Imaginary Toys (12 page)

‘Margaret, let’s get out of here,
please.
’

‘Very funny. Ha, ha. I suppose that you think that just because you didn’t undo the wrong sort of button at the end of
Lear,
you can set yourself up as …’

‘Larry … John … Ralph … Michael … Richard …’

‘Charles, you haven’t got ten bob, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Edith … Sybil … Peggy … Dorothy … Flora …’

Names, names, names, spilling all over the tables, names of actors and actresses that I admired, spilling about among the cigarette-ends, tarnishing in the glossy gossipy hungry malicious mouths of the
jeunesse
dorée
of the undergraduate theatre; names,
names, names, used as coins to buy a few seconds’ speech, a few seconds of reflected glory; names like coins, once polished and bright, now grubby with too much handling, bitten by too many teeth, slandered even while they were praised, all the sordid apocryphal stories standing between them and their performances like an impenetrable safety curtain; names gradually losing their power to entice and charm, names losing their faces, names, names, names.

After a while I simply gave up trying to get Margaret out, I just sat in a corner and looked sour and said nothing and refused to lend them money. But I couldn’t stop them picking up my
cigarettes
. As soon as I put one down, it had gone, God knows why. I don’t know what it was about that afternoon, none of those people had ever bothered to steal cigarettes from me before (they never had the chance again), but they disappeared the moment I laid them in the ashtray. The actors were simply being highly
acquisitive
. No property rights for them. But it’s not something I want to think about much; after all, cigarettes weren’t what I was angry about. It was just the second of the last great betrayals of
Margaret
, and I sat there feeling not in the least sorry for myself, but hearing a voice somewhere inside my head saying: serves you bloody well right,
now
will you pay attention? It said a great deal more, too, in fact I think it surveyed the whole of my courtship of Margaret in unnecessary but impartial detail, drawing conclusions, pointing trends, assessing the significance of this and that incident or gesture, till I was absolutely fed up with myself; and so far was I from feeling self-pity that the only thing I wanted to do was go out and start an altogether new life, altogether new and better and simpler, far from Margaret and Oxford and all these absurd
popinjays
with their carefully modulated voices all shouting at once. In fact, I rose at one point, to go, but Margaret saw me, and said where did I think I was off to, hadn’t I promised to take her out, and the exquisite humiliation of that (for me) and the wonderful arrogance of it (for her) set me back in my seat with a little glow of purely objective pleasure. And shortly after that everyone
had
to leave, and although some of them were not, in my opinion, fit to walk the streets, let alone attempt to ride bicycles, as they did, stealing the bicycles without hesitation from the kerbside, I was damned if any of them was going to ride in the back of my car, and I said so. I knew they’d only smash the horn of the gramophone, or get me arrested for carrying drunken passengers, if that’s possible, which
I’m sure it must be (you can’t go near a car these days without doing something criminal), and although Margaret protested I simply said that if she wished to go with her friends, she could, but she would have to go on foot or pinch a bicycle, as I and my car would be very happy to spend the next few minutes entirely alone together. And she noticed at last that I was rather angry, and, deciding with a speed which did credit to her sense of opportunity that the party was over, got into the car without even bothering to say goodbye to her acting friends, who were, by now, giving an impromptu performance of
The
Knight
of
the
Burning
Pestle
on a traffic island in the middle of the High. And for pestle they read something quite different and without, as far as I know, any textual authority whatsoever, but which, I remember thinking as I drove past, would, with any luck, land them all with stiff sentences for indecent exposure.

When people talk about angry young men, and they used to in those days without stopping for breath or pausing for definition, they usually
seem
to mean, if they mean anything, people who object to pomposity and the general nauseating self-satisfaction, greed and incompetence of the governing-class. But when I was an angry young man, which was exactly then, I objected very powerfully indeed not to any abstract qualities in any particular class or indeed in society as a whole. I objected with a full heart to all the individual characteristics of those six young actors, and I could at that moment, though luckily I have forgotten them sufficiently not to be able to do so now, have spoken for at least ten minutes about each one of them, that is to say for an hour all told, at minimum, giving precise and lucid and even lurid accounts of their behaviour, and powerful reasons why each should be given not more than one week to leave country, family and friends, for ever.

About Margaret I felt absolutely nothing whatever. She sat beside me and said nothing, so I dare say she felt the same way about me. When we got to my college, I stopped the car.

‘What are we going to do here?’ she said.

‘Nothing. I am going to see if there are any letters for me by the second post, that is all.’

She looked a bit startled, as though this was hardly a time for me to catch up on my correspondence, but she shrugged and settled down in her seat with a bored look on her pretty face, and I leaned over to her and said very loudly and clearly: ‘You have kept
me waiting for something over two hours, and if you can’t wait for me for two minutes you can get out and walk.’

Well, as it happened, there
was
a letter for me, a bill from
Blackwell’s
of such colossal dimensions that I fairly reeled. I mean I’m not
that
rich, and I’d been overspending pretty freely the last month or two, what with one thing and another, and because I’d wanted to, too, and though the bill was only in two figures, it was only
just
in two figures, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to pay it for many, many months, unless my dear old dad turned up with something unexpected for my birthday, and anyway my birthday wasn’t till November. So I was pretty sober when I returned to the car, only to find that Margaret had obeyed my suggestion to walk and had altogether disappeared.

This shook me a bit, I must say, but it all seemed to fit in with my general philosophy, and I took it very well, I think, under the circumstances. I mean I didn’t jump into the car and drive at ninety through the streets trying to find her, I drove at about seventy, and I found her about two hundred yards away,
pretending
not to notice that I was hooting away like an old-fashioned Parisian taxi-driver, but with a very definite blush on her face, which was a rare sight, believe me.

The rest of the day was rather tiresome, really. We had a furious argument for about an hour, in which I accused her of callousness, selfishness, inability to pick friends, and generally of absence of the basic principles without which human life could not be called civilized, and she retorted with ill manners, jealousy, presumption, and complete spinelessness and lack of character. After that we calmed down a bit, and she expressed her sorrow that my plans for lunch had had, so unforeseeably, to be altered, and I apologized for thinking that she associated only with grubby young hams, and we opened one of the bottles, and went to the pictures, and by
dinnertime
we were almost friends. At least, when I took her home, after we’d been to a nice quiet party given by Nicholas, she allowed me to kiss her very quickly on the left cheekbone, and said good night in a voice which had already agreed to have lunch, really this time, tomorrow.

Jack and Elaine were at Nicholas’s party, but not for long as they started their Schools the next morning. Just as they were going, I said to Nicholas, let’s do our Bacon and Montaigne dialogue for them again, just to give them a few last-minute ideas, but he said no, and they went away unaided. I didn’t see why he was being
coy at first, but I soon guessed, because, as I must have said too often already, I rather like guessing what is going on between people, and it soon appeared to me that Nicholas was giving this particular party for one particular person, and that it was very probably the person for whom he had been delving in Romance Languages, and whom he called Delta, but whom I, since I knew him, always called Giles Mangles.

Giles was rather nice, I thought: shy, dark, quiet, with elegant rooms in a corner of the College farthest from the traffic. He shouldn’t really have been living in at all, but someone had died, by his own hand, I think—as people do from time to time at Oxford, what with one thing and another—or perhaps he had just been sent down, or left of his own accord; anyway he wasn’t there any more, and Giles had moved back into the College from his digs. He, too, it turned out, was starting his exams next morning, which
surprised
me, rather, because I had always imagined he was only in his second year. He’d been a friend of my younger brother at school, as it happened, and not done any National Service—flat feet, I dare say—so he was only about twenty-one or -two. My younger brother’s friends aren’t always mine by any means, but when I did meet Giles I thought he seemed rather better than most. He liked sailing on Port Meadow, which I didn’t, but he shared my
detestation
of actors. Apparently there was one who lived in the room above him, and who gave noisy readings of Jacobean comedies of the bawdier sort till late into the mornings. So we had always got on all right, though we never did much more than smile at each other and chat idly at parties, and it was with some surprise that I came to the conclusion that this was Nicholas’s latest. Nicholas was usually in love with someone quite unsuitable, but he never did anything about it, claiming that to fall in love with people under twenty-five was a weakness that he never let get out of control, and I dare say he was being honest when he said it.
Anyway
, he never slept with them, as far as one could make out, though some of them, it seemed to me, would have been only too pleased to sleep with him if he’d asked. I think he liked them because they made him feel responsible and paternal, and he could try and educate them and teach them what was and what wasn’t important, and who they should vote for. I caught him in the Ashmolean once, developing a theory of democracy from some faintly obscene Greek vases to a young man who obviously didn’t understand a word of what he was saying and who was looking
politely bored. But dear old Nicholas was trying his best. If it wasn’t for his honesty, he’d have made a splendid schoolmaster of the old-fashioned motherly kind.

Anyway, it was none of my business, and though I observed what I observed, it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. Besides, it was rather a nice party; Margaret had come with me, and Nicholas had collected some rather distinguished old bores, as he always did; bores distinguished, I mean, for their particular
brilliance
on one subject and one subject only. And I also had a sneaking suspicion that some of the people might be on the board of examiners in Modern Languages. For instance, even if he wasn’t an actual examiner, to have got old Henry O’Connel along was rather a coup. He was talking about what sounded like Racine
déraciné
to me, but it may have meant more to Giles, who nodded encouragingly whenever old Henry looked like running down. I adroitly left Margaret with Mason Arnold, who was trying to get someone to listen to his plan for a new surrealist magazine, and went to talk to Angus Macintosh about cricket. Angus is about forty, but he claims to know every single statistic about cricket that has ever been published, and, though this could be dull, usually it wasn’t. I mean he didn’t talk cricket the way wine-snobs talk wine. I never watch cricket myself, I find it too exhausting, the constant necessity of watching everything all the time in case something does, after all, happen. But listening to Angus is pure joy, and I listened for about half an hour, and then rejoined the party with the feeling that classical prose was not yet dead.

And then I took Margaret home. Which brings me to the end of this part of the story, almost, but not quite. Next morning, when I went to collect Margaret at the agreed time, there was only a note for me at the lodge, which said:
At
Clarendon
Press
Institute.
Margaret.
I knew the worst at once, because the Clarendon Press Institute is a hall, one of the few halls in Oxford, where people rehearse. It is a ghastly building, and I have spent some of my most tedious hours in it, waiting for Margaret, and when they put on plays there you are constantly being distracted by the noise of billiard balls from the room below, which is some kind of club where they obviously enjoy themselves, unlike those upstairs.

I wondered if there was any point in going, but I felt I ought to do something to round things off, so I went. Walton Street seemed even drabber and dirtier than usual. When I arrived, Margaret was sitting on the stage, reading a part from a script. It was something
terribly modern and difficult, I imagined, because there were two other people also on the stage, one sitting on the edge with his feet in the audience (a trick no undergraduate producer can ever
resist
), and the other standing up-centre with his eyes looking firmly at the backcloth. All three were talking at once, and repeating the same thing over and over again. I watched them for about ten seconds, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I walked down the hall and said: ‘Margaret, will you stop that, please.’

Everyone looked at me, and the producer, a man I had never liked, a fat man with no hair except at the back and sides where it was very bushy and rather too lush to be true, had a sort of fit, seizing me by the lapels and saying: ‘Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles.’