Imaginary Toys (19 page)

‘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.’

‘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.