One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Mitch, Mitch, Mitch,’ Atkins broke through by degrees, ‘I’m a horrible Anglophile. And you’re trying to change me, boy.’

  ‘Nobody could change you, you dull bastard,’ Roger said.

  Atkins had taken his arm away and now stood shrugging and swaying. ‘No, I guess nobody could,’ he said. He started grinning, his eyes on the floor. ‘No, Mitch, I guess you’re in the right of it there.’

  Roger looked up and met Helene’s glance. It was fixed directly on him for the first time that evening, and was full of contempt. She left the room and he followed.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Roger? Are you sick or something? Insulting that nice funny little man? Why are you always like this? Oh, God, it’s so awful. I’m about through – I don’t think I can stand it any more. Oh, what makes you behave this way?’

  ‘You dare lecture to me on how to behave after that perfectly monstrous exhibition of yours earlier on? Insulting me and my country in front of everyone? The most preposterous—’

  ‘Roger, are you insane? Are you literally, certifiably insane? Don’t you know a joke when you see one? Where’s that jolly old sense of humour the British are supposed to have?’

  ‘Ha, that’s even better, isn’t it? A Dane laying down the law on humour. Talk about—’

  ‘I’m no Dane, damn you, I’m American.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion, darling.’ Ernst walked buoyantly over with a glass of milk in his hand. He looked as if he had just showered after a brisk early-morning run. ‘But we won’t pursue it now. Have I been missing something, Roger? Some fisticuffs?’

  ‘Everything but,’ Helene said, gazing furiously at Roger. ‘Let’s get home, Ernst. If we don’t break it up there’ll be an economy-size slugfest in a little while.’

  ‘Yes, it is late. Well, Roger, things always start to hum when you’re about, don’t they? Never a flat moment, eh?’

  Roger only calmed down finally when he stood in his bedroom tying the cord of his orange-and-black silk pyjamas. The seven dinner-guests had gone without his having been able to get near Helene again. He was leadenly visualizing tomorrow morning’s round of penitential phone-calls when Joe knocked and came in carrying a thick cardboard file.

  ‘Young Macher’s novel,’ he said. ‘I thought you might care for some bedtime reading.’

  ‘How thoughtful of you.’

  ‘I gathered you had a kind of passage of arms with Strode.’

  ‘Insufferable little swine.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, he can be hard to take at times. He has his problems, though. Like the rest of us. And don’t underrate him, Rog. He’s a real smart cookie.’

  ‘Smart? Are you serious? Man’s a moron.’

  ‘Yeah, I know about that too, but there’s a lot there that doesn’t show. That manuscript business of his, he makes a lot of that now. The agency’s getting to be almost a sideline. Last year alone—’

  ‘I know a bit about that sideline. He’s been sitting on the typescript of a novel by my brother-in-law for God knows how long. I’ll have to get it off him somehow.’ At the moment Roger meant this. Since coming upstairs he had thought quite a bit about Pamela and the possibility of a reconciliation.

  Full of American energy, or American inability to retire to one’s bed, Joe settled himself on Roger’s and opened a new packet of cigarettes. A few seconds’ furious finger-flicking at the base of this got the first cigarette up far enough to be torn free and lit. Then Joe started: ‘The whisper is – this is between ourselves, Rog – Strode’s got his hands on some notebooks of Swinburne. Not very legally – three guys in England say the things belong to some library somewhere but they don’t know where to look for them. Strode’s supposed to be waiting for them to cool off so that he can push them to some fellow who likes that type of stuff. You know, whipping and the rest of it.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Roger, his back to Joe, had finished openly rubbing hair-tone into his scalp and was now furtively rubbing skin-tonic round his eyes.

  ‘Never seemed a good idea to me, being whipped,’ Joe said in some surprise. ‘Other things, maybe, but not that. Just once or twice I’ve thought when I was stoned to hell I might like to sample it for the experience, but Jesus, the first time that lash curled round my bare ass would be enough to . . . You ever been whipped, Rog?’

  ‘Not my line, old boy.’

  ‘They say Swinburne got the taste for it at his prep school. British schools have always been big on flogging, haven’t they? Raises an interesting point. The basic psychological situation here is getting ideas of sex muddled up with ideas of violence, tenderness inverted into cruelty, right? Now a lot of people would say this is, you know, very much a British thing, and I’m wondering just how far—’

  ‘My dear Joe, I don’t want to be rude but I am very tired and I have to be up early in the morning, so perhaps we could continue this—’

  ‘Sure, Rog, of course, I was forgetting, sorry. We’ll see you at breakfast, then. Good night.’

  Roger wound and set his alarm-clock and put it by the bed. Then he knelt down on a zebra-hide rug, crossed himself, and muttered:

  ‘In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Now look, this isn’t good enough. You know what I’m like and yet you keep on at me. All those people – you know as well as I do they’re the type I can’t stand. Why do you keep sending along bastards like Atkins and Macher and bloody fools like that Pargeter creature if you don’t want me to be angry? When a chap starts talking the sort of pretentious cock that horrid little—’

  Conscious that his voice had risen, he paused and went on in his mutter: ‘And what makes you think I need showing how one sin leads to another? I knew that when I was thirteen. That Mrs Atkins business tonight – it was wrong and I hereby repent it and beg pardon, but I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t made me angry. Hadn’t made it easy for me to be angry, I mean. Please, if I felt you were showing a little restraint I’d be able to try much harder.

  ‘Then there’s Helene. Of course the whole thing’s very wrong and I shouldn’t be asking you to let me commit a sin, but won’t you let me arrange something? If you only would I could get it all cleared up: I’ll take her away and marry her, or else I’ll stop seeing her. Either way I shan’t be going on like this, which I agree is very bad. I’m only asking for this one chance. You must know how much I want it, for Christ’s sake.’

  Roger stayed on his knees for half a minute or so. Then he added out of the corner of his mouth: ‘And whatever you do see to it that Irving Macher’s novel is no good.’

  He climbed to his feet effortfully and with clicking kneecaps. A bird called outside, an ugly and unfamiliar sound. A blue jay, or one of the other local sorts they kept on about. He got into bed, clutching at the quilt as, with its usual promptness, it started sliding off. What frightful toll such a quilt must take of Joe if he had one on his own bed, Roger reflected, and if so how inevitable that Joe should refuse to replace it with another, more adhesive type of quilt. That would be cheating destiny.

  Once more grabbing the quilt, Roger got out of bed again and tramped to the wardrobe where his jacket was. He took from a pocket his folder of traveller’s cheques and peered at the scribblings on it. Plaza restaurant 1.0 p.m. Tuesday – Christ, was that it? No, thank Christ, he remembered now – bloke from Doubleday’s. Ah: Miranda, Fothergill Street, Ammanford, W Alnut 6–4077. That looked like it, both in content and in (barely legible) calligraphy. But what the hell was the woman’s name? And what sort of face had she?

  Five

  ‘Please let me go, Roger. Please.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Roger, will you let me up, please?’

  ‘Why on earth should I?’

  ‘Look, I told you we’re having some people in for cocktails this evening and I just remembered we’re fresh out of vermouth and we’re low on bourbon too, and I have to call the liquor store before three o’clock or they won’t deliver this far out of town, and it’s a quarte
r of already, so unless—’

  ‘So you needn’t move for at least ten minutes. Darling . . .’

  ‘Oh . . . why can’t you be reasonable?’

  ‘I don’t feel reasonable.’

  ‘But you’re going to be it just the same, aren’t you? It won’t take me two minutes to call and then I’ll be right back.’

  ‘I shall time you. I warn you I shall time you.’

  ‘You do that. Now if you’ll just—’

  ‘I want a kiss first.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake . . .’

  ‘You’re saying good-bye to me. For two minutes. No more.’

  ‘All right . . . Now I have to go . . . Oh, don’t start that again.’

  ‘Can I come with you and help you telephone? I’m good at that.’

  ‘Maybe you are, but you’re staying right there. It’ll be a hell of a sight quicker, for one thing.’

  ‘Ah, now in that regard I think it more than probable that you have a point. Just one more little . . .’

  ‘Oh, honestly . . .’

  As soon as Roger finally let her go Helene jumped up from his lap and stalked across to the kitchen door, combing her hair briefly with her fingers. Watching her go, Roger felt complacent, partly through having just drawn a little-considered benefit from being fat. A lap as wide and deep as his could accommodate indefinitely a girl far bulkier than Helene, in fact a girl of any standard size and weight. And a lap was a good place to put a girl. She felt safer there for some reason, but was not. There was something masterful as well about the idea of a lap.

  The abdominal boundary of Roger’s lap was at the moment even more convex than usual. On its further side weltered a dozen clams, a soft-shell crab with beans and egg-plant, a double order of apple pie and whipped cream, much pumpernickel and butter, and a bottle of New York State champagne. Roger was always frightfully good on this last sort of thing, very tolerant, and very funny at the expense of all that stuff about burgundies of great breeding and finesse. If it made him drunk without making him throw up on the spot, he would declare, it was his drink. The company would thus be nicely in position when, the meal over, he asked to see every brand of cigar they had in the place, looked at three, smelt one, sent all away, and got going on his snuff-boxes.

  Today’s cigar demonstration at the Queen’s Tavern had been on a reduced scale – nobody to notice besides a few other lunchers and Helene, and there was probably little hope of impressing her further in this direction. She could not have forgotten – who could? – the time at the Hotel Codan when, staring woundingly into the waiter’s eyes, he had crushed out a 17kr.50 Corona Corona after half a dozen puffs. In the ensuing hush he had explained, without any rancour now, that owing to carelessness on the part of the finisher the wrapper was cracked and the head – as the end you stuck in your mouth was correctly known – therefore imperfect. As he talked he had felt great waves of power flooding in towards him. There had been a seventh wave when he smilingly declined the fervent offer by the management of any other cigar he fancied (estimating accurately that when the bill came the offending weed would not appear on it).

  Though of low cigar interest it had been a good lunch. Its only defect had been the time it took place. So as to get Helene back to the Bangs’ house as early as possible, Roger had been willing to start eating at noon, or even 11 a.m., but she had told him over the telephone that, with an appointment for a Swedish massage at 10.30 and ‘a few things’ to buy at the supermarket afterwards, she could not be at the station to pick him up before about 12.30. Faced with the choice of arriving there at 11.53 or 12.44, he had gone for the earlier train and was very ready to see her when she turned up at 12.50. He had not been able to push the necessary two large martinis into her in less than a quarter of an hour, and the meal itself, like all meals, was not to be rushed. With the evil presence of Arthur, back from school, forecast for 4.0, they had the house to themselves for just about the next hour.

  Roger became conscious that Helene had stopped talking a minute or more ago, but that she had not rejoined him. Instead of that, kitchen noises were coming from the kitchen: cupboards, drawers, crockery. Coffee. How nice; but how readily postponable.

  He strolled the length of the room, glancing out of the picture window which gave so oddly little illumination. A small deer was moving slowly and without evident timidity through a belt of conifers thirty yards away. This sight caused Roger definite annoyance. He was not clear in his mind how he wanted these people to regard the fauna of their country, but he could have done with less of their habit of hanging up an Audubon print wherever they felt like it and less of their excited wonder at harbouring so many species within their borders. It stood to reason that any fool who owned half a continent was going to own a lot of birds and mammals and such as well. They ought to have got over all that by now.

  Mildly ill-wishing the American deer, Roger turned a corner and did his best to peer impishly round the kitchen threshold. (The place was one of those ranch-type affairs that of course left doors off to promote togetherness.) ‘And what do you think you’re up to?’ he asked in what he thought of as his jocular-sinister manner.

  She turned her unkempt head towards him in faint surprise. So far from preparing coffee she seemed to be wrapping up small parcels and sweets and nuts in squares of orange paper. ‘I have to do this,’ she said.

  He advanced on her. ‘What? Do what?’

  ‘The kids’ll be coming around for trick-or-treat and I have to—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Hallowe’en, Roger, and we always—’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘I have to get these—’

  By this time he had her cornered somewhere among the vast banks of domestic apparatus. Interlocked, they slid along the smooth white door of the man-high refrigerator and came to rest against the dishwasher, or perhaps the spin-drier. There was relative silence for a minute or so. Then Helene said:

  ‘The Selbys might see us from across the yard – we shouldn’t be—’

  ‘All right, we’ll go back and sit down.’

  ‘But I should finish wrapping the—’

  ‘Later. Whatever it is and I don’t know or care what it is, later.’

  He got her in a sort of policeman’s come-along hold and assisted her to their seat in the main room. After another minute or so she began to resist him.

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ he said.

  ‘No it isn’t all right. Who says it’s all right?’

  ‘Don’t be so silly. Of course it’s all right.’

  He wondered if they would ever reach a stage at which it became unnecessary for him to seduce her de novo every time. It had always been well worth it but the prospect of an indefinite series of these preambles, neither lengthening nor shortening, had begun to daunt him rather, and also disturb him. What was he doing that he ought not to do, or not doing that he ought to do? He was sure he had not deviated an inch from the standard procedure which, if successful at all, could normally be dispensed with after the first application. What was wrong with her? Did Ernst have to ply her with flowers, drinks, dinners, speeches whenever he felt like getting conjugal?

  Blurring his voice, he said now: ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  ‘No, Roger.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We can’t.’

  Her tone had moved from her ordinary reluctance to decision. ‘Why not?’ he repeated, this time in real inquiry.

  ‘We just can’t. Arthur’ll be here any time now.’

  ‘But it’s only . . . a quarter past three. He’s not due till four.’

  She shook her head rapidly. ‘Any time now.’

  ‘But you said on the phone . . .’

  ‘I told you, it’s Hallowe’en.’

  ‘What the devil has that got to do with it?’

  ‘They . . . they’ll probably let them out of school early today, so they can get home and dress up for the evening.’

  ‘Why the hell
didn’t you tell me? Christ, Helene.’

  ‘Don’t be angry, honey, please . . . Monday I told you he got home around four, and on regular days he does. Then when you called today you were so set on coming I just didn’t have . . . time to tell you this wasn’t a regular day, that’s all.’

  ‘My God, if I’d known . . .’

  ‘If you’d known then what?’

  Roger brooded, swallowing heavily. ‘Listen. Are you sure he’s coming home early?’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty sure. It got mentioned . . .’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘I don’t know, but what difference—?’

  ‘Let’s telephone the school and find out.’

  ‘All right,’ Helene said, getting slowly to her feet. ‘We’ll telephone the school.’

  They got the janitor, who was very affable but knew nothing. Helene had some trouble getting the receiver back on to the hook before Roger could demand to speak to someone in authority.

  Standing face to face with her in the kitchen, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘How’s he getting home?’

  ‘Well, we have this taxi group . . .’

  ‘Taxi group? Talk English, Helene, do you mind?’

  ‘We take turns, the mothers, the ones on this street. Once or twice a week one of us has a turn to take them to school and go fetch them.’

  ‘Whose turn is it today?’

  ‘Let’s see . . . I think it must be Sue Green. But honey, look, even if—’

  ‘Ring her up and ask her what time they come out.’

  ‘But we couldn’t possibly have more than—’

  ‘Ring her up.’

  Helene looked blankly at him for a moment, then dialled. ‘Hallo? Hallo, is this Linda? Hi, honey, this is Helene? Oh, I’m fine. Say, is Mommy around? She did? No,it’s nothing. We’ll see you soon. Good-bye now.’ She added to Roger: ‘Sue already left.’

  ‘So I gather, but how long ago? I mean, God . . . Why didn’t you ask?’

  ‘Linda Green is four years old,’ Helene said.