Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

Lord Bagshot spoke up. ‘What is this stuff we’re drinking, Jimmie?’

‘It comes from the prettiest little vineyard you ever saw, twenty miles or so south of the upper Loire.’

‘M’m. It’s only my opinion, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me to go too well with this very nice beef.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I notice you’re not drinking it.’

‘No,’ agreed Jimmie. Not quite surreptitiously but without attracting much attention, he had helped himself to some of the red wine and replaced the bottle on the sideboard behind him, its label still out of sight. ‘The quack told me to avoid dry white wine with my acidulous stomach. Don’t tell me you’re in the same case, Basil, because if so …’ His voice died away before he could reveal what he might do if so.

‘No, I’m not,’ admitted Lord Bagshot. He forbore from going on to say that, whether acidulous or not, a stomach was apt to welcome what must have been at least a tolerable claret more heartily than a tepid Muscadet with hot roast beef. All he did was push his barely tasted glass away from him, an action perhaps unnoticed by Jimmie, who at that moment was engaged in recharging his own.

Gordon had been placed between Louise and Lady Bagshot. Without trying he could think of plenty he wanted to say to Louise, but little of it seemed sayable then and there, and no amount of trying was ever going to suggest to him anything at all to say to Lady Bagshot, who had one of the largest faces he had ever seen surmounting a human neck and whose spectacles were in proportion. Not that she had the air of someone who wanted to be talked to, being quite satisfied with the companionship of a half-bottle of vodka stowed between times in a beaded woollen bag she kept within her direct reach. Before her stood an untouched bowl of cooling soup and a sparse plate of cooling beef. She was vigorously smoking cigarettes.

On her other side sat the count and beyond him Joanna Fane, who was giving him a full account of a visit to the opera paid perhaps earlier that week, perhaps a decade or two before. As he had been doing, the man nodded and smiled and now and then dilated his eyes sympathetically, drank and had his glass refilled. It might have been that he had had his tongue torn out by an indignant peasantry.

Many things might have been true of him without upsetting Gordon, who got conscientiously on with the task of sorting out impressions. The house, a few doors down from the King’s Road towards the river, was only a room and a passage broad but it ran back some way, and no doubt fell into one or another upper category of posh people’s praise like rather ravishing. Gordon could not have said much about things like lamp fittings and cutlery but he could tell they were expensive here without being either flashy or new. The ceilings had the look of having been the work of somebody in particular and over the sideboard there hung an oil painting of foreign parts that had a distinctly pricey appearance. Yes, but what about the couple who lived here?

A glance in Jimmie’s direction showed him to be looking straight at Gordon. So did a second glance a moment later, with the increment that this time he was frowning slightly and evidently concentrating his attention on Gordon’s moustache, until a great yawn supervened. Gordon could so vividly imagine Jimmie’s high voice asking him to be a good chap and try not to stare in that extraordinary fashion that he lost no time in transferring his gaze to Joanna. She too proved to be looking back at him, while still telling the count about who might well have been, but fairly unexpectedly was not after all, to be seen in the opera-house bar. It occurred to Gordon to wonder what, if anything, the Fanes had said to each other about him and his possible intentions.

This wonderment returned in a sharpened form when the party had finished lunch and moved back to the sitting-room upstairs. Here Jimmie had seized him by the arm and borne him off in stagey style to a narrower extension where books of a more consistently solemn, leather-bound aspect were to be seen. Jimmie at once sat himself down on a comfortable-looking old-fashioned chair, did not invite Gordon to find a seat but made no perceptible objection when he did. After shutting his eyes and perhaps dozing for a few seconds he suddenly said to him,

‘It’s very nice of you to come over today and bring that enchanting little girl with you.’

‘Oh, it’s very –’

‘Joanna, that’s my wife, you know – Joanna tells me you’ve got a proposition you want to put to me.’ Also suddenly, Jimmie reopened his eyes, ‘I confess to you I’m all agog to hear what it can be.’

‘Oh. Well, I was rereading The Escaped Prisoner the other day, and I thought –’

‘Do tell me just what your proposition is, dear man.’

‘All right. I’d like to try my hand at a long article or even a short book on you and your work. It’s been eleven years since the –’

‘Who would publish it?’

‘If it ends up as an article I reckon I could get a couple of instalments into The Westminster Review of Books , they rather go in for length. If it extends to a book it would certainly be worth trying it on your old publisher right away. Somebody there seemed very interested when I mentioned the possibility.’

‘I have to say I don’t think many people today would want to sit down and read a whole book about an old back number like me.’

‘I don’t think that’s true, Mr Fane, and you’re –’

‘Jimmie, please.’

‘Jimmie. I reckon you’re due for a revival and I’m not the only one by a long chalk. Those novels aren’t going to stay away for ever.’

‘I haven’t published a book of any sort since 1987, and that wasn’t much better than a potboiler of snippets and cuttings.’

‘Jimmie, you deserve to be back in the public eye and there are strong signs that you’re moving in that direction or why would I, well …’

‘Bother. Quite so. Yes, I suppose it might be taken as such a sign.’

This was not far out. Or it was a possible way of putting it. A way of putting it closer to Gordon’s view of the matter would have been that, on the literary stock exchange, Fanes had been due for a recovery but for the moment could be snapped up cheap pending a strong reissue. He himself would have said he had no definite opinion of the quality of Jimmie’s writing but saw clearly enough that as a figure of the prewar and wartime years and later, with an admittedly heterosexual but still conspicuous personal history, the old fellow could without undue difficulty be made the subject of a publishable set of articles or even a book. And now, or soon, was the time. What Gordon had been going to say was that it had been eleven years since the appearance of the last book on him. Just the right sort of interval.

Again Jimmie’s attention seemed to focus for a moment on Gordon’s moustache before diffusing itself. ‘I imagine I can’t stop you from publishing practically anything you like.’

Gordon nodded reflectively. ‘No, in a sense that’s true. But I hope to have your co-operation in this case.’

‘Even if I give it you, what’s to stop your writing and publishing anything that comes into your head, however untrue or unpleasant?’

‘Short of recourse to the law, you could stop me by refusing to let me quote more than the odd line from your works, which wouldn’t be nearly enough for what I have in mind.’

‘I think I see that,’ said Jimmie. ‘Of course.’ Then he turned animated. ‘Naturally, my dear chap, I’ve not the slightest reason in the world to suppose that any words of yours would be other than irreproachably veracious and well-mannered, I do assure you.’