Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  15

  Charles Frederick Hammond

  When I think about Jack, I think of the more liberal newspapers and how wrong they are. They think that an educated working-class man these days is necessarily an intellectual rumpus-rowser. He’s supposed to barge into a middle-class front parlour, open the windows and shout an obscenity at a passing royal procession. Well, I’m all for windows being opened and an occasional startled shy from the Royal Mews, and I’m sure people like that must exist somewhere, selling sweets and things, though I don’t seem ever to have met them. I don’t like sweets, that’s part of the trouble, perhaps, or perhaps they play jokes on me when I go to buy something, by pretending not to understand my accent, and being deliberately stupid. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the people I do know, who’ve worked their way up from the bottom, as Jack unhesitatingly called it, aren’t the brilliantly verbal, satirical, witty young men who get labelled angry, make a lot of noise, like successful Guy Fawkeses, shooting up Crown and Parliament and everything else that happens to get in the way. (Rather irritatingly, Crown and Parliament don’t seem to be affected, though.) In some ways I regret not having met these people, because I’m sure they’re fascinating, though I think they’d be horribly rude to me. The ones I do know are rather quiet, silently bitter young men, and not quite sure what or whom to be bitter about. Like Jack, they often feel homeless.

  And the more I talked to Jack, which wasn’t often then, but later, the more I felt that something was going wrong somewhere, that they were being choked by their need to have some background they could depend upon. They all had pasts, but not very many had solid presents. I used to wonder where they would all end up, there was so much talent going begging for someone to use it, and be kind to it. And though most of them desperately wanted to be Lucky Jim or Jimmy Porter, very few of them had the courage, or the will, when it came to it, to do more than talk about themselves as though they were Lucky Jims. As if, in fact, seemed to be holding them back, all the time. All those books were very splendid and funny, they unfroze a lot of things and a lot of people, but then they seemed to become a drag, they froze people into new attitudes that weren’t genuine. And what was interesting about Jack was the way he felt all the same bitternesses as the others, but never got caught in a pose. He was caught in a genuine tangle between his sense of inadequacy about manners and things, and his knowledge that he was really just as good as, if not much better than, the public-school man with his sports car, i.e. me. He didn’t go off into a fantasy about how to get his own back, he just suffered, and tried to work it all out, and fit himself in somewhere, and, eventually, because he didn’t go out and throw stones at passing Cabinet Ministers and their muffed and minked wives, he went to God, and there the suffering got even worse, because the God wasn’t his, it was Elaine’s, if anyone’s, and all the time he was torn between himself as a person, in love with Elaine, and himself as a social product, who didn’t have a sports car. And he got out of that, eventually, by being himself, and thank goodness for that. At least, that was how it seemed to me, after I’d thought about it, and I’m probably quite wrong, but after that evening, when he made the one and only speech of his life, he never felt the same again. Having said all those things, they ceased to be true for him any more, and Jack became Jack, and he wasn’t a brooding worried man, he was a quiet, hard-working schoolmaster with a passion for a girl called Elaine.

  But I’m getting ahead of things. As I said, Elaine was going down on the Saturday, and on the Friday I saw them together again, and it was obvious at once that something pretty cheering had happened, that the middle-period Jack, to borrow a phrase from literary criticism, which is only useful, really, as a place to borrow phrases from, was moving into the late-period Jack.

  They were holding hands and laughing as they went along down the street, and when they saw me Jack looked positively pleased. I may say that I didn’t at all, because I’d been feeling nothing but remorse and shame about him ever since he’d made that speech, and, though I didn’t think of myself as quite a capitalist hyena, I was certainly, I considered, a thoughtless oaf, if not a flannelled fool, and no doubt it was only my ineptitude at sports that prevented me from being that. In fact, I wasn’t far from being a hyena, because my future was much on my mind, if I dared call my thinking apparatus a mind, and I wasn’t at all sure that morning whether I dared.

  ‘Charles,’ said Jack, ‘we want to thank you very much for being—well, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t. What are you talking about?’

  ‘What he means,’ said Elaine, ‘is that we went to bed together last night, and it was ever so gorgeous.’

  ‘I’m very glad,’ I said, not sure what I had to do with it all. ‘But please don’t say “ever so”.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ said Jack. ‘He looks all sad and embarrassed.’

  ‘I expect he is, poor thing,’ said Elaine. ‘We can’t explain now, Charles, we’ve got to go and see Father Gibbons. We’re going to go on a barge from Bristol to Birmingham, isn’t that nice?’

  ‘Terribly nice. What happened?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Elaine, ‘not when you don’t have a woman to love. Time you did, Charles.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I tried to look hurt, as I was.

  ‘It was hitting you, in a way,’ said Jack.

  ‘He spent the whole time at the party saying: “By God, I believe he’s right.” And really, it wasn’t the drink, because it ran out very soon, and we had other things to do than drink.’

  ‘I can’t explain,’ said Jack. ‘It may have been you, it may not. What does it matter? You can take the credit, though, if you like.’

  ‘I wish I knew what you were talking about, that’s all.’

  ‘It was what you said. Education makes you want to be like everyone else who’s been educated.’

  ‘I’m sure I never said that.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Elaine. ‘We can’t stay and natter with you, Charles, we have to go and see Father Gibbons. He’s about to have a lovely shock. He’s not going to be a father-substitute after all.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to have done something, whatever it was.’

  ‘Oh, you did,’ said Jack earnestly.

  ‘Goodbye, Charles,’ said Elaine. ‘Remember us in your will, won’t you? Father Gibbons is cutting us out of his.’

  And she was off up the street, and he was laughing at me over his shoulder, and I didn’t see either of them again for a few months. What had happened, I gather, was that they had both got horridly drunk at the party they went to, though they never admitted this, and shed a lot of inhibitions and other Christian virtues, and decided that to hell with Father Gibbons, they loved one another. Me, I’m all for that sort of thing, though how they came round to it, I really don’t know, and why stop to thank me, I shall never understand. I think they just wanted to say thank you to everyone—one gets that feeling sometimes when one’s young and in love. I can think of no other explanation, unless I was a sort of rock round which they fought, and when they’d finished fighting they felt an obscure feeling of warmth for the rock. I mean I didn’t do anything except get punched on the nose and then have a rather futile argument, which wasn’t even an argument, but an exchange of statements of position. I shook my head at them as they disappeared and felt rather old. For some reason, they depressed me.

  I was depressed anyway, because I had been on my way to Nicholas to ask his advice about my future, and I thought I wouldn’t like his advice when I heard it, and anyway he hadn’t been in, and so I thought he was probably with Giles Mangles somewhere, and that depressed me, too, and when I met Jack and Elaine I was on my way to the Rawlinson for a cup of coffee to salve my conscience before I had several beers.

  Needless to say, the first person I saw at the Rawlinson was Nicholas, with Giles, and the two looked terribly pleased with themselves, as though they’d just won a football pool or successfully and with detailed accuracy p
redicted a rail-crash or some other appalling disaster. Nicholas was looking like a successful civil servant, instead of the usual minor one, and Giles was gazing out of the window every few minutes and then turning to say something to Nicholas which obviously had nothing to do with what he saw in the street, because Nicholas just smiled and said something back and made no effort to look out of the window himself; in fact, his eyes seemed wholly occupied with Giles’s eyes, and as I stood in the queue watching them I wondered if there wasn’t anyone else I would rather sit with, because that sort of thing I find acutely embarrassing, and I dare say it is illiberal of me, but I can’t help it.

  But there wasn’t anyone else, so I went and joined them, and they didn’t seem to mind, and as I did really want to hear what Nicholas had to say about me and my life, and it looked as though he might be rather busy during the rest of my time at Oxford, I said: ‘Nicholas, I need your advice.’ I mean, what else could I have said?

  He looked very solemn and pleased with himself, because if Nicholas had a fault, and he had many, like everyone else, it was that he actually enjoyed pressing his opinions upon people.

  ‘What have you done now?’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t done anything. It’s what I’m going to do. I think I’m going to join the family business.’

  ‘No,’ he said, at once, ‘that is out of the question, unless I have totally misjudged you. You can’t possibly spend the rest of your life making atom bombs. It’s immoral to begin with. And then, it wouldn’t suit you.’

  ‘Does your family actually make bombs?’ said Giles, opening his eyes very wide.