by Diana Athill
To see written down on three consecutive days “Dinner Joe,” “Lunch Raoul,” “Hugh L. 6:30, the Antelope” could give an impression of gaiety only if you didn’t know Joe (who worked in the studio), Raoul (one of Jamil’s friends), or Hugh L. (whose surname I have forgotten but who was a shy man in thick glasses, met at some cocktail party). I wondered if the content of other people’s apparently gay lives amounted to no more than this. It was not even very satisfying that men wanted to take me out. Sooner or later I would have to rebuff them, and then they would either disappear or fall in love with me. Lucy seemed to think that I should feel guilty when they fell in love with me, because there was no chance of my loving them in return, but I didn’t try to make them do it, and anyway why be so scrupulous about them when they were not particularly scrupulous about me: they tried to make me fall in love, and several of them were as firmly married as Dick was, so what were they offering me but a bad time? “You enjoy it, Meg!” said Lucy once, accusingly, and perhaps I did a little; but surely everyone enjoys being loved? I felt fond of any man who fell in love with me, and wanted to keep him as a friend—but it was true that he would usually end by being unhappy and that was exhausting.
* * *
Not long after Conrad was born Dick and I did something we had never done before: we went for a walk in Hyde Park. We were an evening couple, usually, a restaurant and indoor couple, not because we disliked being out but because of the times when it was possible to meet. This time we had managed a whole day together, and it turned out to be the kind of day I always waited for in October, on which autumn seems to come to rest at the point of its perfection. There are never many such days—sometimes only one: warm, the sky blue but everything under it softened by a mist so faint that it is almost imperceptible. The remaining green of summer and the gold of autumn are not shrouded but are on the edge of dissolving in the silvery haze. On that particular day the tops of trees and the roofs of distant buildings were distinct against the sky, but their bulk was blurred, like a landscape in some Chinese painting, and it seemed to me miraculous that this day should have coincided with Dick’s presence.
We didn’t have to be careful. Who among the people we knew would be walking in Hyde Park early on a weekday afternoon? We wandered across the grass, Dick’s arm round my waist and my head against his shoulder, indulging ourselves in being “lovers in a park.” When Dick looked at the Serpentine and the horizon of rooftops, disguised that day as those of some exotic city, a place of spires and domes, he wasn’t smiling but his whole face had a smile behind it and I knew that mine had too. There was no need to say, “How beautiful!” because we were both seeing it in the same way.
The afternoon, the evening, and the night stretched ahead, and we didn’t have to wonder what the time was. “Shall we go,” he said, “to one of those places where my mamma used to meet her friends for tea after shopping in Bond Street? Tiny sandwiches and enormous éclairs—or babas au rhum?” I felt water run in my mouth: éclairs with real cream in them, luxury and idleness. If Dick were with me all the time how many trivial things would flower into delight. I thought, “Tomorrow he’ll be gone; I must store up every moment of this day.” And although I didn’t know it then, that was when unhappiness began. Before that I had gone through bad times, particularly towards the end of each of our absences from each other, when I would suddenly fall into obsessed misery as though without knowing it I had exhausted all my hope, but those times hadn’t counted as unhappiness because I forgot them when he was with me. It was when the “storing up” began that I knew what I was in for.
Once I was fool enough to go to a party with Dick and Roxane when they were in London together. Being with the two of them together was manageable, although I avoided it as much as I could without puzzling Roxane, because a pattern for such meetings already existed and because Dick and I then shared the dangerous game of precautions and tact so that the more we seemed indifferent to each other except as friends, the more we were conscious of our alliance. But at this party they were together as a couple in their own setting. They knew things about other people there which I didn’t know, and shared opinions about them. I watched them standing side by side, talking to another couple, obviously pleased to see them. Dick said something funny, and their friends laughed so much that the woman spilt some of her drink. Dick took out his handkerchief and wiped her skirt, all of them still laughing, and I knew that he was enjoying himself.
It was like spying through a window into the life he led during all the many days when he was not with me. I knew he would have suffered equally if he had watched me across a pub while I was drinking with Joe or Raoul—more, if he had seen me letting Raoul kiss me good night—but I still felt stiff with misery, the situation’s victim. I tried to listen to a woman telling me about New York, but my eyes kept seeking Dick out however much I forbade them to. He never looked across the room at me. “He’s right,” I told myself, “we could give ourselves away with one glance,” but his attentive or animated face turned towards other people seemed cruel.
The woman who had been to New York was not a strong enough antidote, so I drifted away from her towards a cluster of people by the bar as though I wanted my glass filled. A tall man wearing a tie with little red shields on it said, “Hullo, need refuelling? Let me,” and took my glass. He had thin fair hair, like plastic smoothed over his scalp, and the shape and colour of his face made me think of a ham.
“Now then,” he said, “tell me who you are and what you do and where you got that perfectly ravishing dress and whether you belong to anyone here.”
“That’s unfair,” I said, “so much at one go. If I tell you one thing, you must tell me one in return.” I was hypnotized by the horribleness of this man, but at the same time pleased with myself for answering in a way he found amusing. I hoped Dick was watching, but I managed not to look round to check.
“I don’t suppose you’ll speak to me when you know what I am,” said the man. “I can see you’re an egg-head and you’ll think me beneath contempt.”
“You’re in advertising?” I said, and he guffawed although he wasn’t pleased.
He turned out to be a stockbroker, and he knew the vice-chairman of Skeffingtons’. Valuable ham-face, he filled my glass three times and to everything he said I came back with something appropriate. It was an extraordinary sensation, like sitting down to some game I had never played, such as bridge, and discovering that I knew the rules: dreamlike, but the opposite of my usual kind of dream in which I would discover that I didn’t know them. When he said, “Come and have dinner with me,” I looked round and saw Dick taking a red carnation out of a vase and sticking it in the hair of a fat, dark woman, everyone round them roaring with laughter and a man shouting, “Olé!”
“I’d love to,” I said, and on our way out I kissed Roxane good night—right cheek touching left, left touching right—which we never did: it was wonderful being ham-face’s girl, like being in a transparent plastic capsule. “Good night Dick, love,” I said. “What a party!”
But in the restaurant the plastic capsule shrivelled, scorched away by boredom. I stared at ham-face and kept repeating to myself, “What am I doing, sitting here with this terrible man? He’s the most terrible terrible man I’ve ever met.” I stopped talking but he didn’t notice because he had started describing what he was really like. There is a sort of boredom which is almost fascinating because it’s so complete and perfect: I knew that ham-face was going to tell me apologetically how rich he was, and he did; I knew he would say he wished he wasn’t, and he did; I knew he would say he was lonely, and that if he had more time he would read a lot, and he did. I made a bet with myself; ask him if he’s married and he’ll say yes but his wife doesn’t understand him—go on. But he wasn’t married, and the question and my return to silence had been a mistake. He interpreted the first as interest and the second as a sign of my yielding nature—my fault, because I was ashamed of how I was despising the poor man and tried to co
mpensate for it by looking into his eyes and smiling.
As soon as we were in a taxi after dinner he clutched at me and began to kiss me; a rough, awkward clutching and kissing, smelling of brandy and leaving slobber on my mouth because I was unable to turn my face away in time. All the vileness of the evening broke over my head and I began to cry. He was fairly drunk, and I suppose he had reason to be annoyed with me, but even so he must have been almost as horrible as I thought him because he was brutal in his disgust at my tears. “You’ve been saying yes all evening,” he said.
“All right,” I said, “put me out at the next bus-stop.”
“Don’t be bloody silly,” he said, and before we got home he had started clutching again. When Dick telephoned next day I was cold to him, and he became jealous because he thought I had liked ham-face. That was the last time I went to a party with him and Roxane.
* * *
“I wish to God we lived in America,” said Dick. “Children … families … none of that seems to matter to them. Divorce is part of the pattern. I don’t suppose people like it, but it isn’t the end of the world.”
“I’d rather live in Spain,” I said.
“Why on earth?”
“Because in a Catholic country there is no divorce—it wouldn’t even be there for us to think about. What’s the point of thinking about it when it’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible? Other people do it.”
“Oh shut up, shut up, shut up.”
It was impossible because of Roxane. For Dick to say, “Roxane, I love Meg. We have been lovers for two years and I want a divorce,” and then to watch her face—he could not do it, and I could not hear of its being done. Roxane’s face, telling us what we were … no. So I grew weary and impatient when Dick indulged himself by imagining that it wasn’t so, and he said, “Everyone thinks you’re gentle, Meg, but my God, you’re hard.”
When I first met Tinka Wheately she had some friends to whom she always referred as “poor Nella and Mike” because their marriage was breaking up. They were the first people I heard about who tortured each other, and I used to listen in horrified fascination to Tinka’s stories about them, unable to understand why they were still together if that was what it was like. Every time she spoke of them it seemed that next week or next month the marriage would be over, but it was four years before it broke. Four years. One thousand four hundred and sixty days of misery fluctuating between being a little better, much worse, almost unnoticeable, unbearable, and neither of them ending it in all that time. So boring, I used to think. Boredom magnified to something vast and filthy, as big as the sea and as stinking as dead fish. How could people remain static in this boredom of unhappiness, year after year? But that was what Dick and I were doing. Not that we tortured each other like “poor Nella and Mike,” but the situation tortured us, and it couldn’t change, and it wasn’t going to end unless we ended it.
13
Roxane’s second baby, called Margaret after me, was born two years after Conrad. I got out of being godmother by pretending to discover scruples which prevented my undertaking a Christian duty when I wasn’t a Christian. “I can’t see it,” said Roxane, “but I suppose it’s the parson’s daughter coming out in you.”
I went for a holiday in Venice a month or so after that, and was unfaithful to Dick for the first time. It should have been important, but it wasn’t. Standing crowded in the stern of a vaporetto with this man—a gentle, eager man with spaniel’s eyes who knew a lot about music—and realizing that if I went to his flat for a drink, as he had just suggested, it would mean going to bed with him, I tried to make it important by saying to myself, “Why shouldn’t I? Dick has Roxane all the time,” but the words meant nothing. I was only accepting his invitation because it was more appropriate than saying “no.” I had let him take me round for two days because it made Venice more enjoyable, and I hadn’t withdrawn my hand when he held it because it would have been discourteous to spoil sitting there after dinner in a vine-roofed courtyard with a full moon visible through the leaves and a candle in a glass vase on the table. He thought I was sharing his feelings. To have revealed suddenly that I wasn’t doing so would have been to introduce an ugly discord in this pleasant time.
He lived in a strange house. The walls of the ground floor looked like a prison, blank except for one dark window with bars. There was a huge double door studded with nails bigger than pennies, but we went in through a little door cut in one of its leaves. The stone stairs were wide and shallow, worn in the middle. He pressed one of those automatic lights which pop themselves off after two minutes, but this one was more economical and plunged us into darkness at the top of the first flight. It gave him an excuse to put his arm round me as he guided me up to his door, and it was a little exciting to be going up those dark, cat-smelling stairs with a stranger’s arm round me.
Once we were in his flat it all became even more unreal and unconnected with me: it was so full of old-fashioned furniture, tables covered with plush cloths, cupboards with pleated silk in their doors, screens with storks and bullrushes painted on them, dozens of family photographs, stiff and out-of-date in style even when the people’s clothes were modern. The pictures on the walls would have done well in some self-conscious little Fulham Road junk-shop: wonderfully hideous oleographs of saintly suffering maidens and of Garibaldi uniting Italy. He left me in the sitting-room while he went to fetch drinks, and it was not easy to wait in a natural attitude because the furniture was so primly arranged and uncomfortable. I went to the window and looked out at the slow wriggling of a lamp’s reflection on the water of a canal. It smelt of rotten melons.
When he came back he had a bottle of yellow liqueur on a brass tray, with two small glasses in gilt filigree holders and two paper napkins. We didn’t drink anything because he started to kiss me as soon as he had put down the tray, and when we were in his bedroom I saw why the sitting-room was so unused. The bedroom was where he lived. It was his mother’s flat, he told me later (she was away staying with her brother), and he kept all his records and books in his bedroom. Because of his mother’s absence there were dirty coffee cups and full ashtrays all over the room, and this embarrassed him, but he didn’t seem to notice that the bed was unmade and the sheets needed changing.
It has always been the flat I have remembered, rather than the man. Sometimes when I have looked out of a train when travelling in unfamiliar country I have glimpsed people talking in a doorway or workmen eating their lunch in the shade of a hedge or children chasing a dog, and have had an intense longing for the train to stop so that I could get out and become part of that scene; a feeling that there I would get it, would be in this foreign life, not just looking at it. Finding myself in Luigi’s flat—that was his name, Luigi—made me feel it had happened for once. Even those dirty sheets, smelling of his sleeping (he didn’t smell disagreeable), which were the kind of thing from which I usually shrank, added to the illusion that I had “surprised” this man’s life.
He was a romantic man. The next day he kept asking me to marry him. I wanted to laugh and say, “Dear Luigi, imagine your dismay if I said yes, with your mother coming home next week …” but that would have distressed him and I like the conventions which govern such matters in Italy. Truth is nearly always disagreeable. I couldn’t be bothered to explain about Dick, so the sad necessity of my going home single had to remain mysterious—he liked that. Our parting was affectionately sorrowful, and next Christmas he sent me a card.
On the way home I wondered if this was the beginning of liberation, but I knew at once that it was not. Luigi’s flat was something to tell Dick about, and sleeping with Luigi might not have happened except that it prevented the telling. I never told Dick things which would make him jealous because the knowledge that he had no right to be jealous made them too painful for him.
* * *
Two sayings which I detest: “You must face facts” and “You can’t have your cake and eat it.” Why must you face fact
s when almost all of them are intolerable? Apart from the obvious ones like war and the bomb and concentration camps, think of the lesser ones: parents lock children in cold rooms and go away for the weekend leaving them with nothing but some bread and margarine; someone collapses in the street and people pretend not to notice so that they needn’t become involved; kittens are put into sacks and thrown into rivers while still alive; a child is tormented by other children because he stammers or wears cast-off clothing too big for him. All facts, and I know about them, and they get into my dreams, but how could I stay alive if I spent much time facing them? Even the tiny corners of cruelty and hopelessness which stick into my own life: what would have happened to me, during the time I am remembering, if I had faced them? The fact that I had not enough talent to become a painter; the fact that I was treacherous and dishonest and inadequate; the fact that I could only love someone as treacherous and dishonest and inadequate as I was; the fact that he and I could never be together as we wanted to be. If I had faced those last three facts I could only have ended it, and then I would have had to face the fact of being alone. Who could deliberately dive into the icy misery of being alone? Perhaps I do understand “poor Nella and Mike” when I think about it. And as for not having your cake and eating it, why not when in all those facts there is so little cake? To hurt Dick by telling him about Luigi was something I could not do; but to let it happen, and afterwards to let other things of the same kind happen … Only they never were real cake and the dreams grew worse and worse.