Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  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 ag
ainst 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?’

  ‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t believe anything. In fact that’s what makes me so angry with you. You have every advantage, you see, I can’t even explain. I can’t talk, I’ve never been able to talk. I don’t have any conversation.’

  ‘You’re doing all right.’

  ‘I’m not. I haven’t said anything. Elaine, explain.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Jack, you must do it yourself. Get it all out, for heaven’s sake, and let’s try and be sane again.’

  ‘Get what out?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you see,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve never been in a polite drawing-room in my life, I don’t have any natural talk to talk with you. I’ve had to get on by writing words down on paper, words to be marked, not played with. I can’t explain, I just feel. Every time I see you with Elaine, you’re so smooth, so polished. If you were as stupid as that waitress over there, you’d still be able to get on, because you’ve been taught all the necessary forms, the ways of sitting down and standing up, polish. I’ve got no polish. It’s not handed out with State Scholarships. It goes with your education, not with mine. Public schools and being an officer. All that. I could have been an officer if I’d had that polish. A good one, too. I’m just as intelligent as most of them. But I don’t have the manners, the manner. I can’t carry authority as if it was natural to me. Authority in anything. But you can. You don’t have to do anything to be treated as someone who gives orders, it’s obvious as soon as you enter a room. It’s like a veneer, and you got it by being at a good school, a good public school, and that’s the only way to get it, because that kind of veneer is the only one that’s accepted. You have a manner and a bearing that everyone accepts as the manner, the bearing, of a gentleman. And you could be the biggest shit in the world, and you’d still be a gentleman; a crook or a fool and still have the manner. I feel inferior as soon as you enter a room. I know I’m not inferior. I’m as good as you, or better, at being a human being. But that doesn’t make any difference. Because I’m always at a disadvantage. In this country, anyway. No, here you’ve got to have the manner to get on. And you have it and I don’t, and you can’t help it, but every time you speak to me you’re being superior. It’s what you’ve been taught to be. Look at us, here because you suggested it, you knew what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I haven’t been polished. And I hit you. And I’m sorry if it hurt, but when you said I’d feel at home in a lorry-drivers’ place, you were trying to hurt me, and you did. Because I’m not at ease even there, now. I’m a displaced person. And I wish I’d never had any brains and had gone down the mine, and none of this need ever have happened.’

  Well, that was quite a speech from Jack. I’d never heard anyone say anything like that before in my life. I didn’t understand, either. I’d never felt superior to Jack for a single moment. In fact every time Elaine said anything about him, I felt thoroughly inferior. So I said: ‘What do you mean, “inferior”? For God’s sake, this isn’t the Middle Ages.’

  ‘I mean … Look, Charles, it’s not your fault. You may even dislike the fact. But with your accent, your bearing, your manner, you can go places where I can never go. And the thing that’s stopping me is my manner. Don’t you see?’

  ‘You don’t have an accent.’

  ‘I do. I have an artificial one, it’s not my own, it’s not yours. It’s phoney. People can smell it a mile off. Not the right background, you see.’

  And, of course, he was right. That was what was so bloody about it. The accidents of birth make all the difference. If I’d been born in a Welsh mining village, I’d probably never have got where Jack had got. If he’d been born in Gloucestershire or somewhere, he’d never have worried about Elaine and me at all. All his life he’d seen people like me getting by without having to try very hard, because it’s our world, we run it, things are easy for us. We talk about equality of opportunity. But we don’t have it, we never will have it, because, to quote Nicholas, we don’t have any social equality. And if you can see us getting it in your lifetime, you must be a lot younger than me.

  ‘You think you’re a Socialist,’ he said. ‘And you are. You have a conscience, you don’t like big business running your country. But you don’t feel the injustice. You’re an intellectual, you have ideas about how things should and shouldn’t be run. But you’ve never felt the pressures which make the ideas seem irrelevant. Because you’ve always been exerting the pressures yourself. You may not have known it, but you were. I’m not a Socialist. It’s more important to make things better at the bottom than to try and abolish the class-system. That would take too long.

  ‘If you’ve ever been at the bottom, you’re either furious about it, and fight like mad to get away, or you don’t care. Most people don’t care. They vote Labour the way other people automatically vote Conservative. They always have done, the neighbours do. I do care, but I’ve done my fighting now, I’m not furious about it any more. I don’t want to turn everything upside-down. I did once. But now I’d rather see things get better down there, and I don’t care who’s responsible. People’s lives are what matter.’

  ‘But ultimately, Jack——’
>
  ‘Yes, ultimately. I can wait. If I went on pushing my way I could get somewhere—oh, of course I could. But I don’t want to push any further. I’m lost already. My family doesn’t understand me, because I’ve been taught to think in a way they’ve never been taught, to care for things they’ve never heard of. We don’t have anything to say to each other. I’ve got brains, they say, and leave it at that. I do my “studies”. They’ve no idea what the “studies” are about.

  ‘All I have is Elaine. She is the only person with whom I feel free. Don’t misunderstand me—I said I wished I’d never come to Oxford, but that’s nonsense. And I’m not complaining if anyone does misunderstand. Communication has broken down, that’s all, between the top and the bottom. Elaine is the only connection I have. The only emotional connection I can make. With her I can be what I am. Difficult, no doubt—obviously. But myself. So when I see you come barging in with your manner and your manners, I can’t help myself. I think you’re going to take her away from me. It’s what you’ve been trained to do, in a way. It’s what your manner is for—to win things. And I can’t bear even the thought of it. And I know it’s absurd in a way, or that you can see it’s absurd, because you’re not in love with Elaine, and she’s not in love with you, and you don’t want to seduce her, but to me it seems so easy for you to do or to want to do any of those things, that——’

  He stopped and began to eat. The mixed grill was congealing on his plate. After a minute or two Elaine said: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘If I thought you despised me for it——’

  ‘I meant what I said,’ she said softly. ‘But, Charles, you see it’s not easy. Jack thinks I’m being superior half the time.’