Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  I had become so emotionally impotent because of the tension between a conscious longing to love and a subconscious fear of it that my feelings for anyone, for a long time, had gone no further than a detached well-wishing. Towards Felix I could feel a positive affection, and it was not—most certainly it was not—to be despised. For two years I remained his mistress (or, more probably, one of his mistresses), and only put an end to it when restored vitality and confidence pushed me out again on to the perilous waters of deeper feeling. And although I was to capsize yet again, my years with Felix had made me more buoyant. With him I had been happy, though in an inglorious way, and I was by that much less likely to drown.

  I wish I had never met Felix again after we had separated, but I did. Eight years later the telephone rang and I heard that familiar, husky voice, that contented chuckle, and cried, ‘Felix! Come round at once!’ As I opened the door to him I thought ‘Heavens, he must have been having a hard day,’ because he had something about him a little dishevelled and awry that I had never seen. Then I noticed a smell of alcohol—stale alcohol—that was almost sickening. ‘He is drunk,’ I thought with surprise, for in spite of all the whisky we had put away together I had never seen him drunk. We went out to dinner, and as the evening passed I realized slowly that this was no unfortunate chance. The bartender had greeted him with bored patience instead of with the old comradely twinkle, the head waiter had given us an obscure table, and no wonder, because Felix started making bawdy jokes, very loud. At one point, when he had eaten a little, he appeared to pull himself together and began to talk as he used to talk and to ask me questions about myself, but I soon realized that he was unable to listen to the answers. When he screwed up his eyes at me it was horrible—the scrag-end of charm, ossified with exploitation. Deliberately frivolous as he was, a hedonist, an opportunist, vulgar in some ways though with a flourish that seemed to me to redeem it, my dear Felix should have been able to bob his way merrily into old age in defiance of Nemesis, but he could not. When he died soon afterwards, people said it was from drink, and I could only suppose it to be so: a man who had actually said in my hearing, ‘Don’t be silly, you know that I can take it or leave it alone’ a man who would have detested himself in the role of object lesson for any end other than merriment or pleasure. I suppose he is an odd person towards whom to feel gratitude and tenderness, but those are the emotions his memory will always bring to life in me. Felix enjoyed women so much that he could not help making them feel valuable, indeed he would have considered it amateurish not to do so. It was he who began the slow process of my restoration.

  13

  THE SQUARE, SCRUBBED woman with cropped hair sat behind a desk on which was a vase of catkins. Her consulting room was decorated in cream and green, a combination I detest.

  ‘Well, now,’ she said in a voice intended to nip hysteria in the bud, ‘it’s not the end of the world.’

  I had never thought it was. She saw, I supposed, a great many unmarried women who had become pregnant, so that she could hardly have avoided treating them according to formula, but I began at once to resent that she was applying her formula to me.

  ‘In fact,’ she went on, ‘one might almost say that in wartime, when there is such a shortage of beds in the maternity wards and so on, it is simpler to have a baby when you are not married than when you are.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, there is a lot of help available. I would strongly advise you to go on with it. It’s your natural function and if you frustrate it you will find that a trauma results, a profound trauma. And it’s quite simple when you have made up your mind to it—there are plenty of war widows about. You can change your job and wear a wedding ring and no one will suspect a thing.’

  ‘But what about afterwards, when the baby is born?’

  ‘That’s the simplest part,’ she said. ‘I can put you in touch with organizations to look after that. There are three alternatives. One: you have the baby and its adoption is arranged beforehand. You won’t even see it. The committee is extremely careful in its vetting of couples who want to adopt children—we make sure that they really want them, as well as that they are able to support them, and I can assure you that it is pure sentimentality to worry about the child in that case. It will probably be a good deal better off with its adopted parents than it would be with you.’ She laughed as she spoke: little shocks of briskness were the thing.

  ‘I don’t see much point,’ I said, ‘in going through nine months of pregnancy and a birth, and not even seeing my child after all that.’ I had a vivid mental picture of waking in a hospital bed to an emptiness through which I could never crawl.

  ‘No. Well then, there’s the second alternative: foster parents. We find a foster mother for it and you are free to see it whenever you like, and then, when you are in a better position to look after it, when you are making more money or have got married, you can take it back. You would be surprised at the number of men who can be made to accept such a situation.’

  What, I thought, if I never make any more money, or never get married, or can’t make a husband accept the situation? And what of a child brought up by a woman who must seem to be its real mother, only to be snatched away by someone who has been no more than a visitor? It was less intolerable than the first prospect but not something I would risk. I nodded and looked expectant.

  ‘The third solution,’ she said, ‘is to my mind much the best. You take your parents into your confidence straight away and get them to help you keep the child. What have you got against that?’

  ‘My parents,’ I said. ‘They would be horrified.’

  ‘Do them good, silly old things,’ said the woman.

  I looked at her in astonishment. She was speaking of people of whom she knew nothing—not their ages, nor their income, nor their way of life, nor their feelings towards their daughter—so how could she possibly presume to know whether it would do them good or not? Her high-handed dismissal of my parents as ‘silly old things’ was a piece of gross impertinence. I sat there thinking ‘What a frightful woman!’ while she went on to explain that most families, once an illegitimate child becomes a fait accompli, adapt themselves to the situation after a time, however shocking they find it at first. ‘You would probably find,’ she said, ‘that it would become your mother’s favourite grandchild. I have seen that happen.’

  My reason told me that she was right: that if I were to go on with this, it would have to be on those terms. I was earning only five pounds a week and could not save anything like enough money to make me independent. Someone would have to help me, and the child’s father was not able to. It was probably true that my parents, after their first horror and distress, would come round to taking the responsibility—but if they did, it would only be at a great cost both emotionally and financially. Their lives as well as mine would be disrupted and complicated, and it seemed to me outrageous that I, because of my own folly, should force them into such a situation. This pregnancy was my business and no one else’s.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘you will regret it terribly if you have an abortion. You’re in perfect shape physically—I would say that yours is an ideal pregnancy, so far. You will suffer in every way if you terminate it.’ She looked down at her hands, then reached out to straighten a folder on her desk. When she looked up, her eyes were sharp with calculation. ‘It is, of course,’ she went on slowly, ‘entirely your own business. It is entirely up to you if you want’—she paused a moment to throw the verb into relief—‘if you want to murder your first child’—and she watched me.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said, getting up. Her look, the choice of verb, had clarified my mind in a flash. I knew, now, that I must get on with the job of finding an abortionist.

  Walking down the street, I began to laugh. ‘The old blackmailer!’ I thought. ‘Murder, indeed!’ Applied to an embryo two and a half months developed, the word, I was abruptly convinced, was nonsense. What was happenin
g in my womb was still simply a physiological process concerning only me, a new departure of my body’s. Later there would be a creature there to consider, but at this stage—no.

  I had become pregnant by subconscious intention and had recognized the fact clearly as soon as it had happened. I had felt brilliantly well from the first day, and proud. I was already having fond dreams of babies in their prams, I knew that I wanted one, I knew that my body had plotted in order to achieve what it most needed—and not only my body but the subconscious layers of my mind. Until I had visited that woman I had seriously been considering bearing the child, but now I knew, without regret, that I would not. The birth of a child was not a matter of therapy for the mother. Would I have a trauma as a result of frustrating it? Too bad for me if I did. I was not going to become a mother unless I could do it properly.

  As it turned out, the suffering of which the woman had warned me never materialized. Physically my health was distinctly improved by three months of pregnancy followed by a curettage, and any trauma that may have resulted has yet to manifest itself. I have often regretted my childlessness and I have caught myself up to my tricks again in attempts to remedy it, but neither of the two attitudes I thought likely have developed: I have never yearned over other people’s children, nor have I recoiled from them. I like them, I enjoy their company, I find them interesting, and that seems to be that. I can only suppose that by nature I am a maternal woman but not passionately so.

  How far did laziness and self-indulgence come into my decision? That they did so to some extent I am sure. One of the many strands of feeling running through me as I sat in that consulting room was certainly dismay at the prospect of having to find a new job and new lodgings, of having to uproot myself (although from a life which I knew to be empty and dull) and turn to solving practical difficulties outside my experience. My inertia was heavy on me, making me reluctant to face the inevitable complications of my situation. I was partly a coward, and a coward in the face of effort, rather than of anything else.

  But although it is probable that my justification of my attitude was—and is—to some extent an attempt to rationalize this lack of spirit, the other elements in my argument did exist. It still seems to me that it is absurd for abortion to be illegal. I do not believe that something not conscious can be ‘murdered’—the distinction between preventing life and putting an end to it is, to me, a clear one. Other women who bear the full consequences of their actions I admire and even, if they make a success of it, envy. Whether they have argued that life must be respected, or whether (which is, I imagine, more often the case) they have obeyed the dictates of their own hungers, they show a courage which I lacked. But in bestowing on a child the chancy fate of illegitimacy, they have shouldered a heavy responsibility. Only if I felt myself able to offer it security would I do it myself, and such security I could not offer at that time.

  So I say, so I believe: but supposing the woman behind the desk had been one who, while putting forward the same arguments, had not alienated me by her manner, had spoken to me instead of to a pregnant girl of her own invention?…The points, perhaps, would have been switched, my life would have veered on to another course. Even though reason was mixed with my weakness to a point where they are hard to disentangle, it does not quite raise it above regret. I am glad that I did not risk giving a child a difficult life, but I am sorry that I was not the kind of girl who would have braved that risk.

  14

  THE WAR WAS in its third year or perhaps the beginning of its fourth. I was still working in the B.B.C., slightly better at living by then, since Felix was a part of my life and I had left bed-sitting rooms behind me for a flat which I shared with another girl—a commonplace event which must be remembered by millions of working women as a turning-point in their lives. Who could feel their circumstances anything but temporary, their condition anything but one of time-biding, while the daily mechanics of living consist of eating only what can be boiled on a gas-ring (frying is usually forbidden because of the smell and the spitting of fat on to the carpet), keeping half one’s clothes in a suitcase under the divan or on top of the wardrobe, moving books and writing things from a table to a divan or chair before setting out a meal, and turning a divan from couch into bed every night before going to sleep in the froust of one’s cigarette smoke? I had taken a modest pride in my ingenuity with small bed-sitting rooms, the way in which I could make myself comfortable and control the ebullience of my too numerous possessions; so much so that when I first experienced the delicious freedom of a flat, I was astonished by the violence with which I cast off single-room living. I had not known that it had been horrible, but it was with horror that I decided ‘Never again!’

  In a flat we could give parties. To one of them a friend brought a small Hungarian said to be in publishing. He did not seem to be much amused by our company, although he did not whisper audibly, as I have heard him do since then, ‘Can we go now?’ He sat on the floor looking boyish and disdainful, then sang ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’ in a manner implying that he, personally, had discovered this song. When he telephoned a few days later to invite me to a play, I was surprised. I was also pleased because I believed that anyone connected with publishing must be interesting.

  It did not take us long to decide that our relationship would not be an amorous one. Instead we slipped into a friendship of a curiously intimate nature, nearer to the fraternal than anything I had experienced within my family. My real brother, with whom I had been close friends when we were small, had been taken out of my life first by his schooling, then by what his schooling had done to him. He had hated it and had spent much of his boyhood taking refuge in stupidity and near-oafishness, happy only when disguised as a game-keeper or, better still, poacher, wearing an ancient, many-pocketed waistcoat, talking dialect, and sloping about the woods at Beckton either alone or with friends from the village. By the time he began to emerge from this camouflage I was at Oxford, and after that the war removed him. On the rare occasions when we met there was always a comfortable freedom between us, an ability to say or to listen to anything and a clear view of each other’s shortcomings which did not prevent affection, but we did not have much in common beyond our temperaments and our memories. With the Hungarian, André Deutsch, I shared a way of life, political views, and interest in the arts, as well as an undemanding kind of intimacy very similar to that I already knew with my brother.

  We began to see each other often and became, in a lopsided way, each other’s confidants: lopsided because while I had a tendency to underestimate my own value, André had no doubt about his. He was always ready to put himself out for friendship’s sake in any practical way—lend money, or bring round food if I were in bed with influenza—but he did not find it easy to believe that I (or anyone else) would be as interested in a discussion of my own life as I would be in his.

  He had come to England before the war broke out, ostensibly to complete his education but with a private determination to settle here. With liberal views and a Jewish father, he had decided while still a boy that Hungary under Horthy was not the country he would have chosen, whereas English literature, combined with everything he had heard about Great Britain, suggested to him that England was. So early and complete a transference of loyalties, made without any great pressure from events, seems to me unusual and strange. André had reacted to things which were in the air rather than to anything which had happened to him or his family. When I have questioned him about it he has answered no more than ‘I just knew, always, that that was what I wanted to do.’ Caught by the war, with no money but an occasional cheque from an uncle in Switzerland, he picked up jobs here and there and was working as floor manager in a big hotel when detectives came to remove him to the Isle of Man. To be an enemy alien was not, however, an unmixed evil. Internment did not last long, and once he was released he was free to take what civilian work he liked, provided he reported at the proper times to the Aliens’ Office. He found his way by chance into the sales s
ide of an old—indeed tottering—publishing house, and by the time I met him he had burrowed well into its structure, was saving a little money, and was already talking of starting a firm of his own.

  André was my age—twenty-six. By that time he did not have a penny beyond what he earned, nor did he have a single relative, old friend, or useful connection in this country. I used to listen to his plans indulgently, contributing to them as one contributes to talk about what one will do when one wins the Irish Sweep. ‘If you join me,’ he said to me one day as we walked arm-in-arm through Soho, ‘what would be the minimum money you would have to earn, to be comfortable?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What am I earning now?’ And he worked out for me, as he has so often done since, what my weekly salary came to by the year. It was three hundred and eighty-eight pounds, I believe—the B.B.C. paid civil-service rates and Temporary Women Clerks, the category under which I worked, did not come high in those rates.

  ‘What about five hundred pounds?’ he asked, and I agreed to it, feeling that such a large sum could safely be considered since it existed only in his imagination. I had not yet understood that André is the kind of person in whom ideas and action are inseparable. It is true that when the time came, five hundred pounds proved at first to have been optimistic—but the time did come.

  I have sometimes wondered whether, if chance had shouldered André into property, or manufacturing cars, or catering, his obsessive nature would have seized on that as it did on publishing. Perhaps it would have done, but it is hard to believe. Picture dealing, maybe, or concert promoting…. The nature of his talent is practical, the demon which possesses him is a business demon rather than a literary one, yet it is impossible to imagine it functioning for an end unconcerned with artistic expression. The ultimate good for a business demon ought to be power through money, but André’s demon drives for something else. He is immensely concerned with money, but as an idea rather than as something to possess: while he can have a car and good clothes he is indifferent to his own income. He will cry out in pain at the least mistake in the costing of a book or the most trivial slip in his opponent’s favour during a deal, but the pain is aesthetic rather than pecuniary: he is offended in the way that a stylist is offended by a badly constructed sentence or an interior decorator by an ugly juxtaposition of objects. The only power without which he cannot live is that of being his own master—over other people he exercises it both reluctantly and clumsily. His business demon is one which, by some quirk, has become bound to the production of books so firmly that its energy would bleed away if it were cut off from them. Whatever he may say when he feels resentful at the demands of his own obsession, André is a man with a vocation.