Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  “I’ll talk to him if you think it will do any good.”

  “Thank you.”

  Abruptly we were faced with a silence full of what she might or might not know, and full of the respect which I had not been able to express, and never would. Even if she was unaware that Jamil was in love with me—even if she believed no more than that he respected the opinions of his friends more than he did hers—she was still accepting humiliation because of her single-minded concern for him. She was still a good, unselfish person, better than I was. It was a pity that we were too dissimilar for my sympathy and admiration to build a bridge between us even if I hadn’t been—however unintentionally—her rival.

  * * *

  I found Jamil in his room in a fog of Gauloise smoke. One of the endearing things about him was that although his mother had sent him an exquisite silk dressing-gown (it even had a cravat) he always forgot to wear it: this evening he was in pyjama tops over jeans.

  “Norah’s been at you,” he said as soon as I reached the word “college.” “Poor Norah, she’s in such a flap. Don’t take any notice of her.”

  “I told her she was fussing too much and that you were just having a mood.”

  “But I’m not. I’m going to post that letter tomorrow. When I said don’t take any notice I meant don’t worry—there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “But there is, sweetie. What about all these labour permits and things? It would be silly enough to change from one course to another now you’ve nearly finished this one, but it would be far sillier to get yourself kicked out. Think how it would upset your parents, all that money wasted and you not qualified for anything—and what would you do?”

  “My parents would make a fuss, but actually my mother would be happy—she hates me being away. And I won’t get kicked out. Look—you know Fuad, that boy we always meet in the George? Well, he’s got a most beautiful technique for fooling the Home Office. He hasn’t had a permit for over five months and he’s still here.”

  “But Jamil, love, what happens when you run out of money?”

  “Why should I? I’ll take a job in a coffee bar. Lots of them don’t mind about permits—I’ll get a job, don’t worry.”

  When Jamil wanted to avoid a subject he would look elaborately bored, arching his eyebrows a little, drooping his eyelids and staring straight ahead of him as though not seeing anything. He did it sometimes if he had made a fool of himself—had got drunk at a party and involved himself with a tiresome girl, for instance—and didn’t want me to know, and he was doing it now. It irritated me.

  “It all seems so unnecessary,” I said. “Why must you give up architecture just because you want to write plays in Arabic—if that’s what you want to do, Norah said it was. It wouldn’t be any easier to write if you were working in a coffee bar all day, and lots of people write and go on being students at the same time.”

  I expected him to start on the newly discovered importance of his writing, but he didn’t.

  “It’s not just that, Meg. I sound so stupid when I talk about it, but the point has gone out of everything. I don’t want —I simply don’t want to be an architect. Meg, you wouldn’t want to sweat away at learning something you didn’t want to do. You know, if you’re a boy at home there are only a few things you can do, it’s nothing to do with how clever you were at school or anything. It’s mostly medicine or law, everyone does those, but architecture’s all right too. All the parents and uncles and aunts and everyone just take it for granted that this boy will do one thing and that boy will do another—I didn’t even think what I wanted to be. It was my mother and Aunt Dolly who thought of it—I’ve told you. ‘Jamil, lui, il a l’esprit d’un artiste, il a du goût il ferrait l’architecture,’ and I thought, ‘Hurrah, I’ll get to London.’ I simply didn’t know that you need a mathematical sort of mind to like architecture and that I hadn’t got it.”

  “But you’ve had ages to find out, and you’ve liked it, you’ve been good at it.”

  “Oh I know it’s stupid to have drifted along till now, but everything was so lovely to begin with—for a long time, really. You know, London, friends, living here … I was so happy I didn’t mind what I was doing. But now nothing’s lovely any more.”

  “But why not?”

  “Oh Meg, you know.” He stood up. He had been on the bed, lounging on it at first when he was pretending to be bored, then sitting forward, pushing his fingers through his hair, gesticulating. Now he began to walk up and down the room in a dramatic way, and I began to feel annoyed with him. It was indeed just a mood, and one more ridiculous than usual. What had I to do with architecture? I decided to ignore his “you know.”

  “I think you’re being silly. I mean, you’ve got to qualify as something and architecture is better than law, anyway. If you were longing to do an alternative thing … but just to do nothing! Egypt must need trained people badly, after all.”

  “It needs them all right, but it doesn’t use them. Listen, if you knew the things I’ve been hearing … the place is crawling with trained doctors and trained physicists and trained God knows what, and all they do is sit in offices being clerks for about twenty pounds a month. I didn’t think you were so English, Meg—‘Be responsible and you’ll get responsibility.’ It doesn’t work like that. I want to do something which matters, and nothing matters to anyone there so I might as well do something that matters to me.”

  “Oh Jamil, do stop veering about. First everything’s pointless, then you want to do something that matters … do stop pacing and sit down and be sensible.”

  “Sensible! You English and your ‘sensible,’ you think it’s the answer to everything.” I tried to protest because he knew very well that whatever other English people were like, I wasn’t sensible, but he gave me no chance. “You know what I sometimes really hate,” he went on, “what makes me want to yell? All this being sensible, talking quietly, being clean. Do things the right way and this will happen, do them the wrong way and it won’t. I wouldn’t mind if I was kicked out.”

  This hysterical outbreak, so unlike him, astonished me so much that I couldn’t speak. He saw my shock on my face and suddenly swerved towards me, squatted in front of me, and took my hands.

  “I’m sorry, Meg—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout at you and you’re being so sweet to worry. Look, it’s just that everything is hell at the moment. But I’ll tell you something: if you’ll order me to go on with my course I will, because I love you. I’ll tear up that letter this moment, but that’s the only reason I’ll do it.”

  At this the mixture of irritation and surprise began to chill into real anger. With part of my mind I understood that he must have been suffering more than I had known in order to get into this ridiculous state, but chiefly I was feeling, “This I will not have!”

  “That’s absurd,” I said coldly. “Stop behaving like a child,” and I jerked my hands out of his.

  He stood up and took two steps backwards, and his bored expression came over his face as suddenly as if he had put on a mask.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being tiresome. But the trouble is, you see, that you don’t understand anything about anything.”

  I don’t know where the thought came from—perhaps out of my own rising temper—but, “His mother would shout and scream at him, she would make a scene,” flashed through my mind, and I heard a sharp voice, unlike my own, saying, “Don’t be impertinent.”

  “What?” His eyes snapped back to mine.

  “Don’t be impertinent. I don’t understand because you’re not making sense, and I’m not being sweet and I’m not worrying, don’t flatter yourself.” I stood up. “I’m simply thinking that you’re a silly little fool, with no gratitude to your family, no consideration for your friends, not caring how miserable you make poor Norah, selfish, showing off …”

  “I’m not …”

  “Showing off like a stupid schoolboy, not caring what your country needs …” My hands were clenched into fists
by my sides, my cheeks were becoming hot. “I’ve always thought you were a good intelligent person who understood things, but you aren’t….”

  “I do care what my country needs….”

  “No you don’t, you’re just a spoilt baby. Other people can work and do useful things, but not you, oh no, not you, you’re too good to work, you’re going to write plays in a language you don’t know….”

  “Meg, I’d break stones….”

  “There you are, you see! You’d break stones. Breaking stones is romantic and you’d never have to do it anyway, but building schools, oh no! You go and break stones, I don’t care. I don’t care what you do.”

  I could feel tears of anger starting in my eyes, an astonishing sensation because my mind was cool and detached as I watched the startled hurt on his face and thought, “I’m making a scene! Me, I’m making a scene!” Then I realized that its end had come, and I turned and ran out of the room, slamming the door as hard as I could, thinking as I did so, “That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever slammed a door when angry instead of shutting it especially quietly, and by God, it’s good!”

  * * *

  I went up to my bedroom and looked at myself in the glass: face red, eyes shining. I looked extraordinary. I could feel my heartbeats sending shudders through my breast and when I looked at my hands I saw that they were shaking. My face stared back at me and the mouth opened in amazed laughter. “Good God!” I said to myself, because surely it had only been a performance? Yes, of course it had been: never could I have behaved like that if the emotion had been real, but here was my body trembling and panting. My body had believed in the performance.

  And so did Jamil. When I came home next evening, by that time full of compunction at what I had done to him and feeling that I dared not see him and that I was the one who was going to suffer from the breach, I found a bunch of violets in my room with a note:

  Beloved Meg, forgive me. You’re right and I’m a fool. I haven’t sent that letter. Don’t believe those things you said about me because they aren’t true. Go on loving me as much as you can, please please.

  All my love,

  J.

  The candour and generosity of this capitulation dumbfounded me, but my first thought, before they struck me fully, was, “Oh God, why can’t I do something like that with Dick?”

  * * *

  It was awkward with Norah. She said she was grateful but naturally she didn’t like me for succeeding where she had failed. Because being rational was so important to her she was humiliated by her jealousy and sometimes deliberately left early when she knew Jamil would sit gossiping with me and Lucy for the rest of the evening, saying she had work to do, as though she were a fair-minded wife determined not to resent her husband’s friendships. It was disagreeable to me, being able to see with such clarity that she was foolish to do this. To be honourable, I should have gone up to bed earlier than I meant to, and I resented my own guilt at not doing this. I wished, to tell the truth, that Jamil would break with Norah.

  19

  I wished Norah out of the way even more when Nasser took over the Suez Canal and Britain attacked Egypt. Naturally, because of Jamil, we were all more preoccupied by this horror than we were about the Russians crushing the Hungarian revolution, but Norah had to defend herself against her own confusion over Russia and Hungary and became a dynamo of activity about Suez. She felt, as usual, that things must be done, so she did them. She wrote and spoke and stood and sat and carried banners, and she was right. Convictions should be expressed however useless the expression is, because they are a mockery if they dissolve into a grey sludge of inertia, like mine. I went to Trafalgar Square with the rest of them—of course I did—but when I was there, all I could feel was cold and despairing. I was there because Jamil was my friend, and that was all.

  And Fuad, Jamil’s friend who fooled the Home Office, killed himself. He too demonstrated in Trafalgar Square, but more aggressively than we did so that he was taken off in a Black Maria for obstructing a policeman. When he appeared in court it came out that he had been doing a series of odd jobs without a labour permit, and what Norah had told me was true: Fuad was told that he must leave the country within four days. Jamil brought him to the house the evening after his case had been heard.

  Fuad had not been demonstrating out of conviction. Unlike Jamil he was opposed to Nasser’s revolution and had been there only because British action against his country had triggered reactions belonging to his schooldays and because he loved disorder. He was the one of Jamil’s friends I liked least. He ought by nature and upbringing to have been a playboy—his most frequent complaint about Nasser’s regime was that all the nightclubs in Cairo had been closed—but his natural development in that direction had been prevented by some family quarrel. There were many royalist Egyptians about who still contrived to live with pre-Nasser frivolity, but Fuad’s frivolity had been jolted out of gear by lack of funds and had become a mildly bohemian delinquency.

  He was unreliable. It was not only that he never paid back the money Jamil lent him and lied to get it in the first place, telling stories about being turned out of his room unless he could pay the rent that day but always using the money for gambling, and putting on an elaborate performance of being insulted when Jamil complained. It went deeper than that. He would begin a story in a mood of indignation, all outraged innocence, and then a word spoken by the person he was with, or even some hidden association within his own words, would switch him to equally convincing cynicism or self-deprecation. It was as though his whole personality was dictated by what seemed apt to the moment so that not only his opinions but his nature could change, sometimes between one sentence and the next, and at any attempt to pin him down he became uneasy and resentful.

  Jamil was loyal to Fuad partly because they had known each other all their lives and partly because there was a certain dash about Fuad’s wild, veering temperament which he admired. Fuad had always been able to survive the messes into which his play-acting plunged him, and Jamil knew that he himself would have failed.

  On the evening when Fuad came to the house from the court he looked very small. His nose seemed to have become longer, his cheeks hollower, and his skin had gone dark. He spoke little, and when he did his manner was mild: patient acceptance of martyrdom seemed to be his role. We poured whisky down him, and in order to comfort him Lucy and I tried to suppress our own disgust at the cruel grinding of official machinery—the way in which a silly boy became a criminal for working in coffee bars without a piece of paper. We did our best to persuade him that going home to Egypt was not the end of the world. “There’ll be the sun, anyway,” said Lucy, “and your family.”

  “I have no family,” said Fuad. “My father’s dead and my mother hates me—she always has. She only gave me the money to come over here because she wanted to get rid of me, and now even if she wanted to give me money she couldn’t—they’ve taken everything away from her.” Sometimes he would tell gleeful stories about how the rich landowners of Egypt evaded Nasser’s campaign against them, but this evening they were beggared.

  “But you’ll be able to get a job.”

  “I’d die rather than work for those bastards. They don’t give jobs to Copts anyway, and what job could I do? I’m not trained for anything.” It was typical of Fuad to give three unrelated reasons as though they substantiated each other.

  Jamil, whose loyalty to Nasser had been fanned by Suez to the point of talking of going home even if he wasn’t forced to, tried to call up patriotism. “It’s horrible to say that you don’t want to go back. It’s our country and look what he’s doing for it! It’s stupid to be sent back like this, but you’d be going soon anyway—we’ll all be going, we must go.”

  “I wouldn’t be going anyway—and anyway I’m not going at all.”

  We became impatient with him. His tragic pose and the stubbornness with which he refused to discuss any practical alternative such as finding out if he would be granted a work
permit in some other European country, seemed like his usual overacting. If he was really unable to face returning to Egypt I could have raised his fare to Germany, for example, and given him enough money to keep him going until he found a job. But no. Fuad had withdrawn into total indulgence of his emotional state.

  Lucy offered him a bed for his remaining nights in London but he wouldn’t take it. It was as though, feeling rejected, he must feel as rejected as possible. When he left to go back to his bedsitter in South Kensington he irritated all of us by the meaningful way in which he pressed our hands and gazed at us from under heavy eyelids. “That Fuad!” said Jamil. “I’m going against him. After all, your bloody country has buggered us all up, not just him.”

  None of us understood how unstable Fuad was, and in so far as we did understand it we saw it as a reason for not taking him seriously. His mood next morning would be different. But he gave himself no chance, poor silly Fuad, to have a mood next morning. He shot himself through the head with a stolen revolver which he had bought in a pub three months earlier, simply because owning a revolver made him feel a devil.

  I was the only person in the house who was not purely horrified when we heard the news. I was horrified for Fuad’s sake. Over and over again, like Lucy and Adam and Jamil, I thought of that melodramatic little figure going out through the kitchen door and ached impotently with the knowledge that we might have forced him to stay with us. The monstrous stupidity of his having killed himself because of a mood haunted me. It was so likely—so certain—that he wouldn’t have felt like doing it in a few hours’ time. But the fact of self-destruction, which I had never seriously considered before, didn’t in itself seem horrible to me. It seemed comforting.