by Martin Amis
(ii) I had a dozen oysters … followed
by François’s triumphant faisan à la mode
de Champagne — GREGORY
Of course, it’s all nonsense about ‘incest’, you know.
In this country at any rate, incest (‘the crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited by law’ — OED) wasn’t even considered a misdemeanour until 1650, when, quite out of the blue and grouped willy-nilly with various other delinquencies, it was arbitrarily promoted to a capital offence. Following the glorious second dawn of the Restoration, naturally, the suppression of the ‘crime’ fell to what the self-righteous Blackstone ruefully called ‘the feeble coercion of the spiritual courts’, though Bills to re-establish it as a felony were repeatedly introduced in Parliament — only to be laughed out of the House every time.
In 1908, however, legislation was sneaked through (the Punishment of Incest Act) under which sexual intercourse of a male with his daughter, mother, sister or granddaughter (sic!) was made punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment. And did it matter in the slightest whether intercourse was committed with or without the female’s consent? Not a bit of it. Indeed, the consenting female was on conviction liable to the same punishment as the male. (Formerly all proceedings under the Act were held in camera, but this provision was repealed by the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1922. In Rex v. Ball [22CX, CC366] it was held by the Lords that evidence of previous intercourse was sufficient to establish guilty passion and rebut innocent association. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?) The terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, by the way, included ‘half-brother’ and ‘half-sister’, whether or not the relationship could be traced through lawful wedlock.
Such dithering needn’t obscure the fact — may even serve to highlight it — that we’re dealing with one of those taboos which society inherits as a piece of half-forgotten lumber, whereby the quite practical rules of a past community are fearfully revived by an anxious or repressive age. As Dr J. G. V. Kruk, in his recent monograph Incest (Michel Albin, 1976) has shown to my satisfaction (and to those of the experts: ‘A convincing and scholarly exercise in de-mythology’ — TLS), the whole notion was just an oldster ruse for luring fresh sons into the family unit. Clearly, you wouldn’t want your shiftless daughters compacting the familial bastion by marrying your own sons — when in the next hut or hovel there languished some strapping ploughboy who would be only too happy to move in and help you farm, hunt, chop wood, stop other people fucking you up, and whatnot. That was the sole reason for the quarantine. Inferior genes, true, are more likely to proliferate in closed marriages, but then so are healthy ones. Take, for example, the superb Egyptian dynasty (Cleopatra, Rameses II, etc.): for several generations a series of siblings ruled; they were dazzlingly cultivated, physically perfect, talented, beautiful and strong. No, it won’t do, I’m afraid: ‘incest’ is a strip of warped lead from the gutter presses, a twitch in the responses of philistines and suburbanites, a ‘sin’ only in the eyes of the hated and the mean.
Besides, we only did it once.
This is the way it began.
My sister and I are seven and nine respectively. It is summer, and we are playing on the D-Pond, a broad, somewhat neglected semi-circular lake at the northern prong of our vast estate. It is one of those shimmery, light-headed, pollen afternoons; ripples slowly flee across the dandelion waters, the wind hot on their heels. Can I find the bits of my lost childhood? Can I gather them up again? Where are they? Ursula cuts a tomboyishly suntanned figure, her tingling blonde hair hung loose on her shoulders; she wears but a pair of spotless white underpants. I am perhaps a head the taller, and already my body shows those qualities of athleticism and economy of movement which were later to serve me so well in the gymnasium and on the games field; I too am pleasantly bronzed in the afterglow of this long late summer (my new tennis shoes and clinging white shorts agree with me). We are playing with our raft, an uneven and treacherous affair roped together out of logs, cracked doors, spare timber and fat petrol tubs. I propose to test it with a circumnavigation of the lake, and with skilful thrusts of the punt-pole I set off, while Ursula falters along the shore, shrieking imperious warning of every reed patch and low-slung branch, and begging me not to go out too far. Straining to keep my balance astride the soggy dipping floats — and careful not to ruin my new tennis shoes on the disgustingly slimy bank — I coolly complete the arc to Ursula’s shouts of wonder and relief. ‘How clever, how marvellous,’ she said. ‘Oh how wonderful.’
‘Come on, up you get. We’re going to the island,’ I said, turning towards the bushy green lump in the centre of the lake. At this, of course, a look of almost heavenly woe besets Ursula’s features. ‘No. Too far, the island. Too deep.’ ‘I’ll look after you. Come on.’ She clung to me tremulously when I lifted her on board, but I managed to get her to sit down at the prow and remain still; after a few moments she even began to help with the paddling, contentedly spooning her hands through the jewelled waters. Drugged somewhat by the heat and exertion, I swirled the punt-pole lazily in our wake, my mind caught by the prisms of sky, liquid, the girl’s glistening back, her many-coloured hair … Our island turned out to be smarter than it looked — past the mucky outer rim were three fairly spruce shrubs enclosing a patch of remarkably firm grass, on which we were soon happily seated. Ursula gazed about herself, at the heavy water on all sides. ‘Success. How wonderful, how beautiful,’ she said. ‘Shall we take off our things?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I think we should. Oh, how wonderful, how wonderful.’ Ah, that lost world. Boiling images gathered and fled beneath our closed lids, the sun decanting into the sweet marine tang of our bodies — held up there in the motionless rotundity of the lake, while our island grew and spread and the land cowered to fill the four horizons. As I placed my hand on the plump rift between her thighs, Ursula looked up at me encouragingly, her face lit by a lake of dreams.
When we came to our senses, of course, we saw that our craft had slipped from the bank and drifted dumbly off some ten or fifteen feet, and — since neither of us could swim (I loathe swimming) — we found ourselves temporarily marooned. Within half-an-hour, though, a housemaid whom mother had sent out with some chilled squash appeared; a rowing boat was duly fetched from the Willow Lake by two of the obsequious senior gardeners, and the young castaways were promptly ferried back to shore (hot blushes from Ursula at being seen in her panties by the staff). Oh, it was nothing really, nothing at all. But for a moment we were out there naked and cold, frightened at the thought of being alone in the empty world we had striven to create.
Following this incident Ursula and I had no close physical contact for more than a year. Not that our love cooled in the slightest. From the start — from the moment we began to sense who and what we were — ours had been perhaps the rarest and most exalted of brother-sister bonds. I cannot remember a single instance of rancour or harshness, a single rivalry or untender word. (I well remember our consternation one day in the village when we witnessed an hysterical brawl between two yokel sibs. Our eyes conferred incredulously, as if to say, ‘But they’re brother and sister, aren’t they? We are.’) Ursula and I loved each other throughout the long Eden of our childhood with a cloudless, sure, quite unanxious love: her miseries were my miseries, my triumphs her triumphs. Our April shower of physical wariness was a period not of withdrawal so much as of reserve, of anticipation. For soon we were to embark on that poignant, sapling rediscovery of our own bodies, a journey which continued for many years until its sudden and shattering end — but that was after Father got sick, and Terence came, and things started to fall apart.
Early in the month my sister telephoned me at the gallery. I had been steering some gravid squaw round the new one-man show and was heartily relieved when Odette Styles, her common face divulging an heroic minimum of disapproval, beckoned me into the netherland of her office to receive the call. Old Jason was in there too somewhere, and I
felt the torpid weight of their lust on my shoulders as I said,
‘Gregory Riding.’
‘Hello, it’s me. Who was that awful woman?’
‘My love, how are you? Well, that would be telling.’
‘The fat one who keeps trying to kiss you?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Gregory, may I come to lunch?’
‘Of course you may! At once.’
I replaced the receiver — and swivelled. Old Ma Styles, having made an unprecedentedly shameless lunge at me in the lower passage that morning, was staring through the glass hatch into the gallery, moodily smoking one of her foul French cigarettes. I turned and saw Jason’s eyes glinting at me through the shadows.
‘I’m going out now,’ I announced.
‘Not another of your long lunches,’ I heard her sigh as I picked up my cape and gadded across the floor.
Now for Ursula, of course, everything has to be just so — and I, of course, infallibly ensure that it is. My usual table has been reserved at Le Coq d’Or, and good Emil is on hand as ever when Ursula and I surge through the great double-doors. (Ursula and I love grand restaurants.) As I unswirl my cape like a balletic stingray and Ursula surrenders her fashionable white mackintosh to a pair of vying flunkeys, our nostrils are already flaring to the settled, inviolable elegance which hangs like cinematic grain in the crystal dining-room: the cultured symmetries of cornice and chandelier, the incognito scurry of dark waiters contrasting with the feted entrances of incendiary chefs, the at first indistinguishable foreground presence of various moneyed and modish diners, the suspended, underwater elegance of the whole.
‘It is your usual table, sir, isn’t it?’
‘Yes of course, Emil,’ I said, folding a five-pound note into his silky breast pocket.
‘And your usual cocktail, sir, as you wait for your lunch to be prepared?’
By now we are cruising through the body of the dining-room — I call and wave at various people I know, even pausing to chat briefly with a well-known young actor (which Ursula always adores).
‘Emil, please. My guest and I must be settled at our table before we can think about anything as complicated as that.’
‘Of course, Mr Riding.’
We gained our table — quite the nicest in the place, with its grotto-like candles, its proximity to a superb Impressionist nude that I have long coveted, and its fine vantage on the restaurant’s broad span. Ursula chose her usual passion-fruit cup (we were both giggling rather by this time) and —
‘And for me, Emil, the vodka martini with — ’
‘Yes, sir. Two slices of lemon, straight up.’
‘Excellent, Emil. I know I may rely on you.’
Now whenever we are out having one of our grand meals, and Ursula sits with her back to the restaurant and prompts me to sit facing the stylish throng, it is always for a very clear reason … I leaned towards her, tenting my forearms on the white tablecloth — my fingertips millimetres from my mouth — and began:
‘Over in the corner, by the door, is Sam Dunbar, the “sculptor”. He does junky Giacomettis that look like stolen microphone stands, plus the odd steel cast of things like pregnant waifs — all Mopsa hair and intolerably sentimental curves. Dunbar keeps turning up at Torka’s. With him lunches Mia Küper, absolutely the tackiest of all the main London hostesses — she’s quite capable of giving her luncheon guests two whole lobsters each, such is her complete panic to impress. Two tables over, the yob architect Ernest Dayton — he perpetrated the South Bank adjunct — is arousing Celia Hannah, the fashion editress, with his fat-lipped whispers. Nearer home (don’t turn round), Isaac Stamp, banker, entrepreneur and Jew, is clumsily drunkening what I take to be some species of escort girl. He’s the lazy fraud who — ’
— But soon the food had to be ordered, Emil materialized in cautious attendance, and Ursula was in any case by this time in stitches.
I had a dozen oysters — not quite up to the house standard — followed by François’s triumphant faisan à la mode de Champagne; Ursula, after much ticklish deliberation with the menu, inevitably opted for the same. And, although my sister drinks very little and doesn’t really know about wines, I insisted on a full bottle of their staggering ’52 de Rothschild, winking at Emil and good-naturedly urging him to be sure to guzzle our dregs. Later, Ursula supped freely from the pudding table (the bit she likes best, I sometimes suspect) while I enjoyed a powerful liqueur with my coffee — and even toyed with a colossal Havana, just to please her.
It must have been, oh, four o’clock by the time we wandered out into the street. I ought to say that U. looked very beguiling in her white mackintosh, and when I lured her for a few moments into a quiet arcade we were soon smoothing up against each other and moaning like doves. At length I shooed her off to her class and strolled back to the comparative gloom of the gallery; its stately matron reared jealously out of her hole as I entered, but I evaded her, tripping nimbly down the stairs; I spent the rest of the afternoon in the stock-room, where I had a good cackle over some side-splitting new prints with which she had recently blundered back from The Hague.
I don’t know, but perhaps if I were leading a less galvanic sexual life myself I might be able to tolerate, if not indulge, Mrs Styles’s ever-bolder attentions. As it is, I feel like — like some prospective conquest of Terence’s, permanently trailed and scrutinized by this damp, adoring need. Three days ago the witch surprised me in the lavatory — I was training my hair and for once had failed to take the precaution of double-locking the door. ‘Why do you need to bother with that, Greg?’ she gaily cried, and actually took me in her arms from behind. Oh yes, a ‘motherly’ gesture. But beneath the squashy pressure of her bosom on my back and her great swirling pelvis on my thighs, I felt the taut shudders of a nerveless animal.
For things are getting rather wild at Torka’s these days, and Gregory Riding, Esquire, is finding himself very much in demand. It’s chic now, I’m well aware, to look for ladders in the silk of decadence, to fret about the underside of the permissive drift, to summon up the nemeses of pleasure. It’s all chippy drivel, of course. (Worth a laugh, too, is the idea that decadence is somehow culpably undemocratic. Just look at the lower classes — look at them seriously. Naturally they stick to themselves. Who else wants them? They’re made for each other.) Nothing sordid ever happens at Torka’s. His glossy apartment is without the sickly tang of some decadent venues I’ve glanced in on, the tang of rough trade and sado-masochism, the tang of concealed cameras and one-way mirrors, the tang of crime. No: it’s all very luxurious, immensely civilized and definitively good fun.
Arrive at eight, springing from my costly car, the tepid filth of the underground showered from my body, which is now hugged by insolently provocative nightwear. Torka’s sniggering houseboy removes my cape, I give my reflection in the giant hall mirror a serious stare, and am ushered with the usual bustle into the half-crowded drawing-room, whose open balcony windows glide off towards the mermaid lights of the Park. I move across, under a heavy fire of eyes, to the marble drinks table, pour myself a glass of expensive white wine, and join the celebrated Torka where he is ensconced on his favourite chaise-longue for a few minutes’ shop before the first appraisals of the evening begin. Who’s there? Adrian of course, Susannah of course (I’m not speaking to them at the moment), that intriguingly shaped American girl of whom everyone is so full of praise, the shy boy who can be very sweet if you nurse him along, the slab-chested Swede who was such a disaster the other night, that television producer and his wife who aren’t quite up to standard, and know it, and always get left till last, Johnnie (Torka’s latest find), the twins (oriental sisters whom I put through their paces the previous evening — fascinating mirror-image stuff), Mary-Jane, who you’d think was a bit antique but is really very proficient in her over-adoring way, Montague, who only ever wants to watch, thank God, two new boys (one hunky cowboy — how did he get here? — and one rather more promising blond, who has a nice
panthery look), and three new girls (one leathery bikie, one titled tearaway who I’m told isn’t up to much, and one agreeably athletic redhead, who has just the kind of firm, tanned, hard-packed body I like).
It’s all done with the eyes. At nine or so the pockets of conversation begin their languid dying fall — glasses remain unfilled, cocaine nostril-spoons are put away, the air gets heady with resinous smoke — and people have started to send their gazes wandering round the room. They are conjectural, uncommitted gazes which offer, spurn, flaunt, sustain, advance until they are met by gazes they like and say hello to, and talk about certain other gazes in a critical way and agree about them or fall out about them or realign in new conjunctions. Then we slip away.
It was with three of the newcomers — panthery blond, leather bike-girl, athletic redhead — that I eventually repaired to the grandest of Torka’s five bedrooms. (I believe, too, that the veteran Mary-Jane tagged along or at least put in an appearance, on the off-chance that an unattended orifice might at some point hove into view.) Inevitably, one imagines, I soon became the cynosure of their eyes, lips and hands. I was kissed by the redhead throughout as the leather girl unbuttoned my shirt and the panther helped peel away my clinging satin trousers. Much ungainly jostling when my brash virilia are displayed; an assortment of lips close and pop. Trickly unzipping noises from the leather girl and a sudden bouquet of healthy flesh as the redhead bursts from her white romper-suit and softly straddles my chest with her warm and freckly thighs, arching backwards as the panther boy cups her (perhaps rather too heavy) breasts from behind, thus admitting between them the busy mouth of the now-naked bikie, which bobs contentedly over my loins, and for a few seconds every cell in my body shakes with ravenous applause. That is the part I love most (though of course the whole thing goes on for ages). From then on, too often, it seems to be just skin and hair, membranes, worthless and familiar stuff, mere leftovers, junk.