Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  “Yes,” I said hoarsely, “I do love him.”

  “Of course you do, I want you to understand that I don’t doubt that. I know that you are not—not promiscuous. You would never have done this frightful thing, this wicked thing, unless you believed you loved him. But my dear child, how can a man like that be worthy of love? Don’t you see that if he is ready to deceive his wife like this it means that he has no conscience, no sense of honour? He could only be—well, what we used to call a cad. A man like that is bound to cast you off, Meg, as soon as he’s done with you. My poor little Meg”—I realized that my father was crying and stared harder through my hair at my knees—“how could you possibly suppose that anything but disaster could come from doing such a wrong thing?”

  “I love him and he loves me,” I muttered, panic mounting because I knew he would soon bring God into it.

  “But darling, that’s not love. How can that man love you if he’s been prepared to expose you to such a situation? He’s been taking what he could get from you, taking your innocence and security … and you too, Meg, you do know what’s right. How can you possibly have allowed yourself to slide into this—this sin? Meg, do you still pray?”

  At that point it had to end. I was on my feet saying, “Daddy —please!” and we were staring at each other. Yes, he had been crying; there was sticky moisture round his eyes. If he had shouted, hated, threatened it would have made sense, I could have shouted back. But he was in agony, looking at me with love and pain, struggling his way through these horrible clichés of love and pain, meaning them, not knowing how else to say them. He was telling the truth about me and Dick but he wasn’t talking about us. Monstrous distortions. The whole situation a total irrelevancy. I wanted to scream, “Of course I don’t pray, I’m not innocent, you aren’t talking about what has happened. Go away, go away!”

  “Daddy, please,” I said. “This is impossible. I’ve been wicked if you like—I am wicked. But it’s ended now, whatever I do—it’s ended. There’s nothing we can say about it. Please go.” By the time I had finished tears were running down my face because having said it I had begun to see that it must, indeed, have ended.

  “Of course I’m not going, I can’t leave you like this. How could I possibly leave you like this?” He got up and came towards me, reaching out his hands.

  Then I did scream—“Don’t touch me!”—and collapsed in a chair. I don’t know what I said then except that I kept repeating, “It’s not your fault, Daddy, but please go away.” He went out to the kitchen on the landing and brought back a cup of water, and after a while I felt him sponging my forehead with his handkerchief which he had dipped in the water, and I thought with interest that I must be having hysterics. He ought to be dashing the water in my face, surely? My stomach began to quake as though I were laughing. His hands were gripping my shoulders, shaking me, and he was saying, “Stop it, child, stop it,” with so much alarm in his voice that I had to pull myself together.

  Finally I was lying in the chair, feeling nothing but exhaustion.

  “Daddy,” I said, “there’s a bottle of wine in my shopping basket. The corkscrew’s in the table drawer.” I expect he was shocked, but he was too upset for it to show. He opened it and poured a very little into the cup he’d used for the water. He wouldn’t have any himself.

  I drank it and said, “I’m sorry. I’m all right now. It really would be best if you left because we can’t say any more.”

  “We have got to say a great deal more. You can’t suppose, Meg, that something like this just ends. This horrible business with Roxane’s husband … Roxane’s husband … Meg, it’s what you have done to yourself, don’t you see? You thought that because you loved this wretched man it didn’t matter what you did…. It’s like a nightmare that you could be so blind and not see that you were going into something nothing could justify. Don’t you see, darling, that you’ve let yourself be changed? You’ve done something terrible to your friend—I find it impossible to believe even now that you could have done that—and you have lost something you can never recover. When a woman loses her—her purity…. Meg, you must come home with me tomorrow.”

  The horror of this was so great that it gave me strength. I had got to collect the energy to manage him, to lie. If I were to scream again (and when he said that about purity I almost did) he would only become more determined. I would rather die than go home—no, that wasn’t the way. I pulled myself up out of my collapsed position and felt myself going cool and hard. When I spoke my voice sounded decisive.

  “How could I come home with you now? How could you and Mummy and I talk about even the most ordinary things, just after this? Look, I’m not trying to excuse myself, I know what I have done, but it was the most important thing in my life and you are telling me I must end it—I mean it has ended, I know it has ended, I don’t even have to promise you because it’s so obvious. I’m not a child any more so no one can help me, not even you, and I can only get used to it in my own way. I’ve got to be alone. It would only be far worse if I came home at this moment—worse for me and worse for you—and think how terrible it would be for Mummy.”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Meg. You’re our child. Your mother loves you as much as I do—she’s desperate with anxiety for you.” But he betrayed that I had touched on something by hesitating and rubbing his forehead. My mother loved me, yes; but she would certainly be far angrier, far more outraged than he was. For a moment I wondered what she had actually said when Mrs. Weaver’s letter came, and knew that it had been something frantic and bitter. The thought of our confrontation frightened him, but he persisted.

  “It’s not right for you to be alone at a time like this. And you forget that I’m a priest as well as your father—I can’t just let you go.”

  “It’s not a question of letting me go, only of leaving me alone just for a bit. I’m only asking that. Please, Daddy, can’t you understand that I must be left alone?”

  His skin was grey and shiny with fatigue. He was as exhausted as I was, he wanted the scene to come to its end as much as I did. He sat for a long time with his head bowed, then he said, “If I go home without you, will you try to pray?”

  If I said yes he would go.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I tell your mother that you will come to us soon?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “And—I can write to that woman, can’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand you, Meg. I can’t bear to think of you here….”

  “I shall be all right”

  “You won’t do anything—silly?”

  Oh God! I thought, if he comes out with one more cliché! I forced myself to my feet, saying, “Of course not. Where are you staying?”

  “At the station hotel.”

  “You must take a taxi back to it.” I could hardly believe that we had suddenly reached the sanity of ordinary words about hotels and taxis.

  In the door he stopped, painfully embarrassed, and said, “I shall pray for you all the time. Promise me you’ll try to find help in God—He’ll give it, you know.”

  “I promise.”

  I stood at the top of the stairs until I heard the front door shut. When I went back into the room Mrs. Weaver’s letter was lying on the floor beside the chair in which I had read it, so I went into the other room instead, fell on the bed and lay there flat on my back, staring at the ceiling. I had pushed the door shut behind me but the latch had failed to catch. The door swung a little in the draught, not banging but making a dull tapping sound: tap—and then again tap, at irregular intervals. I waited for the taps. For months after that, if I heard a door tapping in that way my skin went cold and I felt sick. I didn’t think. When I began to think I would have to remember Mrs. Weaver’s account of Dick’s reaction when she faced him with it. It was almost three in the morning before I had the strength to undress and take my pills.

  16

  When I woke next morning it was too late to go to
work. I made coffee upstairs and then I didn’t know what to do. God! How often one says, “I don’t know what to do,” and how appalling it is when one really doesn’t! I could get dressed and go downstairs to face talk and normal behaviour, which was impossible. I could get back into bed and stay there and know what had happened, which was intolerable. When people kill themselves it must often be simply because they don’t know what to do.

  Some people, when they feel grief, scream and sob; when they are angry, attack; when they are disgusted, spew out. Jamil, from his stories, had people in his family who behaved in that way, and to some extent did it himself. I envied him. There must have been some way of expressing what I was feeling, but I wasn’t even able to experience the feeling properly, to say nothing of expressing it; I felt desperate in an almost physical way, as though there was not enough room in me, or I was not the right shape, to contain what was happening inside me.

  The only easy emotion was incredulous hate for Mrs. Weaver and Leo Pomfret. His sitting there in the restaurant spying on us, then running back to report to her; her writing not to me but to my father: when I thought about them disgust and hate swelled in me and filled every corner so that if either of them had been in front of me I could have been moved to action by these feelings, insulting them or spitting at them. But what I felt about my father, about Dick, and about myself …

  Lucy saved me by coming upstairs, worried that I hadn’t appeared for breakfast and agog to know the reason for my father’s visit. I had thought I couldn’t talk about it but I was thankful when she came. That was a way out for at least some of the feelings: describing the letter to Lucy, even quoting the viper bit and finding that in an appalled way I could laugh when I did that.

  “The woman is evil, Meg—she’s evil,” said Lucy. “I suppose once that beast had told her, from her point of view she had to do something, but to write to your poor parents! She was being deliberately destructive. She wasn’t just wanting you and Dick to end it, she was wanting to create havoc. Oh my God! What did your father say? Has he sort of cast you out?”

  “It was worse than that. He cried.”

  Lucy listened avidly while I tried to describe my father talking like a character in a bad play and making everything unreal by his words, but she didn’t quite understand what had been so unbearable about it—the sense that the situation about which he was talking had nothing to do with the situation as it really was.

  “But it wasn’t unreal to him,” she said. “How could he see it in any other way, being the kind of person he is? And I know it must have been agony, but really he was being rather marvellous—I mean saying it’s his fault and wanting you to go home. Suppose one of the children did something I honestly thought was a sin—I can’t imagine for a moment what it would be—but something incredibly wicked—I’d be shattered. I mean, suppose Sebastian grew up to be a real, active fascist, beating up Negroes! I hope I’d think it was my fault and want him to come home, but it would be awfully difficult, and living in sin must seem almost as monstrous as that to your father.”

  With my reason I could see that she was right, but it didn’t stop me shrivelling with disgust at the memory of that interview. In fact, if she was right, it was worse….

  About Dick Lucy was circumspect. When I had to tell her that he had admitted everything to Mrs. Weaver and had said that it was over—I left out the bit about its having been “a torment” to him—she just said, “Oh Meg!”—almost crying—and seemed to know that I couldn’t have stood it if she had blamed him. Then she began to treat it all as though it was an illness, telephoning the studio to say I wouldn’t be coming in, making me a hot-water bottle and fresh coffee, telling me she would bring me up lunch and that in the evening, if I felt like it, we would go to the cinema. “Sleep and the cinema,” she said. “The hours I spent in the flea-pit when Paulo first took off. The great thing is to have something going on but not to have to use one’s brain.” No other attitude could have been so comforting.

  Lucy told Jamil what had happened. For a day or two he dared not speak of it but he was always there, telling me funny things that had happened, reading me poems, leaving violets, a sea-shell, and green Penguins in my room. I think even Lucy must have seen at that time that love can be worth giving however unrewarding its object, because the gentleness and kindness it inspired in Jamil must have been valuable to him as well as to me. And Adam offered, through Lucy, to write to Dick….

  Soon our intimacy and the lack of inhibition normal in that house made it possible to neutralize parts of the situation by referring to them as things to laugh at, and “I’d as soon pick up a viper” became a catch-word with us. But as day after day went by without a word from Dick, their sympathy was able to warm me less and less.

  * * *

  What had Dick really said to Mrs. Weaver? “A great torment to him.” He might have said deceiving Roxane had been a torment, and he might have said that he knew he ought to have ended it long ago. He might have said … I didn’t believe Mrs. Weaver’s version. Over and over again I remembered every detail of being with Dick, and I knew that she was lying. But he didn’t write, he didn’t telephone, he didn’t come. And over and over again I remembered Dick and Mrs. Weaver together, their dark, mobile faces so alike, amusing each other and flattering each other (“Angel Dodo, you must wear your emerald brooch with that dress”; “Darling boy, only you could have thought of that!”). And I remembered Dick moving smoothly onto territory alien to me, so successful at dinner parties with masters of colleges and vice-chairmen of companies; Dick knowing what to say to people older than he was, richer than he was, people whom he thought stupid or coarse or even horrifying; Dick trimming his sails, the pirate. He could have said those things. And then I would begin all over again: he could have said them but without meaning them, because—and yet again I would be going over every word, every detail of our times together.

  This was at night. For ten days after my father’s visit I managed never to be alone during the day. I ate lunch twice with a girl at the studio who had always bored me, I went to an exhibition of embroidery with her, and to a Rugger Club dance with Joe—anything was better than being alone and I didn’t mind tedium. It made me feel as I had felt with ham-face, enclosed in a transparent, sound-proof capsule, floating through whatever was going on, mildly interested in it in a detached way and meanwhile protected from anything else. I read Jamil’s green Penguins in the bus on the way to and from work, although reading in a bus made my head ache. My head ached most of the time and I was taking ten or twelve aspirins a day. Drinking on top of so many aspirins made red blotches appear on my face and neck in the evenings. If I was at home we played canasta at the kitchen table, with a demijohn of red wine, the glasses leaving purple rings on the wood. I loved Lucy, Adam, and Jamil in the grateful, helpless way one loves nurses who are kind to one in hospital. Luckily, they enjoyed staying up late and often it was one of them, not me, who said, “Just one more cigarette” or “What about some coffee?” I had to postpone going to bed because the pills had begun to be unreliable.

  On the eleventh day I came home at nine, having joined some people in a pub after work. Lucy heard me come in and ran up from the kitchen to tell me that Dick was waiting in my room.

  * * *

  I would have expected to freeze, hearing that: to stand in the hall feeling dizzy, thinking, “What now? What are we going to say?” Instead, I don’t remember pausing even long enough to thank Lucy, and I don’t remember running upstairs, only opening the door, seeing him standing there staring at it, being in his arms, and my bag dropping, everything spilling out of it. Anything I can think of which is a law of nature—water finding its own level, a vacuum being filled—that is what it was like. That sensation of being the wrong size or shape or kind for what was happening inside me—gone. Everything was smoothly and totally filled by Dick’s being there.

  It was a long time before we spoke. We fell on the divan and lay there hugging each other, p
ushing our faces into each other’s necks and hair, not even kissing to begin with.

  When we sat up and began to talk I saw that he was looking terrible. Dick’s face could very easily appear sallow and tortured —with a hangover he was alarming. The only time I had seen him looking as bad as this was with a hangover after an all-night journey. I must have looked almost as bad because the red blotches were showing. “Oh darling,” I said, “do I look like the victim of some hideous debauchery too?” and weakly we began to laugh.

  It was extraordinary, how much we laughed that evening. It was because we had both been in the same nightmare and there was no need for us to try to convey to each other what it was like. We could use serious words or frivolous ones, it made no difference to our understanding, and the relief of this made the frivolous ones come more readily than the serious.

  “She really is macabre,” said Dick, telling me about his interview with Mrs. Weaver. “Do you know, I don’t believe she gave a damn about Roxane. She was quite brisk and no-harm-done about her, but at the same time she was in an absolutely vicious rage about you. She kept saying, ‘I trusted that girl and I trusted you like my own son’—as though anyone trusts their son! After a bit I had a hair-raising feeling that it wasn’t Roxane, it was her the whole fuss was about. I don’t mean she was consciously thinking that if I had to sleep with someone else it ought to be her, but it was in the air, I can tell you. I nearly said to her, ‘Why Dodo, you incestuous old puss!’ but I was paralyzed—I had this feeling that if I said, ‘It was because I couldn’t have you’ … It sounds funny, but it was creepy, it actually shocked me.”

  “Why did you tell her it was true? He’d only seen us having dinner together, after all.”