When people talk about angry young men, and they used to in those days without stopping for breath or pausing for definition, they usually seem to mean, if they mean anything, people who object to pomposity and the general nauseating self-satisfaction, greed and incompetence of the governing-class. But when I was an angry young man, which was exactly then, I objected very powerfully indeed not to any abstract qualities in any particular class or indeed in society as a whole. I objected with a full heart to all the individual characteristics of those six young actors, and I could at that moment, though luckily I have forgotten them sufficiently not to be able to do so now, have spoken for at least ten minutes about each one of them, that is to say for an hour all told, at minimum, giving precise and lucid and even lurid accounts of their behaviour, and powerful reasons why each should be given not more than one week to leave country, family and friends, for ever.
About Margaret I felt absolutely nothing whatever. She sat beside me and said nothing, so I dare say she felt the same way about me. When we got to my college, I stopped the car.
‘What are we going to do here?’ she said.
‘Nothing. I am going to see if there are any letters for me by the second post, that is all.’
She looked a bit startled, as though this was hardly a time for me to catch up on my correspondence, but she shrugged and settled down in her seat with a bored look on her pretty face, and I leaned over to her and said very loudly and clearly: ‘You have kept me waiting for something over two hours, and if you can’t wait for me for two minutes you can get out and walk.’
Well, as it happened, there was a letter for me, a bill from Blackwell’s of such colossal dimensions that I fairly reeled. I mean I’m not that rich, and I’d been overspending pretty freely the last month or two, what with one thing and another, and because I’d wanted to, too, and though the bill was only in two figures, it was only just in two figures, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to pay it for many, many months, unless my dear old dad turned up with something unexpected for my birthday, and anyway my birthday wasn’t till November. So I was pretty sober when I returned to the car, only to find that Margaret had obeyed my suggestion to walk and had altogether disappeared.
This shook me a bit, I must say, but it all seemed to fit in with my general philosophy, and I took it very well, I think, under the circumstances. I mean I didn’t jump into the car and drive at ninety through the streets trying to find her, I drove at about seventy, and I found her about two hundred yards away, pretending not to notice that I was hooting away like an old-fashioned Parisian taxi-driver, but with a very definite blush on her face, which was a rare sight, believe me.
The rest of the day was rather tiresome, really. We had a furious argument for about an hour, in which I accused her of callousness, selfishness, inability to pick friends, and generally of absence of the basic principles without which human life could not be called civilized, and she retorted with ill manners, jealousy, presumption, and complete spinelessness and lack of character. After that we calmed down a bit, and she expressed her sorrow that my plans for lunch had had, so unforeseeably, to be altered, and I apologized for thinking that she associated only with grubby young hams, and we opened one of the bottles, and went to the pictures, and by dinnertime we were almost friends. At least, when I took her home, after we’d been to a nice quiet party given by Nicholas, she allowed me to kiss her very quickly on the left cheekbone, and said good night in a voice which had already agreed to have lunch, really this time, tomorrow.
Jack and Elaine were at Nicholas’s party, but not for long as they started their Schools the next morning. Just as they were going, I said to Nicholas, let’s do our Bacon and Montaigne dialogue for them again, just to give them a few last-minute ideas, but he said no, and they went away unaided. I didn’t see why he was being coy at first, but I soon guessed, because, as I must have said too often already, I rather like guessing what is going on between people, and it soon appeared to me that Nicholas was giving this particular party for one particular person, and that it was very probably the person for whom he had been delving in Romance Languages, and whom he called Delta, but whom I, since I knew him, always called Giles Mangles.
Giles was rather nice, I thought: shy, dark, quiet, with elegant rooms in a corner of the College farthest from the traffic. He shouldn’t really have been living in at all, but someone had died, by his own hand, I think—as people do from time to time at Oxford, what with one thing and another—or perhaps he had just been sent down, or left of his own accord; anyway he wasn’t there any more, and Giles had moved back into the College from his digs. He, too, it turned out, was starting his exams next morning, which surprised me, rather, because I had always imagined he was only in his second year. He’d been a friend of my younger brother at school, as it happened, and not done any National Service—flat feet, I dare say—so he was only about twenty-one or -two. My younger brother’s friends aren’t always mine by any means, but when I did meet Giles I thought he seemed rather better than most. He liked sailing on Port Meadow, which I didn’t, but he shared my detestation of actors. Apparently there was one who lived in the room above him, and who gave noisy readings of Jacobean comedies of the bawdier sort till late into the mornings. So we had always got on all right, though we never did much more than smile at each other and chat idly at parties, and it was with some surprise that I came to the conclusion that this was Nicholas’s latest. Nicholas was usually in love with someone quite unsuitable, but he never did anything about it, claiming that to fall in love with people under twenty-five was a weakness that he never let get out of control, and I dare say he was being honest when he said it. Anyway, he never slept with them, as far as one could make out, though some of them, it seemed to me, would have been only too pleased to sleep with him if he’d asked. I think he liked them because they made him feel responsible and paternal, and he could try and educate them and teach them what was and what wasn’t important, and who they should vote for. I caught him in the Ashmolean once, developing a theory of democracy from some faintly obscene Greek vases to a young man who obviously didn’t understand a word of what he was saying and who was looking politely bored. But dear old Nicholas was trying his best. If it wasn’t for his honesty, he’d have made a splendid schoolmaster of the old-fashioned motherly kind.
Anyway, it was none of my business, and though I observed what I observed, it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. Besides, it was rather a nice party; Margaret had come with me, and Nicholas had collected some rather distinguished old bores, as he always did; bores distinguished, I mean, for their particular brilliance on one subject and one subject only. And I also had a sneaking suspicion that some of the people might be on the board of examiners in Modern Languages. For instance, even if he wasn’t an actual examiner, to have got old Henry O’Connel along was rather a coup. He was talking about what sounded like Racine déraciné to me, but it may have meant more to Giles, who nodded encouragingly whenever old Henry looked like running down. I adroitly left Margaret with Mason Arnold, who was trying to get someone to listen to his plan for a new surrealist magazine, and went to talk to Angus Macintosh about cricket. Angus is about forty, but he claims to know every single statistic about cricket that has ever been published, and, though this could be dull, usually it wasn’t. I mean he didn’t talk cricket the way wine-snobs talk wine. I never watch cricket myself, I find it too exhausting, the constant necessity of watching everything all the time in case something does, after all, happen. But listening to Angus is pure joy, and I listened for about half an hour, and then rejoined the party with the feeling that classical prose was not yet dead.
And then I took Margaret home. Which brings me to the end of this part of the story, almost, but not quite. Next morning, when I went to collect Margaret at the agreed time, there was only a note for me at the lodge, which said: At Clarendon Press Institute. Margaret. I knew the worst at once, because the Clarendon Press Institute is a hall, on
e of the few halls in Oxford, where people rehearse. It is a ghastly building, and I have spent some of my most tedious hours in it, waiting for Margaret, and when they put on plays there you are constantly being distracted by the noise of billiard balls from the room below, which is some kind of club where they obviously enjoy themselves, unlike those upstairs.
I wondered if there was any point in going, but I felt I ought to do something to round things off, so I went. Walton Street seemed even drabber and dirtier than usual. When I arrived, Margaret was sitting on the stage, reading a part from a script. It was something terribly modern and difficult, I imagined, because there were two other people also on the stage, one sitting on the edge with his feet in the audience (a trick no undergraduate producer can ever resist), and the other standing up-centre with his eyes looking firmly at the backcloth. All three were talking at once, and repeating the same thing over and over again. I watched them for about ten seconds, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I walked down the hall and said: ‘Margaret, will you stop that, please.’
Everyone looked at me, and the producer, a man I had never liked, a fat man with no hair except at the back and sides where it was very bushy and rather too lush to be true, had a sort of fit, seizing me by the lapels and saying: ‘Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles.’
Eventually I got my lapels out of his great fat fists, and by this time Margaret was standing at the front of the stage and saying in an important, busy voice: ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to have lunch with you, Charles, after all. I’m terribly sorry, but you see——’
‘I see absolutely nothing,’ I said, seeing everything. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘The thing is,’ said the producer, calmer now, ‘we are in the most awful mess, because Joanna has got tonsillitis, and can’t do it, so there was only Margaret, and we’ve only got another week of rehearsal before the festival, and will you please go away and let us get on with it.’
I like a man who is simple and to the point like that, so having disengaged him again, this time from my right arm, I said ‘Thank you,’ and left, without, I’m afraid, very much dignity.
Because there was nothing to say at all, and I didn’t feel angry or anything, I just felt that that really was that, at last, and Margaret knew what she wanted, and I didn’t like it, and, well, that was too bad, wasn’t it? But I was terribly sad, too, that it had been so ruthless a betrayal, and I felt almost like crying, and I wondered what to do now, and I went to see Nicholas, and together we looked at the food which still filled the back of my car, and he shook his head and we looked at each other without saying anything, and then we had a brief lunch of cheese sandwiches in the King’s Arms.
8
Jack Evans to Elaine Cole, undated
Elaine, I can’t sleep, can you, not with everything having started at last, and oh, I can see you from where I’m sitting, I told you, and it’s not fair, I look up and there you are, with your legs tucked up under your chair, do you always sit like that when you have to write, isn’t that funny, I have no idea how you look at lots of times, what do you look like when you’re buying the dinner, how do you look when you’re under the drier, I don’t know anything about you, Elaine, hardly a thing, but I shall, I will, wasn’t it easy this morning, I was so surprised I could have laughed out loud, we must have been good influences on each other for it to have been so easy, but this afternoon I kept looking up and seeing you, with your legs tucked up under the chair, and I wanted to go over to you and ask you, have one of our little talks, when we stop being ourselves and apply our minds, and we get quite angry sometimes, don’t we, as though it mattered whether or not Leavis or Eliot was right about Milton, there’s always Milton, isn’t there, who could care less, after all, as long as you know there are two sides to every question and Milton is somewhere quite different, not in between at all, they can’t fail to give you good marks, excellent marks, in fact. Oh, Elaine, marks don’t matter to you, but they matter to me, terribly, I live on marks, I use them to sprinkle my food like salt, I wouldn’t eat at all if I didn’t have marks, at school I used to get hundreds and hundreds of marks, and I thought they were a great supply, I could always use them, count on them like a hoard of gold, if I ever fell short, because there were so many of them, mark upon mark, and then here they didn’t give marks at all, they gave me letters from an alphabet I’d never learnt, and the first time I got one I simply didn’t know what it was, it was a beta, in fact, but I looked at it, and looked at it, did I ever tell you, and eventually I thought it must be thirteen, and that didn’t seem much of a mark, and I was terribly upset for ages, I thought it must be out of a hundred, or fifty at least, and thirteen was terribly small and unlucky and low, and then someone explained to me, and I was so relieved, it’s absurd, Elaine, you’ve no idea how ignorant I am about all sorts of things like that, did you ever learn Greek, I think marks are horrible now, they’re too precise and unyielding and like a currency of pebbles, and now we have paper money, Greek letters instead, terribly grand, I went and learnt the whole of the Greek alphabet afterwards, and of course they never go below delta, and I’ve never got lower than gamma/beta, thank goodness, and that was enough of a shock, but I didn’t know, and I learnt the whole thing, I was so ignorant then, Elaine, and I still am about so many things, will I ever learn, do you think, Elaine, you must teach me, you’re my guardian in that, you have to teach me all about so many things, and I’ll try and be a good pupil, but how can I be, there are so many alphabets I don’t know, I’ve learnt so many things, facts to be used and shovelled and put in order and set down and marked and paid for, always to be marked and paid for, and red pencils under the facts that were returned as below standard, and written in red in the margin a lot of facts I didn’t know, a sort of bonus for being a good customer, no, I’ve got that round the wrong way, it doesn’t matter, margins are full of useful things, I’m always going on about my schooldays, I wonder why, I think they were when I became me instead of a coal-miner, that must be it, words and facts and marks, all to be dealt with in certain ways, and if you did it right, you got things instead, as though you were signing cheques, you wrote your name at the top of the page and then you wrote out the names and the numerals and the facts and other people’s ideas about the facts, and they gave you scholarships in return, it’s easy to get on if you do the right things, fill in the right forms with the right answers, and all the answers are there to learn, you just have to apply yourself and learn and learn and learn, and then you won’t have to be a coal-miner, you’ll be much better, you’ll be a teacher, I always loved my teachers, because they could teach me how not to be a coal-miner, I thought it was the most wonderful job in the world, I still do, a teacher was a man who taught you how to write cheques and put money in your bank, a bank of marks, and sometimesthey were even better, they taught you things that were interesting and exciting and you suddenly thought knowledge was wonderful, the things that the teachers knew and could teach you, but you had to be interested or you never understood how marvellous a teacher could be, he could give you more than money in the bank and cheque-books to write in, he could point things out in the world that you’d never noticed before, make you see things, everything, put colour into the drab world of the mines, I think a good teacher is like an artist, he makes you see things you’ve never thought of, and he excites you, makes you want to see still more, to see new things all the time, he makes you interested, but you didn’t have to be interested, of course, and sometimes you couldn’t afford to be too interested, if you got too interested it meant that your marks in other subjects would go down, so you had to be careful, you had to know when to stop your interest carrying you away, when to stop listening, or you might find your cheques returned marked ‘Insufficient Funds’ because you have to have funds all the time, Elaine, always there had to be funds, funds, funds, or you couldn’t buy your way to a university, to scholarships, you had to have those, and if you opened your eyes too wide you’d see
things that didn’t pay any interest, if you looked about you instead of learning the facts and the words and the numbers, you might go down the mine, so you had to be careful, it’s terrible, the more I think about it, the more terrible it is, the best teachers were the ones I couldn’t listen to all the time, as much as I wanted, because if I did I should work too much for them, and not enough for the bad ones, and there were lots of bad ones, Elaine, and they all counted the same in the end, so I had to be careful, I am careful, aren’t I, you know how careful I am, Elaine, oh but I gave them some good solid words and facts and numbers today, they got what they wanted, enough anyway, they’ll give me a degree for all that, though this afternoon wasn’t too good, was it, Elaine? But music, that was something I had to find time to listen to, to learn a little about, and it got me no marks, but I had to learn for my own sake, that was Mr Sibley, he used to ask a few of the boys round to his house on Saturday mornings, and he would play Beethoven’s Fifth, and Tchaikovsky, and all the most obvious and popular things, but I would never have heard them at all otherwise, and I don’t think I shall ever love any music as much as I love the things he taught me, like the Mozart symphonies, and the Beethoven quartets, which were kept for very rare occasions when he couldn’t bear to live without them any longer, and didn’t care whether we liked them or not, he played them for himself, and I learnt them, he gave us a taste, that’s what all schoolmasters should do, that’s what they’re for, to give you a taste, to give you lots of tastes, so you can learn to tell what you like, and to know the differences between things, and the difficulties of tasting and judging between tastes, and to make you want to taste more, to make you want to taste as much as possible of all there is in the world, as much as you can before you die, and I’ve tasted so little yet, there has always been the word and the fact and the number to be learnt by tomorrow morning, and to be put in the right order, but we’ve tasted some things together, Elaine, haven’t we, things we taught each other, we’ve tasted a lot, I’d never have tasted so much if it hadn’t been for you, and I still want to be a schoolmaster and teach young people to taste, not because I want to give them banks full of marks, though that too, of course, but to teach them that there are so many tastes in the world, and it’s silly to drown everything in Worcester Sauce and tomato ketchup, we have Worcester Sauce at home, always, always on the table, and ketchup, that too, and they have always been there, and I think they always will be, because Dad thinks they make things tastier, but he drowns the food, he smothers it, and Mum’s not a bad cook with what she can afford, but he’s lost all sense of taste, there are only two tastes left in the world for him, Worcester Sauce and tomato ketchup, and when I see him I sometimes want to cry, because he’s missed so much, but he doesn’t know it, and if he did, he still wouldn’t understand, not now, he doesn’t know how many other tastes there are in the world, I don’t want to be like that, Elaine, I won’t be now, I don’t want our children to be like that, I want them to have more tastes than I shall ever have, we mustn’t be like our fathers and mothers, we mustn’t be shocked at what they like, we must always love them, but we mustn’t get like them, and we must try not to be patronizing about them, it’s not their fault, but it’s difficult, and they can be irritating, can’t they, but we’re human, we can’t hope to be perfect, but we can try, we must just accept that we shall never share tastes with them, and in a way it would be awful if we did, we’d all be the same, which would be awful, don’t you think, Elaine? I shall be able to sleep soon, it would be terrible if I was too tired to sign my cheques tomorrow, after all the time I’ve spent collecting the money, but it’s still quite early, we said good night about eight, did you realize how early it was, it’s odd how when you’re at home early you don’t know what to do at a time like this, I mean there’s always been you, and we’ve done, oh so much, but now I thought I ought to look at my notes for tomorrow, and I find I know them, I’ve been at this cheque-writing game for so long, I have it all worked out, six points about Shelley, six points about Wordsworth, only five on Byron, I wonder why only five on Byron, but there’s enough for the examiners, and I could write them all down in a nicely shaped little series of essays now, without any difficulty, and I will tomorrow, too, and I’ve always been able to write them down, ever since I had a tutorial on them, and all I have to do is decide which are the questions into which my six points will fit best, and then, there I am, another paper done, another cheque signed, it’s awful in a way, pure machine, but it’s a way, and I’d never get a First however hard I tried, you have to have more imagination than me, more flair, you have to be able to think of new points of your own, and I’m not really interested in thinking up points, I’d rather read poems, I would never know whether my points were good ones or bad ones, and it would never be worth the risk, Elaine, because if they were bad ones, then you’d have had it, you’d have paid out of the bank and got nothing in return, you can do that in tutorials, but not in exams, tutorials are places where your cheques are looked over and examined, the good ones and the bad ones sorted out, so after the tutorial I’ve always stuck to the points, and I suppose I shall always go on sticking to the points all my life, I hope not, I hope I shall grow out of them, and then perhaps I shall find that I’m a real person, and I shall know what I think for myself, and be able to say it, because now I know what I think, sometimes, but I can’t ever say it, I can only say the six points I’ve been taught, the tried and tested six points, some people never get any further at all, it’s terrible, they know only what they’ve been taught, all their lives, and they repeat it whenever they can, which is subhuman, my dad is better than that, he was never taught anything very much, so he’s always had to work things out for himself, and it hasn’t been easy, but he’s got there in his own way, quietly, slowly, but got there, he’s made the effort for himself, and arrived at an answer, not very good answers most of the time, but his own, even if worthless, oh, Elaine, that’s why I’m so frightened of Father Gibbons, he gives out marks, you see, I’m sure that’s why I do what he says, believe what he says, I’ve always accepted whatever my teachers have told me, and they said if I learnt what they said, and could repeat it and understand it, I’d go to Oxford, and they were right, and here I am, and Father Gibbons says there’s heaven, and if I learn what he says, and understand it, I shall go to heaven, and if I do what he says I shall find happiness on earth too, and that’s terribly crude, he doesn’t put it like that, but for me that’s what he’s saying, and I instinctively believe him, because I’ve always believed my teachers and they’ve always been right, but sometimes I can’t believe him, I’m not really a machine at all, I’m a person, and we’ve done what he said, and are we happier, Elaine, we were much happier before, weren’t we, but yet I believe he is right, I can’t get rid of the idea that he must be right, because he’s the teacher, and if I do what he says, then heaven, but can he be right, it’s not like school at all, the world, there are no scholarships to heaven, there is no limit to the number of places available, or to hell, either, and your whole life is an examination, and I have the most terrible doubts about this, I can’t really believe it, and yet I do, I do, I don’t know, Elaine, it’s terribly difficult for me, I can’t make up my mind, and all my life I’ve driven myself to be top of the class, to do exactly what the teacher says, and I’ve always been near the top, not often at the top itself, that’s for the ones who get Firsts, but there are no degrees to heaven, though I’ve always been just behind them, through sheer application, sheer hard grind, all the time, since the eleven-plus, grinding away, Elaine, and now, it was you, Elaine, you who took me to church, and here was a new set of rules, a new alphabet, a new class, and I was so far behind, I hadn’t prepared anything for it, and Father Gibbons will hardly have me in the class at all because we love each other too much for him, too much for the rules of the class, it was like being carried away by a good teacher, the rest of the work suffered, you, I mean, were the good teacher who carried me away, and I had to be c
areful again, and Father Gibbons is so clear, so positive about it all, and I’m so used to obeying, I don’t know, Elaine, it seems all wrong somehow, but he says it’s all true, one must have faith, I fight every inch of the way for faith, but I’m so weak, and you’re so strong in one way, you never doubt the whole thing, but you’re so weak, too, in another way, it makes it even more difficult, I have to be all for a thing, or not at all, and you believe whatever you want to believe and ignore all the rest, and that’s all right for you, but it won’t do for me, I have to take it all or nothing, I have to understand why they wear certain robes for certain feasts, and why they believe what they do, I have to have all the facts, and there are so many impalpables, I have to have the facts and the words and the numbers, you see, Elaine, and they don’t seem to matter to you, how can that be, Elaine, I don’t understand it at all, do you, it’s terribly difficult, and I love you, and Father Gibbons says we mustn’t make love, and the part of me that believes him says we mustn’t, and you say we must, and there’s another part of me that doesn’t believe him at all, and the two parts fight all the time, and it gets so difficult, Elaine. But I don’t think much about love-making these days, I haven’t, I mean, I’ve been concentrating on keeping near the top of the class, a good second, the old stand-by, marks, but though I haven’t felt that longing I tell you about, not recently, not the sudden almost uncontrollable desire, at least not often, not when I have to fight against myself so hard, you know how it is, Elaine, and you don’t help me, do you, you love me too much, perhaps, perhaps that’s the difference between a man and a woman, a man has to be absolute, definite, a woman doesn’t have to be, she takes what she needs, you’re a much more practical sex than we are, Elaine, at least you are much more practical than I am, aren’t you, I don’t know why that should be, but recently I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking quietly and steadily, not deliberately, it’s been going on silently while my mind has been checking the six points, I’ve suddenly found myself thinking about Father Gibbons and God, as though Father Gibbons was Leavis or Eliot, and I have to have my six points, of course, but this time I’ve got to think them up for myself, that’s the first time I’ve ever had to do it, ever had to appraise my own teacher, it’s a very strange feeling, always I’ve believed what my teachers have said, I haven’t questioned that they’re right, I’ve never had to have six points for a tutor, no one’s ever asked me for them, but now I’m giving marks almost, and taking them away, thinking up six points against Father Gibbons, and they are against, sometimes I stop and say to myself there must be another way of looking at him, think of Leavis and Eliot, but I can’t think of the six points for him, and I haven’t even got six against yet, but they’re forming, I can feel them forming, I think, I am going to make a decision for myself for a change, and it frightens me, because half the time I think he’s right, and then I find myself appraising, and it’s very muddling, Elaine, and I don’t think I’ll know what the decision is till—well, not till all this earthly exam is over next week, then I can start the heavenly one on Father Gibbons, and on God, do you understand me, Elaine, my mind is thinking about it when I’m not thinking, almost, and I’ve no idea what it will say, but I’ve told you so much about it before, what do you do with all these letters I write to you, you can’t read them all, there are too many, or perhaps you do, and we never talk about them, do we, I just send them off, and I know you do read them, really, because you show it without talking about them, but don’t ever read them again, Elaine, because they would show me so muddled, and changing my mind all the time, but then that’s better than having a machine, at least I do change, that’s something, but I wish I could know definitely that I believed something myself, anything, and not just because someone has taught it to me, but then it will come in time, and perhaps when I am forty I shall be so different from what I am now that you won’t love me any more, and now, Elaine, it is time I went to bed, my six points are all there in my head, neatly stacked, ready to spring up when I press the button, like cards in a complicated filing cabinet, all I have to do is press the button. It’s odd, isn’t it, that I seem to have more leisure now to think than I had before, they are good for me, exams, they’re what I’m used to, I can cope with them, I enjoy them, I know what I’m doing, they don’t bother me at all, it’s just the preparing, the endless preparing, that’s so awful, trying to get as many facts and numbers and words into the cabinet ready to spring up, in a limited amount of time, and it’s all done now, nothing more to do, all done, the Diploma of Education is nothing, I could do it now, almost, it’s easy, this is the last proper exam I shall ever have to do, the last proper exam, and it’s a strange feeling, Elaine, a whole part of my life is suddenly stopping, I’m switching the points, I’m changing the currency again, perhaps, I wish I knew, it’s as though I’ve been playing that game all my life, Monopoly, and now it’s over, and it didn’t make any difference whether I won or not, it was only a game, and everyone won, you just had to go on playing, everyone won some time or another, but now there’s real money to be earned, or there will be next year, and real houses to be rented, and even a real jail, and real income tax, do you see what I mean, Elaine, and I’m thinking about things in that world, the real one, the future, not in terms of the old one, wholly new terms, new rules, it’s odd how easily I’ve shed the idea of marks in the bank, but good night now, Elaine, my Elaine, Elaine, I love you more than all the marks in the world, and more than all the real money, and more than anything on earth, and that isn’t much of a thing to say, but my imagination isn’t free yet, and you’ll have to wait till I’m forty perhaps before I can tell you how much, but till then and till tomorrow, and don’t forget the six points, will you, Elaine, good night and much, Elaine, very much, Elaine, much much much.
Imaginary Toys Page 12
