by Diana Athill
I enjoyed the restaurants. The first time I said to myself, “This is me, Meg Bailey, walking into the Miranda as though it were normal,” and it made me smile to myself. I pretended not to notice the trolley with the iced bombe and the peaches and the profiterolles and the millefeuilles and decided to end with cheese, as though such temptations bored me. We had a drink in the bar first, and Victor said, “Good morning, Mr. Sherlock, good morning, Madam. A whisky sour as usual, Mr. Sherlock?” Dick was pleased, but he didn’t show it. He enjoyed spending too much money and he wanted more of it, but he was accustomed enough to it to take its manifestations naturally. When I looked round I saw that there was no one else in the bar with whom I would rather be.
The lunch was disappointing, though. We started with asparagus. It was different from any I had eaten: fat, soft stalks with blunt ends, “in from France this morning,” the waiter said. I expected it to taste like the essence of all asparagus, but if I had been blindfolded I could hardly have told what it was. Our spindly old asparagus at home had far more flavour. And the sauce on the chicken had no more than a general “sauce” taste. Only the wine failed to be disappointing.
“I wonder how they fasten those buttons into the wall?” I said to Dick—the wall was covered with a podgy quilting of red satin, the bulges rubbed in places and the dips where the buttons were with traces of dust in the folds. It didn’t occur to me that they made the quilting in panels. We imagined the wall of the house next door starred with little knots where the buttons’ threads had been pushed through holes bored in the walls, and tied. “It is ugly, isn’t it?” said Dick. “But soothing. There’s nothing like red satin and velvet for making one feel deliciously overfed.”
To me velvet and satin equalled money, glitter and sparkle equalled money, and one of the secret pleasures about restaurants like the Miranda was that they made me feel superior to money. Their decor, food, and ritual were soothing, as Dick said, but at bottom it was boring. I would soon have had enough of our dining out if it hadn’t been for the amusing feeling of invading foreign territory in disguise. This was stimulated by our use of Dick’s expense account. Every time we pushed through one of those revolving doors I felt slightly piratical.
It was odd to discover how well I knew Dick. I had seen him often and had watched him closely in the days when I was “in love” with him, but Mrs. Weaver’s pattern had prevailed over him and me as well as over him and Roxane: we had never talked intimately. If I had been asked I would have said that I knew him well without really knowing him. But I did really know him.
The familiarity came partly from sharing the Weavers. I had stopped seeing Wilfred Yardley when I came to London; everyone I knew now dated from after that time, and I was still not at home with them. Dick was from the past. If I said “tender morsels” to Lucy it would mean nothing to her. When I said it to Dick we both laughed at the same thing. (It was Leo Pomfret’s phrase for choir boys and had been adopted into the jargon of the Weaver household.) Our mannerisms were still much the same, and we could discuss Mrs. Weaver with equal relish, though with some reserves. But it went deeper than that. Without knowing it, I had learnt what Dick was really like, and he was like me.
I had learnt that although he was so good at managing life he didn’t trust it, perhaps because his parents’ separation had given him a worse time than he admitted. He used to insist that he enjoyed having divorced parents. “I’ve always thought how boring for poor things like you, with only one family. If my mamma had stayed with my father I’d have always known where I was going for the holidays, and it would probably have been Golders Green or Epping Forest—my father’s a devil for huge, hideous, comfortable houses in suburbs. As it was I never knew what was coming next. Mind you, it would have been better if they could have back-dated it a bit and got more of it in before the war, because my mamma is a Riviera girl if ever there was one and the frustration of staying in England turned her a bit beady-eyed and bridge-playing. But still, she used to contrive plenty of surprises—a brigadier who taught me golf in the summer hols, and a lance-corporal who wrote plays in verse the next winter.”
Dick was good at managing life because he felt so strongly that it had to be managed—almost that it had to be scored off. It was important to him to be successful, comfortable, and liked because these things proved he had brought it off—which he could do easily, being able and quick-witted as well as an unscrupulous user of his charm. He could see himself using his charm, and found the spectacle amusing. He mocked at his victims sometimes, but he was too kind-hearted seriously to despise them, so to be intimate with him was to join him in an amiable conspiracy. He had developed a method, and I hadn’t yet; but I needed one for the same reasons that he did.
We talked little about Roxane. When we met I would ask how she was and he would answer that she was well, and then she rarely came into our talk again until I said on parting, “Give my love to Roxane.” But I sometimes used to think of her as we talked. We laughed a great deal, more than I had ever laughed before. Did Dick and Roxane laugh so much when they were together? I knew that she could share our special way of being unkind about people (“Nonsense, you can’t call her fat; she’s only fat round the bottom”) because it dated from Oxford, but I wondered whether she knew how alarming Dick found people who were brutal or obtuse. And had she noticed his skin go greenish at the sight of physical cruelty, illness, or poverty on the cinema screen, and realized that he often spoke callously about such things because his nerves shrivelled when he thought about them? It wasn’t long before I realized that he could no more have watched policemen putting handcuffs on that poor madman than I could have, and that he had been brisk about the incident only because Lucy and I, his audience, had forced him to “act the man.”
The most delightful thing about going out with Dick was the discovery that I could be frivolous. With Roxane, and now with Lucy, I was often giggly, but the few men I knew seemed to expect something different from me: listening and looking at them (I had already learnt about my eyes) had seemed the best way to manage them. I had known frivolous thoughts about Henry, but I had never shared them with him: his value, anyway, had been his demonstration that talk could be serious. With Dick, for the first time, I discovered how much I could enjoy frivolity with a man.
* * *
Three times during those months Roxane came to London with Dick, and those occasions were even more enjoyable than the others. The two of them felt like family to me, but more amusing because they were my own age and not family, and their cheerfulness together pleased me for Roxane’s sake. She looked secure and satisfied, not trying to be anything but what she was, and I told myself that she must have learnt to “like it.” It would have been odd if she hadn’t, because of all the men I had met Dick was the only one I could see as being physically attractive.
During those months my job at Skeffingtons’ was confirmed, a cotton I had designed was illustrated in a magazine (though credited only to the firm, not to me), Hargreaves and Blunt promised me more work, and I began to meet people outside Lucy’s house. When I went home for a weekend my parents used to show me off in a quiet way and I used to feel ungrateful and angry because I was bored. Somehow those weekends always used to coincide with a cold or a toothache or having the curse, but I was never ill enough not to go and used to drag about pretending I felt all right so that my mother wouldn’t fuss about the effect of London life on my health. When she asked what I had been doing I would say sulkily, “Oh, nothing special,” as I did when I was at school; and when my father got a book on abstract painting out of the library so that he could talk to me about modern art I was so embarrassed that I let some milk boil over on purpose, to end the conversation. It was better when they talked about the garden or the village or Mrs. Hunter, who now came in to help my mother with the housework. It was frightening that two adult people could stand such monotony, but at least none of it became distorted in the telling.
They thought I looked odd. The
way I cut my hair and made up my eyes, and the kind of clothes I had started to wear, seemed to them outré and unbecoming, but I knew that they weren’t. When I went into a restaurant with Dick and people looked at me, I could tell that they weren’t looking because something was wrong. Perhaps the best thing about that time was learning that I could risk confidence in how I looked.
* * *
Dick stayed at his club when he came to London. One day he said that the next time he came it would be closed for redecorating and he detested the club which offered accommodation to its members at such times: he supposed he would go to a hotel.
“Rodney’s going on his holiday in about ten days’ time,” said Lucy. “Why don’t you stay in his room? He wouldn’t mind.”
That first time Dick stayed in the house we went dancing, which we had never done before. I had said something about never having been to a night-club, and Dick said it was time I started.
“I don’t see how you can swing a night-club on expenses,” I said.
“You’ll have to be a Swedish businessman—you can be buying fertilizer for sphagnum moss, that stuff they feed to reindeer. Swedes are devils for night-clubs. It’s a well-known occupational hazard, spending hours saying, ‘Skol!’ while they get up steam to dance with a hostess.” And when we got there he said to the waiter, “No, we don’t want a table near the band, Mr. Erikson’s got sensitive ears.” We skolled each other when we drank, and got the giggles. We had already drunk a good deal at dinner.
It is disappointing in a way, at last penetrating one of the pockets of life you don’t know and finding that it’s nothing but a part of ordinary life. Before that evening, if I thought about a night-club I saw something like a still out of a glossy American film, the women all beautiful and elaborately dressed, the men all urbane: a race apart called “smart people” who would be talking wittily to other smart people about flying to Marrakesh next weekend. The picture didn’t include the old man sitting alone and reading the Evening Standard who was the first person I noticed in that place. Most of the other men were old or middle-aged, too, some of them in business suits, in groups without women, others with middle-aged wives who wore too much jewellery and fur stoles. A few were with pretty girls, but they weren’t being urbane about it. Only one young party there: three fair pink boys with three fair pink girls wearing taffeta, a twenty-first birthday, as the band soon proved by playing “Happy Birthday to You” on request, with bored automatic smiles in their direction. I came to the surprised conclusion that of all the people there, Dick and I were the ones who would have looked best in the picture as it should have been.
This was relaxing. I needn’t bother with the place any more, I could just enjoy the evening. The band was good, and Dick was as easy to dance with as he had been at that long-ago party at Oxford. We danced so well together that soon we almost stopped talking and it didn’t seem odd that he should keep his hand on my waist as we made our way back to our table. My body had become supple and easy. “Lovely drink!” I thought. “If I could stay in this non-bothering state I could do anything well.”
For a while nothing happened except an increase of this relaxed, dreamy feeling, and longer silences. It was like working on a good drawing: a time when what was in the past and what was in the future disappeared, and I was completely in the moment, with no trailing edges. If no more than that had happened I would not have been disappointed.
It was sudden. At about two o’clock Dick put his elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands, and said softly, “Oh Jesus Christ, you’re beautiful,” My heart jumped, the shock of fear and delight so abrupt that I could only feel it physically, not understand it. I turned towards him and he lifted his face and turned towards me, very near in the almost-darkness, lit on one side by a red glow from the lamp on our table. “I’ve often wanted to ask you, Meg—do you really not know how beautiful you are?”
It was impossible to say anything. Too much was happening, all in one moment: the shock of its being true, the shock of his saying it, the swerve of our bodies towards each other, the word “Roxane” in my head. I sat staring at him, and he leant forward and kissed me on the mouth. “There,” he said. And still very close, staring into my eyes: “So now, what?”
So now panic, and I got up quickly saying, “We must go.” I hardly recognized myself in the cloakroom mirror: my face had a dazzled, almost mad look and my eyes were so big. I went into a lavatory and sat on the seat staring at the door, counting the corners of the panels on it. “Straight lines and right angles are the thing,” I thought, as I had done that night at Fulham Road when I was about to pass out. I said to myself definitely and coldly, “It must stop now. I love Roxane. It hasn’t happened.” After I had combed my hair, powdered my nose, and buttoned my coat up to the neck I thought I had regained control. When I rejoined Dick we didn’t look at each other, stood silently side by side, not touching, while the doorman called a cab, and the moment it had begun to move, as though it had hit the kerb and jolted us violently together, Dick’s arms were round me and his tongue was in my mouth.
* * *
I suppose women like Tinka Wheately are not lying when they talk about sex. I suppose that I am a freak. But I still don’t understand why this is meant to matter so much. They—the novelists who write so balefully about frigidity and the psychiatrists who work at it so earnestly—they must have a case. I wouldn’t be so secretive about myself if they hadn’t made me aware of their case: never have I known anyone well enough to admit that even with Dick I didn’t find out what was meant to happen to me when I made love. I have behaved as though it were freakish and I were ashamed of it. But the truth is that in spite of it I have never been so happy as I was in bed with him.
I loved his smell and his touch and the softness and tenderness of being curled up with him in that secret closeness. I loved my own sensations when he kissed me and stroked me. And when it came to the actual love-making I didn’t mind that nothing happened to me except, sometimes, thoughts about what an odd thing it is for people to do to each other. And I liked his enjoying it—I loved his enjoying it. I loved being for him what he made me at those times.
It was the intimacy of love-making which had always seemed distasteful to me: someone touching parts of you which ought not to be touched, watching you when you ought to be alone, knowing when you have the curse and how you spit in the basin when you are cleaning your teeth; and because that seemed disgusting it was all the more magical to discover that it could be natural. It was only when Dick and I became lovers that I knew how lonely I had been all my life.
The most important part of love is being in secret league with someone. Some women say, “I couldn’t love a man unless he were cleverer—or stronger, or better—than I am.” I don’t understand this. Dick was cleverer than I was in some ways—he had a quicker mind and he was better at putting ideas into action—but he wasn’t stronger or better and I never thought he was. It was nothing of that sort which made me love him, but the fact that secretly, without anyone’s being able to see it from outside, we were alike.
People who knew us both would have said that we were dissimilar, for instance that he was vain and I was diffident. Together we knew that possibly I was the vainer, appearing shrinking only because I wouldn’t risk blows to my vanity. He appeared self-confident, I didn’t, and yet we were both near being arrogant; he appeared sociable, I appeared shy, and yet we both saw other people in the same way. Neither of us felt that living was natural, it was something we had to survive. His tricks of survival were aggressive, mine evasive, that was all the difference, and we could recognize each other’s tricks and applaud them. Dick took more pleasure in his tricks than I did in mine (though I learnt a lot about taking pleasure from him), but he would have been no more surprised than I would have been if suddenly life had declared itself an alien element and we had gone glugging to the bottom.
We could show each other our good sides as well as our bad ones. Once, on a rainy nig
ht, we found an old man lying in a doorway. Dick’s first impulse was his usual one, that of trying to dodge the disagreeable or the tragic, and he said, “Oh come on, he’s only drunk.” Mine was also my usual first impulse, that of thinking, “Poor thing, what can I do,” and then standing there at a loss, ready to cry for him but inefficient. My standing there made Dick come back—he had started to walk on—and bend down to examine the old man, protesting all the time at what a fool I was. It turned out that the old man had had a heart attack, so that we had to get him to hospital; and Dick, once he was involved, was much better than I was at dealing with the situation and was haunted by it for just as long. His escapes from this kind of thing were often ignoble, but he didn’t escape because he was unable to feel; and my response was usually generous, but it was mostly inside my head.
We knew this kind of thing about each other. We were the only people who knew this kind of thing about each other. It made other people seem stupid. We didn’t only laugh at them, we used to have giggling fits about them like two children with a secret. Oh Dick!
* * *
The one person we never laughed at was Roxane. Mrs. Weaver yes, and often, but not Roxane. Dick never even said that she was dull; it was too horrifying for both of us. We talked about her as little as possible, and then gently, as though she were an invalid. Our joint guilt in betraying her was, perhaps, our strongest bond.