The Biographer’s Moustache. Kingsley Amis
with me I’ll tell you about them.’
‘Can’t do dinner this evening, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh,’ said Gordon, and added rather mechanically, ‘Some other time, then.’
‘But I am dying to hear. Are you going to be around later tonight?’
‘I might be.’ This time he spoke cautiously.
‘So might I be. Start trying to ring me about a quarter to eleven.’
Then Louise disconnected and Gordon admitted to himself he was quite glad in retrospect she had been booked for dinner, because in the heat of the moment, such as it had been, he had forgotten how hard up the great Jimmie lunch had currently left him. After some thought he heated up a tin of soup in his kitchen, not so nourishing it proved as the pea and ham concoction Joanna had fed him, but followed with cold sausages, which when smothered with mustard, spicy sauce and tomato ketchup turned out to be distinctly tastier than the chicken salad supplied earlier. To wash it all down he recklessly put away a nine-ounce can of a Dutch lager that, had he known it, had come second from bottom in a table of alcoholic strengths of imported beers in a recent Sunday-magazine survey. To offset these indulgences he read seriously in his copy of The Escaped Prisoner, Jimmie’s first novel and by common consent his best, published in 1959.
Its story told of a young man, brought up in conventionally well-off and well-connected circumstances somewhere in the north of England, who had reacted against his upbringing to go and be a schoolteacher in the more proletarian parts adjacent to his native heath. As time went by he came to doubt the wisdom of having done so, found his new companions ignorant and coarse and his new girl trivial-minded and finally went back whence he had come. At the time and later there had been some disagreement whether the hero was to be thought of as having permanently escaped from the prison of working-class life or only temporarily from the patrician bondage to which he voluntarily returned. It surprised Gordon to find several of the posh characters effectively presented as disagreeable, even snobbish, and the story seemed to veer now and then between one interpretation and the other and back. He wondered if Jimmie might have had something to say on the matter and made a note to ask him about it some time.
The time was just after ten forty-five. Gordon telephoned Louise, who answered after two rings. She sounded distinctly less full of beans than when he had talked to her earlier, but agreed that he should come and see her as soon as convenient.
‘I’d only just that moment got in when you rang,’ she told him as soon as he arrived.
‘Sorry,’ he said, feeling it was somehow required of him.
‘I suppose you couldn’t tell,’ she grudgingly conceded.
Things had improved, but not much, by the time they were sitting in the area reached by her electric fire with mugs of hot decaffeinated coffee in their hands. When she asked him to tell about his midday dealings with Jimmie’s wife it was not in the unguardedly friendly spirit she had shown before.
‘What sort of line did she take?’ Louise asked. ‘Was she against the old monster, as she’d have to be to pass as a human being herself, or was she on the whole for him, trying to make out he wasn’t too bad?’
‘Well, just a minute. Even if she’d felt like it she wasn’t going to denounce the man she’d been married to for twenty-odd years to a fellow she didn’t know existed until just the other day. Be reasonable.’
‘Gordon, I’m being reasonable. Jimmie sodding Fane is a, well, if not a monster then a monument of old-fashioned, passé class superiority and sheer snobbery. If his wife doesn’t have the least inkling that that’s what he is, then as I see it she’s tarred with the same bloody brush.’
‘Look, hold on, dear.’ It had already occurred to Gordon that Louise’s new-found hostility to Jimmie and all his works, as opposed to or further than a semi-genial rallying scepticism about poor old Jimmie, originated less in any kind of revision of the facts that in something that had happened in her own life. (Like having been stood up for dinner, it occurred to him later, though not then.) He said pacifically, ‘She’s got more than an inkling that old Jimmie’s got a pretty stiff dose of the sort of prejudices you’d expect from somebody his age and, well, class, I suppose.’
‘You suppose!’ Louise answered at once and perhaps a shade predictably, if he’s really out of the top drawer I don’t see what you’re doing writing about him in the first place, you being you, and if he’s a phoney you just, you shouldn’t, I mean you’ll have to expose him in whatever you write about him, and you told me he can prevent you publishing what he doesn’t like. That’s unless you simply …’ She shook her head about and made various impatient noises.
‘He’s the genuine article all right, uncle a baronet, went to school –’
‘Spare me the sordid details, for Christ’s sake. Well: it sounds to me …’
‘Yes?’
‘It sounds to me as though you’ve been won over.’
This challenge irritated Gordon, but he did his best to swallow any such feeling. ‘Granted I’m to write something substantial about this chap,’ he began, but got no further.
‘You clearly grant it. I don’t.’
They went on in their respective strains until an inadvertent lull brought the chance to say experimentally, casually too,
‘Where’s that flat-mate of yours this evening?’
‘She’s away,’ said Louise in a tone that precluded further discussion of the matter.
He now asked, without much thought, ‘Oh, where did you have dinner?’
This caused perceptible confusion. After hesitating for a full second, she said, ‘Somewhere in Soho, I can’t remember the name, I was taken there. Why, what of it?’
‘Nothing of it, I was just trying to change the subject.’
‘All right. You were going to tell me about lunch with her nibs. Especially the funny bits.’
He started on a pedestrian report of that event, thinking to himself meanwhile that to have failed to remember the name of a restaurant, any restaurant at any time, was most unlike Louise. Whatever she might now have been thinking to herself, she seemed not to be listening to what he said. Before he had managed to get to a funny bit she interrupted him.
‘Did she make a pass at you? I don’t mind if she did but I would love to know.’
‘Nothing of that sort happened at all.’
‘Because she was well and truly looking you over the day we were both there. Almost as if she was having trouble keeping her hands off you. I call that bloody cheek at her age.’
‘She couldn’t give me all that many years, and what do you mean, at her age? You make her sound about a hundred and ninety.’
‘She’s an old bag. An old bag.’
‘On a purely objective, unemotional, factual plane, Louise, she’s not, Joanna Fane is not an old bag. Middle-aged, if you like, if you must, but –’
When, not much later, Gordon was making his way out of Louise’s flat in a sexually unsatisfied state, he was reflecting that what she had just said about having to make an early start in the morning might well have been true as well as decisive. Nevertheless he could not help feeling that he might not have been forced to leave in such an unceremonious fashion if he had handled things a little differently, if for example he had concurred at once with her view of the aged Joanna Fane. As he put the point to himself on his way home, when there was nobody to overhear, you could get it right, or you could get it away.
The telephone was ringing when he got back home, which circumstance made that place seem much less bleak and comfortless. ‘Gordon Scott-Thompson,’ he said into the instrument, wishing strongly for the moment that he had a less cumbrous name.
‘Fane