Athill - Alive, alive oh! and other things that matter

Alive, Alive Oh!

And Other Things
That Matter

DIANA ATHILL

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York London

ALSO BY DIANA ATHILL

Fiction

An Unavoidable Delay

Dont Look at Me Like That

Memoirs

Stet

After a Funeral

Make Believe

Yesterday Morning

Somewhere Towards the End

Life Class (omnibus)

Letters

Instead of a Book

Copyright 2004, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015 by Diana Athill

First American Edition 2016

First published in Great Britain by Granta Publications

All rights reserved

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Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

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ISBN 978-0-393-25371-9

ISBN 978-0-393-25372-6 (e-book)

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For Phil and Annabel, with love
and endless gratitude

S ometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits: I have forgotten who it is who is supposed to have said that, but it is a good description of a state quite often observed in a retirement home, and considered pitiable. Disconcertingly, I recently realized that I myself (not often, just now and then) might say those very words if someone asked me what I was doing. It is not a welcome thought, but less dreadful than it might be because I now know from experience that the state is not necessarily pitiable at all. It is even rather pleasant or it can be. That probably depends on the nature of the person sitting. To me it has been, because the thinking turns out to be about events in the past which were enjoyable, and when my mind relaxes itself it is those same events which float in and out of it.

Until about two months ago, those events included people, usually men. I talked about it the other day with someone who is also in her nineties, though not so far into them as I am, and she said, Yes, of course, men. What I do when Im waiting to fall asleep is run through all the men I ever went to bed with, whereupon we both laughed in a ribald way, because that is exactly what I did too. It cheered me up to learn that I had not been alone in indulging in this foolishness.

But then something odd happened. The things floating out of the past did often still include events which involved men, but just as often, and just as pleasurably, they were images of places and objects: all the most beautiful places and things that I once experienced.

About halfway through my seventies I stopped thinking of myself as a sexual being, and after a short period of shock at the fact, found it very restful. To be able to like, even to love, a man without wanting to go to bed with him turned out to be a new sort of freedom. This realization was extraordinary. It was like coming out onto a high plateau, into clear, fresh air, far above the antlike bustle going on down below me. It was almost like becoming another sort of creature. Well, I had in fact become another sort of creature: I had become an Old Woman! And to my surprise, I dont regret it. In the course of the ninety-seven years through which I have lived I have collected many more images of beautiful places and things than I realized, and now it seems as though they are jostling to float into my mind.

For example: because (I suppose) it will soon be May, I have just caught the scent of bluebells in my room. Once a booksellers conference took me and some colleagues to Yorkshire, near Fountains Abbey. An energetic colleague said to me, Lets get the hotel to call us at 5 oclock tomorrow morning, so that we can nip out and have a good look at the Abbey before the day begins. Never an early riser, I was at first appalled, then felt ashamed of myself and agreed, so we did it, and the Abbey was indeed very lovely, standing there in the silent and delicate mistiness of an early morning in May; but even more magical was the nearby woodland sloping down to the river, carpeted with bluebells which were responding to the rising sun by releasing a great wave of scent a wave more powerful than Id known their flowers could possibly produce. The little new leaves on the branches above them were that first green, which looks as though made by light, and which will be gone in a day or two, and blackbirds had just started to sing. Those few minutes in that wood were so piercingly beautiful that I ought not to be surprised at their still being with me.

Venice is the source of many more such memories the special greenness of its water, the way rippling reflections pattern its walls, facade after facade, painting after painting that stop one in ones track oh, how hopeless it is to try to put paintings into words. There are so many paintings which turn the I into eye, take you right out of consciousness of self, and make you see, when you leave their presence, that everything has become more alive. All of Italy always seems to be waiting there to over-whelm me with its acute pleasures, so that dismal news of its political squalor becomes unbearable although Im sure that if I were able to go there again, my tourist-eye view of it would soon obliterate all but its art, its architecture, its olive trees, its cypresses. And surely its food would still taste like it ought to taste?

Food: in Tobago, friends once drove me to a little almost-round bay where forest came right down to the waters edge, and there we swam and lay on the sand drinking rum and grapefruit juice (as my hostess said, all that fruit juice surely made it very good for you) until their motor boat came puttering into the bay piloted by the islands only happily sea-going man Joe was his name who had been fishing as he came, carrying with him a big black iron pot and a chest containing their collection of spices. On that island surrounded by fish-filled ocean most people ate nothing but salt-dried fish you rarely saw a boat. My friends found that absurd, so discovered Joe, bought him the boat, and every evening jeeped down to the little jetty under their house to meet him, unload his catch, and drive it slowly up the hill while they announced the arrival of fresh fish by blowing a conch (such an ancient and mournful sound). And out of the darkness came silent women, to buy their very cheap and delicious suppers. Which, if they were anything like our lunch that day... No, they probably were a little less good, because much of that wonderful fragrance which came wafting along the beach from the crackling fire over which Joe was stirring the big black pot was the result of well-chosen spices. The fish he cooked for us was easily the most beautiful meal I have ever eaten. Or ever will eat (alas!).

Other beautiful things? Oh yes, the Folk Museum at Santa Fe. The words folk museum bode ill, suggesting rough brown pottery, more worthy than seductive. But folk produce much that is not brown (the Rio carnival for example), and the stuff in this museum was collected from all over the world by a man of the theatre, a master of the art of Display, which makes it a splendiferous palace of colour and fantasy in which you are soon running mad in your attempt to see everything, and there is so much that its impossible to do that but you end up feeling dizzy with joy. To go to Santa Fe without visiting that museum would be a grave mistake.