Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

‘There’s not much either of us could add to that,’ said Joanna.

‘Certainly nothing I can.’

‘It’s quite a complete list except for committees he’s been on which he doesn’t think are worth mentioning.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I was his secretary at one time.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh, I forget. Just the last Who’s Who thing to do.’

Recreations: visiting churches in Tuscany and Umbria, good food, conversation.

‘Anything to add to that?’ asked Gordon.

‘I’ll say. And to subtract too. I’ll tell you in a minute. Can we have that drink now?’

‘I suppose so. I mean thank you, I’d love one.’

‘What would you like? I have vodka, and tonic, and vodka and tonic.’

‘I’d like vodka and tonic with not much vodka, if I may.’

‘I don’t see why you may not,’ said Joanna, giggling a little with what sounded genuine amusement. She had got up and gone over to a costly-looking marble-topped chiffonier on which bottles and glasses stood.

‘What’s the joke?’ Gordon had no desire to be told, but it was easy to see he was meant to ask something like that.

‘Well, the way it was absolutely certain you’d ask for a small one if you got half a chance. Then …’ Instead of continuing she came back and handed him his drink.

‘Cheers. What was that last bit again?’

‘Oh right. Italian churches, good food and conversation, wasn’t it? I’ve never known him go near a church anywhere, though he might literally venture near an Italian one if it was next door to a kosher palazzo that had a proper duchessa in it he could chat up. His Italian’s quite fluent, actually, and of course bits of Italy like Tuscany sound right, or did when he said that about himself. Yes – good food; he likes expensive food, as you well know, but that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t think he’s much of a taste-buds man, do you? As for conversation, well yes, again on the understanding that the chaps he’s conversing with are either rich or well-born, preferably both but if it has to be one or the other then give him rich every time. I suppose it sounds pretty awful of me to be saying some of that, and I suppose it is in a way, and I do think that side of him’s a bit of a joke, but I don’t … I don’t feel superior to him or resent the way he goes on. I realize I might one day but as yet I don’t. Now we’ll just drink these up and give ourselves another small one and then we’ll totter down and have something to eat. Mainly a chicken salad, which I’m afraid won’t be very warming, but there’s a pea soup to begin and I know you like soup.’

That evening Gordon noticed that Joanna’s ultimately lenient attitude to Jimmie was not shared by Louise, or at least was not shared by her that evening. Earlier, starting about three-thirty when he got home, he had heroically beaten off drink-induced lassitude and written up his notes for that day. These had contained not only biographical details and dates but less starkly factual information, given over lunch, about Jimmie’s dealings with such persons as priests and peers. Much of the latter material had not shown him in a particularly favourable light but the facts had gone into the notes anyway, regardless of whether Jimmie might sooner or later veto their publication. When Gordon had satisfactorily finished the job, he had brewed himself a very strong pot of tea and made the first of several unavailing attempts to telephone Louise, finally getting hold of her at seven-twenty or so.

She sounded full of beans. ‘How did your lunch with Her Grace the Honourable Lady Joanna Fane FO go?’

‘Oh, some quite funny bits. If you’ll come out to dinner with me I’ll tell you about them.’

‘Can’t do dinner this evening, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ said Gordon, and added rather mechanically, ‘Some other time, then.’

‘But I am dying to hear. Are you going to be around later tonight?’

‘I might be.’ This time he spoke cautiously.

‘So might I be. Start trying to ring me about a quarter to eleven.’

Then Louise disconnected and Gordon admitted to himself he was quite glad in retrospect she had been booked for dinner, because in the heat of the moment, such as it had been, he had forgotten how hard up the great Jimmie lunch had currently left him. After some thought he heated up a tin of soup in his kitchen, not so nourishing it proved as the pea and ham concoction Joanna had fed him, but followed with cold sausages, which when smothered with mustard, spicy sauce and tomato ketchup turned out to be distinctly tastier than the chicken salad supplied earlier. To wash it all down he recklessly put away a nine-ounce can of a Dutch lager that, had he known it, had come second from bottom in a table of alcoholic strengths of imported beers in a recent Sunday-magazine survey. To offset these indulgences he read seriously in his copy of The Escaped Prisoner , Jimmie’s first novel and by common consent his best, published in 1959.

Its story told of a young man, brought up in conventionally well-off and well-connected circumstances somewhere in the north of England, who had reacted against his upbringing to go and be a schoolteacher in the more proletarian parts adjacent to his native heath. As time went by he came to doubt the wisdom of having done so, found his new companions ignorant and coarse and his new girl trivial-minded and finally went back whence he had come. At the time and later there had been some disagreement whether the hero was to be thought of as having permanently escaped from the prison of working-class life or only temporarily from the patrician bondage to which he voluntarily returned. It surprised Gordon to find several of the posh characters effectively presented as disagreeable, even snobbish, and the story seemed to veer now and then between one interpretation and the other and back. He wondered if Jimmie might have had something to say on the matter and made a note to ask him about it some time.

The time was just after ten forty-five. Gordon telephoned Louise, who answered after two rings. She sounded distinctly less full of beans than when he had talked to her earlier, but agreed that he should come and see her as soon as convenient.

‘I’d only just that moment got in when you rang,’ she told him as soon as he arrived.

‘Sorry,’ he said, feeling it was somehow required of him.

‘I suppose you couldn’t tell,’ she grudgingly conceded.

Things had improved, but not much, by the time they were sitting in the area reached by her electric fire with mugs of hot decaffeinated coffee in their hands. When she asked him to tell about his midday dealings with Jimmie’s wife it was not in the unguardedly friendly spirit she had shown before.

‘What sort of line did she take?’ Louise asked. ‘Was she against the old monster, as she’d have to be to pass as a human being herself, or was she on the whole for him, trying to make out he wasn’t too bad?’

‘Well, just a minute. Even if she’d felt like it she wasn’t going to denounce the man she’d been married to for twenty-odd years to a fellow she didn’t know existed until just the other day. Be reasonable.’

‘Gordon, I’m being reasonable. Jimmie sodding Fane is a, well, if not a monster then a monument of old-fashioned, passé class superiority and sheer snobbery. If his wife doesn’t have the least inkling that that’s what he is, then as I see it she’s tarred with the same bloody brush.’

‘Look, hold on, dear.’ It had already occurred to Gordon that Louise’s new-found hostility to Jimmie and all his works, as opposed to or further than a semi-genial rallying scepticism about poor old Jimmie, originated less in any kind of revision of the facts that in something that had happened in her own life. (Like having been stood up for dinner, it occurred to him later, though not then.) He said pacifically, ‘She’s got more than an inkling that old Jimmie’s got a pretty stiff dose of the sort of prejudices you’d expect from somebody his age and, well, class, I suppose.’