Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  “You know Beverley, the man in New York—I told you once about his stuffed barracuda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they want me to replace him.”

  The void filled with endless ridges, waves made of lead: the Atlantic.

  “What would it mean?”

  “It puts me in a bloody awful spot, it’s been driving me frantic. It isn’t just the money—anyway I don’t suppose that would seem so fabulous over there although it sounds it by English standards. And work’s work, so it’s not so important that it would be more interesting…. But the thing is, it would be moving up onto quite another level. If it was only me … oh love, I don’t have to say that the idea freezes my blood, do I? But there have been hints that if I turned it down I’d risk being passed over in the future, and have I the right to risk that with the children to educate?”

  “How long would it be?”

  “Three years …” Then, seeing my face, he burst out, “Oh my precious love, don’t look like that. I’ll be able to wangle trips home and anyway it isn’t till February”—and I knew that he was not talking about the possibility of accepting the job, but that he had accepted it already.

  * * *

  How long ago had he accepted it? Six weeks, I was to learn later, and we had met twice in those six weeks without his making any sign. He was not brave, any more than I was. As we stood on that street corner in Bruges, I didn’t know how long he’d hidden it, but it would have made no difference. I did know that he was presenting me with a fait accompli, and that he had been trying just now to manoeuvre me into giving him retrospective comfort by telling him that he ought to do what he had already done.

  There was an impulse to corner him by saying, “Oh, so you’ve said yes already?” but it was feeble; hardly perceptible under the icy blanket of “It has happened.” What did it matter what I said, if it had happened? So I said what he wanted me to say. I said, “What else can you do? Let’s, for God’s sake, not talk about it because what else can you do?” There was a smell of frying potato chips in the fog although we were nowhere near a restaurant—Belgians eat nothing but mountains of potato chips. “Oh God,” I said, “the Belgians are a dismal lot. I’m glad it’s them and not some other people I’m going to have a prejudice against from now on.”

  “I wanted this to be a lovely weekend,” said Dick. “How mad can one get? We’d have done better to go to Manchester. Let’s go back to bed and not stir till we leave.”

  * * *

  We both cried when we were in bed, until at last it made us laugh: the two of us with our noses running so that we had to disentangle, sit up, and grope for handkerchiefs, both of us so ugly and feeling so ill. But something strange happened: those hours in bed were good, not bad. Rock bottom is solid, so that you can rest on it, which is not agreeable but is a relief after years of treading water. I thought I knew myself and that I was sure that I would rather get drunk and take pills and go to bed with strangers than face facts—they are all pleasanter activities than facing facts, so it is only sensible to prefer them. Yet in that Belgian bed, when there was no alternative to facing facts, it was good, not bad. I knew that Dick loved me as much as he could, which was not enough to make him change his way of living; I knew that I must not stop him going to America even if I could, and that anyway I couldn’t; and I knew that he would never come back. When I had to start living with this knowledge, day after day, it would surely be death, but in that bed I was resting.

  PART SIX

  22

  How can any last kiss or last “I love you” contain enough to mean anything? In the last week of February, just before Dick left, he was able to be in London for four days while Roxane was packing up their house, and he stayed with me. Discretion no longer seemed to matter. He was busy all day but he managed to avoid dining with people, so those days were the most ordinary and domesticated days we had ever had. I got a suit cleaned for him, and a watch repaired, so there were things like that to talk about at breakfast, and the evenings were not special occasions, like our usual evenings, but times when we needed to relax. It was as though we had already said good-bye and now had a little bonus of ordinary living together.

  Sometimes we talked about how he would try to get over to England every now and then, and about how it was only for three years anyway; but mostly we avoided the subject. Even sitting together without talking, or wasting time with Lucy and Adam, was better than letting ourselves think of how these days were moving towards their end: we were trying to force them to be their own length and not let them be telescoped by awareness of conclusion.

  He was still asleep when I woke up on the last morning. I propped myself on my elbow so that I could watch his face, feeling that I ought to be devouring it with my eyes so that it would be with me forever and ever; but it was only Dick’s face, which was with me always, anyway, so nothing special happened to me during those minutes. And his actual departure back to Oxford to fetch Roxane and the children, which happened two hours later, was a matter of parcels not fitting into suitcases and worrying whether the taxi would turn up: a balancing trick, necessary if we were not to crash. Of course we clung together at the last minute and said what had to be said, but I hardly felt present while I was doing it and I’m sure he didn’t either.

  * * *

  Then he was gone, and his being gone was not much worse than his being about to go. I had sobbed myself sick when I lost Jamil, but now I didn’t cry. It was a flat, tedious, numbing misery, and that kind isn’t hard to live with, it’s only hard not to be changed by it. What I felt threatened by as the outward sign of my inward condition was not any dramatic collapse but things like dull hair, dry skin, scuffed shoes, and sweaters overdue for washing: that was what was going to become of me if I wasn’t careful, and because there was nothing else to do I became coldly determined to guard against it. The forms must now be very carefully observed; a performance must be put on.

  I didn’t show that I was aware of my friends’ dismay, but I was, because their reactions reflected so clearly that my manner had become disturbing. People close to me, like Lucy and Tinka, became irritating with their evident concern, their readiness to be confided in and their tact in not insisting. I couldn’t entirely avoid them because I couldn’t be alone and there were not enough strangers and bores about to fill every evening, but I became polite to them and I could feel how strange this elaboration of manner was. There were times when I couldn’t answer a question or fulfil a demand, and then I had to get up and go, so it was necessary to cover up with a lot of courtesy. All my old affectations began to re-establish themselves, and some new ones appeared: and once there was almost a moment of disaster when Lucy suddenly exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Meg, stop playing with your bracelet,” and reached for my wrist, and I had to bolt out of the room and then, on the stairs, realized that up in my own room, alone, I would begin to scream, so that I must turn and go out of the front door, no matter where. (I went to a cinema.)

  It was not surprising that she said it, because I played with my bracelet all the time. Things were a comfort: touching them, turning them round and round, looking at their textures and the way they reflected light. I learnt a lot about the different kinds of paving-stone in those weeks, their colours and the way their surfaces become worn, and the way some of them contain tiny flecks of glitter.

  * * *

  It was preoccupations of this kind which prevented me from noticing at once that my period hadn’t come, and when it occurred to me to wonder about it I found that I was unable to remember its last date and told myself that it was only the month seeming long because it contained Dick’s departure. No strong feeling stirred in me when I tried to force myself to calculate and to consider the possibility that I was pregnant: no panic, and certainly no pleasure. Chiefly I felt that if I took no notice of what might be happening, then it wouldn’t happen. Such an inexpressibly tedious—such an absurd—thing couldn’t happen, so why worry. It was at least three
weeks past the missed date when I woke up with a jerk in the middle of the night and thought at once, as though a voice were saying it in my head, “Yes, I’m pregnant”; and even then my immediate conscious thought was, “Well, supposing you are, you’ve still got plenty of time so go back to sleep,” and I went back to sleep.

  I had never wanted a child, and Dick’s child without Dick was a clumsy irony which I refused to contemplate. I was too tired to contemplate it. That was what I was most sure of: my horrible fatigue, so that the thought of having to manage anything—even something so simple as my friends had always told me an abortion was—appalled me. And as for a baby’s having to be fed and washed and clothed, waking me up in the night and forbidding the possibility of sleeping all morning on Saturdays and Sundays … It was best not to think.

  But I wasn’t frightened. Something too boring and absurd to be endured is not frightening, and once I could bring myself to the point of action what had to be done wasn’t frightening, either. A distasteful interview, a disagreeable hour or so, and a few days in bed, all triggered by a telephone call or two: that was all it meant. Exhaustion set in at the thought of making the first telephone call, but there was no necessity to act before the end of the third month, so I could afford to indulge it; I still had plenty of time. “Go back to sleep”—I did it all the time, even, as far as thinking was concerned, during the day, so that I got through hours on end without letting my mind settle on the fact of my pregnancy. Sometimes it would take me by surprise as though I had bitten on a scrap of bone hidden in a stew, and then the feeling, “I want this problem to go away,” would be so overwhelming that I would forget it again at once. I went on taking my sleeping pills out of habit, but their effect was submerged in a surrounding sea of sleepiness—and I never even noticed that I’d forgotten about the collection in the aspirin bottle in the corner of my underclothes drawer.

  * * *

  I was well on in the second month before I told Lucy, and I hadn’t meant to do so. We were up in her drawing-room for once instead of in the kitchen: an agreeable room, though overcrowded since Adam had moved his piano in, and one in which we always felt a little different. My own sitting-room was the natural place for working, reading, being alone; the kitchen was the natural place for living as part of the household, the children coming and going, something to be done at the stove, one of us ironing in a corner—the communal room; and Lucy’s drawing-room was for “being civilized,” as she always said. She didn’t use it often except in the evenings, but sometimes she would say, as she said on this Sunday afternoon when everyone but us had gone out, “That’s done—let’s go and put our feet up in the drawing-room for a few minutes,” and we put the pink teacups on a tray and carried it up and flopped into the comfortable shabby armchairs.

  There was a bowl of blue hyacinths on a table in front of one of the windows, catching the sun and smelling wonderful, and a bee, which had been tempted out too early by three days exceptionally hot for April, was buzzing dopily against the panes. The house was quiet and there was hardly any traffic in the street: individual footsteps and voices could be heard, sounding light-hearted as they do during the first warm days of a year. It was the kind of occasion, like many before it, on which we might have had the best sort of gossip—the sort which is not just factual but which is full of wonder and amusement at how strange human behaviour can be, and it suggested that unhappiness was unnecessary and existed only in one’s own head. Decide not to be lonely and sad, expel the feelings by an act of will, and ordinary, agreeable aspects of life would flow in and fill the vacuum, soothing and sustaining. But how could I do that when, although an act of will might work on what was in my head, it was powerless against what was in my womb? “Despair” is not the word for what I felt at that thought because it is too strong and dramatic; “depression” is better, but only if it’s understood literally as being pushed slowly but relentlessly down, down, down under a heavy weight.

  I couldn’t bear it alone any more. “Shall I tell you something too silly to be believed?” I said in a flippant voice. “I’m nearly two months pregnant.”

  One thing about Lucy: she’s never been known not to react thoroughly. She exclaimed, “Oh my God!” pressed both hands to her cheeks, and went pale—she really did go pale. Then: “Meg, love—why didn’t you tell me before? Oh, poor love, what you must have been going through!” and I was suddenly able to start laughing and say, “It’s not the end of the world, my dear. It’s hateful and damnable and a crashing bore, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  We poured out more tea and began to talk about what I should do, and the depression lifted away. Tinka would know someone who would know an abortionist … a hundred pounds was an awful lot of money, but I’d been going to have a holiday abroad, after all; it would be a bore to give it up but … look at X and Y and Z, and how they’d said it was no worse than having a tooth out if you were sensible and had it done properly. We must act quickly, Lucy said: the end of the third month was the latest time for it, not necessarily the best, and it might be some weeks before the right man could be found.

  “I’ll call Tinka tomorrow,” I said.

  “Why not now?”

  “Now? Oh well, Sunday afternoon …”

  She asked whether I had told Dick and was surprised that I hadn’t. I was surprised, too, but writing to him seemed pointless enough anyway. It was so certain that he was never coming back to me that going through the forms of still being close had become a mockery—I had only written twice, and both letters had been stilted and short. Any “sharing” of this ridiculous mess was impossible, so why distress him with it: that is what I thought I was thinking.

  I went to bed that night in an almost cheerful mood. Now that Lucy knew, I was out of my inertia, I would act—I was as good as acting already. Soon it would all be over, and it had even helped me, in a way, by taking my mind off Dick. Miserable the past weeks had certainly been, but the misery of loss had not been their only emotion, and even now I still had the coming ordeal—it must be something of an ordeal whatever people said—to occupy my mind.

  23

  So I felt better on Monday morning—much better. It was a lovely day again, and I could notice it. Lucy had asked me how I was feeling physically and had said I was lucky in having no sickness or special fatigue, and I experienced a foolish quirk of pride when I remembered her words. I had a lot to do that day, so I didn’t telephone Tinka after all, but a day more or less couldn’t matter…. I did telephone Miss Kleinfeld at Hargreaves and Blunt and ask her if I could have the next money due to me in advance; and the cheque, which arrived the next day, was proof that I had begun to behave sensibly. “Look, I’ve got almost all the money, already,” I was able to say to Lucy on Thursday, when she began to nag me about my call to Tinka.

  On Saturday Lucy telephoned Tinka, and the next Monday Tinka called back with the name, address, and telephone number of the abortionist.

  “You must call him today,” said Lucy.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to write?”

  “No, he doesn’t like it done by letter, you have to telephone, Tinka said so.”

  “Oh—all right.”

  But I didn’t because it was a difficult day and I was rushing from place to place during office hours and it didn’t seem fair to disturb the doctor’s evening by ringing him after six.

  Lucy and Adam thought it was extraordinary that I kept postponing this call. “Do you think that perhaps you want this baby?” she asked me, and I said, “How could I possibly want it? Apart from anything else, think of my parents! I’ve harrowed them enough as it is—I simply couldn’t land them with an illegitimate grandchild, it would kill them. And anyway I’ve never been maternal, you know that, and you’d need to be super-maternal to bring up a child singlehanded, I should think.”

  “People do it all the time.”

  “I know they do, but it must be an appalling strain. I’m too lazy, Lucy. I couldn’t do it.”


  I meant it. I thought about it often, after I had broken the “sleep barrier” by telling Lucy, and all my thoughts came to the same conclusion, which was that I had not the energy to face the upheaval of my life which becoming an unmarried mother would entail, and that the distress it would cause my parents would make it impossible even if I wanted to go ahead with it. I was sure of this, and I thought that it must be an unsuspected physical cowardice which made me, every time I tried to think about the abortion, start to tremble.

  In the end it was Adam who telephoned the doctor and made the appointment, eight days after Tinka had given us the address. I was to see him for a preliminary examination at six-thirty in the evening, the day after tomorrow.

  * * *

  The next day the weather became good again after an interlude of drizzle and grey. My bedroom window looked over the garden, to the east, so I knew it before I opened my eyes by the colour of my closed eyelids. It was still very early but the room was full of sun.

  In winter our garden looked no more than a cat-run, and in summer our neglect of it was made exuberantly obvious by the riot of pink willowherb which took over. In spring, however, it and its neighbours could create an illusion. Crocuses first, then daffodils and narcissi, beat most of the weeds in reaching their prime, and every garden had its tree or trees—pear, apple, lilac, laburnum, cherry, or real trees such as lime, plane, and acacia—which with their blossom or first foliage foamed up over the sooty walls and blended to suggest space and charm far beyond that really contained by any of the gardens. We had the best pear tree of the lot, tall and craggy, and always solid with blossom although years of going uncared-for prevented its ever bearing fruit. About every third garden had its blackbird, and one of these lived in our pear tree.