Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (34 page)

T
HE TIMES – WHEN
the pain was nearest to the physical – to that of a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill – were not those in which I thought ‘He no longer loves me’ but those in which I thought ‘He will not even write to tell me that he no longer loves me.’ For weeks his silence seemed no more than his usual unreadiness as a letter writer; then, for months, the result of his absorption in his work and in the place where he was working, both of which he had described with vibrating enthusiasm. Such excuses I went on making for much longer than any detached observer could have accepted them, shutting my eyes in panic to the considerate silences and distressed expressions of my mother and my friends. I remembered what he had said in the third but last letter I had from him: ‘Never write to me less often. I know that I don’t deserve it, but it is terribly hard to write here and I’m bad at it anyway, so if you don’t hear from me often enough you must never think it’s because I am not thinking about you. I think about you
all the time
and I would die if you stopped writing to me.’ So I went on writing, and I tried not to complain at getting no answers. But after a while my letters became involuntarily appealing, then humiliatingly pleading, then unconvincingly threatening. Before I myself became silent – after how long I cannot remember – I had thrown off all attempts at consideration, strategy, or pride: I had told him as nakedly as I could what his silence was doing to me – and still it continued.

If he had written to say, ‘For such and such a reason I no longer want to marry you, I no longer love you,’ I should have been stunned with grief and loss but it would have made some kind of sense and I could have come to terms with it. But that Paul, who had loved me, and who knew what I was now feeling, should have wiped out my existence so totally … I was often literally unable to believe it, it was something he
could not
do.

It was not until many years later that I learnt the reason for what had happened – a love affair, of course, although not with the girl he was to marry. Feelings of guilt snowball. When they have accumulated beyond a certain point, a sense that nothing can annul them makes any action seem inadequate, so that oblivion becomes the only easy answer. Paul, who was never good at doing anything which he disliked, must have felt at first that a time would come when he would be able to explain, then that the time had taken too long in coming. So he cheated; he shut his imagination.

If I had known him less well the whole thing might have been over comparatively quickly: I might have written him off as a monster, dropped all hope, and have been cured. Two things prevented this. One was the reaction common to almost everyone in such a situation: the terrible knowledge that if you accept the unworthiness of the object of your love, then your love itself is discredited and all the good in its past becomes poisoned retroactively. The other was the plain fact that Paul was not a monster. I had known him for so many of the longest years in a lifetime, I had grown up with him, I had loved him, after the first spell of childish infatuation, with the sort of love which brings knowledge rather than illusion: I was unable to make a grotesque of him. He was a spoilt young man who lived intensely in the present, and I had always known that in whatever place he happened to be, his present would be there. It was not in his nature to live suspended between past and future, as I could do. So although there were many times when I was cornered by that worst of all manifestations of suffering – the certainty that what is happening, what is being done, is too painful to be borne, but that the logical consequence of this, which would be that therefore one would not have to bear it, is simply not going to come about – although this happened night after night, and although I laboured through long stretches of incredulity and anger, and great bogs of self-pity, I always came back to the knowledge that it was not Paul’s fault that our relationship had become unreal to him.

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 admiration 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, manoeuvring 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.