One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Look at me, sir. Study my countenance. Do I seem to be holding anything back?’

  ‘No. Very well. Good night to you.’

  Roger went to a bar opposite the college entrance and ordered a large whisky and water with no ice.

  The barman repeated the order and added inexplicably: ‘And a double self-communion. Coming up.’

  It was unjust, Roger considered, that he should have got virtually no information out of Castlemaine after subjecting him to a kind of pressure that, to some judges, might savour a little of blackmail. But more important was the difficulty of deciding what to do next. Macher and Helene were probably not in Harlem or Central Park or Wall Street, but that still left a lot of Manhattan to search from scratch. Then Roger realized that he knew of one place to look. The chances of its being the right place were perhaps not high, but he had no other lead at all. There was one trifling inconvenience to be endured first.

  Twenty minutes later he was listening to the thrilling ecclesiastical chimes that resulted from pressing the bell-button at Strode Atkins’s front door. The master of the house, wearing a mustard-coloured velvet smoking-jacket with lilac piping, answered the summons in person. ‘Hi, Mitch,’ he said as if glad to see Roger. ‘Come right on in.’

  In the living-room, Roger soon picked Mollie out from among the terra-cotta figurines and witch-doctor masks. ‘What brings you here?’ she asked him.

  ‘I was just passing.’

  ‘Going to get you a brandy, Alexander,’ Atkins said. ‘Good for keeping the cold out. I know it hasn’t been cold yet but it’s best to be on the safe side. The weather can turn awfully sharply in this part of the State. Shan’t keep you a minute. You’ll entertain Mollie, won’t you?’

  When Atkins had gone out to the kitchen, Mollie said neutrally: ‘I didn’t really expect to see you again much. What do you want?’

  Roger decided some slight preamble was called for. ‘Look, if I said anything uncalled-for the other evening I want to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘But if you only said called-for things then you don’t want to say you’re sorry, is that right?’

  ‘I was frightfully tight and I don’t remember much about it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Bully for you. Oh, hell. What do you want, Roger?’

  ‘This is very urgent and complicated or I wouldn’t dream of asking you. I want the key of your flat in New York.’

  She looked away. ‘Oh.’

  After a long pause, he said: ‘There isn’t much—’

  ‘Oh, we’ve plenty of time.’ There was a crash and a curse from the kitchen. ‘See what I mean? . . . I feel I should do what I can to protect my fellow women but you know it’s impossible for me to say no, you son of a bitch. How would I look to myself? All right, I’ll give it to you when you leave, which I imagine will be soon. The address is on the tag. Oh, what a bastard you are.’

  ‘I know.’ Roger tried to look ashamed. ‘But it’s too late to change.’

  There was some more silence until Atkins came out of the kitchen and handed Roger a glass of thick tan-coloured stuff. ‘More than a food,’ Atkins said: ‘a drink.’ Then he laughed.

  As he held up his glass to them Roger was congratulating himself on the sudden flash of uncanny insight which had led him to disguise his motive for wanting the key. To have perceived this paradox, that they would abet disloyalty to themselves but might shrink from helping to make things awkward for one of their own sex, one who in this case was in some sense a rival – what was this but to understand women?

  Fifteen

  Roger listened hard at the door of the flat. Nothing. There was no light from under the door either, but perhaps it fitted unusually well. Not that the condition of the lobby downstairs or of the lift made this likely. Anyway. At Pennsylvania Station he had dallied with the thought of a reconnoitring telephone call, but even if he had rung off instantly on hearing Macher’s or Helene’s voice (an unlikely provision in his present mood) some surprise-value would have been lost. And in any case they would surely have let the thing ring. This second consideration settled his last doubts about having omitted to ask Mollie not to tell Strode what was going on. Confident intuition that the state of the Atkinses’ marriage ruled out this chance was no substitute for the knowledge that Strode, even if he got to the stage of being baulked on the telephone, was not the man to drive to New York simply in the hope of preventing or alleviating an ugly scene. Roger listened again. Still nothing. Out or asleep. He turned the key and entered silently.

  The first thing was a slight smell of dust and soot. The furniture was humped against the light from the street. However gently he moved the floor gave and creaked under his feet like a disintegrating raft. Then he made a loud remark and clawed at the walls until a battered copper chandelier came to life – if the guilty couple were here he would be able to insist on having a word or so with them before they left or were rendered unconscious or whatever was in store for them. He explored. There was a single bedroom that nobody was using and a bathroom and a kitchen and a double bedroom with a very expensive bed in it that somebody was or had recently been: two people, in fact, to judge by the bathroom shelf. But were they the right two people?

  Roger tried to remember if he had ever seen Helene wearing any of the articles – earrings, a striped cotton shirt, a blue suede skirt – that seemed to belong to a current female occupant, but without success. Normally he had less than no time for that kind of accomplishment, deeming it best confined to homosexuals, but it would undoubtedly have come in handy now. He rubbed his podgy nose. It might be awkward to find himself confronting other acquaintances of Strode’s: a Milwaukee wrestler and his wife, a New York State Legislator and a hat-check girl. He left the bedroom and wandered about pettishly. Then, behind the bathroom door, he found something he was fairly confident of having seen in the last week or so, a housecoat affair with stripes of pale blue and white. Inspiration sent him to the label. It said lundqvist modes københavn. Being sure made a surprising difference. Roger discovered he was short of breath.

  Well, what now? Eleven-forty. They should be back soon. But then people, at no time remarkable for behaving as they should, seemed in the last week to have given up all pretence of doing so. Macher and Helene might not be back till two-forty. Or four-forty. Roger was pretty confident that he himself, faced with the prospect of a whole night with Helene, would have had her back from dinner by eight-forty. Or six-forty. But Macher was different. It was entirely conceivable that he would turn out to be interested in sleeping with Helene only in the literal sense, would shake his head and do his laugh on finding that Roger supposed otherwise. Conceivable but unlikely.

  Roger decided he would very much prefer not to hang round this flat for two or three hours in his present state. Perhaps he could modify his present state. He ransacked the place for drink. There was a little whisky, about a treble, which he drank without looking at it. There was a slightly larger quantity of dry vermouth which he drank after looking cursorily at it. There was about a third of a bottle of Californian rosé which he drank after very carefully examining it. He looked at his watch. Eleven-fifty.

  At one stage in his searches he had noticed food without its arousing any response in him. Had he dined? To set about eliciting this information from himself at any other time could only have betokened extensive brain-damage. No, he had not dined. He went back to the kitchen and put down a piece of bread and a glass of milk. The bread was like friable cardboard and the milk like liquid cardboard. Eleven fifty-three.

  He examined the front door of the flat for any bolt or other device that could stop someone with a key from entering. There was none. He made sure he had Mollie’s key with him and went out. After standing in the street for a few minutes he walked along to an intersection, saw a taxi and hailed it.

  ‘Is there jazz taking place in this city tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon so. Yeah, you could say that.’

  ‘Take me to where it’s being played.’


  He was driven to Broadway at great speed and set down in front of what they called in their language a marquee. At the entrance two Negro women behind a window told him that that would be one dollar eighty. He explained that he only wanted to see if some friends of his were inside and had not come to listen to the music. They said that he was very welcome to do just as he pleased and that would be one dollar eighty. He told them that that was extortion and he was going in and be damned to them. Two of the biggest and most muscular men he had ever seen in his life, both Negroes, came over and stood and looked at him. He handed over a dollar eighty and moved towards the strange and dreadful noises coming from the interior of the establishment. These grew sharply in volume as he entered the main auditorium and seemed to acquire a faint tactile quality, like a continuous shock-wave.

  Several hundred people of various colours were present, all standing or sitting very close to one another. It was also very dark. Roger soon divined that it was going to be most difficult to find out whether Macher and Helene were here or even to exercise the divine gift of free will in any particular. But one such effort in that direction must certainly be made. He began shoving and twisting his way towards the bar that ran down the left-hand side of the room. By the time he got to it the noises had stopped, there had been applause, and a tiny Negro with a squeaky voice had launched into a long hugely amplified harangue of evident introductory intent. Roger ordered three large whiskies, poured them all into one glass, added water and took a hefty initial pull. A lanky Negro in an olive-green suit of which all three jacket-buttons were fastened was watching this carefully. He turned his sunglasses on Roger (what could he still see?), gave a cordial smile and said:

  ‘Man, ya beez lan wah yam reez a heez woo nap lah cam a nam.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  A shorter but blacker Negro on Roger’s other side turned his head. This man wore a narrow-shouldered charcoal-grey suit which made him look very sedate, of a higher order of society altogether than the groups of arguing white men at the near-by tables. He said with an air of indulgent explanation:

  ‘Wa hang heez a beez mah gat sam reez a ran moo pah yah dan, man.’

  ‘I fear I fail to understand you.’

  This occasioned no surprise or resentment. The two men exchanged a few remarks across Roger, seeming finally to arrive at a shared theory about him that in no way imperilled his self-esteem. Both nodded courteously at him and turned their attention to the stage.

  In the intervals of looking about, rather perfunctorily, for Macher and Helene, Roger too found himself noticing events. After great hardship he reached the lavatory, which was of a size that might have been expected aboard a rather cramped day-excursion steamer. Slogans informed him that Zoot was something else, that Bird lived and that CCNY ate it. On his return Roger found that yet another Negro, whose moustache stretched from cheekbone to cheekbone, was talking, doing more introductions. But this one was a funny one. Roger could easily tell that from the way the people kept laughing at what he said. They applauded and shouted enthusiastically in addition when he told them he wanted to thank them and added: ‘Well look, here’s Daz MacSkibbins Vouts O’Rooney and his trumpet.’ O’Rooney had a small goatee beard and wore sunglasses and carried an instrument that someone, in a fit of rage no doubt, had bent in the middle. The man O’Rooney was of Negro race. Roger stared apathetically at him, finishing his drink. Attempts to buy something to take away met a polite refusal, and the idea of going in search of a liquor-store was fatiguing, so he decided on another three-in-one for the road. A certain John Colvoutie and three other persons of Afro-American descent had been presented to the audience before Roger abandoned whatever had been his project here and struggled to the exit. He was only just in time. The noises had begun again, and a fearfully prolonged wavering squeal – O’Rooney? Colvoutie? – hung in the air as he departed.

  Outside, he again stood in one place for a time. It was twelve-fifty. Something that Ernst had said penetrated slowly to him. When a taxi came he said to its driver:

  ‘I want to go where there’s some authentic jazz. Could you find it for me?’

  ‘Let’s see, there’s a West Coast outfit or so, and there’s bossa nova, and the MJQ are in town, and there’s that stuff at Jimmy Ryan’s, or maybe you’d prefer Eddie—’

  ‘I want authentic jazz. Is there any?’

  ‘Oh, now I get it, you want authentic jazz.’

  ‘Take me to where it’s being played.’

  There was no marquee or anything like that this time, and all the performers and most of the patrons were white, and there was much more room, and a lot of people were dancing, but the noises were just the same. A policeman at the entrance gave Roger a postcard-sized card which said: We want you to have a good time – but – we must insist on proper behaviour, and went on to mention some of the things Roger might do which would result in his immediate ejection. He found a small bar at which, under the eye of a policeman, he ordered three large whiskies. He was given a glass jug holding about two pints of beer for which he paid. At the edge of the dance-floor he looked for a chair to sit on and eventually came to one of several which had its back tipped forward against a table. He untipped it and sat down, but a policeman explained that its earlier tipped position meant that it was reserved for somebody else and he must not sit there. After a time he noticed some chairs stacked against a wall. Watched by two policemen, he unstacked one and sat on it. When his beer was finished he toured the floor in search of Macher and Helene, muttering to himself. They were not there. A long queue at the bar prevented his getting more beer there, so he went to a table where two small men were sitting with two small women and helped himself from their jug. He moved his mouth about and glared fiercely at them as he did so and none of the four spoke or moved. But, although the theft of beer was not mentioned on the card he had been given, what he had done resulted in his immediate ejection. Three policemen were concerned in this. Their insistence that he should not try to re-enter the place was unmistakable, but they made no attempt to injure him.

  From inside the taxi everything looked foreign. A number of typical American citizens stood in a leather-jacketed huddle on a street corner, idly watching a white-clad man in a shop throwing what might have been some foodstuff into the air and catching it again. There were other shops that offered to sell him things he would not be needing, notably Persian carpets. Several times Roger caught sight of signs and such in the Italian language. Then the taxi rushed past a number of identical box-like redbrick buildings – the secret police barracks, no doubt, or the various departments of the propaganda ministry.

  It was dark in the street when he left the taxi. There was nobody about, though he could hear some sort of concerted shouting in the distance. Beside the main steps of the apartment building he could have sworn he saw a number of dustbins. The lid of each was secured by a chain. Roger pondered about this for some time. It must be possible to remove the lids temporarily, otherwise the contents of the bins could not be emptied out, nor, if you thought your way back far enough, put there in the first place. He grasped the railing by the steps and watched the bins and their lids. Then the solution struck him: the chains were to prevent people from taking off the lids and running away with them and selling them. How much would a dustbin-lid change hands at? What sort of culture was it, he asked himself, that took precautions against dustbin-lid-thieves while some people, other people, were watching colour TV and going to Vermont on shooting trips? Answering his own question put him to no trouble whatever. He had known it all along.

  He decided the intellectual difficulties raised by the lift were worse than the physical ones raised by the stairs. Here and there he noticed empty niches that perhaps had once contained images of Our Lady. At the door of the flat he went through the same routine as before with the same eventual result: there was nobody there. This struck him immediately as very unjust. The three bottles he had emptied earlier proved on inspection to be stil
l empty. He felt at something of a loose end. Strolling from room to room on burnt and holed fitted carpeting that had once been pearl grey, he just about noticed a gramophone with an almost incredible number of heat- and spirit-rings on its lid, a one-armed New England rocking-chair, a sofa of some slight interest as an anti-personnel device (wherever all this had come from it had not been from Miranda), a stained pitch-pine shield on which was mounted the stuffed head and neck of a dachshund. Beneath this a copper strip said: Mitzi* 1946–1953. Had Strode been devoted to this animal or had he shot it? Probably both.

  Roger turned next to the bookshelves, which had some time ago been painted so as faintly to recall the gorgonzola type of marble. On them there stood or leaned several dozen proof copies and a couple of hundred bound books, all evidently novels, all in bright and effective eye-repelling jackets, all giving off a tang of mingled immediacy and obsoleteness. He regarded them with a half-hearted distaste which few save the initiated would have thought appropriate to one professionally concerned in putting living literature into the hands of the many, or at any rate of the relatively numerous. An inside wrapper, swung away from the binding into a position probably destined to remain frozen for ever, carried several citations to the effect that the book in question extended the tradition set going by Jane Austen and kept going by Henry James. Roger had never heard of its title or author. He yawned in particular and in general: he felt, as always, that what he could not do with was a good read.

  The desk, surmounted by a beaten-up typewriter and carrying evidence of many years of devoted cigarette-smoking, looked more promising. There was some apparently recent correspondence. Roger picked up a sheet hastily torn from a pad that bore a few ill-written lines in green ink. Without formality the writer announced that he had recently arrived in the United States from the United Kingdom, wanted assistance in finding a publisher for a book of his about South America, considered chiefly from educational and other social points of view, and would be sending the typescript along ‘in due course’. He would be writing again ‘before very long’ and signed himself ‘L. S. Caton’. The other letters were of even less interest.