Kingsley Amis - The Biographer’s Moustache

Two managers, or perhaps one manager and one deputy manager, appeared and bent over Jimmie, partly screening him from view. Gordon found he was quite looking forward to the spectacle of the venerable artist swallowing his eighteen natives one by one between hiccups, but as yet no food, nothing further, had reached their table. Then Jimmie moved his face into sight. It had gone rather pale.

Take me home,’ he said tremulously, and clapped his handkerchief back just in time.

There will be no charge for anything,’ both managers said.

Gordon did not try to persuade Jimmie to stay. Watched by several of those near by they reached the street door and hurried through it to a corner past which taxis could be expected to cruise.

‘Sorry I’ve made you miss your lunch,’ Jimmie managed to say.

‘That’s all right, Jimmie. As a rule I just have a sandwich.’

After a minute or two watching for taxis Gordon felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Jimmie smiling at him in an almost spiritual way.

‘There should be one along any minute.’

Jimmie was shaking his fine head. He looked now as if he was listening to heavenly music. He said nothing for the moment.

‘My God,’ said Gordon.

Now Jimmie nodded. ‘They’ve gone. I’ve had these fits of the hiccups before and sometimes they just go away after a few minutes and don’t come back. I wish I knew what I do to make them stop. Stopping trying to make them stop is what does it, perhaps. Let’s get a move on – my appetite’s come back with a rush. Ah, I think we’re going to be all right. Yes, that’s our chap, isn’t it? Waiter!’

‘Oysters and lobsters and some crêpes suzettes that were really quite well done. I’m afraid I rather over-indulged myself there. I seemed quite unable to stop eating them. Little Mr Thompson couldn’t keep up with me. Well really, he didn’t try, he said he’d had enough to eat.’

‘Was it very expensive?’ Joanna put a large dark Belgian-made chocolate into her mouth.

‘What? I didn’t do any sums and wasn’t shown the bill. Perhaps it did cost a little by Mr T’s standards. I must say, darling, it was really quite funny.’ Jimmie produced a brief cracked laugh, an old man’s laugh. ‘He was consternated when he saw the place was slightly more what he no doubt calls up-market than he’d remembered. I only had to mention oysters to fill him with horror. He put on a great show of being frightfully concerned when I was having my hiccups but he couldn’t hide his glee at the thought of not having to pay. And then when I recovered … well …’

‘What did he have to eat himself?’

‘I didn’t notice much, I blush to admit. Some kind of soup, I fancy, and cheese or something. Why? I mean, should I have …’

‘It sounds as if you chose the priciest dishes on the menu.’

‘Not as such, they were what I fancied eating. Are you saying I should have lunched off a sardine and half a tomato out of consideration for Mr Thompson’s pocket?’

‘ No , but you needn’t have caned him as ruthlessly as you did. No doubt you managed to force down a bottle of wine or so?’

‘Yes we did, but before you ask on behalf of your Uncle Arthur from Penge it was quite a decent Chablis but not even premier cru. ’

‘How many bottles?’

Speaking with less urbanity than before, Jimmie said, ‘Darling, I can’t think why we’re having an inquisition. The answer to your latest question is one, one bottle.’

‘Which you had most of.’

‘If I did it was to save leaving half of it for the waiters to swill at their leisure. I don’t think your precious Mr Thompson is used to wine. He’d obviously have felt more at home with a nice tankard of wallop.’ Jimmie paused and eyed his wife. ‘And if you ask me whether I drank any brandy I might get rather cross,’ he said, giving the last word an old-fashioned pronunciation. ‘To put your mind at rest I refrained, out of kindness not to my host not to myself. I’d had quite enough to eat and drink and I didn’t want to run the risk of stirring my insides up. And I must say, darling, I find it a teeny bit boring of you to tell me I’m not to ask that fellow to take me where I want to go for luncheon and then when I manage to get a tolerable meal after all to haul me over the coals for eating and drinking what I fancied.’

‘Well done,’ said Joanna, looking for another chocolate but for the moment not settling on one. ‘Your capacity for –’

‘Oh, what? ’

‘I was going to say, your capacity for putting other people in the wrong seems if anything to increase from day to day.’

Immediately the telephone began to ring downstairs on the ground floor, there being from Jimmie’s repeated prohibition only the one instrument in the house. On hearing it now he laid his hand energetically across his forehead like a figure in high drama expressing the ultimate dissatisfaction with fate. ‘Oh, that damned contrivance, don’t tell me it has no mind of its own, it knows just when to ring to cause the maximum … Well, I’m glad to hear that some faculty in me is increasing against the general trend. Answer that thing, would you, darling, there’s a sweetheart, it’s certain to be for you.’

But when Joanna came back again from downstairs soon afterwards she said, it’s for you.’

‘Oh God. I hope you –’

‘The second Mrs Fane. She’s hanging on.’

‘That bloody woman. I thought I’d made it perfectly clear …’

Saying no more, Jimmie dashed from the room like somebody half his age. Joanna followed him as far as the door, then moved quietly to the stairhead. After a moment she heard a clink and a clash as Jimmie noisily rang off, and was sitting reading a fashion magazine and eating a chocolate on his return to the room.

‘How sure are you there’s a book in it?’ asked Brian Harris a couple of mornings later.

Gordon Scott-Thompson answered without hesitation. ‘Sure enough to sign a contract specifying a delivery date.’

‘What delivery date have you in mind?’

‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that yet. I’d need to think about it.’

‘So think about it, my old Gordon. Anyway, you seem a good bit surer now than you were this time last week.’

‘This time last week I hadn’t talked to him much and I hadn’t realized what a lot of stuff there was in the archives here for a start. You’re going on as if you’re a good bit keener on your side of the fence.’

‘Yeah, we are, I think it’s fair to say.’

Brian Harris used the plural pronoun out of no delusion of grandeur or of anything else but in general reference to the publishing firm in whose offices the two were sitting. His own office in these offices, partitioned off from them with man-high sheets of lavatory glass, had no special publishing look about them, except perhaps for the presence of rather more books than even a literate stockbroker, say, was likely to have installed where he worked. But then Brian Harris was not, in dress, hairstyle and accent, at all the kind of youngish fellow most people might have supposed to be a director of a publishing house, and a rather old-fashioned house at that, one that occasionally published works of literature.

‘So you’ll be commissioning a book on Jimmie Fane’s life and works by me,’ said Gordon now.

‘Quite likely, yeah.’

‘Under a contract.’

‘I clock you,’ said Brian, thoroughly scratching an armpit.

‘With an advance.’

‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised, though of course that’s off the record.’

‘What about an advance on that advance?’