Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  “Oh Daddy! It’s not hashish or something, and anyway I didn’t because I didn’t want to. Mrs. Weaver wore a purple housecoat even when there was no one coming to dinner, and when people do come the food is famous, full of rosemary and things.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” asked my father.

  My mother raised her eyebrows and looked at the egg on her plate. I knew what was coming. “Oh dear,” she said, “I hope you aren’t going to find my cooking dull now. I’m so unenterprising, I know I am. I expect she has been abroad a lot, you know. When I went to Florence with your grandfather I remember they gave us some veal full of rosemary and garlic, and he sent it away and made them bring fried eggs instead, but I rather liked it. I might try a little rosemary one day—just a touch. Although Daddy wouldn’t eat it, of course—you know how you hate highly seasoned food, Will.”

  Both my father and I knew that he would eat anything put in front of him whether he liked it or not, but neither of us contradicted her. I had always taken it for granted that he loved her too much to be anything but patient and accepting, but I think now that he had never known any other woman well, so assumed she was as she was because she was a woman. If she was self-centred, if she shuffled responsibility onto him, if she cried easily, if she was irritable—well, women were odd and delicate creatures, and a man must be gentle with them. I had only recently begun to feel indignant at them both for the way he indulged her.

  I looked about me at the dining-room. The lights above the sideboard had been switched off, of course. There were some bronze chrysanthemums on the table in my father’s christening mug, and the silver was well polished, but these were the only colour and gleam in that threadbare room. The marble chimney-piece was handsome, but it supported disorder. The small travelling clock and the curly brass candlesticks were meant to be there, but the ball of string, the red plastic flashlight, the copy of the parish magazine, and the three fir-cones were not. Mrs. Weaver’s house with its chintzes, brocades, and velvets, its clear colours and soft textures, its warmth and the value given in it to objects for their prettiness, began in retrospect to shed a glow over its owner. I felt now that she had been kind to me.

  “There’s an art school at Oxford,” I said. “Roxane asked me to stay with them when I’ve finished school, so that I could go to it.”

  * * *

  What did other people dream about? I used to wonder; particularly Roxane. Where did her mind wander when she lay weightless in bathwater or shapeless in a bed’s warmth, comfort dissolving the outlines of her body as approaching sleep blurred those of her imagination? It was hard to suppose that Roxane’s inner world was different from the one she inhabited outwardly: she must dream neat, cheerful dreams of parties, clothes, friends —not of love, since she spoke of it no more than I did. Other girls must dream of love all the time, judging by their talk, but not Roxane, which was one of the reasons why I was comfortable with her.

  My own dreams, before I returned from that weekend at Oxford, had never included any of the real boys or men I knew, and the heroes of my reading had entered them to prove my worth rather than to be loved. As a little girl I had manœuvred them into situations of peril from which I had rescued them. Later I had shared their ordeals, acting as an inspiration rather than as a saviour: the Scarlet Pimpernel, Stalky (or M’Turk—a difficult choice), Mr. Rochester, Mr. Darcy, Vronsky, Prince Andrew, and King Henry V had all, at various times, had reason suddenly to see me. How aggressively self-conscious I was when I was young! My parents saw me as a child, the girls at school saw me as an unfriendly prig, people at parties saw me as someone shy and badly dressed who couldn’t talk or dance well. In the company of heroes I escaped from these humiliating roles, or else I moved through my own mind alone, riding a white horse over storm-shadowed moors, or painting great canvases in the tower of a castle furnished with silks and sandalwood, one window overlooking a forest, the other a walled garden where little apple trees grew out of flower-starred grass and where squirrels, rabbits, and roe-deer played, ready to take food from my hand when I went down among them.

  For a long time—since I was twelve at least—I had known that these dreams were absurd and had been ashamed of them, which was why I couldn’t believe that other people indulged in them or their like.

  Now, when I went to bed after washing up the baked-egg dish, there was Dick Sherlock, and I met him as confidently as though he were Wilfred. The setting—a ball—demanded wit and poise rather than heroism. I tried out various appearances for myself and found that I couldn’t go so far as I used to. The cloud of auburn hair which had served me in many dreams had become unconvincing. It had to be replaced by hair like my own, only better done. The blue velvet dress could be turned black and could reveal more shoulder, but it had to be basically the same dress if it were to work. Dick held open a french window and I swayed out of the ballroom’s glitter onto a terrace which smelt of honeysuckle, where, leaning on a balustrade, I became heavily aware of his dark shape beside me.

  “Look,” I said huskily. “The moon, that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops …”

  I had dreamt the last of my heroic, or Gothic, dreams.

  PART TWO

  5

  On an evening in June, two years later, I was running along the Cornmarket in Oxford—and it did seem natural to me—to catch the bus which took me back to the Weavers’ house. Two boys from the art school called me from across the street, asking me to come and have a drink, but I was in a hurry to get home because Mrs. Weaver was giving a dinner party and Dick Sherlock would be there. I liked the boys and their friends, and they had already started to teach me things such as not to be shocked by their love affairs or their politics, but I had no time for them that evening, or on many other evenings, because living with the Weavers was proving more important to me than being at the art school.

  I enjoyed pushing through the front door so casually, running upstairs, leaving my discarded work-clothes on the floor of that bedroom; it was still surprising to feel at home there, and that Mrs. Weaver had become a joke—or almost a joke. Dick had been right, and her mannerisms and snobbishness were more comic than impressive. That evening, for instance, there were only a dull professor of biology and his wife, another couple asked out of duty, Dick, and two first-year undergraduates who had never seen so much as Il Trovatore, yet Mrs. Weaver, who loved opera and knew a great deal about it, put on a performance about an opera she had seen in Milan, a flourish of technicalities and comparisons, which was an exercise in pure exhibitionism carried out in all but a vacuum. Her way of talking, her salon, her refusal to admit the limitations of her interlocutors: it was all play-acting, and now I dared see it as absurd and even to be a little fond of her.

  But, living in the house, I was not quite able to think her only comic. There was something feverish in the energy she devoted to her play-acting, and without understanding what longings drove her to it I could feel their uncomfortable presence. It was not possible to be easy with her because her frustrated energy might at any moment crack the surface.

  It did so sometimes in fits of temper over trivial causes, and these frightened Roxane. They frightened me too—loss of control in a woman so dedicated to a performance was shocking—but it was the sight of Roxane’s silent crumbling which most affected me. She never criticized her mother. When Mrs. Weaver’s husky voice became raucous and her words became cruel Roxane would go white, would scurry humbly to repair whatever might have gone wrong, and would seem to be listening for an hour or so afterwards. She felt to blame for whatever had happened, and when her mother’s temper was restored, which usually happened soon enough, she would be grateful to her. Once I said, “But Roxane, it was her fault”—the car’s radiator had frozen because Mrs. Weaver had forgotten to have antifreeze put in—and Roxane looked at me without speaking as though I had blasphemed.

  And something strange had happened during the holidays before I arrived for that first term at the art school. Sitting on my be
d among the taffeta cushions while I unpacked, Roxane had told me that she had fallen in love.

  “Imagine what I did this summer,” she said. “I fell in love.” And she laughed.

  Did she mean it seriously, I wondered, sitting back on my heels and staring at her. If she did I was prepared to be awestruck because it would be a landmark in our lives. As I have said, we didn’t talk about love. I avoided it because of my confusion between romanticism and distaste, and Roxane avoided it—so I had always assumed—because she was worldly enough to bide her time. I had admired her and followed her in an attitude which seemed to me adult: schoolgirls who did talk about love were not only silly to be going on like that while still so young, but were also displeasing: their callow passions were somehow connected with sweatiness and spots.

  Perhaps Roxane was only joking. Her voice had been light enough—but it had been a little strained too.

  “Who with?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was too banal,” said Roxane, getting up off the bed and beginning to put underclothes in a drawer for me. “I had riding lessons—you remember, I told you—and it was with Roger Harrison, of all people.”

  “You mean the riding-master?”

  “Yes,” said Roxane, blushing; and then, suddenly earnest: “He’s a terribly kind person, you know. Really, truly—it wasn’t just that he’s so good-looking. He is very good-looking, thin and distinguished-looking, but he’s … oh he’s lots of other things too. He really is … a terribly nice man.”

  “What happened? Did he fall in love with you?”

  “Well, he … I think he was fond of me. He said once how pretty I looked in my red jersey, and he put his arm round me once when he gave me a lift home. But nothing happened, of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  “Oh well … I told Mummy, you see.”

  “You told …”

  Roxane laughed again and this time there was no mistaking the falseness of the sound.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I really had it badly, you see, I thought it was serious. Mummy was marvellous, she didn’t laugh at all and you know how she can’t stand schoolgirl capers. I felt such an ass, doing something like that. So I stopped having riding lessons and it’s all right now, of course. Mummy said most schoolgirls go through that sort of stage.”

  “But didn’t you mind?”

  “I minded rather. I’m quite over it now, naturally, just think how ridiculous—but you know, Meg”—and suddenly her voice stopped being brittle and became much lower, and shaky—“I did … well, I did actually love him while it was going on.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The room seemed stifling with a mixture of gravity and embarrassment, with excitement (because, after all, this was a landmark) and with distress. And with dismay: because, although Roxane didn’t seem to see anything, what had Mrs. Weaver been up to? “Oh, it was too banal,” Roxane had said. “Just think how ridiculous.” Her bright parrot-voice. Her laugh. That a mother should intervene in an affair with a riding-master I could accept as the kind of thing a mother was bound to do, but that her daughter should accept the intervention in this way was unnatural. This was a more frightening aspect of Mrs. Weaver than any amount of talk about The Trojans or Thomas Arne.

  * * *

  I had expected men to be harder to get used to than women, but Dick Sherlock disproved this. By then he was nearly at the end of his time at the university, but although his life was full he was often at the Weavers’ house: because he liked the food, and being on familiar terms with people older than himself, he made no strenuous efforts to avoid Mrs. Weaver’s pursuit. And she did pursue him. He was talkative and funny at her parties, and brought along decorative young men—which, to begin with, I supposed to be the whole reason for her enthusiasm.

  In my last years at school I had evolved a language for myself not unlike Dick’s (naturally, since it was based on his and Mrs. Weaver’s). A mixture of exaggeration, silliness, and preciosity, it was easy enough. I could make Dick and his friends laugh and—even better and more surprising—I didn’t have to make them laugh. I learnt that if I looked at them from time to time I didn’t have to bother about talking unless I felt like it. I learnt this almost at once with Wilfred Yardley, whom I saw quite often although without any pleasure, and found that it also worked with the boys at the art school, but its real value was in relation to Dick. I didn’t even think of marrying him, in spite of being “in love” with him, but I wanted him to “see” me—and he did. So the smells and colours and objects in Mrs. Weaver’s house began to move me as though they were more beautiful than they had been before, because Dick had been there recently or was about to come again soon.

  But although he “saw” me he didn’t do anything more, and I know now that if he had done anything more Mrs. Weaver would have found a reason for sending me home. Only once did he go beyond public gallantry, friendliness, and secret watching.

  He was affecting a passion for “epic” films that term, priding himself on being a connoisseur of melodrama, bathos, and cliché. Roxane and I were the only girls he knew young enough to be impressed, so he and a friend took us one evening to Abingdon, where an especially vast and vacuous biblical specimen was showing. When we laughed and exclaimed loudly in the wrong places I thought we were being clever—I supposed that the people behind us were admiring us—and I came out of the cinema in a state of agreeable self-satisfaction.

  “I’ll get in the back with Meg,” said Dick. “Come on, let’s tuck up all warm and snug,” and he unfolded a tattered blanket which was on the back seat—the car’s heater worked badly—and put it over us both, drawing it up under our chins and reaching to tuck it round my further shoulder. Then, under the blanket, he took my hand, and he started to sing.

  The first twenty minutes of that drive were an island of happiness. Dick’s friend was singing too, and driving fast. Sleepy from gazing at the screen, relaxed from giggling, I watched the headlights eating up the road, the swing of hedge and tree as they swept by, and thought, “This is being happy.” The night was a dark one and seemed particularly huge because I was unfamiliar with the road: what was stretching invisible on either side I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I wanted to rush on into unknown territory forever, safe in the warm intimacy of the car, the blanket rough against my chin, the men singing and joking, Roxane reaching into the back from time to time to feed me a chocolate, and neither of the two in front knowing that my hand was fast in Dick’s. I was eighteen and no one had ever held my hand before. Wilfred had always been too shy to attempt physical contact beyond bumping into me occasionally. This was a new move in the game, and a big one. When I spoke I was careful to keep my voice normal, and this made me feel both sly and reckless. I said things for no reason but to enjoy this feeling. To say nonchalantly, “Roxane, remember the bit where the centurion ground his teeth …” while at the same time I could feel my pulse—or was it Dick’s?—beating between our hands gave me a jubilant sense of daring. “Little do they know!” I said to myself, and tightened my fingers.

  When I did that Dick let go of my hand and I experienced an instant of desolation. But he had only let go in order to put his arm round my shoulders and pull me nearer to him. This should have been even more exciting, but it dismayed me: if Roxane looked round now she would surely see what was happening, and anyway it was going too fast. If a man put his arm round me, I felt, then we had reached a point where kissing was a possibility, and if I had not yet been kissed it was because I shrank from the idea.

  From that point in the drive I became tense, submerged by the gravity of the question: was Dick going to kiss me? My heart-beat was disturbed, I felt sick, and my head was heavy as though a magnetic force were pulling it towards Dick’s shoulder. This pull frightened me, not only because Roxane might see, but also because I didn’t want to be so close to another body. When Dick whispered, “Relax!” I jerked away from him, but he moved his hand from my shoulder to the side of my head, his palm warm ov
er my ear so that a shudder went down my spine, and gently drew my head onto his shoulder. For a few moments I remained stiff and uncomfortable, then I thought, “This is me, sitting in the back of a car with a man’s arm round me,” and with a dizzy sense of abandonment I let myself go limp.

  The kiss came at the last moment, as the car was pulling up outside the house. He did no more than brush my forehead with his lips, but it was a kiss: it counted. Later I thought, “Dick has kissed me,” but at the time the words were, “I have been kissed.”

  * * *

  And then nothing more happened. We went into the house, and Dick behaved exactly as he always did. I thought there must be a conspiracy between us not to betray our new relationship, but when at our next meeting, and our next, there was still no change in his manner, I saw that as far as he was concerned we had no new relationship. It was chilling, but I was still at the stage when horror at the idea of making a fool of myself was stronger than any positive feeling, so I was more thankful that I hadn’t betrayed my expectations than distressed by their disappointment. I was secretly lovelorn for a week or so, but what chiefly happened was that I went off Dick.

  The part he was playing for me then, I suppose, was still so like that of my childhood dream-heroes that he didn’t hurt me. But he had failed me: I should have been becoming a different kind of girl because of him and he was leaving me as I was. And as time went by I saw that this was because of some limitation in him, not in me. Dick was the only person—and at the time I didn’t understand why this was—whom I could see as well as be seen by.

  It was not until the next term that I realized why Mrs. Weaver wanted him. Dick’s mother had come for a weekend, and on the Sunday afternoon, when the two women were beside each other on the sofa, I noticed them watching Dick and Roxane. Mrs. Weaver had put her hand on Mrs. Sherlock’s wrist to draw her attention to the couple, and the two pairs of parent-eyes observed and approved, then turned towards each other full of complicity. Mrs. Sherlock bent her head towards Mrs. Weaver’s and said something in an undertone, and Mrs. Weaver laughed, shrugged, made a “who can tell” gesture, and looked smug. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and looked at Roxane and Dick for a clue. They too had their heads together because Dick was drawing a diagram of something on the back of an envelope and Roxane was trying to follow it, and suddenly it came to me: Mrs. Weaver intended them to marry.