‘There’s more to tell you about Jimmie if you want to hear it,’ said Madge. To do with his literary career and all that.’
‘Yes, I do want to hear.’
She put her glass down and smiled at him. ‘You can turn your tape-recorder thing on now if you like.’
Later, at his work-table, Gordon found that he remembered almost word for word what he had been told about the evening of the great stand-up and its sequel, or lack of one. He had said truthfully that his memory was good, but it had never before been as good as this. In the morning or even sooner he would very likely find he had started to forget. Within seconds he had begun typing on a fresh sheet of paper:
M in Tripoli bar waiting for J who didn’t show. Feels a bit of a fool, her predicament obvious, has just enough cash to pay for 2 drinks and get home. No word from J. ‘After a couple of days’ someone [who? if it matters] rings up and tells her J been at Ritz on evening when
At this point Gordon stopped, read through what he had typed and sat and thought for a time. Then he took the piece of paper out of his typewriter and crumpled it into a ball which he dropped into the waste-bin. He was far from clear in his mind why he did this, but it had something to do with not wanting to deceive old Madge. Not, he had told himself, that old Madge would have been at all taken aback to hear he had done his best to get round her recording ban, but she might have been disappointed in him or, to use a phrase he associated with his childhood, surprised at him. When he put this to himself it sounded very much as if he had decided without any real qualification to believe her story and reject Jimmie’s portrayal of her. Well, so he should.
And yet … He had indeed started disbelieving the Jimmie version soon after setting eyes on Madge for the second time, and he had seen no subsequent reason to modify this disbelief. Nevertheless Jimmie had shown abundant signs of holding a low general opinion of persons at the Scott-Thompson social level and Madge had shown none. And she was a woman, however old, and her version of events, the picture of a woman abandoned by a ruthlessly self-seeking lover, made a clear appeal to sentiment, however sugary. All true enough. And yet …
Gordon had obviously had no inkling of such moral-emotional difficulties when he first formed a serious intention of writing something like a book about JRP Fane and his works. It was undeniable that they, the difficulties, made the project more interesting, but all the same he wished quite heartily that they had never arisen. He was most relieved when a mate telephoned with the suggestion of a couple of halves of Callow’s best bitter at the pub on the far side of the park.
16
‘Have you been living here long?’ asked Joanna.
‘Nearly two years. I know it’s not very nice but it’s not really supposed to be.’
‘What is it supposed to be?’
‘Well,’ said Gordon, ‘it’s quite near the middle for the price, and there’s a good bus and Tube service, and anyway I’m usually out a lot of the time.’
‘No, I can’t see you giving any lunch- and dinner-parties, and anyway if I found myself living here I’d certainly be out a lot of the time, and I suppose you meant it’s cheap for what you get. Darling, I’m not sure how to put this, but could you lay your hand on your heart and say you think it’s quite … cheap … enough?’
‘Joanna, why are you so cross? What have I done, or have you just thought of something?’
‘Christ, do you see? You men are all the same, said the contessa. Actually she wasn’t so far out, if she’d said you’re all either As or Bs she’d have got it right to an inch. Shut up, I was going to tell you anyway, one lot it never crosses their minds they could be anything but right the whole time, like no names no pack-drill, and the other lot are always moaning and apologizing and asking where they went wrong. You get half a mark for daring to ask if I’ve had second thoughts – no, you did.’
‘Which you haven’t.’
‘No, not quite, but don’t you ever ask me what you’ve done again, and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. And no, I wouldn’t like a cup of tea, there’s never a right time for that as far as I’m concerned.’ She sat up. ‘I must say in fairness to it the place is quite warm. Is that you or the landlord or whoever it is?’
‘I suppose what there is of it is me.’
Without saying any more she got out of bed and left the room. As she did so he got a goodish look at her naked back view, not quite as good as he would perhaps have liked but good enough to lend some support to the belief he had more than once heard expressed, that of ladies of more mature years the part below the neck retained the look of youth longer than that above. Joanna had given Gordon his first close experience of such a person and he was relieved and delighted that things seemed to have gone well, and hoped he had not felt or shown too much vulgar triumph at having carried off the situation. He knew without minding that it was beyond him to have felt and shown none.
He looked back now, with much less nonchalance than he had felt at the time, to learning that the telephone chez Fane had been off the hook yesterday through inadvertence, incompetence, lordly and crappy failure on Jimmie’s part to see the handset was properly back on its rest after a chat with some Ascot-frequenting property tycoon. Without actually starting to strip as soon as the door of the flat was fairly shut behind her, she had shown no signs of wanting to have a serious talk with him about what they were getting into or indeed any kind of talk about anything. In one way or perhaps in more than one he had welcomed this, but felt at the same time that such thoroughgoing avoidance of inessentials rather lowered the tone of the occasion. A different type of man might have resented any implication that he was being what such a man would very likely have called used. If this thought had occurred to Gordon he might have felt flattered instead, toned up by the notion that at least one female considered him worth using. Very soon the rush of event and action had swept away all such thoughts and most others too. But the point had returned to his mind and stuck there, so firmly that he had tried to think of a safe way of bringing it up. But as it happened Joanna had soon moved not far from it herself.
‘One terrific advantage of an adulterous affair is that it cuts down the preliminaries, not necessarily out but down. I mean if a chap kisses the lady of the manor and she responds, well they’re away unless she’s having him on, but you don’t have to be married to have a chap on, as perhaps you’ve noticed yourself. It’s funny, though, how seldom people mention the what, the time-saving side-effect of adultery. They probably think it’s bad form in some way. You know I’ve often thought it’s a big selling-point of queerdom they never seem to go on about that it gets jolly near cutting out the preliminaries. But after all, there are limits. You wouldn’t have to hanker after a French dinner or a dozen red roses to feel a bit let down by just getting your bottom pinched.’
Gordon had got about as far as this in playing over what had earlier been done and said when Joanna came back into the room and, not at all in the slow-motion tempo he would have voted for if consulted, got into bed beside him.
‘I hope I didn’t give you the impression I was seriously dissatisfied with the appointments in this of course one would call it a flat,’ she said quite close to his ear.
‘I can see it has its shortcomings.’
‘We won’t dwell on those, though as my old headmistress might have put it I do think you might find it helpful in future to consider softening the austerities of the decor with a few pictures, reproductions thereof of course, and while we’re on that sort of point, old boy, get those suitcases of yours out of sight unless you’re letting it be known that you mean to be off first thing in the morning at the latest.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And don’t say sorry unless you really are sorry and don’t mind sounding it, and even then you’re better off not saying it.’
‘I see.’ Gordon thought it best not to say he was nearly sure she had said it to him illegitimately more than once.
‘And that’s another one I’d contemplate dr
opping from my phrase-book if I were you, darling. It’s a sort of short cut on the cheap to sounding knowing and experienced.’
‘You’re not leaving me much it is all right to say.’
‘Let’s get up and go out and have lunch somewhere.’
‘Is it a good idea, you and me being seen having lunch? Somewhere?’
‘More than a good idea – necessary. Everybody knows by now you’re on the scene and will expect us to go round together a certain amount, it would be pretty odd if we didn’t. And it isn’t as if you’ve still got your moustache.’
‘What difference would it make if it was still there?’
‘Think about it.’
‘I didn’t tell you, did I, Jimmie warned me against having what he called an association with you.’
‘What, on the grounds that you might find me a lousy screw?’
‘Er, no, on the grounds that we come, that’s you and I come from different classes.’
‘I say, did he actually put it in those words?’
‘Not much, he preferred to talk about social groups and the rich and well-born and the toiling masses and the plebs and so on.’
‘And that was the clincher, what? You need not answer that question. Wow, I knew he was a cunning old bugger, but that takes the biscuit.’
‘You mean warning me off you for being …’
‘Exactly, darling. The cunning old bugger. But I wonder why.’
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said when they were in the sitting-room about to leave. He had not said it before to anybody in these circumstances, and thought it quite witty although unlikely to be original.
Joanna ignored it, however. Her eye fell on a tumbler with water and some nascent daffodils in it. ‘Do you usually have that sort of thing hanging round the place?’ she asked him. ‘Fresh flowers?’
‘No, I don’t bother usually, but I thought today was special.’
‘Just as well I noticed. I mean I suppose they are there because of me or am I making a complete idiot of myself?’
‘No, they’re there because of you.’
‘I nearly missed them. Why didn’t you put them in the bedroom?’
‘I was going to, but then I thought that might be a bit forward.’
She seized him round the neck and held on to him tight without kissing him. After a moment she said, ‘A hug says more than a fuck any day. They’ve been trying to din that into us for years. Without getting through.’
‘Who? Who’ve been dinning it or whatever it is?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll go to Woolton’s and I’m paying and just you bloody well shut up, I want my sort of lunch. Let’s go.’
‘Will they have a table there if we just walk in?’
‘They will for me.’
With however much hidden reluctance, they did. It was Gordon’s first visit to Woolton’s, reopened the previous year, he remembered someone saying, after a long period in limbo. Its interior, reached after a complicated descent, had the look of being originally designed for some other purpose than serving meals, as a hangar for non-rigid airships, perhaps, or a film-set of vaguely science-fictional tendency. He and Joanna were shown to their table, the furthest of all from the entrance, by a succession of dauntingly beautiful, disdainfully polite girls, all of them in heavy make-up and showing as much leg as practicable. A similar girl provided an authentic pre-war touch by bearing a cigarette-tray mounted on a yellow silk sling round her bare shoulders. Gordon blessed his own foresight in having had a pee before coming out: he would not lightly have faced a journey to the gents and back in a place like this. The surrounding noise was like a hundred Jimmies all insisting on being heard.
‘Would you like to pretend to be paying or shall I just pay?’ asked Joanna when they were sitting down. ‘Think before you answer.’
He thought. ‘You just pay,’ he said.
‘Is there anybody you know here?’
‘Only you.’
‘You haven’t had anything like a proper look round yet.’
‘I don’t need one. I’m not saying that in any carping spirit. This just isn’t my kind of joint at all but that doesn’t mean I disapprove of it.’
‘It would have meant exactly that if you’d kept your moustache.’
‘At a time like this I quite wish I had. By the way I’m not trying to be funny.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘I keep being afraid they’ll all suddenly see through me and throw me out.’
‘I remember thinking the same sort of thing about this sort of eatery when I was seventeen.’
‘How did you get over it? My God, listen to me.’
‘Two large Dry Martini cocktails straight up with a twist and don’t forget the gin,’ said Joanna to a waiter behind Gordon. it’s best to be on the safe side and stress the gin,’ she explained to Gordon. ‘Otherwise they’re liable to give you plain vermouth these days.’
‘What do they think we are?’
‘It’s just that you’ve never been a part of this kind of set-up, just treated it as something to hear about and once in a blue moon look at. You’ll have to be at home in it for however long we’ve got. You can still think and say nasty things about it if you’re anything like me.’
‘Does Jimmie come here a lot?’
‘Christ no, I doubt if he’s ever put his head inside the door. Far too loud and vulgar and brassy and flashy. And full of Americans.’
‘I’ve already heard dozens of people talking in here but not one in an American accent,’ said Gordon.
‘Metaphorical Americans. Americans in the sight of God.’
‘Why Americans?’
‘I suppose ultimately because they’ve never asked his permission to exist. He says they think they know everything but all they really know is how to rope a steer.’
‘Some of us don’t even know that much.’
‘If he ever goes near a real American he’s afraid he’ll be frightfully rich and he, I mean Jimmie, he won’t know how to deal with him.’
‘So much for freedom from envy,’ said Gordon. ‘Sorry, but can we stay on Jimmie for a bit? According to you he warned me to keep my paws off you in such a way as to have the opposite effect, is that right?’
‘Well, it did strike me as a characteristic Fanean move.’
Gordon cogitated. ‘Does that mean he really wanted me to go back to Madge Walker and get her full story and believe the lot?’
‘Oh no, the way you told it it seemed to me as if he really wanted you to have nothing more to do with the lady and to not believe anything she might have told you. He was being sincere, if that’s not a too absurdly incongruous expression to apply to him. Consistency of approach is not a Fanean trait. Only devotion to self-interest is. And don’t tell me that applies to everybody.’
At that point the drinks arrived. It was instantly clear to Gordon that to thank the waiter, as opposed to saying thank-you to him in a preoccupied way, was not done at this kind of dive, so he did it extra hard and stoutly never mind how much of a prat and a scholarship boy it made him feel. That was not difficult because for all his would-be bright talk since coming here, his mind had been more than half full of something else, to do with how pleased he felt about Joanna and at how things had gone between them. He was only disappointed that there seemed no way of telling her so, any more than he had ever in the past found it possible to convey things like that in any direct way or even, for all he knew, indirectly. In any case, he was new here.
‘Do you mind if we talk a little more about Madge?’ he asked.
She said with a remnant of irritation, ‘I’ve never met her and I know next to nothing about her.’
‘But you must have heard this and that.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Do you mind telling me what you’ve heard?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m not going to let you have it verbatim, but Madge gave me a long circumstantial account of how, well, how r
uthlessly and humiliatingly Jimmie dropped her when he got the chance of marrying somebody rich.’
‘Not only rich, be it said. Old man Brown, the girl’s father, had a lot of influence and he used some of it to get Jimmie jobs and stuff of that kind. As regards ruthlessness and so on, that sounds like standard Jimmie behaviour. In this case something like that might have been justified, partly anyway. Apparently she was a bit of a clinging vine. There was a bit of a sort of collective sigh of relief when he dropped her. That’s his side of it at least.’
‘So you think Madge was exaggerating,’ said Gordon flatly.
‘Not consciously, perhaps, after all it’s a long time ago. And Jimmie must have been piling it on in what he said to you, but then he always does when he’s making that kind of point.’
‘Which leads to the conclusion that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.’
‘I thought that was where it’s usually meant to lie. Don’t look so fed up, darling, what do you care, you’re not the recording angel, you’re just trying to write a book that’ll make you and the publisher a spot of cash and in the second place advance your reputation and with a bit of luck old Jimmie’s as well, right?’
‘Well … yes, that too, but any kind of book, that’s to say any book with purported facts in it has got to get those facts right as far as possible.’
‘How far’s that in this case, only two witnesses who disagree, and something that happened fifty years ago? You’ve already gone as far as can be expected.’
‘Maybe. But there might be other surviving witnesses. I don’t know there aren’t.’
‘Darling, assuming you have a bit of luck and find out what really happened and it turns out to be even slightly damaging to Jimmie, can you see him letting you print it?’
‘Very likely not. But I’ll know.’ He drained his glass.
‘Oh, Christ, we’ve got Mr Valiant-for-sodding-Truth to deal with, have we? I see you’re not a Scot for nothing.’
‘Scotsmen are notorious for being on the make, don’t forget. Newspaper editors are prepared to pay quite a lot for a scandalous story about an upper-crust figure like Jimmie Fane.’
The Biographer’s Moustache Page 12