Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked Gordon.

The sort of drink that he would have liked was a cup of tea or coffee, but he felt he could not very well ask for such a thing here, it’s a bit early in the day for me,’ he said.

‘It’s a bit early in the day for anybody, but would you like one?’

‘To be honest I’d rather not.’

‘Fine, I’ll keep you company and not have one too.’ She smiled in a friendly way. ‘Come and sit down. It’s warmer up this end where the heating is. Jimmie went off to Gray’s as advertised. He’s lunching with a couple of earls and a marquis so he might as well be in Timbuctoo as far as we’re concerned.’

Joanna smiled again. He thought to himself she had obviously been a very good-looking woman when younger. Then he thought his use of the pluperfect might look or sound ungallant, so he amended his first thought to signify that she was still a good-looking woman now, at that very moment. He could have sworn his expression had remained constant throughout this interior shift, but when she smiled for the third time it was not the same.

‘Rather a waste from one point of view,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I gather he took a pretty flashy lunch off you the other day. I got him to let you choose the place but he didn’t want to and you wouldn’t have been able to influence what he ate and drank.’

‘I survived.’

‘Did you ever get the feeling he was choosing the expensive stuff on purpose, just because it was expensive?’

‘Now you mention it, I did once or twice.’

‘Good for you. But I don’t think he was just enjoying the simple pleasure of getting somebody else to spend money on him, though perhaps one shouldn’t put that past him in general. No, I think what he was doing was showing you who was master, coming out on top in a battle of wills. I’m sorry, Gordon, aren’t you going to take notes?’

‘I’ve a very good memory. As long as I write a few things down afterwards I’ll be all right.’

‘Did you write down how much that lunch cost you?’

‘I didn’t need to.’

‘I can’t help feeling I ought to reimburse you for what you had to cough up.’

‘Don’t worry about that, Joanna, I’ll get it off expenses and anyhow I couldn’t take your money.’

‘How Scottish are you, darling?’

‘M’m? Oh, only by descent. All my grandparents were born in London and I’ve no particular connections with Scotland. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I just wondered. Look, er, isn’t it time we got down to business? How are you on the early years of the great man?’

They quickly established between them that James Reginald Pruett Fane had been born in 1918 in Cheltenham, the son of the comfortably-off but not rich second son of a baronet who had made a study of country houses. JRPF had attended a small public school in Shropshire, where he had shown a precocious talent for painting in watercolour.

‘Has any of that stuff survived?’ asked Gordon.

‘No. He renounced painting for ever when he went up to King’s and made a bonfire of all his work, all he could lay his hands on anyway. He doesn’t mind people knowing he used to paint but he’s never tried to trace what he sold, not that there was much of it.’

At Cambridge 1936–39 JRPF had vocally supported the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war, though he had not himself visited Spain at that time.

‘Rather brave of him, wasn’t it, coming out for Franco then?’ asked Gordon.

‘Not at Cambridge, at least among his mates, or the chaps he wanted to be his mates, you know, posh chaps. He was a bit of a Catholic then, or says he was.’

‘But you mean he’s renounced that too.’

‘Just let himself lapse.’

Also at Cambridge JRPF had become known as a poet. In those still early days he had contributed to some of those journals and anthologies that were hostile or indifferent to the quasi-Marxist stance of contemporary poets in Oxford and elsewhere. His first volume had been published in 1939.

‘What did he do in the war?’ asked Gordon, ‘I can’t make out. His Who’s Who entry just says he was in government service.’

‘That’s as much as he’ll say when you ask him, all he’s ever said to me anyway, he worked for the government. If it were somebody else that might mean he was to do with something hush-hush, so hush bloody hush in fact that he can’t tell you about it fifty years after the event, and I did meet a queerish buffoon not so long ago who owned up to having helped to snatch a Nazi general in Crete but wouldn’t say which one. But anyway I’d give a small sum to know what the old man’s work for the government amounted to.’

Just before or just after saying that, Joanna had changed position in her chair in a way that brought to notice her legs, which were enclosed in a pair of dark-blue stockings or tights that went well with her royal-blue skirt. Although not himself a great leg man, as indicated earlier, Gordon could see perfectly well that they were very good, shapely legs. It crossed his mind straight away that this fact was ultimately connected with Jimmie’s preferences and their likely root in the period of his puberty. Other considerations could be deferred for later thinking over.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Gordon assured Joanna.

As his first wife JRPF had married the daughter of a newspaper owner in 1945. That wife had run away with an amateur jockey early in 1950. Later that same year he had pot married a second time, to a less pretty girl who was also not all that well off but was a viscount’s daughter. The 1960s had seen a third marriage, this time to the undoubtedly handsome daughter of a very rich commoner, and in 1975, at the age of fifty-seven, JRPF had married the then thirty-three-year-old Joanna, daughter of a very rich nobleman.

‘If anybody wanted to be nasty about him,’ said Joanna, who had supplied some of the details, ‘they could say he hit the jackpot on his fourth try – money and pedigree, but that wouldn’t be quite fair. All his wives, including me, have been the sort of people he mixed with socially, especially number three and me and I’m pretty sure he was pally with number two’s brother at Cambridge. Perhaps he oughtn’t to have gone around with nobs so much, but I can’t see him downing his pint in the public bar because it’s more real there or something. He knows I think he’s a bit of a joke with his nobbery, but I got my nobbery as a sort of christening present, if you see what I mean.’

‘M’m. Who’s Who mentions one s . one d . by, er, number one and one d. by number two.’

‘Number one took her descendants off and they haven’t been seen for donkey’s years. Number two’s d. turns up occasionally, I’m sorry to say. Another thing I can’t see him as is a proud father, caring father, anything father.’

Gordon waited a moment and said, ‘Had you been married before?’

‘Only once. He drank himself to death, but I may say he was already doing that when I came into his life. I didn’t start him but I didn’t stop him either, as you see. Talking of which, I don’t think we’d be breaking any law of God or man if we had a drink after all that work.’

‘I’d like to finish this lot first if you don’t mind.’

‘My, what a little stickler you are.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘Oh well, point taken.’

JRPF had been employed in the books department of the Daily Post from 1945, its literary editor 1949–63, James Cadwallader Evans Award 1961, Hon. DCL, Hove University 1978, FRSB 1980, Chairman, Carver Prize Committee 1981. Principal publns: three books of verse, Collected Poems 1970, six novels, last in 1965, two vols, on wine, etc., one vol. coll. journalism, etc.