Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m the least class-conscious person I know,’ she said, still softly. ‘I’ve never noticed anyone’s accent in my life, unless I couldn’t understand what he was saying. My parents used to get very angry with me as a child, because I would play with children who didn’t “speak properly”. I must be tone-deaf to accents. And people, men anyway, only interest me by being themselves. I don’t like you when you’re being facetious, for instance, Charles.’

  ‘I’ve never felt less facetious in my life.’

  And I meant it. I felt as though my life must have been a series of minor insults to Jack and everyone like him. I felt I had never bothered to find out who Jack was. I thought he resented me, and I was right, but I’d never bothered to find out why, I’d never stopped to consider what it might be like to be continually without ‘the right background’. I think I’ve said already that I think class is a very boring subject. And it is, especially when it’s played on the Nancy Mitford level, with U and Non-U, and upper-class giggling behind a manicured hand about fish-knives and doilies. But that’s not what class is about at all. Class is the unthinking acceptance of a difference in kind between oneself and the man who cleans one’s shoes or puts petrol in one’s car or keeps the sewers clean for one. The implicit belief that ‘we’ are better than ‘they’ by some magic of birth. Or worse—because it works both ways, doesn’t it? It’s almost racism. ‘He married beneath him’—it’s as condemning as saying ‘He married a Jewess’, and don’t let’s pretend there isn’t any anti-Semitism in England, either. The idea is the same. The class has been let down, the blood has been contaminated. And that in the most mongrel nation in the world. But being against class-consciousness doesn’t stop anyone from being a member of a class. It didn’t stop me from having a manner, the manner, which made me acceptable where Jack wasn’t. All intellectuals are déclassés in a way—if they accept the fact that people aren’t to be judged by their origins but by themselves—they can’t help being excluded from the class which nourished them in exclusivity. But it doesn’t remove the manner, the polish. Look how our intellectual life is dominated by middle-class standards.

  ‘I haven’t got anything to say,’ I said to Jack. ‘Except that … you might have said all this before. And I’m sorry. And there is nothing I can do to make your father well, or undo the injustices of the last thousand years. But I should like to be able to do something. And I don’t want to seduce Elaine. And while we’re on the subject, I think you’re mad not to sleep with her.’

  ‘You see,’ he said, flushing, ‘you judge me, you think I’m not behaving “sensibly”. You think I’m different from you because I believe in God and you don’t.’

  ‘Well, that is a difference between us, but it’s got nothing to do with class. I don’t feel superior because I’m an atheist and you’re not. You mix things up so much.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m mixed up, pitiably so. Don’t pity me.’

  ‘I’m not pitying you. I just think you let your class worries get into your spiritual life.’ As a matter of fact this had never occurred to me till that moment, but it did then, and I couldn’t stop it blurting out, almost before I knew what I was saying. ‘All right, so you believe in God, lots of people do. But why do you choose the most snobby Church going? Why tag along with all that historical fraudulence? I think you tag along because you want to forget the bottom, because you want to be as conformist as possible. You want to be accepted where you are now. Fine—but do you really think the best way to do that is to join a Church which specializes in being special and rather rare and chi-chi and traditional and nose-tilting and fake? Where was it founded, Jack? Why, here, in Oxford. So you troop along to the most Oxford of Churches. You want to establish yourself in a nice comfortable geographical area and be indistinguishable from all the rest of the fauna. But that’s denying yourself the right to be yourself. Do you see?’

  ‘You may be right. I don’t know. I never went to church at home. I went because Elaine took me when we fell in love. It’s with her that I want to belong. Yes. But it was nice to belong to a special congregation. You may be right. I have terrible difficulty holding on to my faith. That’s why I’m so sticky about it, I dare say. I feel I have to make myself obey rigidly, or the whole thing will collapse.’

  ‘And I took him there,’ said Elaine. ‘Like cutting my own throat. Jack wants to save my soul more than his.’

  ‘And we quarrel,’ said Jack.

  ‘And if I’m blinded to things by being from one class, Jack, then so are you. I may have polish, it may make me behave in a certain way. But so will your not having it. Somehow, we have to forget all about it. To treat each other as human beings. You’ve got to forget.’

  ‘I haven’t thought for months, properly,’ said Jack. ‘Exams, I suppose. Jealousy burrows and destroys. You can’t think.’

  ‘You probably felt about me the way I felt about the actors who kissed Margaret on stage,’ I said, thinking out loud, ‘and I knew damned well she wasn’t in love with them, but I still couldn’t bear it. And you know I’m not in love with Elaine. Margaret, I wish I’d never been so silly about Margaret. We can’t stop ourselves. And we never think. We aren’t responsible.’

  ‘I wish Nicholas could hear you,’ said Elaine.

  ‘I’ve been irresponsible. I haven’t thought. It’s thinking that makes one decent, fit to live with.’

  ‘I shall always resent it,’ said Jack, ‘but ignore me, will you?’

  ‘I cheated myself. I lied and lied, trying to make her act the acts I wanted them to be. But they never were.’

  ‘Nicholas should be here.’

  I suppose Elaine was the only one who was following what was going on. Jack and I had gone off on our separate musings, we were talking about ourselves, in fact, and that never makes for sparkling conversation. After a while Elaine took Jack’s hand and laid it against her cheek and said: ‘I suppose we’re all growing up, slowly.’

  ‘Do you think we ever stop?’ I said.

  ‘I wish Nicholas could have heard you both, that’s all.’

  And soon we parted. I wandered around by myself for a while. It was one of those nights which aren’t nights at all, but very light evenings, when everything stops looking real and becomes part of an opera-set. And I thought just how unreal my life had been for the last year, all based on a false premise, an intermission, on a stage of my own. One loses one’s sense of proportion when one continues to live in a university after one’s ceased to be an undergraduate. I’d become so lax, so lazy. But there is, too, the feeling that one has achieved something very important by graduating, and that now one is ready for life, and life is ready for one, and one can take one’s time before going to meet it. But that’s the great drawback to the post-graduate racket. One never has enough time to decide. One never knows what’s going to happen, or, as people usually say, what’s not going to happen. One just drifts along, waiting, and quite suddenly one wakes up with a jolt, and the opera is over, and instead of growing up one has simply had a relapse, all under the crumbling gargoyles of the dreaming spires. One wakes up because a little bit of gargoyle crumbles right on top of one’s head. And one’s a year older, and one’s learnt nothing.

  At least, that’s what I felt. I’d learnt nothing myself. I was exceptional, perhaps. I hope so.

  As I wandered round, one word kept coming back to me, Nicholas’s word. One might as well not be human as surrender it. Responsibility. Responsibility to oneself, one’s feelings, one’s ambitions. And to the feelings and ambitions of others. And being responsible meant one had to care and think. And I found myself caring and thinking, caring very much about Jack, and thinking that if I, and all the others of course, had only been responsible, he would never have been called a bore, never have gone through his agonies about God and woman, he’d have been accepted in the only way a man can be accepted—as another human being, as individual as everyone else, and, under the circumstances, with perhaps
much more dignity and responsibility than most. And I felt very ashamed of myself for not growing up.

  14

  Jack Evans to Elaine Cole, undated

  I don’t have anything to say now, do I, Elaine, but for once I really want to, I wish I was a poet, only a poet could tell you, but I’m not, and I have to sing, like a poet, but the words don’t worry me, the words are all mine, I tickle them along, they are free now, like me, they aren’t money in anyone’s bank, they’re the air we breathe and the bed we lie on, they’re singing away like like telephone-wires, humming the message I want to deliver, our message, at last, not the counters in some game, the symbols of success and knowledge, because I don’t have to have any more knowledge to get me along, it’s like using plates every day of your life and not noticing them, then going into a museum and seeing that plates can be beautiful and decorative and not for eating off at all, if you don’t have to. I’ve eaten off words, Elaine, but now I’m going to look at them, and listen to them, and play with them, and now I want them to set themselves down all anyhow, any crazy way they like, why should I care, we’re all singing, they are like ringing glasses all with different notes, all jangling together, like church bells gone mad, you see, all nonsense, marvellous words, because when I say I love you, those words don’t do anything, do they, they’re like blood, without them we couldn’t begin, but we don’t notice them any more, they tell us the basic facts and leave the rest to us, and we’re using them to sing, Elaine, Elaine, and they don’t have hedges and fences round them any more, not the barbed wire and the fierce Alsatians patrolling inside to keep me out, words like love, and God, and sin, and duty, and morality, and oh, words, words, they sing now, they are free, they are musical wings, they are ours, Elaine, if I was a poet it wouldn’t make any difference, I should manage them better, of course, I should make them ring and sound as they had never sounded before, I would make them new, give them new meanings, and then you would know, Elaine, but now I can’t do that, and so what, and when you said: ‘Darling, we’ve been mad, ever so mad,’ the words leapt up off the pillow where your head was saying them, they jumped off the bed and switched on the light and did a little dance round the room, and then they picked us up and made us join them, and then off they went, out through the window, they couldn’t contain themselves, could they, oh, Elaine, and I couldn’t, I wanted to shout, I wanted to climb to the highest point in the world and shout out the news like a muezzin in the morning, I wanted the world to know, but I wouldn’t have said anything at all, I should just have given a great laugh, a huge grin, a shattering rumble of laughter, like a great belch or a cannon splitting its sides, and there would have been so many astonished faces, and they would have looked up, and they would have said: ‘Look at that man, he’s laughing,’ and they would have started laughing themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to stop, the whole world would have had a fit of the giggles, and then it would have got worse, and better, they’d have stopped giggling and they would have looked at each other with sudden smiles, and they’d have laughed from deep down, from right down there, where the life comes from, from their loins and their places of love, miles down inside them, the laughter would have burst out, convulsing them, overwhelming them, setting their heads spinning with happiness, their eyes like marbles rolling in the sun, sparkling in the gutters, their tears pouring down their cheeks like great transparent pebbles, and falling to the ground and shaking together, because that was all we needed, the great soul-shaking laugh, the laugh of the secret places of love, the bellow from the heart of man, the joyous bellow of love, the goodness and truth of it, oh, I can hardly sit here and write to you, I want to go out and laugh, it’s all too much, too wonderful and good and singing, oh, Elaine, all this from the little blueprint, the faint shadowy lines of ‘I love you’, look what I’ve built, a tower and a man and the world shaking with laughter and love! Oh, Elaine, I didn’t know what I was doing, I don’t understand for a moment, I never shall, I don’t think, I don’t care, what does it matter, how can anyone ever understand, it’s a revelation, a miracle, a great tonguing of men like angels, a consuming joy, oh, anything you like to call it, and while it was happening, I was talking to you, and I don’t know what I was saying, I was arguing away, I expect, but my mind was saying to me, like a mother to a fractious child: Come on now, darling, come on, it’s time to get ready, stop playing around, come along, my love, it’s time to go home now, time to put the toys away, to stop all this childish nonsense, you won’t be needing all that any more, come along, there’s something much better for you, it’s waiting for you to stop playing, and I could hear my voice saying: He’s got something there, now what is it, it must be something to do with Father Gibbons, and my mind was saying: Listen to him, he goes on like a machine, but we know the answer, don’t we? We have it here, if he’ll only stop talking, and suddenly my mouth stopped and my heart began, does that sound too silly for you, Elaine, is it all right for us to talk like that, but my heart began, and it said: Elaine, and we didn’t have to do anything more, did we, we knew where we were, and all the voices were silent, because the noise of the singing drowned all the speeches. Oh, Elaine, I said that I’m sure I said that, but I didn’t hear myself, I didn’t hear you, and you were so like me, you didn’t ask any questions, you didn’t pretend you didn’t understand, we understood, didn’t we, oh, Elaine, if we always understand, we must, it’s the perfect, the only, the true, the good, it’s you and me, and we aren’t Jack and Elaine, we’re a new person called Elainejack and Jackelaine, and there, there’s a lovely joke the words have played, and I never meant it, really I didn’t, they just came out like that, we shall call our daughter Jacqueline, we must have a daughter to remind ourselves always that we’re not Jack and Elaine, but Jacqueline, you see what happens when you let them sing by themselves, they tell you things you’ve not thought of, they make little jokes, I never knew, Elaine, I’ve never been able to know, I’ve been very strict with my words, I’ve kept them down, I’ve been stern and said: ‘Into the corner, no laughing in class,’ but now it’s holidays for ever for the words, they can play tag all their lives, did you ever play tag, and did you have those counting-games, and the rhymes for picking people out to be It, and I’ve forgotten words could play games like that, lovely nonsense, with the finger poking out of the middle at It, and It is our love now, Elaine, don’t you think that’s a nice idea, I feel exalted tonight, though there’s nothing to say, why do I write to you, Elaine, because I shan’t see you till tomorrow, and it’s that already, so why, but I do, I sit in these shabby old rooms, and I’ll still be sitting here next year, but it will have been a year of nonsense, and brilliant sense, how long did it take me to learn, you always knew, I’m sure you did, you knew it would come out all right, you waited and I worried, and panted along, trying to find the clues, and then I realized, oh so suddenly, there weren’t any clues, no footprints, no broken branches, it was everywhere, you were everywhere, and it was with you, Elaine, and it didn’t have anything to do with Charles and Father Gibbons, and what started it off was Charles, but no more, it was like having all the pieces in a puzzle set in the right order, but they won’t quite fit, and then suddenly seeing it, slipping the last piece in, and the puzzle all fitting together at once, and it’s like doing a puzzle, too, because you can see the end coming you know what the picture’s going to be, but you have to go on, fitting the bits together, to do the thing properly, and that was like me, I knew the answer, but I had to fit all the bits together first, so I went on talking, you see, Elaine, and all the time my mind was saying: Come along home, it’s time to go, leave the puzzle alone, you’ve done it now, you know the answer, but I had to finish it, and then, oh, Elaine, I’m mad this evening, I must be, I’m raving like a lunatic, it’s wonderful, I must be like this for the rest of my life. And what shall I say to Father Gibbons, I don’t know, I shall tell him, I shall try and tell him all about it, but he won’t understand, he’ll say: It’s a sin, and I shall say: No
, you’re so wrong, you don’t understand, and he’ll get very angry, and say that it is, and I shall say: No, it’s not, really it’s not, and he’ll think I’ve gone mad, but I haven’t, not really, I’m suddenly sane, and how it happened I don’t know, Elaine, and I shan’t understand, not ever, though I want to, and I think I know, I think it was Charles, with his telling me, I can’t remember what, it seems a year ago at least, it wasn’t at all, how crazy the world is getting, but he said something, about me, I think it was, something about me not daring to be myself, did he say that, hiding, being more conventional, he may have said that, I wish I knew, but it doesn’t matter, really, does it, and I was myself when I hit him, that helped, too, quite suddenly I couldn’t do anything at all, and I hit him, and I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to hurt him at all, I just wanted him to stop talking and making things worse, because when you came out with him like that, I suddenly despaired, I thought things would never be right, he couldn’t help it at all, it wasn’t his fault, he was just so much better than me in all the things that count, except one, except your love for me, Elaine, but I couldn’t think of that then, I thought even that might have gone, and I couldn’t bear it, and it wasn’t him I was hitting, it was the whole topsy-turvy world that wouldn’t let me alone to be myself, because I’ve always known that I could be myself and beat everyone, if only I could get through, I could walk without shame and worry, if only I could get through, and I was all bogged down, and I didn’t know why, I’ve always felt slightly, just slightly, ashamed with people like Charles, because they have so many things they don’t understand, I’ve known you loved me, but it must have been much easier to marry someone like him than someone like me, he’s so lazily correct in everything, so widely, what’s the word, dance, words, dance, oh, they’re all away playing hopscotch, cultured, perhaps that’s the word, he has the air of being cultivated, that’s better, he’s been grown on the best piece of garden, with the richest dung and the best fertilizers, he’s been weeded, been tied up with sticks, to grow straight, he’s a fine blossom from the finest garden in England, and I’m not, I’m the sort that grew from an odd seed sown near the coal-hole, oh, a joke of a sort there, not very funny, an odd seed which grew without anyone noticing it very much, no one to tie it up to a stick, and then they did notice, they said: He’ll never be as good as the ones we’ve cared for, not the ones we’ve nursed from the beginning, but he’ll do as a nice piece of contrasting background, for the star attraction, and all this is absurd, really, but you see what I mean, Elaine, and, anyway, I wanted to say that flowers, me and Charles, are just as good as each other, it depends how you judge them, the more exotic the less likely to last, the more leaf the less blossom perhaps, I don’t know, I’m not a gardener, but the standard for flowers has been fixed, and if someone comes along and says: No, I don’t like these great big blooms at all, they’re horrid, I don’t care how much they have been fertilized and hybridized, how many generations of nurserymen have worked to produce them, give me the small natural flower any day, if someone came along and said that, there’d be a rumpus, and he’d be asked to leave the Royal Horticultural Hall, and please not to say things like that again, or he’ll be had up for libel against the great body of industrious and patriotic flower-growers of the country, who have put a great deal of hard work into producing big blossoms, and they won’t have it called pointless and the blossoms ugly by anyone, and now go home and think about it, and you will soon, I am sure, come to the correct conclusion, which is, Big Blossoms are Best and Most British, do you see, Elaine, do you see, and I could never be like Charles, you can’t train a man to act like him unless you get him very young, and put him through the right schools and the right regiments and the right colleges at the right universities, and I could never be like him, and he doesn’t really understand why not, he thinks everyone is basically like him, and that’s true, but he thinks they all assume the same things, too, which isn’t, all I can be, could be, could have been, is what he accused me of, accepting, being glad to pick up the crumbs of social recognition that came my way, being patronized, and all the more because I loved you, and you, for some extraordinary reason, loved me too, and that made it all the more tempting to ape the manners, without ever being able to do more than ape, but being accepted because of you, Elaine, and the more I think about it, the more intolerable it would have been, but it won’t be like that, not now, Charles didn’t know it, but he made me see where the last piece went in the jigsaw, and I suddenly saw how it all came out, and suddenly saw all the business I’d been through, trying to be as good as Father Gibbons, trying to accept your Church, when it’s nothing to do with me at all, Oh I believe in God, I suppose, in a something somewhere, but vaguely, very vaguely, I always have, that was why it was so easy for Father Gibbons to get me, I had a natural, a muddled, belief he could work on, enough for him to construct a weighty theology and his own morality, but nothing to do with me, ever, all that superstructure, I just had a basic belief, and I still have it, he hasn’t driven it out, it’s not got much to do with Christ, in fact I don’t think I’ll ever go to church again, unless you want me to, for our wedding, I suppose, and for things like that, but nothing else, my God is quite different, he’s the man who suddenly makes the whole world laugh, my God doesn’t believe in original sin, he thinks original sin is all nonsense, he wants people to be happy, he doesn’t exist in landscapes or beautiful pictures or anything, either, I’m not a pantheist, he’s just a feeling you get sometimes, a feeling that it doesn’t matter what happens, be happy, if you possibly can, and if you can’t, be yourself and see what happens, live, that’s what my God says, you can’t be yourself and be unhappy all the time, and you can’t be unhappy all the time and be yourself, he wants us to be, goodness, Elaine, I’m writing a sermon, he wants us to exist for each other all night, oh dear, I meant all right, but both, oh yes, he wants us to be happy together, I don’t think he likes hermits much, he thinks hermits are rather sad and failed human beings, but then my God is only just coming through to me, and at the moment his doctrine is terribly vague, as vague as my belief, and it certainly won’t stand up to Father Gibbons, Elaine, you’ll have to help me, I’ve got to tell him, haven’t I, it would be cheating not to, that’s where Nicholas is so right, you have to be honest with other people to be honest with yourself. Poor Nicholas, he’ll never be very happy, how can he be, at least you never can tell with people like that, I’ve never really known one before, I think he’s much too bright not to realize how much he’s missing, don’t you, though you don’t, actually, do you, you like him, well, so do I, you think he knows how to be happy in his own way, but I can’t see how, I think women must understand men like that better than other men, I always feel rather frightened, as though I was the one who was odd, not the queer, I distrust them, wonder what it is they want when they’re only making polite conversation, but, Elaine, we don’t have to worry about them, do we? Oh, Elaine, what do we have to worry about, absolutely nothing, not now, because whatever hits us, as things will, we’ll know we have each other, goodness that sounds trite, simple-minded, I must be a bit simple-minded tonight, I can hardly wait for the dawn, can you, these ridiculous rules, why do we allow ourselves to be told what to do, because if we didn’t things would be even more difficult, wouldn’t they, so we do, and they aren’t too bad, not too hard to obey, once one’s accepted them as necessary nuisances, it’s only if you believe in them as ultimately good that you go crazy, stark raving, oh, Elaine, what does it matter, what the politicians and the rule-givers say, we can always ignore them together, they have nothing to tell us, we don’t need them, they just manage the things we can’t be bothered with, we should be grateful that other people can be persuaded to take an interest in us, to make us have sewers and things, but I can’t take politics seriously, Nicholas or no Nicholas, when I think about the hydrogen bomb and the cobalt bomb and all the other bombs, they don’t mean anything to me, they’re just impossible things, I can’t ever control
them, other people can try, I have you to live with and for, and they mustn’t interfere, that’s all I ask, maybe when we’re older, Elaine, we’ll become crazy like Nicholas, and march through the rain to rocket-sites and get ourselves arrested, and then maybe we won’t, today is what matters now, we’ll deal with the future when we come to it, and it was late when you climbed in, Elaine, and the nights are so short now, and the dawn is coming, it’s damp, I can see the cobwebs in the garden, if those silvery things are cobwebs, and the dew has left my footprints still in the grass from when I came back and started all this, and the sun isn’t up, but it’s coming, and it’s going to be like me on top of the world, it’s going to laugh its fat face off, it’s going to be for us, and whether it shines or not, who but the cricketer cares, there are plenty of things to do indoors, things like sitting still, and arguing and making love, oh, Elaine, we shan’t ever go wrong again, shall we, we are together for always now, and don’t let me ever forget it, will you, and here comes the sun, there is a tree in the Parks, I can just see the top of it, and it’s a very strange colour, it’s almost golden, honey-coloured, though I know perfectly well it’s green, and that’s how I feel, Elaine, what do the real colours matter, or whether some people see red and some brown or whatever it is, let’s leave all that to Nicholas, we have each other, and now it’s dawn properly, and the birds are beginning, and I’m so tired I can hardly see, but my hand goes on writing, and this is a letter I shall give you myself, have to save the threepences now, and you needn’t ever read it, because you know every word of it, Elaine, you know every single word, and for me every word is Elaine, and for you every word is Jack, and what does it matter, because here’s today, and I shall go to bed and I shall be asleep before I’ve pulled up the sheet, and tomorrow we shall have the happiest breakfast anyone has ever had, it will be warm and toasty and full of marmalade and we shall fall into bed with our eyes and we shall never notice the crumbs between the sheets, because, oh, a joke coming, Elaine, because who wants an egg without salt?