his best to what?’
‘Well, to make you feel at home or something of the sort.’
‘If he’d wanted to do that he could have asked us to meet somebody a bit more interesting than his bloody lordship and his piss-artist elephant’s-bum-faced four-eyed boiler of a wife. Oh, and that asshole of an Italian who never opened his mouth except to put food and drink into it. Not that I wanted him to talk. No, poor old Jimmie was showing me and you and Mrs Jimmie and possibly others that there was life in the old dog yet. Some hopes. By the look of him he hasn’t had it up for half a century.’
‘I reckoned he asked those people to impress us with his aristocratic connections.’
‘Fancy that. Well, all I can say is he didn’t impress me.’ Louise spoke sulkily rather than with any heat.
‘Nor me, actually.’
‘If you’re right about him wanting to impress us he’s even more pathetic than I thought.’
‘Yes, I think there is something rather pathetic about poor old Jimmie.’
‘I don’t mean that sort of pathetic. And you must be careful of poor old Jimmie. He’s bad news.’
‘I’m sorry I inflicted him and the rest of them on you.’
‘That’s all right, it was quite an interesting experience considered as an item of social anthropology. A chance to see the British class system in action.’
‘You must mean in inaction. Decline from whatever it may once have been.’
‘Christ, Gordon, after that display?’
‘All … bangs and coloured lights. A hundred years ago, even up to 1939, the thing really had some teeth in it. There was an empire to run and a comparatively barbaric peasantry and proletariat to be kept down. What’s left of either of them today? The, the remnants of that class system operate in the other direction. Dukes and what-not complain that their titles hold them back, get in the way of their careers in banking or photography or whatever it may be. The British class system, as you quaintly call it, is –’
‘I know, it’s dead, which up to a point is a good thing, but beyond that point isn’t so good. Don’t go on about all those dukes who can’t get on in banking because they’ve admitted they’re dukes unless you want me to burst out crying. But anyhow, please don’t lecture at me.’
‘I didn’t mean to. But you must admit things have come to a pretty pass when you get someone like Jimmie Fane hobnobbing with an Italian count who never learnt to speak English. Even fifty years ago one wouldn’t –’
‘Fuck fifty years ago, and it’s time you realized there’s nothing I must do, all right.’ Louise sighed and stretched. ‘Except now I must be going and things like that.’
‘Oh darling, do stay a little longer.’
Gordon got to his feet as Louise had done and grappled with her briefly in an amatory way, at the end of which she disengaged herself without hostility and telephoned for a minicab. Within a few minutes she was being borne away from his flat towards the rather more commodious one she shared with a girl associate. It might have mildly surprised the Fanes to hear that, although the younger couple had certainly done the deed of darkness together, as Jimmie sometimes expressed it, they actually lived apart. Whatever the merits of this arrangement, at times like the present he was more strongly aware of its drawbacks. He doubted if Louise ever felt like that. When the subject of literal cohabitation came up, which it seldom did now, she was liable to say something like she wanted to keep her independence. He had given up wondering what she meant by that and had never asked her how many other chaps she was keeping her independence from.
This apparent tolerance testified not to self-confidence but to unwillingness to imperil their present arrangement, which at times unlike the present suited him well enough. He asked himself occasionally whether he was suited to live with any woman at all. He had so lived in the past, up to and including the point of being married for nearly six years, not counting the interval between his wife’s departure and their divorce. She had departed with a man who worked in a government office on something to do with pensions and who, according to report, was three or four inches shorter and substantially younger than he. These factors had not enhanced Gordon’s self-esteem. His wife had once accused him of not knowing how to help a woman to feel pleased with life or even how to have a good time himself, and quite often and more succinctly of being hopeless. Perhaps he just had a low sex-drive. It was true, to be sure, that he thought or at any rate talked about sex less than his mates seemed to.
An internal twinge smartly followed by an eructation reminded him of the unpleasant wine he had earlier drunk and so of its provider. Someone had told him that Jimmie Fane was one of the most money-conscious buggers in London, but had not reckoned on a demonstration of this quality at his own table. Gordon wished more than ever that he had managed to get a glimpse of the label on that bottle of red. Moving now towards the corner where he kept his typewriter, he thought of what Jimmie’s wife had intimated about the financial dangers of taking him out to lunch, but then she had probably been talking for effect, to impress him with how wild and free and not to be thought of as stuffy and middle-aged she was. However, discussing Jimmie with her was bound to have its points of interest.
Now, by the window that overlooked the gloomy suburban park, he put a sheet of inferior paper into his typewriter and got to work on roughing out his curriculum vie-tee for Jimmie. Experience led him to resist the impulse to get it over in one go and try for a fair copy straight off. Wincing with boredom, then, and x-ing out every other phrase, he set down the facts of his London birth, his sound but beyond all question non-posh schooling, his minimally creditable, non-Oxbridge college course and ‘good’ final grading. None of this, he felt, would impress or even interest any sentient being but it had to be there in its entirety. Couple of years’ drudgery as sub-editor on Barnsley Echo or equivalent before lucky breakthrough to features desk, with special reference to culture, on London daily. Slow and limited ascent to books section on Sunday newspaper. Principal articles. Contributions to publications, to collections. First man to land on Mars 1995, on Titan 1996. The last entry would not survive retyping, but had been necessary to set down in order to ward off terminal coma. Something did that job, anyway, though far from having shown the least sign of private amusement he looked a little guilty at sinking into facetiousness, and hastily x-ed out the offending space fiction with the shift-key down.
Soon he was retyping. A word-processor would have been quicker and the result perhaps more imposing, but Gordon had not got one of his own. Too expensive, he would say, and he had a sort of access to a machine in the office provided he had a good enough story and could persuade the editor’s secretary to let him use it. And this time there was the consideration that Jimmie would probably have learnt to tell apart a processor print-out and something run up on the old steam typewriter and, needless to say, would not have approved of anything in the former category. At the moment it was very likely not needful to say that he would have had no corresponding bias in favour of the latter. Having biases in favour of things, Gordon already suspected, was not something Jimmie was noted for, a trying characteristic in a biographee.
Challenged by somebody like Louise, Gordon would probably have stuck to self-interest, enlightened where possible, as by far his leading motive in writing about Jimmie. But in his mind he would freely admit that he hoped the result would do something more than advance his own career. He had not lied when he said earlier that he had recently reread The Escaped Prisoner, at least on the understanding that by ‘reread’ was meant something like ‘read through to the end with some respect having several years ago looked at the thing and found it intolerably complacent.’ The fuller text captured a youthful observation that the book was silent on critical issues like racial equality and equal rights for women. Well, that was roughly how he saw the matter in retrospect.
His transcription done, Gordon read through the page he had filled, trying to see what was there as a record of events and actions as well as a mere piece of typing with possible errors. Quite soon he stopped reading it and just checked it for literals. As a narrative of the better part of