Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  Knowing this, I would not give him 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.

  Perhaps this might have happened if the war had not prevented his return to England. He was then cut off from us, and flying bombers, with the airman’s usual cold knowledge of the chances against his ever coming home again. England and everything in it must soon have become incredibly remote to him, and who knows what chill stretches of loneliness he must have lived through, loving his lost home and his lost life as he did, before he met a girl who could give him warmth and certainty, and whom he married. He was killed before their son was born, but at least he knew that they were to have a child. It is now easy to be grateful to that girl for having existed (she married again, I am happy to say), but at the time….

  His final letter, arriving after two years had passed, with its formal request ‘to be released’ from our engagement, seemed to me so cruel that I still cannot think of it as having been written by Paul. It seemed cruel not because of its contents but because of its wording. It was written in the kind of words men use in letters to women who, unless everything is ‘cleared up,’ might sue them for breach of promise, and that Paul should write in that way to me seemed to annihilate the half of our years together that had existed in his mind. The manner was dictated, I can now see, by guilt and embarrassment. It would have been no more possible for Paul to remember me as such a woman than it would have been for me to remember him as mean or vindictive. But when the letter was brought up to me early one morning by my silent mother, my body went cold and limp on the bed at the image it suggested of what I had become in Paul’s memory. Then I dropped the horrible piece of paper and thought, Well, anyway, it’s over now. The final desolation was to see, even as I thought the words, that it was not. The picture which came into my mind was of a long bridge suspended between two towers. One of the towers was knocked away, so surely the bridge must fall—but it did not. Senselessly, absurdly, it went on extending into space.

  The humiliations of grief are revolting. If only I had kept silent! But in the short letter I wrote back I permitted myself the whining, miserable words ‘I hope you never make her as unhappy as you have made me’ and I have never been more ashamed of anything I have done. That was the kind of thing about being unhappy which I loathed: the spectacle of oneself being turned into something despicable. That was what I struggled against, and for that reason I was pleased for many years by the knowledge that I had never for any length of time lost my hold on the truth of the situation: never, at bottom, held Paul ‘guilty’ for what had happened. But now I am not sure that this was so fortunate.

  Paul was not any ‘guiltier’ than any other human being—all are capable of the unpardonable from time to time—but if I had let myself feel that he was, I believe the effects of his desertion might have been less far-reaching. By heaping blame on to him, I might have kept my confidence in myself intact. As it was, frightened by a vision of myself gone sour and self-pitying, I went further than allowing the situation not to be his fault—I took ‘fault’ on myself. ‘Why should he have gone on loving me in absence?’ I began asking myself bleakly. ‘The fact that he was not able to do so proves that I am not the sort of person who has the right to expect such a thing.’ During the nights which followed the blank, heavy days, when bitterness began to mount in me, I would hammer it down with this thought.

  A long, flat unhappiness of that sort drains one, substitutes for blood some thin, acid fluid with a disagreeable smell. When in those days I stared at myself in the looking glass it seemed to me that I was the same as usual: my colour normal, enough flesh on my bones, my hair shiny. But I had proof that I was not the same. People had noticed me when I was happy, had chosen my company, and laughed with me and tried to make love to me. When I was no longer happy they did none of these things, they saw something about me which made them avoid me. I remember telling myself that this was subjective, that it was I who was not responding to other people—none of them had any quality other than being not-Paul—so the lack of contact came from me, not them: self-pity, I told myself, was working on my imagination. Before I went to a party I would try to persuade myself that if I expected to enjoy it I would do so, and then there would be no more of those eyes straying in search of other glances while flat talk was made. No one, I would assure myself, was thinking of me as diseased—why should anyone think of me in that way? But the most horrible moment of that horrible time was not imagined.

  One of our family friends was an exceptionally attractive, slightly raffish man, nearer my parents’ generation than my own, with whom I might well have fallen in love if I had not been otherwise occupied. He was just the man for it: tall, lean, very handsome in a fine-drawn way, he had bummed romantically about the world busting broncos, sailing on tramp steamers, ruining his health (who knew how?) in places full of parrots and mangrove swamps. My own acknowledgment of his charms remained detached, but not so that of my sister. She, five years younger than I was, felt his glamour to the point of hero worship, and he, tickled by this and observing that an attractive child was developing into a lovely girl, used to flirt with her. She was a busy diarist, filling fat notebooks by the dozen, writing ‘Secret’ on them and leaving them about in her bedroom so that her private life was not so private as she hoped. I am sure that my mother read those diaries from end to end, and I too would leaf through them from time to time, half amused, half sympathetic. My sister’s passion for this man was faithfully recorded, and so was his mischievous but harmless response to it.

  Once, driving her back from some party, he held her hand. When they got home they sat for some minutes in the car and she, dizzy with expectation, thought that he would kiss her. He did not. ‘He told me that he was not going to kiss me although he wanted to. He said that I was going to be a fascinating woman but that I mustn’t begin that sort of thing too soon or it would spoil me. Look at Di, he said, you don’t want to be like her. And of course I don’t.’

  The shrivelling sensation of reading those words is something I still flinch from recalling. I could not even summon up indignation at their smugness and unfairness, or question the misconception that ‘being like Di’ resulted from being loved too soon instead of from misery at being loved no longer. With a shameful, accepting humility I saw that I was diseased in other people’s eyes: that unhappiness was not a misfortune but a taint. In the depths of my being I must have wanted to kill my sister for it, but all I recognized was a shuddering acknowledgment that out of the mouths of babes…. Pretty and vital as she was, for many years after that I saw her as prettier and more vital, and was prepared to take second place to her, to rejoice at her triumphs and fret over her sorrows like a model sister. This was not a bad thing, since she gave good reason for admir
ation and affection, but there was a streak of falsity in it: I was over-compensating for my resentment at the scar she had left with her innocent, idle thrust.

  Some time after that, during the first May of the war, I was invited for a week’s sailing on the Broads. There would be six of us: Hugh, the young doctor who had asked me, who would be paired with a pretty cousin; an engaged couple, both of whom I liked; and a friend of Hugh’s to pair with me. The girls were to sleep on the boat, the men ashore, in tents. Every week that the war continued ‘phony’ was, we knew, a week to grab. It had not yet closed the Broads for defence purposes, but it had driven people off them, so that we would see them as they are never ordinarily seen, free of motor launches, houseboats, and picnickers. The weather was miraculous, a springtime out of a pastoral poem, and I felt a lift of heart at being invited. Sailing I loved, and Hugh must want me with them or he would not have asked me. Perhaps I would be able to enjoy something, at last, enough to break through the barrier and get a foot back into life.

  Two days before we were to start, Hugh telephoned to say that the man invited for me had failed us, his leave had been cancelled. It would make it less amusing for me, they feared, but please would I come all the same, it was not the kind of party on which even numbers mattered. I felt foreboding, but I went.

  During most of each day it was true, even numbers did not matter. We were busy sailing and sunning and preparing absurd meals, all enjoying having those strange waterways to ourselves, manœuvring through the narrow cuts, coming quietly out on to the wide expanses with nothing on them but coot, grebe, and duck. No people. We seemed to have gone back in time to a wild, untouched country. Both Hugh and the engaged ones knew of Paul’s long silence and were kind and welcoming, doing their best to include me and to cheer me up. But the engaged ones were engaged—and the little girl cousin was fiercely in love with Hugh. She had no reason to be jealous of his amiability to me, but she was; and he, although not deeply involved, was touched by her; he could not do anything but treat her, gently, as his love. When the early evenings fell, when we had wrestled with our primus stove and eaten, and the moon had sailed up above the rushes, it was inevitable that the two couples should link up.

  The engaged ones would take the dinghy and paddle off, leaving an uneven wake of silvered ripples on the smooth, inky water. Hugh, the girl, and I would wash up, sit on the deck to talk in low voices, and the tension would mount. It was painfully beautiful. Reed warblers (Paul would have known if they were really reed warblers) would toss off little beads of song, almost like nightingales, and the uncanny booming of the bitterns—more like some ancient monster bellowing—sent shivers down my spine. After a while the couple’s wish to be alone would force me to my feet. ‘I know what I want to do,’ I would say, my wretched humility brightening my voice. ‘I’m going for a walk to see if I can get nearer to that bittern.’ Hugh would go through the motions of asking the girl whether she wanted to go too, and she would go through the motions of deciding that no, on the whole she thought she was too sleepy.

  I did not cry as I wandered by myself through the tufty marsh grass. I tried to be only my senses, soaking outwards into the beauty, savouring night-time, of which one always has too little—and I must have succeeded up to a point because when I remember that week the beauty is still sharply with me. But only a yogi could keep that up, and I had to face the truth. This was before I had heard of Paul’s marriage, but far enough on for my belief in his return to have been reduced to its minimum: less a belief in his return, than a belief that if he returned, all might be well. On the night when the moon was full I had to put aside that belief. On that night there was no cloud in the sky, but there was a wind. It came rushing between the moon and the flat land, bending the forest of reeds where earth melted into water with such a steady, even thrust that it hardly made them rustle. With the same relentless flow it seemed to flood through my emptiness. Out on the Broad the engaged couple would be whispering and laughing; in the boat’s cabin Hugh and the girl would be holding each other close and kissing. I stood under that moon, in that wind, and knew myself to be absolutely alone. It was so absolute that for a time I might have been my skeleton lying somewhere, as Paul’s was soon to lie, to be picked clean by the elements.

  It was a feeling far too powerful to be evaded; it had to be accepted. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘This is how it is,’ and with a sort of dull, weary recognition I saw that it could be endured, and that if that could be endured, then anything could be. After about an hour I went back to the boat to find that the others had reassembled as a party and were brewing tea. Hugh reached out and squeezed my hand in the cabin’s almost-darkness, for which I am still grateful to him. And from that time I made better progress in my discipline against self-pity and it was less bad than it had been, or so I thought. But perhaps it was that experience of absolute acceptance which put the seal on my loneliness for so much of my life.

  To be in love and engaged at nineteen, and disengaged at twenty-two, is not fatal: you have lost your love, you have lost your job (for that is what it amounts to for a woman, as surely as though she had been training to be a doctor, only to be prevented by circumstances from practising), but you are still very young. ‘You are still very young,’ I used to tell myself. ‘It is absurd to consider your life ruined at this age. However improbable it may seem, someone else will take Paul’s place.’ And that, naturally, happened. What my self-admonishment did not take into account was the change brought about in my nature by my own loss of confidence.

  Why should my sense of my own value in relationships with men have collapsed so completely? I have sometimes wondered whether the smallness of the part played by my father in my childhood may have been responsible. Did I once, long before I can remember, want to fall in love with him as little girls are supposed to do, and was I chilled by an indifference that left me with a tendency to expect rejection? It would make sense, it is the sort of explanation offered by convincing textbooks, but it seems a bit too simple to me.

  Whatever the reason for it, there was a flaw of some sort in me which split under the impact of my abandonment by Paul and ran through all my subsequent relationships with men until I believed that I had come to the end of them. Love still took up most of my attention, but to describe in any detail my other affairs would be tedious, because they ran to a pattern. I could only be at ease in a relationship which I knew to be trivial. If I fell seriously in love it was with a fatalistic expectation of disaster, and disaster followed. By the time I had reached my thirties I was convinced that I lacked some vital quality necessary to inspire love, and it was not until my forties were approaching that I began to see the possibility that instead of lacking it, I might have been suppressing it; that my profound ‘misfortune,’ of being unable to make the men I loved love me in return, might be the result of an attitude of my own which came from a subconscious equating of love with pain.

  Twice I fell in love with happily married men—the first time quite soon after Paul’s marriage. It felt like coming back to life with a vengeance, but I recognized from the beginning that it was ‘hopeless,’ in that when he said ‘love’ he meant something less than I did, and the more I recognized this, the greater my secret abandon to the situation. It must have been chance that he repeated the pattern of Paul so exactly—going away, writing a few times, then silence—but although this second blow on the same spot was an agony, it was not unexpected: I had been waiting for it from the moment I realized that this was a ‘real’ man, not just a man who was not Paul. And both with that man and with my second married lover, I flattered myself that I was unselfish and fair-minded in not wanting to force them into leaving their wives: indeed, their affection for their wives, underlying their readiness to enjoy themselves with me, was something which I esteemed. I felt with both of them that they would not have been the kind of man I could have loved so much if they had been prepared to wreck long-standing marriages for my sake, and estimable though this attitude ma
y be on the face of it, there now seems to me something fishy about it. I was hungry to be alive, so I was hungry to love—but was I hungry, in fact, for the companionship of those particular men, or of the third one, unmarried but not in love with me, whose reservations about me turned a lively attraction into infatuation so that I did not fall in love with him, but might have been jumping off a cliff? I have always shrunk from the idea of possessiveness, I have never tried to mould people into my own idea of them, and I have been satisfied with myself because of this; I have considered it a virtue. It may have been in part the virtue I took it to be, but I suspect now that it had other aspects as well: that if I did not grab at people, I grabbed at emotion, and that for many years the most intense emotion I could conceive of was one of pain.