Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Roy, I must talk to you about her.’

  ‘What about? What about her?’

  At this very point, some unseen master of timing set in motion a record or tape of a piano playing, at top speed and chock-full volume, a dance song of the ’twenties, impeccably in period by prevailing standards, and not exhaustively offensive, but a distraction for one whose ears had hardly stopped ringing after their ordeal of a few evenings ago. Roy beat me to the door by a yard or two. So how did he manage to stand up to the assault of pop in full caterwaul? – which must be substantially grosser to his senses than to mine or to those of almost anybody else not yet adult when the first bawls began. New ways of hearing? No, such could not exist. Not on the scale required, anyway.

  Outside, I said, ‘Where are we off to now?’ I could sense that I said it rather pettishly. I was not sure I could stand another Roy-directed mystery tour, even a diurnal one.

  ‘Pick up Sylvia in some boutique or other,’ he replied briskly, ‘and then a spot of lunch at the Bolognese. Joint off Knightsbridge.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Pull yourself together, Duggers. Be a man. You can face it. Or if you find you can’t, then you can scream and run away. Not that I can see why. She likes you. Thinks you’re a great wag.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘I quite see you might say she’s got a funny way of showing it, but then you don’t know how she performs when she’s really taken against a sod. And you were going on about wanting to talk to me.’

  ‘So I was.’ Curiosity had already overcome whatever opposition I might have been able to find grounds for. ‘Fine.’ I noticed we had started walking at some speed, and added, without much curiosity, ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Laid up,’ said Roy, briskly again, but with a different kind of briskness. This kind told me at once that his car was being used, or had been burnt down to the axles, by somebody he was not for the moment inclined to have me discuss with him: Gilbert, or Penny, or Chris, or Kitty, or Ashley. Somebody somewhere in his circle.

  We picked up a taxi. Roy, instead of taking his place beside me in the back seat, thrust down one of the folding affairs in the partition that separated us from the driver and threw himself youthfully upon it, perhaps in the hope of suggesting a cultural frontiersman’s indifference to comfort. I asked him,

  ‘Are you inviting me out to a jolly lunch, or do you still feel you need me for camouflage? Because I thought you were just about ready to tear off the mask and stand in the full glare of publicity.’

  ‘How did you come by that idea?’

  ‘Penny. But we’ll get on to her in a minute. Are you thinking of leaving Kitty and setting up with Sylvia?’

  ‘Yes, old lad, between ourselves I rather am.’

  ‘You’re off your head.’

  ‘Yes, so everybody seems to feel. I suppose there really might be something in the idea.’

  ‘She’s terrible.’

  ‘I think I see what you mean. There are times when I almost feel it too. Things you couldn’t know about. For instance, she won’t do anything.’

  ‘Anything? I thought there was very little she—’

  ‘Like cooking or preparing food or tidying up, making beds, all that. The first day I spent with her in her flat, there wasn’t any food in it, just some milk that had gone off and some very quiet biscuits. You could bend them to and fro like wax. Well, we couldn’t go out, you understand, because of being seen, so it ended up with me having to – ended up? Started, with me going out and buying steak and vegetables and stuff. And a bottle of Scotch, I may add. When I brought it all back she wouldn’t do anything to it. Any of it. I was going to have to start from scratch on the potatoes. Fuck that. So I went out again and bought some sandwiches and made-up potato salad and cole-slaw, and then I had to wash up plates and knives and forks for us to eat them with and take the lot to her in bed.’

  ‘How does she manage when you’re not there?’

  ‘Her flat-mate does it or she goes out. She won’t starve, in case you’re worrying.’

  ‘And you want to go and live with someone like that.’

  ‘Oh yes. In all other, in most other respects it was a bloody marvellous day. I can get someone in to shop and cook and the rest of it when we’re out in the open. In fact, it’s the thought of that as much as anything that’s weighed with me over going off with her.’

  ‘I see.’ I also saw that my line of attack up to now was effectively blocked. ‘I suppose you’ve given some thought to the Harold Meers angle. He had it in for you before this ever came up. When he finds out you’re proposing to live with his daughter – if he doesn’t know already – he’s going to hit the roof.’

  ‘He can beat a timp-roll on it with his balls for all I care. What can he do? Get whoever does the John Evelyn column to put something in about which recently knighted veteran conductor is buggering about with which teenage daughter of which prominent Fleet Street figure? If he pisses on me he’s pissing on her too, and himself. And going by the dog-doesn’t-eat-dog principle, that’ll keep the rest of the Press quiet too. I ought to have thought of that months ago.’

  ‘He’ll come up with something.’

  ‘He can’t touch my sex life, or my professional life unless he sacks you, and whoever he got instead would still only be the music chap writing in the . . . Sorry, Duggers, I mean you count because you’re you, but the paper doesn’t in itself, do you follow? Harold bloody Meers doesn’t scare me.’

  ‘Well, he does me.’ I was going to have to switch again. ‘Anyway, Press or no Press, the news’ll get round soon enough. Won’t you mind everybody who knows you and millions who don’t thinking you’re rather a charlie? Undignified? A bit of a joke? Even youth?’

  ‘Yes, I expect I will. Not much, though. Partly because I shan’t look all that much of a charlie. Film stars and people are going off with much younger girls all the time and nobody gives a shit. Or hadn’t you noticed that?’

  ‘I didn’t only mean the age thing. You’re proposing to do something that’s really awful. What about Kitty? And what about Penny? And what about Chris? And what about Ashley?’

  ‘Ashley’s a problem, I agree. There’ll have to be some sharing arrangement worked out there. And don’t think I haven’t thought about the others, too.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I do think, seeing that you’re intending to leave regardless of all of them. Why can’t you just stay put officially and see a lot of Sylvia on the side?’

  ‘No. I’ve had enough of that. So’s she.’

  The taxi was moving up Grosvenor Gardens, more and more slowly as the traffic thickened towards Hyde Park Corner. Ahead, rattlings and crashings came into earshot from where something was being pulled down or put up or excavated. I would soon, yet again, have to start shouting, but we were nearing boutique-land and my chance would be gone.

  ‘If you’ve had enough of it, then pack it in. And how do you mean, had enough? You talk as if you’ve spent the last couple of years fighting in the jungle. What you’ve had getting on for enough of, no doubt, is making other people’s lives a misery while you’re watching. I’m sure Kitty goes on at you all the time about why don’t you shoot her and have done with it and so on. There’s a straightforward answer to that, of course, to do with her going on just the same when the butcher forgets to send the dog’s meat. But now and then perhaps it crosses your mind that crying out before you’re hurt doesn’t actually guarantee permanent protection against being hurt, and that without you Kitty really would be done for – there’d be nobody left in the world for her apart from Ashley, who’s a little monster, thanks largely to the insane way you let him do as he likes all the time, because if you tried to stop him you wouldn’t be so popular with him, and you couldn’t have that, could you? Penny and Chris both despise you for the way you go on in general, but that doesn’t mean to say they don’t love you, or couldn’t be made to again, but if you go off with Sylvia they’ll never forgive you
. I mean that literally. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  I had had some trouble competing with the noise outside, but Roy had taken in every word, his eyes never leaving my face, his head nodding in thought at irregular intervals. Something struck me about his posture on the folding seat; it was uncomfortable, almost studiedly awkward, that of a man perched on a hard chair or a stool while the man talking to him leant back against padded upholstery. That was why he had chosen the seat in the first place, to advertise his humility, put himself physically in the position of somebody being lectured at by a superior, be seen to be paying close attention – none of it possible with him beside me. My job here, perhaps not only here, was to dish out his medicine and watch him taking it like a man. He had planned to be helped to feel how deeply he was affected by the case against what he wanted to do before going off and doing it anyway. And now, for the moment at least, I saw the basic motive of all the favour business: to see to it that I got a good, solid, continuous six or seven hours of Sylvia and so could act as a key prosecution witness in the show-trial of his integrity, with Penny thrown in not, or not simply, as a lure to me but as a reassurance to him that, even at a time of such crisis for himself, he was thinking of her, trying to get her off with dependable, concerned old Duggers.

  I hardly listened at first when he said,

  ‘I understand it all right. The whole thing’s an agony, you must know that. I’ll just have to live with the Kitty part of it. In a way I feel worse about the kids, Penny and Chris. But they’ve got their lives to live. There’s not so much left of mine, so they won’t have to go on never forgiving me indefinitely. With luck I’ll make sixty. Fine with me. I’m not interested in living out my span in an odour of sanctity, beloved husband and father, approval of my own conscience – all of which it’s a bloody sight too late for anyhow – and no girls or whisky or careering around in my own inimitable irresponsible way. I’ll take criticism from chaps who’ve been in my situation and chosen differently. No one else.’

  I was listening now, but could find nothing to say, except for a possible query about the role of late capitalism in the present quandary, and rejected that. The taxi had turned off at St George’s Hospital. Roy lit a cigarette and said,

  ‘Anyway, let’s have a jolly lunch.’

  ‘Yes, let’s. Do you mind if I go up and see Kitty tomorrow?’

  ‘Not a bit. I wish you would.’

  ‘I will, then. When are you and Sylvia thinking of taking off?’

  ‘Not for a couple of months. After I’ve done Gus and she’s over eighteen. Uh, Duggers, could you do me a small favour? Only take a minute.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Nearly opposite this place there’s a man’s shop.’ His eye held mine in a pleading look. ‘Could you just nip in there and buy me a pair of underpants? Medium size, sort of boxer’s shorts pattern. Or anything they’ve got that’ll do. Nothing fancy.’

  Forewarned, I neither sermonized nor laughed, and a couple of minutes later was standing in the shop, which was filled with loud pop noises, of all things. The lad who had served me peered through his fringe out of the window as he gave me my change.

  ‘That’s Sir Roy Vandervane over there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah, he often hangs round here. After the birds, see. My sister was at a party once he was at. Five minutes’ chat-up and then boof!’

  ‘Boof?’

  He gestured outwards and upwards at crotch height.

  ‘I see. How extraordinary. Thanks. Goodbye.’

  I crossed the street making faces at Roy, who glanced to and fro in alarm.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘Along here. What’s up?’

  ‘Come on. Bloke in the shop recognized you.’

  ‘Did he really? What of it?’

  The pants changed hands like missile blueprints between two secret agents of the meaner sort, such as get sprayed with napalm from a passing car in the pre-titles sequence. When this was done, I said,

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what of it.’

  ‘That’s better. All part of the fun, old lad. It ought to tone you up.’

  ‘What? I only went on like that because of the way you—’

  ‘I agree that things like pancy-curity can get me down, but when they tone me up, they tone me up. No, you come in too. Do you good. Broaden your mind.’

  Uncouth minstrelsy enveloped me again when I crossed the threshold of what I supposed was the boutique. A single room about the size of a squash court, but with a low ceiling, was illuminated by a faint daylight glow through thick curtains and by some objects that might have been electric-toaster elements fixed to the walls at head height. By their aid I was able to pick out a shirt-collar, a belt-buckle here, a leg, the back of a head there. Roy was going to have to find Sylvia by touch and smell, touch rather than smell, for a rehoboam of deodorant would hardly have been too much to neutralize the miasma of surrounding bodies. It was very hot, too. I stayed near the door, enduring virtually continuous jostling for the sake of not missing Roy on his way out. Time went by. I recognized my present state, a milder but authentic version of that attained over long stretches of the night of the favour, as what a child experiences when his elders take him round a museum or on a conducted tour of a great house: a fusion of boredom and discomfort into some third thing, a solipsistic despair, a progressive and apparently irreversible loss of belief in anything not here and not now, in tea, homework, television, school, cricket, holidays – this place is hell, in fact. To give myself something to do, I started concentrating on trying not to breathe.

  Roy became distinguishable, with what must be Sylvia at his side. At the doorway, I saw against the daylight a figure confront Roy and apparently deliver a series of quick punches on the front and sides of his trunk; but he passed on unscathed. When my turn came, the exercise turned out to be a search, expertly and not uncivilly conducted. This precaution, which struck me as unusual in itself, could surely, I thought, have been rendered much easier, if not unnecessary, by switching on a light or two. Then I realized that potential new customers at a place like that would simply turn back at the threshold if their chances of stealing something were to be so visibly hampered.

  ‘At least they didn’t have pop in the Black Hole of Calcutta,’ said Roy as we moved off.

  ‘Oh, I thought you liked it,’ I said.

  ‘When it’s a decent group. That wasn’t.’

  Sylvia, whose black jerkin, black thigh-boots and extended waistbelt of chains hung with padlock-sized pendants (or whatever) made her look like a gaoler in an advanced musical of the ’fifties, said nothing.

  She went on saying nothing while we made our way to and established ourselves in the restaurant, and while Roy went away for a couple of minutes, presumably to switch pants. I looked round the room. Its layout and decor, its furniture, even what the waitresses were wearing, seemed indefinably original, strange, almost exotic. It was some moments before I saw that the place was got up as a restaurant, with tables and chairs, people ordering drinks and food and being served with them, others handing over money and receiving change. An odd environment for Roy, I thought. Perhaps he was making a trip in reverse, an expedition to the old world, as a white man gone native might travel into town to see if there were still such things as shops and buses.

  The issue was never raised. Nor was much else. Roy asked what I was up to and I told him about the Haydn symphonies and the Mozart sonatas, then about Terry Bolsover’s desire for an interview with him. The last interested him more than the other two combined. I asked him what he was up to, and he told me about having had to turn down a commission to write the music for a film about Richard II.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, some right-wing shag had written the scream-play. Glorifying the monarchy and so on.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Throughout this and such, Sylvia remained sile
nt, vocally at least, though she clanked and rattled whenever she moved at a volume far outdoing Vivienne’s charm bracelet. The waitress brought our main course and went away with an awkward, rolling gait. Sylvia watched her go and, speaking for the first time that day in my presence, said,

  ‘Why does that girl walk in that bloody silly way?’

  ‘She’s got something wrong with her hip,’ said Roy. ‘TB, I think. She’s the proprietor’s daughter. I know them here.’

  Sylvia ate spaghetti and went on with her mouth full, ‘Why doesn’t he do something about it?’

  ‘He has, but there’s not a hell of a lot you can do in cases like that, apparently.’

  ‘He must make a puhcket out of this dump. You can see it’s had nothing spent on it for ten years.’ She was chewing and swallowing like somebody on an eating marathon; perhaps the flat-mate had failed to furnish breakfast. ‘Why doesn’t he lay out a few quid on his daughter’s hip or whatever it is?’

  Roy said casually, ‘He’s laid out all he has on operations in this country, Switzerland and America and is still heavily in debt because of it.’

  This might have seemed to settle the matter, but Sylvia did not think so. She ate some more and said, ‘He’s been done, then, hasn’t he? Why couldn’t he have the sense to find a proper doctor somewhere? He probably didn’t try. Just wanted to fling the cuhsh around so as to feel good.’

  I recognized a fully fledged case of that moral vandalism which, in slightly different spheres, could take the form of beating up old ladies because nobody beats up old ladies, shooting at firemen fighting a fire because nobody shoots at firemen fighting a fire. And something else besides. All the more clearly for its distance from the present topic, I saw the root of Sylvia’s attraction for Roy, that of the agent for the spectator who would act likewise if he dared, the bomb-thrower for the liberal too decent and cowardly and fastidious and old and late-capitalistic to countenance the existence of bombs. And/or.