On the last morning, when I drove her down to the Examination Schools as usual, I was really rather excited. When I dropped her I said: ‘Don’t forget, Margaret, after this morning we’re going to have the time of our lives. You just go in there and show them.’
‘It’s too late now to show them anything they don’t know already,’ she said. ‘Honestly, after a week of these papers I feel as if I won’t know what to do this afternoon. It gets to be a habit, going in there and writing.’
‘Don’t worry about this afternoon,’ I said, ‘I have it all cared for.’
‘Well, thanks for the lift, Charles.’
And off she went for the last time, in those long black stockings which really gave her something extra, I’m not sure what. That absurd uniform that girls have to wear for exams makes most of them look awful, like overgrown schoolgirls, but Margaret seemed to be taller and grander, and the silly little hat they have to wear looked on her like the badge of some terribly O.K. foreign decoration. Dear Margaret, I thought, it will be nice for you to look ordinary again. But for a moment I kept the picture of her in her black hat and black stockings and black skirt, and wondered whether she shouldn’t just pause for a minute before she threw away the hateful things, pause to consider how they’d protected her for three years, in a sense, how the sheltered little world of Oxford had given her a pretty good time, and whether the outside world was really quite as attractive as it always seems in the days before you enter it. Anyway, I didn’t think about this for very long, partly because, although I had had a pretty good time myself, I’d also had enough, and after a while the continual postponement of life can have a very bad effect on one’s character, and make one very dissatisfied and gloomy and even intellectually arrogant, and partly because I had to go and buy the lunch I was going to give her.
The market at Oxford is one of those covered ones, so that you can wander about in it for hours, quite lost to the vagaries of the weather. For instance, among its many attractions is a shop which sells things like tinned grasshoppers and chocolate ants and bumble-bees, and there’s the pleasure of selecting from about fifty different kinds of cheese, and then there’s the appalling problem of the kind of bread one’s going to have, so that one really can spend hours in a world of delicious sights and smells. And nothing in the lunch I was planning was in the very least ordinary, everything had to be not just special but extra-speciaj (and pretty expensive too, I don’t mind saying), and rare and a treat and delicious. Kumquats I bought, to begin with, and smoked salmon, which isn’t all that special, I admit, but a treat all the same, and really brown brown bread to go with it, and then I thought perhaps she would prefer caviar, so I bought some of that, too; and then, for the main part of the meal, since we were going to eat it out of doors, thick slices of ham, chosen with great care for juiciness and flavour, nice and smoky, and six lettuces so that we need only eat the hearts, and some spring onions (which could always be replanted somewhere along the river-bank if she thought them too daring), and some tomatoes and a whole cucumber and some celery, really crisp young celery, without any of those hairs that spoil the crunchiness; and as well as the ham I bought some slices of cold beef, the sort you put between great hunks of new white bread with lots of butter, which you guzzle rather than eat, and then new white bread, of course, and pounds of butter, and then fruit, peaches and apples and even some ripe apricots. And that was only the beginning. By the time I’d finished I had a whole line of men carrying bags, I’d spent pounds and pounds, and there was quite enough to keep two people alive very comfortably for a week, without either of them having to do anything more strenuous than pay a visit to the refrigerator. And then of course there had to be wine, lots of it, because if you spend a whole afternoon and evening drinking, even quite slowly, just sipping in fact, you can still get through an awful lot of liquid. So I bought every colour—rosé for the river itself, and for the chicken (did I mention that?), white wine for most of the time, red for the evening. And not just any old wine, either, but the sort which costs much too much, however good it may be, because it’s smart and clever to drink it, and the swank papers pay wine merchants masquerading as connoisseurs to write about it in chi-chi little columns. And there was even a bottle of brandy, in case we needed it for medicinal purposes, or stayed out too long and got cold.
As I loaded all this into my car I was very glad that I had the sort which you can take the roof off, otherwise there simply would not have been room. Because I also had in the back a very ancient gramophone, the sort that has a huge horn and you can’t hear anything because of the scratch of the needle, but which looks marvellous on the prow of a punt, if a punt can be said to have a prow, and which is just marvellous, anyway. Besides, you can always take the horn off, if you want to, and use it as a megaphone, and I thought that morning that if we were going to be silly we might as well do it thoroughly. With this went my collection of worn 1920 records, Tea for Two and Hey, Maggie; Yes, Ma; Come Right Upstairs and Ukulele Lady and Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby and other similar gems of the period. I don’t know what it is about the records of that period—I suppose they’re the ones to which my generation’s parents got married and had our elder brothers and sisters, but unless there’s something very horrid and deep-seated and neurotic about that, it can’t be why they have such an appeal. Perhaps we remember them from the not-quite-soundproof womb, I don’t know. Anyway, they’re funny, and they’re also extremely good tunes, and besides it’s marvellous to have ancient gramophones on which to play them. Actually, I prefer Lionel Hampton and Billie Holliday to almost anyone you can mention, but the dear old Savoy Orpheans also have their place in my hagiography, with their beat so heavy you can feel the musicians chomping along as though they were in a chain-gang, and their absurd violins, and their plunkety-plunkety ukuleles. Those may not have been the days, and how should I know whether they were or not, but it’s nice to pretend they were and we’ve missed them, and therefore we’re deprived and to be pitied. Well, not really, but they do make one very nostalgic.
Anyhow, to get back to the story, at half past twelve I’d already been waiting for Margaret for twenty-five minutes, because I hadn’t frankly expected her to see the thing out to the bitter end, but she did, and at last she appeared, having given the academicians far more than they deserved, even though it can’t have been all that much. But at least she’d made her effort, and I had made mine, too, the necessary champagne waiting in my car wrapped in wet towels (the Proctors always got very cross if you started drinking it in the street, I can’t think why), and as soon as I saw her I went to greet her with my arms stretched out, to tell her to come and eat, drink and be merry, but first, drink. But one can’t keep one’s arms outstretched for very long when there are a whole lot of people in the way, so I stopped pretending to be a bird, or a head-waiter, folded my wings, as it were, and tried to force a passage through to her. Throng was the only word for it, hundreds of people telling each other how shamefully they’d done, correctly enough, I dare say, and how simply divine, my dear, it was that the whole bloody thing was over. There were one or two calm self-sufficient-looking men who spoke to no one, and one girl in tears, and these men at least looked as though they were already certain of their success (I think they must have got jobs before they’d even sat down to start writing), but most of the place was filled with hooligans shouting and laughing and jumping on their mortar-boards and such like juvenilia, and there was Margaret, too, in the middle of a lot of hooligans, moving very slowly and noisily towards the door. My heart began to sink a bit as I got near them all, because they were actors, for the most part, and actors don’t have to act to look like hooligans, and when they do act like them they make a very good job of it indeed. I don’t have much against actors when they’re acting, but when they’re not I find them extremely tiresome. For one thing, even when they’re not on stage, they’re still always giving some sort of a performance, and when you get about six of them, as there were then, each one is doing his damnedest, which is pretty damned, usually, to act the others out of the room, or, in this case, out of the huge vestibule of Thomas Jackson’s masterpiece, the Oxford Examination Schools. And as I edged my way to them, my heart sank a little bit more, because I wanted Margaret for myself, and I knew that if these intolerable little show-offs didn’t move off pretty quick I’d be left with Margaret and a cast of thousands, as it were, which would not be in any way the same thing at all. They were jabbering away like parrots, too, which annoyed me, because Margaret could hardly hear what I was saying, which was, roughly: Come along down to my car, baby, where the champagne is just bursting to get out of the bottle. In fact she didn’t catch on till we were all half-way out of the door, but then she did, only too well.
‘Champagne! Oh, Charles, how marvellous! Goody!’
Well, by the time we were actually outside Thomas Jackson’s masterpiece and on the pavement, she’d expressed her delight so loudly and cheerfully that all the actors wanted champagne too, in fact they said: ‘Oh, how nice, Charles’, and ‘Oh, Charles, how sweet of you’, and ‘Charles thinks of everything’, and ‘Did someone say champagne?’ So I was in something of a fix. But I wasn’t having all that lot drinking my drink, and certainly there wasn’t room for them where I was going with Margaret, and anyway they were being, I considered, unduly presumptuous. So I said: ‘Sorry, chaps, the champagne is for Margaret, not for you’, only not that, something much ruder and more to the point, though with roughly the same meaningful content. But they didn’t pay any attention they simply said: ‘Oh, but Margaret will give us some, won’t she, Margaret?’ and ‘We know you, Charles, you’ve got bottles of it,’ and ‘Charles has got bottles and bottles of bubbly for everyone,’ and ‘I did hear someone say champagne, didn’t I? And so I said: ‘Margaret, for Christ’s sake,’ and she just shrugged and shouted over the general hullabaloo: ‘Don’t be a spoilsport, darling,’ and after all it wasn’t every day that she called me ‘Darling’, so I gave in, and we all went off to my car, and we drank the drink out of the bottle, and they were really very nasty young men, I thought—in fact I loathed them—but Margaret seemed quite happy, and wanted to throw the bottle through a window, but we stopped that, and then suddenly everyone moved off to a nearby pub for lunch and more drink. In fact, after a moment of stunned incomprehension, I noticed that Margaret had gone, too, which annoyed me very much indeed. To be frank, I was getting rather ill-tempered by now, so I marched off after them, and got hold of Margaret and said I had everything laid on, and why didn’t she come? And she said, oh, but she must just have a drink with her friends, and I said, for God’s sake, there were quantities and quantities of drink waiting for her with me, and she said, oh, but that wouldn’t be quite the same thing, would it? and, anyway, after about a minute of really foul language when one of the actors stubbed a cigarette out on the thigh of my trousers, I agreed to one drink, but only one, and then we really must go.
I expect you can guess the rest—there was not just one drink, there were many, many drinks, and I didn’t get Margaret out of the pub till it shut, and half her heroes were dead drunk, or making a very creditable attempt to play the part, and she’d eaten two revolting pork-pies and a ham sandwich, and the lunch I’d so carefully arranged (not to say expensively) might just as well have stayed where it was in the shops. I can’t remember what anyone said during those hellish two hours to closing time, but to give you an idea of the general wittiness and intelligence of the conversation, I think this is not an unfair pastiche of it:
‘Frank, that’s my cigarette.’
‘Don’t be so possessive, Charles, jealousy is a most terrible thing. You could make yourself quite unhappy if you treated everything you owned as yours, like that.’
‘Oh, I remember when I was playing Iago to Vernon’s Othello, and Desdemona—who was Desdemona?—oh yes, Josephine—well, Desdemona forgot her lines—how does it go?—that bit where …’
‘And I told Jeffrey, I said Neville would never allow it, and of course he didn’t, and Jeffrey was terribly upset, and so everyone else got nervous, and the whole performance was absolutely ruined.’
‘That is my cigarette.’
‘… hopeless. So we tried again. This time I took Hamlet, and he took Horatio, and of course it worked perfectly, so of course when the time came and I was given Rosencrantz …’
‘When was the last revival of’Tis Pity She’s a Whore?’
‘… Beckett, I ask you, as though anyone could hope to be definitive in Beckett. He’ll learn. When he’s done a few years at the Theatre Royal, Southsea, playing the wronged husband, and lost a bit of that hair he’s always combing, he’ll make a very passable second footman—provided he can train his toes not to turn in so much.’
‘Charles, can you lend me any money? I don’t seem to be able to pay for this round, quite.’
‘… so he said “Mushhhrrrumps” and …’
‘Margaret, let’s get out of here, please.’
‘Very funny. Ha, ha. I suppose that you think that just because you didn’t undo the wrong sort of button at the end of Lear, you can set yourself up as …’
‘Larry … John … Ralph … Michael … Richard …’
‘Charles, you haven’t got ten bob, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Edith … Sybil … Peggy … Dorothy … Flora …’
Names, names, names, spilling all over the tables, names of actors and actresses that I admired, spilling about among the cigarette-ends, tarnishing in the glossy gossipy hungry malicious mouths of the jeunesse dorée of the undergraduate theatre; names, names, names, used as coins to buy a few seconds’ speech, a few seconds of reflected glory; names like coins, once polished and bright, now grubby with too much handling, bitten by too many teeth, slandered even while they were praised, all the sordid apocryphal stories standing between them and their performances like an impenetrable safety curtain; names gradually losing their power to entice and charm, names losing their faces, names, names, names.
After a while I simply gave up trying to get Margaret out, I just sat in a corner and looked sour and said nothing and refused to lend them money. But I couldn’t stop them picking up my cigarettes. As soon as I put one down, it had gone, God knows why. I don’t know what it was about that afternoon, none of those people had ever bothered to steal cigarettes from me before (they never had the chance again), but they disappeared the moment I laid them in the ashtray. The actors were simply being highly acquisitive. No property rights for them. But it’s not something I want to think about much; after all, cigarettes weren’t what I was angry about. It was just the second of the last great betrayals of Margaret, and I sat there feeling not in the least sorry for myself, but hearing a voice somewhere inside my head saying: serves you bloody well right, now will you pay attention? It said a great deal more, too, in fact I think it surveyed the whole of my courtship of Margaret in unnecessary but impartial detail, drawing conclusions, pointing trends, assessing the significance of this and that incident or gesture, till I was absolutely fed up with myself; and so far was I from feeling self-pity that the only thing I wanted to do was go out and start an altogether new life, altogether new and better and simpler, far from Margaret and Oxford and all these absurd popinjays with their carefully modulated voices all shouting at once. In fact, I rose at one point, to go, but Margaret saw me, and said where did I think I was off to, hadn’t I promised to take her out, and the exquisite humiliation of that (for me) and the wonderful arrogance of it (for her) set me back in my seat with a little glow of purely objective pleasure. And shortly after that everyone had to leave, and although some of them were not, in my opinion, fit to walk the streets, let alone attempt to ride bicycles, as they did, stealing the bicycles without hesitation from the kerbside, I was damned if any of them was going to ride in the back of my car, and I said so. I knew they’d only smash the horn of the gramophone, or get me arrested for carrying drunken passengers, if that’s possible, which I’m sure it must be (you can’t go near a car these days without doing something criminal), and although Margaret protested I simply said that if she wished to go with her friends, she could, but she would have to go on foot or pinch a bicycle, as I and my car would be very happy to spend the next few minutes entirely alone together. And she noticed at last that I was rather angry, and, deciding with a speed which did credit to her sense of opportunity that the party was over, got into the car without even bothering to say goodbye to her acting friends, who were, by now, giving an impromptu performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle on a traffic island in the middle of the High. And for pestle they read something quite different and without, as far as I know, any textual authority whatsoever, but which, I remember thinking as I drove past, would, with any luck, land them all with stiff sentences for indecent exposure.
When people talk about angry young men, and they used to in those days without stopping for breath or pausing for definition, they usually seem to mean, if they mean anything, people who object to pomposity and the general nauseating self-satisfaction, greed and incompetence of the governing-class. But when I was an angry young man, which was exactly then, I objected very powerfully indeed not to any abstract qualities in any particular class or indeed in society as a whole. I objected with a full heart to all the individual characteristics of those six young actors, and I could at that moment, though luckily I have forgotten them sufficiently not to be able to do so now, have spoken for at least ten minutes about each one of them, that is to say for an hour all told, at minimum, giving precise and lucid and even lurid accounts of their behaviour, and powerful reasons why each should be given not more than one week to leave country, family and friends, for ever.
About Margaret I felt absolutely nothing whatever. She sat beside me and said nothing, so I dare say she felt the same way about me. When we got to my college, I stopped the car.
‘What are we going to do here?’ she said.
‘Nothing. I am going to see if there are any letters for me by the second post, that is all.’
She looked a bit startled, as though this was hardly a time for me to catch up on my correspondence, but she shrugged and settled down in her seat with a bored look on her pretty face, and I leaned over to her and said very loudly and clearly: ‘You have kept me waiting for something over two hours, and if you can’t wait for me for two minutes you can get out and walk.’
Well, as it happened, there was a letter for me, a bill from Blackwell’s of such colossal dimensions that I fairly reeled. I mean I’m not that rich, and I’d been overspending pretty freely the last month or two, what with one thing and another, and because I’d wanted to, too, and though the bill was only in two figures, it was only just in two figures, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to pay it for many, many months, unless my dear old dad turned up with something unexpected for my birthday, and anyway my birthday wasn’t till November. So I was pretty sober when I returned to the car, only to find that Margaret had obeyed my suggestion to walk and had altogether disappeared.
This shook me a bit, I must say, but it all seemed to fit in with my general philosophy, and I took it very well, I think, under the circumstances. I mean I didn’t jump into the car and drive at ninety through the streets trying to find her, I drove at about seventy, and I found her about two hundred yards away, pretending not to notice that I was hooting away like an old-fashioned Parisian taxi-driver, but with a very definite blush on her face, which was a rare sight, believe me.
The rest of the day was rather tiresome, really. We had a furious argument for about an hour, in which I accused her of callousness, selfishness, inability to pick friends, and generally of absence of the basic principles without which human life could not be called civilized, and she retorted with ill manners, jealousy, presumption, and complete spinelessness and lack of character. After that we calmed down a bit, and she expressed her sorrow that my plans for lunch had had, so unforeseeably, to be altered, and I apologized for thinking that she associated only with grubby young hams, and we opened one of the bottles, and went to the pictures, and by dinnertime we were almost friends. At least, when I took her home, after we’d been to a nice quiet party given by Nicholas, she allowed me to kiss her very quickly on the left cheekbone, and said good night in a voice which had already agreed to have lunch, really this time, tomorrow.
Jack and Elaine were at Nicholas’s party, but not for long as they started their Schools the next morning. Just as they were going, I said to Nicholas, let’s do our Bacon and Montaigne dialogue for them again, just to give them a few last-minute ideas, but he said no, and they went away unaided. I didn’t see why he was being coy at first, but I soon guessed, because, as I must have said too often already, I rather like guessing what is going on between people, and it soon appeared to me that Nicholas was giving this particular party for one particular person, and that it was very probably the person for whom he had been delving in Romance Languages, and whom he called Delta, but whom I, since I knew him, always called Giles Mangles.
Giles was rather nice, I thought: shy, dark, quiet, with elegant rooms in a corner of the College farthest from the traffic. He shouldn’t really have been living in at all, but someone had died, by his own hand, I think—as people do from time to time at Oxford, what with one thing and another—or perhaps he had just been sent down, or left of his own accord; anyway he wasn’t there any more, and Giles had moved back into the College from his digs. He, too, it turned out, was starting his exams next morning, which surprised me, rather, because I had always imagined he was only in his second year. He’d been a friend of my younger brother at school, as it happened, and not done any National Service—flat feet, I dare say—so he was only about twenty-one or -two. My younger brother’s friends aren’t always mine by any means, but when I did meet Giles I thought he seemed rather better than most. He liked sailing on Port Meadow, which I didn’t, but he shared my detestation of actors. Apparently there was one who lived in the room above him, and who gave noisy readings of Jacobean comedies of the bawdier sort till late into the mornings. So we had always got on all right, though we never did much more than smile at each other and chat idly at parties, and it was with some surprise that I came to the conclusion that this was Nicholas’s latest. Nicholas was usually in love with someone quite unsuitable, but he never did anything about it, claiming that to fall in love with people under twenty-five was a weakness that he never let get out of control, and I dare say he was being honest when he said it. Anyway, he never slept with them, as far as one could make out, though some of them, it seemed to me, would have been only too pleased to sleep with him if he’d asked. I think he liked them because they made him feel responsible and paternal, and he could try and educate them and teach them what was and what wasn’t important, and who they should vote for. I caught him in the Ashmolean once, developing a theory of democracy from some faintly obscene Greek vases to a young man who obviously didn’t understand a word of what he was saying and who was looking politely bored. But dear old Nicholas was trying his best. If it wasn’t for his honesty, he’d have made a splendid schoolmaster of the old-fashioned motherly kind.
Anyway, it was none of my business, and though I observed what I observed, it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. Besides, it was rather a nice party; Margaret had come with me, and Nicholas had collected some rather distinguished old bores, as he always did; bores distinguished, I mean, for their particular brilliance on one subject and one subject only. And I also had a sneaking suspicion that some of the people might be on the board of examiners in Modern Languages. For instance, even if he wasn’t an actual examiner, to have got old Henry O’Connel along was rather a coup. He was talking about what sounded like Racine déraciné to me, but it may have meant more to Giles, who nodded encouragingly whenever old Henry looked like running down. I adroitly left Margaret with Mason Arnold, who was trying to get someone to listen to his plan for a new surrealist magazine, and went to talk to Angus Macintosh about cricket. Angus is about forty, but he claims to know every single statistic about cricket that has ever been published, and, though this could be dull, usually it wasn’t. I mean he didn’t talk cricket the way wine-snobs talk wine. I never watch cricket myself, I find it too exhausting, the constant necessity of watching everything all the time in case something does, after all, happen. But listening to Angus is pure joy, and I listened for about half an hour, and then rejoined the party with the feeling that classical prose was not yet dead.
And then I took Margaret home. Which brings me to the end of this part of the story, almost, but not quite. Next morning, when I went to collect Margaret at the agreed time, there was only a note for me at the lodge, which said: At Clarendon Press Institute. Margaret. I knew the worst at once, because the Clarendon Press Institute is a hall, one of the few halls in Oxford, where people rehearse. It is a ghastly building, and I have spent some of my most tedious hours in it, waiting for Margaret, and when they put on plays there you are constantly being distracted by the noise of billiard balls from the room below, which is some kind of club where they obviously enjoy themselves, unlike those upstairs.
I wondered if there was any point in going, but I felt I ought to do something to round things off, so I went. Walton Street seemed even drabber and dirtier than usual. When I arrived, Margaret was sitting on the stage, reading a part from a script. It was something terribly modern and difficult, I imagined, because there were two other people also on the stage, one sitting on the edge with his feet in the audience (a trick no undergraduate producer can ever resist), and the other standing up-centre with his eyes looking firmly at the backcloth. All three were talking at once, and repeating the same thing over and over again. I watched them for about ten seconds, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I walked down the hall and said: ‘Margaret, will you stop that, please.’
Everyone looked at me, and the producer, a man I had never liked, a fat man with no hair except at the back and sides where it was very bushy and rather too lush to be true, had a sort of fit, seizing me by the lapels and saying: ‘Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles, Charles.’
Eventually I got my lapels out of his great fat fists, and by this time Margaret was standing at the front of the stage and saying in an important, busy voice: ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to have lunch with you, Charles, after all. I’m terribly sorry, but you see——’
‘I see absolutely nothing,’ I said, seeing everything. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘The thing is,’ said the producer, calmer now, ‘we are in the most awful mess, because Joanna has got tonsillitis, and can’t do it, so there was only Margaret, and we’ve only got another week of rehearsal before the festival, and will you please go away and let us get on with it.’
I like a man who is simple and to the point like that, so having disengaged him again, this time from my right arm, I said ‘Thank you,’ and left, without, I’m afraid, very much dignity.
Because there was nothing to say at all, and I didn’t feel angry or anything, I just felt that that really was that, at last, and Margaret knew what she wanted, and I didn’t like it, and, well, that was too bad, wasn’t it? But I was terribly sad, too, that it had been so ruthless a betrayal, and I felt almost like crying, and I wondered what to do now, and I went to see Nicholas, and together we looked at the food which still filled the back of my car, and he shook his head and we looked at each other without saying anything, and then we had a brief lunch of cheese sandwiches in the King’s Arms.