The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  With a show of grimness, Brian said, ‘That was something, to go through that. But it’s just how things turn out, I suppose. No one to blame.’

  ‘No, but it does seem a bit unfair.’

  ‘So do lots of things. Fair and unfair doesn’t enter into it.’

  Gordon cut short this banal interchange by saying, ‘At least I hope that’s taken you away from your publishing worries. Worse troubles at sea.’

  Brian scowled and sipped grappa, ‘it’s not just a matter of a bit of aggravation here and there, you know. I happen to think publishing’s a very important job.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Gordon without any great sense of urgency.

  ‘You don’t know what’s been going on, do you, otherwise you wouldn’t be so fucking smug. All these financial deals going on, who cares a toss who owns this or who’s paid a hundred million quid for that, I agree. The trouble comes when the bloody philistines who’ve bought you up start looking at the books, and I don’t mean the books of exciting new poetry or the books of vibrant innovative prose, I mean the books, the sodding account-books. One fine day one of the bastards happens to glance at the page that shows the annual profits on turnover of the various enterprises the company owns, and the fellow starts making a few comparisons. He’s one of the smart ones who can count on his toes as well as his fingers, and after some time he notices what intellectuals call a disparity. Soft-drinks chain, profit last year, twenty-six per cent, breakfast cereals, thirty-six per cent, telecoms, forty-six per cent, Brontosaurus Books, six per cent. Say that again slowly – six per cent. Now any actual publisher who nets six per cent in an average year knows he’s doing very nicely, thank you, but this sod isn’t a publisher, he’s only a businessman with a head for figures, which means he can spot the fact that Brontosaurus Books is much less profitable than even the lousiest oil-well. Perhaps he can’t cure the disparity but he sure as hell can reduce it, and if he can he obviously must. That means –’

  Here Gordon interrupted, but not for long, ‘if this is a way of working up to telling me –’

  ‘You’ll get your turn in a minute,’ said Brian, and drained his glass of grappa. ‘So businessman consults a friend of his who can read, and friend explains there are things called bestsellers which are more profitable than other things that get published. The best-sellers may not be as, well, since nobody’s listening you and I can call it between ourselves good as some of the other things, but that’s a matter of opinion and only to do with culture. That means that books that are clearly never going to be best-sellers –’

  ‘Like JRP Fane: lyrist and libertine, by Gordon Scott-Thompson, will have to move over to make room for something that’ll show a handsome profit, or a profit at any rate.’

  Brian said without expression, ‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’

  ‘Actually you took them out of mine. I decided before you started your lecture that I wanted nothing more to do with any book on Jimmie. There are limits to how much of a shit one can face writing about.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Brian inattentively, looking over Gordon’s shoulder for the waiter. A little later he added, ‘I should have seen this coming, well in a way I did, but you know how you get.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  Quite soon the two had agreed that the contract between them should be rescinded as from that moment, that Gordon should be free to sell wherever he pleased the fruits of his labours and that he should not be called upon to refund the advance he had so far been paid in consideration of his honest endeavours under the said contract.

  Of course, as Brian had said over Gordon’s shoulder of course there was nowhere to put on record the fact that the money-men at the publishing house had done nothing more than decide to get out of the Fane commitment if they and it could, and their and its ability to do so had come about because of what Gordon had decided to do or not to do, a decision taken quite independently. If anyone should ever care to ask, Brian Harris had been deputed to tell him that the thing was off and off it was at once and the record said so. Well, what did it really matter?

  One final point was that the two excerptible chunks faxed to Brian were in his judgement and that of his contacts uneven in commercial quality, so much so that the chunk about Jimmie and his wives and girl-friends would need a good deal of beefing up before being offered to a quality newspaper, while the chunk about the works of Fane was probably too tame and intellectual to be worth offering at all. Brian added that the fact that no book was now contemplated would very likely take a thousand quid or so off what such a newspaper would pay.

  ‘It’s rather a pity that the bastard concerned didn’t put off looking at the books a bit longer,’ he said on parting. ‘Another couple of weeks and we’d have got ourselves in too deep to pull out. Thanks for being so helpful over this. My expert handling of the situation’ll probably give me more time to look for another job. Not necessarily within the world of books.’

  ‘So you’re leaving this lot soon?’

  ‘It’s not up to me, my old Gordon.’

  Another bus-ride took the ex-biographer to one of the places he had originally visited in search of Fane material. On arrival he decided to leave the matter of his change of status for a different occasion. A man’s voice spoke to him out of the wall when he pushed the bell at 14 Pearson Gardens: Norman Cooper’s.

  Upstairs in the Walkers’ flat, Gordon thought Madge was looking no worse than he remembered, though in a way hard to define more closely she did look smaller. But again it was obviously not a time to go in for any peering or wondering about things like that.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear your news,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Gordon dear.’

  ‘I suppose it was all rather sudden, wasn’t it?’

  ‘When it came it was. I piped him down as usual, everything was as usual then and during the night, and then when I went in to him this morning he just hadn’t woken up.’

  ‘There’s no need to go through it all again, Madge,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I want to hear,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Of course he does, Coop dear. After all, there’s not an awful lot to go through. The doctor was very sweet when he got here. I hadn’t really taken to him in the past but the captain always swore by him, said he was tough as well as kind, that was the sort of combination he always looked up to, the captain. And he was marvellous this morning, the doctor was, he said … that Alec wouldn’t have known a thing about it, couldn’t have done, which really put my mind at rest, honestly.’

  ‘You sit down with Gordon now, Madge,’ said Cooper, ‘and I’ll get us some tea.’

  While tea was being made, Gordon heard how Madge was glad the captain had gone so suddenly and painlessly, glad too for his sake that his life was over. In the past he had kept up with old shipmates, gone out to lunch with them, done a bit of sailing, attended reunions and reviews, but those days had been brought to an end years before. Since his illness he had never talked about his feelings or even referred to them except when he had had to, but Madge had known him well, not that it had been difficult to guess a certain amount, such as what went through his mind first thing in the morning. No, she said, they had not had many visitors after the first year or so.

  ‘Well, perhaps people get lazy,’ said Gordon. ‘And don’t like journeys.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, but sometimes I think it’s a kind of embarrassment that keeps them away. They think they ought to come more often than they do, perhaps, and it makes them uncomfortable to keep apologizing for leaving it so long since the last time and promising it won’t be so long till the next time. Once they’ve realized that they may start finding it too far to come at all. And they’re not getting any younger themselves.’

  ‘I suppose you haven’t had time to think what you’re going to do yet.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had plenty of time before this morning. I’ll start by getting my grand-niece over for a week or two. Well, actually she
’s Alec’s grand-niece but we’ve always got on quite well, she and I. I rang her up and she’ll be coming along tomorrow.’

  Cooper arrived with the tea in time to hear this last bit. ‘Not till then?’ he asked.

  ‘No, she’s got to get a child off to school.’

  ‘That leaves tonight,’ said Cooper, ‘I can’t do tonight.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, either of you,’ said Madge. ‘I’ll be fine on my own.’

  Cooper continued to address himself to Gordon, ‘in fact I really ought to be off about six.’

  ‘If I leave in a few minutes I can easily be back here by six,’ said Gordon.

  ‘There’s really and truly no need,’ said Madge.

  ‘I’ll hang on for you,’ said Cooper.

  28

  Now that Gordon no longer had any obligation to write any sort of book about JRP Fane, artist and man, he found his estimate of the old boy had changed in both aspects. Jimmie himself seemed slightly less of a towering shit than when last encountered in Gray’s. This relative leniency towards him might have issued from a sense of having disappointed some of his expectations, however richly they might have deserved to be. The sense of gleeful anticipation with which Gordon had looked forward to passing on his news was largely abated. On the other hand, with all pressure towards impartiality removed, the novels instantly struck him as the most abject piss, well beyond any excuse of a comprehensive change of taste, simple passage of thirty years or more, etc. The interesting ambiguities he thought he had seen in The Escaped Prisoner, for instance, were now revealed as no more than a boring attempt at mystification that failed totally to obscure the lack of conflict at the centre and a conclusion so thoroughly foregone as to make all but the first few pages predictable in every detail above the smallest. No doubt his opinion of the Fane writings would ascend again in the future, but not far, he thought, not as far as it had fallen, just far enough with luck to recall to him what he had found in them that had made them seem worth writing about in the first place.

  Gordon sat at his work-table, though he was not doing any work. It was twenty minutes past four the following afternoon and Joanna had been due at four o’clock. Unlike some women he had known, she had an observable sense of time, perhaps having grasped that one person waiting for another is effectively debarred from doing anything else but wait. So it was with Gordon now. He sat on for a short while waiting in vain for Joanna to arrive, then went to the window as if looking into the street would cause her to appear in it. Much to his surprise she was indeed to be seen at that moment, approaching the front door of the building, though not in her usual brisk, head-down mode, almost at an amble. When she reached the door she failed to stop by it or even glance at it, continuing on her way instead at the same strolling pace. A couple of dozen yards down the pavement she came to a halt and stood without turning. Although the sun shone the air was not warm.

  These antics, which were in no way characteristic of Joanna, disconcerted Gordon. He had almost reached the point of opening the window and calling down to her when she seemed to come to herself, swung round and walked actively back and pressed the doorbell. Not wanting to be seen as over-expectant he took his time about going to let her in, but it was not very long before she was there in his flat. She proved to be wearing a shirt of some deep red colour and a shortish leather skirt which showed off her legs. He was dimly conscious of having seen her in these clothes before, though he could not have said on what occasion. For all that, he also sensed he was better off not remembering. She unemphatically avoided their customary inaugural kiss and was not so ready as usual to look him in the eye.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, already knowing a large part of the answer.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong exactly but something’s changed. Jimmie isn’t going.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He told me the whole story last night and I mean the whole of it. How he’d worked it all out and come to the conclusion that he’d be so much better off back with Rosie that it was going to be worth all the upset and boredom and everything of making the switch and never mind what the papers said.’

  ‘I can’t see Jimmie bothering much anyway about –’

  ‘Rosie held out against the idea for a bit but she finally caved in and after she told him so at Hungerstream he felt fine.’ At this point she gave Gordon a quick smile of defensive apology, almost as if asking him not to judge the old boy too harshly. ‘But then quite soon, he couldn’t have said exactly why but he found himself asking her for a sort of stay of execution, putting off the moment when he finally took the plunge. I think that was him changing his mind but not liking to admit it to himself straight away. Well, he’s admitted it to himself now and to Rosie and also to little me. So …’

  ‘What’s to stop him changing it back again?’

  ‘Pride. Or conceit if you think that’s a better name for it, which it probably is. Plus the fact that Rosie wouldn’t let him near her in a hundred years for a second bite at the cherry. Actually it would be a third bite, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What do you think made him change his mind about taking the plunge?’

  ‘Rediscovering what Rosie was like. There are limits to what a chap’ll put up with for let’s call it money. Of course, I’m biased.’

  Gordon got to his feet from where he had again been sitting at his work-table. He felt as if his future had been dismayingly and irrevocably settled. Without much sense of what the words meant he said, ‘Where does this leave you and me?’

  ‘Darling, if Jimmie and I are going to make a fresh start together we’ll have to do it completely, without any attachments either of us might have had.’

  ‘I thought what you and I had was more than just an attachment like any other.’

  ‘Of course it was.’

  ‘But then you … it dawns on you … you just decide he’s more important to you than I am and always has been, but that’s only because of what he’s decided he’s going to do.’

  ‘You do realize you’re trembling.’

  ‘No, I mean yes, why shouldn’t I be, naturally someone in my position would be or might be, surely you can see that.’

  She stayed where she was, sitting on the edge of a chair it was hard to imagine anybody ever having relaxed in. The tension she had shown until only a few moments earlier had transferred itself to him or had disappeared. Still without moving from where she was she spoke in a gentle almost a wheedling tone. ‘Darling, let me tell you where we’ve got to and what’s going to happen, can I?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I still think Jimmie is a rotten man and I know more about him than you can hope to. At the same time, not but, just at the same time, I do know him after all these years, and his attractive side which I also know about makes up for his rottenness, not by much and not all the time but on the whole it does. And I’m married to him and not to you. You’re a better sort of man than he’s ever been or ever will be, but when it comes to picking husbands that sort of thing doesn’t seem to matter as much as, as much as it probably should. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I should have asked you to marry me,’ said Gordon.

  ‘If you ever had I’d have turned you down. Not because of you but because of me. I’m too old. In a few years I’ll be sixty and not attractive any more and don’t interrupt me. I’ve worked it out that with you there I could face any amount of public fuss and not-public as well as public jeering and serious talks from old friends and I expect you could manage too if you had to, but me waking up every morning and wondering whether it was going to be today I first saw you thinking I’d started to look my age, just the thought of it scared me so much I had to make sure it would never happen. Right, that’s it. You can say something now if you want to.’

  He said nothing at first, but then he said, ‘I suppose you’ve talked to Jimmie?’

  ‘Yes, I told him about you so to speak officially and he was decent enough to pretend parts of it were news to him. I didn’
t tell him anything private.’

  ‘Of course not. But you did tell him what you were going to do about me now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would it be all right if I came to see him in the morning?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Just stuff to do with my book on him.’

  ‘Will it be affected by what I’ve been –’

  ‘No, all that stays exactly as it was, well, twenty-four hours ago.’

  ‘Good. Come about ten and I’ll see he’s there. I’ll go now, after I’ve said two things. One is, please don’t ever try to remind me of how it was before in any way at all, which sounds harsh but isn’t if you think about it. The other thing is, you and me, that’s over, finished and done with, but I’ll always love you. No, darling, not a word, seriously.’

  When Joanna had gone, Gordon sat on where he was for a few minutes, after which he went into his bedroom and found quite soon what he had not felt confident of finding at all, a quarter-full little bottle of sleeping pills left over from early the previous year, when he had painfully ricked his back playing squash. The bottle was in his pocket when he went out and across to the pub. Here he drank two glasses of Scotch whisky in quick succession and bought a half-bottle of the same to take away. Back in his flat he switched on the television set and settled himself down in front of it. At first he watched snooker, then some national news followed by weather, then some regional news, then more snooker. After that he watched a programme about Liverpool followed by one about food and drink. While he was watching the latter he thought how lucky he was to have something to do, something to occupy his time, and wondered what previous chaps suddenly deprived of their girl-friends, not just girl-friends, very serious girl-friends anyway, had done for the rest of their waking hours. While he was watching some strangely attired people sitting at desks and guessing things, if that was what they were doing, he remembered that his doctor had warned him that it was dangerous to drink alcohol while he was taking the sleeping pills. Washing down a couple of the pills with diluted whisky he thought he would probably be all right, and anyway for the moment it seemed to him slightly more important to get off to sleep that night than to be there in the morning. In the end he swallowed the last of the pills with the last of the whisky while the TV was showing professional golf.