Schizophrenic, homosexual, a little drunk, it is high time I went to bed. If only one could sleep without dreams.
7
Charles Frederick Hammond
On the last morning, when I drove her down to the Examination Schools as usual, I was really rather excited. When I dropped her I said: ‘Don’t forget, Margaret, after this morning we’re going to have the time of our lives. You just go in there and show them.’
‘It’s too late now to show them anything they don’t know already,’ she said. ‘Honestly, after a week of these papers I feel as if I won’t know what to do this afternoon. It gets to be a habit, going in there and writing.’
‘Don’t worry about this afternoon,’ I said, ‘I have it all cared for.’
‘Well, thanks for the lift, Charles.’
And off she went for the last time, in those long black stockings which really gave her something extra, I’m not sure what. That absurd uniform that girls have to wear for exams makes most of them look awful, like overgrown schoolgirls, but Margaret seemed to be taller and grander, and the silly little hat they have to wear looked on her like the badge of some terribly O.K. foreign decoration. Dear Margaret, I thought, it will be nice for you to look ordinary again. But for a moment I kept the picture of her in her black hat and black stockings and black skirt, and wondered whether she shouldn’t just pause for a minute before she threw away the hateful things, pause to consider how they’d protected her for three years, in a sense, how the sheltered little world of Oxford had given her a pretty good time, and whether the outside world was really quite as attractive as it always seems in the days before you enter it. Anyway, I didn’t think about this for very long, partly because, although I had had a pretty good time myself, I’d also had enough, and after a while the continual postponement of life can have a very bad effect on one’s character, and make one very dissatisfied and gloomy and even intellectually arrogant, and partly because I had to go and buy the lunch I was going to give her.
The market at Oxford is one of those covered ones, so that you can wander about in it for hours, quite lost to the vagaries of the weather. For instance, among its many attractions is a shop which sells things like tinned grasshoppers and chocolate ants and bumble-bees, and there’s the pleasure of selecting from about fifty different kinds of cheese, and then there’s the appalling problem of the kind of bread one’s going to have, so that one really can spend hours in a world of delicious sights and smells. And nothing in the lunch I was planning was in the very least ordinary, everything had to be not just special but extra-speciaj (and pretty expensive too, I don’t mind saying), and rare and a treat and delicious. Kumquats I bought, to begin with, and smoked salmon, which isn’t all that special, I admit, but a treat all the same, and really brown brown bread to go with it, and then I thought perhaps she would prefer caviar, so I bought some of that, too; and then, for the main part of the meal, since we were going to eat it out of doors, thick slices of ham, chosen with great care for juiciness and flavour, nice and smoky, and six lettuces so that we need only eat the hearts, and some spring onions (which could always be replanted somewhere along the river-bank if she thought them too daring), and some tomatoes and a whole cucumber and some celery, really crisp young celery, without any of those hairs that spoil the crunchiness; and as well as the ham I bought some slices of cold beef, the sort you put between great hunks of new white bread with lots of butter, which you guzzle rather than eat, and then new white bread, of course, and pounds of butter, and then fruit, peaches and apples and even some ripe apricots. And that was only the beginning. By the time I’d finished I had a whole line of men carrying bags, I’d spent pounds and pounds, and there was quite enough to keep two people alive very comfortably for a week, without either of them having to do anything more strenuous than pay a visit to the refrigerator. And then of course there had to be wine, lots of it, because if you spend a whole afternoon and evening drinking, even quite slowly, just sipping in fact, you can still get through an awful lot of liquid. So I bought every colour—rosé for the river itself, and for the chicken (did I mention that?), white wine for most of the time, red for the evening. And not just any old wine, either, but the sort which costs much too much, however good it may be, because it’s smart and clever to drink it, and the swank papers pay wine merchants masquerading as connoisseurs to write about it in chi-chi little columns. And there was even a bottle of brandy, in case we needed it for medicinal purposes, or stayed out too long and got cold.
As I loaded all this into my car I was very glad that I had the sort which you can take the roof off, otherwise there simply would not have been room. Because I also had in the back a very ancient gramophone, the sort that has a huge horn and you can’t hear anything because of the scratch of the needle, but which looks marvellous on the prow of a punt, if a punt can be said to have a prow, and which is just marvellous, anyway. Besides, you can always take the horn off, if you want to, and use it as a megaphone, and I thought that morning that if we were going to be silly we might as well do it thoroughly. With this went my collection of worn 1920 records, Tea for Two and Hey, Maggie; Yes, Ma; Come Right Upstairs and Ukulele Lady and Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby and other similar gems of the period. I don’t know what it is about the records of that period—I suppose they’re the ones to which my generation’s parents got married and had our elder brothers and sisters, but unless there’s something very horrid and deep-seated and neurotic about that, it can’t be why they have such an appeal. Perhaps we remember them from the not-quite-soundproof womb, I don’t know. Anyway, they’re funny, and they’re also extremely good tunes, and besides it’s marvellous to have ancient gramophones on which to play them. Actually, I prefer Lionel Hampton and Billie Holliday to almost anyone you can mention, but the dear old Savoy Orpheans also have their place in my hagiography, with their beat so heavy you can feel the musicians chomping along as though they were in a chain-gang, and their absurd violins, and their plunkety-plunkety ukuleles. Those may not have been the days, and how should I know whether they were or not, but it’s nice to pretend they were and we’ve missed them, and therefore we’re deprived and to be pitied. Well, not really, but they do make one very nostalgic.
Anyhow, to get back to the story, at half past twelve I’d already been waiting for Margaret for twenty-five minutes, because I hadn’t frankly expected her to see the thing out to the bitter end, but she did, and at last she appeared, having given the academicians far more than they deserved, even though it can’t have been all that much. But at least she’d made her effort, and I had made mine, too, the necessary champagne waiting in my car wrapped in wet towels (the Proctors always got very cross if you started drinking it in the street, I can’t think why), and as soon as I saw her I went to greet her with my arms stretched out, to tell her to come and eat, drink and be merry, but first, drink. But one can’t keep one’s arms outstretched for very long when there are a whole lot of people in the way, so I stopped pretending to be a bird, or a head-waiter, folded my wings, as it were, and tried to force a passage through to her. Throng was the only word for it, hundreds of people telling each other how shamefully they’d done, correctly enough, I dare say, and how simply divine, my dear, it was that the whole bloody thing was over. There were one or two calm self-sufficient-looking men who spoke to no one, and one girl in tears, and these men at least looked as though they were already certain of their success (I think they must have got jobs before they’d even sat down to start writing), but most of the place was filled with hooligans shouting and laughing and jumping on their mortar-boards and such like juvenilia, and there was Margaret, too, in the middle of a lot of hooligans, moving very slowly and noisily towards the door. My heart began to sink a bit as I got near them all, because they were actors, for the most part, and actors don’t have to act to look like hooligans, and when they do act like them they make a very good job of it indeed. I don’t have much against actors when they’re acting, but when they’re not I fi
nd them extremely tiresome. For one thing, even when they’re not on stage, they’re still always giving some sort of a performance, and when you get about six of them, as there were then, each one is doing his damnedest, which is pretty damned, usually, to act the others out of the room, or, in this case, out of the huge vestibule of Thomas Jackson’s masterpiece, the Oxford Examination Schools. And as I edged my way to them, my heart sank a little bit more, because I wanted Margaret for myself, and I knew that if these intolerable little show-offs didn’t move off pretty quick I’d be left with Margaret and a cast of thousands, as it were, which would not be in any way the same thing at all. They were jabbering away like parrots, too, which annoyed me, because Margaret could hardly hear what I was saying, which was, roughly: Come along down to my car, baby, where the champagne is just bursting to get out of the bottle. In fact she didn’t catch on till we were all half-way out of the door, but then she did, only too well.
‘Champagne! Oh, Charles, how marvellous! Goody!’
Well, by the time we were actually outside Thomas Jackson’s masterpiece and on the pavement, she’d expressed her delight so loudly and cheerfully that all the actors wanted champagne too, in fact they said: ‘Oh, how nice, Charles’, and ‘Oh, Charles, how sweet of you’, and ‘Charles thinks of everything’, and ‘Did someone say champagne?’ So I was in something of a fix. But I wasn’t having all that lot drinking my drink, and certainly there wasn’t room for them where I was going with Margaret, and anyway they were being, I considered, unduly presumptuous. So I said: ‘Sorry, chaps, the champagne is for Margaret, not for you’, only not that, something much ruder and more to the point, though with roughly the same meaningful content. But they didn’t pay any attention they simply said: ‘Oh, but Margaret will give us some, won’t she, Margaret?’ and ‘We know you, Charles, you’ve got bottles of it,’ and ‘Charles has got bottles and bottles of bubbly for everyone,’ and ‘I did hear someone say champagne, didn’t I? And so I said: ‘Margaret, for Christ’s sake,’ and she just shrugged and shouted over the general hullabaloo: ‘Don’t be a spoilsport, darling,’ and after all it wasn’t every day that she called me ‘Darling’, so I gave in, and we all went off to my car, and we drank the drink out of the bottle, and they were really very nasty young men, I thought—in fact I loathed them—but Margaret seemed quite happy, and wanted to throw the bottle through a window, but we stopped that, and then suddenly everyone moved off to a nearby pub for lunch and more drink. In fact, after a moment of stunned incomprehension, I noticed that Margaret had gone, too, which annoyed me very much indeed. To be frank, I was getting rather ill-tempered by now, so I marched off after them, and got hold of Margaret and said I had everything laid on, and why didn’t she come? And she said, oh, but she must just have a drink with her friends, and I said, for God’s sake, there were quantities and quantities of drink waiting for her with me, and she said, oh, but that wouldn’t be quite the same thing, would it? and, anyway, after about a minute of really foul language when one of the actors stubbed a cigarette out on the thigh of my trousers, I agreed to one drink, but only one, and then we really must go.
I expect you can guess the rest—there was not just one drink, there were many, many drinks, and I didn’t get Margaret out of the pub till it shut, and half her heroes were dead drunk, or making a very creditable attempt to play the part, and she’d eaten two revolting pork-pies and a ham sandwich, and the lunch I’d so carefully arranged (not to say expensively) might just as well have stayed where it was in the shops. I can’t remember what anyone said during those hellish two hours to closing time, but to give you an idea of the general wittiness and intelligence of the conversation, I think this is not an unfair pastiche of it:
‘Frank, that’s my cigarette.’
‘Don’t be so possessive, Charles, jealousy is a most terrible thing. You could make yourself quite unhappy if you treated everything you owned as yours, like that.’
‘Oh, I remember when I was playing Iago to Vernon’s Othello, and Desdemona—who was Desdemona?—oh yes, Josephine—well, Desdemona forgot her lines—how does it go?—that bit where …’
‘And I told Jeffrey, I said Neville would never allow it, and of course he didn’t, and Jeffrey was terribly upset, and so everyone else got nervous, and the whole performance was absolutely ruined.’
‘That is my cigarette.’
‘… hopeless. So we tried again. This time I took Hamlet, and he took Horatio, and of course it worked perfectly, so of course when the time came and I was given Rosencrantz …’
‘When was the last revival of’Tis Pity She’s a Whore?’
‘… Beckett, I ask you, as though anyone could hope to be definitive in Beckett. He’ll learn. When he’s done a few years at the Theatre Royal, Southsea, playing the wronged husband, and lost a bit of that hair he’s always combing, he’ll make a very passable second footman—provided he can train his toes not to turn in so much.’
‘Charles, can you lend me any money? I don’t seem to be able to pay for this round, quite.’
‘… so he said “Mushhhrrrumps” and …’
‘Margaret, let’s get out of here, please.’
‘Very funny. Ha, ha. I suppose that you think that just because you didn’t undo the wrong sort of button at the end of Lear, you can set yourself up as …’
‘Larry … John … Ralph … Michael … Richard …’
‘Charles, you haven’t got ten bob, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Edith … Sybil … Peggy … Dorothy … Flora …’
Names, names, names, spilling all over the tables, names of actors and actresses that I admired, spilling about among the cigarette-ends, tarnishing in the glossy gossipy hungry malicious mouths of the jeunesse dorée of the undergraduate theatre; names, names, names, used as coins to buy a few seconds’ speech, a few seconds of reflected glory; names like coins, once polished and bright, now grubby with too much handling, bitten by too many teeth, slandered even while they were praised, all the sordid apocryphal stories standing between them and their performances like an impenetrable safety curtain; names gradually losing their power to entice and charm, names losing their faces, names, names, names.
After a while I simply gave up trying to get Margaret out, I just sat in a corner and looked sour and said nothing and refused to lend them money. But I couldn’t stop them picking up my cigarettes. As soon as I put one down, it had gone, God knows why. I don’t know what it was about that afternoon, none of those people had ever bothered to steal cigarettes from me before (they never had the chance again), but they disappeared the moment I laid them in the ashtray. The actors were simply being highly acquisitive. No property rights for them. But it’s not something I want to think about much; after all, cigarettes weren’t what I was angry about. It was just the second of the last great betrayals of Margaret, and I sat there feeling not in the least sorry for myself, but hearing a voice somewhere inside my head saying: serves you bloody well right, now will you pay attention? It said a great deal more, too, in fact I think it surveyed the whole of my courtship of Margaret in unnecessary but impartial detail, drawing conclusions, pointing trends, assessing the significance of this and that incident or gesture, till I was absolutely fed up with myself; and so far was I from feeling self-pity that the only thing I wanted to do was go out and start an altogether new life, altogether new and better and simpler, far from Margaret and Oxford and all these absurd popinjays with their carefully modulated voices all shouting at once. In fact, I rose at one point, to go, but Margaret saw me, and said where did I think I was off to, hadn’t I promised to take her out, and the exquisite humiliation of that (for me) and the wonderful arrogance of it (for her) set me back in my seat with a little glow of purely objective pleasure. And shortly after that everyone had to leave, and although some of them were not, in my opinion, fit to walk the streets, let alone attempt to ride bicycles, as they did, stealing the bicycles without hesitation from the kerbside, I was damned if
any of them was going to ride in the back of my car, and I said so. I knew they’d only smash the horn of the gramophone, or get me arrested for carrying drunken passengers, if that’s possible, which I’m sure it must be (you can’t go near a car these days without doing something criminal), and although Margaret protested I simply said that if she wished to go with her friends, she could, but she would have to go on foot or pinch a bicycle, as I and my car would be very happy to spend the next few minutes entirely alone together. And she noticed at last that I was rather angry, and, deciding with a speed which did credit to her sense of opportunity that the party was over, got into the car without even bothering to say goodbye to her acting friends, who were, by now, giving an impromptu performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle on a traffic island in the middle of the High. And for pestle they read something quite different and without, as far as I know, any textual authority whatsoever, but which, I remember thinking as I drove past, would, with any luck, land them all with stiff sentences for indecent exposure.
Imaginary Toys Page 11
