One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN BOOKS
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.
“THE BEVAN TICKET,” I said, “has expired, and will have to be renewed.”
The middle-aged woman put a hand to her mitre-like hat and frowned across the counter at me. After some time, she said: “Mrs. Bevan said she just wanted one like the one she had out last time.”
I was used to this sort of thing, as indeed to every sort of thing that could go on here. “The Bevan ticket,” I repeated in the same tone, or lack of one, “has expired, and will have to be renewed.”
My gaze, slightly filmed by afternoon drowsiness, swam round the square, high room, fixing idly on the etching, or daguerreotype, or whatever it was, of Lord Beaconsfield’s face which hung over the Hobbies and Handicrafts Section. Lord Beaconsfield had had some connexion with the founding of the Library, which took place a long time ago. At the moment his likeness was glowing in a cloudy beam of late spring sunshine, and looked as if it wanted to be sick but knew that this would be wrong. I nodded imperceptibly to it.
“She couldn’t get in herself this afternoon, you see, Mr. Lewis,” the woman was saying; “she’s had to go down the Food Office because of her boy, so I said I’d take her book and change it while I was changing mine, like. Quite often I do it for her.”
I allowed a pause to elapse. From the dozen or so other borrowers present came sounds that had grown familiar to me; the squeaking of shoe-leather, a fairly loud grumble of voices, the thud of a book replaced on the wrong shelf or dropped. Quite a long way away to my left a dates-tamp thumped intermittently. I wetted the ring finger of my right hand and smoothed the place next to the parting where my hair was just beginning to go. Then I swayed my long thin body over the rows of tickets, taking my time about bringing my face nearer the woman’s. My face is a round and rubicund one, and a girl I once knew used to say it looked cheerful, but that was before I got this job. Anyway, I now moved it forward, making a great effort not to blink my eyes, which are grey. They began to smart a little, but I’ve often thought that not blinking them makes me look more formidable, and I could do with that. It doesn’t seem to work when I try it in the mirror, but you couldn’t expect it to, I suppose. I stood facing this woman, keeping absolutely still, as if I were waiting for her to scream or faint. Nothing happened apart from the collapse of a loaded shelf in the Geography Section, which one of the other assistants was rearranging that day. Weighing my words, I said: “The Bevan ticket has expired, and will have to be renewed.”
“But you’ve always let me do it in the past, Mr. Lewis. I’ve never had any difficulty about it before. And Mr. Jenkins, is it?—he always let me do it too.”
“Mrs. Edwards,” I said compassionately, “have you been listening to what I’ve been saying?”
She looked timidly down at her shopping-basket, which was stuffed with goodies for her luckless family. “No,” she said.
Just then young Dilys Jones, a blonde girl of sixteen or seventeen, came into the Lending Department from the entrance-hall. Her face was flushed and she was picking at the buttons of her pink woollen cardigan. She said in some agitation: “Mr. Lewis, can I speak to you a minute?”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Edwards, will you please?” I waited until an expression of mature calm had had time to diffuse itself over my face—I was on surer ground here, pretty certainly, than with the non-blinking trick—before I turned to Dilys. “Now, Dilys, what’s the matter?”
“Please, Mr. Lewis, there’s a lady come into Reference to make an inquiry and she’ve been terribly rude. Awful, she’ve been, Mr. Lewis, honest.”
I moved another few feet away from Mrs. Edwards and dropped my voice. With people like Dilys, the term ‘rude’ tends to get used in situations where indecency, rather than insolence, is in question. “What on earth’s she been doing?” I muttered.
“Terribly rude she was. Kept on asking me about a book about some old-fashioned thing, something about costumes or something, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying really, and she kept going on and on at me, and she got proper insulting, man—Mr. Lewis, so I came and …”
“What sort of lady is she?”
“Aw, well-dressed like. Plenty of money, I’d say.”
“Yes, I know the kind of lady.”
“Used to having her own way, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Why didn’t you put Mr. Jenkins on to her?”
“Couldn’t find him, sorry.”
Dilys was good at not being able to find people, though she generally managed to get hold of me all right, as now. “Did you look in the cataloguing-room?” I asked. “Or round the Biography Section?”
I wondered for a moment why I was bothering to prolong this conversation. In the first place, no doubt, it was because Dilys was a girl, a fact not to be lightly set aside. In the second place, it was because she was on the right side of the line dividing the attractive from the rest. Nice, that. What was in the third place, if there was a place so numbered? Oh, the usual thing, presumably: when nothing’s going on or likely to start going on, which is a lot of the time, I start practising certain poses and tones and phrases, for no very clear reason. Anyway, I often used to behave like that in those days—it’s last year I’m talking of. There must have been something to do with vanity in it, but vanity, if you train it with enough devotion, can be the best defence against boredom.
So I stood there now all willowy, one lot of fingers drumming away like fury on the counter, until Dilys had at last stopped listing the main stages in her search for Ieuan Jenkins. I didn’t mind helping her anyway, and said with quiet confidence: “Don’t you worry, Dilys, now. I’ll be glad to look after it for you,” and, raising my voice to an official kind of tone: “Very well then, Miss Jones, if you’ll attend to this lady here I’ll see to that other matter immediately.”
Trying to look preoccupied and earnest, and wishing the chief could see me looking it, I couldn’t help feeling a glow of triumph at having got rid of Mrs. Edwards. I opened the counter and went out, grinning tensely now and slapping my shoes on the dark-brown hummocky lino. The place was starting to empty, thank God, as tea-time approached, thank God. Two slow old men came out of the Newspaper Room and turned towards the main doors. They looked poor as well as the rest of it, and so reminded me of how poor I was, especially for a man with a £6 11s. 5d. electricity bill to pay before the end of the month (discount 3s. 3d., but much too late for that now). Why had the Glamorganshire Electricity Board got to have that money before the end of the month? If they’d owed me money, I could wait, oh yes, I’d got plenty of time, see, no hurry about that at all. But whenever I owed them money they had to have it immediately, straight away, now. Why was that?
Distraction was at hand: a female student from the local University College crossed my path some yards ahead and my glance dropped involuntarily to her legs. Then it climbed again, voluntarily, to the swing door of the Reference Department. I injected into my demeanour a purposeful air that owed a little, I confess, to the striding, sneering hero of that week’s main feature at the Pavilion. You wanted to see me? Well, now’s your big chance, lady. Siddown, will you? All right, shoot.
I put out my tongue at a painting of a former mayor, a tiny little wizened fiend of an auctioneer, which hung in the entrance-hall. Then the memory of Dilys’s description made another and more genuine sneer twitch at my mouth. Well-dressed, eh? Not much difficulty then, eh, in picking her out from the other users of Aberdarcy Public Library. The colloquy with Mrs. Edwards had got me into exactly the right mood to deal with this person, whoever she might be.
Who she might be, and in addition who she was, remained obscure when I saw a woman of thirty or thirty-five swing round and face me with an impatient movement. She was standing by the counter behind which we filed some, but not by any means all, of the weekly reviews. Yes, I knew the kind of lady all right. “Can I help you?” I asked. I tried, successfully I think, to suggest how very unlikely, all things considered, this was. My lethargy had vanished, giving place to an alertness that seemed disproportionate in the circumstances. I felt nervous too.
She looked up at me quickly with wide dark eyes and checked whatever she’d been going to say. Her frown lifted. “Yes, I should think you probably can.” Her voice, deep, educated and English, reinforced my suspicions of her. “It’s really quite a simple matter.”
I noticed now that she was attractive in a square-shouldered, taut-bloused way, with skin the colour of the top of the milk and hair the colour of tar. But I said with what I hoped was irritating deliberation: “I’ll do my best, naturally. I thought I gathered a few moments ago, though, from what one of our junior assistants was telling me, that you’d encountered a certain amount of difficulty in establishing just what it is you need.”
Hesitating again, she smiled, showing china-like teeth firmly clenched. “Well, I can see that must have been partly my fault. I just couldn’t seem to make myself … Oh, by the way, my name’s Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams.”
This was one of the biggest Aberdarcy names, and hearing it pronounced by one who owned it made me feel even less confident. But since it was clearly my political duty to seem unimpressed, I just nodded my head a little bit.
“My husband’s on the Council, you know. Perhaps you’ve had some contact with him? He’s on the Libraries Committee.”
“No, I’ve never come across him.”
“Oh, pity.” I had to admire the way it didn’t put her off. “Let’s see, you’re Mr. …?”
“Lewis.” I returned her stare.
“What I was actually looking for, Mr. Lewis, was a book or books on the history of costume, preferably with plenty of coloured illustrations. They’ve asked me to design the costumes for the next production of the Darcy Players.” The mention of these, a local troupe of amateur actors keen as mustard on culture, wrung from me no cry of inarticulate wonder, in fact no sound at all. She went on: “The setting is medieval Wales, you see, and we want the things to be as authentic as we can get them, naturally.” She put her head on one side so that a lock of the black hair, which she wore long, fell across the angle of her jaw, and a black pendant-earring swung to and fro. “I wonder if you have any suggestions, Mr. Lewis?”
I had one or two I could have brought up, but they had no immediate bearing on the matter in hand, so I just said: “Wouldn’t the University College Library be a more likely place to inquire, Mrs. Williams?” and wished I hadn’t said it in my cut-glass, Cardiff-announcer accent.
“Yes, well theoretically of course I quite agree with you, but they were terribly tiresome about not letting …”
I let her ramble on; three years in this job had made me an adept at letting that happen. I thought for a bit about her air of authority, and wondered how recently it had been acquired. It derived from her husband’s position, presumably, and the odds were that that too had been gained since the war. Still, that didn’t matter, did it, now it was no longer true, thank God, that it took three generations to make a gentleman? I yawned, and, when the momentary deafness had passed, understood this gentlewoman to say that she’d have had to sign on for a three-year course at the College in order to borrow a book from its Library, which, as she put it, “would have been just too much.”
This declaration, rounded off with a slight laugh, had come out with enough volume to make an unshaven, wild-eyed student look up from Sight and Sound and old Parry, a retired Grammar School master famed in his day for almost continuous pauses when conducting a class, lift his shaggy head and stare with emphatic bafflement at the SILENCE PLEASE notice above the periodical racks.
Very quietly indeed, I said: “I see. Had you thought of trying the subject-catalogues here?”
“I’m ashamed to say I’m rather a fool with catalogues and all that kind of thing. I’d really been hoping to find someone here who might be prepared to help me out personally.”
She looked suddenly up at me again from beneath her dark, rather thick eyebrows, and it occurred to me that it was rather silly, even though it might also be rather fun, to be hostile to this woman. Furthermore, I now realised, my hostility, such as it was, grew not out of any righteous feeling for Dilys, but merely from my familiar embarrassed defensiveness at talking to a member of the anglicised upper classes, a thing I’m supposed to have got out of now. I realised too that it was no use hiding from myself the fact that I quite liked the look of this particular member of those classes, especially the daunting carriage of her head, complete with the earrings, and the hair of course, and the set of her shoulders in the black tailor-made costume or whatever it was. I decided to stop being the Pavilion hero, or at least to see what I could do with him in another aspect.
Screwing up my eyes a little, I said: “Well, I wouldn’t mind having a go at that. Between ourselves, though, I warn you I’m not much of a catalogue expert either. Would you mind waiting a moment while I go and have a look?” I dropped the Cardiff announcer too and used the pure Welsh ‘o’ in ‘moment’ and ‘go’.
“Not in the least; thank you very much.”
We eyed each other for another second or two, before I went out. Yes, I thought to myself, very fine indeed; no question at all about that. Strong and active, good at leisured pastimes like tennis and golf instead of just joining in them to conform, probably a furiously reckless car-driver. Some things about her appearance and mannerisms seemed to indicate that a certain basic human activity never entered her thoughts, others that it never left them. Perhaps they were really the same things all the time. I reflected, as sometimes before, that women were a thing in themselves that had made a profound and not easily forgotten impression on me. Well, that was life, wasn’t it? Yes, and it was also true that this little representative of that noteworthy sex was a little devil when she was roused, no doubt. That’ll do, Lewis, that’ll do, thank you. Give it a rest, can’t you, Lewis? There could hardly be more and better reasons why I shouldn’t let my thoughts wander, or rather sprint, in that direction. And besides, in the last few weeks I’d been enjoying myself no end, practising the role of the truly strong man, the man superior to things like sex. Oh, and money too, of course.
The subject-index gave nothing of any conceivable use under Kostyoom, Dres or Kloadhing (the reason for its being in ‘reformed’ spelling is something I still hope to lay bare some day), except for a history of underclothing which might help to soften the rigours of an evening duty or two. But, wait a minute, I was superior to that kind of thing. I firmly refrained from making a note of the shelf-mark, and began humming like a fool to drive the catalogue page-number out of my head.
Back in the Reference Department, I found the woman frowning short-sightedly over The New Statesman. Too vain for glasses, I decided as I made my report, and found all my suspicions reviving when she said “Oh dear” with a dropping, ladylike inflexion.
“Well, what’s the next step?” she went on. “If there is one.”
“Yes, there is one. We can go and see Mr. Jenkins.”
“And who might Mr. Jenkins be?”
“What he is, among other things, is the man who sees to the inter-library exchange system. We can find out from him if we can get hold of something you might want from somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” She pronounced it ‘somehwere’, like an elocutionist.
“Somewhere else, yes. From another library.”
“Ah, that sounds a bit more hopeful, doesn’t it?”
“Along here.”
“It’s very good of you to go to all this trouble.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Why not? Why wouldn’t you say that?”
“It’s nicer doing this than being on the lending counter.”
She laughed and said “Mm” several times, indicating complete familiarity with the miseries of being on the lending counter, then began to walk with tapping high-heels along the gloomy corridor I had brought her to. She looked about with the irritated wonder of one being shown a very ancient and boring ruin. We came to two adjacent doors. One of these led to a room ostensibly dedicated to book-repairs, but nobody used to do very much of that in my time, and the place was actually three-parts full of junk, the peculiar detritus, almost but never quite totally useless, thrown up by a large public library. I opened the other door and went in. This was where Jenkins catalogued the non-fiction. Nobody had been cataloguing the fiction since the outbreak of war, and after the war nothing had happened to make starting again seem desirable. Here too, there was plenty of junk, much of it powdered with dust and plaster, but no Jenkins. I found that I was glad about that.
Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams had followed me in. Although her expression didn’t change, I could tell that the room seemed squalid to her, as it did to me seeing it through her eyes. I felt ashamed, as if the place were my bedroom, and said challengingly: “He’s not here.”
Looking into the corners, she agreed, and edged past a rusty cabinet. “Do you work in here, Mr. Lewis?”
“No, thank God,” I said with emotion. “This is the cataloguing-room. I’m nothing to do with that.”
“Why ‘thank God’? Is it such an unpleasant job?”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but … we’ve been up against a lot of difficulties, one way and another.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Shortage of staff principally, I imagine?”
“Well, no, not so much that at all …” When I tried to define these difficulties, which I’d grown to think of as a kind of immemorial and irremediable heritage, I found that they tended to recede into a kind of Celtic mist—which is where a lot of things of that sort are to be presumed hidden. But I soon forgot all about that, though I went on talking, when I realised how close to this woman the smallness and littered state of the room forced me to stand. I had one elbow on top of the rusty cabinet and she was leaning against the edge of a table with her arms spread behind her. When she asked a question I noticed that she spoke with her teeth together but with her lips moving very freely. This gave her voice a harsh resonant quality which I thought suited her looks.
There we were, then, started on one of those conversations which vanish from the mind before they’re even over. After a minute or so, she moved her hands back a little on the table-top so that her body and thighs were in a straight line. I felt an old and hateful excitement beginning to stir in me, the kind which, although mingled with apprehension, has the property of soon casting off any hateful ingredient. In the preceding few years I’d spent a good deal of time and energy in courting and avoiding that excitement. At the moment it was limited by the shame I felt in my ill-fitting tweed suit. This had apparently been made to measure for an under-nourished gorilla, with immense shoulders, long arms and a tiny abdomen. That morning, moreover, I’d noticed a curious pink stain on one trouser-leg—my knee it was, waiting for a chance to run for a bus or something and force its way through to the light of day.
The woman listened to me coolly. She was no doubt merely engaged in concealing the boredom she must feel. In a Councillor’s wife, just as in an assistant librarian, the efficient concealment of that emotion wasn’t an unexpected skill. The only thing, in fact, which was at all out of the ordinary, which came anywhere near justifying the half-shuffle I made towards her under the pretence of easing my stance, was the way she was leaning on the table. And if she really was bored, why didn’t she go away? I repeated this query to myself when she moved again, this time pulling her shoulders back. Dear, dear. I wanted to shut my eyes: there are some things a man doesn’t like to see. Was this attitude merely a habit of hers, something she didn’t notice herself doing? Unlikely, in a woman of her age. I sweated a little, or at any rate felt convinced that I ought to, and started praying for and against an interruption.
This was at once provided. In the middle of a particularly vapid and halting sentence of mine about some particularly soporific, and indeed largely fictitious, detail of library organisation, the opening door rapped me admonitorily on the elbow. While I rubbed this and the woman grinned, a man in the late forties with a dark red face and thick lips came by degrees into the room. Every straight grey hair in his abundant crop seemed the same length, making his head look as if it belonged to a little furry animal or shaving-brush. Seeing a strange woman, he dropped his head and hunched his shoulders, then looked at me.
“Hallo, Ieuan,” I said. “This is Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams. Mr. Jenkins.”
While she nodded and smiled, Ieuan Jenkins moistened his lips audibly. “How do you do,” he said in a hoarse high-pitched voice with a strong North Walian accent; not an imitation, but the way he habitually talked. “Well now … hallo, John,” he added.
“This is really your department, Ieuan,” I said, quickly deciding to withdraw from Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams and her inquiry. A patrol encountering a vastly superior enemy force should avoid contact and retire at once before suffering any casualties. “This lady has a query about a possible exchange. I told her you were the man to deal with it, eh? So I’ll leave it to you to …”
“Don’t go yet, John,” Jenkins said in tones of entreaty. “Must have a word with you, old man …” He looked about as if he expected a sound-proof barrier to spring up round himself and me.
“Of course.” I brought out a pencil and handed it and a pad to the woman. “If you could jot down the details while I …”
“Why, certainly,” she said with obtruded charm, starting to write.
In the corridor, at the other end of which some sort of juvenile disturbance was going on, I said to Jenkins: “All right, Ieuan: shoot.”
“I beg your pardon?”
It was one of his favourite things, pretending not to understand slang. Although English wasn’t his mother-tongue he guarded it jealously against all innovations (which he stigmatised as ‘incorrect’) by letters to the South Wales press, and, once, to the Observer. Since I know a little about linguistics I often used to attack Jenkins on this point, and at any other time would have gone for him over the ‘shoot’ business, forced him to admit he knew what I meant. But I knew what he’d got me out here for, and wasn’t looking forward to it, so I only said: “Sorry. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
He hunched himself up again. “About the job,” he began submissively.
“The job? How do you mean?” It was gross time-gaining.
“Aw, John, you know perfectly well, boy. What else have we been talking about for the last month or more?” Submissiveness laid aside, his voice pealed down the re-echoing passage and mingled with the juvenile disturbance. He’s always been a great one for the hwyl—you know, the old Welsh oratorical fire and the rest of it.
“Oh, you mean old Webster’s job? What about it?” Webster, the Sub-Librarian, was going to Leicester as Chief Librarian in a few months, and the vacancy had recently been advertised.
After beginning to repeat my last phrase in a half-scream, Jenkins checked himself and turned liquid eyes on me. “All right, John,” he said quietly; “no need to tell me if you don’t want to. No need to discuss it at all.”
“I’m sorry, Ieuan, I wasn’t trying to shut you up. What do you want to know?”
“Just whether you’ve sent in an application for the post, or whether you intend to do so or not. You were going to think it over. You were going to let me know, if you recollect.”
“Yes, I know, Ieuan. Well … I talked it over with Jean, and we decided that I should apply, because after all it’s up to me to have a shot at anything that …”
“Yes yes. Quite so, John. Thank you.”
“I mean I shouldn’t be crabbing your chances, because with my lack of experience I’m not very likely to …”
“Say no more. That’s all I wanted to know.”
“I’m only putting in for it so as to show them I’m …”
“All right, John, all right, boy. I’ve heard all I …”
“Just for practice when …”
Jenkins raised his hand like one quelling applause. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like being a nuisance in this way. I get worried about it and make a fuss, I don’t want to embarrass you. But you know how important that extra cash would be to me. Bear with me when I fly off the handle, won’t you?”
“Well, of course, Ieuan, I absolutely understand. There’s no need to feel …”
Long overdue, Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams came into view again from the cataloguing-room. “I’ve put down all the details I can think of, Mr. Jenkins,” she said briskly in her clenched-teeth voice. “Including my address and telephone-number. Do get in touch with me, won’t you? as soon as anything comes up. It is—rather important.” Saying this with insulting mock-humility, she relinquished the pencilled sheet into his care.
“Righto, then, Mrs. … Thank you. Thank you, John. How’s the wife?”
This question seemed so far off the point and so unnecessary—he and I had already exchanged words a couple of times that afternoon, and would no doubt exchange more before we parted—that I wondered whether he might have felt himself called upon to spoil what he might think were my chances with this woman. He was a great advocate of things like the sanctity of the home.
“She’s very well, thank you, Ieuan,” I said loudly and slowly, and added loudly and slowly: “So are both of the children.”
“Good, good,” he said. “Well, thank you.” He nodded at the two of us and moved quickly away, shutting the door of his earth behind him.
The woman raised her black eyebrows at me as if in commentary upon the oddity of my colleagues.
“Everything satisfactory?” I asked.
“Well, I rather hope it will be.”
We moved together towards the entrance-hall. I felt I was walking in an absurdly unnatural way, like a schoolboy on the stage for the first time in his life. Did I always swing my arms as if I were carrying a pair of empty buckets? Surely not. And what did I suppose I was going to say next?
Perhaps under the spell of the frenzy of gratitude just vented by Jenkins, she did some thanking as we halted in the entrance-hall. “It’s been nice chatting to you,” she went on. “I’ll ring up next week, if I may, to find out what stage things have got to. Or would that be too soon?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Looking over her shoulder, I could see an enormous car, of amphisboenic appearance, parked at the kerb outside the entrance. It must be hers, the lucky little thing. There was a slight pause. “I’m sure we’ll fix you up all right, Mrs. Williams. Good afternoon.”
“Oh, goodbye, Mr. Lewis. Until next week.”
“Yes, goodbye.”
I watched her trot masterfully down the steps and approach her car, then I went back to the Lending Department. The obvious expensiveness of the car had managed, like most things that week, to remind me again of the electricity bill. It was very rude indeed to send me a Final Notice, all in red like that, as if they doubted my intention of paying at all. And how did they mean, Final Notice? I’d only had one other. Wasn’t it ‘incorrect’, from the Jenkins point of view, to use Final except as the last of three or more? Perhaps I could fight them in court on that issue. Yes, if I didn’t mind losing.
The encounter with Mrs. Thing-Williams had made it too late for me to slip out for a cup of tea. Life was returning to normal, I perceived, a perception substantially reinforced when, immediately inside the Lending arena, I found myself confronted by a woman who could have been, and perhaps actually was, the twin of Mrs. Edwards the Bevan ticket, and who, like her, ‘knew’ me. This one wore a smaller and less episcopalian hat. She said in a blurred voice: “Have you got a nice book, Mr. Lewis?”
“Hundreds of them,” I said reassuringly, and pushed past one of the juniors to a set of shelves behind the counter. Though I was sincerely looking forward to the dialogue which now impended, it was rather terrible to know in such detail what lines it would follow.
On these shelves we kept about two hundred books of the kind technically known as romances. Most of them were ordinary ‘light’ romances, but a couple of dozen at one end made various untenable claims to literary merit. This two hundred, the composition of which changed only when rebinding necessitated the withdrawal of the odd volume and the calling-up of a reserve from the open shelves, used to supply the entire literary needs of half-a-dozen times the number of housewives, office girls, shop girls and schoolgirls. I sometimes wondered how this could be, and then how it had originally come about, and then what people had done before it came about, but now, after a long spell of duty, a debilitating encounter with a moneyed person and a missed tea, I only took down a book at random and handed it to the deutero-Mrs. Edwards.
“Have I read this one?” she began by asking—a popular query, this, and spoken in the tone of high-level business executive to confidential secretary.
“No,” I said firmly.
After a searching, don’t-lie-to-me glance, she turned over the pages doubtfully and inattentively, then stared hard at the lettering on the spine. “Who’s it by?” she asked at length.
“A very good author.”
“Not too light it isn’t, I hope?”
Pursing my lips and drawing in my breath, I shook my head like a hanging judge. “Not a bit too light.”
She fought back gamely: “Mm. Is it a good book?”
That finished her. Of all the questions borrowers could ask, this was my special favourite, and, in the clear insolent tones of Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams, I made my favourite answer: “You’ll like it.”
“WHAT SORT OF party is it going to be?” my wife asked.
“Drinking and talking, I expect,” I said, tucking my shirt into the trousers of my blue serge suit. This shone here and there in a good light, but it wasn’t a gorilla suit. “Bits of things to eat on sticks.”
“A standing-up do, you mean?”
“Yes, I should think so.”
“Didn’t she say anything about it over the phone?”
“No, not much; she sounded in a bit of a hurry.”
“I see.” She went on brushing her hair for the moment. “Do you think there’ll be many there?”
“No idea. I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I expect they’ll be all her classy friends, won’t they?”
“Probably.”
“Funny her asking us, really.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
But perhaps it was rather funny. Mention of Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams’s visit to the Library the previous week had drawn from my wife the information that she’d been at school with her. This wasn’t all that funny in itself, because everybody always seems to know everybody else in Aberdarcy, despite its size, and although this woman was now out of our class she apparently hadn’t always been so, having made what people in this part of the world still call a good marriage. What could justly be called funny was the promptness with which Mrs. Gruffydd-Williams, after I’d told her casually of this schooldays connexion, had come out with an invitation to this party. And then she’d rung off before I could tell her that her books, the reason for her having rung me up at all, hadn’t come in yet. Yes, it was funny. In the intervening couple of days I’d thought a good deal about it, but now I only said:
“Well, you know, I expect she wants to show herself off as the great Aberdarcy hostess entertaining all the local big shots. For my benefit because I’m a man, and for yours because she wants to show how much better she’s done for herself than you have since you were at school together. If I’d got all that money that’d be enough to make me invite two people to a party. And anyway, she hasn’t got to pay for it herself.”
“Clever, aren’t you? I don’t see why you’ve got to be like that about her. I think she was just being decent. These people are always throwing parties and things.” She put her hairbrush down and began fixing earrings into, or on to, her ears.
“Come on, get a move on. Mrs. Jenkins’ll be here in five minutes, and I don’t want to have to talk. …”
“All right, I’m ready now. You’re not.”
“You don’t look ready to me. I’ve only got to put my tie on.”
“Easy enough for you. Who had to put the kids to bed?”
“Agreed.” Hopping on the way, so as to draw the toecaps of my shoes across my trouser-calves, I went to the mirror and tied my tie. It was cleaner than the others because I wore it rarely, not liking it; apparently made of hessian, it had been a Christmas present from Jean’s mother.
“Don’t start playing the fool there, will you?” Jean said.
“Playing the fool? Me? Why should I play the fool? How do you mean?”
She turned round on her stool—I’d retreated to get my jacket—and glared at me, as far as somebody of habitual and almost comical amiability of expression, at least when animated, can be said to glare. “You know bloody well what I mean, now.”
“I don’t, honestly.”
“Yes you do. I’ve seen you with these upper-class types. Showing off all the time, honest Joe making no bones about what he thinks of them, that’s you.”
“No it isn’t, I never do that. You’re making it all up.”
“Yes you do. What about that Coll. dance when Prof. and the Principal and his wife came and talked to us? The way you went for Prinny’s wife over the election. You and your amateur theatricals: Karl Marx bloody Lewis.”
“I didn’t think you could remember that far back.”
“I can, though, and don’t you forget it. I’ve seen you doing the same thing with that yachting lot in the Red Dragon. You know what I mean. I’m not standing for it to-night.” Unwillingly, she started smiling. “I’ll walk out on you, honest.”
“All right, I won’t say a word.”
“Well, that’ll be a bit of a change, I must say.” She stood up. “Do I look all right?”
“Yes, of course, darling.” Someone with such abundant dark-red hair, a small thin full-lipped face with large dark-fringed eyes, and a slender figure was bound to look all right, especially with careful make-up. It was saddening to remember how lustrous, as well as abundant, her hair had been before she’d had the children; to know how necessary that careful make-up was and how angular her hips and shoulders had become. But I didn’t think of that as she stood there frowning and smiling, narrowing her eyes as always when staring at someone. Her face is one that I can never see without wanting to smile for one reason or another.
“Is the dress all right?” She turned right round, much too quickly for me to see the back. The front suggested that the best had been made out of something not very opulent.
“It’s fine. Haven’t you done something to it?”
“I’ve lowered the front a bit. Not too low, is it?”
“No, it’s just right.”
“You’d say if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you?”
“You bet I would. It’s bloody fine, really.”
She nodded, reassured by this use of her favourite word. “You look nice. You look very young.”
“No, do I really?”
“Yes, I said you did.”
“How do I?”
“I knew you were going to say that. I’ll tell you how when you’ve gone down and brought up a clean nappy off the kitchen table and the rubber knickers on the rack over the stove for me, there’s a good boy.”
“Oh, why is it always me?”
“Don’t shout, dull, you’ll wake him up. Go on, now, and I don’t want any of that swearing.”
When I returned with the baby’s stuff Jean was bending over the cot which stood in the far corner from the bed and was partly hidden from it by a kind of flying buttress common in this type of attic. As I approached, the baby drew in his breath with a grating but pleasantly drowsy sound, like a sawmill at work on a summer afternoon. I’d often had cause to resent his presence in this room, but it was hard to do so now, seeing him asleep in his recumbent-camel posture, one which recalled his mother’s attitude in front of the fire on cold days. No creature, I thought, could be so vehemently asleep as he was now, his buttocks in the air, his face pushed over to one side by the pillow. Knowing better than to try and turn him on to his side, Jean drew the blanket up to his shoulders. “Let’s go down,” she said.
In our sitting-room on the floor below, she said to me: “Now you’re to stick with me to-night, see? No wandering round seeing what you can pick up like you usually do.”
“Oh, I don’t usually do that, do I?”
“Well, no, not really, I suppose, but you won’t tonight, will you, darling?”
“Why, can’t you look after yourself?”
“Course I can, but I’ll be nervous with all that crowd.”
“All what crowd?”
“Aw, all the bloody horse-riders and yachters and golfers and aeroplane-fliers and what-not. You know ’em all right. I can never think what to say to those types.”
“Neither can I.”
“Don’t lie, now. I’ve never seen you at a loss for a word with anyone.”
“You’ll probably see me at a loss for one to-night.”
“I bet. But you’ll stick to me, won’t you?”
“Like a bloody leech, man.”
“That’s the spirit. What’s keeping Mrs. Jenkins, I wonder?”
“Is she late?”
“Must be. Go and get the clock from the kitchen, will you?”
I went into the room next door and took the clock off the dresser. On its face was painted a scene of animal husbandry in the United States, with steers and lariat-casting cowboys. One of these, in the left foreground, twitched stiffly to and fro in the saddle in time with the loud, clacking tick, to which a dull thumping periodically added itself.
“What is it?”
“Quarter past.”
“Isn’t it fast to-day?”
“Don’t think so. It was slow for the news at six.”
“She is late, then. Not like her.”
“No. Unless she’s had one of her turns.”
“She looked all right this morning out shopping. Still, they come on pretty suddenly when they do. You know, Ieuan really should get her to a specialist, John.”
“He has, I told you. The chap couldn’t find anything wrong with her.”
“I mean another one.”
“Well, he’s got her name down, but you know how long that’ll take, and he hasn’t got the cash to jump the queue. Bloody marvellous Health Service the Tories have …”
Before I was fairly launched on my diatribe, a knocking was heard at the street door beneath our window. An uproar at once set in, consisting of the raucous barking of a dog and what Jean and I knew to be a human voice. Both dog and voice were the property of a Mrs. Davies, who lived with her husband and grown-up son in the lower half of the house. They weren’t our landlords, a dispensation which had often cheered me. The house belonged in fact to an Englishwoman, a solicitor’s widow, who was characterised by two desires: that we should have as little contact as possible with the furniture and pay the rent in cash.
“Here she is,” Jean said. “You go, John.”
“Oh no. Why is it always me?”
“I want to see Eira’s tucked up. And you’d better get a move on or you’ll have Mrs. Davies to deal with.”
With an inarticulate cry I sprang out of the room. The voice from below started calling “Mr. Lewis” repeatedly as I hurried downstairs. “I’m coming, Mrs. Davies,” I replied repeatedly, and very loudly, but to no avail. The arrival of visitors for us always troubled Mrs. Davies and I’d sometimes thought that she’d have preferred us to do without them.
In the passage-type hall the bowed shape of Mrs. Davies, holding a now whimpering dog by the collar, was barring the way not of Mrs. but of Ieuan Jenkins. My heart sank. “All right, Mrs. Davies; thank you,” I said, and when the crone retreated towards her basement: “Hallo, Ieuan. Anything the matter? Coming up?”
“No, John, thank you, I can only stay a couple of moments. I’m afraid we shall have to disappoint you to-night.”
“Nothing wrong at home, is there?”
“Nothing seriously wrong.” He sighed, standing there hunched up under the light from the bare bulb. Passing his hand over his grey crop, he said: “The same old business, you know. But fortunately only mild this time. Still, I’m afraid any baby-minding is out of the question for the immediate future. I’ve sent her to bed. I’d help you out myself, but I don’t like to leave her.”
“Of course not. You’re sure it’s not serious?”
He half-turned away to kick idly at the skirting-board, his hands in his raincoat pockets. “No, it’s not serious.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. Anything either of us can do?”
“No thank you, John, it’s nice of you, boy. I’m extremely sorry indeed to spoil your evening.”
“That’s all right, Ieuan. Neither of us were all that keen.”
“It’s nice of you. Well …”
“Give our love to Megan and tell her we hope she’ll soon be better.”
“Yes yes. Good night, then, Johnny. See you tomorrow morning.”
His small figure retreated and the front door slammed, causing a valedictory flurry of barking from the basement.
Grimacing to myself, I ran athletically up the stairs.
“What’s up?” Jean asked.
“Ieuan. We’ve had it.”
“Bad, is she?”
“Yes, bad, that’s what she is, bad. Yes, she’s bad all right.”
“Aw, come on now, John. How bad is she? Do you think I should go round?”
“No, I asked. No need to, anyway. There’s nothing organically wrong with that woman. All mental, you know. Hysterical. Just for the fun of it.”
“Don’t be silly. I seem to remember you telling me on another occasion that hysterical stuff was just as real as the, what, physiological kind of business.”
“No need to bring that up, is there?” I began pacing a little. “Well, I feel full of fun now. Really going to enjoy an evening at home. Just what I could do with.”
“I didn’t know you were so set on going.”
“It isn’t that,” I said peevishly. “It’s being all dressed up and no bloody place to go that gets me down.”
“Look, John, I know it’s a disappointment, but it isn’t the end of the world. You could fetch some …”
“No, no, I know, it isn’t the end of the world. I’m quite clear on that. But that’s not what I’m talking about, see?”
“Look. You’ll have to go along to the corner and phone ’em up and tell ’em we can’t manage to …”
“Jesus wept.”
“Wait a minute. You can pop into the General Picton and get a couple of flagons—cider for me—and we’ll listen to the wireless. There’s a play on, isn’t there?”
“Yes, Maugham, I think. Well, I suppose we could. The cash situation isn’t any too wonderful, though.”
“Never mind, let’s fill our boots. I’ll pay for the cider. And try and get some crisps.” She dug down the side of her chair for her purse and gave me a florin (cider), a sixpence (crisps), and three pennies for the phone. “There. Now get cracking or you’ll miss the start of the play.”