‘Hallo. There was a bird caught in here. But I’ve let it out.’
12
The Notebook of Nicholas Sharpe
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.
Imaginary Toys Page 16