His desk stood where it caught the eye of anyone coming up the stairs, so it was easy for Henry to look up and say, “Hi! Had a hard day in the office?” and then, after a gossip, to suggest a beer or a walk after supper.
He was a great walker, although to begin with he asked me to do no more than stroll down to the embankment with him. He used to go out for hours at night, along the river to the City, or into those endless parts of London where long streets of big, flaking houses have been turned into rabbit-warrens of bed-sitters. He would go out quietly, as though trying to escape attention, but afterwards he would let slip how far he had gone, and at what strange hours. He must genuinely have enjoyed his walks or he would have made them shorter, but I couldn’t help imagining that as he strode along in the sandals he had made out of old motor tyres and his thick sailor’s sweater, he was saying to himself, “Look at me, Henry Page, interesting and misunderstood, walking alone through the night.”
For some days we talked in his doorway and went to look at the river. Then he began to knock on my door from time to time, offering cups of tea. Then, when he knocked, he brought his manuscript with him and read me parts of it. That a writer should be reading his work to me was so exciting that it took me a little time to realize how bad it was, but when I did acknowledge it I was less embarrassed than reassured: I thought a good writer would have found me an inadequate audience.
I soon got used to Henry’s lugubrious face and his accent, and I liked him. It was surprising that someone whose writing was so full of turgid imagery (I remember “the sun like a chandelier dripping blood” and, of a green-grocery, “the pubic tangle of chicory leaves”) should have been so sensible and interesting in speech. And Henry didn’t mind being silent. He talked to the point of garrulity if he felt like it, but he didn’t believe that he ought to talk if he didn’t feel like it, and he didn’t observe any code as to what might or might not be said. Most of the people I had known until then had observed such a code. My parents and—even more—Mrs. Weaver would have thought Henry ill-mannered, but I found it comfortable to be with someone who, although he could be self-conscious and devious, talked as naturally about beliefs, unhappiness, or dreams as he did about food or the weather.
I felt honoured when at last Henry asked me to go with him on one of his night walks, and I enjoyed it, although I was footsore by the time we reached Putney Bridge and exhausted when we got back. The knowledge that however far we were from home there was no way of returning except on foot—it was three in the morning when we reached Putney and we had no money for a taxi—was simultaneously bracing and restful in an unexpected way. The darkness of side streets, heavy with the sleep going on behind curtained windows, and the cold light of main streets stretching empty in either direction, both suggested adventure. When we heard footsteps, or a car went by, we wondered, “What is he doing, out so late—where are they going?” Night turned people into individuals. I was sorry afterwards that memories of my sore feet and aching calves prevented my going out again with Henry on his longer walks.
He kissed me that evening, and I began to wonder if he might be the man to whom I would lose my virginity. I felt at home with him. He talked so naturally of his fears and failures that I, in return, could tell him some of mine; and although I was at first disgusted by some of his revelations, I was also interested. One of his anxieties was that he masturbated too often, and he asked me how often I did it. This, for all my determination to be unshockable, shocked me. Because I had never done it I was not even sure that I knew what the word meant, but I was sure it was something too private to be mentioned. After Henry had brought it out, however, I couldn’t help admiring him for being able to discuss a subject so taboo with such earnest openness—and it was useful too. When I had stopped recoiling I could learn from him how masturbation was done.
I was as unfamiliar to Henry as he was to me. My inhibitions, as well as my voice and manner, seemed to him the result of my class, and I only had to be the least bit intelligent, kind, generous, or open-minded for him to be touched: he felt he was discovering the real human being behind the façade and the funnier he found the façade the more he valued what he discovered behind it. I could have given Henry a worse shock than he ever gave me by telling him that part of the reason why he was attracted to me was that I was “a lady” and that buried under his intelligent resentment of class differences there was a romantic idea of them. I never did because it would have hurt him, and also because I liked his image of me: the comic, archaic but rather delicate form containing the warm real thing. But in spite of Henry’s advantages I disliked being kissed by him. His breath often smelled of digesting food and I couldn’t bear the touch of his dry, thin hair.
One evening
Lucy startled me by saying, “You mustn’t be unkind to poor dear Henry.” I didn’t know what she meant. Seeing me puzzled, she went on to say that he was falling in love with me and that if I didn’t want him I must do something about it.
“But Lucy,” I said, “I haven’t done anything to make him fall in love with me—if he is falling—so what could I do to make him not? I like him, so I don’t see why I should suddenly turn horrid to him.”
“You don’t have to turn horrid to him…. Meg, how old are you?”
“Nearly twenty-one.”
“Haven’t you ever had an affair with anyone?”
“Of course not,” I said, and then blushed hard at having said it. I knew that there was no “of course” about it at my age; that it was only the way I had lived which made it seem inevitable to me. Lucy’s look of surprise was not unkind, but it embarrassed me so much that I had to find an excuse to go up to my room.
Soon afterwards we had another party, with music because Rodney had a guitar-playing friend sleeping in what must have been great discomfort on the floor of his room. It was Saturday, so no one needed to go to bed. I felt gay and relaxed because of the music and because Adam was there and was the sort of man who made any woman who happened to be in the room feel charming—Lucy always became pretty when he was there. Without noticing it, I began to drink wine as though it were beer. We all laughed a lot, and when Henry put his arm round me I leant against him, and after a while I began to have a strange but not disagreeable feeling of watching the room through a plate-glass window. I didn’t want to move and my face was fixed in a smile. I thought of trying to change my expression, just to make sure that I could, but when I began deliberately to pull down the corners of my mouth the attempt amused me so much that I smiled again and said to myself, “Why not go on smiling when I am only doing it because I want to.” I drank more wine and soon a delicious lassitude came over me and I wished that I could be in my bed without the trouble of going upstairs and undressing. I rested my head on Henry’s shoulder and shut my eyes, and at once the room began rocking gently like a boat. It was a pleasant sensation at first, but it became vertiginous. Sitting up, I found that if I concentrated, focusing my eyes on a corner of the dresser (“Straight lines and right angles,” I said to myself. “That’s the thing.”) I could check the rocking, but now my face had become stiff and heavy as though the flesh had turned to clay. These various sensations absorbed me so completely that I didn’t speculate about their significance, and I was astonished when Henry suddenly asked, “Meg, are you feeling all right?”
“Quite all right,” I said distinctly, but as I said it I knew it wasn’t true. I ought to get up and leave the room, but the effort would be too much. “I think she’s going to be sick,” said someone, and Adam had his arm round my waist and was rushing me to the downstairs lavatory. I had always had a horror of being seen vomiting, but this time I felt so deadly ill that I could only be grateful for the support of a hand under my forehead. Then Adam and Henry helped me upstairs and I was sick again, all over the floor, and somewhere inside the helpless inertia of my body and its overwhelming illness I was thinking, “They lie when they talk about passing out. I know what’s happening and I wish to God I didn’t.” Then I passed out.
My shame next morning was more painful than my hangover. Seeing the floor clean and my washed dress on a clothes-horse by the open window, I knew that Lucy—or Adam and Henry?—had dealt with my vomit, and I felt that I could never face them again. “I must find another place to live,” I thought—and certainly there was no question of going down to breakfast. If I slept again I might wake to an empty house, because on Sundays they often went to the pub round the corner for a pre-lunch drink, and then I could sneak out to a coffee bar—wasn’t black coffee supposed to make you feel better? But the discomfort of my queasy stomach and aching head kept me awake.
At ten o’clock Henry came in with coffee. “With the commiseration of the house,” he said. “How are you feeling?” He was smiling, but not in mockery. Gently he made me drink the coffee, get up, and go downstairs. None of them seemed to see anything horrifying in what had happened. “Poor Meg,” said Lucy, “did you want to die? It was Adam’s fault for sloshing out the wine like that.”
It was because Henry was part of this absolution from shame that I made up my mind to go to bed with him after all.
* * *
If my parents had ever known about it they would have assumed that Henry “seduced” me, but Henry could not have made me go to a cinema with him if I had been unwilling. Though he was not shy in speech he lacked confidence in action, knowing himself to be unattractive and having, besides, a generous inclination to allow people their freedom. If I flinched when, during our embraces, he put his hand on my breast or thigh, he would remove it at once. He never asked me to sleep with him, although even I could tell that he was in a fever for it.
I had learnt that he liked to kiss my eyes and neck, so that by turning my head in certain ways I didn’t often have to endure kisses on the mouth. Once this pattern had been established I had become accustomed to his touch, even enjoying the warm feeling of being in a man’s arms and the disturbance which came from knowing how excited he was. And the words he would mutter: those were a genuine pleasure to me and I wanted to hear more of them. I didn’t suppose that by carrying our evenings together in my room the final step further I would be changing their nature much. It was simply a matter, I thought, of getting this one thing over. I had to do it sometime, and until I had done it I would continue to feel childish compared to people like Tinka and Lucy.
So three nights after my drunkenness, when Henry had exclaimed “Oh, God!” and had wrenched away from me, and I had seen that he was shivering, I said, “Would you like to come back when I’m in bed?”
* * *
At least I was able to disguise from Henry the degree of my revulsion. All he knew was that I was rigid and trembling and experienced no pleasure, which he put down to my virginity. “Poor little Meg,” he whispered, “poor darling, it will be all right soon, you’ll see,” and he held me tenderly, wanting me to fall asleep with my head on his shoulder. How anyone could suppose sleep possible in that position was astonishing to me, but I was so exhausted and so thankful that the worst was over that for a few minutes I did sleep, and I dreamt.
I dreamt that I was in a small room with no windows. Long paper streamers hung down from the ceiling—only a few of them to begin with, then a great many so that I couldn’t see through them to the door. I wanted to get out, but when I began to move towards the door I found that the streamers were fly-papers clogged with dead flies, and the more I tried to push them aside the more they stuck to me. They stuck to my pushing hands, they stuck to my hair, they stuck to my face and wound round my neck. Every attempt to escape entangled me further, filling me with terror and disgust. “Perhaps if I make a wild plunge,” I thought, “I can tear my way through them”; and I woke to find myself turning over violently in bed, with the knowledge that it was not fly-papers on my skin, but Henry’s hands.
I was appalled at dreaming like that about Henry. He had been nothing but kind, and at that stage I still knew how much I liked him. It needed an effort, but I managed to kiss him good night and to speak gently when I asked him to go back to his room. When he had gone I cried—not in grief but in hysteria—had a bath, and at last went to sleep knowing that I could never do it with Henry again—could never let him touch me again—but that I had done it, and that it hadn’t been the act itself which had caused my dream. The act itself was disagreeable and uncomfortable, and it seemed extraordinary to me that anyone should be able to enjoy it; but people did, and it was soon over, and it could be got used to. Having done it once I could, if I had to, do it again, provided I felt for the man something more than I felt for Henry.
* * *
It was true that I couldn’t let Henry touch me after that. The next day, my hysteria over, I argued that I must. To betray the violence
of my distaste would be cruel. But when he put his hands on my arms and drew me towards him to kiss me, my body took over against my will and jerked so convulsively that I knocked his glasses off. Poor Henry, feeling for his glasses with a stunned expression; poor me, not knowing how to explain what had happened.
A painful week followed, during which I began to hate him although I knew I was the one to blame. Knowing that he lacked confidence in his own attractiveness, I tried to exaggerate my neurotic nature and my lack of experience, but he didn’t spare me in return. He even became cruel as the wrangle went on, so that I began to feel that I had not, after all, asked him to fall in love with me. I prefer not to remember the terrible scene he made at the end of that week when he announced that he could stand it no longer and must leave the house.
I had to contend with guilt towards Lucy as well as towards him. Henry had been a good lodger, tidy and regular with the rent, and Lucy and the children were fond of him. For a time they became cool towards me, and I took to making coffee on the stove outside my room instead of going down to the kitchen for breakfast. But a new lodger soon turned up—a friend of Rodney’s—and Tomas got German measles so that Lucy needed my help. It was not long before we were friends again.
9
A month or so after Henry left I got my first illustrating job.
I had a portfolio of drawings from the art school, and I had made some for Sebastian and Kate, illustrating a fantastic serial story which Adam used to tell them from time to time. The children made me shy, so it was easier to draw for them than to talk to them. Tinka Wheately saw these drawings one day when she came to the house and began nagging me to try for free-lance work. It was simple, she said. There was a copy of The Writer’s and Artist’s Year Book at the studio in which I could find publishers’ requirements and telephone numbers, and all I need do was ring up and make an appointment with the art editor. Tinka was a sexy girl, always too occupied with men to become a close friend, but she was good for me because I was ashamed of betraying my nervousness to her. If Lucy had advised me to hawk my wares in this way I could have answered, “But Lucy, just imagine having to telephone some frightful unknown art editor, who is probably very busy….” and she, too, would have thought the prospect alarming, but Tinka would have answered, “Don’t be an ass, it’s what they’re there for.” So when she put the Year Book on my drawing-board and said, “Try Hargreaves and Blunt—they do lots of children’s books,” there was nothing for it but to reach for the telephone.