by Diana Athill
Perhaps afterwards, when we are in bed, he will make us laugh again, although this time it will be at him, not with him: we know that although he loves us he also considers us in some ways barbaric. He leaves his diaries in a pile on the table he has to share with me, shows us parts of them and knows that from time to time we leaf through other parts. We know that he has written of us: ‘It’s rather strange. They jump (I think) into bed at once, make love, or rather just fuck, and an hour later they are in the sitting-room again. I don’t know which is better—this hello, fuck, cheers, or my terribly elaborate way, drinking and smoking and eating and leading up to it and music and lights etc. I prefer mine, of course—but then they don’t have time, poor dears.’
‘So that’s what we do, love—“or rather, just fuck,”’ I say to Luke. ‘He’s got a nerve!’ and we hug each other and I feel sorrier for Didi than he feels for us.
Or there are Saturday mornings, my shopping mornings. Didi cooks only erratically, when he wants to express affection or to make an occasion seem important, but he drives me to the shops on Saturdays without fail, seeing it as a return for hospitality. We go to the market in Camden Town and to a Greek grocer in the market. We always mean to go early but rarely get there before midday, and soon we have a ritual, starting at the end of the street with a Guinness or two in the pub which smells of Lysol and is full of old Irishmen, then working our way down from stall to stall. We always pause to examine the junk stall and sometimes find a treasure—a pudding-basin for sixpence, and once, for half a crown, a beautiful photograph in faded sepia, heavily framed, of a dragoman showing the sphinx to Edwardian tourists, which Didi says might have come straight out of a railway station waiting-room in Egypt. We call at the toyshop, too, because Didi says that the man who runs it is a socialist: once, when we exclaimed at the cheapness of the toys, the man said ‘Poor children need toys too, you know,’ and we have liked it ever since and get all our presents for children there, and horrible bath-cubes because Didi insists that they are a bargain, and toothbrushes which cost sixpence and last about a fortnight. If we are in a hurry we split up and take the stalls separately, Didi getting the vegetables while I get the fruit and eggs, meeting again in the grocer’s for the Greek bread, the olive oil, the tahina, the spices, all the things which need consultation. And finally we go to the butcher we like best because he has chalked on his window-glass ‘meat boutique and rump steak emporium’ and his fascia carries the mysterious words ‘’Tis not immortal to command success, but we do more deserve it.’
Didi greatly enjoyed picking up the threads of old friendships dating back to his student years in London, and making new friends, but he surprised me by being at first only intermittently happy, then not happy at all, to see again those of his relations who turned up in London from time to time. The loving mood of his visit to Dolly and Mémé seemed to have evaporated, and now the members of the family often found each other ‘impossible.’ Their image of the devotion which they felt for each other—and of what the other ought to feel for them—was extremely demanding: mothers ready to nourish children with the flesh of their hearts, children ready to sacrifice anything rather than bring a tear to a mother’s eye. While they were cushioned by money and status in the society which produced them, it was perhaps easy to enjoy the luxury of believing in this image; but those of them who had been reduced, either by choice or by necessity, to the precarious condition of exile, seemed to me to come up pretty smartly against reality. Love flowed as freely as ever when it was no trouble, but could curdle into complaint and resentment overnight if it had to face claims.
I heard much from Didi on these curdlings in others towards himself, but I couldn’t help noticing a similar process at work in him towards others. Only for one cousin, a girl much younger than himself who was having a hard time, did he continue to feel sympathy and love. There was little to choose between him and the rest of them when it came to disgust at another person’s selfishness when something was being demanded of oneself. The only moral advantage he had over the rest of the family was that materially he had absolutely nothing over which to crouch jealously, while they had at least a little.
As I came to know more about people like those among whom Didi had been brought up, I realized that they—and particularly the women—are strange mixtures. Perfectly at home among the elegant and cosmopolitan in any part of the world, on the surface they belong less to a country than to an income-group: the rich. They do have a country, however, and it is one in which the women have only recently begun to be educated and become free to move out of the home. Their grandmothers certainly, and often their mothers, lived in a different age and by a different set of moral values. A part of Didi’s family, anyway, was undergoing a double exile even before physically leaving Egypt: a voluntary exile from a way of life, and an involuntary exile from the world of the rich. It was not surprising that they felt that they had their work cut out to keep afloat themselves, and could spare little thought for anyone else. It had to be everyone for himself or herself.
What made the situation hard to understand at first was that they still spoke, and no doubt often felt, as though this were not so. They had always been addicted to generous emotions, so they went on expressing them. This was hard on Didi, who shared the addiction with the best of them and could never resist the luxury of believing loving words and gestures coming from the people from whom he most needed them—believing them, and sometimes inventing them, and then, when the truth emerged, becoming vicious in his pain and anger. I soon concluded that the idyllic elements in his childhood which he liked so much to describe were wished-for more often than they were remembered. This was not a family in which an odd-child-out with a difficult nature, and who was likely to be a financial liability, could be considered anything but ‘impossible,’ and the rejection must have been even more thorough than I had thought. Dolly had done her best—of that I was sure, and Didi always insisted on it even when he was angriest with her; but even with Dolly love, when it came to the pinch, was by now more a matter of faith than of acts.
After a month had gone by Didi and I began to say to each other ‘We really must start thinking about this job problem’ but we usually said it late in the evening when ‘tomorrow’ seemed the appropriate time for decisions. I felt that Didi deserved a holiday, and I had little idea what we were going to do. Presumably Didi would start scanning advertisements in the New Statesman and so on, and we would both ask around among friends, and if anything likely turned up I would produce a reference. I had thought of employing him in my office, but had rejected the idea as bound to lead to trouble. As a publisher’s reader he would be good at detecting good writing, but he had no commercial sense; he would be looking for Chekhovs all the time, and would be unable to judge whether something he despised might be useful on our list. As an editor he was disqualified because he was slapdash about detail and although he could use English vividly and honestly, he was unable to spell it and was uncertain about its grammar. I could foresee the effect of this practical inefficiency combined with his arrogance about his opinions and his large areas of ignorance on my colleagues—and on myself—and although I knew that he was disappointed at my not offering him work (I explained to him why I couldn’t), I was not going to risk it.
Then our neighbour downstairs, my cousin who owns the house, came to the rescue. Didi had declared himself ready to do anything, so diffidently she suggested that he might paint the hall and stairs. She found out what a professional decorator would charge, and offered to pay him this sum.
Didi responded as though painting the stair-well of a tall house would be a lark. This stair-well, he said, would be the most elegant in London, the walls white, the paintwork picked out in black—perhaps alternate black and white rails on the banisters? Neither my cousin nor I like paintwork picked out, but his delight in the idea made us feel that it would be unkind to resist it and we let him have his way. When asked whether he would prefer my cousin to buy the materia
ls and to pay him simply for his work, or to give him the whole sum so that he could do the shopping for the job himself, he chose the latter. Let her give him £10 or £15 at a time, he said, and he would spend what seemed to be the right proportion of it on equipment and paint and keep the rest for wages, and see how far it took him. It might turn out that the materials cost less than we expected and then my cousin wouldn’t have to fork out the full £80 that the decorators had said the job was worth.
He decided that first he must strip the walls—he couldn’t make a good job of it unless he did. We told him that stripping would probably be harder work than he thought, and that it wasn’t necessary, but he refused to listen. Energetically and cheerfully he began to strip the hall.
He managed that, and a few feet round the turn on to the stairs, before reality caught up with him and cheerfulness dwindled. It was an appalling job, particularly as he was saving money by not hiring proper ladders and planks, and on the third day he announced slightly accusingly and as though he were the first to discover it that to strip such an area of wall was a job for a professional and that it wasn’t necessary anyway, so from now on he would just paint.
He began by using emulsion, but soon changed to whitewash because it was cheaper. He also began carefully, but then decided that if he applied the whitewash very thickly, with rough strokes, it would give the walls an interesting texture. He almost threw the stuff on to the wall, so that besides swirls and lumps there were long trails of dribble. (‘Someone must have done this job with his feet,’ said a house-painter the other day, but the effect is not disagreeable.) He also spread whitewash and black paint everywhere, so that I couldn’t pick up a teaspoon without getting paint on my fingers, and my carpets were tracked with painty footprints. ‘It will come off,’ he said impatiently, ‘I’ll do it when I’ve finished,’ but he never did.
Soon he was talking about ‘those bloody stairs’ instead of about ‘my stairs,’ and the only way he could face them was by doing very little at a time and often taking days off. It took him two months to finish, and cost my cousin considerably more than £80, although Didi came to feel that he had been paid too little because the longer he spun the job out, the further and thinner the money had to stretch.
Not that he attempted to stretch it. We soon realized that he always bought less paint at a time than he said he bought, and that he drank and gambled the money left over on the day he got it. ‘She has no idea how much paint is needed,’ he would then say to me in a worried voice. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s going to cost her much more than she thought, and she can’t afford it, poor girl. I don’t know how to tell her I need more paint already, it’s horribly embarrassing.’ But at the same time, because the money he made stayed in his pocket for such a short time, he felt that he had made none. The lark of painting the stairs had become a boring, fatiguing, unprofitable chore—and I began to question the picture of patient industry in humble tasks during his years in Germany which had moved me so much when I first met him.
Both my cousin and I knew that he was doing the job sloppily, that he was taking an absurd amount of time over it, and that he was cheating over his expenses; so why did we tolerate it?
It was partly because of an attitude we share about possessions: we are not house- or possession-proud women, we spend as little time and energy on housekeeping as we can, and neither of us has ever felt more than passing regret over objects lost or broken. If the stairs had been well done it would have pleased us; if they were done sloppily, too bad, but we would soon stop noticing it. And neither of us much minds being cheated, although naturally we would prefer not to be. It always seems to me, and I think to my cousin too, an embarrassing experience rather than a distressing one, and on the whole it’s easier, as well as kinder, not to notice. We were brought up in families which maintained the strictest standards of honesty in all outward matters, and where no strain was put on those standards; and whereas we have both reacted against much that we were taught in our youth, this we seem to have absorbed to a point where we see anyone dishonest as deformed rather than sinful. This ‘pretending not to notice’ is foolish. It means that you lay yourself open to being cheated—invite it, almost—so if it happens, what right have you to complain? Both on the irrational level and the rational, therefore, it is something on which I cannot feel seriously indignant.
In addition to this, Didi was in a miserable position in having to depend on our charity. He knew that my cousin would not have had the stairs painted if she hadn’t wanted to help him—he guessed it at once, and evidently disbelieved me when I denied it. It was possible for him, without too much loss of dignity, occasionally to ‘borrow’ money for petrol (he often used his car to help us) or for food, but he couldn’t comfortably say ‘Lend me £5, I want to get drunk tonight’ or ‘I’ve got the gambling urge.’ Didi had to drink and gamble—that was how he felt about it, and that, I realized much later, was the literal truth. At the time I had not yet understood to what extent a neurotic person’s ‘symptoms’ are his props, his techniques for endurance, pathetic ones certainly, but the only ones he can command; but I did already sense, and so did my cousin, that we must not expect Didi to be rational about drinking and gambling, and that it wasn’t surprising if he tried to wangle a taste of them when given the chance.
Another element in our lack of indignation was the value which Didi soon developed as an object for observation and discussion: ‘Guess what he’s done now!’ If he said he was going out for a quiet evening with friends, adding ‘And it will have to be quiet, I’ve only got 3s 6d left,’ and I learnt later that he had instead gone to a gambling club and lost the best part of the £10 he’d just been given for paint, he was in a way offering us entertainment: indeed, the worse he behaved (within his really very modest range) the more interested and amused we would be. An appetite for gossip can stomach a good deal of inconvenience.
But our acceptance of his behaviour was not due only to our own natures. The power of Didi’s personality contributed much to it. If he had come to feel that he was demonstrating virtue and strength of will in finishing a boring job, and was doing it only out of generosity to us, then he could make us feel it too. The power of the auto-suggestive process by which he generated his moods and interpretations of events was such that it spilt over on to other people—men as well as women, though women were more subject to it—who often found themselves astonished at the discrepancy between how they saw something when they were in his company and how they saw it when they thought about it later. It was to Didi’s credit that he was not a serious con-man. He had the equipment for it, but he did no more than obtain a roof over his head, one meal a day, a little petrol for his car, his drink and (only in fits and starts) his gambling—the bare necessities of life, from his point of view—which showed restraint and goodwill towards his friends. He never had any truck with people whom he couldn’t accept as friends (although, as I was to learn, he could have spells of finding his friends antipathetic); it would never have occurred to him to pretend friendship only for what he could get out of someone.
The rapid collapse of his good intentions over the stairs combined disturbingly with my random readings of his diary. It surprised me that he allowed these readings, because although they told me almost nothing I didn’t already know in outline, they filled in the picture in a way painfully unflattering to him. I learnt, for instance, that what I had suspected about the period immediately before he came to London was true, and that he had been kept during that time by his friend Peter and the girl he was having an affair with—because, as he put it, ‘it seems pointless and stupid to go and work for 2.50 DM an hour and then go and gamble, so I’m not working any more’: reasoning all the more disconcerting because he was evidently unaware of its oddness. And I learnt with dismay how disabled he was in love.
‘His capacity to love is deep and candid’ I said of him in my portrait. His longing to love was deep and candid, and it is unlikely that such a longing,
such a sense of the pre-eminent value of love, could exist in someone who wasn’t born with a strong potential for loving. But where now was the capacity? I had thought that he destroyed trivial loves because he despised their triviality, and that his thirst for a great and true one was something which with luck he might assuage. But the more I read of his private accounts of his relations with women, the more doubtful I became. None of his affairs, apart from a small category of random fuckings when exceptionally drunk (which he loathed) were trivial. All of them were wild bids for something beyond him, and were doomed.
He never ‘saw’ the women he pursued; and when, after he had caught them, he had to recognize their individuality, he resented it. The magical creature would become ‘a bore’—‘stupid’—‘mediocre’—‘neurotic.’ Although he believed himself to be haunted and driven by sex (‘I am unable to imagine love without sex’—‘It is always all sex with me, if I love her I want to fall on her every minute’), his own accounts made it clear that physical delight in itself meant almost nothing to him, perhaps even disgusted him. The passion which overtook him boiled in his head, and his head alone, in response not to an actual body but to a dream image which some single feature or some article of clothing had conjured up in him. As soon as a woman had been in his bed once or twice and he had been forced to apprehend the reality of her body, its shape and texture and smells, it would become repulsive to him, just as her personality became tedious to him once he had perceived it. Very quickly he would become unable to make love to her unless he was at least a little drunk, and the more often he had to do it, the drunker he had to be. The truth, I began to suspect, was that he could never make love sober: if he were not intoxicated by the quick flash of the romantic dream in his imagination, he had to be intoxicated by alcohol.
