One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Be with you in a minute, Al. Just want to settle a point with my old friend Mitch here. — Yeah, there was something else . . . What the hell was it? After a pause which Roger used to get his feet into a favourable position, Atkins seemed to come to a decision. He held out his hand and looked Roger in the eye. ‘Mitch, old son, I’d like to tell you I’m sorry and I’d like for you to shake my hand to show me you bear no ill-will.’

  Roger stared. ‘Sorry? What about?’

  ‘Well now, as to that, Mitch, you rather have me. I don’t seem to recall exactly what about. But this much I do know. There was some kind of . . . unpleasantness in which you and I were involved.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘This of it, Mitch. This of it. I make a rule that if I’m involved in any . . . unpleasantness then I apologize afterward. It’s nearly always been my fault anyway and if it wasn’t, what the hell? Better somebody apologizes than nobody, huh? Are you going to shake?’

  Roger shook and Atkins clapped him on the back. ‘That’s my boy,’ he said approximately. ‘All friends now. Be seeing you around.’

  He made a good if slow job of the stairs and squelched off across the rugs and tiles and wood blocks to his host’s side without once taking a wrong turning. Roger found his glass was empty.

  He was refilling it for the second time when Nigel Pargeter came up to him. When he saw who it was Roger threw up mentally. Pargeter, for God’s sake. What did the fellow think he was doing, hanging about the place in this fashion? Who had asked him along and how had he presumed to accept? Pargeter – it was dreadful to have to face the fact of his existence. The notion of the universe as the handiwork of the Almighty received a severe check at Pargeter. Nevertheless Roger greeted him effusively. There was a fist-fodder air about Pargeter that was rather appealing. ‘Hallo, Pargeter, stands England where she did?’

  The man ignored this and looked busily about for some seconds. This and the way he spoke suggested that he had approached Roger because he knew Roger and Roger was on his own rather than because Roger was Roger. He said to Roger: ‘I wonder if you could give me a hand. There’s a bit of trouble going on outside and I thought perhaps you might give me a hand.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘Bit of trouble with Joe Derlanger.’

  Roger followed Pargeter through what was no doubt the hallway alcove or the lobby area to the front door. This had worm-holes in it that might have been put there with red-hot knitting needles but was otherwise unremarkable. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘He’s acting up. Seems to have got himself into a bit of a state.’

  ‘Fighting anyone?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  As they left the porch there was the clanging boom of a hard object striking metal. Then Roger saw Joe, brightly lit by powerful bulbs in fisherman’s lanterns hung aloft on poles, take a pace forward and very single-mindedly kick the door of a car: his own, as it proved. The booming noise was repeated. Small dents in the door and elsewhere testified to earlier kicks. Five yards from him Grace Derlanger stood, her shoulders bowed and her hands over her face. Pargeter went up and put his arm round her. ‘Please don’t, Joe honey,’ she called. ‘Please don’t. Take me home. I’m so tired.’

  ‘Not till I’m good and ready,’ Joe said. He sounded preoccupied. ‘I’ll finish this and then I’ll go call a taxi.’ Rubbing his chin and slowly shaking his head in a dissatisfied way, he contemplated the car for a few moments, then turned decisively and strode off round the side of the house.

  Roger joined Grace and Pargeter. ‘What’s this all in aid of?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just the way he gets sometimes,’ Grace said, swallowing. ‘I don’t have any idea what causes it or what he gets out of it. When I ask him tomorrow he’ll say he doesn’t remember.’

  ‘Come on inside, Grace,’ Pargeter said. ‘Let me take you inside and give you a drink. You won’t do any good here. He might stop if you went inside.’

  ‘No, I have to stay and see it. It makes no difference whether I’m here or not – he isn’t aiming it at me.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s got fed up and gone indoors himself,’ Roger said.

  ‘He’ll be back. He hasn’t finished yet. He won’t stop until he’s wrecked it.’

  ‘Come inside and have a drink, Grace,’ Pargeter said.

  ‘I’ll stay, thank you, Nigel. You go in. Oh, here he is.’

  Joe came into view again, carrying what looked like an iron bar. He swung it accurately at the near headlamp and there was a dull explosive sound without any hint of breaking glass. ‘This is more like it,’ he said, moving over to the other headlamp.

  Roger felt some concern. He went and stood in front of Joe and said: ‘This is a bit of a bloody waste of time, isn’t it, Joe?’

  ‘Out of the way, Roger, please.’ Joe’s tone held no menace. He might have been asking his opponent to leave him an unimpeded shot at a two-yard golf putt. ‘Just move aside, will you?’

  ‘This is going to cost you a few quid, Joe. As it is. Plus a lot of embarrassing explanation. I’d call it a day if I were you. I’m saying this as a friend.’

  ‘The sooner you move aside the sooner I’ll be through. This is my car and I can do what I like with it. Right now I want to beat it up some.’

  Pargeter came and stood at Roger’s side. ‘Why not give it a rest, Joe?’

  ‘Look, I know you guys mean well but all you’re doing is hold me up, do you understand? Just pipe down and let me get the job done. Won’t take more than a minute or two.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she start, or what?’ Pargeter asked.

  ‘It isn’t the car. Now quit standing in the light, will you please?’

  Roger and Pargeter went back to Grace. Joe knocked out the surviving headlamp and stood considering for a time. Then he broke the windscreen. This time the sound of shattering glass was abundant. Roger left Pargeter with Grace and turned away towards the house. His feelings of concern had ebbed. It would have been agreeable to stop Joe but the matter was not of great importance. At the same time Roger was dissatisfied. More than once, he seemed to remember, he had been near the point of telling Joe something about Helene and even, conceivably, asking his advice. But he realized now that he would not have known how to set about it. It was impossible to talk to them about anything more personal than baseball without having been in the same class at Yale or in Phi Upsilon Kappa with them.

  Somebody was standing in the shadowed porch when he entered it. Repeated encounters with Mollie Atkins now ensured almost immediate recognition of her. This was she. She was standing on one foot and swaying slightly to and from the door-post and she had a drink in her hand. She held this out to him without speaking: Roger took it and drank it.

  ‘Thank you very much.’ He took a step nearer the door, but the steady surging noise of people in the house gave Joe’s spasmodic break-it-yourself efforts a kind of rural charm. Except for the reluctant sound of falling glass there seemed to be quite a lot of space and silence. Roger turned to Mollie and took her arm. ‘How about a little fresh air,’ he declared.

  Mollie hopped and then lurched against him and her lengthy necklace of what looked like fossilized birds’ eggs (or pottery imitations of this nasty idea) swung painfully against his midriff.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, can’t you so much as walk?’

  ‘If you mean am I smashed the answer is yes. But that’s not the trouble.’ She took another – from Roger’s point of view – painful hop. ‘I have the standard number of feet but I don’t have the shoes to match: I was coming out to look for it. Hang on a minute.’ She bent and came up with a high-heeled sandal.

  ‘Well, if you left the other one in Joe’s car I doubt if it would be wearable by now.’

  With the pedantry he recognized wearily as belonging to her state, she said: ‘I didn’t leave it in Joe’s car, because that was not the way I came to this house. Grace came here in Joe’s car, with Joe; I came here in Al’s car, with Al.’ />
  There was a by now more distant rupturing crash from Joe’s direction. Roger had steered them well round the corner of the house, with some difficulty. Mollie need not, he reflected, be as capable as all that, but how capable was that? Women had tiresome habits when drunk, becoming either irritatingly dependent or unreasonably aggressive. In fact, without a few decent inhibitions they could be a confounded nuisance. But Mollie interrupted this:

  ‘At least he only does it to things. He’s quite patient and kind with people really. He blew up a water-heater one time and it made more of a bang than he expected and he was terrified someone might have gotten hurt.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ He had managed to back her up against a fairly substantial tree, and saw no need for her to talk at all, about anything.

  ‘About Joe. He’s worth our weight in gold. And with you counted in, old boy, that’s quite some weight. We haven’t done too well tonight, have we? Why do you think that is?’

  ‘But he’s been breaking up his car.’

  ‘I know it. I’m talking about it. You think it’s childish of him, don’t you? You think it would be more adult if he’d gotten hold of me or someone and had some fun at their expense, don’t you?’

  ‘Look, if you’re going to talk like that—’

  She had seized his jacket and the shirt inside it and some of his arms inside that and held him in a surprisingly firm grip. ‘Just relax, honey . . .’ To his slight astonishment she was hauling, or levering, him on to the ground, and he had just enough time to decide that he would prefer to be sitting down before he did so. American women seemed entirely without finesse. He preferred frank submission to frank pursuit except, theoretically, from the kind of woman who frankly made no move of any kind in his direction.

  ‘. . . comes a time when you can’t get exactly what you want . . .’

  What was she droning on about? Suzanne Klein’s attentions were probably a result of the twofold insecurity of being Jewish and American (and the consequent aggression). Her youth was only a temporary advantage beside such fundamental handicaps.

  ‘. . . so much better if people like us made the most of what’s available . . .’

  She was leaning against him rather for her own comfort than to give him pleasure, and his mounting resentment focused momentarily on being treated as an out-of-doors sofa. All this dragging and pawing him about was clearly the consequence of her being a middle-aged nymphomaniac, and not a particularly attractive one at that. If Helene had had the common courtesy to be decently polite to him, let alone nice, none of the evening’s physical indignities would have taken place. After all he was her guest, wasn’t he?

  Mollie had put a hot dry hand to his face. ‘. . . should make people in our position kinder to each other? What do you say, Rog?’

  He took a deep breath to ensure rapidity of fire. ‘I fail to see any similarity in our positions. I have, fortunately for you, been taking almost no notice of your nonsense. But considering your time of life I would advise you to conduct yourself with a little more dignity. Most men don’t enjoy drunken women after a certain age making passes at them. You have a perfectly good husband. I suggest you pay a little more attention to him.’

  He had succeeded in shaking off her hand, and with some difficulty – there was nothing to help him – had risen to his feet. There was a moment of complete silence during which he realized that all sounds of Joe and his car had stopped. Getting up had somehow interfered with what should have been an unanswerable exit line. She lay exactly as she had collapsed when he removed his support: on her back, staring up at him without moving. Then she said:

  ‘Beat it, Mr Englishman. I want to be alone with the memory of your old-world courtesy. So beat it.’

  Her voice was quiet and flat, but higher in pitch than usual. Roger stood there a moment experiencing, unusually for him, a mixture of feelings. One of them resembled agitation.

  He hurried into the house and went in search of the man Al who seemed to own it. Al was standing talking to a group that included Helene, Suzanne, Macher, and a couple of Macher’s followers. Ernst was also listening from a plush-covered armchair, one leg out in front of him on a footstool of rawhide and tubular steel. Once or twice he moved his foot experimentally.

  ‘So the guy wakes up on the edge of the turnpike,’ Al said, ‘a few feet away from what’s left of his car, and he decides he must have been knocked crazy, because bending over him there’s a one-eyed Negro, a man-sized rabbit and an Apache with all the feathers and paint and junk. He figures he’s strayed into The Wizard of Oz or somewhere. Then the Indian says to him in a Boston accent: “I think you’re all right but I’ll have to examine you further. Now don’t worry about a thing – I’m a doctor”, and the guy screams: “Keep your hands off me, you savage”, oh, and there’s a lot more before he realizes it’s Hallowe’en and these are three guys on their way to a—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Roger got in finally, ‘but have you a telephone directory? Something rather urgent has come up.’

  ‘Sure, you just come with me,’ Al said, taking him by the arm and steering him round various corners. ‘Nothing bad, I hope? Anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Thank you, I can manage.’ Roger soon found the address he wanted and was looking for a taxi number when Helene appeared.

  ‘What’s the matter, Roger? Are you sick?’

  ‘No. There’s somebody I must see, that’s all.’

  ‘Can’t you call them? It’s kind of late to go visiting. Who is it?’

  ‘No, I have to see them in person . . . Here we are: Keeley’s Taxi Hire.’

  ‘Keeley never comes out after midnight. Where do you want to go? How far?’

  ‘It’s in the town somewhere. I don’t know how far that is.’

  ‘Not more than five minutes. How long will it take you when you get there?’

  ‘I don’t know. A quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes perhaps.’

  ‘I’ll drive you and I’ll bring you back if you’re not too long. I have to get Ernst home some time.’

  ‘Would you, Helene?’

  ‘Sure. Who is it you’re going to see?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. It’s nobody you know. I want to go to the lavatory first.’

  ‘I’ll meet you outside.’

  In the bathroom, which had walls all the way up to the ceiling, Roger found he was not actually going to be sick. He sat on the closed lid of the w.c., which resembled apricot marble, and kept quite still for a minute or two. Then he drank some water and splashed more of it over his face and scalp.

  Outside the porch the Bangs’ green-and-brown station wagon was waiting for him. He got in beside Helene and they moved off. As they passed Joe’s car, which someone had pushed half off the drive, a voice said interestedly from the back seat: ‘Somebody seems to have been expressing himself there.’

  Roger shut his eyes. He asked very slowly: ‘What is that little shit doing in this car?’

  ‘I brought Irving along to keep me company while you’re doing whatever it is you’re going to do. It’s not any fun to be a girl on your own in the middle of town at this time of night.’

  ‘Good God, woman, you’ll be in the car, won’t you? You’re not expecting them to come at you with crowbars, are you?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not the point.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it the point? You’re all the same. Got to be feather-bloody-bedded all the time. Being looked after – i.e. exacting unreasonable concessions. Being wanted. Getting more than your fair share of attention at all times.’

  ‘Look, Roger, I know you’re stoned, but if you go on this way you’re going to say something you’ll be sorry for.’

  ‘You’re probably quite right, my dear. Trouble is those are the only things I really enjoy saying.’

  Macher’s laugh came from behind Roger. ‘I have to admit your method does pay off now and then, Mr Micheldene. Compared with mine it stinks in general but there are a few things it can do and
mine can’t.’

  ‘We can do without your puny little comments, Macher. Going back to where we were . . . A woman tries to get a man into a position in which he—’

  Helene trod on the brake so abruptly that Roger’s forehead brushed the windscreen. ‘How would you like to walk the rest of the way?’ she asked him.

  ‘Have a care, will you? . . . I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I really hardly knew what I was saying,’ Roger said truthfully. ‘I’m a bit upset. I didn’t mean it. I know I was being awful. I couldn’t help it. Please forgive me.’ He put his hand on her wrist.

  She let his hand stay there for a quarter of a minute while nobody spoke or moved. Then she said quietly: ‘All right, but no more cracks’, and drove off.

  The rest of the trip passed in silence. Roger got out into a deserted street with terraced three-storeyed houses and a few shops in it. He went up to one of the houses and rang the bell. When nothing had happened after a minute he started battering on the door and bawling:

  ‘Come down here. Come down at once, you long-frocked clown. I know you’re in there. No use trying to hide from me. Let me in this instant, you spiritual dentist. Come and do what you’re paid to do, curse you. Confess me. Confess me. If you’re not down here in one minute I’ll set the bishop on to you. Shop.’

  Some neighbouring lights went on in upstairs rooms and a couple of windows were raised. A voice called in reasoned protest. Then the door in front of Roger opened and a tall stout Negro in white pyjamas confronted him. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Let me pass, please.’

  ‘Be so good as to state your business.’

  ‘Where’s your boss?’

  ‘I am the boss here. This is my house. What is your business?’

  ‘Where’s Colgate?’

  ‘My name is Miller. There is no Colgate here, I assure you.’

  ‘Must be. Priest chap. Dog-collar.’

  ‘Ah, now I believe I can help you. A young man in holy orders lives in one of the houses across the street. Number 19. No doubt he is the object of your search.’