Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  Over coffee in the sitting-room, he asked, ‘What are you up to this morning?’

  ‘Well, it was supposed to have been Weber, really, followed by a recording at Broadcasting House at twelve fifteen – Music Diary.’

  ‘Weber can hang on for a bit, can’t he? How long is it till his bicentenary? Ten years?’

  ‘Sixteen. At the present rate of progress I’m going to need all of them. What had you got in mind?’

  ‘Oh, nothing in particular. I thought we might idle about for a spell, ending up at my club, where I could shoot a couple of glasses of champagne into you and send you off in top form to your recording.’

  ‘After which we meet Sylvia and Penny for lunch at the Mirabelle.’

  ‘No, honestly, nothing like that.’ Roy looked neither transparently honest nor pained at having his honesty thrown in doubt, which meant he was being honest, or very, very nearly. ‘How do you feel about Gilbert Alexander?’ he went on. ‘You remember, the chap who—’

  ‘Yes, the black chap. I feel fine about him. Why?’

  ‘He’s bringing the car in for me. I said I’d give him a drink and show him the club. You wouldn’t mind if he joined us?’

  ‘Not in the least, but isn’t he going to find things rather on the fascist racist side at Craggs’s?’

  ‘I don’t think so, much. I’ve explained to him about it.’

  ‘You mean that although it may look fascist and racist it isn’t really?’

  ‘He won’t make any trouble,’ said Roy confidently.

  Acting as the Vandervane all-purpose social diluent had been no uncommon experience during our former association. Today’s usage seemed unlikely, in prospect, to take much out of me, differing in this regard from the favour to which I had alluded a minute before. While Roy put the new Oistrakh on the hi-fi and I carried the rubbish bucket down to the dustbin, the full complexity of my intended role in the favour dawned on me: not only diluent, not just camouflage, but whipping-boy, bodyguard, odium-sharer, listener to tales of the have people and the be people, and probably getaway man, fetcher of police, ambulance, or the rejected fire-brigade. I went over my recording-script and set about hardening my heart against all talk of the favour.

  ‘Are you ready, Duggers?’

  ‘Bit early, isn’t it? I can’t drink champagne for an hour and a half and then go and work.’

  ‘It’s a bloody marvellous day. I thought we might walk down as far as the flyover, or anyway the canal.’

  It was dusty, windy and noisy in the Edgware Road, but so sunny that even the tower blocks on the western side looked inhabitable, gave the illusion of being places where the good life, whatever that might be, was possible to pursue. The buses seemed unusually red and solid, the articulated lorries to be clattering and bouncing to some purpose. I said,

  ‘What’s special about her? I mean I can see she’s young and all that, and you say she knows a lot about whatever it is, and I’ve only met her for a few minutes, but what’s special about her?’

  ‘The chief special thing about her as far as I’m concerned, and I’m the only one who is concerned, is that there she is. I met her and I started going to bed with her. It’s Sylvia and not anybody else that I met and started going to bed with. Oh, the being young thing and knowing things is important, sure, but a lot of other kids have got that. Only I haven’t met and gone to bed with them. Another point about her is that she isn’t my wife.’

  ‘True. Very few people are Kitty.’

  ‘It isn’t Kitty she isn’t, you bloody fool. What she isn’t is my wife. Not the same thing at all. As you get older you’ll find that absolutely straight-down-the-middle sex doesn’t strike you in quite the same way as it did when you started off. It is the same when you get to it, in fact it may be rather better, because you’ll probably have picked up a few tips over the years, got better control and so on, but it doesn’t strike you as the same. And there’s no whacking fucking as a side of life where how things strike you matters at least as much as what the things are really like. Whatever they are really like. Everybody spends much more time being struck by it all than actually on the job. Not juss stuff like looking at tit magazines and pulling your wire, though you can’t leave that out, and not just all the ground you cover in your mind from first catching sight of a bird to throwing the definitive pass, though there’s a lot of that, too. No, it’s looking at your wife in the bath, seeing a bird for a few seconds in the street and wondering how it would be, reading a sex scene in a novel and putting yourself in the chap’s place, or not, and why not, and running into an ex-girl-friend and wondering about that, and wondering how you’ll be functioning in ten years’ time if you still are. All that. Anything to do with sex that isn’t any kind of actual sexual activity, and there’s a hell of a lot of it. Ah, now here’s a bit of luck, by Christ.’

  We had halted on the kerb at the corner of St John’s Wood Road, waiting for a green light or a gap in the traffic. Near us there also waited a man of about thirty, wearing a sober dark suit and a large pair of dark sunglasses. Roy went over to this person and abruptly linked arms with him.

  ‘Don’t you worry, old lad,’ I heard him say. ‘I’ll get you across. Mind you, if I may say so, I think it’s a bit silly of you not to carry a white stick. And you really ought to go into the guide-dog question. I’m told they’re absolutely marvellous. Transform your life.’

  The flow of vehicles stopped for a few seconds, and before the man had thrown off his bewilderment Roy had conducted him to the opposite pavement. Here he shook himself free.

  ‘What the devil are you playing at?’

  ‘That’s no way to talk to somebody who’s juss seen a blime man across the street. Talk about ingratitude.’

  ‘You crazy or what? I’m not blind.’

  ‘Then why are you wearing dark glasses on a day like this? Any reasonable person would certainly assume that you were blind. Wasting my time. Pure bloody affectation.’

  ‘Roy,’ I said when we were side by side again, ‘it is quite a sunny day, you must admit.’

  ‘Not that sunny. This is England in May, not Italy in August.’

  ‘Agreed, but some people have weak eyes.’

  ‘That’s not why that little turd was wearing his blinkers. Pure showing off. You can’t let them get away with it all along the line. Got to keep at them. No, I quite see it would have been better if the sun hadn’t been shining. The trouble is it’s so rarely one’s going to get the chance, with the chum there actually waiting to cross. I’ve been wanting to do that for two or three years, and this is the first time it’s come up. I couldn’t let it go, could I?’

  After we had walked in silence for a time, I said, ‘Go on about how sex strikes you.’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, what I was really building up to saying was, you remember the chap in that Joyce book who went round the streets at night yelling out “Naked women!” to give himself a thrill. And there was some other chap, in some book by a Frenchman I seem to remember, who said he couldn’t read “Girl, 20” in a small-ad column without getting the horn. Well, that was all very bloody well for them. We all went through that stage in our youth. Nowadays, as far as I’m concerned it’s got to be something more. For sex to really strike me. More detailed and off the beaten track. I suppose in one sense it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s something. Take the chaps who after three-quarters of a lifetime of the most boring marital respectability start trying to bugger Boy Scouts, or flashing their hamptons at little girls in trains – I think Aldous Huxley’s got a bit on that somewhere. It’s not that they’d really rather have been doing that right from the start and finely decide they’d better get it done if they’re going to, not just that, anyway. It’s much more that Girl, 20 won’t work any more as a thing to strike them. As a slogan, sort of. Girl, 20 as a reality might be fine for them, but that’s different. Look, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty well knackered with all this walking. Let’s get a taxi, for Christ’s sake.�
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  ‘How does your own case fit into this?’ I asked when we had done so.

  ‘Yes, well I was coming to that, as you may well surmise. Sometimes, you know, you find yourself thinking things over as if you were well, deciding which country to emigrate to, climate versus cost of living, exetra. What about turning queer? you say to yourself. Plenty of facilities, these days highly respectable, pleasant companions, comparatively inexpensive. And a prick is a splendid thing, and a splendid idea as well. It strikes you. The trouble is that in every case it’s got a man on the end of it. Which I’m afraid puts paid to it as far as I’m concerned. Then there’s flagellation. I never even seriously considered that. It strikes you, sure, but what’s it got to do with anything? You might as well play tennis or knit a pair of socks as a way of working up to a screw. And the same goes for those other capers like necrophily and bestiality. No point in even discussing any of them. It would just be flogging a dead horse.’

  I turned in my seat and stared hard at Roy, who twitched a hand and a knee and a shoulder, and muttered to himself.

  ‘Well . . . I mean, that’s only a way of saying it’s of no interest,’ he said defensively. ‘And flogging and dead and horse. Surely you got that?’

  ‘Oh yes, I got it all right. I just wanted to make sure you had. Carry on.’

  ‘Really, Christ . . . Anyway, I was knocking Girl, 20 just now, but it gets about fifteen per cent better as an idea if you can expand it to Girl, 20 and man just old enough to be her grandfather if you assume a soupçon of juvenile delinquency in both generations. And, uh, didn’t I tell you it was Girl, 19? Yes, that’s what I tell most people. I mean the people I have to tell something. Well, between ourselves, Duggers, it’s actually Girl, 17. That jacks it up no end, I can assure you.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Ageing shag tries to stimulate jaded appetite by recreating situation of days of firse discovery of sex plus whiff of illegality, corruption of youth, dirty ole man luring child into disused plate-layer’s hut and plying her with wine-gums and dandelion-and-burdock to induce her to remove knickers and slake his vile lusts. That’s it exactly. No better description possible. Hit the thing right on the nose.’

  I was still a little shaken. ‘Aren’t you taking rather a risk?’

  ‘Yes, there’s that too. You can see why I’ve been keeping her out of sight to some extent. Actually I haven’t been breaking the law much, as far as I know. She doesn’t drink, and anyhow she’ll be eighteen soon, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘How do her parents feel about this?’

  I could see him start to take evasive action as plainly as if he had been a merchantman and I a U-boat. ‘Well, they . . . give her a lot of freedom . . .’

  ‘They seem to, certainly. Do they know about you?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed at the absurdity of this idea. ‘They know she has men, of course, but, uh . . .’

  ‘It might be awkward if they found out, mightn’t it? Where had you been last night before you turned up at my place?’

  ‘Some party. Friends of hers. Quite safe.’

  ‘Who are her parents?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a . . . banker,’ said Roy, eliminating at a stroke one category of employment tenable by Sylvia’s father, and adding with dissimulated relief, ‘Here we are.’

  We descended at Craggs’s Club. Roy shouldered me aside in order to pay, crying out like a man in a film falling off a high building when a florin rolled over the edge of his hand. The driver put his vehicle in gear, revved up and said in a high monotone,

  ‘You Sir Roy Vandervane?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Why don’t you bugger off to Moscow if it’s so bloody awful here?’

  The cab shot away. Roy sighed heavily as we turned towards the steps.

  ‘No use telling a chap like that I spoke out against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘Not the slightest use. He’d think you ought to go just the same.’

  ‘He’s got his ideas laid out in blocks.’

  ‘That must be it.’

  We entered a lofty, squarish hall where a ticker-tape ticked, or rather chattered. Roy went over to a porter who was glaring at us from within a glass-and-mahogany emplacement. Another man, doubtless a member, but resembling a pop singer attired as a City gent, swung past with hanging jaw towards the street. I took in a small fraction of the scores of portraits and groups that covered the walls, feeling anew the shakiness of the whole concept of a population explosion, there having demonstrably been so many more people about a hundred years ago than now.

  Roy rejoined me and we walked down a carpeted passage that crepitated very loudly underfoot. At its end there was an equally tall and much larger room with enough writing materials spread about to supply a hundred compulsive correspondents for the foreseeable future, and sheltering at the moment half a dozen solitary men in slightly different stages of torpor. Roy pushed a bell-push, a youthful white-jacketed waiter came and an order for champagne was given. I looked thoroughly round the room and then at Roy.

  ‘It’s convenient,’ he said placatingly. ‘Somewhere to be between appointments. Good food. It impresses Americans. And you can stay here.’

  ‘With birds?’

  ‘No, but you can cash cheques. And it’s a good alibi spot. Of course I was here, dear. Asleep in the colour-television room. The porters are getting very slack. I’ll have to have a word with the secretary. You know.’

  ‘Speaking of alibis, where were you last night?’

  ‘Here. Frugal, wholesome dinner and early bed. No phone calls; I checked.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. One thing you didn’t go into was the business about you-know-who not being your wife. I can see that Girl, 20 or Girl, 17 don’t come in as that anyway, but what about Girl, 28? I suppose she’d just be too—’

  ‘Let’s leave that until the drinks have come.’

  When they had, we settled in a corner bounded by volumes of Punch and Who Was Who, and Roy began,

  ‘There are two things really. The obvious one about anything up to about Girl, 45 being more striking than your wife, not better in fact, just—’

  ‘I’ve got all that. Let’s have the other thing.’

  ‘Well, that’s simply a matter of you wanting to get away from normal, decent, God-fearing sex and your wife being no good for that. The tone of the thing’s all wrong, the whole context. It can’t be done. Darling, here’s a letter from the Toolboxes asking us down for Easter and you remember how you enjoyed it before when you, I don’t know, uh, pissed in his rain-gauge so shall I accept? And would you give me my hambag off the dressing-table? And could you ring the bloody, oh, paraffin man as you promised and give him hell? And anything interesting in your post? Not really, dear, just the tickets for the Shitshitski recital and the BUM contract and a few clippings and have a look at this and what about going down?’

  I sat on for a moment while a clock at the end of the room struck the half-hour. ‘You mean it’s all so routine, getting up and going down to breakfast and never getting the—’

  ‘Oh, peace in our time, Duggers! Statesmanlike act! Going . . . down. Where have you been? She takes your—’

  ‘Quiet. I know what she takes all right.’

  ‘Allow me to present you with the information that these days it’s called going down.’

  ‘I know what it’s called.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t seem to just now.’

  ‘You threw the phrase at me without sufficient preparation.’

  ‘Did I? Sorry. Let me top you up. Well, you get the point. Girl, anything will do that for you, and other things besides, whereas . . . It’s not so much that she will as that you can ask her to. I suppose it is very much an age thing, too.’ He turned judicial and wise, reminding me that a week or so previously I had read of his forthcoming contribution to a symposium, run by some churchman, on a sexual morality for our (or their) time. ‘I think even somebody like you would admit that one solid, u
narguably liberating gain from the new atmosphere of tolerance, among younger people at any rate, has been the admission of all that type of stuff to the, Christ, to the standard repertoire of what people get up to in bed.’

  ‘So that everything becomes as natural as breathing.’

  ‘Precisely. Where’s Gilbert got to? Normally he’s punctual to a fault. I hope nothing’s wrong at home.’

  ‘Might something be?’

  ‘Something might always be.’

  He looked at me assessingly, and I guessed he was trying to make up his mind whether to present domestic going-wrongness as an inevitable effect of the bourgeois social structure or, alternatively, as a healthy sign of a larger, higher going-rightness just round the corner. But, before he could decide, Gilbert came into the room. I had not noticed his slimness before, nor the ease of his movements. His face, however, was at the moment troubled. He addressed himself immediately to Roy.

  ‘Penny’s here.’

  ‘What! She can’t be. Women aren’t allowed in before five.’

  My immediate thought had been that here was one of the little prearranged surprises that had brought Roy a modest fame in the past, but it was soon clear that his wonder and apprehension were every bit as genuine as his feelings of outrage at such infringement of Club protocol. This, it was next revealed, had not actually been infringed after all, or not yet: Penny had been left sitting in the car, which Gilbert had parked in St James’s Square. In admitting as much, he went out of his way not to offer the smallest comment or suggestion or comfort. Roy gave a sweeping gesture of anger and hopelessness which blended into a jab at the bell.

  ‘What’s she playing at?’ he asked. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She barely announced her intention to make the trip,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Perhaps she felt like a bit of a jaunt, a look round the shops and lunch out somewhere,’ I said, drawing upon myself remarkably similar glances of pitying contempt for such imaginative poverty.

  ‘Come on, Gilbert, what’s she up to? How’s she been behaving? You must have some idea, surely to God.’