Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  ‘Yeah, as if it’s “only human”. I wouldn’t want to even if it wasn’t against the law.’

  ‘You don’t like them till they’re eighteen.’

  ‘I like them older than eighteen. Twice as old. You, for instance, Phoebe.’

  ‘Youth is pretty, you claim, but it’s not interesting. Oh yes it is. It commands plenty of interest. Haven’t you noticed? Look around.’

  ‘I’m not just saying it, I mean it, I feel it. I don’t like schoolgirls, not in your sense.’

  ‘Mm. I don’t like schoolboys. What do men like about schoolgirls – those who do? What is it they like the idea of?’

  These days, when it came up, they talked about paedophilia ‘normally’, as if it was just a subject like any other. He found himself saying,

  ‘There was a schoolgirl Dad had a crush on.’ They were waiting at a red light – parkland on one side, gabled and churchy Victorian houses on the other…Martin now recalled Kingsley’s puzzled and diffident late-night confession. In some semi-rustic earlier life – Eynsham, perhaps – a pretty fourteen-year-old in the market square gave him a smile that he went on thinking about all day. And there might have been another smile or two. Anyway, the last time he saw her their eyes met and she looked straight past him; and for a whole month he despaired. ‘Yeah, my dad liked a schoolgirl,’ he said. ‘Though of course he never did anything about it.’

  ‘Father Gabriel liked a schoolgirl,’ said Phoebe, and said nothing more.

  Poets can pull

  ‘The US edition of High Windows is out,’ wrote Larkin in 1974, ‘with a photograph of me that cries out for the headline, FAITH HEALER? OR HEARTLESS FRAUD?’ In common with all PL’s self-descriptions, this was unsparingly apt: ‘And then my sagging face, an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on.’ He looked antique, stranded in time; his was one of those forgotten figures from the 1930s (a minor politician, a senior civil servant). Then there was his figure, which was also ovoid – tall, cumbrous, and unhappily heavy. ‘None of my clothes fit either: when I sit down my tongue comes out.’ As he headed off for one of his pseudo-holidays in Eigg or the Isle of Mull (‘one couldn’t call this spot anything but desolate, or the weather anything but wet’), Larkin’s bathroom scales would be stowed in his luggage…

  Phoebe and I used the lift then went within. Conquest’s sitting room and contiguous dining area contained about three dozen people (some of them faintly familiar, a poet, a knighted journalist), and the Hermit of Hull was over in the far corner, his head bent forward as he listened to the kind of man who, to paraphrase Kingsley (also present), looked like the kind of woman who played Sir Toby Belch in sorority productions of Twelfth Night. I said,

  ‘That geezer seems to be slipping away. I’ll slip away too after I’ve introduced you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘slip away now. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Okay, but don’t scare him, Phoebe.’

  With a twirl and a glide she was there in front of him and brightly saying, ‘Dr Larkin, good evening. I’m Phoebe, I’m Martin’s girlfriend.’

  He politely inclined his head and took her offered hand.

  ‘I’m a big fan.’

  ‘Are you now. Everyone’s saying that, suddenly. “I’m a big fan.” Making me wonder, Where are all the medium-sized fans? Where are all the little fans?’

  ‘Yes, where are all the dear little fans? But I’m not a little fan. I’m a big fan.’

  He was smiling. ‘All right. Quote me a line.’

  ‘All right. When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s…No, that won’t do. Uh, He married a woman to stop her getting away / Now she’s there all day, // And the money he gets for wasting his life on work / She takes as her perk / To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier / And the electric fire…’

  ‘That is quite impressive.’

  ‘Paying for the kiddies’ clobber and the electric fire – it’s hardly her perk, is it? I mean, the kiddies can’t go around naked, and the husband gets warm too. But that just makes it funnier somehow. Why are you so funny, Dr Larkin?’

  ‘…Why?’

  Their duologue was now lost in ambient murmurs, and I moved off to get a drink and say hello to Bob and find my dad. This I did, without losing sight of Phoebe; and from this distance, in this company, she looked like a peacock let loose in a senior common room.

  Kingsley said, ‘What’s the point of that get-up?’

  I shrugged. ‘She wanted to give him a thrill.’

  ‘No harm in that I suppose.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Bob (b. 1917), ‘she should’ve worn one of her business suits.’

  Within its staid limits the party was getting thicker and louder. After a few minutes I got hold of another drink and went and attached myself to an elderly and unvoluble foursome to Larkin’s rear, and Phoebe (who still held his full attention) was saying,

  ‘…and you’re famous. As well as being funny and the rest of it. So you might as well have some fun along the way. Because poets can pull, you know.’

  Larkin straightened up. ‘Now how is it that this evident truth has passed me by?’

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t chanced your arm enough. Poets can pull. I’ve seen it, mate.’

  ‘Ah. You’re referring to rugged brutes like Ted Hughes and Ian Hamilton.’

  ‘No. When I was a little girl we had a so-called poet living across the street. And he looked like Quasimodo – you know, one eye here, one eye there. I don’t think he’d ever published a line – all he did was say he was a poet. And he had this permanent gaggle of bints lining up to muck out his bedsit and bring him his pale ales and his hot dinners. That was in the bungalow belt. And as for what I’ve seen in town…It’s one of those laws of nature. Women like poets.’

  ‘Mm, I’ve heard rumours to that effect. Women like poets. Why d’you think the ones that do do? Is it because we’re meant to be in touch with our feelings? With a well-developed feminine side?’

  ‘Well, getting, uh securing the interest of a poet – that makes women feel interesting. But I think it’s simpler than that. Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr Larkin, but poets don’t get much in the way of rewards, do they. Compared to dramatists and even novelists.’

  ‘That at least is incontrovertible.’

  ‘And women sense it. Poets don’t get much, so women make sure poets get women. God bless them.’ Phoebe clutched her bag and gazed about her. ‘Ah, Christopher’s here. He’s a definite Christopher, isn’t he – not a Chris. Now Dr Larkin, I can’t hog you all night. There’s a press of admirers dying to give you a pinch and a punch.’

  She meant the two young men and the one old lady who were hovering disconnectedly nearby.

  ‘Now you won’t vanish, will you,’ said Larkin, ‘without bidding me farewell?’

  ‘Oh I promise.’

  * * *

  —————

  That particular poet took the late train back to Hull, while Martin, his girlfriend, and his father had a noisy dinner in a local tratt with Bob and Liddie (wife number four) plus Hitch and Eleni. Also present were a couple of young academics from San Francisco, who became increasingly entranced by the sheer bulk of what Phoebe was putting away; they fell silent after she ordered a second veal chop and a further hamper of bread; and when at last she got nimbly to her feet (after two custard pies and two fruit salads), they stared at one another and shook their heads…

  Then there was Kingsley to be driven home and dropped off in Hampstead. The house was still lit, at twelve-fifteen; and something told Martin that the white sheen from the sitting room – it had a coldly watchful look in the warm summer night – would be reproduced in Jane’s waiting face…Now Kingsley climbed heavily from the car, heavily aware that he would not be going straight to bed.

  Unlike his middle child. In fact it started on the moonlit landing, in Hereford Mans
ions; as he followed Phoebe up the stairs, giving himself a shadowy eye-level view of the enormous bra of her underpants, he reached up and she went still and widened the set of her legs, saying,

  ‘Give me your hand.’

  And even as the reptilian glaze came down on him, he was thinking, no, this isn’t quite right, something is not as it should be.*1 But it will do beautifully for now…

  Later – but not very much later – she said, ‘That was quick.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I just lost concentration…It won’t happen again.’

  There was a silence – a silence he urgently wanted to break. He said,

  ‘Uh Phoebe, did you manage to say goodbye to the old boy?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said (unhuffily and even with some enthusiasm). ‘We had a whole other chat. And we got on to death I’m afraid. I told him I was just as messed up about it as he was. I even told him about the lav.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I did. And I asked him if he felt the same way.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘And did he? Does he?’

  Phoebe’s fear of death, or her type of death awareness, somehow extended to her morning visits to the bathroom. These visits were always preceded by a hectic demand for absolute sequestration (even at her place, with its remote second toilet, she sent him out to buy a paper). I thought only blokes were like that, he once said – because in his experience girls just went in there, without locking or even closing the door, and just came out again as if nothing had happened. Yet Phoebe argued the other way. You’d expect a bloke to need a shit now and then. But not girls. How’re you meant to think of yourself as even halfway pretty, she said, when you’re responsible for that, that swamp of hot muck? Every day? No wonder I’m neurotic about it.

  ‘And was he? Is he the same way?’

  ‘No. He said he regards it as “communing with nature”. Which I thought was slightly nuts too. Still, he doesn’t see it as a visit to hell.

  ‘On one thing we saw absolutely eye to eye. The kiddies. I said, I take a lot of pride in my figure. It’s my one great blessing. And I won’t stand for some grasping little bleeder ruining my midriff and my tits, which he kept trying not to stare at, and God knows what else. And on that he was with me all the way…

  ‘I was planning to give him a flash before I went off. There was hardly anybody there by then, so I thought I’d drop my compact and then bend right over to pick it up. Then he’d be able to structure a wank around it when he got back up north. I mean, with him that’s the point of it all, isn’t it? Wanks. There’s no boring bit before and after with wanks, not like fucks. And wanks are free.

  ‘It seemed so lame. But I couldn’t think what else to do. So I did it. And stayed down an extra minute fiddling with my boot buttons. Then I straightened up with a silly-me smile…And I think I did scare him, because he had a frail look on his face, like an old woman. He is an old woman. And he said, You oughtn’t to be allowed.’

  ‘Oughtn’t. That’s very him.’

  She said, ‘Martin. Earlier on. It was as if you came as quickly as you could.’

  ‘…I’m sorry, Phoebe. It won’t happen again.’

  Not long after, when she went quiet and then still, I carefully got out of bed and groped my way to the balcony and had a shivery smoke, saying to myself, Christ. Even the sex has suddenly got something wrong with it…

  Knowing and accepting that ‘the moronic fraternity of sleep’ (Nabokov) would be closed to me that night, I went inside and turned on the table lamp and ran my eye over Phoebe’s sparse bookshelves. A paperback bestseller called The Usurers, Jane Howard’s After Julius, a legal thriller, Ian’s first collection of stories, a romance set in the Paris Bourse, my third novel, and – wedged between Principles of Accountancy and The Crash – the four volumes of Larkin (barely an inch thick), 1945, 1955, 1964, 1974…

  1964 contained the poem I’d been meaning to look out, ‘Dockery and Son’, in fact a B-grade PL poem famous for its last four lines.*2 But the bit I wanted came in the stanza before…Funereally dressed for the occasion (‘death-suited’), the poet-narrator, who is forty-one (and wifeless and childless), pays a visit to his old college and learns that a contemporary of his, Dockery, already has a son enrolled there. And the stunned ‘I’ wonders at how

  Convinced he was he should be added to!

  Why did he think adding meant increase?

  To me it was dilution.

  And I thought, No. To me it wouldn’t be dilution, and not addition, either. Something more impersonal. Continuation: so that when the only end of age at last arrives, your story doesn’t just stop – doesn’t just stop dead.

  Children, that was the thing (that was the next thing): you needed children. Because (or so I later came to believe) they were the ones who embodied the ordinary, the average, the near-universal push for a kind of immortality. Or so I later came to believe. I would say it out loud, gropingly, several times a day – I just want to see a fresh face…

  Julia, then (I hoped), let it one day be Julia.

  Apollo 2

  ‘They’re used to us in here now,’ I said (it was six months later – March 1981). ‘I don’t even feel particularly white.’

  ‘Nor me,’ he said. ‘I just feel particularly alcoholic. And particularly gay.’

  ‘I know what you mean…Yeah, but they don’t mind us.’

  ‘No. We’re just those two pissed little queers.’

  ‘Exactly…Hitch, I thought only chicks felt broody.’

  ‘Me too. But maybe it’s just that blokes never own up to it.’

  ‘Or don’t know they’re feeling it. Are you feeling broody do you think?’

  ‘No. I’m feeling open to experience, but I’m not feeling broody.’

  ‘Mm. Talking of not feeling broody, how did you find Larkin that time? Did you talk? I can’t remember.’

  ‘I only had a couple of minutes with the old buzzard. And he just went on and on about his bills. His bills. Especially as they related to his car.’

  He got more drinks and I said,

  ‘Didn’t he say something about black people?’

  ‘About foreigners in general. He said he didn’t like London because of all the foreign germs…You know, that’s the one thing that really daunts me about America. Race. And now Ronnie’s stirring it up with that guff about welfare queens and strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps.’

  ‘All plain invented. “I’m not smart enough to tell a lie” – remember that?’

  ‘He’s too thick to make any up, but he’s happy to repeat all the ones he hears. He’ll even tell the same lie twice! They’ve worked out he tells a lie, in public, every single day. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Unbelievable. Yeah. “Eighty per cent of acid rain is caused by trees.” He’s not just pig-ignorant, it’s as if he’s anti-knowledge. He’s actually anti-science!’

  ‘Did you see that quote from Andy Warhol? Saying it was “kind of great”, so American – having a Hollywood actor as president. Yeah, but what next?’

  I said, ‘Ronnie’s still an actor, and quite good at it too. Don’t forget I travelled with him for nearly a week last year, and I heard him tell the same long anecdote nine times – with identical intonations. That’s what actors do.’

  ‘And now he’s an actor playing the part of an aw-shucks goodie. He’s not a goodie. You’re meant to think there’s no harm in the old boy, but I sense…Oh, the pen of the Hitch’ll have some warm work to do in America.’

  ‘It’ll be okay. The First Lady’s a distinguished astrologer. She’ll keep him steady.’

  I got more drinks and he said,

  ‘Tell me, Little Keith. I’ve just reread Lucky Jim. Is it true that Margaret Peel was based on the old buzzard’s bird? On Monica?’

  ‘Absolutely. And wit
h the old buzzard’s enthusiastic collaboration. And no disguise – not even an alias. Monica’s full name is Margaret Monica Beale Jones. But Larkin drew a line. He made Kingsley change Beale to Peel.’

  ‘Ah, so chivalry isn’t dead…Christ, that Margaret. Dirndls and weird jewellery, and not only always tedious but always absolutely excruciating.’

  ‘…Monica can’t be that bad. Or she can’t still be that bad. They’ve been together since we were one. Imagine that.’

  ‘Mm, well that’s how it happens. No kids. So you get stalled in your status quo.’

  ‘That’s what Mum says. Childlessness dooms you to childishness. Having kids isn’t the trap – not having them’s the trap…Right, that’s it, I’ve decided. Which means farewell to Phoebe.’

  ‘You’re always saying that. Then you creep back to your sick bonk…’

  ‘That’s stopped working. Now even the sex is fucked up. All the time, while we’re writhing around, I’m thinking, What’s sex for?’

  ‘What’s it for? Well, pleasure, morale. And an escape from thought.’

  ‘And also the little matter of procreation. I can’t go on evading it, Hitch. I need to see a fresh face. One unmarked by the world. I need to see an innocent.’

  In conversation with Monica Jones

  ‘THEN THE RECTOR,’ she said, ‘BY WHICH HONORIFIC I DO NOT REFER TO THE INCUMBENT OF A PARISH AND THE RECIPIENT OF THE TITHES THEREOF IN THE GOOD OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND, OH NO. I MEAN THE HEAD OF ONE OF OUR VENERABLE SEATS OF LEARNING.’

  ‘Do you mean Leicester University, Monica?’ I asked.

  ‘WELL DONE THAT MAN! NONE OTHER, GRACIOUS SIR!…OUR MOST HONOURABLE RECTOR! NOW, AT THIS JUNCTURE, SAID RECTOR PERMITS HIMSELF A COPIOUS DRAUGHT OF SHERRY AND THEN LOOKS ME UP AND DOWN AND ENQUIRES, “HELLO. WHO ARE YOU THEN?” ’