Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  Our families were neither surprised nor displeased when we told them that we intended to marry; only a little anxious, mine because they thought me young for it, his because they knew him to be wild. They all pointed out that to live on four hundred pounds a year, which was apparently what a pilot officer’s pay came to in those days, would not be easy, and they all kept telling us that there was plenty of time. I did not see what time was needed for. We had agreed that I should not cut short my three years at Oxford – Paul had enjoyed his own time there too much to expect it of me – but that we should be married once my precious last year was over was as certain as the rising of the sun, so why wait before we said so?

  I felt selfish in wanting that last year of freedom so much, but it fitted in well. Soon after we had decided to get married, Paul heard that he was to be posted to Egypt at the beginning of that year, and we agreed that it would be a good thing for him to have time to settle down to the kind of work he would be doing there, size up the kind of life we would be living, and find us a house before I joined him. So although I ought not, perhaps, to long so urgently for more people, more emotions, more adventures before I married, I could disguise the longing as common sense.

  It is curious now to remember our relationship between my growing up and Paul’s departure for Egypt: I would hardly believe in it if I did not still have letters to bear witness. For all that long-short time in my teens I had been the lover waiting to be loved, and for all the long – the really long – time that was to follow, I was to revert to that role, but during this interval, when everything seemed settled, I was confidently, even smugly, the beloved. Paul often told me that he understood my wish to stay on at Oxford and that he wanted me to have my fling, but after these generous gestures he would report nightmares in which he saw me walking away down a street with Robert, and would scribble a miserable note saying ‘I know I said I wouldn’t mind, but I would, I can’t help it.’ We would have a wonderful afternoon over at Maggie’s, spending hours lying together in the grass by the river, then idling back to the pub for drinks and gossip; and suddenly, rather drunk, I would snap at him with an accusation of possessiveness; or he would press me to decide on the time for a meeting and I would answer coldly that I could not be sure, and I had to see so-and-so, go to a dance with such-and-such. I was not deliberately playing the bitch. I felt that we had a lifetime together – and a lifetime in which Paul would certainly be unfaithful to me whereas I could not see myself being unfaithful to him – so that I still had and deserved time to play.

  That he would be unfaithful was something that I could not doubt when I knew him so well. For a long time before our engagement he had reported to me on his affairs, filling me at first with awe and with pride that he should choose to confide in me, then with a feeling of security. One of them was ‘a very gorgeous and exotic time, but it became indigestible, like an absolute orgy of rich, delicious fruit cake. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to get back to sanity and you.’ This was when I was about seventeen, and although I felt a little wry at being considered plain, wholesome fare, I was flattered at being told about it. Later this kind of thing stopped, but even after we had begun to sleep together I had seen him answering a roving eye with an eye no less roving, and I did not believe as firmly as he did in his protestations of absolute fidelity for the rest of our lives. It would be a long time before Paul would be content to leave any situation unexplored.

  Once, when we were already engaged, we went out to the Plough in a taxi and since we were both feeling liverish and hung-over, dismissed the cab before we got there so that we would walk the last mile. It was a winter day with a low grey sky above flat brown fields over which fieldfares were flitting. While Paul watched the birds, I watched him. It was soon after I had observed the exchange of roving glances; I was distressed that he should have been ready to click with a girl while I was actually present and he was penitent and extra tender, as he always was when he felt guilty. It will be all right for a long time, I thought. He won’t love any of them, he will always come back to me. But I had better face the fact that it will be hell when I get old, when I am thirty – and I had a vision of a scraggy neck and pepper-and-salt hair reflected in my mirror. He will still be in his prime then, I thought. That’s when I shall have to learn how to be clever, in case he finds love creeping up on him with one of them.

  I knew that this problem existed, but it did not worry me deeply. I was sure that I was loved in spite of it, I could see for myself that when I, in my turn, had moments of considering Paul to be plain, wholesome fare, he was more distressed by the role than I was. Perhaps this contributed without my knowing it, to the slightly offhand manner I slipped into after we were engaged.

  Whether that was so or not, the manner had brought him to heel so smartly before a few months were over that it led me into a new development of feeling. Seeing my carefree Paul so distressed, I began to understand that even someone who knew me as well as he did might be confused by my behaviour. If he were to take my love for granted as surely as I did, I must manifest it more clearly, and so I did. The prospect of a year’s separation was becoming real; it was easier to sacrifice the small freedoms and the slight independence on which I had been insisting. ‘Thank God,’ he wrote from the ship, ‘that before I left you managed to convince me that you love me as much as I love you. I shall never doubt it again.’

  The end of Paul’s embarkation leave coincided with the beginning of my term. We had spent a week sailing together at Burnham-on-Crouch, tarnishing my Woolworth’s wedding ring in salt water and knowing a more relaxed and lovely intimacy than we had ever had before, and after it I went to London to stay with his family. Our last evening together was wretched. We drank too much and made love unsuccessfully, unhappiness making me cold and stiff, and Paul rough. He cried and I could think of nothing to say to comfort him, nor could I cry myself. The next morning, when he was seeing me off at Paddington, it was I who cried and he who was inarticulate. His parents, my parents, all our friends had been saying ‘Never mind, a year is not really very long,’ and now Paul fell back on this. ‘Daddy told me that he waited four years for Mummy,’ he said through tile train window, and I sobbed, ‘I don’t care. A year is forever.’ When the train pulled out I thought of going into the lavatory to conceal my tears, but realised that if I indulged in this privacy I should never be able to check them. I stood in the corridor wrestling with them, facing the lavatory door so that the passengers who edged past me should not see my face.

  It would have been a horrible farewell if that had been what it was, but in the few days he spent at Grantham before he sailed, Paul gave a typical twist to our parting. He did not warn me but wangled a day off, flew to Abingdon and turned up unexpectedly in Oxford. We clung to each other in the little den of a waiting room in which we had to receive visitors, and knew that everything had become smooth and natural again: the goodbyes were done with, we could be together. We went to Maggie’s and were happy all that day, and when he left it was almost as though there were nothing special about our parting. A year had become just a year. In Egypt I was going to ride a white Arab stallion and keep a white saluki to run behind me. We were going to have four children – Paul had always wanted children on the grounds that creation, in whatever form, was the justification of living, so that for people like ourselves, who could not write or paint or compose, children were the thing. I had as yet no stirrings of maternal feeling, but was prepared to believe that I would like babies once they were there. ‘I expect you will change your mind and come out to me sooner than you think,’ said Paul, and I answered, ‘I expect I shall.’

  So Oxford became a good place to wait in. Flaking stone, blue mists over the river, laburnums showering over garden walls in the road leading to my college, the scent of stocks and roses from behind the walls, voices calling up to windows, and the charming frivolities of friendship now suddenly revealing a deeper value than I had suspected. Even love still went on, though now tha
t I was committed to Paul it was different. Once the obsessing question of virginity had been solved, the clouds of sex rolled back a little and I became more familiar with affection, patience, tenderness, and understanding, all of which I accepted gratefully, even greedily, as something to keep me warm while I waited for Paul’s letters. Perhaps, at that time, I enjoyed Oxford even more intensely, knowing that my ‘real’ life was already being lived for me – half of it, at any rate – in Egypt.

  I was both nervous and arrogant at the prospect of becoming an ‘RAF wife’. The other wives, I was sure, would talk of nothing but their servants and would play bridge every afternoon. I would have to be a rebellious and eccentric wife, I decided, and Paul’s letters suggested that this could be achieved fairly easily. It was true that he reported that no one else on the station met Egyptians or ate Egyptian food – ‘They might be Colonel Blimp in person, every one of them,’ he said – but he himself had made the rounds of the Arab nightclubs in Cairo before he had been there a week, enjoyed the food and was guest of honour at an Arab village wedding within three weeks. He wrote about Egypt with a lively tourist’s relish, easily tickled by the picturesque or the comic: not a particularly serious or understanding approach, but an open, welcoming one. He described the problems of sailing a dhow; the white Arab stallion was going to materialize – a man in the neighbouring village knew of a perfect one; we would ride far into the desert, we would sleep out, we would meet nomads. It seemed likely that by the time I arrived his ‘Arab technique’ would be almost as good as his ‘pub technique’. The RAF wives, he said, were not so bad as I had expected and would be kind and helpful, but we would have more fun than they did: not for us the narrow circle of club, swimming pool, and bridge table.

  He worked out a budget for us – something which neither of us had ever done – proving that we could live on £24 a month, with a furnished house, a servant, a car, and plenty to drink (‘Mind you, we could live cheaper than £24 a month, but it would be more fun if we didn’t’). ‘Our gloomy pictures of marital boredom are quite impossible,’ he wrote. ‘My day and your day – an ordinary day, when we weren’t doing anything special – would be like this: 5 a.m.: I get up and go to the camp in car to work. 7.30 a.m.: I return for breakfast, by which time you have got up and quite probably will have already been for a ride with the saluki on your white Arab. 8.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.: I work and fly. You drive into Cairo, do some shopping, bathe at the Ghezira sporting club and have some lovely looking Frenchman flattering you. 12.30 p.m.: Both home to lunch. 1.30 p.m. to 5.30 p.m.: The whole of Egypt sleeps in a temperature of about 105 in the shade, but a lovely, dry, energizing heat!!!! 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.: Tea and toast and baths and wanderings about in kimonos. 7.00 p.m.: Drinks and friends. 8.30 p.m.: Cairo for dinner, dancing, and cabaret. 2.00 a.m.: Bed.’ Mentally turning half of the shopping time into reading time, I had to acknowledge that this deplorably idle life, provided it were lived with Paul, would be just the life for me. I always knew when Paul’s letters had come. Before I had opened my eyes in the morning, something in me would have sniffed the air and I would know. He wrote well, and at length, but not often, so that morning after morning lassitude would come over me again and I would have to struggle not to bury my face in the pillow and go back to sleep. Then a morning would come when I would be out of bed without thinking of it. I would try to dress slowly and calmly, and not to run downstairs, telling myself not to be excited in case I was wrong, but I was never wrong.

  When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia I knew that I had been a fool. We only had time to draw a deep breath before the war began, so I wrote to Paul telling him that I had indeed changed my mind and was ready to join him at once. He answered with delight, but hardly had his letter arrived than it was followed by a cable saying that he had been transferred to Transjordan, then in a state of emergency, and that we must revert to our plan of marrying at the end of the year. He was transferred. I had two more long, alive, loving letters from him, and then I never heard from him again until I received a formal note, two years later, asking me to release him from our engagement because he was about to marry someone else.

  11

  THE TIMES – WHEN the pain was nearest to the physical – to that of a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill – were not those in which I thought ‘He no longer loves me’ but those in which I thought ‘He will not even write to tell me that he no longer loves me.’ For weeks his silence seemed no more than his usual unreadiness as a letter writer; then, for months, the result of his absorption in his work and in the place where he was working, both of which he had described with vibrating enthusiasm. Such excuses I went on making for much longer than any detached observer could have accepted them, shutting my eyes in panic to the considerate silences and distressed expressions of my mother and my friends. I remembered what he had said in the third but last letter I had from him: ‘Never write to me less often. I know that I don’t deserve it, but it is terribly hard to write here and I’m bad at it anyway, so if you don’t hear from me often enough you must never think it’s because I am not thinking about you. I think about you all the time and I would die if you stopped writing to me.’ So I went on writing, and I tried not to complain at getting no answers. But after a while my letters became involuntarily appealing, then humiliatingly pleading, then unconvincingly threatening. Before I myself became silent – after how long I cannot remember – I had thrown off all attempts at consideration, strategy, or pride: I had told him as nakedly as I could what his silence was doing to me – and still it continued.

  If he had written to say, ‘For such and such a reason I no longer want to marry you, I no longer love you,’ I should have been stunned with grief and loss but it would have made some kind of sense and I could have come to terms with it. But that Paul, who had loved me, and who knew what I was now feeling, should have wiped out my existence so totally … I was often literally unable to believe it, it was something he could not do.

  It was not until many years later that I learnt the reason for what had happened – a love affair, of course, although not with the girl he was to marry. Feelings of guilt snowball. When they have accumulated beyond a certain point, a sense that nothing can annul them makes any action seem inadequate, so that oblivion becomes the only easy answer. Paul, who was never good at doing anything which he disliked, must have felt at first that a time would come when he would be able to explain, then that the time had taken too long in coming. So he cheated; he shut his imagination.

  If I had known him less well the whole thing might have been over comparatively quickly: I might have written him off as a monster, dropped all hope, and have been cured. Two things prevented this. One was the reaction common to almost everyone in such a situation: the terrible knowledge that if you accept the unworthiness of the object of your love, then your love itself is discredited and all the good in its past becomes poisoned retroactively. The other was the plain fact that Paul was not a monster. I had known him for so many of the longest years in a lifetime, I had grown up with him, I had loved him, after the first spell of childish infatuation, with the sort of love which brings knowledge rather than illusion: I was unable to make a grotesque of him. He was a spoilt young man who lived intensely in the present, and I had always known that in whatever place he happened to be, his present would be there. It was not in his nature to live suspended between past and future, as I could do. So although there were many times when I was cornered by that worst of all manifestations of suffering – the certainty that what is happening, what is being done, is too painful to be borne, but that the logical consequence of this, which would be that therefore one would not have to bear it, is simply not going to come about – although this happened night after night, and although I laboured through long stretches of incredulity and anger, and great bogs of self-pity, I always came back to the knowledge that it was not Paul’s fault that our relationship had become unreal to him.

  Knowing this, I would not give hi
m up. When he came back to England, I was sure, I would again become his present. At one point, about eighteen months after he had fallen silent, a cousin told me that a man she knew had met Paul at a drunken party, somewhere in Palestine, and that when Paul had learnt that this man knew Beckton, my family, and me, though only slightly, he had burst into tears (he always cried easily when thoroughly drunk). He had wept, he had said that he was a worthless brute, he had said that I was the only woman he really loved. My cousin, it seems to me, took a risk in passing on this report to me, because it might have led me to build some wild structure of hope, but in fact it did no harm because the structure was already there. I simply took it as confirmation of what I already believed: if Paul and I were to meet again – I could see that in all probability we would not, but if we did – it would be possible to overcome what had happened. More than any other image of him, I remembered a moment when, in a room full of people, he had come across to light my cigarette, our eyes had met, I had felt my own changing and I had seen his lighten from brown to gold as the flash of understanding passed between us. Whatever happened in the interval, I was convinced that if we saw each other again a moment would come when our eyes would do that; that while I remained myself and Paul was Paul, we could not be together without being as we had been.