Ending Up Read online

  About the Authors

  Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was born in South London and educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. He began his literary career as a poet but shot to fame on the publication of his first novel Lucky Jim in 1954. He wrote over twenty novels including That Uncertain Feeling, Take a Girl like You, One Fat Englishman, The Green Man and Stanley and the Women. He was nominated for the Booker Prize for Ending Up (1974) and again for Jake’s Thing (1978) and he won it for The Old Devils in 1986. Amis also published six volumes of poetry and many works of non-fiction including his Memoirs, in 1991. He wrote widely on science fiction, politics, education, language, films, television, eating and drinking. He was appointed CBE in 1981 and was knighted in 1990.

  Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright, A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, With Your Crooked Heart, The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby, House of Orphans, Counting the Stars and The Betrayal, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer.

  Ending Up

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  With an introduction by Helen Dunmore

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1974

  Published in Penguin Books in Great Britain 1987

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © Kingsley Amis, 1974

  Introduction copyright © Helen Dunmore, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the introducer has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96179-8

  To Betty and Paul Fussell

  Contents

  Introduction by Helen Dunmore

  ENDING UP

  Introduction

  From time to time, baby-boomer journalists write articles suggesting that groups of like-minded elderly people set up communal living arrangements. Perhaps there is nostalgia for the ideals of youth, or a belated realization that the laws of ageing, sickness and death will apply to this generation as well as all those that preceded it. Partners may die, children may be indifferent or in Australia, and lonely decay stalks the imagination. How good it would be to have company, share cooking, meals and cars, collect prescriptions in bulk and yet retreat to a private space when this is desired. The advantages are clear; the disadvantages rather less so. These are envisaged hazily, if at all: a few organizational difficulties, perhaps … a need for clarity about finances … some system required for buying in help for those who become disabled …

  Kingsley Amis’s fiction, however, is no more hazy than a scalpel. Almost forty years ago he produced his own study of communal living for the over-seventies, in a novel which is as untainted by self-delusion as it is ruthlessly funny. Ending Up was published in 1974, when Amis was fifty-two and almost a decade into his second marriage, to Elizabeth Jane Howard. Their assorted household of family and friends finds its older and colder echo in the five septuagenarians who live together – or are banged-up together – in Amis’s fictional Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. The season is winter. The characters are in the December of their existences, plagued by bodily ailments and more or less resigned to the discomfort of their surroundings. The cottage is icy, dilapidated and remote, a bargain only in being ‘what, for the new occupants, it had had to be – low in price and not actually uninhabitable.’

  The work of the household is done by two of its members: Adela, who has had a largely unloved and unloving life and has learned to exchange hard toil for a safe place in the world, and Shorty, the perpetual squaddie, who cleans, cooks, makes fires and lives by the punctuations of ‘time for a burn and a nip’. Adela is the sister of Bernard Bastable, a man with an exceptionally unpleasant manner and his own way of keeping secrets. Shorty and Bernard were lovers many years ago, which led to Bernard’s enforced departure from his regiment. Both now regard the fact of their former physical relationship with incredulity. The fourth member of the party is George Zeyer, Emeritus Professor of Central European History, whose sister Vera was married briefly and unhappily to Bernard ‘because a senior officer had better be married’. George has come to Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage following a stroke, which has left him with nominal aphasia and right-side paralysis. Adela’s old schoolfriend, Marigold Pyke, completes the household and, like the others, she allows Adela to serve her in return for crumbs of affection and an illusion of family life. Some are failing physically; others fear for their minds.

  So far, so unsparing. The set-up is done with laconic brilliance, and Amis allows each character to skewer him- or herself through a distinctive speech-pattern. Marigold, for example, trots out the tarnished diminutives of the Bright Young Thing she probably never was. Her grandson and his wife are ‘Mr and Mrs Trackle-Packles’ – that is, very attractive. When she offers her grandson a ‘drinkle-pinkle’, Bernard, grandson and reader are united in recoil. But for all her gruesome verbal tricks, Marigold is tough and occasionally brave. Even Bernard does not cow her.

  Shorty is in many ways the classic old soldier, who possesses a rich repertoire of linguistic imitations and subversions with which to deal with his own position as half-servant and half-friend. His commentary on the action has a Shakespearean quality: Shorty is chorus as well as clown as he earths the inhabitants’ pretensions and deceits. He eavesdrops, observes and judges, but the class prejudices of Adela, Marigold and Bernard prevent them from realizing what he is up to; they see the role and not the man. Only George is more perceptive, as well as more generous. Shorty plays with language, employing spoonerisms, army argot, imaginary foreign accents, imitation and mockery. His flow of words is such a familiar background that the others miss its purpose. Shorty uses language, as well as action, to get enjoyment from a way of life which arouses bleary discontent, if not despair, in those he serves. Like Adela, he knows how to work, but unlike everyone else in the cottage, he still knows how to play. He spins his web of words, drinks, farts, smokes or falls asleep at the table with complete unselfconsciousness. There is no mileage, even for Bernard, in the attempt to shake Short
y’s world:

  He sipped, lit a Player’s No. 6, sipped again. This was the squaddie’s literal seventh heaven: he was dry, warm, indoors, off-duty, smoking, pissed and getting more pissed still. ‘And no chance of getting collared for guard,’ said Shorty.

  Through the economy of his pitch-perfect dialogue, Amis not only establishes a character within a few lines, but also its nuances. A man like Bernard may seem armoured by selfishness and the atrophy of kindness and affection, but he can still feel a stab of regret, or experience a moment of self-knowledge before he manages to stifle it. Amis is the most sensitive and least sentimental of novelists when it comes to the accretions of character. The tight pace and plotting of Ending Up make his subtlety of characterization even more crucial, and at all points, the five inhabitants of Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage triumphantly skirt the grotesque. Horrible as they may be, they remain entirely real.

  Ending Up was published in 1974, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while The Old Devils, published in 1986, won the prize itself. In certain ways, Ending Up clearly foreshadows The Old Devils, and reveals a similar fascination with what the sheer process of living for a certain number of decades does to human beings. There is the same preoccupation with mortality and the disintegration of the body, if not the personality, with age; there is a similar interest in random, apparently unmotivated acts of cruelty and revenge. Alcohol is potent in both books, addling, distorting, cheering and provoking. Drinks are the clock that mark the passage of the days. No character considers himself an alcoholic, although several clearly are.

  There is another parallel between The Old Devils and Ending Up in the tender attention with which Amis handles relationships between the old and the young. Marigold’s grandchildren visit Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage with some reluctance and have to construct comic interior narratives to make the experience endurable, but they do visit, and even help to pass the time on an endless Christmas Day by devising games for their elders to play.

  The physical loveliness and emotional clarity of these young visitors makes a painful contrast to the usual life of the cottage, but for once the five old people feel little resentment. They see these qualities, perhaps rightly, as the gift of time. But if time gives, it also takes away, and this point is made by the grandchildren in a moment of snatched privacy on Christmas Day:

  ‘We’ll be just the same when we get to their age.’

  ‘Oh no we won’t. Horrible, yes. Boring, sure. But not like them. Chummy little crowd, aren’t they? And I take it back about us being boring. Boring on that scale, anyhow.’

  ‘I’d like to have a tape of what they were saying about their grandparents and so on thirty years ago …’

  Brilliant as the comic set-piece of Christmas Day may be, the point it makes is chilling. The old people are fragile, forgetful and self-absorbed, but all that may be understood and forgiven. Amis’s more brutal point concerns a moral decrepitude which makes the cottage a small hell for its inhabitants. Is this, too, a gift of time? The moral inquiry is forensic. Again, there are parallels with The Old Devils, in particular with the harsh, slapstick death scene awarded in that novel to Alun Weaver. Ending Up, however, offers little hope of forgiveness or redemption, whereas in The Old Devils these possibilities are celebrated in the renewal of Peter and Rhiannon’s early love, as well as in the marriage of their children.

  In an interview in Paris Review (Issue 64, Winter 1975), Michael Barber commented to Kingsley Amis that he thought Ending Up was ‘very bleak’. Amis’s reply is instructive.

  Yes, well, no book is the author’s last word on any subject, or expresses what he feels all the time. So if I were to walk under a bus this afternoon, then Ending Up would be my last novel, and people might say, ‘Well, he ended in a fit of pessimism and gloom.’ This wouldn’t really be so. Each novel can only represent a single mood, a single way of looking at the world, and one feels bleak from time to time, and takes a fairly pessimistic view of one’s own future and chances. But there are other times when one doesn’t, and out of that other books would emerge.

  Undoubtedly there is deep pessimism in Ending Up. The question of what life becomes when health, charity, warmth and tenderness have been consumed – or wasted away – is painful to pose, and hard to answer. Only comedy of this quality can embrace such a bleak midwinter with relish, and make the reader relish it too. The brevity, structural tightness and keen pace of Ending Up make it one of Amis’s most engaging novels. It is also one of his funniest, with scenes of pure, laugh-aloud farce, which recall Lucky Jim. Bernard’s manoeuvres to demonize George’s unappealing but well-loved dog, Mr Pastry, are as faultlessly absurd as they are unsuccessful. A passage where Marigold’s grandson-in-law, Keith, discourses for a couple of pages on the subject of pet food is a masterpiece of comic invention.

  ‘… I’ve had many a worse portion of tinned meat than Bow-Wow. They sell a—’

  ‘You mean you’ve tasted it?’ asked Marigold.

  ‘Yes, they have what they call quality testing sessions where it’s made, and you’re expected to join in if you happen to be there. The thing to do is keep to the Bow-Wow side of the room. Mew’s worth steering clear of unless you’re a cat …’

  Amis stacks up the detail with perfect timing; the scene is ripe, almost over-ripe, and then, just when it has to, it explodes.

  The young are the survivors, as they have to be. Ending Up makes this point with savagery; the moderately kind and well-intentioned, such as George and Adela, are despatched with the same ruthlessness as the morally atrophied Bernard. The author becomes godlike, even gleeful, as he hands out fates to his characters. There is no particular note of hope in the clarity of the denouement, any more than there is hope in the heap of bodies at the climax of an Agatha Christie novel.

  Ending Up is chastening in its analysis of the struggle between self-interest and the impulse of generosity. But other novelists can do that. It is the combination of high farce and line-by-line attention to the comedy of how people speak and think and feel that makes Ending Up so remarkable. A comic novelist of Amis’s stature is a rare presence; we have no one to replace him.

  Helen Dunmore, 2011

  Ending Up

  One

  ‘How’s your leg this morning, Bernard?’ asked Adela Bastable.

  ‘Much as it was yesterday morning,’ said her brother in his usual bantering tone. ‘Or afternoon, for that matter. Sorry, but there it is.’

  ‘Because it’s quite a long way from this new place to the car-park. From the supermarket itself, I mean. You have to come out at the front, where you go in, and go all the way round to the back. You’d think they’d have an entrance or an exit at the back, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Or even both. In a sense, yes, you would. Why not go to the old place?’

  ‘I’ve explained all that to you I don’t know how often,’ said Adela in her thick voice, one that seemed to make it hard for her to express by its tone any emotion but a mild resentment. ‘We’re getting poorer the whole time because of inflation, so I have to keep trying new places to see that we get the best value for money. If you took the slightest interest in the affairs of the household you wouldn’t have to be told that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? Anyway, I do, don’t I, Shorty? Take an interest in the affairs of the household. I can’t help my leg.’

  The man Bernard Bastable had spoken to was not short. Nor was he tall enough for the name to be appropriate as an irony. He was known as Shorty partly because his surname was Shortell, and partly because it was generally felt that his domestic status, not on a level with the others’ and yet not properly that of servant, rather ruled out the use of his Christian name, which was Derrick. He said in a sort of Irish accent, although he was not Irish, ‘Och, now, a course ya can’t, me ould darlin. Ya can’t go expectin a fella to—’

  ‘I don’t see what stops him taking an interest,’ said Adela. ‘Actually physically
prevents him.’

  ‘Shorty means to express his agreement with the proposition that I can’t help my leg,’ said Bernard, speaking as clearly as he could, which was not very clear. He still sounded rather drunk, but he was no more drunk than Shorty was Irish; he had not been drunk for fifteen years.

  ‘How a bad leg prevents you from being able to carry things is a mystery to me.’

  ‘Yes, I know it is. It’s something of a mystery to me as well. And of course it’s a complete mystery, hidden in total and impenetrable darkness, to Mainwaring. Or Maine-wearing, as he seems to think it’s pronounced.’ Bernard referred to the local doctor, one much despised and much in demand.

  ‘Anyway, you can’t come to the supermarket.’

  ‘Only as a companion. Not as a carrier of things.’

  ‘Look, I’ll come, Adela,’ said Shorty in his native modified-Cockney.

  ‘No, Shorty, you’re needed here. Don’t forget that Trevor and Tracy are coming to luncheon, so you’ll do the vegetables, won’t you? And you’ll clear up breakfast.’

  ‘Shorty clears up breakfast every morning of his life.’

  ‘Indeed he does. It’s amazing how many things a bad leg can prevent one from doing.’

  Bernard started reading the Radio Times, or his glance fell to it.

  ‘There’s bound to be a bloke there who’ll carry your stuff, Adela,’ said Shorty. ‘Some kid or other.’

  ‘They have to know you before they’ll do that.’

  ‘Yet one more argument for going to the old place,’ said Bernard.

  ‘I’ve already explained about that and I haven’t the time or the inclination to run over it again.’ Adela looked at her hefty wristwatch. ‘I must be off; I’ve got to go to the chemist and the cleaners as well. And I might be able to fit in the electricity shop too. We need a plug for that lamp. The one by the sitting-room window. I’ll just have to see how things turn out. It’s largely a question of the traffic. You just can’t tell in advance. It seems to be quite unpredictable. Bernard.’