Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (37 page)

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 opened 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.

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.

T
HE 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 happening 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-infulgence 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.