Free Imaginary Toys by Julian Mitchell Page B

bit I remember best, and you can see why, for heaven’s sake. I mean, you don’t hear that sort of thing every day. It made me think about Margaret, and the waste of youth, expense of spirit, and all that sort of thing. I felt very sad and sorry for myself when I thought about Elaine and Jack.
    We punted around a bit more, and then we went to our separate homes, and we’d both enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. At least I had, and Elaine had, too, only Jack tried to make her change her mind about it later. That’s one of the interesting things about what she said. She might not move a muscle when she was in bed with Jack, but out of bed she was the one who seemed to dominate. She never seemed to give a damn about what Jack thought. That was the appearance, and look at the reality. It just goes to show that you have to sleep with someone to know what she’s like, or he’s like. Because if I had ever thought about Jack and Elaine in bed together, which on the whole I hadn’t, I certainly would never have thought of it like that .But then, you never can tell. And, anyway, you can see that an afternoon on the river with Elaine was rather a change from Margaret. (I wonder what she is like in bed.)
    Nicholas pretended to be very stern with me about it later, but I think he knew perfectly well that there’s nothing very wrong in two people having an innocent time on the river. And for some reason I was much less gloomy after it than before, so my friends could hardly complain. Though Jack, of course, took a rather more self-interested point of view. Margaret never said a word about my failure to pick her up that morning, and things went on rather pleasantly for a while. I took her to Schools every day and gave her lunch and so on, with never a murmur about where I’d been. Of course, she may simply not have noticed my absence. This disappointed me slightly, because I would have liked her to be a little piqued by me, for a change. But I soon forgot all about that, because she was always tired at the end of the day, and seemed genuinely grateful for the consideration I gave her, and when I mentioned the fun we were going to have when all the scholarly nonsense was over, she said yes. The week-end was still fine; in fact that period was Oxford at its best, one of those rare summerswhen people start looking up in old almanacs for similar spells of sunshine (the English really are tremendous bores about weather statistics, I mean you do want to know what tomorrow’s going to be like, but who cares what it was like the day he was born?), and on Saturday evening we drove out to a pub to have supper, and we sat outside in the garden and watched the river and thought about what we were going to do when we went down, though not too seriously, and Margaret said she wanted to be a journalist, which surprised me, rather, so I asked why, and she said she didn’t know, but it would be fun to write for Vogue ,or one of those papers, or even for a gossipy paper, but not for a real newspaper, that would be too much like nosey-parkering. I must say I’d never suspected that Margaret had any interest in the protection of the rights of the individual against the encroachments of the Press, but we didn’t pursue the matter. We got back into the car and drove around the lanes near Lechlade and down the river, more or less, to Bablock-hythe , and she had remembered that this was where Robert de Vere probably crossed the Thames after the battle of Radcot Bridge, but unfortunately there hadn’t been a question on that. So we took the little ferry there, paying our toll to the man who pulls you across with a bit of wood on the wire, quite how I don’t know, and drove back in the twilight, and I felt that really maybe everything would turn out all right after all, because Margaret could be very sweet indeed when she tried.
    And on Sunday, after lunch, we drove into Gloucestershire and looked round the Swells and the Slaughters and Bourtons on Hills