Kingsley Amis

  DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

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  DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS

  Kingsley Amis’s (1922–1995) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of the Second World War. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment in novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His other works include The Green Man (1970), Stanley and the Women (1984), and The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism and short stories.

  To Jessica

  ONE

  ‘Right, on your way, brother. Out. I’m not having you in my house. Go on, hop it.’

  ‘What for? What do you mean? I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve done, darling, and cross my heart I don’t want to know. And don’t let me guess. Go on. There’s nothing says I got to have one of you in here, okay? Not yet there isn’t. Any moment now but not yet. So out.’

  The last half of this was said to a retreating back. The landlord of the Princess Beatrice, London SE1, turned to Patrick Standish and went on in a tone not much friendlier than before,

  ‘It’s getting to be a full-time job, you know, keeping them out of here. They think they can go anywhere they like these days, as if they were entitled to under the law. No good will come. I suppose we ought to think ourselves lucky he didn’t go for his lipstick.’

  Patrick, standing up at the bar with his midday White Shield, thought among other things that the young man had shown a lot of restraint whatever he was. ‘He didn’t look all that peculiar to me. These days everybody has their hair in a bloody – ’

  The landlord, who had pushed up his mouth, closed his eyes and started shaking his head at Patrick’s first words, let him go no further. ‘It’s not the look, my friend. It’s the whole je ne sais quoi. You develop a feel for it this side of the counter in sheer self-preservation. No, it’s not the look.’ He paused and moved his eyes sideways. ‘Of course, I don’t know, perhaps you, er …’

  At this interesting juncture he moved away to serve a little old woman hung with crocheted shawls and long ropes of jewellery. Patrick had begun to take to him for his air of total contempt for the world, not only as it was and was becoming but as it had no doubt always been. Ignoring fashion, he had a totally naked skull, its presumably natural baldness filled out by close shaving round the edges. It was rather small in proportion to his broad shoulders and massive arms. Extravagant blue tattoos with some minor touches of pink adorned the lower parts of those arms, made visible by rolled-up sleeves. Over his very white shirt he wore a waistcoat-shaped woollen garment of a tan-and-yellow pattern too awful for the thing not to have been specially knitted by somebody close to him, assuming there to be any such person. He had been heard to answer to the name of Cyril.

  Patrick considered he had done well to find the Princess Beatrice so soon after arriving in the district, or rather to have had it there to find: not too large, not too crowded even at night, not noisy but not quiet, bar-billiard table. The provision for darts, cribbage and shove-ha’penny he saw as a token of virtue in the abstract rather than as for his actual use. His eye was caught now by the half-dozen little rectangles of engraved glass attached to the woodwork above the counter.

  ‘Snob screens,’ Cyril seemed to say to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In days gone by, if you didn’t fancy being observed in your carousals by the tout le monde, you just swivelled the …’ – he turned the pane nearest Patrick outwards on its pivot – ‘and lo and behold you were shielded from their vulgar gaze. Like the partitions there.’ These were of some sort of oak, head-high, dividing the drinking-space into three. ‘Lot of tommy-rot really.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘No, you don’t, because you haven’t got to keep it all clean, have you? Our beer-pipes here, when I took over in ’60 I had to shut for three days to wash the goo out. You’d think the brewers could spare a copper to shake the place up.’

  Patrick had soon lost interest in this. His glance shifted to the large glass case mounted high on the wall at his side and displaying assorted but uniformly horrible-looking corks and bottle-stoppers fancifully worked. ‘Isn’t that asking for trouble a bit? I’m sure this is a very nice neighbourhood but it’s not exactly Berkeley Square. The sort of chap who enjoys a – ’

  ‘Oh, you mean somebody driven to express a well-developed sense of fun. Believe me I’d like nothing better.’ Cyril suddenly reached below the counter and laid on it a substantial iron tool that tapered to a point at one end. ‘What you see before you is a marlinspike, which is c’est-à-dire an implement useful for separating strands of rope and also for cooling the ardour of those who get carried away by high spirits. Yeah.’ He looked affectionately at the spike for a moment before replacing it. ‘Well, I’d better be …’

  He had started to move when he turned his gaze over Patrick’s shoulder towards the door. ‘Whaw!’ he growled, not very quietly. ‘God bless your dear old rosy-cheeked mother, sweetheart. Fooh! I could – ’

  ‘Before you go any further,’ said Patrick, ‘that’s my wife that’s just come in.’

  Cyril did a grin that showed no amusement. ‘Your … wife?’ he asked, putting equal stress on both words.

  This brought Patrick definite annoyance. He knew he was quite personable enough and impressive enough and vigorous-and-all-that enough to be married to someone who looked like Jenny, not out of conceit or wishful thinking but as a simple deduction from years of carefully noted experience. And not that much older and hardly going bald at all and anyway only at the temples. And he considered he needed no reminding how lucky he was to have her even so.

  Jenny came up and she and Patrick kissed as they always did on meeting. For this lunch today she wore her best suit of cream linen and a navy blouse with the row of cream-coloured pretend-bone beads. She was twenty-eight that year and as slim as ever, with very dark colouring that she was sure had a bearing on the way strangers quite often told her they thought she was French, or sometimes Italian or Spanish, but usually French if it was anything. Patrick himself had made that mistake when he first saw her, or had given that impression.

  Evidently the man behind the bar had done the same. At any rate he leaned over it and said, ‘Comment allez-vous, mademoiselle – oops, excusez-moi, madame.’ He said it without trying to sound French at all, but his manner was genial in the extreme and a bit polite-lecherous too.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you very much,’ said Jenny, staring back at him and intensifying her regional accent.

  Turning sideways behind his bar to give himself more room, the man swept off an imaginary hat and made her a great bow. ‘And what is madame’s pleasure?’ He had rather heavy eyelids and he lowered them in a way that harped on the lecherous end of polite-lecherous.

  ‘I’d like a small medium sherry, please.’ This time the important thing was to get it said clearly and quickly. To Jenny the pub was still men’s territory, and to shilly-shally over choosing what drink to have in one would have been inconsiderate as well as awkward.

  The man did a speedier bow and went off.

  ‘He can’t be like that all the time,’ said Jenny.

  ‘He’s a cockney, you see,’ said Patrick. ‘Or would claim to be if challenged. He thinks that sort of thing’s expected of him. He also thinks he’s being funny. I mean amusing. At least I hope to God that’s what he thinks he’s being.’

  ‘Probably the nudge-nudge stuff is him being amusing too. Or he thinks it’s expected of him.’

  ‘Yeah. No, of course not. I mean only partly. Anyway, you know where you are with a bastard like that.’

  ‘Oh, good. A very funny chap came to the door just as I was leaving.’

  ‘Funnier than this chap?’

  ‘No, this was a very funny chap. You know, peculiar. Not a nasty piece of work but peculiar.’

  Patrick signalled to Cyril for another White Shield. ‘Peculiar,’ he said, remembering his own use of the word a couple of minutes before. ‘What, you mean … one of them?’

  ‘What? Oh, you mean a … I honestly don’t know, I didn’t think of it then. He could have been, I imagine. He certainly had a very peculiar manner.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Well, that was just it, he didn’t seem at all clear what he wanted. He said he’d like to ask me a few things if I didn’t mind, he was polite enough, because he’s just moving into the end flat, the one at the
far end. So I asked him in, and then he couldn’t seem to think of anything he wanted to know, and he seemed …’

  Jenny could not express for the moment what else her visitor had seemed. Patrick said, ‘Did he mention a wife?’

  ‘No. No, nothing about that, I’d have remembered. Nor a girl-friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was an odd little silence. ‘Did he give his name?’

  ‘Yes, but I forgot it straight away, although I remember thinking it couldn’t be right. Anyway he said he’d be back. I thought he might be a bit off his head at one point but then he got all right again.’

  ‘Never mind, perhaps he’ll take a turn for the worse next time.’

  When Cyril brought the drinks he asked Jenny if she had come to live round there, and was told more or less willingly about the flat (the maisonette, actually, said Patrick) in that new block of five over those shops in Lower Ground next to that pretty little square of garden on the corner, and told her in return that the missis was out shopping at the moment but would be only too delighted to give her the benefit of her local knowledge any time, but meanwhile the dry cleaners in the block had tried to get away with losing his topcoat for him last winter, the seven or eight minutes on the 159 down to the old-style butcher’s in Kennington Lane was very much vaut le voyage, and the Irish shop two along from the garage stayed open all Sunday for if she ran out of baked beans or fags. In between he asked if she had any children and was told no, or according to Patrick not yet. All this and much more was exchanged while Cyril unremittingly made, handed out and dealt with the money for four rounds of drinks, including three Pimm’s complete with slices of cucumber-peel, cocktail cherry and sprig of borage, and served three tasty-looking cold snacks backed up with sauce and pickle. He operated the till without looking at where his fingers were going, like a concert pianist.

  When this part was over, Cyril’s manner changed. He stared at Patrick and took his time about pointing a finger at him and wagging it rather harrowingly from the knuckle. His words, when they came, seemed inevitable, preordained. ‘Right … now don’t tell me … let me guess.’

  Patrick hated letting anybody do that where he was concerned, which he was obviously going to be, but he could think of no way of preventing it this time without courting Cyril’s marlinspike, so he frowned and muttered to himself as if he was adding up expenses in his head.

  After rotating his finger for a space, still from the knuckle, and keeping the opposite eye closed, Cyril eventually said, ‘Erm … advertising!’

  ‘What about it?’ said Patrick, though he knew, and wondered what occupation he might reasonably have hoped his face fitted: test pilot, brain surgeon, tennis seed, major poet – no perhaps not that one. But bugger it anyway.

  ‘All right … Public relations.’

  ‘I think if you don’t mind – ’

  ‘Television then,’ said Cyril in a spirit of good-humoured indulgence. ‘On the production side. Oh, okay, I give up.’

  But he still waited to hear. With Jenny there Patrick had to say, ‘Actually I’m in publishing,’ and say it sportingly too.

  ‘Publishing.’ There was another pause. ‘That’s books, is it? Or not?’

  ‘It’s books. And a quarterly magazine. And now you mustn’t let us keep you from your regulars.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jenny.

  ‘II n’a pas de quoi, chérie.’

  ‘And don’t tell me he was just trying to be pleasant,’ said Patrick when he and she had sat down in the little alcove under the window.

  ‘Well, making conversation. Passing the time of day.’

  ‘If you’re right I must remember not to get into a serious discussion with him.’

  ‘You said you knew where you were with a bastard like that. And why shouldn’t he be interested in what you do for a living?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded that, but it wasn’t that. What he was interested in was joshing me along.’

  ‘What’s joshing you along?’

  ‘Pissing on me so I couldn’t hit back.’

  ‘Oh, Patrick, people aren’t thinking about you the whole time. And what would he want to piss on you for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, he … Come on, do you think I look like somebody in advertising?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it. Now you come to mention it I suppose I do, quite. I mean you do. Dynamic. Thrusting. You know, all that. He was paying you a compliment, or trying to.’

  ‘You cheeky little bag. And was he buggery trying to pay me a compliment. He was buttering you up and being charming to you and pissing on me at the same time. Thinking he was being charming. Jesus, perhaps he really was. I’ve come across that technique before.’

  ‘And used it too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Patrick looked amused and irritated in exactly equal parts and said nothing. She saw he had arranged his hair in a slightly new way to disguise his bits of baldness. Given the right approach she was sure she could have convinced him that things like that made no difference to her without at the same time leading him to believe she took no notice of how he looked. It was difficult. She no longer went round saying to herself he was the best-looking man she had ever met, but she could not remember having stopped thinking so. By now it was simply impossible to judge. Rather like the way she went on thinking he was the most wonderful man in the world long after she was quite sure he was not. After years of trying she had never managed to put the matter to herself more satisfactorily than that.

  When he spoke again she gave a little start, before realising he had only been quiet for about five seconds. It was amazing how much could go through a person’s head in that time.

  ‘Unless you feel like another of those I suggest we move. With Saturday shopping there may be a bit of traffic and I want to be there on the dot.’

  Such a simple thing to say, but something cold or bored about the way he said it gave her thoughts a new turn. Their not very long conversation was very much the kind they were always having when nothing of much importance was going on. Jenny kept finding she was in the middle of enjoying it when something one or other of them said, something gone by too fast to be quite taken in, would strike her as not right, out of key, off the track, however you put it. She remembered how Patrick had looked that time when Elsie Carter, one of her colleagues at the school in Hertfordshire, had told them there was one thing at any rate that had to be said about them as a married couple: they were obviously such terrific pals. Well, a possible way of putting that was that he looked as if he had suddenly realised just what must have been wrong with those Portuguese oysters he had eaten for lunch, so perhaps he too wondered sometimes about how things really were between them. But then it was fair to say that Elsie had never quite taken to Patrick.

  They crossed the wide, bustling street. It was a sunny morning in early May and lots of people, like the landlord’s wife from the pub, were out shopping, or anyway out. With nothing on their heads and showing off their bright clothes they strode along the pavements with incredible confidence, altogether different from the eyes-down amble she remembered from home. The ones with small children seemed to be half pulling them along, leaning over to talk to them in a brisk way. Jenny was always being asked how she liked living south of the river, and was usually hearing how that part was going up in the world these days before she had had time to say it was fine with her, and rather like north of the river, and after only a couple of years in the town she still had a great deal to notice and find and compare.

  North of the river was where they were going to have lunch, or rather brunch, going to have it more specifically at Simon Giles’s new house in Hampstead. Simon was the managing director of Hammond & Sutcliffe Ltd where Patrick worked.

  When telling Jenny of the invitation on the Monday, Patrick had not seemed easy in his mind. ‘I don’t like the sound of it. Apparently there are going to be a lot of bleeding poets there. Where am I supposed to fit in with a shower like that? He must want something. You haven’t been there yet, have you?’