Imaginary Toys (17 page)
Authors: Julian Mitchell
As usual, when confronted with a major crisis, I retire to bed. But not to sleep. Today should have been a minor
celebration.
Delta finished his exam. At noon I was working in the Bodleian, salving my conscience. Five past noon, enter Phi.
Phi: Nicky!
Me: Phi!
Silence, consternation, the expected has happened unexpectedly.
Phi: Oh dear, I’m not welcome. Then I shall take the next train back to London. But first I shall treat you to lunch, Nicky,
something
very
intime
while we tell each other all about them.
Me: All about who?
Phi: Whom, Nicky, whom. You forget, my dear, that I know all about you. No, not all. But I know you terribly well, don’t I? Put those absurd books away. This is
life,
Nicky. Aren’t you excited?
Me: Very well.
Phi (loudly, as we leave): Do people read books all the year round, Nicky? I thought it was a winter sport.
Me: I’m supposed to be having lunch—I am
going
to have lunch with someone, Phi, I’m sorry.
Phi: Good. Then I can play the part of a nice fairy godfather, can’t I?
Where shall we go? I beg your pardon. Where are you going?
Me: Phi, but——
Phi: But we are friends, Nicky, and I will not tolerate any of your boring puritan embarrassment. When old lovers meet, they should rejoice together for their past happiness. And if you think you
weren’t in love with me, or that I wasn’t in love with you, you may be right. But that makes it all the more silly to be embarrassed about it. Where are we all having lunch?
Me: I think I’d better have a drink.
Phi: Only if there is time. You must not be late.
We go to the Eastgate Hotel.
Phi: I sent you postcards, which you did not answer. The telegrams you were not supposed to answer. But the postcards, Nicky dear, were, in a funny little way, enquiries.
Me: And my silences, as you must have realized, were answers.
Phi: Well, I
thought
so, it’s true. But silence is so ambiguous, isn’t it? So unsatisfactory. The person may be dead, or something. When I was very tiny, about ten, my uncle gave me a pocket diary. I hate to think what he thought I would write in it at
that
age. Each page had a little joke, or a great thought, or sometimes both in one. One of the jokes was ‘Silence is golden, but oft-times criminal’. I remember ‘oft-times’ distinctly. It is a precept that has long guided me. You know, Nicky, how
little
I ever say. But really it’s the wrong way round. Silence is almost always criminal, and only rarely golden. And your silence, my dear, was definitely criminal. I might have been fading away with love, for all you knew, among the chi-chi of Brighton.
Me: Not when those postcards kept arriving. Where do you get them?
Phi: I buy them at shops, like everyone else. Those postcards, Nicky, might have been the elegant sacrifices of a wilting spirit. You simply don’t trust me, my dear.
Me: Not always.
Phi: I knew it. I knew it all the time. How can one have a really
satisfactory
relationship with someone who doesn’t
always
trust one? But I do trust
you,
Nicky. You’re predictable, and you’re nice, and you’re quite honest, most of the time. Now I am not honest at all, I never have been. But I value honesty in others. That’s why I am here. I have detected a note of
dishonesty
in your silence.
Me: Well, there may be. I think you are honest, Phi, in rather a crooked way. You think the truth is often not worth telling.
Phi: Good, Nicky, good. But, dear—and we’d better be quick about all this, and gentlemanly, since we’re in a public place and your new friend will be coming at any moment—but, Nicholas, you dear old
thing, I am now going to be like you. Honest, rather puritanically honest. And nice, if I can. You are not proposing to rejoin me, I take it?
Me: I’ve been living in a sort of dream, you won’t understand.
Phi: I understand perfectly, my dear. You want
me
to decide for you. How very
mean
of you. But honest, I suppose, honest. So, you read my postcards, and wonder what will next fall through the letter-box. You can’t make a decision on insufficient evidence, Nicky, that’s your trouble. You have to have reasons for
everything.
So I have to make your decisions for you. Very well. I am going to decide for you over lunch.
Me: For God’s sake, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t do this sort of thing, etc.
Phi: It’s what you want me to do. It is high time you left the academic life, Nicky. You seem to think that what people do has some kind of relation to what they should do according to some harebrained scheme of yours. It’s bad for you, too, because you snuggle up in a nice warm library, like a lovely womb full of books, where no question can ever be wholly and finally answered. There is continual flow of discussion—like mother’s blood, isn’t it? But since the subjects have to be ones which can’t ever be settled, otherwise there would only be ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to be written down in examinations, you tend to forget that in the
real
world—which is, whether you like it or not, where
I
live, and
you
live, too, when you think about it—there are questions which require immediate answers. I can’t tell you to grow up, Nicky, because if you ever did it would be tragic. But I think it is time you were
born,
dear. Come out of the womb and look around and decide.
Me: You are the most unfair man I know. I am working for a degree which will get me the job I want, eventually. I could get the job now, if I wanted. But one must be
thorough,
Phi.
Phi: No, you will become a don if you stay here much longer. That would kill you. You would simply fall in love with your pupils one after another. Then one would fall in love with you, and one day you would wake up to find yourself faced with the police and a rapidly disappearing son-figure. No, Nicky, not that, please. But be quiet. I have to remember my speech. I prepared it on the train, all the way down. I was being
thorough,
you see. How does it start? Oh yes. I am much troubled in spirit, my dear Nicholas, about your future. So much seems to rest with me, so much with your own unaided soul—
Me: Phi, for God’s sake, make less noise and say what you have to say.
Phi: Yes.
Suddenly very serious. Usually everything is covered under the mannerisms. All dropped now. The only other time he ever did this was after I’d lost my temper with one of his friends. Then he told me I was childish to care about such people. And I felt a child.
Phi: Nicky, I thought I loved you, and I think I did. Now I don’t think I do. But I am fond of you. If it’s any consolation, I usually detest someone after I have been with him as long as I have been with you. I have been with only one person longer, as it happens. Sometimes I pay them to go away, they fill me with such disgust. But about you I feel no disgust, only a certain amount of guilt. It is your fault. You would keep talking to me about responsibility, and politics and sex and everything else. You made things important, when I didn’t want them to be important. I don’t agree with more than a third of what you said, if that. But I feel responsible about
you,
dear. I respect you, which I don’t any other of my ex-lovers. And I don’t now respect myself for treating them the way I did.
Now
I don’t. At the time it never occurred to me. I simply wanted them to get away from me as soon as possible. But you, Nicky, manage to make me feel naughty every time I think about myself. And I am now going to show you what I have learnt. [Sudden leaning back, rich smile. Then smile fades, sadness and simplicity take over.] For all my money, Nicky, I’ve never had any power. Except the power I had over the people who slept with me to get gold cigarette-cases. I have never wanted power much. But I should like to have the power of love, to be loved so much that I could do anything I liked with the lover. I think I might then become a really nice person. It probably won’t ever happen now. But if I stopped thinking that it might happen, I should commit suicide. I had a certain power over you, you know. But that was the power of the experienced man over the innocent one. And it makes the experienced man impotent after a time. If he has any sensibility at all. You had your power, too, you see, even though you may not have known it. I learnt a great deal from you, my dear. But I have some power left. And I am going to use it to try and make you happy. It is my power but you have controlled it, in a way. I hope you understand.
Me (silent, feeling that if I were to say anything at all, it would be I loved Phi still)—then: Thank you, Phi, very much.
Phi: Barman, two more gin-and-tonics. Put in much,
much
more gin.
Me: I’ve been in a daze.
Phi: Never mind. Was it a nice daze, or a nasty one?
Me (new drinks appearing): Cheers, Phi. May you make a happy mess of your life, not a miserable one.
Phi: winced.
Me: I can’t think why I said that. State of shock. I’m sorry.
Phi: Just your honesty getting the better of you again, dear. Much best to let it sometimes.
Enter Delta.
*
I think it was Delta’s look of disappointment that did it. He did not know anything about Phi, of course, he had never even heard of him. And he had no idea of the situation, or the state I was in. But he came in, saw me, saw Phi, and his face gave him away. At least, I think it was his face. It was the face I was watching. I nearly cried out—what I don’t know. For about a second I had a reaction which seemed to last for several minutes, but it was all during the first look on Delta’s face. I thought: honesty, Phi talks about my honesty, but honest to what? The moment—a face? Many moments—how many faces—how many moods on how many faces? Knowledge? I am afraid this feeling will return. I came to bed fearing it, that I would not be able to answer. But it hasn’t come. I think it, but I do not feel it. There is no nagging.
When I saw the look on Delta’s face, I decided. Coming out of the state of suspension. Breathing suddenly a little difficult. But decision taken.
*
Phi did not once call either Delta or me ‘my dear’ during lunch. He behaved with apparently effortless tact. I think he regards my life as something he has to
do.
The way other men have their businesses to run. Having done nothing all his life, he has suddenly found a task. Or he thought he had something to do. But after the look on Delta’s face, the matter was decided. Phi thought he had power over me. Until that moment he had. But after it, none. He was a
catalyst, simply. An enzyme of love. I expected a
deus
ex
machina,
and was given a recording angel.
*
Phi: Do you know the Dawsons in Dorset?
I thought he was trying to be rude—the
Dorsetshire
Dawsons. But no. He simply wanted to know.
Delta: Yes. They live near Bridport.
Phi: Aren’t they dull? They think that living in the country somehow makes them morally superior to those who live in towns. And anyone who lives abroad is insane.
Delta: It’s even worse than that. Anyone who doesn’t live in their part of Dorset cannot appreciate either the beauties of nature or the Christian religion.
Phi: I didn’t know they went to church.
Delta: They don’t. But they hold the advowson of the parish.
Me: They sound as though they believe in the Over-soul.
Delta: What kind of religion is that?
Phi: Oh, a sort of cross between Wordsworth and William Morris and Christian Science.
Delta: My uncle died of moral disarmament.
Phi:
Re
-armament, surely?
Delta: No. He believed that the M.R.A. had become corrupted. What was needed was total abstention from all things that might lead one into moral difficulties. Since moral problems were, for him, purely physical ones—whether or not one should eat meat or have sex or hit someone back—he decided that the only thing to do was to stop having a physical existence. Which he did. He starved himself to death.
Phi: Well, it was logical, I suppose.
Delta: Yes. His wife found the logic of it very comforting. The only thing was he decided at such an awkward time of life. She had four children, you see, between twelve and two.
Me: People like that should be put into cool calm hospitals.
Delta: No, they should be made to witness suttee.
Phi: I’d never thought of the practical moral to be drawn by Christians from human sacrifice.
Me: But would it have made any difference to him?
Delta: Yes. He couldn’t bear to hurt anyone in any way. That’s why
life became impossible for him. If he had seen a wife being burnt he would have realized that, though being alive raises all sorts of difficult problems, suicide is immoral for a married man. His wife, unfortunately, loved him too much to tell him while he was alive.
Me: How long have you been saving this uncle up, or is he purely imaginary?
Phi: What a rude question, Nicholas.
Delta: Oh, it’s all right, Nicky can ask. It all happened before I was born, so it’s both fact and fiction. He was an early heretic of the M.R.A. I only thought of it today because I had to translate some of
A
Passage
to
India
into German. It looked quite different when I’d finished with it. I’ve never read it. Is it a good book?
Phi: Yes. Nicky—Nicholas will lend it to you. He lent it to me.
Delta: Oh, I thought I was the only person who called him Nicky.
Phi (at once): From now on you are. I surrender all rights.
Delta (with a smile): Thank you. What sort of rights do you have?
Me: Fishing rights.
Phi: Nicholas, I wish you would be serious.
Me (desperate): I am serious. You know me, Phi, serious responsible Nicholas Sharpe.
Phi: Be quiet. If you’re going to be facetious you must eat at another table.
Delta: I thought you had surrendered all rights.
Phi: I beg your pardon.
Delta: You mustn’t give orders, you know. Nicky, if you cannot be serious, you must go and eat at another table.
Me: Damn you both. All I meant was—let’s change the conversation.
Delta (arrogant): Very well. Phi, do you know the Dawsons?
Phi: No. Hardly at all. They were only a conversational gambit. But they will serve again.