Imaginary Toys (15 page)

No, if we want things to get better, we must
work
for them. ‘Make it new’ is a good philosophy, but not mine. Mine is ‘Make it better’. Things will get worse and worse if we don’t fight like mad. This is a form of realism that many people find sapping. It is disappointing after hopes of a gradual progress towards heaven on earth. But I don’t think it’s spiritually sapping. I think it’s realistic, that’s all. It sees and proclaims difficulties, it does not try to avoid them, or, like the Christian Scientist, pretend they don’t exist. It deals with the here and now, not with the future perfect. If we would only concentrate on the next few years, instead of the next millennium, we might achieve something. All the time one is fighting things that have been officially dead for years. But their ghosts haunt our schools and our imaginations.

All one needs to do, in a way, is show that by getting together each and every separate individual can be even more satisfactorily selfish than before. The image of the frontiersman as the full man has got to go. (Less Westerns, a pity.) Communities are a pooling of
selfishnesses,
so that everyone can do what he wants. When I say this sort of thing I am accused of being a Communist. But a Communist has some misty goal—and in the over-developed Western civilizations there is no need for such a thing. There are various concrete goals that could be reached within my lifetime, none of which involve any idea of an ideal community. Charles is unbearably right. I shall
eventually go into politics, simply to get a few things done. One might start with a wholesome reform of the entire educational system….

*

The silence from Phi is becoming ominous. He has either
abandoned
me altogether, or is sitting somewhere alone thinking whether or not to abandon me. Actually he is almost certainly
doing
neither. But I like to think that I still have some significance for him. As he has for me. I seem to have undergone a very strange alteration in the last ten days. When I last saw Phi it was with the thought that I should see him again shortly, and that it would be a pleasure to see him. I thought our drifting apart was only
temporary.
Now I feel as though I shall never … of course I shall see him, I hope. But he no longer appears to me as my lover. As a very special friend, but not as a lover. How has this happened, I wonder? Is it a symptom of my constant feeling of unreality? Or the cause of that feeling? I’m sure it can’t have anything to do with Delta. Delta is almost certainly a symptom, not a cause. Or is he? I really have no idea at all. I think I could fall in love with either of them, if the other did something to make me react against him. But that is a very negative state of mind. I have no idea of what will happen. Delta came to call on me this afternoon—he said he was going to spend the week-end in bed as he was tired of feeling he ought to feel tired. He asked me why I hadn’t been to see him. I blushed.

The maddening thing is that I don’t know if he means what he says quite literally, or whether his remarks are as loaded as mine. And I simply daren’t ask. He
seems
so innocent. I don’t think I could bear
to fall in love with an innocent again. It simply is not fair to people like me, the innocent’s seductive and unobtainable smile. Our scruples are used against us by the ones we love. But then I don’t
know
whether he is innocent or not. Charles was quite blunt. He said that while everyone else was going through emotional agonies it was only fair that I should have my share. But who did I think I was fooling, Delta or myself? And I couldn’t answer.

Charles knows much too much. I told him about Phi, with
discretion,
some months ago, and ever since he has had a smile of pitying condescension on his face. He thinks I am incapable of
faithfulness.
I think he thought Phi was simply something of a week, a one-night stand, perhaps. Since breaking with Margaret he is taking a quite unnecessary interest in other people. Particularly in Elaine and Jack. He broods about them. I told him to leave them alone, or Jack would knife him. He said that he thought Jack was insufferable, because he, Charles, had a car, and he, Jack, didn’t. ‘He thinks my exhaust-pipe is a forked tail,’ he said. Then he looked rather worried and said: ‘I’m not that bad, am I?

*

Delta did not spend all of today in bed. At noon he came to my lodgings and found me still getting up. Thus he got his own back for last week. I had read till four in the morning. I get through the interminable bell-ringing of Sunday mornings by not getting up till lunch. We walked for an hour or two and then he said he had to go and revise. The only way he can remember the philology is by rote, and though he finds this easy enough, he forgets it at once, or within twenty-four hours. So tomorrow being philology, he had to go and learn. We parted outside my college, where I was going to read the Sunday papers.

And then he went away,
whistling.
I can’t cope, I have no idea of what is, or is not, going on. I think I shall go home soon. The summer is always too heady at Oxford. People forget themselves and regret it later. Perhaps.

*

Appalling dream last night. Phi making love to Margaret, Jack in Charles’s car runs down Delta in his hurry to stop them. If Freud could work that one out, then I dare say I could, too, but I don’t want to. But where were Elaine and I? And Charles? Perhaps Charles and Elaine were making love somewhere off-stage, and it was them that Jack was going to stop. But that was not how it appeared. I suppose I
was
present, observing. It was a horrible
awakening.
For a minute I thought Delta really was dead. Everything was in Technicolor, and I had sweated enough to make me think I might have wet the bed. But I hadn’t. Four-thirty in the morning. Sleep impossible. There should be some law against nightmares. I took several doses of Vance Packard. Sociological rubbish always cheers me up. But I still could not sleep. Jack drove over Delta without even noticing he’d done so. There was just his corpse in the road, and I couldn’t reach him, though I ran and ran. Perhaps I am embroidering in recollection. Horrible in either case.

*

Charles is cheering up a bit. Today he said about Margaret: ‘She knows very well where her treasure is, but she has never been able to find her heart.’ I have given up any attempt at work until
everyone
has gone down. Until then my life, like everyone else’s, will alternate between emotional agonies and wild laughter at parties. Today I found myself sitting on the lowered hood of Charles’s car (there was nowhere else to sit as the car already held six people) as it travelled at sixty miles an hour to Henley. We had lunch there and then came back. A quite pointless expedition. Apparently the influence of the Beat Generation is felt even here. Charles drove fast, but not dangerously. He spoke only to say: ‘Go, man, go.’
One man had a guitar, to which a girl sang rather badly. I knew none of the other people, and I don’t think Charles knew more than one or two of them. It was that sort of an expedition. I have given up any attempt to lead a sensible and organized life. It is always the same at this time of year, something to do with the odour of river-water. One needs festivals, releases. Charles accuses me of being censorious about frivolity. But I am not, not about genuine frivolity. It is something which should be taken with great seriousness. It—the seriousness—should not, however, be
self-conscious.
We have forgotten the art of enjoying ourselves with our whole selves. Ascot is so stupid, pointless and snobbish, merely. But a point-to-point may have genuine frivolity. Mardi Gras in New Orleans three years ago had it. The native inhabitants were very shocked and stayed at home. But everyone else had a great time. That is what is so sad about Western civilization. We can only enjoy ourselves abroad. Today the only thing which could be said against us was that we were noisy. We were not drunken, but the singing was offensively maudlin.

The point about frivolity is that it is not a full-time occupation. It should be spontaneous. A year of frivolity would drive me mad. Phi’s sort of life did bore me after a time. Not that he was ever boring himself. But his life was. Why do I speak of it in a past tense? I know perfectly well, but dare not admit it.

Delta and I were not frivolous at all. We had a circumspect tea together while I told him of what we had done. He seemed tired, but laughed. When he laughs it is a complete surrender of his face. Usually he looks rather sober. When he smiles it is gently and seriously. But when he laughs he opens his mouth like a horse, and neighs. After tea we walked through the parks, then parted. Nothing said. Amiable day.

When one gets dropped like that, or at least when
I
got dropped like that, one, or rather I, became very sluggish and silly: lying in bed till all hours of the morning simply because there was nothing to get up for; driving round the country with people who were only vaguely my friends because it was better than sitting alone; spending hours in totally pointless
conversations
about nothing at all or in particular; being generally
subhuman,
in fact. Of course from time to time I got the most colossal ache in the pit of my stomach, which seemed to have something to do with Margaret, and wasn’t indigestion, and which wouldn’t go away with alcohol or any other drug, but after a few days I came to regard this ache as more or less a normal state of affairs, like having a finger missing, something you can’t do anything about, but which you go on feeling after it’s gone. Not that I ever forgot the ache properly—I’d be in the middle of telling someone a joke when I’d remember telling it to Margaret, and somehow it just wasn’t funny any longer, so I didn’t bother to finish it. Or I’d be setting off with a whole lot of people to go to some pub somewhere in the country, and I’d go in the opposite direction when I thought of buying a drink there for Margaret. I suppose this sort of
behaviour
is quite normal, under such circumstances, and it’s not really very interesting or anything, so I won’t go on about it. But what
is
quite interesting, I think, is the sudden feeling of vacuum one gets—I got—when it seemed as though a suction-pipe had been attached to my mind and my body, and there was nothing left inside at all; I was only an outer skin, which would deflate at once if anyone pricked it with a pin, or even, perhaps, if I cut it shaving. I felt that I had no blood any more—the heart had been whooshed off with everything else into the bag of the
vacuum-cleaner.
And my head was completely empty. If someone said something of the utmost banality, and, as you may imagine, he frequently did, I would think it was a tremendously new and important discovery about the nature of the world or the essence of humanity, and I would think to myself, how remarkable, two blacks
don’t
make a white, do they, how profound, what an
intelligent
man to conceive such an idea. If someone did say something intelligent, of course, I simply didn’t understand him. I was like a line out of a poem, I had no context. I existed without any relation to anything, through only basic bodily functions, eating, drinking, going to the lavatory, sleeping. Only those basic physiological needs gave me any sense of being alive. I was numb, as though I’d fallen off a wall and was still suffering too much from the shock to be able to assess the damage I’d done to myself.

Once, when I was a child, I
did
fall off a wall, actually, which is why I put it like that. I can remember it vividly still. I was playing with a friend—we were both about six, I suppose—and we were pushing little model cars along the top of this wall, and quite suddenly, for no particular reason, I fell off. I don’t think my friend pushed me or anything, I just fell, the way one does
sometimes
find one’s body has done something dreadful without telling one. And I remember lying at the bottom of this wall—it was only two or three feet high where we were playing, but it fell away to about eight or ten feet the other side—lying there and looking up and seeing the face of the friend, very white and scared out of his mind, saying: ‘Are you all right?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you,’ and I did, in fact, feel absolutely fine, not a bruise, nothing, slightly light-headed, as though I’d been on a swing for too long, but physically in tip-top condition. And then I looked down at my leg, because I could feel something wet there, and I thought perhaps I’d fallen into a puddle, but it wasn’t a puddle, there was more blood than I’d ever seen before in my whole life, and this was enormously interesting to me. I’d always been interested in blood in other people, but I’d never seen so much of mine before; it was warm and it flowed and flowed, a great red stream all over my bare leg and down to my stocking and my shoe, and I watched it in great fascination for a moment or two, and then quite suddenly it came from
me
, from a great cut (I’ve still got the scar) on my knee, and it wasn’t in the least fascinating, it was very frightening, and then it hurt and hurt, hurt very much indeed, and I opened my mouth to cry, and then I passed out.

Well, something of the same light-headedness and painless interest in my own body and mind were what I felt after the morning when I’d seen Margaret reading her part at the Clarendon Press Institute, and I went on feeling it for days, and this time the shock lasted more effectively than when I fell off the wall, so that when I came out of the trance of numbness everything seemed bearable again—almost. Anyway, I’ll come to that. But you see what I mean—numb, and yet aware of a dull ache which had nothing to do with my body, but which was in my body somehow (though nowhere near the heart, of course). I let things happen to me, I slept for hours every night, I never opened a book, I never got further than the cartoons in the paper, I went to the cinema and couldn’t remember the plot afterwards, or even the title sometimes; I just existed, vacuously, in a vacuum. And whether the weather was fine or foul I hadn’t the faintest idea, and whether I talked sense or nonsense or at all I shall never know, and if the world had come to its end in an orgy of hydrogen bombs, I simply would never have noticed.

That sort of thing can’t last for ever, of course, and it would be a pretty ghastly prospect for the human race if it could. But I didn’t get my first and last real jolt till Tuesday. I’d met Margaret once or twice in the street, and we’d said ‘good morning’ to each other with cold smiles, and
my
cold smile felt as though it had been saved up since the ice age, in fact I could hardly get my face together again afterwards, it was frozen so stiff, but neither of us had said anything of any significance. I forget when, exactly, but sometime during the week-end I was at a party, and she was at a party, and it was the same party, and we were both rather drunk, I imagine, or the conversation could never have taken the turn it did. Luckily I can’t remember most of it, but the gist was: ‘Oh, Margaret,’ ‘It was such a shame, Charles,’ ‘It
is
such a shame, Margaret,’ ‘Charles, it mustn’t end this way’. (The cinema has had a ferociously destructive effect on the manner in which romantic conversations are conducted these days.) ‘No, Margaret, it mustn’t, must it?’ ‘Will you get me another drink, Charles, darling, then we can talk about it properly.’ And so on. The result, after several complete memory-blanks on my part, was that I agreed to give her a lift to the bus in which she was proposing to travel with her fellow buskers (I like the ambiguities and puns of that word) on Tuesday morning. I have spent a great deal of time sweating with worry about what went on during those memory-blanks. I’m
afraid I must have asked her to let me do her one final service, and she must have accepted. Either that or she was so drunk she’d decided to be nice to me, and naturally the only way she could think of being nice to me was to ask me to do something for her, because Margaret knew what the centre of her world was all right. Anyhow, I woke up next morning with quite a hangover, and a few broken fragments of memory which didn’t quite fit together but which suggested, in the throbbing light of day, a rather maudlin task. But I wasn’t quite sure. So when I saw her in the street again, where I saw almost everyone those days (I think I must have spent a great deal of my time simply wandering up and down), I questioned her with my frozen smile, and she replied confirming the appointment, and I wouldn’t be late, would I? My eyes must have given me away then, even though I did have my dark glasses on; in fact, I hadn’t taken them off for days except when I went to bed, and sometimes not even then. Because she said: ‘You don’t have to, if you don’t want to, you know.’

And for a moment I coolly considered whether I
did
want to or not, but as I say my mind was simply not working properly at that time, and cool consideration left it merely as blank as, if more chilly than, before. So I said: ‘Of course’; which, when you think about it, was really rather a clever thing to say, because it could have meant ‘Of course I don’t have to’, not ‘Of course I will’, which is how Margaret took it. But since she did take it that way, and I was in that particularly receptive mood where whatever anyone else said was true, I took it that way, too, though whether I had meant to or not, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

Anyway, I turned up at the appointed hour next day, expecting to see Margaret surrounded by about fifty bitching actors, but she wasn’t, she was all alone, and very quiet, and she got into the car with her luggage, very demurely, and I started to drive off. We kept this up for about half the distance, when she said: ‘You’ll get over it, Charles.’

Now I don’t know if she meant that kindly, but I think she probably did, really, God rot her. After all, she had nothing to lose by being nice for five minutes, and I might very well have put her out on the kerb if she’d been nasty, for all she knew. (Though in fact I was far too dazed for such a thought to get anywhere near my mind, unless someone else had suggested it, which he hadn’t. But she wasn’t to know that.) Anyway, kindly or not, she said it, and the way she said it made me choke, quite literally. I had to slow
down and have a small coughing fit before I was able to see through the windscreen again. She managed to get into her voice a whole range of callousness that I had never suspected, even in her. I don’t think she meant this to happen, as I say, I think she meant to be very sweet and gentle. I think she may even have seen herself as the
grande
dame
giving a sophisticated brush-off to one of her lovers, who was just
too
young to be possible. But when Margaret didn’t speak loudly, she didn’t speak exactly softly, she gave a sort of croak, so that it was hard and hoarse, an ideal vehicle for conveying callousness, in fact. And I took it in the solar plexus. I mean, I simply wasn’t prepared, it was like hitting a man when he’s fast asleep in a chair, and when I say solar plexus I mean solar plexus, because that’s where the dull ache was, right at the bottom of the solar plexus. It was like, in fact, hitting a man who is fast asleep in a chair
on
an
ulcer.
Or kicking his gouty foot with a steel-pointed toe. The pain, I’m trying to say, was physical.

Still, holding my breath and pretending to be grave, we got to the bus station, and somehow it was easier outside the car than in, and I took out her bags and put them on the bus, and she said, ‘Thank you, Charles,’ and then we stood and looked at each other for a bit, and there was absolutely nothing to say; at least I couldn’t think of anything to say, though I tried like mad, and she was obviously doing her best, too, but nothing came of it at all. So after about a minute and a half of this, she said: ‘Well, I’m not going to stand around here like this,’ and she sounded strangely disappointed, and for once in her life completely ill at ease, and she said: ‘Goodbye, Charles,’ and I said: ‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ and we looked at each other for another half-second. Then she turned round and made for the bus, rather faster than was quite dignified, and I thought, my God, she’s going to cry, and I called after her: ‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ again, but she didn’t turn round, she just got straight into the bus, without speaking to any of the actors crowding round the door, she just pushed her way through them, and then she disappeared, and then I thought, my God,
I
’
m
going to cry, so I dashed for the car, and got into it, and for a moment didn’t trust myself to start the engine, and I thought, I shall never see Margaret again, and my eyes stopped seeing properly, but I made a
tremendous
effort of will, and they could see again, and there was the bus station in all its dreariness, under a baking sun, a dazzling
dreariness
of single-deckers and double-deckers and tea-rooms and concrete and the back of a cinema and shelters and a few seedy
shops and more concrete and more shelters and pipes and tubes and barriers and buses, buses, buses, and I felt I had to get out of that place at once, or I would die, so I started the car, and kept my eyes seeing by concentrating very carefully on what I was doing, in fact my mouth seemed to be giving me orders, talking to me, saying: reverse, brake, neutral, first gear, second gear, brake, stop, right turn, left turn, third gear, and so on; and with its help I got out of the bus station and into the street, and it told me to drive towards my digs, and I didn’t argue, I drove just as it said,
concentrating
all the time on the rules of the road and the Highway Code, and the careful co-ordination of hand and foot in changing gears and slowing and accelerating and turning, concentrating, concentrating, but I could only see directly in front of me, as though I wore blinkers, and I was frightened that someone might step into the road and I wouldn’t see him, because of the blinkers, so I drove slowly, second gear, third gear, brake, second gear, concentrating, concentrating, and eventually I reached my digs, and I parked the car, carefully, carefully, and my mouth said, handbrake, switch off the engine, lock the door, but I couldn’t lock the door, I had to run, suddenly I had to run, if I was to get in in time, so I left the door hanging open and ran, and somehow my fingers found the right key, and the key went into the lock, and the door was open, and I couldn’t see now at all, my concentration had gone altogether, I was steering by instinct, up the stairs and down the passage and into my room and on to my bed, and there I collapsed for what seemed for ever, crying my heart out.

There’s little like a good cry. A tremendous vomit, perhaps, or a really shattering attack of dysentery—otherwise nothing. One feels absolutely exhausted and empty, and one’s muscles groan with fatigue, one is too weak to go out and shut the door of one’s car. A really good cry, by which I don’t mean a quiet sniffle into a dainty handkerchief, is an athletic performance. At least, I’m no expert on crying, in fact I’ve only ever had that one devastating cry in my life, but, if it’s anything to judge by, it leaves one feeling as though one has just been massaged by an ex-S.S. sergeant, in spiked boots. I don’t know how long it lasted—but it must have taken me quite half an hour to move so much as an arm after I’d actually stopped shedding tears. The weeping is only part of it, and not the worst part, either, once one’s given up trying to stop the tears coming out. No, the weeping’s nothing, it’s the convulsions that hurt. I couldn’t stop myself—it felt as though someone had
got inside my lungs and was wringing them out like a wet
bathing-costume,
twist, twist, wring, twist, twist, twist, wring. At times I thought I was going to die, I heaved so much that my diaphragm seemed to be dislocated, I thought I should never be able to get it breathing again, I gasped and choked. Anyone watching would have sent for a doctor at once, I’m sure, and certainly, in my moments of clear thinking, which were few, I wondered if I really was all right, whether I hadn’t got lockjaw or polio, or taken prussic acid or something by mistake. Because my body was paying no attention at all to my mind, it was writhing and heaving and twisting at the orders of someone who simply ignored my mind, for reasons best known to himself, and who attacked every sign of conscious thought by seizing the lungs again and giving them an extra-vicious twist and wring. I dare say there’s a neat psychological explanation for all this performance I endured, but I’m not at all sure that I want to know about it. It would, I’m sure, show me up as a weak and possibly degenerate character who completely lacked any kind of self-control. Because that’s what I was at the time; weak, if not degenerate exactly, and quite without any idea of how to stop my body taking off on another of its crazy gyrations across the bed. What brought me around eventually was not the
fortunate
appearance of my landlady with smelling-salts (though what she must have thought of the noises I was making, I hate to think) but complete exhaustion. And what brought me out of the torpor and languid semi-consciousness of exhaustion was the nagging thought of the door of my car hanging open.