by Amis, Martin
‘Humph,’ she said.
‘…Humph?’
‘Yeah. Humph.’*10
Later in the morning they performed their first act of love in a week; and for him, as always, it was like the tearsoaked reunion which marks the end of a long romantic melodrama about the Second World War. But the act of love, that morning, was probably a frail coincidence, or so he thought in 1977.
* * *
—————
Sometimes she called him Martin, and sometimes she called him Mart. This was useful, because it gave sure notice of her mood: Martin prepared him for a certain solemnity, stringency, and (often) reproach; Mart meant friendliness and high spirits and even on occasion led the way to eros, as Martin never did.
‘Correct me if I’m mistaken, Mart,’ she announced, about six months in, ‘but when I’m noli me tangere like this your thoughts must often turn to uh, to infidelity. Well, you’re a man.’ She told him that for years she had tried her hand at infidelity. ‘And I didn’t have the knack. Girls don’t seem to be very good at infidelity. To their extreme discredit. But you’re a man.’
‘This is true, Phoebe.’ It felt anachronistic, even counter-revolutionary – the notion that certain allowances should be made for men (of all people). ‘So you’re saying?’
‘Well. If I happen to find out you’ve spent the odd afternoon with a trusted ex-girlfriend…you might just be forgiven in the end. A deeply trusted ex-girlfriend. And a compulsively hygienic ex-girlfriend. Because if you ever give me a nasty surprise, Martin, then you won’t just be spurned, I promise you. You’ll be sued.’
He watched as her smile disappeared, leaving no trace on the lean lips.
‘Now you’ve said you want children.’
‘Yes I do, in principle. But I’m not in any rush.’
‘Then you’ll also be prospecting for wives. And, Mart, honestly I approve – because it sets a natural time limit. Let me know, immediately, if you think you’ve found one, and that’ll be that. With no hard feelings.’ Another smile. ‘In the meantime I issue this warning. If you ever, if you ever publicly compromise me with another female, then…Then, Martin, woe betide you. Do I make myself clear?’
He was used to strongminded eccentricity, or adamantine whimsicality, and none of this was altogether foreign to him – apart from the purdahs and the gambling. Still, the sense of an additional, an ulterior strangeness persisted, and was regularly topped up by her so-called friends. Barely worth describing, Phoebe’s friends were at least very few in number. There were three.
Comprising Raoul and Lars, who sometimes showed up for an hour in the late evening, two tall young men (a paunchy Austrian and a wiry Dane) with suntans and layered hair, whose talk was unswervingly footling and plutocentric (and eloquent, despite their waisted pinstripe suits, of truly boundless free time)…
Comprising Merry, who had a flat in one of the terraced houses further up the street. Perhaps ten years older than Phoebe, frizzy, flustered, ladylike in manner, slapdash in appearance (the offwhite tackle of her bra always peeping through the misbuttoned gaps of her blouse), this neighbourly visitor was Phoebe’s only associate of the gentler sex…
Martin asked Phoebe about Merry, Raoul, and Lars. Phoebe explained that they were people who had happened to attach themselves to her and then time passed, until it became a question of loyalty and habit. He acknowledged that this was how things often turned out (look at Robinson). But even so he thought that Phoebe’s friends were meaningless. They didn’t add up to anything.
By now he could tell when her episodes of lassitude were looming. She would sometimes go silent in the middle of a conversation, seeming not vacant but concentrated, and then both angered and fearful, as if listening to a voice within herself, a voice that sharply criticised or cruelly mocked…
The view of the elders
I said, ‘The only other girlfriend of mine you seriously fancied was Denise.’
Kingsley lifted his glass (Scotch and water) and said over the top of it, ‘What makes you think I fancied Denise?’
‘Oh nothing much. You went slightly intent whenever you talked about her. It wasn’t your Sex Life in Ancient Rome face, no. But your eyes widened. Or lengthened. Intently.’
‘Balls,’ he said.
‘I only mentioned it because it’s so rare. And now with Phoebe you’ve come out into the open. You freely admit as much.’
It was after dinner. My car was outside but I would be staying here this Saturday night. Not that long ago the Amises had moved house, from the northernmost fringe of London, and there were still stacks of books on the floor and half-empty tea chests…
‘I can see why you fancied Denise.’ Yes, because she looked like a gorgeously soft-hearted barmaid (very gentle with her hungover regulars). ‘But why d’you fancy Phoebe?’
‘You know, apart from just liking the look of her I’m not…She reminds me of an illustration I saw in a children’s book. A little fox dressed as a forest ranger.’
‘What was the little forest ranger wearing?’
‘Green skirt and green tunic,’ he said. ‘And brown shoes. Bob was very taken with Phoebe. Remember last time? Very taken. He even asks after her in his letters.’*11
‘So. Bob too.’ Nodding, and half to myself I said, in vindication, ‘There you are you see, it’s the business suit. I keep telling Hitch it’s the business suit.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Sorry, Dad, I’ve been wondering. And you won’t like it, but it’s to do with your age and your work ethic. And I have that too. In weaker form, diluted by time.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘Well, there she is, Phoebe. A looker, and a probable goer, but also an earner. That means you and Bob can fancy her without feeling haunted by the poorhouse.’
Kingsley was wearing his inconvenienced expression, and was about to say something gruff – but then his wife entered the room…Things had got to the point where tension entered with her (a false stillness); on the other hand, tension was already there, waiting. That was what the two of them were doing these days: directing tension at one another. I got to my feet and said,
‘Ah. We were talking about Phoebe. You quite approve of her, don’t you Jane?’
She sat, and took up her sewing (another huge and heavy patchwork quilt – swirling squares of velvet and slanting trapezoids of silk and satin; all the beds in the house were bedizened in Jane’s patchwork quilts).
‘I, I admire Phoebe. All right, she’s undereducated, but then so was I. She’s a striver and she’s come a long way, and good for her.’
I could feel an impending proviso. Jane looked up frowning and said,
‘She’s not an orphan, is she?’
‘…No. No, she’s got parents. I’ve met them. No, she’s not an orphan.’
Thereafter the evening seemed to lose its shape. But the next day, as I was leaving, I went up to Jane’s study to thank her and hug her goodbye. First I said,
‘What made you think she’s an orphan? Phoebe.’
Jane’s study window used to look out on the vernal expanse of Hadley Common (giving on to Hadley Woods) – with the small circular pond, the size of a helipad, just on the other side of the road; and at her disposal, back then, was a five-acre, three-lawn garden topped by an extravagantly imposing and ancient Lebanon cedar. She missed it all. Now Jane’s study window looked out on the steep and jumbled chunks of Hampstead as it reared up towards the Hill and the Heath.
‘Yes, why did I say that?’ Jane had turned in her swivel chair and now slipped off her glasses.
These glasses had a history and I asked, ‘Are they the ones that make you look like a career-mad cockroach?’
‘They’re the ones.’
‘Put them back on a second. Christ. They really do.’
‘I know, it’s the curly bits u
p here.’ Resignedly she lit a herbal cigarette, with its unenticing scent. ‘Yes, why did I say that?…When I was eleven or twelve I shared a governess with an orphan. Hattie. And Hattie put on a good show. She was always pretending things were all right, but they weren’t all right. Because her parents had both died in a hotel fire. Hattie – a good show, but she seemed to exist in another dimension. Always slightly glassy and preoccupied. One step behind.’
‘…And Phoebe reminds you of Hattie? Giving a good show?’
‘She gives a very good show, a very advanced show. It’s a show of normality. Well I suppose we all do that, a bit. I’m not trying to put you off, Mart. I understand the attraction…What is she, thirty-five? She’s going to want –’
‘No, she doesn’t want that, she says. No husband, no child…I must go.’
‘Mm. Then she has decided views.’ We embraced and Jane swivelled round to face her desk and the window. ‘She’s also got a wound, I think.’
The drive back in the Sunday twilight, with the days of the working week stacked up ahead of me. It was eerily daunting, that Sunday drive. Knowing how far I was from the child, the halfmade pupa, and how far I was from the adult – the finished imago.
Beset by small fears
That same Sunday night he rolled up late and parked on a yellow line outside the mansion flat on Hereford Road.
As she undressed in the bathroom (yes, yes: ‘in solitary’, ‘in splendid isolation’, ‘up the ivory tower’, etc.), he lay in bed, stoically reminiscing about their last act of love, 164 hours ago…With some girls, with many girls, with most girls, no, with all girls, even the most energetic and proactive, there came a point when their hands would float down to rest on the pillow – palm up on either side of the face, in what did happen to resemble an attitude of surrender; but the point was that their hands were finally still. Phoebe’s hands were never still; they never rested, right up to the very end…How to account for the attentiveness of the hands? Busying themselves down there, in the little menagerie, her hands were meticulous: ‘careful and precise’ but also ‘wary or timid’ (from L metus, ‘dread’). Her hands were beset by small fears…
When it was over, that time, and Phoebe prepared herself for sleep (struggling to untangle her garter belt and two sets of pants), she said, ‘One of these days I’m going to dress up as someone. Guess who. Eve.’
‘How can you dress up as Eve?’
‘Eve after the Fall.’
Next door, a light and two taps were thrown off, and she emerged, in her nightdress (white, opaque, knee length). Which reminded him.
‘Uh, Jane’s a fan of nightdresses – she thinks they’re good because if you…’
Phoebe gave him a look of the sourest exasperation, as if he’d been going on about Jane for at least an hour. It was one of those times when her feelings were very close to the surface – there to be read.
‘Sorry, I forgot,’ he said lightly. ‘Jane’s a woman.’
‘I’m a misogynist, okay?’ This wasn’t the first time that Phoebe had laid claim to that noun (seldom heard in the 1970s, and certainly never laid claim to, and only ever directed at men). ‘Can’t a girl even…And don’t blame me, Martin. Blame – blame that sick bat in Morley Hollow!’
This was Phoebe’s mother. He said, ‘You’re a bit too hard on Dallen, Phoebe.’
‘Oh am I. When I was seven you know what she did? She upped and went to bed for ten years!’ Phoebe reached for her hairbrush, and after a while the rhythmical motions had the effect of siphoning off her anger and replacing it (he thought) with sorrowful perplexity. ‘Not ten years. Eight. See, she had me in her forties and it completely did her in. First a heart attack and then she broke both her legs. Brittle bones. And after the hysterectomy she doubled her weight, so she was sort of trapped. All to do with “the Change” – don’t you think that’s a beastly word for it?’
‘Yes, beastly. That must’ve been hard on you. How did Graeme cope?’
‘Luckily Father Gabriel stepped forward.’ She opened the bed and let herself into it. ‘Father Gabriel’s very organised.’
‘Good,’ he said as he unemphatically embraced her. ‘You know, Phoebe, a misogynist hates women. All women. You don’t. You don’t hate Merry.’
‘You’re right. Blind loyalty, you see. The thing is I’m beholden to the old slag. Do the light…Do the light – so I won’t see your hurt face. I told you not to be hurt. How dare you be hurt? What about me? Give me your hand.’
He did her bidding. With the hand and then with the light.
About fifteen minutes later she murmured,
‘As it happens, Mart…Tomorrow I’m not going in till nearly noon.’
He felt a thrumming in his chest. It would be wiser, now, not to say anything at all. He kissed her palm and pressed it to his cheek and turned over.
‘…Mm. Now you can have a lovely sleep! And lovely dreams about tomorrow morning…I’m setting the alarm’, Phoebe said sternly, ‘for eight.’ She yawned and licked her lips. ‘We’ll need showers and a proper breakfast first of course. And you’ve got to dash down and do the Mini. So seven-thirty. No. Seven…fifteen.’
Courtesy car
Out on the balcony, clad in Y-fronts and donkey jacket, his hair chilling in the needles of cold rain, he smoked a delicious and seemingly endless hand-rolled cigarette, and, with that achieved, he slid inside, poured two cups of coffee from the steel jug on the stove, and got back in time to see Phoebe emerging from her second shower of the morning, with a white towel round her waist and another one hanging loose from her shoulders like an unfurled scarf (and of course he kissed her and praised her)…She now attended to her day clothes, pre-assembled on a straightbacked chair, as if ready for school. (He similarly, if less pleasingly, had an arm out for his socks.) With a forbearing shrug Phoebe said,
‘Jane isn’t so bad I suppose. She can’t help being a know-all. And a snob…What was that about the nightdress, Mart?’
He was thinking, he was languidly deciding that this was yet another reason for the marked popularity of the sexual act: you also got the ease and freedom that nearly always bobbed along in its wake. And you could also talk freely about sex. He said,
‘Between you and me, Phoebe, the nightdress thing was really pretty lame. But let me tell you what she says about…’ He hesitated. Anglosaxonisms didn’t really sit well with Phoebe (and Sir Graeme also had a horror of rude words). ‘About, you know, men’s things. Men’s arrangements. Ready? See if you agree.’
Phoebe gave a tolerant lift of the chin as she positioned her snaps and stays and leaned down from the chair to start scrolling up the white stockings.
‘Well. Jane says it’s not size that matters. Within reason of course. It’s hardness.’
‘…Jane said that to you? About penises?’ Phoebe’s tall neck lengthened. ‘She’s your stepmother for goodness’ sake.’
‘Yeah. She’s Dad’s wife. And it can be a bit awkward. Listen, I want your opinion. Now weigh, with your practical mind, Phoebe, weigh these two items of evidence.’
‘I’m listening.’ She looked at her watch and reached for her coffee. ‘Quick though.’
‘Number one, she stops me on the stairs and says, Your father hasn’t fucked me in three months.’
‘She said that?’
‘Yes. And indignantly too. And years ago. In 1973 or something.’
‘That’s disgusting…That’s abuse of trust, that is.’
‘No. No it’s not, Phoebe. I’ve known her half my life. We’re pretty close. Anyway.’ He felt an obscure unease pass over him. ‘Anyway, item number two…Dad, Dad told me, just the other night, he’s been going in for sex therapy…I can’t believe it.’
‘There. See? That’s what Jane’s reduced him to.’
He went on wanderingly, ‘I couldn’t believe it, because he loathes all that. Viennese innuen
does, anything personal. I said, Bad luck, old man, and he just shrugged and said, Well, in a case like this you have to show willing.’
With a faraway look Phoebe rose to her feet, like a girl in church slowly straightening up for the hymns. ‘Now will you admit I’m right.’
Phoebe was at this point fully primed for the outside world, hugging her business jacket close as she strode towards the door. ‘Oi. Chop chop. So tell me, Martin. Do you want to follow in his footsteps? So, so dulled they send him to a bloody lab?’
‘…No. You show me how, Phoebe. Show me the way.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘Stick with me, kid.’
‘I will.’ As they were shuffling round the front door she said,
‘What kind of therapy?’
‘I’ve no idea. Just Dad and Jane sitting there with the guy or the girl and discussing how they feel about each other.’
‘Oh, well. Once they start doing that it’s all over very quickly.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘Because it’s more of what you hate.’
She did the bolts and they stepped out on to the landing. ‘You show me how. I like you, Phoebe. You’re great. I like you very much. You show me how…’
‘All right. Deal.’
‘You know, Dad said you looked like an adorable woodland creature in a children’s book. And Jane said, oh yeah, Jane wondered if you were an orphan. She –’
Now Phoebe faltered as they started down the stairwell, half sliding towards him on the moist tiles; he easily steadied her; she regained her height and gave him an ordinary glance, but he saw that her eyes had freshened and her upper lip had a numb and puffy look to it.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t’ve passed that on.’
‘What on? Oh. It’s nothing to do with Jane. When you said those nice things…’