by Amis, Martin
‘What was it you once said? About the wand?’
He turned his head away in a sort of shrug. ‘Now Maud, tell your aunt I won’t be writing back, or not yet anyway. I’ll see what my wife says.’
She smiled now, with relief (and even approval), ‘Oh, Phoebe said you might be one of them. A good husband. She will be disappointed. I’m afraid she slightly revelled in your divorce. Your new wife, she’s very beautiful.’
‘Thanks. And not only that…Apart from sending you here today with her, with her message, is Phoebe more or less all right?’
‘Oh yes. She’s rich suddenly. She sold her business.’
‘What business? Oh never mind.’ He offered his left hand, his good hand, which she took. ‘Give her my…’
‘Well thanks for the coffee. Personally I can’t see the point of vengeance, can you? I mean, who benefits? And it’s so much trouble.’
‘Mm. Mm. But I bet vengeance was great fun in the old days. If you’re the type and in the mood.’
‘I’ll walk myself down. I apologise for that nonsense about the wand. But I promised Phoebe. She just wanted to know. Anyway, again – sorry to bother.’
Loth and cold
Before I could see what my wife said about it (everything would be laid before her), I was asked to absorb two lessons, two readjustments, bequeathed by September 11. Both involved a subtraction of innocence.
Lesson number one. They would never look the same – those things up there in the firmament, those A-to-B devices, those people carriers: airbus, skytrain. On my way home that evening, at a traffic light, I saw one of them glinting in over the tower blocks…Already and unalterably associated with mass death, a commercial aircraft did not, perhaps, have that much innocence to lose; but only now did it look like a weapon.
Lesson number two. Planes would never look the way they used to, and neither (strange to say) would children.
Or my children. Who did not look the same. At the evening meal that Wednesday night in the house on Regent’s Park Road all five of them were present: Bobbie (twenty-four), Nat (sixteen), Gus (fifteen), little Eliza (four), and tiny Inez (two).
In the L-shaped kitchen/dining room on the ground floor I gave everyone drinks (Eliza ordering milk), laid the table – six places plus a high chair – and did odd jobs for my wife at the stove, and chatted away as convincingly as I could…
My feeling for my daughters and sons: it was more than a change, it was a capsizal. The sensory pleasure they gave me when all of them were gathered had its core in their strength of numbers, the amount of them, all the flesh and bone and brain they added up to; but now it was that same multiformity that made my heart feel loth and cold. Because I knew I couldn’t protect them. Actually you cannot protect your children, but you need to feel you can. And the delusion was quite gone, replaced by a bad-dream sensation, not a nightmare, quite – more like a dream of nudity in a crowded public place…
The connoisseur of vengeance would savour just this – the taste inside our mouths, the mineral sourness of a lost battle, the ancient, the Iron Age taste of death and defeat.
‘Will there be a war?’ asked Nat. Nobody answered.
In the crook of the room there was a miniature TV wedged into a low cupboard (with folding doors). For the last couple of weeks it had often been tuned to the US Open at Flushing Meadows (and only three days ago, on Sunday, Lleyton Hewitt had in the end thrashed Pete Sampras 7–6, 6–1, 6–1). At that moment, I saw, the little set was silently rescreening the clips – the first plane, the second plane…
Inez staggered over there and took the two white panels in her hands ready to slam them shut. ‘No…tennis,’ she said scathingly, as the North Tower (the first to be hit, the second to drop) folded in on itself; and there was New York under its soiled sheepskin of chalk-thick smoke.
Parfait Amour
‘Okay.’ He took the envelope from his breast pocket. ‘Now you’re going to have to be a good sport about this, Elena, and you’re going to have to be wise, too. I know you’re a good sport and I know you’re wise. I need your guidance. Your counsel.’
This was 2001, so his wife was even younger than she would be in St-Malo.
She said, ‘…Go on then.’
He remembered a piece of advice in a novel of Kingsley’s. What it amounted to was this: In conversations with women, never even mention another woman’s name – unless it’s to report her (very painful) death. Yes, but that was in the second of the two forthrightly misogynistic novels he wrote after Elizabeth Jane Howard walked out on him (‘I’m a bolter,’ Jane once levelly told her stepson). To be honest Martin thought that Kingsley’s advice had its applications; but he wasn’t worried about Elena, so advanced and evolved (almost a generation on), and he said with perhaps a touch of complacence,
‘Elena, when it comes to ex-girlfriends, I know there are three or four you take a dim view of, but there are some you broadly tolerate. And some you even like. Isn’t that the way of it? You like some and dislike others?’
‘No. You hate them all.’
‘Do you?’ he asked and laughed quietly (at the instant rout of all his expectations). ‘You’ve heard me speak of Phoebe Phelps…’
‘The sex one.’
‘Roughly speaking.’ Although now he came to think of it, she was, on balance, more like the no-sex one. ‘It’s from her.’
Elena said, ‘The one that didn’t want to get married or have kids. Would you call that a real love affair? Phoebe?’
Man and wife were still at the table. Bobbie, who shared a flat with her (half) brother, had been put in a taxi, and the four others, all supposedly asleep, were in the four bedrooms just beneath his attic study. He poured more wine…Unlike Julian (who wrote a whole novel about it), and unlike Hitch (who had found himself increasingly prey to it), Martin did not suffer from retrospective sexual jealousy; and nor did Elena. They were not inquisitive about each other’s anterior lovelives. He was aware of certain male preponderances (certain weights on the fabric of her personal spacetime), and very much alive to any suspected ill-usage; but he was not inquisitive, and asked few questions. And Elena was the same.
‘A real love affair?’ Well, we never exchanged the three words, Elena (he said to himself). As you and I so often have and do. You know the three words: first person singular, verb, second person singular. ‘Not in the strictest sense.’
‘So just a detour.’
‘As you might say. A dalliance, a digression.’
‘Mm. How long did it last?’
‘Five years.’
‘Five years.’ She went still. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Yes you did. I told you at least twice. 1976 to 1980. On and off.’ Almost entirely on. He waited. ‘Now – the matter at hand, if you would, Elena. Here. Read, recite, as Allah instructed the Prophet. Jesus, listen to him.’ He was referring to one of the talking heads on Newsnight. ‘He’s saying it’s all our fault. And serve us fucking well right.’
‘Quite a few of them are saying that. As Hitch said they would.’
‘Mm, that lot think Osama did it for the Palestinians…Now proceed, dread queen.’
She sat back and straightened the stiff sheets out in front of her. ‘Ready? Dear Martin. I’m going to tell you something that…’ Her eyes focused, then dilated. ‘My God, what truly hideous handwriting.’
‘She thought so too. It mortified her.’
‘There’s no consistency to it. It’s like one of those blackmail letters that’s patched together from different strips of print…Something really ghastly must have happened to her when she was very young.’
Indeed, Elena. Starting when she was six, an old priest called Father Gabriel bribed her into bed three times a week for eight years…He, Martin, had never told this story to anyone, ever, not even Hitch. All afternoon he had considered telling Elena – for its explanatory
power; but as ever he found its violence unmanageably and unusably exorbitant, like nuclear fission. It was just too big.*5 Elena said,
‘So. Dear Martin, I’m going to tell you something I think you ought to know. Now I’m sure you remember a certain day in 1977 – November 1 – because by the standards of the “literary world” in quotes it had its moments. Let me jog your memory! exclamation mark.’ Elena visibly honed her attention. Just after lunch your old flame Lily rang up in hysterics and you chose to rush off and join her for the night. I prepared dinner for Kingsley…For Kingsley? What’s all this?’
‘See, I was doing a spell of Dadsitting so Jane could have a holiday.*6 Greece. Phoebe consented to come over for the weekend. Lily, Lily was organising a literary festival up north. Some old poet chucked or got sick or actually dropped dead at the last minute, and she had a big gap
in her programme. Saturday night. She was desperate. And I couldn’t say no, could I.’
‘Yes you could. Very rash not to, I’d’ve thought. Very rash indeed. Are you nuts? I prepared dinner for your father, and that was fine, but then he…invaigled me into drinking a glass of Parfait Amour. Can’t spell inveigled. What’s Parfait Amour?’
‘That’s significant. See, alcohol didn’t agree with Phoebe and she very rarely touched it. But she had a weakness for Parfait Amour.’
‘What’s Parfait Amour?’
‘Parfait Amour is a disgustingly sugary liqueur. It’s the same colour as that notepaper and it smells like cheap ponce. Eliza might fancy a dab of it behind her ears. And it’s Mum’s favourite drink too. By far. One glass of that and her whole personality changed. I mean Phoebe’s did.’
‘Her whole personality changed. You mean she became less of a slag.’
He said, ‘Very good, Elena. No. She became more of a slag. She became something of a slag. And she wasn’t a slag.’ He thought for a moment. ‘True, she had a tendency to flirt, but that was later on. Phoebe was in many ways rather proper.’
‘Oh was she. Did your father know that drinking made her more of a slag?’
‘Uh, yeah. But it had to be Parfait Amour. He was always fascinated by people who didn’t drink. He asked, and I told him.’
‘That’s why’, Elena continued, ‘I was so ill when you got back from your mission of mercy. Did you tell him that drinking made her ill?’
‘No.’
‘You just told him that it made her more of a slag.’
‘Jesus. I didn’t put it quite like that. I think I just told him it made her, you know, unusually easygoing. More amenable…Now how did Kingsley get hold of a bottle of Parfait Amour? – that’s what I want to know. I’ve never seen it on sale here. He must’ve called one of his vintner friends. He must’ve gone to a fair bit of trouble.’
‘…New para. So as you can imagine I was feeling pleasantly languid, sitting there in front of the fire.’
‘Romantic, isn’t it. The marmalade light, the Parfait Amour…’
‘Your father then made a verbal pass at me that went on for half an hour.’
On the table in front of them the baby monitor politely cleared its throat; and there came the first notes of protest and distress. These opening cries always seemed to tell them how long the visit would need to last. Ten minutes, he thought.
‘You do the next one,’ said Elena as she rose.
He poured himself more wine and remembered.
It was a recent (and temporary) development in Phoebe’s life – the Parfait Amour. She got her first taste of it the year before, in 1976, sitting opposite Hilly and her third husband at an outside table in a restaurant in Andalusia. Hilly asked for a glass, and drank it with every sign of near-unbearable enjoyment. ‘Go on, dear,’ she said. ‘I hate the taste of drink too. But I love Parfait Amour. Mmm.’
Phoebe acceded. And that night, at the hotel, Martin was suddenly in complete possession of a smilingly acquiescent stranger (of sharply reduced IQ). She was somewhat indisposed the next morning, admittedly, but it was a thing of the past by lunchtime…Four nights later it happened again – the damson digestif, her meandering gait along the shadowline of the bullring and up the slope, the dazed and breathy succubus in the Reina Victoria; but this time she spent all the following day groaning and sweating in the darkened bedroom. Nonetheless he found himself unobtrusively buying a litre of Parfait Amour at duty-free in Malaga Airport…*7
After that he inveigled Phoebe into a Parfait Amour only once, and she was so very poorly, for nearly a week, that he reluctantly swore off Parfait Amour – sobered, or so he thought, by the interminable business with the trays and the tomato soups and the lightly buttered toast, and by all the recriminations. But as he poured the Parfait Amour down the kitchen sink he felt pleased and proud in an unfamiliar way. His sense of honour – or of minimal decency – was not quite defunct; it could still twitch and throb…
Martin got up from the dining table and fetched a bottle of Scotch, and then, reckoning he still had a few minutes, went out through the back door for a stoical cigarette. He could hear Elena veering off into another room on her way down.
…As he was getting himself ready to fly to Newcastle (and take a train on to Durham) Phoebe caught up with him in the hall and said,
‘So you’re off are you then.’
‘Phoebe, I can’t possibly not do this. She’s my oldest friend.’
‘I see. I see. You’re going all the way to Hadrian’s Wall for a thankyou fuck.’
‘What?’ She was one step ahead of him. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘Come on. You’ve gone to John o’Groats to save her bacon. You’ll be up on stage seeming chivalrous and clever. There’ll be a dinner. She’s an ex-girlfriend. You’re both in hotels. Beyond any doubt there’ll be a thankyou fuck.’
He said, ‘Lily and I broke up at university. There won’t be a thankyou fuck, I swear. Anyway, thank you for tending to Dad tonight. He trusts you, Phoebe.’
‘…I can’t believe it! You’ve trapped me here just for a thankyou fuck!’
She refused his kiss and he turned and pulled open the door and went down the garden path with his bag.
The storyteller
‘Eliza,’ he now said (he had naturally recognised Eliza’s cry).
‘Eliza,’ said Elena. ‘She just wanted her water refilled and a chat. All fine. You’ll have to do Inez.’ His wife settled. ‘When was this? How old was he?’
‘Uh, Kingsley was in his mid-fifties.’
‘How old was she? How old were you?’
‘I was twenty-eight. Phoebe was thirty-five.’
‘Oh. An old slag. No wonder she didn’t want children,’ said Elena (who was the same age when she had Inez). ‘She didn’t dare…At what point was it? I mean in your eon together?’
‘About eighteen months in.’
‘How attractive was she? Wasn’t she a ginge?’
‘No – dark auburn. At first glance you’d say she was a brunette. Not pale. She had a kind of rusty colouring.’
‘A ginge, in short. Right. Your father then made a verbal pass at me that went on for half an hour. I’ve never known anything like it. It was like a flood of praise, and he was very eloquent, being a poet of course and not just a storyteller.’ Elena gave a comfortable grunt and said, ‘So, a poet’s pass. Not just a novelist’s. As these things go it was pretty painless. No bullying and no whining. I always liked your father – he, for one, knew how to be attentive to a woman. New para. Well I don’t need to tell you how “tolerant” that particular drink makes me, and I have to confess I was quite tempted in a way. He was still fairly slim and handsome, then, and beyond all else by far it would have been a reasonably good way of paying you back for Lily.
‘New para. I can’t remember how he phrased the actual proposition, but I’ll never forget how he rounded it all off. He said, “It’s a faint hope, I realise. But I do w
ant you to feel secure in my admiration.” ’
‘That’s Kingsley, that is. I can hear him saying it. That’s his style.’
‘And was it his style’, asked Elena, ‘to drug, rape, and poison his sons’ girlfriends?’
‘…When he was younger, there was no limit to how reckless he could be with women. Much more reckless than I ever was. Here’s an example. You’ll have to concentrate, Elena.’
‘I’m listening,’ she said and reluctantly raised her eyes from the page.
‘Okay. I’ll be quick. Hilly and Kingsley are asked to dinner by some old friends – call them Joan and John. Now Kingsley’s been having an affair with Joan and nobody knows. And there’s another couple there – Jill and Jim. You’d think Kingsley’d have his hands full, keeping Mum in the dark and giving Joan the odd stroke. But guess what. He goes and makes a pass at Jill.’
‘That’s…that’s ambitious. And Jill’s keen?’
‘Yeah. So he ups and has an affair with Jill. As well as Joan. He goes on about it in the novels – with girls, he says, he was like a frantic adolescent. See, they tended to say yes. He must’ve felt infallible – inerrant. Like the Koran.’
‘Never mind the Koran…In the end I just said, “Look, Kingsley, come on. This is all very well but you’re Martin’s father!” New para.’ Elena’s eyes widened. ‘Then he really shocked me. He said –’
The baby monitor again sounded – not with the preparatory cough but with a convulsive splat of alarm. Immediately followed by the ratcheting wail.
‘Inez. “D’you think I’d be talking to you like this this if I were Martin’s father?” ’
‘Stop! Wait,’ he said as he made for the stairs.
‘Why? You already know what she’s going to say.’
‘I still need to watch your face,’ he called out…But Elena had already settled into it, looking ahead to see how much more there was to go.