Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  * * *

  And then Jamil went home to Egypt. He need not have done so—it was possible for genuine students to stay on if they wanted to—but his impulse to do so, which had been shaken by our arguments that he ought to finish his nearly completed course if it was possible, returned with redoubled strength after Fuad’s death. England had murdered Fuad as well as attacking Egypt.

  Three nights after the suicide he was still in my sitting-room at three o’clock, raging against what had happened. I was silenced, watching him have to hate what he most loved, and when he began to cry I held his head against my shoulder, loving him with impotence because what could I do to make it better? The dreadful feeling of that time—the knowledge that the beliefs and emotions of millions and millions of individuals, all of them wanting to help the Hungarians, all of them disgusted by what we had done to Egypt, were worth nothing because they were not harnessed to the centres of action—this feeling seemed to be concentrated in my room where Jamil and I had fallen onto the divan. The rug was askew on the floor. He had got up suddenly and crossed the room to where I was standing by the divan, and the rug had slipped under the clumsiness of his movements. There were glasses on the floor by the fireplace, and only one reading lamp was on, and we could hear no traffic except for that London hum which is almost silence. The room should have been cosy but instead it was like a desert because things so far beyond Jamil’s control were making it impossible for him to continue being himself, and I could do nothing about it—except, when his hand moved down from my shoulder and began to feel for my breast, to let him.

  He made love to me clumsily at first because it began more as a groping for comfort than as an expression of desire; and then avidly because he had been wanting to do it for so long. It was as though he realized suddenly where he was and felt, “Nothing is going to stop me now.” He was beautiful, his blind face with its parted lips like a sleeping child’s. Even ugly men can have a sort of beauty when they are turned inwards and forget their faces, all concentrated on the sensations of their desire; and Jamil, who was beautiful anyway, looked like some marvellous mask. I felt for the first time real sorrow that I was unable to share what a man was feeling. With Dick I never felt this sorrow because the love and closeness were enough, and with other men I was only waiting for it to be over. With Jamil, whose skin was so soft and whose hands were so sensitive that even when he was clumsy or greedy he could not be ungentle, I wanted to share. If he could have been content with lying close and letting me stroke him and rock him in my arms we could have stayed like that all night and I would have been happy. But he had to become aroused again, of course—he had to search my mouth with his tongue, and lick my neck and breasts, and force his way into me again—and all I could do in response was to endure.

  I thought he must be sensing this. He was not an inexperienced lover and he was always perceptive about emotions, so he must be understanding what was happening and realize that this love-making was freakish, the result of our emotions over what had happened and not the beginning of a change between us. I thought he knew this when at last he went downstairs. But next morning he came up to my bedroom and woke me by kissing me on the mouth.

  I had no time to be fully conscious and to control my movements. Even before I had opened my eyes I had wrenched away and my hand was rubbing my mouth. And when I looked at him my eyes must have been full of dismay because my sleepy mind was jumbling with the beginnings of understanding. His eyes, as he stared down at me, opened so wide that for a moment the white showed all round the iris. Then he turned and went out of the room without saying anything.

  * * *

  He was out a great deal after that, usually with Egyptian friends or with Norah, so that for some days I didn’t see him and neither did Lucy or Adam. It was natural that he should turn to people in the same plight as himself, and we knew that what they were endlessly discussing was whether or not they would be allowed to stay, whether or not they wanted to stay. Jamil would go—we knew that, but we didn’t understand that he was making his actual plans for departure without consulting us. He had been so much a member of the family for so long that we couldn’t imagine his excluding us from something so important.

  That he was excluding us from something was apparent, and the sensation reminded me of school. There I had not wanted to be in on the various cliquish activities from which I was kept out, but I had been chilled by the keeping-out. If three girls in animated conversation fell silent when I came into a room or began to laugh the moment I left it, I used to feel forlorn. It was important to remind myself quickly how trivial their preoccupation surely was and how I would not have joined in even if they had invited me, and it was important to show that I didn’t mind what was happening; but hard though I worked at these defences, I would still feel exposed and vulnerable as I crossed a room to fetch a book, pretending not to notice. What was frightening was less the feeling that these girls didn’t want me than the sense that an invisible watcher would see me as pitiable.

  There was something of the same forlornness when Jamil came into the kitchen with Norah and said no, they didn’t have time for coffee, they had to be somewhere in half an hour. I scolded myself that naturally he was avoiding me after that horrible morning, but we never had been lovers, after all; I was still Dick’s and Jamil knew it, so why could we not be as we had been before? I knew I was being foolish, but still the sensation of chill persisted.

  And at the end Jamil saw to it that it struck home. The comings and goings, the telephone calls, the confabulations with Norah ended in his announcing one evening that he would be leaving for home in four days’ time. His parents were against it, he said (their attitude to the revolution was nearer Fuad’s than his and they saw few opportunities for him in Egypt), but he felt too unreal and split-minded in England; the only way he could be comfortable again was by going home and identifying with what was going on. He was affectionate to Lucy and Adam, apologizing for the short notice and offering them a month’s rent, which they wouldn’t accept, and towards me he was composed. We discussed his decision sensibly and I told myself, “I have no right to feel so sad, and I do not feel sad.”

  Not only must I not feel sad, but I must accept the situation generously. I decided that I must give a little farewell party for Jamil, the sort of thing it would be normal for such an old friend to do after all this time. Later that evening, thinking that Norah was still with him and that I could establish whether the day after tomorrow would suit her as well as him, I went to his room.

  He was alone, sorting his books, and looked startled when he saw me. I must speak, I thought, as I used to speak before that mistaken night: neither more intimately nor more stiffly.

  “Jamil love,” I said, “would the day after tomorrow do for a farewell party? It’s such a horrible thought that I can hardly bear it, but you can’t leave just like that.”

  He put down the books he was holding and came across the room to me. He stared down at my face, his expression almost puzzled. Then he said, “Meg, you’re incredible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t believe you understand anything about anything.”

  I could only stare back at him.

  “I’ve been in love with you for two years—all right, you didn’t want me, you’d rather eat your heart out for that bastard, I knew that, I could have accepted that. But you never let me go….”

  “What do you mean, Jamil? I always told you …”

  “Oh Meg, for God’s sake! ‘If it makes you too unhappy hadn’t we better see less of each other’”—his voice was parrotty—“and all the time looking at me with your eyes, and your hand on my wrist, and your voice saying ‘love’ and ‘darling’ … And then that night. I was so miserable that night I was almost dying, and then you were suddenly there like I’d been dreaming of—Meg, don’t you understand what that night was for me? And then the next morning, the horror in your eyes, and realizing that you’d only been being kind. God
, Meg, you thought it was kind… and now here you are, chirping away about a lovely farewell party.”

  I couldn’t speak. There was too much unfairness to answer in a sentence, and more than a few words would have been impossible because my throat was strangling. I wanted to get away but he caught my wrist.

  “Do you know what you are?” he said. “Poor Meg, I don’t think you can help it but it’s what you are all the same. You’re a cock-teasing bitch.”

  * * *

  Since then, of course, I have understood what made him so cruel. He was under the strain of leaving, and he had loved me, and I had rejected him. And Jamil had not only male vanity, but the extra male vanity of a Mediterranean man. To be rejected sexually was something so wounding to him that it prevented him from seeing anything else. It was absurd of me to mind that he couldn’t see what it had been like for me; and all the more absurd because I didn’t want him anyway. Now, when I think of him, I’m able to be fond of him again. But that evening, after I had got away from him and was safe in my room, I thought I was going mad. I couldn’t stop crying. Not just crying silently, but with wild, hideous sobs and moans so that I had to jam things into my mouth not to be heard. I had only lost Jamil and what was he or any other man to me while I had Dick, yet I felt that everything had been taken away from me: that there was nothing left of me but a naked, bloody carcass like a skinned rabbit hanging in a butcher’s shop.

  20

  It was bad that Dick could come to London even less often than usual at that time, and that when he came I couldn’t tell him about Jamil. But I had a talisman in the thought that if Fuad could do it, so could I. Being so unlike him I wouldn’t do it for a mood but in cold blood; not because of some specially terrible grief but because normal days were clearly too meaningless to live through. And not with a gun but with my sleeping pills. Soon after Jamil left I started putting two aside out of each batch prescribed by Adam’s kind doctor, keeping them in an old aspirin bottle in a corner of my underclothes drawer, where my contraceptive cap (fitted by the same doctor) was hidden.

  Perhaps I put them together because I never used the cap. Getting it had been a gesture towards common sense, urged on me by Lucy, and having made the gesture, I had exhausted the impulse behind it. Lucy would have scolded me if she had known, but she would have had no right to because she did the same kind of thing herself. Once, when someone had broken into the house and stolen a few things, she made the effort of having bolts put on all the windows, and she never used them once. Sometimes I would wake early and think, “Oughtn’t I to have the curse by now? Oh lord, is it really late? Perhaps it’s not going to come …”; and then for an hour or so I would wonder at my own fecklessness and would promise myself that if I were let off this time I’d never make love again without using the damned thing, but when I was let off the anxiety would fade. I would decide with relief that I was probably barren, and would forget it. Perhaps I knew in my heart that the sleeping pills were the same kind of gesture as the cap, but at the time it simply seemed that my underclothes drawer was the best place for them, and I liked the knowledge that they were there. Endlessness was what I feared, and the pills proved that nothing need be endless. I could put a stop to it whenever I liked—and this power made it unnecessary to put a stop to it just yet.

  * * *

  During that year two or three people told me that I ought to see a psychiatrist, not because of the pills—no one knew about them—but perhaps because of the things I disliked talking about or doing, and silly habits such as fainting in the Underground and being nauseated by anything slimy. And men always think a woman is neurotic if she won’t go to bed with them. I had taken a dislike of casual affairs, and one of my advisers, at least, was doing no more than resenting my frigidity towards himself. He couldn’t have known that I was frigid towards everyone except, in a way, Dick: he was only assuming it out of wounded vanity. But when Tinka Wheately suddenly said, “Meg, why don’t you ever just pick things up?” she was noticing something unconnected with herself. I asked her what she meant and she demonstrated: nervous hands hovering over an egg (we were in her kitchen), hesitating as though touching it would be disgusting. “Do I do that?” I asked, and she said, “Yes, you never seem to make an uninhibited gesture nowadays. I think you ought to see a psychiatrist.”

  Tinka’s remark didn’t really worry me. She was married by then to a man who worked on a medical journal, and had become infatuated with the psychiatric part of his jargon—she couldn’t light a cigarette without saying, “Me and my comfort habits!” I felt angrier when the doctor made the same suggestion. He had been good about my pills for so long that it was a shock to discover that he was disapproving. I had known that it was pointless to consult him about my headaches because people either have headaches or they don’t; but they had been getting worse, and Lucy and Adam nagged me one evening when I was unable to disguise how bad it was. “Think how lovely it would be if he could cure them,” Lucy said, so soon after that I asked him if he could, and all he said was that I was becoming too dependent on pills and would I like to see a psychiatrist. Doctors are always inadequate for anything but pills. I knew that if anything could make me mad it would be someone rummaging in my subconscious and dragging out all kinds of disgusting horrors—why does a mind have a subconscious if it’s not for keeping things hidden? If I had things hidden there I knew better than to bring them out, and anyway I knew what was wrong with me.

  * * *

  Not that it was all loneliness, or that Dick had changed. Sometimes we would add up the years that had gone by, and would marvel at ourselves, and particularly at him because he was not an essentially faithful man. But although I am sure there were occasions when he slept with other women besides Roxane and me—I knew, after all, what I myself had done—he still depended on me in the same way that I depended on him: we were still the only people with whom it was absolutely natural to be ourselves.

  21

  By the time I was twenty-seven a whole weekend with Dick had come to seem almost impossible. A night was rare enough. Usually it was a matter of three or four hours in an evening before he caught the late train home, and sometimes only of lunch. So when his work took him to Germany for a few days, and we were able to contrive a weekend in Bruges on his way home, it felt like a new beginning.

  It was November. I arrived in Bruges late on a cold and foggy afternoon and went straight to one of the little hotels which overlook the open space called the Sands. I had heard the hotel spoken of affectionately by someone, and neither of us knew of any other. It’s recommenders must have stayed there in summer. In November there was no one at the desk, and the woman in the bar seemed surprised when I asked for a room, and all the cooking smells of the vanished season were congealed in the roofed-in courtyard full of dusty palms and wicker chairs through which she led me to the stairs.

  The room was big, a “family” room: two brass beds with a cot across their feet, and a small radiator which failed to respond when the woman twiddled its tap and shook it. When I had convinced her that I knew we would have to pay extra for it, she fetched an electric fire. I opened both windows wide while she was out of the room, so that the smell of other people could be replaced by fog which could then gradually be warmed into our own smell, and her disapproval of this eccentricity was such that she never smiled again for the whole weekend.

  But I was not depressed. The nights of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and two full days with Dick: it was luxury beyond hope. And while any journey pleased me, a journey in circumstances not typically “holiday” was best of all. Dick wouldn’t arrive for another hour so I went out to walk through the early darkness, feeling that Bruges in this ugly weather was more “real” than Bruges dressed for visitors. Now I could tell what it would be like to live rather than to stay in this lovely place, how it would feel to take it for granted. Even the discovery that Belgian bars serve only beer and wine when what I needed was a hot grog was not too discouraging. I knew Dick wo
uld be able to find a bar which was an exception, and I had seen that the bed-linen was clean and the duvets were plump and light: we would be snug in one of those brass beds, and this town would become our secret living-place, not just a “sight” to see together.

  And indeed the hotel itself proved an exception and supplied me with my grog when I got back. With a warm stomach, in a room which was warming up, I took off my suit and sweater, got under the duvet, and wrapped my feet in a scarf. I meant to read until Dick came, but there is something especially comfortable about creating a nest of warmth in forbidding surroundings, and I let my book lie on the top of the commode. Brass knobs, huge chocolate-brown wardrobe, faded “modernistic” triangles on the wallpaper—I lay there contemplating them in a state of sleepy happiness because so soon they would become the room inhabited by Dick and me.

  All Friday evening and almost all Saturday were what I had expected them to be: a time of such concentrated pleasure and peace together that I could tell myself something which I had long stopped claiming. I could say, “If we were married, after all these years together we would not be able to feel like this, so it’s worth it.” It is important to remember that. If I let what happened later destroy what happened earlier …

  After lunch on Saturday I noticed that Dick was becoming silent, but I was too secure in my own contentment to question his mood and assumed that fatigue from his work in Germany was catching up with him. “Tonight we must just sleep,” I thought. It was not until late in the afternoon, when we were window-shopping antiques near the Béguinage, that he said, “Love, I’ve been putting something off.”

  The pavement seemed to shift a little under my feet. My voice when I asked, “What is it?” was calm, and my mind had no time to formulate the least speculation, but before the three words of my question were out of my mouth I was rigid, on the edge of a void.