The Biographer’s Moustache

‘What, without you there? Would a couple of hundred quid be any help?’

‘Yes, it would. So you’re paying me an advance on my advance after all.’

‘I’ll send it on to you. It’ll be out of my own pocket actually, and before you say thanks a lot but no thanks it’ll actually be the firm’s money which I’m borrowing from them so when you pay me back I’ll use what you give me to pay the firm back, and before you ask me just out of curiosity how I can be so sure you’ll pay me back on the nail I’ll say you’re enough of a cunt to pay your own grandmother back if you had to cut your foot off to do it. I hope you understand I say that without the slimmest possible sliver of reluctant admiration or any crap like that. You don’t deserve an expense account, you don’t. On a paper that size?’

After giving a couple of upward nods in lieu of imprecations, the publisher recrossed his blue-clad legs on the hard chair he had pulled up to rest them on, and joined his hands behind his head. Uncharacteristically, he hesitated before speaking again. Gordon clearly had nothing to say for the moment.

‘I told you we were thinking of reissuing some of the Fane works to coincide with your own effort.’

‘Still only the novels?’

‘At the moment. They seemed the obvious ones.’

‘M’m. All of them at once, some then some later, or what? You hadn’t decided when you and I talked before.’

‘We still haven’t. Most likely it’ll be two at the time and then if they catch on the others the following season. Nothing fixed yet, though.’

‘I’ll be saying quite a bit about the novels. I’m going to feel, well, hampered, restricted, if some of them are still out of print.’

‘I shouldn’t let that worry you. After all, you’ll be saying more than quite a bit about other items in the Fane story, I hope.’

‘Such as?’

During these exchanges Brian had produced a small oblong tin with a green-and-goldish design on its lid. It proved to contain cigarette makings and their owner was soon demonstrating his skill with them. In this second pause Gordon fancied he could detect traces of actual embarrassment. He wondered a little what was to come.

Now Brian put between his lips a sort of cigarette of about the girth of a stout toothpick, and lit it. A faint narcotic odour became perceptible. ‘Your book’s going to have two kinds of stuff in it, call them critical and personal, what old Fane wrote and what he was or did. By definition, right? I’m sorry to say, but not all that sorry to say, more people are going to be interested in the second than the first. From what I know of you, my old Gordon, you’re likely to be more interested in the first than the second. Fine. We’ll work it out, we being you on one side and us on the other. For now I’d just like to ask you to remember that we’re obviously very pleased when one of the heavy papers buys something out of one of our books to liven up its review section, and also, like you to remember too, none of them gives a toss about any of your critical or literary stuff. That’s all for later. It has a bearing, but it’s for later. What counts for the review editor is the personal angle, and Fane’s on his fourth wife, okay? Now if you could let me have a specimen chapter and a synopsis by the end of next week we’ll all be laughing. Nobody’ll look at what you turn in, but they like to know it’s there.’

Ten minutes later, Gordon was waiting for a bus in Baker Street. To do so was not at all pleasant on this autumn morning, but to go where he was going by Tube would have meant a longer walk at the distant end. He wished he could have dealt half as easily with the problem presented just now by Brian Harris, or more truly brought into the open by him. When Gordon had first thought of writing about Jimmie Fane he had had in mind a sort of working subtitle, something to be imagined as coming after the subject’s name and a colon on the title-page, something no livelier or more inventive than Neglected Genius and not even to be committed to paper. Then as soon as he started looking to any purpose he had glimpsed something like Sexual Adventurer looming up on the other flank. Both phrases, he foresaw, would eventually seem appropriate in some measure, but he wanted to work all that out for himself, not be influenced by any pressure one way or the other. Well, there was one consolation, that the time for making up his mind about such matters was not yet.

These reflections lasted him till his bus came and he was climbing into it, at which point they were superseded or shoved out by a closer sight than before of the legs belonging to a girl of student age and general appearance just in front of him. It was not that the rest of her was specially attractive, nor even that the legs themselves were, it was simply that they did seem to extend a very long way upwards. No, he must mean he could see a very long way up them. How their owner stood the weather apparently wearing nothing between foot and crotch but a pair of tight tights was not his present concern. That was to do with Jimmie, had been suggested by thinking of Jimmie. Gordon settled himself in a seat from which he could see only the student’s back view and only as far down as her shoulders and went on with the same line of thought.

Jimmie had presumably come to puberty in the late 1920s or early ’30s, the golden age of the female leg, as was testified by many things, including films and mildly erotic calendar drawings of the period. By the 1940s, the decade of Gordon’s own birth, the focus had shifted to the breasts and the pin-up, often emphasizing the nipples, which could not then be shown or seen in public. By 1960 anything went, or had started to go, and not long after that had come the golden age of everything or else nothing in particular. Gordon was just old enough to remember the departure of the brassiere along with its contents, and it happened to be no comfort to him among many others that behind all this the old female bottom had continued jogging along on its way undisturbed.

In a thin drizzle Gordon’s bus made its way along Knights-bridge. He found that when he tried to call up an erogenous image of Louise in his mind he got little more than a blur. That might have been the result of defective sexuality on his part. Or more remotely of the kind of changes in socio-erotic history he had been trying to assemble. Or the fact that he was in a bus on a chilly, damp morning.

When the time came he got out into the middle of it. Not far to walk, though, towards the river but not all the way. To identify the house, ring its bell and wait called for no unusual powers. On the first floor above his head a window was opened, but by whom he could not see. The next moment a small metal object dropped through the air and tinkled on the pavement near by and the window slammed shut. The object proved to be a latchkey. While approaching and climbing the stairs within, Gordon called to mind his observations on legs and dates, but forgot them again on entering the first-floor front room and being greeted by the Hon. Mrs Jimmie Fane. He had reckoned that she was eleven or twelve years older than he, though he had to admit she looked less, today at any rate. She had on a snuff-coloured pullover with ribbing at neck and cuffs and a royal-blue skirt of smooth but non-shiny material. Apart from an unmemorable ring or two she was wearing no jewellery.

‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked Gordon.

The sort of drink that he would have liked was a cup of tea or coffee, but he felt he could not very well ask for such a thing here, it’s a bit early in the day for me,’ he said.

‘It’s a bit early in the day for anybody, but would you like one?’

‘To be honest I’d rather not.’

‘Fine, I’ll keep you company and not have one too.’ She smiled in a friendly way. ‘Come and sit down. It’s warmer up this end where the heating is. Jimmie went off to Gray’s as advertised. He’s lunching with a couple of earls and a marquis so he might as well be in Timbuctoo as far as we’re concerned.’

Joanna smiled again. He thought to himself she had obviously been a very good-looking woman when younger. Then he thought his use of the pluperfect might look or sound ungallant, so he amended his first thought to signify that she was still a good-looking woman now, at that very moment. He could have sworn his expression had remained constant throughout this interior shift, but when she smiled for the third time it was not the same.

‘Rather a waste from one point of view,’ she said, ‘don’t you think?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I gather he took a pretty flashy lunch off you the other day. I got him to let you choose the place but he didn’t want to and you wouldn’t have been able to influence what he ate and drank.’

‘I survived.’

‘Did you ever get the feeling he was choosing the expensive stuff on purpose, just because it was expensive?’

‘Now you mention it, I did once or twice.’

‘Good for you. But I don’t think he was just enjoying the simple pleasure of getting somebody else to spend money on him, though perhaps one shouldn’t put that past him in general. No, I think what he was doing was showing you who was master, coming out on top in a battle of wills. I’m sorry, Gordon, aren’t you going to take notes?’

‘I’ve a very good memory. As long as I write a few things down afterwards I’ll be all right.’

‘Did you write down how much that lunch cost you?’

‘I didn’t need to.’

‘I can’t help feeling I ought to reimburse you for what you had to cough up.’

‘Don’t worry about that, Joanna, I’ll get it off expenses and anyhow I couldn’t take your money.’

‘How Scottish are you, darling?’

‘M’m? Oh, only by descent. All my grandparents were born in London and I’ve no particular connections with Scotland. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I just wondered. Look, er, isn’t it time we got down to business? How are you on the early years of the great man?’

They quickly established between them that James Reginald Pruett Fane had been born in 1918 in Cheltenham, the son of the comfortably-off but not rich second son of a baronet who had made a study of country houses. JRPF had attended a small public school in Shropshire, where he had shown a precocious talent for painting in watercolour.

‘Has any of that stuff survived?’ asked Gordon.

‘No. He renounced painting for ever when he went up to King’s and made a bonfire of all his work, all he could lay his hands on anyway. He doesn’t mind people knowing he used to paint but he’s never tried to trace what he sold, not that there was much of it.’

At Cambridge 1936–39 JRPF had vocally supported the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war, though he had not himself visited Spain at that time.

‘Rather brave of him, wasn’t it, coming out for Franco then?’ asked Gordon.

‘Not at Cambridge, at least among his mates, or the chaps he wanted to be his mates, you know, posh chaps. He was a bit of a Catholic then, or says he was.’

‘But you mean he’s renounced that too.’

‘Just let himself lapse.’

Also at Cambridge JRPF had become known as a poet. In those still early days he had contributed to some of those journals and anthologies that were hostile or indifferent to the quasi-Marxist stance of contemporary poets in Oxford and elsewhere. His first volume had been published in 1939.

‘What did he do in the war?’ asked Gordon, ‘I can’t make out. His Who’s Who entry just says he was in government service.’

‘That’s as much as he’ll say when you ask him, all he’s ever said to me anyway, he worked for the government. If it were somebody else that might mean he was to do with something hush-hush, so hush bloody hush in fact that he can’t tell you about it fifty years after the event, and I did meet a queerish buffoon not so long ago who owned up to having helped to snatch a Nazi general in Crete but wouldn’t say which one. But anyway I’d give a small sum to know what the old man’s work for the government amounted to.’

Just before or just after saying that, Joanna had changed position in her chair in a way that brought to notice her legs, which were enclosed in a pair of dark-blue stockings or tights that went well with her royal-blue skirt. Although not himself a great leg man, as indicated earlier, Gordon could see perfectly well that they were very good, shapely legs. It crossed his mind straight away that this fact was ultimately connected with Jimmie’s preferences and their likely root in the period of his puberty. Other considerations could be deferred for later thinking over.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Gordon assured Joanna.

As his first wife JRPF had married the daughter of a newspaper owner in 1945. That wife had run away with an amateur jockey early in 1950. Later that same year he had pot married a second time, to a less pretty girl who was also not all that well off but was a viscount’s daughter. The 1960s had seen a third marriage, this time to the undoubtedly handsome daughter of a very rich commoner, and in 1975, at the age of fifty-seven, JRPF had married the then thirty-three-year-old Joanna, daughter of a very rich nobleman.

‘If anybody wanted to be nasty about him,’ said Joanna, who had supplied some of the details, ‘they could say he hit the jackpot on his fourth try – money and pedigree, but that wouldn’t be quite fair. All his wives, including me, have been the sort of people he mixed with socially, especially number three and me and I’m pretty sure he was pally with number two’s brother at Cambridge. Perhaps he oughtn’t to have gone around with nobs so much, but I can’t see him downing his pint in the public bar because it’s more real there or something. He knows I think he’s a bit of a joke with his nobbery, but I got my nobbery as a sort of christening present, if you see what I mean.’

‘M’m. Who’s Who mentions one s. one d. by, er, number one and one d. by number two.’

‘Number one took her descendants off and they haven’t been seen for donkey’s years. Number two’s d. turns up occasionally, I’m sorry to say. Another thing I can’t see him as is a proud father, caring father, anything father.’

Gordon waited a moment and said, ‘Had you been married before?’

‘Only once. He drank himself to death, but I may say he was already doing that when I came into his life. I didn’t start him but I didn’t stop him either, as you see. Talking of which, I don’t think we’d be breaking any law of God or man if we had a drink after all that work.’

‘I’d like to finish this lot first if you don’t mind.’

‘My, what a little stickler you are.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘Oh well, point taken.’

JRPF had been employed in the books department of the Daily Post from 1945, its literary editor 1949–63, James Cadwallader Evans Award 1961, Hon. DCL, Hove University 1978, FRSB 1980, Chairman, Carver Prize Committee 1981. Principal publns: three books of verse, Collected Poems 1970, six novels, last in 1965, two vols, on wine, etc., one vol. coll. journalism, etc.

‘There’s not much either of us could add to that,’ said Joanna.

‘Certainly nothing I can.’

‘It’s quite a complete list except for committees he’s been on which he doesn’t think are worth mentioning.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I was his secretary at one time.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh, I forget. Just the last Who’s Who thing to do.’

Recreations: visiting churches in Tuscany and Umbria, good food, conversation.

‘Anything to add to that?’ asked Gordon.

‘I’ll say. And to subtract too. I’ll tell you in a minute. Can we have that drink now?’

‘I suppose so. I mean thank you, I’d love one.’

‘What would you like? I have vodka, and tonic, and vodka and tonic.’

‘I’d like vodka and tonic with not much vodka, if I may.’

‘I don’t see why you may not,’ said Joanna, giggling a little with what sounded genuine amusement. She had got up and gone over to a costly-looking marble-topped chiffonier on which bottles and glasses stood.

‘What’s the joke?’ Gordon had no desire to be told, but it was easy to see he was meant to ask something like that.

‘Well, the way it was absolutely certain you’d ask for a small one if you got half a chance. Then …’ Instead of continuing she came back and handed him his drink.

‘Cheers. What was that last bit again?’

‘Oh right. Italian churches, good food and conversation, wasn’t it? I’ve never known him go near a church anywhere, though he might literally venture near an Italian one if it was next door to a kosher palazzo that had a proper duchessa in it he could chat up. His Italian’s quite fluent, actually, and of course bits of Italy like Tuscany sound right, or did when he said that about himself. Yes – good food; he likes expensive food, as you well know, but that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t think he’s much of a taste-buds man, do you? As for conversation, well yes, again on the understanding that the chaps he’s conversing with are either rich or well-born, preferably both but if it has to be one or the other then give him rich every time. I suppose it sounds pretty awful of me to be saying some of that, and I suppose it is in a way, and I do think that side of him’s a bit of a joke, but I don’t … I don’t feel superior to him or resent the way he goes on. I realize I might one day but as yet I don’t. Now we’ll just drink these up and give ourselves another small one and then we’ll totter down and have something to eat. Mainly a chicken salad, which I’m afraid won’t be very warming, but there’s a pea soup to begin and I know you like soup.’

9

That evening Gordon noticed that Joanna’s ultimately lenient attitude to Jimmie was not shared by Louise, or at least was not shared by her that evening. Earlier, starting about three-thirty when he got home, he had heroically beaten off drink-induced lassitude and written up his notes for that day. These had contained not only biographical details and dates but less starkly factual information, given over lunch, about Jimmie’s dealings with such persons as priests and peers. Much of the latter material had not shown him in a particularly favourable light but the facts had gone into the notes anyway, regardless of whether Jimmie might sooner or later veto their publication. When Gordon had satisfactorily finished the job, he had brewed himself a very strong pot of tea and made the first of several unavailing attempts to telephone Louise, finally getting hold of her at seven-twenty or so.

She sounded full of beans. ‘How did your lunch with Her Grace the Honourable Lady Joanna Fane FO go?’

‘Oh, some quite funny bits. If you’ll come out to dinner with me I’ll tell you about them.’

‘Can’t do dinner this evening, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ said Gordon, and added rather mechanically, ‘Some other time, then.’

‘But I am dying to hear. Are you going to be around later tonight?’

‘I might be.’ This time he spoke cautiously.

‘So might I be. Start trying to ring me about a quarter to eleven.’

Then Louise disconnected and Gordon admitted to himself he was quite glad in retrospect she had been booked for dinner, because in the heat of the moment, such as it had been, he had forgotten how hard up the great Jimmie lunch had currently left him. After some thought he heated up a tin of soup in his kitchen, not so nourishing it proved as the pea and ham concoction Joanna had fed him, but followed with cold sausages, which when smothered with mustard, spicy sauce and tomato ketchup turned out to be distinctly tastier than the chicken salad supplied earlier. To wash it all down he recklessly put away a nine-ounce can of a Dutch lager that, had he known it, had come second from bottom in a table of alcoholic strengths of imported beers in a recent Sunday-magazine survey. To offset these indulgences he read seriously in his copy of The Escaped Prisoner, Jimmie’s first novel and by common consent his best, published in 1959.

Its story told of a young man, brought up in conventionally well-off and well-connected circumstances somewhere in the north of England, who had reacted against his upbringing to go and be a schoolteacher in the more proletarian parts adjacent to his native heath. As time went by he came to doubt the wisdom of having done so, found his new companions ignorant and coarse and his new girl trivial-minded and finally went back whence he had come. At the time and later there had been some disagreement whether the hero was to be thought of as having permanently escaped from the prison of working-class life or only temporarily from the patrician bondage to which he voluntarily returned. It surprised Gordon to find several of the posh characters effectively presented as disagreeable, even snobbish, and the story seemed to veer now and then between one interpretation and the other and back. He wondered if Jimmie might have had something to say on the matter and made a note to ask him about it some time.

The time was just after ten forty-five. Gordon telephoned Louise, who answered after two rings. She sounded distinctly less full of beans than when he had talked to her earlier, but agreed that he should come and see her as soon as convenient.

‘I’d only just that moment got in when you rang,’ she told him as soon as he arrived.

‘Sorry,’ he said, feeling it was somehow required of him.

‘I suppose you couldn’t tell,’ she grudgingly conceded.

Things had improved, but not much, by the time they were sitting in the area reached by her electric fire with mugs of hot decaffeinated coffee in their hands. When she asked him to tell about his midday dealings with Jimmie’s wife it was not in the unguardedly friendly spirit she had shown before.

‘What sort of line did she take?’ Louise asked. ‘Was she against the old monster, as she’d have to be to pass as a human being herself, or was she on the whole for him, trying to make out he wasn’t too bad?’

‘Well, just a minute. Even if she’d felt like it she wasn’t going to denounce the man she’d been married to for twenty-odd years to a fellow she didn’t know existed until just the other day. Be reasonable.’

‘Gordon, I’m being reasonable. Jimmie sodding Fane is a, well, if not a monster then a monument of old-fashioned, passé class superiority and sheer snobbery. If his wife doesn’t have the least inkling that that’s what he is, then as I see it she’s tarred with the same bloody brush.’

‘Look, hold on, dear.’ It had already occurred to Gordon that Louise’s new-found hostility to Jimmie and all his works, as opposed to or further than a semi-genial rallying scepticism about poor old Jimmie, originated less in any kind of revision of the facts that in something that had happened in her own life. (Like having been stood up for dinner, it occurred to him later, though not then.) He said pacifically, ‘She’s got more than an inkling that old Jimmie’s got a pretty stiff dose of the sort of prejudices you’d expect from somebody his age and, well, class, I suppose.’

‘You suppose!’ Louise answered at once and perhaps a shade predictably, if he’s really out of the top drawer I don’t see what you’re doing writing about him in the first place, you being you, and if he’s a phoney you just, you shouldn’t, I mean you’ll have to expose him in whatever you write about him, and you told me he can prevent you publishing what he doesn’t like. That’s unless you simply …’ She shook her head about and made various impatient noises.

‘He’s the genuine article all right, uncle a baronet, went to school –’

‘Spare me the sordid details, for Christ’s sake. Well: it sounds to me …’

‘Yes?’

‘It sounds to me as though you’ve been won over.’

This challenge irritated Gordon, but he did his best to swallow any such feeling. ‘Granted I’m to write something substantial about this chap,’ he began, but got no further.

‘You clearly grant it. I don’t.’

They went on in their respective strains until an inadvertent lull brought the chance to say experimentally, casually too,