The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  Nobody else seemed to have seen what Gordon had seen, though it was clear enough that Joanna had seen something. ‘For your information,’ she said in a strained voice, even touching his hand for a moment, ‘the lady who has just come in is Mrs Jimmie Fane number two.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Gordon dully. ‘What, what of that?’

  ‘Oh darling, it’s Jimmie’s bomb, I know it is,’

  ‘How, I mean how is it, how do you know, what sort of bomb?’

  In those few seconds the newly arrived lady and Jimmie had officially recognized each other, nodded, smiled. The lady looked much less surprised to see Jimmie than he to see her. The duke and others moved towards them.

  ‘What sort of bomb?’ Gordon repeated to Joanna.

  ‘A Jimmie sort of bomb.’ She had evidently recovered her composure. ‘But I can be much more specific than that. We’ve got a couple of minutes yet because nobody’s going to expect Mrs Jimmies two and four to make much of a fuss of each other. Now then, oh by the way have you ever met her, yes, the female over there?’

  ‘No, I did run into her daughter just for a moment quite recently.’

  ‘Bloody little Periwinkle. She doesn’t half take after her mother, that girl. Actually it was Periwinkle turning up the way she did that first started me thinking about bombs and things. This is maddening of me, I know. Okay, the said bomb consists of Jimmie Fane leaving his fourth wife, me, and taking up again with his second wife, the person he and the Duke of Dunwich are at present in conversation with. Darling, please try not to look at me as if I’ve gone mad. Things like this happen every day.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was … Not that, not that that would be wildly inappropriate.’

  ‘Darling, you’re so predictable. That’s not the kind of behaviour they go in for where you come from so nobody at all goes in for it, eh? Right. One, my father died last year and he didn’t cut up as well as forecast, so Fane’s standard of living is under threat, theoretically at least. Two, some time in the last however many years it is, Rowena, that’s Mrs F number two to you, her by the fireplace, she used to be called Rosie but it’s Rowena now, not only that but Lady Rowena on account of her dad’s unexpectedly coming into an earldom. Just imagine all the places that would get him invited to! Or he thinks it would. And she’s never been hard up for a few bob. Three, things like him always saying what a great girl old Rosie-Rowena used to be until he got the idea for his bomb and then shutting up about her overnight. Oh, give it a rest, Gordon, do – no one’s watching us, you’re quite safe. Yes, and four, this may still be all balls from start to finish but it isn’t self-evidently all balls. Jimmie Fane’s perfectly capable of – I must get myself another drink. Don’t worry about me, darling, I’ll be all right, I’ve seen it coming for long enough. The only thing I don’t quite understand is what the fair Lady Rowena is doing here. Just stirring up trouble as usual, no doubt.’

  Gordon had no chance of either improving or throwing doubt on this reading of motives in what followed. Quite soon he was introduced to Lady Rowena and experienced some minutes of her being charming to him in his capacity as Jimmie Fane’s biographer, a role she plainly thought of as on a level rather below that of the great man’s physiotherapist but well above his bootmaker, say. Something about her carefree tolerance made it seem unlikely that in her view Jimmie had any sort of claim to be a figure of eminence, let alone in a field conventionally regarded with respect among the educated. Putting this point to himself made Gordon feel like a good deal of a pompous dunce but, he reflected, better that than a philistine. At the time the set of her shoulders, it might have been, or the way she lifted her nose as she started to speak, made it not impossible or revolting to imagine her, when younger, the object of male interest. Well, all things considered, including the durability of Joanna’s looks, it was clear that old Jimmie could pick fillies with staying-power, as people like the present duke’s grandfather would no doubt have put it.

  After a short while there presumably sounded some buzzer or kindred device inaudible to Gordon and all at once Lady Rowena withdrew her attention from him so totally that he felt like glancing down at himself to make sure he was still there. By the time he had recovered, she had moved away with Jimmie and the duke’s eyes were on him or somewhere near him. His Grace seemed no drunker than before, but no less so either. He allowed himself to be taken aside.

  ‘Charming woman that Lady Rhona or Rowena Thingummy,’ said Gordon in the kind of fluctuating whinny he fancied was a serviceable rendering of the mode of speech generally affected by the company. ‘Knew she was coming, did you?’

  ‘Absolute charmer, isn’t she? Absolute, er, you know, what do I mean? Charmer.’

  Gordon took a fresh glass of gin and Dubonnet from the butler’s tray, ‘I asked you if you knew in advance she was coming.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ said the duke. He appeared puzzled.

  ‘I mean you did know Lady Rowena was coming over tonight for dinner.’

  ‘Fellow she’s been staying with, old Something-or-other, he asked if he might bring her along, and of course I said the more the merrier. What exactly –’

  ‘Tell me, Willie, do you think she knew she’d run into Jimmie here?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The duke showed no signs of puzzlement now. ‘But that’s little Rowena all over. One of these wenches who like giving things a shove every so often.’

  ‘Somehow I doubt if Jimmie knew she was coming.’

  ‘Really? I say, that makes me out to have been rather remiss. I certainly intended to drop a word in his ear. It must have slipped my mind. That’s if you’re right, of course. Oh dear, I find all sorts of things have slipped my mind these days, I tell you frankly.’

  Before any instances could be given, a tall fair-haired woman approached whom Gordon found distinctly attractive. ‘We’ve met before,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed we have, Mr Scott-Thompson, several times, the first having been when I picked you and your party up in the car this morning.’ She turned to the duke, ‘I think we could go in now, Willie.’

  ‘All right, my dear, thank you, Polly. This is Polly,’ he explained. ‘She runs my life, I don’t know what I’d do without her. She’s been being hostess for me here ever since, er, ever since …’

  ‘For quite a while,’ said Polly. ‘You go on, love, and we’ll come along after.’

  ‘So you sort of act as hostess for the duke at dinner-parties and things,’ said Gordon without feeling in the least degree proud of doing so.

  ‘You’ve got it. It’s this way.’

  ‘You aren’t one of these characters, are you?’ he found he had said.

  ‘We’re in here tonight,’ said Polly. ‘More of a chance to spread ourselves.’

  There was, or they had, in one of the larger dining-rooms at Hungerstream. Gordon sat down among people who were completely unknown to him. Even protracted ocular search failed to reveal anyone he remembered having seen before except the duke, although the Fanes and Louise were presumably close by. His kneecaps were cold and bit by bit he perceived that other parts of him, like his fingertips, were cold too. The soup, when it came, warmed him a little without to any degree impressing itself on his memory. Nobody took any notice of him except the old man opposite who was wearing a dinner-jacket and who said confidentially of it,

  ‘Don’t know why I put this thing on. Habit, I suppose. Makes a fellow feel a damn fool, I can tell you, being the only one. By the time somebody told me it was too late to change back. Don’t want to bore you. How have you been getting on?’

  ‘Oh, not too badly, thanks.’

  ‘M’m. Didn’t you do not too badly at Doncaster?’

  ‘Where? I don’t think I’ve ever been there in my life.’

  ‘What are you saying? You must have been in Doncaster, my dear fellow. In fact I remember you did frightfully well there only last year, or perhaps it was the year before. Never been to Doncaster, eh? You’ll be telling me you’ve never seen a horse next.’


  ‘As a matter of fact I saw one just a …’ Something happened to Gordon’s vision for a moment that he thought might be the result of his head spinning. He said carefully, ‘I’m sorry, but I think there must have been some mistake. Who, who do you think I am?’

  Until this point the old chap’s demeanour had been the very soul of cordiality and good humour. Now he frowned and his manner sharpened at once.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped, ‘I know who you are. I don’t think, I know.’

  ‘In that case, what’s my name?’

  ‘Look, if you want to pretend you’ve never met me that’s entirely your affair. Reasons best known to yourself. I won’t say another word to you, never fear.’

  Without much hope, Gordon started to give his name and occupation, as to a policeman. Before he had said it all, however, the man in the dinner-jacket cut him off in effect by shutting his eyes, abruptly raising a hand and remaining frozen in this posture till he had achieved the outcome he wanted. On resuming normal bodily movement he never again glanced in Gordon’s direction. Neither did anyone else, indeed from the start of their exchange the two had attracted no perceptible attention whatever, a testimony either to laudable tact or uncommon blockishness.

  Gordon had not yet decided which alternative was the likelier, though on reflection inclining to the second, when he noticed that the wine-glass in front of him still or once more contained wine. He drank it down and set about marvelling at the irreversibility and speed with which the dinner-jacketed man had put him in the wrong from what one might have thought was a position of grave weakness. Such a stroke, in his world, was rarely so much as attempted except by women, but then his world was, so to speak, not this world. Either his marvelling went on a long time at one go or he kept going back for a further instalment of it, because he was still or once more engaged in it when he noticed that people were leaving the room. He got to his feet and joined them.

  Some time later Gordon was happily urinating in the nice little lavatory that opened off the bathroom that in turn opened off the bedroom allotted to him and Louise. When he had finished in the lavatory he went back through the bathroom and bedroom, thinking how pleasant they were, and into the dressing-room, which he thought even more pleasant with its pleasantness concentrated in the made-up bed he had noted earlier. This was so inviting that he decided to lie down on it for a moment, or found that he had started to do so.

  When he woke up it was to notice that the overhead light was very much on, that it was seriously dark outside and that he felt extraordinary, awful too but more extraordinary. When he woke up a second time the centre of attention was concentrated on the inside of his mouth. He was pouring water into and through his mouth when he heard somebody come into the main bedroom: Louise, as it proved.

  ‘Never felt this way before.’

  ‘Oh, come on, don’t let me down. Have a shot.’

  ‘No. It’d only make me feel worse. Did anyone notice I was drunk?’

  ‘Oh yes. I couldn’t speak for absolutely everybody, but they all seemed to except the duke. That old boy I saw you chatting to, he said all the other champion jockeys he’d met were tremendously abstemious. You must have given him a nasty shock.’

  ‘What? He can’t have been talking about me,’ said Gordon indignantly.

  ‘No, he was talking about you all right. He described you to an absolute T.’

  ‘Oh, he did, did he? What did he say, can you remember?’

  ‘Of course I can. He said you were rather large for a jockey, he thought, and you had a sort of nervous look. I couldn’t have done better myself in a few words.’

  ‘Nervous of what, did he say that?’

  ‘I can’t see why you want to know all this. Well, he said he couldn’t tell if you were nervous about anything in particular, it was just that you seemed, you know, nervous.’

  ‘Oh yeah. The man’s a raving lunatic. Anybody with a tittle of wit would be nervous of him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d have thought you were of anything if you still had your moustache.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘You’d better get yourself to bed, chum. In milord’s chamber, not in here with me. Your heart, let’s call it that, your heart wouldn’t be in anything coarse, would it? And come to think of it your heart wouldn’t be in it either, that’s heart in the more genteel sense, of course. You can’t expect to make those sort of goo-goo eyes at a female without Auntie Louise noticing, even if the female is, I’ll spare your blushes over what I think she is, but for purposes of identification she’s the one married to the toffy-nosed scribbling twit with the snowy locks. On your way now.’ And she turned her back.

  21

  ‘Tea, coffee or fruit-juice, sir?’ asked Alec Walker in an unexpected voice. Then it immediately became clear that it was not the captain that had spoken but the ordinary-looking chap in a suit visible at the duke’s front door and on later occasions the previous day, identifiable as a butler. Gordon said something back and the chap came out with something about India, China and-or Ceylon which evidently needed a reply, so Gordon mentioned India, a country about which an uncle had given him a large illustrated book one Christmas, and fell asleep again for what was probably no more than a few seconds. When he awoke the chap was in the middle of asking him a question about the Channel Islands, or at any rate Jersey and Guernsey, which he answered with a mutter indistinguishable even to himself. After that he once more fell asleep, for a bit longer this time, he suspected, because when he again awoke it was to find a cup of what he discovered was cooling milky tea on the bedside table. He found out it was lukewarm in the course of drinking it, found out too that it was unsweetened, greasy in texture and of mildly unpleasant flavour, but down it all went to the last drop. He reflected that he would have welcomed the chance of opting for lemon instead of milk, but then perhaps he had slept through that part.

  By cautious degrees he established that Louise was not immediately about. It was not that he had any great objection to her presence, just that as he felt at the moment the thought of talking to her, indeed to anybody at all, was insupportable. Still moving slowly, if not with positive caution, he shaved, dressed and otherwise prepared himself to move away from here before the advent of an assiduous chambermaid or other domestic. Without any thought of breakfast he went downstairs unobserved and along and into the library where he had first encountered the Duke of Dunwich, not because he wanted a book and very much not because he was hoping to encounter the duke again, but merely because he could not have faced venturing into those extensive parts of the house where he had not been. To visit a part he had at least seen before gave him a feeling, however illusory, of being in touch with events, even perhaps of having some influence over them.

  He had barely arrived in the library when the audible threat of another arrival there drove him to scoop off the shelves a book, any old book, some book or other, and carry it with him at top speed to a handy chair, one no doubt of some antiquity. There entered the chap in the suit Gordon had come across in the context of early-morning tea.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said politely, ‘but have you seen His Grace anywhere?’

  Gordon was rescued from having to reply at once by a quite unexpected compulsion to retch. By the time he had yielded to it without further offence but quite loudly, something that evidently caused the suited chap no concern of any kind, he was sufficiently master of himself to be able to say, distinctly enough, ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid not.’

  The man nodded but did not speak. Instead, he went on a brief tour of the room, perhaps to assure himself that his master was not concealed anywhere in it, finally returning to a nearby point. ‘If you should happen to see His Lordship, sir, would you be good enough to tell him that Nigger will be saddled up and ready for him at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘I most certainly will,’ said Gordon heartily, in the confident assumption that Nigger was some kind of horse and not, say, a stable-boy. ‘As s
oon as I see him.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The butler nodded again, with more amplitude than before, and left.

  After an interval only long enough for Gordon to heave a lengthy sigh, retch another couple of times, still without issue, and open his book, the duke came in. This arrival disconcerted him less than it otherwise might because he knew exactly what to say to him for at any rate the first few seconds of their meeting.

  ‘Good morning. That butler chap asked me to –’

  ‘Good morning to you, and thank you but I saw Jenkins in the, in the, and he told me.’

  ‘About –’

  ‘I told him to stand Nigger down. I don’t really feel like an outing today. Now what’s the book you’ve found for yourself?’

  ‘Culture and Anarchy.’

  ‘M’m. The fellow found himself a good subject there, what? Interesting subject, I mean.’

  ‘He certainly –’

  ‘Or subjects. No, I don’t feel like an outing today, but I know what I do feel like. And hey, I’ve just had the most marvellous idea. Why don’t you join me?’

  ‘Join you in what exactly?’

  ‘Just a little glass of fruit-juice. Say you will. Splendid.’ The duke went over to what was doubtless a bell-rope, swathed as it was in some rich damask stuff, and pulled it – twice, Gordon saw. ‘The two rings are for two glasses,’ said the duke. ‘You can save an awful lot of time with a simple code for things like that.’ After a moment he said, ‘Funny sort of name for a horse, isn’t it, Nigger? I mean it’s not as if he’s black or even brown. I suppose you’d call him more of a red roan than anything else, you know.’