by Diana Athill
During the second year after Conrad was born I began to make myself sleep by drinking wine. I didn’t get drunk. Never since that night when I passed out have I got really drunk. But if I had to be at home by myself all evening I would keep a bottle of wine beside me while I worked or read, and I would usually drink all of it. Then, when the wine stopped working, I took sleeping pills; Adam knew a Polish doctor who was kind about prescriptions. But although the pills made me sleep, they didn’t stop me dreaming. Sometimes I couldn’t remember the dreams but woke up tired, as though a voice had been babbling in my ear all night; but often I could remember them. When I was a child I had a grey kitten called Sukie, and I used to have dreams about Sukie, losing her and knowing that something terrible had happened to her. I would hunt for her desperately and sometimes find her dead in some most dreadful way, perhaps with her head squashed so that her eyes had come out. Once I dreamt that my mother —my poor mother who felt sick if she found a rabbit in a trap! —forced me to kill Sukie by putting her into the machine at the farm near our house which sliced beet for cattle-food, but I woke up screaming before the end of that dream.
I even dreamt when Dick was with me, but less because on those nights I took no pills and slept little. I liked staying awake when he was there. When we had stopped making love and talking I would turn on my side, facing away from him, and he would face the same way with his knees pushed into the back of mine, his body warm against my back, and his hand on my hip. I would wait to feel his hand going limp and to hear his breathing change as he fell asleep. There was a slight feeling of being abandoned as his hand relaxed, but afterwards, in a different way, he would be even more present. If he moved his hand or turned over in his sleep I would edge closer so that other parts of our bodies touched. Even when he snored I liked it, because he was there. When I remembered that in the morning he would have to go away I used to stop thinking, because it seemed, quite literally, impossible. And when the impossible happened I didn’t complain or protest, because the happening of the impossible is too confusing and odd. I wanted him to go on being there enough to make it happen—but it didn’t. One can’t be anything but silent about failure.
14
Perhaps I ought not to have done what I did with Jamil—if in fact I did anything. Lucy thought I did.
In the four years I had been living in her house she and I had become close friends. In theory, once the top floor was my flat I was going to keep more apart from the household. I had thrown out the old gas stove on the landing and replaced it with one of those kitchens-in-a-cupboard; and Lucy, during the last of her rapprochements with Paulo, had fitted a second bathroom into the basement so that the children and Jamil no longer used the one upstairs, and her, Adam’s, and my toothbrushes side by side on the shelf represented the only sharing we had to do. In practice, however, I was down in the kitchen almost as often as I used to be to begin with. It was the hub of the house, and dropping in as I came and went was not only habit but a pleasure as well. Lucy and I depended on each other for support in crises and for gossip and laughter: we had each become for the other the person with whom it was easiest to be, apart from our men. I was to think from time to time of moving into a proper flat, but there never seemed much point in it. I could have had the most elegant drawing-room and dining-room in London, and still I would not have wanted to entertain any more than I did, and I had no wish to be burdened with ownership or increased domesticity.
There was only one matter in which a shadow of awkwardness used to fall between Lucy and me: my relationships with men other than Dick. She was tolerant to the point of total amorality about sex and would have listened with wonder and amusement if I had come home with tales of orgies with different men every week; but about love she was respectful and easily shocked. Her hard-won security with Adam made her feel herself an expert on its value. Paulo’s widow had at last managed to bully him out of his Catholic scruples, and he allowed Lucy to divorce him without citing (as he had always threatened to do) her adultery with Adam and fighting for the children. He was then carried off to live in the Argentine, Adam came to live in the house, Lucy looked five years younger, and everything became as straightforward for them as it ever could be for two people with so little money and such a gift for muddle.
So for Lucy love had become simple. She touched wood whenever she thought of it, and she wanted nothing more—Adam was there all the time, after all. And she and he really did share an unusually trusting and solid kind of love; she did have reason to know its value, and sometimes I felt uncomfortable enough to try to keep things hidden from her. Whenever she noticed that someone I didn’t want had fallen in love with me she disapproved and would hint—if only by silences—that I was being unfair and unkind. She had been cross with me about Henry, she had several times been unsympathetic about other men, and about Jamil she was shocked.
But I still ask myself: what did I do? It happened so gradually, Jamil and I already knew each other so well and with so much affection; at what point should I (or could I) have seen that I must stop letting him come up and sit on my bed on Sunday mornings, stop letting him come shopping with me (he loved women’s clothes and was very good at them), stop calling him “darling” and treating him with the affection I felt for him? It would have been absurdly self-conscious if I had started deliberately putting on an unbecoming dress when I went out with him, or left off my scent. I only went on behaving as I always had behaved.
It is true that I was aware of the effect certain kinds of thing had on him, and used to think how obtuse or rash Norah was in disregarding them. Once when I was buying a pair of gloves—the most expensive and beautiful gloves I had ever bought—I thought, “How Jamil will relish these”; and a week later, sitting across from him at a pub table, I put them where he could see them, and watched, and when he picked them up and began stroking them, his fingertips obviously adoring the supple softness of the suede, I smiled to myself at how accurately I had foreseen just that gesture. And another time, when I was using the downstairs bathroom because Lucy was in the upstairs one and I was in a hurry, I sprayed several extra squirts of my eau-de-toilette into the air so that if Jamil went in soon after me he would be moved by the scent I’d left. I suppose I ought not to have done things like that, but they were very small things; and if someone is having to spend much of her time being lonely and unhappy, it is hardly immoral for her to enjoy and be grateful for such whiffs of admiration and desire as come her way. A man can provide such whiffs without necessarily falling in love, after all—and it was not as though Jamil didn’t know about Dick. He was my chief understander and comforter: he can’t have expected for one moment that I would ever be able to fall in love with him.
And why should Lucy have taken for granted that loving me when I was unable to love him in return was a tragedy for Jamil? He didn’t think it was. The night he told me, soon after my return from Venice, he said in so many words that he knew it was no good but that it was better to see me often than not to see me at all. I had said what I ought to have said. I knew how horribly I would miss him if he went away, but I had told him that he ought to do so if seeing me all the time would make him unhappy, and he laughed at me. All the friendship part of our relationship was as good as ever, his only deprivation was not being able to make love to me—and he still had Norah. Indeed, if I was being bad, he was being worse, because he did go on having Norah; and how can a man, however young, be seen as a helpless victim if he is capable of using someone as cynically as Jamil used poor Norah, continuing to eat steaks she brought him, smoke the cigarettes she ran out for, and tuck up in bed with her whenever he felt like it?
For long periods it would be as though nothing had changed between us, then he would become hollow-eyed and sulky for several days, working up to a declaration of how miserable he was and how cold and cruel I was, and I would have to end the scene by counterattacking with Norah. It worked better than saying, “Look, you have always known about me and Dick, and I didn�
��t ask you to fall in love with me,” because if Jamil was deflected to thoughts of his own cynicism he could be made to marvel at it. Some of these occasions even ended in our laughing together in a complicity which, I suppose, might have seemed to anyone else almost indecent; but they reassured me that in spite of the misfortune of his having fallen in love with me, Jamil and I remained friends. And that was what I wanted because even now I can hardly bear to think how much colder, lonelier, and sadder I would have been without him.
15
My father rarely came to London. He disliked it and used the expense as an excuse for not accompanying my mother when, two or three times a year, she came up to buy a new hat or visit an exhibition. When he did come he looked more out of place than any foreigner, thin, tall, and shabby in his clergyman’s clothes, slightly flustered by the noise and traffic. He would send me money beforehand to buy us theatre tickets—he and my mother liked plays with Sybil Thorndike in them—and afterwards he would give us dinner at the Trocadero, which, in his youth, I suppose, had been a gay place to go. He wanted these outings to be a treat and would insist on taking a taxi from the theatre to the restaurant, but the evening always misfired a little. When he hailed a cab someone else would jump into it, and however recklessly he had determined to be extravagant the cost of the dinner would always disconcert him. He would order the meal slowly and ceremoniously, with touches of old-fashioned urbanity, and the waiter, instead of cooperating, would be bored and barely polite. This would embarrass me, whether for my father’s sake or my own it was hard to tell, and it was with relief that I would say good night to him at whichever depressing hotel I had found for him (my mother used to stay with me). Never in all the time I had been in London had he come up without my mother.
One Monday morning, three months after my Venetian holiday, I got a letter from him which suggested that something extraordinary had happened:
Dearest Meg,
I shall be coming to London on Wednesday and it is very important that I should see you. I shall come to your house at 6:30 in the evening, and I must ask you to make a point of being in.
Your loving father
Its uncharacteristic curtness, and the fact that he was obviously coming alone, were alarming. He must be going to tell me something which he felt unable to write, and I assumed at once that my mother was ill. “They’ve told him she has cancer,” I thought. My mother was rarely ill in any definite way but she suffered a good deal from headaches and indigestion, and it was easy to imagine our doctor telephoning my father with grave news after one of her visits to his surgery.
“It might be something about money?” said Lucy when I showed her the letter.
“But he would have said that—and anyway, what could it be? Parsons don’t get ruined overnight.”
“Well, don’t brood too much. There’s probably some quite ordinary explanation.”
But the more I thought about it during the next two days, the more sure I became that my guess was right. My anxiety and dismay—this was horrible—were chiefly caused by the thought that if my mother was really ill, he was going to say I must come home.
I left the studio early that evening and bought chops and vegetables on the way home so that I could give him dinner. I also bought a bottle of Burgundy, feeling that whatever an illness of my mother’s might mean to me it would be even worse for him: it would be my responsibility to sustain him through it. The selfishness of my first reaction was so disgusting that I knew I could not act on it, and that whatever was required of me, I would have to do it.
* * *
I was upstairs when my father arrived, so he was let in by someone else and I met him on the stairs, where the light was bad. It was not until we reached my room that I saw how haggard he was looking. His face shocked me so much that I said at once, “Sit down, Daddy. What has happened?”
He was still wearing his coat and holding the old briefcase into which he had stuffed his things for the night. Instead of sitting on the chair he put the briefcase on it and began slowly to unbutton his coat. He didn’t speak until I had helped him off with it, disposed of the case, and steered him into the chair. Then he said, “I don’t know how to tell you, Meg. It’s beyond me—the whole thing is beyond me. Look, I think the best thing is for you to read this.” His hand was shaking as he pulled out his wallet and extracted a letter. The writing was Mrs. Weaver’s.
Dear Mr. Bailey,
I never in my life foresaw having to write a letter so profoundly distressing. I would gladly avoid it, but I have no one beside me to help me with my responsibilities, so I have no alternative but to tell you something which I know will seem as incredible to you and your wife as it does to me, and to ask you to intervene.
I have learnt that your daughter Meg is having an affair with my son-in-law. To begin with I was no more willing to believe this than you will be. I welcomed Meg into my house as Roxane’s friend. I gave her affection and trust. My Roxane, whose nature is generous to a fault, loves her. But the fact remains that what I have said is the truth.
A friend of mine, Leo Pomfret, saw them together in a restaurant. He tells me he was about to greet them in all innocence when something in their behaviour made him hesitate and instead sit down where he could see them, and watch them. He says their behaviour was openly amorous. Mr. Pomfret is one of my oldest friends and is devoted to Roxane. After much painful debate with himself he decided—and I am thankful he did—to warn me. I laughed at him. I said, “Those two have known each other for years, Leo, you are becoming stuffy in your ideas.” But he was emphatic—so much so that after three sleepless nights I decided to speak to Dick. He did his best to protect your daughter, but in the end admitted it was true. They have been meeting in London and sleeping together—I am sorry, but you have to know the worst—for over three years.
Roxane, thank God, knows nothing of this. I do not wish to excuse Dick, but he has at least preserved some sense of responsibility towards his wife and their children.
If your daughter, in spite of what I can only presume to be a Christian upbringing, chooses to ruin her life and reputation, that is her business and yours. My only concern is that Roxane should never know anything about this—that this disgraceful affair should end at once, before it is too late.
Dick has promised me that it is over—and I believe from what he has told me that it has been a great torment to him and that it was only from weakness that he did not end it long ago. But I know him well enough to feel that his kindness of heart makes him vulnerable and that he would find it difficult to resist your daughter if she put pressure on him. I cannot bring myself to write to her. It is distressing to say this to her father, but I would as soon pick up a viper as write to her—you as her father and a guardian of morality (I do not labour the point that in both capacities I find you wanting) must do it. I must therefore ask you to tell her without delay that she must never again write or telephone to Dick, or see him alone.
I only wish I could say that she must never see any member of my family, but it is vitally important that Roxane should suspect nothing. Your daughter must taper off relations gradually. She has shown enough cunning in maintaining them for me to suppose that this will not be beyond her ingenuity.
Please let me know as soon as possible what action you have taken.
Yours sincerely,
DOROTHY WEAVER
As I took in the first sentence of this letter I felt such a sharp physical jolt that my body must have jerked, and then it was as though the blood had started to drain out of me. I had never fainted so I was unfamiliar with the symptoms, but I think I must have been on the edge of fainting. I sat with my head drooping, the ends of my hair getting in the way of my reading, and when I had to turn the page I was only able to do so because if I had stopped reading I should have had to look up. My eyes went on following the words, but I was not aware of taking them in. I was only aware of the draining sensation and of being cold. At the end I went on staring at the paper, think
ing, “Dorothy—yes, of course, Dodo—but what an incongruous name for her to have.”
My father had risen and was standing by the window. When he heard me put the letter down he turned and said “Meg—is it true?”
I said, “Yes.” I had not expected to be capable of speaking.
He came back to the chair and sat down, leaning forward, his hands clasped tightly between his knees and his head bowed. It was a pose into which a stricken father would have fallen on the stage, and in some unconnected corner of my mind I was irritated by it. That he should go on sitting there in that melodramatic way, and that we should have to say things to each other, was intolerable: all I knew was the necessity for this not to be happening. My body was inert and heavy, as though in a moment I would be asleep and then it would not have happened. But my father began to speak.
“Your mother …” he said. “Your mother is ill because of this, Meg, I left her in bed. I ought to go back tonight but there isn’t a train. Meg—no, listen dear: I’m not going to say anything about your mother and me. You must know well enough … I feel we are to blame, I am to blame. If I had given you the strength I ought to have given you this could never have happened. We—I know that you would never have done a thing like this unless you loved this man desperately, and I can imagine what you have suffered—my poor little Meg. But my darling child, we are your parents, we love you—why didn’t you come to us?”
The question was shocking in its senselessness. Anything I said would be equally senseless. His words seemed to be about a situation which didn’t exist. But now he was waiting for me to say something.