by Amis, Martin
Perhaps, in the end, it was because she was a cryptogram he very much wanted and needed to solve. He had the answer trapped here at Kensington Gardens Square. It was cornered; it couldn’t get away. So let it reveal itself, he thought, let it all come down. What’s next is next.
And yet there were moments – the moments in between the other moments – when he knew for a certainty that he was in an alien medium, and out of his depth, and going under. If he closed his eyes he was once again seven years old (the sailboat off the Welsh coast, the bang on the head from the loosened boom, the cartwheeling drop overboard); and, once in, he sank. Is this the way to death then? he wondered. But it was not an unhappy memory. He continued his leisurely descent, too stunned and winded to swim or even struggle; and he seemed to be watching a pretty cartoon, a silent Fantasia – sinking through the fathoms of the Bristol Channel, and hoping to witness as much of this blue-black world as he survivably could before someone (his Uncle Mick or one of his older cousins) hoisted him out again.
Morley Hollow
‘Father Gabriel will be looking in. Keep left. Now he’s sort of nonconformist for a priest in two respects. For a start, he’s not poor. Now signal right. In fact he’s very lavish. Normally I’d be bringing tons of food and drink but I can save a few quid because Father Gabriel’ll be doing all that. Now turn. He adores spending money. He’s actually far less pious than my parents. What they adore is poverty.’
‘They what?’
‘Didn’t you know this about Catholics? In a minute the road forks and you go straight ahead. They adore poverty. And cold and damp and discomfort. And dirt. One mustn’t forget dirt. It’s called mendicity. It’s meant to uh, to relieve you of distractions from your full devotion to God. Poverty doesn’t relieve me of distractions. Does it you?’
‘No. But I don’t mind being distracted from my devotion to God.’
‘Oh very droll. Keep going. It’s in the cul-de-sac at the end on the right, and it’s the one with its own sludge driveway and not just a concrete slot for a Ford Cortina. Ooh look. Clever him, he’s beaten us to it. Well at least you’ll get a proper drink. They usually serve an oloroso called Folkestone Dew. Eighty pee from Safeway’s. Get me close to the grass but leave him room to back out. Mind your shoes.’
The bungalow was called Morley House, even though it was if anything slightly smaller than the other very small bungalows in Morley Hollow, where every bungalow had a name – Dunroamin’, HiznHerz, Journey’s End, Shangri-La…
‘Don’t be deceived by the exterior. It’s not a suburban villa. It’s more like a cowshed with the odd stick of furniture in it. You expect to see stacks of sleeping sheepdogs.’
They climbed out and edged past and around Father Gabriel’s car, a Mark IX Jaguar, perhaps twenty years old but fiercely burnished. It looked like a hearse but one with artistic lines and contours; the interior with its leather and walnut had the sealed fixity of a confessional. He said,
‘What’s the other heretical thing about Father Gabriel? He’s not poor…’
‘Uh, oh sorry. And he’s not queer.’
* * *
—————
I held up my furred toothglass to receive more champagne. The three Phelpses were still in the kitchen unpacking the hamper, and Father Gabriel was genially saying,
‘So, Martin – I may call you Martin, mayn’t I? – you’re here, no doubt, to see Sir Graeme. And to clarify your relationship with his youngest child. A testing moment.’
I shrugged and smiled. ‘So will there be a little inquisition?’
‘Mm. There’s such a scene in one of your father’s fairly recent novels. What is the title? Anyway, it’s most amusingly done. The father, a Mr Cope, asks his daughter’s suitor four questions, the first of which is – I take it you’re sleeping with my Vivienne?’
‘Would you like a seat,’ I said and shuffled sideways along the ankle-high sofa.
‘No, I’ll remain perpendicular for now, thank you – having crouched all morning behind the wheel. You know, going about my rounds.’
He stood over me, sixtyish, sleek, still solid, with thick pewtery hair fringing his clerical collar (a tight black band almost entirely concealing a tight band of white); he also wore a silk-backed waistcoat, striped City trousers, and succulent galoshes.
‘Mr Cope asks four questions, all of which the young suitor answers with an indignant negative. Are you sleeping with my Vivvy? The second is, Then I take it you’re sleeping with some other young lady – or young ladies? The third is, So perhaps you prefer your own kind? And the fourth is, Ah, then you must surely rely on those solitary practices they warned us about at school?’
‘I remember. And when he says no to that, Mr Cope disqualifies him as unnatural.’
Father Gabriel laughed – we both laughed. ‘He means no harm, Mr Cope. It’s really just a tease, isn’t it, or a rhetorical snare. The trick is to say yes to the first question.’
‘Or failing that to say yes to the second question. And then go on about how your feelings for Vivvy are on a far higher plane.’
‘Very good, Martin. And very filial too.’
‘The novel is Girl, 20,’ I said. Which soon left both of us rather staring at the fact that Phoebe was girl, thirty-six. ‘So I suppose Sir Graeme won’t ask whether…’
‘No, he won’t. Nor will he ask whether you intend to make an honest woman of her. Because he of course knows that Phoebe’s gone her own way – she doesn’t want to be made an honest woman of. And she’s honest already, by her lights, God bless her.’
Crockery and cutlery were being laid out on the Fablon-decked table in the corner. Phoebe and her mother started gathering an assortment of kitchen chairs, and Sir Graeme, jerking upright with a corkscrew in his hand, called out,
‘Oh Martin! Would you care to wash your hands before we sit?’
Having followed directions to the lavatory (and found it, and used it), I then followed directions on how to flush it. These were handwritten, and gummed up on the flaking ballcock: ‘Pull the chain very slowly downwards, sustain your grip on it’s handle, wait at least a minute, then release. Then tug it sharply. Repeat ‘til sucess is your’s!’
I rinsed my hands under the arctic trickle of the basin, dried them with Bronco toilet paper, and retraced my steps, past gumboots, detergents, groundsheets, a broken hockey stick, a child-scale tin bathtub, a stringless tennis racket…
‘…no Jews or Muslims or Buddhists,’ said Phoebe, trailing off.
‘It seems, Dallen,’ said Father Gabriel with amused regret, ‘that “ecumenicism”, among the young, has come to stand for a kind of metaphysical BYOB. Whereas all it’s ever meant, my dear Phoebe, is good relations between Christians. To avoid such setbacks as for example the Thirty Years War. Gustavus Adolphus…’
As he talked on I marked him, I tried to grade him, the very white whites of his clean blue eyes, his full, lineless, and studiously barbered face (Sir Graeme, hunched over at his side, seemed physically benighted, almost medieval, with his craters and orbits and the divots sprouting from his ears and nostrils)…Also, Father Gabriel was the only ecclesiarch I’d ever come across who had no twinkliness in him, no unconscious theatricality, no offered excuse for his lifelong commitment to something so elaborate and so flimsy (and so intellectually null)…The outward man was worldly, serious, decided, intent.
‘Now Grae,’ he said, ‘before I go, which I must, I want to help you through the uh, the purely formal aspect of our gathering here today. Forgive me, but Romans are such ninnies when it comes to their daughters’ care. And I –’
‘It’s all right!’ cried Sir Graeme, wagging an agitated finger while he chewed and swallowed. ‘I trust him! It’s all right!’
‘You trust him – that’s good. But tell us, Martin, is Sir Graeme being…wise?’
‘Uh, yes.’ I sat up and said, as I’d in
tended to do if it came to it (but now feeling as coldly fraudulent as I always did whenever I set foot in church). ‘Certainly. It’ll be as if she’s my best friend’s sister. An honourable friend, one I’d be ashamed to sadden. She’s safe with me.’
Father Gabriel said, ‘Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply.’
And Dallen leant forward and said pleadingly, ‘Ah now, and I’m sure he’d be knowing that the girl’s a little frailer than she –’
‘Oh, Mum. Don’t start.’
Father Gabriel rose to his feet. ‘Well I’m off – to visit a woman. And before you set the tongues flapping in the village, she’s a spinster of ninety-three.’ He went around the table, impressing his goodbyes on everyone including me, and saying, ‘Unfortunate word that, spinster. With none of the festive associations of bachelor. She keeps a “spinster pad” in town? A “gay” spinster?’
Phoebe stood and offered her cheek. ‘Well I’m a, I’m a “confirmed” spinster.’
‘I know you are, my dear. I know you are.’
During the hour that remained Sir Graeme finished the gull’s eggs and the potted shrimps and the beef sausages and the huge game pie and the second bottle of claret, and then went and rocked on his heels with his back to the room’s only source of heat. Comfortably muttering to himself, he rocked and twanged away – the one-bar electric fire, the slimline shirt, the shiny old flares.
* * *
—————
‘Of course it’s uninhabitable in winter,’ said Phoebe. ‘Really terrifyingly cold.’
‘Why don’t they sell it and get a nice little flat?’
‘Sell it? It’s worthless. Negative equity. Mortgaged to death.’
‘…Who was the first Sir Phelps?’ Placed in the passenger seat (no better for drink than Graeme), Martin thought of the baronets in Trollope. ‘Some soldier or bureaucrat, I suppose, under Queen Victoria…’
‘Rodney Phelps was uh, semi-ennobled in 1661. By Charles II. Sir Rodney’s the only one who ever did a stroke or earnt a bean. His son, Sir Reginald, pissed it away. And all the others inherited nothing but debt.’
‘Has he got any income, your dad?’
‘Yes. He rents out his name for letterheads. Pools firms, casinos. Payday Loans Inc., chairman – Sir Graeme Phelps. Don’t imagine the baronetcy helps. It doesn’t. It’s a deadly secret. He wants people to think he actually got it for something. Services to this or that.’
‘What did Sir Rodney get it for in 1661?’
‘He ran a plantation in Barbados. He got it for services to slavery…Uh, how did you hit it off with Father Gabriel? Did you take to him at all?’
‘Mm, I did, quite. He has a certain, I don’t know, a certain persuasiveness.’
‘Yes. He does.’
Dallen – not long before they left (Phoebe was in the lavatory and making the ballcock honk and bray) – laid her hand on Martin’s arm and said, ‘Phoebe’s sisters, they’re like Grae. They take the world as it comes. Phoe, though, she’s more like myself. It happens sometimes that her mind…it goes away, you know? The dear help her, but it does.’
That was all. And it came just as he was warming to the realisation that for the last span of time (with its encumbrances and its patches of awkward new ground) Phoebe had at no point seemed less than sane.
The night of shame: Foreplay
Morning.
On the day of the night of shame all was innocent. And all would remain innocent – for as long as the light held.
‘Good morrow to you,’ she said, opening her eyes as he brought in her tea. ‘Milk! What’s this?…I hate milk.’
‘No you don’t.’ He assessed her glare, which contained sincere reproach (as if saying, Don’t you even know that about me by now?). ‘Not first thing. It’s in the afternoon you like it black.’
‘…I hate milk. But never mind.’ She drank her tea. ‘Ah, that’s better.’ She lay back. ‘Mart…Give me your hand.’*3
Having woken around nine, they were washed and dressed by ten. They then made their way to Normann’s, the local café. Here he had the still-reliable pleasure of watching his elegantly flutelike girlfriend apply herself to a huge bowl of sugary porridge, a full English breakfast including chips and fried bread, followed (over two pots of coffee), by several rounds of buttered toast thickly lashed with marmalade. Does she get that from her father? he wondered. Unlikely. With Graeme it was mere hunger, with Phoebe it was greed…
Together they strolled around for an hour in the unnatural humidity, under a nauseated sky (coppery twilight colours on a felt of blackness so deep that it made everything – trees, buildings, their own faces – seem electrochemically pale. And he thought, These are the colours loved by the mad). From his wallet he offered up three, no, four, no, five tenners, and went home to write.*4
* * *
—————
Afternoon.
She returned around three and disappeared into the bedroom; around five he heard the bare-flame whump of the gas water-heater and the rush of the taps. Around six she emerged with a towel turbaned over her hair, wearing a pleated dress shirt (One of Raoul’s cast-offs, she’d earlier explained. It’s newish but he was already too fat for it). By this time Martin had reached the end of his effectiveness at the desk and was to be found on the sofa, reading.
‘You must get a proper shower fitted, Martin. I can’t rinse my hair.’
He said inattentively, ‘Isn’t there that uh, that rubber tube?’
‘But it takes ages because it’s all flabby and warped. You just get dribs and drabs…Oh, so he’s got his nose in a book now, has he.’
‘That’s right. No fresh air and ruining my eyes.’
He went on reading or at least looking at the page.
‘…Oh, “poetry”,’ she said. ‘You’re such a hypocrite!’
‘Oi,’ he said lightly. ‘Hark at the pot calling the kettle black. I saw you in there yesterday. Having a sly look at High Windows.’ P. Larkin, 1974. ‘I saw you.’
‘Well if you will leave them lying around…Shove up then!’ He straightened his back and Phoebe eased in beside him. ‘And they’re meant to be great mates, isn’t that right? Him and Kingsley? Lifelong mates.’
‘…Yeah. Supposedly. Not lifelong. They met at Oxford. During the war.’
‘Oh. So he must’ve pinched your cheek and tousled your hair when you were little.’
‘Yeah, he was around, a bit. Maybe once or twice a year he’d come and stay.’
‘So he’d have you on his lap. Give you your baths.’
‘My baths? Christ no. He really didn’t like children. My baths…’
‘Oh, that’s funny. Because to me he looks like a classic…you know, the kind of bloke that hangs around the parks? I bet, I bet if you went into a copshop with your nippers and lodged a complaint, and they opened their album of local fiends and flashers, that’d be the first face staring up at you. The pasty dome and the specs. Don’t you think?’
‘Uh, what did Timmy look like? Fresh as a daisy, you said. Apparently there’s no real physical type. They come in all shapes and sizes.’
‘Still. When you were little, uh, did he ever uh…?’
‘No.’ He was starting to feel unnerved; but he was used to that by now and he said, in the supernormal tone he seemed to have developed for her, ‘No. He didn’t just fail to warm to children – he actively disliked them. It’s even there in a poem. Children, with their shallow, violent eyes. To him they’re like aliens…But he was all right, Larkin. Solemn but benign. Benign. And children can tell.’
‘Not at first they can’t. Often. Warm my feet!…No, he’s more than solemn, that one. Man hands on misery to man. It…’
‘It deepens like a coastal shelf.’
‘Get out as early as you can,’ she said. ‘And don’t have any kids yourself.’
/> ‘Mm. So he says.’ Of course Phoebe had never drawn attention to the thing she shared with the poet: their common recusancy from the sway of common life. She couldn’t talk about it; but she could sometimes talk around it…Martin leant his head on her shoulder (the smell of talc and limey shampoo). ‘He doesn’t always feel like that. It’s a kind of poetic bravado. Or real bravery at least on the page. It’s just a mood, but poets have to go to the end of the mood.*5 To explore.’
‘Oh they explore, do they. Explore the mood. What’s the point of that?’
‘I don’t know – to contain it, the grievance. Whatever quarrel you pick with life, whatever it is that chafes you. You have to see it through.’
‘Yes, well that’s what I’m doing – seeing it through. Haven’t you noticed?…You say it’s just a mood, with him. When his mood changes, what’s he going to do? Up and start a family? At his age?’
‘Mm. Mm, a comical thought, I agree. No, you’ve got me there, Phoebe.’
‘…Now who’s this? Ooh, “Stevie Smith” no less.’
‘I think you’d take to Stevie Smith. Little girl lost in the woods – that kind of thing.’
She slid the book from his hand and leered at the back flap. Yes, this was very bad: not only poetry but poetry written by a woman. ‘Cor, you can pick ’em, Mart. Her and that other old boot. Begins with a B…’
‘Elizabeth Bishop.’
‘Yeah. Boiler Bishop. You’re such a hypocrite…I’m going to ring the papers and tell them what a dirty little bastard you really are. Underneath.’
‘The papers wouldn’t be interested.*6 Anyway, I’m reformed. I haven’t been a dirty little bastard for nearly three weeks.’
‘What about this morning? Oh, I suppose that doesn’t count because you didn’t…Well one thing’s for certain. You won’t be being a dirty little bastard tonight. Either.’
His shoulders went slack and he said, ‘Look at it out there, Phoebe. Listen to it out there.’ Listen to it: the hissing, the seething. ‘It’s a mess. Do we honestly have to go to this do? It’s for a nude magazine for Christ’s sake.’