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Praise

From the reviews of The Biographer’s Moustache:

‘A mischievous piece of work.’

JAMES WALTON, Daily Telegraph

‘Amis’s characters emerge with a truthful clarity. He knows how to tell a story, and The Biographer’s Moustache is as well-structured as a dance.’

KATHY O’SHAUGHNESSY, Literary Review

‘The Biographer’s Moustache has some splendid and wholly characteristic scenes and observations.’

ALLAN MASSIE, The Scotsman

Dedication

To Catharine and Tim Jaques

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

‘Darling, who else is coming to luncheon?’ asked Jimmie Fane. He spoke in a voice that had hardly altered since he was a young man half a century before, his full head of silvery-grey hair was carefully arranged and he sat up very straight in his brocaded chair.

‘Sorry, darling, coming to what?’ said Joanna, his wife, though she had heard.

Jimmie’s already high voice rose a little higher. ‘Darling, to luncheon. Surely the usual term for the usual meal taken in this country in the middle of the day.’

Joanna said in a slightly patient tone, ‘Darling, luncheon doesn’t mean the same as lunch any more, just food and people and wine and things, it means a great formal do like a City dinner with a toastmaster and speeches, you know, a, in fact a luncheon.’

‘Oh dear, I wasn’t thinking of anything remotely like that. I do hope you haven’t arranged anything frightfully stuffy like that. You know I hate things like that.’

‘Yes, I do, and I promise not to arrange anything frightfully stuffy ever if you’ll help by calling things by their right names.’

‘Right names? I will, I do. Like lunch in what one does and luncheon is what one does it at or with, or …’

‘Was. Was what one did and what one used to –’

‘Oh, was, was, was, I can’t be expected to heed let alone follow these ephemeral fads of speech.’

Joanna Fane, now a thinnish woman in her early fifties who still showed considerable remains of earlier beauty, had once been famous for her clear blue-eyed gaze. Although no less clear than formerly, that gaze at the moment had begun to show some irritation. ‘I thought you were a great one for words changing their meanings,’ she said. ‘Surely this is –’

‘Darling, could I ask you politely not to lecture me about words? I think I may claim to know a little more about them than you.’

‘Darling, I am married to you already and have been for years and years.’

‘Well?’

‘So there’s no need for you to go on trying to impress me with your genius or anything else.’

For a moment Jimmie sat on without any movement, as if turned to stone. Then he shook slightly with laughter. ‘Darling, my advice to you is to reconcile yourself to having married a very impressive man whose impressiveness has not been diminished by the passage of time, in fact if anything enhanced. I just am impressive, I have no need to try. But you still haven’t answered the question I asked you just now, which was and is, who else is coming to … wait for it … luncheon,’ he concluded, facetiously mouthing the word.

‘I truly think I mentioned everyone,’ she said without change of expression. ‘As I said, it’s only a small party.’

‘You mentioned somebody I fancied I’d never heard of, some Scotch name would it have been?’

‘Not Scott-Thompson?’

‘Was it? Who is that, anyway?’

‘I’m sure I said. Gordon Scott-Thompson is a literary journalist, freelance I think. He writes mostly for the Sunday –’

‘Oh, a literary journalist. Should one have heard of him? I’m so terribly cut off these days.’

‘I really don’t know. Quite well thought of, I gather. He was at a party a couple of weeks ago. He said he’d got a proposition he wanted to put to you so I said he’d better come to lunch. He must be about forty-one or -two. Not bad looking if it weren’t for his moustache.’

‘Have you told me all this before?’

Joanna hesitated. ‘No,’ she said.

‘What’s this proposition of his, do you know?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me, at least he didn’t tell me.’

‘He’s not queer, I hope, the enterprising Mr Thompson? Just clearing the ground.’

‘No. At least I shouldn’t think so.’

‘So many of them seem to be these days, especially the ones with moustaches. There must be some reason for it, I suppose. These days all that side of life is quite beyond me. These days I’m told the creatures have the impertinence to call themselves gay, thereby rendering unusable, thereby destroying a fine old English word with its roots deep in the language. You must have heard as much.’

‘Yes, I had noticed. I don’t think this chap’s one of them, he had a rather pretty girl with him, Louise something, a few years younger. He asked if he could bring her along and I said he could.’

‘Really.’ What his wife had just revealed apparently alleviated any gloom that Jimmie had fallen into over the perhaps unrelated matters of Gordon Scott-Thompson and homosexuality. ‘Good. What a good idea.’

‘There’s somebody now,’ said Joanna as the doorbell sounded from downstairs. ‘Have you seen to the wine?’

‘Oh yes. And there’s no actual need to respond to a possible arrival as if it might be that of your Uncle Arthur from Penge. Is my tie all right?’

‘Oh, as usual it’s all … Here.’ She efficiently reduced the dark-purple knot from something the size and rough shape of a baby’s fist to a smaller polyhedron. ‘That’s better but it’s still not right. You’re hopeless when it comes to tying ties.’

Jimmie said with pretended humility, ‘I’m afraid I’ve never managed to learn,’ and might have gone on to say something about the truly neat tying of ties being a body-servant’s skill if Joanna had not been hurrying from the room. Instead he called after her, ‘But then I’ve got you to look after me,’ which was better anyway.’

2

‘I shouldn’t have thought he was your idea of fun at all,’ said Louise. ‘All those lords and ladies and butlers and what-not.’

‘It was my impression I’m not meant to like fun anyway,’ said Gordon Scott-Thompson seriously. ‘As for lords and ladies and what-not, I can take them or leave them alone. It’s up to him what he writes about anyway, within reason. There isn’t any point getting hot under the collar about Hardy’s peasants as such, before he does anything with them.’

‘You do stick to the point, don’t you, Gordon? It’s a bit off-putting, you know. People don’t necessarily like thinking what they’re saying.’

‘Blame it on my far-off education. Bad timing – another couple of years and the school I went to was comprehensivized out of existence. As it was they taught me how to read and write.’

‘There you go again.’

Gordon had not been far off the mark about his being meant not to like fun. From time to time Louise certainly took that view and would often go on to say he would be well advised to keep that kind of attitude to himself; as he knew, she meant in his dealings with females. He thought she might have had a point there. He would never have said he knew a great deal about women, but he had noticed that one of the many ways in which they could be divided into two classes was along the lines of whether they did or did not show signs of wanting to remake their men to suit them better. According to him, Louise was one of those who did. As if in pursuit of some kind of symmetry, she had once told him he was obviously the sort of man who refused to compromise his standards when dealing with a woman. Though he had had enough sense (for once) not to say so, he interpreted this to mean he refused to palter with the truth or what he saw as the truth no matter what the company, what might be gained by answering any old rubbish a woman might talk with rubbish of his own, etc. He was intermittently aware of the repellent tendency of such an attitude.

Nevertheless, Gordon had had some success with women. He must have been, he felt, reasonably personable, otherwise people like Louise would not have considered being seen with him in public. Women interested him, too, though admittedly more as a series of individuals than, in the manner of his randier contemporaries, as one huge undifferentiated objective to be assaulted wherever it might show itself; after all, perhaps a man did that much better in this field for having a touch of the prig in his character. Even so, Gordon now and then felt dimly that he was missing or had missed something in life by not being permanently on full sexual alert.

There remained the question of his moustache. It was on his face now for a mixture of reasons, starting chronologically with dissatisfaction or boredom with his own unadorned looks as seen reflected in mirrors and such. His grandfather, his father’s father, universally said to have been a striking-looking man, had worn a similar moustache all his adult life. Then he, Gordon, had remembered being secretly rather taken by how he had looked with just such a pencilled-in facial addition in a newspaper photograph. And he had since found it a useful talking point. Anyhow, there it was, establishing itself more firmly every day.

That morning Louise had come to his flat because it was a good point from which to set out for the Fanes’ place near the river. She knew that the lodging across the landing from his own was occupied by a West Indian sound engineer called Emmet Berry, and mentioned him conversationally to Gordon as the two were leaving.

‘What’s he like to have in the same house?’ she asked.

‘I hardly see him. He and I keep ourselves pretty much to ourselves.’

‘Doesn’t he make a lot of noise?’

‘Nothing out of the way.’

‘For a boogie, don’t you mean? For a jig?’

‘If you’re telling me I believe in my heart or somewhere that black people make more than their fair share of noise, I’d have to say some of them probably do. But then some white people probably –’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Christ, Gordon, why have you got to be so bloody balanced about everything under the sun? In your world it’s always on the one hand this, but on the other hand that. I’m sorry, but the effect is most uncool.’

‘You don’t sound very sorry,’ said Gordon mildly, ‘I don’t care that much what the effect is, and whatever it may be I thought everybody had stopped saying things were cool or uncool.’

‘They had, but they’re starting to again.’

In exchanges like this, he could never quite settle in his mind how far Louise was really ticking him off for being uncool and how far satirically recommending conduct calculated to go down well in a trend-crazed society like the present one. A bit of both, no doubt, unless that was him just being bloody balanced again. It was that kind of uncertainty that kept him and her in their separate establishments instead of moving in together somewhere. That and, he had thought more than once, a certain ambiguity in Louise’s appearance, splendid, radiant, starlet-like at a short distance, slightly chubby, sometimes almost lumpish, when seen close to. Well, perhaps his moustache had a comparably unsettling effect on her.

‘Here’s our bus,’ he said.

3

Quite soon afterwards, seven persons were gathered in the Fanes’ first-floor sitting-room, a place of thick light-coloured rugs, glass-fronted bookcases and paintings and drawings from earlier in the century. Guests for lunch, or luncheon, consisted of an elderly boring peer of the realm and his elderly drunken wife, a lone man in his fifties who looked like a retired boxer but in fact helped to publish expensive books in Milan, and the relatively unknown Gordon Scott-Thompson and his girlfriend. That was anyway how Jimmie would have described her if left to himself, though he understood the contemporary world well enough to be aware that you were not supposed to call people things like that in it. The young couple, whether or not it was all right to call them that, had turned up not long after peer and wife, whom Jimmie instantly abandoned for the new arrivals.

‘Come in, come in,’ he cried as they were doing so, ‘how absolutely splendid that you’re here,’ and he swept up to the girl and rested his hands on her shoulders. ‘Oh dear, I knew your name as well as I know my own until half a minute ago but now it’s completely vanished.’ He removed his left hand to smooth his hair back, thereby drawing attention to its continuing abundance and distinguished coloration. ‘Do help me out, there’s a darling.’

‘Louise Gardiner.’

‘Louise,’ echoed Jimmie, his right hand still on her shoulder. ‘Does that mean you’re French? If I may say so you don’t look it.’

‘I’m not. English all the way back as far as I know.’

‘Oh I thought so. But the name did make me wonder for an instant.’

At Louise’s side, Gordon admired the assurance of this while privately questioning some of its substance, and hoped he would be in as good shape when his turn to be seventy-six came round. At the same time he did rather wonder at what stage he might be expected to enter the conversation. His moment came after Jimmie had briefly wondered aloud whether there was such a thing as a characteristic English face without shifting his attention from Louise’s.

‘Do forgive me, you are … ?’

Gordon said, ‘Gordon –’

‘We haven’t met, have we?’

‘No, Mr Fane, but having read I think all your –’

‘Come and be introduced.’

A drink, in the shape of a medium-sized glass of champagne, found its way into Gordon’s hand after he had met two people called Lord and Lady Bagshot and just before meeting a latecomer in a high-necked sweater called Count somebody. The champagne tasted rather nasty to Gordon, but then champagne had never been his drink, and besides this sample of it could not in fact be nasty, because Jimmie Fane was known to be quite an authority on wines, had in the 1950s published a couple of books on the subject. Anyway, for the moment there was no alternative to be seen.

The view that Jimmie’s drinks could never be nasty required some modification over lunch, or luncheon. The meal was taken in a room on the ground floor facing the street. Here on a sideboard were ranged three bottles of still wine, two whites and a red, dl three with their labels facing the wall. They stayed where they were until the first course, a properly made vegetable soup, had come and gone. Then Jimmie went round the circular table pouring the white, his large and efficient right hand continuing to hide the label. As Gordon soon discovered, this wine, unchilled, was dry to the point of sharpness and, he thought, not at all good with the well-done roast beef it was perhaps meant to help down. He drank sparingly of it. So did the other guests, except for the sweatered count, who from first to last had nothing to say of it or of anything else, but drained his glass at a swallow. Was he truly a count? It still seemed perfectly possible.

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.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Gordon ventured a smile. ‘Perhaps we can proceed to the next stage.’

‘And what do you see as the next stage?’

‘Well, just a thorough general chat, working out an approach. I’ll need to do some thinking in the meantime, make a note or two.’

‘You mean we should have a sort of preliminary discussion.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Very well. May I insist we conduct our discussion over luncheon somewhere?’

‘That sounds like a good idea.’

‘I do so adore being taken out to luncheon.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Gordon bravely.

‘I’m sure you’ll do me reasonably well, better than I did the Bagshots today.’

Gordon found this remark difficult to answer, so he merely nodded his head in a dependable manner.

‘Perhaps I owe you a small explanation. When I was a young man, it used to be said of me, not only in jest, that when I wiped somebody’s eye it stayed wiped. That unspeakable wine I offered was by way of getting back at Bagshot for the vile Peruvian red he gave us the last time we dined with him. He saw that all right, which was why he didn’t make more of a fuss. Oh, and if you’re worried about young Carlo, that count person, he doesn’t care or notice what he drinks. Where he comes from one can’t afford to.’

‘I see.’

‘I think now we might rejoin the others,’ said Jimmie, rising to his feet. ‘Give me a telephone call, will you?’

Gordon likewise rose. ‘I will. I’ll also send you my c.v.’

‘Send me your what?’

‘My c.v. My curriculum vitae.’ He pronounced the first word like curriculum and the second like vee-tye.

‘Your what?’

Gordon said it again and added, ‘Meaning a dated account of what I’ve done and written if anything and where I’ve worked and such. So you’ll have it by you, what there is of it.’

‘Oh, presumably you mean a curriculum vitae,’ said Jimmie, pronouncing the first word like curriculum and the second like vie-tee.

‘Yes, if you prefer.’

‘I do prefer if it’s all the same to you. Since we’re supposedly talking English rather than Latin or Italian. Yes I agree I know what you meant the first time but then one often infers as much from a grunt or a whinny and that’s no argument for conducting one’s discourse wholly or even partly in a series of approximations and lucky guesses. I hope you take my point?’

‘Yes I do.’ Gordon spoke with some warmth. He was relieved not to be called upon to repeat the phrase in its preferred pronunciation slowly after Jimmie.

‘Good. Can I tempt you to a glass of port?’

‘No thank you.’

‘I think I’ll let myself be tempted. I should give it up but I can’t. No – cannot is false; I will not give it up.’ Jimmie gave a smile that only the literal-minded would have hesitated to call charming. ‘We’ll have some fun with this business.’

‘Indeed we will.’

The rest of the company had split into two, or two and a half. The half was Lady Bagshot, who was sitting near but not with Joanna Fane and Louise and was conscientiously working her way through her half-bottle of vodka. Another drink like the one she had just poured herself would get her there with no more than a heeltap left over. Her current drink, as she took a mouthful, looked quite small beside the vastness of her face. By the window the still-vigilant count let Lord Bagshot go on telling him all about somebody’s house, it might have been his own. Gordon went over to Louise and Joanna, who looked up expectantly.

‘Well?’ they both asked, and Joanna added, ‘I’ve been hearing.’

‘The answer’s yes.’

‘I knew it,’ said Louise.

‘Well I didn’t,’ said Joanna. ‘Not his kind of thing at all. It’s not that he doesn’t like publicity, it’s just that he likes to be in complete control of it and everything else. Do sit down.’

‘I can’t see Gordon letting anyone else control what he writes.’

‘Time will show. What’s he agreed to so far?’

‘Lunch and a chat,’ said Gordon.

‘It’ll be your lunch and his chat. Don’t let him flannel you into taking him somewhere madly expensive like Woolton’s or the Tripoli. Make it a little place you happen to know. Where is he now? Did he say where he was going?’

‘To get himself a glass of port, I thought.’

‘He’ll be stretched out on his study couch and fast asleep and dreaming by now. Not a pretty sight.’

But if Jimmie was indeed asleep as his wife spoke he was very soon awake again and re-entering the sitting-room. Any port he carried back with him had come within him, a possibility that on recent form Gordon did not at all rule out. However that might have been, Jimmie seemed in elevated form and at once settled down next to Louise on the little padded couch with its vividly covered cushions and resumed the intimate revue style of their earlier meeting. Joanna cast her eye over Gordon to no purpose he could determine, but he evidently passed whatever muster it might have been. She said,

‘I suppose you’ve written this sort of thing before.’

‘About someone else, you mean. No, I haven’t ever.’

‘If you had, I was going to warn you you’re up against something new this time. I was going to tip you off he’s not like other people.’

Nobody is, thought Gordon rather dully, so this time he made what was meant to be a thoughtful face.

‘You can’t know very much about him.’

‘Only his work.’

‘His what? I thought you were going to write his biography.’

‘That was the idea, or part of it.’

‘Nearly all of it, surely. A catalogue of his principal publications and appointments would hardly get you on to the second page.’

‘I hope to be digging a bit deeper than that.’

‘If you do, watch out, as I said. You probably won’t come to much actual harm, but parts of it won’t be much fun if you do your job properly. You’d better let me talk to you about him to get a rounded picture.’

Gordon knew enough already about Jimmie to know too that he would be actively displeased with any really rounded picture, but he kept this reflection to himself, saying only, ‘Does that mean I’m to take you out to lunch as well – on a different occasion, of course.’

‘I expect it occurred to you that he’d do his damnedest to stop you printing the juicy bits. Maybe, but I think someone in your position ought at least to have some idea of what they are, don’t you? And it’s terribly nice of you to ask me to have lunch with you somewhere, if that’s what you were doing, but it would be sure to get back to him, which might be embarrassing at this stage. So I’m afraid that’s not on at the moment.’

‘Oh.’

‘But if we shared a crust one day when he’s cavorting with his chums at Gray’s, shared it here I mean, then that couldn’t get back to him.’

‘No.’

‘In fact I can’t see why it should get back to anybody, frankly.’

‘Nor can I.’

‘Give me a ring. Between half past eight and nine on a weekday morning is a good time.’

4

‘Darling, what did you really make of that young man?’

‘Not a lot, darling. Pleasant enough, rather conventional, anxious not to say the wrong thing. The very chap to be your biographer, darling.’

‘It’s to be literary too. A critical study of what I’ve written. I’m not sure he’s up to that. For all I know he may be. I hope he’s been properly educated. He says he’ll send me what he calls his c.v. Fascinating. Do you fancy him?’

‘Darling, please. With that moustache?’

‘I’m sorry, darling, yes. It didn’t look like hair at all.’

‘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.’

5

‘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.

Now, by the window that overlooked the gloomy suburban park, he put a sheet of inferior paper into his typewriter and got to work on roughing out his curriculum vie-tee for Jimmie. Experience led him to resist the impulse to get it over in one go and try for a fair copy straight off. Wincing with boredom, then, and x-ing out every other phrase, he set down the facts of his London birth, his sound but beyond all question non-posh schooling, his minimally creditable, non-Oxbridge college course and ‘good’ final grading. None of this, he felt, would impress or even interest any sentient being but it had to be there in its entirety. Couple of years’ drudgery as sub-editor on Barnsley Echo or equivalent before lucky breakthrough to features desk, with special reference to culture, on London daily. Slow and limited ascent to books section on Sunday newspaper. Principal articles. Contributions to publications, to collections. First man to land on Mars 1995, on Titan 1996. The last entry would not survive retyping, but had been necessary to set down in order to ward off terminal coma. Something did that job, anyway, though far from having shown the least sign of private amusement he looked a little guilty at sinking into facetiousness, and hastily x-ed out the offending space fiction with the shift-key down.

Soon he was retyping. A word-processor would have been quicker and the result perhaps more imposing, but Gordon had not got one of his own. Too expensive, he would say, and he had a sort of access to a machine in the office provided he had a good enough story and could persuade the editor’s secretary to let him use it. And this time there was the consideration that Jimmie would probably have learnt to tell apart a processor print-out and something run up on the old steam typewriter and, needless to say, would not have approved of anything in the former category. At the moment it was very likely not needful to say that he would have had no corresponding bias in favour of the latter. Having biases in favour of things, Gordon already suspected, was not something Jimmie was noted for, a trying characteristic in a biographee.

Challenged by somebody like Louise, Gordon would probably have stuck to self-interest, enlightened where possible, as by far his leading motive in writing about Jimmie. But in his mind he would freely admit that he hoped the result would do something more than advance his own career. He had not lied when he said earlier that he had recently reread The Escaped Prisoner, at least on the understanding that by ‘reread’ was meant something like ‘read through to the end with some respect having several years ago looked at the thing and found it intolerably complacent.’ The fuller text captured a youthful observation that the book was silent on critical issues like racial equality and equal rights for women. Well, that was roughly how he saw the matter in retrospect.

His transcription done, Gordon read through the page he had filled, trying to see what was there as a record of events and actions as well as a mere piece of typing with possible errors. Quite soon he stopped reading it and just checked it for literals. As a narrative of the better part of a lifetime it was undeniably thin, lacking in uplift. He now saw without difficulty that his original instinct had been right, and his personal history would not have been improved by including in it mention of the novel of his that had been rejected by fourteen publishers, even less of its successor that remained in rough draft if anywhere outside the mind of God. After some attempted clairvoyance, he pencilled a few words across the top of the sheet and got it ready for the post.

Having done so he felt committed to something, small as it might have been, and about time too.

6

The day came when Gordon was to take Jimmie Fane out to lunch. The morning of it he filled in at the offices of the Sunday newspaper he worked for. These had once been majestically sited in the area of Fleet Street, but rising costs had compelled a series of moves into humbler quarters, ending for the moment in a dockland semi-wilderness. The building was reachable, or nearly, by a water-bus service that was slow and uncomfortable but at least different from that of the ordinary land bus with its route through miles of houses in silent-screen disrepair apparently occupied by remnants of a dwarfish aboriginal race. Both alternatives had the quality of always seeming a little worse to experience than to remember. This time it was the water-bus that Gordon swore he would never use again. The weather was wet and he had to plod across a kind of mudflat between disembarking and reaching shelter.

‘Nice of you to condescend to drop in on us,’ said the books editor. Originally he had not much wanted to be books editor, but the then editorial editor, the Editor in fact, had not wanted him to be anything else. ‘We appreciate immeasurably being spared some of your attention.’ This man was now nearing sixty and called Desmond O’Leary, though he gave no other sign whatever of having to do with Ireland or any of its inhabitants, past and present. ‘Everybody here understands that you have weightier calls on your time.’ Whatever his origins, O’Leary looked like a kind of bird or lizard above the neck, having no hair at all to be seen on his head, though he was very ready with the assurance that he was like an ape everywhere else. ‘All that we lesser mortals would beg from you in the foreseeable future is a thousand words on this latest piece of New England farmhouse guff, a round-up of female black American guff with some latitude as to space and, let’s see, no, yes, whither the docudrama as seen on TV and film and what, if anything, is literary truth.’ O’Leary laid bare and lit a smallish cigar of rectangular cross-section.’ Actually all I need from you more or less straight away is your next column piece and a word with Harry about our coverage of the Codex Prize. It looks like Latin America’s turn this time round, much to my personal mortification. How did your lunch with JRP Fane go?’

‘It’s today.’

‘Look, Gordon, when it comes to picking up the bill, mind you don’t –’

‘It’s come to that already and I’m picking it up. He virtually made it a condition of coming out at all.’

‘Oh did he? Clearly his hand has lost none of its cunning. Aristocratic sort of old sod, isn’t he? I saw him at some party once and there was nobody there half grand enough for him.’

‘He was quite willing to talk to me.’

‘Ask yourself why. But what’s the attraction as far as you’re concerned? Not your cup of tea as a bloke or as a writer, I’d have thought. And he’s what, he’s passé, over and done with, gone for good, thing of the past, beyond revival even by you.’ O’Leary stared over his half-glasses at Gordon, ‘I happen to think you’d do the job about as well as anybody if it could be done, but it can’t, as you’ll see. Not worth the sweat.’

Gordon shrank from saying that O’Leary himself was something of a relic, specifically in the view he took of Fane’s irrevocable departure as a literary figure. What he did say, no less truthfully, was, ‘He may not be my kind of writer and he’s obviously not my kind of man. That’s an important part of what you called his attraction for me as a subject. I want to see how far I can –’

‘Oh God, it’s the challenge, is it, the fascination of what’s difficult and all that. Some old tit, even older and tittier than JRP Fane, anyway you remember he said when you’ve done something you can do, do something you can’t. Wrong again. Do something you can do and then do something else you can do and never mind if it’s the same thing. No virtue in trying what you find uncongenial because you find it uncongenial. You know that very well, or you would if you weren’t still stuck in that bloody Scottish Presbyterianism you flatter yourself you’ve left far behind you. My own upbringing was – but it’s a little early in the day to be bringing up bygones, I suppose. I shouldn’t really have started on any of this. Sorry.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Gordon, though he could see little enough to forgive, O’Leary having mostly stuck to his habitual friendly-jeering manner. Well, perhaps what he had said had fetched up a little nearer the bone than usual, ‘In fact it’s a nice change to be treated as an adult. Anyway, with your permission I mean to have a fair crack at showing how decent writing can overcome almost any prejudice in the reader, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.’

Perhaps it did; whether it did or not, O’Leary seemed to pay it small heed. He said, ‘I just hate to see a reasonably competent and successful journalist like yourself thinking it’s about time he did something less perishable and throwing his talents away on a serious book. I wouldn’t mind so much if you were going for something of your own, even a novel, but a critical biography, your phrase be it noted, of a prehistoric old sod like Fane, oh dear oh dear. Right, I’ve said too much already, not that any of it’ll shake your determination to misuse your abilities. You know, Gordon, in this life it’s important to recognize one’s limitations. Mine extend as far as this desk and no further, not my first choice as you may have heard, which goes to show one can sometimes do with a bit of guidance in setting one’s course. Now I mustn’t be late for the Chairman’s conference. He’s become a degree or two less tolerable since he got that bloody knighthood, unless it’s my imagination. Well, show me a pot of ointment and I’ll show you a fly. Give me a call tea-time about the days of the week you’ll be coming in to the office. Don’t forget to talk to Harry before you go. And first thing in the morning will do for your column but no later.’

It had been arranged that, when the time came, Gordon as host-designate should call to collect guest at the Fane residence and he turned up there punctually, indeed with a couple of minutes to spare. A girl of about thirty answered his ring apparently clad in an excerpt from the Bayeux Tapestry. ‘Yes?’ she said loudly before he could speak. Her manner was unwelcoming.

‘I’ve called to pick up Mr Fane.’

‘What?’

‘I’m taking him out to lunch.’

‘Name?’

‘Yes, meaning yes, I have a name, and if you ask me nicely I might tell you what it is.’ That was something like what Gordon was tempted to say. But all he did say was his name in full.

‘I’m terribly sorry but I’ve never heard of you.’

‘I exist nevertheless,’ Gordon actually did say this time. ‘Will you kindly tell Mr Fane that I’m here as arranged with him on Monday this week?’

‘Mr Fane is not here.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps I could wait for him. May I come in for a minute?’

‘Anything wrong, darling?’ asked a new voice, new in this conversation but in other respects age-old. Gordon had spied its owner, or that person’s head, sticking out of a nearby doorway inside the house a moment before. Now he was to be seen in full, striding up the hallway, a well-set-up man in a dark-grey suit and glasses. As he approached he repeated his question.

‘I don’t really know, darling,’ answered the girl.

‘M’m,’ said the man. He came to a halt in front of Gordon, at whom he still gazed while he said, ‘Could this be the chap, do you think?’

‘Well, he certainly looks and sounds like it.’

‘M’m.’

Now the man took his glasses off his nose and put them folded into the top pocket of his suit, ‘I think it might be better if you left, old man,’ he said. ‘No hard feelings.’

Gordon moved his arms a little way away from his sides and leant slightly forward, and things looked quite interesting for a moment, but then a distinctive high voice could be heard from the street.

‘Ah, there you are, my dear fellow, I’m terribly sorry I wasn’t here to greet you, I just popped out for some cat-food.’

‘Never mind, Jimmie,’ said Gordon, ‘I’ve been well looked after.’

‘Periwinkle’s been taking care of you, has she? I’m afraid I’m absolutely hopeless at organizing things, especially people. Let’s be off, shall we? I suppose I must have asked them along to give a … That’s Oliver, my son-in-law, back there. I think you could hail this chap. Fancy painting a taxi yellow.’

When they had driven off, Gordon asked, ‘She’s your daughter, is she, Periwinkle?’ He wanted to have it authoritatively confirmed that this was indeed a girl’s name.

‘Not a very friendly creature, I’m afraid, little Periwinkle.’

‘She wasn’t exactly welcoming me in just now. She seemed to think I was a tout or a hawker or something.’

‘She must have got you mixed up with a sort of cadger kind of fellow from Bulgaria did he say, who’s been hanging round the place for a day or two. She must have mistaken you for him.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘Yes, different kettle of fish altogether. Horrible-looking broken-down sort of chap. It may seem an odd description of such a person, but what I believe is known nowadays as dead common.’

‘Really,’ said Gordon, remembering to make three syllables of it. He glanced surreptitiously down at his clothes.

‘He did have a moustache rather like yours.’

‘Perhaps that was what confused Periwinkle.’

‘Of course, she’s the child of my second marriage. She’s a funny girl. I don’t think she’s ever kissed me of her own accord. The truth is she’s a howling snob. I can’t think where she gets that from, it must be from her mother. Between ourselves I’ve never greatly cared for young Oliver, what’s he called, Turnbull I fancy. He’s what they call upwardly mobile, or at any rate desirous of being so. He’s also something in the City. Remind me. Just remind me where you’re taking me if you would.’

‘I thought –’

‘And whatever you do don’t please say it’s a little place you happen to know.’

Since that was more or less exactly what he had been going to say, Gordon’s reply was slow in coming. He was thrown off too by trying to remember where he had not long ago heard that very expression, and further still by wondering whether it was the form of words or the likely reality or both that was being interdicted. But in fact it was not at all long before he was saying gamely, ‘Well, it is a rather small place and in the nature of things I do happen to know about it.’

‘Yes yes, no doubt no doubt. What’s it called again?’

‘Cakebread’s.’

‘Really,’ said Jimmie, far outdoing in all respects Gordon’s pronunciation of the word. ‘He’s not an American, I hope, the valuable Cakebread?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Nevertheless I prophesy that his establishment will be full of citizens of that great republic. Hiram and Mamie are just mad about little places they happen to know, yes sir.’

Jimmie’s second sentence here was delivered in what was presumably intended as an American accent, though one that failed to recall any actually used within the nine million square kilometres of the Union. Gordon was at a loss for an answer, so he just smiled nervously.

‘I’m sorry, dear boy, of course I adore Americans and feel at home with everything about them except the way they speak. I can never make out what their rules are for choosing between pronouncing every single syllable, as in tempo-rarily, and swallowing as much of a word as possible, as when Polonius tells Laertes, neither a bore nor a lender be.’

This time Gordon laughed nervously.

‘You remember that Shakespeare wrote borrower, a word no American can pronounce. And all those glottal stops they put at the beginnings of words, as in Deutschland über alles. They’re deeply German, you know, German to their fingernails. That awful Hunnish greeting that uses the bare name, so it’s Tom, Dick, Harry, no hallo Tom, good morning Dick, give my love to your mother, Harry. German through and through. I wonder they don’t all click their heels and wear monocles. Well, thank you for putting up with that harangue, dear boy. Of course, one wouldn’t dream of letting a word of it reach an American ear, they’re so desperately sensitive and nervous of being made fun of, haven’t you found that?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t noticed.’

‘That’s what they’re like, I do assure you. Now. Where is Citizen Cakebread’s eatery located?’ This last brought a brief and perfunctory return to the Jimmie accent. ‘Hopefully.’

‘A few doors off Edgware Road.’

‘So we’re nearly there.’

If Gordon had set out to tell the whole truth from the start he would have had to add something about not having visited the little place himself for some time, but he decided to keep this fact up his sleeve. In what he intermittently saw as the battle of the lunch, or his attempt to protect what he could of his disposable capital against luxurious Jimmie’s ravages, the defence had made an encouraging start in the circumstances. Gordon’s mind went back to Monday’s telephone conversation. His ring had been answered by a voice he recognized with some relief as Joanna’s.

‘May I speak to Mr Fane, Jimmie Fane?’

‘Oh, isn’t that, isn’t that Gordon? Are you calling him about that lunch you were going to give him? Right, I’ll get him.’

Pause. ‘Hallo, dear boy. Yes, of course I remember. I’m afraid I haven’t really thought where. Oh, would you hold on just a minute?’ Burble burble burble, soon translated without difficulty. ‘Hallo? Er, it’s kind of you to leave the choice of venue up to me, my dear fellow, but I rather think it’s only fair that you should decide that question from your obviously more immediate knowledge than my, er …’

So, unexpectedly, it was not to be the Tripoli or Woolton’s but the joint Gordon had on the spur of the moment recalled from a couple of lunches with Louise’s predecessor. He was not a habitual luncher-out and Cakebread’s, he thought, had been cheap and cheerful and not too bad. Thereafter his sense of adventure had taken over.

The taxi stopped outside somewhere that did not, at first glance, look much like the Cakebread’s of Gordon’s memory, though the name was to be seen in fluorescent tubing. Jimmie sprang athletically out on to the pavement and peered in through the glass door. In an abstracted state Gordon paid the cab-fare and joined him, or more truly followed him into the restaurant. For restaurant it was or had now become, neither cheap-looking nor particularly cheerful. Waiters in little striped waistcoats and bow ties darted to and fro where overalled girls had once moved more slowly, and the menu no longer appeared on a smudgy blackboard but between fat leather covers on every table. The noise was immense. Jimmie put on a good king-in-exile show, holding his distinguished white head high above the rabble, apologizing with gestures for accidental buffets inflicted on him by others. He and Gordon were shown to a table by a side wall and brought drinks.

‘The industrious Mr Cakebread would appear to be prospering.’

‘There have been considerable changes since I was last here,’ Gordon shouted back. He felt he must immediately correct any mistaken impression that this was the kind of level on which he customarily refreshed himself in public.

‘I shouldn’t care to become an habitué here perhaps but it suits my mood at the moment.’

Gordon tried to look receptive.

‘Last night I did something I hadn’t done for what seems like simply decades and probably is quite a long time and dipped into one of those old novels of mine, not The Escaped Prisoner which you were kind enough to mention recently but another, no matter which for the present. And do you know it seemed to me, it seemed not too bad. A little wordy, a little clumsy, really rather embarrassingly clumsy here and there but on the whole not too bad. For the first time for many years I found it not inconceivable that I might one day return to the charge, try my hand at fiction once more. It was, I can’t tell you, it was like being reminded of one’s youth. And I’ve you or your advent in my life to thank for turning my thoughts in that direction. I see they offer natives here, meaning I take it oysters rather than cannibal islanders, offer them at what seems to me a ridiculously inflated price but I’ve long since given up trying to make any sense of such matters. Tell me, er, tell me, Gordon, from your past experience and your present information, do you imagine they would be of a respectable size or something falling a wee bit short of that?’

‘I –’

‘Because I know of very few minor disappointments as keen as that of expecting an oyster to fill the mouth in that agreeable way and then finding it just too small to do so, and this not once but a dozen times over. So to be on the safe side I think, yes, I think I’ll order eighteen and then if the worst comes to the worst quantity will have to do duty for quality. Yes, I think that’s the best solution in the circumstances.’

Holding his voice steady with an effort, Gordon said, ‘I’m sure if we asked them nicely they’d fetch a couple of specimens to the table so that you could –’