I Like It Here by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis [Amis, Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: comedy
Published: 2011-10-28T17:53:06+00:00

GREGORY: Don’t give me that.

After that he felt he had given the creative process enough outlet for one morning. The trouble was that he was committed to providing further outlets on succeeding mornings. His only hope lay in establishing some real foundation to his vague suspicion that someone had used his Teach Him a Lesson idea before. Well, you couldn’t force that sort of thing. It had to come of its own accord.

He next picked up and re-read the mysterious letter from his landlord that had arrived, thanks to miracles on the part of the Portuguese postal authorities, the previous day. After a salutation that featured one of the less common allotropes of Bowen’s surname, it said that the writer had been thinking things over again—in itself a questionable claim by one so clearly unused even to once-and-for-all cogitation. If Bowen considered himself entitled under the agreement to the room on the half-landing, it was further stated, he should confirm same at once with a view to matters being regularised. After that all there was was “Yours Knowland”.

Had the landlord really been ennobled during the last couple of weeks? No; he could not have been. What was “same” that Bowen was being asked to confirm at once? Was he really to write back saying Yes, he did consider himself entitled to the room on the half-landing? The letter was a very appropriate sort of document to receive abroad, in that it used the English language to suggest a rich variety of possible meaning, like a revolutionary kind of poetic style. Bowen was reminded of the forms he had had to fill in in order to get the car on board the Rio Grande with them. One extra good one had had spaces headed “Reg. No.”, “Serial No.” and “No.” on it, and he had had some marvellous fun reeling round the flat swearing about that one; but the best of the lot had had “Type” on it in two different places. Which of them meant which of the answers “Morris”, “Morris Minor”, “Saloon”, “Private Car” or (since the form said it could be used for motorbikes as well) “Car”? In the end he had just said “Type” to himself and written down in both cases what first came into his head, as if taking part in one of those tests where words like “love” or “lavatory” are used as response-detonators. He had thought at the time that to fill in the spaces with something like “oxymoron” and “valve-trombone”, say, would have done just as well, and that the only real purpose of the form was to remind you that doing something you didn’t want to do (like going abroad) was going to be just as hard as doing something you did want to do. More and more his life was becoming a matter of grimly going on day after day trying to persuade his mother-in-law to spend Easter with them—symbolically, anyway. By Christ, and actually too, by Christ.

These thoughts depressed him, and in addition brought no nearer a settlement with Viscount Knowland.

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