The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Would you call Mrs Fane attractive?’ she asked.

  He had just shoved a spoonful of apple pie into his mouth, so was off the hook for a couple of seconds. In this interval he decided that a show of uncertainty was the thing to be avoided here, and accordingly said with ready emphasis, in fact she’s almost exactly twenty-five years younger than old Jimmie, but that still puts her somewhere in her middle fifties, so in a way I can’t really tell. Even so, I can see she’s taken good care of herself over the years.’

  ‘I’ll bet she has. There’s nothing like never having had to lift a finger to boil an egg for keeping the signs of age at bay. And massages and facials and moisturizing creams galore, I’ll be bound. A woman of that class, no wonder she’s well preserved.’

  Gordon heard this contribution of his father’s with mixed feelings. It was good to be offered a way out of having to say just how attractive he found the wife of the subject of his biography. On the other hand he had been led up this side-track too often in the past to be able to look forward to anything in the least unexpected along its course. So he put on a considering face.

  Having muttered, rather mechanically, ‘Now then, Dad,’ Mrs Scott-Thompson said to her son, ‘I saw somewhere that Mrs Fane was one of the great English beauties of the 1960s period.’

  ‘Oh yes, everybody seems to agree she used to be absolutely gorgeous and she’s still got a marvellous pair of …’

  ‘Sorry, dear?’

  One moment, Gordon thought to himself, he had been nowhere near where he was now, and the next here he was. He said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Blue eyes.’

  Across the table from him, Gillian let out a great snort which merged into a brief coughing-fit over some biscuit-crumbs.

  ‘It’s not at all surprising,’ Scott-Thompson senior pursued, ‘that such a person should possess lasting good looks. Things like that go to the highest bidder as a matter of course. You may say that’s just a piece of flippancy or easy cynicism, but I don’t think you would if you’d seen as much of the other end of the scale as I have. I remember when I was about your age going up to Dundee to visit my Uncle David and Auntie Grace, you must have met them, they’re both long dead now, and where they lived there was no chance at all, no prospect of encountering a woman over forty, over thirty-five, who retained any handsomeness she might once have possessed. Up there, women of that age looked like old women, dragged down by years of childbearing and housework and getting all the family washing done in the copper on a cold dark Monday morning and then putting it through the mangle with just the wee daughter giving a hand till she had to be got off to school. And then ironing on the Tuesday depending on the weather. Ah, you don’t keep your pretty looks for long when you’ve got that to cope with week in week out and nothing to look forward to bar more of the same as far ahead as you can see.’

  Gordon had no doubt of the genuineness of his father’s emotion in recalling or assembling this picture. What he felt he could not drive away, was a slight doubt of the genuineness, or at least the universality, of the picture. In his experience human beings were good at avoiding unpleasant things if they could and making the best of them if not. it’s just as well that Mum’s generation was spared all that,’ he said after a pause. His mum, though pleasant enough to look upon, had not had much in the way of handsomeness to lose, but he avoided glancing at her. A trifle annoyingly, his father now said, ‘Of course, I admit I was laying it on rather thick just now about how life used to be for the underprivileged. If things were ever as bad as that they’ve got much better since those days, there’s no use pretending they haven’t.’

  Mrs Scott-Thompson’s expression showed some relief. It had looked to her as though her husband was fully set on the other of his two unwelcome courses, the pursuit not of what she meant by theory but of class. Now it seemed as if he had voluntarily drawn back from contemplation of a world of primeval misery and impoverishment, a world she did not recognize as anything real in her own life, or that of any forebear of hers, but which presumably meant something important to him. That was the sort of way she might have put matters to herself when on her best behaviour, like this evening. At other times she might have described what he had been saying as schoolmaster talk, a phrase she might have found hard to clarify but one instantly acceptable to her contemporaries, including some who had never had even a figurative schoolmaster in the family.

  Her husband perhaps felt he had drawn back too far from his original portrayal of proletarian life in the past. At any rate, he made some meditative noises while he took off his glasses and cleaned and polished them. Then he said, ‘Mind you, the position at what we’ll call the better-off end of the scale hasn’t changed. The poor aren’t as poor as they used to be but the rich aren’t any less rich. Far from it. They may have changed a little in their composition and they’ve certainly developed some new forms of extravagance, like the people they think of as the lower orders, who seem to get rid of most of their spare cash on foreign holidays, preferably in places like Florida where King Mammon rules, and secondarily on magazines and videos and the like that celebrate the doings of … of the people I very much hope they don’t regard as their betters in any literal sense.’

  With his closing words Mr Scott-Thompson betrayed a mild complacency, no doubt at having said what he had said, and particularly at having brought its long final sentence to a successful conclusion. The quick glance he sent his wife and son, though, showed something different. At such times it was hard to shake off a feeling that he knew how he seemed or sounded to the rest of the human race, if not precisely then much more so than appeared at other times. Gordon could not think of any useful reply to make to this last lot, so he made none. Over a cup of instant coffee, his father went on soon enough.

  ‘I know you too well, old chap, to imagine you took on the Fane job of work with the least intention of ingratiating yourself with Fane himself and his circle and the others you might run into, what we used to call social climbing. No, of course you had no such thought in your head when you started. But now you’re some way into the business – I’m sure you won’t take it amiss if I just remind you of the dangers of letting your good nature run away with you so far that your judgement is distorted. I’ve learnt how responsive you are to kind and sympathetic treatment such as you tell me you’ve been getting from Fane and his wife and so on, but don’t get confused, don’t mistake charm for decency. Fane and all he stands for belongs to a different world from yours and you know what I think of that different world, however pleasant some of its individual inhabitants may be. Don’t let yourself be circumscribed by what I say, well you wouldn’t, I’m well aware of that, just cast a cold look on what you’re writing about is all I ask.’

  Gordon looked over at his mother and sister, happily engaged it seemed in discussing some female topic like holidays or money. He said, ‘it sounds to me as though you’re telling me I’d better give old Jimmie Fane’s stuff some pretty hard treatment.’

  ‘That too,’ said his father.

  18

  The next morning Gordon awoke with an entire dream in his head, entire in the sense that it was complete in itself but also that he knew the answers to all questions that could possibly be asked about it. But in the very moment, in the very act of starting to contemplate it, something in his mind started to take it away from him, something that kept pace with his accelerating efforts to remember, until all of it was gone for ever. There must have been a woman in it somewhere, he thought, but could not think who, and within a moment even the participation in it of any such character had become doubtful. Enough.

  He reasoned that nothing much was to be expected of a day that began with getting up, but got up nevertheless. While waiting for the midget gas-stove to heat his egg-water he was startled, as he always was, by the imperious twitter of his telephone.

  ‘Gordon Scott-Thompson.’

  ‘Hallo darling,’ said Joanna’s voice, it’s me. Are you alone?’

 
‘Hallo darling. Of course I’m alone.’

  ‘Listen darling, Jimmie’s remembered he’s got a meeting of his Rupert Brooke committee thing so I could come and see you after all, that’s if you still want me to.’

  ‘Of course I still want you to.’

  ‘You don’t sound particularly keen. Do say if something else has come up.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Hang on a minute, something’s boiling over.’ Nothing actually was, though it was true that the egg-saucepan might have done if left to itself much longer. After pottering about for a moment or two, he went back to the telephone and said loudly into it, ‘What time shall I expect you?’

  That did the trick. Over his breakfast egg and two slices of toast, eaten in the sitting-room so as not to be in the kitchen, Gordon reflected on the brief telephone conversation. On the face of it Joanna had really wondered whether he might really not have wanted her to come to his flat that morning to make love and had anticipated or sort of finessed this by suggesting as much before he could. He saw that this spoke either of a distressing condition of insecurity or of a desire to bugger him about or a mixture of both. And her reasons were to do with her being either upper-class or a woman or a mixture of both. Enough! No more thought, he thought, not for a bit.

  But then soon afterwards he was back in his bedroom wondering about the sheets. This would be the third time Joanna lay in this bed, the first time between sheets both clean and fresh, the second between sheets fully clean enough to satisfy a normal person but not strictly fresh. Thanks to an unprecedented effort on his part he was now in a position to convert from state 2 to state 1. Taking everything into account, should he? Oddly enough it was his difficulty with this question, not with the one just now about her state of mind when telephoning, that finally convinced him of what he had been suspecting for the last twelve hours and longer: he knew less about her than about the Hon. Mrs JRP Fane, knew her no better than any other female he might have happened to talk to for a few minutes, bar a hazy impression of what parts of her looked like with no clothes on, not that they had struck him as differing in any important way from the corresponding parts of other females. He must look at Joanna more closely.

  Making up his mind not to bother to change the sheets after all used up so much of his energy that he flinched at the first job he had set himself for that morning, tidying up his biography stuff. At present this stuff consisted chiefly of hundreds of pieces of paper, some little more informative than bookmarks, some faxes or sheaves of typescript, some barely intelligible reminders and notes to himself, some in notebooks, some loose. They were parked on most horizontal surfaces in the room, including areas of the floor, and fully occupied his work-table and its immediate neighbourhood. He removed from the keyboard of his typewriter a xerox of a contemporary review of The Escaped Prisoner and found a new home for it on an unregarded section of windowsill. The way was now clear, if that was truly the word, for him to go on roughing out his remarks on this novel, but instead of doing that he went and took from the row on the mantelpiece the St James’s Library copy of The Battle Cruiser, fifth novel of the Fane six. This one had been more successful, in terms of sales, than those that had come before and after it, though according to people like Brian Harris that was only because some first buyers had been misled by the title into taking it for a tale of adventure or even a work of naval history. Gordon had picked it out because he had read the text through only once and had studied little except the opening and closing pages. To reread The Battle Cruiser at this stage would be his nearest available approach to coming with a fresh eye to the works of JRP Fane.

  Having removed from its seat half a dozen recorder tapes, Gordon settled down in his best and almost only chair to get as far into his task as he reasonably could by the time Joanna was due. He had made himself some fresh coffee and turned to a fresh page in his loose-leaf notebook.

  The hero of the novel, presumably in some sense the battle-cruiser of its title, was the head of some agricultural and possibly agrarian concern in the north of England. His status and activities in this regard were less fully realized than his position as head of a family still centred in that area, not that anything very substantial was made out of that either. No matter: Gordon had come across fictions that survived a similar thinness at the centre. What made The Battle Cruiser hard to read was far more an ineptitude at the edges, understanding by these such outer manifestations of sensibility as dialogue and passages of narrative and description, down to phrases and individual words. The principle of selection here seemed partly one of perversity, preference for the unexpected when the obvious would have served perfectly well or even, perhaps, stronger in the context. How could the overall effect be described? As artificial, as influenced by a desire to be striking at the risk of being obscure, here and there as plain silly. Now he came to think of it, he had noticed this tendency at work in The Escaped Prisoner, but there it had seemed to matter much less. Was it possible to say anything sensible about why this might be? One could point out, at least, that Prisoner was a first novel and argue that as such it was likely to be better, because its author would have had a far greater freedom to choose his material than was possible for him in later works, where he had to depend on what he had not dealt with earlier. Or so he might feel, as Gordon remembered his father going on to say.

  One advantage of having an excellent memory was that it put little strain on the powers of recall. Another – less comfortable, thought Gordon – lay in its power to remind persons who dealt in ideas that comparatively few of their ideas were original. But in the present case he wished he could have forgotten that it had been his father who had put forward this one in his hearing. The reason why he wished this was obscure to him, but it had something to do with wondering whether to allude to this fact in what he finally wrote, and if so how. He tried to puzzle this out for a bit, but then found himself overtaken by pondering the significance, if any, of Jimmie’s often-advertised concern with the spoken language. Was that insistence of his on saying curriculum vie-tee related to the occurrence of the word adscititious twice in five pages of The Battle Cruiser? Why, incidentally, was there no hyphen between the two main words there? A discussion of this point, including comments by Jimmie, would at any rate help to bulk out what was coming to appear a thinnish book on the author and his works.

  Gordon had still not reached any conclusion on this when his bell rang to announce Joanna’s arrival at the flat. His feeling of pleased anticipation, raised at the sound and its significance, dropped back and further when he observed that she was blinking her eyes more often than usual and showing other signs that something was wrong. While he helped her off with her coat he was considering which of three or so possibilities was the most likely. In no particular order they were: something was wrong and she was jolly well letting it show, nothing much was wrong but she was pretending something was, and something was wrong and with the best will in the world she was simply unable to hide the fact, or a combination of any two of the three or all three. He also thought more dimly that some men, presumably including himself, were liable to get this sort of trouble with any and every sort of woman, while others, unlike himself, never got it with a solitary one. He tried to pack neutrality into his tone when he asked, is something wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He might have been more surprised, he fancied, if a miracle out of science fiction had altered her bodily form, but only thus. He said aloud, ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure, I can’t think, I simply …’

  ‘O soul, be changed into little water-drops and fall into the ocean, ne’er be found,’ he said, again silently, and articulated, ‘Come and sit down and tell me about it.’

  Fortunately, and from a detached view mysteriously, there was a polished wooden bench of classic genre in the small space outside his flat. The two of them sat on it side by side and he put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Now what’s the trouble, what’s the matte
r?’

  Here she astonished him just a little by not at once bursting into tears by way of reply, and rather more by feeling for his hand and squeezing it. After a moment she said in a normal voice, ‘it’s this week-end he wants us to go on.’

  ‘By us you –’

  ‘I mean him and me. The week-end at the end of this week.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound terribly –’

  ‘He’s up to something. I always know with Jimmie.’

  ‘What sort of thing would he be up to?’

  ‘I say, do you mind if we go through? It’s a bit on the bleak side out here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, remembering too late that it was a forbidden word. Joanna had not noticed, as perhaps was to be expected in the circumstances, but even so it was then that he decided that something was indeed wrong, whether or not she could define it.

  ‘Christ,’ she said when she saw his untidied biography stuff, ‘Is this all to do with Jimmie?’

  ‘In one way or another.’

  ‘I had no idea there was such a lot to be said about him.’

  ‘I’ll clear a place for us to sit down.’

  ‘Do you want a hand?’

  ‘it’ll be quicker if I do it.’

  By the time they were settled on either side of the inoperative fireplace, Joanna’s demeanour was more relaxed and normal than on her arrival. Among other things she was wearing a padded jacket and a thick scarf in the colours of what could have been a rugby club.