The Mimic Men Read Online Free Page B

however, if well carried off, they were prepared to admire, the boys of Isabella approved of me. I exaggerated the role they admired. ‘My dear fellow,’ I said to a young man, wrapped in a college scarf, whom I met as he was coming out of a teashop, one of a popular chain, ‘my dear fellow, never, never, never let me see you coming out of those doors again. And remember that the sole purpose of your college scarf is to shine your shoes.’ This is not of course how it occurs in my memory; I was probably no more than flippantly reproving. I give the story as it circulated in Isabella some years later, when I had gained a little local celebrity. And I must confess I was pleased then that the character Lieni created had in its own small way become a legend.
    But Lieni, with the woman’s limited view of the world, had sent me out to conquer. She wished to share or at any rate witness my conquests; she expected me to bring back women to her boarding-house. And because she expected me to do so, I did. It was not hard. In the halls of the British Council there were always women to be picked up. Those halls could be disagreeable, with acrid-accented Africans in stiff white collars and gold-rimmed glasses nursing racial grievance like a virtue and righteously seeking sexual reward from the innocent. But I preferred the halls of the British Council to the halls of the School. I could not separate those earnest scholarship girls from their families, from the bitterness and mean ambitions that had been passed on to them; I knew their language too well. It suited me better to have a relationship with someone whose language I couldn’t speak. From the halls of the British Council I wandered off on occasion to the art galleries. I thought that with their vast intercommunicating rooms, their excuse for movementbackwards, forwards and sideways, any number of times, they provided the perfect hunting ground. It grieved me to find out that I was not the first to have seen the possibilities. But the excursion trains to provincial centres of culture were, I flatter myself, a discovery wholly original.
    To the town of Oxford, for instance, there used to run in those days a Wednesday excursion train. It left Paddington station at a quarter to twelve; it arrived at Oxford at three minutes to one; the return fare was seven shillings and sixpence. The Continental girls were easy to pick out. As I remember, in the late forties these girls went in for very pale, bloodless colours; they wore flat-heeled tan shoes and their macintoshes were nearly always of a fawn colour. I would try to choose my compartment sensibly; but in the end I always surrendered to instinct and luck; in these matters they are as good a guide as any. I would not attempt any conversation immediately. I would wait until the ticket collector came round. The excursion ticket was, suitably, fawn-coloured, contrasting with the regular ticket, which was green. If the girl proffered a fawn ticket I would put her down as a tourist like myself. I had taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably
Punch,
published as it still is on a Wednesday.
Punch,
then, I might offer; it would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. The slow French; the question about the Norwegian crossed o or the Swedish j; followed by the suggestion that we might do our exploring of the cultural centre together. At any one of three or four stages the encounter might have been rendered futile. But when one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will I be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? A Norwegian – what a country, Norway, its reputation in this respect dimmed by the somewhat inflated reputation of its vulgarneighbour Sweden; a French girl and a French woman; and a German Swiss. After the disturbance of this last adventure I