Don't Look At Me Like That

by Diana Athill

  Now the blackbird’s song came in with the sun—it was the song which had woken me. I opened my eyes cautiously, and was dazzled. My usual morning misery was given no chance by the strong physical impact of light and sound. Without even thinking, “Dick’s gone,” or having to push away the words, “and I’m pregnant,” I got out of bed, went to the window, and leant right out.

  The faintest trace of mist was still caught under the leaves, minimizing the presence of walls and suggesting that the caves of shadow under branches led into further spaces, but the sky was a pure Italian blue. New leaves, particularly those of the lime tree next door, looked as edible as lettuce. I tried to see the blackbird but he was hidden in the blossom of our tree, which had reached the exact point of perfection: full out, but still a day nearer to its budding than to its scattering. Sometimes petrol fumes came over from the street side of the house, but this morning they seemed to have been washed away forever by the night, and the air smelt green—country air could have smelt no greener. I leant out of the window into this morning without a thought in my head but its beauty, and words seemed to come to me without my volition: “What a morning! What a morning for birds and bees and buds and babies.” And when I straightened up and stood in my room again I knew: “Yes, of course, this is what I have been waiting for. I shall cancel that appointment today.”

  I didn’t start dressing at once but went back to bed to question myself. After all that dismay and depression, and all those sensible thoughts, it didn’t seem possible that this lunatic shift could be enduring. “But I don’t want this child,” I told myself. “I’ve been spending weeks not wanting it—this must be a passing mood resulting from whatever it is that glands get up to during pregnancy.” It was as though a flippant little voice answered, “So what!” And then I began to tell myself that there was still no immediate need to make up my mind; it was true that there was very little time left, but enough of it, surely, for me to postpone the appointment by a day or two, so that I could still have the abortion if this did prove to be a passing mood. But when I tried to examine that thought it was as though a shutter came down between the shallow front part of my brain where the words formed and the depths in the back of it where they would take on meaning: it was physically impossible to continue with it. I got up, looked at myself in the mirror and laughed aloud, so comic did this sudden declaration of dictatorship by my body seem. “So that’s what you’ve been up to,” I said, remembering the exhaustion, the resentful lethargy which had prevented my picking up a telephone…. What I had been doing, all this time, was waiting for this morning.

  Lucy, sleepy in her dressing-gown and with her hair uncombed, was putting on the kettle for coffee when I went down to the kitchen. “It’s not the time to tell her,” I thought—and told her.

  “You’re mad!” she said. “I thought …” and then she stopped and stared at me, and said, “You mean it, Meg—my God, you’re looking marvellous! Oh Meg!”—and she threw her arms round me and kissed me, all cold-cream and tooth-paste.

  “I’ll have my breakfast upstairs,” I said. “I’m feeling lightheaded, I’ve got to calm down and think”; but all that happened when I tried to put order into my own incredulity was that I remembered those fatuous words, “What a morning for birds and bees and buds and babies,” and began to laugh again.

  * * *

  The most surprising thing about happiness was that it seemed natural. It should have been almost shocking after so many meaningless years and the last months of misery, but day by day it became clearer that it was my element. Like any element it could contain other things while remaining itself. I had something else to postpone now—telling my parents—and I was appalled by it; and I didn’t forget that small children keep their mothers awake at night and have to be fed and clothed and educated: indeed, I saw clearly for the first time how tired and harassed I was bound to become. “For the next four or five years I shall never not be tired,” I said to Lucy, “and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able not to bother about money again, for the rest of my life.” I had to say it because I had to believe it and face it, but it made no difference to the element: I was still happy.

  Always, before, I had been made melancholy by the beauty of spring because of its transience. When I had stared at the pear tree’s blossom, dazzling against a blue sky, my awareness had always included the fact that the petals would soon be browning at the edges, then falling. I had felt as though I were standing on the bank of a river, watching something being carried past and away. Now I was part of what was moving, carried at the same speed, miraculously in it, not even marvelling (as no doubt I will some day) that such pure happiness can come from so commonplace a cause.

  Lucy and Adam were allies from the beginning. On the very day she learnt of my decision she started trying to remember whether any of Tomas’s baby clothes were still tucked away somewhere (they had all vanished long ago, in fact) while he made a formal statement that I must forget about rent if money became difficult for a time. They embarrassed me by believing that I was brave, and that the chief reason why I wanted this child was because it was Dick’s. I knew that I was not being brave. I was doing nothing but follow dizzily and—it seemed—gratefully, my body’s decision. And I suspected from the start what the following weeks made clear—that Dick did not come into it. I tried to believe that he did because it seemed only right, but I couldn’t go beyond feeling that since the child had to have a father I was glad that the father was Dick. If it turned out to look and smell and laugh like him I should be pleased, so its paternity was lucky—lucky, but not important. The truth was that instead of coming into it Dick, on that sunny morning, had gone out of it. This child was not because of him but instead of him, and now he could no longer make me unhappy. At the level where the colour of my days was determined—it was disturbing to know it, but I did—I had forgotten Dick.

  * * *

  Lucy and Adam were sympathetic, Tinka was sympathetic, and so were all the other people who learnt what I was doing, in appearance at least. It has sometimes seemed that among the kind of people I know there is no more agreeable way of taking the centre of the stage than by announcing that you are going to have an illegitimate baby after your lover has left you. Friends offer prams and cots and scales; doctors and nurses at the clinic are concerned and considerate, always calling you “Mrs.” in a careful way; lorry drivers lean out of their cabs to grin and wave at you—though when that happened I hadn’t started to bulge so he couldn’t have known and it must have been only because I was looking so happy. I seemed to have stepped out into a garden of kindness and privilege until that evening when Norah came round.

  After Jamil’s departure Lucy had kept in touch with Norah, though not closely. On the rare occasions when she came to the house I went out or stayed in my own room, and I wouldn’t have seen her now if I had known that she was coming; but she dropped in unexpectedly one evening after dinner, and when I came in soon afterwards I found her there. Adam suggested that I should have a drink with them—he was less aware than Lucy was of the undercurrents round Jamil—and my mind wasn’t working fast enough to hit on an excuse which would not have seemed rude.

  Norah looked tired. She is the first of the people I know to betray how she will look when she is old: a gaunt woman, she will become, her sensuous mouth and intense eyes insistent and even embarrassing in her uncared-for face. She acknowledged my presence sketchily, and for some time went on addressing herself to Lucy and Adam, but after a couple of drinks she relaxed and began to include me. When the talk turned to holidays she asked me where I was going.

  “I meant to go to Morocco,” I said, “but I shan’t now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve got to save money. I’m having a baby in November.”

  Lucy and Adam exchanged a surprised look, and I myself felt it odd that I should have volunteered this information to Norah; but the words had come out for two reasons, first that I had a strong impulse to t
ell everyone anyway (and why not, when my stomach would soon be bulging for everyone to see?), and second that I suddenly wanted to show Norah that I wasn’t entirely to be despised. Although I knew that I wasn’t being brave, enough people had been behaving and speaking as though I were to make me expect that reaction when I broke my news, and I liked it. I could imagine Norah being impatient with a woman who didn’t have the courage to accept the consequences of her own actions; if I had chosen to have an abortion, I thought, she would have considered me frivolous and selfish; so I assumed that if she knew what I was doing I would go up in her esteem.

  “But I thought Dick had left you?” she said, shocking all three of us into silence. That Dick was away for a long time was known to all my friends, but no one had been brutal enough to say it in those words—and anyway, what was she implying?

  “Dick’s job—” began Adam kindly, but anger drove out my shock and I cut in.

  “What of it?” I said. “He didn’t know I was pregnant when he left—even I didn’t know—and I haven’t told him because it’s not possible for him to do anything about it. This is my own business.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” said Lucy, trying to give the occasion what she felt to be its proper tone. “I’m dying to have a baby about the house again, and really this place is cut out for it. There’s always somebody here for baby-sitting, and there’s the garden, and Meg is getting more and more work she can do at home. And isn’t she looking well?”

  “Blooming,” said Norah, but flatly; and then, “But what I can’t understand, Meg, is why. I never thought you went for children much.”

  “She understands them better than most people,” said Adam. “Look at her illustrations.”

  “But you never seem to talk to them,” said Norah.

  This was almost true. Lucy’s children and I were used to each other—they took me for granted and I wasn’t scared of them—but we had never become intimate and when I was concerned about them it was usually because I was sharing Lucy’s concern. Adam had a theory that I could draw so well for children because in some way I was too like them: I could be a child, and that made it difficult for me to be an adult in relation to a child. We had discussed it one evening when I said how mysterious it was that I wanted this baby after never having wanted one before. “Nonsense,” Lucy had said. “It’s just that some people become maternal later than others—good old nature has caught up with Meg at last.” Now she became sharp with Norah.

  “You don’t have to be ‘good with children’ in order to love a child of your own,” she said. “I was bored stiff with the little beasts before I had the twins.”

  “It’s just as well to be good with them if you’re going to have a fatherless one,” said Norah. “Have you ever known anyone illegitimate, Meg?”

  “No.”

  “A pity.”

  I had flushed and was feeling rattled, but less so than I would have been at a similar attack about something else in the days before my decision. It seemed to me that Norah was being extraordinarily disagreeable, and disagreeableness is always dismaying, but it didn’t really matter now what anyone said, and I was sure I could convince her.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve thought about it. I know that it’s going to be an appalling responsibility and that I’ve got to work like mad at not letting this child suffer. I know I’ll have to kill myself to bring it up right, not to mention the strain of earning its keep and all that. You can’t imagine, Norah, that I’m doing this for fun….”

  “Then why are you doing it? You don’t start by liking children, you know how risky it is for the child, you say the effort will ‘kill’ you—what do you want this wretched child for?”

  I stood up to leave the room, then sat down again, moved even more by impatience at the idiocy of the question than I was by resentment. What did I want the child for? It was there, it was me. “Because I love it,” I said, “and because—” I was going to continue, “because it will love me,” but I bit it off. The inadequacy of the words stifled me. How could I say to anyone, least of all to this woman with her hostile eyes, the things which had been filling not only my mind but my very veins for the last few weeks? I wanted to shout, “I don’t care what anyone says! This child in my womb—my child—of course I know it will grow up, of course it will turn into a separate person and I will have to steel myself to let it go when the time comes, but the time won’t come for three, four, five years. It will be mine for all those years. The happiness will have to end one day, but what luxury, what heavenly repose to know that for all those years there will be someone I can safely and entirely love because to him I will be the most perfect being in the world—whatever I do, whatever I’m like, he won’t be able to feel otherwise, he won’t be able to do anything but love me as naturally as he breathes air, for what I am.”

  I didn’t try to say this because I couldn’t get it out, and also because something was flashing “Danger!” I must not say anything like this to Norah. But although I remained in strangled silence, she heard. It was then that she said those horrifying words.

  * * *

  She’s gone now. She will never come back into this house. Lucy and Adam saw what she did to me and turned on her. I’m not sure how the evening ended because I ran out of the room, but it was final. Lucy said later, “We ought to feel sorry for her, really, losing Jamil has made her bitter, she can’t help it—but she’s become too aggressive to be borne.”

  And in the days which have gone by since that evening I have become able to see that Norah is a sad person who didn’t know what she was talking about. And now I have just finished doing something so difficult that no one could think it selfish. I have posted a letter to my parents, telling them what I am doing and offering to visit them and talk it over if that’s what they want. I didn’t have to say that, I could simply have vanished from their lives, but I said it and—God help me—they will probably take me up on it, and I shall go. And I have been thinking about the future, refusing to let the shutter fall between the front part of my brain and the back part. I do realize what I am undertaking; I do know that if I fail to be both a mother and a father to this child I shall sin against him and that I must sacrifice everything for this. I know, too, that one day he may say to me, “I didn’t ask to be born”—but we all say that, and who means it? Whatever he may say, my son will rather have been born than not.

  Yes: I am sure now that Norah was wrong, and having become sure I can write down her words. She leant back in her chair and crossed her arms on her chest, and said, “What I think, Meg, is that you are doing a wicked thing. You’re one of those women who don’t want a child at all, they want a magic mirror.”

  There’s something almost enjoyable in having one person in the world I can truly hate.

  About the Author

  Diana Athill (1917–2019) was a novelist, editor, and memoirist. She helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Athill’s distinguished career is the subject of her acclaimed memoir Stet. She was the author of seven other volumes of memoirs: Instead of a Letter; After a Funeral; Yesterday Morning; Make Believe; Somewhere Towards the End; Alive, Alive Oh!; and A Florence Diary. She also published two collections of short stories and a collection of letters. Her only novel, Don’t Look at Me Like That, was first published in 1967. Athill won the Costa Biography Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and she was appointed to the Order of the British Empire.

  About the Publisher

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challengin
g, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year."

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Diana Athill

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One 1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two 5

  6

  7

  Part Three 8

  9

  10

  Part Four 11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Five 17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Part Six 22

  23

  About the Author

  About the Publisher