Don't Look At Me Like That by Diana Athill

Author:Diana Athill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783783786
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc

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Three times during those months Roxane came to London with Dick, and those occasions were even more enjoyable than the others. The two of them felt like family to me, but more amusing because they were my own age and not family, and their cheerfulness together pleased me for Roxane’s sake. She looked secure and satisfied, not trying to be anything but what she was, and I told myself that she must have learnt to “like it.” It would have been odd if she hadn’t, because of all the men I had met Dick was the only one I could see as being physically attractive.

During those months my job at Skeffingtons’ was confirmed, a cotton I had designed was illustrated in a magazine (though credited only to the firm, not to me), Hargreaves and Blunt promised me more work, and I began to meet people outside Lucy’s house. When I went home for a weekend my parents used to show me off in a quiet way and I used to feel ungrateful and angry because I was bored. Somehow those weekends always used to coincide with a cold or a toothache or having the curse, but I was never ill enough not to go and used to drag about pretending I felt all right so that my mother wouldn’t fuss about the effect of London life on my health. When she asked what I had been doing I would say sulkily, “Oh, nothing special,” as I did when I was at school; and when my father got a book on abstract painting out of the library so that he could talk to me about modern art I was so embarrassed that I let some milk boil over on purpose, to end the conversation. It was better when they talked about the garden or the village or Mrs. Hunter, who now came in to help my mother with the housework. It was frightening that two adult people could stand such monotony, but at least none of it became distorted in the telling.

They thought I looked odd. The way I cut my hair and made up my eyes, and the kind of clothes I had started to wear, seemed to them outré and unbecoming, but I knew that they weren’t. When I went into a restaurant with Dick and people looked at me, I could tell that they weren’t looking because something was wrong. Perhaps the best thing about that time was learning that I could risk confidence in how I looked.

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