Somewhere Towards the End

by Diana Athill

  Such a grief, it seems to me, is proof of a good, or at least an agreeable, life, and ought therefore to be something for which one is grateful – provided, of course, that one has not been cut off untimely, and I know that my brother agreed with me that once past eighty one has no right to complain about dying, because he said so. I guess that if I am given the time for it, I too shall feel at least a little of it, and hope to remember that it is simply what one has to pay for what one has enjoyed.

  So: I have inherited a good chance of going fairly easily, and I have found it easy to think myself into a reasonable attitude towards death. It is not surprising, therefore, that I spend no time worrying about it. When I worry, it is about living with the body’s failures, because experience has shown me that when that ordeal is less hard than it might have been, it is usually because of the presence of a daughter. And I have no daughter. Barry, the person closest to me – we became lovers sixty-three years ago and started sharing this flat eight years later – has beaten me to physical collapse, so that I have to look after him. And I haven’t got the money to pay for care of any kind. If I don’t have the luck to fall down dead while still able-bodied, as my uncle and my cousin did (and that luck certainly can only be hoped for, not counted on), it is going to be the geriatric ward for me.

  Fortunately, if a prospect is bleak enough the mind jibs at dwelling on it. It’s not a matter of choosing not to think about it, more of not being able to do so. Whatever happens, I will get through it somehow, so why fuss? Now that I have attempted to assess my own attitude, that seems to be it. Those last miserable weeks or months (may it not be years!) when you are unable to look after yourself are so disagreeable anyway that it hardly matters how they are spent. My oldest friend died this year, my age, daughterless like me but with enough money first for carers visiting her home, then for a nursing home reckoned to be an exceptionally good one, which given what it cost it damn well should have been. From time to time, in emergencies, she also had to spend a week or so in hospital, in wards full of other ancient people, and she didn’t seem to be any unhappier there than she was in the expensive ‘home’. The one real drawback to a ward, I felt, was that the nursing was better there so they were more likely to haul you back from the brink to suffer further misery than they were at the ‘home’. She, on the other hand, was always glad when hauled back. Perhaps when one comes to it one always is? By the time I’ve learnt whether that is true for me I shall be past handing on the news.

  That is all I have to say about the event of death and what I feel about it in advance, so now I shall move on – or perhaps ‘over’ is more exact – to the experience of living during one’s last years.

  7

  WHAT HAPPENS TODAY is, of course, closely interwoven with what happened yesterday, being simply a continuation of the same process: only those old people afflicted with senile dementia move on to another plane. For the rest of us, as we have sown, so do we reap. And one of the best parts of my harvest comes from a lucky piece of sowing a long time ago.

  Soon after the event described on page 24, when I first had to accept the fact that I was on the wane sexually, Barry Reckord, my lover-turned-just-friend, decided to take a play of his, White Witch, to Jamaica. All but one of the people in the play are Jamaicans, so those parts could be cast when he got there, but the ‘witch’ herself is English, so her interpreter had to be found here and taken with him. He couldn’t afford an established actor, so it had to be someone young and inexperienced who was going to be offered the thrill of this big and juicy part, and who would probably be excited enough by it to take off happily for several months in the Caribbean on very little money.

  Almost the first he auditioned was a farmer’s daughter from Somerset, Sally Cary, who read the part well and was pretty enough for it, although to my mind her looks ought to have been a touch more extreme and eccentric. Barry liked them, however, and judged (rightly) that she would be capable of expressing the part’s character once on stage. So off they went, and the production was successful. I was not surprised when it became apparent from Barry’s letters that he and Sally had slipped into an affair.

  When they got back to England I was, however, slightly surprised to see how serious it was – certainly very far from being a passing flutter. But that was explained almost at once. Barry and I are similar in our responses to intelligence, honesty and generosity, so when it turned out that Sally was one of the nicest young women – one of the nicest people – I had ever met, I had no trouble understanding why he loved her. Certainly if I had still been in a physical relationship with him it would have pained me to see them together, but because by then I had fully acknowledged within myself that sex between us was gone for good, it didn’t worry me. It was a great piece of luck that this important shift in our relationship had happened before Sally came into our lives.

  She found herself a bedsitter not far from us, and returned to the nerve-racking routine of auditions, getting work so rarely that paying for her room was not easy. Her parents, though both from farming families as well as being farmers themselves, had apparently begun to resent the rigours of their life enough to want to rescue their three daughters from it. The two elder girls had married Americans, and Sally, with her good contralto voice and gift for acting, had been firmly pointed towards a career on the stage. She said that her father positively discouraged her from taking an interest in the farm, and she really seemed to know little about it: I used to tease her for not knowing the difference between wheat and barley. From school she went on to an acting school, and she was still taking singing lessons.

  Quite soon it occurred to me that, since she was spending almost every night in Barry’s bed, keeping on her bedsitter was a waste of money, so I suggested that she should move in with us. It seemed to me that I would enjoy having her with us, and so I did. I know people thought our ménage à trois odd, though whether I acquired undeserved merit for generosity, or disapproval for loose morals, I could never tell because no one was ever impolite enough to comment. I suspect there was more of the former than the latter, given that no one could live through the 1960s without at least hearing possessiveness condemned, even if they didn’t condemn it themselves. It is true that many people are so neurotically possessive that they can’t bear seeing someone enjoying something even if they don’t want it for themselves, but I was not, and still am not, possessive like that, not because I had trained myself out of it but simply because I wasn’t made that way – luck, not virtue, for which I am grateful, having often witnessed the miseries of jealousy. When Sally joined us what I felt was that now I had a lovely new friend in the house, as well as a darling old one, and the next two years or so were some of the happiest I can remember.

  That stage came to an end when Sally’s father’s health deteriorated. She had already given up singing lessons (her teacher had said she ought to write i want to be the best contralto in the world and stick it up above her mirror, and she had thought, ‘How bloody silly! I don’t in the least want to be the best contralto in the world’); and although she enjoyed acting she was not obsessed by it and detested the often humiliating ordeal of auditions. She therefore came to the conclusion that she ought to go home and help her father, to which end she signed up for a course on farm management at Cirencester. I think I missed her almost as much as Barry did, but by that time friendship had consolidated into a sense of belonging together like family, so that there was no question of ‘losing’ her, not even when at Cirencester she met Henry Bagenal and they decided to get married. Henry, being a warm-hearted and wise young man very much liked by both Barry and me, simply joined the family, so to speak. On Mr Cary’s death the two of them took over the farm, and when Jessamy and Beauchamp were born it was almost as though Barry had acquired two grandchildren, and me too to a slightly lesser degree.

  So now, in my old age, although I have not in fact got a daughter and grandchildren, I have got people who are near to filling those roles. One of the most imp
ressive things about Sally has been that although she didn’t seem to be unusually drawn to children before she married, once she had them she opened out into motherhood with astonishing completeness, yet without losing herself. She was, for instance, determined to breastfeed her babies and to go on doing so until they chose to give it up. Jessamy, her first child, continued to return to the breast when she needed to be comforted well into her third year, by which time she could understand and agree that it must be passed on to her little brother because he couldn’t do without it while she could. All the usual arguments had been brought to bear on Sally – it was unnecessary, it was indecent, it would tie her down, it would wear her out, and above all it would make the child neurotically dependent on her – and she had disregarded them. What in fact happened was that conveniently portable Jess was absorbed into adult life instead of imprisoning her mother in the nursery, then developed into a child so secure that her self-confidence and independence were remarkable, and has now become a young adult who leaves us all gaping with admiration and envy as she sails triumphantly into her career as a doctor, living – to our great good luck – in a flat five minutes’ walk from us. And her brother Beachy, in his very different way, is equally beautiful and successful, while their mother, who has never for a moment failed either of them and is as much loved as she is loving, simultaneously built herself a full-time career in the organic food movement. Her two children are far from being the only remarkably attractive young people of my close acquaintance – I have nephews, nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom make nonsense of gloomy forebodings about modern youth – but they are the two I see most often, so it is they who seem to symbolize my good fortune in this respect.

  What is so good about it is not just the affection young people inspire and how interesting their lives are to watch. They also, just by being there, provide a useful counteraction to a disagreeable element in an old person’s life. We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so. We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead … It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier. Whereas if, flitting in and out of our awareness, there are people who are beginning, to whom the years ahead are long and full of who knows what, it is a reminder – indeed it enables us actually to feel again – that we are not just dots at the end of thin black lines projecting into nothingness, but are parts of the broad, many-coloured river teeming with beginnings, ripenings, decayings, new beginnings – are still parts of it, and our dying will be part of it just as these children’s being young is, so while we still have the equipment to see this, let us not waste our time grizzling.

  And if we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-à-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror.

  Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy …? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It’s not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it’s going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having.

  The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk – remote, but possible – of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn’t enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his. Not long ago I sat at dinner next to a lively man in his late sixties or early seventies who announced blithely that he got on very well with young people, he didn’t know why but they seemed to feel as though he were the same age as they were. And as he spoke his intelligent face slid into a fatuous smile. Oh, you poor dear! is what I felt. Then – it was unkind of me, and almost certainly useless – I told a little story from my own experience.

  When I was eighteen or nineteen we were all surprised to learn that a man who lived near us had got married. It had been assumed that he was a confirmed bachelor because he had reached the age of (I think) forty-nine as an apparently contented single man, a condition attributed to his dimness, not to any suspicion of his being gay. People were pleased for him when they learnt that he had found a wife, a suitable woman in her mid-forties, but there was a touch of amusement in the way they discussed it. There had been enough talk about it for me to be interested when I went to a dance and saw them there, just back from their honeymoon. I watched them take to the floor together, two small, sandy-haired, plain but cheerful-looking old people – no, more than cheerful-looking, rapturously happy. They were glowing. They were gazing into each other’s eyes. They had shut their eyes and were dancing cheek pressed to cheek. And it was disgusting. ‘I suppose,’ I thought, ‘that old people must still make love [in those days it didn’t occur to us to say fuck], but they ought to have the decency not to show it.’ And I was a kind, well brought-up girl who would not have dreamt of betraying that response if I had been face to face with them.

  It does seem to me that the young nowadays are often more sophisticated than I used to be, and that many of them – certainly my own darlings – relate to their elders more easily than we did; but I am convinced that one should never, never expect them to want one’s company, or make the kind of claims on them that one makes on a friend of one’s own age. Enjoy whatever they are generous enough to offer, and leave it at that.

  8

  AS WELL AS relationships there are, of course, activities, which are almost as important. There was a time, about twenty years ago, when if you lived in London it was possible to take, almost for free, evening classes in a vast number of subjects. For years I had felt snobbishly that such activities were not for me, but when I became too fat to find ready-made clothes I liked in any shop I could afford, it occurred to me that I might learn dressmaking, so I made enquiries and my eyes were opened. I was awe-struck, when I went to the local primary school in order to enrol in a dress-making class, to discover how many subjects were offered: painting, several kinds of dancing, plumbing, languages including Chinese, Russian and Latin, motor mechanics, antique collecting – you named it and you could learn it. So soon a group of us were crouched like gnomes at tiny desks in the infants’ library every Wednesday evening, stitching merrily away. We were probably uncommonly lucky in having dear Biddy Maxwell for our tutor, who not only taught us very well, but also became the central figure in a cluster of friendships that endures to this day, but it seemed obvious that we were not the only class having a good time.

  About six years later this abundance of almost-free classes began to shrivel. It had started to be under threat a bit earlier: if fewer than ten people turned up at any class it was closed down, so from time to time we had to hijack an obliging husband, give him a scrap of material and tell him to look as though he were making himself a tie. But finally the whole of that particular system ended; though there still, of course, continued to be institutions running evening classes for those willing to pay, and as far as I was concerned classes for adults had become a welcome part of life.

  It was my mother who first caused me to associate the idea of them with painting, because in her mid-seventies she had taken up Painting for Pleasure classes. Some of her fellow students were content with making
careful copies of postcards, but some, among whom she was one of the bravest, were more adventurous. She produced many bold still lives and one quite startling self-portrait, and she enjoyed it very much, so when I reached my mid-seventies, and after dress-making had been closed down, it seemed natural to follow her example. I had always loved painting lessons at school, had once enjoyed a short fling as a Sunday painter before realizing that my job simply didn’t allow me time for it, and was still aware that if I wanted to draw something I was able to make some kind of stab at it. I was still at work when I joined my first life class (I didn’t retire until I was seventy-five), and soon realized that the necessary concentration called for more energy than, in those circumstances, I could command. But after I had retired I found an agreeable and well-equipped life class just round the corner from where I live, and that I continued for some time.

  I think I was almost the only student in that class whose aim was to reproduce the appearance of the model. What most of the others seemed to aim for was marks on paper that gave what they hoped was the effect of modern art. To them my attempts must have seemed boring and fogeyish; to me theirs appeared an absurd waste of time, and I still think I was right. This may be because I am old, but being old doesn’t necessarily make one wrong. I am pretty sure that it is not only the old who are unable to regard as art anything that does not involve the mastery of a skill.