Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

‘More like something that’s been turned on a lathe. Anyway he’s about thirty years younger than me. What did you make of little Louise? I saw you firing on all cylinders.’

‘Pretty as a picture but rather stodgy. Filling, like plum duff, you know. Do you think the noble lord enjoyed himself?’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. He didn’t care for being given wine he didn’t care for.’

‘I hope not. Now he knows how it feels.’

‘I didn’t care for that warm white stuff either.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, darling. I just couldn’t think of a way of getting a decent drink into your glass.’

After a pause, Joanna said, ‘Lady B sensibly brought her own tipple as usual.’

‘I wonder when those two talked to each other last.’

‘You can’t really expect it of her. She talked to me a bit at one stage but she wasn’t making much sense.’

‘He might as well keep quiet too.’

‘But both of them are positive conversational giants compared with Carlo.’

‘These voluble Italians,’ said Jimmie.

‘Darling, I wish you’d have another go at him about his English. He gets about one word in twenty of what I say to him and one in a hundred of anybody else and apparently he can’t say anything himself.’

‘Not in English. His Italian’s fluent enough.’

‘Why doesn’t he stay in Italy then? There can’t be anything for him here.’

‘Something to do with his tax, as I said. And he likes eating in friends’ houses in London because he hasn’t got to grapple with English as he’d have to in a restaurant.’

‘Can’t he go to an Italian restaurant? There are dozens all over London.’

‘As I told you, he doesn’t like Italian food.’

‘But why do we keep asking him here? Actually I can tell you the answer to that. Because he keeps asking us to that palazzo place of his and we keep going there. After all, he is a count.’

‘Well, if you must hark back to the primordial rudiments of everything,’ said Jimmie in a weary tone.

‘Hard luck on those youngsters, getting let in for two duds and one semi-dud.’

‘Only duds conversationally.’

‘Oh, you mean it’s much more important that they’ve all got handles to their names?’

‘That Scotchman and his bit of stuff would think so.’

‘I can’t see it cutting a single millimetre of ice with either him or her.’

‘Well, what did you really make of that lot at lunch-time?’ Gordon asked Louise.

‘I wasn’t particularly struck by any of them.’

‘Not even by poor old Jimmie? He was doing his best, after all.’

‘Doing his best to what?’

‘Well, to make you feel at home or something of the sort.’

‘If he’d wanted to do that he could have asked us to meet somebody a bit more interesting than his bloody lordship and his piss-artist elephant’s-bum-faced four-eyed boiler of a wife. Oh, and that asshole of an Italian who never opened his mouth except to put food and drink into it. Not that I wanted him to talk. No, poor old Jimmie was showing me and you and Mrs Jimmie and possibly others that there was life in the old dog yet. Some hopes. By the look of him he hasn’t had it up for half a century.’

‘I reckoned he asked those people to impress us with his aristocratic connections.’

‘Fancy that. Well, all I can say is he didn’t impress me.’ Louise spoke sulkily rather than with any heat.

‘Nor me, actually.’

‘If you’re right about him wanting to impress us he’s even more pathetic than I thought.’

‘Yes, I think there is something rather pathetic about poor old Jimmie.’

‘I don’t mean that sort of pathetic. And you must be careful of poor old Jimmie. He’s bad news.’

‘I’m sorry I inflicted him and the rest of them on you.’

‘That’s all right, it was quite an interesting experience considered as an item of social anthropology. A chance to see the British class system in action.’

‘You must mean in inaction. Decline from whatever it may once have been.’

‘Christ, Gordon, after that display?’

‘All … bangs and coloured lights. A hundred years ago, even up to 1939, the thing really had some teeth in it. There was an empire to run and a comparatively barbaric peasantry and proletariat to be kept down. What’s left of either of them today? The, the remnants of that class system operate in the other direction. Dukes and what-not complain that their titles hold them back, get in the way of their careers in banking or photography or whatever it may be. The British class system, as you quaintly call it, is –’

‘I know, it’s dead, which up to a point is a good thing, but beyond that point isn’t so good. Don’t go on about all those dukes who can’t get on in banking because they’ve admitted they’re dukes unless you want me to burst out crying. But anyhow, please don’t lecture at me.’

‘I didn’t mean to. But you must admit things have come to a pretty pass when you get someone like Jimmie Fane hobnobbing with an Italian count who never learnt to speak English. Even fifty years ago one wouldn’t –’

‘Fuck fifty years ago, and it’s time you realized there’s nothing I must do, all right.’ Louise sighed and stretched. ‘Except now I must be going and things like that.’

‘Oh darling, do stay a little longer.’

Gordon got to his feet as Louise had done and grappled with her briefly in an amatory way, at the end of which she disengaged herself without hostility and telephoned for a minicab. Within a few minutes she was being borne away from his flat towards the rather more commodious one she shared with a girl associate. It might have mildly surprised the Fanes to hear that, although the younger couple had certainly done the deed of darkness together, as Jimmie sometimes expressed it, they actually lived apart. Whatever the merits of this arrangement, at times like the present he was more strongly aware of its drawbacks. He doubted if Louise ever felt like that. When the subject of literal cohabitation came up, which it seldom did now, she was liable to say something like she wanted to keep her independence. He had given up wondering what she meant by that and had never asked her how many other chaps she was keeping her independence from.

This apparent tolerance testified not to self-confidence but to unwillingness to imperil their present arrangement, which at times unlike the present suited him well enough. He asked himself occasionally whether he was suited to live with any woman at all. He had so lived in the past, up to and including the point of being married for nearly six years, not counting the interval between his wife’s departure and their divorce. She had departed with a man who worked in a government office on something to do with pensions and who, according to report, was three or four inches shorter and substantially younger than he. These factors had not enhanced Gordon’s self-esteem. His wife had once accused him of not knowing how to help a woman to feel pleased with life or even how to have a good time himself, and quite often and more succinctly of being hopeless. Perhaps he just had a low sex-drive. It was true, to be sure, that he thought or at any rate talked about sex less than his mates seemed to.

An internal twinge smartly followed by an eructation reminded him of the unpleasant wine he had earlier drunk and so of its provider. Someone had told him that Jimmie Fane was one of the most money-conscious buggers in London, but had not reckoned on a demonstration of this quality at his own table. Gordon wished more than ever that he had managed to get a glimpse of the label on that bottle of red. Moving now towards the corner where he kept his typewriter, he thought of what Jimmie’s wife had intimated about the financial dangers of taking him out to lunch, but then she had probably been talking for effect, to impress him with how wild and free and not to be thought of as stuffy and middle-aged she was. However, discussing Jimmie with her was bound to have its points of interest.