Lucky Jim

by Kingsley Amis

He looked round the crowded Common Room, which seemed to contain everybody he knew or had ever known, apart from his parents. Mrs Welch was a few feet away talking to Johns, for whose presence in this room, normally inadmissible, she must be in some indirect way to blame. Beyond them were Bertrand and Christine, not saying a great deal to each other. Right over by the window Barclay, the Music Professor, was talking earnestly to the Professor of English, no doubt urging on him the necessity of voting for Dixon’s removal when the College Council met at the end of the following week. In the other direction the Goldsmiths were laughing at something Beesley had said to them. Elsewhere were figures Dixon barely recognized: economists, medicals, geographers, social scientists, lawyers, engineers, mathematicians, philosophers, readers in Germanic and comparative philology, lektors, lecteurs, lectrices. He felt like going round and notifying each person individually of his preference that they should leave. There were several he’d never seen in his life before, who might be anything from Emeritus Professors of Egyptology to interior decorators waiting to start measuring up for new carpets. One large group was made up of local worthies: a couple of aldermen with their wives, a fashionable clergyman, a knighted physician, all of whom were members of the College Council, and at the edge of the group, Dixon saw with a start, the local composer he’d seen at Welch’s arty week-end. He looked round distractedly, but in vain, for the amateur violinist.

  After a moment the Principal moved over to the local worthies and addressed some remark to the fashionable clergyman that was received with general laughter, except by the knighted physician, who stared coldly from face to face. Almost at the same time a signal from Mrs Welch drew Welch away and left Dixon with Gore-Urquhart, who now said: ‘How long have you been in this game, then, Dixon?’

  ‘Getting on for nine months now. They took me on last autumn.’

  ‘I’ve a notion you’re not too happy in it; am I right?’

  ‘Yes, I think you are right, on the whole.’

  ‘Where’s the trouble? In you or in it?’

  ‘Oh, both, I should say. They waste my time and I waste theirs.’

  ‘Mm, I see. It’s a waste of time teaching history, is it?’

  Dixon resolved not to mind what he said to this man. ‘No. Well taught and sensibly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good. But in practice it doesn’t work out like that. Things get in the way. I don’t quite see who’s to blame for it. Bad teaching’s the main thing. Not bad students, I mean.’

  Gore-Urquhart nodded, then shot a quick glance at him. ‘This lecture of yours tonight, now. Whose idea was it?’

  ‘Professor Welch’s. I could hardly refuse, of course. If it goes well it’ll improve my standing here.’

  ‘You’re ambitious?’

  ‘No. I’ve done badly here since I got the job. This lecture might help to save me getting the sack.’

  ‘Here, laddie,’ Gore-Urquhart said, and snatched two glasses of sherry from Maconochie’s tray as he went towards the group that now included the Principal. Dixon thought perhaps he oughtn’t to drink any more—he was already beginning to feel a little splendid—but took the glass that was held out to him and drank from it. ‘Why have you come here tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve evaded your Principal so many times recently that I felt I had to come to this.’

  ‘I can’t see why you bother, you know. You’re not dependent on the Principal. You’re only letting yourself in for a lot of boredom.’

  When Gore-Urquhart looked at him again, Dixon had a moment’s trouble disposing of a slight spin of the head, caused by the other’s out-of-focus face. ‘I let myself in for several hours’ boredom every day, Dixon. A couple more won’t break my back.’

  ‘Why do you stand it?’

  ‘I want to influence people so they’ll do what I think it’s important they should do. I can’t get ’em to do that unless I let ’em bore me first, you understand. Then just as they’re delighting in having got me punch-drunk with talk I come back at ’em and make ’em do what I’ve got lined up for ’em.’

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ Dixon said enviously. ‘When I’m punchdrunk with talk, which is what I am most of the time, that’s when they come at me and make me do what they want me to do.’ Apprehension and drink combined to break through another bulkhead in his mind and he went on eagerly: ‘I’m the boredom-detector. I’m a finely-tuned instrument. If only I could get hold of a millionaire I’d be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktail-parties and night-clubs, just for five minutes, and then by looking at me he’d be able to read off the boredom-coefficient of any gathering. Like a canary down a mine; same idea. Then he’d know whether it was worth going in himself or not. He could send me in among the Rotarians and the stage crowd and the golfers and the arty types talking about statements of profiles rather than volumes and the musical . . .’ He stopped, aware that Gore-Urquhart’s large smooth face had tilted over to one side and was being held towards his own. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, ‘I forgot . . .’

  Gore-Urquhart looked him up and down and then covered one eye with a hand, afterwards drawing a finger down the side of his face and smiling slightly. Though it wasn’t a smile of ordinary amusement, it wasn’t unfriendly either. ‘I recognize a fellow sufferer,’ he said. Then his manner changed: ‘What school did you go to, Dixon, if I may ask you?’

  ‘Local grammar school.’

  Gore-Urquhart nodded. The fashionable clergyman and one of the aldermen now came over, filled glasses in their hands, and drew him off to join their group round the Principal. Dixon couldn’t help admiring the way in which, without saying or doing anything specific, they established so effortlessly that he himself wasn’t expected to accompany them. Then, as he watched incuriously, he saw Gore-Urquhart fall slightly behind his two companions and look across to where the Goldsmiths were standing. Cecil and Beesley were deep in talk and didn’t notice Carol catching Gore-Urquhart’s eye. An almost imperceptible and quite indecipherable glance passed between them. This puzzled Dixon, of course, and in some way troubled him, but, deciding to ponder about it later, if ever, he drained his glass and went up to Christine and Bertrand. ‘Hallo, you two,’ he cried gaily. ‘Where have you been hiding?’

  Christine flashed a look at Bertrand that made him not say whatever he’d been going to say, and said herself: ‘I’d no idea this was going to be such a grand affair. Half the big-wigs in the city must be here.’

  ‘I’d like us to go over to your uncle now, Christine,’ Bertrand said. ‘There are one or two things I want to discuss with him, if you remember.’

  ‘In a minute, Bertrand; there’s plenty of time,’ Christine said ‘dignantly’.

  ‘No no, there isn’t plenty of time; the thing’s due to start in about ten minutes, and that isn’t plenty of time for what I want to talk about.’

  Dixon had noticed that Bertrand always said ‘No no’ instead of ‘No’, combining at small outlay a simultaneous lowering and raising of the eyebrows in verbal form. He wished he wouldn’t do that. Past Bertrand’s head, he could see Carol beginning to edge away from Cecil and Margaret—he noticed her for the first time—in his own direction. Quoting from a film he’d once seen, he said to Christine: ‘Better do as he says, lady, otherwise he’s liable to kick your teeth in.’

  ‘Run away and play, Dixon.’

  ‘Bertrand, how can you be so rude?’

  ‘Me be so rude? I like that. Me be so rude. What about him? Who the hell does he think he is? Telling you to . . .’

  Christine had gone red. ‘Have you forgotten what I told you before we came?’

  ‘Look, Christine, I didn’t come here to talk to this . . . this fellow, nor about him, I may say. I came here simply and solely to get hold of your uncle, and it’s now . . .’

  ‘Why, hallo, Bertie dear,’ Carol said behind him. ‘I want you. Come over here, will you?’

  Bertrand had performed a start of surprise and half-turn in o
ne movement. ‘Hallo, Carol, but I was just . . .’

  ‘I shan’t keep you a minute,’ Carol said, and gripped his arm. ‘I’ll return him in good condition,’ she added over her shoulder to Christine.

  ‘Well . . . hallo, Christine,’ Dixon said.

  ‘Oh, hallo.’

  ‘This really is the last time, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  He felt petulant and self-pitying. ‘You don’t seem to mind as much as I do.’

  She looked at him for a moment, then abruptly turned her head aside, as if he were showing her a photograph in a book of forensic medicine. ‘I’ve done all my minding,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to do any more now. Neither will you if you’ve got any sense.’

  ‘I can’t help minding,’ he said. ‘Minding isn’t a thing you can do anything about. I can’t help going on with it.’

  ‘What’s the matter with your eye?’

  ‘Bertrand and I had a fight this afternoon.’

  ‘A fight? He didn’t say anything to me about it. What were you fighting about? A fight?’

  ‘He told me to keep off the grass where you were concerned, and I said I wouldn’t, so we started fighting.’

  ‘But we agreed . . . You haven’t changed your mind about . . .?’

  ‘No. I just wasn’t going to let him tell me what to do, that’s all.’

  ‘But fancy having a fight.’ She seemed to be repressing a laugh. ‘You lost, by the look of you.’

  He didn’t like that, and remembered her tendency to grin during the hotel tea. ‘Not at all. Take a look at Bertrand’s ear before you start deciding who won and who lost.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The right. But there probably won’t be much to see. The damage was mostly internal, I should think.’

  ‘Did you knock him over?’

  ‘Oh yes, right over. He stayed down for a bit, too.’

  ‘My God.’ She stared at him, her full, dry lips slightly apart. A pang of helpless desire made Dixon feel heavy and immovable, as if he were being talked to by Welch. Then he felt that never had he been reminded so clearly of his first meeting with her as in the last couple of minutes, and glared at her.

  At this moment of silence, Bertrand suddenly reappeared from behind the wife of one of the aldermen with a quick shuffling movement, rather like a left-arm bowler coming into a batsman’s view round the umpire. His face was red; he was obviously almost beside himself with rage, either in its pure form or compounded with some other emotion. Carol followed him, looking inquisitive.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ Bertrand said, his voice a choking bay. ‘This is just how I expected things to bam.’ He caught hold of Christine’s arm and pulled her away with some violence. Before moving off, he said to Dixon: ‘Right, my lad. This is the finish for you. You’d better start looking for another job. I mean that.’ Christine gave Dixon a brief, startled glance over her shoulder as she was virtually frog-marched towards the group that contained her uncle. Carol too looked at Dixon, a speculative look. Then she followed the other two. A loud homicidal-maniac laugh came from the Principal.

  Dixon experienced a return of the ill feeling he’d had some minutes before. Then he found his thoughts being blindly swept along by panic. Bertrand must mean what he said; whatever it was that went on in Welch’s head, the facts his son had to reveal must surely have a significant influence—and even if they didn’t, there were his wife’s contributions to add to the scale, that was if she hadn’t added them already on her own initiative. Dixon realized he’d been wrong in thinking that the Bertrand-campaign was over and won; the last shot had still to be fired, and he was in the open and unarmed. What he’d warned himself of at the outset had really happened; he’d let himself be carried away, the joy of battle really had robbed him of his discretion and prudence. He was helpless; above all, helpless to prevent that bearded slob from standing there with his hand on Christine’s arm, confident, proprietary, victorious. She stood by her boy-friend in an awkward, uncomfortable attitude, even an ungraceful one, but for Dixon’s money there could be no more beautiful way for a woman to stand.

  ‘Taking your last look, eh, James?’

  At this sudden appearance of Margaret on his blind side, Dixon felt like a man fighting a policeman who sees another approaching on a horse. It dazed him. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You’d better have a good look at her, hadn’t you? You won’t get another chance.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I . . .’

  ‘Unless of course you’ve fixed it to run up to London every so often, just to keep in touch.’

  Dixon stared into her face, genuinely surprised, surprised too that Margaret could, at this stage, do anything to surprise him. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked dully.

  ‘No use pretending, is there? Doesn’t take much imagination to see what you’re thinking.’ The tip of her nose wiggled slightly as she talked, in the way it always did. She stood with her feet apart and her arms crossed on her breast, as Dixon had seen her many times, making small-talk in this room or one of the little teaching-rooms upstairs. She didn’t look at all strained, or excited, or ill-at-ease, or annoyed.

  Dixon heaved a sigh of weariness before plunging in with the kind of protests and excuses laid down for him by the conventions of this particular pursuit. As he talked, he reflected how easily, by what deft sleight-of-hand, he’d been deprived of his one moral advantage in recent dealings with Margaret: his uninfluenced decision to take no more active interest in Christine. It was a bit rough to be reproached for hankering after what he’d voluntarily turned down. His spirits were so low that he wanted to lie down and pant like a dog: jobless, Christineless, and now grand-slammed in the Margaret game.

  With no conclusion reached, their conversation was brought to an end by the drift of the Principal’s group towards the door. Gore-Urquhart was apparently deep in talk with Bertrand and Christine. Welch called: ‘Ready, Dixon?’ With Mrs Welch at his side, he more than ever resembled an old boxer, given to a bit of poaching now and then, standing with his ex-kitchenmaid wife.

  ‘See you in the Hall, Professor,’ Dixon called back; then, with a word to Margaret, he hurried out and into the Staff Cloakroom.

  Stage-fright was upon him now; his hands were cold and damp, his legs felt like flaccid rubber tubes filled with fine sand, he had difficulty in controlling his breathing. While he was using the lavatory, he began making his Evelyn Waugh face, then abandoned it in favour of one more savage than any he normally used. Gripping his tongue between his teeth, he made his cheeks expand into little hemispherical balloons; he forced his upper lip downwards into an idiotic pout; he protruded his chin like the blade of a shovel. Throughout, he alternately dilated and crossed his eyes. Turning away, he found himself confronted by Gore-Urquhart, allowed his face to collapse, and said: ‘Oh, hallo.’

  ‘Hallo, Dixon,’ Gore-Urquhart said, walking on past him.

  Dixon went to the mirror above the wash-basin and examined his eye. It looked a good many shades brighter than he’d remembered it. In the circumstances, any attempt at smartness of clothes or hair seemed beside the point. He took from a shelf the stolen

  R.A.F. file that contained his lecture-script and was about to leave when Gore-Urquhart called: ‘Hold on a minute, Dixon, will you?’

  Dixon stopped and turned. Gore-Urquhart approached and stood gazing at him intently, as if planning a funny sketch of him, in charcoal, perhaps, or ink-wash, to be begun as soon as the lecture was over. After a moment, he said: ‘Are you maybe feeling a little nervous, laddie?’

  ‘Very nervous.’

  Gore-Urquhart nodded and produced a slim but substantial flask from his ill-fitting clothes. ‘Have a swig.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Deciding not to bother about coughing, Dixon took a good pull at what was evidently neat Scotch whisky—more evidently than any drink he’d ever had. He coughed wildly.

  ‘Ah, it’s good stuff, that. Have another swig.’

/>   ‘Thanks.’ Dixon did exactly as before, then, gasping and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, gave the flask back. ‘I’m very grateful for that.’

  ‘It’ll do you a power of good. Out of my sherry-cask. Well, we’d best get along if we don’t want to keep them waiting.’

  The last stragglers were still leaving the Common Room and moving up the stairs. At the stairhead a little group was waiting: the Goldsmiths, Bertrand, Christine, Welch, Beesley, and the other lecturers in the History Department.

  ‘We may as well go up the front, sir,’ Bertrand said.

  They began moving into the Hall, which was disconcertingly full. The front row of the gallery held an unbroken line of students. There was a loud mixture of conversations.

  ‘Well, give it to them, Jim,’ Carol said.

  ‘All the best, old boy,’ Cecil said.

  ‘Best of luck, Jim,’ Beesley said. They all moved away into their seats.

  ‘Here you go then, laddie,’ Gore-Urquhart said in an undertone. ‘No need to worry; to hell with all this.’ He gripped Dixon’s arm and withdrew.

  Aware that a shuffling for places was going on behind him, Dixon followed Welch on to the platform. The principal and the fatter of the two aldermen were already there. Dixon found that he felt rather drunk.

  22

  Welch uttered the preludial blaring sound, cognate with his son’s bay, with which he was accustomed to call for silence at the start of a lecture; Dixon had heard students imitating it. A hush gradually fell. ‘We are here tonight,’ he informed the audience, ‘to listen to a lecture.’

  While Welch talked, his body swaying to and fro, its upper half more strongly illuminated by the reading-lamp above the lectern, Dixon, so as not to have to listen to what was said, looked furtively round the Hall. It was certainly very full; a few rows at the back were thinly inhabited, but those nearer the front were packed, chiefly with members of Staff and their families and with local people of various degrees of eminence. The gallery, as far as Dixon could see, was also packed; some people were standing up by the rear wall. Dropping his eyes to the nearer seats, Dixon picked out the thinner of the two aldermen, the local composer, and the fashionable clergyman; the titled physician had presumably come for the sherry only. Before he could look further, Dixon’s vague recurrent feeling of illness identified itself as a feeling of faintness; a wave of heat spread from the small of his back and seemed to become established in his scalp. On the point of groaning involuntarily, he tried to will himself into feeling all right; only the nervousness, he told himself. And the drink, of course.