One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘What? There must be someone else in the house, mustn’t there?’

  She shook her head, not in negation, and turned away. With a hand on her upper arm he pulled her round again to face him.

  ‘Don’t you try that with me, young woman. You listen to what I have to say. What kind of a game do you think you’re playing with me? Why do you think I came down all this way today, total of four hours in the train and the rest of it? To have lunch with you and then sit and hold your bloody hand? Clearly not. I came here to go to bed with you, only it appears that owing to an unfortunate oversight on your part I am to be debarred from doing so. Not that that impinges on your well-being to the remotest degree. Quite the contrary, in fact. I know what you’re about and I know you. You look lecherous but actually you’re not in the least – you haven’t a particle of ordinary sinful human sensuality in your whole body. But allow me to inform you that there are far worse sins than lechery. Pride is what possesses you and eats you away, pride and the love of power.’

  He looked at her and saw that, although her eyes were still blank, her mouth was half open and she was breathing quickly. ‘You’re cold,’ he shouted; then, after a pause, added in a broken voice: ‘I love you, Helene.’ Saying it at this point would, he was prepared to bet, be richly rewarded in the near future, and at worst could do no harm. It was true, too.

  She put her arms round him and pulled his head on to her bosom for a moment. Then she started violently and stepped away from him. Following her eyes he saw a being resembling a four-foot-high Zulu in T-shirt and jeans apparently watching them through the window. ‘Christ,’ Roger said.

  ‘It’s Jimmy Fraschini,’ she said, smiling and waving. The figure waved back, turned and ran off at great speed. ‘Got his mask on already. The rest of them’ll be by soon.’ She took Roger by the forearms and stood close to him, something she rarely went out of her way to do. After a moment she said slowly: ‘You know, Roger, if only you could just be a little . . .’

  ‘Less troublesome? Less persistent? Slimmer? Younger?’

  ‘No, just not so . . . angry. It scares me half to death, honestly. And you were quite wrong about today. I just didn’t think . . .’

  Judging her excuses beneath his attention, Roger thought first of how characteristic it was that this afternoon’s defeat had been brought about by an alliance of Arthur and the USA, then debated policy. One point must be made immediately. But as he opened his mouth to make it Helene finished speaking and without any pause turned a switch on one of the smaller devices of the kitchen. A loud moaning whine arose, unsuitable as accompaniment to talk of any dignity. It went on for some time. Before it died away, car noises and the pattering of sub-standard-sized feet, punctuated by the slam of the front-door screen, let Roger know that something wicked was coming his way. Fury made him feel temporarily several stone lighter when he looked at his watch: 4.0 exactly. He took up an offensive position near the refrigerator.

  Six

  A little boy, or something closely resembling one, ran into the room. He wore a zip-up jacket with a big loose collar and other garments suitable to a youth twice his age, if to any human creature. His close crew-cut gave him a look of juvenile frivolity that did not match the rather florid, patrician dignity of his face. In an accent more American than Roger would have believed possible Arthur – for it was he – said to him: ‘Did the prairie dog come?’

  ‘Not yet, honey; maybe tomorrow,’ Helene said, taking the question as meant for her. ‘Now say hallo to Mr Micheldene – you remember him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Arthur said ruminatively, ‘I remember him.’

  ‘Hallo, Arthur, how are you? You’re quite a bit bigger than when I—’

  ‘Is Daddy around?’

  ‘He went over to college but he’ll be home soon.’

  ‘Has he been here long?’

  ‘Mr Micheldene just dropped by because he had to pay a call on a famous writer who lives near town.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Can I have a milk shake?’

  ‘Sure, and I’ve done you a turkey sandwich. Will that hold you for now?’

  ‘Guess so. Is he staying here?’

  ‘Don’t say he like that, honey. Mr Micheldene’s staying in New York. He just came in to visit. Now why don’t you go dress up and put your mask on and get all ready, huh?’

  Looking at his mother and away from Roger for the first time, Arthur asked: ‘Is there a hurry?’

  ‘Why, no, dear, but you want to be all set when your friends start coming by, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll finish my sandwich first.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Arthur sat down at the kitchen table and ate his sandwich with peculiar ferocity, his mouth lunging at it with swift recurrent bites, then chewing with a rotary movement. He was not closely scrutinizing Roger now, just watching him. Helene, her back to them, was busy making some spread or whip or paste stuff. Roger decided he should say something to Arthur, but not what he felt like saying. Once, when Arthur fired his cap-pistol a foot behind his head, and another time, when a half-eaten toffee turned up in the lamb’s-wool lining of a glove of his, Roger had said things to and about Arthur that might have struck Helene as evidence of impatience or even dislike. Here was a good chance to remove that impression, if it existed. After some thought, Roger said:

  ‘Did you have a nice time at school today, Arthur?’

  Arthur spent some time considering this, less to prepare an answer, it struck Roger, than to analyse in his learned father’s manner the phonetic or syntactical structure of the question. Finally he said: ‘Yeah, okay.’

  ‘What lessons did you have?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Did you have arithmetic?’

  ‘No.’

  Most of Arthur’s day was still unaccounted for when, his sandwich finally dispatched, he leant forward and said: ‘Would you play me at scrabble?’

  Before Roger could draw in his breath Helene broke in: ‘Would you, Roger? I have to wash my hair and get ready and I shan’t have a chance later.’

  And so it came about that Roger found himself sitting opposite Arthur in the main room. Between them stood a cobbler’s bench, an object with many useless drawers and compartments and a circular leather panel where some long-dead last-wielder had reposed his buttocks. Here the scrabble-board was set and play began.

  ‘I should have thought you’d have been too excited to play this now, Arthur,’ Roger said with a smile.

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘Well, all these letters to sort out into words and get scores, it’s rather tricky, isn’t it? Needs thought and so on.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But why should I be excited?’

  ‘Well, aren’t you and all your friends going to dress up and put on masks and . . . have a party?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I’m not excited,’ Arthur said.

  AEEEOUU was Roger’s first draw from the bag. After ten minutes it had changed to AGHIIOU and Arthur, ploughing steadily on with BLUE and HOME and SEND, was well ahead. Roger began wanting very much to go away from where he was, but that point of his was still unmade and he also wanted, if possible, to get in a crafty telephone call before leaving. He put down AI on the D of SEND, scoring four points. ‘That makes you twenty-nine and me sixty-four,’ Arthur said with no emotion. Roger drew another H and another A.

  A further set of car noises brought the prospect of relief, but the new arrival did not appear for a minute or two. Then a sudden feral howl from the doorway drew his attention. A creature with flattened humanoid features and bulging red orbs where the eyes should be advanced on him with a sleepwalker’s gait. ‘Blind man-eating monster from Mars,’ it said in familiar thick tones.

  When Arthur, laughing with horrid abandon, had run up and been embraced, Ernst removed the silk stocking from his head and offered for inspection the crab-apples he
had used for eyes. He greeted Roger with enthusiasm and asked him casually what had brought him over their way. Roger told his prepared lie about lunching with a leading novelist in the neighbourhood. Ernst barely listened. He had no curiosity about others’ lives, a handy characteristic when Roger turned up in Copenhagen for a week or so at a time and explained that he was on his way to West Berlin or Athens. Helene reappeared with towel and hair-brush. Defending himself against the possible charge of having picked up a bad American habit, Ernst suggested a drink. The humiliation of being routed at scrabble by a seven-year-old seemed destined to pass Roger by.

  ‘Oh, anything will do,’ he said in answer to Ernst’s question. ‘You know I don’t care what I drink. A little whisky, perhaps, if you have it. Water but no ice.’ He started abstractedly getting to his feet.

  ‘Hey, we’re playing scrabble, remember?’ Arthur said.

  ‘Oh, I resign,’ Roger said good-humouredly. ‘You’ve won.’

  ‘You can’t resign. You have to play right through. Doesn’t he, Daddy, Mommy?’

  Both Ernst and Helen looked as if they supported their son.

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  ‘You must be strengthened in your ordeal, Roger,’ Ernst said, and went off to the kitchen. Helene stayed where she was and brushed her hair.

  Looking incuriously at the board, Roger saw that Arthur had put down NITER. ‘Niter? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know, like a one-nighter.’

  ‘No such word.’

  ‘Challenge me?’

  ‘Most certainly I challenge you.’

  ‘All right.’ Arthur opened what was evidently a dictionary and soon said: ‘Here we are. Niter. Potassium nitrate. A supposed nitrous element—’

  ‘Rubbish, that’s n, i, t, r, e.’

  ‘Mm-mm.’ Arthur shook his gleaming head. ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘I . . . But this is a bloody American dictionary.’

  ‘This is bloody America.’

  ‘None of that, please, Arthur,’ Helene said. She had stopped brushing her hair.

  ‘Unsuccessful challenge,’ Arthur murmured, picking up the lid of the box where the rules were printed.

  ‘But . . . that’s not what you thought it meant.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the rules that says you have to know what your word means. Unsuccessful challenge: 50 points deducted from challenger’s score. That makes you . . . minus 21, Mr Micheldene.’

  Helene laughed.

  Roger got up so suddenly that his knee caught the edge of the board and sent the letters flying. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. How frightfully clumsy of me.’

  ‘Clumsy nothing. You did it on purpose. You saw him, didn’t you, Mom? He did it on purpose, didn’t he, Mommy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helene said. ‘I wasn’t watching.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m afraid that means the end of the game.’

  ‘It does not. I can remember where everything was.’

  ‘I think Mr Micheldene’s probably had enough, Arthur.’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Arthur growled. ‘I’m going to go dress up.’

  I know a little man whose favourite toy is going to disappear suddenly soon, Roger thought to himself as Arthur swung out of the room. Helene’s glance was weary. Cocking an ear for Ernst, Roger heard the refrigerator door slam. He said with a smile: ‘Terrifyingly bright, that offspring of yours.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Budding genius.’ Then he said in a gentle, or at any rate quiet, voice: ‘Helene dear.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  He had never felt timid or hesitant in his life, but did his best with blinking, lip-licking and just not speaking yet. Finally he quavered: ‘The week-end. You will arrange something then, won’t you?’

  She looked away quickly, then back at him. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Not just try, darling. Please.’

  ‘Roger, all I can do is try, can’t you see? It doesn’t just depend on me. All sorts of other people’ll be around and I’ll have things to see to. But really I’ll do what I can to fix it. I really will.’

  At this evasion a part of Roger – one of which the rest of him on the whole disapproved – wanted to step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops. But all of him was easily sensitive and intelligent enough to realize that that kind of treatment would undoubtedly worsen rather than improve his chances of satisfaction at the week-end. So he followed a radically different line whereby affable balding Roger, popular quirky Roger, urbane much-travelled Roger took over from noted alcoholist Roger, esurient Roger, famed goat-getter and dirt-doer Roger. Quipped he to handsome hospitable word-pundit Dr Ernst Bang, 32: ‘Oh, thanks.’

  He kept it up in the intervals of being introduced to Paul and Mary Selby and young Jay Selby and George and Evelyn Fraschini and Jimmy Fraschini and Karen Fraschini and Martha Selby and Bob and Ann Sullivan and Clay and Sue Green and Russ Green and George Fraschini Jr. There were others whose names he never heard but who, in the forms of miniature spacemen, witches, Red Indians, goblins and Frankenstein’s monsters, burst in and snatched up the packets Helene had prepared and ate what was in them and ran about shouting. At a climax of this Roger asked to use the telephone and went into the kitchen.

  Soon a voice was saying into his ear: ‘Miranda, good-afternoon.’

  ‘May I speak to Mrs Atkins, please?’

  ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘George Green here.’

  ‘One moment, Mr Green.’

  Almost at once another voice said: ‘Mollie Atkins speaking.’

  Good, Roger thought, but still could not visualize the face that went with the voice. ‘This isn’t George Green, this is Roger Micheldene.’

  ‘Hi, hallo, how are you?’

  ‘Surviving. Look, are you free at all this evening?’

  ‘Well no, I’m afraid not. We have a dinner party and I have to get home right away and start things going. You could come to dinner if you want.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I might, I suppose.’

  ‘On the other hand Strode’ll be there and you two didn’t seem to get along too well the last time you met, I remember thinking.’

  ‘No, there is that. Well . . .’

  ‘Listen, why don’t you come and see me tomorrow afternoon? I’m free then. I could take you on a little scenic drive.’

  ‘All right. What time?’

  ‘Come around at three.’

  ‘What, to this . . . shop of yours?’

  ‘Sure, why not? You’ll just love it. You’ll be coming by train? All right, there’s one gets in at six minutes of three. You take that one, old boy.’

  Roger said he would, rang off, made two more calls and went back to where the people and children were. The people were taking notice of the children in that curious American way, talking to them, picking them up, even running about with them. A man asked Roger if he had any children and Roger said no and the man evidently saw that he had been put in his place and said nothing more. Then another man – either George Fraschini or Clay Green, or possibly Paul Selby – said he hoped very much that Roger would be able to manage to come along and have dinner with everybody when the party moved to his place.

  ‘So kind of you,’ Roger said, taking a pinch of Golden Cardinal from his pewter snuff-box, ‘but I must be getting back to New York very soon.’

  There was a general gasp of astonishment, incredulity and protest, as if Roger had announced that he expected the Federal authorities to deport him next morning. Those who had not heard what he said came hurrying anxiously over to be informed. ‘But he can’t go. Look what it’ll do to his evening. It’s out of the question. When will he eat? Evelyn, you tell him. Anyway, there’s no train. Ernst, do you have a schedule? Give him another drink, quick. I’ll drive him back.’

  Roger found this reaction agreeable rather than the opposite. Helene, he saw, was standing at a window, holding in her arms a small child of uncertain sex with whom she was apparently dis
cussing the view. The child’s hand rested lightly on the back of her neck. Roger said: ‘No, I’m afraid I really must be going. And don’t worry about the train – there’s one from that junction place in about half an hour. I’ve ordered a taxi.’

  There was more objection, centring on how far away the junction was and how huge the taxi fare would be and he must let Bob-Paul-George drive him, but it had died down into dissident muttering by the time the taxi came and Roger, waving Helene good-bye, went and got into it. Before it had moved more than a couple of yards another car turned off the road into the Bangs’ drive. Roger fancied he could hear laughter from it. When it stopped, Irving Macher and Suzanne Klein and Nigel Pargeter, strongly illuminated in the porch light, got out and moved in an undisciplined manner towards the front door. Although now being carried away from this scene at an accelerating twenty miles an hour, Roger pressed himself well back against the cushions.

  ‘You’re missing out on a lot of fun, aren’t you, travelling at this time?’ the driver asked.

  ‘If you don’t mind terribly I prefer not to talk.’

  ‘Anything you say.’

  On either side of the road were houses festooned with multi-coloured lights and orange-coloured turnip ghosts. Now and again ragged groups of people or children could be seen cavorting about. What did they think they were celebrating?

  The distance of the houses from one another, their wooden construction, the absence of horticulture and fences or walls, the woodland setting, all combined to give the area the look of a semi-temporary encampment for a battalion of parvenus. Not a bad image of America as a whole, eh?

  Roger met an alternative image when the taxi got on to one of those throughway or turnpike things. It was a great charade of light and sound and movement aimed at the participants themselves. By having so many tons of metal hurtling along at these speeds, you see, hooting, winking, overtaking, they hoped to convince themselves and one another that they had energy and were important and were going somewhere. Nevertheless it was being done in remarkable quantity and with some conviction. As the taxi accelerated past a line of large trailer-lorries got up with strings of lights like the houses he had just seen, and two five-yard-wide cars with a dozen rear lights apiece swept by him in turn in the left-hand lane, he found it surprisingly difficult to feel absolutely sure that he had not spent his whole life travelling down this turnpike, that anything anywhere else existed, that Helene existed. It was as if the whole effort of all these furious lumps of matter had its point in separating him and her as decisively as possible. He was quite relieved when he saw the pale blue lights of an exit ahead and his driver pulled over to the right and began to slow down.