Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Oh, I should think so.’

  ‘You should think so?’

  ‘He’s never asked, so I haven’t told him. About anybody, not just you. But I should think he knows. He must do.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  The door opened and a short, stocky man let us in. He was bald and had a closely cropped beard that (in a phrase that sprang complete and unabridged into my mind) went all the way round his face without him having a moustache. This, coupled with Vivienne’s and my exchange of a minute earlier, made me think for an instant that what she had really brought about was a confrontation between me and the other bloke. Then I reproached myself for associating her with such a typically, even grossly, Vandervanean concept. Nevertheless, there turned out to be more than one point during the evening when I was to wonder momentarily whether I was dealing with an actor hired by Roy to coax or bluff me into some new machination of his.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Copes.’

  ‘It’s very nice to see you again. But haven’t you . . . ? Wasn’t there a . . . ?’

  He made passes at his chin and jaws, uninformative to the average outsider, but conveying clearly enough to me that it was now in his mind that the image of the other bloke had surfaced, and setting me to wonder in some discomfort how far I really resembled that unknown. Then I remembered Vivienne telling me he was only an inch taller than she, which made him eight inches shorter than me, and cheered up again. Unless there was another bloke . . .

  ‘No, Dad, this is Mr Ee-andell, Douglas Ee-andell,’ she was saying in her usual attempt to block off any Randalling on the part of people she introduced me to.

  ‘That’s all right, Vivvy, don’t you worry, dear. Come on, what are we hanging about here for? Let’s find ourselves a glass of something.’

  We entered what was clearly a study, with an open roll-top desk, typewriter, postal scales, rows of reference works – or fairly clearly so; the walls were thickly hung with pictures and such of a devotional tendency. I noticed a reproduction of Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, photographs of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a well-known American evangelist, a Negro divine and somebody who could perhaps have been Samuel Wesley, a lithograph or whatever of Haydn (presumably in his role as composer of The Creation), and representations of scrolls, inscriptions and illuminated texts.

  Mr Copes waved his hand at parts of this. ‘Something for everybody,’ he said, making for a card table topped with pink baize on which there stood a silver tray bearing a decanter and three glasses. Briskly, he poured and handed out drinks.

  ‘Not very nice, is it?’ he said (to my silent agreement) when we had tasted. ‘Cyprus sherry, they call it. A more exact description would be Cyprus raisin tea with some spirits in it. They soak the raisins in a water tank in the sun and either it ferments on its own or they make it ferment – I’m not quite clear which – and then they strain it and put the spirits in it. But perfectly wholesome. You saw what they’ve been up to today, did you? It was in the paper.’

  He soon made it apparent that he was referring, not to the Cyprus sherry-makers, but to the government then in office. Some price-increase or wage-claim had been allowed or met. Mr Copes explained that he took no interest in politics and never had, but that what the country obviously needed was a dictator, a benevolent one, of course, or a reasonably benevolent one, who would surrender his powers the moment the necessary period of martial law came to an end. Asked what that period would have accomplished if all went well, Mr Copes said that unity and decency would have been restored by the fairest possible methods, without the singling-out of any class or group: profiteering tradesmen would be gaoled as readily as strikers and agitators, coloured landlords deported along with coloured tenants, rioting students and rampaging football-supporters shot down side by side in the streets. In the climate of opinion thus engendered, other problems, like abortion and homosexuality, would probably be found to have cleared up of their own accord.

  After some minutes of this, Vivienne went out to the kitchen. Mr Copes recharged my glass and said, in the gentle tone he had maintained throughout,

  ‘I must be right in thinking, Mr Yandell, mustn’t I, that you and young Vivvy go to bed with each other?’

  This query took me off balance. With as much as a throat-clearing by way of prelude, later in the evening, alleviated by Vivienne’s presence, if ideas about the imposition of decency by martial law had been less fresh in my mind, it (the query) might have been more manageable. As it was, I found myself saying, if not blurting,

  ‘Oh no. Nothing like that. Not at all.’

  ‘Not at all. In that case there must surely be some other girl, or even girls, among your acquaintance with whom you do go to bed, mustn’t there?’

  ‘Oh no. Of course not. No.’

  ‘No. Perhaps you prefer your own sex? I must say, to look at you, I shouldn’t have thought—’

  ‘Oh no. Really.’

  ‘Well, then you must without question find relief in the kind of solitary practices they used to warn us against at school, mustn’t you?’

  ‘No, I . . . don’t go in for any of that.’

  ‘I see. And you’ve been keeping company with Vivvy for how long?’

  ‘About four months.’

  Mr Copes twitched abruptly, as from a small bolt of electricity. ‘And you’re how old?’

  ‘Thirty-three.’

  ‘Yes. You know, Mr Yandell, I may be very old-fashioned, but I can’t help feeling that, as a companion for a healthy, vigorous girl like Vivvy, an apparently equally healthy and vigorous young man who can totally suppress his physical desires over a period of about four months, uh, leaves something to be desired.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said, doing some wistful, tender speculation about how Sylvia might be spending her evening.

  ‘I call it Copes’s Fork.’ He gave the low, affectionate laugh of somebody watching the antics of a favourite animal. ‘Like chess, in a way. Once you’ve said no to the first question – and the skill, such as it is, all lies in manoeuvring you into saying no at that stage – then your only possible chance of drawing the game is to say yes to the second question and play out time talking about the high plane your feelings for Vivvy are on. There was a fellow once who did that. He worked for a publisher, I think he said. But it’s most exceptional. I must grant you, Mr Yandell, you went to your doom with dignity. Evidently you’re an easy-going sort of chap. That must be one of the things Vivvy likes about you. She likes easy-going chaps. Do smoke if you want to.

  ‘Over the years, Vivvy must have brought I don’t know how many young men along to see me. There was one who was middle-aged, I suppose you’d have called him. Unmarried, naturally. Not divorced, either. Vivvy couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or -two at the time. I put my foot down about him. In the first place there was too much of a gap in age, and in the second place I never trust a man who isn’t married and a father before he’s forty. I had a word with Vivvy and that was that.’

  ‘She just stopped seeing him?’

  ‘She stopped bringing him along to see me, and that means something. I don’t think she’d have a great deal of time to see anyone she didn’t bring along occasionally. She likes men, doesn’t she? We don’t discuss these matters, but it didn’t take me much thought to work out how she runs her life. There were three possibilities. Either she wasn’t going to bed with any of the fellows she brought along, or she was going to bed with some of them and not with others, or she was going to bed with all of them. Now, there’ve been some fellows she’s brought along over periods of a year or more, and most of them have lasted a few months. So if she wasn’t going to bed with any of them, she was rustling up an entire string of fellows who were going on going round with her because they were so keen on her conversation. Well, to be able to keep it up for ten years and more, continuously rustling up fellows like that, in quantity, these days, would take a very extraordinary sort of girl. And Vivvy’s hardly extraordinary at all. That took me
to possibility number two. There, it was harder to be absolutely certain in one’s mind, but I noticed that she talked about all the fellows in just the same sort of way and treated them in just the same sort of way when she brought them along. That was pretty well good enough for me. Vivvy tells me your job’s to do with music. I’m pretty keen on music myself.’

  I had almost stopped feeling uncomfortable since the promulgation of Copes’s Fork, thanks to its author’s friendly manner, but was relieved on the whole when he started telling me about a performance of Iolanthe that he (and I) had recently seen on television. There followed a discussion of the propriety of modernizing the librettos of light operas intended to be topical in their day. Vivienne came back in the middle of it. She gave me a how’s-it-going? look, and I gave her an all-right one in return.

  ‘I can’t help feeling Gilbert’s wit has been rather overrated,’ I said to Mr Copes, took a further look from his daughter that suggested I had chosen an unpropitious line, and added quickly, ‘but at his best he can be very ingenious and inventive.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that. I know it’s fashionable to decry him, but I am rather fond of the old chap. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m used to him and know most of him by heart. I should certainly agree that Sullivan is the senior partner, as it were. Well, Vivvy, how’s it going? Have your efforts been crowned with success?’

  Vivienne seemed to think he was talking about dinner, which did in fact turn out to be ready in the next room. This was a kitchen in the old-fashioned sense, but not in the old-fashioned style: no wall-clock, rocking-chair or cat, nothing much at all, really, and I guessed that Mr Copes ate off a tray in his study when alone. He saw me hesitating to sit down as soon as it occurred to me that I was doing so, and waved his hand.

  ‘Let’s get on with it. Unless you’d positively like me to say grace . . . I only say it when some sort of man of God is of the company, and as often as not I don’t even say it then. I worked out a sort of rule of thumb years ago. Under about thirty, or these days let’s say more like thirty-five, they’re not keen on it. Outmoded ritual. I should have thought that a modish ritual or an up-to-date ritual was a contradiction in terms, but that’s by the way. Then the middle lot, going up to fifty or so, they rather care for a touch of benedictus benedicat. Above that, it tends to be outmoded ritual again. You’ve no idea how much I’ve sometimes wanted to find out why chaps who feel like that feel like that, the older ones, I mean, but I can’t help thinking it would be unkind to ask them. I don’t know whether I’m making any sense to you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said truthfully. ‘Perfect sense.’

  The soup was out of an opulent packet or authentic tin, the fish pie had been prepared by an expert and warmed up competently enough. Mr Copes poured stout of a brand unfamiliar to me and began to talk about the American and Russian space programmes. It seemed that development of these was altogether too slow and unambitious for his liking, and that our country’s failure to have put up a decent orbiting satellite approached a national scandal. He said he realized that such projects cost a lot of money, but, by his reckoning, the outlay necessary to get a manned ship off to Mars and a new drive evolved, whereby the outer planets became reachable in a matter of weeks, could be met by stopping public expenditure on everything else whatever – far more than met: the abolition of income tax, sufficiently urgent on moral grounds, could be carried through at the same time.

  ‘I don’t quite see in that case where all the cash would come from,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. Taxation. Cars, television, tobacco, drink, all these domestic machines. Anything at all to do with cars. Anything people spend their money on, in fact. Food. That way you’d catch everybody.’

  ‘You’d certainly need a dictator to run a system like that.’

  ‘A dictator. Yes, come to think of it you probably would. As you imply, it isn’t a particularly realistic scheme. But what a splendid thing for everybody if it could somehow be put into effect.’

  ‘You mean the advances in knowledge that might be made?’

  ‘Oh no. I don’t in the least hold with advances in knowledge. No, it’s the idea, the wonder of it all. Tell me, Doug – do you read any of this science-fiction stuff?’

  ‘I know it sounds silly, but I have so much listening to do I hardly get time to read what I’ve got to read for my work.’

  ‘No, I quite understand, but with respect I think you should make some time to read a few of these stories. They’d show you, much more clearly than I could explain, what I’m trying to get at about wonder and so forth. It’s necessary, that sort of feeling, more and more so every year, as people bother less and less with religion. How much do you bother with it?’

  Twice might have been coincidence: sex via (or hurtling out of the blue after) dictatorship, religion behind the snatched-off mask of space travel. To be certain I was faced with a full-grown policy, I was going to have to wait until nursery schools had led instantaneously to my income, its sources and amount, or an exchange of views about the fabled lost portion of Atahualpa’s ransom had, in the twinkling of an eye, become an inquiry into the incidence of madness in my family. Meanwhile, I must answer the current question, doubly so, for Vivienne, instead of sending her father the now-then-Dad look I had been banking on, had turned in her chair and was sending me a look of genuine, amiable expectation.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t bother with it much.’

  ‘Never be sorry or afraid to speak your mind. Don’t bother with it much. You mean you don’t bother with it at all,’ said Mr Copes, almost more gently than I could bear.

  ‘Yes, I’m . . . I suppose I do.’

  ‘But you must think there’s something more than just this world,’ said Vivienne. ‘I know you can have a lot of argument about what. But something. You must.’

  ‘I can’t see why.’

  ‘Have you ever tried? To see why?’

  Mr Copes frowned for the first time, in puzzlement, not disapproval. ‘But surely the two of you must have gone into these matters together, mustn’t you! Having known each other all these months?’

  ‘No, Dad. Never.’

  ‘Never. What an extraordinary state of affairs.’

  ‘It just hasn’t happened to come up,’ I said, feeling slightly hedged in. ‘And I don’t think that’s all that extraordinary. Not statistically extraordinary, anyhow.’

  ‘Oh, I should have said statistically very extraordinary,’ said Mr Copes, ‘if you took a conspectus of the last couple of hundred years as opposed to the last couple of dozen. And even over the shorter term my considered guess would be that numbers would tell against you if one were to survey the country as a whole, rather than merely the south-eastern corner of it. I needn’t speculate about the rest of the world. But do go on.’

  I had no idea how I had come to seem to have started something, let alone what it might be; however, I went on. ‘I just lead my life from day to day, like most people, whatever they may say to themselves or one another about it – in fact like everybody I’ve ever met or heard of, apart from a few prophets and such. Which suggests to me that what you say to yourself and your friends about what you’re doing can’t be very important.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. At all events, it’s natural to think and talk about one’s life in the whole. I should like to call it human in the most literal sense. It would take a funny sort of soldier never to think or talk about war, wouldn’t it? I wonder how many sailors there are who’ve never thought or talked about the sea.’

  ‘You’ve got to believe in something.’ Vivienne did not look or sound very amiable now. ‘Everybody has to.’

  Trying to sound light and airy, I said, ‘You’ll be telling me in a minute it doesn’t so much matter what it is as long as it’s something.’

  ‘Suppose I did, then? I’m not, but suppose I did?’

  ‘Well, good God, it matters all right if it’s fascism or communism or any of those. Or flower power or lov
e-ins or any of—’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything soft or anything nasty. I meant something reasonable. I thought you’d have seen that.’

  ‘Okay, sorry, but I still feel—’

  Mr Copes broke in. ‘Very, very nearly everybody who’s ever done anything has believed in something, and by anything I don’t mean anything important, I mean anything whatever. Rather in the same way as very, very nearly everybody who’s ever done anything whatever has had two arms and two legs. But I seem to have interrupted you again.’

  ‘No you haven’t, Mr Copes. I’ve pretty well run out of things to say about all this. Not that I had very many in the first place.’

  One still in stock concerned belief in belief in something reasonable, and just how reasonable the something had to be in order to count as reasonable, but I kept quiet. So, for a short time, did the other two. Then Vivienne said she would see about some coffee, and Mr Copes took me back into his study, where he poured out two glasses of port.

  ‘I know you’re not a drinking man, Doug, but that’s no excuse for not giving you anything nice at all. This isn’t in the least out of the way, but it is port and not port type or port character. Not too bad, is it? Now, while I’ve got you on your own for a few moments, I wonder if I could intrude on you a little, as it were, and ask you to put my mind at rest about something, if you would.’

  He sat down facing me across the hearth, where a green paper fan partly hid the emptiness of the grate, and stared, for quite a few of the few moments he had me on my own, at a point on the opposite wall where there was a fearful reproduction of Guido Reni’s sufficiently fearful Ecce Homo. When he had accumulated enough spiritual afflatus from this, he said,

  ‘How shall I put it? Is this country heading for a state of complete moral anarchy?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it,’ I said, trying not to fall out of my chair with relief. ‘It’s not a question I bother about much, quite frankly, but I would have said there’s about enough respect for tradition still going, family life, discipline and that kind of thing, to see us all out. Perhaps you’ve been taking too much notice of the way some people behave in the south-east of England.’