Free Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill by Diana Athill Page A

general’s eye over the confusing vista of tables, single one out and usher us towards it. All would be bustle and tinkle, but muted, and the tablecloths and cutlery, being unlike our own at home, must surely be more elegant.
    We knew in advance what we would choose from the menu: fried fish, in its crisply golden coat of breadcrumbs, and fruit salad. We never had fried food at home because it was considered unhealthy, and all the fruit we ate, whether cooked or not, was fresh, so the jewel colours, bland texture and syrupy sweetness of tinned fruit salad was to us unspeakably delicious. We were sure that restaurant food was food at its rarest and best.
    My romanticism made me relish these occasions even more than Andrew did. He, although he enjoyed the food and the excitement, never wavered in his certainty that the country was best, whereas I could easily be seduced by notions of sophistication and the mondaine . So when at the end of one such lunch he wanted to pee and I didn’t, I was pleased to be left alone at the table while Mum took him to the cloakroom. I pushed my chair a little way from the table, hooked an elbow over the back of it, and began to examine the lunching ladies, seeing their hats, furs, gloves and handbags as very smart.
    Suddenly it occurred to me that now I was on my own at the table, anyone noticing me might think me alone in London . They might suppose that I had been doing my shopping all by myself, was in the restaurant and had ordered my meal all by myself, and was going to pay for it all by myself with money out of my own pocket. How deeply impressed they would be if they thought this! Some of the ladies might be whispering to each other even now, ‘Look at that little girl over there, lunching all by herself in a restaurant and so young !’ This idea enchanted me, and I began carefully to adjust my pose to one of greater nonchalance and assurance. I let one hand dangle over the back of the chair while with the other I ‘toyed’ with a fork; I tilted my head at what I was sure was a graceful angle, and willed my face into an expression of blasé hauteur. My eyebrows arched, my lips drooped; with perfect conviction I felt my face become that of one of the beautiful mannequins I had admired in Mum’s copies of Vogue . (They were ‘mannequins’, not ‘models’ in those days: ‘models’ took clothes off, rather than showed them off, being the people who posed for artists.)
    I was so deep in this role that I didn’t notice Mum and Andrew weaving their way back towards me through the tables. The first I knew of their return was Mum’s furious whisper: ‘For God’s sake sit up straight and stop gaping – everyone will think you’re half-witted!’ I was too stunned by the humiliation of it to cry.
    Incidents – and there were many – in which something wished on us by my elders seemed an affront to my dignity, or in which my own image of myself betrayed me into absurdity, were the cause of the most acute mortification I experienced, but it cannot be said that they harmed me. They resulted in dignity’s becoming less touchy and more discriminating, and behaviour better judged. Perhaps a more delicate understanding of my susceptibilities might have hindered more than it helped: the quickest way to learn to avoid or humour wasps is to be stung by one.
     
     
    The restaurant of a big store was not in our eyes what it was in our mother’s, nor was the flavour of its food on our tongues what it was on hers. We saw grandeur in size and quantity, deliciousness in sweetness and softness. We were easily moved to admire beauty, but had no idea of ‘taste’.
    Satin was beautiful because it was sleek; pink was beautiful because it was the colour of roses. So pink satin was very beautiful. So if you could have an enormous room decorated in pink with satin curtains and upholstery, it would be breathtaking, and it would be even better if all the furniture were made of gold and silver, because