The Old Devils

by Kingsley Amis

  She said hopefully, 'But it makes sense when you think about it, to yourself. It's all right then.'

  'Yes it is. Indeed it is, but only then.'

  'M'm. So you think it's quite sensible' on the whole to hang on. You would if you were me.'

  He hesitated. She was looking at him in another special way of hers, affectionate, attentive, troubled, the way she had looked at him just before he told her that final abject lie, that there was nothing wrong between them and she was still the only one for him. Over her shoulder now he saw Rosemary, no doubt under orders, step out and head off the nearer approach of one of the hatted females from indoors, stacked lunch-plate at chest level. In sudden agitation he asked himself how long it would take a particular hatless female to miss him and Rhiannon from the party and scurry to find and fuck up. He said in something of a rush, 'Well, that's really what I wanted to talk to you about. Muriel says William getting married means she can leave Wales as she's always wanted, or does now, I don't know, and go back to Yorkshire. When she said that, she hadn't heard he was off to London either or she'd certainly have mentioned it. Well, I'll have to go too, to Yorkshire. I don't want to, I don't want to leave any more than you do, I've lived here all my life. And it's more than that, as you say. But I just can't think of anything else to do. The house and everything else all belong to her and I haven't got a bean. A pension that would keep me in cornflakes.

  It doesn't sound very high-minded, I know, but it's a bit of a struggle being high-minded when you're hard up and pushing seventy.'

  'But you wouldn't be able to stand it,' she said in open dismay.

  'I'll have to. It's not sort of uniformly appalling. Some of the time we struggle along more or· less all right. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. '

  'Oh, really? Funny, I've never known anything to be that. It's just a thing people say.'

  'To sound decent. Yes.' .

  Rhiannon shook her head impatiently to recall herself to the point. 'She'll change her mind. It's a big step at her age.'

  'No she won't. Not after saying it the way she did, with dates and things. I know her. Take it from me, there's nothing for it.' He said with great emphasis and finality, 'I hate everything about it, but I'll have to go.'

  'But you can't. I mean I thought we were going to start seeing each other again. You'd said you'd ring me up but you never did.'

  'I did mean to but when it came to it I couldn't face it. Me, not you.'

  'But I thought by about now you might be thinking it would be all right to. With the children getting married and everything. To each other, I mean. I was so hoping you would.'

  'After everything I've done? After the way I treated you?'

  'Yes. It was losing you I minded. The other didn't matter really, not after a bit. Didn't I tell you that time, we'd been to the Golf Club party? You can't have been listening. God alive, perhaps I didn't really say it. Anyway, I meant to tell you you'll always be... I can't say it now either.

  It used to be so easy. Now, it's like talking about Wales.'

  Slowly, to give her time to back off if she felt like it, and furtively, so that Rosemary and the others should not see, Peter reached out his hand. Rhiannon gripped it. Furtively again, he looked at her and saw that she was trying to look at him. Yes, she had changed: not the direct confident glance now.

  'Let me try. Though you might well not think so,' he said with care, 'and there was certainly a time when I forgot it myself, I've always loved you and I do to this day. I'm sorry it sounds ridiculous because I'm so fat and horrible, and not at all nice or even any fun, but I mean it. I only wish it was worth more.'

  'Ring me up. This time.' With her back half turned she said, 'I'm sorry, but I can't talk any more now.'

  'I've got so much to tell you.'

  He again watched her retreating, moving hardly any faster than earlier, certainly not running. One of her distinctions from other females had always been that she only ran to catch buses and such, not to let the world know about her wild free spirit or alternatively the coruscating wave of emotion that for the moment enfolded her. At her approach Rosemary released a foolish-looking black dog whose collar she had been holding. It jumped up at her in an ungainly fashion, half fell over itself on landing and followed her into the house.

  Peter did the same at a greater distance, feeling very much drunker than he had ever felt in his life before, or something. By the time he got to the food most of it had been swept away, the main body of it at least, but back-ups were still in place. He found the sandwiches excellent, especially the cheese-and-pickle and the egg-and-tomato, more especially still with plenty of Vin Rouge de Pays to help them past his teeth, and he silently undertook never again to underrate Victor, as he was conscious of having done in days gone by. But he commented aloud on the merit of the sandwiches.

  'First-rate Sandwiches these,' he said. 'Especially the egg-and-pickle. '

  'Don't seem to have come to those yet myself,' said Garth.

  Peter had started on Dundee cake and Founders Reserve port when the word came that the speeches would begin in five minutes. Instantly, as intended, all those with elderly bladders, or as many as were capable of responding, made for the toilets. Others went or were there too. From among a small crowd round the one outside the kitchen Peter identified Percy Morgan.

  'Marvellously happy occasion,' he told him.

  'Oh, I should just about think it is, boy.' Percy was perhaps a little startled to hear· this from Peter about anything. 'Seems very nice, your new daughter-in-law. I've seen a bit of her, you know, with her mother. No nonsense about her, oh no by George. Never took to the father, I tell you frankly. Never much cared, myself, for people who laid it on thick about the Welsh heritage and all that. I don't know whether you agree with me, Peter, but as I see it that kind of thing is, well it can be a trifle embarrassing, you know, if it's overdone.'

  'Oh absolutely, I was saying just now - '

  'I'll stay for the speeches, of course, and then I think I'll be cutting along. It certainly takes you back, this lot, eh?'

  'You mean the - '

  'Well, queueing up for a piss. Takes you back to nights out after rugger. Takes me back, anyway. She went off it in a week fiat after one chat with Dewi.'

  There had been so little apparent pause between this remark and the previous one that Peter wondered whether he might have passed out on his feet for a few seconds. 'Oh yes,' he said, doing his best to smile encouragingly.

  'Liver,' said Percy. 'Another couple of months the way she was going and - ' he passed the edge of his hand across his throat and gave a loud palatal exhalation. 'Of course, her being off it, I'm glad for her, but it leaves me a bit up in the air. I used to be the bloke with this impossible wife who was bloody magnificent about her, that was what I did, so what do I do now she's possible again all of a sudden?'

  'Yes, I can see that. I think I'll try upstairs.'

  Upstairs Peter found waiting Sian Smith, Duncan Weaver and another man he was nearly sure he was supposed to know, had even perhaps invited. It seemed to him reasonable, and also enterprising, to go up a further flight to the top floor. Here a passage ran the width of the building, at the far end of which he was just in time to glimpse a half-naked white-haired female with a garment or two over her arm dashing across and out of sight. A door shut and a bolt clicked. After a moment another door opened and the face of old Vaughan Mowbray peered out and turned in his direction, and after another moment, occupied by mutual astonishment, drew back again. On the whole Peter felt he might as well go back to the floor below.

  He found the situation there unchanged, except that Sian had moved over to the landing window and was leaning across the sill, presumably in quest of fresh air. He presumed otherwise when he was near enough to pick up the noises she was making. Duncan Weaver also had his eyes on her, more casually though; with his deafness he had no call to shift from the fresh-air presumption. Simultaneously the second fart of Peter's day rang out - fr
om Duncan it had to be, unless the other man's start, glare and forceful rattling at the door-handle were the work of a consummate actor. Peter contemplated briefly the strangeness of a world without sound.

  There was still a queue near the kitchen, though with different people in it, but now he came to think of it there was a little cloak-room place by the front door which he had not yet tried. In mid-transit he was again perfectly placed to catch old Arnold Spurting and the best man quite turbulently hustling the Levantine-moustached Tony Bainbridge along the hall and out of the house. Before the fellow was lost to view Peter saw him mouthing curses and shaking his fist in an old-fashioned way.

  The speeches came and went. Drinking continued until suddenly there was nothing to put in your glass, not even wine. Victor was having the whole lot collected, stowed in cartons, carried out to a small off-white van. One moment Peter was in a group, the next alone with Rosemary - Rosemary Thomas, as she now was and as he addressed her a couple of times.

  'I gather you're going to be seeing something of my mother,' she said. Her ears had fuller lobes than Rhiannon's.

  'Am I? I mean of course I am, but how do you know?'

  'She told me.' Rosemary looked him in the eye and said not altogether seriously, but quite seriously enough, 'Now you behave yourself, right?'

  'What? How do you mean?'

  'I mean don't misbehave.'

  'What? How could I do that?'

  'Any pal of Alun's could find a way. On today's showing - no problem. No, I mean severely misbehave. Like let her down. If you do, William and I will kill you, okay? Oh Peter, I don't think you've met Catriona Semple, also reading law at Oxford. Catriona, this is my father-in-law.'

  Ten - Malcolm

  'How's she getting on up there?'

  Gwen turned one of the neatly written pages. 'Oh, having a whale of a time, it appears. Dinner-parties every night, house never empty, weekends in the country. Country? What country?'

  'It's quite a big place, actually, the size of here. She must still know a great many people locally, some of them pretty well off I shouldn't be surprised, even in these days of industrial havoc.'

  'Muriel never kept up with them much as far as I heard.

  Anyway, there she is. The theatre, what's she talking about? In Middlesbrough? It can't be the theatre as _civilized folk__ think of it. Racing? Is there a course somewhere in that region?'

  'Sorry, no idea,' said Malcolm, smiling and spreading his hands. 'Not my department.'

  'No, I realize that, no, I just thought you might happen to know. Whippet-racing perhaps she means.'

  'Well, it's good to hear that she seems to be doing reasonably well.'

  'It says something for her pride that she exerts herself to give that impression.'

  'I'm afraid I'm not quite with you.'

  'If you want my opinion, she's protesting too much.

  Life's not turning out to be much fun, how could it in a hole like that, but she's buggered if she's going to let anyone think she's made a mistake. Very roughly.'

  'Maybe, I suppose.' Malcolm tried to sound about half convinced. 'What does she say about Peter?'

  'Nothing very much. She's surer than ever she was right to make the break when she did, exactly what she said before, er, oh and if you see Peter tell the lazy sod to drop her a line. Underplaying it there, you see.'

  'She must miss him a lot in spite of everything.'

  'It's not him she misses, for Christ's sake, it's having a husband as a social seal of quality. And then, well, she doesn't like him not being there in another way, because he still belongs to her really. Some women don't like parting with anything on their inventory even when they've no further use for same.'

  'You're amazing, the way you see things. I'd never have been able to penetrate that far into her motives.' He missed the sharp look these remarks drew from Gwen and went tentatively on, 'But you don't visualize her coming back.'

  She gave a restrained sigh and said, 'Peter's more likely to go there than she is to admit she was wrong in letters nine feet high, and that's it. Mind if I take first knock in the bathroom?'

  'You go ahead.'

  Left alone, Malcolm poured a last cup of tea and lit his daily cigarette. Putting aside the _Western Mail__ for later he noticed a section headed 'Welsh News', a mere quarter of a page or less, and that in the daily newspaper of the capital of the Principality. That, he considered, was coming out into the open with a vengeance. But it was hard to go on feeling indignant for very long, especially after having just spent a good ten minutes reading about a police scandal in South London and not much less on the prospects for England's cricketers on their Australian tour.

  As strongly as ever before, the conversational dealings at his breakfast-table had reminded Malcolm of those at another, the one at 221B Baker Street. There, as here, the first party regularly offered well-meaning provisional explanations of bits of human behaviour and the second party exposed their naivety, ignorance, over-simplification, non-virtuous unworldliness. But there, unlike here, the exposures were sometimes softened with a favourite-pupil tolerance or even varied with an occasional cry of 'Excellent!' or 'One for you, Watson!' Nor was it recorded of Holmes that half of what he said came in aural italics or bold or sanserif. Had Gwen started piling this on recently? Or had she only started doing it so's-you'd-notice recently? Well, they had been married a long time.

  He picked up Muriel's letter. The firm, spacious hand, which he could not remember having seen before, impressed him and made him wish, vaguely and momentarily, that she had made more of herself than she had. Scorning the small change of inquiries after health or other sociability, the text launched itself _in medias res__ with a fully dramatized but not very lucid account of some visit to somebody somewhere. The more factual stuff came later. Among it Malcolm noticed a piece of information, or supposed information, that Gwen had not passed on: in alliance with two friends and the daughter of one of them, Muriel proposed to open and run what she called a coffee-shop in a suburban shopping-centre. The way she talked about it sounded to him quite unlike part of a brave or overdone attempt to hide boredom and loneliness, whatever bloody Sherlock might say.

  Malcolm cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher and set it going. Of late the steady humming it made had been reinforced by an irregular drumming and it shuddered violently every few seconds. With no one repairing anything any more the best plan was probably to let it run until it blew itself up. _Western Mail__ in hand he strolled to the cloakroom. Some delay, but no real bother there, in fact all was well- as far as he knew. No, all was well. He had started telling people who asked him how he was keeping that he was all right as far as he knew, and then stopped when he realized that that was as much as was meant by just saying you were all right. As if it mattered.

  Gwen had about finished at her dressing-table, squirting anti-static fluid on her tinted lenses and preparing to follow with the impregnated cloth. He thought the movements of her hands made them look slightly fat.

  'All right if I take the car? You'll be looking in at the Bible, will you?'

  'Might as well, I thought.'

  'If Peter's there you could give him Muriel's message, perhaps.'

  'Eh? Oh yes. Actually he hasn't been in for a week or two.'

  'One can't help wondering... ' She sat facing him on the oblong padded stool, her spectacles held up to the light. 'Has he ever said if he hands over any cash for his bed and board? Makes any contribution to the household?'

  'Well no. Nobody's asked him, not even Garth. Putting up at Rhiannon's for a bit is what it's called.'

  'For quite a bit - what is it, three months? Fascinating.

  In Wales. Under the same roof as an unprotected female in Wales. And her a widow too. You'd think you were in the twentieth century.'

  'Good luck to them is what I say.'

  'Oh, do you really? It's certainly what I say. I also say it to or with reference to the representatives of the younger generation. I imagine the
lad can practise his trade no less profitably in London than hereabouts. Anything to get out of this dump.'

  'You can call it that if you like,' said Malcolm. 'Personally I feel that any place where two people can manage to fall in love can't be as bad as all that.' .

  'Meaning who? Meaning who?'

  'Well- William and Rosemary.'

  'Ah. Well, of course. Malcolm dear, I was just - I meant that's how William might think of it, as a dump to get out of. I'm very nicely set up here, thank you.' And she smiled at him. 'Sorry,' said Malcolm. He had forgotten to include sonic inverted commas in his run-through of Gwen's special voice-effects.

  She got to her feet after that and brushed down her chequered front. 'Well. Give my love to Charlie.'

  'I will if he's there. He hasn't been in for a bit either.'

  'I'm worried about Charlie, I really am. That evening at Dorothy's, you noticed nothing out of the way but I thought he looked awful. Awful.'

  One of Gwen's things was not only to know better in general but to know better than you did about the people you were supposed to know better than she did in particular. Or so it had more than once seemed to Malcolm, who now said, 'He told me he hadn't been sleeping well for a year or more.'

  'Right, I'm off. Smarty-pants Eirwen could do with some critical comments on the exhibition of alternative Welsh culture at the Dafydd ap Gwilym Arts Centre' - some system of tonal notation would obviously have to be developed to handle stuff like that - 'and then it's coffee and perhaps a glass of lemonade at Sian's. See you.'

  Malcolm went and brushed his teeth in a glancing style, an even less demanding exercise than formerly, now that the lower-jaw one with a hole in it had fallen to pieces on a mouthful of ham at the wedding in the spring. While he shaved he thought about the fact that since the moment when he had brought her the news of Alun's death Gwen had not mentioned him in any way. At first he had put this down to shock or other temporary state, but it had long since been too late for that. For months he had been able to close a conversation with her by an oblique reference, or would find he had done so, not that he had much use for such a weapon. What kind of punishment or self-punishment her silence was meant to inflict he had very little idea, but if she had wanted to remove any doubts he might have been trying to hang on to about whether she had had some son of affair with Alun - well, she had pulled that off in fine style. He had not quite lost the hope that one day a casual pronouncement of the name would touch off an equally casual allusion to that affair, and he could tell her that that was of no consequence and never had been. But he judged it very unlikely. And it was odd how a taboo on a single, less than all-important subject had seemingly turned out to impose a blackout on so much else.