Imaginary Toys (21 page)

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?

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 predicted 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.

‘Not really. It makes things you have to have to make them, that’s all. But I’m not a pacifist.’

‘That has nothing to do with it,’ said Nicholas, enjoying his severity. ‘The moral state of a civilization which bases its defence on the threat of annihilation of another civilization is very weak, Charles, and as a manufacturer of the weapons your moral problem dwindles into insignificance beside that lack of morality on a million-dollar scale. But …’

And so we started it all over again, me for form’s sake defending Hiroshima against Vorkuta, and eventually, since Nicholas liked to keep to the point, and then to elaborate it at length, we analysed the morality of killing an awful lot of people in a peculiarly horrid way, and went on to discuss whether or not one was ever justified in killing anyone at all under any circumstances whatever. But always with my future as Nicholas’s illustration of moral pitfalling possibilities. Actually, I’m against killing people, in fact I think you have to be out of your mind even to want to kill someone, and I also think that hanging people for murder doesn’t really make anyone more civilized, particularly not the man who’s been hanged, and that it is not really all that much of an improvement on the quartering and drawing and public lip-licking of yore, if yore means what I think it does.

But all that didn’t help me much.

‘How will my personal abstinence from arms-making make any difference? That’s what you can’t answer, Nicholas. I mean, I can make an awful lot of money, I might even end up in charge of the business, and if I felt like it I could turn it over to making something quite different, like radiators for people with cancer.’

Nicholas expatiated on my ignorance of methods of curing
cancer, and answered me fully enough, and with sufficient
pointing
of points to upset a cup of coffee at the next table. After the apologies were over, he took a deep breath and began to tell me why it was hopelessly immoral to go into business at all.

‘Business has its own ethics, roughly summarized as “the devil take the hindmost”. Each individual business man may lead a blameless personal life, and deplore in private, and indeed at times in public too, the very qualities which he praises at his place of business. The man who makes the most money is the best man. Anything that helps him to achieve this dominance over his rivals is laudable. Sometimes the consumer is benefited, incidentally. Sometimes not. When they talk about the consumer as the man they wish to serve, they are simply lying. They wish to serve
themselves,
and if they didn’t they’d never get any credit from the bank. Don’t be fooled by all those clever advertisements written by clever men, many of them with excellent degrees from the very best universities. They, too, are paid. If it serves his personal interest a business man will form a cartel, to prevent competition. This will be described as “in the interest of the consumer”. By ruthless undercutting he may try and drive his rivals to bankruptcy. This too, with great righteousness, will be described as “in the interest of the consumer”. Price-fixing agreements are obviously not in the interests of the consumer, but listen to the business man
describing
how they serve some idea he cloudily claims to be in the interest of efficient service. In each instance the consumer will not in fact be considered for one second. All this is obvious—the consumer is the business man’s enemy. He has a mind of his own, he can choose, he can complain about prices, the declared profits of companies, quality. He is dangerous, and democratic. He can speak. Since it has become impossible to silence him by force, he is silenced by private agreements on prices; he is assaulted by advertisements at all times, even advertisements telling him how advertising helps to make life better for him and his neighbour; he is baffled by take-over bids and monopolies.

‘The Marxist is wrong, you see, in thinking that private
enterprise
will eventually kill itself. We are more and more becoming as monopolistic a society as the Communists’. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that a state monopoly is any better or any worse than a private one. But one must never make the mistake of thinking that, because we live in a capitalist society, all our business men are devoted to free competition and private enterprise.
Competition is the one thing a manufacturer wishes to avoid. And you, Charles, must avoid falling for all the cant that is talked about business. Read the proceedings of the Restrictive Practices Court some time. See how ludicrous the anti-trust laws are made to appear in America. And ask yourself whether you really want to take part in anything so outrageously immoral as a business world run on current business ethics.’