One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Helene.’ For once, there was a good deal of Danishness in the way she spoke.

  ‘Grace, find Helene something, will you, sweetheart? Fine. Now what about you, Rog, old man? You look as if you could do with a—’

  ‘Thank you, Joe, no, I won’t, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  They all went away then.

  Two

  Roger’s decision not to swim had been among the easiest of his life. For a man as keen as he on getting into bed with women, keeping hidden the full enormity of his fatness was a chronic problem. Its most acute form naturally came up when someone new had to be hustled or cajoled past the point of no return. That point tended to get later and later as his belly waxed. The merest glimpse of it might be enough, even at a very advanced stage, to remind a girl of her obligations to family tradition, to husband or boy friend or host or room-mate or landlady, to humanity. But not only that. Recent experience suggested that that belly, exposed in a moment of inattention or abandon, could cause total withdrawal of favours previously granted. In other words, it tended to stop them. Cold. At any time.

  This must not be allowed to happen with Helene. It was a crying shame that, temperamentally, she was different from his usual sort of girl. His usual sort of girl tended not to take it personally when he slept with them and this could lead to a lot of rather loose behaviour. Helene, on the other hand, was always very strict. In particular, she insisted on something like parity of nudity. She would not put on anything like a show for him while he sat about in faultless West of England tweeds. In the intervals of choking with rage and lust over this policy of hers, Roger saw it as not unreasonable. But it meant that the really detailed inspection of her which he longed to make would have to be paid for by giving her the chance of making a roughly equally really detailed inspection of him if she were so minded. So no go. So he had had to make do with a couple of glimpses of the side of her as she skipped out of or into bed, the back of her as she dressed or undressed, a small part of the top of the front of her before she switched out the light.

  So seeing her in a bathing suit, he told himself without fear of contradiction, was going to be significant. He would be gaining visual experience of her body, if not neat, then in a higher concentration than he had had a chance of getting used to. He hoped it would not be too strong for him. With a slight smile of complacency at his own forethought, he reached into his jacket pocket for his sunglasses and put them on. Provided he could remember to move his head about slightly from time to time, nobody would now be able to tell where he was looking. Any involuntary bulging of the eyeballs would likewise be masked. It occurred to him, as he watched carefully for Helene’s reappearance, that he might throw away these advantages if he went on behaving like a seated figure carved out of old red sandstone. He shifted in his chair, mopped his face, took a pinch of snuff, attacked his drink, glanced about.

  Only Grace Derlanger and, more surprisingly, Irving Macher had failed to go and change. They stood talking a few yards off. Or rather Macher was talking. He was doing it in a deep and rather resonant voice which Roger considered he had no right to. Any more than he had a right to a two- or two-and-a-half-thousand-dollar advance.

  ‘And you’re justified in acquiring money,’ Macher was saying, as if in self-defence. ‘More than that, it’s your duty. We’ve gotten over all that other stuff now, that junk about it’s your duty not to have money. Whoever did that duty? And duty’s a thing people do, not something they don’t do. Listen, what would you do to a soldier who went into a battle without taking his gun along? You’d have him court-martialled, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right. Somebody who can’t protect himself weakens other people’s power of self-protection. Armies understand this. And a lot more. An army’s the right kind of organization because it only exists to do what’s necessary. Nothing stuck on afterwards for the look of the thing. It’s a pity nobody can use them any more, armies. All we have now is scientists, and they’re no good. No good in the way I’m looking for. Too much aesthetics about the whole idea.

  ‘But going back to money: it’s a terrific liberation to think of it in the right way. My parents have money and I like and admire them for it. It used to bother me a little, knowing so much of it was around and hearing about it all the time, but not any more. Money’s good.’

  Roger got the last part of this at close range, for Grace Derlanger, seeing him sitting on his own, had walked her companion over. She settled her stocky body efficiently in a near-by chair, gazing at Macher through her thick glasses but not moving a muscle of her face. It was hard to tell whether or not she thought she was having nonsense talked to her. Roger guessed she did, though without feeling as much conviction as he would have liked. To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense, and so on. Macher’s nonsense stopped before he could get deep enough into it.

  Willingly turning his head, Roger saw that the Bangs were approaching. Ernst had his arm round Helene’s shoulders, partly screening her from view, though not enough to conceal the fact that her bathing suit was in two widely separated pieces. With much loud chatter, Joe and Pargeter, the Englishman, joined them by the diving-board, closely followed by Macher’s girl. The group was in continuous movement, so that Helene was only visible for unpredictable instants. Roger sat watching like a sniper waiting for a clear shot at a general.

  ‘Let me get you another drink,’ he said after a good deal of this, and without waiting for an answer got up and strode off to the drinks cupboard. He was quite near Helene when, with perfect coordination, she turned towards the pool to say something to Macher’s girl. This move presented her back to Roger and her front to where he had just been sitting. When he got back there with the drinks she had turned away again.

  ‘Come on, you lot,’ he called with a suddenness and an unlooked-for joviality that brought both Grace and Macher round in their seats. ‘What about some action? Or are you all afraid of the water? Show us what you can do, eh?’

  ‘We’re not standing for that, are we, Nigel?’ Joe roared. ‘Let him see how wrong he is.’ He moved along the diving-board, bony in a minimal pair of light green trunks. The group behind him began to break up.

  ‘You’re British, aren’t you, Mr Dean?’ Macher asked loudly.

  ‘I am. And the name is Micheldene.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It has a hyphen in it, does it? Like Mitchell-Dean?’

  ‘No no no, it’s one word. Why, anyway?’

  ‘Well now, I wouldn’t know why, would I, Mr Micheldene?’

  ‘I fail to see who else would.’

  ‘What? It’s your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘So you’d know why it’s one word and I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Look, you asked me why your name was one word.’

  ‘I did nothing of the kind. I asked you why you wanted to know if I were British.’

  ‘Oh, that was what you asked me.’ Macher laughed quietly for a time while Roger watched him. ‘I beg your pardon. Well, the answer to that should be obvious enough.’

  ‘Should it?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to know.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Roger had been suffering several kinds of pain during this exchange. One was physical, the result of forcing his eyeballs as far round to one side as they would go in hasty attempts to get a look at Helene. More severe was the emotional pain of not having got a look. Macher had kept distracting his attention. By the time he had finished with him all five of the bathing party were in the pool. A third kind of pain got going in Roger. Retrospective in nature, it came from not having reached out a foot and tipped Macher, chair and all, into the water
as soon as he opened his horrible mouth.

  The pool was not a long one, but it was sufficiently long for Joe to think it worth while ploughing his way from one end of it to the other again and again. Doing this made him snort a lot. It also disturbed the water enough to turn most of Helene, in the intervals when she was not herself swimming, into a disintegrated mess of oscillating patches of colour. There was the refraction too.

  Ernst started to do some diving. He seemed good at it, good enough at any rate to make Helene stop swimming and watch him. Roger had a full close view of the back of her head and shoulders. The water had altered the colours of her hair, deepening the yellows, making the light parts almost transparent and introducing bronze tints near the crown. She and the others laughed and shouted to one another in a relaxed, convivial way.

  ‘Aren’t they a lovely couple?’ Grace asked Roger.

  He gave her a suspicious glance. For a middle-aged American woman she had not often struck him as very unamiable, even though he had never contemplated bothering to find out what took place in her head. But he had caught her eye late in the Macher monologue and found her watching him interestedly, her nostrils dilated in a way that meant she was suppressing something. A yawn, he hoped. He said now in a puzzled tone: ‘Who?’

  ‘Why, Dr and Mrs Bang, of course. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes, I do. Quite charming.’

  ‘They seem completely made for each other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If he ever decides he’s done enough philosophy or whatever it is, I should imagine there must be a part waiting for him in some Tarzan movie or other. He’s so graceful. Look at him go now. With those looks he might so easily be effeminate, but there’s nothing like that about him at all. And isn’t she just ravishing?’

  ‘Oh, delightful.’

  ‘So typically Scandinavian in her colouring. And that figure. I really am surprised some fellow hasn’t gotten hold of her.’

  ‘What sort of fellow?’

  ‘Well, you know, some sort of movie or television fellow. With those looks she wouldn’t need to be able to sing or anything, or even act.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t, would she?’

  ‘But you know what the loveliest part of all is.’

  Roger gazed at her in unexpectant silence.

  ‘They’re so utterly devoted. You can see it the moment you lay eyes on them the first time – well, I did. Completely devoted. He doesn’t really care to look at anybody else, and it’s the same with her. Or even more so, wouldn’t you say?’

  Roger would not say.

  ‘And that’s so rare these days, isn’t it? – with all this running off and breaking up and divorcing and all the . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Roger, how terribly tactless of me. I didn’t mean—’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right, Grace.’

  ‘I do feel so—’

  ‘Say no more.’ Or else stand by for a dose of grievous bodily harm (Roger thought to himself), you women’s-cultural-lunch-club-organizing Saturday Review of Literature-reading substantial-inheritance-from-soft-drink-corporation-awaiting old-New-Hampshire-family-invoking Kennedy-loving just-wunnerful-labelling Yank bag.

  Grace dropped her voice to say in a carefully casual tone: ‘Did you hear anything from Marigold recently?’

  ‘Not for some years.’ Roger was aware of Macher listening to all this, and listening with something less than full attention too. That made it worse. If the Yid scribbler was going to go on sitting there with his lobeless ears flapping, Roger reasoned, the least he could do was flap them with passionate absorption. ‘Marigold was my first wife,’ he went on very loudly. ‘My present wife, if you can call her that, is named Pamela.’

  ‘Oh, Roger, I don’t know what to say, I seem to have—’

  ‘Sweetheart, it doesn’t matter in the least.’ He gave her a full-production smile to ram home his moral advantage. The grade-one going-over Grace had just earned would have to wait until he was unencumbered by the presence of Hebrew jackanapeses and such. ‘I had a letter from Pamela just before I came over, actually.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She seems very well.’ Most of the single page of the letter had been devoted to asking him to see if he could find and bring back to England the unique typescript of a novel called Perne in a Gyre by his talentless nuclear-disarmer brother-in-law. It was thought to be lying about somewhere in the offices of a New York literary agent, Strode Atkins by name, who was supposed to have been attending this evening’s gathering but had not, thank God, so far appeared.

  ‘Any real news?’

  ‘No.’

  Ernst had climbed out of the pool and stood pressing the water from his hair. Helene, her back still turned to Roger, was also emerging. Grace said she must see about towels and went away. Roger watched Helene while she chatted to her husband and to Macher’s girl, accepted a towel from Grace and moved round the pool to within a few yards of him, the towel hiding most of her between the neck and the knees. Her eyes were slightly bleared with the water. After a moment she sat down, going so far as to present Roger with a three-quarter rear view. Even though the towel was round her shoulders and she was clasping her knees, her shape was such that he got something. Not enough, of course.

  He was just rehearsing mentally the casualness with which he would get up and walk over and ask her how she had enjoyed her swim when Macher said: ‘Some girl, that.’

  ‘Girl?’ Roger went through the motions of noticing he was not alone. ‘What girl?’

  ‘Not Suzanne Klein, the girl I brought. You haven’t noticed her. The other girl. The blonde. The Dane. The professor’s wife. Mrs Bang. Helene. That girl.’ He pointed.

  ‘Oh yes, I think I see which one you’re referring to.’

  ‘Good. Some girl, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree. What’s she like?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know how I mean.’ Macher did his laugh. ‘Well now, let’s just sit around for a while and get together and have a little think and try to figure out how I mean. I can’t mean what’s she like to look at, because I can see that for myself. As a matter of fact it was seeing what she’s like to look at that led me to comment that she’s some girl. Anyway, since we’ve decided I can’t mean what’s she like to look at I must mean something else, like is she nice or nasty, smart or stupid, educated or illiterate, drunken or of temperate disposition and habits – all this type of stuff. That’s how I mean.’

  Roger heard him out with unwavering gaze, his invariable policy in this situation unless a really murderous verbal interruption could be devised or physical violence resorted to. After prolonging his gaze for half a minute or so without speaking or moving, he said: ‘I see. But quite apart from whether I feel I ought to consider giving you my opinion on these matters, I should have thought your approach to life in general was far too idiosyncratic for you to take an interest in what I or anyone else thought about this or anything else.’

  ‘Oh no, Mr Micheldene, that would be arrogant of me. You’ve misjudged me most terribly, I’m afraid. Of course I’m interested in what you think about Mrs Bang. After all, you’ve known her much longer than I’ve had a chance to, haven’t you? And you’re an older man, so your judgement would be more mature and balanced than mine.’

  ‘How true that is,’ Roger said. ‘However, allow me to suggest that we defer our discussion of Mrs Bang until such time as you’ve acquired some basis of comparison. Until then at the very earliest.’

  He was on his feet to go over and look at Helene’s front when Grace called his name. He turned with some effort and saw her approaching across the grass with a man and a woman about his own age: Strode Atkins and his wife, no doubt. Both were of well-groomed and yet battered appearance. They clearly expected to be introduced to him. Roger was perplexed to find no red mist of rage clouding his vision. He and Mrs Atkins, a thin woman with la
rge eyes and straight brown hair done in a fringe, looked at each other a moment longer than was necessary. Then her husband was shaking his hand and shouting: ‘An Englishman. Another goddam Englishman. I like that. I do like that. I’m a horrible Anglophile, you know. And believe me there aren’t too many of them around these days, brother.’

  Three

  ‘What sort of Anglophile’s a horrible Anglophile?’ Roger noticed that Mrs Atkins was minutely studying an apparently featureless patch of grass not far from her feet.

  ‘Oh hell, I just meant I love English people and English things so much it almost disgusts me. Disgusts a lot of other guys too, I can tell you. But I seem to keep right on doing it for some reason or other. What it is, I suppose, I’m of English descent. My ancestry is English. Goes back I don’t know how far. Now I’d like to ask you something, Mr Dean.’

  ‘Micheldene.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I’d like to ask you if you happen to be acquainted with the fact that the Tommy, the kind of, well, the English GI Joe, the average English private soldier, you know, like Uncle Sam as you know means the United States . . . uh . . . are you aware that the original Tommy was named Thomas Atkins?’

  ‘Yes, now you mention it I do seem to remember hearing something of the sort.’

  ‘Well, you can take it from me it’s true. That’ll show you how English I am. I’d like to ask you something else, too.’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘How do you pronounce the word’ – Strode Atkins frowned and licked his lips – ‘the word o, u, t?’

  ‘Out,’ Roger said without hesitation. The silent-stare ploy, just now tried on Macher with indifferent success, would plainly not do at all here. ‘Out,’ he added for good measure.

  Atkins shook his head slowly and gravely. ‘Oat,’ he said or something very like it.

  ‘But people—’

  Atkins held up his hand. ‘How do you pronounce the word’ – he did some more frowning while he stared at his feet, perhaps because he was rocking on them slightly – ‘a, b, o, u, t?’