The Hippopotamus

by Stephen Fry

  “Let me get this . . .” a voice, female, at my elbow.

  “One of the finest phrases in our language,” said I, without turning round. I could see in the mirror that it was the bony-bunned creature, levering herself back up on to her stool. Absolutely love small women, they make my dick look so much bigger.

  “And a Maker’s Mark for me,” she added, pointing to a bottle high on the bar shelf.

  A proper drinker, I noted with approval. Your experienced lapper knows that barmen always initially mishear the name of whatever brand you specify. “Not Glenlivet, Glenfiddich! No, you oaf, not a lager shandy, a large brandy . . .” Always find the bottle with your eye first and point at it when ordering. Saves time.

  A hint of something Floris-ish, or at a pinch Penhaligony, wafted up as she settled herself. Adequate breastage and a slim white throat. Something neurotic in her bearing, you get to spot that quickly in female bar-flies, most of whom are usually on the brink of the kind of hysteria that smashes glassware or slaps innocently by-standing faces.

  Roddy poured a large measure into a highball glass and she watched him closely. Another good sign. I was a close chum for a time of Gordon Fell the painter, before he got knighted and began to think himself too high for low company; we went out on the nasty together fairly regularly throughout the sixties. Gordon always drank Old Fashioneds, had done for thirty years. Never took his eyes off the barman for a second while they were being prepared, like a blackjack player eyeing the deal. One afternoon Mim Gunter, the old witch who wielded the optics at the Dominion Club in Frith Street, a favourite pissery, was off sick and her son Col had to take her stand at the bar. Well, Col was only sixteen, poor lad didn’t have the first clue what an Old Fashioned was, and bugger me if Gordon hadn’t the fog­giest either. I tried later to calculate how many hours of his life Gor­don had spent watching while they had been assembled before his unblinking eyes, but ran out of napkins to do the sums on. I knew that Angostura bitters came into the formula somewhere, but that was all I knew. In the end we had to ring Mim in hospital where she was all gowned up and ready to be wheeled into the theatre to have the can­cer cut from her throat. Our SOS tickled her pink, of course. Ten feet from the phone, the other side of the bar we were, but we could still hear her screeching the foulest insults at the hapless Col down the line and telling the doctors to bugger off, “this was business.” She died under the knife two hours later, Gordon Fell’s Proxy Old Fash­ioned taking its place in history as the last drink she ever mixed.

  The point is, we watch the barman, but we don’t take it in. It’s the reassuring movement of the hands, the pleasing fitness of bar stock and cocktail apparatus, the colours, the noises, the rich, speaking scents. I’ve known non-drivers unable, in the same way, to recall routes they have taken daily in taxis for years.

  The placing of the glass on its paper coaster, the discreet pushing forward of the ashtray and Roddy’s quiet withdrawal having been ac­complished, we were free to talk.

  “Good health, madam.”

  “And yours.”

  “Have I a feeling,” I wondered, “that we’ve met?”

  “That’s what I was asking myself when I was here before. I de­cided you were too forbidding to ask, so I disappeared to the corner seat.”

  “Forbidding?” I’ve heard this tosh before. Something to do with jowls, eyebrows and a pugnacious, Bernard Ingham–like set to the lower lip. “As it happens,” I said, “I’m a lamb.”

  “And then, sitting there, I realised you were Ted Wallace.”

  “The same.”

  “You may not remember, but . . .”

  “Oh hell, we haven’t done the deed, have we?”

  She smiled. “Certainly not. I’m Jane Swann.”

  Said as if the name was a reason for my never having sauced her.

  “Jane Swann. And I know you, do I?”

  “Cast your mind back to a small font in Suffolk twenty-six years ago. A baby and a rising poet. The baby cried a great deal and the rising poet made a promise to turn his back on the world, the flesh and the devil. A promise that even the baby didn’t believe.”

  “Well, fuck my best boots! Jane . . . Jane Burrell!”

  “That’s me. Though in fact it’s Swann now.”

  “I must owe you any number of silver napkin rings. And a library’s worth of moral guidance.”

  She shrugged as if to say that she didn’t believe me to be the kind of person whose taste in silver napkin rings or moral guidance coin­cided with her own. Now that I looked there was that in her cast of features which recalled her ghastly parents.

  “Never got much of a chance to get to know you,” I said. “Your mother threw me out of the house not half an hour following the bap­tism. Barely laid eyes on her or Patrick since.”

  “I was always very proud of you, though. From a distance.”

  “Proud of me?”

  “Two of your poems were set texts at school. No one believed you were my godfather.”

  “Bloody hell, you should have written to me. I’d’ve come and gab­bled to the Sixth Form.”

  Too true. Nothing like the parted admiring lips of a seminar of schoolgirls to make a man feel wanted. Why else would anyone try to become a poet?

  She shrugged and took a sip of her bourbon. I noticed she was trembling. Not trembling perhaps, but shivering. She had about her an air that reminded me of long ago. Leaning forward as if she wanted to pee, leg jogging up and down on the barstool stretcher. There was something . . . images of wooden draining boards, Dividend tea stamps and pointy bras . . . something forlorn.

  I looked at her again, the little signals came together and I remem­bered. Jane looked now exactly as girls in the early Sixties did when they returned from visiting an abortionist. An unmistakable conflu­ence of gestures and mannerisms, but one which I hadn’t seen in a girl for years. That blend of shame and defiance, of disgust and triumph; the urgent appeal in the eyes that encouraged you either to mourn the desolation of a life utterly ruined or to celebrate the victory of a life made magnificently free, a dangerous look. I remembered only too well that if you guessed the girl’s mood wrong in those days and congratulated her when she wanted to be comforted, you got a foun­tain of tears and a fortnight of screaming recrimination; if you con­soled and sympathised when what she fancied she needed was ap­plause and praise for a proud and heroic stand, you got a zircon-edged swipe across the chops and scornful laughter. Why the expression on my new-found god-daughter’s face should have put me in mind of the atmosphere of those sordid and unmissed times, I had no idea. Women haven’t needed to look as vulnerable and guilty as that for thirty years; that is a man’s office now.

  I coughed. “Which poems?”

  “Mm?”

  “Set texts. Which ones?”

  “Oh, let me see. ‘The Historian’ and ‘Lines on the Face of W. H. Auden.’”

  “Of course. Of bloody course. The only two that ever make the anthologies. Tricksy rubbish.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Certainly not, but you’d expect me to say so.”

  She favoured me with a sad-eyed smile.

  “Same again, Roddy.” I rapped the bar.

  “I often read your theatre reviews,” she ventured, sensing that the smile had been a touch too obviously sympathetic.

  “Not any more you won’t.”

  I told her of my sacking.

  “Oh,” she said, and then, “oh!”

  “Not that I give a stuff,” I assured her, in a manner that admitted no condolences. I unloosed my thoughts on the current state of Brit­ish theatre, but she wasn’t listening.

  “You’ve time on your hands then?” she said once I had run down.

  “Well . . . I don’t know so much about that. There’s a more or less open invitation to fill the restaurant column in Metro . . .�
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  “I’m not a writer, you see, and I don’t know enough . . .”

  “. . . and there’s always room for just one more definitive book on the Angry Young Men . . .”

  “. . . you are virtually family, after all . . .”

  I stopped. There were tears forming in her lower eyelids.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  “Look, do you mind coming home with me?”

  In the cab she stayed off whatever it was that was distressing her. She sketched a short biography, enough to show me that she wasn’t as bright or pretty or stylish or interesting as she had seemed sitting at the bar. But then, no one ever is, which is why it’s always worth hav­ing shares in whisky and cosmetics.

  Five years earlier, barely twenty-one, she had married a man, Swann, who traded in paintings. No children. Swann was currently in Zurich sharing his duvet with a Swiss girl, degraded enough and powerfully enough built (if Jane’s bitchy glossing was to be believed) to appreciate his bruising bedroom habits. Jane’s father Patrick had been gathered to God some six summers, which come to think, I knew, and Rebecca, the mother, still gadded about between Kensing­ton and the Brompton Road pretending to be smart. Rebecca’s other child, Jane’s brother Conrad, whom I remembered as something of a turd, died in a car-crash. Pissed off his head, apparently. Good thing too. There’s no excuse for crashing a car sober.

  Rebecca was one of the few women I ever met who . . . well, it is a fact that women do not enjoy sex. It has become almost a matter of religion for them to deny this, but it remains a fact. Women put up with sex as the price they pay for having a man, for being part of what they like to call a “relationship,” but they can do without. They do not feel the hunger, the constant stabbing, stomach-dropping hunger that tortures us. The bugger of it is that whenever I say this I am ac­cused of being a misogynist. For a man who has spent his entire life thinking and dreaming of women, skipping after them like a puppy trying to please his master, ordering his entire existence so that he might be brought into more contact with them and judging his life and worth solely according to his ability to attract them and make them desire him, it comes a little hard to be accused of dislike of the sex. All I feel is profound worship, love and inferiority mixed in with a good deal of old-style self-loathing.

  I know the arguments . . . Lord, who doesn’t? Desire, they tell me, is a form of possession. To lust after a woman is to reduce her to the level of creature or quarry. Even worship, according to a reasoning too damned tricksy for me to follow, is interpreted as a kind of scorn. All this is, I need hardly tell you, the supremest bollocks.

  Some of my best friends, as you would expect of a quondam poet, are chutney-ferrets. So too, as you would also expect of a quondam theatre critic, are some of my bitterest enemies. You couldn’t ask for a better controlled experiment to help us settle this business of the genders than the world of the nance, now could you? Gaysexuals, bottomites, benderists, settle on a name you like, taking such prob­lems as the queer-bashers, the newspapers, the virus, the police and society as read, lead a pretty fabulous life. Lavatories, parks, heathland, beaches, supermarkets, cemeteries, pubs, clubs and bars vibrate to their music of simple erotic exchange. A man, bent, sees another man, bent. Their eyes lock and . . . bang, sex is done. They don’t have to know their partner’s name, they don’t have to talk to him, they don’t even, in the back rooms of dark metropolitan nightclubs, have to see his bloody face. It’s a male world, ordered in a precisely male way, according to the devices and desires of a strictly male sexuality. Do those big hairy faggots who pose in magazines with leather collars round their dicks and rubber tubing up their cack-alleys think of themselves as oppressed? Do gay men tarting themselves up for a night in a club whine about the vile sexism which insists they must be made attractive in order to be inspected like cattle? Do they hell.

  Sometimes, in my dreams, I imagine a world in which women enjoy sex: a world of heterosexual cruising areas in parks and prome­nades, heterosexual bars, heterosexual back rooms, heterosexual cinemas, heterosexual quarters of the town where women roam, searching for chance erotic encounters with men. Such an image is only conceivable in one’s fantasising bedroom, jerked into life by an angry fist and a few spastic grunts. If women needed sex as much as men did then—duck, Ted, duck, run for cover—then there wouldn’t be so many rapists around the place.

  We live in the world as given, and no doubt anthropologists and zoologists can tell us that it is biologically necessary for one of the sexes always to be hungry and the other to be mostly bored. Men have compensations, after all, for the agony of their endlessly unful­filled desires. By and large, we run the world, control the economies and swank about with laughable displays of self-importance. This isn’t a whinge. I merely want the simple truth understood and out in the open: men like sex and women don’t. It has to be recognised and faced.

  Women’s constant rejection of such a self-evident fact doesn’t help at all. Whenever I point it out to my women friends they in­stantly deny it; they will claim to be regular masturbators; they will claim that the idea of a good anonymous fuck is a real turn-on; they will claim that only the other day they saw a man whose bottom re­minded them a little of Mel Gibson and that they got really quite juicy thinking about it. Only the other day? What about only the other minute? What about every damned sodding bloody minute of every bloody damned sodding day? Don’t they see that women should pop open the champagne and celebrate the fact that they are not slavering dogs like men, they should revel in the biological luck which allows them to be rational creatures who can think about the benefits a part­nership with a man can provide, who can think about motherhood and work and friends . . . who can just plain think unlike us poor bas­tards who spend days that should be spent in work and higher thoughts having to realign the sore and swollen cock under the waist­band of our underpants every time a set of tits walks by? Of course women get the itch now and again, we wouldn’t be here as a race oth­erwise; of course they have genital equipment sensitive enough to ensure that sex can, when embarked upon, cause shiverings of plea­sure, barks of delight and all the dirty rest of it. But they are not, lucky, lucky, lucky things, for ever hungry, for ever desperate, for ever longing for the base physical fact of getting their bloody rocks off. I mean, the fact is, it’s five in the afternoon as I write this, and I’ve al­ready tossed myself off twice today. Once first thing, in the shower, and again just after lunch, before sitting down to this. Any honest tart will tell you, sympathetically, like a nurse, that men, poor dears, just have to spit their seed. Why women should wish to claim parity in the matter of this gross imperative beats me.

  As it happens, because of my trade, I’ve met a great many famous men, men of good report. Do you know, without exception, those I’ve known well enough to be able to sit with round a whisky bottle in the small hours have all confided to me that the real motivation behind their drive to become famous actors, or politicians or writers or what­ever, has been the hope, somewhere deep inside them, that money, celebrity and power would enable them to get laid more easily? Whisky can rot through the layers that mask this simple truth: ambi­tion to do well, a desire to improve the world, a need to express one­self, a vocation to serve . . . all those worthy and nearly believable motives overlay the bare-arsed fact that when you get right down to it all you want to do is get right down to it.

  I owe whisky that. Not a drink many women of my acquaintance are much given to, but it has saved me. Without it I should be even more of a lost and bewildered old cunt than I am. If it weren’t for those late scotch-soaked nights I should have gone through life con­vinced that I was uniquely dirty and uniquely dangerous. The ruina­tion of a promising career, the occasional run-in with the police and the destruction of a couple of marriages is the price whisky exacted for allowing me to see that I was not alone: solid bloody bargain.

  But . . . that’s enough of that. I can get carrie
d away. If you want catchpenny theories about the Sexes and all that, you can find shelves in bookshops devoted to nothing else. Men Biting Back, Women Biting Back from Men’s Biting Back, responses to responses to counter-responses: it’s like the days of the Cold War, every publication by the other side is read, every posture analysed, every twitch on the web detected and every cultural shift pored over. God knows there are columnists, cultural commentators and semi-academics enough to keep the Gender Wars industry arming and rearming for ever. Any­way, who gives a fuck what a parcel of undereducated journalists have to say about anything?

  No, I fart this noxious guff in your faces not because it’s important or new, nor because I want to engage in a sterile debate about it, but because you have to understand something of my mood and disposi­tion that day Jane found me and dragged me off to Kensington. Her mother Rebecca, I was about to note before I leapt astride my hobby­ horse and galloped off for a few paragraphs, was probably the only woman I’ve met who really seemed to enjoy sex for sex’s sake with a relish and a need that could compare to a man’s desire. She was also the only woman I’ve ever met whose favourite drink was whisky. A connection possibly.

  Jane’s house found itself somewhere near Onslow Gardens. There was money in her purse, no question, courtesy of her Uncle Michael no doubt, and, like every rich, ignorant girl these days, she passed herself off as an interior decorator.

  “People saw what I’d done with the flat,” she said, as the taxi drew up outside a standard South Kensington white-pillared portico, “and asked if I could help them out too.”

  The interior lived up to my ripest expectations. Hideous flounc­ing swags for curtains, raw silk instead of wallpaper, you can picture the whole sham shambles for yourself, I’m sure. Barbarically hideous and as loudly wailing a testament to a wholly futile and empty life as can be imagined. Just how fucking idle, just how rotting bored, do you have to be, I wondered, to sit down and dream up this kind of opulent garbage? She was standing in the middle of the room, eyebrows raised, ready for my gargles of admiration. I took a deep breath.