Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Time telescopes, so whether it was for weeks or for months that I considered the matter I do not know. I came to the topsy-turvy conclusion that whether I believed or not depended on what I was prepared to do about it. The Ten Commandments, for example, of which confirmation classes had refreshed my memory: would I be prepared – would I be able – to keep them? I was having one of my happy interludes in the sickroom while I pondered them, lying there in comfortable solitude with a mild attack of tonsilitis and nothing to distract me. Most of them were easy, but when it came to ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ – I did not need to examine my heart, it was self-evident: the fact must be faced that I was absolutely sure to commit adultery just as soon as I got the chance. So, I thought, slightly awestruck but also relieved, I do not believe in God.

  ‘Adultery’ and ‘God’ were both, of course, shorthand terms. I knew the technical meaning of adultery, but I meant something different by it: I meant making love, whether married or not – but marriage would not come for years and love I was going to make soon. The obsession with sex in the abstract had faded out and been superseded by a wholehearted concentration on love, usually directed upon one man, but if Paul failed me it would be someone else, and too bad for Paul. We never discussed such things at my school, where the standard of purity was so high that we did not even understand the purpose of the rules which maintained it – the curtains drawn back at night, the ban on less than three girls being alone together. I felt that I knew more about sex and men than most of my companions, and thought about them more, but I would have felt it irresponsible and lacking in taste to spread my knowledge. On one thundery afternoon, during dancing class when we were practising stage falls, I lay sprawled on the parquet in my sage-green art-silk tunic and bloomers and my salmon-pink lisle stockings, thinking, ‘If a stevedore’ – why a stevedore? I am sure I had never met one – ‘if a stevedore would come and rape me at this minute, I would let him.’ It was an incongruous idea to have in that setting and I enjoyed it as such, feeling sorry for my companions, whom I supposed to be innocent of such emotions. As for me, I knew that I was made for love, and love meant lovemaking, and I was going to bring this two-things-in-one to a blazing consummation (no, not with a stevedore, that was a joke) as soon as possible. God forbade me to do so and I did not – I could not – feel that he was right.

  For just as ‘adultery’ was shorthand, so was ‘God’. I meant by the word that God I had been brought up on, the God of the Church of England as revealed to me by my family and teachers. It was his laws that I was going to break, and because of his convenient, English mildness, I was not afraid of breaking them. And because I was not afraid of breaking them, they were not laws. Anything which could be dismissed with such surprising easiness could not be the whole answer.

  I have thought of more logical arguments for non-belief since then, and I have still felt no need to replace that God by another one, but I am not so sure that I ever really stopped ‘believing’. I suppose I shall have to come back to this later, if I am to understand why I did not shiver after my dying grandmother asked me why she had lived.

  8

  FRENCH TAFFETA, THIN but crisp, striped with a pencil-point black line on the pure evening-sky blue which Mrs Siddons wore when Gainsborough painted her; grey silk velvet, dovecoloured in shadow, silver in light; another grey, corded silk veiled with chiffon, sashed with lemon yellow; more chiffon, pink over pink pearl embroidery on the breasts; more pearls, a trellis of them as a belt: dresses for dancing in! How many hours – weeks, months, years – did I spend thinking about clothes between the ages of fifteen and twenty? Day clothes too, of course, but evening-dresses were the ones which worked a change, making me feel like a mermaid, a swan, a willow tree, making me move differently, making me ready for love. Usually my mother made them for me; a shop dress was at the same time a luxury and (too often) a disappointment. My mother was clever and romantic about them, raiding shops and fashion magazines for ideas, spending far too much on materials, stitching into them, I see now, the gaiety she was not herself enjoying. She was only in her thirties. For what seemed like hours she would keep me standing in the middle of her drawing-room while she fitted me, both of us growing irritable and I never thinking that she might have been making dresses like that for herself. It was by her choice that we were living at the Farm, away from my father except at weekends, and her temperament was such that given her family, her garden, and her animals she could occupy, or appear to occupy, all of herself with energy and conviction. But there was another side to the coin. Not long ago she flipped it over for me, startling me by saying, ‘Sometimes I used to wonder if I could bear it another day. No man, no fun, no travel – it was a dreary time.’

  The gayest time of my life was a dreary time? I looked back and saw the frightening abyss between parents and their children: that young woman making the best of the situation into which she had stumbled, ‘difficult’ and contrary, leading her husband a dance but feeling ashamed of it so that she endured her wilful choice of an unmanned country life as a ‘punishment’, while I never questioned the front she put up: that was how she was. I accepted her thought and work for me, the generosity with which she turned me loose, as though it were her pleasure and my due. And when she lay awake fretting because I was being driven back from a dance by a young man, I held it against her: why, as I crept upstairs, must she always call apologetically, ‘Darling, are you back? Was it a good party?’ And when she betrayed anxiety as to how I was using my freedom – an anxiety usually suppressed and often justified from her point of view – anger flared in me.

  Paul came and went and came again. Sometimes I would not see or hear from him for weeks, then there would be a long letter or a telephone call, he would rattle up the lane on a motor bicycle or in a second-hand car, and we would be off to a party together, or over to the coast for sailing.

  He excelled as someone to do things with. When I remember him it is less for what we said to each other (although we always had plenty to say) than for what we did together. If Paul were playing with a dog, his pleasure in its silky ears, its movements and its expression would make the dog more real; if he were driving one of his old cars, his handling of it made the mere act of driving more interesting. Any place that he loved – the place he called Little Japan, for instance, where the flat land on either side of our sailing estuary curved up and fell again to the marshes in a sandy cliff on which grew a few wind-tortured Scotch firs – sprang its nature at me because of his relish. When he went with me to pick primroses one Easter – an annual ritual for the decoration of Beckton Church – he was astonished at my matter-of-fact attitude to the thick cushions of flowers in a certain part of the wood. I took it for granted that primroses grew thickly there – they always did. He, who lived either in London or on the coast, where they did not flourish, saw them. He squatted to bury his face in a clump, then laughed and said, ‘My God, but they’re marvellous. You’re like that chap in the poem – a primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose was to him!’ At once the frail, reddish, slightly hairy stalks of the primroses, their delicate petals, the neat funnels of their centres, the young leaves, folded and lettuce-green among the darker, broader old ones, the grouping of each constellation of flowers, their delicious, rain-fresh scent – everything about them became alive.

  He was a good illustration of that thing so difficult to explain to anyone who does not know it from experience: the point of participating in such sports as shooting. A good shot, he liked to exercise the skill, but to accompany Paul as he walked a rough shoot was to see that there was more in it than that. Any kind of hunting, whether with a gun or with hounds, brings the hunter into a close intimacy with the country over which he does it. He learns what kind of cover a partridge, for instance, will favour – learns it so intimately that he can almost feel himself crouching under the broad, wet leaves of a field of sugar beet. He knows what weather does to ‘his’ land, and to its animal inhabitants; he knows smel
ls and textures, the sounds different sorts of fallen leaves make when he walks through them, the feel under his palm of the moss on the damp side of a tree trunk. Because of his pursuit his senses have to be more alert than those of even the most enthusiastic walker, so he takes more in. He has to contend with nature, not merely look at it, wading through heavy land, clambering through thorny hedges, allowing for wind, observing the light – and discovering, of course, as much as possible about the habits of the creatures he is after. People who have always been, as a matter of course against blood sports often gibe at the sportsman’s professed affection for animals, but paradoxical though it may be, it is perfectly true that there is no surer way to identify with an animal than to hunt it. The man who shoots for pleasure only is doing, I myself now believe, something wantonly destructive – but I have no doubt that it is he who knows best what it is like to be a hare, a partridge, a pheasant, a pigeon … Paul knew this very well. He got from shooting the same kind of satisfaction that he got from sailing: that of playing with real things – water, wind, living creatures. Sailing was the better of the two, because there the game was more even: water and wind can kill you if you are not cleverer than they are. But shooting (and hunting, as I could have taught him) has the same power of engaging you more closely than anything but work with nature, with the elements.

  His enjoyment and acceptance were as infectious at a theatre or an exhibition of pictures, dancing in a London nightclub (he took me to my first, finding the last remaining hansom cab in which to see me home) or gossiping in a village pub. I do not think that it was only because I loved him that I found it so, because I often saw other people responding to this quality in him, but no doubt the fact that I had fallen in love with him even before meeting him had made me specially ready to embrace it; and that, in its turn, had made him accept me as an ally from the beginning.

  Our relationship developed slowly but steadily. Even after I had left school I would still react to any opinion of Paul’s by going through the motions of accepting a Revealed Truth, but I began to find that afterwards I would sometimes blink and have second thoughts. I began to see that being five years older than I was did not prevent him from being young. He had a pontificating vein when he generalized and it was not lèse-majesté on my part if it sometimes struck me as funny, or even absurd. If Paul said ‘It is far safer to drive fast than to drive slowly’ I would not go so far as to say at once ‘Don’t be silly’; I would suppose that it must, in some mysterious way, be true, but later I would come back to the idea and think about it, and reach my own conclusions. Was he, for example, right when he expounded a theory of which he was fond for about a year: that all sexual relationships were basically the pursuit of an essential thrill which, in its purest essence, could only be found in rape? This, he warned me gravely, was why I should find making love with a man who loved me, and therefore could not rape me, a little disappointing. It seemed to me an impressive idea at first, but later I began to wonder if, possibly … I began to tease Paul more often, as well as to argue with him, and his elder-brotherly affection for me was a little modified each time we met.

  There were plenty of other young men about – our county was well-endowed in that respect – and I never thought of holding them off for Paul’s sake: the gaining of experience was too valuable and exciting in itself to be rejected. He was the man I loved, he was the man I was waiting for, but meanwhile if anyone else wanted to fall in love with me, or to kiss me, or to tell me I was attractive, I would welcome it greedily. It was pure chance that it was, in fact, Paul who kissed me first. By then I had been waiting for him for two years, which anyone over twenty-five should read as five, or eight, or ten, for it seemed an eternity. The vigil, I felt, had earned me recompenses which I was ready to grasp. But it so happened that going to a dance with my cousins, at just seventeen the youngest of the party and ready for anything, I met Paul unexpectedly after one of our gaps and he saw more sharply than he had seen before that I was growing up. He noticed it halfway through the evening, left his own party, and swooped me away from mine.

  He took me out to sit in a parked car, put his arm round me and told me a fairy story – he liked to make up stories. I dared not move for fear that he would think I was uncomfortable, which I was, and take his arm away. When we were dancing again he said, ‘Don’t go home with them. I’ll drive you if you think your mother will let me stay the night.’ To an anxious elder cousin I announced that I was coming home separately, then disappeared; and she, when she got back to the Manor, telephoned my mother and asked, ‘Is Diana home yet? Paul carried her off and I couldn’t stop them.’ Meanwhile, halted by shut gates at a level crossing, Paul had put his arm round me again and I, my heart thudding, had learnt how to relax and let my head fall against his shoulder. When he turned my face up and kissed me on the mouth, we were both surprised: I because his lips were cold and a little sticky whereas I had expected them to be warm and smooth; he because mine were hot and parted whereas he had expected them to be like a child’s. He told me later that he had thought, ‘The little devil, she has been at it already, this is not the first time,’ but it was. I was thinking, ‘Paul is kissing me!’; I was thinking, ‘And high time, too’; I was thinking, ‘Silly, of course his lips are cold, the night air has been blowing on his face’; I was thinking, ‘It is natural for first kisses to be disappointing so it doesn’t matter, it will be all right next time’. I was coming into my own at last, as I had always intended to, and the difference between anticipation and reality could only be to the advantage of reality, simply because it was reality.

  When we arrived at the Farm my mother sat up in bed, furious with worry. ‘How could you have behaved like that!’ she said, ‘Why did you take so long to get home, what did you do?’ I meant to say nothing, but I was too full of it to keep it in. ‘There was a train shunting at the level crossing,’ I said. ‘Paul kissed me.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and I could sense the clutch of fear in her stomach. ‘Did he just kiss you, or did he – are you sure he didn’t mess you about?’

  I could not strike her because she was in bed and I was standing some paces away. I could only mutter savagely, ‘How could you say that!’ and slam out of her room thinking, ‘Damn her, damn her, damn her!’ I could still feel Paul’s dinner jacket against my cheek, those surprising lips, and his hand lightly on my breast where my own hand held it; I was still wrapped about with the most important moment of my life, and she had said ‘mess you about’.

  ‘They are filthy!’ I thought.

  Poor parents, what are they to do?

  From Christmas 1935 to October 1936 I stayed at home, losing the last shreds of my desire to conform to my family’s plan for me by going up to Oxford. I had tried for a scholarship and failed; something of which I was ashamed but which was just becoming a relief when a great-aunt stepped in with an offer to help with my fees. ‘Darling Aunt Mary,’ they all said. ‘How wonderful of her’ – and I thought ‘Interfering old crone.’ Now this is a bad thing to remember: that never, other than formally, did I thank Aunt Mary for the three best years of my life.

  I did not know that they were going to be so delightful because I saw them as a continuation of school. Here was I on my eighteenth birthday, and still they wanted to stuff education down my throat. But because the months ahead of me, before the first term began, looked so rich and free – a clovery green meadow to a pony who had stood in a stall all winter – I kicked up my heels and forgot about the future. New dresses, friends to stay, dances, reading what I liked, horses, hunting, tennis parties … If I had been asked ‘Do you want to do this forever?’ I should have answered with an emphatic no, critical as I had become of the structure on which it all rested, and depressing as I found even then the spectacle of girls older than myself who were doing it forever – taking the dogs for walks, arranging the flowers, helping their mothers at garden fêtes. No, I did not intend to be like that. But I did want to do it now.

  Not all of i
t was pure pleasure. The tennis parties, for instance, almost amounted to misery. My eye sent messages to my hand no more quickly for a tennis ball than for a lacrosse ball; I was always the worst player there and I hated to show at a disadvantage. But they were a large part of our soclal life as soon as summer began, and that I would not miss. Besides, the white-clad figures against green lawns, the smell of new-mown grass, the taste of iced homemade lemonade, and the presence of men – once the playing was over the parties became enjoyable. Driving to them, I would practise a fierce self-discipline: ‘It does not matter if you make a fool of yourself, it does not matter what they think. It is only vanity which makes you think that it matters and if you stop thinking it, it won’t.’ When this had only depressed me further I would switch to ‘And anyway you dance better than they do, and you ride much better, and you read more, and you’re a socialist.’ It did not do much good, but even so the parties’ pleasures were never wholly obscured by their pains.

  Hunting had no pains – or rather, its pains were both private and shared, and sharpened its joys. That I was nervous almost to the point of throwing up at every meet, hearing the crack as my horse’s forelegs hit the top bar of a gate, the crunch as one of its hooves came down on my skull, was at the same time an internal matter and something in which I was not alone. During the waiting about before the field moves off; many people are likely to be either unusually silent or unnaturally hearty. The more frightened you were, the more miraculous the vanishing of fear as soon as things started to happen; the more exciting the thud of hooves, the creak of leather, the more triumphant your thrusts ahead by risking a blind bit of fence while others were queuing for a straightforward bit. What instinct it is in a horse that gives it its passion for following hounds I do not understand. It is not only the obvious herd instinct, for I have often known horses who continued to quiver and dance, to be alert in every nerve, when we had lost the field and were riding alone, stretching our ears for the hounds’ voices, and I once had a pony who was so mad about the sport that she would not eat when she got home after a long day but would lean against the door of her loose-box, straining to hear the intoxicating sounds from which I had had much trouble turning her away several hours before. Whatever it may be, it is shared by the rider, and it is not lust for blood. I used, whenever possible, to avoid being in at the kill, and of all the many people I have known who enjoyed hunting, not one took pleasure in the chase’s logical conclusion.