Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (44 page)

W
ITH ONE OF
those BBC companions, after a while, I launched into flat-sharing. Until then I had lived in billets while our office was evacuated to Evesham in Worcestershire for safety’s sake, and in a sequence of depressing bedsitters when we were brought back to London to await Hitler’s secret weapons, the flying bombs and the long-range missiles. The flat was the two top floors of a stately house in Devonshire Place, one of the streets traditionally inhabited by England’s most expensive doctors who had left a temporary vacuum in the neighbourhood when carried away by the war. Marjorie and I had the top floor, which included the kitchen. George Weidenfeld and Henry Swanzy had the floor below us.

The few young men in the BBC at that time had to be exempt from military service. George was exempt because he was still an Austrian, Henry because … and I suddenly see that I don’t know why Henry was exempt, which speaks well for the Second World War compared with the First. In the First a feverish jingoism prevailed, with women thrusting white feathers on men simply because they were not in uniform. In the Second I never saw or heard of any jingoism. Perhaps Henry was disqualified for active service by some weakness in his health, or perhaps he was a conscientious objector who was considered more useful in the BBC than down a coal mine. Probably I once knew, but if so it was unimportant to me and my friends. Anyway, there he was, sharing the flat at first with George and a man called Lester Something, and when Lester moved away from London, with George, Marjorie and me. George was wooing Marjorie at the time, so our inclusion was probably his idea.

The men’s floor had an enviable bathroom, all black glass and chrome, given extra distinction by containing a piano on which Henry often played moody music. Our bathroom was very mere – it had probably been the maids’ – but the kitchen gave us an advantage since what communal living went on in the flat had necessarily to centre on it. Neither Marjorie’s parents nor mine questioned the propriety of our ménage – but whether this was because they chose to believe us unshakeably chaste, or because we avoided mentioning George and Henry, I no longer remember.

The two of us who ended up in bed together were Marjorie and George. She fell seriously in love with him, causing some of our colleagues to exclaim ‘Yuck!’ and ‘How could she?’, because George at twenty-four already had a portly presence and a frog face. But he also had five times the intelligence of most of the young men we knew, and a great deal of sexual magnetism. I soon noticed – though Marjorie did not – that the women whose ‘Yucks!’ were the most emphatic were usually in bed with him before a month was out.

To be more exact, I did not notice this, but heard it from George himself, because in his early salad days he relished his sexual success too much to be discreet about it. He kept a list of his conquests at the back of his pocket diary, and would bring it out to show me when we were in the kitchen together without Marjorie. I remember him saying gleefully: ‘Look – the fiftieth!’

At that time I was all but unsexed by sadness, because the man I was engaged to, who was serving in the Middle East, had first gone silent on me, then married someone else, then been killed. A little later I would start to find that promiscuity cheered me up, but our Devonshire Place days were too early for that. My inner life was bleak, which made surface entertainment all the more important. If Marjorie had been sailing into happiness with George I might have found the spectacle intolerably painful; but as it was, although I liked her and was far from wishing her ill, I found watching the relationship so interesting that it became enjoyable – the first time that I was shocked by my own beady eye.

After eight or nine months Lester came back and claimed his half of the apartment, so Marjorie went to live with her parents for a while and I returned to bedsitters. Just before we left, our kitchen witnessed a significant event: the four of us chose a name for the periodical which George would soon be editing. After much list-making and many disappointments when good names turned out to have been used already,
Contact
was picked. During one of our naming sessions, when we had drifted onto other subjects and one of us asked George what his central ambition was, he replied: ‘Very simple – to be a success.’ So that was where George’s publishing career began, and where its direction first became apparent; and soon afterwards, because of someone I met through George, my own publishing career put out the first pale tip of an underground shoot, like a deeply buried bulb.

Before this happened I had begun to feel a good deal better, partly because I had the luck to fall into a frivolous and enjoyable affair, and partly because Marjorie’s mother’s dentist told her that he wanted to let the top floor of his house in Queen Anne Street, which is a few minutes from Devonshire Place, and Marjorie and I took it. The dentist had converted this floor into an elegant little flat for his son, who had killed himself in its kitchen by putting his head in the gas oven – which we did not at first enjoy using. But soon we began to think that the poor young man must have had a weak personality, because no flat could have had a pleasanter atmosphere. Devonshire Place had been fun, but also uncomfortable and shabby to the point of squalor. Queen Anne Street was a delight to come home to.

So we decided to celebrate it by giving a party. George came, of course, and brought André Deutsch, the man who had introduced him to the publishing firm which was going to produce and distribute
Contact
: a firm which would soon cease to exist, called Nicholson and Watson. André, a Hungarian the same age as I was (twenty-six), had come to England to study economics, had been caught by the war, and had been interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. The Hungarians were soon let out on condition that they reported regularly to the authorities, and André returned to London armed with a letter from a fellow internee to a well-known bookseller who had passed him on to John Roberts, managing director of Nicholson and Watson. Roberts, a kind, lazy, rather boozy man who was struggling to keep the firm going almost single-handed, took him on as a salesman and was pleased to discover that he had acquired an intelligent and energetic young man who was greedy to learn every aspect of the trade: who was, in fact, finding his vocation. By the time André came to our party he was doing much more for the firm than visiting booksellers and librarians – not that I was bothered about that. He could have been a junior packer for all I cared. His being the first person I had ever met who was ‘in publishing’ was enough to exalt him in my eyes.

He was small, trim and good-looking in a boyish way. I remember thinking that his mouth was as fresh and soft-looking as a child’s, and being surprised that I found it attractive – usually I liked my men on the rugged side. He sat on the floor and sang ‘The foggy foggy dew’, which was unexpected in a Hungarian, and charming, so that I was more aware of him than of anyone else in the room. Two days later, when he asked me to dinner and a theatre, I was gratified. He was living in a tiny house in a Knightsbridge mews, and that was impressive, too. The possibility of having a house had never entered my head. André’s had been lent him by a friend who was away on war-work, but it seemed like his, which made him more ‘grown-up’ than I was. In that little house, after the theatre, we ate an omelette and went to bed together, without – as I remember it – much excitement on either side.

In old age I can still remember the matchless intoxication of falling in love (which may well be a neurotic condition, but still nothing else lights up the whole of one’s being in that way) and the more common but no less delicious sensations of a powerful physical attraction; but I have gone blurry about the kind of affair I had with André. I wonder what took me into such affairs, and what held me in them, almost always, until the man moved on. Rather than remembering, I have to work it out.

It was not thinking myself in love when I was not – I was too clear-sighted for that. And it was not simply the nesting instinct, because I was romantic enough (or perhaps realist enough?) to be sure that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love. To start with it was probably curiosity – a cat-like impulse to poke my nose round the next corner – combined with the emptiness of my emotional life at the time: this would at least seem to fill it. And once it had got going … well, perhaps the nesting instinct did start to come into it, after all. Although I knew from experience that whenever I genuinely fell in love it happened almost on sight, perhaps in this other kind of affair I allowed myself to slide into a vague hope that this time, given the chance, love might develop. And anyway I was pleased to be wanted; I liked the social and erotic occupations involved; I enjoyed being fond of someone; and I continued to be moved by curiosity. Quite early in my career the image of a glass-bottomed boat came to me as an apt one for sex; a lovemaking relationship with a man offered chances to peer at what went on under his surface. Once, listening to someone as he told me for the third time a story about his childhood, I caught myself thinking ‘He’s a squeezed orange’ … oh dear, the beady eye again!

It was soon apparent that André and I would not be lovers for long. I felt that I could have enjoyed making love with him if he had been more enthusiastic about making love with me, and given my essential coldness since the shock of losing the man I really wanted, he probably felt the same about me: less than adequate grounds for an affair. And he was an insomniac whose bed, though a double one, was not wide. When I wanted to sleep, he wanted to sit up and read
The Times
, and what he wanted to do he did, with much uninhibited rustling: it was his house, his bed – and insomnia commands respect while somnolence is boring. Englishwomen are notorious for somnolence, he told me tetchily. He often remarked on the shortcomings of the English as lovers, a habit shared by many continental men with a touching failure to see how easily it can provoke the bitten-back response ‘Who are you to talk?’ Rather than enjoying the dozen or so nights we spent together, we went through them ‘because they were there’, and the only sadness I felt when he moved on to another bedfellow was the knee-jerk reaction ‘There you are, you see – you’re unable to keep
anyone’
. Understanding that I owed this droopy feeling to the fiancé who had jilted me, I didn’t hold it against André. It turned out that the slightness of our affair did not matter because – mystifyingly given how unlike we are in temperament – we had ended it as friends.

We continued to meet, I became his confidante about his love-life, and he introduced me to his other friends: a handful of other Hungarians and three or four likeable and intelligent older women who had more or less adopted him. Two of the women ran an organization which helped to settle refugees, in which he had done part-time work before being interned; one – Sheila Dunn, who became a dear friend of mine – was the aunt of a girl he’d had an affair with; and one – Audrey Harvey – was an old friend of Sheila’s. Because of my inwardly broken-spirited state, when we met I knew no one in London apart from the people I worked with; while my pre-war friends were scattered and out of reach. Even the merry lover who had done me (and was still intermittently doing me) so much good came from a neighbouring department of the BBC’s Overseas Service; and anyway we saw each other only to dine and hop into bed because he was both married and busy. The sudden acquisition of a group shading from slight but amusing acquaintances to great friends was an important pleasure.

The first flying bomb came over while I was lying awake in André’s bed. Its engine-sound was strange but we assumed that it was a plane, and that the sudden silence followed by an explosion as it landed meant that it had been shot down. The news next day that it was Hitler’s ‘secret weapon’, which we had all been trying not to believe in, was the most frightening news that had yet hit us. As well as fearing the pilotless engine-driven bomb in itself, you feared the idea of being panicked by it; so it seemed best not to think about it, and that was how most people dealt with it, confining their fear to the short time between first hearing one of the horrible things approaching, and feeling guilty relief when it chuntered past without its engine cutting out, to fall on someone else. When the V2s took over – huge missiles launched at us from hundreds of miles away – I thought them less bad because they came down bang, without a whisper of warning, so you might be killed but you didn’t have time to feel afraid. (In retrospect I find them the more frightening of the two.) To get a good night’s sleep, André and I sometimes spent weekends with Audrey Harvey, who lived about an hour by train from Marylebone Station. Sheila would be there too, and usually one or two of the Hungarians: how dear generous Audrey found suppers and breakfasts for us in those tightly rationed days I can’t remember: I suppose we took our rations with us. These were delightful occasions, which contributed a good deal to the feeling of being ‘family’ which grew up between André and me.

It was this feeling which made it natural for us both to expect me to be involved in his plans when he decided that he would start a publishing house as soon as the war ended … not that my own expectations, to begin with, were anything but provisional. He had no money and no connections: how could he possibly start a publishing house? It was like someone saying ‘When I win the football pools’. But of course if he
did
win them, I would want to be in on it.

He asked me one day – we were walking arm in arm down Frith Street – ‘What’s the minimum you’d need to earn, to start with?’ I didn’t know what to say. I would like it to be more than the
£
380 a year I was getting from the BBC, but I didn’t want to sound greedy. Impatient with my hesitation he said: ‘What about
£
500?’ and I replied: ‘That would be lovely.’ It sounded a lot to me, but we were only talking about a dream so what did it matter?