Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

by Diana Athill

  I ran upstairs to look at myself, and it did seem to me that I was very pretty even though my face was quite pink again by then. When I came down I was feeling dreamier than ever and Toofat happened to be at the bottom of the stairs and just put his arm round me and whirled me into the room for a waltz, which he did pretty well. He talked all the time about how, although he despises games, he has decided to take up a sport because he believes that everyone should exercise his will power by doing some things he hates. He wanted to know whether I thought cricket or rugger would be best. I told him cricket because I guess that’s easier – he would be very bad at either, you should see his tennis. But wanting to exercise your will power is something I admire, so I decided to stop calling him Toofat, even to myself – and even more so when he went on to say that his favourite occu- pation is writing poetry. Last term he actually had a poem published in a Cambridge magazine. Really published, in print. I never dreamt I would get to know a poet so soon.

  I asked him to tell me his poem but he said it was too complex, it had to be read slowly and that he would explain it to me and give me a signed copy of the magazine. He always talks to me in this patronising way but it seemed almost justified after his revelation. Then I told him a little about my poems and he offered to read them and say if they were any good. A few minutes earlier I would have thought, ‘Pompous ass, what a nerve!’ but now I felt quite grateful. We began to have a very interesting conversation about poetry. If he didn’t talk in such a pompous way which sounds silly coming from someone so fat and pink, he would be a most interesting man, I believe. Also if he didn’t sniff so often.

  But I must never again be horrible about Toofat – Thomas, I mean – because the next fabulous thing which happened to me that evening happened because of him.

  It had got very hot and they had opened the French windows. ‘Let’s go into the garden for a breath of air,’ he said. In the middle of the lawn there was an enormous mulberry tree on which they had strung millions of fairy lights, and the grass where the windows shone on it was brilliant and the night was black with a terrific smell of honey- suckle. It was terribly romantic. We walked past the tree into the shadowy part of the lawn where you couldn’t see any- thing but a few pale dresses floating here and there, and shirt fronts, and the white flowers in the border, just dimly. We were walking along slowly, still talking about poetry and sort of bumping into each other occasionally, when Thomas did an unexpected thing. He put his arm round me.

  He didn’t say anything special, went on booming about John Donne as though nothing were happening – but his arm was round me and his hand was on my waist. I wasn’t sure whether he had done it absent-mindedly or on purpose, but there it was, his hand on my waist, and it gave me the most extraordinary feelings. First I felt as though I were a girl in a film with a man’s arm around her, graceful, with my waist swaying towards him – me, doing that! And then I felt as though my bones had gone soft and as though his hand wasn’t just touching my dress but was sending rays right down into me – the feeling went right through into my stomach. It was quite different from when someone puts his arm round you for dancing. I almost began to feel sick but it was vital not to show how surprised I was, so I went on say- ing yes and no to old Toofat in an ordinary voice, while all the time my body was absolutely full of this extraordinary feeling of that hand on my waist, and my mind was full of how this was really happening.

  ‘I suppose we should go back,’ he said, when we got to the fence at the end of the lawn, and he squeezed his arm tighter as he turned me round. And then it became even more marvellous. He said in a funny voice, ‘You’re a very sweet child,’ and before I knew what was happening he bent down and kissed me.

  His lips were cold and rather sticky from the hock cup he had been drinking. Some people might have been pretty disappointed by that kiss, but luckily for me I read the whole of Thomas Hardy when I was much too young to appreciate it and I have always remembered one thing out of one of his books – I forget which book. A man and a girl are walking together and he kisses her for the first time and it is dis- appointing, but Thomas Hardy says that first kisses always are. So although in a way I had always imagined my first real kiss from a man would be tremendously warm and soft and faint-making, I did actually know that it might not be, and after one second I remembered this. You have to learn about lovemaking like you do about dancing – look how I hadn’t known about the hand feeling – but I expect some people learn more easily than others and I’m sure I’m going to be one of those.

  I stood quite still while Toofat was kissing me – it didn’t take long – and I was doing a lot of things all at once: think- ing ‘This is me, being kissed’; remembering Thomas Hardy; noticing the tree with the lights and the green grass outside the windows; listening to the music from the house; smelling the honeysuckle; thinking that I must fix every bit of it in my mind for ever. Then the kiss stopped and we went indoors, still talking as though nothing had happened. And the next time I’m kissed it will be by someone like the man with the crooked nose.

  NO LAUGHING MATTER

  There had been things not so long ago (or, by Jane’s reckoning, years ago) that could become strange and torment- ing for no reason: a bonfire throbbing and blazing as though for ever, the flames rushing her eyes up into dizzy night; water folding round the pier of a bridge, into which her inability to flow was suddenly an absurd limitation; an after- noon in summer when she had squatted in a tree, wearing a stolen string of amber beads, and something had been going to happen – something so wonderful, so imminent, that its not happening had been unbearable. She had suffered the unbearable there in the tree because of the happening which went on keeping itself to itself through a whole hot afternoon. When she grew older love was like those things. At first she was not always sure whether she was thinking of clothes or a party or men (or a man) because the dazzle of love could be on any of them, not coming out of them but streaming into them from the source in herself out of which the flames and the water and the imminent happening had come. Now, in her first year at the university, it was Stephen who received it.

  ‘Do we think about men too much?’ she asked Nora, her head on the book she had brought out to read.

  ‘Yes, I think we do,’ said Nora, ‘I sometimes try to add together all the hours I spend thinking about men in a week, and it’s appalling.’

  ‘We ought to discipline ourselves. Suppose we try not to think about them before lunch?’

  ‘What about getting letters?’ asked Nora.

  ‘Oh well, that’s different. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t when they are there to think about. That’s common sense. It’s day-dreaming that’s wrong – I read an article about it once.’

  And she turned her cheek onto the book’s smooth page (she never expected to do the work she brought out onto the river) and began to think about putting on her pink dress tomorrow afternoon before going to see Stephen: their first meeting that term, which had only just begun. Their first meeting since the decision.

  What she had said was nonsense: ‘When they are there to think about.’ For all twelve weeks of the summer vacation Stephen had been abroad, but to say that he ‘was not there . . . his presence had been felt even by her family. This she had learned when she found her sister’s diary:

  Jane’s too silly for words this summer. She moons about with circles under her eyes for days and then she gets a letter from her love and rushes upstairs to wash her stockings so that she can sing without being told to shut up. I think people in love should be more dignified and learn to hide it. Ma says it’s her age.

  God damn them, God damn them to hell for discussing me, she had prayed; until she had thought: If they knew what is really happening they would change their tune. She had found a pencil and had written, very small, on the wall behind the reproduction of The Absinthe Drinker in her bed- room: ‘Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed a
gain.’ Later she had rubbed it out with bread.

  She had known Stephen for two terms and had never been in his bed. They met two or three times a week and always on Wednesdays. He was living in rooms, not in college, and every Wednesday she would go to his room for tea and stay there till they went out together to dine or to meet friends. The first part – the teatime part – had become a ritual.

  She always walked the same way to the square in which he lived and as she went she looked at everything she passed so that it would be with her for ever. Soon she could walk with her eyes shut (when she knew the street was empty) and say, ‘Now I am passing the big laburnum tree . . . now the gate- post which has lost its stone lion . . . now the three new flagstones in the pavement,’ and she would always be right. In the street leading to his square she passed a junk shop with a few pewter mugs and cracked soup tureens among the rolls of linoleum and the bedroom crockery; a fishmonger’s at which she held her breath; a baker’s at which she drew it again. When she rang his bell there was always a wait. The landlord was fat and had bad legs but he would not allow the bell to be answered by the young men who lodged with him for fear that he should miss goings-on. He was an official land- lord and could report them to their college authorities if he liked. Wheezing, inquisitive, partly disapproving and partly sly, he would open the door six inches before he opened it wide and her voice would sound false in the hall as she enquired after his legs and his budgerigars. She would go slowly up to the second floor and hesitate before she tapped on Stephen’s door, delaying happiness.

  She would plan different greetings, sometimes. She would plan to go straight through the door and throw her arms round him saying, ‘Oh my love, I have been dying for you.’ That was what she felt, but in the end they always met the same way. Stephen’s gravest condemnation was theatrical. They would kiss each other stiffly, he would take her coat and she would sit on one of the two armchairs, not on the sofa. Soon the landlord would be lumbering up with the tray of tea and until it had come and gone they could not feel alone. A few days apart would have given them enough to talk about while they waited for it and ate it, although enough to talk about was what they usually lacked.

  The things she knew about Stephen: he liked rowing, dancing, the Valse Macabre and the Valse Triste, Americans from the South because of their voices, The Story of San Michele, mountain landscapes, old motor cars, tweed rather than worsted. He disliked displays of sentiment, eccentricity, shrill voices, red fingernails, talking about politics or God, his aunts. He distrusted things unfamiliar to him in the way a child distrusts an unfamiliar food: ‘I don’t like it,’ without tasting. He thought himself unintelligent. He had kissed fewer people than she had. Nora found him dull or had said, meaning that, ‘He doesn’t talk much, does he?’

  Jane had answered, ‘He’s different when we are alone.’ She knew he was not but she did not mind. Or rather she believed that although he seemed dull he was not really, it was only that (probably through her fault) they had not yet found the way to communicate easily with words. With her other friends she could talk freely and he, no doubt, could talk as freely with his. Because of the texture of his skin and hair, the flecked green of his eyes, the way his thin hands touched things, he could not be dull. Perhaps he found her dull, too? She hoped he did, for otherwise she might feel superior to him and that she balked at. And if he did it was unimportant because he clearly did not mind it either. He, too, was only waiting for the tea-tray to be taken out.

  When it had gone she would move to the sofa, but casually, as though for some other reason; and he for some other reason (to show her a book or put away a gramophone record) would join her on it. This was the time when she had to keep still as though a bird were hopping near her, which made her timid, too. Other men who kissed her admitted what they were doing, often carried the matter further, or tried to, and would talk about it. With Stephen, she felt, it had to happen to them. When, after a breathless pause, it did, she would lie in his arms feeling that this was the highest point of bliss because to dream of any higher point, when he seemed not to, would have been unsuitable. And besides, it was the highest point she had ever reached. More exploratory lovemaking she had already known, had come to expect but could still do without. No one else’s gave her so expansive, so complete a pleasure or one so natural, as though his skin under her hands was of the same kind as her own, the taste of his mouth her own taste. She treasured everything about him, the smell of his jacket, the bristles on the back of his neck. She could have been kissed by him for ever, and was for many hours each term. Once, after leaving him, she had said to herself: I love him so much that I would do anything for him, I would even marry him. She had told this to Nora and they had both laughed.

  ‘There you are, you see, that shows,’ said Nora. ‘You couldn’t possibly marry a man if it was something you would even do for him.’

  Jane only laughed again. Yes, of course she knew it was so, but she still felt it, she loved him.

  When the end of the summer term had come, the season of balls, they had gone together to that given by his college. Even getting the dress for it had been extraordinary, almost frightening, because it meant twice playing truant and journeying to London for fittings, for which she should have asked permission but did not for fear of refusal. She had never before had a dress made for her in London. She saw it as so beautiful that it gained an almost magical property, and when she went to show it to friends gathered in Nora’s room they cried, ‘Jane!’ And Stephen, tall in evening dress, giving her dinner in a restaurant usually too expensive for them, had looked at her and blushed and said, ‘You’re looking marvellous.’

  After two or three dances a friend of Stephen’s had said, ‘If you want champagne there’s plenty up in my room.’ Already a little drunk, they had left the marquee and had gone there expecting to find a party, and the room had been empty. The lights had been out and moonlight was shining through the window showing a glint of bottles and used glasses. Without switching on the light Stephen had poured them wine. ‘They must have joined up with another party and moved on to someone else’s rooms,’ he had said. He had been very quiet for some minutes, sitting beside her on a strange sofa, drinking his champagne. And then he had taken her glass out of her hand and kissed her in a new way; kissed not only her mouth and her eyes but her neck and her breasts. After a little while he had moaned, ‘Jane, sweetheart, I can’t bear it, we can’t just go on and on like this.’ The friend’s bedroom was next door, curtains drawn, quite dark. ‘Come into the other room,’ Stephen had said.

  Jane had cried. She had wanted to go into the other room, she knew she ought to, not only to prove herself but because this was what she knew, hoped, must happen to her soon. Partly she was breathless at finding kisses not enough for him, partly ashamed at her own naïvety in believing they were. And she was startled – not at the suggestion, but that he should make it. Above all she was afraid that she would blunder. She did not know whether he would expect her to undress or not.

  To make love with their clothes on seemed to her horrifying (especially in the dress, but that thought she put down quickly). But to stand up in front of him and strip – would it not seem indecent to someone whose hands had never so much as pushed her skirt above her knee or, until this evening, pulled a dress off her shoulder? Would it not leave them both shy and shivering? And if someone came in, as well they might, two bodies stretched naked on a bed, how would they survive the shock of light, a stranger in the door? And then, she thought, they were not prepared, she might have a baby – but that was finding a reason, her real wish was: Oh why, why doesn’t he do something, why doesn’t he take off his tie or start unhooking my dress, so that I can be sure?

  So she cried and he said, ‘Sweetheart, don’t, please don’t. I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ and she could have hit him.

  Instead she said, ‘No, I’m not frightened, truly not. But I didn’t know you wan
ted that.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said fiercely. ‘I haven’t thought of anything else for weeks, I can’t even work.’

  Astonishment, delight, fear. How could she have known that while she had been behaving in the way she supposed him to expect, he had been reading her behaviour as a guide to his own?

  ‘Stephen, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know. And now it’s all so . . . Darling, not here, not tonight. Think how easily they might come back.’

  It was true, and he got up and went over to the window where she could see his ruffled hair outlined against the pale light.

  ‘It’s the end of term,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘We won’t see each other again for months and months.’

  ‘Only three,’ she said. ‘Please Stephen. It’s such a thing to decide. Let me get used to it – can’t we leave it till next term? I’ll think about it all the time between and I’ll – I’ll tell you when we meet next term. It’s not a thing I can just do like that.’

  He came back and sat beside her. ‘I suppose it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’m a brute. It’s just that . . . oh well. Look, let’s have a cigarette and then we’ll go and find something to eat.’

  She had hoped he would kiss her again, take her back into the warmth and safety of their customary embraces, but she told herself that of course he could not after this. She flinched from ‘something to eat’ as the end of the scene, but what else could he say, what else could they do, now that she had shown herself a fool, a clumsy virgin? She should have melted in his arms – but she did not know how to melt with all those hooks to undo. So she forgave him ‘something to eat.’