THAT WAS HOW I had come to see Didi (I might as well go on calling him that) two years after meeting him. The outlines were to remain unchanged, but there was to be much shuffling of detail and I still had a lot to learn about the complexities of his sickness.
When I wrote that portrait I still believed almost everything Didi told me. Often I was right to do so, because there were times when he was capable of piercing honesty; as both his published writing and his diary proved, he could tune himself up to a pitch where he hit the truth exactly. But at other times he was unable to resist the ‘adjustment’ of detail. He didn’t lie in order to deceive, and not often to save his bacon. He lied to make things more like they ought to be: more amusing, sadder, more romantic, more strange, less humiliating. The lies could be as trivial as a description of a dinner’s being delicious when in fact it was bad; it was their pointlessness, even more than the masterly naturalness with which he told them, which made them hard to spot, and in the end made me stop trying to spot them: that, and the knowledge that I was as likely to be doing him an injustice by suspecting a lie as I was to be fooled by believing one.
For one of them I am grateful. Didi was ten years younger than I am, but he passed himself off as eight years younger than that, and did so with great thoroughness, even to altering the date of his birth on his papers. ‘Oh lord!’ I said to him soon after we met, ‘eighteen years difference! I really am old enough to be your mother.’ He answered impatiently: ‘Don’t be absurd, age means nothing. Don’t you realize that you are far younger mentally and physically than most women in their early thirties?’
I am grateful that our relationship began with me being ‘old enough to be his mother’ because I fell in love with him the second time we met. A few days after my dinner party he took me out to show me the places which had become most precious to him during his student days, and sitting beside him in a small Hampstead pub I knew that I was in danger.
I was ‘in danger’ because I already had a lover of five years’ standing who suited me perfectly and was more profoundly valuable to me than any other man could be. Not for a moment did I suppose that I would reach the point of wanting to break with Luke, but I might want to deceive him and that would be so unnatural between us that it would make me unhappy. It would be impossible for me to love little goat-face better than I loved Luke—but ‘falling in love’ has little to do with love, and I was startled to be reminded of how intoxicating it can be. The sensations involved are, after all, undeniably delicious: not least the sensation of danger, of being aware of risk and of a sudden release from one’s inhibitions against embracing risk. ‘Careful! This is likely to end in a painful mess…But so what if it does!’ It is exhilarating.
I was, however, ‘old enough to be his mother,’ and in that knowledge lay sobriety. I find the spectacle of a woman throwing herself at a man who doesn’t want her distressing and shaming. There is no good reason why I shouldn’t find the sight of a man throwing himself at a woman who doesn’t want him equally distressing, but I don’t. Conditioning is irreversible. I can no longer remember exactly how I was conditioned, but conditioned I was: a woman should be the pursued, not the pursuer, her dignity depends on it. And how could a charming young man who could obviously take his pick of girls want a woman old enough to be his mother, who wasn’t even beautiful? He couldn’t, of course. Didi’s true age would have been enough to chasten me, but it was the word ‘mother’ which made it conclusive.
From the start, therefore, I knew that any ‘in love’ sensations I experienced over Didi must be treated as a passing fever, and I meant ‘treated’ in the medical sense. They must be cured as soon as possible.
There are some advantages in growing older. I have learnt from experience, for example, that the mere recognition (if it is real) of hopelessness in being in love, and of the necessity of curing it, works as an important step towards recovery. In this case recognition would probably be all the treatment necessary. Provided I kept it in the front of my mind I could go on seeing Didi, and enjoying him, and although I must expect to suffer twinges for some time they would gradually fade away. The words I used to myself were: ‘I shall be able to keep the pleasures of the friendship element, and make the rest change gear from the amorous to the maternal.’ And that, exactly, is what happened.
Didi helped me by more than his deception over his age. He answered warmly to my friendship but he made it clear that he wanted nothing more. I am not the type of woman to whom he was attracted. The quality which always caught him was what he called ‘elegance.’ Surprisingly, considering how good he was at being elegant himself, the women in whom he saw it were sometimes quite inelegant in other people’s eyes, but I learnt to recognize them. They had to give him the impression of being assured, cool, perhaps unattainable. Ideally they were dark and slim, deliberately ‘feminine,’ and wore a lot of black. Their clothes were important. A ‘little black suit,’ which in Western Europe deteriorated long ago to being the uniform of the tart on the one hand and the French governess on the other, and then all but disappeared, retained its status as a hallmark of elegance much longer on the shores of the Mediterranean—perhaps retains it still? A ‘little black suit’ on a dark slim woman was enough in itself to make Didi fall in love. I am not a ‘little black suit’ woman. I am fair, was already putting on weight by the time he met me, dress comfortably rather than smartly, and appear even more accessible than I am: few women have less ‘mystery’ than I have. Even if we had been the same age, Didi could not have fallen in love with me, and from the beginning he let me know him well enough to understand this.
A few weeks after we first met, on the last evening before he returned to Germany, we went out on a pub-crawl with friends of his and got drunk together. He was staying in my flat, after Dolly’s return to Egypt. He had been hesitant about accepting my invitation, having sensed at once that I was attracted to him and fearing complications, but I had then introduced him to Luke and he had taken the introduction as I meant him to take it: I was safely back on the right side of the line and this was the signal for friendship. It may have been partly this which made him hold my hand on the way home that last evening—any withdrawal by a woman, even one he didn’t want, was likely to make him advance—although by that time he had started to feel real affection for me, which was heightened by his misery at having to leave his beloved London next morning.
I had often noticed with rueful amusement his scrupulous avoidance of any physical touch, and I had drunk enough, and was enough moved by his unhappiness and the prospect of losing him to make much of this hand-holding. At that early stage the steadiness of my good sense depended almost entirely on its not being tested, and no more than this was needed to make it wobble. If he was prepared to hold my hand, perhaps…I turned my palm to his and allowed all the sensuality I could muster to flow into the contact.
‘Now then, sweetie,’ said Didi, laughing. ‘What would Luke think?’
‘I don’t care.’ Just this once, I was thinking. It can only be this once, after all, he’s going tomorrow, and I know I can get my balance back, so why shouldn’t I have this one delicious collapse into abandonment?
He dropped my hand as soon as we were in the house and let me go up the stairs ahead of him, while he switched off the lights behind me. That told me nothing more would follow, but I was unwilling to accept it. As soon as we were in the flat he went to the kitchen to prepare our last ‘midnight feast’—we had been forming a habit of late suppers of Egyptian food which he enjoyed cooking. We ate at a low table in front of the fire, sitting opposite each other, talking easily. I admonished myself to relax and not to mind that nothing more was going to happen, but I was still half hoping that the emotion of this farewell occasion might end in love-making.
After the meal he cleared it away, came back to his chair and sat in silence for a few moments, leaning back, his eyes half shut, his expression deeply sad. Then he said suddenly: ‘Oh god, Diana, I don’t know that I can stand losing all this.’
I was up and across to him in one movement, without any thought, down on my knees beside him with my arms round him, kissing him. He didn’t move, didn’t even turn his eyes to look at me.
‘Oh darling…’ I said, and kissed him again.
He still didn’t move, only said gently: ‘Sweetheart, you know I can’t make love to you, you know it.’
And I knew it. I went on holding him for a moment or two, stroking the hair away from his forehead with one finger, then I said: ‘Yes, I do know it. It’s a pity, though.’
He gave a little laugh, and I stood up. I felt horribly disappointed but hardly at all rebuffed. Whether because of his gentleness or my own resilience, it didn’t occur to me that his not wanting to go to bed with me when I wanted to go to bed with him would change our affection for each other.
‘Oh well, love, I suppose it’s time for bed,’ I said. ‘I shan’t get up early tomorrow to say goodbye, it would be too sad.’ Then I kissed him again and went to my room.
He thought that he had hurt me badly that night. ‘How terribly I must have hurt and humiliated her,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘How dreadful that night must have been for her.’ Later there were to be times when I would have taken a sardonic pleasure in telling him that he was wrong, but now I am glad that he never knew that I went to sleep at once, as I normally do, and woke next morning feeling grateful to him because thanks to him the cure had just taken a big step forward and at this rate I would soon be over it. He needed, sometimes, to feel that he had hurt people. He didn’t enjoy making people unhappy—he hated it—but at the same time the belief that against his will he had done so acted occasionally as a piece of string or a safety-pin in the groggy mechanism by which he hung on to his self-esteem.
I wasn’t over it so very soon. For almost all the first year I knew him, the sight of one of Didi’s letters on the doormat could make my heart jump in the way which only happens when one is in love, and certain things—the sound of a small Volkswagen’s motor, and the taste of salad as Didi dressed it, for instance—continued to move me as though they were significant long after I’d become thankful that there was nothing for them to signify (I still sometimes pause to salute them even now). By the time of our meeting in Bruges I knew that I had been right, and that a maternal kind of concern was quite certainly taking over from amorousness, but even then the latter flickered up and coloured my response to him. That was, however, its last flicker. Simultaneously I moved a step nearer to understanding how seriously disturbed his whole personality was, and that was the true end of ‘being in love.’
If my heart had never jumped at the sight of Didi’s letters, if I had never wanted him physically, if I had never romanticized him, our relationship would not have endured. Sex and the maternal impulse are closely interwoven, particularly in childless women of middle age. However much I had liked a girl, and however great the girl’s need, I would not have ‘taken her on’ as I was to take on Didi, nor would I have done it for a man to whom I had not, at first, been physically attracted.
The desire for children and sorrow at its frustration have never haunted me to the point of discomfort, but I am normal and healthy and I did at one time decide to have a child. Becoming pregnant early in my forties, I discovered that I wasn’t—as I had thought at first—dismayed, but was jubilant. I would be able to support a child and I loved this one’s father: I would let it be born. The months following this decision were the most intensely happy I have ever known, and when for no apparent reason I miscarried, it was only the seriousness of the miscarriage which prevented me from suffering badly. As it happened it almost killed me: a curious event to see as lucky, but the joy I experienced on coming round from an operation and discovering that I was still alive after bleeding almost to death was so overwhelming that it did much to counter-balance my grief at losing the child.
This attempt seemed to purge me of any wish to repeat it, but no doubt it defined the area of emptiness in the emotional life of any childless woman, and I have been more subject since then than I was before to the attraction of other people’s need. To be able to feed, house and comfort someone: earlier I hadn’t much impulse to do these things, but now I enjoy them. I like being turned to and relied on, I like being seen as indulgent, understanding and reassuring—a motherly figure. Whenever I was pregnant I was always sure that I was either preventing or—that one time—expecting the birth of a boy, and it is men, not women, whom I tend to mother. Having never had a son I cannot be sure to what extent sex would have coloured motherhood, but judging by the extent to which motherliness now colours sex in my relations with young men whom I find attractive, I suspect that it would have done so strongly—that I might have been quite a Jocasta, given the chance.
Elderly women in love with younger men are usually seen as pathetically greedy old cunts, avid only for love-making, desperately trying to nurse a fantasy of continuing youth and desirability in order to get it. Some of them may be like this, but some, I am sure, are in pursuit of a different kind of satisfaction. The silly old woman who gives her gigolo a gold cigarette case or jewelled cufflinks is possibly not only bribing him to continue fucking her but is also indulging her own pleasure in making him happy as she once made—or would have liked to make—a child happy by a present of a bicycle or roller-skates.
The give-away, surely, is that it is rare for an old woman to take on an impeccable young man. She couldn’t do it, of course, since an impeccable young man would avoid being taken on, but she isn’t often moved to do it. An impeccable young man finishes the jobs he undertakes, gets to appointments on time, doesn’t buy silk shirts unless he can afford them, stays sober when he ought to, keeps himself clean. He is able to look after himself and creates no illusion that she is needed. The peccable young man, on the other hand, appears to create the state of affairs which exists between a mother and a child. She may at any moment have to rescue him because he has done something the equivalent of sticking his finger into a light socket, tearing his pants, skinning his knees, grabbing a toy which isn’t his, being run over, getting lost. He goes straight to her need to be needed. And in addition, here is a child who is not a child, with whom it is at least possible to express the incestuous impulse which has to be repressed with a real child. If he should let her take his head in her hands, smell his hair, kiss away the hurt, he might well respond—as she mustn’t let a child respond—by thrusting his way back towards her empty womb. That the situation is really far more complicated, and that she is the victim of illusion, makes it inevitable that if she becomes involved in such a relationship, much painful stumbling over knobbly truths will follow—but that, after all, is true of many forms of love.
Being less silly than some women, I was able to escape from falling too far into unseemly love with Didi, but it was a near thing, and that in spite of my being armed not only by his lie about his age and his sexual coolness towards me, but also—and far more strongly—by the existence of my real love for another man. It was impossible for me—and I always knew it—to go overboard for Didi in any fatal way; yet I found myself near enough to the edge to believe that I was given a glimpse of the nature of such affairs, and can now speak of them with some authority.
I know, therefore, that there was still a good deal of self-indulgence in my continuing affection for him after the last twinges of ‘being in love’ had died away. When I spent hours answering the desperate letters he wrote from Germany, counselling and consoling, encouraging and commiserating, I was certainly trying to help him but I was enjoying myself as I did so. I began to see how true this had been when answering his letters started to feel like a task. Counselling and consoling become fatiguing when you see that they aren’t doing any good, and even when all I had actually seen of Didi was contained in two visits he had made to London of a few weeks each and our meeting in Bruges, the difficulty of helping a depressive was becoming evident. There is not much satisfaction in being kind and wise if it’s all so much water off a duck’s back.
When this thought began to sneak out from the back of my mind, I stopped to take a look at my own motives. It appeared that I had landed myself with more than I had bargained for, but I had to admit that I had landed myself with it. Didi, once he felt he could trust me, had grasped eagerly at what I was offering, but he hadn’t forced it out of me, he had only accepted what I wanted to give.
That being so, I couldn’t withdraw it. I had been enjoying myself in trying to make him less unhappy, and I had been enjoying myself in behaving as the sort of woman I would like to be: concerned, affectionate, kind and reliable, someone to whom a desperate man could safely hold. So if I wasn’t going to puncture my own favoured image of myself, concerned, affectionate, kind and reliable I had damned well got to continue to be. It was an exhausting thought. I remember particularly being exhausted by it in my bath that Friday night when I admitted to myself that Didi was a ‘nut’: something which I kept out of the ‘portrait’ because that was supposed to be objective.
Didi’s depressive crises had to relate to a woman. There had been Inge, there had been Ursula, and now there was Gudrun. She had been appearing as a minor character in his letters for some time. She was ‘poor Gudrun’ because she was in love with him: a sweet-natured girl who stayed behind after parties to help him wash up, inadequate in the role of femme fatale. It must have been the lack of anyone ‘elegant’ which made him use her.
Gudrun was happy when they became lovers. She had no wish to be ‘complicated’ or to torment him, so he had to do what he had done with Inge: force her to reject him so that he could long for her. He didn’t do this consciously. Her compliance made her at first boring to him, then even sexually repulsive to a point where he found that she smelt disagreeable (he often found this about women: ‘Like so many women I have known, she suddenly breaks out in a horrible smell—her mouth, her body, everything—at the moment of her climax’). He would be unable to disguise his revulsion; hurt and unhappy, she would withdraw; then the agonizing longing could begin. This time even Didi himself was unable to pretend that the girl had much to do with the tedious ritual. He was beginning to see that the girls never had much more connection with it than those feminine names given to hurricanes have with hurricanes: ‘Inge,’ ‘Ursula,’ ‘Gudrun’—names for crises. So it didn’t much matter that the present girl was particularly inappropriate—poor Gudrun!—for the role, and it certainly didn’t prevent the crisis from being the worst yet.
Lying hour after hour, getting now and then, like a blow, a terrific crunch on my skull, a spasm of depression, of loneliness, of yearning, of absolute horror. I stand up, open the window, close it, walk up and down, close my eyes, open them, even feel nausea. As though caged, imprisoned in this infernal life. No one is to blame. This makes it even worse. A disease, an affliction…
To go mad—as eventually I must as a natural antidote to this—to go mad slowly, alone, and aware of it must surely be a terrible torment. Sometimes I think of the Jews in concentration camps and compare my state to theirs—but suffering is all relative I suppose…
I cannot foresee happiness any more. If this present depression is because of Gudrun, and if tomorrow Gudrun declared her love for me, that would still not make me happy…
This time he went to a doctor (‘He didn’t laugh because I had warned him, but he smiled’) who told him that his health insurance didn’t cover psychiatric treatment, but who tried to help him with drugs. The pills worked for an hour or so at a time, but as soon as their effect wore off he was back in his pit, and he soon gave them up for the reason (an odd one in a man so given to addiction) that he feared becoming dependent on them. The doctor also encouraged him to probe his own condition, but this was no help.
Falling—falling—falling. Perhaps I have been unable to touch my diary lately, except in short fits, because at times I am repulsive to myself, I don’t want to touch me, to interest myself in me. It is horrible to dislike your own self so much and there must be a vestige of genuine madness in all this (we have, alas, used the word ‘mad’ again). I look here, I look there for the cause of this misery, but I know what it is, it is ‘love,’ this sickness. Anyone reading this diary will realize, as I do myself alas, the picture: a man in his thirties with the emotions of a schoolgirl. And very aware of it. But how to change? Is change possible now? Of course it isn’t.
On Saturday stopped at midday for a drink at a pub, with a meal in view at home later, a fag and then sleep. Drug myself to sleep simply because I do not want to be awake. I was in that pub and I picked up a magazine. In it was a quiz, by—I think—a psychologist, asking you questions which you answer and accord yourself points. The questions were about your ability to be in love—to love. So I answered the questions as truthfully as I could, added up my score and it came to 32. Then I turned to the summing up of your character according to your score. This is what it said: ‘It is impossible, it is unbelievable—anyone scoring 34 points or less is still in his puberty as far as love is concerned.’
Yes. Yes…
There is nothing I would welcome more than death at this moment, this very instant—here and now. How can I put it, and to whom? How can I express what I am going through to anyone but myself? Now I know I am diseased, that it is nobody’s fault, that I have matured physically and also mentally except in one part of my brain coupled with a part of my feelings—particularly my emotions, which haven’t matured at all. These two parts, a part of my brain and all my emotions, are in the same state they were in when I was seven or eight. If only they had shrivelled and died—but no, they remain young and fresh. Too too often I am at the mercy of their young power, their freshness which overpowers everything else in me, and I am left in this hopeless state of seeing myself, in my thirties, intelligent, terribly self-aware, overpowered by the feelings of a child. This exhausting fight, my mature reasoning self fighting desperately to get the upper hand, but succumbing despairingly in the unequal struggle—and I am left with what I am left with now: hopelessness, self-pity—an ugly and repulsive self-pity—and such despair, sadness, loneliness and finally utter darkness. Relief, o Lord, relief. There is nothing for me but to get drunk tonight…
I have no affection or respect for myself at all. I loathe and find intensely repulsive a man of my sort. I want to get out of my skin—it must be like a woman who has to put up with the embraces of a husband she loathes—that is how I feel about myself.
Day after day, week after week, month after month it continued. At times when he couldn’t face the diary he wrote to me. He told me most of what he was going through, but because he was writing to be read by someone else he was able to introduce saving touches of irony, and what was reflected back to him from the letters was less frightening than what was reflected back from the diary, in the way that a mirror is less frightening to a sick woman—can even make her feel better—when she has been able to put on make-up. What we hung on to in our letters was that this was an illness, and that it would pass. If he could only endure, it would go away. When he was most ashamed of himself, and he was very ashamed (‘My moaning, my endless whining’) I told him, and meant it, that he was brave. And he was brave, ploughing his lonely way through this morass of despair and self-loathing, hanging grimly on to a purely formal, unfelt knowledge that the world, and himself, would look different if only he could survive.
That time, anyway, it was because I was there that he didn’t kill himself. I was outside both the situation and the place where he was experiencing it, so I offered an alternative to death.
I am going to ask something which I know I shouldn’t. Get me to London. It is unforgivable to ask it because as you know very well I shall not have a penny and it means you will be keeping me, but if I could be in London for three months or so I’m sure I could get round this work permit thing and find a job and then I’d be all right. This place is killing me. If I have to stay here I can’t not kill myself.
I cabled ‘Yes of course,’ and then thought: ‘Oh my god!’
If Didi were to be given a visa for more than a holiday visit, he would need a work permit. To get a permit he would need an employer, and the employer would have to convince the Home Office that it was impossible to find a native qualified to do the job.
The law was clearly intended to protect the native’s chances of employment against undercutting by foreigners ready to work for low wages, and to prevent foreigners from becoming a charge on the state. Since this was reasonable, it seemed likely that the Home Office would be reasonable towards someone who offered no threat. If a writer needed to be in England to finish a book, he would be doing no one out of anything; and if someone undertook financial responsibility for him he would cost the state nothing. So I applied for a permit for Didi, undertaking to ship him back to Germany if the authorities decided not to renew his visa. It was possible, after all, that once he came out of this crisis he would finish his second book in England. Given this start, Didi could then look for a job in which he could support himself and for which a permit could be granted, whereupon he could exchange the one I had procured for him for another more genuinely useful. Meanwhile he could no doubt find odd jobs—translating, baby-sitting, decorating?—for which he could be paid in cash without the Home Office’s being any the wiser. It would be illegal for him to take such jobs, but I can’t say that I felt any scruple at the idea of helping him to do so.
The permit was granted without trouble, but it took time simply because any dealings with the Civil Service take time. It was two months before I received the final confirmation, but they were encouraging enough from the start for me to tell Didi that the omens were hopeful, and I felt that having escape to look forward to would do almost as much for him as coming to London at once would have done.
This was true. He was soon reporting that he had ‘become a human being again,’ and gaiety and humour returned to his letters. He didn’t, however, go back to his job, from which he had been absent on sick leave, and although he wrote about events again, not only about his mood, he gave no explanation of how he was living. He began to sound busy, but without describing any specific business, and I was puzzled over what he was up to. He was spending a lot of time in Düsseldorf, where he had made a new friend.
This friend, Peter, delighted him. For the first time in all his years in Germany he had met someone whom he could love rather than merely find agreeable. Peter was young, at odds with his family in some way, generous, intelligent, amusing, natural, ‘un-German,’ and had a large library which contained all the books Didi loved best. They enjoyed the same reading, shared the same political convictions, laughed at the same jokes, and perhaps the best of all was that Didi was able to feel that he was contributing something good to Peter’s life which had been lacking. He wrote a great deal about Peter, and a little about a kind and gentle girl to whom Peter had introduced him and with whom Didi was having an affair.
This picture emerged only gradually. Didi’s ostensible reason for not coming to London as soon as the permit was granted was that he hoped to raise some money first by selling a television play on which he had been working, but I began to suspect, from a curious ‘airiness’ of tone which appeared in his letters, that this was not the whole truth. It looked as though, once the climax of his crisis was past with his desperate appeal to me and my response to it, he had started to enjoy himself enough to be reconciled with Germany—and to do this while being kept by Peter and the girl.
I found myself split-minded over this. I was relieved, but I was also cross. Commonsense told me to act on the relief—in other words, to leave well alone and make no attempt to remind him of my invitation—but inwardly I grumbled. It had not, after all, been a light decision to ‘take him on,’ and I had been to some trouble to procure his permit; come to think of it, muttered the inward voice, it had been quite generous of me to do what I had done, and now the little wretch was preferring someone else’s generosity. Of course one doesn’t want gratitude, I told myself, but still…but still…And then the voice of commonsense: Oh come off it, thank your stars if he doesn’t come after all, you know quite well what a problem he would be if he did. That was the first of many a long spell of inward muttering that I was to go through in the next three years.
Two or three months after the permit had been granted, by which time commonsense had won, Didi wrote to say that he would be with me in six weeks. In an ‘Oh well!’ mood, I bought a camp bed and a sleeping bag and emptied a drawer in the sitting-room bureau—my spare room, which I usually let, was occupied at the time, and Didi would have to camp—and this improved my temper. Preparing for a guest is pleasant in itself, and it reminded me how enjoyable Didi had been in that role before. I am out all day, and I knew from experience that he would be out most evenings, so his sleeping in the sitting-room would not be inconvenient, and since he was obviously well out of his crisis, his company when I had it would be gay.
A few days before he was to arrive, he sent the following letter:
Dearest sweetheart—Hm, hm, hm…Hold your breath, sweetie…because I find the whole thing terribly funny. Yesterday I was at the British consulate for my visa…and I was refused—refused—a visa!!!! My initial perplexity (and anger for ten minutes) gave way to a long laugh.
‘But why?’ I ask.—‘We must write to England first.’—‘I must know why.’—‘I am sorry’—the clerk is a nice man who stutters a bit and is very polite and is himself perplexed. ‘It is the consul,’ he says.—‘But I want to know why?’—‘Sorry.’
He went on to complain that he had got rid of his room and sold his car to a man who had insisted on making a profit when he let Didi have it back (‘It is impossible to be here without a car’); this refusal of a visa had caused him so much inconvenience and expense, besides being cruel and unreasonable, that he was now in a fit of Anglophobia and quite glad not to be coming; and I wasn’t to worry because although it would have killed him if it had happened while he was ill, now he had recovered he could stand it.
It was clear from the tone of the letter that the refusal was no disaster to Didi, but it puzzled and angered me because I had been told definitely that now he had a work permit he would get a visa without trouble. ‘They’ mustn’t be allowed to get away with this, and I telephoned the man at the Home Office with whom I had been dealing. I was angry, he was puzzled and apologetic. He would call me back when he had looked into it. When he did so his voice was cold. There had evidently been some mistake, he said, because the visa had not been refused. The applicant had been told that it would be three or four days before he had it, which was customary, but that was all.
For a moment I thought that Didi had made the whole thing up, so that he could stay in Germany without hurting my feelings by admitting that he wanted to do so; then, reading his letter again, I suddenly saw what had happened as surely as if I had been in the consul’s office at the time. He hadn’t made it up—not consciously: he had simply heard the words spoken by the clerk as refusal. To get what he wanted he had not misrepresented, but had misinterpreted.
And this was, in fact, what he had done. Much later I was to read his diary account of the incident, and sure enough, he thought the visa had been refused and raved at the ‘bloody limey authorities’ who, he could see, had enjoyed refusing, and at the expense and inconvenience to which he had been put. The only part of his story to me which was a conscious lie was the tale of having sold his car and being forced to buy it back for more than he got for it. He hadn’t sold it, although he had let his flat. In his diary he was on the very edge of seeing the trick he had played on himself—he admitted that he was pleased to stay in Germany and wrote ‘no wonder!’ on reporting that he’d had a tart letter from me—but he still contrived, by a hair’s breadth, to believe himself a victim of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
My letter was tart because, having seen what he was up to, I wanted to end the situation. I told him that he had made a stupid mistake and that his visa was there for the taking, but that if he didn’t want to take it there was no reason why he should. And as he clearly didn’t, why not stop this play-acting and admit as much? It didn’t matter to me whether he came to England or not, but uncertainty was inconvenient so if he had decided not to come would he please let me know.
I expected him to reply either by admitting that he was now happy in Germany, or with a flurry of hurt feelings and indignation, but his answer was perfunctory and airy: ‘I think, sweetie, that you are being just a tiny little bit unfair…’ Perhaps the clerk in the consul’s office had made a mistake, and of course he wanted to come—how could I suppose otherwise?—but just at the moment he did have rather a lot of things to settle.
My idea of a depressive was of someone who has spells of illness and who, between those spells, reverts to being ‘normal.’ It was to be some time before I would begin to understand how far out of kilter such a personality is all through, and that the crises of despair and self-disgust are only parts of a crippled whole. I suspected that Didi was living on his friends in Düsseldorf, but I didn’t then know that he was also on a feverish gambling and drinking jag; and I had a good many other things to think about besides him. Retrospectively I can see the incident at the consulate, and the situation which led up to it, as a clear indication of his condition, but at the time it seemed no more than irritating and odd, and my reaction to feeling irritated and puzzled was to dismiss it as a waste of time. When, some two months later, in June 1966, Didi at last arrived in England, I had no trouble in forgetting how annoying he had been.
Didi made this easy. He had come, finally, because he had again been moved to come. The part of him which loved London and which trusted it as a place—the only place—in which he could feel at home and happy had surfaced again, and he made a festival of his arrival, radiating pleasure and affection. His power to project his moods was exceptional: all his friends recognized it. To decide that you would ignore what Didi was feeling was a waste of time, and when what he was feeling happened to be good, a perverse one because it meant rejecting genuine pleasures.
Didi had charm, and charm is not a trivial quality. It is a way of responding. People who have it make what they are regarding (and that includes you if they are regarding you) more vivid and enjoyable, funnier, more interesting, because that is how they find it. However mechanical charm becomes, and it does often become mechanical with exploitation, it is always to begin with a spontaneous quality. Didi’s had not become mechanical. He often knew he was exercising it and sometimes deliberately exploited it, but even then it gave him so much pleasure that the freshness was preserved. He could cut it off, but when he did that he was depriving himself more than he was punishing others. There were to be angry times when I would say to myself ‘He has nothing to recommend him but his charm: when he suppresses that there is nothing left.’ I would be saying more than I knew. I would think that I meant only that his one virtue was a petty one, but in fact that virtue sprang from the centre of his being and was the thing about him which had enabled him to write with originality and truth. When it left him it was as though he went blind. On his arrival in London he was overflowing with it.
Having Didi in the house: footsteps running up the stairs, bringing a funny story. ‘Listen, this is true, I swear it. I looked at her and I thought she may be mad but there’s something serene about her—something sort of holy, and I whispered to L. all right, she’s mad, but I believe because she’ll be in the car, all the traffic lights are going to be green. And they were—every traffic light between London Airport and Kensington! So she said God always does such things for her and it was God who brought us together, so I must edit her book, I must. And L. said quickly “He’s very busy with his own work, you know, it would be very expensive to get him to edit your book.” And she said “Would a thousand pounds be enough?” I nearly fainted—well, you can imagine!—and I said very nonchalantly with no breath in my voice, oh well, I supposed…And she had this sort of shopping bag on her knee, and she pushed her hands into it and took out a thousand pounds in dollars.’
‘Didiiii! Show me—show me at once!’
‘Are you mad? How could I take them, how could I do such a thing? No, we were scared, L. and I, it was too mad, all those traffic lights and everything. We said we must make a proper contract, and I must do a sample bit before she decides—we became very sober and virtuous, it was terrible.’ (Part of me knew, of course, that the holy lady would never be mad enough, but Didi could always make things seem possible.)
Or I would come home and find a tray in the sitting-room with ‘a little aperitif’ all ready: cubes of cheese, radishes cut into roses, celery feathery in a glass and salted almonds roasting in the oven. ‘Do you want help in the kitchen, Didi?’—‘No, what are you thinking of! You know me.’ Exchange of news through the door open between sitting-room and kitchen while he, with a flowered apron of mine round his middle, performs alchemy with three courgettes, a pound of mince and a bechamel sauce. ‘Is Didi in a cooking mood? Is he making one of his delicious creamy things?’ says Luke when he arrives, and Didi calls ‘Don’t tell him, it’s to be a surprise’—then darts in with a lettuce: ‘Look, what beautiful salad I found in the market—look at it.’ He never mixes a dressing in advance. When the salad is in the bowl he grinds the pepper over it, scatters salt, sprinkles oil and lemon juice, pausing every now and then to bend over it and inhale its smell to see how near perfection he has come—no, a few more grinds of pepper, another drop or two of lemon. Luke has gone into the kitchen and started to pick and nibble. Didi drives him out, crying ‘Stop him! He’s ruining his appetite—’ then sees that I am smoking and exclaims in despair ‘You’re both hopeless.’ A little later he comes through the door without the apron, an almost tranced expression on his face. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘now we can start opening our appetites,’ and he pours himself a drink with ritual gravity and walks about the room as he takes the first sips, his eyes half closed to concentrate his senses. Didi’s appetite can be opened by things which would close most people’s for the night such as the best part of a bottle of whisky or several pints of beer (he has probably had the beer already before coming home to cook), but to see him now you would think him a gourmet of impeccable chastity, savouring one glass of dry sherry for the meal’s sake; and however unorthodox his methods, his appetite is opened. He eats as though he were reading a poem.
Then there is the pleasure of sitting on the floor by Luke’s chair, relaxed against his knee, while Didi, who is making us laugh, looks at us with tenderness. He is loving us, romanticizing and simplifying us as he does so delightfully to those he loves with affection, and so disastrously to those he loves with passion. In his eyes we are being lovable Luke and sweetheart Diana: dear, gentle, funny, trusting people (slightly childish in our trustingness—he has to look after us), with a touching relationship. He enjoys sharing jokes and ideas with us, and he admires Luke’s writing, but he loves us as ‘characters’ more than he likes us as companions; and we, sitting opposite him, accept our roles smugly, if slightly sheepishly. It makes us feel very nice. And we are relaxed because we know that at just the right moment Didi will get up and leave, saying that he has arranged to meet so-and-so, he is late already.
Perhaps afterwards, when we are in bed, he will make us laugh again, although this time it will be at him, not with him: we know that although he loves us he also considers us in some ways barbaric. He leaves his diaries in a pile on the table he has to share with me, shows us parts of them and knows that from time to time we leaf through other parts. We know that he has written of us: ‘It’s rather strange. They jump (I think) into bed at once, make love, or rather just fuck, and an hour later they are in the sitting-room again. I don’t know which is better—this hello, fuck, cheers, or my terribly elaborate way, drinking and smoking and eating and leading up to it and music and lights etc. I prefer mine, of course—but then they don’t have time, poor dears.’
‘So that’s what we do, love—“or rather, just fuck,”’ I say to Luke. ‘He’s got a nerve!’ and we hug each other and I feel sorrier for Didi than he feels for us.
Or there are Saturday mornings, my shopping mornings. Didi cooks only erratically, when he wants to express affection or to make an occasion seem important, but he drives me to the shops on Saturdays without fail, seeing it as a return for hospitality. We go to the market in Camden Town and to a Greek grocer in the market. We always mean to go early but rarely get there before midday, and soon we have a ritual, starting at the end of the street with a Guinness or two in the pub which smells of Lysol and is full of old Irishmen, then working our way down from stall to stall. We always pause to examine the junk stall and sometimes find a treasure—a pudding-basin for sixpence, and once, for half a crown, a beautiful photograph in faded sepia, heavily framed, of a dragoman showing the sphinx to Edwardian tourists, which Didi says might have come straight out of a railway station waiting-room in Egypt. We call at the toyshop, too, because Didi says that the man who runs it is a socialist: once, when we exclaimed at the cheapness of the toys, the man said ‘Poor children need toys too, you know,’ and we have liked it ever since and get all our presents for children there, and horrible bath-cubes because Didi insists that they are a bargain, and toothbrushes which cost sixpence and last about a fortnight. If we are in a hurry we split up and take the stalls separately, Didi getting the vegetables while I get the fruit and eggs, meeting again in the grocer’s for the Greek bread, the olive oil, the tahina, the spices, all the things which need consultation. And finally we go to the butcher we like best because he has chalked on his window-glass ‘meat boutique and rump steak emporium’ and his fascia carries the mysterious words ‘’Tis not immortal to command success, but we do more deserve it.’
Didi greatly enjoyed picking up the threads of old friendships dating back to his student years in London, and making new friends, but he surprised me by being at first only intermittently happy, then not happy at all, to see again those of his relations who turned up in London from time to time. The loving mood of his visit to Dolly and Mémé seemed to have evaporated, and now the members of the family often found each other ‘impossible.’ Their image of the devotion which they felt for each other—and of what the other ought to feel for them—was extremely demanding: mothers ready to nourish children with the flesh of their hearts, children ready to sacrifice anything rather than bring a tear to a mother’s eye. While they were cushioned by money and status in the society which produced them, it was perhaps easy to enjoy the luxury of believing in this image; but those of them who had been reduced, either by choice or by necessity, to the precarious condition of exile, seemed to me to come up pretty smartly against reality. Love flowed as freely as ever when it was no trouble, but could curdle into complaint and resentment overnight if it had to face claims.
I heard much from Didi on these curdlings in others towards himself, but I couldn’t help noticing a similar process at work in him towards others. Only for one cousin, a girl much younger than himself who was having a hard time, did he continue to feel sympathy and love. There was little to choose between him and the rest of them when it came to disgust at another person’s selfishness when something was being demanded of oneself. The only moral advantage he had over the rest of the family was that materially he had absolutely nothing over which to crouch jealously, while they had at least a little.
As I came to know more about people like those among whom Didi had been brought up, I realized that they—and particularly the women—are strange mixtures. Perfectly at home among the elegant and cosmopolitan in any part of the world, on the surface they belong less to a country than to an income-group: the rich. They do have a country, however, and it is one in which the women have only recently begun to be educated and become free to move out of the home. Their grandmothers certainly, and often their mothers, lived in a different age and by a different set of moral values. A part of Didi’s family, anyway, was undergoing a double exile even before physically leaving Egypt: a voluntary exile from a way of life, and an involuntary exile from the world of the rich. It was not surprising that they felt that they had their work cut out to keep afloat themselves, and could spare little thought for anyone else. It had to be everyone for himself or herself.
What made the situation hard to understand at first was that they still spoke, and no doubt often felt, as though this were not so. They had always been addicted to generous emotions, so they went on expressing them. This was hard on Didi, who shared the addiction with the best of them and could never resist the luxury of believing loving words and gestures coming from the people from whom he most needed them—believing them, and sometimes inventing them, and then, when the truth emerged, becoming vicious in his pain and anger. I soon concluded that the idyllic elements in his childhood which he liked so much to describe were wished-for more often than they were remembered. This was not a family in which an odd-child-out with a difficult nature, and who was likely to be a financial liability, could be considered anything but ‘impossible,’ and the rejection must have been even more thorough than I had thought. Dolly had done her best—of that I was sure, and Didi always insisted on it even when he was angriest with her; but even with Dolly love, when it came to the pinch, was by now more a matter of faith than of acts.
After a month had gone by Didi and I began to say to each other ‘We really must start thinking about this job problem’ but we usually said it late in the evening when ‘tomorrow’ seemed the appropriate time for decisions. I felt that Didi deserved a holiday, and I had little idea what we were going to do. Presumably Didi would start scanning advertisements in the New Statesman and so on, and we would both ask around among friends, and if anything likely turned up I would produce a reference. I had thought of employing him in my office, but had rejected the idea as bound to lead to trouble. As a publisher’s reader he would be good at detecting good writing, but he had no commercial sense; he would be looking for Chekhovs all the time, and would be unable to judge whether something he despised might be useful on our list. As an editor he was disqualified because he was slapdash about detail and although he could use English vividly and honestly, he was unable to spell it and was uncertain about its grammar. I could foresee the effect of this practical inefficiency combined with his arrogance about his opinions and his large areas of ignorance on my colleagues—and on myself—and although I knew that he was disappointed at my not offering him work (I explained to him why I couldn’t), I was not going to risk it.
Then our neighbour downstairs, my cousin who owns the house, came to the rescue. Didi had declared himself ready to do anything, so diffidently she suggested that he might paint the hall and stairs. She found out what a professional decorator would charge, and offered to pay him this sum.
Didi responded as though painting the stair-well of a tall house would be a lark. This stair-well, he said, would be the most elegant in London, the walls white, the paintwork picked out in black—perhaps alternate black and white rails on the banisters? Neither my cousin nor I like paintwork picked out, but his delight in the idea made us feel that it would be unkind to resist it and we let him have his way. When asked whether he would prefer my cousin to buy the materials and to pay him simply for his work, or to give him the whole sum so that he could do the shopping for the job himself, he chose the latter. Let her give him £10 or £15 at a time, he said, and he would spend what seemed to be the right proportion of it on equipment and paint and keep the rest for wages, and see how far it took him. It might turn out that the materials cost less than we expected and then my cousin wouldn’t have to fork out the full £80 that the decorators had said the job was worth.
He decided that first he must strip the walls—he couldn’t make a good job of it unless he did. We told him that stripping would probably be harder work than he thought, and that it wasn’t necessary, but he refused to listen. Energetically and cheerfully he began to strip the hall.
He managed that, and a few feet round the turn on to the stairs, before reality caught up with him and cheerfulness dwindled. It was an appalling job, particularly as he was saving money by not hiring proper ladders and planks, and on the third day he announced slightly accusingly and as though he were the first to discover it that to strip such an area of wall was a job for a professional and that it wasn’t necessary anyway, so from now on he would just paint.
He began by using emulsion, but soon changed to whitewash because it was cheaper. He also began carefully, but then decided that if he applied the whitewash very thickly, with rough strokes, it would give the walls an interesting texture. He almost threw the stuff on to the wall, so that besides swirls and lumps there were long trails of dribble. (‘Someone must have done this job with his feet,’ said a house-painter the other day, but the effect is not disagreeable.) He also spread whitewash and black paint everywhere, so that I couldn’t pick up a teaspoon without getting paint on my fingers, and my carpets were tracked with painty footprints. ‘It will come off,’ he said impatiently, ‘I’ll do it when I’ve finished,’ but he never did.
Soon he was talking about ‘those bloody stairs’ instead of about ‘my stairs,’ and the only way he could face them was by doing very little at a time and often taking days off. It took him two months to finish, and cost my cousin considerably more than £80, although Didi came to feel that he had been paid too little because the longer he spun the job out, the further and thinner the money had to stretch.
Not that he attempted to stretch it. We soon realized that he always bought less paint at a time than he said he bought, and that he drank and gambled the money left over on the day he got it. ‘She has no idea how much paint is needed,’ he would then say to me in a worried voice. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s going to cost her much more than she thought, and she can’t afford it, poor girl. I don’t know how to tell her I need more paint already, it’s horribly embarrassing.’ But at the same time, because the money he made stayed in his pocket for such a short time, he felt that he had made none. The lark of painting the stairs had become a boring, fatiguing, unprofitable chore—and I began to question the picture of patient industry in humble tasks during his years in Germany which had moved me so much when I first met him.
Both my cousin and I knew that he was doing the job sloppily, that he was taking an absurd amount of time over it, and that he was cheating over his expenses; so why did we tolerate it?
It was partly because of an attitude we share about possessions: we are not house- or possession-proud women, we spend as little time and energy on housekeeping as we can, and neither of us has ever felt more than passing regret over objects lost or broken. If the stairs had been well done it would have pleased us; if they were done sloppily, too bad, but we would soon stop noticing it. And neither of us much minds being cheated, although naturally we would prefer not to be. It always seems to me, and I think to my cousin too, an embarrassing experience rather than a distressing one, and on the whole it’s easier, as well as kinder, not to notice. We were brought up in families which maintained the strictest standards of honesty in all outward matters, and where no strain was put on those standards; and whereas we have both reacted against much that we were taught in our youth, this we seem to have absorbed to a point where we see anyone dishonest as deformed rather than sinful. This ‘pretending not to notice’ is foolish. It means that you lay yourself open to being cheated—invite it, almost—so if it happens, what right have you to complain? Both on the irrational level and the rational, therefore, it is something on which I cannot feel seriously indignant.
In addition to this, Didi was in a miserable position in having to depend on our charity. He knew that my cousin would not have had the stairs painted if she hadn’t wanted to help him—he guessed it at once, and evidently disbelieved me when I denied it. It was possible for him, without too much loss of dignity, occasionally to ‘borrow’ money for petrol (he often used his car to help us) or for food, but he couldn’t comfortably say ‘Lend me £5, I want to get drunk tonight’ or ‘I’ve got the gambling urge.’ Didi had to drink and gamble—that was how he felt about it, and that, I realized much later, was the literal truth. At the time I had not yet understood to what extent a neurotic person’s ‘symptoms’ are his props, his techniques for endurance, pathetic ones certainly, but the only ones he can command; but I did already sense, and so did my cousin, that we must not expect Didi to be rational about drinking and gambling, and that it wasn’t surprising if he tried to wangle a taste of them when given the chance.
Another element in our lack of indignation was the value which Didi soon developed as an object for observation and discussion: ‘Guess what he’s done now!’ If he said he was going out for a quiet evening with friends, adding ‘And it will have to be quiet, I’ve only got 3s 6d left,’ and I learnt later that he had instead gone to a gambling club and lost the best part of the £10 he’d just been given for paint, he was in a way offering us entertainment: indeed, the worse he behaved (within his really very modest range) the more interested and amused we would be. An appetite for gossip can stomach a good deal of inconvenience.
But our acceptance of his behaviour was not due only to our own natures. The power of Didi’s personality contributed much to it. If he had come to feel that he was demonstrating virtue and strength of will in finishing a boring job, and was doing it only out of generosity to us, then he could make us feel it too. The power of the auto-suggestive process by which he generated his moods and interpretations of events was such that it spilt over on to other people—men as well as women, though women were more subject to it—who often found themselves astonished at the discrepancy between how they saw something when they were in his company and how they saw it when they thought about it later. It was to Didi’s credit that he was not a serious con-man. He had the equipment for it, but he did no more than obtain a roof over his head, one meal a day, a little petrol for his car, his drink and (only in fits and starts) his gambling—the bare necessities of life, from his point of view—which showed restraint and goodwill towards his friends. He never had any truck with people whom he couldn’t accept as friends (although, as I was to learn, he could have spells of finding his friends antipathetic); it would never have occurred to him to pretend friendship only for what he could get out of someone.
The rapid collapse of his good intentions over the stairs combined disturbingly with my random readings of his diary. It surprised me that he allowed these readings, because although they told me almost nothing I didn’t already know in outline, they filled in the picture in a way painfully unflattering to him. I learnt, for instance, that what I had suspected about the period immediately before he came to London was true, and that he had been kept during that time by his friend Peter and the girl he was having an affair with—because, as he put it, ‘it seems pointless and stupid to go and work for 2.50 DM an hour and then go and gamble, so I’m not working any more’: reasoning all the more disconcerting because he was evidently unaware of its oddness. And I learnt with dismay how disabled he was in love.
‘His capacity to love is deep and candid’ I said of him in my portrait. His longing to love was deep and candid, and it is unlikely that such a longing, such a sense of the pre-eminent value of love, could exist in someone who wasn’t born with a strong potential for loving. But where now was the capacity? I had thought that he destroyed trivial loves because he despised their triviality, and that his thirst for a great and true one was something which with luck he might assuage. But the more I read of his private accounts of his relations with women, the more doubtful I became. None of his affairs, apart from a small category of random fuckings when exceptionally drunk (which he loathed) were trivial. All of them were wild bids for something beyond him, and were doomed.
He never ‘saw’ the women he pursued; and when, after he had caught them, he had to recognize their individuality, he resented it. The magical creature would become ‘a bore’—‘stupid’—‘mediocre’—‘neurotic.’ Although he believed himself to be haunted and driven by sex (‘I am unable to imagine love without sex’—‘It is always all sex with me, if I love her I want to fall on her every minute’), his own accounts made it clear that physical delight in itself meant almost nothing to him, perhaps even disgusted him. The passion which overtook him boiled in his head, and his head alone, in response not to an actual body but to a dream image which some single feature or some article of clothing had conjured up in him. As soon as a woman had been in his bed once or twice and he had been forced to apprehend the reality of her body, its shape and texture and smells, it would become repulsive to him, just as her personality became tedious to him once he had perceived it. Very quickly he would become unable to make love to her unless he was at least a little drunk, and the more often he had to do it, the drunker he had to be. The truth, I began to suspect, was that he could never make love sober: if he were not intoxicated by the quick flash of the romantic dream in his imagination, he had to be intoxicated by alcohol.
He knew this about himself, was always ashamed of it, and during his depressive crises was appalled by it, but he couldn’t change it and at bottom he didn’t want to change it. No other experience was so ravishing to his whole being as that quick flash of illusion, that momentary dazzle of being intensely alive, and it seemed to him that if he loved in any other way he would forfeit the very essence of joy.
Those early readings of passages here and there in his diaries were chilling. It was impossible not to see that my first idea of his illness had been inaccurate, and that he was to a large extent crippled even when he was ‘well.’ The question ‘What will become of him?’ now concerned me more closely than it had done before: he was in my house and on my hands—for how long? I could envisage no acceptable answer to it when I looked at the diary, so I preferred to look at Didi in the flesh: tiresome at times, of course, but healthy and gay, amusing and amused, a pleasure to have about and perhaps on the way to a real recovery. This was, after all, the first time for many years that he had lived in a place which could become his home, with people whose affection he might learn to trust. If he found a job in which he could use his languages and his intelligence, all might be well.
I began, therefore, to shy away from the diaries, although my shameless inquisitiveness would draw me back to them from time to time for a quick peep. It was a relief when one day Didi said that he’d started to feel uncomfortable at the thought of me and Luke reading them, and that he would rather we didn’t any more.
I said all right, but we’d have to make a rule. Anything left lying about I was likely to look at—I might try not to, but I knew the strength of my impulse to pry and I couldn’t count on controlling it. He knew that very well because he was the same, admit it now! He admitted it—we were both laughing—and we agreed that from then on we must both put away anything we wished to keep private. I could trust myself not to open a drawer or dig about in a suitcase. Whether I could trust Didi on that I was not so sure, but as I was unlikely to have any vital secrets I didn’t mind.
From that day he kept his diaries hidden and I didn’t read them again. Sometimes, when I suspected him of making a more than usually strange or comic ‘adjustment’ in his account of events, there would be a twinge of temptation to see how it compared with his private record, but I was able to withstand it. I was so familiar by then with his patterns of behaviour that they had lost their savour, so my restraint was not particularly honourable.