The Biographer’s Moustache

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 –’

‘No no, dear boy, too much of a fuss and bother and certain to cause incalculable delay. Talking of which, they don’t seem to be positively falling over themselves with anxiety to take our order, do they? Oh well, it gives us time to catch up with our reading.’

With that, Jimmie brought up an eyeglass on a fine silvery chain through which he proceeded to study the menu. Or to pretend to, to look effective while apparently so doing. Did it just happen that what he fancied turned out to be the most expensive dish to be had? Or had he quite consciously set out to sting his host as painfully as practicable? Or was his motive somewhere in the capacious territory between the two? In search of an answer, Gordon observed Jimmie’s full-collared silk shirt and boldly clashing tie, side-parted silvery hair worn long for a man of his age, green-bordered handkerchief ‘carelessly’ pushed into jacket-sleeve, antique cuff-links. He would have observed the cut of the seasoned-looking dark suit if he had ever learnt to tell one sort of cut from another. Then Jimmie glanced up from the menu and round the room with an expression of tolerant superiority on his face that seemed to go with details of clothing and stuff. Old Jimmie Fane saw himself as an artist of a far-off time when artists were special people and looked special and of course ate lots of oysters. Any moment now he would be calling for a bottle of the Widow.

There were perhaps elements of the ridiculous in this picture, but Gordon felt no disposition to laugh, not even internally. He felt less like it than ever when a waistcoated waiter arrived and after appreciatively taking an order for eighteen natives asked what was to follow and got an inquiry from Jimmie about the available sizes of lobster. Gordon stopped listening for a while and did his best to put aside his copy of the menu. He swallowed the last of his gin and Campari – why had he ordered that? – and saw that after paying this bill he must simply go home and take to his bed and stay there until the end of the following week, when his monthly bit of salary would reach his bank. He would use the period of bodily inactivity to square his accounts with God and such matters.

Quite calm now, Gordon watched while Jimmie nodded approvingly at a bottle of no doubt expensive wine brought for his inspection, chewed an intervening mouthful of crust of bread, coughed thoroughly, drank fizzy mineral water, gulped a large mouthful of the wine poured out for him to try, followed it with more mineral water and after a short interval in which he sat stock-still, made a loudish noise that sounded like a kind of indrawn belch, but proved to be the first of a tremendously long and sort of well-entrenched series of hiccups. At first he stared at Gordon and held up his hand as if calling for a silence he failed to produce. Soon the waiter returned with a glass of still water and Jimmie sipped at it fast, slowly, from the right side of the glass, from the wrong side of the glass, to wash down any crumbs or other extraneous matter that might have been lingering in his throat, vaguely. Nothing happened, or rather he continued to emit belching sounds a dozen times a minute. Possibly these had acquired a new sonority, because now a partial silence did descend, though not on Jimmie. With the glass of water put aside, he pulled out a handkerchief, not the one tucked into his cuff, and stuffed it over his mouth, a manoeuvre that muffled his noises but failed to make them anywhere near inaudible.

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!’

7

‘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.

8

‘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?’

‘You mean, you mean I go and give you some money, just like that?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not, you want to know. Why is what I want to know, among other things.’

‘I had to pay for this rather stiff lunch for the two of us.’

‘You were telling me. I thought you were supposed to have an expense account on that paper.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Well then.’

Gordon thought it would take too long to explain that his boss on the paper was opposed to the Fane project and might not look favourably on a submission for the refunding of expenses incurred in its furtherance. So he said, ‘Louise has been spending money like water recently, my money.’