Journey Into the Past

by Kingsley Amis

  They reached the bar, a small room not designed for the purpose. The still recent tradition of a ‘wet’ Summer Ball had been instituted, though few could of course bring themselves to believe it, by the College authorities, on the argument that the amount of drunkenness among student patrons, alarming at one time, could be reduced by providing cheap non-spirituous liquors on the premises, and by thus rendering less acutely attractive the costly and injurious gulping of horses’ necks or of inferior gin and synthetic lime-juice in the city’s pubs. More oddly still, perhaps, this argument had shown itself to be sound, so that in the room now visited by Dixon and the rest three minor College employees were toiling at barrels of beer and cider under panels representing, similarly to the larger ones in the Ballroom, swarthy potentates about to be danced upon by troupes of midget Circassians, or caravans of Chinese merchants being sucked up into the air by whirlwinds. The pallid pillars were here replaced by potted and tubbed palms of an almost macabre luxuriance. Among these last lurked Maconochie, the titular supervisor of the three barmen, adding to the effect in some indefinable way by wearing a starched white coat over his olive-green trousers.

  Gore-Urquhart and Carol were sitting in one of the further palm-groves, talking fairly hard. When he saw the others coming towards them, Gore-Urquhart rose to his feet. This formality was so unfamiliar in the circles Dixon normally moved in that for a moment he wondered whether the other meant to oppose their approach by physical force. He was younger than Dixon had expected any distinguished man, and an uncle of Christine’s, to be: somewhere in the middle forties. His evening suit, too, was not nearly as spectacularly ‘faultless’ as might have been predicted. His large smooth face, surmounting a short thin body, was the least symmetrical, short of actual deformity, that Dixon had ever seen, giving him the look of a drunken sage trying to collect his wits, a look intensified by slightly protruding lips and a single black eyebrow running from temple to temple. Before the party was finally seated Maconochie, no doubt well tipped already, loped forward to see what drinks were wanted. Dixon watched his servility with enjoyment.

  ‘I’ve managed to keep out of your Principal’s way so far,’ Gore-Urquhart said with his strong Lowland-Scottish accent.

  ‘That’s no mean achievement, Mr Gore-Urquhart,’ Margaret said with a laugh. ‘I’m sure he’s got all his spies out for you.’

  ‘Do you think so, now? Will I be able to get away again if he catches me?’

  ‘Most unlikely, sir,’ Bertrand said. ‘You know what they’re like in this part of the world. Throw them a celebrity and they’ll fight over him like dogs over a bone. Why, even in my small way I’ve had a good deal of that sort of thing to endure, especially from academic so-called society. Just because my father happens to be a professor, they think I must want to talk to the Vice-Chancellor’s wife about the difficulties her wretched grandson’s having at his school. But, of course, it must be a thousand times worse for you, sir, am I right?’

  Gore-Urquhart, who’d been listening to this with attention, said briskly ‘In some ways,’ and drank from his glass.

  ‘Anyway, Mr Gore-Urquhart,’ Margaret said, ‘you’re quite safe for the moment. The Principal holds court on these occasions in a room at the other end of the dance-floor—he doesn’t mix with the rabble in here.’

  ‘So while I’m with the rabble I’m fairly safe, you mean, Miss Peel? Good, I’ll stay with the rabble.’

  Dixon had been expecting a silver-bells laugh from Margaret to follow this remark, but it was still hard to bear when it came. At that moment Maconochie arrived with the drinks Gore-Urquhart had ordered. To Dixon’s surprise and delight, the beer was in pint glasses and, after waiting for Gore-Urquhart’s ‘Find me some cigarettes, laddie,’ to Maconochie, he leaned forward and said: ‘How on earth did you manage to get pints? I haven’t seen anything but halves in here the whole evening. I thought it must be a rule of the place. They wouldn’t give me pints when I asked for them. How on earth did you get round it?’ While he said this he saw irritably that Margaret was looking from him to Gore-Urquhart and back again and smiling deprecatingly, as if to assure Gore-Urquhart that, despite all evidence to the contrary, this speech betokened no real mental derangement. Bertrand, too, was watching and grinning.

  Gore-Urquhart, who didn’t seem to have noticed Margaret’s smiles, jerked a short, nicotined thumb towards the departing Maconochie. ‘A fellow Scottish Nationalist,’ he said.

  All the people facing Dixon and to his left—Gore-Urquhart himself, Bertrand, and Margaret—laughed at this, and so did Dixon, who looked to his right and saw Christine, seated next to him with her elbows on the table, smiling in a controlled fashion, and beyond her Carol, at Gore-Urquhart’s left, staring rather grimly at Bertrand. Before the laughter cleared, Dixon noticed Bertrand becoming aware of this scrutiny and looking away. Perturbed by the small tension in the company, and finding now that Gore-Urquhart’s eyes were fixed on him from under the black eyebrow, Dixon twitched his glasses on to the right part of his nose and said at a venture: ‘Well, it’s an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.’

  ‘You’re in luck, Dixon,’ Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing round cigarettes.

  Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name. With a braying flourish of trumpets, the music started up in the Ballroom, and people began to move out of the bar. Bertrand, who’d settled himself next to Gore-Urquhart, began talking to him in a low voice, and almost at once Christine addressed some remark to Carol. Margaret said to Dixon: ‘It is sweet of you to have brought me here, James.’

  ‘Glad you’re enjoying yourself.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you are very much.’

  ‘Oh, I am, really.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re enjoying this part of it, anyway, better than the actual dancing part.’

  ‘Oh, I’m enjoying both parts, honestly. Drink that up and we’ll go back on the floor. I can do quick-steps.’

  She looked earnestly at him and rested a hand on his arm. ‘Dear James, do you think it’s wise for us to go round together like this?’ she asked him.

  ‘Why ever not?’ he said in alarm.

  ‘Because you’re so sweet to me and I’m getting much too fond of you.’ She said this in a tone that combined the vibrant with the flat, like a great actress demonstrating the economical conveyance of strong emotion. This was her habit when making her avowals.

  In the midst of his panic, Dixon managed to find the thought that this, if true, would indeed be grounds for their seeing less of each other; then he hit on a remark both honest and acceptable: ‘You mustn’t say things like that.’

  She laughed lightly. ‘Poor James,’ she said. ‘Keep my seat for me, will you, darling? I shan’t be long.’ She went out.

  Poor James? Poor James? It was, in fact, a very just characterization, but hardly one for her to make, surely, her of all people. Then a sense of guilt sent him diving for his glass; guilt not only for this latest reflection, but for the unintentional irony of ‘you’re so sweet to me’. It was doubtful, he considered, whether he was capable of being at all sweet, much less ‘so’ sweet, to anybody at all. Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation and/or pity over boredom. That behaviour of such origin could seem ‘so sweet’ to her might be taken as a reflection on her sensitivity, but it was also a terrible commentary on her frustration and loneliness. Poor old Margaret, he thought with a shudder. He must try harder. But what would be the consequences to her of treatment more consistently sweet, or of a higher level of sweetness? What would be the consequences to him? To drive away these speculations, he began listening to the conversation on his left.

  ‘. . . I’ve the utmost respect for his opinion,’ Bertrand was saying. The bay in his voice was well throttled back; perhaps someone had upbraided him about it. ‘I always
say he’s the last of the old-fashioned professional critics, and so he knows what he’s talking about, which is more than you can say for most of the fraternity nowadays. Well, we kept running into each other at the same exhibitions, and funnily enough in front of the same pictures.’ Here he laughed, momentarily raising one shoulder. ‘One day he said to me: “I want to see your work. People tell me it’s good.” So I packed up an assortment of small stuff and took it round to his house—it’s a lovely place, isn’t it? You must know it, of course; one might really be back in the dix-huitième. Wonder how long before the Rubber Goods Workers’ Union takes it over—and I must say that one or two pastels seemed to fetch him . . .’

  Fetch him a vomiting-basin, Dixon thought; then horror over-came him at the thought of a man who ‘knows what he’s talking about’ not only not talking about how nasty Bertrand’s pictures were, not only not putting his boot through them, but actually seeming to be fetched by one or two of them. Bertrand must not be a good painter; he, Dixon, would not permit it. And yet here was the Gore-Itchbag fellow, not on the face of it a moron, listening to this frenzy of self-advertisement without overt protest, even with some attention. Yes, Dixon saw, with very close attention.

  Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn’t bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn’t bear not missing any more of it—Bertrand was now using the phrase ‘contrapuntal tone-values’

  – and switched to his right, where for some moments he’d been half-conscious of a silence.

  As he did so, Christine turned towards him. ‘Look, do join in this, will you?’ she said in an undertone. ‘I can’t get her to say anything.’

  He looked over at Carol, whose eye met his without apparent recognition, but before he could start working on what to say Margaret returned.

  ‘What, still hanging over the drink?’ she said vivaciously to the whole party. ‘I thought you’d all be on the floor by now. Now, Mr Gore-Urquhart, I’m not going to permit any more of this sulking about in here, Principal or no Principal. It’s the light fantastic for you; come along.’

  Gore-Urquhart, smiling politely, had risen to his feet and, with a word to the others, let himself be led away out of the bar. Bertrand looked across at Carol. ‘Don’t let’s waste the band, my dear,’ he said. ‘I’ve paid twenty-five shillings for them, after all.’

  ‘So you have, my dear,’ Carol said, stressing the appellation, and for a moment Dixon was afraid she meant to refuse and so bring the situation, whatever it was, to a crisis; but after that moment she got to her feet and began to move towards the dance-floor.

  ‘Look after Christine for me, Dixon,’ Bertrand bayed. ‘Don’t drop her; she’s fragile. Good-bye for a little, my sweet,’ he fluted to Christine; ‘I’ll be back soon. Blow your whistle if the man gets rough.’

  ‘Care for a dance?’ Dixon said to Christine. ‘I’m not much good, as I told you, but I don’t mind having a crack if you don’t.’ She smiled. ‘Nor do I, if you don’t.’

  11

  As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn’t spontaneously intervene to prevent him. But in a moment there they were in the conventional pseudo-embrace, actually dancing together, not very skilfully, but without doubt dancing. Dixon looked past her face in silence, afraid of any distraction from the task of not leading her into a collision, for the floor was a good deal more thickly populated than a quarter of an hour earlier. Among the dancers he recognized Barclay, the Professor of Music, dancing with his wife. She permanently resembled a horse, he only when he laughed, which he did suddenly and seldom, but was momentarily to be seen doing now.

  ‘What was the matter with Mrs Goldsmith, do you know?’ Christine asked.

  This inquisitiveness surprised him. ‘She did look rather fed-up, didn’t she?’ he fenced.

  ‘Was it because she was expecting Bertrand to bring her here tonight instead of me?’

  Did that mean she knew about the switch of partners? It needn’t, but it might. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a muffled voice.

  ‘I think you do know.’ She sounded quite angry. ‘I wish you’d tell me.’

  ‘I know nothing at all about it, I’m afraid. And in any case it’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘If that’s your attitude, then there’s nothing more to be said.’

  Dixon felt himself flushing for the second time in the last few minutes. Obviously she’d been at her most typical when helping Bertrand to bait him at their first encounter, when reproving him for drinking too much, when treating him this evening as non-existent. Her formal, not her relaxed, pose was the true one. Her cooperation over the sheet had been given in return for anecdote-material likely to amuse her London friends, her amiability over the phone had been to get something out of him. No doubt she was disturbed by the Bertrand–Carol business, but the feminine manoeuvre of using an innocent bystander as whipping-boy was one he’d learnt to recognize and dislike.

  They danced on in silence for some time. She’d not been modest in declaring herself an indifferent dancer, but Dixon’s enforced avoidance of anything ambitious kept them fairly well together. The other couples moved round them, wheeling when a space momentarily presented itself, huddling and marking time in the crushes. Everybody else seemed to be talking, and eventually a female voice of Christine’s pitch, heard close at hand, deceived Dixon. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Something would have to be said by him now, so he said what he’d been waiting to say all the evening: ‘I never got a chance to thank you for playing up so well over that phone business.’

  ‘What phone business?’

  ‘You know, me pretending to Bertrand that I was a reporter.’

  ‘Oh, that. I’d sooner not discuss that, if you don’t mind.’

  She couldn’t be allowed to get away with that. ‘Supposing I do mind?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You seem to forget that, but for me, and but for my little impersonation, you probably wouldn’t be here at all tonight.’

  ‘Well, that wouldn’t have mattered very much, would it?’

  The dance came to an end, but neither of them thought of leaving the floor. Through the applause he said: ‘No, perhaps it wouldn’t, but you seemed to want to come at the time, didn’t you?’

  ‘Look, can’t you shut up about it?’

  ‘All right, but don’t you try to queen it over me. You’ve no call to do that.’

  She shrugged clumsily, then dropped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry; that was silly of me. I didn’t mean to be like that.’

  As she spoke, an inaudible piano introduction led into the last of the set. ‘O.K., then,’ Dixon said. ‘Dance?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They moved off again. ‘I think we’re getting the hang of this quite well,’ he said in a moment.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t said what I did say. I was a fool. I acted like a perfect fool.’

  He saw that when, as now, she abandoned her set expression, her lips were full, and protruded like her uncle’s. ‘It’s all right, really; it was nothing,’ he said.

  ‘No it wasn’t nothing; it was ridiculous. I thought the whole of the Evening Post business was brilliantly funny.’

  ‘Oh come, there’s no need to go to the opposite extreme.’

  ‘But you see I didn’t feel like discussing it with you because that would have been like laughing at Bertrand behind his back, and that would have been wrong. I’m afraid I must have sounded a bit unfriendly over the ph
one the second time, but that was only because I couldn’t have let myself go like I wanted to without seeming as if I was getting mixed up in a conspiracy to get the better of Bertrand. That’s all it was.’

  The whole thing sounded rather childish, but better that than peevish. All the same, what messes these women got themselves into over nothing. Men got themselves into messes too, and ones that weren’t so easily got out of, but their messes arose from attempts to satisfy real and simple needs. He was saved from having to reply by the intervention of anenormous, half-incoherent voice, like that of an ogre at the onset of aphasia, which now began to sing through loudspeakers with an intonation rather resembling Cecil Goldsmith’s: