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 whole. 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.
‘What about everything, then?’ I said vaguely.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, Nicholas, Giles and all that.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and he seemed to perk up a bit. ‘I’m going to live in London and work for this new paper. Giles and I will be living together, if that’s what you want to know.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to know, but thanks for telling me all the same.’
I must have sounded a bit acid or something, because he looked at me and said: ‘You have no idea of the difficulties of our kind of life, Charles. It may be because of them that my politics are what they are. Any member of a minority that is discriminated against gets the feeling that other minorities may be having just as bad a time, and that he ought to help them as well as himself.’
‘I’m in favour of abolishing the law against consenting adults doing whatever it is you do do with each other.’
‘I know you are, Charles, and I’m grateful for it. But do you realize how difficult it is, even with people like you to offer their support? It’s not a question of the police. It’s a question of being accepted as a human being. People like me always hope for some permanent, some lasting, liaison—just as you look forward to marriage. My thoughts about my future private life probably aren’t very different from yours, except where you’d put a woman I’d put a man. We both want someone to love and someone to love us, someone to make a life with. There’s nothing in the least glamorous about being queer. The conditions of our life are far harder than you’d think. We’re always being treated as separate, and not always as equal. The whole weight of society is against us establishing liaisons of any permanence, all for quick affairs, one-night stands. There are plenty of queer bars, Charles, but have you ever asked a queer couple to your house for drinks?
‘And a series of affairs is sordid, homosexual or heterosexual. One needs the stability of a permanent love. I’m always saying that a society should be based on personal responsibility. Well, so should one’s private life be based on love, not on the whim of one’s lust. But, in a queer’s life, all the emphasis is put on the sex, never on love. You, for instance. If you know someone’s queer, you think about his sex-life first, and only then, if at all, about his love-life. And if you have the normal human weaknesses, that kind of social attitude can be destructive. You just said “whatever it is you do do with each other”. You’re in favour of abolishing the law against “whatever it is”. But you don’t think about all the unwritten laws against our being in love with each other, the social disapproval, the ostracism. You don’t think how damaging it is for people to live in a world of nothing but other queers. You think about what we do in bed. Which is entirely our business, as what you do in your bed is your business. I don’t keep nosing round you trying to find out what you do in bed, it doesn’t interest me. But you hear the word “queer” and at once you lick your lips and think “sex”. You probably think, without being conscious of thinking it, that it was just lust that brought Giles and me together. Well, it wasn’t. Sex played its part, as in any other love-affair. But I wasn’t lusting after him, I was falling in love with him.’
‘I didn’t say I thought that.’
‘But you still thought it, didn’t you?’
‘Perhaps I did. I’m sorry. It’s an unintelligent thing to do. I seem to have been being very unintelligent recently. I’m only just beginning to think at all, in fact. First Jack told me why I wasn’t a proper Socialist, and then how much he hated me, and it turns out he doesn’t hate me at all. And now I find I’ve been prurient about you. The guilt gets bigger hour by hour. I must have another, drink.’
Nicholas got me another bottle. ‘Do you like Giles?’ he asked ‘Try not to think of us as like dogs, sniffing each other out, circling each other, bristling and snarling, then sleeping together. You know we’re not like that.’
‘God, I’m sorry, Nicholas. Yes, I like Giles. I don’t know him very well. I liked what he said the other day about the quality of life.’
‘We’re lucky,’ said Nicholas. ‘We both have something to give the other, you see, and we want to give it.’
Quite suddenly I felt terribly glad for Nicholas, and for Giles, too. What Nicholas had just said seemed a pretty good definition of anyone’s love.
‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, ‘really I am, Nicholas.’
‘Thank you. I wish I could be happy about you, Charles, but it would be dishonest to say I was. But I will be, I hope.’
‘I’ll get by, I reckon. I’m fairly resilient, you know. I’ve got things to give, if only I could be certain what they were.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘you’ve got things. I don’t mean that you’re rich—that’s the worst kind of giving.’
‘I know that.’
‘Phi once said the only power he’d ever had over people was the cigarette-cases he gave them for sleeping with him. That’s not giving at all.’
‘Who is Phi?’
‘Never mind. But you have things, Charles. God, I must be drunk, talking like a kindly father. But you’re basically decent, and indecent in all the ways that matter. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t end up as someone I could be proud of.’
‘Shall we adopt him?’ said Giles, who’d just come in.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too dependent on other people, imaginary ones, mostly. I think I’ll find my way to somewhere. It will have a woman and a job, and a place, and it’ll all come together eventually. And what with you, Nicholas, and Jack, and Margaret, and Elaine, too, and you, Giles, I don’t think about cloud-cuckoo-land any more. I think I’m going to be a human being, soon.’
‘Have a drink,’ said Giles, ‘before we all burst into tears.’
‘I’m drunk already,’ I said, which I must have been, really, in spite of my previous feeling of invincibility. But I didn’t feel drunk. When I feel drunk everything becomes rather loud and cheerful and gay and funny. But just then I felt quiet and serious—though strangely cheerful. For a few minutes I felt that I might actually achieve something some day. Perhaps I have, I don’t know. Anyway, I went off after a bit, and I never felt embarrassed by those two again. And it was only several days later that I remembered I’d quite forgotten to look at Giles’s room.
I went off to look for Helen. The dance was at its height, the bands and the talk competing happily with one another, the girls looking glamorous, as they always do when the bright lights are shining late into the evening, though the men, again as always, were beginning to look slightly crumpled. It was a fine night. I stood outside the marquee and watched the silhouettes leap and die against the wall of canvas, thinking for a moment (I must have been either very drunk or terribly sober) that it must have been something like that that old Plato was thinking of when he said we never saw things as they really were. And I dare say we don’t, because there are always about ten sides, at the very least, to every question, and, even with someone you love very much, there are things which can’t quite be communicated. I thought about Margaret, too, and whether she thought I was just a stupid young man, or whether she really quite liked me in some strange way of her own, and I didn’t know, and I’ve never found out, but just then I was grateful to her, because without all that misery I would never have had to think, and learn to care as I’d had to the last week or so; and, absurd as it sounds, I almost wished she was there, not with me, but with someone she loved, because I didn’t feel anything for her except a desire that she should be happy, if she could—I wished she was there, and was dancing round inside the marquee, and that it was her silhouette that bounced up and down the canvas, stretching itself up tall, then shrinking down low as the couple whirled off to another part of the floor.
And then I went to look for Helen. I found her gliding round to the forward-side-together band with Teddy, whose girl had passed out, as predicted, and who seemed more relieved than sorry about it. And after a few minutes of courage-summoning, I asked Helen if she would dance with me, and she said in her deep, deep contralto: ‘Of course I will, Charles, you poor thing.’ Well, that should have been enough to put me straight back in my chair, but I’d drunk a good deal, so we set off. When we got to the marquee the jazz band was back on again, playing a nice old-fashioned Charleston, so I said: ‘Can you do this?’ and she said: ‘I just love Charlestons,’ which was my second and last warning, and I still went gamely on, and we started off quite decorously at the far end of the tent from the band, but as we got nearer the trombone, which was hitting its notes like conkers, things livened up a bit, and soon we were giving an exhibition performance, with the floor cleared for twenty feet around us.
The band must have seen us, I’m afraid, and thought we were terribly funny, because instead of changing the tune they repeated it, without stopping, and rather faster, and occasionally I caught sight of the trombonist, who had long fair hair and a ghastly smile on his pasty face, but I didn’t get much chance to look, because Helen occupied most of my time. She knew all sorts of variations that had never occurred to me, including one that had us both on our stomachs, wriggling like worms in a can, and another which involved taking six steps backwards, then hurling yourself at your partner like a human cannonball. Well, this was all very well in its way, and I was rather enjoying it, but Helen was no Titania, believe me, she was well sinewed, and by the time we’d made the ’twenties’ Charleston look like a dignified minuet, and the band was starting up again for the third time round, I was beginning to puff. I’m never in very good physical shape at the best of times. Now, with Helen lunging at me, her arm outstretched like a hypodermic, and wham, as she yanked at my fingers, and zonk, as my arm came out of its socket, and zoom, as she sent me spinning round her, I felt like a demonstration top in a toy shop, or the villain of a science-fiction strip cartoon when the hero arrives at the crucial moment and uses bare fists against the Venusians’ ray-guns, triumphantly. I mean, I badly wanted to stop.
But no, she wasn’t having that, whirling, lunging, flinging, she was as happy as a puppy with a ball of string—and I do mean a ball of string, because I was beginning to come undone, my shirt was tearing more and more at each meeting of hands, my tie had started tickling my left ear, and then, suddenly, without any warning at all, my right shoe came off and soared gracefully over the heads of the crowd that was cheering us on. But that didn’t stop her, oh no, nothing could have stopped her. Panting and roaring like some seal jumping for its tea, she whisked me and whirled me and pumped me on and on, while the band went faster and faster, and then she whisked me once too often and too hard, and I completely lost control, I crossed the floor in a tremendous slide, like an ice-hockey player showing off, and when I looked up I saw the main pole of the marquee coming towards me, and I thought, this is all I need, and then I hit it, and as I sank down I remember looking up at the roof as it slid away, and thinking: So this is heaven, and then I passed out.
That I was the sensation of the evening goes without saying. When I came round I was having brandy poured all over my face by willing, if unskilful, helpers, and Helen was shouting: ‘That’s what I call creative dancing!’ at which I decided to pass out again as quickly as possible, and did. When I thought it was safe to recover I found myself on someone’s sofa, with a medical student politely asking me if I was all right. And there I stayed till breakfast-time when I reappeared, to the plaudits of the by then jaded dancers, for eggs and bacon. I never asked what happened to Helen, but God rot her, wherever she may be.