Imaginary Toys (8 page)

And on Sunday, after lunch, we drove into Gloucestershire and looked round the Swells and the Slaughters and Bourtons on Hills and on Waters and in Marshes and under Wychwoods, and all the rest of that Olde Englande, but there were too many other people doing the same thing, so we took a few very minor roads and found ourselves near Broadway Tower, but not too near, far enough away to have a view to ourselves, and we counted the visible counties, and there weren’t anything like as many as there should have been; and then she said she ought to go and look at her notes for the next day, which was Political Science, I think, about which she had even less clues than English History I, so we went back, and with the roof down there wasn’t much opportunity for conversation, but what we had seemed really rather satisfactory, I thought.

And so we went on till Wednesday lunchtime when she finished at last, but before I get to that I ought to say something about Nicholas and Jack and Elaine. As usual I saw them most mornings in the Rawlinson, and Jack looked at me with great bitterness and
loathing, which annoyed me very much, but I didn’t say anything, because really he was just a bore about Elaine, in fact she told him so sometimes, though it didn’t have any very profound effect. In any case they were getting the usual pre-examination hysteria, and talked about nothing except Anglo-Saxon feminine endings, if there are such things, and they sound rather rude, and about the significance of the Green Knight, and whether or not Bacon’s essays owed anything to Montaigne, or vice-versa, and did it really matter whether or not Chatterton was a fraud, and what
about
Fielding and Richardson, anyway? Nicholas and I would sit and listen to them and raise our eyes to the ceiling, which was very dirty and had a lot of yellow stains and cracks, and we would start imitation conversations between Bacon and Montaigne about each other’s influence, but Jack and Elaine didn’t seem to appreciate it, in fact one of them would say: ‘Would you two mind going and playing somewhere else?’ or they would get up and leave.
According
to Nicholas, who always seemed to hear everything that was going on, Elaine and Jack were being much more loving than for the last few weeks, and certainly they joined together very happily to ignore us. Jack even made one or two rather desperate jokes, though he never actually addressed
me
, unless it was to refuse a cigarette or another cup of coffee or something. He would throw out his remarks in his soft bitter voice, and then look at the table, never at anyone sitting with him, not even Elaine, though she spent a good deal of her time looking at him. She had a habit of talking about him as though he were a pet animal who couldn’t really understand what she was saying, which he didn’t seem to mind, though I couldn’t have stood it. But since I knew what I now did about him, the way he treated Elaine and Elaine treated him seemed quite different, though they were, of course, exactly the same. What I mean, I suppose, is that I saw their relationship in new terms, but I hate words like ‘relationship’ and ‘terms’. The difference was in me, not in them. I just thought I understood a bit more of what was going on. At least I watched them with new eyes, being the sort of person who always watches others for some hint of their true nature, even when they don’t have any true nature at all, which most people haven’t, not when they’re young, anyway.

Nicholas was behaving pretty oddly at that time, I thought, and I kept my eyes on him, too, trying to find out what was up. He didn’t seem to be doing any work at all, and when he did go to the library it was to read something quite outside his field, like
Provençal poetry or Ezra Pound (whose economic ideas must have struck him as quite crazy) or some terribly O.K. French poet like Du Bellay. And usually Nicholas worked like a mad thing, like someone who has only a limited number of hours to save the world, and can’t spare the time for a cup of coffee. (Actually, that’s wrong, of course, because it was when he was drinking coffee that he gave this impression most of all, but you see what I mean.)

I caught him in Blackwell’s one morning as he was glancing at a French dictionary (quite a lot of people use the Blackwell’s dictionaries for their work).

‘
Hypocrite
lecteur
,’
I said, quoting something I learned at school. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

But he just smiled and said: ‘Where are you going for the vacation, Charles?’

‘I’m not going on any vacation. I told you, I’m going to travel, for months, years even. What are you doing, looking guilty beside the Blackwell’s dictionary? Is it strictly responsible to read
dictionaries
in bookshops? Is it moral? Oughtn’t you to buy one?’

‘Works of reference should be provided free in all places of public worship,’ he said. ‘Blackwell’s is a place of worship.’

‘But what were you
doing
?’

‘I was just checking something for Delta.’

‘What is Delta? Oh, I see.
Who
is Delta?’

Nicholas blushed very sharply and said, was I going anywhere in particular, or just on my way to the Rawlinson, like him? And I said he knew very well that I had nowhere to go, and no one to go with me, particularly not at eleven in the morning, and why didn’t he answer my question? But he still didn’t answer it, so I said, rather unkindly, that I was sure I’d heard of a magazine called
Delta,
and wasn’t it a rather
avant-garde
publication and in English? And at last he admitted that Delta was a person, not a magazine, and that it was not just a person, but a rather special person.

‘Why on earth do you call him Delta? Is it some kind of homosexual code? Or is it his real name?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘He must be madly Greek.’

‘He is English. As English as they come. And,’ he said quickly, ‘they come Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, Scandinavian, German and everything else.’

Nicholas never likes talking about the people he’s in love with, or, rather, got a crush on, and quite rightly, in my opinion, because,
if you’re like him, then for your own sake you should be as little ostentatious as possible. I mean, look what they did about the Wolfenden Report. Took the prostitutes off the streets and put them in phone-booths, and if anyone thinks that’s going to reduce the misery of homosexuals, he’s nuts. All the same, I managed to worm out of Nicholas that Delta was only a name he gave this particular person in his head, and that the particular person certainly didn’t know about it, so there was no point in me running round the streets shouting ‘Delta’ to find out who it was. He also said he used Greek letters to prevent himself from saying things he shouldn’t, and that this was a very good example of how successful his system was, because I still hadn’t a clue about whom he was talking. Which was true, and rather irritating. But all the same it was quite something to get such an admission out of Nicholas, and he made me promise not to tell anyone else, because it was, he thought, rather a shame-making thing to do, if not a positively guilt-loaded one, and if the secret got out he would simply feel a fool. So I duly promised and we talked of other things.

My life at this time, for these few days, anyway, was just a very pleasant drift. I read novels, not very arduous ones, and not very fast; I looked at all the papers every morning, and read all the cartoons; I lay in the sun with my glamorous dark-glasses on and thought about absolutely nothing; I drank with my friends in the evenings, but only enough to quench my thirst; I drove into the country and took in a country-house here and a church there; I led a life of what in retrospect seems great dullness, but which at the time seemed extremely satisfying. It was a period of anticipation. Everything I did, or didn’t do, was coloured by the prospect of the week to come, when Margaret would be all mine. The rose on the tarmac was forgotten, the feeling that something had snapped seemed ridiculous. There was this interval of time which
should
be spent in idling, in drifting, in letting the strength gather itself for a prolonged exertion, a great emotional bun-feast, perhaps, but mostly just exertion for and of love. I intended to let my love for Margaret dominate me completely, nothing else would count at all, I would ride the mad white horses of the sea of passion, and all the rest of that stuff. And there would be some sort of trial of my worth as a lover, some difficult test which would win me Margaret at last. Fade-out in rose and gold.

It was an awfully short period, of course, to prepare myself for anything so arduous, but it wasn’t really preparation so much as
gathering that had to be done. A final count of supplies, an
inspection
of the army. If I make it sound like a military expedition, well, that’s what it was in a way. Once one starts thinking in terms of devoted slaves and knightly warriors, and tests and trials and all the rest of that medieval junk, the metaphor carries one along; one starts hoping for a real dragon as one walks one’s girl home. But of course the whole thing was irrelevant, really, because there was never any suggestion of the battlefield about my love for Margaret. In fact, if we have to stay in the Middle Ages, my passion for Margaret would have been much more accurately described as a feudal manor. I mean there was a hierarchy, and all that, me at the bottom, and Margaret at the top, and whatever she said got done, and whatever I made the mistake of saying got done if it happened to suit her. And, come to think of it, practically nothing I said ever did suit her, except for that one marvellous week-end in the middle of her Schools.

But I went on dreaming very happily, and lying about oiling myself with sun-tan lotion as though it was some magic ointment which would help me against dragons, and one evening Nicholas caught me gazing into a jeweller’s window, full of rather exciting wedding-rings, and he said: ‘My dear Charles, before you buy a ring you should wait for her to propose’; which made me very angry.

But I couldn’t think of any very satisfactory answer to that, except that he should mind his own bloody business, and he just laughed. So we went and had a few drinks, and I stopped looking into windows. At least when he was around.

As I was on my way home that evening, thinking about the general implausibility of modern life, the lack of proper attention given to the meaning of meaning, and other related topics, I came across Mick. Mick was a well-known figure in those days, who claimed to be Irish, but spent most of his time in English jails, for vagrancy and begging and such things, and what remained of it wandering round the streets either dead drunk and harmless or half drunk and accosting passers-by for sixpence ‘for a cup of tea’ and a little less harmless. The tea, of course, was wholly mythical, since every time Mick found anyone with a soft enough heart—and there were few around, because, as I’ve said, he was a well-known local figure, but didn’t add much to Oxford as a tourist attraction—every time he got enough coppers, he would gabble something which sounded like ‘Bless you, me darlin’, but probably wasn’t,
and head for the nearest pub which would let him in, these, too, being few in number, and there he would invest in spirits. Mick never drank beer, as he once told a magistrate with some pride. He didn’t have much conversation, Mick, he would shuffle up to you when he saw you coming, and whine till you were close, and try to block your way, and if you passed him without acknowledging his need he would pursue you a few yards with a medley of
old-fashioned
oaths.

As I say, he was well known, if not widely loved, and frankly he didn’t distract me that evening from my consideration of the word ‘mean’ and whether it had meaning, and what, if anything, was meant when one meant ‘mean’, and, anyway, it was a fine night for strolling. But as I walked past him, deep in this problem, he snatched at my elbow so that I was more or less forced to look at him, and to ask him please would he mind letting me go as I had urgent business of a personal nature which did not allow me to banter with stray drunks. Only I didn’t say any of that; in fact, I didn’t say anything at all, I just looked at him, and he whined at me, thinking he’d made a catch, and I suddenly felt an
overwhelming
disgust that anyone should be reduced to living like him, in an absolutely futile and hopeless way, and then I felt great pity for him, and I put my hand in my pocket to give him something to forget, if he was still capable of remembering, the waste and shame of a drunkard’s life. And I found only two pound notes. And then, for some extraordinary reason, I gave him both of them, and he looked absolutely astounded, and so did I, I expect, and then he dashed for the nearest pub, certain, perhaps, that the leprechauns or DTs had got him at last. After he’d gone, I stood there for a moment getting over the shock, and gradually aware that a new feeling was coming over me, one which I knew only too well, and couldn’t deal with at all, a feeling that somehow it was all my fault that Mick was a useless drunken beggar, and that giving him money didn’t excuse me, it made my crime rather worse, because you can’t calm a conscience by sending a hundred-pound wreath to the funeral of the man you’ve driven to suicide, you can only surfer and suffer. And at the same time I knew perfectly well that there were probation officers, welfare officers, prison officers and many other people who had tried to do something for Mick, and they were all looking at me with accusing eyes. And I knew, too, that if they had failed there was nothing I could do for him, I was only a milk-and-water Liberal, with a conscience of aspen. And I
knew it wasn’t my fault, really, and I knew I should have felt awful whether I’d given him money or not, and that Mick wasn’t really my problem, it was something much bigger, a failure of nerve
somewhere
, a failure to grow and accept myself, I didn’t know which, or even if it was either, but somewhere I’d failed.

And I thought of myself outside the jeweller’s, and I thought of Mick’s eyes summing me up as a prospect, and of his voice whining for a cup of tea, and I wondered which of us was really the fraud. I’ve always had this sense of guilt, it follows me round like a tin can tied to my ankle, noisy and sharp-edged, but not big enough to slow me down, that’s not what it’s for, it’s to make me ashamed when people stare. Nicholas once said something rather good about me: ‘Class-systems work in two ways: they make people feel guilty of being rich, and guilty of being poor. If you have a really
unsuccessful
life, Charles, you will manage the double.’ Nicholas talks a lot of balls sometimes, and I don’t give a damn about the class-system bit. He was just so hideously accurate about me. Because now I felt outraged that I should have given so much money away. Giving money away to beggars is like paying parking fines. The next time you park the fine will be bigger. A second offence is always more serious. Ask Mick. It’s a kind of self-
blackmail
. And I’m not responsible for Mick, I’m not responsible for the whole damned miserable world, I thought, I’m not even
responsible
for myself. Which was true, in a way, but not very comforting, in fact rather the opposite, because I kept thinking of myself outside the jeweller’s, and Mick outside the pubs of Oxford, and I didn’t want to be a beggar all my life.