The Biographer’s Moustache

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.’