‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘You might have given me hay-fever.’
The rose flew out of the window and fell, too tight in its bud to shed a petal, in the middle of the road.
‘Well, get on,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’
I wasn’t waiting for anything, really, I was just wondering what the hell I was doing there, how the devil I’d ever got myself mixed up with her, and why on earth she’d chosen that morning, of all the mornings she could have chosen, to tell me she didn’t even like my presents. And I was wondering why it had to be me, of all people, that God, if He existed, was determined to keep out of heaven that particularly beautiful day.
I’d borrowed an alarm-clock to wake me early. I’d gone to the market and paid through the nose to have a dew-wet stupid flower done up for a beautiful girl to wear on the first day of her Schools. I’d played the part of the hopeless young lover as well as I could, and all that white-bearded old man up in the sky had to offer was: ‘You must be mad.’ He was quite right, of course. Only a lunatic would ever have fallen in love with Margaret, and it was my mis-fortune to have been the number-one eligible lunatic in Margaret’s life.
The car, sympathetically, refused to start.
‘Switch on the engine,’ said Margaret.
The car started. With exaggerated care I drove her through the gowned and white-tied streets to the Examination Schools. They’d just been cleaned—outside, I mean—and the stones shone like well-scrubbed cheeks.
‘Unwillingly to school,’ I said, drawing in to the kerb.
‘Thanks, Charles,’ she said, and got out. ‘’Bye.’
She twitched her gown about her shoulders, and her long black-stockinged legs tripped along the pavement and up the steps and out of sight. The paper that morning was English History I—from the year dot to somewhere in the middle of all those Edwards. She didn’t have a clue. I’d lent her my notes, I’d virtually given her tutorials, I’d tried to teach her the difference between the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Domesday Book, but she didn’t have a clue, not a clue. If she gets through that one, I thought, it will show once and for all that it is immoral to allow girls to be examined by men.
But then in many ways Margaret was the most immoral person I have ever met. I don’t mean by that that she slept around—if only she had. No, if she hadn’t used her chastity as a weapon she might have saved me, and a few others I dare say, a lot of time, agony and petrol. She was immoral in that she allowed people to fall in love with her, and then used them. She gave nothing in return but her occasional patronage and the sort of masochistic kicks that only lovers of true bitches can really appreciate. When Margaret left Oxford, I can guarantee, there were more mental masochists around than Dr Kinsey would have believed. For instance, pretending to have hay-fever. Now it was true in a minor way that Margaret was given to summer colds, she made rather a thing about them, in fact, and insisted on being given hot toddies at parties, though everyone knew perfectly well that hot toddies were the only drinks she liked. But suppose she really was frightened of it, suppose she thought that innocent rose might harm her chances in the exam, even then she needn’t have thrown it out of the window as though it was someone else’s dirty handkerchief. She knew perfectly well that I’d got that rose for her specially—and it wasn’t a notably sentimental thing to give someone on the morning of his Schools. Many, many people have worn roses to their first paper, I wore one myself, actually, that I’d picked from a bush in the college garden, so she couldn’t pretend that she was disgusted by a lah-di-dah romantic gesture. It was simply that she didn’t want a rose, she wasn’t going to have a rose, and she didn’t give a damn about whose feelings got in the way. Usually she was much more subtle, it is true. But the stress of impending examination has brought out the worst in some of my very best friends, and no doubt she hadn’t slept too well the night before, and in any case, as I’ve said, she didn’t have a clue about English History I. So exit one rose.
But for me a rosebud on the tarmac was the beginning of the end—the true end, this time. I’d been in love with Margaret for too long, I’d told myself ‘This is the end’ too often before, not to realize that this time something had snapped and I meant it. My feelings were of as little interest to her as the number of the lorry that ran the rose over, if a lorry did run it over. (It was probably picked up by some Romeo on his way to a wooing at her college, actually.) In a way, I felt I was the victim of my society; for a society which has seven men to every girl is not the best place, at least in my opinion, to teach young ladies to care for the feelings of young men. The sheer futility and boredom of Oxford love-affairs is directly related to the disproportion between the sexes, which leaves the women in complete command of the battlefield. I am prepared to bet a large sum of money that Oxford has more virgins of both sexes than any comparable community in the British Isles, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where all the men are queer anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is that I decided quite suddenly that a great epoch of my life was over. (I was wrong, of course; things don’t end just because you think they’ve ended, but I was right, too, in a way.)
Margaret, before her final spastic attempts to learn something of the Glorious Past of her Great Country, had devoted her undergraduate career to the stage, usually under a pseudonym of some sort, as the girls’ colleges take the view that acting is not really quite what they were founded to encourage. And when I think of the hours I spent being shouted at by producers, under the misapprehension that I was the soldier who comes on in Act Three Scene Eight to be stabbed by the hero after a singularly cowardly fight with an obviously painted wooden sword; of the hours in filthy rehearsal halls with those seedy characters who chew pencils and talk about light-bars; of the hours in theatres watching other men get their grubby lips on to her grubby lips (grubby with greasepaint, I mean, of course); of the hours in tawdry coffee-houses and plush bars while she talked with her friends about the way Miranda had stolen the scene from Patrick and what Roger was going to tell Geoffrey to do tomorrow night to put Adrian in his place—when I think of those hours, the months of hours, I spent being in love with that impossible, delightful, exquisite, stupid girl—then the full horror of undergraduate life comes back to me, and I know just how glad I am that I need never, ever, go up that awful sordid sexual back-alley again, to poke in the dustbins for a few stray smiles and an odd kind word. The crying boredom of that kind of youth, all its emotional agonies and intellectual despairs have gone for good. Not, I dare say, that love isn’t always rather boring in retrospect, particularly a frustrated love. Once it’s over, it’s over; and if you’re in love with someone else, then what you did and felt and thought before must always seem pretty tedious, because the virtue of love is its living kindling quality, and no amount of blowing on dead ashes can ever compensate for the thing itself. And in recollection nothing can match the absurdity of undergraduates: the long hair of the boy and the long hair of the girl getting knotted and twisted together till they don’t know where they are, and the roots shrieking with pain as they draw apart. At least, that’s how it seems now, to me. I dare say it could be all right if you found a girl who would love you back the way you loved her, but my experience was that you didn’t. The disproportion always worked against it.
I should say, I suppose, that while Margaret was chucking my rose out of the window I was not myself an undergraduate at all. By no means. I, Charles Frederick Hammond, got a First the year before, no doubt due to some mix-up by the examiners, and for about six months I thought I was some kind of demi-god. When the news came through we opened a bottle of champagne and my father gave me a car, and though he was hoping I’d join him in the manufacture of certain alloys essential to the defence industry, and therefore highly profitable, he was quite pleased when I said I’d like to stay on for a while at Oxford and enjoy myself, since I’d worked so hard (a damned lie) and so hadn’t had time (in three years, would you believe it?) to get all that I could have got out of that great place of learning. A thoroughly decent man, my father; and even now I think he still believes I’ll help him boss the men that make the parts that go to the factories that make the bombs that will blow us all sky-high any day now, once and for all. Anyway, there I was in the most modern of rackets, the postgraduate career, sitting in the Bodleian, or so my father imagined, getting my nose down to some really fascinating work on the alum industry in Yorkshire in the late sixteenth century. In fact, of course, I was doing nothing of the kind. I was back in Oxford because that was where Margaret was, and where she was I could continue my self-analysis in the long dark hours, proving night after night that I was a fraud and a failure. I suppose really clever analysts can be absolutely impartial about themselves, but I never even tried to be. I wallowed in Margaret’s unkindness, sending myself to sleep with imaginary sleeping-pills, or concocting immensely long suicide-notes in my head, and planning where to leave them so that only she would know how much I loved her and how bloody she was. Because I did love her, in my own unpleasantly juvenile way; because, however young and stupid one is, once one has fallen for a Margaret there is nothing else to think about and one’s whole life becomes a sort of sleep, with rude nightmares from time to time when she throws a rose out of the window of your car, or slaps your face, or smilingly turns from you to kiss someone else.
And at the end of this year, when I should have been flexing my arms to get down to the serious business of life and all that sort of rubbish, when I should have been sated with pleasure, I was just where I had been a year before, only rather worse off, as it happened, because I’d gained nothing; I hadn’t done a stroke of work, my mind was becoming as lazy as my body, which hates to take exercise, and I still didn’t want to do anything but be where Margaret was and take my punishment like a he-adolescent. Of course, I did have a pretty clear idea of what Margaret was like by this time, even if I wasn’t so clear about myself. So that when she threw the rose out of the window I was expecting it in a way; it was the sort of thing I was used to. But something snapped then, quite unexpectedly, and I knew it was the beginning of the end. Don’t think I wasn’t still in love with her. Knowing that she was a bitch didn’t stop me wanting to make love to her, to marry her, to trot off to work every morning, if it was absolutely essential, to provide her with food and clothing. But I knew where I stood, and I felt the first spark of rebellion, and I was getting ready to tell her I’d had enough, and she could like it or lump it, I didn’t care—the only thing holding me back being, of course, that I did care, and I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that she would be only too pleased to lump it if I gave her half a chance. Because, though she did like me in her own way, so long as I kept out of the way, as it were, and I was useful to her with my notes and my car and my slavish slavering devotion, there were a lot of other boys around, and notes wouldn’t be any use any more, and a car wasn’t much use when she lived at her home and I lived at mine, and devotion she thought she could get whenever she wanted it. Her other boyfriends were mostly actors, though, and she had no illusions about them being nice or reliable or anything like that. Whereas I had been the most reliable man in the world. Much too reliable, in fact. Much too reliable.
I don’t pretend that all this went through my head while I sat in my car outside the Examination Schools, but some of it did, and the vision of her lovely black legs tripping up the steps to think about the difference between Aelfric and Offa stayed with me for quite a time. Eventually a policeman came along and threatened me with a parking fine. I don’t know why it is, but a policeman has only to ask me the time and I feel guilty, although I know perfectly well that I’ve never committed any crime worth mentioning at all. I may have left my vehicle for more than twenty minutes where it wasn’t supposed to be left, but apart from that my conscience is clear. But policemen frighten me. I think of the clergymen who used to sweat down at us from the pulpit at school and talk about morality as though only regular communicants had a hope in hell of getting to heaven, and I remember the petty-officers who could see at one and the same time that my left boot wasn’t as highly polished as my right and that my cap-ribbon was three-eighths of an inch nearer to the left ear than it should be. Any kind of disciplinary authority fills me with dread, I feel at once that I have committed some terrible outrage, like pissing into a font or going into Buckingham Palace with my fly-buttons undone—not that I have ever been into Buckingham Palace, or am ever likely to be asked to spend the time of day there, or that I have any intention of visiting any church of any denomination except to look at the architecture. But I still feel, as soon as a policeman appears within a hundred yards, that this is it, there is no excuse this time, I’ve had it, and I shall never see green grass growing in the open air again.
Well, as soon as I’d recovered sufficiently from this particular policeman’s visitation, I drove off, wondering whether I shouldn’t go and look at some of the manuscripts which my supervisor described as enriching the Bodleian Library. That’s typical, by the way, of the sort of effect that policemen have on me: they make me feel guilty about absolutely everything. After all, I thought in justification, I am at Oxford, and I might as well show my gratitude by giving my supervisor a few hints as to the nature of those riches. ‘There’s enough there,’ he’d said to me, when he put me on to the impossible subject, ‘to keep you busy for a year, anyway.’ Some dons, you may not know, are simply without any inkling of morality; they use their students for gathering information that they’re too busy or idle to gather for themselves. Harold Brandon was one of them. He lived in one of the richer colleges, in a magnificent suite, and had a mistress in London, and went to all the parties, and wrote the most savage book reviews, and never contributed anything himself except an occasional article summing up what other people had done and saying how hopeless it was and suggesting the need for much greater research before even a tentative solution to the problem could be adumbrated. He was rather fond of the word ‘adumbrated’. He was much feared and generally hated, but I rather liked him, because he never bothered me at all. He obviously decided at the beginning that I would be useless. I went to see him occasionally, to tell him how I was getting along, and our conversation would go like this:
‘Ah, Hammond, come in. Doing all right, are you?’
‘Wasn’t that party last Friday awful, Harold?’
‘Ghastly. Have a glass of sherry.’
‘Well, yes I will, thank you.’
‘Did you ever hear the story about …?’
And that would be that for the next month or two, and the alum industry looked after itself.
But that morning I thought I’d take a look at the things which made the Bodleian so proud, so I parked the car under a notice saying ‘Permit holders only’ and went up the stairs feeling that I’d got on terms with the police at last. Only when I got to the top I thought I might as well stroll through the Reading Room to see what was going on, and who was sitting next to whom, and all that sort of thing. The place was fairly quiet and empty, it being examination time, and a fine summer day, too, and apart from the regulars toiling away at their theses on ‘Imagery in Early Icelandic Sagas and its Influence on the Celtic Twilight’, and ‘Marvell and Milton: a Study in Ideological Conflicts’, there was only the gentle murmur of the girls at the Reserved Books Counter. But I saw Nicholas Sharpe sitting by himself, so I went and looked over his shoulder, and saw he was reading some fearfully learned journal about Romance Languages, and after a bit he turned round and said: ‘Voyeurism, Charles, that’s your trouble.’
‘Who are you trying to impress?’ I said, because Nicholas was writing a thesis on something to do with Trade Cycles.
‘Just doing a little reading for a hard-pressed friend,’ he said, shutting the journal.
With Nicholas this meant one thing and one thing only—he was in love again, though he probably didn’t know it. I like him a lot, Nicholas, I always have done; he’s witty, extremely able, extremely energetic, very sensitive, very good-looking, in spite of his glasses, and altogether a nice guy. But he’s rather sad, too, because he doesn’t like women; in fact, he never even notices them, because he’s queer, and I think that’s sad. He also has rather extreme views on the major political issues of our time; in fact, he’s only a few feet outside the Communist Party, which I, as a good middle-of-the-road Socialist, regard as far more perverted than being homosexual. These views he holds with a tenacity that makes argument impossible, unless one is prepared to go into the fundamentals of absolutely everything from traffic regulations to the nature of sovereignty, which on the whole I’m not. So when he’s finished mauling my objections to what I regard as his Neo-Stalinism, all I can do is shrug and say that he may be right, but he doesn’t know about life because he doesn’t understand about women. He always gets very angry when I say this, and starts telling me I’m a Fascist, which I’m not, and that my attitude to queers is as bad as the Nazi attitude to Jews, and that there will be no room for people like me when the revolution comes. So I usually put my arm round him then and say: ‘Oh, but I love queers,’ and he changes the subject.
Anyway, I wasn’t in any mood for his left-wing trash just then, and as it happened I hadn’t got much to say for women, either, and luckily he looked at me and saw I wasn’t feeling very happy, and said: ‘What’s she done now?’
So I told him, and he shrugged and said he wasn’t making much headway with Romance Languages himself, and why didn’t we both go and have some coffee at the Rawlinson? But I said I was feeling guilty and thought I ought to look at a few manuscripts, and he said why didn’t we meet in half an hour and drown our sorrows together—to which I agreed.
So I went to Duke Humphrey, the old part of the library where the manuscripts are brought to you out of the depths of the earth, and after about ten minutes I decided that it had been a great mistake even to pretend that I had an interest in alum. I wasn’t altogether sure what it was used for, for one thing, and for another I had grave doubts whether it was really very interesting to know that the business men of the late sixteenth century were even more immoral than their descendants of the twentieth. There were, it suddenly struck me, life and scholarship; and one could either spend one’s time worrying about the ghastliness of the past or in trying to do something about the ghastliness of the present; to make the current ghastliness, in fact, a little less ghastly. There was an argument, I admitted, that knowing about the ghastliness of the past might help one to understand the nature of ghastliness itself, and throw valuable light on contemporary ghastliness. Scholarship might very well have its purpose. But wasn’t I, I thought, looking out of the window, the sort of man who was best occupied on the practical side? Might it not be better to leave these questions of what might be called ghastliness-theory to those who really appreciated them—men who could analyse ghastliness, cut it down to various types and sub-types, examine their inter-relationships, define, equate, judge? Such men were essential to any community, I granted. But was I one of them? Didn’t my own acquaintance with ghastliness equip me rather to deal with it in its manifest daily forms, than to evaluate the influence of its past upon its present?
Somehow these deep questions led me to examine the lawn below the window. Stretched out upon it were two young men, their half-naked bodies surrounded by pieces of paper—their essays, no doubt. Beside them, on a deck-chair, tilting back and forth, sat, or rather sprawled, a man in a white cotton jacket and light-grey trousers, a panama hat over his eyes, and one foot tapping lightly in the air. From time to time he would raise an arm languidly, as if to make a point, then let it drop, as if utterly exhausted. The last tutorial of the academic year, an Oxford idyll, white wine almost certainly for tea, punts nuzzling the river-bank like tired crocodiles.
Thinking of punts, I thought, too, of Margaret. She had promised me her time after Schools, some of it, anyway. We were to punt and drink and go to parties and dance at a Commemoration Ball; we were to have a magnificently old-fashioned, old-hat time for the last few days before the elms sighed over us for the end of youth. Gently I moved into a daydream of the afternoons to come. Perhaps she really was frightened of hay-fever. Perhaps her nervousness before an examination should not be taken too seriously. I had a splendid quarter of an hour’s relapse.
When Nicholas came to find me I was half asleep. The manuscript had shut itself, as far as I was concerned, for ever. Harold Brandon would chuckle, and tell me another story.
As I handed it in to the desk I said: ‘I shan’t be needing it again, thank you.’
‘We have some other things out in your name, Mr Hammond,’ said the girl. ‘Do you want us to keep them for you?’
‘No, thank you. I have abandoned scholarship.’
‘What did you say?’ said the girl.
‘Good morning,’ I said, leaning across the counter and taking her hand. ‘And goodbye. You’ve been so helpful.’
I raised her hand to my lips, gave a small bow, and left.
‘Really,’ said Nicholas, ‘if I’d done that you would have accused me of exhibitionism.’
‘I was merely showing my appreciation for the really splendid work those library people have done for me, and, besides, I think that girl is rather pretty.’
‘You looked so gloomy half an hour ago.’
‘I was. But I had a vision while I was sitting there. I looked out into the garden and saw an illustration from a medieval Book of Hours. Everyone was sitting around waiting for nothing to happen on a lovely summer day. Oxford at its most ninetyish.’
‘High time you got out into the world and saw a bit of life,’ said Nicholas, getting his own back for a change. ‘Do you have any plans?’
Well, no, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I knew I had no intention of staying at Oxford any longer—it would have been a sort of deliberate self-paralysis, and I didn’t want to end up as a failed scholar, whatever else I might do. No, there was always my father’s firm, if the worst came to the worst, and anyway my father was very keen on people knocking about the world a bit and seeing things, seeing how the other ninety-nine point nine per cent lived and all that sort of rubbish. He used to talk vaguely about sending me to Canada for a year, where the firm had a branch factory. I’ve never liked the idea of Canada—cold, I imagine, and a sort of America without the trimmings, and lacking in the civilized amenities, like art galleries and theatres and good monthlies. Not that I read the monthlies much, but I like to know they’re there for me to read if I feel like it. It’s not much to ask, and maybe Canada does have some good ones, but I have the feeling that it’s the sort of place that hasn’t, that’s all. Anyway, my father wasn’t set on Canada; there were a lot of other places he approved of as well, and, though he did want me to get in there and make a few munitions eventually, he was prepared to wait till I’d seen a few of the places they were likely to be used by or against.
‘I think I’ll travel a bit, you know,’ I said as we came out into the Broad.
‘Idle bloody rich.’
‘Would you work if you didn’t have to?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas at once. ‘If you had any sense of responsibility at all, you would realize that the amount of work to be done to make the world habitable for the vast majority of human beings would occupy every man living his whole lifetime, and then some.’
Nicholas was always bringing out statements like that; statements which made you feel guilty about wondering whether he was inventing statistics or actually could prove what he said. I mean, he may have been absolutely correct, but he never gave proof. It’s rather sad that no one goes to political meetings any more, because he sounds magnificent when he’s talking and I have a feeling that a lot gets lost when it’s reduced to paper.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to take him up on that one, knowing perfectly well that he would end up by exhorting me to do something serious; something serious in his eyes being agitation of an unpaid sort for or against bombs, pensions, civil liberties, strikes and Tories. Against Tories, of course, and for strikes.
So what I said was: ‘I think one ought to broaden one’s outlook, don’t you?’
‘On the Riviera, no doubt, or among the rotting canals of Venice.’
The trouble with people like Nicholas is that they always assume the worst about you. If I’d said I was going to Sicily to work for Danilo Dolci he would have laughed and said: ‘For a fortnight? I’m sure he’ll be terribly grateful.’ So I didn’t bother to answer, I just pulled him across the road and into Blackwell’s, because I can’t drink my morning coffee till I’ve had a look at the new books. One never knows; there may be something one suddenly wants to read, like a new William Golding or an old Ivy Compton Burnett, or they may have decided to stock Astounding. You never can tell with Blackwell’s. I’ve never seen a shop so quick on the draw with Samuel Becket, for instance, and they are devoted salesmen of The Evergreen Review.
As a matter of fact they hadn’t got anything new that morning, except a volume in the series on English place-names and a whole lot of theological paper-backs with titles like The Courage To See. But I suddenly felt like clutching a new book in my hand, something rather shocking and derrière-garde that I could flaunt at Margaret when I went to collect her at half past twelve. I didn’t want a book to read, you see, I wanted one to carry, so I chose one of those explosive cowslip covers with lots of purple paint and a piece of paper wrapped round it which said, incredibly, that A. L. Rowse, Aneurin Bevan, Edith Sitwell, John Wain and Lionel Trilling all thought it was the tops.
Nicholas protested that it was just a piece of neo-Fascist semi-autobiography; but it was very cheap, and I said: ‘If it’s good enough for Aneurin Bevan, then it’s good enough for you, too, Nicholas.’
They wanted to wrap it for me, but I wasn’t having that, so we came out into the sunlight again and I carried it with the jacket glittering down the Broad towards the Rawlinson. It really was a very splendid day and I rejoiced to think of all the people taking exams, wishing like mad, I hoped, that they were dead, or lifeguards on some Florida beach. The tar looked as if it would certainly come to the boil in the early afternoon.
‘I must get some sun-glasses,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Nicholas. ‘You seem to be trying to consume as conspicuously as possible this morning.’
‘And why not? It’s my last week in Oxford. Well, my last few weeks. It’s time we both woke up.’
‘I am quite awake, thank you.’
‘I meant myself and Oxford.’
‘Listen,’ said Nicholas. ‘Half an hour ago you had a face as long as a boot, and I felt reasonably sorry for you. I’m a sucker, I know, for people who look sad. But I can change. So shut up. The Rawlinson will be full if we don’t hurry.’
So we went, but I still wanted some sun-glasses. Sun-glasses are like bathing-costumes, you have to buy new ones every year. Also they make me feel very rich and important, like a film-star on holiday, although I know perfectly well that two and a half people out of every three at Oxford wear them at the slightest sign of a chink in the clouds. But just then I felt very ordinary, and I wanted to be ordinary and happy and not to think about Margaret at all, except in terms of a new, glamorous Charles Hammond, with dark hair showing just a touch of silver here and there, the idol of teenagers from Wisconsin to Wessex, Eng.
The Rawlinson is a dingy place. It’s a huge room with dirty frosted glass down one side so that you can’t see the muck they’re shovelling into the kitchen, and three of the ugliest and most pointless pictures I’ve ever seen in my life on two of the other three walls. But the fourth wall looks out, through its three windows, at the Broad. You can see all the way from Elliston’s to the King’s Arms, which can be a fine view, especially on a summer morning. Of course, the coffee is absolutely revolting, the sort of stuff they give horses when horses have colic, if that’s what horses have, but the point is, about the Rawlinson, that everyone goes there, view or no view, horse-tonic or no horse-tonic, because that’s where everyone else goes. I dare say some people go elsewhere, and maybe the Rawlinson doesn’t even exist any more, but in my day anyone who was anyone could be met there nine days out of ten between eleven and twelve, the tenth day being, of course, Sunday when the place was shut; why, I can’t think, since there was nothing whatever to do on Sundays, and all they had to do was open the joint and customers would have come flocking in to read bits of the Observer to each other.
Anyway, that’s where Nicholas and I went, up the stairs and past the cashier’s glass box which never had a cashier in it (you paid when you got your coffee) and on to the end of the queue. Strange to say we couldn’t see any of our friends so we grabbed a table by the window from under the noses of a couple so obviously in love with each other that they didn’t need a view at all.
‘The way people go round flaunting their happiness!’ said Nicholas, with a certain distaste. ‘They use it as a sort of status-symbol. Sometimes I wonder whether there is any point in trying to save the human race from extinction.’
‘Bombs away,’ I said. ‘What’s the latest?’
‘Oh, the government are trying to suppress the report on radiation.’
‘Not according to my paper. My paper says that the danger is greatly exaggerated, and that if we all keep calm and our chippers up we’ll all be all right. Not to worry, it says.’
‘If you will read the Tory Press …’
‘You mean there are horrid facts my paper doesn’t tell me? But surely, Nicholas, a report is a report. You can’t make it say things that aren’t there.’
‘You most certainly can. And when there is an election in the offing it sometimes becomes politically necessary to interpret facts to suit your own purposes. The report is fine, it simply states a few facts and a few opinions about the facts. But the papers pick the facts and the opinions that suit them.’
‘Well, I know that,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t prove that you are right and my paper is wrong about radiation.’
‘I am not going to go into it all with you now, Charles. You are obviously not serious this morning.’
‘And I can’t help it if my landlady takes a Tory paper.’
‘You can help it. You can take a paper of your own, for one thing. You can try and change her politics, for another. And I suppose you’re allowing her to exploit you?’
‘Exploit me?’
‘Does she charge you a fair rent? Does she make you pay a retaining fee during the vacations? Is she getting more than a reasonable return on her capital?’
‘Really, Nicholas, you know I haven’t any idea.’
Nicholas, though, wasn’t being too serious himself. But he could go on like that for hours about the smallest things. Sometimes it would work the other way round. Was I paying enough for my bus fares? Were the bus-conductors getting a fair wage? But usually it was that I was paying too much because I had more money than most people at Oxford, and this was irresponsible, because by paying more than I should I was helping to raise prices for those who had less money than most. All of which was true, I suppose, but on the whole I tried not to think about it.
Luckily, I didn’t have to think about it now because Jack and Elaine came to join us. Elaine Cole was one of the most beautiful girls at Oxford at that time, and perhaps of all time, but then I’ve always liked her, so I am biassed. She had really golden hair, not the usual Scandinavian watery-coloured stuff, such as Margaret had, but really golden, and she wore it very long, falling about all over her shoulders, so that you kept wanting to grab great fistfuls of it and rub it all over your face. If you see what I mean. And her eyes, too, were wonderfully sexy, a deep warm blue, not like Margaret’s eyes, which were the cold piercing blue you get in pictures of Mount Fujyama or whatever it’s called. (Margaret had a reproduction in her room, and I used to look from it to her and from her to it, and try and decide whether her eyes were like the picture or the picture like her eyes. I never did make up my mind.) Elaine’s eyes seemed to be swimming about, looking for innuendo, like those fish that joke with passing ships. And where Margaret had a very beautifully moulded face, very fine and classical, with the sort of skin you can almost see through, so that you can feel the bones under it when the muscles move to eat or smile or talk, Elaine had full cheeks, fat cheeks in fact, so that when she smiled everything wrinkled up and smiled with her. And on top of all that she was extraordinarily sexy.
Jack wasn’t so good-looking. He was about medium height, about medium everything, except for his jaw which was very long, and a perpetual look as though someone had just slammed his finger in a door but he was being very brave about it. His eyes were nondescriptly grey and his hair was nondescriptly brown, and when he put on his spectacles they seemed to flatten his face somehow, so that he looked as though he’d been carved out of bone, a single straight bone, with the knuckle at the bottom where his chin was. Also his chin looked rather shiny all the time. But I mustn’t be unfair to Jack. In many ways he was a most remarkable man. He was born in a mining village in Wales, and his father was a permanent invalid, disabled in a pit accident, and now he’s a successful teacher in a comprehensive school in London, and if you don’t think that’s a big jump, I do. Everyone is always saying that what with the Welfare State and all that everyone now has the same opportunity to get on. At least, not everyone says it, but a lot of people who should know better say it, such as my family, and the rest of the people who vote Tory, and there are too many of them in my opinion, and they have been in the majority for more years than I care to think about. However—if you’d ever met Jack you would realize just how difficult it is for a miner’s son to get to Oxford; what it means to him, what it does to him, and how he still has to fight every inch of the way to get past people who think he hasn’t got quite the right background, don’t you know, for the sort of job, don’t you know, that pays a man enough to have a wife and children and an occasional holiday abroad in his own car. I don’t say that things aren’t a great deal better than they were, but I do say that they have a long way to go still, if people like Jack aren’t going to be lost to the country down some god-awful mine somewhere. And if anyone with an upper-class accent starts talking about how important it is to fight one’s way up from the bottom, and how it develops initiative, I always want to ask whose bottom he’s talking about. Because when your bottom is in a nice warm chair, and all you have to do is press a knob for Miss Floozit to come and take a letter, it’s very easy to talk about initiative, but you tell me how many managing directors had to fight all the way up, as Jack had to fight.
But though I admired Jack very much, I didn’t, to be honest, like him. I respected him, but I couldn’t bring myself actually to like him. Partly, I think, it was because he was one of those people who made me feel ashamed of being richer than average, so ashamed and self-conscious that I wanted to give my car away at once. I mean, I had a car because my father was rich and successful, and Jack didn’t have a car because his father wasn’t in the very least rich: he lived on some miserable pension; and though I didn’t see what could be done about it, whenever I put my mind to it I couldn’t think of any reason why I should be privileged and not Jack, because I did not believe that the sins and misfortunes of the father should be visited on the heads of his children, or, as it were, vice versa. I mean, when you come to think about it, it’s absurd, isn’t it, that someone should be hugely rich just because his great-grandfather was hugely successful at selling something to someone? Or perhaps I lack a sense of tradition, I don’t know. Anyway, Jack made me feel uneasy, not that he ever said anything about all this; in fact he was a Tory, it was widely believed. He made me feel uneasy without saying anything at all. He just looked at me in a way which made me feel he despised me, and I hate being despised, particularly for being rich. I think if you’re going to despise someone you should despise him for being inherently or actively despicable, for weakness of character or badness of action, and not for some accidental and extraneous thing like having or not having money. And Jack would look at me—lower at me, rather—as though I personally was responsible for the accident to his father, which I wasn’t; and furthermore I wasn’t having it that I was. Not that any of this was said, but it was there, lowering. And so I wasn’t exactly mad about Jack, though I liked Elaine enormously.
All this class business can get to be the most terrific bore, if you’re not careful. I’ve heard a group of middle-class Socialists arguing for an hour and a half about whether or not they were upper-or lower-middle, and really, when you come to think about it, that is a very deeply boring occupation for supposedly intelligent young men and women. To hell with one’s ancestors, I say, let’s go and do something now; but then, as I’ve just said, I don’t have much feeling for tradition. I’m all for being alive and all for forgetting about my great-grandfather’s morality (he was the one who founded the firm and is therefore responsible for my guilt about being rich—at times he would appear as a real villain in my life). So I’m against being class-conscious and terribly for treating people as human beings, as long as one isn’t, to adapt one of Nicholas’s favourite phrases, forgetful of that fact that one lives in a society and therefore has various social responsibilities. I’m for society, and against classes. I’m glad I’ve got that more or less clear, because otherwise people might think it was class hatred I felt for Jack, but it wasn’t at all, it was just that I didn’t like him very much. And if making me feel guilty was one reason for this, another was that he was, I thought, dull. He and Elaine made a great thing about going to church and spent a lot of time listening to classical music, both admirable things in their way, at least listening to music is admirable, I think; but he was dull and Elaine wasn’t. When I say I didn’t like him, you see, there was no positive dislike. I just thought him a bore, a rather negative character. And I couldn’t, for the life of me, see what Elaine saw in him.
Because Elaine was one of the most positive characters around, she was so positive she frequently fused the lights, if you see what I mean. She wasn’t brilliantly clever, her conversation wouldn’t have rivalled Madame de Staël’s, nothing like that; but when she was in a room it was a good room to be in, things livened up, there were people laughing and joking and enjoying themselves. For one thing she was a tremendous flirt, she would play up to a perfect stranger as though he was the only man in the world for her, but always with a flutter of the eye-lashes which said that the whole thing was just a great joke. After one had been flirting with Elaine for five minutes one simply didn’t care whether she was being serious or not, because one was having a great time. She never made a great thing about being virtuous, like Margaret, but in fact she was always perfectly loyal to Jack, and if someone made a pass at her she didn’t get on a high horse and pretend to be insulted and all that lah-di-dah rubbish, she just laughed and said she was sorry, but no, and the man didn’t feel hurt in the least.
Well, they came and joined Nicholas and me as we were about to have a tiresome argument, and Elaine made eyes at both of us, though particularly at Nicholas because she felt sorry for him being queer, and Jack sat and looked solemn and gloomy, and it was soon quite obvious that something was wrong between them, because usually Elaine would keep turning to Jack to bring him into the conversation, or she would pat him from time to time, just to let him know she knew he was still there, alive and with her. But that morning she was ignoring him completely, and she kept her hands to herself, and her banter wasn’t really quite up to standard; in fact she was making rather heavy weather of telling Nicholas that there would be plenty of opportunities for him to change sex, if he wanted to, if he’d only wait a few years and let the scientists finish their experiments on other people first.
Nicholas took all this very well, as he would have taken it from no one else. Queers, I’ve noticed, often enjoy having a pretty girl make a fuss of them, probably because it makes them feel human in spite of everything. It must be rather like being a Negro in South Africa and having a white man come up and congratulate you on being elected to the African National Congress, delightfully surprising and hopeful to find an enemy not an enemy at all. But I, who was not being fussed over, could see what Nicholas couldn’t, that Elaine was aiming a lot of her remarks at Jack rather than Nicholas.
‘Why don’t you become a priest, Nicholas?’ she was saying. ‘All the priests in our Church are queer. So are most of the congregation. It must be the incense that brings them in. That and the robes and going to confession.’
‘Particularly going to confession, I should think,’ said Nicholas. ‘A good deal of father-substitution goes on, I expect.’
‘Don’t you ever want to confess anything, Nicholas? I’m sure the Anglo-Catholics would love to know all about you.’
‘Never. I keep a diary for future biographers, or my own memoirs, whichever happens first, but I’m not like Roger Casement.’
‘Oh, can I read it, Nicholas, please? I need something juicy to take my mind off literature before Schools. Am I in it?’
‘Sometimes. I should say you were more often in Jack’s, though.’
‘Oh, Jack doesn’t keep a diary,’ she said. ‘At least he’s never shown it to me. It would be full of breast-beating and how he was tempted. I should appear as Jezebel. But he doesn’t need a diary, he’s got Father Gibbons. Father Gibbons is devoted to Jack. I get quite jealous of him sometimes. Father Gibbons tells him everything he ought to do to be ever such a nice clean-living scoutmaster.’
‘What does he tell you, Elain?’
‘Oh, he says I shouldn’t tempt Jack so much. I ask you. He must be queer. Anyone else would realize that I have to do my utmost to stop Jack assaulting me in the street.’
‘I don’t know how you can go on believing all that nonsense,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I don’t,’ said Elaine. ‘Sometimes I don’t believe one single word. But I keep coming back.’
‘It’s simply a form of intellectual masturbation,’ I said. ‘It’s like Nicholas’s diary. You only do it because it’s nice to lose control from time to time, to let everything go and tell someone everything private.’
‘Where do I come into all this?’ said Jack.
‘You provide her with things to tell Father Gibbons. She wants to have you all to herself, but to share you with God, too. It’s like having a tremendous secret. Once you’ve told someone else you can bear it. You’re her secret, you’re very lucky.’
‘What do you mean about intellectual masturbation?’ said Elaine, looking puzzled.
‘Well, I regard all religion as a form of self-abuse, I suppose. I was really thinking of the false excitement with which people work themselves up to confess or to write in a diary. Nicholas is obviously dying to tell someone all about his affairs, but he daren’t, they’re too illegal, he’d get thrown in jail. So he writes them up, and makes them more exciting than they really are.’
‘You do talk the most frightful rubbish,’ said Nicholas.
‘I can just imagine it,’ I said, ignoring him. ‘He probably pretends all his lovers are close political associates, and his courting becomes a debate about the future of Socialism. “Today I had coffee with E, J and C. None of them are serious. Afterwards I saw X”—or Y or Z or whoever he’s in love with at the moment—“and we talked about the role of fraternity in the development of equality. We came to an agreement that further discussion should be postponed till he has finished Schools.”’
Nicholas had blushed a deep red, something he didn’t do very often, so I felt I had made a lucky hit somewhere. It wasn’t often that I scored even a near-miss.
Elaine laughed and said: ‘Do you really write things like that, Nicholas?’
‘That’s my business,’ he said.
‘Leave the poor sod alone,’ said Jack. ‘I must go and do some work.’
Jack and Elaine were both reading English, and for some reason people reading English started a week later than people reading History. This was either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the state of one’s revision and nerves.
‘Go and work, if you want to, Jack,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ve done enough to get me a Second, it’s all I want.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.
‘I am not going to do any more work this morning, Jack. What are you waiting for? Go on, if you’re going. I should say it wouldn’t do you any harm at all to read a few books.’
‘Don’t let her bully you,’ said Nicholas. ‘But my advice for all examinees is to stay well clear of books for the whole week preceding the examination. Two hours a day on your notes is quite enough.’
‘My God,’ I said, ‘and you used to lock the door of the room so no one could disturb you. Nicholas,’ I said to Jack, ‘is one of those swine who pretend to do nothing, but in fact pack twenty-five hours into every day.’
‘And we all know what he does with the twenty-fifth,’ said Elaine. ‘But you, Charles, are the sort of swine who pretends to do nothing and actually succeeds. I think that’s much worse.’
They all laughed, even Jack. Then he said: ‘Aren’t you coming, Elaine?’
‘Oh, go away, Jack, be a dear. If you’re very good I’ll have lunch with you at the Turf. One o’clock. Now go.’
Jack looked as though he hated Nicholas and me very much indeed. Nicholas got up and said: ‘I must be getting back myself.’
‘Look at them,’ said Elaine. ‘Goody-goodies. Run away and read. You can tell me all about it later.’ She turned and gave me a smile. ‘Charles and I have a lot to talk about.’
They went off, Jack looking as though someone had just put his finger back in the door and slammed it again, and Nicholas looking, with his black hair and black-rimmed spectacles, like a civil servant of not quite the highest rank.
‘What’s that book?’ said Elaine.
‘Oh, just something that caught my eye.’
She looked at the title and the plaudits of the critics and said: ‘Really, Charles. It’s time you grew up.’
‘I didn’t buy it to read. I bought it to show off.’
‘Exactly,’ she said. We both laughed.
‘You are an awful man,’ she said. ‘Go and get me some more coffee.’
When I came back I said: ‘What’s the trouble, Elaine?’
‘Oh, just the usual. Jack can be impossible when he really puts his mind to it.’
‘I’ve been telling you that for ages.’
‘We’ll get over it, though. It’s a very ordinary conflict, sex versus religion. The love of God and the love of man. How’s Margaret?’
‘She threw a rose out of my car.’
‘How romantic. Did you get out and throw it back in?’
‘No. I was taking her to Schools.’
‘Just nerves, then,’ said Elaine, trying to be cheerful. ‘Jack is impossible. Father Gibbons won’t let us sleep together, and says he won’t give us any more warnings. He’s even threatened to tell our parents. I’m sure Jack’s would be delighted, but mine would throw up their hands in lily-white disgust.’
‘But you both go to church, don’t you? What’s the problem?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Elaine, ‘so let’s not talk about it.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and said: ‘Let’s go, I hate this place. I can’t think why I come here.’
It was a lovely day, getting hotter and hotter, and with that curious smell of exhaust-fumes which you only get in towns when the weather has been dry for some time, and is going to stay dry.
‘What a marvellous day to go punting,’ said Elaine.
‘Let’s!’
‘I said I’d meet Jack for lunch.’
‘I’m supposed to meet Margaret at twelve-thirty.’
‘There isn’t really time.’
We looked at each other.
‘Oh, damn them both,’ said Elaine. ‘One must have a little peace sometimes.’
‘What about your Schools next week?’
‘I couldn’t work even if I wanted to just now. I need an afternoon off.’
So we had one. Very irresponsible, very nice, I thought, and what on earth would Nicholas say?
‘Oh, I have to get some dark glasses.’
‘How nice. Let’s buy some for both of us.’