Ending Up

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘I was just saying to Bernard here that a sense of humour is more precious than pearls or rubies or any number of motor-cars or luxury yachts or private aeroplanes or castles,’ said George, in whom the full restoration of vocabulary, on top of a few drinks and some natural loquaciousness, was producing a florid, almost aureate style of talk.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tracy. She thought for a moment and added, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean to say, supposing you do eat off silver plate with a pearl-handled knife and fork and drink your wine out of cut glass …’ After listing further concrete signs of affluence, George went on to question their real worth to anybody without a sense of humour.

  Like Tracy, Trevor had noticed the tension on the other side of the room, but he made towards it, walking however with very short strides of not more than eighteen inches or so. The effect of this was almost to double the time it took him to reach the old ladies while giving the impression, from where they sat, that his gait was quite normal. He used the seconds thus won to push words through his mind as fast as possible. They can’t help it (he gabbled silently) they’ve got nothing to look forward to it’s just got to be accepted you’ll be like it yourself one day you’ll be out of here soon oh Christ. Aloud, he said,

  ‘Well, that’s all seen to. Everything, er, seen to.’

  ‘Trevor, darling,’ said Marigold: ‘it was such fun remembering that Christmas. I was thinking about the one before that. We did spend it at home, didn’t we? Or were we—?’

  ‘No, that was the year you and Grandpop went to that hotel in Eastbourne and we all drove down on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  It was obvious to Trevor that his grandmother had forgotten the whole thing, which should be no surprise, considering her age. Well, he would find it less of a chore to give her an obsessively detailed account of the occasion than to try to converse with her. ‘The moment we arrived Grandpop ordered a magnum of champagne and you said it was extravagant of him …’

  Unconscious of anything amiss, Keith had gone straight to one of the tapestry chairs beyond the fireplace carrying a large dictionary (the property of George) and a note-pad. He now began to look for rare words and to record their definitions for later use in the promised game of Call My Bluff, a task he would pursue with the most thorough and prolonged care, prolonged at any rate until pity for Trevor and Tracy should quite overwhelm him.

  Bernard gave a small start, as if at the memory of something overlooked, and left the room at a fair pace.

  ‘I must see to the children’s tea in a few minutes,’ said Adela.

  Thirty-Two

  The plan was simple in outline, but there was a particular detail which would call for the utmost vigilance; one must be grateful, on the other hand, that it had been foreseen in good time. Alone in the kitchen, Bernard looked through the rubbish-container until he found an empty tomato-purée tin. It was small for his purpose; still, it would have to do. He rinsed it thoroughly under the tap, hurried into the outside lavatory and so arranged matters there that when he returned he was carrying perhaps five fluid ounces of urine. Now came the dangerous part of the operation. To light the gas and put the tin on the flame was the work of a moment; to stand by, as always, called for resolution. Just when the contents, as a dipped finger-tip showed, had reached the estimated necessary temperature (not low, in view of the coldness of the house and the notorious rapidity with which small bodies of liquid lose their heat), Bernard heard Adela’s step in the hallway. He snapped off the gas and picked up the tin, the outside of which proved unexpectedly hot, but the aid of handkerchief or kettle-holder was excluded. Wincing slightly with pain, he juggled the tin from hand to hand behind his back and waited for his sister to come into the kitchen. She would not: she stood in the doorway turning her broad face to and fro and beaming.

  ‘They’ve made a lovely job of it, haven’t they? Draining-board scrubbed down and the tea-cloths hung up to dry. They are so sweet, those four.’

  ‘Oh, enchanting.’

  ‘I really do believe you’re enjoying Christmas.’

  ‘To some extent.’

  ‘Marigold has decided to stay with us after all.’

  ‘Has she?’

  ‘It means such a lot to me.’

  ‘I know.’

  How much longer was he to go on chatting away with a can of piss about his person? Still Adela did not move; he was positive she had consciously noticed nothing out of the way, but her instinct for obstruction ran deep and wide. He was on the point of stepping forward himself when he realized that he dared not risk a jostle on the cramped threshold.

  ‘I’ve got to do the children’s tea,’ said Adela, ‘because they soon get hungry at that age, and it’s not fair to keep them waiting, and poor Rachel has enough to do every other day of the year.’

  ‘I can find no fault with your reasoning.’

  He held the container now in one hand, fingers pointed downwards round it in a grip that would hide it from most eyes; its smallness had become an asset. At last Adela came right into the room. She sniffed the air.

  ‘Funny smell, isn’t there?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed anything.’

  ‘Perhaps one of the animals …’

  ‘Very likely.’

  He was away and into the hall, and was there instantly blocked again by Rachel and her offspring grouped in arrow-head formation between him and the stairs. He noticed scarves, gloves, a woolly hat or so. He said without premeditation,

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be having tea.’

  ‘Walkies first,’ said Rachel, ‘while Auntie Adela gets the tea ready. Then we all come back and eat it round the fire and have a lovely time.’

  She spoke as if she thought this conversational style the most suitable for Bernard as well as for the children. Or so it seemed to him at that moment. Before he could be let past, or ask to be, he saw that Finn’s attention was caught: the child’s head was just at the right/wrong level.

  ‘What’s that thing you’ve got there in your hand?’

  ‘It smells funny,’ said Vanessa, craning forward.

  ‘It’s nothing. Kindly allow me—’

  ‘It smells like—’

  ‘Be quiet, you two,’ said Rachel, ‘and get out of Uncle Bernard’s way.’

  ‘But,’ said Finn, ‘it’s like, you know, when you—’

  ‘It’s somebody’s—’

  ‘It’s special medicine for my bad leg. Now …’

  At last he was through and on the way upstairs, leaving behind him an excited altercation in childish whispers and stern adult undertones. He paused in the first-floor lavatory to regain his composure and to tell himself that a lighter man might well have been deflected from his purpose by such hazards – tell himself so only briefly, for time was now vital.

  Behind the screen in the bedroom, Shorty was asleep with such extravagant soundness as to suggest a drunken gaoler in a farce impersonated by someone given to play-acting much more than to acting: Shorty himself, for instance. With quick deft movements, Bernard twitched aside the incongruously clean blankets and poured the urine over the crotch of Shorty’s trousers. He did not stir, much less wake, as (Bernard had reasoned) he might well have done if the liquid had been perceptibly below blood heat. Bernard put the blankets back and stared down at the sleeper.

  ‘If you’ll pardon the intrusion, Shorty, I think that’s very funny,’ he said, and left the room.

  Thirty-Three

  Half an hour later, Shorty drifted back to a waking state. He became aware by degrees of a dampness, here and there a wetness, in his lower clothing.

  ‘Huh-lo-ullo-ullo, what’s all this ere?’ he said. ‘Pissed myself, eh? Well, it won’t be the first time, nor the last, I hope, thanks very much. Funny in a way, choking for a piss after you’ve just pissed yourself. Goes to show how much one can imbibe without its being fully clear to
one how much one has imbibed, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, ra-ra-ra. Pooh, stinko!’

  He very quickly established that the spillage had not extended to any of his bedclothes, went into the lavatory and made water for a couple of minutes, had a prolonged bath during which he also washed his trousers and underpants, got outside a toothglassful of Dr Macdonald’s while he dressed, and arrived downstairs in excellent condition: the very picture, in fact, of a man untroubled by the least fear of losing or having begun to lose control of his bodily functions.

  Operation Incontinence had gone the way of Operation Stink.

  Thirty-Four

  ‘Nemel,’ said George, ‘is an Arab sweetmeat or dessert made of dates, poppy seeds, coriander seeds, peppermint, rose petals and gum tragacanth, mixed with a pestle in a mortar, served in earthenware cups and decorated with cactus flowers and the feathers of the bulbul or Eastern nightingale.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Bernard amiably. ‘To start with, it’s a nemel. A nemel is a pompous old windbag head over heels in love with the sound of his own voice and consumed by a desire to show off his fund of trivial and boring information.’ He paused, then added, ‘So called after the character le Sieur de Némel in Molière’s Le Misanthrope.’

  Adela peered through her spectacles at the slip of paper on her lap. ‘Er, nemel,’ she said in some puzzlement, ‘is just to name, verb. To name.’

  ‘I simply don’t understand,’ said Marigold from her Louis Quinze sofa on the opposite side of the sitting-room fireplace. ‘To name verb? What does it mean, darling?’

  Trevor, next to her, spoke up quickly. ‘It must mean like, when I have a son I’m going to nemel him Joe, instead of name him Joe. That’s right, isn’t it, Adela?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Fine, thanks. Now …’ Trevor turned successively to Marigold and Tracy. ‘I say it’s George.’

  ‘But it must be Adela,’ said his grandmother, fitting a cigarette into her shagreen holder. ‘Surely that’s obvious.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what we’re supposed to think.’

  ‘But surely you could see, Keith dear … Trevor dear. She was just reading it off that piece of paper.’ Marigold had not lowered her voice at all.

  ‘That’s just it,’ murmured Trevor. ‘Double bluff, you see.’

  ‘But a thing like that would never occur to her,’ said Marigold at the same pitch as before.

  ‘Well, I pick George.’ Trevor looked at his wife and made the pupils of his eyes vibrate in a disturbing way that was an established domestic signal. ‘What do you think, Tracy?’

  ‘George.’

  ‘Right, that’s two George, one Adela. How did we do?’

  ‘And the teller of the truth was … ?’ asked Keith from the rocking-chair.

  After some hesitation, Adela raised her hand.

  ‘I told you, you noodle-poodles.’

  ‘One only to Goldie’s team. Well done, Adela, well done, George.’

  With a flourish, Keith made an entry on his pad. After eight hours of pretty continuous fire, it was wonderful to be merely in the frying-pan. It seemed that everybody had now mastered the complexity and strangeness of a game wherein two members of a team improvised false definitions of some piece of lexical slag and the third (appointed in advance and in secret by that team’s captain) offered the true one; mastered, also, the scoring system whereby a correct guess at the truth-teller’s identity obtained one point for the opposing team, an incorrect guess none at all – and that these points were cumulative, issuing, after a time previously agreed, in a result. That time was now only a matter of minutes away.

  (In the next room, Marigold’s room, Rachel was minding the children. This meant in practice that she slept in a rather knobbly easy-chair with an abandonment almost approaching that of Shorty’s drunken-gaoler performance, while each of them, in strict rotation, and in something near total silence, climbed on to the bed and aimed one gob of spittle at the open mouth of the other, stretched out on the floor immediately beneath. As with their elders’ game, there was a scoring system here, but it was observed with less rigour: a direct hit, at any rate a total direct hit, was less easy to establish.)

  Keith announced the score so far, then said, ‘I suggest we have a team change. Good old Shorty’s been seeing to coffee and drinks and making up the fire and generally looking after us. I think we ought to give him a turn at the game, eh, Shorty?’

  ‘Grassy-arse, seen yours. Delighted to oblige.’

  ‘I wonder if …’ Keith pretended to consider. ‘Tracy, would you mind dropping out?’

  ‘No, er, of course not.’

  Shorty sat down next to Marigold, who moved up for him a little further than necessary. Keith handed Trevor three folded slips.

  ‘And the next word is spronk, s,p,r,o,n,k. Spronk.’

  There was a timed pause for consideration, part of which Shorty used for very deliberately topping up his glass of Bénédictine.

  ‘Spronk is a dialect word,’ said Trevor, throwing himself about on his chair to imply desperate improvisation, ‘meaning a shoot or, er, a sprout, or … the stump of a tree or of a tooth, or it used to mean, er, a spark, yes, a spark. It’s a very rare word and has pretty well died out these days.’

  Marigold gazed at her slip. ‘A spronk is a man who hates everybody and whose only pleasure in life is being sarcastic to people and trying to make them as unhappy as he is. A very lazy man too. Named after Hezekiah Spronk in … one of Dickens’s books.’

  ‘A splonk,’ said Shorty, ‘or rather to splonk is to have a bloody good time boozing away like the hammers of hell. In the words of the poet, let us eat, splonk and be merry. Hic.’

  Bernard’s team was divided in its response, he himself opting for Trevor, George for Shorty and Adela for Marigold. Again, one point scored. Trevor said to Keith,

  ‘Shall we play something else? I think this is getting a bit, you know, sort of dull.’

  ‘Do you? I think it’s fascinating. Anyway, there must be one more round to even things up. Each team has got to have the same number of goes, you see. The next word is … jimp, j,i,m,p. Jimp.’

  ‘A jimp is an abbreviation for a chimpanzee,’ said Adela. ‘Some people say chimp, of course, but not everybody. Some of them say jimp instead.’

  ‘To jimp,’ said Bernard, looking into the fire, ‘is to behave in an exaggeratedly theatrical way in order to conceal the fact that nothing whatsoever is taking place inside one’s head. Or, transitively, to jimp somebody is to make him, or her, do everything for one while patronizing and humiliating him, or her.’

  Before Bernard had quite finished, Shorty leaned over sideways and seemed not so much to spill as to pour a couple of ounces of Bénédictine on to the skirt of Marigold’s dress. Trevor immediately started wondering whether this move was an additional assault on his grandmother, a diversion designed to prevent her from, say, scratching Bernard’s eyes out (very much on the cards an instant earlier), or a drunken accident, but he had to stop wondering quite as soon when she in turn behaved in a way equally hard to evaluate. But, either as the result of a delayed reflex of recoil, or by way of an actual blow in retaliation, her elbow came up and caught Shorty hard under the chin. He was still off balance and fell sideways in the opposite direction, over the end of the sofa and half into the fireplace, his head near the fire itself. A moment later Adela also crashed to the ground, having tripped up over her own feet on her way to assist Shorty. Keith soon pulled him out of harm’s way; Trevor helped Adela up; both the fallen seemed undamaged. At that stage, Marigold, who had risen to her feet, collapsed backwards on to the sofa. Tracy ran to her.

  ‘I think she’s fainted. Could someone get a glass of water?’

  Trevor did, and quite soon Marigold opened her eyes.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. At no point had she been other than all right, though just now as angry – with Bernard
– as she had ever been in her life. Her mind, whatever its defects, had worked fast enough to suggest to her that to throw a faint would be an unimprovable way to avoid having to apologize to Shorty (whom she had meant to jostle or possibly thump, not set fire to), would make her the focus of attention and solicitude, and might also suggest to Bernard that any effect of his insults on her had been erased by the scene that had happened to follow them. That would have to do for the time being.

  Trevor turned to Keith. ‘Get the kids up and ready to move and we’ll put her to bed.’

  ‘Shall I ring the doctor?’ asked Bernard in an anxious tone.

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Sorry about the dress, Marigold,’ said Shorty, who had fully intended to souse her in Bénédictine, but had been too drunk to make the action look drunken. ‘I’m none the worse myself, you’ll be glad to hear.’

  Adela knelt by the sofa and began swabbing at the stained skirt with her handkerchief.

  Tracy caught Bernard’s eye and at once looked away. With her back to the windows, she had had a good view of the events of the last minute. When Shorty fell, there had been a general reaction; even George had clearly done all he could to get up, out of instinct. Only Bernard had not moved at all. Could he really have been indifferent to the sort of thing that might quite easily have been going to happen to his old boy-friend? She felt for a cigarette and looked at her watch.

  Thirty-Five

  It was Adela who, in the face of Marigold’s renewed assurances that she was all right, telephoned Dr Mainwaring on the morning after Boxing Day. Two more days passed before he could, or would, come, but come he did about the middle of the morning, when Adela was out at the shops.