Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Whether I do or I don’t doesn’t come into what I’m supposed to be at. The job you hired me for was to cover the most important musical events, and important judged by musical standards, not by any . . . ’

  One of Harold’s telephones had started an enfeebled rattling, and he picked it up with one small hand while waving me down with the other.

  ‘Yes,’ he said on a high note. ‘Yes. Who? Get her number.’ He replaced the telephone and said to me, ‘All right, what do you feel about just scrubbing where he comes from?’

  ‘Just saying he’s German, you mean?’

  ‘Not saying he’s anything. We’re not handing out publicity material.’

  ‘But Harold, if you’re against the Eastern lot, then surely you—’

  ‘All right,’ he said again, neither impatiently nor coaxingly, in fact in not much of a way at all, ‘all right. We’ll leave it. But, as I say, you must let up a little on these technical terms. Remember, you’re not writing for the profession.’

  ‘Apart from one reference to a slow movement and another to a theme and variations, which ought to be elementary enough even for—’

  ‘Fine. Give Features a ring about five thirty as usual, would you, in case we have to lose an inch or so? Right. That call was for you.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Kitty Vandersomething. Not Mrs Sir Roy Vandervane?’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘He must be worse than ever with that knighthood. Services to music, Services to the Prime Minister’s backside more like.’

  ‘He’s better than that, Harold.’

  ‘Yes, you used to work for him, didn’t you?’

  ‘For his orchestra.’

  ‘Fine. See you.’

  Along the corridor in Features I got the switchboard to put me through to the number Kitty had left there, realizing or remembering now that the Vandervanes had moved some miles north of Hampstead, where I had last visited them a year or more earlier, to a reputedly rather grand establishment on the fringes of the Hertfordshire countryside. After half a minute of ringing tone the distant receiver was lifted, but at first nobody addressed me. Instead, I heard a wordless yelling, loud but some way from the instrument, and a man’s muffled voice saying he would go mad if that noise were not stopped. When the yelling had a little receded, I got my turn.

  ‘Hallo, yes, who is it, please?’ asked the same man’s voice crossly. It sounded coloured.

  ‘This is Douglas Yandell. Lady Vandervane wanted to speak to me.’

  There followed no indication whether these facts had been absorbed, but at the end of another interval, during which the yelling changed to a vague shouting that faded out, Kitty came on the line.

  ‘Is that you, Douglas?’

  ‘Yes, Kitty.’

  ‘Oh, thank God, thank God you’re safe, my darling, my love, and I can start to live my life again’ would not really have been an excessively emotional follow-up to the tone of heroically controlled hysteria in her opening question. But I knew Kitty always talked at that level, and all she actually said, with a mixture of dignified reprobation and a sorrow too deep for any mere words to be adequate, was, ‘It seems ages since we saw you.’

  I agreed, and in no time at all, without any formalistic nonsense about how I might have been intending to spend the rest of my day, I was listening to a fully researched account of how to get from where I was to where she was. She said she absolutely did most desperately need to see me, meaning she wanted to see me and took it for granted that I would come belting up to be seen by her as soon as so informed. Well, presumably there was the chance of seeing Roy as well.

  ‘Is Roy round the place?’ I asked as soon as I could.

  ‘No, he’s not, not at the moment. Actually, it was . . .’ – I had no trouble visualizing the dignified furtiveness of her glance over her shoulder – ‘it’s him I so terribly urgently have to see you about. He’s getting ready for another of his goes, Douglas. He may even have started.’

  ‘Has he told you?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Not the pants again?’

  ‘Yes. How incredible of you to remember.’

  ‘I’ve never forgotten.’

  Who could? Though no stinker, Roy had never been one of the most fanatically cleanly of men except when building up to, or embarked on at any rate the pristine stage of, one of his ‘goes’, as Kitty called his affairs. Over the period since their marriage in 1961, she had learnt to recognize this situation by the stockpiling of pants in his underclothes drawer. Sudden rapid diminution of the pile, accompanied by an equally sudden flurry of oddly timed off-the-premises interviews with foreign journalists, abortive get-togethers with recording-company executives, etc., was the signal that the go was off the ground. Kitty had told me this years before, when I was still working as secretary of the orchestra of which Roy was then resident conductor. On ordinary male-trade-union grounds, I had promptly warned him about this dead give-away, but it seemed that he, unlike myself, had forgotten. Or had he? How could he have?

  I had been considering matters while I listened and talked. It was exactly midday. What I had planned was a walk up Fleet Street for a couple of smoked-salmon sandwiches and glasses of hock at El Vino, a nice noisy afternoon in the flat going through some of the new discs I had to review in The Record-Player, an early dinner at Biagi’s and a trip to the South Bank for a rather routine Bach-Handel concert. And there was always, or rather never, my book on Weber to be hauled past the Early Years phase. But I experienced no real inner struggle. Curiosity, always a powerful motive in matters Vandervanean, won hands down, though I had the sense not to indulge it for the moment. Asking Kitty over the telephone how I could help would have earned me twenty minutes of impassioned and impermeable hints. I said I would come straight away and added, out of more curiosity,

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Oh, that was Gilbert. He’s marvellous at things like that.’

  ‘Who’s Gilbert?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I was turning to go when the features editor, a fat man called Coates with a terrible cough, said to me,

  ‘How was the great man?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Sure I know. I was just wondering how you found him.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘What word would you use to describe being very decent about not paying attention to anything and not caring about nobody being any good?’

  ‘I’d settle for shitty, but then I’ve got a simple mind. Did he cut you?’

  ‘Not yet. He turned political again.’

  Coates drew at his cigarette and coughed terribly. He seemed unaware of any link between these two actions. When he had finished coughing he said,

  ‘Can’t you get the Greek colonels to form a symphony orchestra and come over? It’d kill him. See you next week, if I’m spared.’

  I took an 11 bus along the Strand and got on to the North-Western Line. As the train clattered out of the tunnel beyond Golders Green, and the April sunshine, stronger now, lit up an arbitrary mixture of cut-back greenery and what looked like emergency housing, I pondered Roy’s goes.

  The current crop of them must have started about four years after his marriage, itself product of an ancient go, for it had followed upon his divorce by a first wife. On my last meeting with Kitty, she had said that they were getting worse, in the sense that the girls seemed younger and more awful each time and Roy’s involvement became successively deeper, and I had felt she was right. At that stage he had just come back from an actual week-end – the first such since their marriage – spent with somebody who called herself an actress and singer, but had never been seen or heard performing in either capacity. Kitty had said that she lived in acute hourly dread of some sort of final walk-out, and that she was plunged in despair, and I would have believed her easily if all her worries were not represented as acute dreads, and the tardy arrival of her cleaning lady did not regularly p
lunge her into despair. Anyway, I felt I could understand how Kitty, at forty-six or seven, must feel, and could not understand why Roy, at nearly fifty-four (twenty years my senior to within a week), should have to grow sillier as he grew older, except that his growing wiser would have been unbelievable.

  The train stopped at the end of the line, and I and not many other people got out. Following instructions, I telephoned from a box near the station entrance and gave some either female or effeminate person the news that I had arrived. I was told to start walking and to expect to be picked up by a car. Asked what I looked like, I said – quite truthfully – that I was six foot three with red hair and glasses. I started walking, first up a stiff slope and then down a suburban road, past a garden with an artificial pond and a lot of painted plaster ducks in it.

  Presently a large, new-looking car approached and pulled up rather violently alongside me. I saw that its driver was a young black man, conventionally dressed in dark jacket, white shirt and striped tie, and knew at once that this was Gilbert, as well as being the owner of the voice I had first heard over the telephone. I climbed in beside him. Without looking at me or answering my greeting, he turned the car round and drove off, accelerating fiercely.

  ‘What a nice car,’ I said. ‘Is it yours?’

  ‘You think a stupid nigger could never make the bread to buy himself a status symbol like this.’

  ‘Well, since you mention it, it would be remarkable, certainly.’

  ‘It’s Roy’s car, if you’ve got to know.’

  ‘He is doing nicely for himself.’

  We turned off, climbed a long hill and emerged into an impressive thoroughfare with a wood and then a common on one side and infrequent large houses on the other.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ I asked.

  ‘London.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘You don’t care anyway.’

  A pond, a real one this time, came into view on the common, and the car pulled off the road at one end of a considerable dwelling with plaster urns and large rhododendron bushes in front of it. I remembered Roy telling me he had got the place for a song: yes, a song with mixed choir, double orchestra, brass band and organ. Then I realized that the car had stopped in front of some blue-painted wooden gates, and that my companion was sitting motionless beside me.

  ‘Would you like me to open those?’

  ‘If you think it won’t soil your fine hands.’

  ‘I’ll risk it.’

  I opened the gates and walked into a paved courtyard adorned with small trees in a sickly or dead condition. As I did so, a ferocious barking, diversified at times with a kind of slipping-ratchet effect, broke out within the house. I recognized the voice of the Furry Barrel, the Vandervanes’ red cavalier-spaniel bitch. I had always thought it slightly odd that someone with Roy’s political views should tolerate, let alone adore, as he did, such a reactionary little dog: authoritarian, hierarchical, snobbish, with strong views on the primacy of the family, the maintenance of order, the avoidance of change, the sanctity of private property and, as I was soon to discover, the preservation of barriers between the races.

  The immediate focus of this last prejudice had driven the car in at speed and stopped it as if he had noticed a crevasse a yard in front. He slammed his door, came up to me and said,

  ‘You are an imperialist racist fascist.’

  ‘But how on earth did you know?’

  He referred to my job on the newspaper whose offices I had recently left.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s a white supremacist colonialist organization.’

  ‘Of course, but I’m not an employee of theirs, I just do regular pieces for them. And colonialist music is rather hard to—’

  ‘While you’re still working on behalf of such an organization, you must expect yourself to be called a fascist and so on.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I’ll just have to.’

  Despite what he had been saying, Gilbert’s tone had so far been remarkably free of hostility. His last remark, in particular, seemed to have been intended as a piece of moral suasion. But his face, which I now noticed was of European rather than African cast, and his voice, pleasing in the abstract, turned quite angry when he said,

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a bloody serious accusation, to call you a fascist?’

  ‘No I don’t. Nor a communist or a bourgeois or anything else. I just don’t care about any of that, you see.’

  He looked at me in pure amazement. ‘But these are some of the great issues of our time.’

  ‘Of your time, you mean. The great issue of my time is me and my interests, chiefly musical. Can we go indoors now?’

  With Gilbert following in defeated silence, I went through a glass porch of recent addition where there were a lot of very old coats on an old coat-stand and a lot of empty whisky- and wine-bottles. A further door gave on to a passage. I saw a near and a distant staircase and, fixed to the wall, an empty Perspex box labelled ‘Anti-apartheid Fund’. Preceded, then accompanied, by tremendous barking and growling, the Furry Barrel pattered round a corner and danced about in our way. I bent over her, noting that she had grown still more like a furry barrel (with appendages) since our last meeting. She either recognized me or saw that I was admissible under her pass laws, for she moved on to Gilbert, showing a tooth or two. I could have told him that although her bark might be bad her bite was non-existent, but, no doubt still reeling under my revelations of a moment before, he seemed a good deal daunted by her. At this point Kitty appeared, greeted me and drove the dog away out of sight more or less simultaneously. We entered a drawing-room with a large bow-window at the farther end and Roy’s splendid old Schwander-action concert Blüthner slightly off centre. A young man and a girl were sitting on a couch muttering together. He looked up at my entry, jerked his head and neck in salutation or suppression of a belch, and looked down again, but not before I had recognized him as Roy’s twenty-or-so-year-old son Christopher. The girl, who was dressed like – rather than as, I suppose – a Victorian governess, kept her face lowered.

  ‘Christopher, you remember Douglas Yandell,’ said Kitty. ‘Douglas, this is Ruth Ericson.’

  This time there was no doubt about it: the lad distinctly nodded. The girl glanced at him, me and him again in what might have been sleepy consternation. Kitty’s demeanour overflowed with mute appeal to me not to despise them utterly on such brief exposure.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘How’s Northampton?’ I alluded to the university there, impressed at having performed the feat of recall needed.

  ‘Oh, you know, usual crap. Nothing really gives.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘I’m doing sociology, politics, economics and sociology. I mean anthropology.’

  ‘Ah. Sounds a pretty, uh, all-embracing course.’ I battled to keep out of my voice the senile tremolo I imagined the pair were willing me to put into it. ‘Are you there too?’

  Christopher answered the question I had put to Ruth Ericson. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Darling, if you’re going to show Ruth the garden before lunch I really do think you ought to start soon,’ said Kitty, smiling and blinking.

  ‘Soon, yeah.’

  The two resumed their muttering. Kitty drew me over to the window, from which there was a view of descending lawns, a sunlit wall with trees fastened to it, and some much bigger trees, cedars of different types, farther down. Much farther still were the roofs of the town, looking rather serious over the distant treetops, as if someone in particular had once been beheaded outside its church or unique glassware formerly made there. Nearby, some croquet debris was lying about.

  ‘Where’s Gilbert?’ I asked idly.

  ‘He doesn’t really mean all that, you know,’ said Kitty, illuminating the truth that not all types of egotist are unobservant. ‘He feels he has to say things. His friends go on at him so if he doesn’t. The white ones more than the black ones. He�
�s terribly nice when you get to know him.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘He’ll have gone back up to Penny and Ashley. They’re absolutely marvellous with him, both of them.’

  I retained a very clear picture of Penny, Roy’s other and elder child by his first marriage; indeed, if possessed of the least graphic skill I could that moment have dashed off a rough scale-drawing of the outward semblance of her breasts, which I had once unsuccessfully tried to fondle in a taxi between a concert of Roy’s and the subsequent party at Hampstead. Ashley Vandervane was an altogether different case, the comparatively recent joint issue of Roy and Kitty, whom I had barely seen at any time and had quite forgotten about. I tried to conceal this.

  ‘He’s what, he must be four now?’

  ‘Just turned six.’ She gazed at me with rather too rich a mixture of emotions, so that I hardly knew whether she regarded her only child with pride-plus-grateful-humility or with apologetic horror. Then she said very eagerly, ‘Would you like to see the house?’

  ‘Later on, perhaps,’ I said, in the hope of avoiding such an ordeal. ‘But it, uh, it looks jolly nice. Must cost a packet to run, though.’

  ‘We’re managing. You know, Douglas, it’s quite frightening how much Roy earns now. He’s really arrived. Oh, we know he’s had the respect of the musical world for years and years, but these days he’s a national figure, in the top bracket. And without lowering his artistic standards.’

  At this opportune point, the couple on the couch, probably feeling that enough time had elapsed for them not to be thought to be leaving because they had been asked to leave, left. Kitty at once turned an overmasteringly urgent face on me, but switched it off again as fast and told me to have a drink. When I demurred, she pleaded that she must have a drink herself to talk to me properly and could not drink alone, or should not, or would not, or one of those. I mentioned beer and she went out.

  I was glad to see and hear that Roy was doing well. He deserved to be, in a ‘musical world’ in which so few people deserved to earn literally as much as their daily bread. It was more doubtful whether that world had ever accorded him its highest respect, but he had always been more or less grudgingly admitted to be well trained and conscientious. He could get a better performance out of the average orchestra than some conductors who perhaps surpassed him in musicianship, by means of charm, or alternatively by means of doing a certain amount of comradely swearing at rehearsal, buying drinks for the section leaders, and similar stratagems. His career as a solo violinist, never very distinguished, had ended early, though not so long ago he had still been quite creditably taking on a Vivaldi or a Mozart concerto at charity jamborees and the like. He had been, possibly still was, a composer too, of what I had heard unkindly described as a sub-Rachmaninov persuasion, to be sub-whom was not, to me, any sort of disgrace. His pieces were not often performed, apart from an early and sugary Nocturne for fiddle and strings, plus a xylophone and one or two other novelties of that period, or the one just before. This had been turned into a popular song about 1950, and had recently enjoyed a fresh lease of life, or somnambulism, as that sadly different thing from a popular song, a pop song. As the latter, it must have contributed not a little to the frightening amount he was alleged to be now earning.