Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (27 page)

‘G
OOD EVENING
… Oh, my god, it’s Paul’s girl!’

‘Maggie, you recognized me!’

‘Recognized you? Of course I recognized you.’

Maggie held my arm for a moment after kissing me, looking as though she might cry, while I stood there feeling a curious internal vertigo. It was almost twenty years since I had last gone through the narrow door into the taproom of the Plough at Appleton, a small village about ten miles from Oxford; almost twenty years since Maggie and I had seen each other.

I had returned to it by chance. An Oxford friend not seen for years had come home to England with his family on leave. The village in which he had rented a house happened to be Appleton, and he had asked me to stay for a weekend. He had once known me very well, and remembered that it had been ‘my’ village although by the time I had met him I had become unwilling to visit it again because it was the place to which I had always gone with Paul. To my dismay, this friend was delighted that now, when everything was safely distant, he could be my escort along two hundred yards of country lane into such a significant patch of my past. It was the sort of thing which he himself enjoyed – he was a great man for pious pilgrimages, for gently melancholy evocations of youthful emotion. I had not thought of Maggie’s for a long time and was horrified to feel such a violent revulsion from his sentimental kindness. It seemed to me a shocking intrusion on something which had nothing to do with him, and if a refusal would not have been even more sentimental than the visit, I would have been guilty of that rudeness.

And Maggie looked just the same; or perhaps as though she were having one of her ‘bad days’ after a thick Guinness evening, only now it was twenty years, not a hangover, that made her look like that. When I saw that she, too, did not know what to say, it was almost intolerable. It had taken a long time, but the whole thing had at last been put away as though behind a glass door – always there to be looked at, it need no longer be felt. But standing there in the taproom, with Maggie’s hand on my arm … ‘Oh, my god, it’s Paul’s girl!’ Of course I was. And yet finally, conclusively, for ever, I was not. So vision skidded and squinted into dizziness.

Paul began long before the days when we went to Maggie’s. When I was fifteen my parents decided to employ a tutor during the holidays, to cram my brother for the entrance examination to his public school. They offered the job to the son of a friend of theirs, who was at Oxford, and he, unable to take it, recommended a fellow undergraduate whom he knew to have run out of money and to be looking for a way of earning some. I was beginning to find my pure and unrequited love for the boy who thought me a good sport too quiet for my taste, so I fell in love in advance, first with the friend’s son, then, when I heard that Paul was coming instead of him, with Paul. If he had been ugly or shy or snubbing I might have fallen out of love again when he appeared, but he was none of these things, so within two days the lines of my life were laid down.

I wrote to a friend of mine: ‘The tutor’s come, and he’s a perfectly marvellous person. He’s got brown eyes and fair hair and I suppose he ought to be taller really but he has got broad shoulders and a good figure, and he’s country and London at the same time. He would be at home anywhere. He’s very funny and he reads a lot, but he isn’t a bit highbrow. We took a boat up the stream yesterday, through all that tangly bit beyond the wood, like going up the Amazon, and he made up a tremendous story about who we were and what we were doing. He knows more about birds than anyone I know, but he dances well too.’

Paul was very much as I described him. Fair-skinned myself, I am rarely attracted by fair people, but he, in spite of hair which in summer would bleach into golden streaks as though he had peroxided it, had an almost Latin pigmentation: sherry-coloured eyes and a matt skin which went with the compact, smooth cut of his features. He was common-sensical and quick-witted rather than clever, good-humoured and high-spirited rather than witty, but the distinctions were not at that time perceptible to me. He was confident, a charmer, and was considered by some of his elders and by more sober young men to be slightly delinquent because he was rarely out of money trouble and would make love to any willing woman, even though she might be the wife or daughter of a friend.

His chief quality – the thing I hit on with ‘he would be at home anywhere’, the thing for which I most loved him, the thing which influenced me, I now gratefully believe, more than any other quality in any other person – was that he went like steel to magnet for the essence of any person, place, activity, or situation, working from no preconception or preferred framework. He had his own touchstone for what he called ‘genuineness’, his own unformulated laws which determined whether people were ‘real’ or not. This eager acceptance of diversity of experience was immensely exciting to me, and of great value, coming as it did when I was ready to take any imprint which came my way. I had reached the stage of being vaguely and for the most part privately in opposition to the laws governing my family’s outlook, but it was not a strong or reasoned opposition because there was not enought to oppose: I loved my family and my home, and I enjoyed all the things we did. It was Paul, with his simply expressed but passionately felt dicta – ‘The great thing to remember is to
take
people as they come
’; ‘I hate people who aren’t
natural
in any situation’ – who broke down my conditioning and made me anxious to meet people as people, regardless of class or race: a freedom from shackles which did not then chafe me, but which would probably have become locked on me, for which I shall always thank him.

Paul used to boast of his ‘sense of situation’ and his ‘way with people’. It was because he felt his way through life with such whiskers that he became at once a member of the household at the Farm. He enjoyed the place and us as we felt we should be enjoyed; he steered clear of the divergencies that might have alienated my parents; and he plunged happily into the situation of moulding admiring youth as he felt it ought to be moulded. As far as I can remember he managed to hammer a certain amount of information into my brother’s then resolutely closed mind, but chiefly he concentrated on opening our eyes to Life.

His family lived in London but spent most of each summer on the coast not far from us, where they had a cottage. His father was a businessman and, without being rich, had more money than mine. Paul had gone to Eton; my brother was going to Wellington. Paul, if his father had his way, would leave Oxford for a job in some organization like I.C.I. or Unilever; my brother, unless he developed some strong bent in another direction, would probably end up like my father, in the Army. Anyone who lived in London and who made money as Paul’s father did (he sometimes lost it, too), by knowing what went on in the Stock Exchange, seemed to us so dashing as to be almost disreputable, while anyone who lived in the country and either just had money or, failing that, earned a salary seemed to them so salt-ofthe-earth as to be almost dull. In spite of this the two families liked what they knew of each other and no one frowned on the intimacy which soon developed between Paul and me. After that first summer of employment as a tutor, he would come to stay for parties to be my escort, or I would go to stay at the cottage to sail with him and the youngest of his three sisters. She, two years older than he was, became for a time my substitute for Paul, the object on which I focussed my love and admiration, for I had found a letter in his bedroom from a girl with whom he had clearly slept, and this, with the four years between our ages (to fifteen, nineteen is grown-up.), had persuaded me that this love, too, must stay unrequited for a time. I was too sensible to hope to compete while still in pig-tails. So deliberately and fairly calmly, hanging about his sister as much as I was able, I settled down to wait.

The best days of that time were spent sailing. There is nothing to beat messing about in boats (well, yes: there is writing and making love and travelling and looking at pictures, but there is nothing
like
it, and it is good). Estuary sailing in a fourteen-foot half-decked cutter of doubtful class but sound performance was what Paul introduced me to, so estuary sailing is the kind I like best. To do more than poke my nose out to sea while inching along the coast from one river mouth to another, frightens me a little. Sailing on the open sea is surely even better, to those who are accustomed to it, but I remain uneasily aware of how extraordinary it is that so small and frail a man-made contraption as a sailing-boat can survive such gigantic and indifferent opposition. Water I have always loved, but the sea – there is too much of it. Only one thing is more frightening: cloud seen from above, on those hallucinating occasions when it takes the form of landscape. After a flight in such conditions I am haunted by those gullies, those escarpments, those cliff faces and peaks rising out of stretches of eroded desert. I cannot throw off the feeling that I have been watching a
real world
. The common-sense knowledge that if I were to float down on it by parachute I should go through it is bad enough; but worse is the nightmare image of landing on it, finding that it existed, but on unearthly terms – no water, no warmth, no growth – so that I would be the only living thing, with no prospect but to die slowly as I stumbled antlike through a world that was solid but belonged to an eternally foreign order of being. The sea, too, is a world with laws which do not accommodate human life. That human ingenuity has found ways of using it, even of playing with it, is foolhardiness.

But an estuary – from the first shift of shingle under rope soles, the first breath of river-mud smell, I was ready to be at home. The sound made by the planks of a jetty underfoot, the strands of seaweed drying on its piles above water level, unfolding beneath it; the glimpses of water between its planks and the feel of rough iron rings to which dinghies are made fast: I know no purer or simpler pleasure than sitting with legs dangling over the edge of a jetty while someone has gone to fetch the new tiller, or to fill water containers, or (more often) to see the man who is repairing the outboard motor.

The waiting about which attends any sort of boat’s motor is the only thing I like about them. In use they are a torment. Chuf chuff chuff – silence. Chuff, a couple of smoke rings, a reek of petrol – silence. ‘You’d better go up and take another sounding.’ ‘There’s enough water but we’re drifting to port.’ ‘God damn this bloody bastard.’ The absence of a motor can be inconvenient, however, as I learnt when becalmed without one for a whole week on the Clyde, sailing with a man who allowed six inches of weed to flourish on the bottom of his already lumpish boat and who left wet sails huddled in a heap at the end of a day (Paul’s ghost asking, ‘What on earth are you doing with this frightful chap?’).

That boat would hardly come about in anything less than a stiff breeze, and in the few light airs we had each morning it was no more handy than a dead whale. On those light airs, and on tide and current, we meandered slowly about the Clyde, getting stuck at last at an anchorage off a tiny island called the Little Cumbrae, in the middle of an hysterical ternery. The birds felt our presence an outrage the whole day long, their querulous screaming and wheeling turning our idle craft into some ravening sea monster, so that when on the second morning there was a breath of wind it was a relief to put off. A long reach took us to the edge of a sandbank running out from the mainland, and there the wind died. There was a mist. ‘I’m going to row to the Great Cumbrae and ask for a tow home,’ said the boat’s owner – there was a village on the Great Cumbrae. ‘You take soundings and anchor when you get between four and three fathoms.’ He set off in a vile temper to row for more than a mile, vanishing into the mist after about fifty yards.

It was a thirty-foot boat, everything about it heavy and contrary. After I had got the anchor down I doubted whether it was holding in the sandy bottom, but I could not check whether we were drifting because I could see nothing to check by. Bits of flotsam on the oil-smooth water were certainly moving in relation to the boat, but was it because they were being carried on a slow current, or was it because the
boat
was being carried? I could sense the cat-backed sand lying in wait, expected every instant that deceptively gentle stroking sensation which heralds running quietly aground. If we did? I saw myself going overboard into water up to my neck to prop her side against the tide’s ebbing with oars and the tabletop from the cabin. It would not be the first time I had done it, but I had never done it alone, without help. And supposing a squall struck? Squalls could come up in two minutes out of a dead calm on those mountain-surrounded waters, or so I had repeatedly been told: ‘A very tricky estuary, you have to know it well.’ I did not know it at all.

I tried to repeat poems to myself, and I tried to summarize the plot of
Emma
– not just what happened, but the exact order in which it happened – but every few minutes I would notice that a particular clot of weed was now floating to the right of the cleat for the jib sheet instead of to its left – that it had crept another six inches towards the stem. After half an hour my hands were sweating, and when something suddenly began to
snort
out of the mist I could feel the blood draining from my face. ‘I am going mad!’ I thought, until smooth shapes came rolling lazily out of the soft greyness: a couple of porpoises to distract me. They had never come so close before and made me happy for a few moments, but soon they went away again, and then there was nothing but a few invisible birds going over, lamenting like exiled ghosts. When I went below to get a whisky I could hear the rim of the glass clinking against my teeth. A book, I thought, and dug out an Agatha Christie from a mess of rotten cord and baked-bean tins, but could not concentrate. To be so scared is ridiculous, I thought. Even if we
do
run aground … But what if running aground and the squall
happen at the same moment
?