That last result is the most remarkable, because Chris, a onetime judo champion, is no dinker and poker: he plays proper tennis, and usually beats me at a stroll. But that day he was up against a Martin Amis whose father was dying — an altogether different proposition. The first racket he broke in anger. As for the second, he calmly removed it from its pouch and placed it on the ground; he stood on the grip and, with both hands, bent the head almost double. ‘No more tennis this year,’ he murmured, shouldering his way off a court scattered with shop-fresh garbage. The two rackets looked like coathangers.
The summer I left home I could hardly lift a tennis ball. Lift a racket? I could hardly lift a hand to my brow. On the court I felt more or less okay only when playing mixed doubles with people in their seventies.
But now, with my old man pegging out at St Pancras’s? Watch me leap as high as the umpire’s chair for those slam-dunk overheads. Watch me twirl beyond the tramlines for that topspin backhand pass. Watch me run that dropshot down — look at that get …
Why do I climb out of bed with a spring in my step? Why do I wake up and feel the ignition of the idea that some palpable good is being prosecuted, being carried forward? Why is my body excited? Why am I all flash?
‘What’s the matter with me?’ it says in my notebook. ‘Do I just want my bit of his money?’ ‘Do I not love him?’ ‘Does he not love me?’
‘Oh, Bernard’s got a head on his shoulders.’
‘Oh, Bernard wasn’t born yesterday. You can be sure of that.’
‘Bernard uses his noodle all right.’
‘Bernard knows which side his bread is buttered on.’
At St Pancras’s my mother is not slow to join in the banter with, or about, Bernard, the ward wag. Bernard gives the impression that he has been in the Phoenix Ward all his life. Lolling, slurring, gurgling, slackly smiling, and almost wholly speechless, Bernard looms and Bernard hovers. It is hard to see how he has gained his reputation as a byword for pertinence and wit. But Bernard’s reputation, it seems, is perfectly secure.
‘I bet Bernard does all right. Don’t you, dear?’ says my mother.
‘Oh, Bernard gets his fair share,’ one of the nurses joins in.
‘I bet there are no flies on Bernard.’
‘Bernard? Oh, he can look out for himself, don’t you worry.’
‘Oh no. I wouldn’t worry about Bernard.’
And Bernard gives a leer, and hovers there: all flash.
Meanwhile the leading comic novelist of his generation lies on his side in mute obscurity. The biographer evidently got a hesitant ‘Hello, old chap’ out of him the other day, but the most I elicit is a tolerant grunt as I embrace him on arriving and parting. Kingsley has ‘the old man’s friend’: pneumonia. He is on morphine and antibiotics. When pneumonia recurs, which it will, the morphine will remain but the antibiotics will go. This is the English way … When I visit alone I no longer read to my father. I read to myself, while keeping an eye on him and hoping, and not hoping, that he will wake. The book most often to be found on my lap is Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, which I will be reviewing at length for the Sunday Times. My mind seems clear but my emotions keep striking me as woefully disordered. For instance, in Palimpsest there is a sub-theme or running joke about the Curse of Gore: all his enemies and traducers receive prompt and often conclusive punishment. Fate is on Vidal’s side, and I don’t want to tempt it. What more, what extra, could the Curse now do to my father? It could return to his dying body all the things he is fortunately without: reason, judgment, awareness. I don’t want that.
‘Oh, Bernard knows what’s what.’
‘Bernard knows a thing or two.’
‘Bernard knows the score all right.’
‘Bernard knows how many beans make five.’
Suddenly and agonisingly my father rises up from the gravity-well of his bed, and says,
‘Oh come on.’
At first, ludicrously, I assume he is referring to Bernard — to Bernard’s drastic and undeserved elevation. But the words are said so sweetly, so pleadingly. Perhaps he is saying ‘oh come on’ to us, to my mother and me: this fiendish charade has continued so far beyond all conscience that we cannot possibly persist in it now. Perhaps he is saying it to life: no more detailing, please, no more skew-whiff nostril-hairs in the madhouse and poorhouse of old age. Perhaps he is saying it to death.
He subsides and my mother tucks him in.
These were his last words and we know their drift. Either resume or finish. Enough. Be done.
I tell myself what I have always told myself. It is what all writers have always told themselves, consciously or otherwise. The things you feel are universal.
The father is dying, as did his (and as did his). The inevitable is coming and there is a readiness in you to rise and meet it. ‘A sense of impending levitation.’ Levitation is right. Levitation is no less than the truth.
Those superdrugs inside the body that wait for shock and pain. They can make you lift a bus off a baby. They are there to get you through, to carry you along to the other side.
Hospitals make the body feel important. The dying father makes the body feel important. It does what the father does not: it lives. There was no reason, until now, why that should have struck you: that your body lives.
It is 1995 and he has been there since 1949. The intercessionary figure is now being effaced, and there is nobody there between you and extinction. Death is nearer, reminding you that there is much to be done. There are children to be raised and books to be written. You have got work to do.
Now it is 1999, four years on to the day, and his books are all over my room, on the desk, on the table, on the floor, on the shelves. I keep having to go and look for the one I want and I keep thinking: What a lot of books you wrote, Dad, and what a lot of work you did. These are your last words. New Maps of Hell is under The Anti-Death League. The King’s English is on top of the Collected Poems. What Became of Jane Austen? is leaning on The Alteration. The Old Devils is hiding behind Ending Up. All this is you and is the best of you, and it is still here and I still have it.
Bernard Speaks
Tuesday, 17 October. I hear a thud and suddenly there is commotion in the Phoenix Ward: Bernard has taken a fall. Bernard has taken a toss and the upsurging nurses gather round his bent, dressing-gowned figure.
‘Whoops. A little accident. There you are, my love.’
‘Bernard’s all right.’
‘Bernard’s as sound as a bell.’
‘Bernard? He’s as fit as a fiddle …’
This week I am in the newspapers for a familiar reason. Yes, the newspapers still exist, but they seem to be reporting on an alternative universe which bears only fleeting resemblances to my own. This week I am in the newspapers because of the absence of The Information from the shortlist for the Booker Prize. So far as I am aware no one has remarked on the similar absence of Kingsley’s latest novel, The Biographer’s Moustache, whose appearance, if you recall, tested the patience of reviewers and interviewers alike. Kingsley, dying, is not in the newspapers. All we have had is a jovial diary paragraph about his mishap and subsequent admission to hospital. Not much, when you consider that the Fourth Estate is still agog about my dental work. For example, no reporter, hoping for the inside story, has wormed his way into the Phoenix Ward (as one journalist wormed her way into the office of Mike Szabatura). Unless that reporter be Bernard — who, I see, is successfully shuffling around again, and often draws close, as if to listen. There is nothing to hear … The newspapers, particularly the tabloids, are much concerned with the trial of Rosemary West. When the Sun does run a piece on Kingsley it describes him as the author of Lucky Jim and the uncle of Lucy Partington.
Kingsley looks smoothly beautiful. His hair is longer than he would normally wear it, and seems to me more suave and silvery. Loss of weight is finding the face within the face, the old face, which is the young face. On the day Kingsley took up his job in Swansea, one of his studen
ts turned to her friends and said, ‘Get a load of this, girls. This is talent with a capital T.’ Not bad — for his tombstone, along with the lines from his poem, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’:
The door still swinging to, and girls revive,
Aeronauts in the utmost altitudes
Of boredom fainting, dive
Into the bright oxygen of my nod …
‘Me first, Kingsley; I’m cleverest’ each declares,
But no gourmet races downstairs to dine,
Nor will I race upstairs.
But I don’t know what nature is playing at here, reconfiguring his beauty for me. Nature should be making him ugly, so that I will be readier to let him go.
The patient stirs and opens his mouth. I am obliged to say that Kingsley’s teeth were his only unpleasing feature. Hence the many early photographs of him with that fully amused but reliably undisclosing smile. His mouth is empty now. It looks like the socket of an upturned angle lamp expecting to have its bulb replaced.
‘He had a fall.’
This, startlingly, is Bernard.
‘That’s right,’ I tell him.
‘Pissed?’
‘Well, yes.’
Bernard now takes it upon himself to give me far more thematic consistency than I feel the need of. I really would have preferred to change the subject. If this were a novel, don’t you think I’d want to give the things a rest?
But no. Dislodged, perhaps, by the effort or novelty of speech, Bernard’s teeth, his false teeth — the upper set — have started to slide out of his mouth. Whoops, here they come. For a moment he looks all youthful and nerdy, like a beaver who trainspots, then instantly goes back to looking very old — disastrously old. Is Bernard the son of Flash Crunch? A nurse steps forward and fondly and spryly removes the coltish denture, placing it — there we are! — in a white plastic tub bearing the label (in black capitals) DENTURES. Bernard grins on.
A year ago this would have freaked me out. But now? Now?
I have guardedly handed in my review of Gore Vidal’s memoir. Eighteen hundred words, dispatched with great fluency and ease. I think my endorphins wrote it. The piece is solidly and sincerely favourable, but I did draw attention to certain anomalies in the author’s character: the simultaneous desire to be in the thick of it and above the fray. I am beginning to wish I hadn’t said that Vidal (like Lear) has always but slenderly known himself. It has an impressive record — the Curse of Gore. It is not that I’m superstitious. We know, pretty much, what is going to happen to Kingsley. The thing we don’t know is what is going to happen to us. My review will be published on Sunday.
Unawakened (2)
The time was January, 1974, the place Lemmons, the house that looked out over Hadley Common and Hadley Wood.
I remember that at breakfast Kingsley had looked truly stricken, as if experiencing the father and mother of a hangover — but it was just his daily penance, his union dues to authorial anxiety. He paid them every day. Every day he believed that he would go into his study and there’d be nothing. There’d be nothing left … Eventually he did his wounded-elephant trumpet — a noise that always signalled furious submission — and pushed himself up from the table.
His study was directly beneath the bedroom I still claimed as mine on weekends and other visits. So I could hear him that morning when, after an hour at his desk, he started laughing: the sound of a man succumbing, after a certain amount of resistance, to unshirkable amusement. He was writing Ending Up, I was writing Dead Babies (and Jane, down the passage from me, was writing Something in Disguise). Both Amis novels were black comedies set in country houses. In his book they all died. In my book they all died except one.
He came up to ask me something and found me looking out of the window. Seventy-five yards from the house, on the common across the road, there was a small circular pond, and a team of plainclothes policemen stood around it. When I think about this I can feel my memory trying to elaborate. It keeps trying to add someone in uniform. It keeps trying to add a frogman in flippers and mask. I don’t know: three men, four men, standing around the pond. I said,
— I want to go out and ask them if they’re going to drag it for Lucy.
This was the only time my father and I ever talked about Lucy Partington. Some hired fantasist of the press has since written that she was a great favourite of Kingsley’s, but he barely knew her (and is very hard, in the Letters, on her sister, Marian, then aged one). He said,
— What was she like?
What did I say? … I recently dreamt about Lucy, in the summer of 1999. In the dream she was about eighteen, and she was showing me how to play an antique and complicated musical instrument. Lucy was animated, amused, encouraging. And I felt what an addition she was. I felt I had discovered a great addition. When I woke up, and focused, I duly felt the other thing: subtraction, subtraction.
What did I say to my father? Something like: Sweet. Intense. Religious, I think. Highbrow, but innocent too. She hadn’t got round to boyfriends.
— Unawakened, as they used to say.
— Unawakened.
I don’t know if they ever dragged that pond. Twenty years later, when we learned what had happened to her, I remember Kingsley tending to stay out of the various conversations I had with my mother. But I knew exactly what Lucy’s fate awakened in him: hatred of God.
When I run the Phoenix Ward past my soul I know it is good and I always want to say to the nurses, ‘Bless you. Bless you.’ But this is a place of death. And sometimes the sights and sounds combine calamitously with what I am learning about the things that might have been done to Lucy and to all the other girls. I have to struggle against a kind of end-time vision where human flesh has been utterly pauperised and all its significance stripped of it.*
Night Visit
Friday.
We were coming back from dinner with friends and we drove past the hospital at midnight … I was first struck by the collective profundity of medicated sleep. It is more than sleep because there is also anaesthetisation. All the pain, in here, is drugged and trapped. Unfelt, unregistered, pain is still working the room, death is still working the room. The air is heavy with trapped pain. But no one cries or moans; all are prone and silent, in lines and clusters and rectangles. You can sense their demotion, and the fact that only animal work lies ahead of them now, because of the barnyard feel, the feel of a starlit barnyard, the old sheep and hens on one side, the old dogs and donkeys on the other. The old dears on one side, the old devils on the other.
Isabel rearranged his bedclothes and smoothed his hair with her hand.
In Homer the gods really do enjoy it when sacrifices are made to them. The adoration gives them physical pleasure but they also relish the smoke, the smells. How the heart of the god of pain must have hummed to see all the sacrifices, all the propitiations, made to him here tonight, with bolus and enema and hypodermic.
Sweat of Death
Saturday.
When I go in around lunchtime Sally is there. She has been there all morning. She sits with him for hours and hours — smoothing him, lulling him. After a while I offer to drive her home, but just for a break, because Sally will be back.
Her flat is spotless, as always. It is also (again as always) amazingly small. I often say that when you call Sally you can hang up after only one ring: it is not possible for the phone to be out of arm’s reach. Despite the want of space a whole corner of the flatlet is made over to what the newspapers would call a ‘shrine’. A shrine to Kingsley: signed copies of his books, photographs, memorabilia. On the shelf, too, is a volume published by the University of South Carolina Press called Understanding Kingsley Amis. I produce from my bag a newly arrived instalment in the same series, Understanding Martin Amis. Sally and I agree that we need to read these books with attention and could do with a couple more.
Sall’s place is tiny. When I get back to my flat in Notting Hill (bedroom, study, sitting-room, kitchen) I feel I am entering an edifice the size
of Harrod’s. These hours have a hollow ring.
The Phoenix Ward in the middle of the night reminds me of a book I know well: Big Red Barn (by the author of Goodnight, Moon). There they all are in their stalls, fast asleep, ‘While the moon sailed high/In the dark night sky’. ‘The little black bats flew away/Out of the barn at the end of the day’: and from a distance you can see the bats escaping through an upper window, like smoke. The fleeing bats make me think about all the trapped pain.
In 1948 the University of Tucumán in Argentina commissioned my father to write a book about Graham Greene: as it might be, Understanding Graham Greene. The fee offered was $1,500: it seemed a stunning sum. On 6 August, nine days before the birth of my brother and three months before I was conceived, Kingsley wrote to Larkin:
There’s some not so good news about them dollars; I asked my father to find out about them and he reports, on the best authority, that the fucking things are only worth about 1s. each, and 1500 of them come to £75-7-6 point something, which is nice, but nothing like so nice as we first thought.
He finished the book and sent it off. And somebody lost it at the other end. It was never published. And he was never paid. There would hardly be room, now, for Understanding Graham Greene on KA’s title page. Yet the most persistent theme in the massive volume of his Letters is self-reproach: self-reproach for idleness.
If there is any disquiet left in him now, then self-reproach is its source. He can’t believe that the work has all been done. At home, on the desk in his study, half a novel called Black and White is waiting. And the other half is still inside him somewhere.
Kingsley’s pneumonia has recurred and is not being treated. I sense that his body isn’t without some ultimate constitutional strength, but it is awfully confused, his body, struggling to stay, struggling to go. The air sacs in his lungs are filling with matter. He must breathe so much the harder and faster to get the oxygen he needs. How hard it is to die. You have to chase it, panting. Great sweat of death, said the divine poet, meaning battle. We can expand the application. My father is doing what he always did. When he went to his study in the middle of the night and typed his i’s and o’s, and seagulls, seagulls … He is working, working, working, working his way towards the main event.