Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (80 page)

The first is the unexpectedness. If anyone had told me when I was in my early seventies that I was going to write another book I would have thought them mad: the odd bit of scribble for my own amusement, yes – perhaps. But never a book, because there was no book there to be written. How could there be, when I was so long past the stage when the kind of thing which caused me to write could possibly happen to me? To which I would probably have added ‘Thank god!’, given how painful those things had been to live through. And then, when in fact it had turned out that I was capable of covering a sufficient number of pages simply because I was enjoying remembering first my time in publishing, then my childhood, there naturally came the thought ‘This stuff is interesting to me, but why should it interest anyone else?’ I could see that the publishing material might amuse people in the book trade, but they are only a tiny part of the reading public, so if I myself were a publisher to whom someone submitted
Stet
, would I risk it? Probably not. And
Yesterday Morning
? All so long ago, so out of fashion! It would not have surprised me in the least if either the publisher or the public had said ‘No’ to either of those books.

So it was truly amazing when both said ‘Yes’. What it felt like was an unexpected and tremendous TREAT.

That was the first gain from being old. The second was that none of it mattered at the deepest level, so that all of it could be taken lightly. When you are young a great deal of what you are is created by how you are seen by others, and this often continues to be true even into middle age. It is most obvious in the realm of sex. I remember a school-fellow of mine, a plump, rather plain girl, pleasant but boring, whom I ran into by chance on a station platform about a year after our schooldays ended and failed, for a moment, to recognize because she had become beautiful. What had happened was that a dashing man known to both of us had fallen in love with her and asked her to marry him: he had seen her as lovely, so lovely in her happiness she now was, and an assured and attractive woman she was to remain. Such transformations can occur in connection with many other aspects of self-esteem, with results either benign or damaging, and there were a good many years in the early part of my grown-up life when my self-esteem was diminished by this fact. But once you are old you are beyond all that, unless you are very unlucky. Being seen as someone who had written and published a book when I was in my forties changed me (for the better, as it happened, but it could have gone the other way and been for the worse). In my eighties that couldn’t happen, no event could be crucial to my self-esteem in quite that way any more, and that was strangely liberating. It meant some sort of loss, I suppose, such as the end of thrilling possibilities; but it allowed experiences to be enjoyable in an uncomplicated way – to be simply
fun
. At no other time in my life did I enjoy myself so comfortably, for so long, as I did around the time of
Stet
’s publication, and the pleasure would have been as great in connection with
Yesterday
Morning
if its publication hadn’t coincided with the worry of Barry’s operation.

The third gain was related to the second: I no longer suffered from shyness. In the past my job had occasionally involved me in having to address an audience, and I was always so afraid of drying up that I typed the whole thing out and read from it. Once I had to go to Blackpool to talk about cookery books in a vast and glittery hotel full of vast and glittery ladies who, it transpired, were the wives of men who made cutlery and were having a convention. My offering was to be made in one of the smaller, darker ‘function rooms’ which smelt strongly and not unsuitably of gravy, and not a single person turned up for it. The relief was great, but was oddly mingled with shame so that I couldn’t fully enjoy it, particularly not when, on creeping away to my room, I found that I had forgotten to pack a book to read in bed.

Because it had always been something of an ordeal I felt nervous about my first exposure by Granta at a literary festival, not understanding how lucky I was in its being at Hay, which is the warmest and most welcoming of all such shindigs. I couldn’t write anything in advance because I was to be part of a trio, three people who had written memoirs discussing their reasons for doing so, and that added to the nervousness. But one of my fellow performers was Andrea Ashworth, whose
Once in a House on Fire
I had admired so much that I had written her a fan letter, which had crossed with a fan letter she had written me about
Stet
, a comically gratifying coincidence which made our meeting at the hotel where we were both staying a happy event. Being embraced by this dazzling young woman and bumbling into our tent with her on a wave of amusing and intimate talk, changed the nature of the whole experience, so that when I looked out over that crowded audience it didn’t seem surprising that they were all beaming in an apparent expectation of a good time, and I found myself actually
wanting
to communicate with them. Indeed, that evening a closet exhibitionist was released: I could make them laugh! I loved making them laugh! It was all I could do to prevent myself from trying to hog more than my allotted time for talking. And from then on standing up in front of an audience has been enjoyable, while being on
Desert Island
Discs
(
much
more impressive to relations, friends and indeed many strangers than any good review had ever been) was an orgy of pleasure. And of admiration, too, because gossiping away with Sue Lawley had seemed so completely natural and spontaneous that I expected to find it considerably cut and modified when it was actually broadcast, and was astonished that not a syllable had been changed: what a pro she was, establishing such an easy atmosphere while remaining in such tight control of timing.

It is not hard to see that writers who have often been through the process of promoting their books come to find it a tedious chore, but to me, for whom it was part treat, part joke and completely unexpected, it turned out to be an agreeable part of an experience which has made my life as a whole a good deal more pleasing to contemplate. I had seen it for so long as a life of failure, but now, when I look back – who would believe it, it was nothing of the sort!

I
T SEEMS TO
me that anyone looking back over eighty-nine years
ought
to see a landscape pockmarked with regrets. One knows so well, after all, one’s own lacks and lazinesses, omissions, oversights, the innumerable ways in which one falls short of one’s own ideals, to say nothing of standards set by other and better people. All this must have thrown up – indeed it certainly did throw up – a large number of regrettable events, yet they have vanished from my sight. Regrets? I say to myself. What regrets? This invisibility may be partly the result of a preponderance of common sense over imagination: regrets are useless, so forget them. But it does suggest that if a person is consistently lucky beyond her expectations she ends by becoming smug. A disagreeable thought, which I suppose I ought to investigate.

The absence of regret that surprises me most is connected with childlessness, because I know that for a short time I passionately wanted a child, and then lost one. Such a loss I would expect to weigh heavily on a woman, but it never has on me. The explanation seems to be that in spite of that one incident, I have uncommonly little maternal instinct, a deficiency I think I was born with. As a child I was not just indifferent to dolls, I despised them. My very first toy, the one which had eventually to be smuggled out of my cot because of how dirty it became, was a white rabbit, and later I was fond of an elephant, but representations of children – never. And I can remember being left alone for a few minutes with a month-old baby when I was nineteen, leaning over it and studying it earnestly in an attempt to feel moved by it, and coming to the conclusion that this unattractive little creature meant nothing to me – I’d rather pick up a puppy, any day. This reaction worried me, but not deeply, because I told myself at once that when I had a child of my own I would love it. That, obviously, was how it worked, because look how inevitably women did love their own children – the instinct must come with the birth. I went on reassuring myself in that way, particularly when Paul talked happily about the children we were going to have, which he enjoyed doing: choosing names for them and so on, games I would never have played if left to myself, though I disguised that. Never once in my twenties and thirties did I hope for a child, or feel more than a vague goodwill towards anyone else’s child. When other women yearned towards babies I kept silent to hide my own feelings, and as for toddlers, I didn’t go so far as to blame them for being what they were, but I did feel that they were tedious to have around except in very small doses.

Nevertheless I was probably right in supposing that I would love a child if I ever had one. This became apparent when I was forty-three, when my body took over from my mind and pushed me into pregnancy. It had happened before, whereupon I had terminated the pregnancy without hesitation or subsequent unhappiness, but this time something buried deep inside me woke up and decided to say: ‘If you don’t have a child now you never will so I’m going to get you one like it or not.’ Only after I realized what had happened did it occur to me that my feckless carelessness about contraceptive measures must have been, at an unconscious level, deliberate, and even then I took it for granted that I was dismayed and must set about arranging for a termination. But when I caught myself making excuse after excuse not to take the necessary steps
just yet
, I hit on the truth: I wasn’t going to take them at all; and at that point I suddenly became happy with a happiness so astonishingly complete that I still remember it with gratitude: my life would have been the poorer if I hadn’t tasted it, and any child to emerge from that experience could only have been loved.

But it didn’t emerge, or rather it did so in the form of a miscarriage early in the fourth of what were the happiest months of my life, during all of which I had felt dazzlingly healthy. That miscarriage very nearly killed me. I was rushed to hospital only just in time. I knew how near death I was because although by then consciousness had shrunk to within the limits of the stretcher on which I was lying in a pool of blood, I could still hear the voices of those leaning over that stretcher. They had just sent someone to fetch more blood for the transfusion they were administering, and a man said, ‘Call them and tell them
to tell him to run
,’ and then, to someone else, ‘She’s very near collapse.’ Not only could I hear, but I could understand. I even thought, ‘What a bloody silly euphemism,’ because what was the state I was in already if it wasn’t collapse? He meant death. So oughtn’t I to try to think some sensible Last Thought? I made a dim attempt at it but the effort was beyond me; the best I could do was, ‘Oh well, if I die I die.’

The man who had to run ran fast enough, they got me down to the theatre, they performed the curettage, and the next thing I was aware of was hands manipulating my body from stretcher to bed. For a moment I was unsure whether this was after the operation or before it, then I began to vomit from the chloroform, and simultaneously became aware that in my belly peace had been restored: I was no longer bleeding. And as though it came from down there, a great wave of the most perfect joy welled up and swept through me: I AM STILL ALIVE! It filled the whole of me, nothing else mattered. It was the most intense sensation I have ever experienced.

It swept away grief at the loss of the child. Of course I went on to feel unhappy, but it was a subdued and dreary little unhappiness, quite out of proportion with the happiness of the pregnancy. I had only one dream as a result of it, and that was a subdued and dreary little dream: I was getting off an underground train, and as the doors slid shut suddenly realized to my horror that I’d left a child on the train – running anxiously along the platform – how was I going to get to the next station before the train did, so that I could recover her (in the dream it was a little girl, though I had always thought of the child as a boy)? The feeling was one of painful anxiety rather than of loss. And after that life went back gradually, but not very slowly, to being what it had been before.

It seems very odd that what had unquestionably been an important development in my life – tremendously important – should have been diminished, almost cancelled, in that way. I think the whole thing was chemical: the body responding to the approach of menopause by pumping out more of something or other which I don’t usually have much of, and after the shock ceasing to pump so that my normal condition was re-established. I don’t think not feeling the loss means that I would have been a bad mother. Without the shock, if that child had been born, I would probably have been a perfectly adequate one very much like my own, who loved her children once they had reached a reasonable age better than she did when they were very young (she had nannies to bear the brunt of our infancy, so had no problem seeming to us to be all that she should be, but she was never able to disguise the slight impatience she felt with very young un-nannied grandchildren). But I can’t, however hard I try,
mind
having lost the chance to prove it. Now, in my old age, I am much more interested in babies and little children than I used to be: actually delighted by them, so that the recent arrival of a baby in our house is an event which gives me great pleasure, although I’m glad that I don’t have to
do
anything about that child beyond observing his progress with interest and admiration. But asking myself ‘Are you really not sorry that you have no children or grandchildren of your own?’ I get the answer ‘Yes, really.’ It is precisely because I don’t and
can’t
have the hassle of close involvement with the infants I encounter nowadays that I have become free to understand their loveliness and promise.

Selfishness: not, I hope, a selfishness that involves all of me, but a stubborn nub of selfishness somewhere in the middle which made me wary of anything to which one has to give one’s whole self, as a mother has to give herself to an infant and a toddler. It was that which prevented me from wanting a child for so long, and then made it so easy to get over losing one. So I do have at least one major regret after all: not my childlessness, but that central selfishness in me, so clearly betrayed by the fact childlessness is not what I regret. And now I remember how my inadequacy regarding small children (I always loved them quite easily when they grew older) caused me to let down my cousin Barbara, whose house I live in, in spite of thinking her then as I think of her now as my best friend, when some forty-odd years ago she started a family. No sooner had she got three children than she and her husband separated, so that she had to raise them single-handed, working at a very demanding full-time job in order to keep them. How she struggled through those years I don’t know, and I think she herself marvels at it in retrospect. But at the time what did I do to help her? Nothing. I shut my eyes to her problems, even saw very little of her, feeling sadly that she had disappeared into this tiresome world of small children – or world of tiresome small children – and she has said since then that she never dreamt of asking me for help, so aware was she of my coldness towards her brood. About that it is not just regret that I feel. It is shame.

One regret brings up another, though it is, thank goodness, less shameful. It’s at never having had the guts to escape the narrowness of my life. I have a niece, a beautiful woman who I shall not name because she wouldn’t like it, who is the mother of three sons, the youngest of whom will soon be following his brothers to university, and who has continued throughout her marriage to work as a restorer of paintings. Not long ago she sat at dinner beside a surgeon, and happened to say to him that if she had her time over again she would choose to train in some branch of medicine. He asked her how old she was. Forty-nine, she told him. Well, he said, she still had time to train as a midwife if she wanted to, they accepted trainees up to the age of fifty; whereupon she went home and signed up. The last time I saw her she could proudly report that she had now been in charge of six births all on her own. There had been moments, she said, when she felt ‘What on earth am I doing here?’, but she still couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than being present at – helping at – the beginning of new life. The most moving thing of all, she said, was when the father cried (there had been fathers present at all six births). When that happened she had to go out of the room to hide the fact that she was crying too. She is a person of the most delicate reserve, so watching her face light up when she spoke about being present at a birth filled me with envy. Having had the courage and initiative suddenly to step out of a familiar and exceptionally agreeable life into something quite different, she has clearly gained something of inestimable value. And I have never done anything similar.

It is not as though I was never impatient at having only one life at my disposal. A great deal of my reading has been done for the pleasure of feeling my way into other lives, and quite a number of my love affairs were undertaken for the same reason (I remember once comparing a sexual relationship with going out in a glass-bottomed boat). But to turn such idle fancies into action demands courage and energy, and those I lacked. Even if I had been able to summon up such qualities, I am sure I would never have moved over into anything as useful as midwifery, but think of the places to which I might have travelled, the languages I might have learnt! Greek, for example: I have quite often thought of how much I would like to speak modern Greek so that I could spend time earning a living there and getting to know the country in a serious way, but I never so much as took an evening class in it. And when I went to Oxford, I indolently chose to read English literature, which I knew I was going to read anyway, for pleasure, instead of widening my range by embarking on a scientific subject, such as biology. And never at any time did I seriously try to use my hands (except at embroidery, which I am good at). Think how useful and probably enjoyable it would be to build a bookcase! I really am sorry about that.

So there are two major regrets, after all: that nub of coldness at the centre, and laziness (I think laziness played a greater part than cowardice in my lack of initiative, though some cowardice there was). They are real, but I can’t claim that they torment me, or even that I shall often think about them. And at those two I shall stop, because to turn up something even worse would be a great bore. I am not sure that digging out past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.