Letters to a Friend

by Diana Athill

  Barry will be in Washington from May 13 to May 30. The visit will be less happy than he hoped because he has just heard that Carol, his eldest brother (he’s about 80, I think) is in hospital in New York (where he and his girlfriend now live) with what sounds horribly like cancer of the liver. The latest news is that the scans are conflicting, so there is a chance that it is less bad – his woman has been told that there’s reason to hope, but his daughter Margaret (the ambassador’s wife) has been told by another doctor that he’s pretty sure that a tumour on the liver has spread to the pancreas. His daughter wants to move him to Washington, but his woman has a job in New York and doesn’t want to lose it . . . I don’t know what they will finally do. They say he is not in pain at present, and Barry is very anxious to see him while he can. His other brother, Lloyd, and his sister Cynthia will be staying with Margaret at the same time. He will be very glad to hear from you.

  Much love. Diana

  13 MAY 1999

  Darling Edward,

  Had we heard, when I last wrote, how ill Barry’s brother in New York is? Cancer of the liver, inoperable. And now he’s decided that he wants to die back home in Jamaica so has already been moved down there, so when Barry left for Washington yesterday, it was with the plan of going on almost if not quite immediately to Jamaica with his niece Margaret (poor old Carol’s daughter and the Ambassador’s wife). He doesn’t mean to stay until Carol dies, but he wants to see him while they can still communicate. I think if I were Carol I’d kick him out – talk about the British being inhibited about expressing emotion . . . they are nothing to Jamaicans. Barry on the phone to Carol kept making jokes. He really minds a lot but he so dreads feeling pain that he just won’t. Margaret is being rather the same, so I hope it’s the family mode, and will seem natural to Carol – tho’ he sounded on the phone, to me, to be pulling no punches about knowing that he’s dying, and hating it, but wanting to accept it with as much courage as he can summon. Mind you, I oughtn’t to be surprised at B’s attitude – I’ve always known that if one’s ill he’s about as much use as half a wet Kleenex.

  Having just spent an afternoon with poor old André, I feel that almost any kind of death would be preferable to dragging on and on in the state of physical dissolution that he’s in. Apparently his doctors can’t – or won’t – tell him what’s wrong. He’s like a little skeleton – no flesh or muscle left – can shuffle two steps at a time, then a long wait, then two more steps (propped up by someone). Falls down very often. Can’t remember anything. Can no longer articulate properly (that’s quite recent, and very difficult for deaf old me). Longs to get out of his ancient and now quite gaga girlfriend’s apartment so persuaded me to manoeuvre him down the stairs and into my car (a fearful business) and drive him to Battersea Park where we could sit in the car under beautiful trees and have a talk – and had soaked his trousers twice by the time I got him back (is obviously v. mortified by this, but tries to deal with it by pretending nothing has happened). And is still enough himself mentally to be totally and ceaselessly miserable – does almost nothing but moan and keen about his condition and say how he wishes he was dead. To me it looks like advanced Parkinson’s Disease, though without the shakes, but he says his doctor says it’s not. Anyway, by the time I got home I must confess that the Little Pleasures of Life had (let’s hope temporarily) rather lost their efficacy.

  I don’t think I could do portraits of Ghali and Hakim Jamal, after those two books, but I might do a chapter on them as examples of what editors are not supposed to do – get emotionally involved with their nuttier authors to the point of spending a lot of time and energy and money on them – which, as it turned out, I am very glad I did do because of how interesting it proved to be and of how much more I know about life as a result . . . I can have a shot at it, anyway, and see if it works.

  I have now reached the stage of thinking about the book on and off all the time, which is satisfactory. It means that what I’ve done up to now keeps on putting out little sprouts, which have to be accommodated – at which point, you will say aha! Didn’t I tell you how useful you would find a word processor. But fortunately I still don’t mind going back and doing bits of retyping – ‘fortunately’ because I looked at someone else’s word processor the other day and not a word could I read on the screen. That green lit-up writing and my cataract are totally incompatible and however closely I peered it was just a blur. I have to peer pretty closely at ordinary typing, but at least when I do it becomes legible. (One good thing about André – he said yesterday – that when the time comes for my operation I must have it done by a specialist and he’ll pay!) I’ve enjoyed doing the Jean Rhys portrait. I’m not sure that it’s quite stopped sprouting – when it does, I’ll send you a copy.

  I’m so sorry that things have gone flat with you – if it’s any comfort, I was quite sure that I was going to go on doing nothing for the rest of my days, but off I go again! And I’m much older than you are, dear love. So cheer up!

  Ribbon ran out – so good-night my dears, & big hugs

  Diana

  9 AUGUS T 1999

  Darling Edward,

  This letter is Naughtiness – because what I sat down at the table to do is my Income Tax – the day by which the filled-in forms have to be sent in is rapidly approaching. And I know that I can do it. I’ve done it for myself for the last two years, and a) it isn’t really difficult when I get down to it, and b) it was deeply satisfying not to have to pay an accountant at least the equivalent of what he had saved one, and usually a good deal more . . . Yet still I put it off, and off, and off. But I now swear that when I finish this letter, I will start on it. So there!

  We are hugely looking forward to Sept. 2 – or the date soon after it when you’re settled enough to call, and arrange our first meeting. Charlie [my nephew] says you’ve been lent a flat this time, which is good news. He came yesterday to Sunday brunch, with his brother Phil, and was in very good form. He’s gone back to teaching for the firm he worked for before – not what he really wants to do, but he says they are nice people – Unlike his NY employers! – and he doesn’t want to run out of money. I think my family is amazingly lucky in its younger – no longer youngest! – generation: so amusing and charming, and yet so level-headed and un-worrying. Nearly all the oldies I know have tales of woe about their grandchildren – or, if the young things are not deplorable, they are deadly dull. How rash to boast like this – god may hear, and send a thunderbolt. Burn this!!

  There really isn’t any news . . . But how much nicer it is to envisage you as a recipient rather than Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes! Actually we are in a state of shock, because our dear old cleaning lady, Doll, has retired, and I’ve taken on in her place the youngest of three formidable sisters from the Philippines who have been bullying Barbara for years. They have the most terrifyingly high standards – Barbara warned us, and we laughed – but lo! both Barry and I have been doing, during the past two weeks, more housework than we have ever done before, in a vain attempt not to feel ashamed in the light of Myrna’s piercing eye. We jump to obey her orders – this kind of toilet cleaner, not that one; old cotton t-shirts, not shop dusters; a new mop, if you please. And I simply can’t convey to you the sense of moral inferiority which engulfed us at her most recent communication:

  ‘Hi! More Jif please. Sorry but I have used a lot because trying to get oil off walls.’ I think it’s that ‘trying’ which is the coup de grace. One reads stories of Filipinas being imported to London and treated brutally as domestic slaves, but now I know Myrna I’ll never believe a word of them.

  Love and love, Diana

  10 DECEMBER 1999

  Darling Edward,

  I’m just coming to the end of a tedious week. Barbara jaunted off to France with our Norfolk neighbours, and Barry went to stay with Sally and Henry in Somerset, so there I was faced with a week closeted with Hannah, when a) my car broke down twice in two days, and b) poor old André broke his hip. He has come through t
he pinning operation; and doesn’t seem to be suffering any pain, but my god, he looks frightful – a tiny bag of sparrowbones, his poor little claws dark purple from where they’ve stuck tubes into him. When he can haul himself out of doziness, which isn’t often, he’s in his right mind (though his speech has gone so mumbly that it’s hard to discern as much). He looks as though he couldn’t possibly live another day, but the hospital says brightly that he’s doing very well and will be going home next week . . . His heart must be amazingly strong to withstand all his illness and now this. Luckily, some time ago, he was canny enough to attach to himself a young man called Paulo who was a decorator working on his house. I think Paulo asked him if he had any odd jobs going, and André recognized a benign and willing nature, took him on to do driving and occasional shopping and so on, and gradually, as André has become more helpless, Paulo has become more helpful. I guess that André has done something major for him – helped him buy a house, or something of that kind – because P says ‘Well, I owe him so much . . .’ – but basically I think it’s that Paulo is one of the world’s natural carers. He is now administering André’s life in almost every way, as far as I can see out of genuine loving kindness (tho’ he does get a bit bossy at times). Although Paulo can go there every day, he can’t be there at night, or at weekends . . . So I was beginning to worry that André must be becoming too much for his girlfriend’s carers, but then Paulo told me yesterday that he has decided he must over-ride André’s instructions and ring up an agency and order a night-nurse for him. He says he’ll be able to get the money for it out of A once it is a fait accompli. So – thank god for Paulo!

  I never did remember to show you my La Fontaine’s Fables. I now send you one of them.

  Love and love

  THE WOLF AND THE LAMB

  Might is right: if you don’t know it

  allow me with this tale to show it.

  At a sparkling stream

  a little lamb was drinking.

  Out of the shadowy wood

  a wolf came slinking.

  ‘Lamb,’ snarled the wolf, ‘you’re mucking up my

  water

  and I intend to lead you to the slaughter.’

  ‘My lord . . . Your Majesty,’ stammered the lamb,

  ‘Kindly observe that as I sip I am

  downstream – a long way down, I truly think

  from that transparent pool where you will drink.’

  ‘You’ve mucked it up.

  And what is more, I know

  that just a year ago

  you called me an idle, cheeky, thieving pup’

  ‘A year ago, my Lord, I wasn’t born . . .

  Oh please, I beg of you, ask my woolly mother!’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t you it must have been

  that foul-mouthed reprobate, your elder brother.’

  ‘I have no brother!’

  ‘So – who cares? – it was

  someone to do with you: a close relation –

  your shepherd – his dog – your who-knows-what –

  and I

  must now avenge my damaged reputation.’

  Whereupon – snap, gobble, crunch,

  he ate the lamb for lunch.

  [Pamela Royds, our children’s books editor, had bought a charmingly illustrated French edition of La Fontaine’s Fables and was wonder­ing who to get to translate them, when it occurred to me I’d like to try my hand at it. I enjoyed it, and Pam approved of the results. Edward thought he could do better and I expect he could – but I still stuck to my versions.]

  21 DECEMBER 1999

  Darling Edward,

  You’ve given me such a lovely present in sending Alfred’s letters. It shocks me that I had forgotten so much – but it delights me that I was right in the essential memory: the feeling that there was a real and warm friendliness between us. What good letters he wrote! It comes back to me now that I didn’t used to bother, quite often, to type (and therefore keep copies of) letters unless they had something official in them, which is why only a few of mine are there – the same thing happened in my correspondence with Jean Rhys, and a few others, with whom the correspondence became one of friendship as well as business. It didn’t occur to me, in those days, that the friendship letters would have any value beyond the time of writing.

  A surprise is the extent to which I obviously was not worried by the signs of disturbance and statements of unhappiness. With hindsight one knows how real the unhappinesses were; at the time I thought it was Alfred’s way, to overstate. I am very glad to have the letters.

  It looks as though we may be in London over Xmas, because Barbara has gone down with a real bad flu. Of course she persevered in her faith in Mind Over Matter long after anyone in her senses would have capitulated, and gave in only when her fever had gone up to 105 and her cough was frightful – and then wouldn’t have got a doctor if left to herself. And now, after four days, when the fever ‘is almost gone’ – it’s still 101 – and she hasn’t eaten a bite for all that time – she couldn’t even drink a cup of weak tea without vomiting – lo and behold, Mind Over Matter is cropping up again! This afternoon I discovered that she had just taken Hannah out ‘for a very little walk’ – in an ice-cold storm of mixed snow and rain, and she has just called Barry that he must not go food shopping tomorrow for her and Vanessa (who went down with it this morning) because she was now so bored that she was looking forward to going to Safeways. Oh well – it’s her funeral: I hope not literally!

  Had André broken his hip when I last wrote? He’s still in hospital, more confused and helpless every day, but I think they turf him out tomorrow. I guess it will be the end of him. Twice in the hospital his heart has almost stopped, and they’ve brought him back – moved him up to a little special room near the ward’s nursing station, so that they could pounce on him if and when he collapsed. If and when it happens when he’s back in Gwen’s flat, even with his own nurse, he’ll be a goner, which I truly think he is hoping for, in so far as he is thinking at all. I do think that by now we should have evolved a way of switching our hearts off: it’s such a drag, the ending of a life being so lengthily horrible.

  I don’t think I could face the crowds along the river on New Year’s Eve, even with Charlie’s [my nephew’s] arm to lean on. Getting there and back will be impossible except by pretty sturdy walking. No doubt the telly will put on a good show.

  HAPPY NEW YEAR

  My dear loves. Diana

  9 or 10 FEBRUARY 2000

  Darling Edward –

  Brillant news about the proper trade edition of Village – may it bring you in lots of money. I read heaps of novels these days because Barbara scoops them up from the literary editor’s desk at the Economist (which doesn’t review much fiction) and passes them on to me after she has read them, and very few of them do I remember as clearly as I remember yours. It deserves to catch on.

  I enclose a letter I wrote you after getting yours re ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, and then forgot to mail! The libel niggles I mention in it have been un-niggled – but André hasn’t yet read the copy submitted to him – hasn’t felt up to it. Maybe he never will!

  They’ve now discontinued making ribbons for our loyal old typewriter – though Barry, galvanized into feverish energy, has just tracked down six dusty specimens in darkest Holloway – so our farming friends in Somerset are going to give me their out of date word processor, bringing it up when they next visit London. I’m sure it won’t be clever enough to do e-mail, but hope it will be primitive enough for me to learn.

  Very much love. Diana

  [ENCLOSED LETTER]

  Darling Edward

  We-e-e-ell . . . To tell you the truth I like mine better – chiefly because the varying line-length reproduces the original more closely. Barry says ‘Nothing to choose between them’ (but then he thinks we’re playing childish games anyway). In all of mine I kept very close to the original, because that was my brief, and I did them in the office, in odd minutes
during the working day, so you have more freedom than me. However, I have to admit that yours is more natural-sounding.

  The libel lawyer has been niggling away at Stet and it seems that I’m going to have to make some more modifications to the André material. What a damnable nuisance. But – reasonably enough – they won’t let it go out without André saying he’ll make no trouble . . . And envisioning him reading, even in his woozy state, I saw that I’d have – damn damn damn – to make some changes. Fuck!

  Our water-heater is kaput, and the man who was supposed to come today to mend it didn’t turn up. Double fuck!!

  And my application for a new driving licence has been returned as faulty for the second time. Treble fuck!!!

  Recently they made the licence into two parts – a card with a photo, and a little piece of paper. I lost my little piece of paper, and wrote on Application form no.1, that I didn’t enclose it because it was lost. The whole boiling – applic. form, card, cheque – is returned to me with a note – please enclose your little piece of paper. So I telephoned – and that takes three hours before I catch it un-busy – and I’m told ‘Send it all back with a letter saying it’s lost.’ So I do. And now it has all come back with a note saying ‘We are no longer issuing licences in two pieces, so please fill in enclosed form for just the card’ – ! Are we in Kafka land, or what?