I Like It Here Read online

  I LIKE IT HERE

  a novel

  by

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  1

  THE DEPORTATION ORDER arrived one clear, bright morning early in April.

  “Owen?” the telegraph boy asked. “Garret Owen?”

  “More or less,” Garnet Bowen told him, feeling the bulk of the envelope fearfully. It could mean the first step on the road towards a sum of money. On the other hand it could be some newly-devised kind of recall to the colours. “Thank you.”

  Bowen, whose large and well-made frame blended with an air of inefficiency, started reading. Without preamble he was informed that the idea was excellent and he was to go ahead. He had to read to the end and scratch his thinly-haired head a lot before he saw just where excellence was being imputed. Last month, drinking with the representative of an opulent American magazine, he had helped the talk along by describing the new kind of travel article he had pretended to think desirable. And now some misinformed, progressive and well-intentioned fathead in New York had taken him up on it. He winced when he saw the size of the fee offered. Well, that finished it. He would have to go now.

  Trying to smile, he hurried into the kitchen where his wife, a pretty little dark woman with strong hands and big wondering eyes, was putting a protesting child into its coat to the accompaniment of a song being sung very loudly and badly by Frank Sinatra. The noise was coming through an extension loudspeaker on the wall.

  “There’s some more money we can have,” Bowen bawled.

  “Sorry, can’t hear with this row. Oh, do stand still, Sandra.”

  Bowen went back to the front of the house, no very great distance, and turned off the gramophone. “You came, you saw, you conquered me,” Sinatra sang. “When you did that to me I knew somehow th—” You tell us how, a part of Bowen’s mind recommended. Another part was reflecting that to cut Sinatra off in mid-phoneme was not such uproarious fun as it was with the men who did the religion at five to ten on the wireless, but it was nice all the same. It was only a pity that Sinatra could never know.

  In the kitchen once more, Bowen read the telegram aloud. As he did so he began quailing internally. It had all started when, mellowed by the acceptance of a B.B.C. script and the small consequent celebration, he had let his wife reveal how much she wanted to go abroad that summer and how much good it would do them all according to her. Her mother would put up a good whack of the money, which could be recouped out of articles inspired by first-hand acquaintance with foreign matters. And getting right away from London would give him the chance to write that play. Until a couple of years ago Bowen had been supposed to be a novelist who was keeping himself and his family going on the proceeds of journalism, wireless talks and a bit of lecturing. In the last six months or so he had started being supposed to be a dramatist who was keeping himself and his family going by the same means. He had never really supposed himself to be much more than a journalist, wireless talker and occasional lecturer. But his wife disagreed.

  “Well, that’s fine,” Bowen now informed her at the end of his recital. “We can do it easily now, especially if we don’t take the car.” There was something fearful about having a car abroad. It would make things happen in more abundance and more quickly.

  “Oh, I think we should now Mummy’s offered it, and it’ll be so useful with the children. We can just come and go as we please. I wish you’d take some lessons, though, and get your licence. It’d be such a help if you could relieve me on long trips. Won’t you?”

  “Well, I’d rather not, dear, if you could possibly manage on your own.” He had had enough experience at the wheel during his Army service to fill him with ever-renewed surprise that vehicles usually overtook one another without colliding with anything, and a little incident on the Nijmegen road one night in 1945, involving his own jeep and an unlighted lorry, could still make him whimper to himself. “I’ll give a hand with the children, take them off your shoulders a bit.”

  “Mind you do, now. Well, where shall we go? Somewhere hot.”

  “Yes, somewhere hot. And where there’s a lot of wine. What do you think? France?”

  “Well, not those mountains we went to that time. What were they exactly?”

  “The Vosges. No, not there. By the sea somewhere.”

  “Yes, but it’s got to be really hot. Does it get hot in France?”

  “In the South it does.” The word Antibes flared across the dark vault of his mind, quickly followed by another, shorter word. “But it’s very expensive there, you know. All the rich people go.”

  “Yes, I know. Well, what do you suggest?”

  “There’s Spain, of course. But then there’s all that filthy bullfighting to cope with. I don’t really fancy that, I must say.”

  “We needn’t go to it, need we ?” she asked him. “Anyway, is it cheap? That’s the main thing.”

  “I think it is. But a lot of awful craps go to Spain. And all the Spaniards are supposed to be proud all the time.”

  “What about Italy?”

  “All those rotten old churches and museums and art galleries.”

  “There’s no need to decide now, we’ll think of a place. Look, I must take this creature out before she gets intolerable. Are you going in?”

  “Yes, I’m having lunch with Bennie Hyman.”

  “Oh? Good job I asked you.”

  “I thought I told you last night.”

  “Well, you didn’t. And for goodness’ sake, Garnet, call in and pick up those shoes. The heels on the pair you’ve got on are right down. They’ll be beyond repair if you keep on wearing them in that state.”

  “All right, darling. See you about tea-time.” Bowen went up and pinched the ear of his daughter, who growled at him. “Same to you, chum. You wait till you get abroad, that’ll teach you.”

  “It will be lovely, won’t it?” his wife said, brightening up again. “All that sun. And you getting some real work done.”

  “Lovely, yes.”

  At the moment, this expressed Bowen’s feelings. Being pushed more or less willy-nilly out of the country in this way had, rightly considered, its points. He had a go at rightly considering these when, half an hour later, he left their South Kensington garden flat and made his way towards the centre of things. Under his arm were three books destined for return to the library. They were the translated work of three French nationals on whom, without knowing quite how this circumstance had arisen, he had recently been lecturing. Cosmopolitanism lay on every hand that morning.

  “Malraux,” he had been saying the other week to his night class, “as opposed to Montherlant.”

  They had looked at him with the glum mistrust they normally reserved for his occasional announcements that, having outlined one possible approach to a subject, he was now going to indicate another, quite different from the first. The curious visiting Egyptian had glanced round at his neighbours and grinned, hunching his shoulders. At the same moment Bowen had realised that the tall dark man at the back, whom he had always taken to be a refrigerator electrician called Noakes, might instead be the French assistant from one of the London University colleges who was conjectured to be attending some parts of that terrible little Modern European Literature course. This realisation had embarrassed Bowen and made him feel thirsty.

  “Sorry,” he had said forcefully. “Mowl-roe and Mont-along.” After glaring for a time he had spelt the names out to them. Some of them had copied them down, letter by letter and glancing continually at one another’s notebooks, like air-crews at a vital briefing. The curious visiting Egyptian and the tall dark man had not done this; they had written down nothing at all.

  Bowen now reflected, as he got on to a bus, that trying to pronounce even a few syllables of French set off in the inex
pert a most complex and deep-seated network of defensive responses. It did in him, anyway. He had a couple of days ago read a travel supplement in some weekly or other which explained that the French, although charming and so on, didn’t like hearing their language spoken incorrectly or with a bad accent. (There was something similar wrong with all other nationalities too according to the supplement, which was perhaps the work of some syndicate of British tourist associations.) Bowen made up his mind with real regret that France was out. How he wished he had shown more foresight at school. Why, at his little school, had he not spent the periods set aside for the B.B.C. Schools programmes in learning how to say the French nasal sounds instead of how to make paper aeroplanes (which in any case he had long forgotten how to do)? Why, at his big school, had he neglected L’Attaque du Moulin and Les Oberlé in favour of hiding behind the cupboard or making a book on how many times Mr. Pritchard would say “of course” and “and so on” in the space of an hour? Education, Bowen decided, ought to be a putting-in, not a drawing-out.

  While he paid his fines at the library he thought briefly about his play. There was a whole act of it, all done out in proper red and black typing, lying under his notes on Ivy Compton-Burnett in his green filing cabinet (a birthday present from his wife). He had not looked at this dramatic fragment for several months, supposedly in order to “come fresh to it” at such time as he should come to it again, but really in order to go on not looking at it. Playwrights he had heard or read about sometimes reported difficulty in getting their characters plausibly off the stage. He was all right at that part; with his characters the trouble lay in getting them plausibly on to the stage and finding things, plausible or implausible, for them to say once there. Bowen shook his head and sighed. What he needed was a bloody theme. But they didn’t grow on trees, did they? No, that was not what they did.

  “You’re looking fit,” Bennie Hyman said to him when they met.

  “Really? That’s a comfort. Yes please. One just like you’ve got.”

  “Barbara all right?”

  “Yes, full of… full of fun.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Oh, tremendous.”

  “Good.” Hyman then talked for ten minutes about how nasty being a bachelor was. It was sincere but failed to grip. When it was over he said: “Anything new on that trip abroad you were thinking of?”

  Bowen gave a throttled cry. “Yes, lots. We’re going all right. Can’t get out of it now.” He explained about the American commission. “See? It’s like being deprived of your citizenship.”

  “Is it, now? Is it? With finances fixed and a car laid on? You’re in a bad way all right. You know what I’m going to say now, don’t you? Well, here it is. I wish I could turn it all up and get away abroad for a bit.”

  “Ah, but I don’t. I like it here, you see. And anyway, it’s my mother-in-law’s car, you fool. And look, it’s just struck me: how do they mean, mother-in-law? What law? What law says she’s my mum?”

  “I’ll explain it to you if you don’t watch out. What I don’t see is why it shouldn’t be your mother-in-law’s car. A car can’t hurt you, can it? What’s wrong with it?”

  “As a car, nothing. Only it’s her way of reminding me that she’s about. Not near necessarily, a thousand miles away perhaps, but about. And she’s thought up another way of doing that. She’s practically made it a condition of lending us the car that I take dozens of photographs of us abroad and the bits of abroad we see and us looking at them and so on. So she can share it all with us. That’s right. So I can feel her breathing down my neck every time I click the shutter. I’ve even had to promise—and I mean promise—to stick the bloody things in an album as we get them developed so they shan’t get lost or damaged or out of order. What about that, eh? It’s enough to drive you up the wall.”

  “So I see. Decided where you’re going yet?”

  “It’s all the same to me, if you know what I mean.”

  “Mm. Well, why not try Portugal, then? Lots of sun, not overrun with Yanks and British, cheap as hell. And the national poet was put on the skids back in the sixteenth century or whenever it was and there’s been sod-all since. That should appeal to you.”

  “What about that filthy Fascist government?”

  “Ah, get stuffed, what’s that to you? Give you something to go for in your piece for the New York boys. No, seriously, Garnet, you think it over. Good place, Portugal. An uncle of mine went there a year or two ago and was pissed all the time on about ten bob a day.”

  “What about another of those while we’re on the subject?”

  “No, let’s go in.” Hyman got up, revealing himself as ridiculously athletic in figure as well as exaggeratedly Nordic in face. He looked very unlike a successful young publisher. But he was. This fact was familiar enough to Barbara Bowen, and so was the related fact that her husband read an occasional manuscript for the firm. A third fact, that Bowen was trying to get Hyman to get the firm to give him a job, was unknown to her. Bowen had often thought that not getting this job would carry the consolation prize of not having to tell Barbara anything about it. She had a way of viewing regular salaried employment as somehow inimical to integrity. She had said as much pretty often in the first stages of their courtship, less often in the latter stages, not at all for about a year after their marriage, and pretty often again during the seven years after that. Many of her views had described that parabola.

  Bowen followed Hyman into the restaurant. It was a rather expensive one and Hyman always gave you lunch there, whether he was going to try to get you to do something for him, explain that he was not going to do something for you, or just give you lunch. Bowen wondered which sort of Hyman lunch this was going to be. Then he felt he knew.

  They were drinking their coffee when Hyman said:

  “I suppose you’ll be flying over, will you? On your trip, I mean?”

  Bowen gave another throttled cry. He remembered very clearly what that climbing turn had felt like the day one of his R.A.F. pals took him up to show him Cader Idris from the air. He decided it would be hard to discriminate the horror-potential of the terms “plane” and “immediate mobilisation”. Nothing would ever get him into the air, not even a life-contract with the Times Literary Supplement. He put this view to his friend.

  Hyman sniffed. “You’ll have a long time at sea otherwise.”

  “I shan’t mind that. But wait a minute: why will I?”

  “Lisbon’s three days from Southampton, that’s all.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to go to Lisbon, have I?”

  “No, but there’s one thing you can do there that you can’t do anywhere else.”

  “I’m always game for a new thrill. But I’m taking Barbara along, and it’d be a bit hard to work up an alibi when I …”

  “Quiet now,” Hyman said, looking round for the waiter. “I’ve got something rather interesting to tell you, but you must promise to keep it under your hat. Let’s try a little experiment. Wulfstan Strether. What’s your reaction?”

  “Boredom, chiefly. I never seem to get on with great novelists.”

  “Don’t you? I can’t help thinking I remember a talk on the Third a year or two ago on the twentieth anniversary of Rapid Falcons coming out. Or wasn’t that you?”

  “I’m afraid it was me, but only because old Cyril got ill at the last moment and couldn’t do it. I was just filling in to oblige.”

  “You fascinate me. Anyway, what do you know about Strether himself, as distinct from his stuff?”

  “Nothing at all. I thought that was the whole point about him. But, after all, you published him, didn’t you? You must have some dope on him, surely. No point in coming to me.”

  “We still do publish him. All five of his novels have been in print ever since the day they first appeared. That’s, what, ten years, isn’t it? or more, from the last one, which was that, Mad as the Mist and Snow?”

  “No, This Rough Magic was the last one, in ‘46. Don’t you remember all that P
rospero stuff at the end about drowning his book ?—pity he didn’t. And how everybody decided it must mean he was packing it in?”

  “Of course,” Hyman said. “Same again? Go on, it’ll do you good. Yes, that’s right. And he did pack it in, you see, or so it appeared. Anyway, you know no more than that about the one indisputably major talent to have arisen since the death of Conrad?”

  “D. H. Lawrence, you mean. Well, I know the rumours about him really being some industrial magnate, or that he’s a bloke in a monastery who can’t afford to let the Father Superior know he’s been writing novels in the firm’s time. Oh, and all that business round about 1950 about him being dead. Was anything ever established about that? You ought to know.”

  “Yes, I ought to, oughtn’t I? I think all that was based on some more stuff in the Rough Magic thing.”

  “Entirely based on that, was it?”

  “That’s another thing I don’t know. Listen, I’ll put you in the picture, Garnet. All Strether’s stuff was handled by old man Hiscock in person. He even used to address Strether’s letters and take them to the post himself. Conscientious old bird, Hiscock. Or I suppose you might call him literal-minded. Anyway, Strether wanted his identity kept dark and for Hiscock that meant keeping it dark from everybody, including the other directors and his own wife. It also meant keeping all the contracts and correspondence—both ends of it —locked away. But when Hiscock goes round the corner and we look through his papers, not so much as a bloody twitter do we find about Strether—couple of years ago now, that was, just about the time I got on to the Board. Well, old Hiscock went very suddenly, down at his place in Sussex on Friday night and dead in bed on Sunday morning. He may have felt himself going, not had time to get hold of Strether and ask him what to do about all the stuff, so he burns the lot to be on the safe side. Anyway, we’ve hunted high and low, boy, believe me. Not a bloody twitter.”

  “Yes, I can see it’s annoying.”

  “Annoying, Christ, I could stand it if it was just annoying, I get all the practice I need. It’s far more than that. Ten days ago a typescript turns up in the office, a novel, a long one, about a hundred and twenty thousand, called—I can hardly bring myself to say it—called One Word More. See what I’m on about?”