Imaginary Toys (18 page)

*

Phi didn’t call anyone his dear, but by the end I did.

*

After we’d slept a little, he said: ‘Do you mind if I don’t see you again today, Nicky? I want to see how it looks to be ordinary for the last time. I’m supposed to go and get drunk with the other people in my college who finished today. Rounding things off. Seeing them from a new angle. All those things.’

*

Two in the morning. An aeroplane overhead. As always, a faint shudder in case it’s carrying an H-bomb. The bomb makes no distinctions. Just and unjust. Upper-lower-middle and middle-upper-lower. Does it really feel different to be in love with a woman? Am I special, are my feelings different in kind? I can’t ever
know.
I would give the whole of NATO’s stockpile to Mr Khrushchev if I am, if they are. Why do men hate each other so? They don’t. Why don’t we learn, listen, love? Hate is only inverted love, they say. Why, then, the terror that hate may win? It seems absolutely impossible, tonight, after today, with tomorrow to come.

There’s nothing very much to say about the days after Margaret went away. The way I am, and the way a lot of other people are too, I imagine—or nothing would ever get done at all—things that have been very bad aren’t thought about much. So when I woke up next morning, having slept and slept, the previous day might not have happened at all. It was there in the back of my mind, I mean, and even at the front sometimes, but it didn’t cause me any sudden desperate grabs for the nearest handkerchief or anything like that. I felt, in fact, pretty frisky, and ready for something new, it didn’t matter what, as long as it
was
new, and hadn’t got anything to do with Margaret or my old waste of a life. I spent a lot of time that morning, in fact, thinking about the family business, about getting down to work, about not fooling around any more, about the stupidity of leading a life of
momentary
sensation, and about the satisfaction that everyone always talks about getting from doing any sort of job well. Really, I suppose, I was pretty trite that morning, and I almost started packing and setting off for the great world outside. But then I remembered the ball I was supposed to be running, and I thought I might as well stay around and enjoy it a bit, because, after all, I wouldn’t be coming back, and those balls can be quite fun if you drink enough. So then I started unpacking again and began to think about whom I should take. The thing was that it was really rather late to ask anyone I didn’t know well, and, anyway, I couldn’t think of any girls around the place whom I particularly wanted to treat to a night out. That’s one of the problems of being in love—it’s such a singular state of mind, you never get around to noticing the other talent about the place, you let the other girls find other men.

So I didn’t do anything very much about it, I just conferred gravely with whisky-coloured wine-merchants and sold a few tickets and pretended to search for a suitable partner. But I didn’t put much life into the search, in fact I put quite a lot of death. One evening at Nicholas’s he told some girl we both knew that I was looking for someone, and persuaded me that she was a sad and deserving character to whom I ought to be kind. Anyway, I did ask her, and she said: Yes,’ at once, very firmly, which set me back a bit, because I hardly knew her, and wasn’t, to be frank, terribly keen on her in the first place. So I hastily explained that I wouldn’t be able to look after her very well because my duties as a member of the committee involved spending most of the time scrutinizing people at the gate and counting tickets and being generally
eagle-eyed
and inefficient. This was a complete lie, as it happened, because I didn’t have a thing to do, it turned out. But after about five minutes, during which we both repeated several times how much we were going to enjoy going with the other, I’d made her think that to be invited by me was to spend the whole night shivering and alone in the lodge while everyone else was whooping it up in the marquee, and she changed her tune a bit and said she
would
have to think about it, but of course it was terribly kind of me to ask her, and I said I
did
hope she would be able to make it, and she said she would let me know as soon as possible, and when Nicholas got me alone he tore me to shreds.

Actually I don’t know why I bothered to stay on at all. But I was completely absorbed by my lethargy, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I stayed, and the girl said she was terribly sorry but she couldn’t come after all, she’d promised to spend some time with her parents before she went to Greece, and did I mind awfully? So I was very gallant, and we both sighed huge sighs of relief almost into each other’s faces, and I dare say she laughed about it as much as I did, because I happen to know that
someone
else had asked her to go to another dance that same evening, and
that
was why she couldn’t come, and she went, parents or no parents. The young are revoltingly cruel to their parents, which is why there are all those psychiatrists. It’s not true that children fall in love with their mothers or fathers at all. It’s the mothers and fathers who are driven mad by the loathsomeness and indifference of their children, so they thrust affection on them in a desperate effort to establish some kind of family life. And they always fail, of course—and, since everyone is either a parent or child at some
time or another in his life, it is terribly clever to be a psychiatrist. Well, perhaps.

The trouble with this lack of interest on my part was that I was expected to have a partner—I mean, it looks terribly bad when an organizer turns up with no one to dance with, like the chef of a fancy restaurant being found eating hot dogs at a stall down the road. But, as the time went by, I became more and more reluctant to get anyone, I just didn’t want to dance, that’s all, and so I had to think up some kind of an excuse. There was always Elaine, of course, only I didn’t think that Jack would care for the idea much, and when I said to her: ‘Shall we dance?’ she said: ‘No,’ only not that, something much more electrifying. However, we discussed the problem a bit, and while we were discussing it I had my great idea. If I had to go to the damned thing—and I wanted to go alone, if I did have to go, so as to be the object of everyone’s pity, and thus get my free pick of all the girls, with none of that awful three-in-the-morning feeling when you think that if you see your partner one second more you will simply go to sleep, which happens all too often at those all-night affairs, and I could go to bed whenever I felt like it, you see—well, if I
did
have to go, then I must have an excuse for being alone. And I thought of one. But there were various administrative things that had to be done, such as getting a telegram from a fictional girl in Cumberland or somewhere equally savage and distant, a telegram saying ‘Snowed in’ or ‘Broken leg’ or ‘Strike-bound’ or something plausible like that, so that my loneliness would be even more tragic, and I would have even better opportunities for indiscriminate preying on girls whose boys thought they had safely attached them. Mean, I know, but … well.

So I said to Elaine: ‘Elaine, will you do something very wicked for me?’

‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘You’re quite capable of doing your evil by yourself. What do you want me to do?’

Well, I hadn’t made up my mind, quite, because there must, I felt, be one girl at Oxford whom I secretly loved but didn’t even know it myself, and anyway the tickets were so damned expensive, it seemed a pity not to give someone a good time. So I said: ‘Why don’t you come and have a drink with me tomorrow evening, and I’ll tell you.’

‘You’re mad,’ she said, ‘you know Jack will kill both of us if I so much as set foot in your digs. Can’t you ask him, too?’

‘No. This must be absolutely secret. And if Jack were to know about it he would certainly tell everyone, just to show how much he hates me. Come about six. I promise I won’t put so much as a hand on your shoulder.’

‘All right,’ said Elaine, ‘but I don’t think it’s shoulders that Jack is worrying about. We’re going to a party that evening at eight, so you can’t keep me long.’

‘I’m not asking you to dinner. I’ve given up buying food for girls, it’s simply a waste of money, and every time I look at the dustbin I feel guilty about the starving in Indonesia. Just a drink.’

‘All right, then. At six.’

And at six she appeared, and I still hadn’t thought of anyone to ask.

‘Jack says he’ll kill both of us, as I told you he would, if you so much as
touch
me. He’s put little hairs all over my clothes so that he can tell if I’ve been touched. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.’

So I kissed her very hard for a moment, a minute to be more accurate, and she said: ‘Oh dear, I wish I had some morals. But you don’t do anything to me, Charles, so it’s all right.’

‘What do you mean, I don’t do anything to you?’

‘Simply that. You don’t make me want to go to bed with you, if I must be blunt. You don’t have animal magnetism, or whatever the thing is.’

‘I suppose you mean I’m not as sexy as Jack,’ I said, feeling distinctly hurt. ‘You’re just a victim of your imagination and culture, as Nicholas would say. He knows all about love. He says it was invented in the twelfth century.’

‘I don’t care when it was invented, it’s just gorgeous.’

So we went on being stupid for an hour or so, and she promised to send a telegram from Surrey, where she lived, which, if not very savage, was sufficiently distant and big to suit my purposes, and the telegram was to say: ‘Alison has jaundice, terribly sorry, hope you have a good party, Taylor-Knatchbull.’ I don’t know why we decided on jaundice and Taylor-Knatchbull, but they seemed terribly funny to us at the time, and Elaine lay in her chair and giggled and said: ‘Yellow Taylor-Knatchbulls make the best
butterfat,’
and we moved to other subjects, equally fatuous, and I said eventually: ‘Elaine, I do wish you would come with me.’

But she got very stiff and solemn when I said that, and told me
that it wasn’t in the least a funny suggestion, and did I realize that Jack and she would have to wait for years before they could get married, and she didn’t know how she could wait that long, because she liked having sex with Jack, indeed it was one of the things that made life seem sensible and worth while, and she wanted to have a child as soon as possible; but now they would be wasting the best part of their physical lives in not loving one another as much as they could, and it was all because of that awful Father Gibbons, and really she didn’t know if she could stand it any longer.

‘It’s not that he isn’t right, really, because you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless you’re in love with him, but somehow he manages to convince Jack that you can’t really be in love with someone properly unless you’re married. Which makes life very difficult.’

‘That’s just Jack being conformist.’

‘If you were Jack you would realize how important it was to be conformist at times, Charles.’

‘I know, I know. But you’ve got to break down this ridiculous church business somehow. Anyone would think you were a couple of lascivious Turks the way you make this Gibbons person sound. He seems to have a nasty prurient mind, and very little love for his fellow human beings. I can’t think what he’s doing being a High Churchman. He ought to be an early American settler.’

‘I shan’t argue,’ said Elaine, as though she knew the Truth, but there were some people, me for instance, who would for ever be blind to It. ‘I shan’t argue, because you would only muddle me, and anyway I agree with most of it.’

Well, that didn’t get us very far, and after this there was
something
of a pause, and then she said: ‘I must go, Charles. Thanks for the drinks. I hope I shall see you again before I go.’

‘When are you going?’

‘Saturday.’

The loss of Elaine would be hard to take. The world was
beginning
to fall apart. Or, perhaps, when the cellophane came off it, I found the reality different and more separating than the illusion.

‘I’ll walk down with you. It’s a lovely evening. I wish I was in love.’

‘Don’t worry, Charles. You will be.’

We went down the stairs and into the street, and I was just saying: ‘Would you like me to drive you anywhere?’
when a voice
said: ‘No, thanks,’ and Jack appeared from behind a lamp-post against which he had been leaning.

Well, I was furious. So I said: ‘Pity my room faces the other way, otherwise you could have watched us making love through a telescope.’

‘Jack,’ said Elaine, ‘how nice.’

‘I dare say it is,’ said Jack. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got a car, though, otherwise I could give you a lift somewhere, couldn’t
I?’

‘Oh my God,’ said Elaine. ‘I shall walk by myself.’

‘No you won’t,’ I said, ‘you will go with Jack. He can’t help being the most jealous man since Othello. Humour him.’

‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘and Othello was black, too, wasn’t he, as I should be, a proper coal-miner, Othello.’

I could have hit him. But I just felt a hopeless muddle and mess, as though Jack had suddenly become Mick the old soak and the starving in Indonesia and everyone else I ever felt guilty about, the police, too, of course. In fact a sort of Mick, the Indonesian policeman. But I was still angry, so I said: ‘I think you’re mad. Have a really pleasant evening, won’t you?’

‘Of course, it would be much more fun if I had a car, and now we’ll be late, as we have to eat before the party.’

‘All right,’ I said, really furious by now, ‘get in the car and we’ll all have dinner together. Let’s go to some nice lorry-drivers’ place and feel really at home.’

I might have hit him too, actually, only he hit me. Twice. Not very hard. Once on the nose, once in the stomach.

‘Will you kindly stop this?’ said Elaine shakily.

Jack looked rather startled. I looked very startled indeed, I dare say. I dabbed at my nose with my handkerchief. Nothing seemed to be happening, which disappointed both of us. We looked at each other, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘I will not stay here a moment longer,’ said Elaine, ‘with either of you. Goodbye.’ And she started to walk off.

‘Look,’ I said to Jack, ‘this is absurd. How did it happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Do you hate me? I mean, really?’

He thought for a moment, then he said: ‘I don’t think I
like
you very much.’

‘We must behave like civilized animals. Let’s all go and have
dinner.
You can’t hit people across a table. There isn’t room to lunge.’

‘All right,’ he said. I don’t think he’d meant to hit me at all, he
was just feeling miserable, and I happened to be the most obvious target for his rage. I’d been rude, too.

We got into the car and picked up Elaine, who said nothing, in fact none of us said anything at all. We compromised on a cheap restaurant without a word being said.

‘Life is impossible,’ I said when we’d sat down, ‘if people go round being enigmatic and punching each other on the nose.
Why
don’t you like me? You don’t really believe I’m trying to seduce Elaine away from you, do you?’