The Biographer’s Moustache Read online

  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,

  ‘Where’s that flat-mate of yours this evening?’

  ‘She’s away,’ said Louise in a tone that precluded further discussion of the matter.

  He now asked, without much thought, ‘Oh, where did you have dinner?’

  This caused perceptible confusion. After hesitating for a full second, she said, ‘Somewhere in Soho, I can’t remember the name, I was taken there. Why, what of it?’

  ‘Nothing of it, I was just trying to change the subject.’

  ‘All right. You were going to tell me about lunch with her nibs. Especially the funny bits.’

  He started on a pedestrian report of that event, thinking to himself meanwhile that to have failed to remember the name of a restaurant, any restaurant at any time, was most unlike Louise. Whatever she might now have been thinking to herself, she seemed not to be listening to what he said. Before he had managed to get to a funny bit she interrupted him.

  ‘Did she make a pass at you? I don’t mind if she did but I would love to know.’

  ‘Nothing of that sort happened at all.’

  ‘Because she was well and truly looking you over the day we were both there. Almost as if she was having trouble keeping her hands off you. I call that bloody cheek at her age.’

  ‘She couldn’t give me all that many years, and what do you mean, at her age? You make her sound about a hundred and ninety.’

  ‘She’s an old bag. An old bag.’

  ‘On a purely objective, unemotional, factual plane, Louise, she’s not, Joanna Fane is not an old bag. Middle-aged, if you like, if you must, but –’

  When, not much later, Gordon was making his way out of Louise’s flat in a sexually unsatisfied state, he was reflecting that what she had just said about having to make an early start in the morning might well have been true as well as decisive. Nevertheless he could not help feeling that he might not have been forced to leave in such an unceremonious fashion if he had handled things a little differently, if for example he had concurred at once with her view of the aged Joanna Fane. As he put the point to himself on his way home, when there was nobody to overhear, you could get it right, or you could get it away.

  The telephone was ringing when he got back home, which circumstance made that place seem much less bleak and comfortless. ‘Gordon Scott-Thompson,’ he said into the instrument, wishing strongly for the moment that he had a less cumbrous name.

  ‘Fane here,’ said a recognizable high male voice. Its owner took some time to assure himself that he was connected whither he wished, but having done so he spoke quite freely. ‘You will of course have dined,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll have what? Oh yes, I’ve dined.’

  ‘I too. Rather well, in fact, as perhaps you’ve already inferred. I’m speaking from, where am I speaking from, yes, of course, I’m speaking from my club. There’s been a slight difference of opinion here, not to say an argument, which you may be able to settle. Now. How would you, how do you pronounce T,I,S,S,U,E, as in the kind of paper?’

  ‘Well, tissue, to rhyme with, er, miss-you, for instance.’

  ‘I understand. Not like,’ and here Jimmie paused for so long that Gordon thought he must have moved on elsewhere, perhaps in search of a taxi, until he came back on the line to say, ‘Not like atishoo, the comic or fanciful representation of a sneeze. Just so. I’m greatly obliged to you, my dear Gordon, and good night.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Oh my dear fellow, I do hope I haven’t got you out of bed, have I?’

  ‘No no, I assure you. I was just wondering what the argument was about.’

  But Jimmie had disconnected before Gordon had done more than start his second statement.

  10

  ‘I was just wondering what the argument was about,’ said Gordon to Jimmie again. This time he said it not over the telephone but face to face or near enough, in the hall of Gray’s club. Not wishing on the whole to have to go in search of Jimmie all over the building, which he had never visited before, G
ordon had told the porter who was expecting him and had himself waited here in the hall.

  At least he had hoped the fellow was the or a porter. There had been a moment of slight and wordless misunderstanding when, meeting some difficulty with the glass door from the street, Gordon had seen through the pane a man coming towards him who looked no older and was better dressed than he and whom he had briefly taken for a member of the club on his way out. From the change in this man’s demeanour at Gordon’s inquiring reference to Mr Fane, it was easy to guess that he for his part revised any first impression that the newcomer might have been some artisan or workman, arrived at the club to repair its dishwasher, say. All was quickly well, and no more than a couple of dukes or millionaires had put their heads round the corner to look him over when Jimmie himself arrived, full of total memory of who Gordon was and what he was doing there. After some irresolution on both sides Gordon had reminded him of the recent telephone-call.

  ‘Oh good God yes,’ said Jimmie amiably, ‘I should have explained there and then but I didn’t want to take up your time. I’d dined here, rather well as perhaps you inferred, and Johnnie Wessex and I and one or two others had got into some sort of barney about language and pronunciation, a prime concern of mine as you must know, Gordon. I won’t bore you with an account of their rather unthinking points of view but I was taking the line that the old natural way of speaking, among reasonably well-educated and thoughtful people, was being, how shall I put it, was becoming eroded by creeping pedantry. Creeping pedantry,’ he repeated, making no move in the direction of the inner parts of the club where food and drink were presumably to be found. ‘Whenever I turn on the wireless or the television I hear the announcer putting in glottal stops in places where they’ve no business to be, they talk about the I R A,’ said Jimmie with a little explosion of breath before the name of each letter, and I expect they call it the R A F,’ similarly enunciated, ‘and in no time every English word that begins with a vowel or vowel sound or looks as if it does will begin with a confounded glottal stop. Have I told you all this before, dear boy?’

  Gordon hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, it’s true you’ve mentioned glottal stops before, but then they were part of an attack on Americans.’

  ‘Americans?’

  ‘Yes. You said it went to show how German they were.’

  ‘When was this supposed to be?’

  ‘It was in the taxi on the way to Cakebread’s. That restaurant.’

  ‘An excellent place, let it be said.’ Jimmie spoke strongly, as if contesting disparagement. ‘Excellent, what I had was first-rate.’

  ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’

  ‘You did get my note thanking you for the occasion?’

  ‘I must have done.’

  ‘Oh dear, these days I’m quite capable of having forgotten to post it. I’m afraid I’ve always been scatterbrained in such regards and of course in recent years I’ve deteriorated even from what I was. Which is not to say I make no sense any longer. On the contrary, let me remind you that we were talking of pedantry in pronunciation and I was saying I come across it whenever I switch on any broadcasting device. Any moment now I expect to hear somebody talking about whenever or how-ever. The traditional way of saying such words is I should have thought quite sufficiently comprehensible, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gordon. He did agree. More than that, if Jimmie wanted to talk about ways of saying words it would have been impolitic and almost certainly useless to try and prevent him. On the other hand, something seemed to be needed to shift them from the kind of padded pews that, still in the hall, they had settled companionably down on. At that moment he caught sight of a youngish man, doubtless heir to a fortune or a marquisate or both, who had evidently come to peer at them. More to the point, he held a drink in his hand, a reasonably powerful-looking one, and it was not every day that Gordon felt he could do with a drink, but today was such a day. He swallowed furtively.

  Jimmie had been going on, ‘I take as part of the same undesirable phenomenon that it’s becoming fashionable in ordinary speech, not just in song to give unstressed vowels their full value, not only Manchester and observer but, well, caramel and condom and no doubt plenty of others. I say, would you fancy a drink perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, I rather would.’ Gordon tried to sound unequivocal without seeming to have no room for any other thought. ‘What a good idea.’

  ‘Oh. I’m terribly sorry, my dear fellow,’ cried Jimmie, ‘I do so clearly see that on a day like today you would be feeling in particular need of a wee tassie.’

  Since the day was neither particularly cold nor rainy nor windy, in fact rather clement for the time of year, nor yet the notorious anniversary of the battle of Flodden, say, Gordon could not fully understand what was meant. He made a vague noise designed to show that there was no ill feeling on his side at least.

  ‘How very thoughtless of me. We must repair that discreditable oversight with all speed.’ Jimmie looked at his wrist-watch, a piece that displayed its merit by being large rather than small. ‘However it might be easier if I just rounded off this point while it’s fresh in my mind. Fowler remarks somewhere that when reciting a sentence like, for instance, Hunt has hurt his head – m’m? – it’s as important not to pronounce the initial H in has and his as it is to pronounce it in Hunt, hurt and head. Yet we hear trained actors bleating of their inamorata that they love her and villains growling that they must kill him. Years ago, much farther back than they remember, their ancestors decided to proclaim that they knew how to speak proper …’

  As a conscientious but exhausted watchman might strive to keep awake, so Gordon fought to go on taking in what Jimmie was saying, and failed. He was beset by longing less for a drink than simply to be elsewhere, not necessarily far away, the next room would do, even at a pinch some unoccupied corner of this one, but it was not to be. What was to be took place quite soon after all.

  ‘… not a very momentous sound-shift, but I think it is starting to happen,’ said Jimmie. ‘And now we simply must have that drink. You’d have got it earlier if you hadn’t been so patient with me when I was going full tilt on my hobby-horse, or one of them. Ridiculous of me. Anyway, what will you have?’

  They stood now in the bar, which was rather more like an immensely spacious and well-appointed cupboard than anything Gordon understood by a bar. He mentioned gin. Two elderly men had hurried out as they arrived; two others in dark suits studied them from some feet away. Or rather they seemed to be studying him, Gordon; in some puzzlement, as he thought. None the less, with his drink in his hand he felt bold enough to bring up tissue again.

  ‘What? I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Tissue,’ said Gordon, pronouncing the word now in Jimmie’s preferred style.

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘We never quite got to what I was going to ask you just now.’

  ‘Fire away when you’re ready, then.’

  ‘You remember my saying when you rang up that I pronounced the word to rhyme with miss-you? Well –’

  ‘Oh yes, Johnnie Wessex had had the barefaced cheek to say he didn’t believe any English person, anybody born in England pronounced T,I,S,S,U,E in any other way than the way he and I pronounced it. So then …’

  ‘So then,’ said Gordon, ‘you thought of me as someone sufficiently far gone in creeping pedantry to pronounce the wretched word in what we’ll call my way, and that was enough to enable you to win your argument with Johnnie Wessex.’

  Gordon would have said he had pitched the foregoing at a tolerably low level, though would have had to admit that his tone when uttering the name Johnnie Wessex had not carried a favourable view of that nobleman. It seemed at least that he had spoken nevertheless loudly or warmly enough to cause the nearby elderly men to look sharply at him and then at each other before doing a fast shuffle out of the room. The barman glanced up from a list he was checking through, but only for a moment. Jimmie seemed a little troubled or v
exed, though in no way conscience-stricken. He said,

  ‘I suppose all of us speak much as those around us do, or used to early in our lives. But I suggest that’s enough on the subject. Well, Gordon, have you made a start on your book about me? Good God, how pompous that sounds.’

  ‘I’ve been reading through your works and making notes which I’ll be using later. In the meantime I’ll be asking you the odd question about your earlier life, as something occurs to me if that’s all right. I don’t want to subject you to long interrogation sessions like a –’

  ‘My dear boy, you may ask me any question you think proper at any time within reason and I’ll answer it. I’ve thought about it and I can see no virtue in my making things difficult for you. If I find I’ve told you too much and want you to take out something I don’t want made public, I’ll tell you when I come to it in your manuscript. Oh, and I’m making some notes of my own which I’ll pass on to you in due course, as they say.’

  ‘Very good; fine; agreed. Here’s a question to be going on with. When you met –’

  ‘I think if you don’t mind we’ll finish these and proceed to luncheon. They turn somewhat reproachful if one arrives at what they consider to be an inopportune hour. In fact I’d have suggested to you that we should go straight in to where one eats if it didn’t sound such a dismal notion, and a mean one. Sounds a mean idea? Nay, it is. Are you ready?’

  They mounted a single turn of the fine staircase and went through a sort of outer dining-room into a sort of inner dining-room beyond it. Both were full of men in suits vigorously talking, eating and drinking. Several of them looked up at Gordon as he went by, making him feel like a spy in an old-fashioned film. Jimmie led the way to a vacant table laid for four near the back of the room. They had hardly settled into their chairs before two additional men in suits came out of the middle distance and took the spare seats at the table. Jimmie introduced them as Bobbie something and Tommie something else, both these surnames denoting some county or other portion of the land area of the British Isles. Gordon was unsure at the time, and was never able to establish afterwards, whether these two arrivals had been invited or had invited themselves. They treated Jimmie as their host throughout, but what with one thing and another there was no certain indication there.