One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  Although he normally made a point of not conforming to American usage or taste in the smallest particular, Roger did not want to look affected today. He did not want to look fat either, but all he could do about that was to stay as fully clothed as was consistent with not dying of heatstroke. He opened the top few buttons of his shirt, peeled it from his chest, blew several times into the aperture, and rebuttoned.

  Joe Derlanger came back from the place by the changing-huts where the outdoor drinks were kept, carrying two huge gin and tonics. He wore a yellow towelling shirt over what Roger saw as a pair of elongated bathing shorts with a pattern reminiscent of cushion-covers in typists’ flats. On his feet were what Roger had heard called sneakers. Apart from the natural endowment of thick blue-grey hairs on forearms and calves, he wore nothing else that was visible. He looked a good twenty degrees cooler than Roger felt. Good luck to him, Roger thought to himself. Or fairly good luck to him. If being cool meant dressing like a child there was a clear case for staying hot.

  Joe handed Roger his drink with a glance of intimate grimness, like a gang-leader dealing out small arms before a job. ‘What does he do exactly, this Ernst Bang? Bang? Is that really a guy’s name? What does he do, anyhow?’

  ‘It’s quite a common name in some parts of Scandinavia. He’s a philologist. Germanic, naturally.’

  ‘Philologist. That’s words and syllables, isn’t it?’

  ‘That kind of thing. Ernst is something of an authority on the North Germanic languages, especially Early Icelandic and Faroese.’

  ‘Sounds compelling, doesn’t it? But what do they want with an Early Icelandic buff at a place like . . .? Wait a minute.’

  He had turned in his chair, looking over towards the point, a hundred yards away, where a track left the metalled road to curve round in front of the house. Here a large green-and-brown car was moving. It began to raise a cloud of dust.

  ‘This must be them now.’ Joe got up and faced the house, fifty yards away in a different direction. He called in a voice of great volume and harshness of tone: ‘Grace. Grace, they’re here.’

  ‘All right,’ the reply came in a voice of at least equal power and only about a major third up the scale.

  ‘Well, come on down.’

  ‘All right.’

  With a shrug and a jerk of the head, Joe moved to the nearby shelter and pulled more chairs out of it, arranging them round the concrete walk by the pool. He did this in the manner of a sadistic animal trainer. If anything looked like starting to go wrong for an instant there would be an outbreak of violence. This policy, Roger had noticed, marked all Joe’s dealings with the world of objects.

  Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger. The first time the two men met, an incident with a briefcase lock had suggested to him that here was a formidable rival in the last-named field. Only that morning Roger had gone into the bathroom to find all the towels very tightly tied by their corners to the chromium rail. The knots appeared to have been consolidated with water. He had wondered why this was until his own towel had twice fallen to the floor from the smooth metal. Joe seemed not to include people in his programme. He was one down on Roger there.

  ‘I meant to tell you about this boy Irving Macher,’ Joe said as he strove with the chairs. ‘Brilliant young Jewish kid from New York. They don’t come any smarter than that. In his junior year at Budweiser. On the staff of the Lit. there and already—’

  ‘Junior year? Is that what you call the first year?’

  ‘No, it’s what we call the last year but one. And this novel of his. It is honestly the most sizzling thing you ever saw. It just about turns your insides over. It’s about—’

  ‘You mentioned it last night.’

  ‘Oh, did I? Well, you can have a look at it tomorrow. We’re all just wild about it. Hoping to rush it through for April.’

  ‘What advance are you paying?’

  ‘Two thousand, maybe two-five.’

  ‘That’s a lot for a first novel.’

  ‘Ah, shows we believe in the goddam thing. You’ll be able to take it, won’t you, Rog?’

  ‘Well, the last few American firsts we’ve done haven’t gone down at all well, I’m sorry to say. There’s a definite feeling against them on the Board at the moment.’

  ‘This is something really exceptional.’

  Talking and watching the car, which was now pulling up near the house, had told on Joe’s vigilance with the chairs. The last of the bunch tried to lurch away from him towards the pool. He brought it back with a sharp twist of its arm, following this up with a kneeing in the behind. It squealed across the concrete on its iron toes.

  Roger watched coldly, but felt his heart beating. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing it,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake where is that woman?’ Joe asked himself aloud. Then, using his whole tall body to wave, he shouted: ‘Hallo. Come on over here. Down here.’

  Five people approached over the gravel of the driveway and the clipped green grass. Three of them, two men and a woman, were unknown to Roger. Of the remaining two, who were talking animatedly to each other, one was Dr Ernst Bang, Otto Jespersen Reader in Language Studies at the University of Copenhagen and currently Visiting Fellow at Budweiser College. The other was Roger’s reason for being here now.

  He got to his feet in good time and drew in his stomach, which had earlier started feeling tight, an impressive achievement for such a stomach. Memories ran in his brain. They were displaced by present longing when he took in his reason’s variegated fair hair shining in the sun, face with thin but prominent mouth, rather top-heavy body in a white dress with small blue and green things on it, long bare brown legs. Sixteen days to decide it one way or the other, he thought.

  There were greetings and introductions. Roger relegated for later inspection, if that, the young man called Nigel Pargeter whose sole right to have turned up seemed to be that he was English. An American girl of college age, whose name Roger missed, deserved instant inspection, if nothing more. She was dark and looked foreign, though not in the usual sense of never smiling. She moved her hips and shoulders about a lot, too. But she was very clearly the property of Irving Macher.

  Roger always remembered how quickly and completely he hated the author of Blinkie Heaven. Long afterwards it occurred to him that he had felt exactly the same excited repulsion on meeting a television producer, also American, at the Mirabelle. The chap had monopolized throughout the evening the attention of the fashionable Jesuit whom Roger had set out to impress and whose dinner he was paying for out of his own pocket: £5 10s. on wines alone. It was easy to underrate Mother Nature’s early warning systems.

  Brown-haired and freckled, with a mild crew-cut and a light-weight get-up of blue shirt and drill trousers, Irving Macher had nothing noticeable about him but a pair of restless grey eyes. Their restlessness indicated that there was nothing much for them to see rather than that they could not take in what they saw. This air of having found out a great deal by the age of twenty-one focused Roger’s hatred. He would do something about Macher’s air.

  For the moment there were more important things on hand. Roger had last seen Dr Bang three days earlier and fifteen miles away. With Mrs Bang the figures were eighteen months and getting on for four thousand miles. And yet it was Dr Bang who laughed and shook Roger’s hand for ten seconds and grasped his shoulder and told him how good it was to see him. Mrs Bang smiled slightly and gave Roger her cheek, or rather her jaw, to kiss in the way she had. He searched her manner for circumspect self-restraint, but could find none. Had it really been she, and not her husband, who had been away in Idaho or Iowa with the small Bang when he made his (unforewarned) descent on their house just off Budweiser campus? Yes, it really had.

  ‘How are you, Helene? You’re looking frightfully well.’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you. What a lovely place this is and how kind of Mr and Mrs Derlanger to invite us o
ver.’

  ‘Oh, they always make a great thing of entertaining . . . You like it at Budweiser, I gather? They found you a reasonable house, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, and the neighbours are fun, they’re so kind, they’re always in and out, and all the kids . . . I think the one who has most of a ball is Arthur.’

  At the sound of this name Roger stiffened, a reaction fated to pass unnoticed in one of his figure. He also crossed himself mentally. He had always thought it malignly significant that every other Arthur he had met or heard of was well over thirty. Even at five years old there had been a dreadful maturity in Arthur Bang’s regard, in the deliberate way he turned his head and seemed to reflect before he spoke. What must he be like now, rising seven? ‘Oh yes, how is Arthur?’ Roger asked solicitously.

  ‘Just fine. He goes to this little farm school place where a lot of the faculty kids go, and the teachers are most impressed with him, especially his study habits and aptitudes.’

  ‘Splendid, splendid.’ This was an understatement. Without wanting to, Roger recalled trying to make verbal love to Helene in Regent’s Park with Arthur looking up at him appraisingly from his push-chair, trying to hold her hand in the small room at Oskar Davidsen’s while Arthur spat no. 91 (fried forcemeat cakes with red cabbage, meat jelly and beetroot) at him. School. Of course. It had had to come. Roger felt the emotions of a traditional French lover whose mistress’s husband’s reserve class is recalled.

  ‘He’s growing so fast. He was just a baby when you last saw him wasn’t he?’

  ‘When I first saw him he was.’ And no mean performer even then, the little bastard, inverting over the knee of Roger’s new suit a whole dish of his grandma’s homemade quince preserve, sent all the way from Idaho or Iowa for the purpose.

  ‘Well, it must be three or four years since we met, mustn’t it?’

  ‘It was April 1961 in London,’ Roger said, doing his best to dispel shock and disappointment from his voice.

  Dr Bang rarely stayed out of any conversation as long as this. Now he said in his uvular Danish tones: ‘These women have no sense of time, have they, Roger? Oh yes, of course, we know, all of us, they’ve got other much more—’

  ‘Oh yes we do have a sense of time, it’s just that you didn’t get around to appreciating it yet.’

  ‘You hear that? Isn’t it monstrous? There’s nothing I can do about it, it seems. Try as I may, she’s incorrigible. Do have – it’s like something in Pope. And always the aorist tense instead of the perfect. She gets more Americanized every day, and of course the speech is where it first shows.’

  ‘Come on,’ Roger said, smiling, ‘you’re not on duty now. Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can never learn better. As long as people are speaking round me, my job’s never over. It’s such a basic human activity, you can’t keep away from it.’

  ‘Well I can think of one or two—’

  ‘But look,’ Helene said to her husband, ‘from everything you told me about this I still can’t figure out why it’s so wrong to speak in the American way. More people speak like this than speak in the British way, after all.’

  ‘But it’s not the only—’

  ‘There you are, Roger. Inability to conduct a logical discussion.’ Ernst turned away and settled down to argue with Helene. ‘It’s not a question of right and wrong at all. Ideas of correctness don’t enter in. Any more than the number of speakers. It’s simply that in the Eastern Hemisphere, which as you know includes Scandinavia, the traditional form of English, learnt as a second language, has been British English. Now—’

  ‘But we aren’t in the Eastern Hemisphere any more, we’re in America, and it’s just as traditional to—’

  ‘It’s not a question of traditional or not traditional, it’s which particular—’

  ‘You told me yourself you should never—’

  Roger stayed close when, under Joe’s direction, they went and sat down by the pool. Nearly half the time he spent in their company was regularly filled by the Bangs talking to each other. He was glad that for the moment they were talking English, which they tended to abandon for Danish when they got excited. Although he liked seeing what talking Danish did to Helene’s mouth, the main effect was to make him feel excluded in some way.

  The relatively close inspection of her he could now safely make showed that, at twenty-nine, she was looking better than ever, a slim girl with an endearingly disproportionate bosom. The slender hips, as far as could be seen, were still slender. So were the shoulders, with a couple of millimetres more flesh over the collarbones that showed through the lightly tanned skin. Then, as a face-fetishist of many years’ standing, Roger shifted his glance upwards.

  That was where the best (by a narrow margin) of her was. With that thin mouth and that thin nose and those heavy eyes she had a look of unawakened brutality that went straight to more than one part of his frame. Then there was that hair. Its range of colour, from ash through pale gold to lemon, was perhaps excessive, coming close to offending his sense of the fitness of things. As always, it was slightly tousled. And, as often, her cheeks were slightly flushed. When he first saw her, walking over to join his party in the Langeliniepavillonen five years earlier, he had seriously thought she might have come straight from a hurried passage with the doorman or even the hat-and-coat girl. By the end of the evening he had had to conclude that this could not have been. Pity, actually, if one took a long enough view.

  What, at any rate, did she see in Dr Bang? Or rather (Christ) find, like, seem to think she wanted to stick to? For visually Dr Bang had plenty to offer, what with his height and youth and slimness and small delicate dark head, all the appearance of a ballet dancer gifted with unusually expressive powers of mime. (Not much more than ten years ago Roger might have considered taking on the good Doctor himself. But he had finished with all that now.) Orally, or aurally, the husband of Helene had less to offer. Then why was she always talking to him? True, they were usually arguing, but this denoted interest on her part. And how could she have that?

  Both Bangs, after a vehement couple of sentences in Danish, now turned on Roger. They talked to him simultaneously, a thing they often did when not talking to each other. Roger tried to divide his attention fairly, being very cordial. People like him had to take every chance they got of being that.

  ‘All this opposition, it’s enough to make a man—’

  ‘ – thing you’re going to give up in a hurry. Why, some women would give their eye-teeth to—’

  ‘—putting any pressure on her at all. It’s a question of the normal—’

  ‘—born over there and of course I speak the language, but it says on my passport that I’m a—’

  ‘—to do is make formal application to the authorities, which in the case of a Danish—’

  ‘—stay that way.’

  ‘—more or less automatically.’

  Roger took advantage of the joint lull to be the voice of reason and moderation, two things which, as with cordiality, he had to keep a sharp look-out for opportunities of being the voice of. It was the easier because the Bangs had had this argument before, every time he had met them, in fact, though usually later in the day. No doubt being in America encouraged it.

  Taking a pinch of Town Clerk from his pewter snuff-box, Roger said: ‘I can quite see Helene’s position, Ernst. The fact that she wants to hang on to her American citizenship doesn’t mean she feels in the least unhappy or in any way disloyal or—’

  ‘Exactly, that’s what I keep—’

  ‘—you or Denmark. On the other hand, Helene, you must realize that the custom is for a wife to take her husband’s nationality, and since Denmark is your—’

  ‘If you could only get her to—’

  ‘—seem natural that you should make this application one of these days.’

  Roger disliked taking Ernst’s part against Helene, but in this matter the more people who did so the better, from his point of view. A fully Danish Helene se
emed more likely to stay in Denmark, which was handy for England. A persistently American Helene somehow brought up the fact that there were more Americans than Danes, and than British too for that matter. And, also somehow, not only more of them either.

  ‘When you’ve got back home, Helene,’ Roger went on, exploiting the weightiness that was weight’s only dividend, ‘you’ll—’

  ‘But this country is my home,’ Helene broke in at full stretch: ‘that’s what I’ve been trying to—’

  ‘She and I were born in the same—’

  ‘—here, but he’s the most obstinate—’

  ‘—drink, or would you like to take a swim while the sun lasts?’

  Joe’s abrasive tones, or possibly his subject-matter, halted them. Dr Bang’s consort shaded her eyes and looked up at Joe with an easy grace, and a display of lifted breast, and ditto of armpit, that half filled Roger with fury. He had had to get used to the idea that three was company, but he was clear in his mind that four was not.

  ‘Why, I’d just love to,’ Helene said, with a smile that showed off her world-class square white teeth, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t have a swimsuit.’

  ‘I haven’t got a costume either,’ Ernst said.

  ‘Oh, no problem, hell, plenty of spares in the changing-huts. You never can tell who might be turning up, you know. Forethought. That’s the thing. If you’d like to come along with me, Dr Bang—’

  ‘Ernst, please.’

  ‘Ernst, and my wife will take care of you, Mrs Bang—’