by Diana Athill
‘What are we to do with him?’ we asked each other. We tried to find an ‘elegant’ girl for him on the town beach, but without success; we tried sending him off to a casino in a nearby town, but that was a failure because the casino only accepted foreign currency and our money was in dinars.
The only occasions which he managed to enjoy were the evenings when we played darts with Ana and her family. He had taught Ana the game in London and they had decided to introduce it to Yugoslavia and had brought a board and two sets of darts with them. Ana’s family took to it with enthusiasm and skill, and we played with the board fixed to a palm tree in their garden, drinking wine and slivovitz, and often losing the darts in sweet-scented, dry-leaved bushes. The moon would come up, music from a hotel’s open-air dance-floor thumped in the background, we laughed a lot—but I began to dread these evenings. It was so obvious that they were spoilt for Didi as soon as I turned up that I used to hesitate in my bedroom, where I had been changing out of my beach clothes, wondering if I should pretend to have letters to write. Then I would hear a particularly merry burst of laughter from the garden, and would say to myself ‘Oh what nonsense! Why should I let the little bastard spoil anything for me?’ and I would go down. But the bilious looks he gave me, and his instant withdrawal to the fringe of the company, were impossible to ignore.
He lived chiefly on bread, salami and cheese. He had decided that the food was not only disagreeable but made him ill. When he ate with the rest of us he would toy in a martyred way with a dish of pasta, giving sidelong looks of distaste at whatever was on our plates. He contrived to make himself sick once or twice—the food had been ‘off,’ he said, although it had made no one else ill—and since he couldn’t drink slivovitz and was determined to find the harmless local wine repulsive, he was condemned to ‘horse piss,’ as he called the light, lager-type Yugoslav beer. If he was punishing me, he was also punishing himself.
Months later he was to claim that he had controlled himself well enough to disguise his evil mood, and particularly what he was feeling towards me; in fact he made it apparent with every flinching withdrawal, every rude contradiction, every turning-away of his eyes, so that the child was the only person who appeared to remain unaware of it.
I remembered a passage in his diary which he had shown me as an example of what happened to him when he was ‘in a dep’—his name for his crises. He had taken Gudrun to a beach, and while he was lying on the sand she had picked up a handful of it and had trickled it on to his foot, and even this indirect touch had made him go rigid with disgust and nausea so that a few minutes later he had made the excuse that he must buy cigarettes and had left her, not returning for an hour. Gudrun had been in love with him, and later they had become lovers, so there must have been some physical tension between them which, I was sure, there wasn’t between him and me; yet clearly I had become the object of the same kind of revulsion.
If we had been alone together it would have been intolerable. As it was, I had no difficulty in salvaging the best part of my holiday by keeping away from him, and by wondering and laughing about him with my cousin. We knew that we ought to be feeling only pity and concern, but he often cut a comic figure and my cousin and I encourage each other’s sense of the absurd. I have sometimes been shocked by a neurotic person’s family, when instead of keeping the victim’s illness clear in their minds they have spoken of him, or treated him, as though he were a ‘normal’ person being bloody-minded and therefore blameworthy. Now I know how difficult it would be for them to behave otherwise. It is impossible to remain unhurt, for example, when you are seen as repulsive and heard as idiotic although you are being, as far as you know, just like you always are, even when you are sure that the person seeing and hearing you is doing so through the distorting element of sickness. Or it was, at any rate, impossible for me.
Then one evening Didi surprised me by knocking on my door—his efforts to pass it unheard had until then been creakingly obvious—and suggesting that he and I should dine together at a restaurant outside the town which he had discovered on one of his drives. A peace move! I thought, and accepted with delight.
‘It’s time we had a talk,’ he said while we were having our aperitif. ‘We haven’t been talking much lately.’
‘How could we, when you’ve been being so beastly?’ It was a relief to say it.
‘I know—I know. I’m sorry, but I’m having a difficult time, a funny mood.’
‘What’s wrong?’
He began by admitting his disappointment in the place; it was silly of him, he knew, but the contrast between this little town and what ‘the Mediterranean’ meant to him made him sad. And besides, he had other troubles…it would be a good thing to talk and bring it all out.
‘What are these troubles?’
But at that he became absorbed in the menu, and through most of the meal he continued to be so evasive that I began to feel uneasily that whatever the cause of the tension we were not, after all, going to get down to it. His expression was still the one of fixed and haughty melancholy which he had worn for most of the time since we had arrived in this place, and he hadn’t looked at my face once since the evening began. I felt I might blunder if I forced him to the point before he was ready, so we talked only of the people round us and the small-change of our holiday affairs.
It was not until we were drinking our coffee that he said: ‘There’s something else which has been making me unhappy. It’s not easy to say it but I must, for your sake as well as mine.’
‘What is it? Go on, whatever it is it can’t be so bad as all that.’
‘Well…you’ve changed since you’ve been here.’
‘In what way, changed?’
‘You know that I love you—that I wouldn’t be able to say things like this unless I was your friend…’ and then, in great detail, he let me have it. I was no longer capable, it seemed, of behaving naturally. My manner, my smile, my way of speaking, had all become so affected that they were unbearably irritating and were driving him mad. The way I insisted that everything was ‘lovely’ just because it was abroad, the way I smiled at people and said ‘good morning’ to them, the way I found some dreary village ‘interesting,’ some dusty figs ‘delicious.’ ‘Don’t you realize,’ he said, ‘that you are making yourself a figure of fun? People are laughing at you—they are trying to hide their smiles as you go down the street, and I hate to see people laughing at you because I’m so fond of you.’
Fortunately for my vanity he overstated his case. The grotesque picture of a silly old English spinster abroad which he’d drawn before he was through ought to have been completed with a green-lined parasol and plimsolls (and I was to find in his diary ‘she walks by the sea with stockingless legs and tennis shoes’—things which I hadn’t owned since I left school!). There was some truth in it. I was an Englishwoman of forty-eight with a fair skin which has the inelegant tendency to go red before it goes brown; I was certainly not trying to dress smartly in this unpretentious little seaside town; I was being interested in and pleased by things which were, in their own context, commonplace, and enjoyed expressing my interest and pleasure. No one could have hesitated for a moment in placing me as a middle-aged English tourist, and that is not a glamorous thing to be. But Didi exaggerated this picture to such a point that I could at once be safely sure that it wasn’t wholly true: I winced, but no blood was drawn.
I fought back by disguising the fact that I had even winced.
‘But Didi,’ I said, laughing, ‘hasn’t it occurred to you that if I seem like a silly old Englishwoman abroad it’s because that’s what I am? I know I go on about lovely views and so on, and you don’t think they are lovely—but I do, so why shouldn’t I go on about them if I feel like it? And why shouldn’t I smile at people and say good morning, when the people here are so friendly? It may embarrass you—it obviously does embarrass you, and I’m sorry about that—but it’s not unnatural or affected, it’s just me being how I am.’
This
disconcerted him, as I had intended, and he laughed and shrugged.
‘You and I, after all, are completely different,’ I went on, hoping to steer us away from sparring into discussion. ‘The English are so bottled up in their little island that they can’t help finding different kinds of places exotic and exciting, and my generation particularly, which didn’t get a chance to travel because of the war…’
He answered vaguely, plainly not interested, and just before we left, while we were waiting for our change, he said without any particular emphasis: ‘It’s a pity we could never have an affair—a great pity that an affair is impossible between us.’
I looked at him in surprise, assuming that he was referring back to the time when I had wanted him and wondering what had made him think of it now. It was no secret between us that I had wanted him. I had several times referred to it in letters when he was pouring out his self-disgust, saying that it was absurd for him to consider himself an unlovable person when he could inspire love so easily—look how strict I had had to be with myself in order to cure myself of being in love with him. I had thought it might bolster his self-esteem to remember it. At this moment, however, the subject was so distant from us in time, and so remote from the mood of hostility in which we were bogged down, that I was puzzled. Perhaps, I thought, he’d brought it up to comfort me by showing that however disagreeable he felt at present, he had not forgotten how close we were; and that was how I decided to take it. ‘It was a pity,’ I said. ‘It would have been lovely at the time. But now I know you better I’m thankful it never happened, because if it had we certainly wouldn’t still be friends.’
Didi didn’t appear to be listening. He was staring past me with hooded eyes and an odd, not at all happy, smile on his lips.
Walking down the steps from the restaurant to the car I realized that the dinner had done nothing to ease our situation, and when he backed the car into another which was parked behind it I was alarmed. He was an extraordinarily good driver and his car was his most treasured possession; normally he handled it impeccably, and for him to reverse violently without looking behind him was a sure indication that he was distraught.
We drove in silence, and I went over the evening in my mind, half angry and half amused at his attack on me, and depressed that disagreeable though it had been, it had obviously not been disagreeable enough to represent the bursting of the boil. And how very odd, I thought, his referring back to that time when I wanted us to have an affair…and suddenly, as though there had been a flash of light in my head, I gave a silent screech ‘Oh my god—he meant now!’ He was imagining that I was in love with him again, was yearning for him: he had been turning me down!
Oh no! No, he couldn’t be imagining that, not at this particular time. Should I ask him? But at that thought my uncertainty vanished: he was imagining just that, I knew for sure. (His diary was to confirm this.) The whole object of the evening had been to show me that I mustn’t nurse amorous longings for him because I was a pathetic old spinster in whom they were indecent. It puzzles me now that after that brief time lag I was able to interpret his fantasy so exactly, from so few words. When he recorded the incident he made himself far more explicit than he was in fact. But he might just as well have been explicit, because so powerfully was he projecting his mood, and so acutely were we tuned to each other by the tension between us, that the message now came across as clearly as though he had.
I sat in the car quivering with a mixture of feelings. The first was simple: fury that he should be imagining that I was in love with him. Then came incredulity: how had he done it, at a time when I could hardly control the impatience and annoyance he was inspiring every day? Then fury and incredulity were broken up in inward laughter: poor Didi, oh poor little Didi, the absurdities of his sad, mad mind! And at the same time there was genuine dismay as the purpose of his fantasy became clear. He had brewed it up in order to hurt and to humiliate me as much as he was able. It was frightening to realize that Didi was in a condition to do that.
I must keep silent. He was not in a state to admit reason, and anything I said would be interpreted as poor Diana trying to save her face. I said nothing more but goodnight, and could hardly wait until next morning when I could let off steam by describing the incident to my cousin.
I had another safety valve in being able to tell it all to Luke in my letters (by the following spring Luke had become, willy nilly, an authority on Didi), whereas Didi had only his self-torturing communings with his diary. By the end of our three weeks in Yugoslavia he was deep in his morass, although curiously—perhaps because this crisis lacked the ritual love affair as a launching pad—he didn’t seem to recognize it. He knew that he was being irrational and nasty, but he didn’t label it ‘a dep.’
In spite of being able to stand back from the situation in conversations and letters, and to express to other people the anger I was forbidding myself to express to Didi (I forbade myself to express it because I knew that he had no control over what was happening to him)—in spite of this, during our journey home I allowed malice to escape.
‘Tomorrow night,’ said Didi, ‘let’s stop at that nice place we stayed in on our way down—the place where Ana and I met the American sergeant.’
‘But it was a dreary place,’ I said—and so it was: a straggle of houses on the main road in dull country, where we had pulled up only because the end of the day had come and I’d had a headache and hadn’t wanted to drive further in search of something better. ‘And besides,’ I added, looking at the map, ‘it would be a very short drive. We’d get there at about four o’clock, and that would mean a huge drive next day if we are going to make Ostende.’
Both these statements were true, and there was no malice in my mind at that stage.
‘Ana and I had fun there,’ said Didi. ‘Don’t you remember—no, of course, you went to bed early. But that sergeant was nice, and he invited us to a party in his mess if we came by on our way home.’
‘Oh all right, then,’ I said. But there had been in Didi’s manner that almost imperceptible nuance of over-casualness which I had learnt to interpret as an indication that he was lying. ‘I wonder what he’s up to?’ I thought when I was in my bedroom.
I remembered the inn he was talking about. It had been uninteresting but comfortable. We had eaten in the bar…and suddenly I remembered the landlady, who had served us: a pretty woman, dark, with a thin face, wearing black. And yes—next morning Didi had said: ‘Wasn’t she an extraordinary woman to come across in a German pub? She spoke marvellous French, you know, and she told Ana and me she was brought up in the Middle East.’ That was it, of course: the landlady in the pub was ‘elegant’! Didi was planning to lay her.
And why shouldn’t he? He had been having a horrible time and he deserved a treat. But the deviousness of his approach suddenly seemed acutely annoying. His usual pattern was to be secretive about some of his affairs and open about others—they divided at about fifty-fifty, according to no rule that I could see—so there was nothing surprising in his being secretive about this one. It was just that I chose to be irritated that this time he’d favoured secrecy. Besides, it really would be boring for Ana and me to have to kill an afternoon in that dull place—‘The only place we’ve been through on the whole trip,’ I said to myself, ‘which is as dull as Rickmansworth!’
At breakfast next morning I took out the map again and found a stopping-place which made better sense. ‘This was a pretty place,’ I said. ‘I remember thinking how charming it looked, and it’s nearly a hundred miles further on than the other. It would divide up the distance much better.’
Didi was staring out of the window with a distrait expression. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘we’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how long the drive takes.’
Throughout our journey he had been the one who was, rightly, insistent on early starts. This morning he dawdled. He lingered over his coffee, moved in slow-motion, forgot things, said he must go out for cigarettes before we started.
‘We can get them as we drive through the village,’ I said. ‘It’s getting very late.’
Not once did I allow myself a word that was not warranted by the situation; he couldn’t prove that I was needling him. The road was good, and Didi was driving steadily at thirty-five miles an hour. ‘Is the car not pulling well today?’ I asked innocently. Before we had been driving an hour he suggested that we should stop for coffee. ‘I don’t really want any yet,’ I said. ‘Do you, Ana?’ Later we stopped in the outskirts of a big city to change a cheque. ‘Why don’t we go for a little walk?’ said Didi, and I said, ‘What, here? Are you mad!’ That time the vista of tramways, tenement buildings, supermarkets and waste lots was so comically far from tempting to a walk that it was all I could do not to give the game away openly and say ‘Really, Didi, you must do better than that!’
In the whole drive I made perhaps two other such remarks, both of them as reasonable; but Didi knew why he was driving so slowly and suggesting coffees and walks, so not for one moment did he stop feeling the needle in his skin. I worked hard at concealing my grin, but no doubt my expression betrayed as much as his did, and anyway we were still unnaturally tuned to each other. As I had been certain of what he was up to on our drive back from that restaurant in Yugoslavia, so he was certain of what I was up to now.
The place looked even duller in the afternoon than it had at night. We reached it at three forty-five, for all his dawdling, and as we entered it poor Didi felt compelled to say, in a strangled voice, ‘If you really don’t want to stay here we’ll go on, of course.’—‘Nonsense,’ I said lightly. ‘I don’t mind. You want to stay here, so why shouldn’t we. You’re the one who is driving, after all.’ It occurred to me that this was exactly the exchange of a married couple pretending not to be quarrelling. And as with a married couple, ritual restraint heralded outburst. While we were unpacking the car Didi said, with an attempt at normalcy, ‘What are you going to do now?’
