Imaginary Toys

by Julian Mitchell

  ‘Do you mind if I raise the window a little, miss?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do.’

  18

  Charles Frederick Hammond

  Taylor-Knatchbull?’ said Jeremy Travers. ‘I don’t think I know her, do I? When did she come out?’

  We were having dinner before the Commemoration Ball, about six couples and me, with nothing to accompany me but the telegram Elaine had sent. She’d changed it a bit, actually. It said: MUMPS MUMPS MUMPS TOO GHASTLY TERRIBLY SORRY DARLING BUT MUMPS LOVE LOVE LOVE ALISON.

  The restaurant was the best Oxford could produce, that’s to say much too expensive, but not too bad as long as you knew the head waiter and did exactly what he said. We’d finished eating and were sitting back with our fingers gently stroking our brandy-glasses or the girl next to us, and we had several minutes before we need go and take up our positions of responsibility for the dance. Everything was there, the champagne, the marquee, the bands, yards and yards of carpet and additional tent-work of all kinds, and the statue of the Founder, in all his decrepitude (it was before they got around to raising all that money to polish the place up a bit), our dear revered Founder was lit, if not by a flood, at least by enough candle-power to blind him to the goings-on.

  ‘Poor old Charles,’ said someone.

  ‘Yes, poor old Charles,’ said Jeremy, mercifully not pursuing Miss Taylor-Knatchbull’s social career. Jeremy had a thick black beard and long black hair, so that if you got him, with the right light coming from the right angle behind him, he looked like a minor saint with a halo which had somehow slipped too far down. ‘Let’s all do the decent thing by old Charles. I shall let him dance with Diana at least twice.’

  Diana was a sexy, Egyptian-looking girl, all dark and sinuous, and, well, sexy, with black rings painted round her eyes to make her look as if she was dying of one of the less interesting kinds of plague. She had adopted an Egyptian mode about the time of Suez, and at one time she was generally known as The Refugee from The Forest Fire. (One of Nicholas’s inventions, of course.) Well, I didn’t mind dancing with her at all, in fact I thought it might be really rather interesting, since it was quite obvious that she thought Jeremy was one of the biggest bores in the world, which he was, in a way, though only minor-league.

  A major-league bore, in fact an international, was Helen Graham, all six feet two and thirteen stone of her. I can’t think who could have asked her, but he was a brave man, whoever it was. She was rather nice in a booming way, but after about ten minutes one reached for the ear-muffs. She liked to talk, particularly about Madame de Staël, her favourite cultural heroine, though not mine (mine is Marilyn Monroe, who is the wittiest comedienne since Sarah Siddons, and I don’t propose to argue about it), and Helen actually proposed to do some research on her, Madame de Staël, that is, and frankly I didn’t ever dare tell her that an awful lot of ground had already been ploughed several times on that subject, because I thought she might hit me, or, worse, burst into tears. They would have made a remarkable pair for one of those interviews in the Paris Review—where the interviewer always knows more about the author’s books than the author, who wishes he’d never published half of them, even if they had earned some money. But when the interview was over, Helen would have had nothing to say at all.

  ‘I shall certainly dance with Charles,’ she said.

  Strike one, I thought to myself. (All this baseball jargon came from Nicholas, and I’m sure he got it all wrong. He’d spent some time in America, he said, and we all believed him.) And the other girls all volunteered, too, to help me pass the evening, except for Virginia Spence, who was half drunk already, and who said: ‘I shan’t dance with him, because I’ve got Teddy.’ And really, in spite of the insult, I felt sorry for Teddy, who was a nice enough person in an innocuous way until his family gave him a seat in the House of Commons and he could afford to get married (not on the salary, of course, but the family thought he ought to be given his head a bit now he had a career). I felt sorry for him, because, although Virginia was very beautiful, she was obviously going to pass out in a few hours, and he would be left without a partner, having brought one in good faith and having played the game like a gentleman, while I, who didn’t regard it as a game to begin with, was going to have my pick all night long.

  And looking round the table I had a moment of stifled hysteria when I thought that these people weren’t even my friends, particularly, and here we all were, like a lot of Victorian business men, bloated, flushed, in one case even properly hirsute, and we were the youth of the country, in which all politicians put their trust sooner or later, or so they say, and I wouldn’t have trusted any of us to arrange the time-table of a one-track, one-train-a-day railway. And yet I was wrong, really, because Teddy is, after all, in there voting as the Whip tells him, between courses at his club, and even by doing that he must, in some eyes, be contributing his mite to the running of the country; and Jeremy is on his way to being a director of a firm that makes flywheels for something I’ve forgotten; and, of the others, one has started writing unexpectedly good film criticism; and another claims to have been instrumental in starting a new battle between rival soap companies on the nation’s television screens; and another is somewhere in the Far East watching her Britannic Majesty’s interests, and—well, they’re all something, and I certainly wouldn’t have thought they ever would be as I sat and looked at them. So perhaps there really is something in education, or maybe it’s just the magic name ‘Oxford’—but they’ve all got on in their little ways, and, trust them or not, they all have power of one sort or another, God preserve us.

  Well, anyway, we moved off to the College and the dance began, and quite soon I discovered that I was going to drink steadily through the evening and into the morning, but that I wasn’t going to get drunk. It’s one of my favourite feelings, a sort of strength of mind showing itself. I knew I probably wouldn’t recover for days, but that was too bad, because I was going to consume a great deal and enjoy it now, and the next few days could look after themselves. So I did, and I danced with various girls, swooshing from one end of the marquee to the other, and one of the bands was the usual forward-side-together, forward-side-together dance band, and the other was England’s idea of a jazz band, that’s to say a lot of pale and exhausted-looking people remembering what they’d learnt from the gramophone records of the Hot Five and the Hot Seven and reproducing it, not quite exactly, but close enough to remind one just how good the Hot Five and the Hot Seven were. The evening, in fact, passed quite satisfactorily into the morning.

  About two in the morning, though, I decided I wanted to be alone for a few minutes, to smoke a cigar I’d pinched from an old member of the College when he thought he was offering his case to a young don, and to consider the stars, and to get my breath, and to have a drink, and generally to rest a bit. Now, when there’s a Ball on, everyone gives up his room, and all the rooms are redistributed to parties of dancers. Just then I didn’t want to join my own party, because so far I’d avoided Helen Graham, and I needed, as I’ve said, a rest, before I found the courage to grapple with her. So I thought a bit, and I came to the conclusion that Giles Mangles was around somewhere, and he probably still had his room, and maybe there was a ball going on there, as opposed to a Ball, and anyway I wanted to see the room after what he’d said. Giles lived in a quiet corner of the College, quiet, that is, at most times of the year, and even tonight it was less raucous than some other places. So I went up the stairs, having seen there was a light on, and breezed in without knocking, which could have been a foolish thing to do, but it was all right, because Giles was there and so were about ten other people, including, of course, though to my amazement, Nicholas. So I said I was sorry to intrude, but I wanted a change of air, and they made room for me on the floor, and gave me a bottle to drink out of, and went on with their own conversation.

  They were talking, it soon became obvious, about British colonial policy, and even more obviously they were against it, on the w
hole. Nicholas was being very quiet and persuasive, in a way he had when really serious, a way which would make me vote for him even if I thought he’d gone off his head. He’s always ready to justify everything from first principles, and it’s almost impossible to disagree with him without becoming illogical. Listening to him, I wondered how many of the others knew that he cared passionately about what he was saying, because he never gave a hint of feeling, he just reasoned and reasoned, growing apparently more objective every time someone disagreed with him. I knew him well enough to know that he could be most unreasonable at times, as much a victim of whim or passion as the rest of us. But, when it came to debate, Nicholas could have been from another planet, settling the issue by pure brain-power, sheer logic, utter reasonableness.

  Well, after about five minutes there was nothing left to talk about. The man who’d been arguing with Nicholas, a South African, got up and said: ‘I disagree with everything you’ve said, but I can’t argue with you, because you don’t know the facts.’

  And Nicholas said: ‘If that is your position, then argument is obviously going to get us nowhere at all. But if I don’t know the facts, would you mind telling me some that might in some way alter my point of view.’

  ‘No,’ said the South African, who was quite nice, actually, and brilliant at squash or one of those games, ‘because the facts won’t speak without their background, and till you’ve lived in South Africa there is no way you can understand them.’

  ‘That is only true,’ said Nicholas, nodding as if in agreement, ‘if you think that South Africa should be treated as a special case for discussion, unlike any other case, with its own rules for argument. Now, you were criticizing the Russian intervention in Hungary a moment ago. Did you know all the facts? We both agreed about that, didn’t we—but if I’d known that you thought one must live in a country before you can criticize its policies, I don’t think I would have done, because, you see, I’ve never been to Hungary, have you? Don’t you think Hungary might be another special case?’

  ‘Look, man,’ said the South African, ‘I just don’t want to talk with you any more, do you mind? I don’t know the facts about Hungary, all right, so I don’t. But——’

  ‘But you won’t let me even think about South Africa without having been there.’

  And the South African, who wasn’t, alas, persuaded, but knew when he was beaten, turned to his partner and said: ‘Let’s go and dance, Harriet.’ Then he turned back to Nicholas and said: ‘All right, you win. But thank God you’ll never win anything more than an argument. Because if people like you ran the world, no one would be allowed to do anything. And you can beat me in argument a thousand times, but I still shan’t change my views on apartheid.’

  Nicholas shrugged and said nothing, and the man went out with his Harriet, but as the door was closing we heard a little fragment of conversation which went: ‘But, John, he’s right, isn’t he? I mean——’ and then the man’s voice: ‘For Christ’s sake shut up.’

  And we all sat in silence for a moment, and then Nicholas said: ‘He’s so bloody right, that’s what makes life so intolerable. Win an argument, lose an election. Look at Adlai Stevenson. Those idiots will only admit they’re wrong when they find a knife in their back.’

  ‘Good riddance,’ said someone.

  But Nicholas looked even more pained when he heard it, and we thought about the idol of the eggheads for a bit, and we saw what he meant, and we all felt sorry for Nicholas, except Giles, who said: ‘Come off it, Nicky, you’ll be Under-Secretary of State for something yet.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, ‘for Sport, I dare say.’ He really did look upset for a few minutes, so we all talked about other things.

  It’s odd the way really intelligent people like Nicholas can be shattered by things like that—spiteful, defeated remarks. It comes of knowing you’re right, I suppose, and knowing at the same time that pigheadedness will stop you getting whatever it is done. Or like being Socrates, on a rather smaller scale, and knowing that they’ll make you take henbane or hemlock or whatever it was, just because they know they’re wrong but simply can’t stand being told so any longer. For people like Nicholas, there is a lot of sheer cussedness in human nature which takes an awful lot of loving.

  Nicholas hadn’t got a dinner-jacket on like everyone else, he wasn’t even wearing a suit, he was in grey flannels and an open-necked shirt, which was slightly outré, but which he explained as a memory of Nieman Marcus of Dallas, Texas. I think most people imagined Nieman Marcus was a man, but actually it’s a very grand shop—very grand indeed—and you have to be very rich, Nicholas says, even to be allowed in. Anyway, he didn’t look as though he was about to take to the dance-floor. Giles was all dressed up, in fact he got up quite soon and went off with Marianne Summerson, and they weren’t going to play tennis in those clothes, so I supposed they were going to dance. After a time everyone moved off except Nicholas and me, and we had a nice natter about life and things, but especially about life. And after he’d asked me who my partner was, and why I was neglecting her so shamefully, and after I’d shown him the telegram from Alison, or rather Elaine, though I didn’t tell him that, he said he thought he’d go away for a week or two and let the place calm down, then do some hard work.