Imaginary Toys (24 page)

‘I’m in favour of abolishing the law against consenting adults doing whatever it is you do do with each other.’

‘I know you are, Charles, and I’m grateful for it. But do you realize how difficult it is, even with people like you to offer their support?
It’s not a question of the police. It’s a question of being accepted as a human being. People like me always hope for some permanent, some lasting, liaison—just as you look forward to marriage. My thoughts about my future private life probably aren’t very different from yours, except where you’d put a woman I’d put a man. We both want someone to love and someone to love us, someone to make a life with. There’s nothing in the least
glamorous
about being queer. The conditions of our life are far harder than you’d think. We’re always being treated as separate, and not always as equal. The whole weight of society is against us
establishing
liaisons of any permanence, all for quick affairs, one-night stands. There are plenty of queer bars, Charles, but have you ever asked a queer couple to your house for drinks?

‘And a series of affairs
is
sordid, homosexual or heterosexual. One needs the stability of a permanent love. I’m always saying that a society should be based on personal responsibility. Well, so should one’s private life be based on love, not on the whim of one’s lust. But, in a queer’s life, all the emphasis is put on the sex, never on love. You, for instance. If you know someone’s queer, you think about his sex-life first, and only then, if at all, about his love-life. And if you have the normal human weaknesses, that kind of social attitude can be destructive. You just said “whatever it is you do do with each other”. You’re in favour of abolishing the law against “whatever it is”. But you don’t think about all the unwritten laws against our being in love with each other, the social disapproval, the ostracism. You don’t think how damaging it is for people to live in a world of nothing but other queers. You think about what we do in bed. Which is entirely our business, as what you do in your bed is your business. I don’t keep nosing round you trying to find
out what you do in bed, it doesn’t interest me. But you hear the word “queer” and at once you lick your lips and think “sex”. You probably think, without being conscious of thinking it, that it was just lust that brought Giles and me together. Well, it wasn’t. Sex played its part, as in any other love-affair. But I wasn’t lusting after him, I was falling in love with him.’

‘I didn’t say I thought that.’

‘But you still thought it, didn’t you?’

‘Perhaps I did. I’m sorry. It’s an unintelligent thing to do. I seem to have been being very unintelligent recently. I’m only just beginning to think at all, in fact. First Jack told me why I wasn’t a proper Socialist, and then how much he hated me, and it turns out he doesn’t hate me at all. And now I find I’ve been prurient about you. The guilt gets bigger hour by hour. I must have another, drink.’

Nicholas got me another bottle. ‘Do you like Giles?’ he asked ‘Try not to think of us as like dogs, sniffing each other out, circling each other, bristling and snarling, then sleeping together. You know we’re not like that.’

‘God, I’m sorry, Nicholas. Yes, I like Giles. I don’t know him very well. I liked what he said the other day about the quality of life.’

‘We’re lucky,’ said Nicholas. ‘We both have something to give the other, you see, and we want to give it.’

Quite suddenly I felt terribly glad for Nicholas, and for Giles, too. What Nicholas had just said seemed a pretty good definition of anyone’s love.

‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, ‘really I am, Nicholas.’

‘Thank you. I wish I could be happy about you, Charles, but it would be dishonest to say I was. But I will be, I hope.’

‘I’ll get by, I reckon. I’m fairly resilient, you know. I’ve got things to give, if only I could be certain what they were.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘you’ve got things. I don’t mean that you’re rich—that’s the worst kind of giving.’

‘I know that.’

‘Phi once said the only power he’d ever had over people was the cigarette-cases he gave them for sleeping with him. That’s not giving at all.’

‘Who is Phi?’

‘Never mind. But you have things, Charles. God, I must be drunk, talking like a kindly father. But you’re basically decent, and
indecent in all the ways that matter. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t end up as someone I could be proud of.’

‘Shall we adopt him?’ said Giles, who’d just come in.

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too dependent on other people, imaginary ones, mostly. I think I’ll find my way to somewhere. It will have a woman and a job, and a place, and it’ll all come together eventually. And what with you, Nicholas, and Jack, and Margaret, and Elaine, too, and you, Giles, I don’t think about cloud-
cuckoo-land
any more. I think I’m going to be a human being, soon.’

‘Have a drink,’ said Giles, ‘before we all burst into tears.’

‘I’m drunk already,’ I said, which I must have been, really, in spite of my previous feeling of invincibility. But I didn’t feel drunk. When I feel drunk everything becomes rather loud and cheerful and gay and funny. But just then I felt quiet and serious—though strangely cheerful. For a few minutes I felt that I might actually achieve something some day. Perhaps I have, I don’t know.
Anyway,
I went off after a bit, and I never felt embarrassed by those two again. And it was only several days later that I remembered I’d quite forgotten to look at Giles’s room.

I went off to look for Helen. The dance was at its height, the bands and the talk competing happily with one another, the girls looking glamorous, as they always do when the bright lights are shining late into the evening, though the men, again as always, were beginning to look slightly crumpled. It was a fine night. I stood outside the marquee and watched the silhouettes leap and die against the wall of canvas, thinking for a moment (I must have been either very drunk or terribly sober) that it must have been something like that that old Plato was thinking of when he said we never saw things as they really were. And I dare say we don’t, because there are always about ten sides, at the very least, to every question, and, even with someone you love very much, there are things which can’t quite be communicated. I thought about Margaret, too, and whether she thought I was just a stupid young man, or whether she really quite liked me in some strange way of her own, and I didn’t know, and I’ve never found out, but just then I was grateful to her, because without all that misery I would never have had to think, and learn to care as I’d had to the last week or so; and, absurd as it sounds, I almost wished she was there, not with me, but with someone she loved, because I didn’t feel
anything
for her except a desire that she should be happy, if she could—I wished she was there, and was dancing round inside the
marquee, and that it was her silhouette that bounced up and down the canvas, stretching itself up tall, then shrinking down low as the couple whirled off to another part of the floor.

And then I went to look for Helen. I found her gliding round to the
forward-side
-together band with Teddy, whose girl
had
passed out, as predicted, and who seemed more relieved than sorry about it. And after a few minutes of courage-summoning, I asked Helen if she would dance with me, and she said in her deep, deep contralto: ‘Of course I will, Charles, you poor thing.’ Well, that should have been enough to put me straight back in my chair, but I’d drunk a good deal, so we set off. When we got to the marquee the jazz band was back on again, playing a nice
old-fashioned
Charleston, so I said: ‘Can you do this?’ and she said: ‘I just
love
Charlestons,’ which was my second and last warning, and I still went gamely on, and we started off quite decorously at the far end of the tent from the band, but as we got nearer the
trombone,
which was hitting its notes like conkers, things livened up a bit, and soon we were giving an exhibition performance, with the floor cleared for twenty feet around us.

The band must have seen us, I’m afraid, and thought we were terribly funny, because instead of changing the tune they repeated it, without stopping, and rather faster, and occasionally I caught sight of the trombonist, who had long fair hair and a ghastly smile on his pasty face, but I didn’t get much chance to look, because Helen occupied most of my time. She knew all sorts of variations that had never occurred to me, including one that had us both on our stomachs, wriggling like worms in a can, and another which involved taking six steps backwards, then hurling yourself at your partner like a human cannonball. Well, this was all very well in its way, and I was rather enjoying it, but Helen was no Titania, believe me, she was well sinewed, and by the time we’d made the ’twenties’ Charleston look like a dignified minuet, and the band was starting up again for the third time round, I was beginning to puff. I’m never in very good physical shape at the best of times. Now, with Helen lunging at me, her arm outstretched like a hypodermic, and wham, as she yanked at my fingers, and zonk, as my arm came out of its socket, and zoom, as she sent me spinning round her, I felt like a demonstration top in a toy shop, or the villain of a
science-fiction
strip cartoon when the hero arrives at the crucial moment and uses bare fists against the Venusians’ ray-guns, triumphantly. I mean, I badly wanted to stop.

But no, she wasn’t having that, whirling, lunging, flinging, she was as happy as a puppy with a ball of string—and I do mean a ball of string, because I was beginning to come undone, my shirt was tearing more and more at each meeting of hands, my tie had started tickling my left ear, and then, suddenly, without any warning at all, my right shoe came off and soared gracefully over the heads of the crowd that was cheering us on. But that didn’t stop her, oh no, nothing could have stopped her. Panting and roaring like some seal jumping for its tea, she whisked me and whirled me and pumped me on and on, while the band went faster and faster, and then she whisked me once too often and too hard, and I
completely
lost control, I crossed the floor in a tremendous slide, like an ice-hockey player showing off, and when I looked up I saw the main pole of the marquee coming towards me, and I thought, this is all I need, and then I hit it, and as I sank down I remember
looking
up at the roof as it slid away, and thinking: So this is heaven, and then I passed out.

That I was the sensation of the evening goes without saying. When I came round I was having brandy poured all over my face by willing, if unskilful, helpers, and Helen was shouting: ‘That’s what I call creative dancing!’ at which I decided to pass out again as quickly as possible, and did. When I thought it was safe to recover I found myself on someone’s sofa, with a medical student politely asking me if I was all right. And there I stayed till
breakfast-time
when I reappeared, to the plaudits of the by then jaded dancers, for eggs and bacon. I never asked what happened to Helen, but God rot her, wherever she may be.

And so we leave the city of dreaming spires, where learning is learnt and learned, and the dons swill the profits on their High Tables, and the undergraduates are all exactly as Max Beerbohm described them in
Zuleika
Dobson,
all dukes or faintly undesirable Americans or absolutely spineless members of the lower orders: city of crumbling stone where the moss gathers and is cherished by comical men in bowler-hats, called ‘porters’, characters to a man, and the young gentleman idles away his days, preparing himself for the rigours of a life of politics or the law, or often, simply, of looking after his estates, so sadly diminished, in so many cases, by the tragically class-directed death-duty tax, a noble city, founded with a noble purpose, which it nobly fulfils.

And now, welcome to Didcot, famous throughout the world as a magnificent example of the nineteenth-century railway-junction, set in the timeless peace of the Berkshire countryside, conveniently close to Aldermaston, where after the whistle of a train you may hear the lyrical singing of the lark, where nature and industry combine in a permanent embrace to make life more satisfying for us all … richer … more traditional … more
English…
.

Well, it all seems a long way away now, both in time and space, though more in time, as it happens, than space, because, although I now live several thousand miles away in Accra, I’m still in academic surroundings, because I got my Ph.D. in the end, largely because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and I came out here to teach, quite why I’ve never decided. But here I am, though probably not for ever, trying to work off my feelings of colonial guilt by teaching the Africans just how little old Great Britain managed to pull such a fast one over the rest of the world and grab an empire without so much as a by-your-leave. You may well ask what the alum industry of the late sixteenth century has to do with all this, and frankly I wonder myself at times, but it got me my job, and I’m very happy in it, and the guilt gets less and less
every day. I don’t know why
I
should feel guilty more than anyone else, but I strongly suspect it’s Nicholas’s fault, and anyway
someone
ought to feel guilty, I think. It’s hot here, of course, but it’s fun, and I may soon get rid of the guilt altogether, because there’s a girl here with whom I am rapidly falling in love, and who seems to be falling fairly rapidly in love with me, too, which is nice for both of us. She’s called Susan, but you couldn’t pronounce her surname even if I told you what it was, because she’s African and has a surname of great phonetic difficulty, which I try not to spell unless I really have to, and anyway I hope she’ll soon change it for mine.

God knows what people will say in England, but I wrote and told Jack and Elaine, and Elaine wrote back at once and said she thought it was absolutely typical of me, trying to annoy my parents again, but I don’t think she’s one to talk. Those two got married in the end, though it was pretty tough going for a time, especially when Elaine told her family that if they didn’t relent they’d find themselves the parents of an unmarried mother or a fallen gentlewoman, whichever they preferred, and they found she was lying to try and chivvy them up. There was a terrific row, but they gave in in the end, though I don’t think they were at all happy about it, and Jack won’t speak of them without prefacing his remarks with: ‘My parents-in-law are both gentlemen.’ They don’t have any children yet, but Elaine said in that last letter that there was one on the way, and it will only be justice, won’t it, if the child turns out to be even more difficult than they’ve been themselves?

To Nicholas and Giles the inevitable happened, which was rather depressing. Nicholas got a job on some more lasting
left-wing
scandal-sheet, and at the last election stood as a Labour candidate against a Tory Cabinet Minister, reducing his majority by exactly two. But everyone apparently thought he’d done very splendidly, and he’s been promised another go at a convenient bye-election. Giles worked at some travel bureau, and they used to take cheap trips abroad together, usually to some ghastly place where the social conditions would make a good subject for an article by Nicholas. Giles once wrote to me that if only there were unemployment among beach-guards they might get a bit more relaxation, but he didn’t mind, really. They were, in fact,
remarkably
happy together for quite a long time, and then they broke up, why I never discovered, but queers do break up, don’t they, and they’d had about a tenth of their adult life together, which wasn’t
bad, and, though I’m sorry about it, because I like both of them, there was obviously nothing anyone could do about it.

I wrote to Nicholas and said how sorry I was, and he wrote back and said:

And I think he means it, too. Nicholas will always have my greatest admiration, whatever he does.

Well, that’s what’s happened, that’s what we’re all up to, and that’s all there is to say, really. We were all beginners in those days, we hadn’t, as we used to say, a clue, we were all learning. And what we learnt, I suppose, is what we now are, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I mustn’t keep Susan waiting.