The Biographer’s Moustache

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘I thought it might be fun.’

  ‘Fun, Christ. Some people have funny ideas of fun. Or did you develop a taste for that kind of life when you were working on the works of the great Jimmie? As regards your original question, why don’t you try your own paper? I’m not your agent, you know, despite what I may have tried and failed to do for you in the past.’

  ‘I did try them, but they said a bloke from their gossip page was set to cover the thing.’

  ‘And if I were your agent I’d be reorganizing my list of clients in a way that unfortunately had no room for your name on it. I don’t much like saying this, my old Gordon, but recent events have signally failed to bring you to the forefront of sophisticated attention. I particularly dislike saying that the experts here may not have got it so wrong when they made no-no noises to your Fane book. The close-down of that project raised about as much of a stir as a warning of the cancellation of a dentists’ quarterly get-together in South Shields. Sorry, but there we are.’

  Gordon had no thought of delivering a riposte when he said, ‘Staying in publishing, are you, Brian, or not?’

  ‘Oh, a shrewd thrust, I declare. I finish at this place at the end of the year. No practical alternatives on the horizon as yet.’ Brian checked himself and his demeanour quietened, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m in rather a bad mood today.’

  An actual apology from that source was rare and, as for the mention of any mood, bad or good, Gordon had supposed Brian Harris entirely and blessedly free of all such disincentives to action and purposeful thought, and said he was sorry to hear it, though not very, he silently added.

  ‘Every day that passes I feel more like getting out of this racket altogether. Not so long ago I thought of myself as a, I thought I was really a, you know, I don’t know what you’d call it, sort of new modern publisher, like one with a whole set of new ideas like thinking publishing was the wrong word for what I was supposed to be doing. Now I think I’m cut out to be just an old-fashioned publisher who brings out books like they did in Graham Greene’s time. Or would like to. Does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Be a museum curator or something. How’s Mrs Fane?’

  ‘Fine, I hope.’

  ‘I see. Well. My upper-class lady is still in place, you’ll be relieved to hear. It’s the only thing that keeps me insane. Yours won’t be attending this rave-up, I suppose?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  Nor did she. Nevertheless Gordon found it hard to expunge her image from the events and the locale of that engagement party when the day came along. The first part was all right, consisting as it did of catching and then travelling by a train without the surcharge of encountering any obvious fellow guests. A couple of couples in the buffet-car queue peered and frowned and blinked a good deal in his direction, but they ruled themselves out by their docile bearing and muted voices. Above all, there they were in the buffet-car taking their turn to be served just like everybody else.

  Things took a modest turn for the worse when he finally descended on to the single platform of the designated small country station. In its yard he came upon a group of a dozen or more persons of about his age or younger who all looked at him to see if they knew him, some of them swinging round to see him better, and then simultaneously resumed their former postures in some disappointment. Gordon was uncertain of what to do next, but at that moment a single-decker bus-like vehicle drove up and the party regrouped round its point of entry. He was still in some doubt when a tall blonde woman leapt athletically down from the driver’s seat, and not just any old tall blonde woman either but one he had seen before in the present connection.

  ‘Polly,’ he said to her with some sense of personal vindication.

  ‘That’s right, sir, how are you, and will you be requiring tea?’

  ‘Not yet. I think. My watch says twelve-twenty.’

  ‘I meant before you set out on the return journey.’

  He made a noise indicating uncertainty and Polly moved off.

  Not for the first time in these parts Gordon felt as if he lacked access to some body of information or wisdom denied him for many a long year, perhaps since his birth and by reason of its circumstances. He boarded the bus and settled in a rear seat away from the other passengers, but a backward glance or two suggested to him that some curiosity about who or what he might have been still lingered. To be on the safe side he should have adopted Brian’s sure-fire stranger-repellent device and got hold of a large newspaper in Greek or Cyrillic print. Then he wondered why he should want to keep at arm’s length the very kind of people he had come all this way to make merry with. He must have forgotten, or until now had been less than fully aware, how much he disliked the English upper classes. As with other social groups of which he was not a member – blacks, queers, women, landlords – they tended on further acquaintance not only to disimprove but also to be seen as increasingly similar among themselves. So if you want to go on thinking that upper-class chaps are not so bad or not so much of a muchness when you get to know them, be sure not to get to know them. That last bit sounded like a piece of advice, one he could foresee himself taking on his departure from Hungerstream later today.

  For the moment, in fact any moment, he would have to stand up to arriving at the place. The country road ran through a small village with cottages in or near it. Some of them no doubt held the contemporary descendants of a peasantry reaching back a century or more, others retired civil servants or council employees and their wives, neither kind of occupant enjoying any advantage over the other when it came to being invited to the great house a quarter of a mile or so further on. Even more than before this struck him, when it came into view, as ridiculously vast for just a couple of people to live in, though to feel as much brought him no sense even of attaining equal terms, let alone superiority. Well, he no longer needed to decide what he thought about any of it or of them.

  They were there. When, a short while after the others, he descended off the bus into the middle of a large green sunlit space, the first person he saw was Louise in a shiny dove-grey outfit too advanced in conception for him to know what to call it.

  ‘You need a drink’ – those were her first words to him, and until she said them he was unaware of their profound truth. A young man with a silver tray propelled a glass in his direction. Gordon took it. It held some kind of white wine punch, but gin was also present, and not faintly either.

  ‘I worked out you were pretty sure to be part of this busload,’ said Louise, ‘and here you are.’

  ‘Indeed. Whose idea was it to ask me?’

  ‘Both of us’s. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know really. Just, the other guests I’ve seen so far are all posh people by the look of them. And the sound of them.’

  ‘All right, I suppose of the two of us it was William who thought of you first.’

  ‘William? Oh yes, of course, William. How nice of him.’

  William! This use of the full name was clearly a kind of running-up of the flag, Louise’s own personal flag, certainly nothing to do with her fiancé, who within a couple of months would have the pair of them called Willie and something like Boofie everywhere they went if Gordon knew his duke and his upper classes. It was a middle-class wifely habit to give a husband’s Christian name a supposed face-lift in ordinary conversation and transform Mike back into Michael, Tim into Timothy, Jim into James. A plebeian wife would never have bothered, though an occasional plebeian mother-in-law might.

  ‘He thought there should be somebody from my side,’ Louise was explaining.

  ‘Very thoughtful. But surely he didn’t remember what I was called.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have taken in a thing like that the first time or two round, but all he had to do was mention the young fellow who came down with me and Jimmie Fane and his missus.’

  ‘They’re not here, are they, by any chance?’

  ‘No. One, they’re staying with royalty s
omewhere. Two, they weren’t asked.’

  ‘Understood, the first part anyway. But why on earth weren’t they asked?’

  ‘William decided he didn’t really care for Jimmie. Pushing sort of fellow, he said. You expect that, of course, but you want a touch of charm with it. The way William saw it, he’d paid him back by asking him that first time.’

  ‘Paid him back for what?’

  ‘Well, me, really. Willie told me there was an evening at Gray’s when Jimmie was going on and on about, sorry, but he was saying he’d met the most gorgeous girl he’d seen in years, just right for an enterprising fellow like the eighth duke of Dunwich. So to cut a long story short you and I got asked down here and Jimmie had to be asked too at the same time, you see. In a way I’ve got Jimmie to thank for all this. It makes you wonder.’

  ‘It does indeed.’

  ‘I hope you feel up to meeting him, William I mean, because that’s what you do now. In fact you should have done it by rights as soon as you arrived. Where has that man got to?’

  Actually he had not got very far, spatially at any rate, in other respects further. He had a glass in his hand from which he refreshed himself twice in under a minute, soon afterwards refilling it from two nearby bottles of which one recognizably held champagne, the other nothing recognizable. Perhaps he was fortifying himself to deal with a semicircle of men of about his age and aspect. The conversation, if that was what they were having, had reached the stage where one of the group, not necessarily the same one each time, would make a loud word-like sound in an unnatural voice and the others would respond with remarkably uniform laughter. When this cycle started up for the fourth time since Gordon had wandered into hearing, he looked over at the duke, but he was drinking freely from his glass. At some point, however, he had presumably spotted Gordon, for after a moment he started to move towards him.

  ‘So glad you could make it,’ he said as he came up. ‘Keeping pretty well, I imagine?’

  No doubt Louise had learnt that, with her fiancé, seeming to recognize someone did not inevitably imply full recognition. ‘You remember Gordon Scott-Thompson,’ she told him now.

  ‘Who? Of course, little one, of course. Lot of boring old shags to put up with on a day like today,’ he went on without lowering his voice at all. ‘Speaking of which, my dear, I wonder if I could trouble you to seek out Prince Thingummy and sort of see to him for a few minutes, make sure he’s got a drink he fancies and all that.’

  ‘Which is he, William?’

  ‘To tell you the truth I’m not very clear, except that he’s black or yellow or one of those. I remember he’s got some kind of robes on so he’s probably black or at least brown. Run along now. See you at the far end of that eating-tent affair in a brace of shakes.’ The duke absently drained his glass, then he looked at Gordon and his manner sharpened. ‘Drink that up and have another,’ he said.

  ‘Very kind of you, but I’ve –’

  ‘If you think you don’t need any more you’re wrong. Don’t forget you’ll be meeting Louise’s parents any moment. As an old friend of the family.’

  ‘My God, I didn’t –’

  ‘At least you would have been meeting them if they’d managed to turn up. Mind you, there are plenty of other people here just as boring as they obviously are. Tell me, Gordon, did you ever meet them, Louise’s parents?’

  ‘She never even mentioned them to me.’

  ‘Exactly. My own view is she didn’t so much as tell them about this jollification taking place. Have to tip them off about the wedding, though. She can hardly hope to keep ’em in ignorance of that, what? That’s if they still exist, or ever did. For all I know they blew themselves up while she was still a baby. I feel I’ve got to give her a bit of leeway over them. After all I get her dancing to my tune about everything else.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I’m senior to her in all sorts of ways. Bigger, stronger, older, heavier and of course much, much richer. In fact I’m senior in every possible way, you name it, isn’t that right? Jolly handy, that! I expect you’ve been wondering why I’m going to marry her, haven’t you?’

  ‘Not, not specially.’

  ‘Haven’t you? How extraordinary in your position. I’ll tell you anyway. As you must have noticed, I’m rather a shy sort of chap. In my walk of life, you see, I find I’m meeting people all the time, some I’ve seen before and some I haven’t. Well, most of them I don’t care for in one way or another. Now boring old farts, well, they’re one thing, after a bit you can handle them, you can put up with ’em, which is just as well. But some fellows you really take against, you want to make sure you never set eyes on ’em a second time. They’re the awkward ones. I mean, a shy sort of chap like me can’t quite bring himself to go up to someone and tell them in so many words to get out and stay out. Case of the spirit’s willing but the flesh is weak, eh? That’s where little Louise comes in. I find I can quite easily go up to someone and tell him I don’t mind him myself but my wife can’t stand the sight of him. Do it without turning a hair. It seems to make all the difference, saying it’s her not me.’

  ‘How does she feel about the arrangement?’

  ‘Oh, all for it. Sometimes she does her own chucking out, there were a couple of music fellows just last week. That’s really why I’ve got engaged to her. There are plenty of reasons for me to have a wife, but that’s why I picked her, because she doesn’t care for people any more than I do. You must have noticed that about her yourself.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘Good.’ The duke brought out a hefty timepiece at the end of a gold chain that looked sufficient to have bound Andromeda quite securely to her rock. He pressed something and the lid over the dial flew open. ‘Nigger workmanship never was any good,’ he said. ‘There should be some grub left if we go after it now.’

  There was plenty of grub left, in the shape of asparagus, gravad lax with sliced cucumber, cold chicken and ham, and potato and tomato-and-onion salads. To wash this down, magnums of chateau-bottled claret stood a couple of yards apart on every table. The noise, from boring old farts, fellows really taken against and perhaps others, was adequate to the occasion.

  ‘I fancy it’s a case of every man for himself here,’ said the duke.

  Fresh raspberries and cream, Beaumes-de-Venise, coffee, a VSOP brandy and Punch cigars followed in due course. Feeling several years older, Gordon eventually found himself in close conversation with Louise.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked him. ‘You haven’t really said.’

  ‘I think you’ve done very well for yourself, and I don’t mean that nastily.’

  ‘I believe you. But you mean it wouldn’t do for you.’

  ‘Very likely not.’

  ‘Obviously not. You’re not seeing Joanna Fane any more, are you?’

  ‘No. Not in the way you mean. No, I’m not.’

  ‘I suppose it all got quite impossible, did it?’

  ‘That would be one way of putting it.’

  ‘I know people shouldn’t inquire too closely into these sort of things, but from what I gather Jimmie was going back to one of his ex-wives or girl-friends but then he got cold feet and he stayed with Joanna on condition she dropped you, is that right?’

  ‘More or less, on the understanding that the girl-friend in question would have given bolder men than Jimmie cold feet.’

  They walked in silence for a time, out of sight of the house and towards the dilapidated remains of some habitation or chapel. Other couples or small groups were to be seen here and there, the bright colours of their clothes showing up against the surrounding greenery. The air was pleasantly warm. Louise looked at Gordon twice in quick succession.

  ‘Don’t I see a sort of fuzz on your upper lip?’ she asked.

  ‘You do. And to anticipate your next question, the answer’s yes, I am growing a moustache, or re-growing my moustache, whichever you prefer.’

  ‘Is that to show the world you’re ba
ck in your old life?’

  ‘I doubt if the world would take much notice whatever I showed it. No, it’s more like a reminder to me, if it’s anything more than just a moustache.’

  ‘You needn’t answer this if you don’t feel like it, but you were very attached to Joanna, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I was. In a way I still am.’

  ‘Did you, you know, try to get her back at all or get her to stay with you or anything?’

  ‘Not really. We both decided that, well, we weren’t suited to a long affair. Because of the age difference and so on.’

  ‘But much more because of the class difference and so on.’ Louise spoke almost indignantly, at any rate with great vigour. Her glance flickered to and fro. ‘Well wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it was in a way.’

  ‘In a way, Christ. William was right, of course he was, and I know you think it’s comic of him to have a view about anything, but on this one he knows what he’s saying, because he’s done what you and Joanna couldn’t face doing and is getting married outside his class. Oh, they’re really there, all those distinctions are, but you shouldn’t let them get out of hand and start letting them interfere with your personal feelings. It isn’t class differences that keep people apart, it’s thinking they bloody matter.’

  ‘Is that you or William talking?’

  ‘Take your choice. Do you mind if we go back now?’

  About the Author

  KINGSLEY AMIS was born in South London in 1922, and educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his writing career as a poet, but it is for his novels that he is best loved, for works including Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You, The Anti-Death League, Jake’s Thing,’ Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils, The Green Man, Difficulties with Girls, The Folks That Live on the Hill and You Can’t Do Both. The Old Devils won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986.

  His controversial Memoirs was published in 1991. Among his other publications are Rudyard Kipling and His World, The Golden Age of Science Fiction, Collected Short Stories, Collected Poems, The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse and The Amis Story Anthology.