Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘And don’t come on so strong, Lady Vandervane. Don’t try and queen it over me. You’re not on camera now, you know. Just talk ordinary, if you can. What else have you got?’

  Kitty toned down the queening straight away. ‘All right, I suppose there’s no reason why you should care about me, but think of the children.’

  ‘I am. I’ve met one of them, and you can put her through a mincing-machine for all I care. The others I’ve never even seen, so screw them too.’

  ‘If you can’t see it or feel it, I can’t make you.’

  ‘No, that’s right. Actually I can see it fairly well, and I can even feel it a bit, but not enough to make any odds.’

  ‘Not even about a child of six whose father’s going off and leaving him?’

  ‘Well, he’ll still have you, of course. And he’ll need you more after Roy’s gone, so that’ll help you use up some of your time, won’t it?’

  With a fully advertised but (I thought) laudable effort, Kitty kept her temper at this. ‘Can’t I even ask you to go on . . . being with Roy, see as much as you like of him, but not go off with him, not take him away?’

  ‘Sure you can ask. Why not?’

  ‘I beg you, I implore you to think about it. I shared Roy with his first wife for two years, and believe me it’s not so bad. You could—’

  ‘That was because you knew you were winning,’ said Sylvia in a reasonable tone. ‘If he doesn’t come away with me now, that’d mean I’m losing, and I don’t like doing that. I’m not having that.’

  ‘Please.’ Kitty was crying and clasping her hands on the crook of her umbrella, making me afraid she might go down on her knees. ‘He could live with you and just come and see us at week-ends. Say every other week-end. Surely that’s not much to ask. Could you . . . could you think about it?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome, you’re welcome. Right, I’ve thought about it. The answer’s no.’

  Sylvia laughed when she said this. As was easy enough for anybody who had met her for more than a few minutes, I had been expecting something of the sort, but the reality was quite enough to make me swear inwardly not to do any laughing in company for a bit without first thinking over how it would sound. Kitty started back as if struck, or like somebody well used to meeting the phrase in print.

  ‘Do you love him?’ she asked loudly.

  ‘Yeah.’ Sylvia considered. ‘Yeah, I think so. I don’t know much about loving people, never had a lot to do with it, but . . . Yeah.’

  ‘You’re not . . . capable of loving!’

  ‘Maybe I’m not – you could have a point there. But then maybe I am too. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, that side of it, does it? Whatever I’m like he prefers me to you, and that’s why he’s leaving you and going off with me, and that’s all there is to it. He wants to and I want to, so that’s what we’ll do.’

  The renewed reasonableness of Sylvia’s behaviour looked and sounded real, just that touch more real than Kitty’s style could ever have encompassed. An impartial witness of their exchanges would probably have been sympathizing with Sylvia most of the time, provided he was ignorant of English. This qualification dwindled slightly in importance when Kitty said, with maximum voice and face and body,

  ‘It’s all so unbelievable. Now that I know the sort of person you are, I’m quite frankly incredulous. What could any man of the remotest intelligence or taste or discrimination see in you?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said Sylvia. ‘I’ll show you.’

  She drew the house-coat over her head and dumped it on the couch. Underneath she was wearing a brassiere and short knickers, not quite as clean as the coat, and these too she quickly removed. Kitty showed genuine consternation. I have no idea what I showed. Only one thing about Sylvia’s body was clear to me: I could have no views on its beauty or health or likeness or unlikeness to others, because it was surmounted by Sylvia’s head and face and because it belonged to Sylvia, but I could see (perhaps simply was aware) that it was a young body. For all I knew, Kitty’s might carry no signs of age and even be better at all points, properly considered; still, I was quite clear in my mind that nothing of that sort could be of the least help to her now. At the same time, I felt a kind of surge of theoretical homosexuality pass through me.

  ‘That’s what he sees in me,’ said Sylvia. ‘Now get out of here, you old buhg, before I go hard on you.’

  She advanced on Kitty, who swung her umbrella; a mistake, for any umbrella, though a potentially dangerous lance, is an ineffective club. Sylvia easily fended off the blow, and the two closed with each other. I came out of my lethargy, or put away my distaste for the prospect of touching Sylvia, and moved to intervene. She brought her knee up into my crotch, upon which I retired from the conflict for perhaps half a minute, listening vaguely to sounds of struggle and to cries of outrage from Kitty. Then somebody fell over; I looked up by degrees to see Kitty mostly flat on her back with Sylvia kneeling on some of her. So matters rested for a few more seconds, until Sylvia, whose head had been moving this way and that, evidently caught sight of what I made out as a fat lump of abstract sculpture, about the size of a human skull and done in some veined stone, a yard or so away from her on a low table. She swayed about on her knees as she tried to reach it without allowing Kitty freedom to move. I straightened myself, stepped forward and grasped Sylvia’s forearm in both hands. After a quick, vigorous pull and turn I released her, remembering even in that moment having noticed both the wrestler with the German name and the Thing from Borneo use this move with telling effect on the night of the favour. Sylvia did a brief sidelong dash across the room and hit the wall. She was starting to climb to her feet from where she had fallen when, having grabbed Kitty and her umbrella, I got the two of us out of the room and then the flat. The lift was waiting.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ I shut the inner gate and pressed the ground-floor button. ‘Very nearly. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. How do I look?’

  She spoke dreamily. Her clothes were disordered but apparently undamaged; her hair was in modified madwoman’s style; there were shallow parallel grazes across her forehead with a little blood, already drying; a large red patch and a small red patch stood out on her left cheek. I put my hands on hers, which were gripping the umbrella.

  ‘You look as though you’ve been in a bit of a fight. Nothing out of the way. What would you sort of like to happen now? Cup of tea? Do you want to go to a Ladies?’

  ‘Just the car.’

  We went to the car. Inside it, Kitty sat back and sighed repeatedly while I held her hand and reflected that, for the second time that day, I had experienced a good deal in a short space, more so than could be rendered by any mere operatic image: the best of Dracula, Frankenstein highlights were fair approximations. After a couple of minutes, Kitty started putting herself in order. Her movements were lethargic. Normally she would be off like a whippet at the first distant shimmers of a shiny nose.

  ‘That girl’s mad,’ she muttered. ‘Stark, staring raving mad.’

  ‘She certainly behaved very oddly.’

  ‘Imagine her . . . stripping off like that.’

  ‘Yes, extraordinary.’

  ‘What could she have thought she was doing?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do realize she’d have killed me if you hadn’t pulled her off, don’t you, Douglas?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it.’

  ‘I tell you she’d gone crazy. She was berserk. She’d have bashed my head in if she’d had the chance.’

  I went on doubting it, but inwardly, and without great conviction or interest. Inwardly too, I assured myself that, however loathsome the episode in that flat and however boring Kitty’s appraisals of it, I must endure until she had had the chance to talk herself back to normal (or somewhere near one of
her norms) as she worked on her face and hair. This she finally began to do, her voice strengthening and hands recovering assurance until she was very largely the Kitty of half an hour earlier in both appearance and manner. The manner part of this impressed me as odd at first. To be in even moderately good spirits so soon after the failure (however predictable) of a last hope, with a whacking physical and emotional humiliation thrown in, surely showed abnormal powers of recovery, especially for a woman like Kitty. Then it occurred to me that she had at any rate done something, struck a blow, survived an encounter with a naked madwoman, given herself something to think about, taken action after a long spell of inaction: and before a longer one. It further occurred to me that very few men would take her on while that meant taking Ashley on as well, and that she would not be free of him until he was twenty or so (if ever), and that by then she would be nearly sixty. I wished that Ashley would meet with a fatal but painless, or not too painful, accident. Something of that sort, not necessarily on that scale, would do Roy no harm, either.

  ‘Where can I drop you, Douglas dear?’

  ‘I thought my flat, if it’s not too far out of your way.’

  ‘No, it’s right on my way.’ She again spoke to the driver.

  ‘On your way where?’

  ‘Home. Or rather to the house I live in.’

  The buoying-up effect of the Sylvia exploit had passed, at any rate for the time being. I got the cinematic war-widow all the way to Maida Vale. Her last words to me were,

  ‘Dearest Douglas, I wish I could thank you enough for being such a tower of strength, such an absolute rock. I know it’s too ghastly for you, but do come up and see me again soon. Meanwhile, you’re not to worry about me. I’ll be . . . I’ll be fine. Really and truly, I promise you. Strange, the way one finds strength in oneself one didn’t know was there.’

  I heard my telephone ringing as I climbed the stairs, and climbed faster, failing to find strength in myself that I could pretty well have sworn was there. I picked up the handset and said my name. A huge cough came down the wire.

  ‘Albert,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Terrible,’ replied Coates. ‘Look, Doug, that business you asked me to keep an eye on.’

  ‘The old maestro.’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, nothing definite as yet, but your and my favourite shit has asked for all the griff about him.’

  ‘Griff?’

  ‘Christ, the file, the clippings, the stuff from what you’d probably call the morgue. My guess would be that your chum’s booked as the first and probably the last of a controversial new series of profiles, Half-Witted Cunts of Our Time. I can’t see what else it could be.’

  ‘Thanks, Albert. Would you let me know if you get anything more definite?’

  ‘Delighted. Anyway, see you Thursday.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  Six: Christian Gentleman

  The next morning, Sunday, I telephoned the Vandervane house to see how Kitty was. Or so I would have put it if challenged. An unassessed portion of my motive was the same old irresistible (and averagely vulgar) curiosity. Very much as on an earlier occasion, I got Gilbert and wordless yelling at the same time, then Gilbert on his own.

  ‘Kitty’s in bed,’ he told me. ‘Sleeping.’

  ‘Don’t disturb her. Is she all right?’

  ‘Naturally she’s not all right. Would you seriously expect her to be all right?’

  ‘I was just asking. I meant is she ill or anything.’

  ‘That’s tantamount to a meaningless query. Perhaps you’d care to give me a concise definition of illness.’

  ‘I’ll drop everything and work on it. Look, Mr Alexander, I simply don’t care how righteous you are, or how learned and sophisticated either. If you can bring yourself to tell Kitty I telephoned, that’s fine. If not—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Yandell, I’m being affected by the atmosphere of strain under which we’re all living. Of course I’ll deliver your message. Hold on, please.’

  Sounds like an argument in a deep dungeon reached my ear; I assumed Gilbert had put his hand over the mouthpiece. Then Roy came on the line.

  ‘Hi, you old bastard, how goes it? In particular, how are your balls? I hear they took a knock yesterday. Very nasty,’ – a sound pre-emptive approach, this, treating the whole episode as worthy of nothing more than brotherly concern for me dressed up as jocularity.

  ‘They seem to be holding up all right, thanks. How are yours?’

  ‘Aching rather in a metaphorical way. Gus is beginning to shag me out. I’ve got the bloody choirs coming in next week to rehearse the Eighth. If you had any conception . . .’

  He talked at some length about his involvement with Mahler, then asked for and perhaps listened to information about Terry Bolsover, whose interview with him must be impending. With this behind us, he said rapidly,

  ‘Oh, by the way, Duggers . . .’

  Thus forewarned of the approach of his reason for talking to me, I started getting my diary out.

  ‘. . . I was wondering if you were doing anything tomorrow lunchtime.’

  ‘What I am not doing is going anywhere with you and Sylvia.’

  ‘Oh, nothing like that.’ He laughed slightly. ‘The point is, old lad, your pal Harold Meers wants to have a little chat with me. He seemed very keen to pim me down: rang me up last night and pressured me into this date tomorrow. Into agreeing to it provisionally, that is. So I could make sure you were free first. Anyway, are you? I was just going to ring when—’

  ‘Yes, I am, but where do I come into this? He’s not going to want me there. He’d sooner—’

  ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but I would very much like to have someone along to bat for my side. Outnumber him. Christ knows what he’s got up his sleeve.’

  ‘Yes, Harold needs a bit of outnumbering. But I don’t see why he should—’

  ‘That fits in with what I hear of him. No, actually, when I said I’d probably be bringing a friend he said more or less the more the merrier. Funny sort of sod. I suppose he just saw he wanted to talk to me and I didn’t want to talk to him, so being on a whichever it is market I imagine I could have insisted on bringing the World Cup soccer team along without him being able to—’

  ‘He’d have drawn the line a long way short of that, however keen he is to see you. Unless you agreed in advance to pick up the bill.’

  ‘Near bugger, eh? That’s worth knowing. Be fun watching him trying to buy me off with thirty quid and his stamp album.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be his approach. And I was going to say he’ll probably draw the line at me too. Still, if I just turn up . . .’

  ‘Oh, I told him it was you and he sounded as pleased as Punch. Punch with a hangover, perhaps, but manful as hell. By all means and all that.’

  ‘Strange. I thought he hated the sight of me. But then he probably doesn’t care for the sight of anybody much.’

  ‘There again his daughter goes along with you. It would do you good to hear her on the subject. Draw the two of you together.’

  ‘Has she got any ideas on what he’s up to?’

  ‘I haven’t been able to get her to discuss it seriously. At all, in fact. Anyway, I’m meeting him at the Retrenchment Club at one o’clock. If you pitch up at Craggs’s about twelve thirty we can have a fortifying noggin of something and walk down. Okay?’

  I said it would be, rang off, and did my best to dismiss from my mind the consideration that Roy ought not to cut tomorrow morning’s rehearsal short by the fifty or so minutes necessary for him to be able to keep his rendezvous with me. Failing in the attempt, I went back to where Vivienne was sitting up in bed reading the Observer. She wore a white nightdress that would have done very well for Norma in Bellini’s opera, granted a rather traditionally conceived production, and a woollen jacket in pink and green, with hanging bobbles, that would have done very well for nobody but her. As soon as I appeared, she picked up and drank from a cup of (by now, surely, no
better than) lukewarm coffee. She meant by this to stress the fact that she was finishing a leisurely breakfast and studying the latest news in what merely happened to be a bedroom, just as her attire proclaimed that she was doing these things in what was quite incidentally a bed. So much was her standard practice. But then, with a preoccupied yet antagonistic air, her eyes making wide sweeps over the print, she said,

  ‘Did you get hold of your friend?’

  ‘No. And she isn’t my friend.’ Out of what had seemed prudence, wanting to get my story in before (say) the irruption of Sylvia in talkative mood, I had divulged something of the previous day’s events and the run-up to them – a positively Royesque misjudgement that all my insistence on Kitty’s age, not-my-cup-of-teaness and down-stagey goings-on had done little to retrieve. ‘Well, she is a friend, of course, but not in the way you mean, as I keep telling you.’

  ‘Who were you on to all that time, then?’

  ‘Only old Roy.’

  ‘What’s he up to now?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. He asked me to lunch with him tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re not going?’

  ‘Of course I’m going. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘But you said you were coming with me to see my father in the evening.’

  ‘I still am. That’s in the evening.’

  ‘H’m,’ she very nearly literally said.

  ‘What do you mean, h’m? I’ll be on the spot when you turn up here, sober, undrugged, and unimpaired by any form of sexual indulgence.’

  To this, she said nothing in a marked manner, but differently marked from the one she had been using for the last three-quarters of a minute. I picked up the Sunday Times magazine section and started reading about poverty and oppression in British Honduras. Vivienne was reading on with equal attention, for after a few moments she said,

  ‘Doug, what’s a . . . ? I can’t even pronounce it. Something about . . .’

  I dropped Honduras and went over to her. My more direct route being blocked by her breakfast tray and the chair it rested on, I made my approach via my side of the bed. Our shoulders touched.