Loyalty is not a favourite virtue of mine. When spouses are concerned, it
seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not
loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out. Fidelity
in the sense of keeping one’s word I respect, but I think it tiresome that
it is tied so tightly in people’s minds to the idea of sex.
The belief that a wife owes absolute fidelity to her husband has deep and
tangled roots, being based not only on a man’s need to know himself to be
the father of his wife’s child, but also on the even deeper, darker feeling
that man owns woman, God having made her for his convenience. And a woman’s
anxious clamour for her husband’s fidelity springs from the same primitive
root: she feels it to be necessary proof of her value.
There are some things, sexual infidelities among them, that do no harm if they
remain unknown – or, for that matter, are known and accepted, and which is
preferable depends on the individuals and their circumstances. This attitude
I shared, and still share, with Barry Reckord, whom I met in my 44th year.
Before him, there was a series of sometimes brief, sometimes sustained
affairs, always amiable (two of them very much so), almost always
cheering-up and none of them going deep enough to hurt.
During those years, if a man wanted to marry me, as three of them did, I felt
what Groucho Marx felt about a club willing to accept him: disdain. I tried
to believe it was something more rational, but it wasn’t. Several of the
painless affairs involved other people’s husbands, but I never felt guilty
because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyone’s
marriage. If a wife found out – and as far as I know that never happened –
it would have been from her husband’s carelessness, not mine.
With Barry I eventually settled down into an extraordinarily happy loving
friendship, which remained at its best for about eight years until it began
to be affected not by emotional complications, but by time. This was not a
sudden event, but its early stage, which took place during my mid and late
fifties, was followed by a reprieve which made it possible to ignore its
significance. Gradually I had become aware that my interest in, and
therefore my physical response to, making love with my dear habitual
companion was dwindling: familiarity had made the touch of his hand feel so
like the touch of my own that it no longer conveyed a thrill.
Looking back, I wonder why I never talked about this with him, because I
didn’t. I simply started to fake. Probably this was because the thought of
“working at” the problem together, as I supposed a marriage counsellor would
suggest, struck me as unlikely to solve it. Tedious and absurd: that was how
I envisaged such a procedure. If something that had always worked naturally
now didn’t work – well, first you hoped that faking it would bring it back,
which sometimes it did, and when that stopped happening, you accepted that
it was over.
That acceptance was sad. Indeed, I was forced into it at a time when our
household was invaded by a ruthless and remarkably succulent blonde in her
mid-twenties and he fell into bed with her. There was one sleepless night of
real sorrow, but only one night. What I mourned during that painful night
was not the loss of my loving old friend who was still there, and still is,
but the loss of youth: “What she has, God rot her, I no longer have and will
never, never have again.”
A belated recognition, up against which I had come with a horrid crunch. But
soon another voice began to sound in my head, which made more sense. “Look,”
it said, “you know quite well that you have stopped wanting him in your bed,
it’s months since you enjoyed it, so what are you moaning about? Of course
you have lost youth, you have moved on and stopped wanting what youth wants.”
Soon after that event Barry decided to take a play of his, White Witch, to
Jamaica. All but one of the people in the play are Jamaicans, so those parts
could be cast when he got there, but the “witch” is English, so her
interpreter had to be found here and taken with him. He couldn’t afford an
established actor, so it had to be someone young and inexperienced who was
going to be offered the thrill of this big and juicy part, and who would
probably be excited enough by it to take off for several months in the
Caribbean on very little money.
Almost the first he auditioned was a farmer’s daughter from Somerset, Sally
Cary, who read the part well and was pretty enough for it, although to my
mind her looks ought to have been a touch more extreme and eccentric. Barry
liked them, however, and judged (rightly) that she would be capable of
expressing the part’s character once on stage. So off they went and the
production was successful. I was not surprised when it became apparent from
Barry’s letters that he and Sally had slipped into an affair.
When they got back I was, however, slightly surprised to see how serious it
was – certainly far from being a passing flutter. But Barry and I are
similar in our responses to intelligence, honesty and generosity, so when it
turned out that Sally was one of the nicest young women – one of the nicest
people – I had ever met, I had no trouble understanding why he loved her.
Certainly if I had still been in a physical relationship with him it would
have pained me to see them together, but because by then I had fully
acknowledged within myself that sex between us was gone for good, it didn’t
worry me. It was a great piece of luck that this important shift in our
relationship had happened before Sally came into our lives. She found
herself a bedsitter not far from us and returned to the nerve-racking
routine of auditions, getting work so rarely that paying for her room was
not easy.
Her parents, who were farmers, had apparently begun to resent the rigours of
their life enough to want to rescue their daughters from it. Sally, with her
contralto voice and gift for acting, had been pointed towards the stage. She
said her father discouraged her from taking an interest in the farm and she
seemed to know little about it: I used to tease her for not knowing the
difference between wheat and barley.
Soon it occurred to me that since she was spending almost every night in
Barry’s bed, keeping on her bedsitter was a waste of money, so I suggested
she move in with us. It seemed to me that I would enjoy having her with us,
and so I did.
I know people thought our menage à trois odd, though whether I acquired
undeserved merit for generosity or disapproval for loose morals, I could
never tell because no one was ever impolite enough to comment. I suspect
there was more of the former than the latter, given that no one could live
through the 1960s without at least hearing pos-sessiveness condemned, even
if they didn’t condemn it themselves.
It is true that many people are so neurotically possessive that they can’t
bear seeing someone enjoying something even if they don’t want it for
themselves, but I was not, and still am not, possessive like that, not
because I had trained myself out of it but simply because I wasn’t made that
way – luck, not virtue, for which I am grateful, having often witnessed the
miseries of jealousy.
When Sally joined us what I felt was that now I had a lovely new friend in the
house, as well as a darling old one, and the next two years or so were some
of the happiest I can remember.
That stage came to an end when the health of Sally’s father deteriorated. She
had already given up singing lessons; and although she enjoyed acting she
was not obsessed by it and detested the often humiliating ordeal of
auditions. She therefore came to the conclusion that she ought to go home
and help her father, to which end she signed up for a course on farm
management at Cirencester.
I think I missed her almost as much as Barry did, but by that time friendship
had consolidated into a sense of belonging together like family, so there
was no question of “losing” her, not even when at Cirencester
she met Henry Bagenal and they decided to get married. Henry, being a
warm-hearted and wise young man very much liked by both Barry and me, simply
joined the family, so to speak. On Mr Cary’s death the two of them took over
the farm, and when Jessamy and Beauchamp were born it was almost as though
Barry had acquired two grandchildren, and me too to a slightly lesser degree.
So now, in my old age, although I have not in fact got a daughter and
grandchildren, I have got people who are near to filling those roles. One of
the most impressive things about Sally has been that although she didn’t
seem to be unusually drawn to children before she married, once she had them
she opened out into motherhood with astonishing completeness, yet without
losing herself. She was, for instance, determined to breastfeed her babies
and to go on doing so until they chose to give it up. Jessamy, her first
child, continued to return to the breast when she needed to be comforted
well into her third year, by which time she could understand and agree that
it must be passed on to her little brother because he could not do without
it while she could.
All the usual arguments had been brought to bear on Sally – it was
unnecessary, it was indecent, it would tie her down, it would wear her out,
and above all it would make the child neurotically dependent on her – and
she had disregarded them. What in fact happened was that conveniently
portable Jess was absorbed into adult life instead of imprisoning her mother
in the nursery, then developed into a child so secure that her
self-confidence and independence were remarkable, and has now become a young
adult who leaves us all gaping with admiration and envy as she sails
triumphantly into her career as a doctor, living – to our great good luck –
in a flat five minutes’ walk from us.
And her brother Beachy, in his very different way, is equally beautiful and
successful, while their mother, who has never for a moment failed either of
them and is as much loved as she is loving, simultaneously built herself a
full-time career in the organic food movement. Her two children are far from
being the only remarkably attractive young people of my close acquaintance –
I have nephews, nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom make
nonsense of gloomy forebodings about modern youth – but they are the two I
see most often, so it is they who seem to symbolise my good fortune in this
respect.
What is so good about it is not just the affection young people inspire and
how interesting their lives are to watch. They also, just by being there,
provide a useful counteraction to a disagreeable element in an old person’s
life. We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply
because within our own boundaries things are doing so.
We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see
less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will
soon be dead. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a
general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last
years even drearier.
Whereas if, flitting in and out of our awareness, there are people who are
beginning, to whom the years ahead are long and full of who knows what, it
is a reminder (indeed it enables us actually to feel again) that we are not
just dots at the end of thin black lines projecting into nothingness, but
are parts of the broad, many-coloured river teeming with beginnings,
ripenings, decayings, new beginnings – are still part of it, and our dying
will be part of it just as these children’s being young is, so while we
still have the equipment to see this, let us not waste our time grizzling.
Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible,
stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy? We never stop being at
least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such
questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or
saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to
look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise
and kind: what a blessing!
© Diana Athill 2008
Extracted from Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill to be published by
Granta Books tomorrow at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69 including
postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
