Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Perhaps you just weren’t listening hard enough,’ said Harold with his standard lack of inflection. ‘There was something else, too . . . What was this a concerto for?’

  ‘Orchestra, if you mean that sort of for.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but what was the, damn it, the solo instrument?’

  ‘There isn’t one. It’s a concerto in the sense of—’

  ‘Look, a concerto means there’s a soloist. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert. Even I know that. Anyway, will you check it?’

  ‘No, Harold,’ I said. ‘You check it if you want to, and then if I’m wrong you can send my fee to the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  Harold went on reading, or at any rate lowered his head again. This morning’s going-over had been stern, even on current form. It must have been that he resented the absence of any point he felt he could validly let himself go on: praise of a Cuban viola d’amore virtuoso or North Korean bass-baritone. I began mentally composing my last piece for him, the one after he sacked me, all about the glories of a new Bolivian opera with a white Rhodesian conductor and a mixed cast of Brazilians, Haitians, Spaniards, white South Africans and members of the John Birch Society. I had not got very far with it when the telephone rattled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harold into it. ‘Get someone to bring her up, will you?’ He rang off and looked in my direction. ‘My daughter’s collecting me, so we’ll have to leave it there. Check with Coates about five thirty as usual. And remember to watch those technical terms.’

  I went along to Features and was jostled at its doorway by a small man coming out, white-haired yet wearing a cerise corduroy suit, gamboge Paisley shirt and Goliath-size orange tie. Inside, Coates was talking to Terry Bolsover, the hairy hobbledehoy who wrote for the paper on pop noises: not a bad fellow for all that. I did not join them at once, but remained by the long inner window on to the corridor, intent on a glimpse of whatever sort of person Harold Meers might have for a daughter. And my inquisitiveness was repaid hand over fist, for in less than a minute one of the grey-clad attendants from the ground floor came round the corner from the lift with Sylvia at his side and took her along to Harold’s office. She did not see me.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.

  ‘I hear profanity,’ said Coates. ‘And from a normally restrained source.’

  ‘He’s remembered he got an opus number wrong,’ said Bolsover.

  ‘Worse than that. I’ve just seen Miss Meers.’

  ‘It is a shaker,’ conceded Coates.

  ‘You want to watch it there,’ said Bolsover. ‘She’s not as nice as she looks, from all you hear.’

  ‘No, she’s not. I mean I’m sure she’s not.’

  I had no trouble now in deciding who Sylvia had reminded me of, that first evening at my flat. My imagination boggled away prestissimo while the other two looked at me with mild curiosity. Then Bolsover said,

  ‘Oh, while you’re here, Doug . . . You are a great buddy of this conductor character, Sir Roy Vandervane, aren’t you? I haven’t got it wrong?’

  ‘No. You haven’t got it wrong. What about him?’

  I probably looked appalled at this collocation. Coates turned up his curiosity-level for a second before raising a riot of coughing. Bolsover brought from inside his guerilla-style jacket a leaflet printed in white on purple.

  ‘You’ve probably seen this about the Pigs Out concert on Tuesday,’ he said – ‘Well, there are these other—’

  ‘Pigs what? – sorry.’

  ‘What you’d call a pop group. They do protest stuff mostly, not really serious, just, you know, I want a girl just like the girl that murdered dear old Dad, all this. But then now and again they reckon they’ll show they’re proper musicians too, extending the frontiers of art. That’s where your pal comes in. I’d have thought you’d be sure to get one. Here.’

  I took the purple sheet and read (to put it in plain English) that part of the programme would consist of Elevations 9, written by Sir Roy Vandervane and performed by him with the assistance of members of Pigs Out. Every purported fact about Roy, except for his sex and his committal to the cause of youth, was wrong. I suffered an onrush of conscience about having altogether dismissed this work from my mind, an onrush mitigated by the calculation that Roy himself had probably taken my name off the distribution list of the document.

  ‘Is this Pigs lot any good?’ I asked, handing it back. ‘By the standards of the trade?’

  ‘Not really, no. The lead guitarist’s not too bad. But they’re in the charts all right. Manager and Press agent are okay.’

  ‘I see. Where do I . . . ?’

  ‘I thought you might, well, ask him if I could have a word with him some time between now and Tuesday. How he came to write it, what pop can learn from classical, where it’s all going, this type of stuff. I’d really be grateful if you could just mention it. So if I rang him he’d know who I am.’

  ‘Once you’ve told him what you do you’d get him for as long as you wanted. But I’ll tell him.’

  ‘Thanks, Doug. I really appreciate it.’

  Bolsover left. Coates was telephoning. When he had finished, I said to him,

  ‘Albert, could I have a quick word?’

  ‘Any speed you want.’

  ‘Old Vandervane. I don’t know whether you knew, but Harold’s got his knife in him. Just on general grounds.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, but I can guess about the grounds. So?’

  ‘I’m . . . I can’t quite think how to put this,’ – indeed, I could barely think what I was about to put – ‘but I suspect Harold may have got something up his sleeve for Vandervane. Some bit of no good he can do him, like a snide para in the Diary or a crack at the foot of the leader. If you see anything like that, or get to hear of it, do you think you could tip me off?’

  ‘Sure, but I couldn’t block it, Doug, you realize that.’

  ‘Of course not, but I could warn him or . . . Anyway.’

  ‘Right. You seem kind of jittery or something. If it was anyone else I’d put you down as hungover.’

  ‘Just the sight of Miss Meers,’ I said, telling a version of part of the truth. ‘Who was that I ran into when I was coming in here?’

  ‘New education correspondent.’

  I now had two extra, or extra pressing, reasons for getting hold of Roy, which I had not succeeded in doing since the night of the favour. In the intervening four and a bit days I had not, admittedly, tried as hard as I perhaps might have done. I had telephoned his house three times, finding Kitty at the other end on each occasion, and getting twenty, forty and twenty-five minutes respectively of formless lamentation with a rebuke or two thrown in – why had I let things reach this pass, not let her know before that things had reached this pass? I explained, working under adverse conditions, that I had hoped to exert some influence on Roy and to have something concrete to tell her, but in vain. This was broadly accurate, in that just to report and be told that Sylvia was awful would not have been worth either of our whiles, but I was relieved when she resumed formless lamentation without having asked me just what pass I myself thought things had reached, and so forcing me to lie: nothing but trouble could come of that revelation. As regards what pass things seemed to Kitty to have reached, I was still in doubt, at the end of the combined eighty-five minutes, whether Roy was at the stage of ordering the drink for an elopement reception, starting to drop the occasional complaint that life at home left something to be desired, or in between. Anyway, where was he? Kitty promised, with maximum fervour, to get him to ring me; I left messages at Craggs’s, at his agents’, at the hall where he was rehearsing Gus Mahler and everywhere else I could think of, with no response. He was lying doggo, no doubt aware that our next meeting would entail my telling him something of how I felt about Sylvia and his invawvement with her.

  After leaving the newspaper office, I got through some hock and smoked salmon at El Vino with my colleague on the Custodian, went ba
ck to my flat and spent the afternoon with my eyes on my Weber notes and typescript and my thoughts on the Roy question. By degrees, I decided that Penny must have been exaggerating, or else I had done so in my own mind. Just talking about going off with that thin-lipped savage might well have been just talk, even though what sounded like just Roy’s talk had a way of quitting that state, as a piece of apparently very much just talk about writing a Vietnam demonstrators’ marching-song had proved a couple of years earlier: mercifully, it had never caught on. I also decided that it was less important to stop him going off with Sylvia than to stop him performing Elevations 9. The latter project was also the more straightforward: breaking his arm on the way to the concert would wrap the whole thing up beyond argument.

  At half past five I got through to Coates and found, much to my surprise, that my piece was going into the paper entire. Not only to my surprise: editorial toleration of my existence must indirectly imply, either that Sylvia had not yet said anything about her doings with my friend Vandervane, or that the news had been divulged and welcomed, or that the Martians had landed. I determined to put the whole thing from me until the morning. Vivienne was due at six or thereabouts, as soon after her office closed as transport conditions would allow. I was ready for her in more senses than the usual one or two.

  At ten to six my doorbell rang. No head and shoulders were visible through the glass panel downstairs, but Vivienne often moved aside in this situation to look at the flowers and shrubs and such that some forgotten toiler had planted in the small front garden, and on opening the door I really quite narrowly missed embracing Gilbert on the front step.

  ‘May I have a few words with you, please?’

  ‘A few, by all means. I’m expecting someone shortly.’

  ‘Then I can return at any convenient time.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. Come on up.’

  In the sitting-room, Gilbert refused a drink but accepted a chair, leaving on the piano the two paperbacks he had been carrying; the top one, I saw, was called Bringers of the Black Dawn. He was frowning worriedly and his clothes, which had been in noticeably good order on our two previous meetings, had a second-hand look.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked.

  He shook his head very slowly at this dismayingly facile view of the present occasion. After that, he sighed. When he had quite finished doing so, he said, ‘The situation of the Vandervane household has reached the brink of chaos.’

  ‘That’s where it’s been as long as I can remember. Still . . .’

  ‘In most ways, I must admit, it’s none of my concern. Roy’s private life is of course his own affair, and the lines on which the family behaves are not my business. However, what I must consider are Penny’s interests. It’s essential, absolutely essential, that she must leave the house as soon as humanly possible. The tension and the awful feelings there are destroying her.’

  ‘I know what you mean. But I think you’ll have a job getting her to go.’

  ‘I’ve been having such a job for nearly two months now, without any success. At first she was saying there was no money and no place for us to go, which was true, but it was an excuse. Then last week I got the news that the Arts Council will give me a grant to finish my London Suite. With good management, it’ll be enough for both of us until the book’s published. And a friend will lend us his flat for a few weeks, at least. But Penny refuses point-blank to budge.’

  ‘I see. But would you mind coming to the point? As I say, I’m—’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Sporting spirit, I thought to myself. Christian gentleman. I wanted to dash out into the street before Gwyneth Iqbal from the flat underneath could add herself to the majority of people in the Home Counties currently needing my help. ‘What the hell can I do?’

  ‘Believe me, Mr Yandell, if there were any other person I could ask, any whatsoever, I’d ask him. There just isn’t. You’re the only person I know who might be able to persuade Penny to leave that household.’

  ‘If you can’t shift her yourself, I don’t see what difference I could make.’

  ‘You’re white, Mr Yandell.’ Gilbert stated this as a fact, with none of the resentment or scorn that might have been expected of him. ‘You and she have grown up in the same culture. Therefore in some ways you know her and understand her better than I can ever hope to do. Perhaps you can think of arguments that I can’t think of. You can make an appeal to your mutual heritage. You’ve known her family. Please try. The poor girl’s in a quite desperate state. And I’m desperate myself, too.’

  ‘I don’t think she’d even talk to me.’

  ‘I think she would. She enjoyed what took place here last Saturday night.’

  ‘Did she, now? Had you given your permission for that?’

  ‘Not as such. Not specifically. She’s a free agent. My only stipulation from her is to answer truthfully any questions I ask her. You see, except in this one admittedly vital matter of our departure I have considerable influence over her. Which . . . I take it you do find her attractive?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I gathered from her that she told you that your association with her, such as it was, must not continue. I think I could influence her to change that decision, within limits. Let’s say one or two times.’

  ‘Good God,’ I said listlessly. ‘That doesn’t sound a bit like you. What I know of you.’

  ‘What you know of me isn’t much. But up to a point I agree. But I said I was desperate, and desperate men do many strange things. I’m coming towards the end of my tether, Mr Yandell.’

  ‘You’ve been living at the Vandervanes’ too long, Mr Alexander.’

  ‘It’s a distressing environment.’

  ‘I meant more than that. All right, I’ll talk to Penny, but you’ll have to fix everything up yourself. I’m not going to talk her into being talked to.’

  ‘Agreed. Many thanks.’

  ‘If I were you I’d clear out from up there right away, Penny or no Penny.’

  The doorbell rang. So, a moment later, did the telephone. I asked Gilbert to let my visitor in as he left and to get in touch with me as soon as he liked. He picked up his books and went. I lifted the receiver. It was Roy.

  ‘Hallo, Duggers, you old sod, how are you?’ He spoke with the heartiness-in-depth to be met with in persons laying off at the start of the evening for being fighting-drunk later.

  ‘Fine, thanks. How’s Miss Meers?’

  ‘Oh, she’s . . . Oh. Who told you?’

  ‘Nobody. I saw her in the office, going along to see her dad.’

  ‘Oh. You haven’t – no of course you haven’t. Well. Now you know, anyway. We’ll talk about it. Duggers, I’m sorry I’ve been out of the picture, but I’ve been up to my neck, what with old Gus and the Royal Commission and, uh, Miss Meers herself. Haven’t had a bloody minute.’

  ‘What’s this Royal Commission?’

  ‘I thought I’d told you about it. Endless discussion, entirely about what’ll be discussed at future discussions. You can imagine. The silly old bugger from the—’

  ‘What’s it on?’

  ‘On? You mean the Commission. Oh, you know, it’s supposed to be dealing with youth problems, crap like that. Load of old rubbish, but somebody’s got to—’

  ‘They ought to be able to get a lot of help from you, anyway.’

  He gave a rich but rather brief laugh. ‘Yes. Look, are you free at lunchtime tomorrow? I thought we might have something to eat and drink and a natter. One or two things on my mind.’

  I decided against asking him if Penny was one of the things, on the grounds that to do so would only warn him that she was going to figure prominently on our agenda tomorrow, thus giving him time to prepare his smoke-screens and diversionary sallies. So I said simply that that would be fine and that I would, as requested, turn up at the Queen Alexandra Hall, where he was rehearsing the NLSO, round about twelve fifteen the following day. Perhaps, I reflected as I ran
g off, it was Roy’s system of total permissiveness towards himself that made him such agreeable company; how odd that permissiveness directed elsewhere should have such different results.

  Where was Vivienne? Repudiating Gilbert’s accusations of white supremacist colonialist fascism on the doorstep? No, here she was, severe and sexy together in her uniform, carrying a canvas bag of the same olive-green colour and with the same airline insignia. In it, I knew, were her overnight things and whatever wondrous clothes she intended to wear later. We exchanged the cousinly kiss that was as much as she allowed herself or me on reunion, even with bed dead ahead. It was a warm evening, but her cheek was cool.

  ‘One of those Pakkies from down below let me in.’

  ‘Actually he’s not a Pakky, he’s a West Indian, and he was from up here.’

  She had taken off her fore-and-aft cap and now took off her jacket, so that I had to concentrate slightly when she said, ‘I thought he was a bit black for a Pakky. Friend of yours, is he?’

  ‘Not exactly. He’s Roy Vandervane’s daughter’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh, him. Doesn’t he mind?’

  ‘Why should he? In fact I’m sure he’s all for it.’

  ‘I meant him minding his daughter having a black boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I realized now why I had not simply agreed that Gilbert was a Pakky from down below and left it: because of the pleasure to be got from hearing Vivienne expound her opinions on almost any topic or situation. ‘He’s very progressive about everything. In favour of racial integration and so on.’

  ‘Why would a white girl want to have a black boy-friend?’

  ‘Why not? But I see what you mean. In this case I think it’s because she hoped her father would object.’

  ‘Oh, nobody has a boy-friend because of a thing like that. And anyway, you just said he was all for it.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said again, having decided in the interval that there was nothing to prevent my stopping her talking at this point and starting her up again at a later one. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Although she must have been expecting it, this made Vivienne blink, if not blush. The question was the first line in what had become a ritual, perhaps puzzling to an outsider, of which the object was to get the pair of us to the brink of bed without the risk of damaging her susceptibilities by some overt word or deed. Now, as laid down, she lifted her head consideringly, narrowed her eyes, said she thought she would wait a little, and walked towards the bedroom with an air of medium-strength curiosity that would have been just right for a home-page journalist on an evening off. This maintained itself, as usual, until I had shut the door after us, and, not as usual, for a moment or two after that. Then it changed out of all recognition. The problem now, if any, was holding her off until there ceased to be any point whatever in holding her off; I surmounted it successfully. What finally ensued went on some minutes over par. This was, by a narrow margin, at her instance rather than mine, as she acknowledged afterwards by apologizing to me. When she pleaded in mitigation that she had been enjoying herself so much that she had not wanted to stop, I forgave her.