by Jenny Diski
Once I stayed for a month with a strict orthodox family and after an intense Shabbos ritual of prayers, blessings and a meal, I woke in the night to have a pee and thoughtlessly turned on the hall light. The entire family ran screaming from their rooms, all demanding to know who the culprit was, sensitised even in their sleep to the grave insult to Yahweh that had emanated from their house, if not, it turned out, their blood. Towels and when to change sheets were always a problem. Toothpaste. How much water should you have in a bath? People had remarkably variable depths of bathwater. Everything generally was difficult. Using the loo during the day was fraught, having to flush and remind the house of my existence in it. If I were sharing a bedroom, I’d try and find some dark corner of the house to claim as my own, and I tried to keep incidental, accidental encounters with members of the family to a minimum, hovering on the stairs if I heard them moving about in the kitchen, returning swiftly to my room if they were coming in my direction. Which books could I take to read, how much loo paper should I use? Eating with them and going out together were all horrible anxiety traps. Their having me to stay was a charitable deed. A mitzvah. Nor was I subject to the natural forgiveness or generally non-lethal battles between family members. I didn’t understand how rows faded away, leaving no one sulking. I knew though that I couldn’t be a recipient of such forgiveness or such easy healing of wounds. I squeezed myself into invisibility, tightening every muscle in my body, terrified when there were arguments and small dramas that I might be dragged into them. Or I made myself known when I thought I needed to by a theatrically heavy footstep or a cough.
On another occasion, when my mother was stretchered off to Friern and I was sent I don’t know where to stay with I don’t know whom, I remember living briefly with some people who had a collection of coloured-glass figures – looking it up, I think Murano glass – and I dropped and smashed one that I picked up. I considered hiding the broken pieces, but the absence on the shelf would have been obvious. I owned up. It would have provoked catastrophe had it happened at my home with my mother. Here, everything was quieter. I could tell that what I’d broken was important, either loved or expensive. There was no hiding the dismay, but there was no shouting or screaming. I was told to be careful and not to touch things in future. I had no idea how to behave in such silent, sorrowful circumstances. When could I leave the room and get myself out of the way? What kind of apology should I make? Should I offer to pay for the piece? But I had no money. I found I didn’t really like the neatness of controlled displeasure. Normally I would have clapped my hands over my ears and locked myself in the bathroom until things calmed down. But here things were calm even when I’d caused a catastrophe.
My first weeks at Doris’s were like that. Having stayed in other people’s homes before didn’t help. (It still doesn’t. I remain awkward and uncertain while staying in other people’s houses.) It was worse, actually, because this wasn’t a holiday and didn’t have an end date, and there was no social worker or rabbi attached to oversee the placement, who could be contacted if there was a problem or my presence was too much of a burden. At Doris’s house, I’d creep down from my top-floor room, past her closed door on the middle floor, to the kitchen for something to eat (did I eat too much?) or another coffee, knowing that no matter how carefully I avoided a creaking stair, or returned the cheese to the fridge, wrapped so it wasn’t obvious that I’d eaten any of it, she would know I was there in the house. It wasn’t just a sense of discomfort at being an interloper, I wanted to be invisible, not to be thought about on my own account. The idea I had was not to be a felt presence, to be a ghost, not to exist except for myself, until some signal said that Doris was ready to acknowledge me, and then I had to act my presence, shape up and be a good guest, however that was. But what signal? I’d have been grateful for a bell or a written timetable. I couldn’t just ease my way into living there, or consider myself to be one of the party of two who would learn how to ‘get used to one another’.
Doris had said clearly and often that I had the freedom of the house. I could eat or drink anything from the fridge and help myself to tea and coffee. I was to treat the place as home. (But hers or mine?) She got up early to work, I’d probably be asleep, but she didn’t like to be interrupted, so I was to ignore her if I met her in the kitchen or on the stairs. (How do you ignore someone in their own house who has given you a home? And my mother had been in charge of etiquette. I knew I wasn’t to ignore people. Speak up and always look people in the eye.) Still, if the door to her bedroom and study was closed, then she wasn’t to be bothered. That was almost as good as a bell. She’d answer the phone and anything else that came up I should just use my common sense about. But I didn’t think I had any common sense or none that told me when to override the usual rule of silence. Very occasionally a phone call was for me, and Doris would shout up or down from her landing. I’d rush to take it, excruciated at having interrupted her. We might meet over lunch and chat if she wasn’t, you know, thinking, but how could I know? And she’d generally be around in the late afternoon and make supper in the evening. After supper we’d talk or watch some television (The Wednesday Play, That Was The Week That Was, news, documentaries, old movies) and then head off for the night to our rooms. I found myself freezing when I encountered her, as if trying to implode myself, and I couldn’t stop myself saying ‘thank you’ and sometimes ‘thank you very much for having me’. I picture myself in those weeks as traditionally Japanese: forever trying to make myself smaller, and out of the way, making my bow lower and my thanks outlast their acceptance. I asked what I could do around the house and Doris said, just the normal things. Keep your room tidy and help with the washing-up. My room was chaos and I didn’t do the washing-up nearly enough. She was giving me an allowance and I should try to keep within it. I rarely did. There was, she said, no need for gratitude, that was silly. She offered the civilised justification: people had helped her at different difficult periods and one day I might be in a position to help someone else. I saw the mutuality of that and I hope I have in some ways, but it’s never consciously been as a return payment to Doris. My need to express gratitude, the insufficiency I felt, was never assuaged by the long view. Gratitude was half of what I felt. The other half was fury and resentment, a leftover from all the chaos before, which in one way or another my parents were incapable of resolving. But also there was a substantial amount of anger at having to be grateful, the gratitude ever increasing, the bill never settled, and made more enraging by Doris’s insistence that I wasn’t to feel it. Also anger at the discomfort I felt trying to live invisibly in an unfamiliar house with someone I didn’t know, at having to relax when I couldn’t, at having to be at home when I wasn’t. I didn’t understand any of that until it began to come clear four years later, in another psychiatric hospital.
Doris’s assurances that we’d get used to each other never cut through the surface of my discomfort. She had a way of offering emotional advice and making declarations of welcome in a distant, throwaway, clipped manner that expressed to me more than anything else her uneasiness with ease. The advice to relax came out like an instruction, similar in tone to telling me not to knock on her door if it was closed. She never seemed to be relaxed with me around. I began to get the impression that the words she spoke and how she actually felt were at odds. It was hard to know which I should attend to. Eventually I learned that they had to be kept separate, and I started to feel that I was in familiar territory, though not familiar in any relaxing sense. I’d come directly from a psychiatric unit, and before that I’d rebounded from father to mother, neither of whose places was anything like any home I’d experienced. It was as if Doris thought she only needed to say ‘relax’, ‘don’t feel grateful’, ‘feel at home’, and it was done. It wasn’t at all clear to me what feeling ‘at home’ meant within the context of the house rules that kept Doris from being interrupted and given that it wasn’t actually my home. What kind of ‘at home’ was I to practise? Was I to be mysel
f, the idle-teenager-with-a-bundle-of-anger-and-stored-problems ‘at home’? Or a good-girl-brand-new-without-any-emotional-baggage ‘at home’? The good girl was pretty submerged by then. I could, at best, remain silent and discover what practically I had to do or not do in order not to be a nuisance. So the first weeks went by. During that time I learned shorthand and typing on a part-time course to help me with the job at her friend’s office, and, of course, because it was essential if I wanted to be a journalist, which was what I said I wanted to be to Doris – unable to admit my improbable fantasy of being a novelist to an everyday real writer tapping out short stories that became the collection A Man and Two Women, and writing the script for a TV version of The Habit of Loving.
A couple of weeks after I arrived Doris told me she’d made an appointment for me to see a gynaecologist. She gave me the time and address. I asked what it was for. To fit me for a Dutch cap, she said. The sooner the better. I asked what a Dutch cap was and Doris sighed before sitting us both down at the table to explain. I didn’t want to get pregnant, did I? And it was really no problem using a cap, providing you took responsibility and never, ever had sex without first putting it in. But I hadn’t got a boyfriend. Well, she didn’t think that state of affairs would last long, and there was no harm in being ready. The last thing you need is to be pregnant and have to have an abortion. I tried to imagine having a boyfriend for whom I needed a diaphragm and how I would manage to put it inside me without his noticing. Being pregnant and abortion flew straight over my head and escaped through the kitchen window. I wondered if the predicted boyfriends were to be brought here to the house I was to make myself at home in, to be entertained sexually, or if I had to find someone with a place of their own.
There was an enormous amount of talk between Doris and her friends around the table, as well as in books and films I was reading and seeing, about the unsatisfactoriness of young people having to sneak about and use dark alleyways to have sex. Sex in dark alleyways and getting pregnant were pretty much one and the same thing. I wondered to myself how late I was allowed to be out, assuming I ever found any friends or knew anywhere to go. There were so many details I needed to know about how to live in this new world, none of which would have arisen with my own family, who had never mentioned the subject of boyfriends, but I never had the courage to ask Doris these very practical questions. Partly this was because I was a teenager with some odd questions to ask of someone whom I didn’t know very well, but also because at any hint of a question about how I should behave, Doris would say everything would be all right and wave that arm dismissing my mostly unspoken queries, saying we’d get used to each other and we’d sort things out as and when problems came up.
This alarmed me. It seemed to mean that there had to be actual problems, clashes of expectation and behaviour, in order for me to understand what was wanted. I looked older than my age, and was a quick study. After a few weeks of silence, listening to people talk around the table, after a film, or about a book, I threw in a few acid or ‘insightful’ comments of my own. I turned from an ‘enigmatic child’, as someone called me, to a perfectly timed commentator on what and who went on around me. I acted sophisticated to fit in with these new people, who clearly valued it very highly. I could see I was doing it right. But bad girl though I was, and thought I needed to be if Doris and her friends were to accept me, I was terrified of anyone being angry with me, or of finding me out. I didn’t know what would happen if I was found out, and especially by Doris, a stranger in whose house I was living. The awkward experiences I’d had staying with other suburban bourgeois families on a strictly temporary basis gave me very little idea of how to live as a familiar stranger in this house with Doris, who mocked suburban ways and values, and had such firm opinions about everything from politics and literature to sociology and psychology. And there was still no mention of how long I was to stay there and what would happen next.
I arrived at the gynaecologist’s with time to spare. It was a private practice in a large house, heavily carpeted. I was taken up the stairs by the gynaecologist who had come down to collect me. She settled behind her desk and I sat in the chair opposite. What could she do for me? She wore a white coat and was, I think, in her forties. I said, as Doris told me to, that I had just arrived to live at Mrs Lessing’s house and that she was a friend of one of her, the gynaecologist’s, regular patients, and I had been sent to be fitted for a Dutch cap. Are you having an active sexual relationship? I said I wasn’t, but it was for in case I did. The gynaecologist’s face was a mask of professional inquiry. She drew a file towards her and took up her pen. She wanted my full name. Address. My age. Fifteen. She put the pen down and looked directly at me, as if I’d just walked into the room. What? Fifteen. Fifteen? And then she started to shout. How dare you come to me asking for contraception! You’re underage. What is that woman doing sending you here? Doesn’t she know it’s against the law to have sex at your age, let alone for me to provide contraception? She’d be struck off. She was boiling and getting out of her chair. I said that it was so I didn’t get pregnant if I did have a sexual relationship. ‘But you’re fifteen!’ she shouted. ‘What are you doing preparing to have a sexual relationship at your age and then coming to me for help?’ She moved around the desk towards me: ‘Get out of here at once.’ I bolted. She actually chased me out of the room, shouting still, and stood at the top of the carpeted staircase to make sure I left. I fled out of the front door and along the street, shaken and embarrassed. I’d come upon a world of professionals on the edge of madness, apparently. I couldn’t understand how Doris didn’t know that the gynae couldn’t give me contraception. When I got back, still shaking, and with an adolescent’s fear of the police being set on me, I told Doris what had happened. She clicked her tongue, irritated. It was too bad, X had been going to her for years and said she was very nice. I said that apparently I was too young to have contraception. Nonsense, Doris said. She wants you to get pregnant and have to have an abortion, does she? I’m sure there’s someone else. I’ll ask Z.
The urgency of my need for contraception was, for all Doris’s explaining the catastrophe of getting pregnant and the terrible world of backstreet abortions, a bit theoretical, it seemed to me. A year before, living in Holland Park with my father, at the age of fourteen, I’d been raped.
I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was fourteen – I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But fourteen is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my fourteen was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent.
I didn’t think a recording studio would be silent and empty, I supposed that other people would be there, technicians, people just hanging around, but I think maybe I would have gone even if I’d known it was empty, just to shut him up. It was in a basement a block from where I lived. He unlocked the door and let me in, then he closed the door behind me and I heard the key turn in the lock. There r
eally is a special sound of a key turning in a lock in an empty room. I asked to leave, and said I wanted to go home, suddenly scared, but he put the key in his back pocket and smiled. I want to go home, I told him, again, a little panicky. Not until we’ve had a good time, he said, and there’s no point in screaming, it’s a recording studio, the place is soundproofed. He pulled me by my upper arm further into the room.
Behind a glass wall there was that bank of recording equipment you see in pictures. In the main room, where we were, there were some mikes, a set of drums, a fridge and a sofa. I said that I was only fourteen and he laughed. No, I wasn’t, he told me. I was, I said. He pushed me on to the sofa and I repeated that I was fourteen, and – I was pleading now, knowing I was in trouble – I was a virgin. I was at any rate young enough to think that telling him that would give him pause. No, I wasn’t, I was not fourteen and I was certainly no virgin, he laughed, as he pushed up my skirt. I have no idea whether he believed what he was saying or not.
Even for those days, I didn’t have much interest in sex, and I knew even less. I’d read some steamy books from the library, but the steam always obscured exactly what was going on. I really didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. I knew it was sex and that I was being raped (I’d read about that), but the details were quite fuzzy. I was frightened, but not because I thought he was going to kill me or even physically hurt me. I was frightened because I was being pinned down. I was also embarrassed (again) at the nakedness of my lower body (I’d never been naked with a man before, apart from my father) and I think I remember even finding a space to worry about whether my knickers were clean.
