Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  When we were transferred back to London and had become an accepted part of the B.B.C.’s machinery, it became an ordinary job and lasted for five years, until after the end of the war. It was never an exciting one but it kept us busy. We were supposed to be able to answer any question at any time, and usually we could: an information service is only a matter of knowing where to look. I liked most of the women with whom I worked, and if there was one I did not like she was usually disliked by all of us; it is not a bad thing in a group, I discovered, to have one unpopular member who will act as catalyst on the others. I came to be head of the section after a time, having first been ‘passed over’ in favour of a more efficient girl, which was supposed to be a drama. I was only slightly pleased when she turned out to be less efficient than had been expected and at last went away to have a baby, while the other women said, ‘It should have been you in the first place.’ I liked their liking me (it was lucky that they did, for it was, in fact, they who kept the section running), but my concern for the work was barely skin-deep. My concern for anything, at that time, was barely skin-deep.

  My life became no more closely knit with the war. Paul was killed, but he had already gone away from me. A cousin was killed, but he was younger than I was and I had never been very close to him. Other people I knew were killed, but they did not belong to my daily life. These deaths were as though the poisonous atmosphere had condensed for a moment and a drop had fallen: horrible, but natural. The nearest violence came to my own person was when a room I was to sleep in that night was blown in, and when the curtains of another room suddenly, silently, bellied towards me, sweeping a china bowl off the window sill, and I had time to wonder whether I was having hallucinations before the sound of the explosion followed. I was not even affected by whatever feverish gaiety there may have been about (people speak of it in memoirs); it did not come my way. Years of emptiness. Years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning. Other people’s experience of them was far more painful, more dramatic, more tragic, more terrible than that; but that too, in its small, dim way, was hell.

  During that time my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one’s personal life was concerned, one was a failure, doomed to be alone because one did not merit anything else, and when every day a part of one’s job was to mark the wartime papers? I remember particularly a cutting about an elderly Pole who had killed himself, leaving a letter to say that he had tried everything to make people see what must be done for Poland but no one would listen. He was killing himself because it was the only gesture left him by which he might be able to draw people’s attention to what was happening. He was a man who chose the other way, the opposite way to mine, and the poor old fanatic got about an inch and a half in a corner of the Manchester Guardian. If one were not to be a walking Francis Bacon picture, a gaping bloody mouth rent open in a perpetual scream, what could one do but go to the cinema and be grateful for an amusing film; go to bed and feel the smoothness of the sheets and the warmth of the blankets; go to the office and laugh because Helen’s lover was at home on leave and she had asked Kathleen to say, if her mother telephoned, that she was staying with her. After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.

  Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure. Sleep for me has always been dreamless yet not negative, as though oblivion were a consciously welcomed good, so the only thing to dread about my nights was the slow, heavy emergence from them when an unthinking lack of enthusiasm for the days into which they pitched me made getting up an almost intolerable effort. Sleep at night, and a cautious huddling within limits during the day: walking to work along the same streets, eating the same meals, going back to the same room, then reading. In theory I longed to depart from this pattern and felt sorry for myself when I did not, but although I would have liked to have lived differently, the smallest alteration seemed to be beyond my energies. I had to be feeling unusually well before I could go so far as to take a bus to the National Gallery on a day off, instead of sleeping all the morning and reading all the afternoon.

  Within these absurd limitations imposed on me by inertia, there were palliatives to be found: the company of the few friends then accessible—and that I do not say more about my friends is because their lives are their own affair, not because they are not precious to me—and the books I read, and the little life spun within the walls of the office, which was often amusing. The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances. And always, at any time, I could look at things, whether at leaves unfolding on a plane tree, or at people’s faces in a bus, or at a pigeon strutting after its mate on a roof, or at pictures. Perhaps the nearest I came to being fully alive for months on end was when I was looking at pictures. This joy I owe partly to the natural acuteness of my response to visual images and partly to one of my aunts, the only one of my mother’s sisters to remain unmarried and the only one of them to escape from the family’s way of thinking.

  An intelligent and sensitive girl, she was extremely shortsighted and had to wear glasses. It was this, I believe, that caused her, as well as the rest of the family, to think her plain in spite of looks which by present-day standards would be considered striking. As a child she had stammered, and quite early in her life she must have written herself off as a shy and unattractive girl. She went to Oxford and became the family bluestocking, much loved by everyone but little understood. Her greatest friend became an almoner in a hospital, and my aunt followed her example. They shared a flat in London, decorated with hand-woven materials and reproductions of Impressionist paintings, and they worked with dedication and enjoyment.

  When my grandfather knew that he was about to die, he told his daughter that she must give up her work and come back to Beckton to look after her mother. No one questioned this. My grandmother must have been about sixty at the time, an extraordinarily healthy, able woman whose house was constantly filled by visiting children and grandchildren. With a little planning she need hardly ever have been alone, and she had a character strong enough to withstand loneliness if it had to. But according to her ideas of what was fitting, it was taken for granted that an unmarried daughter owed a duty to her parents compared to which her duty to her work was frivolous and her duty to herself did not exist. My mother, the other sisters, and their brother shared this belief. Their own children were still young and they had not yet foreseen their own acceptance (in my mother a splendidly generous one) of their daughters’ rights to lives of their own. ‘It horrifies me now,’ my mother has said to me. ‘How could we have let her be sacrified like that? But at the time it just seemed natural.’

  What my aunt felt about it she never said. She was not only a reserved woman, but the most genuinely unselfish person I have ever met. Silent, a little apart, she threw herself into work. She gardened, she served on committees, she taught Sunday school in the village, she became a Justice of the Peace. The books on her shelves were not quite like the books of the rest of the family, the pictures in her bedroom were not like their pictures, and she was the only one who would slip away for holidays abroad, walking in the Dolomites, or staying in rough inns in Italy or Yugoslavia. She loved small children and the
y loved her. Gently, diffidently, she dropped crumbs of poetry or romanticism or liberal opinion along their paths for them to pick up if they cared to. One of these crumbs was an occasion when she took me up to London to a great exhibition of French painting given in Burlington House in the early ’thirties.

  I have never forgotten that exhibition. To be in London was exciting enough, and to be doing something so grown-up as visiting an exhibition was even better: I was ready to enjoy the pictures, and enjoy them I did. I loved the Watteaus and the Fragonards, which seemed to me glimpses of an exquisitely graceful life in which I longed to join, but the canvases which impressed me as the most beautiful of the lot were La Source and La Belle Zélie by Ingres. That marmoreal perfection, that polished, heightened realism of texture, conveyed to me Ideal Beauty. Why did my aunt stand for so much longer in front of a baigneuse by Renoir? Why did she say, undidactically as usual, that she thought it more lovely than the Ingres? I looked at it attentively and could only see a smudgy painting of a plain girl who was too fat and too red. But my darling aunt, who knew about pictures—she did like it better than La Source, I could see that without being told. So although I did not then see the Renoir, nor any of the other Impressionists except Manet’s boy playing the fife, I understood that this was a limitation in myself, not in them: the first, the vital lesson for anyone who wants to enjoy painting. Looking at that Renoir was like meeting someone at a party and getting nowhere with him because one or both of you happen to be distrait. You do not discover until you meet again that he is going to be one of your best friends—but useless though the first meeting may have seemed, without it the second one would not have taken place.

  There was another occasion, too, earlier than this, when my aunt dropped a hint about art and I picked it up. I was drawing horses, as I constantly did, when she leant over my shoulder and said, ‘Draw a naked man—a man or a woman.’ Disconcerted by a suggestion that seemed to me indecent, I hesitated. She, seeing what I was thinking, became embarrassed in her turn and said, ‘Go on, you needn’t put in his—er—his little arrangements if you don’t want to.’ So I drew a shapeless forked radish and she looked disappointed. I did not understand her fond hope that a child’s eye would produce something original and alive, but I knew that I had failed in some way: that there was something of significance I should have been able to do with the human body instead of being embarrassed by it. When, after that, I looked at paintings of the nude, I was looking for beauty.

  So my aunt and my own temperament equipped me with eyes, and seeing things remained, through the dreariest stretches of my life, a reason for living.

  Another device for filling emptiness—a common one, difficult to consider with detachment—is promiscuity. Lack of energy prevented me from ranging about in pursuit of men, but if they turned up, I slept with them. I had started this soon after unhappiness set in, and if I am to be honest I must admit that I was less shrivelled when I was doing it than I was when I was not: when, for instance, during a long period at Evesham and in London, I was too cowed by the double blow I had received from love to do even that.

  It always seemed to me that the factor of physical frustration on the simplest level, although it must have played its part, was much less important than the reassurance which came from the sense of being desired and the mitigation of boredom which came from having something to do. That I must iron my pretty dress and wash my best underclothes because on Friday the bell would ring and I would be going out to dinner with a man, however dull, was at least to appear to be living. It was going through the familiar motions, it was getting back into harness, even if the drive would not lead anywhere—and I was determined that it should not. Only in an encounter which contained no threat of serious emotion, no real relationship, could I, at that time, feel safe.

  Sometimes these sorties were not to be regretted. If there was enough companionship and physical compatibility, a small expansion beyond the confines of my own predicament into another person’s life was possible, some tenderness could be felt—and tenderness between bodies, though restricted, is real. At other times they were simply absurd, and I would be both amused and puzzled by them. I would meet a man with whom I had nothing in common, who was perhaps fat and garrulous, who told boring anecdotes and could not even dance well. He would make the first movements of a pass at me and I, a little warmed because he was behaving as though I were attractive, would make the first responses. Hands would be held under restaurant tables, or as we danced my body would yield to his pressure until our thighs were touching. At that point I would say to myself, ‘Now steady! You do not want to go on with this, you know quite well that it will be deadly.’ But whatever reason might be saying, once the first moves had been made there was no breaking the pattern. It was as though a familiar music had begun to play, I had stepped into a familiar measure, and to go against its rhythm was beyond me. A certain kind of look, certain words, gestures, and contacts, and all my faculties would go into a state of suspension: bed was the only conclusion. ‘What is obliging me to do this?’ I would wonder, going up in a hotel lift or watching someone who should have been a stranger as he put his keys and change on a dressing-table. I would split in two on those occasions, one half going obediently and easily through the routine, the other watching with an ironic amusement. When the dance had reached its inevitable conclusion and the night in bed with whoever it might be was over, the two halves would rejoin and I would wake up thinking, ‘But I am mad! Never again!’

  This was where complications could set in. Common courtesy would have seemed to me, during the night, to demand that if I was making love with this man I should appear to enjoy it, so how, without insulting him, could I avoid a repetition? He would be under the impression that he had met a girl of easy virtue and amorous temperament, and would look forward to other meetings. I used to be forced to spin elaborate tales of my own fickleness, neuroticness, bitchiness—‘You are well rid of me really, I promise.’ Once, becoming hopelessly enmeshed in my own tangled web, I implied that it was only the man’s ardour that had demolished my normally strong defences, whereupon he believed me and soon afterwards asked me to marry him: perhaps the most disconcerting thing that has ever happened to me.

  These foolish and always short affairs were threadbare rags against a cold wind, but they were better than no rags at all. During the period when my spirits were too low for me to grasp at them, the shrivelling affected my body as well as my soul, my health deteriorated, my appetite dwindled, and sensations of faintness and nausea attacked me whenever I left my room or the office. I reached the stage of dreading the short walk between the two for fear that I should faint or vomit in the street. I went to a doctor, was told that I had become anaemic, and was sent home for a month’s sick leave.

  Beckton could always restore me. I used to imagine a ‘scientific’ reason for it: that the nature of its soil made its leaves and grasses give off a certain kind of exhalation which suited me above all others. But although as I sat in the train returning to London I felt better physically, I knew that at bottom I was the same: I would continue my dreary round unless I took some kind of action. ‘It is not that life has deserted you,’ I told myself. ‘It is you who have deserted life.’ I thought of the brisk injunctions in women’s magazines—‘Take up an interest,’ ‘Join a club.’ At that sort of thing I could only laugh or shudder, it was too far outside my line of country. So I said to myself (it is not an inspiring thing to recall, but it is true)—I said to myself, ‘Look, the next man you meet who appears at all attracted to you, whatever he is like, however unreal he seems to you, you will revert to your bad old ways and will accept whatever happens.’

  I went straight from the station to the office, for the late shift. After a little gossip the girls I was relieving collected their things and left me alone in the racket of typewriters and ticker-tape machines from the News Room next door which had come to seem like silence. I was about to go to the canteen for a coffee when the door open
ed and there stood a man whom I shall call Felix, a great womanizer and until recently the lover of a friend of mine who had left for a job abroad. ‘Hullo, sweetie,’ he said. ‘Are you all alone?’ A stocky little figure leaning against the door post, crinkling professional charmer’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘You can come out for a drink with me.’ ‘No, I can’t, not until midnight, anyway.’ ‘All right, I’ll come and collect you at midnight.’

  Felix was anchored by marriage and was not a man whom I could admire enough to love. With him I could feel absolutely safe. At the same time he was a gay companion and we shared great pleasure in making love. Our relationship was pure cinq-à-sept, except that its venue was a restaurant where we would eat as good a dinner as could be found in wartime London, and drink a lot, before going to spend a night in an hotel or, if Felix’s family was in the country, at his house. Neither of us ever set foot in each other’s daily life. We would bring to our meetings incidents from it, if they were amusing or bizarre, but neither ever expected the other to take more than a passing interest in anything more grave; I would never, for example, have told Felix about money troubles except as a joke, and he would hardly have referred to any difficulties he might be having with his children. Our roles were clearly defined: to make each other laugh, and to give each other physical pleasure. At both of these he was very good. He was an excellent raconteur with a quick eye for character and an immense relish for the absurd, whose sympathies, though not profound, were wide. He had also the disarming honesty with which a rake will often feel that he can justify himself. He loved having money and making a vulgar show with it, because to make a show was more fun than being discreet. He loved success, even though he had got it by jettisoning his integrity as a writer. The relish with which he lived eclipsed any thought of how he might have lived.