Ending Up by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis [Amis, Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141961798
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

One evening later that week, Shorty, Marigold and Adela were gathered in the sitting-room. Shorty was doing his best to read a paperback book that told, it seemed to him, of some men on a wartime mission to blow something up. His state of mind, normal for him at this time of day, lent the narrative an air of deep mystery. New characters kept on making unceremonious appearances, or, more exactly, he would find that he had been in a sense following their activities for several pages without having noticed their arrival, or, more exactly still, they would turn out, on consultation of the first couple of chapters, to have been about the place from the start. The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms; the dialogue, after the same fashion, was stuffed with obscurities and non-sequiturs and, like the story itself, constantly referred to people, events, places and the rest that had never come up before, or, once again, had come up eight or eighty pages earlier. Every so often he would run across some detail that nearly convinced him he had read the whole thing before, perhaps more than once. But none of that bothered him in the least: he was not working for an exam, and to read as he did meant that he used up books very slowly and economically.

Marigold too, in her different way, was contentedly reading. Dr Mainwaring’s pills must already have started to take effect; at any rate, she had been pretty tranquil for the past forty-eight hours or so; there had been no recurrence, as far as she was aware, of loss of memory. What she was reading was her scrap-book, a compilation mainly of short items referring to persons far from squarely in the public eye, persons not always known to her in any direct fashion, persons who had less often done something than had something happen to them.

Only Adela, of the three, was less than at ease. A few minutes earlier, she had given up trying to watch the little Japanese television set: there was a young man singing and moving about a lot on one channel, cowboys on another, and what had turned out to be an incomprehensible drama of some sort on the third. It was incomprehensible to her partly because she could not with confidence differentiate any one character from any other, except in point of sex, and partly because, as had been clearly announced at the start of the transmission but too quickly or unemphatically to register with her, what she had seen was part of the fourth episode of a six-part serial.

She picked up her book, Sense and Sensibility, but did not open it. Bernard had gone to London that morning for an exhaustive medical examination by somebody called Mr Brownjohn, promising to telephone from Newmarket railway station when he had returned there and needed her to bring him home in her car. Probably about six o’clock, he had said; it was now nearly eight, and eight was dinner-time, as he well knew.

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