Читать книгу The Biographer’s Moustache - Kingsley Amis - Страница 7

‘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.