Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  ‘Where did he get them from?’ I whispered to Paul.

  ‘From his father. And he got them from his father, and he got them from his. Nobody has ever written them down.’

  Back they went into time, the pretty maidens going to market, falling into ditches and showing first their slim ankles, then their round knees, then their white thighs, then…A miller went down to his mill to see if his apprentice was filling sacks properly, and found him filling the miller’s wife…A naïve young shepherdess asked a young shepherd what it was that the rams were doing, and why…. Some of them were not lewd but romantic, like the one about a girl lovelorn like a nightingale, leaning her bosom on a cruel thorn. Once the Poacher was launched, others joined in. They all knew the songs and loved them, sentimental or bawdy, and none of them thought of them as anything but ‘the old songs’ as opposed to ‘modern jazz’—none of them thought it strange that they should still be singing them. But when I saw Maggie again after all those years, ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said to me, ‘they never sing the old songs now, not ever. The young ones don’t go for them any more and the Poacher’s dead.’

  I sat through that evening in spellbound silence, made shy by the family greeting Paul got, afraid that I should not be considered worthy. I drank my half-pint of beer to his pint, I watched, I listened, and happiness crept up like a rising tide. Later we drove off somewhere to see a man called Bernard—my first of many a confused exodus at closing time, the cool air of night so sweet on one’s face, the handle on the car’s door so strangely not quite where one expects it to be, the plans to go to such and such a place changing so mysteriously en route to arrival at another. Bernard was a homosexual, Paul told me as we went up the stairs, but a grand chap, great fun. Goodness, another first! I had never spoken to a homosexual in my life. And soon I was not just speaking to one but was in bed with him, snuggled between him and Paul and drinking whisky, because Bernard it turned out was in bed with a cold and his room was chilly. I was living! Thawed, happy, drunk, kissed, I was delivered back to my college two minutes before midnight when the doors were shut—and I knew that I was going to love Oxford.

  To me Oxford became a game at a time when play was life. The play of young animals, their pouncing and stalking and woolly wrestling, is serious. It is learning, without which they would not survive as adults, and that kind of play among human beings is too often restricted by economic necessity to childhood, in which a great deal is learnt, but not everything. Oxford struck me—I am not being wise after the event, it struck me like this at the time—as the perfect place for this kind of learning, or growing. Some of my friends became impatient of it, feeling it unreal, but I argued that if for three or four years you could have the advantages of being adult with none of the responsibilities, what more could you ask? And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd—to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties—that was the kind of thing which you would never be able to do unselfconsciously anywhere else, and which you needed to do. Behind you were the prison walls of school and the deflating intimacy of family (‘No one likes an affected girl,’ when you had thought you were being witty), and in front of you were the necessary, not unwelcome, disciplines of a job or marriage. But here, now, in the present, was the chance to think and talk and behave in whatever way you wished, and this I could only see as a glorious good.

  To say that I did no work while I was up would be to exaggerate only slightly. Certain things I could not avoid: writing an essay for my tutor once a week and attending classes, which were smaller and more intimate than lectures, consisting only of the people from one’s own college, in one’s own year, who were reading the same subject, visiting some don in his or her room as a group. It was only possible to be absent from a class with a watertight excuse, but no one knew whether one attended lectures or not, since they were a University, not a college, matter, given in the impersonal setting of the University Schools or in the hall of the lecturer’s college. I soon thought up the argument that all lecturers wrote books on their subjects, and that one could benefit more from reading than from listening: an argument which would have had something in it if I had read, since no form of instruction is more soporific than words spoken to a large audience by someone who has often spoken them before. I must have attended about six lectures in the course of my three years. On those occasions I carried a pen and several sheets of paper, sincerely meaning to take the methodical notes on which, I had so often been told, everything depended. I would get to (3), or perhaps (3a), and then a drawing of a crocodile, a horse, a hat would appear; or a note to show at knee level to Margaret: ‘Isn’t that man with red hair the one who got drunk at Gerry’s party?’ ‘No, he was fatter.’

  I had chosen to read English because I reckoned that I would be reading it anyway, for pleasure. A good deal of it I did read, and wrote about with spirit though always at the last possible moment and too briefly, in essays which gave the impression of intelligence and enthusiasm. But native wit could not disguise for long so thorough a lack of application; indeed, when it came to the barbaric Anglo-Saxon language, an extensive knowledge of which was required, it could not disguise it at all. I was soon starting each term with a little talk from my Moral Tutor—the don responsible for one in a general way throughout one’s career. Mine was a small, shy woman of great tact and delicacy of feeling, a scrupulous scholar and a scrupulous respecter of other people’s liberties, fastidiously disinclined to bully. Gently, almost humbly, she would ask how I intended to work that term. ‘You ought to get a First,’ she would say during my first year. ‘It would be such a pity if you did not.’ In my second year it was ‘You ought to get a Second.’ In my third year we reached the point, painfully embarrassing to us both, when she had to steel herself to speak out. ‘You cannot do enough work to catch up and avoid disaster if you continue to go out so much, and to act. Rehearsing takes up so much time. I am afraid I really must ask you to think seriously about cutting down your activities—giving up the acting, for instance—now that Schools are nearly on us.’

  These interviews made me angry with the itchy, irritable anger which results from knowing yourself to be in the wrong, and after the anger had died down, they made me sorry that I should have inflicted such a disagreeable task on a woman who would so warmly have appreciated the pleasant one of praising me. They did not, however, influence my behaviour in the smallest degree. Even the acting I clung to, although I was no actress and did not think myself one. I only loved everything about it: being onstage, being backstage, making up, painting scenery, the smells, the lights, the sounds.

  Intelligent in certain ways I may have been, but I was by nature entirely, hopelessly unscholarly. What I got from Oxford, on the level of formal education (apart from a Third Class degree, and if one were going to do badly the rare Fourth Class would at least have had the merit of dash), was no more than the reading of a few books which I might not otherwise have read and which I am glad to know, and a vague, general idea of what scholarship is. I can recognize it in others, I can wince at its imitations. But if that were all Oxford had given me—or rather, that I had been capable of taking from Oxford—I should have cost my parents and my great-aunt a lot of money for an appallingly small return.

  I believe, however, that I owe to Oxford much of the stability and resilience which enabled me, later, to live through twenty years of unhappiness without coming to dislike life. I already had the advantages of a happy childhood and a naturally equable disposition, and three years of almost pure enjoyment added to those advantages confirmed in me a bias towards being well-disposed to life without which, lacking faith, lacking intellect, lacking energy, and, eventually, lacking confidence in myself, I might have foundered.

  On the river at night, moving silently through t
he darkness under trees: suddenly the man punting whispers ‘Look!’ and I turn my head towards the bank. Three naked boys are dancing wildly but without a sound in the moonlight.

  On the river at night again, moored in the cave of shadow made by a willow: music in the distance, coming slowly nearer. We stop kissing and another, solitary punter passes us without knowing we are there, with a gramophone in the stern of his punt on which The Swan of Tuonela is playing into the night.

  In someone’s room on an October evening, the air outside the window turning deep blue: a long way away, someone begins to play the Last Post on a bugle and we stop talking while the whole of autumn, the whole of Oxford, the whole of time passing seems to be drawn up into an exquisite sadness. Even at my father’s funeral, when the Last Post was played over his grave, it carried me back to that room.

  People who have been happy in a first marriage are likely to be happy in a second: they are conditioned to companionship and affection. In the same way, I, having lived for so long in a place which I loved passionately, had a readiness to love another place: it was because of Beckton that Oxford, as a place, meant so much to me. I do not believe that I ever went out of my college, even if only to buy a tube of toothpaste, without taking conscious pleasure in something that I saw, some chime of bells, some smell. Coming back from a class I would deviate from the shortest way to go by the Turl, or by New College Lane or Magpie Lane, or some other street for which I had a particular affection, and I liked to walk by myself so that without distraction I could soak these streets and buildings up. The place seemed to me to give off a physical exhalation to which my very skin responded. If at Oxford anything had irritated, bored, or frustrated me, if I were unhappy or lonely or angry with myself, I could always be restored by the place. Towards the end of my time there I would go out with the deliberate intention of ‘soaking up.’

  The room which depressed me so much on my first arrival was not mine for long. Soon I was given the chance of moving into better accommodation, and got a room in the Old Building, looking over a lawn with apple trees growing out of neat rounds cut in the grass: ‘the unicorn garden’ Nan and I used to call it, because it had the look of a garden in a tapestry. My extravagant mother came to visit me and saw at once that all that dark blue, with the ugly washstand, was intolerable. With guilty excitement we hurried out shopping and I chose a shockingly expensive chintz for bed and curtains, and a neat cabinet to enclose the washing paraphernalia which, when shut, looked pretty with a bowl of roses on it. Once books, pictures, and china were arranged, that room became to my mind the most charming and adult-looking in the college, and from that day it was my habit to spend almost my whole allowance of a pound a week on flowers for its decoration. After the detestable promiscuity of school life and the pleasanter but no less unavoidable infringements of privacy in a family, a room of one’s own was both an adventure and a reassurance. Thinking it pretty, I even kept it tidy: something which to this day I can only do to rooms I like.

  I never used the common rooms except for the short periods during the mornings when I was winkled out of my own by a housemaid; and then, unless it was the morning before I had to produce an essay so that work was unavoidable, I would prefer to visit Nan or Margaret, or to meet friends for coffee in the town. Our social life sounds extraordinarily mild. Except for my escapades with Paul, it was meeting people for coffee, meeting people for a walk, going on the river, going to tea with people—those were by far the most frequent entertainments. There was a scattering of pub-crawls and sherry parties, but few of our young men had more money than we had ourselves, so that although a bottle of reasonably good sherry cost only seven and six, debauchery was usually beyond our means. Except for the summer term, which ended with the Commemoration balls, we were not likely to dance more than two or three times in the eight weeks, while dining at the George, at that time the dashing restaurant, had to be kept for special occasions. Paul took me there, of course, but my undergraduate friends would manage it only during the early, display-dance stage of a wooing.

  Because mild though such occupations may sound, they were in fact nearer to being feverish. During nearly all of them love was being approached, made, or dissipated. Sprawling on beds in each other’s rooms, Nan, Margaret, and I would certainly often discuss books, politics, religion, and the meaning of life, but more often we would discuss people, and most of the people we discussed were men.

  When, and to whom, were we going to lose our virginity? That was our covert, and sometimes our overt, preoccupation. Both Margaret and I had come to Oxford officially in love, and Nan was soon to become engaged, though not for long. Since we all felt that this serious step was synonymous with the sealing of a great love, we should have had no problem—but we did. Not inevitably, but most often, to meet a new man, to be asked out by him, and to get to know him beyond a superficial point was to be embraced by him; and with the embrace he would become at once more than a casual aquaintance, he would become a new person to know. These little explosions of meeting were constantly blasting new shafts into the mine of experience, opening new galleries of relationship to be explored.

  Sitting behind two girls in a bus not long ago, I heard one of them saying gravely, ‘The trouble is, I’m beginning to think that it is possible to be in love with two people at once,’ and her words gave me an instant feeling of exhaustion. Yes indeed, that was the trouble. How could it not be when the people one was meeting were all different, all real, none of them yet visibly crippled by the patterns their life would impose on them into distrust, or masochism, or boredom, or whatever deformity might overtake them later. I never believed that I would marry any of the men I came to know at Oxford—it was Paul whom I was going to marry—but this did not prevent them, sometimes, from being more immediately important to me than mere liking could account for. When Paul was out of sight he was not so much out of mind as tucked away into cold storage in the back of my mind, and during those times other relationships, intense, delightful, or harrowing, could flourish. We all, in the end, steered the course we believed to be right: Margaret married her love soon after leaving Oxford, Nan postponed decision until she was older, and I went to bed with Paul. But it was a serpentine wake that we left behind us before reaching those points, and regularly once a term, I for one would have to spend a day in bed for no other reason than nervous exhaustion.

  In one of these subsidiary relationships I was all but trapped, reaching a stage in which I said to myself in so many words ‘I love him so much that I would even marry him’ and clinging to that stage even after I had laughed at my own momentary conception of marriage as a desperate resort. He was the first man I had met for whom I felt the tenderness which comes with physical accord in its purest form: that sympathy between skin and bone and nerves which on its own level is as rare as true temperamental affinity. Simply to look at his thin hands, the way his hair grew crisply above his ears, the slant of his eyelashes and the freckles on the bridge of his nose, gave me such intense pleasure that it had to involve the whole of me. I knew perfectly well that although he was a gentle and sweet-natured person, and had a kind of secret integrity of character which was deeply likeable, he was not someone with whom I could communicate. Ideas might flow between me and other people, and between him and other people, but they did not flow between me and him—we came up against a blank wall in each other and a marriage between us would have been a disaster. But we only had to kiss each other for this knowledge to vanish, and at the end of one summer term, when our long, shy love-making had reached a point of tension unbearable to him, we had a scene from which I emerged determined that the first thing I would do at the beginning of next term was to commit myself to him by sleeping with him.

  I brewed this decision for the whole of the vacation, becoming more exalted as I became more nervous—and he, at his end, brewed it too, coming, though I did not know it, to an opposite conclusion. He was a level-headed young man with high principles, and he decided that to seduce
a girl whom he liked but did not want to marry would be asking for trouble. We met again, I in my fine fever, he in his anxious lucidity—and no other meeting in my life, however much more grave in reality, has remained with me in its detail more painfully than that one. I have written a story about it so I will not describe it here. I will only say that the pain and humiliation and sense of loss seemed to be quite literally unbearable.

  So unbearable were they that after two days I saw that I could not bear them. I wrote to Paul: ‘Darling Paul,’ I said, ‘I am so miserable that I want to die. Robert does not love me. Do you think that you can come to Oxford soon?’

  Back came a letter by return, telling me that even if Robert did not love me, Paul did; telling me that ‘he will miss you more than he can bear and will throw care to the winds’ telling me that I must not stop loving or stop being unhappy ‘because now you are living’ telling me to ‘read Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Oxford Book of E. V.’ telling me that he was coming.