Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (17 page)

My aunt told me this herself, when I was driving her back from London to Norfolk one day, and why she told me I have never been able to work out. She was always slightly given to little paroxysms of confession, but this was not little, and nothing led up to it: we had just been laughing at some extravagance of my mother’s when she suddenly said: ‘Oh, poor Kit – I once did such a terrible thing to her, I could never tell you what it was.’ Naturally I protested that to say so much without saying more was unforgivable, and – not very unwillingly – she gave way. What happened then, she said, was that Gramps wrote to my mother saying that unless she broke with this man at once the family would never see her again, my father found this letter in my mother’s handbag, and my mother had a nervous breakdown and had to go into a nursing-home for a ‘sleepcure’.

Poking about in her handbag is so unlike my father that at first I found it hard to believe. But if the letter arrived by the first post, at breakfast time, and she opened it in front of him – ‘Oh, look, a letter from Dad’ … The shock would have been undisguisable, she would almost have fainted, would certainly have had to leave the room with it as fast as possible. And even if it didn’t happen like that, there were other ways in which he could have known that the letter had come, then seen her dismay. And although he was not a particularly observant man, it seems likely that someone whose wife was so lit-up by an affair that her own sister had almost failed to recognize her, would already have had an inkling that something was up. My father may well have been in a tormented state for weeks, struggling to believe that his suspicions were unfounded, so that her reaction to her father’s letter was the last straw.

‘Sleep-cures’ were popular during the twenties: the patient was sedated so heavily for several days that she was oblivious of whatever was done to her in the way of nourishment and evacuation (it sounds delicious).

I don’t know whether my parents discussed divorce, but I doubt it. If my mother had got divorced she would have been cast out by her parents (perhaps, in the end, not; but she would have been convinced that this would happen at the time) and would have lost her children: it is improbable that my father, who truly loved her, could have borne inflicting all that on her, and certain that she would not have demanded it. Even if her lover was in a position to marry her – and I have no idea whether he was – I think she was too much a daughter to face the prospect of losing her parents in any circumstances, and probably too much a mother (though less so than she would later become) to face losing us.

From then on she
knew
that she loathed being touched by my father, although her guilt prevented her from entirely denying him his ‘rights’. To continue having sex, even if only occasionally, with someone whose touch has become hateful, is nerve-racking; while on his side, poor man, to be unable to resist making love to someone you adore, even though you know she can hardly bear it, is misery. So the quarrels began – not, or not publicly, about what was really wrong, but about an endless series of little things: his unpunctuality, her extravagance, whether to do this or that, whether to go here or there … It became impossible for them to be together for more than two days running without there being a row, almost always started by her. There was never any physical violence worse than flouncing out of rooms and banging doors, but the emotional disturbance was acute.

It was only after my father’s death that I learnt (again from letters) how sad and patient he had been. As soon as the Second World War began he had returned to the Army, and had the good fortune to be sent to Ethiopia to run an officers’ training corps for Haile Selassie (he could speak Amharic – in fact he was probably the only officer in the British Army who could). This was a quirky kind of occupation that suited him – he became known for communicating with his headquarters by means of homing pigeons, which he trained. But the process of demobilization took a long time to reach him at his exotic outpost – a pink palace at Harar – and he was feeling pretty homesick by the time he wrote to my mother to tell her he would soon be back. It is distressing to know that he then, so many years after their trouble began, felt that he must
apologize
for his imminent reappearance, as something which she was unable to enjoy. ‘I am so dreadfully sorry, my darling, that I have never been able to make you feel about me like Peggy feels about Geoff.’

Andrew and I, although no one we knew had been divorced, were aware of it as a possibility. From time to time we said to each other: ‘Why don’t they get divorced? It would be better than all this quarrelling.’ It was years before it dawned on me that, given the law as it was then, if they had, we would have lost her. An aunt would presumably have been recruited to look after us: one of my father’s two unmarried sisters, both of whom we liked well enough as aunts but who were unthinkable as mother-substitutes. Once I was grown-up, the thought of how much had been preserved for us by their decision to stay together made me profoundly grateful, though it was always painful to know of their pain.

It was institutionalized romanticism that did the damage: the fatal glorification of sexual excitement into Falling In Love, the dangerous concept of marriage as being In Love For Life. My mother had accepted those notions wholeheartedly, so when she found herself offending against them she thought herself nothing less than wicked. I am sure that she believed no one else among ‘our sort of people’ (people in books and so on didn’t count) had ever done what she had done: a fearful burden to carry, but at that time unquestioned.

And even now I hesitate to say plainly what I myself believe about marital infidelity, because I know how cold-blooded it will seem to many people, among them some whom I love.

I believe that when the first flush of delight at being together has passed, infidelity is certainly not inevitable, but is and always has been very likely to take place if occasion offers. In most people’s lives occasion offers only rarely unless pursued, and some people choose not to pursue, but not many will reject it if it turns up, as became perfectly clear during the war. I also believe that if infidelity does not cause heartbreak in a spouse or deprive children of a parent, and if it cheers up the two rule-breakers, thereby adding to the pleasure abroad in the world, it does no harm. I have never, therefore, seen any reason for all the mopping and mowing which goes on about it.

I do think, however, that even in the best-managed cases a couple ought to be very sure indeed that they understand each other before they indulge in mutual confession. For those who dislike dishonesty this is quite hard to accept – but think of what Tolstoy put poor Sonia through by his gross self-indulgence in honesty! It is up to the unfaithful to recognize the damage that might result from their conduct, and to avoid it if possible. Though of course they may, in their turn, start romanticizing what they are doing; and that, only too often, will cause mayhem. Falling In Love! I can still remember the ravishing sensation, the surge of vitality which gave brightness to the eyes and shine to the hair, the intoxication of it, as against the warm nourishing glow of plain
loving
. But ‘intoxication’ is what it is: it is as seductive and dangerous as alcohol, and should be handled as cautiously. How generations of romanticizing Romance can be counter-balanced is hard to see, but it ought to be done.

It is sad to think of my parents condemned to go through all their adult lives without any loving sex, harnessed together as mutual sources of unhappiness and guilt. It does, however, become less sad if I look at their marriage as a whole, because that reveals that they did somehow manage to develop the muscle to bear their burden. After he came home from Ethiopia it appears that both became less vulnerable, and when his job gave him the chance to live for six years in Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then called), not only did she agree to accompany him, but she also enjoyed the experience. They had first to travel across Africa, sharing the driving of a truck, then build a house, living in a pair of
rondavels
until it was finished, and once he started managing the factory he had been sent to set up, she found much interest and entertainment in running their establishment and made many friends. They came back to England with a working companionship in place, and when he died in 1968, twenty years before she did, it was his generosity and gentleness that lived on in her mind. And she, in her long widowhood, was far from showing any sign of being embittered by past sadness. Instead she became calmer, kinder, wiser and more practically creative than most old women: someone who, rather than nurturing her sorrows, had preserved and worked on all the elements in her life – and there were many – that were worth having. Neither of them, in fact, allowed their less than happy marriage to become, in the end, as tragic as it might have been.

As children we, of course, had no idea of any reason why it might be tragic. All we knew was that there were rows, which we hated. I think Andrew knew more clearly than I did how much he hated them – he was younger than I was, and more vulnerable. I often managed to make myself think that I was irritated rather than frightened: ‘How can they be
so silly?
’ I used to say to myself; or, more often, ‘How can
he
be so silly, always doing just the thing to make her lose her temper?’ Because although it was clear to me that it was usually my mother who started the row, it was always my father I blamed for it. I ‘sided’ – we all three did, strongly – with her. Somehow – God knows how, because she certainly never
said
anything to indicate it – the fact that he had become repulsive to her conveyed itself to us, and as her nerves twanged, so did ours. What we desperately wanted when they were rowing was not that she would pull herself together and stop it, but that
he would
go away
.

My grandmother was to say to me one day, when I was grown-up, ‘Poor little girl, those quarrels used to make you so ill,’ and I was astonished. Later still, when I had observed my own reactions to the stress of living in London during the bombing raids, I understood that she was right. I used to be surprised by the extent to which I was
not
frightened by the raids – but for the first time since I was a little girl I began to suffer again from colitis. So
that
was why I used to get those tummy-aches and sick-attacks when I was a child! I had been able to feel that I didn’t so very much mind the rows because I
wasn’t
minding them, I was stomaching them. And on consideration, I think I was lucky. It was a less painful way of getting through something bad than being fully aware of how bad it was, as my brother was.

But for us, quarrelling parents were not nearly – not anything like – so bad as they would have been if we had been less lucky in our circumstances. For one thing, there was always a buffer state of relations, nannies, governesses, housemaids, grooms, gardeners, farm friends around us, going on in its usual way,
continuing to be the same
, whatever was happening between our parents. It was one of those people who provided us with a useful formula: ‘Your mummy and your daddy are both very nice people: it’s just that perhaps they oughtn’t to have got married to each other.’ Andrew and I often used to repeat this formula and found it efficacious: it was the sort of thing grown-ups said, so it gave a feeling of detachment and superiority. And in addition to all these helpful people we had something even more valuable. We had space.

We came nearest to not having it when we lived for a couple of years in a five-bedroomed house in Hertfordshire with no land of its own except an orchard and a paddock. By then we had graduated from nursery to schoolroom, so we were eating all our meals with the grown-ups. Neither parent wished to shut us away (we were never shut away at any time, it was only that the layout of the larger house allowed much more spreading-out). So in ‘the cottage’ our family mingled closely all day except during lesson-time, and tensions had to be experienced by us all. Ursula’s benign presence prevented it from being hell, but it was certainly a great deal worse than it ever was in Gran’s house or the Farm, where we could simply disappear into our own world, forget the grown-ups, and enjoy life as much as ever. It chills my blood to think what it must be like for the children – the many, many children – of quarrelling parents who have to live without the space in which to create a world of their own.

The other source of pain was our own behaviour, and the pain was inflicted on the two cousins younger than ourselves.

Although we were the recipients of affectionate attention from older cousins, we did not transmit it onwards. Even Patience, before she became old enough to be a friend, received little from Andrew and me but teasing and irritable tolerance. I have sometimes watched with surprise and admiration the unselfconscious way a group of working-class children will accept responsibility for a baby, if their mother has sent it out in their care. If anyone had suggested such a task to us we would have gone on strike. One reason for this was, I think, the nursery/schoolroom split: when you moved out of the nursery you began to live a life quite different from that of the children still in it – even to see a good deal less of them. But Joyce and Anne had continued to be kind to us across that divide, so I fear that Andrew and I simply had less generous natures. And he, after having felt the stress of our parents’ misery more acutely than I did, had then been forced to endure intense unhappiness by being sent away, at the age of eight, to boarding school: an unhappiness which naturally affected his behaviour.

To be sent away from home was the most frightful thing either of us could possibly imagine. I didn’t have to imagine it until much later, when I was old enough to understand the reasons for it. Andrew knew that it was going to happen because it happened to all boys, but at the age of eight there is a big gap between the theoretical knowledge of something and the thing itself. When they actually put him in a car, drove him off and handed him over he had no alternative to bearing what felt unbearable.