The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  29

  The next morning Gordon woke up to find his bed had grown enormous during the night. This was much less tiresome or frightening than it might otherwise have been because he discovered on investigation that he too had grown enormous, and in exactly the same proportion. When he looked further he established that this was also true of everything else, including what he could see out of the window. He went on assuring himself repeatedly that this new belief of his made literally no sense, but in vain. Then when he had made himself a cup of tea he noticed that the world and its contents were back to normal, so firmly so that he had quite forgotten what it had felt like to suppose any different. As against this he now had a sort of headache right at the top of his nose, between the eyes.

  In the same general way as his mistaken view of visible reality, Gordon’s nose stopped hurting behind his back, as it were, when his attention was elsewhere. This took place during his bus journey into the Fane neighbourhood. The front door of the house stood ajar and very soon he was in the upstairs sitting-room face to face with his former biographee, for the moment presumably unaware that he had recently become former. Jimmie was wearing the pale-grey suit Gordon had seen him in when they last met at Gray’s, but he showed little trace of the well-being that had been noticeable in him on that occasion. Without showing actual hostility his expression was not welcoming or cheerful. He stood on the fringed hearthrug with his back to the grate, where an electric fire glowed.

  ‘Joanna told me she had a talk with you yesterday and the two of you agreed to put an end to your liaison,’ he said, pronouncing the last word in the French rather than the English fashion, causing momentary difficulty but no real misunderstanding.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there anything you want to say to me on that subject?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll say something. Or rather remind you of something I said to you a little while ago. I cautioned you briefly against having an affair with my wife not because such a thing would inconvenience me, which it duly proved not to do, but on the grounds I seem to remember that no good result could be expected to result from such an entanglement. An entanglement between two people of such different backgrounds, such disparate upbringings and, er, and origins. Do you remember my saying that?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but I can’t see what …’

  ‘What about it? What advertence? Very little. None at all directly. But it’s not often an old man is given the chance of triumphing over a younger one, especially in such a, what you probably call sensitive area as this, and I meant and mean no more than to avail myself of that chance. I’ve no thought of turning it to my advantage.’

  ‘Avail away and welcome. I can’t think where that chance would have come from if you hadn’t made yourself available to Joanna after all by deciding to turn down your Lady Rowena or Rosie option. Which downturning, having recently seen her, I may say I fully support.’

  Gordon was conscious of having put his point with something less than unimprovable clarity and force. Jimmie shared this general view, or affected to. He nodded busily with half-shut eyes and said, ‘Just so, just so, I willingly concede that and more. Now I think we might profitably leave this, er, sensitive area and pursue the object of this visit, the notorious book I presume you still intend to complete and publish.’

  ‘You presume wrong,’ said Gordon quickly, to give Jimmie as little warning as possible. ‘I’ve dropped the whole idea.’

  ‘Ah. Have you told your present publisher of your decision?’

  ‘Yes. He, the firm, won’t mind, in fact they made the suggestion before I’d got as far as –’

  ‘Oh, it was the publishers’s proposal, I see, that the venture was shelved.’

  ‘In a sense, but I’d already made up my mind before he’d put forward the –’

  ‘Of course you had, dear boy, of course you had. Now for goodness’ sake let’s sit down and see what we can salvage from the wreck.’

  Jimmie’s tone had perceptibly lightened since the subject had changed, and although Gordon’s news, whatever it might have been in detail, could not exactly have pleased him, his manner remained buoyant. It was almost vivaciously that he sat himself down in a honey-coloured chair of some foreign provenance, clasped his hands together and arranged them over his knee and gave an encouraging nod.

  Gordon would have rather liked to stay on his feet, but he knew well enough that the era of preferring to stand when invited to sit had passed with the discontinuance of the JRP Fane novels, if not earlier. So he too sat and said coldly, ‘I’m afraid there’s no question of my being able to salvage anything.’

  ‘Why, does your publisher, or former publisher, retain some sort of ownership of the work you’ve done up to this point, or imagine he does?’

  ‘No, it was specifically agreed that I should be free to sell any of the stuff I’ve got by me to anybody I like.’

  ‘In that case our next step is clear. I told you some of my friends in publishing responded favourably to the notion of a book on the present theme. Well …’

  ‘Jimmie, you don’t seem to have taken in what I’ve said. As far as I’m concerned the project is over. I’ve written no book and never will write one about you and the work I’ve done up to this point to all intents and purposes has ceased to exist. I intend to sit on it indefinitely. Any new writer or researcher would have to start from scratch. Now do you see?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Jimmie might or might not have seen, but it was doubtful if he had accepted. ‘May I ask what has prompted this change of heart? I expect you think people never talk like that, but be assured that some of them do.’

  ‘Oh, is that so? In a nutshell, which is about the right size of container, what’s done the prompting is deciding once and for all that you’re such a … massive and multifarious shit that I disdain to be associated with you in such ways as having my name with yours on a title-page. And the operative part of that was funnily enough our last conversation, yours and mine, in Gray’s club. You actually thanked me for portraying you as a, as a reprobate among other things and by doing so advancing your esteem among the public. You’re not a reluctant shit and certainly not an unconscious shit, you’re a self-congratulatory shit.’

  ‘As I remember the matter, you didn’t go quite that far, dear boy, in that extract or whatever it was you showed me.’

  ‘I’d probably have put it in later, when I got a proof of it if not before.’

  ‘How sorry I am that that piece will presumably never see the light of day. It would have profited us both. And just to anticipate you, I’m afraid I rather took against that other thing, the critical one, when I considered it closely. I’m afraid I couldn’t have let it appear.’

  ‘No good for the paper anyway,’ said Gordon. ‘Too thin-blooded.’

  ‘That too, indeed. It occurs to me, did it play any part in the reaching of your momentous decision?’

  ‘I read it over last night. I found it over-indulgent to your weaknesses as a writer is a short way of describing what I felt.’

  ‘You know, old fellow, all things considered it may be just as well that this work of yours about me and my works will not now appear. I doubt if it would have furthered my reputation.’

  ‘I understood your bookish pals thought it would trigger off a JRP Fane revival. And just a minute ago you –’

  ‘Did I really say that? I’m afraid I was rather exaggerating in the hope of cheering you on. May I just suggest quickly that what you delicately called my weaknesses as a writer one might be inclined to see instead as evidence of your unsuitability for your task, an unsuitability nothing to do with the powers of your mind in the ordinary sense.’

  ‘But everything to do with the irreducible gap between our respective social groupings.’

  ‘Yes, Gordon,’ said Jimmie with great emphasis. ‘Yes. Exactly so.’

  ‘When did you decide that that was a fatal weakness?’

  ‘Oh, right at the start, as soon
as I heard you speak. I thought it would be amusing to proceed even so. And it has, in my view and I hope in yours.’

  ‘That too, Jimmie.’

  ‘It would distress me somewhat to think that you’ve suffered financially through me, though I fear there’s not very much I could –’

  ‘I’ve no complaints, none at all.’

  After a moment, Jimmie said, ‘I’m sorry, I am getting deaf, would you mind terribly saying that again?’

  Gordon started to do as he was asked, then stopped and stared. ‘You old bugger,’ he said without either hostility or affection. ‘You wanted to be sure about whether I say c’mplaints or kommplaints and whether I say none or nonn. I suppose if I got them wrong you’d have had to decide between me being culpably Yorkshire-Lancashire or criminally tainted with spelling-pronunciation. You old bugger.’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh yes you have. You looked at me in just the same appraising sort of way as the time you asked me if I pronounced the T in often or whatever it was. You were seeing if I fitted into your pattern of horrible nouveau people. Come on, Jimmie, admit it.’

  ‘Oh very well, perhaps the thought did cross my mind. I confess I am a little bit naughty like that once in a way, but we all have things like that about us, don’t we? Childish things? M’m? And now perhaps you’ll join me in a farewell glass of champagne.’

  ‘Oh God. In one way there’s nothing I’d like better but in another I just can’t. Too dull and literal-minded and self-righteous.’ Gordon would have liked to find a way of putting into words his feeling that he stood for a whole dismal army of buck-toothed scholarship boys with pens and pencils clipped to the V-necks of their grey sweaters who had to be supported to the end against the bucks and rakes, but he could not think how, so after a couple of seconds he said Sorry and left.

  He happened to be quitting the house just as Joanna Fane was returning to it. He had not yet pulled shut the front door of the place behind him when she came stepping down from her taxi, so he hesitated a second time and left it. He stood irresolutely back while she paid the driver and went into the building, acknowledging him with the kind of mixture of intimacy and impersonality to be expected between mistress and family servant. Just before she disappeared from his sight she raised her hand to him in an awkward salute. Well, that time, just for a few seconds, he had caught one of them at a perceptible disadvantage.

  Gordon looked at his watch and calculated. If he now walked without hurrying to the nearest point of the river where he could board a water-bus, he could then be delivered by one within further walking distance of the newspaper office that held Desmond O’Leary.

  That literary journalist was indeed behind his desk when Gordon appeared. He remained in a seated posture only momentarily before bounding to his feet in apparent alarm, seizing the telephone and gabbling into it, ‘Security? A strange man I don’t much care for the look of has just come bursting in. I’ll try and hold him in play till you get to me. Quick as you can.’ Then he said to Gordon, ‘Who are you and what are you doing here? There’s no money to hand except what’s in my wallet and a couple of quid in the petty-cash tin. If you’ll just leave quietly we’ll forget the whole thing.’

  Gordon said and did nothing. Experience had taught him that O’Leary’s cameos finished faster if it was left to him to keep them going and, sure enough, there soon came a change in the man’s expression. Signs of puzzlement appeared there.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, lifting a forefinger, ‘I could have sworn I’d seen you before somewhere, when you … No, it’s gone. No! I thought so, you remind me of a fellow, what the deuce was his name, used to hang round here looking for a book to review, many years ago it must be now. Perhaps he was a relative of yours. I’ve not set eyes on him for, oh, it can’t be less than …’

  ‘Come off it, Des, I was in here last week three times including Saturday and from now on I’ll be coming in …’

  Gordon’s voice too died away. Staring triumphantly at him over his half-glasses, tearing the paper off an oblong cigar by feel alone, O’Leary said in a thrilling voice, ‘Has something happened? Something you feel I should know about?’

  The cigar was not much burnt down by the time Gordon had told him all it was necessary for him to know. Its recital made it sound tame, the account of a failure of nerve, a prim unwillingness to overcome personal scruples. It seemed that O’Leary found nothing very surprising or reprehensible in any of this. He might have been restrained by scruples of his own, or just as likely he was not listening very hard. Wherever it might have come from, some sort of mildness of manner had kept O’Leary where he was instead of long since having been thrown out of his office window on to one mudflat or another. He said now, ‘Without wishing to presume, perhaps we may look forward to your being able to put together something on JRP Fane for our forthcoming series, the one provisionally entitled Where Are They Now?’

  ‘I don’t want anything more to do with that old scrounger.’

  ‘We’ll discuss the matter further when you’ve had the chance to distance yourself from the thought of him and from the necessity of seeing him.’

  ‘A century won’t be too long for that.’

  ‘Don’t you be too sure.’ O’Leary’s manner became more direct, ‘I caught myself being quite tolerant about that old fart EM Forster not so long ago, only in my thoughts, admittedly. I bet you haven’t thrown anything away, have you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not on your life. There’ll be more in what you’ve written than you remember. Well now, I won’t say I told you so but nobody can prevent me from thinking it. I’m also relieved to see you alive and well and presumably back. I am right in thinking you mean to give us the benefit of your full support in the days that lie ahead?’

  ‘You’re saying we can go back to our original arrangement.’

  ‘Yes, which is very decent of me. My old heart must have been touched by the spectacle of the return of the prodigal journalist to where he belongs.’

  ‘You told me once it was important for everybody to know where their limitations are. Oh shit, and as you know I don’t say that lightly.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I can’t drive out of my mind the thought of that old sod Fane picking me up for getting my sequence of tenses wrong.’

  ‘What would he have said?’

  ‘I have to confess, dear boy, that in the context I feel you must mean limitations were rather than are, surely. I’m afraid that’s not very good, Des, I’m sorry.’

  ‘The words were all right but I agree it wasn’t much of an imitation. Not your forte, what? Have a word with Harry while you’re here.’

  30

  A habit from his early life Gordon had retained was that of devoting a couple of moments to looking at each item in his morning mail with a view to guessing its sender, should this not be irrelevant or instantly obvious. Nearly always, of course, it was one or the other, if not both at once, with possible interest confined to noting if a correspondent had added to the existing corpus of misspellings or other distortions of Gordon and-or Scott and-or Thompson. A previously unrecorded version turned up rarely now.

  Then, one fine morning in the early summer of that year, he found on his doormat a postal packet that broke new ground. All his names were correctly rendered, even though in a larger face of typescript than he had thought existed outside dyslexic institutions or the like. The entire object weighed a few dozen grammes, was several millimetres thick and resisted bending. When he had glutted his curiosity without result he rent the envelope asunder.

  Inside it was a card with a thick dark-red edge that was obviously more expensive than any mere gold. Some very black embossed printing on it quite soon yielded the information that somebody called Clarence William Dunwich, viijth duke and xviijth earl of Dunwich, whom Gordon was pretty sure he could identify, was inviting him to be present to celebrate his engagement to b
e married to someone who revealed herself almost at once as old Louise, his, Gordon’s, erstwhile girlfriend. Well, well. At first blush, something of a surprise, on little further consideration, not so much of one. The envelope also contained a letter on perhaps simulated calf’s-skin including part of a train time-table and with an actual two-way ticket clipped to it. The whole thing seemed a world away from the relaxed manner of Gordon’s last invitation from that source, but this, after all, was a bit special. Somewhere it was said that he was expected to be wearing a lounge suit rather than the full armour with casque his fancy first suggested to him. Before he or anyone else could think better of it he telephoned the RSVP number, which consisted of a great many digits, and accepted the invitation.

  Once or twice over the intervening couple of weeks he wondered why he was bothering to attend this upper-class junket now that he had no biographical or literary reason to do so, and told himself by way of reply that so disencumbered he would be freer than before to indulge his curiosity, or in simpler terms there was no knowing what he might pick up there, even if it was no more than a piece of first-hand knowledge of what actually went on at such do’s. He might even be able to turn such knowledge to his own financial benefit, and mentioned the possibility to Brian Harris on looking in at the latter’s office.

  ‘You’re going down there anyway, are you?’ he asked.