Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘This one isn’t like most women, and what’s the good of a letter?’

  ‘Don’t you believe it, my dear. We’re all like most women. Gilbert got hold of the address for me – don’t ask me how.’

  ‘Having access to a telephone directory and knowing the alphabet would be a help, I should imagine.’

  ‘The number isn’t listed, Douglas. But Gilbert managed to find out the address just the same; he is wonderful, you know. And you’re not to be like that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, giving the telephone itself an unfriendly glance, for we stood now in the hall. ‘What’s the number?’

  She produced it with a gunman’s speed and deftness from a pocket of her dressing-gown, rather abandoning any implication that our common progress towards this point had been roundabout or accidental.

  ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘I told you, anything. Just so you’re sure it’s her.’

  ‘Yes, I see that, I’ve got that. I wondered if you had any suggestions.’

  ‘Say anything you like.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s what I’ll do. Of course. I’ll say anything I like.’

  I reached for the instrument. She faced me with joined hands in a mannish posture, like a fairly undevout man at a burial service, in fact. Discarding any hope of her removal, indeed preferring to have her under my eye rather than at the end of another extension, I dialled. The chances against getting through were surely enormous, considering the odds-on likelihood of connection with the speaking clock or a kosher butcher in the Bronx, no connection at all, precipitation into a duologue between psychiatrist and patient, and so on, added to other hefty contingencies such as non-payment of bill at the far end, absence of Sylvia and flat-mate, absorption of Sylvia in new ways of doing something or other. Nevertheless, not much to my surprise after all, the distant receiver was lifted after a couple of rings and loutish tweedledee burst upon my eardrums. A female voice said something.

  ‘Is Fred there?’ I asked.

  ‘What? For Christ’s sake why don’t you speak up, muhn?’

  ‘Is Fred there?’

  ‘Ah, piss awff.’

  I put the handset back and said to Kitty, ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Thank you, Douglas dear. Now I must get a move on. I’ll go and get dressed. You find Gilbert and tell him to have a taxi waiting outside the Two Brewers in an hour’s time. You and I can walk to it. You don’t mind a pub lunch, do you? It’s very good there, actually. They make all their own soups and things. We don’t want Chris and Penny and the rest of them round our necks, do we? Then I’ve got one or two things I want to do in Town, and the chap can drop you wherever you want to be. I’ll be quite quick.’

  I felt like shaking my head as if I had just been thoroughly hit on it, but refrained. ‘Gilbert said you could never get taxis round here.’

  ‘He can get one if he wants one. Make sure you tell him it’s for me.’

  She went away and up the curve of the staircase before I could ask her how to set about finding Gilbert; however, he emerged from some doorway within seconds. Wearing a lumpy cardigan and trousers of a baroque sort of tweed, he still bore the rumpled appearance of a couple of days earlier. His manner was reserved. He agreed to summon the taxi as requested, showing a certain impatience here, as with a task hardly calling for his qualities of generalship. After a pause, he said,

  ‘Perhaps you might be so kind and go and see Penny now. I’ve told her you’re here. You’ll find her upstairs, in the second room to the left. I can’t say how grateful I’ll be.’

  ‘If she makes any move to throw me out I’ll let myself be thrown out.’

  ‘She won’t.’

  Nor did she. Looking, in her flowing crimson robes, pale yellow kerchief and plain sandals, really remarkably like an illustration in a Victorian bible, she stood with her back to a window that gave a view of the common and a distant line of trees. I had been half expecting to encounter her weltering on an unmade bed among reefer butts and empty Coke bottles, and the neatness of everything was a mild surprise, until I remembered that Gilbert lived in here too. Neatness, in fact, was scarcely the word: the place had the bare yet not underfurnished appearance of a vacant hotel bedroom, and Penny might have arrived in it moments before, a few yards ahead of her luggage.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  The eyes could hardly have been bluer than usual, but seemed wider than usual. They stayed on mine while, in a swirl of draperies, she moved across to the bed and began pulling the coverlet off it.

  I spoke without weighing my words. ‘What’s the idea?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, chum. This is eh bed and I am eh girl and you are eh man and we are eh-lone too-gether. What could be the idea?’

  ‘Are we? Alone, I mean. With Gilbert and Kitty and God knows who round the house, I don’t feel very alone.’

  ‘There’s a bolt on that door. But of course Regulation 82(c) of the By Jove and Great Scott Society states, No gentleman shall lay a finger on a lady if the lady should presume to have the effrontery to make the first move.’

  ‘You made the first move the other night and I laid a bit more than a finger on you that time.’

  ‘What is it, then? Why are we having an argument?’

  ‘Gilbert put you up to this,’ I said, marvelling idly at how petulant and unconvinced I sounded.

  ‘So what do you care? If you don’t want me you just say. Go on.’

  She had let go of the coverlet the moment I asked her what the idea was, and was standing half turned away from me, apparently looking out of the window towards the trees. I reviewed the children-of-Israel get-up, especially its top half, which would have done as much or as little for the thorax of a ten-year-old, a stripper or a great-grandmother, and saw why she had chosen to wear it, and found the explanation for my strange failure to have already hauled it off her or bored my way through it. Again I spoke without thought.

  ‘That makes two of us. Oh, God, what am I saying? Forget it if you can. God. I mean, just for the moment, you don’t feel like it any more than I do, just for the moment. Tell Gilbert I said I was having conscience trouble about my girl. He’ll understand that.’

  ‘You know, I never really feel like it, not it on its own. But I don’t sort of feel not like it all the time either, really. But it’s not that I don’t care one way or the other.’

  ‘You like a proper reason.’

  She stepped forward, kissed me and laid her head against my shoulder, leaning prudently forward to keep the rest of herself out of contact with the rest of me. Both of us sighed deeply. I felt as if I had just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes. I heard a jet passing somewhere high overhead, and then the Furry Barrel protesting against the violation of her air space. Penny sighed again and turned away. Could I ask her whether Gilbert had actually said to her, ‘Now, when he comes, you go to bed with him, you see’, and whether she had indeed said to him, ‘Yes, Gilbert; well and good, Gilbert’? No. A pity. A pity that the more interesting a question became, the more absolutely one was assumed not to need to ask it. I tried answering this one in my mind. Of course that was what had happened. That sounded quite certain, obvious, solid as iron, plain as the nose on my face. Of course that was not what had happened. That sounded exactly the same. But how could it?

  ‘Shall we get the talking done?’ asked Penny. ‘There’s that as well, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I was supposed to try to get you to leave here and go into a flat somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, that one. He put you up to that, didn’t he?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Gilbert did.’

  ‘Never mind, I’m staying here.’

  ‘You’re mad. There’s nothing but unhappiness in this house and it’s just going to go on and on. No it isn’t just going to go on and on, it’s going to get worse. More violent and more . . . awful. Do what Gilbert says. He’s the only one r
ound here you can trust.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it, mate. Anyway, you’re wasting your time. Like everyone else. I’m not leaving, not this side of next Christmas. He wants me to go.’

  ‘He. People can be right for the wrong reasons.’

  ‘Not him.’

  ‘And they’re not all wrong reasons, for God’s sake. He really does want to spare you as much as he can of all this; you’ve got to give him that. He doesn’t want to chuck you out.’

  ‘I’d like to see him try.’

  ‘Yes, I think you would.’

  She looked hard at me and turned farther away. I said to her back,

  ‘Penny, I wish you’d let me—’

  ‘Like I told you, nobody takes me on. Did you talk to him? You know.’

  ‘Yes, I tried to . . .’

  ‘But you didn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I had to ask you to try, though, didn’t I? I’ll make out, don’t you worry. The next time you come I’ll be much better. Not so depressed. I’m going to take myself on.’

  I had been outside in the courtyard for less than a minute when Gilbert, alerted perhaps by his own closed-circuit television system, came through the porch and joined me. The diffidence of his manner struck me afresh.

  ‘So you made no headway. I’m deducing as much from the shortness of the time you spent with her.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ I said, hoping it would be an hour or two before I would have to issue yet another communiqué announcing breakdown of talks.

  ‘I can see now that it was a shot in the dark. But one feels one must have tried everything. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Of course.’ As an understander of this and that, now, I reflected, there was a tremendous lot to be said for me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do any good.’

  ‘Don’t reproach yourself. The whole thing’s a classical Freudian case of a girl seeking her father. Roy’s opted out of performing that role, and I’m unfitted for it by nature. Debarred from it, in fact. Each man can only fulfil one or at the most two of the aspects in which he’s dealing with a woman, like a husband, a brother, a friend and so on and so forth. I can only be a lover and at times a friend.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  He seemed uninhibited enough by now. Almost companionably, we sauntered over to a corner of the yard from which the barn, surmounted by an archaic weather-vane, could be glimpsed. The current ill wind would at any rate blow clean away any chance of the structure’s being turned into a music laboratory. I speculated whether Kitty, Ashley, Christopher, Ruth, Penny and Gilbert could continue to exist here, visualized the house physically collapsing from neglect, fire or the weight of encroaching vegetation. Not even Gilbert, I felt, could stave off something of the sort.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked him.

  His face flickered with distress or vexation. ‘What can anyone do? I shall continue to try, I suppose. But there comes a time when the will to try begins to disappear. You can’t make your whole life out of being unselfish.’

  ‘No indeed. But I hope you’ll hang on here long enough to see her through the next few weeks or however long it’s going to take.’

  He was about to reply when I heard the porch door shut. Kitty had appeared, all dolled up in a bottle-green trouser-suit with frilly damson-coloured shirt, long gloves and what might have been a slightly undersized beach-umbrella, not to speak of well-applied artifices above the neck. I took all this in, marvelling at the promptitude with which it had been assembled, while she instructed Gilbert about Ashley’s homecoming, the Furry Barrel’s tea and such matters. She did so briskly and without self-consciousness, or with only as much as was appropriate, and inevitable, in a woman being efficient to a male audience. Neither then, nor during our walk to the pub (past, among other buildings, an old people’s home from which old people stared resentfully out at us), nor while we lunched among horse-brasses and shopkeepers, nor on the taxi journey through Hendon, Swiss Cottage and farther did she relapse into paraded bravery. She came out with sound forgettable stuff about Christopher’s tribulations at his university, the Common Market, whether she ought to take up Ouspenskyism again and when was I going to bring this new girl of mine along for her to meet. I was tempted to regard the impeccable smoothness of this part as further evidence of earlier insincerity, until I saw that what I was really doing was refusing to give her credit or sympathy however she might behave: not a very nice response from a supposed friend. So I started trying harder, but had hardly done more than start when she started acting like somebody summoning up courage for something.

  ‘What is it, Kitty?’

  ‘Douglas dear, please don’t think I’ve gone off my head, but could I possibly ask you to do me one more teeny favour?’

  ‘What is it? I mean of course I will.’

  ‘I know you’re tremendously reliable and careful and dependable, but I would feel just that bit easier in my silly old mind if you could have the patience to ring that number again and make absolutely certain that it is, you know, her at the other end. So that I can be sure my letter gets to her, you see.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes, all right.’

  Two minutes later, in a telephone box somewhere on the edge of Bayswater, I went through the Fred routine a second time, with the same results as before. Ringing off, I noticed that the call-box telephone and the distant telephone were on the same exchange, a feat of observation that would have been no feat at all in those primeval days when exchanges had had letters instead of figures and so immediately advertised their whereabouts. This, and other matters, set me thinking. Back in the taxi, I said to Kitty,

  ‘She’s there all right. And I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Please yourself, my dear, but there’s no more to do there than at any other dressmaker’s.’

  ‘She may not be on her own, and even if she is you could probably do with a bit of support.’

  ‘At my dressmaker’s?’

  ‘You should have put in some work on your dressmaker earlier. A witness might come in handy. How far away is it?’

  ‘Two streets down. You are brilliant to have worked it out.’

  ‘What are you thinking of doing exactly?’ I asked when she had spoken to the driver.

  ‘Well, I want to have a look at her is the first thing. Find out what sort of creature it is that’s doing this to us all. And then just try to tell her what she is doing, make her see – you know what Roy is, he could have told her I’m running about with a millionaire or anything. If I could make her see . . .’

  ‘Having a look at her you’ll probably manage, but I wouldn’t bank on getting through much of the rest. But good luck, anyway.’

  Ideas of Sylvia and of squalor had become so firmly linked in my mind that nothing about her immediate neighbourhood could have surprised me: a razor-fight in full swing in the street outside, children crapping and giving themselves fixes on the steps, recumbent meths-drinkers cluttering up the threshold. In the event the pair of us walked unhindered along a passage abounding in potted greenery and entered a lift.

  ‘Flat 6,’ said Kitty, consulting a scrap of paper and pressing a knob. ‘Gilbert is marvellous, you know. He ought to be some colossally high-powered secretary kind of person, not fooling about with . . . Still, I’m sure he’s good at that too and I expect he enjoys it.’

  She looked charged up: pink-cheeked and square-shouldered, genuinely intent on whatever was to come. When we got out of the lift, she marched straight to the relevant doorway and pushed the bell-push with a flourish. Ruffianly ululation sounded faintly from within, then, after quite a short interval, sprang into grievous volume as the door opened. Sylvia looked dully out at us.

  ‘Hallo, Sylvia,’ I said briskly, moving forward with my hand on Kitty’s elbow – ‘I was just passing so I thought I’d drop up as they say and see how you were getting on and while I was about it I saw no reason why I shouldn’t give you a chance to meet someone you must h
ave heard a lot about. Lady Vandervane.’

  First score to the goodies: I had driven both females before me into what could with some reason be called a sitting-room, in that evidence of its use for eating, sleeping, and other personal activities and states, though present, was on the whole minor, random. It might also have served as a music-room, if indeed the gramophone, loud enough at this range to drown out anything much short of a piercing scream, had not certainly been wired up to reject actual music. Rather to my surprise, Sylvia went and turned off the amplifier.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  As Kitty, using what was for her a measured tone, began to go through the themes she had just outlined to me, Sylvia sat down on the arm of a couch. This, like much of the other furniture, looked new and battered at the same time, as if somebody wearing football boots had set about it immediately after its delivery. I also took in some posters (including a large and well-produced one of a bare bottom), a cardboard box holding perhaps a hundred light-bulbs, a pie-dish full of pennies and threepenny bits, and an overall version of the smell I had noticed the first time I met Sylvia. Nothing else, apart from the long, multi-buttoned house-coat kind of garment she was wearing. It looked fairly clean.

  ‘I’m appealing to you.’ Kitty had got into her stride by now. ‘It’s all I can do. I’ve nothing to fight with, no bribe to offer. I can only ask you to realize the unhappiness you’ll be bringing four people who’ve never hurt you.’

  ‘Which are they?’

  ‘Roy’s two children, our own child, and myself.’

  ‘You aren’t including him, then.’

  ‘That’s not for me to say.’

  ‘No, that’s right. Well, from the way he talks about his life at home, I can’t see he gives a sod for any of you, so I don’t see why I should.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘He—’

  ‘Please, Douglas,’ said Kitty, and Sylvia said, ‘Belt up.’ Both spoke absently and without turning their heads.