The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Who christened him?’

  ‘Now there’s a funny thing if you like. It can’t be more than a couple of years ago, so it’s got to be yours truly, and bugger me if I can think what I had in mind. I mean I must have had something in mind, it stands to reason. But please, don’t let me keep you from your book.’

  ‘No really, I only picked it up because there was no one to talk to.’

  Not for the first time, Gordon wished he had something to call the Duke of Dunwich. Duke – too American. Dunwich – too familiar, too egalitarian. Willie – too familiar and very likely too egalitarian as well. Your Lordship – too humble and too much like a policeman in a police-court, if they still had police-courts. Your Grace – much too humble and like a servant. For a short period Gordon thought of writing a newspaper piece on this anachronistic class barrier in modern Britain. Then his attention became concentrated on his right knee, part of which was aching slightly and continued to do so until he moved that leg an inch or so. Then the suited man appeared with a bottle of champagne and two glasses on a silver tray. The champagne bore a label to the effect that it was a Veuve Clicquot-Pontsardin 1943, which struck Gordon as satisfactorily long ago and far away.

  ‘I find a glass of this stuff very comforting at about this hour,’ said the duke. ‘Talking of which, what precisely is the hour? M’m, a bit early, it must be said. That’s if this damn watch isn’t slow, which wouldn’t surprise me in the least considering I only paid two quid for it. You can’t expect much for two quid these days. Well, anyway. Your very good health, my dear fellow.’ And, with a smile of what looked like pure friendliness, he lifted his glass and drank a good deal of its contents.

  ‘Yours too,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Thank you.’ The duke lowered his glass again and tried not very successfully to smack his lips. ‘M’m, most comforting. I feel better already, you know. Tell me, do you ever suffer from alcoholic remorse? I don’t mean alcoholic’s remorse, I mean alcoholic remorse. Feelings of remorse for recent actions imperfectly recalled but suspected of having been unworthy in some way and certainly performed under the influence of drink. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’ Gordon tried to sound encouraging.

  ‘The thing is, I think I may have made a bit of a grab at young Norah last night. Now I see no harm in that sort of thing in general, in fact quite the reverse, a girl likes to feel she’s been noticed. It’s just as much of a compliment if the fellow’s some way from being love’s young dream and may even have started on his second glass of sherry. M’m. No, as I say, I think that sort of thing’s perfectly innocent in itself. It’s when it goes, what’s that useful tag, over the top that one starts feeling a little awkward the next morning. No use apologizing, of course. Bad habit altogether, apologizing.’

  ‘What did you actually, I mean …’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. I don’t mean I won’t, I mean I can’t. If I could remember anything more than the haziest possible outline I promise I’d seriously consider telling you. Has Norah said anything to you?’

  ‘What? No, no, not a word. Why don’t you just forget all about it? She’s knocked about a fair bit in her time.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘Well … Norah has.’

  ‘You know, it’s a funny thing,’ said the duke, topping up Gordon’s glass and refilling his own, ‘but I could have sworn you called her something else once or twice. Pet name, perhaps. Anyway, never mind. Well, that’s a relief. You didn’t happen to notice anything from where you were, I suppose?’

  ‘No, but then I’d had a fair bit to drink myself.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘You did seem to think you might have forgotten to tell Jimmie that one of his ex-wives, Lady Whatsit, Lady Rowena was coming over for dinner.’

  The duke drained his glass with a sucking sound. ‘This is an innocuous bally drink,’ he muttered. ‘Would you care for something a bit more grown-up?’

  ‘No thanks, this is fine with me.’

  When the duke came back from the drinks tray he was carrying a tumbler half full of a dark-brown liquid and was also frowning. But as he started to speak his expression cleared, to Gordon’s relief.

  ‘No no,’ he said affably, ‘I distinctly remember dropping a word in Jimmie’s ear to the effect that the lady concerned would be putting in an appearance in these parts. He didn’t like the prospect any more than I did myself, in fact rather less actually. But after all, what could I have said to her hosts? Don’t bring her? Tell her to go out in the garden and eat worms while we feast our heads off? The trouble is, you know, my dear fellow, we’re all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody’s forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life’s not like that but what can we do? Now my advice, for what it’s worth, is either finish what you’ve got there or just forget about it and have a proper drink.’

  ‘Could I trouble you for a small Scotch and water?’

  ‘One standard-sized Scotch and water coming up.’

  Later, more than at the time, but not only later, Gordon thought about the duke and some of the things he had said. Among much else it could have been argued that to talk of the reputation for eccentricity enjoyed by members of the English upper classes was not really to call things by their right names. Consistency of character, logical behaviour, reliability, sense of duty, however admirable and however resolutely to be pursued, were middle-class virtues and to some extent under the control of the will, became moral qualities and as such imposed restraints on freedom. Jimmie had said more than once that the upper class enjoyed the true freedom of not caring what anybody else thought about them. Like children, perhaps. If that had a bearing, there might be a connection here with the boyishness of such people noted by some outside observers, including Indians under the British Raj and later.

  At this point in his ruminations Gordon became aware that the duke was standing a couple of yards away rotating his glass, which seemed to have slightly more in than before, and rocking a little from foot to foot, ‘I say,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I was just going to say, have you got everything you want there?’

  ‘I think so, yes, thanks.’

  ‘Not bursting for a pee, for instance? If you are, for God’s sake get it over quick like a good chap. I don’t want you to go dodging out of the room all of a sudden in the middle of a conversation like, like a, well.’

  ‘No, I seem to be all right at the moment.’

  ‘M’m.’ For once in his life the duke seemed momentarily at a loss. ‘The fact is, my dear fellow, there was a bit of a dust-up last night. Jimmie and Joanna, you know. I wasn’t really involved myself, any more than anybody else was, I’m happy to say. Well, I call it a dust-up, nobody was actually throwing things but there was a definite atmosphere, no, that’s not right either, more than an atmosphere. What it seemed to be about was her, Joanna, going on at Jimmie for being fed up with her in a big way, you understand, and Jimmie saying he wasn’t. That’s about it. Quite enough when you come down to it. Oh, there was something about Lady Rowena sticking her nose in, but that was separate as far as I could tell. It was a bit late on by then. Anyway, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party, meaning I’d as soon not be left alone in here to cope with the pair of them. Then there’s the matter of young Norah, as I was telling you. I’m not exactly pining to meet her unescorted either, as no doubt you can imagine.’

  Gordon made reassuring noises, did so as persuasively as he could considering how impressed he was to find Willie Dunwich admitting to the possibility of embarrassment, even taking precautions to ward it off or at least to minimize it. That used up a few seconds, and then hardly at all behind cue the door opened to admit not the Fanes, not Louise, but the ruffianly couple first seen almost exactly twenty-four hours before. Something far from unimpressive had brought it about that they were entirely trans
figured in dress and accessories and yet no whit less ruffianly than before. They were quickly followed by a couple of couples of additional scum mobilized as short-service guests, and by the suited butler and an underling or two. Before the camaraderie of their foregoing chat should have quite dissipated, Gordon said to the duke,

  ‘While you and I are still in touch …’

  ‘Yes, old chap?’

  ‘… I wonder if you’d mind explaining what puttock-sieighs are.’

  ‘What what? What? I’m terribly sorry, I don’t seem to have quite …’

  Gordon gave it up. Paddock-something perhaps, he thought. It occurred to him that the duke’s inveterate slurring of consonants in his speech might have originated from an innate difficulty with several, such as L, R, S and Th. Something that dawned on Gordon later was the irreducible cost of this hypothesis, entailing as it did identical genetic speech defects in some thousands of persons of noble birth. He quickly gave that one up too when he had identified it.

  For the moment there was plenty to occupy him, though perhaps not at any profound intellectual level. Even so he soon found he was at the centre of a small group of youngish people who asked him questions about himself and even seemed to be listening to his answers. He had given several of these before it struck him that, though asked in a perfectly friendly way, their questions seemed designed to elicit biographical facts that could have been of no particular interest to the company. Or so one might have thought, and yet what he said was listened to with mysterious attentiveness.

  For instance, the female half of the ruffianly couple said to him, ‘I expect you go back up to Scotland quite a bit to see your folks and old friends and so on.’

  ‘I haven’t been to Scotland for years. I doubt if I go there more than anybody else who doesn’t live there.’

  ‘Would you say you were English or British or Scottish or what?’

  ‘It’s something I never think about except at times like this,’ said Gordon, who was already starting to tire of the subject of himself.

  ‘Which do you think you are when you do think?’

  ‘If it has to be one of them I suppose British. As I said I was born in London. But I don’t quite see what –’

  ‘You also said your father kept up his connections with Scotland,’ said the ruffianly male.

  ‘I read somewhere that over fifty per cent of those who call themselves British have at least one grandparent who wasn’t English,’ said somebody else.

  Then Gordon said something. In the last minute he had come to one or two tentative conclusions about the way he was regarded by the ruffianly couple and others present. To them he was an object of curiosity rather than interest, as if he had been a spaceman or an Australian aboriginal. Seen in this light he was a mixture of the hackneyed and the incomprehensible, exotic, perverse, forbidding, part ridiculous, part marvellous. At the same time a more serious inquisitiveness was at work, a genuine desire to know something of a kind of person little seen or studied or called to mind, namely a commoner, one of the majority.

  But at the moment this imbroglio took up less of Gordon’s attention than wondering where on earth Jimmie and Joanna were and what they were doing. Perhaps they were preparing to leave without telling him, perhaps they had already left. Neither of these hypotheses appeared to him in the least likely, but between them they finally edged out of his mind all speculation about his questioners’ motives, with a farewell hint that they should go and stuff themselves. But just then Joanna came into the room followed by Jimmie, and Gordon switched tracks again.

  Humorously berating the rest of the company for frowsting indoors on a fine morning like this one, Jimmie explained that the two of them had been out for a health-giving walk. Certainly at that moment there seemed to be colour in his cheeks over and above what decades of assiduous boozing had put there. At his side, Joanna too had a fresh-air look. Nothing about them suggested that they were other than a decent, respectable, well-behaved, moderately posh, rather boring couple. It was hard to believe that husband was about to ditch wife or that wife was about to suffer ditching. But then again he found it hard to believe that, say, Joanna was a persistent fantasist. Harder.

  All the same, he found himself inspecting Joanna quite carefully when he got her alone, or rather, to be strictly fair, she got him alone. Whichever way on it was, the mutual isolation process was achieved thoroughly enough to make him forget all about the people he had been talking to.

  ‘Did you have a nice walk?’

  ‘It was all right as far as it went.’

  ‘Did anything emerge?’

  ‘Well, that you could have knocked old Jimmie Fane down with a feather to find old Rowena swimming back into his ken after so long, and at the same time how unsurprising and humdrum it was, just the sort of thing that happens. Oh dear, he’s usually better than that. He was so open and artless and friendly that any girl at all would have realized something, well, something rather horrid was on the way, let alone one who’s been married to him for something like twenty years.’

  ‘And who still doesn’t really know what she thinks of him after all that time. You know, Joanna, before long you’ll have to decide about Jimmie.’

  Gordon had spoken lightly but he saw at once that he had said something she would very much have preferred not to have heard. She concentrated her gaze, ‘I think that’s all wrong, the way you’re thinking, if it is the way you’re thinking. I made up my mind about Jimmie a dozen times when I thought it still mattered, of course I did. It doesn’t matter what anybody else decides about Jimmie, what counts is what he decides about other people.’

  This seemed to Gordon almost unbearably neat as well as depressing but he let it go. Instead he again spoke rather out of turn. ‘Has he made up his mind about you?’

  ‘Yes, and for your information what he’s made up his mind to do about me is leave me and go back to Rowena.’

  ‘Oh. Would she have him?’

  ‘I reckon that’s what she came here for last night, to tell him the good news in person. And without putting anything in writing, of course.’

  ‘Oh, come on, love, when he saw her come in he was flabbergasted and furious at the same time. I’ll swear to that.’

  ‘Swear away, darling. He must have thought as I did at first, that Lady Rowena had turned up to pursue her favourite sport of stirring up trouble.’

  ‘You’ve got an answer for everything.’

  ‘So I have.’

  ‘So when’s he off?’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything about when. In fact you might as well know he hasn’t said anything as yet, not in so many words. But I know, for sure, surer than if I’d heard it from his own lips, and for Christ’s sake don’t tell me I’m being hysterical, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Do you really think I sound it or look it?’ She certainly looked much as usual, except if anything healthier and more blue-eyed than ever, and sounded as usual too, except perhaps less nervous.

  ‘No, I have to admit you don’t, not to me, but then I don’t know much about how people sound or look when they’re being hysterical.’

  ‘Now there’s a couple of per cent chance I may be wrong, here and there at any rate, but put it this way, if I had that amount of reason to believe he was a spy and I was a security copper I’d arrest him even if my career depended on it.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Gordon. It was all he could think of to say.

  ‘He was marvellous when we were out for that walk, funny and charming and kind, if it doesn’t sound too much of a hoot. He hasn’t been like that for years, at least not to me. He’d stopped worrying, you see, he’d made up his mind. I remember reading that thing about some chaps who’re going to commit suicide being on top form for their last few days, because the struggle’s over. They’ve decided.’

  Gordon had been about to tell Joanna as if for her own good that now she was being melodramatic when, perhaps fortunately, a well-remembered fu
zzy voice said, ‘Oogh ah awww er errghgh,’ this no doubt occasioned by a sudden access of pain at the base of the back, and then after a few moments’ self-massage, it’s no use you two thinking you can sneak off and have a nice little chat on your own, you’re at a party, which means every couple of minutes you switch to something even less interesting than before if possible, no no you be off out of it you two little things I haven’t time for you now, but, but, but you have a lovely fresh drink, dear Joanna, and you too, Gordon, my dear fellow, if you’ll just excuse me a moment,’ and the Duke of Dunwich moved by a slightly curvilinear path to where Louise had just then arrived in the library.

  Impressed as he was by the other man’s retention of his name against so many odds, Gordon got no nearer to him for the time being. But he had little leisure to consider that when a kind of spreading wave of vacancy ascended in his insides from somewhere like the pit of his stomach. He had had nothing to eat for over twelve hours, a condition in effect hidden from him earlier by the internal presence of the large amounts of water and other fluids he had swallowed since waking. Lack of food had been further masked by the alcohol he had ingested more recently and by occasional fits of nausea. These last seemed to have fallen off sharply in the past twenty minutes. Was he getting drunk again? Yes, but as against that he felt generally the better for it and was confident, too, that long before or at least before attaining last night’s state he would have fallen asleep, perhaps from a standing posture. To appear normal he chatted to other guests of about his own age, as far as theirs could be determined. He found it a strain to make a whole remark without forgetting its second half, but evidently no one noticed or cared. With a total blank in his memory of the conversational ground covered he drifted along with the others when the time to eat came round.