Read Online Imaginary Toys by Julian Mitchell - Free Book Online Page B

both knew that there was a great deal the other wasn’t saying, but all the same we both said quite enough. We didn’t want to land, we wanted to circle, and to listen to each other’s comments on what we saw. Just talking, under such circumstances, can be very helpful. I mean, every time Elaine said something about Jack, I thought of Margaret in a slightly different way. And every time I said something, the fact of Elaine’s presence, the fact that she was listening, made me think of things from her point of view, made me try and put things so that she could understand them. In fact it was more like being in two spaceships, telling each other by radio about two different but similar planets. If you see what I mean. You know—mine has two moons, how many has yours, that sort of thing.
    I don’t know if that was how Elaine felt about it, but at any rate we were both quite muzzy with understanding each other’s problems after an hour or two, or thinking we understood them, and we stopped the boat under some trees, and I said I wanted to swim. We hadn’t brought costumes, and the river was far too crowdedfor any naked bathing, so she was against it herself, but I was for it, and I took off everything except my pants and dived in. The water was really too warm, in the way that river water can be—I felt that fish were struggling to the surface to breathe all the time, and that I was in their way—but it was quite nice really, as long as one didn’t try and do something stupid, like opening one’s eyes under water, and I splashed around quite happily, waving at Elaine from time to time, and sinking to the bottom to get the marvellous sensation of coming up again. Something to do with the womb, I dare say. Then I took one of the cushions out of the punt and lay on it in the sun to get dry.
    Elaine was too idle to leave the punt, she said. So the conversation was conducted between two people who couldn’t see each other without some physical exertion, like raising one’s head, and, as I say, we were fairly muzzy, and head-raising didn’t seem altogether necessary. It was rather nice and curious, like being in a telephone-booth and imagining that the person you’re talking to is, in some magical way, in the booth with you, but invisible. Anyway, it was gloriously hot, and I could feel the water drying on my back, and the sweat soaking out of my armpits, and the talk seemed to hang in the air between us, taking its time to sink into our ears, and then to push its way to our brains. There wasn’t a trace of a breeze, so that talking itself was rather an effort, one felt one had to push the sounds through the air or they would never get beyond the few feet of air outside one’s mouth.
    Well, as we lay there, our periods of silence grew longer, and the periods of speech fewer and fewer, and I dare say we both thought the other was asleep. But quite suddenly I found myself listening with both ears and no sense of effort or lethargy at all, because Elaine started telling me what it was like to make love to Jack. Now I am interested, as I hope any human being is, in the intimacies of other human beings. It’s not just prurience, it’s not even the desire to make sure that what you do yourself is what everybody does. No, I think—and I may be quite wrong about this of course—I think that when you sleep with someone you show much more about yourself than you can ever do in any amount of conversation. After all, when you’ve got no clothes on, and you can’t say anything because you’re too busy using your mouth for something else, you are revealed by your acts, by the way you kiss, the way you stroke, the way you handle the other person’s body. And in how you do these things, and who does them to whom, and all the rest of it.Because then you can only act, and you can’t explain, and if it’s a success you can’t even control yourself. At least, I’m not really an expert on this, it’s just an idea I have, I