Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘If buying a pair of underpants makes you want to wear a false beard, how do you manage when you take her out somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t. Take her out anywhere. Do you think I’m a bloody fool?’

  ‘What do you do, then?’ I asked, hoping he would not insist on an answer to his question.

  ‘Stay under cover. Occasionally I go to her flat, though there’s a lot of room-mate trouble there. On the up-grade, too. Or I borrow a flat off someone. But that’s tricky in a different way. I only know a few people with flats well enough to ask them, and most of those know Kitty too, and go British on me if I do ask them. And then the ones I can ask are always the ones who’d talk about it. It’s odd how strictly that rule applies.’

  With an air of philosophic gloom, he led off down an overgrown path that proved to be two or three inches deep in rotting leaves. My forebodings, however, had vanished.

  ‘If that’s all you – I mean, you’re welcome to my place any time with a bit of warning. And I can keep my mouth shut, as you know.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Duggers, I’ll take you up on that,’ he said, making it as clear that this was not the favour as turning round and bawling the news in my face would have done, and feeding my forebodings back to me in mint condition.

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Good God,’ I said, largely out of respect for the accuracy of Kitty’s observation.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Well, nothing at all really, I suppose, though it did strike me that it’s somehow a bit young.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? I do wish you’d make an effort to get out of this habit of thinking in categories all the time. The whole generation-gap idea’s just an invention of the media and the Yanks. You obviously don’t know the first thing about youth in the true sense. You’ve no conception what it’s like, what it knows, what it can do.’

  The path had turned a corner and begun to climb back towards the house. We moved on to the lowest of a series of lawns, rather squashy underfoot. I was enjoying the garden and the air and sun, but was clearly getting nowhere with the favour. I plunged on nevertheless.

  ‘Is it just youth you’re talking about, or this lot of youth?’

  ‘The whole bit. She’s shown me so much I’d never even suspected the existence of before.’

  ‘Really? What sort of thing do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, everything – ways of feeling, ways of seeing.’

  ‘Not ways of hearing too, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, bugger off, Douglas. Of course she likes pop; they all do. And if you look into it at all, I mean the good stuff, Led Zeppelin, say, not Herman’s Hermits, you’ll come across a surprising amount of real music. But I suppose you wouldn’t accept that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘School of thought!’

  This phrase I recognized as one of Roy’s obscenity-savers, or fuckettes, to which he was prone in moments of stress. His use of much greater amounts of genuine obscenities alongside them, whatever his company, inclined me to feel that here was no outcropping of prudery, more likely just the relic of a childish habit, originally taken up as a way of observing the letter of some law of home or institution. To qualify as a fuckette, a phrase had to have annoyed him at some stage of his life, and this in some cases could be fairly positively identified. School of thought itself, for instance, might spring from some middle-period academic experience; sporting spirit, another favourite, from a slightly earlier epoch. Christian gentleman, I had established through research, had been an admiring description of General Franco at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and I had often imagined Roy, baulked of any more active form of defiance, growling it out from the Barcelona hospital bed where he had lain with appendicitis and its aftermath during the autumn of 1937 – all but the first few and last few hours, in fact, of his stay in the country.

  After a silence, Roy was going on, ‘She likes jazz too. She hears different things in it from what we hear, but she likes it.’

  ‘Good for her. Who is she?’

  ‘Nobody you know,’ he said, spelling out by his tone the fact that who she was was important.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got to give you one thing. It’s good going for a man, uh, of your general—’

  ‘An old shag like me to have it off and go on having it off with a kid of nineteen.’

  ‘Yes. But I meant more than that. Not just the having it off, but keeping her happy with never going out with you, no parties or flash restaurants, none of the perks of being Sir Roy Vandervane’s bit of stuff. That’s new with you, isn’t it, by the way, Roy, keeping the whole thing dark, except from the family? Kitty was telling me—’

  ‘There are special circumstances.’

  ‘No doubt. But she must be an unusual kid of nineteen, especially by today’s standards, to put up with being kept indoors like that. Or has she got another bloke who does take her about?’

  We had reached the top lawn and were moving across it to the courtyard. Now, abruptly but abstractedly, Roy turned and began pacing back the way we had come. I joined him, certain that the favour was about to declare itself.

  ‘She’s not putting up with it. Every time I see her she spends longer complaining about being hidden away. Any moment now she’ll refuse to come to bed with me unless we go out in public. And I can’t have that. Not just the two of us on our own.’

  ‘So it’ll have to be the four of us, you and she and Penny and I disguised as you and your daughter’s girl-friend and your daughter and her girl-friend’s boy-friend who also by a happy coincidence turns out to be an old friend of yours. Very neat. Cosy, too.’

  He showed no appreciation of my acumen. ‘It’s the only thing I can think of. I was at my wits’ end until you happened to turn up today. Her putting me off this morning was all part of it, you see. Bloody war of nerves.’

  ‘It strikes me that Gilbert would be far more your man. Penny likes him. Presumably. And then he’s, uh, he’s more the right age and everything.’

  ‘I’ve already asked him.’

  ‘And he turned you down.’

  ‘Flat. These . . . chaps can be very puritanical, you know. Result of all the bloody Nonconformist propaganda we pumped into them to keep them quiet while we were exploiting them.’

  ‘There’s quite a few it hasn’t rubbed off on so’s you’d notice, from what I hear.’

  ‘Well, it’s rubbed off on him. He won’t do it.’

  Roy kicked savagely at an already disintegrating croquet ball and waited for me to make a start on the huge list of objections to his proposal.

  ‘It’s grotesque.’

  ‘It may sound a bit on the grotesque side to you at this stage. When you’ve thought about it, which I want you to do before you decide, then you’ll see it won’t look in the least grotesque when we do it, not even to people who know us, assuming there are any of those round the place.’

  ‘It would feel grotesque.’

  ‘You’ll get into the way of it.’

  ‘Gilbert wouldn’t like me taking his girl out on expeditions he already thinks would be immoral.’

  ‘One expedition. No, really, Duggers, I promise you that. Just to give me time. And what can he do? Go for you or Penny with a knife? He’s not that type.’

  ‘No. Yes, there is that. But what about her? She can’t stand me.’

  ‘Oh, balls, that’s all juss the way they go on. You know, cool. I suppose you know about cool? Of course you do. She’ll come like a shot if I . . . put it to her in the right way.’

  ‘You’re proposing to bribe your own daughter to do camouflage duty so that you and your mistress can have an evening out against her boy-friend’s wishes and behind her stepmother’s back.’

  ‘Mistress, eh? By gad, sir. Not bribe. And it’ll do Gilbert good to have a bit of opposition. And the stepmother part’s just what she’ll like about it.’

  ‘She oughtn’t to, and you oughtn’t to put her in that situatio
n.’

  ‘I see we’ve got more than one puritan round the place. No, honestly, I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t care for how she feels about Kitty either, believe me. It’s a fact, that’s all. And she’s exactly the type, Penny is, to be much nicer to her after something of that sort. Anyway. I know all this makes me look a right shit, and probably be a right shit, and I don’t want to, but I am in love with this curious little creature, and perhaps that doesn’t justify anything, but you can’t imagine how it makes me look forward to each day, and really want tremendously to work, which hasn’t happened to me for years. I can assure you. You know, it’s true the young deserve a bit of special tolerance and understanding, because they’re young and in conflict and have this different vision, but poor old sods at my time of life deserve it too, or anyway we need it, just starting to shape up to the idea of being dead or ole men. It’s all right for buggers like you. In the middle. That’s the place to be, by Christ. Now let’s drop it. What do you say to K.481?’

  ‘Is that the one in E flat?’ I asked torpidly.

  ‘Yeah. Come along.’

  He led me away and to the drawing-room. Christopher and Ruth got to their feet respectfully at the sight of us, and at once left. Only Penny remained, having finished the chocolates but continuing to read her book, or so it seemed while Roy and I tinkered about and finally got into our stride with the Mozart. Then, during an undemanding bit of accompaniment, I saw that she had not turned a page since we began. Very few women outside the profession take any kind of interest in music at all, and the idea that a girl like Penny might be a secret listener surprised me so much that I nearly muffed the passage of modest bravura that then confronted me. After that I played at my very best, and we rounded off the first movement really quite creditably.

  ‘Bloody good,’ said Roy. ‘Nicely done, old lad. You certainly have been doing a bit of work.’

  ‘So have you.’

  ‘Oh, glad it shows. I’ve been reasonably hard at it for the last couple of months now. One of the results of, uh, feeling pleased with life.’

  ‘Are you building up to something public?’

  This plainly scored a hit, but his damage-control unit lumbered into action at once. ‘Not really, no. More for the satisfaction than anything else. I may have some sort of charity do in the autumn, but it’s all quite vague. I don’t know where I might be by then.’

  Penny turned a page of her book and caught his attention.

  ‘I say, Pen, do try listening to this next bit. First-rate stuff. I can’t think why it isn’t better known. Quite short.’

  As an eviction order, this could not have been surpassed. On her way to the door I heard Penny mutter something about having to help Kitty, which I thought was fulsome of her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Roy when she had gone. ‘Touch me not, what? One simply can’t reach thack girl.’

  ‘Doesn’t Gilbert reach her?’

  ‘I suppose he must, here and there, but it doesn’t seem to make her any easier to live with. Still, you can’t blame her, can you?’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘This bloody awful society. Simply doesn’t offer anything to anybody with any kind of sensibility or creativity or . . . I know you think it’s absolutely unimprovable, of course.’

  ‘I don’t think anything about it.’

  ‘Precisely. Let’s get on, shall we?’

  The slow movement went rather less well, largely because, with Penny out of the room, I was free to think about the favour and whether to take it on. Curiosity, as always, said yes. What said no most loudly was the thought of what a fearful evening it would be. Penny’s recent performance had amplified this objection. Halfway through the finale, the sight of Kitty coming into the room decided me. No.

  Kitty was so good about not interrupting or distracting us, her mouth thinned and eyes narrowed with concentration as she fetched, opened, deployed and started on some sewing, that Roy and I had to work hard to prevent the closing pages from degenerating into chaos. We finished approximately together. Kitty hurled down her sewing and clapped in the childish mode, hands pointing the same way instead of across each other at right angles.

  ‘I do wish I’d been able to be here for all of that,’ she said in a faint voice designed to show something of what the frustration of this wish had cost her.

  ‘What?’ Roy cupped his hand behind his ear, either not having heard or countering the faint-voice tactic.

  ‘I said I do wish I’d been able to be here for all of that,’ shouted Kitty, no elaborate mouthing about it this time.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He put his Stradivarius back in its case. Kitty, her neck looking several inches longer than it had a moment before, picked up her sewing again. I got to my feet and looked round the room, which was furnished with a hi-fi set-up, a mahogany sideboard that had a marble top visible here and there among bottles, a science-fiction giant lily or two, some bloated china cats, and framed posters of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, a nude couple making love and other key figures of the time.

  Behind me, I (quite distinctly) heard Kitty say, ‘Darling, I wonder if you’d have a word with Ashley about the bathroom.’

  Roy answered, ‘Have a word with him about what?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d have a word with Ashley.’

  ‘That was the bit I heard. Have a word with him about what? I heard the bit about having a word with him.’

  ‘About the bath . . . room.’

  ‘What about the bathroom?’

  ‘Darling.’ Kitty sounded relaxed to the point of imminent sleep. ‘Would you have a word with Ashley about it?’

  ‘I know! I know! I heard the bit about have a word with him about the bathroom. What about the bathroom? Christ – what is it about the bathroom that you want me to have a word with him, Ashley, about?’

  ‘Really, darling. About peeing in the bathroom. That’s what I want you to have a word with him about. If you would.’

  He howled like a wolf, his usual method of indicating belated comprehension, and said, ‘There at last. You want me to have a word with Ashley about peeing in the bathroom.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kitty in a voice full of lines of strain and glazed eyes and skin stretched tightly over cheekbones.

  There was a pause, during which Roy nodded his head a good deal and I began to wonder, for the first time in my life, whether the experience of listening to the whole of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony might not have something to be said for it after all. Then Roy asked,

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Oh! Tell him not to!’

  ‘I’ve done that and he goes on peeing.’

  ‘Use your authority.’

  ‘How? What authority? We agreed he’s not to be punished and we can’t go back on that. I’m not suggesting for a moment we go back on that. But what sort of word can I have with him? I’m not asking rhetorically, I can assure you. I really would like to know.’

  ‘Could I make a telephone call?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly, old lad.’

  Roy took me across the hall to his study and departed. It was a small room on which some sound-proofing had been done, not enough to keep out the faint wails and solid thumps of pop from the floor above. Some thought, perhaps too much, had gone into the selection and arrangement of objects on view: photographs of Brahms and Castro, small busts of Beethoven and Mao, copies of Hutchings on Mozart’s piano concertos and Marcuse on liberation, posters announcing a Nikisch concert in 1913 and an anti-American demonstration in 1969. I telephoned the airline office where somebody called Vivienne worked (where I had first met her, in fact) and arranged to pick her up at her flat for some supper after my concert, which was taking place conveniently close by. As I talked, I noticed a sheaf of music manuscript lying on a miniature upright piano across the room, and hurried to pick it up the moment I had rung off.

  It was several pages long, unfinished, in Roy’s hand: a quartet, or chamber concerto for violin, with parts fo
r sitar, bass guitar and bongoes. Across the top of the first sheet Elevations 9 was written, perhaps by way of title. I felt a particular loathing for that 9: either there were eight other Elevations or the numeral was arbitrary, a piece of decor, which was nearly as bad. I studied the violin part for a few moments. As far as I could tell, which was probably far enough, it called for some virtuosity but not much – not too much, anyway, for a trendy old idiot of a fiddler who until quite recently would have had, not the sense, but the sense of style, to refrain from musical adventurisms like writing a sort of pop tune (as I now saw it to be) with a classical-type violin obbligato to be performed by himself – who else? A first-rate example of the not-lowering-artistic-standards Kitty had talked about.

  Then I thought I must be going too fast and far. There was no real reason to suppose that Elevations 9 was anything more than an exercise, an experiment, or even a parody, designed to raise a laugh or so as part of some cod mélange at a charity do. But, to a Roy who went on as he now did, that would be inadmissibly square. And an exercise for its own sake, with no thought of performance? Hardly Roy. And the amount of practising he had so clearly been doing. Then why had he . . . ?

  I went quietly out into the hall and at once caught sight of what I had been certain would be there: a perfectly good telephone, in working order, as it proved. I returned to the study and stared at the pages of manuscript. Yes. By God. I (representing the orthodox musical public) and they were the artistic equivalent of Kitty and the pants. Flaunting it. I went on staring, mostly into space.

  After a couple of minutes I looked at my watch. Five thirty exactly. I dialled the newspaper and soon got Coates’s cough, then his voice.

  ‘We’ve had to lose half an inch, Doug.’

  ‘The half-inch about where Kohler comes from and where he studied and the rest of it.’

  ‘That’s the one. Reasons of space, of course.’

  ‘You or him?’

  ‘Well, both, in a way. He was in here when we were making up. Sorry, I didn’t realize.’

  ‘Is he in his office now?’