Imaginary Toys (2 page)

‘Ah, Hammond, come in. Doing all right, are you?’

‘Wasn’t that party last Friday awful, Harold?’

‘Ghastly. Have a glass of sherry.’

‘Well, yes I will, thank you.’

‘Did you ever hear the story about …?’

And that would be that for the next month or two, and the alum industry looked after itself.

But that morning I thought I’d take a look at the things which made the Bodleian so proud, so I parked the car under a notice saying ‘Permit holders only’ and went up the stairs feeling that I’d got on terms with the police at last. Only when I got to the top I thought I might as well stroll through the Reading Room to see what was going on, and who was sitting next to whom, and all that sort of thing. The place was fairly quiet and empty, it being examination time, and a fine summer day, too, and apart from the regulars toiling away at their theses on ‘Imagery in Early Icelandic Sagas and its Influence on the Celtic Twilight’, and ‘Marvell and Milton: a Study in Ideological Conflicts’, there was only the gentle murmur of the girls at the Reserved Books Counter. But I saw Nicholas Sharpe sitting by himself, so I went and looked over his shoulder, and saw he was reading some fearfully learned journal about Romance Languages, and after a bit he turned round and said: ‘Voyeurism, Charles, that’s your trouble.’

‘Who are you trying to impress?’ I said, because Nicholas was writing a thesis on something to do with Trade Cycles.

‘Just doing a little reading for a hard-pressed friend,’ he said, shutting the journal.

With Nicholas this meant one thing and one thing only—he
was in love again, though he probably didn’t know it. I like him a lot, Nicholas, I always have done; he’s witty, extremely able, extremely energetic, very sensitive, very good-looking, in spite of his glasses, and altogether a nice guy. But he’s rather sad, too, because he doesn’t like women; in fact, he never even notices them, because he’s queer, and I think that’s sad. He also has rather extreme views on the major political issues of our time; in fact, he’s only a few feet outside the Communist Party, which I, as a good middle-of-the-road Socialist, regard as far more perverted than being homosexual. These views he holds with a tenacity that makes argument impossible, unless one is prepared to go into the
fundamentals
of absolutely everything from traffic regulations to the nature of sovereignty, which on the whole I’m not. So when he’s finished mauling my objections to what I regard as his
Neo-Stalinism
, all I can do is shrug and say that he may be right, but he doesn’t know about life because he doesn’t understand about women. He always gets very angry when I say this, and starts telling me I’m a Fascist, which I’m not, and that my attitude to queers is as bad as the Nazi attitude to Jews, and that there will be no room for people like me when the revolution comes. So I usually put my arm round him then and say: ‘Oh, but I love queers,’ and he changes the subject.

Anyway, I wasn’t in any mood for his left-wing trash just then, and as it happened I hadn’t got much to say for women, either, and luckily he looked at me and saw I wasn’t feeling very happy, and said: ‘What’s she done now?’

So I told him, and he shrugged and said he wasn’t making much headway with Romance Languages himself, and why didn’t we both go and have some coffee at the Rawlinson? But I said I was feeling guilty and thought I ought to look at a few manuscripts, and he said why didn’t we meet in half an hour and drown our sorrows together—to which I agreed.

So I went to Duke Humphrey, the old part of the library where the manuscripts are brought to you out of the depths of the earth, and after about ten minutes I decided that it had been a great mistake even to pretend that I had an interest in alum. I wasn’t altogether sure what it was used for, for one thing, and for another I had grave doubts whether it was really very interesting to know that the business men of the late sixteenth century were even more immoral than their descendants of the twentieth. There were, it suddenly struck me, life and scholarship; and one could either
spend one’s time worrying about the ghastliness of the past or in trying to do something about the ghastliness of the present; to make the current ghastliness, in fact, a little less ghastly. There was an argument, I admitted, that knowing about the ghastliness of the past might help one to understand the nature of ghastliness itself, and throw valuable light on contemporary ghastliness. Scholarship might very well have its purpose. But wasn’t I, I thought, looking out of the window, the sort of man who was best occupied on the practical side? Might it not be better to leave these questions of what might be called ghastliness-theory to those who really appreciated them—men who could analyse ghastliness, cut it down to various types and sub-types, examine their inter-relationships, define, equate, judge? Such men were essential to any community, I granted. But was I one of them? Didn’t my own acquaintance with ghastliness equip me rather to deal with it in its manifest daily forms, than to evaluate the influence of its past upon its present?

Somehow these deep questions led me to examine the lawn below the window. Stretched out upon it were two young men, their half-naked bodies surrounded by pieces of paper—their essays, no doubt. Beside them, on a deck-chair, tilting back and forth, sat, or rather sprawled, a man in a white cotton jacket and light-grey trousers, a panama hat over his eyes, and one foot tapping lightly in the air. From time to time he would raise an arm languidly, as if to make a point, then let it drop, as if utterly exhausted. The last tutorial of the academic year, an Oxford idyll, white wine almost certainly for tea, punts nuzzling the river-bank like tired crocodiles.

Thinking of punts, I thought, too, of Margaret. She had
promised
me her time after Schools, some of it, anyway. We were to punt and drink and go to parties and dance at a
Commemoration
Ball; we were to have a magnificently old-fashioned, old-hat time for the last few days before the elms sighed over us for the end of youth. Gently I moved into a daydream of the afternoons to come. Perhaps she really was frightened of hay-fever. Perhaps her nervousness before an examination should not be taken too seriously. I had a splendid quarter of an hour’s relapse.

When Nicholas came to find me I was half asleep. The
manuscript
had shut itself, as far as I was concerned, for ever. Harold Brandon would chuckle, and tell me another story.

As I handed it in to the desk I said: ‘I shan’t be needing it again, thank you.’

‘We have some other things out in your name, Mr Hammond,’ said the girl. ‘Do you want us to keep them for you?’

‘No, thank you. I have abandoned scholarship.’

‘What did you say?’ said the girl.

‘Good morning,’ I said, leaning across the counter and taking her hand. ‘And goodbye. You’ve been so helpful.’

I raised her hand to my lips, gave a small bow, and left.

‘Really,’ said Nicholas, ‘if I’d done that you would have accused me of exhibitionism.’

‘I was merely showing my appreciation for the really splendid work those library people have done for me, and, besides, I think that girl is rather pretty.’

‘You looked so gloomy half an hour ago.’

‘I was. But I had a vision while I was sitting there. I looked out into the garden and saw an illustration from a medieval Book of Hours. Everyone was sitting around waiting for nothing to happen on a lovely summer day. Oxford at its most ninetyish.’

‘High time you got out into the world and saw a bit of life,’ said Nicholas, getting his own back for a change. ‘Do you have any plans?’

Well, no, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I knew I had no intention of staying at Oxford any longer—it would have been a sort of deliberate self-paralysis, and I didn’t want to end up as a failed scholar, whatever else I might do. No, there was always my father’s firm, if the worst came to the worst, and anyway my father was very keen on people knocking about the world a bit and seeing things, seeing how the other ninety-nine point nine per cent lived and all that sort of rubbish. He used to talk vaguely about sending me to Canada for a year, where the firm had a branch factory. I’ve never liked the idea of Canada—cold, I imagine, and a sort of America without the trimmings, and lacking in the civilized amenities, like art galleries and theatres and good monthlies. Not that I read the monthlies much, but I like to know they’re there for me to read if I feel like it. It’s not much to ask, and maybe Canada does have some good ones, but I have the feeling that it’s the sort of place that hasn’t, that’s all. Anyway, my father wasn’t set on Canada; there were a lot of other places he approved of as well, and, though he did want me to get in there and make a few munitions eventually, he was prepared to wait till I’d seen a few of the places they were likely to be used by or against.

‘I think I’ll travel a bit, you know,’ I said as we came out into the Broad.

‘Idle bloody rich.’

‘Would
you
work if you didn’t have to?’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas at once. ‘If you had any sense of
responsibility
at all, you would realize that the amount of work to be done to make the world habitable for the vast majority of human beings would occupy every man living his whole lifetime, and then some.’

Nicholas was always bringing out statements like that;
statements
which made you feel guilty about wondering whether he was inventing statistics or actually could prove what he said. I mean, he may have been absolutely correct, but he never gave proof. It’s rather sad that no one goes to political meetings any more, because he sounds magnificent when he’s talking and I have a feeling that a lot gets lost when it’s reduced to paper.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to take him up on that one, knowing perfectly well that he would end up by exhorting me to do
something
serious; something serious in his eyes being agitation of an unpaid sort for or against bombs, pensions, civil liberties, strikes and Tories. Against Tories, of course, and for strikes.

So what I said was: ‘I think one ought to broaden one’s outlook, don’t you?’

‘On the Riviera, no doubt, or among the rotting canals of Venice.’

The trouble with people like Nicholas is that they always assume the worst about you. If I’d said I was going to Sicily to work for Danilo Dolci he would have laughed and said: ‘For a fortnight? I’m sure he’ll be terribly grateful.’ So I didn’t bother to answer, I just pulled him across the road and into Blackwell’s, because I can’t drink my morning coffee till I’ve had a look at the new books. One never knows; there may be something one suddenly wants to read, like a new William Golding or an old Ivy Compton Burnett, or they may have decided to stock
Astounding.
You never can tell with Blackwell’s. I’ve never seen a shop so quick on the draw with Samuel Becket, for instance, and they are devoted salesmen of
The
Evergreen
Review.

As a matter of fact they hadn’t got anything new that morning, except a volume in the series on English place-names and a whole lot of theological paper-backs with titles like
The
Courage
To
See.
But I suddenly felt like clutching a new book in my hand, something rather shocking and
derrière-garde
that I could flaunt at Margaret
when I went to collect her at half past twelve. I didn’t want a book to read, you see, I wanted one to carry, so I chose one of those explosive cowslip covers with lots of purple paint and a piece of paper wrapped round it which said, incredibly, that A. L. Rowse, Aneurin Bevan, Edith Sitwell, John Wain and Lionel Trilling all thought it was the tops.

Nicholas protested that it was just a piece of neo-Fascist
semi-autobiography
; but it was very cheap, and I said: ‘If it’s good enough for Aneurin Bevan, then it’s good enough for you, too, Nicholas.’

They wanted to wrap it for me, but I wasn’t having that, so we came out into the sunlight again and I carried it with the jacket glittering down the Broad towards the Rawlinson. It really was a very splendid day and I rejoiced to think of all the people taking exams, wishing like mad, I hoped, that they were dead, or
lifeguards
on some Florida beach. The tar looked as if it would certainly come to the boil in the early afternoon.

‘I must get some sun-glasses,’ I said.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Nicholas. ‘You seem to be trying to consume as conspicuously as possible this morning.’

‘And why not? It’s my last week in Oxford. Well, my last few weeks. It’s time we both woke up.’

‘I am quite awake, thank you.’

‘I meant myself and Oxford.’

‘Listen,’ said Nicholas. ‘Half an hour ago you had a face as long as a boot, and I felt reasonably sorry for you. I’m a sucker, I know, for people who look sad. But I can change. So shut up. The Rawlinson will be full if we don’t hurry.’

So we went, but I still wanted some sun-glasses. Sun-glasses are like bathing-costumes, you have to buy new ones every year. Also they make me feel very rich and important, like a film-star on holiday, although I know perfectly well that two and a half people out of every three at Oxford wear them at the slightest sign of a chink in the clouds. But just then I felt very ordinary, and I wanted to
be
ordinary and happy and not to think about Margaret at all, except in terms of a new, glamorous Charles Hammond, with dark hair showing just a touch of silver here and there, the idol of teenagers from Wisconsin to Wessex, Eng.

The Rawlinson is a dingy place. It’s a huge room with dirty frosted glass down one side so that you can’t see the muck they’re shovelling into the kitchen, and three of the ugliest and most
pointless pictures I’ve ever seen in my life on two of the other three walls. But the fourth wall looks out, through its three windows, at the Broad. You can see all the way from Elliston’s to the King’s Arms, which can be a fine view, especially on a summer morning. Of course, the coffee is absolutely revolting, the sort of stuff they give horses when horses have colic, if that’s what horses have, but the point is, about the Rawlinson, that everyone goes there, view or no view, horse-tonic or no horse-tonic, because that’s where everyone else goes. I dare say some people go elsewhere, and maybe the Rawlinson doesn’t even exist any more, but in my day anyone who was anyone could be met there nine days out of ten between eleven and twelve, the tenth day being, of course, Sunday when the place was shut; why, I can’t think, since there was nothing whatever to do on Sundays, and all they had to do was open the joint and customers would have come flocking in to read bits of the
Observer
to each other.