Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  ‘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.

  Anyway, that’s where Nicholas and I went, up the stairs and past the cashier’s glass box which never had a cashier in it (you paid when you got your coffee) and on to the end of the queue. Strange to say we couldn’t see any of our friends so we grabbed a table by the window from under the noses of a couple so obviously in love with each other that they didn’t need a view at all.

  ‘The way people go round flaunting their happiness!’ said Nicholas, with a certain distaste. ‘They use it as a sort of status-symbol. Sometimes I wonder whether there is any point in trying to save the human race from extinction.’

  ‘Bombs away,’ I said. ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘Oh, the government are trying to suppress the report on radiation.’

  ‘Not according to my paper. My paper says that the danger is greatly exaggerated, and that if we all keep calm and our chippers up we’ll all be all right. Not to worry, it says.’

  ‘If you will read the Tory Press …’

  ‘You mean there are horrid facts my paper doesn’t tell me? But surely, Nicholas, a report is a report. You can’t make it say things that aren’t there.’

  ‘You most certainly can. And when there is an election in the offing it sometimes becomes politically necessary to interpret facts to suit your own purposes. The report is fine, it simply states a few facts and a few opinions about the facts. But the papers pick the facts and the opinions that suit them.’

  ‘Well, I know that,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t prove that you are right and my paper is wrong about radiation.’

  ‘I am not going to go into it all with you now, Charles. You are obviously not serious this morning.’

  ‘And I can’t help it if my landlady takes a Tory paper.’

  ‘You can help it. You can take a paper of your own, for one thing. You can try and change her politics, for another. And I suppose you’re allowing her to exploit you?’

  ‘Exploit me?’

  ‘Does she charge you a fair rent? Does she make you pay a retaining fee during the vacations? Is she getting more than a reasonable return on her capital?’

  ‘Really, Nicholas, you know I haven’t any idea.’

  Nicholas, though, wasn’t being too serious himself. But he could go on like that for hours about the smallest things. Sometimes it would work the other way round. Was I paying enough for my bus fares? Were the bus-conductors getting a fair wage? But usually it was that I was paying too much because I had more money than most people at Oxford, and this was irresponsible, because by paying more than I should I was helping to raise prices for those who had less money than most. All of which was true, I suppose, but on the whole I tried not to think about it.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to think about it now because Jack and Elaine came to join us. Elaine Cole was one of the most beautiful girls at Oxford at that time, and perhaps of all time, but then I’ve always liked her, so I am biassed. She had really golden hair, not the usual Scandinavian watery-coloured stuff, such as Margaret had, but really golden, and she wore it very long, falling about all over her shoulders, so that you kept wanting to grab great fistfuls of it and rub it all over your face. If you see what I mean. And her eyes, too, were wonderfully sexy, a deep warm blue, not like Margaret’s eyes, which were the cold piercing blue you get in pictures of Mount Fujyama or whatever it’s called. (Margaret had a reproduction in her room, and I used to look from it to her and from her to it, and try and decide whether her eyes were like the picture or the picture like her eyes. I never did make up my mind.) Elaine’s eyes seemed to be swimming about, looking for innuendo, like those fish that joke with passing ships. And where Margaret had a very beautifully moulded face, very fine and classical, with the sort of skin you can almost see through, so that you can feel the bones under it when the muscles move to eat or smile or talk, Elaine had full cheeks, fat cheeks in fact, so that when she smiled everything wrinkled up and smiled with her. And on top of all that she was extraordinarily sexy.

  Jack wasn’t so good-looking. He was about medium height, about medium everything, except for his jaw which was very long, and a perpetual look as though someone had just slammed his finger in a door but he was being very brave about it. His eyes were nondescriptly grey and his hair was nondescriptly brown, and when he put on his spectacles they seemed to flatten his face somehow, so that he looked as though he’d been carved out of bone, a single straight bone, with the knuckle at the bottom where his chin was. Also his chin looked rather shiny all the time. But I mustn’t be unfair to Jack. In many ways he was a most remarkable man. He was born in a mining village in Wales, and his father was a permanent invalid, disabled in a pit accident, and now he’s a successful teacher in a comprehensive school in London, and if you don’t think that’s a big jump, I do. Everyone is always saying that what with the Welfare State and all that everyone now has the same opportunity to get on. At least, not everyone says it, but a lot of people who should know better say it, such as my family, and the rest of the people who vote Tory, and there are too many of them in my opinion, and they have been in the majority for more years than I care to think about. However—if you’d ever met Jack you would realize just how difficult it is for a miner’s son to get to Oxford; what it means to him, what it does to him, and how he still has to fight every inch of the way to get past people who think he hasn’t got quite the right background, don’t you know, for the sort of job, don’t you know, that pays a man enough to have a wife and children and an occasional holiday abroad in his own car. I don’t say that things aren’t a great deal better than they were, but I do say that they have a long way to go still, if people like Jack aren’t going to be lost to the country down some god-awful mine somewhere. And if anyone with an upper-class accent starts talking about how important it is to fight one’s way up from the bottom, and how it develops initiative, I always want to ask whose bottom he’s tal
king about. Because when your bottom is in a nice warm chair, and all you have to do is press a knob for Miss Floozit to come and take a letter, it’s very easy to talk about initiative, but you tell me how many managing directors had to fight all the way up, as Jack had to fight.

  But though I admired Jack very much, I didn’t, to be honest, like him. I respected him, but I couldn’t bring myself actually to like him. Partly, I think, it was because he was one of those people who made me feel ashamed of being richer than average, so ashamed and self-conscious that I wanted to give my car away at once. I mean, I had a car because my father was rich and successful, and Jack didn’t have a car because his father wasn’t in the very least rich: he lived on some miserable pension; and though I didn’t see what could be done about it, whenever I put my mind to it I couldn’t think of any reason why I should be privileged and not Jack, because I did not believe that the sins and misfortunes of the father should be visited on the heads of his children, or, as it were, vice versa. I mean, when you come to think about it, it’s absurd, isn’t it, that someone should be hugely rich just because his great-grandfather was hugely successful at selling something to someone? Or perhaps I lack a sense of tradition, I don’t know. Anyway, Jack made me feel uneasy, not that he ever said anything about all this; in fact he was a Tory, it was widely believed. He made me feel uneasy without saying anything at all. He just looked at me in a way which made me feel he despised me, and I hate being despised, particularly for being rich. I think if you’re going to despise someone you should despise him for being inherently or actively despicable, for weakness of character or badness of action, and not for some accidental and extraneous thing like having or not having money. And Jack would look at me—lower at me, rather—as though I personally was responsible for the accident to his father, which I wasn’t; and furthermore I wasn’t having it that I was. Not that any of this was said, but it was there, lowering. And so I wasn’t exactly mad about Jack, though I liked Elaine enormously.

  All this class business can get to be the most terrific bore, if you’re not careful. I’ve heard a group of middle-class Socialists arguing for an hour and a half about whether or not they were upper-or lower-middle, and really, when you come to think about it, that is a very deeply boring occupation for supposedly intelligent young men and women. To hell with one’s ancestors, I say, let’s go and do something now; but then, as I’ve just said, I don’t have much feeling for tradition. I’m all for being alive and all for forgetting about my great-grandfather’s morality (he was the one who founded the firm and is therefore responsible for my guilt about being rich—at times he would appear as a real villain in my life). So I’m against being class-conscious and terribly for treating people as human beings, as long as one isn’t, to adapt one of Nicholas’s favourite phrases, forgetful of that fact that one lives in a society and therefore has various social responsibilities. I’m for society, and against classes. I’m glad I’ve got that more or less clear, because otherwise people might think it was class hatred I felt for Jack, but it wasn’t at all, it was just that I didn’t like him very much. And if making me feel guilty was one reason for this, another was that he was, I thought, dull. He and Elaine made a great thing about going to church and spent a lot of time listening to classical music, both admirable things in their way, at least listening to music is admirable, I think; but he was dull and Elaine wasn’t. When I say I didn’t like him, you see, there was no positive dislike. I just thought him a bore, a rather negative character. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, see what Elaine saw in him.

  Because Elaine was one of the most positive characters around, she was so positive she frequently fused the lights, if you see what I mean. She wasn’t brilliantly clever, her conversation wouldn’t have rivalled Madame de Staël’s, nothing like that; but when she was in a room it was a good room to be in, things livened up, there were people laughing and joking and enjoying themselves. For one thing she was a tremendous flirt, she would play up to a perfect stranger as though he was the only man in the world for her, but always with a flutter of the eye-lashes which said that the whole thing was just a great joke. After one had been flirting with Elaine for five minutes one simply didn’t care whether she was being serious or not, because one was having a great time. She never made a great thing about being virtuous, like Margaret, but in fact she was always perfectly loyal to Jack, and if someone made a pass at her she didn’t get on a high horse and pretend to be insulted and all that lah-di-dah rubbish, she just laughed and said she was sorry, but no, and the man didn’t feel hurt in the least.

  Well, they came and joined Nicholas and me as we were about to have a tiresome argument, and Elaine made eyes at both of us, though particularly at Nicholas because she felt sorry for him being queer, and Jack sat and looked solemn and gloomy, and it was soon quite obvious that something was wrong between them, because usually Elaine would keep turning to Jack to bring him into the conversation, or she would pat him from time to time, just to let him know she knew he was still there, alive and with her. But that morning she was ignoring him completely, and she kept her hands to herself, and her banter wasn’t really quite up to standard; in fact she was making rather heavy weather of telling Nicholas that there would be plenty of opportunities for him to change sex, if he wanted to, if he’d only wait a few years and let the scientists finish their experiments on other people first.

  Nicholas took all this very well, as he would have taken it from no one else. Queers, I’ve noticed, often enjoy having a pretty girl make a fuss of them, probably because it makes them feel human in spite of everything. It must be rather like being a Negro in South Africa and having a white man come up and congratulate you on being elected to the African National Congress, delightfully surprising and hopeful to find an enemy not an enemy at all. But I, who was not being fussed over, could see what Nicholas couldn’t, that Elaine was aiming a lot of her remarks at Jack rather than Nicholas.

  ‘Why don’t you become a priest, Nicholas?’ she was saying. ‘All the priests in our Church are queer. So are most of the congregation. It must be the incense that brings them in. That and the robes and going to confession.’

  ‘Particularly going to confession, I should think,’ said Nicholas. ‘A good deal of father-substitution goes on, I expect.’

  ‘Don’t you ever want to confess anything, Nicholas? I’m sure the Anglo-Catholics would love to know all about you.’

  ‘Never. I keep a diary for future biographers, or my own memoirs, whichever happens first, but I’m not like Roger Casement.’

  ‘Oh, can I read it, Nicholas, please? I need something juicy to take my mind off literature before Schools. Am I in it?’

  ‘Sometimes. I should say you were more often in Jack’s, though.’

  ‘Oh, Jack doesn’t keep a diary,’ she said. ‘At least he’s never shown it to me. It would be full of breast-beating and how he was tempted. I should appear as Jezebel. But he doesn’t need a diary, he’s got Father Gibbons. Father Gibbons is devoted to Jack. I get quite jealous of him sometimes. Father Gibbons tells him everything he ought to do to be ever such a nice clean-living scoutmaster.’

  ‘What does he tell you, Elain?’

  ‘Oh, he says I shouldn’t tempt Jack so much. I ask you. He must be queer. Anyone else would realize that I have to do my utmost to stop Jack assaulting me in the street.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can go on believing all that nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t,’ said Elaine. ‘Sometimes I don’t believe one single word. But I keep coming back.’

  ‘It’s simply a form of intellectual masturbation,’ I said. ‘It’s like Nicholas’s diary. You only do it because it’s nice to lose control from time to time, to let everything go and tell someone everything private.’

  ‘Where do I come into all this?’ said Jack.

  ‘You provide her with things to tell Father Gibbons. She wants to have you all to herself, but to share you with God, too. It’s l
ike having a tremendous secret. Once you’ve told someone else you can bear it. You’re her secret, you’re very lucky.’

  ‘What do you mean about intellectual masturbation?’ said Elaine, looking puzzled.

  ‘Well, I regard all religion as a form of self-abuse, I suppose. I was really thinking of the false excitement with which people work themselves up to confess or to write in a diary. Nicholas is obviously dying to tell someone all about his affairs, but he daren’t, they’re too illegal, he’d get thrown in jail. So he writes them up, and makes them more exciting than they really are.’

  ‘You do talk the most frightful rubbish,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘I can just imagine it,’ I said, ignoring him. ‘He probably pretends all his lovers are close political associates, and his courting becomes a debate about the future of Socialism. “Today I had coffee with E, J and C. None of them are serious. Afterwards I saw X”—or Y or Z or whoever he’s in love with at the moment—“and we talked about the role of fraternity in the development of equality. We came to an agreement that further discussion should be postponed till he has finished Schools.”’

  Nicholas had blushed a deep red, something he didn’t do very often, so I felt I had made a lucky hit somewhere. It wasn’t often that I scored even a near-miss.

  Elaine laughed and said: ‘Do you really write things like that, Nicholas?’

  ‘That’s my business,’ he said.

  ‘Leave the poor sod alone,’ said Jack. ‘I must go and do some work.’

  Jack and Elaine were both reading English, and for some reason people reading English started a week later than people reading History. This was either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the state of one’s revision and nerves.

  ‘Go and work, if you want to, Jack,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ve done enough to get me a Second, it’s all I want.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

  ‘I am not going to do any more work this morning, Jack. What are you waiting for? Go on, if you’re going. I should say it wouldn’t do you any harm at all to read a few books.’