The Old Devils

by Kingsley Amis

  'Take it easy, Tarc, for Christ's sake. I don't know what's got into him. Have a drink.'

  'The bloody lot of you. Starting with you, Squire Weaver. And this also applies furthermore and notwithstanding to you, Professor pissy pernickety thick as two planks Cellan-Davies. And you, little Garth, on your way, brother. And this pair of bloody soaks by here.' This seemed most unfairly to mean Peter and Charlie. 'And you, Spurling and whatever your name is. No, sorry, I withdraw that, no fault of yours, sir, but you'll oblige me by leaving too. If you'll be so good.'

  Garth made one last effort. 'can't we just - '

  '_Out__. If you're not gone in two minutes I'll send my lads in and then you'll know all about it. And you can take this squash-club pathetic bullshit with you. Every bloody scrap of it - I'll bum anything you leave, I promise you. I've been dying to get rid of you buggers for years and now's my chance. On second thoughts one of you can come back in the morning and pick up the junk then. That's if you think it's worth the bother. Now get moving, the lot of you. Two minutes, mind.'

  Under his louring eye they filed out and assembled ridiculously in the passage that led to the front door, embellished as it was with speckled greenery and dismal old photographs and littered with the remains of packages that might have held footwear or clothing. Here tongues broke loose.

  'That was a disgraceful piece of behaviour,' said Malcolm. 'On your part, Alun. Quite indefensible. You're supposed to know better.'

  'I'm sorry, I just can't stand that kind of posturing,' said Alun.

  'Whereas other kinds you've no rooted objection to,' said Peter. 'Anyway, thanks for destroying our pub for us.'

  'I'll have a word with Tare tomorrow,' said Garth. 'We're off,' said Arnold Spurling with decision, and he and Tony Bainbridge left at once and were not soon to be found in those parts again. At the same time a great general roar of laughter sounded from the bar and Charlie saw Doris the barmaid at the hatch peering at them through her upswept glasses.

  'It's shocking that an educated man should descend to downright verbal brawling,' said Malcolm. 'I said I was sorry.'

  'Oh, that's all right then,' said Peter.

  'Tell you what,' said Garth: 'it's early yet to pack it in and we could all do with a drink and what shall I say, a pause for consideration. Why not come up to my place? It's only just round the corner. Angharad's away seeing her mother,' he added. 'Ninety-one, she is.'

  There was a pause there and then, for consideration of Angharad, perhaps, or her mother. Eventually Alun said with a touch of defiance, 'Yes. Why not? I certainly fancy a drop. Thank you, Garth.'

  'What about you, Peter?' asked Charlie. 'Unless you feel you..!

  'No. Let's go along. Why not indeed.'

  'I ought to be getting back,' said Malcolm.

  'Oh for heaven's sake,' said Garth. 'Never even seen the inside of the Pumphrey domain, have you?'

  'Go on, move, you old pests,' bawled Tarc's voice from up the passage, booming and resounding in a frightening way. 'Outside, the pack of you, you're making me nervous.'

  Without a rearward glance they hurried out into the rainy, windy gloom where what light there was came mostly from shops and houses and re1lections in the roadway. Charlie had a close impression of heavy bodies piling into cars, the lights of the cars coming on suddenly, loud grunts and door-slamming and the whinnying of starters. Now was a time for the years to roll back. But no, they stayed where they were. Beside him, Peter gave a whistling sigh arid pushed the car into gear.

  'You all right, Charlie?'

  'Full of fun.'

  'Well bugger me.'

  'Absolutely. '

  They said no more for the moment. Charlie's mind drifted off to one side. The ancient sanctuary of the Old Gods, he thought. No: when. the primeval fastness of the Ancients is, is menaced by unknown powers, its guardian, the giant Tarc (bass) comes before them with a moving plea for counsel _('Ach, was muss ich?')__. In response, the most illustrious of the Ancients, Alun (baritone), haughtily rebukes Tarc for his presumption _('Vergessen nun Sie')__. A stormy exchange between the two, which the fool Garth ( counter-tenor) tries vainly to quieten, introduces an elegiac portrayal of desolation and defeat. In a climactic... In a ritualistic monologue of great power and beauty _('Heraus Sie alles sofortig')__, Tare invokes his immemorial right to banish the Ancients from their refuge, ordains and salutes their passing one by one and compels the removal of their age-old trophies. The Act closes with an Ancients' chorus of...

  'Wake up. We're there. I think.'

  The Pumphrey house, which Charlie could not remember ever having seen before, was unlit within. There were slippery wet leaves on the flags of the garden" path and he nearly stumbled over the trailing stem of a rose-bush or something similar. The two clambered up half a dozen rounded stone steps to a Victorian Perpendicular porch with stained glass to be faintly seen. Charlie stamped his feet rhythmically on the tiled floor.

  'Is this right?' he asked. 'If it is, where's Garth?'

  'I think he took a lift with Malcolm. Even he isn't going to walk it in this, I mean Garth.' - 'Oh well, there we are then. Be here till midnight. Well no, er, eh? Unless Garth doesn't know the way either. Brilliant of you knowing. I suppose this _is__ right, is it? It certainly feels right, it's giving me the shivers before I've even crossed the bloody threshold. Like a house of the dead.'

  Peter pulled his raincoat more closely round him. 'Here they are. And Alun. Do you think he's mad, by the way?'

  'No, just fed up because... I'll talk to you later.' "

  At once upon entering, Garth turned on the lights, first startlingly overhead in the porch, then two in the hall. Both of these seemed of low wattage, not doing much to cheer up the heavy parental or even grandparental furniture or help to identify the wide-mounted engravings that covered large parts of the walls. Charlie noticed a cylindrical stand full of superannuated umbrellas and walking-sticks. When everyone was indoors Garth switched off the porch light, switched on a staircase light to indicate the lavatory on the landing, switched it off again and led them into a room at the back of the house.

  It was cold in here, in a settled way that suggested it had not been warm for some time. Garth activated a small mobile electric fire, from which a smell of scorching dust soon began to issue and loud clangs were heard from time to time as the metal warmed up. Some large armchairs and a sofa were theoretically available, but none looked very inviting. The party clustered round the sideboard of some unpolished black wood on whose top a number of bottles and glasses were arranged.

  This display had attracted Charlie's attention on entering and almost immediately thereafter his disquiet as well: all the liquor-bottles, which included, he saw, ones containing port and sherry as well as gin, Scotch, brandy and vodka, had optic measures like those used in pubs fitted to their necks. Then he brightened up again at the thought that Angharad would not have been the first or the last wife to try to limit her husband's drinking, heavy-handed as this particular scheme might appear. No cash-register was on view and" when his turn came Garth served him a double whisky and passed on without delay.· Water came out of a half-empty plastic bottle beaded on the inside with air-bubbles of unknown antiquity.

  'Welcome to my humble abode,' said Garth as soon as they all had drinks. When nobody said what a nice place they thought he had or anything else, he went on, 'Rather sad to think it took a dust-up at the Bible to get the gang of you along here. I don't think we need be too despairing about that, by the way. I'll pop round in the morning and see how the land lies.'

  Whether or not his words had any cheering effect, resentment of Alun's conduct seemed to have cooled or petered out in apathetic acceptance; anyway, no more was expressed. After a few minutes Charlie glanced at Peter and led the way towards a grand piano which showed every mark of having been _in situ__ since about the time of the death of Brahms. Photographs of various sizes stood along its lid or hung from the wall behind it.

  'God, what a shower,' said Cha
rlie, moving on from the likeness of one staring bearded fellow in a high-collared jacket to another. 'They can't be Garth's or Angharad's parents or uncles et cetera - too far back.'

  'In their comparative youth perhaps. That would be quite far back.'

  'Oh, but not... Look at this old bitch here. Are those ostrich feathers, would you say? What would that make it? Not even the Boer War, more like the Zulu wars in when, the 1880s?'

  'Well... '

  'You know, I don't think this lot are anything to do with the Pumphreys. I think they must have come with the house, like the carpets and the curtains. And the furniture too by the look of it. There's something... Don't you get a funny feeling in here?'

  'How do you mean, Charlie?'

  'I can't see any sign of anybody actually living here. No bits of possessions. Of course it could be this room's just kept for visitors. Not such a ridiculously antediluvian idea in these parts, after all. But it's more like a time I remember when a bloke from round here called Lionel Williams, - perhaps you came across him, anyway he took me home once in Kinver Hill for a nightcap after the pub, and it was quite a bit like this. Very much like this. It turned out, I'd naturally assumed it was, you know, the marital domicile, but it turned out his wife had divorced him, oh, fifteen years before and he'd gone on living in the house as a lodger, her house it was. And it was very much like this, the atmosphere. Imagine that. You don't suppose it could have happened here by any chance, do you, Garth living here as, er, as Angharad's lodger?'

  'No I don't,' said Peter rather sharply. 'That's absurd.'

  'What? Well, of course it is. Not meant to be a tremendously serious suggestion. But it was very odd at Lionel's that time, you know. The atmosphere.'

  Drink in hand, Charlie moved from the piano-top to the dozen or so photographs on the wall. Over by the sideboard Alun had coaxed a rather reluctant smile from Malcolm and got a falsetto squawk of laughter out of Garth. Willingness to amuse Garth was to Charlie a sign of great humility. Or perhaps above-average vanity. Nevertheless he was glad of Alun's presence and of the others' too. There was no such thing as a good room to be shut up alone in, though the one at Birdarthur where he had read Alun's typescript had been not too bad, tolerable enough to have given him false confidence in himself. This one here could never do that. He pulled himself up and passed over an elongated coloured print of a desert sunset or dawn, complete with camels, palms and pyramid, that he would have laid a thousand quid he had seen a clone of in seaside lodgings in Porthcawl fifty years before. What he came to next made him stop and stare.

  'By Christ, what's this? Hey, I could have done her a bit of no good in days gone by. Proper little bugger too, you can see with that mouth. Nobody made that one do what she didn't want to do. Ever. Who the hell would that be?'

  He noticed now that Peter had sat down on a nearby sofa and was looking at the floor. 'That would be Angharad. I never thought... It never occurred to me... '

  'What?'

  'Angharad as she was before her illness.'

  Charlie lowered himself beside Peter and put his drink on a small polygonal table of Oriental suggestion. The leather or synthetic material of the cushion-cover at once struck cold, even damp, to the backs of his thighs. 'What?'

  'Serves me right for coming here. It doesn't do her justice, what you see there. Not to what she was when I first saw her. It was her I left Rhiannon for, not Muriel - Muriel was later. I didn't want to give Rhiannon up... '

  Peter's face had grown dark red and he was pressing his hand against his chest. He breathed in and out noisily a couple of times, as if he was going to cry.

  'Can I get you something?' asked Charlie.

  'If you could just sit back, that's right, so they can't see me.' Quite briskly Peter took out a small tubular bottle and from it a white pill. 'Could you just sit with me, it'll go off in a little while.'

  Not swallowing the pill, keeping it under his tongue, Peter held himself rigid in his seat with his eyes shut. Now and then he winced sharply, once so sharply and with such a screwing-up of his face that Charlie thought he was going to die the next moment. Charlie also stayed still, with his hand ready in case Peter should want to hold it, and listened for any pause in the others' talk or any stir of interest, though he had no ideas about what to do in that event. The electric fire hummed away. It was not really so long before Peter's colour improved and he began to breathe more normally. After another minute he opened his eyes, smiled a little without parting his lips, as he always did now to keep his teeth out of sight, and sipped his drink. This was whisky and water, lately his preferred tipple in place of the old gin (which he had said he thought made him depressed) and slimline (bound to retain some baneful calories however rigorously pruned).

  'Well, that's it for this time round. Where was I?'

  'What? Well, you were on about Angharad. Are you sure you want to - '

  'Yes, I'm all right. Thanks for sitting there, Charlie.

  Yes. Angharad said - please let me ten you this - she insisted I had to give Rhiannon up completely if I wanted· ever to see her again. She was the insisting type, as you astutely perceived from that photograph. Well, a girl like that, you can understand it in away, and understand it even better if you allow for the bloke being a selfish shit who's rather thrilled to be the object of it. Then not so very long afterwards Angharad was doing some more insisting, but what she was insisting on this time was that I shouldn't see her any more. Some other fellow had... well... '

  When he broke off and gazed at his empty glass, Charlie said, 'Can I get you another?'

  'No. Don't go, Charlie. Can I finish yours? Just for this minute.'

  'You're not to regard it as a precedent, mind.'

  'Thanks. Then, of course, I should have gone back to Rhiannon, or tried to. But I couldn't face her. A bit hard to understand now, perhaps. And there was cowardly stuff about my job which is much easier to understand, I'm sorry to say. It's all so obvious really, but I'd met Muriel by then. She was a friend of Angharad's, if you can credit· such a thing.

  'All this was well before Angharad got ill. Cancer of the womb it was, or that was what it boiled down to in the end. Quite rare at twenty-nine. They took out the whole works, gave her a total pelvic clearance I believe it was called. Plays hell with the hormonal system and the rest of it, or it can. I didn't see anything of her for four or five years, and when she did turn up she looked within shouting distance of how she looks now.

  'So there we are. They didn't know a hell of a lot about these things in those days. I don't say they know much more about them now, but then they thought that kind of thing was brought about by excessive sexual indulgence, as they would have phrased it. Or anyway helped on by it. Well, even then I could see it would have been altogether too funny for words if I'd done all the damage myself, but I could have done my bit, along with one or two others. Yes. No doubt that's something you dismiss from your mind if you've got any sense, and also if you happen not to have grown up with a lot of bloody Methodists and Calvinists and Calvinistic Methodists.

  'Anyway, thanks for listening, Charlie. At least I suppose a lot of it you hadn't heard before.'

  'Some of it, yes. Everybody was wondering but there were things nobody knew.'

  'People always say you can't keep a secret in Wales, but there's no problem if it's nasty enough. They know all too well what they're like, what talkers they are. And hypocrisy's good too. Comes into its own, you might say.'

  'But Muriel knew.'

  Peter actually laughed. 'Oh yes. When I look back, me marrying her is about the hardest thing to believe of all. Next to her marrying me. She was keen, of course. She wasn't quite a virgin but near enough not to count. She may even have thought she honestly didn't mind coming third to Angharad and Rhiannon. If so the scales fell from her eyes with... '

  'Prodigious precipitation.'

  'And comprehensiveness. And irreversibility. And everything else. Well, it's done me good to get that off my chest.' Peter w
as breathing naturally now and just with this mention of his chest he finally removed his hand from it. 'How long I can expect it to last is another matter. Oh, God, there I go - moan, moan, moan. It is a time for the recharging of glasses. '

  As they got up thankfully from the sofa Charlie asked, 'How much of the story does Rhiannon know?'

  'All of it, I should think. Well, not everything I've told you. I haven't discussed it with her since.'

  'No, I can see how you wouldn't.'

  Charlie tried to set it all in order in his mind. He told himself he could not be expected to manage the whole thing straight away. There was quite enough for an old josser to take in in one evening. Whatever the time might be he was beginning to feel like moving on - after another here he would suggest to Peter that they should drift along to the Glendower for a bite and a swallow. The fire had failed to warm the room appreciably and a headachy reek of damp had emerged, with a touch of stale flower-water thrown in. But if Garth was not living in the house then where was he living? Or could he really be a lodger after all?

  Peter and Charlie came up to hear Garth saying, 'Well, whose shout is it, then?'

  As if by pre-arrangement first Alun and Malcolm, then Charlie and Peter looked at each other. It fell to Malcolm, as sometimes in the past, to say what everyone else was thinking and not saying.

  'Sorry, Garth, I'm not with you. How do you mean, shout? We're not in the pub now.'

  'No, boy, of course not, of course not,' said Garth, laying his hand reassuringly on Malcolm's arm. 'Just with the prices things are these days we simply can't afford unrestricted hospitality. Of course we'd like to, but we can't. So?' He sent round an interrogative glance.

  'All right, if it's shouts we're on to, I'll shout first.' Alun still looked very much astonished.

  'Good for you. Double Scotch, is it?' Garth tipped the bottle twice while the rest of the company paid close attention. 'Right. Help yourself to water or soda.'

  'You don't mean to say they're free? Oh, goody bloody goody, what?'

  Garth nodded without speaking, his eyes on a pocket calculator that had appeared on the sideboard before him. 'Mind you don't forget to add on the cost of the first round.'