Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

‘You suppose!’ Louise answered at once and perhaps a shade predictably, if he’s really out of the top drawer I don’t see what you’re doing writing about him in the first place, you being you, and if he’s a phoney you just, you shouldn’t, I mean you’ll have to expose him in whatever you write about him, and you told me he can prevent you publishing what he doesn’t like. That’s unless you simply …’ She shook her head about and made various impatient noises.

‘He’s the genuine article all right, uncle a baronet, went to school –’

‘Spare me the sordid details, for Christ’s sake. Well: it sounds to me …’

‘Yes?’

‘It sounds to me as though you’ve been won over.’

This challenge irritated Gordon, but he did his best to swallow any such feeling. ‘Granted I’m to write something substantial about this chap,’ he began, but got no further.

‘You clearly grant it. I don’t.’

They went on in their respective strains until an inadvertent lull brought the chance to say experimentally, casually too,

‘Where’s that flat-mate of yours this evening?’

‘She’s away,’ said Louise in a tone that precluded further discussion of the matter.

He now asked, without much thought, ‘Oh, where did you have dinner?’

This caused perceptible confusion. After hesitating for a full second, she said, ‘Somewhere in Soho, I can’t remember the name, I was taken there. Why, what of it?’

‘Nothing of it, I was just trying to change the subject.’

‘All right. You were going to tell me about lunch with her nibs. Especially the funny bits.’

He started on a pedestrian report of that event, thinking to himself meanwhile that to have failed to remember the name of a restaurant, any restaurant at any time, was most unlike Louise. Whatever she might now have been thinking to herself, she seemed not to be listening to what he said. Before he had managed to get to a funny bit she interrupted him.

‘Did she make a pass at you? I don’t mind if she did but I would love to know.’

‘Nothing of that sort happened at all.’

‘Because she was well and truly looking you over the day we were both there. Almost as if she was having trouble keeping her hands off you. I call that bloody cheek at her age.’

‘She couldn’t give me all that many years, and what do you mean, at her age? You make her sound about a hundred and ninety.’

‘She’s an old bag. An old bag. ’

‘On a purely objective, unemotional, factual plane, Louise, she’s not, Joanna Fane is not an old bag. Middle-aged, if you like, if you must, but –’

When, not much later, Gordon was making his way out of Louise’s flat in a sexually unsatisfied state, he was reflecting that what she had just said about having to make an early start in the morning might well have been true as well as decisive. Nevertheless he could not help feeling that he might not have been forced to leave in such an unceremonious fashion if he had handled things a little differently, if for example he had concurred at once with her view of the aged Joanna Fane. As he put the point to himself on his way home, when there was nobody to overhear, you could get it right, or you could get it away.

The telephone was ringing when he got back home, which circumstance made that place seem much less bleak and comfortless. ‘Gordon Scott-Thompson,’ he said into the instrument, wishing strongly for the moment that he had a less cumbrous name.

‘Fane here,’ said a recognizable high male voice. Its owner took some time to assure himself that he was connected whither he wished, but having done so he spoke quite freely. ‘You will of course have dined,’ he said.

‘I’ll have what? Oh yes, I’ve dined.’

‘I too. Rather well, in fact, as perhaps you’ve already inferred. I’m speaking from, where am I speaking from, yes, of course, I’m speaking from my club. There’s been a slight difference of opinion here, not to say an argument, which you may be able to settle. Now. How would you, how do you pronounce T,I,S,S,U,E, as in the kind of paper?’

‘Well, tissue, to rhyme with, er, miss-you, for instance.’

‘I understand. Not like,’ and here Jimmie paused for so long that Gordon thought he must have moved on elsewhere, perhaps in search of a taxi, until he came back on the line to say, ‘Not like atishoo, the comic or fanciful representation of a sneeze. Just so. I’m greatly obliged to you, my dear Gordon, and good night.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Oh my dear fellow, I do hope I haven’t got you out of bed, have I?’

‘No no, I assure you. I was just wondering what the argument was about.’

But Jimmie had disconnected before Gordon had done more than start his second statement.

‘I was just wondering what the argument was about,’ said Gordon to Jimmie again. This time he said it not over the telephone but face to face or near enough, in the hall of Gray’s club. Not wishing on the whole to have to go in search of Jimmie all over the building, which he had never visited before, Gordon had told the porter who was expecting him and had himself waited here in the hall.

At least he had hoped the fellow was the or a porter. There had been a moment of slight and wordless misunderstanding when, meeting some difficulty with the glass door from the street, Gordon had seen through the pane a man coming towards him who looked no older and was better dressed than he and whom he had briefly taken for a member of the club on his way out. From the change in this man’s demeanour at Gordon’s inquiring reference to Mr Fane, it was easy to guess that he for his part revised any first impression that the newcomer might have been some artisan or workman, arrived at the club to repair its dishwasher, say. All was quickly well, and no more than a couple of dukes or millionaires had put their heads round the corner to look him over when Jimmie himself arrived, full of total memory of who Gordon was and what he was doing there. After some irresolution on both sides Gordon had reminded him of the recent telephone-call.

‘Oh good God yes ,’ said Jimmie amiably, ‘I should have explained there and then but I didn’t want to take up your time. I’d dined here, rather well as perhaps you inferred, and Johnnie Wessex and I and one or two others had got into some sort of barney about language and pronunciation, a prime concern of mine as you must know, Gordon. I won’t bore you with an account of their rather unthinking points of view but I was taking the line that the old natural way of speaking, among reasonably well-educated and thoughtful people, was being, how shall I put it, was becoming eroded by creeping pedantry. Creeping pedantry,’ he repeated, making no move in the direction of the inner parts of the club where food and drink were presumably to be found. ‘Whenever I turn on the wireless or the television I hear the announcer putting in glottal stops in places where they’ve no business to be, they talk about the I R A ,’ said Jimmie with a little explosion of breath before the name of each letter, and I expect they call it the R A F ,’ similarly enunciated, ‘and in no time every English word that begins with a vowel or vowel sound or looks as if it does will begin with a confounded glottal stop. Have I told you all this before, dear boy?’

Gordon hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, it’s true you’ve mentioned glottal stops before, but then they were part of an attack on Americans.’

‘ Americans ?’

‘Yes. You said it went to show how German they were.’

‘When was this supposed to be?’

‘It was in the taxi on the way to Cakebread’s. That restaurant.’