Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  Her going-out apparel, when she came to put it on, was something of a disappointment. Most of it consisted of a familiar dress in good taste – dowdy and featureless, in other words, and so forgettable that the eye slid glumly off it at once. As often before, I tried to define its colour, but got no further than locating it in some nameless region between brown and purple. She had tried to liven it up with a shiny green belt, a neck-scarf of a different green, a sort of head-band in a third green, but it would have taken a necklace of shrunken skulls and a nose-ring to do the job effectively. I put on a suit. Over biancos and soda in the sitting-room, she said, in a chatty tone,

  ‘You’ve got someone else, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve had someone else. Saturday night. How did you know?’

  ‘You looked at me before we . . . started. Usually, well, I suppose you must see me, but you don’t look. Is she as pretty as me?’

  ‘About the same. I mean she’s not at all the same, but she is pretty.’

  ‘Is she as reasonable as me?’

  ‘My God, no.’

  ‘Is she as good as me?’ Her eyes flickered towards the bedroom in what was, for her, a flamboyantly lewd gesture.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ (That felt like a lie, but perhaps I had not made allowance for the first-time excitement of that night.)

  ‘What do you want her for, then?’

  ‘Didn’t I look at you on Sunday and yesterday?’

  ‘You may have done; I didn’t notice. Perhaps you made sure not to then. What do you want her for?’

  ‘Well . . . People can be no prettier than you and not as good and still be pretty and good. And it was late at night. And she sort of suggested it.’

  ‘She sleeps around a lot, then, does she?’

  ‘I don’t know. A bit, I imagine.’

  ‘When are you going to go with her again?’

  ‘I doubt if I ever will,’ I said with verbal truth, though I was not above implying a loftier reason for doubt than Penny’s fairly certain rejection both of me as I stood, so to speak, and of Gilbert’s influence in the matter.

  ‘I suppose she’s younger than me.’

  ‘A few years, but it hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned it.’

  ‘Who is she? What is she?’

  ‘She’s Roy Vandervane’s daughter.’

  ‘Him again. No, not again: still. Phew. Had that black chap come to knock your block off?’

  ‘No, he wanted me to give him a hand with something he’s working on.’

  ‘Easy-going sort of type, isn’t he?’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be round here? What about you and the other bloke? He doesn’t sound anywhere near as pretty as me from what you told me about him, in fact you said so yourself, but I quite see he might be a hell of a lot reasonabler and gooder, but anyway whatever he’s like you’ve got him, so it isn’t fair for you to start minding what I get up to.’

  ‘Yes it is, it’s perfectly fair for me to mind. What wouldn’t be fair would be me going on at you, doing things or saying things, anything at all to try to get you to stop going with her. And I haven’t, have I? I’ve been reasonable.’

  ‘Yes, I give you that straight away.’

  ‘Thank you. The other bloke’s a bit more reasonable than you and just about as good,’ she said, volunteering information for the second time that evening.

  ‘I see. I still can’t make out why you mind.’

  ‘If you can’t, you can’t. Now we’re going to forget it. I won’t bring it up again and I won’t make you think I’m thinking about it even though I’m not bringing it up.’

  Unsurprisingly, she kept her word, denying herself even her smallish mid-week ration of sullenness-cum-preoccupation throughout dinner at Bertorellis’ in Charlotte Street, the showing of the nuclear-submarine thriller I had chosen instead of the Hungarian film about the life of Liszt she had thought I must want to see, and the remainder of the night’s events. Nevertheless, I was betting myself I had not heard the end of her part in the Penny question, and put on an internal red alert when she said at breakfast,

  ‘Oh, Doug, have you got anything fixed for Monday?’

  I got my diary out. ‘Well, half. But I can easily not go. But isn’t that the night you go to see your dad?’

  ‘Yes, but I was thinking you might like to come along too. He’s often asked about you.’

  ‘Just the three of us?’

  ‘Yes. I was thinking I could come up here about six, and then’, she said, looking out of the window, ‘we could get on our way about quarter to seven.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll look forward to it.’

  I won my usual battle to prevent Vivienne washing up the breakfast things, saw her off, washed up the breakfast things, wrote a letter and hung about until three short rings at the doorbell signalled the departure from below of Gwyneth Iqbal, who minded my piano-playing, for the accountants’ office where she worked. Accordingly, I sat down at the keyboard at once, although I knew that Fazal Iqbal, who also minded, was still downstairs, and would be for the next hour or so, doing none knew what. But he was tolerant of the piano, because I minded – it seemed to me with better reason – the unsteady wailing, punctuated by explosive clicks, he was in the habit of producing from some apparatus he owned, and I was tolerant about that.

  I took myself through the Beethoven op. 109, first piecemeal and then, after a cup of coffee, entire. At the end, I decided that there was something to be said for the Iqbals’ point of view. Hands had followed brain with fair efficiency, but brain had been sluggish, lazy, allowing eyes to usurp too much of its function. I decided that my favourite excuse to myself for having failed to become a practising musician, my piano teacher’s obstinacy in stopping me from switching to some wind instrument and going for a job in an orchestra, was an excuse and no more. Oh well, bashing piano keys kept one in touch, but in future I had better concentrate on bashing typewriter keys with more elegant and readable results.

  By half past eleven I had had enough and left, in the expectation that some royal occasion or sporting event, or one of those mysterious lemming-like impulses that can urge ten thousand extra vehicles into trying to cross central London inside the same hour, would intervene to use up at least the forty-five minutes I had in hand. Not a bloody bit of it, as Roy would have said. As virtually always in this situation, half the people were using the ring road that morning and most of the others had already left for the Channel ports. The drivers of my successive buses performed with dash and intrepidity, scraping through lights in the last instant of the amber, swinging out into the fast lane and rampaging round Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner as if under notice of dismissal. At two minutes to twelve I was climbing the steps of the Alexandra Hall. In the foyer, a small-headed fellow in uniform came over to bar my way with an air of undifferentiated hostility. Almost at once he recognized me and changed his air to one of differentiated hostility.

  ‘A rehearsal is in progress,’ he said.

  ‘So I understood from Sir Roy.’

  The man’s head seemed to shrink a half hat-size or so. ‘There’s a round dozen of them in there already, sitting about.’

  ‘I’ll have company, then.’

  ‘Name?’

  After some Yandell-Randall?-Yandelling, he went through an inner conflict, decided against asking me to submit to a search, and let me pass. I took a seat about a third of the way down the auditorium, as indicated by the acoustics of the hall. Roy, on the rostrum with score and baton, was in shirt-sleeves, both shirt and sleeves flamingo-hued and ruffle-adorned in a mode that might have appealed strongly to Vivienne. The orchestra were giving him their close attention.

  ‘First oboe,’ he was saying, ‘remember not to take that minim off till the next beat. In the passage in general, the wood-wind balance is much better now, excellent, in fact, but I’d like just a shade more from third and fourth clarinets and a touch less from first flute. Strings, overall, a little more warmth if you
can. Try to sing. Oh, I know a lot of silly sods go on about singing, but I’m afraid they’re right. I’d use another word if I could, but there ain’t one. But don’t feel you’ve got to give it absolutely every bloody ounce at this stage. In these long works you’ve got to pace yourselves, keep just that little bit in hand, or by the time you get to the finale you’ll be drained dry. Right, we’ll take the whole of the movement straight through now. Okay, everybody? Fine.’

  He drank from a glass that his enemies would have said contained vodka, but which I knew, Elevations 9 or no Elevations 9, Sylvia or no Sylvia, must hold nothing but water. Then he picked up his baton and started them off.

  The movement turned out to be the first movement of the First Symphony: a considerable mercy, seeing that it might so easily have been something broad, full, ample, spacious, massive, leisurely and going on for over half an hour from the Second or the Third. Thanks to some paroxysm of curtailment on the composer’s part, I was in for little more than fifteen minutes’ worth. (It was true that, in a comparable situation, Weber would have gone on half as long and used an orchestra a quarter as big, but then he would have had eight times as much to say.) As the music got into its lubberly stride, I made some attempt to separate it in itself from how it was being interpreted and played, but I had never been very good at this with works on my private never-mind list. At first against my will, I listened to Mahler’s enormous talentlessness being rendered by Roy and the NLSO. As they went on, flecks of seeming talent began to insinuate themselves. Factitious fuss turned itself into a sort of gaiety; doodles in the horns and woodwind were almost transformed into rustic charm; blaring and banging acquired a note of near-menace; even that terrible little cuckoo-motif reflected something more than the great man’s decision to let the world know how jolly preoccupied he had been in those days with the interval of the perfect fourth.

  The ending went off poorly, but that was mostly Mahler, and I could have faulted the ’cellos with a bit of raggedness near the beginning, but all in all it had been a very good performance, approaching the best second-rate, that rare and exalted level to which Roy could decisively lift the orchestra when the concert came and where, I was much relieved to have found, he himself still belonged as he always had. The other listeners – not the crew of rioters at which the microcephalic had seemed to hint, but various attachments of the players – agreed with me. At least, they applauded. So did I.

  ‘Bloody good,’ said Roy. ‘Thank you, all of you. Very nearly absolutely what I want. Now, it’s now getting on for twelve thirty, so we might as well scrub the last half-hour. And everybody’s worked bloody hard this morning and the last couple of days, so unless there’s a lot of opposition I propose scrubbing this afternoon’s session as well. Okay? Ten o’clock Monday, then. Thank you again.’

  A couple of minutes later he came up the aisle, buttoning one of his uneasiness-dispensing overcoatish jackets, and greeted me. I suppressed a qualm at his ready cancellation of the afternoon rehearsal, telling myself that I had just now been full of appreciation of the standard already achieved, and had better stop coming over all officious whenever anybody started derelicting my ideas of his duty. No, not anybody. Getting caught up in Roy’s affairs meant turning into either his accomplice or his aunt, or both.

  We came out on to the steps. The weather had changed in the last day or two, and was making up for lost time with moist grey skies and sudden squalls. Roy’s hair rose and swung to and fro in one of these.

  ‘Well, Duggers, I rather think somewhere near. Somewhere close by, if you follow me.’

  ‘Somewhere quiet, too. We’ve got a lot to discuss.’

  ‘Oh, bugger off,’ he temporized. ‘I’m not discussing anything until I’ve got a gill of Scotch inside me. If then.’

  ‘I thought you had some things on your mind.’

  ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘You said so over the telephone.’

  ‘Oh, did I? Oh yes. Oh, nothing very much. We’ve plenty of time. What sort of row did you think we were kicking up back there?’

  I gave him my views on the run-through I had heard while we made our way round several corners to somebody’s Hostelry and Eating Rooms. Here, the decor turned out to be Vicwardian, not approached in the lukewarm spirit that had shaped the representations at the Islington pub, but carried out with frightening devotion: a bare-plank floor uniformly scattered with a thin layer of sawdust, engraved-glass panels and mirrors at the bar, tables with (perhaps) marble tops and the rest of them made of (perhaps) ancient sewing-machine stands. A whiskered waiter in a plum-coloured velvet waistcoat and ticking trousers took our order: a lager for me and two large whiskies for Roy.

  ‘Well, glad you approve, old lad,’ he said, drinking. ‘I thought they soundig good myself, but when you get to my age, you know, you keep wondering if you can still tell. I could do with a bit of encouragement.’

  ‘Maybe. What you certainly need is a lot of discouragement. Elevations 9 and Pigs Out and all that jazz. No, Roy, I’ve seen the programme and everything. What the hell are you playing at? A bloke like you. When you ought to be—’

  ‘Oh, erosion of personal freedom! I do wish you’d try and fight your way out of this box you’re in about everything stopping when Brahms died. You can’t pretend—’

  ‘No, it stopped with Schoenberg and serial technique, that’s to say apart from the characters who’ve managed to—’

  ‘Don’t let’s start that, Duggers.’

  ‘All right, sorry. But look. What is the point, what do you think is the point, of you getting mixed up in all this pop . . . rubbish? Doing your own thing is a phrase I seem to have heard, or did it go out with wing collars and Frank Sinatra? Anyway, your thing is music. What their thing is I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but I do know it isn’t music. Now. Why do you, of all people, how could you justify trying to mix them up? How are we all supposed to react to it? If we’re supposed to think it’s just a laugh, then we won’t. Everybody you care about won’t. Whose opinion you care about. Or ought to care about. I just can’t . . .’

  ‘Let strine put it this way. Life’s changing, changing pretty fast, so fast you just can’t say where things are going to go. All right, let’s agree, just for the sake of argument, that the whole pop bit’s pretty ropy musically. But what’s musically? That’s changing too. You’ve got to look beyond these bloody categories we’ve all been brought up with. Under late capitalism, there’s bound to be—’

  ‘To hell with late capitalism.’ I felt we had reached an important point, one that had been slopping about in the recesses of my mind for some time – reached it a good deal earlier than was opportune, but reached it we had. ‘All I think you’re really trying to do is arse-creep youth.’

  Roy gave a laugh of full, authentic richness; anybody could make any sort of personal attack on him, which had always been one of the nicest and most disastrous things in his nature. ‘Arse-creep. By Jove, Mr Yandell, sir, you do show an uncommon gift for a racy phrase. Well yes, there is that, and it seems to me quite reasonable in a way, because there are things I can get from youth I can’t get anywhere else.’

  I felt my face turn very tired all over.

  ‘No, I’m not only thinking of the stuff about new ways of seeing I told you about,’ he said, showing what were, for him, stupendous powers of intuition and memory. ‘If you work it just right, with a bit of luck they’ll give you something you really start to want when you get to my time of life. Shut up, I’m talking about uncritical admiration. A very rewarding thing to have, I can assure you.’

  ‘The Furry Barrel will give you plenty of that. I should have thought you’d prefer the critical kind. Or let’s call it reasoned appreciation.’

  ‘That’s good too, and I know I get it from you and one or two other people, and I’m bloody grateful, believe me, and remembering it bucks me up no end whenever I start thinking I’m a failed composer and mediocre fiddler ending up as a hack conductor, but
you see, Duggers, old lad, the point is, through no fault of your own you don’t happen to be ten girls of nineteen or twenty and their boy-friends.’

  ‘Eh? Where do the boy-friends come into it?’

  ‘Well, they sort of eke the chicks out. A girl might give me a lot of bear-oil because she wants to screw me because I’m on the telly, or because I’m a sir, or because she thinks she can twist a platinum bracelet out of me, though there’s not much of that around these days, as a matter of interest, now none of them can tell platinum from plastic. Christ . . . Oh yes, the boyfriends don’t want to screw me, so that puts it on a broad impartial basis. Makes it look like hero-worship. I know it isn’t that really, but I enjoy it all going on. That’s why I arse-creep youth. Mind you, I go for their attitudes and the rest of it as well. Quite a bit, anyway.’

  After a pause, I said, ‘What about Sylvia? Does she give you uncritical admiration?’

  ‘Much more than you might think from the way she behaves on occasions like the other night. No, actually she doesn’t, not a lot. Hardly at all. I don’t really know why she . . . I think she just likes old men. Some of them do, you know. Still, it’s a good thing, her not making with the uncritical admiration. Does something to stop it all going to my head.’