The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ he asked.

  ‘Another couple of degrees and I’ll be in a muck sweat. How do you do it?’

  ‘I don’t do anything, it’s just always like it in this weather and never mind and why don’t you take your scarf off and you were going to answer my question about what Jimmie might be up to.’

  ‘Don’t you take that pissily complacent tone with me, my lad. You’re part of the same deal whether you like it or not.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

  ‘Calm down, darling. You remember I told you about this week-end?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, you’re coming on it too.’

  ‘Oh, what nonsense, how can I be? Whatever Jimmie’s got in mind he won’t want me hanging round the place and getting in the way.’

  ‘Sorry, darling, I should have explained.’

  ‘I wish somebody would.’

  Joanna’s explanation, elicited piecemeal, made it clear that the week-end in question was not the sort one went off on like a coach trip but something one went to, like a theatrical performance or a fancy-dress dance only lasting that much longer. This particular week-end would take place at a house called Hungerstream situated somewhere in the south midlands, the country seat of the Duke of Dunwich.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of him,’ said Gordon.

  ‘You wouldn’t. I mean just he’s quite rich but not very well known for a duke.’

  But well enough known to Jimmie Fane, who had been trying to wangle an invitation to Hungerstream for simply ages, as Joanna put it. Now that the coveted summons had at last been extracted, it proved to include Gordon.

  ‘Something fishy about that part, if you ask me.’

  ‘I agree it does sound like Jimmie at his fishiest, but it also sounds like the duke at his most ducal. He is the most colossal wand-waver – you won’t have come across people like that, darling. Jimmie said you happened to be mentioned in conversation at Gray’s and His Grace said just let’s have him along too. I can hear him saying it. Anyway, don’t you want to come? Whatever happens’ll be biographer’s bully-beef.’

  ‘You bet I want to come, but I don’t want to turn up and find I’m not actually expected, as part of some merry jape of Jimmie’s.’

  ‘Again I agree that would be just like him as a rule, but absolutely not with a duke in the offing. He’ll be as good as gold in that way while he’s there. Incidentally if you’re expecting an engraved invitation card addressed in secretary hand to Gordon Fcott-Thompfon Efquire, forget it. His wish is your command, if you follow my meaning.’

  ‘M’m. Is there any more?’

  ‘Only a little bit. Nothing really. How’s my old friend Louise whatever-she’s-called, that pretty girl chum of yours?’

  ‘Fine as far as I know. I haven’t had anything to do with her since you and I got properly started.’ Gordon spoke quite artlessly.

  ‘Did you have a terrific row, the two of you?’

  ‘Nothing like that. Looking back I don’t think we were ever all that close. No, one of us just didn’t ring the other one up, I’ve forgotten which way round it was, and we sort of took it from there. Why?’

  ‘I see. You know darling, when you and I got properly started, as you call it, I said to myself you were the best thing that had happened to me for ages. There is just one more tiny bit about the week-end. The done thing is, if possible to save it being awkward with the numbers and everything, you’ll be bringing your wife with you or of course some other female. Why don’t you ask Louise if she’d like to come? Just give her a ring and say you’re going to Hungerstream for the week-end and would she like to come.’

  ‘She’s dead against all that aristocracy and grand houses stuff.’

  ‘Want to bet? Just ask her. Right now, if you know where to get hold of her.’

  ‘But I just told you I’d finished with her,’ Gordon protested, without much force because he was still a little elated at being thought even as much as a passably good thing in Joanna’s life.

  ‘What was actually said?’

  ‘I don’t think anything was said, in so many words. It was all –’

  ‘Tell her – bugger it, it won’t matter what you tell her within reason if she decides she likes the idea.’

  He succeeded in penetrating quite soon the layers of local-governmental bullshit that surrounded Louise in her borough counselling unit. Their conversation was decisive and not prolonged. Joanna looked over from the book she had picked up from the pile on the floor, like its fellows a volume of lacklustre memoirs in which there nevertheless figured a younger Jimmie Fane.

  ‘So she’s coming.’

  ‘Hell-bent on it.’ Gordon sounded puzzled. ‘You know, I can’t quite see what’s in it for her.’

  ‘Can’t you? All sorts of people would give their ears to see Hungerstream from inside with its duke in it. She can drink it all in and have a bloody good time and then give the whole thing a right ballocking, perhaps even get her name in the papers in the end plus a spot of cash.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you like her much.’

  ‘What are you talking about, I’ve hardly met the girl,’ said Joanna.

  ‘Anyway, what’s in it for you if she does come? That’s another thing I don’t quite see.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my idea in the first place, if you remember, and it could be rather fun to see Willie in action. Willie’s the duke, by the way.’

  ‘In action? Surely you don’t mean –’

  ‘Shaping up to wave more than his magic wand. He’s quite a serious man, young Willie Dun wich.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand. What’s the duchess going to say?’

  ‘Not very much. She overdosed herself last year, perhaps you saw.’

  ‘I don’t know that I want anything to do with this,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Please come, darling.’

  She looked at him with a forlorn smile and carefully replaced the book she had been looking at. As so often before in conversations with Joanna, he felt he had to take up an earlier matter.

  ‘You haven’t talked about Jimmie being up to something.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘That? You weren’t taking it so calmly when you arrived, were you, not by any manner of means.’

  ‘Oh, well I didn’t know then that you’d be coming to Hungerstream.’

  ‘I don’t see what that can have to do with Jimmie perhaps being up to something.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it won’t be as bad with you there.’

  ‘What, you mean having his biographer’s eye on him will sort of tone him down? Possibly, but I must say this whole –’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’ Joanna nodded her head emphatically.

  ‘M’m. There’s another point I’m not clear about. Rather a delicate one.’

  ‘Come on, I think I can probably stand it.’

  ‘Well, presumably as my wife or other female, Louise’d be sleeping in the same room as me.’

  ‘I was going to tell you, we went to lunch there once and the guest bedrooms have dressing-rooms opening off them with beds in so you could barricade yourself in there if you felt like it. Or of course Louise could.’

  ‘Or not, as the case may be.’

  ‘What? How do you mean, darling?’

  ‘Where do you want me to start? She and I used to be quite good together, well, on and off. She was very come-hitherish to me just now over the –’

  At this stage, rather late in the day, Joanna did burst into tears. He sat on, stayed where he was, kept quite still, as if tears had a well-known way of clearing up on their own if left completely to themselves. The noises she was making and what he could see of her face were too unattractive, he considered, for there to be much that was voluntary, let alone deliberate, about her behaviour. It was not all that much less voluntary for him, after half a minute or so, to go over to where she was and, kneeling inelegantly on the floor beside her chair
, embrace her, wet face and moist bits of hair and all. She cried harder and clung to him, but he had been ready for that. He said nothing.

  Eventually she spoke. ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ she asked, wiping her cheeks on the rugger club scarf.

  ‘I’ll fetch you one,’ he said, and did.

  ‘I screwed it up,’ she went on in due time, ‘I got carried away when you said you’d finished with her. I wasn’t going to say anything to you about her being invited as well, I was just going to go back and say you didn’t know where she was or something, but then like a fool I went and blurted out the whole story. I thought it would be all right. For a moment then I thought, I thought you felt the same about me as I felt about you. It was like being back at school.’ Here she blew her nose.

  Joanna’s tears and words had severely shaken Gordon. He had never been the sort of man that women cried over, except possibly to express their boredom and exasperation with him. To hear one of them seeming to confess to strong emotions in his favour was an unfamiliar experience, but he now asked Joanna to explain herself a little, not in the hope of further gratifying his ego but because he thought she might want to, and in any case could not at the moment think of anything else to say. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose I must have, well, if you don’t mind me calling it fallen for you as soon as I set eyes on you, anyway I noticed you and I don’t usually notice men your age.’

  ‘It must have been my moustache you noticed.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘That moustache I used to have.’

  ‘I must have managed to see through it. I don’t mean that, I don’t mean it like that, I wasn’t trying to be funny when I said that. I suppose there’s nothing much wrong with trying to be funny but it’s a way of not taking something serious seriously and just ducking out. I’m sorry darling, I realize this whole thing was just meant to be a load of super fun and here goes silly old Jo-bags spoiling it all by taking it seriously.’

  She said nothing more for a moment, her glance lowered, dabbing inexpertly at her nose with the doubled-up handkerchief, looking swollen round the eyes and the top half of her face in general and yet at the same time pitifully worn, a preview of her in five or ten years’ time. Then she gave a long sigh, as if resigning something or the hope of something. A kneecap of Gordon’s was hurting but not so badly that he had to move.

  ‘I’ll get hold of Louise again later on and tell her there was a mix-up about the week-end and she won’t be able to come after all.’

  ‘That wouldn’t do any good.’

  ‘Me turning up in person will turn the scale, you mark my words. Shall I have to put on a black tie at Screamborough or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘Hungerstream. Only if all your tartan ones and ultramarine ones are worn out. I’ll give you a complete run-down on all that crap.’

  ‘Right, come on, love.’

  ‘Where are we off to?’

  ‘Well, I rather thought bed.’

  ‘Ooh, super, but isn’t it a little early in the day for that?’

  ‘No.’

  Until the two of them were actually in the bed and for a few seconds afterwards, Gordon had imagined he had made his suggestion out of the feeling, not so much that a woman who had as good as told a fellow she loved him deserved to be taken to some such place at once, as that in the circumstances Joanna and he had to embrace more fully and intimately than was attainable anywhere else. Even so he very soon discovered that he had a strong personal interest in what more usually takes a couple to bed together.

  Then for a short time her face appeared to have lost all marks of age, to be completely untouched, unused, free of the worn look he had noticed on it earlier. But it was not long before those marks came stealing back, so that he noticed more clearly than ever before the lines across her forehead and the faint pinkish stains there, the creases at the outer corners of her eyes and even the incipient loosening and falling away of the flesh of her cheeks where they met her chin. He kissed her gently.

  ‘You meant that, didn’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Are you sleepy?’

  ‘I am rather. I didn’t get much –’

  ‘Have a little nap now, just for a few minutes. I won’t go away.’

  She made a noise like someone sampling a more than usually delicious chocolate and turned on her side.

  19

  Gordon thought it would be better not to ring Louise at work a second time, a policy decision he regretted when she proved unreachable for the rest of the day and at any rate the earlier part of the night. She was reachable the following morning, however, though not at all friendly to the notion of meeting him to discuss arrangements for the Hungerstream week-end, as he perhaps not very brilliantly expressed himself.

  Tell me now,’ she kept saying over the telephone, ‘and I’ll meet you anywhere you say.’

  ‘I’d rather pick you up when you come out of the town hall.’

  ‘I don’t see why you can’t tell me now.’

  As eventually agreed, he reached the designated town hall shortly before six o’clock the following evening. Not for the first time in his experience, the tattered Edwardian grandeur of the building combined with the shifting presence of so many purposeful black people seemed to suggest contemporary life in a former African colony. It was very likely just his imagination, but he felt that those few who noticed him at all regarded him with some patronizing amusement as a quaint survival, an archaically clad white man just carrying on as if nothing had happened. He had hardly been there a minute before two young girls with plastic cards on their lapels and very shiny hair came up to him. They asked him if he knew where he was and then at once told him.

  ‘I’m waiting for somebody,’ he assured them civilly.

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Oh yes. By the way this isn’t a business call.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it social. Or personal, yes, that’s more like it – personal.’

  ‘Could you be more specific?’

  By this stage Gordon would in different conditions have made some protest, sufficient at any rate to get himself either left to his own devices or perhaps made the object of a form of citizen’s arrest. He would have had some idea of how to handle the situation had those who had accosted him been white and male. As it was, he turned through a right angle away from the main door, seemed to look to and fro among the swarming throng, waved at vacancy, shouted unintelligibly and took off, dodging once or twice as he ran like a wing three-quarter making for the line. After tripping slightly over an upward step he took shelter in the far side of a great shiny marble pillar with brown veins in it. While he was checking that there was no pursuit he heard a familiar voice speak behind him.

  ‘Gordon. It is you, is it?’

  ‘Louise, hi.’

  They kissed minimally, as though against time.

  ‘What were you doing peering round that pillar?’

  He explained a little, ‘I don’t know what they thought I was doing here.’

  ‘They probably thought you might have been off your rocker.’

  ‘It was a bit like that. Why, do I look as if I’m off my rocker?’

  ‘Well, trying to be completely objective, perhaps there is a touch of that, yes.’

  ‘I can only assume that for reasons best known to yourself you’re trying to be funny.’

  ‘I’m not, honestly, I’m doing my best to help. It’s only slight, as I said. Your eyes and all round them, that’s okay. It’s your mouth really, that and your top lip.’

  ‘M’m. Somebody who was supposed to be a daughter of Jimmie’s, anyway, never mind. I had my moustache then, so it can’t be anything to do with that.’

  ‘What’s happening to this country?’

  The questioner was not Louise but a stout well-dressed woman in middle age who had come up to them as they stood momentarily halted in the street. She spoke with a n
oticeable German or eastern European accent.

  Gordon, who had been taught at an early age that it was rude to ignore people, went on standing there and said something about not having any idea. Louise glanced at him in apparent uncertainty, the sort of uncertainty a hypothetical madman might well have encountered.

  ‘They think if they say enough times the place is going to the dogs it will never go there. America they should consider. America has gone already. And what are you doing to stop the same thing from happening here?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, I’m sorry.’ Gordon started to follow Louise, who was walking on.

  ‘Look out for yourself, young man!’ The woman moved her head jerkily so that her blackrimmed spectacles caught the light. ‘Be very careful or she, she there will cut your penis off!’

  Like everybody else within a dozen yards or so, Louise had heard the last few words. When Gordon caught her up she dilated her eyes theatrically and said, or cackled, ‘Don’t be afraid, young man, it’s safe with me. For the moment!’

  ‘There’s somebody who’s well and truly mad, poor old thing,’ said Gordon, and looked cautiously over his shoulder.

  ‘Well, they do say it takes one to know one.’

  ‘Look, give it a rest, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Sorry, I forgot you don’t like being teased. You haven’t got any mad people in your family, have you?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘I bet there’s not one as far back as bloody Macbeth. That’s your trouble, you know, Scotty. A touch of homicidal mania somewhere in your ancestry is just what a solid sod like you could do with. That cannibal chap who lived in a cave on the sea-shore about eight hundred years ago, for instance. Liven you up no end, my lad.’

  For the next few minutes conversation languished, not through any failure of invention but because the two of them were perforce concentrating on crossing the road, reaching the point of descent to the Underground station, descending once there without being trampled to death by fellow passengers and eventually making their way aboard a train. Here any intercourse was limited by their having to sit separately, on opposite sides of the gangway and, after this was corrected, by a sufficiently powerful counter-attraction. This took the form of a youngish man, certainly some years junior to the lady with the spectacles, entering their coach at one end and departing at the other with his head leaning back and an ordinary pencil balanced under his nose. Before his progress had quite faded from the mind he reappeared and passed in the other direction. What perturbed Gordon was less this performance in itself than the lukewarm interest in it shown by those who gave it any attention at all. He promised himself he would keep a vigilant look-out for further cases of epidemic lunacy, but abandoned this project when a pony-tailed josser vacated the seat next to his and Louise slipped into it.