Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  My first meeting with Roxane after the night-club evening was … well, it was disconcerting. She telephoned to say that she was coming to London for a day’s shopping and would I lunch with her. I hung up, went slowly upstairs, and sat on my bed waiting for guilt and panic. I didn’t know what I was going to feel but I expected it to be unbearable. I said these words to myself: “How can I face her? I must get out of it.” And I waited.

  Nothing happened. It was shocking to sit there and discover, gradually, that nothing was going to happen—interesting, too, as though I were meeting myself and finding that I was a stranger.

  There was no change in my feelings for Roxane: she was still the girl I knew best and whom I loved for her innocence, affection, and vulnerability. And there was no doubt in my mind about me: I was betraying her. These two facts simply coexisted, without seeming to affect each other. I was appalled by myself, but of course I could meet her.

  We met in Harrods’ bank and she was there when I arrived, sitting alertly on the edge of one of the deep armchairs with her knees together and turned sideways and her feet pointing in the right direction for her pose. It is rare for an Englishwoman to have feet which go naturally into the right position when she is sitting; often the toes are turned in or out, or the feet are resting on their outer edges, as though feet were attached to legs as an afterthought and were easy to forget. Even on that occasion I was amused at Roxane’s neat, elegant way of sitting compared with the sprawls of her schooldays, and thought, “Those old French ancestors of Mrs. Weaver’s at work!”

  She jumped up when she saw me, and hugged me, which was unusual. “Let’s not go to the snack-bar,” she said. “I want us to have rather a super lunch today.”

  “What have you been buying?” I asked, and realized as I spoke that this was going to be not only possible, but easy. All I had to do was to slip into gear for “being with Roxane,” and that would be that. We talked about her purchases, about her mother, about her house. She liked it now that she had it, and over our roast chicken I became genuinely involved in trying to seduce her away from her mother’s ideas about decoration.

  “But I like lampshades with white bobbles round them,” she said. And then suddenly, putting down her knife and fork: “Oh Meg, I know it’s silly to say anything yet, it’s far too soon—but guess what!”

  “Nice or nasty?”

  “Marvellous.”

  “I’m hopeless at guessing—I can’t.” And I really couldn’t.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  For an instant—it can only have been the briefest instant because she noticed nothing—I went blank. Then it was like sitting on my bed after her telephone call over again: tensing myself against the unbearable emotions which were going to flood into the vacuum. It seemed monstrous when I heard my voice saying, “Roxane! My dear! Are you terribly pleased?” and discovered that “being with Roxane” was still working.

  “I saw the doctor this morning,” she said. “He kept warning me not to be so excited because I’m only a fortnight overdue and he couldn’t possibly be sure yet. But Meg, you know how clockwork I am—I’ve never been late in my life, so I know this is it.”

  The word “fortnight”: that was the clue to my dizziness. There had been no time for the thought to form, but “Why hasn’t Dick told me?” had been in all my nerves. If it was only a fortnight, then he couldn’t have told me because it was three weeks since our last meeting and we rarely wrote. It was impossible for him to write or receive letters from me at home, and he said he hated doing either at his office.

  “Is Dick pleased?” I asked.

  “He’s still saying ‘touch wood’ but I think he is. He wasn’t so keen as I was to start trying—I suppose men never are—but he was being quite swaggery about it last night.”

  The waitress had just taken away our chicken plates. I looked at my watch and said, “Oh God, I must fly, they’ll kill me if I’m not back in the studio by two-fifteen.” Roxane protested that surely I could have a quick cup of coffee, at least, and in the few seconds taken up by that flurry I was able to stop the trembling which had started in my stomach, clamp down on any thought of Dick, jam myself back into gear for Roxane, and say, “Well, a very quick one. Have you thought of any names yet?”

  * * *

  “He was being quite swaggery.” Roxane and Dick together, probably in their bedroom, talking about what had happened. Two people alone together in their own life, cheerful, she sitting up in bed with her feet tucked under her, he pulling his shirt over his head … no one else in their minds, no one else concerned. And they had often talked about it—“He wasn’t so keen as I was”—and whether it had “worked” this time or not had been something they made jokes about….

  Oh yes, I saw all that and I saw it clearly, so how was it that when Dick next turned up, four days later, I was less upset than he was?

  Partly it must have been because of my freakishness about sex. I had wondered from time to time how Dick, loving me and not loving Roxane, could continue going to bed with her in such a way that she noticed nothing, but there was so much about sexual feelings which I didn’t understand that I could allow its possibility. She was very pretty, after all, and that was probably enough to cause the necessary amorousness. And the amorousness was not the principal thing for me. Physical jealousy was foreign to me. But mainly it was because at that time I was still so new to being in love that nothing could make me think beyond that. I once saw a Swedish film in which the “other woman” began to mope and droop the first time she went to bed with her married lover, unable to enjoy being with him because she couldn’t be with him all the time, and I wondered whether I used to be peculiar, or she was: surely, at the beginning, having him at all is enough? So many people in the world who were incomprehensible or frightening or merely boring; so many who had skin or hair I would hate to touch; so many who distorted me when they looked at me! Dick and I, lying naked on a bed with our legs tangled, sharing a cigarette and laughing because poor old Peter Pilkington had sent me a hideous bunch of mauve chrysanthemums—it still seemed such a miracle to me that I asked for no more.

  So I recovered quickly from the shock of Roxane’s pregnancy, quickly enough to be gentle with Dick about it. I knew, of course, why he was so upset: the more “swaggery” he felt, the guiltier he would be towards me. But something did change. This was the first time since the night-club evening that I wasn’t open with him. He spoke as though it had happened by accident and I didn’t tell him that I knew it wasn’t so—I think he guessed that I knew it, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it because it was a situation in which his humiliation was possible and I felt concern for him, as though he had suffered a disfiguring accident and must be prevented from feeling bad about it. My maternal instinct began working on Dick’s behalf long before it attached itself to the idea of a child.

  “How the hell can I ask her to divorce me now?” he said miserably. I might have asked, “So why did you make her pregnant?” but this feeling that it would be brutal to force him into a lie kept me silent.

  PART FOUR

  11

  By the end of my first year in London I had made enough money to throw away all my old clothes—I had very few—and to pay my own fare to Paris when Dick had to go there for five days on a business trip. In my second year my first Pootle royalties began to come in, and I had illustrating jobs piling up. My salary at the studio had been increased a little, too, so there was often a bottle of whisky on Lucy’s dresser as well as the usual demijohn of cheap red wine. When the boy who had taken Henry’s room left and Lucy said, “Why not take both top rooms and make yourself a little flat,” I couldn’t believe it would be possible, but it was; and after Adam had pointed out that I could ask the bank for an overdraft since I knew more money was coming in, I became house-proud and bought rush matting for the floors, and two lithographs, and an oil stove. It was delicious to have a whole floor to myself, warm at that, so that I could wander from room to room wi
th nothing on if I wanted to. I never seemed to have more money than I had before, but I began to have things, and I enjoyed them. Once, when I was buying some writing paper, I almost asked them to print my address on it, but that turned out to feel too unnatural. Instead I made my gesture by paying for an extension of the telephone to my sitting-room.

  Roxane’s baby, Conrad, was born a month after Dick and I went to Paris. He was a little yellow-faced monkey with long black hairs on his head. His christening, to which I went, was painful; not because I wanted a baby myself but because Dick enjoyed holding him. He had been talking (when he talked about Conrad at all) in terms of getting no sleep and having to fight his way through drying nappies when he wanted a bath, as though it were all a martyrdom, but, seeing him with the baby, I knew he felt like a father. After that I made it easier for him to talk like one because it was humiliating to be “spared” Conrad.

  * * *

  Jamil moved in to the little room downstairs when Rodney left for a job in Bristol. Jamil was an Egyptian, twenty years old, studying architecture, and Rodney had met him in a pub. I was sure that the British ought never to have been in Egypt and that people who called Egyptians “wogs” were disgusting, but I had hardly met anyone who wasn’t European and Jamil might have come from Mars and been a cripple as far as I was concerned: from Mars because of how strange I expected him to be, and a cripple because of my feeling that he must be treated with careful delicacy to make up for “wog.”

  One of my uncles had been stationed in Egypt during his army days, and my mother had spent a holiday there with him and his wife when she was eighteen. They called Egyptians “gyppos,” not “wogs.” In theory they liked Arabs provided they remained picturesque desert-dwellers, but they deplored them in cities. (Jamil was a Copt, not an Arab, but I didn’t know that to begin with.) In cities, my uncle said, Arabs became corrupted. The poor ones were treacherous and cowardly, the rich ones fat and greasy, comic in their aping of western ways; and of all the city-dwellers of the Middle East, the gyppos were the worst. I remember laughing when I was about seven at his description of vulgarity of some pasha’s house, and repeating it as a joke. My mother’s holidays had been few enough for her to recall them vividly and often, and she had several comic or disgusting stories of the same kind, to which my gentle and charitable father never raised any objection. I was in my teens before my rejection of my family’s attitudes led me to suppose that Egyptians were human beings, and when I heard that Jamil was coming I must still have been more gyppo-minded than I thought, because I felt slightly nervous. I don’t know exactly what I imagined, but the smell of cheap hair-oil came into it, and perhaps dirtiness in the lavatory.

  Even Lucy, who had known many more foreigners than I had, asked Rodney if Jamil would have to have special food.

  “He was drinking beer and eating sausage rolls like anyone else when I met him.”

  “I thought they weren’t allowed to drink.”

  “Well, he does. He was as high as a kite that evening.”

  “That’s something, anyway,” said Lucy, and I began to laugh. I suddenly saw my mother’s face as she learnt that I was under the same roof—even sharing a bathroom—with a gyppo who added drunkenness to his corruption, treachery, and cowardice.

  On the Saturday morning when Jamil came to see the room I was in the kitchen drinking coffee with Lucy. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and an expensive black pullover, very soft and clean. Vaguely I had supposed that an Egyptian, if good-looking, would be smooth and doe-eyed, perhaps with a dapper mustache, but Jamil had a bony, intelligent face with an expression of gentle irony which made him look older than he was. He would have looked even more ironic if he had known of my nervousness, because his family was so rich and cosmopolitan that mine, in comparison, was absurdly provincial. When Lucy congratulated him on his English he was surprised and said, “But I’ve never talked anything else—except French, of course.”

  Within fifteen minutes the Martian cripple had given way to this beautifully-mannered boy, a little shy but at ease underneath it, with eyes which turned from brown to gold when he smiled. The most immediately obvious thing about him was his candid response to friendliness—it delighted Jamil to like people. He asked if he could move in that afternoon, and by the time he left to fetch his things Lucy and I both knew that we would be fond of him.

  * * *

  “Your little wog is a honey,” said Dick after he had met Jamil for the first time. He was using the word as a joke but it annoyed me. “How that boy brings out the mother-hen in us,” said Lucy once, but it wasn’t exactly motherliness that I felt for Jamil. I might have felt the same ease with a brother.

  He never had any doubt that I was affectionate, wise, and kind, and hadn’t been in the house three days before he was consulting me about his love affair with Norah. She was a Communist: a serious girl who wore her hair in an eccentric plait over one shoulder, with whom he used to go to political meetings. Jamil’s politics stopped at an ardent support of Nasser’s revolution over which he quarrelled with his family, who stood to lose a great deal by it. As a schoolboy he had demonstrated against the British, but only light-heartedly: “What else? Everyone did it—you’d have done it too. And the great thing was, they used to shut the school for a bit afterwards and we could go to the beach.” Norah felt that he should put some order into his rebellious attitudes and wanted him to join the Communist Party, but although the discussion into which she led him excited him, it was something else which held him to her. She adored him.

  “It’s terrible,” he told me. “She’s so kind to me. I’m a very horrible person, you see. I’m so lazy that I can’t help loving someone who is kind to me. I only have to say I’m out of cigarettes and she runs to get me some. How can I help loving someone like that? But it’s very bad for me. I might even join the Communist Party to please her and not because I wanted to. What shall I do?”

  “There must be other things about her that you love, not just her kindness?”

  “Oh, she’s a very intelligent person, a very good person, far too good for me. But I think, you see, that I’m too young to be very seriously in love.”

  “Might it be a good thing to go out with other girls as well?”

  “I couldn’t if she knew about it, I couldn’t bear to hurt her.”

  “But if you go on like this you might have to end up by marrying her. Do you want to?”

  “It would be a tragedy. It would kill my mother, and Norah’s parents would kill me, and if they didn’t I’d end up by killing Norah, I’d be so unfaithful to her. And that would be horrible because I take marriage very seriously, I would hate to be unfaithful to my wife. I am disgusting to be in this situation, but what can I do, that’s what I’m like.”

  A few minutes later Norah arrived with some steak for his supper, and Jamil went soft with love and pleasure. “You see?” he said to me when she was out of the room.

  I saw, and I felt sorry for Norah, which was a comfort. She was a girl with whom, otherwise, I felt inferior. She did things about what she felt. She spent hours on tedious tasks in committee rooms, she distributed pamphlets, she overcame shyness to address meetings, and she accumulated great amounts of information on politics and international affairs. All the things she saw as wrong, I too saw as wrong. Most of the things she saw as right, I too saw as right. The things she did were unlikely to make the least difference to events, but at least she was expressing her feelings in action, and I wasn’t—and probably never would. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of frivolous inadequacy which Norah reflected on me, and couldn’t help a certain satisfaction at her foolishness over Jamil.

  Jamil was as frivolous as I was, but there was always the possibility that he would become engaged in action because of the strength of his emotions. He lived among emotions, not only indulging them but also understanding them. He was often silly but he wasn’t stupid.

  I used to tease him about the word “love,” wh
ich he used more than anyone I had ever known. His mother telephoned him once a week, all the way from Cairo, and although it made him angry he was never out when her call was expected. “My mother is mad, but what can I do? You see, she loves me very much.” “Sometimes I could kill my mother, she’s such a fool, but I love her.” And about other people: “There’s an Irish boy at the college, he’s crazy. He’d take off his trousers and give them to you if you were cold—I really love that boy.”

  What Jamil loved best of all was England. When Dick was not in London I would often go out with him and his friends and watch him watching people. He would sit quietly in a pub for minutes on end, simply watching the Englishness of everyone there, and loving it. “Isn’t it funny,” he said to me one evening. “I wanted to kill you all when you were in Egypt, and I still would, but there’s no one else I love so much.” He even enjoyed the most boring parts of English life such as helping Lucy and me with the washing up after a party. No man in his family had ever dreamt of undertaking the least domestic task, so to Jamil it seemed romantic.

  Sometimes he would announce that he was giving up architecture for psychology or designing for the stage or painting, according to his latest enthusiasm. He was doing well in his course, so I would be put into the unfamiliar role of counselling common sense. “Jamil, sweetie,” I heard myself saying one evening, “you get sillier every day,” and I was astonished. I had never spoken to anyone like that, still less been listened to. And then he said, “Come out with us this evening. If you come today, that’ll make only two more evenings of waiting before Dick comes,” knowing so simply and openly what I was feeling that I was astonished over again.

  12

  Having Dick was the end of one kind of loneliness, but waiting for him was the beginning of another. The illustrating jobs helped, filling up much of the evenings and weekends, but if I wasn’t to think too much I had to go out more than I had done before. You can live a long time in London without meeting people or seeing how you ever will meet people, then suddenly you find you know quite a lot of them. Most of mine came through my work to begin with, but one led to another. Sometimes when I looked at my diary I was surprised at how full it was, like the diary of a girl with a “social life,” but its appearance was deceptive.