Lucky Jim

by Kingsley Amis

How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics. Then how?

Dixon, though on the whole glad at this escape, felt at the same time that the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch’s death.

These facts had been there for all to read in the Acknowledgements, but Dixon, whose policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book, never bothered with these, and it had been Margaret who’d told him.

Dixon alerted all his faculties. Conundrums that sounded innocuous or even pleasant were the most reliable sign of impending attack, the mysterious horseman sighted riding towards the bullion-coach. ‘I didn’t know I’d been all that tactful,’ he said in an uncoloured tone.

This question illustrated exactly why Dixon felt he had to keep Michie out of his subject. Michie knew a lot, or seemed to, which was as bad.

He repressed a desire to smoke, having finished his five o’clock cigarette at a quarter past three.

Next to Dixon was Cecil Goldsmith, a colleague of his in the College History Department, whose tenor voice held enough savage power, especially above middle C, to obliterate whatever noises Dixon might feel himself impelled to make.

Bertrand strode up the room to meet her, throwing Dixon a brief hostile glance. Dixon didn’t like him doing that; the only action he required from Bertrand was an apology, humbly offered, for his personal appearance.

Dixon hesitated; Bertrand’s speech, which, except for its peroration, had clearly been delivered before, had annoyed him in more ways than he’d have believed possible.

He opened his eyes again, making his tragic-mask face; yes, it had after all been a bad idea to take that last pint.

DIXON was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.

He sighed; he might as well be thinking of Monte Carlo or Chinese Turkestan; then, jigging on the rug with one foot out of, the other still in, his pyjamas, thought of nothing but the pain that slopped through his head like water into a sand-castle.

In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy-peasant face at it – what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed?

A sudden douche of terror then squirted itself all over Dixon. After a moment he realized that this was because he had a plan and was about to carry it out.

After a bit the thing was, I was starting to get rather fond of him, and at the same time – this is the funny part – I was getting a bit fed-up with him in other ways while I was still getting more fond of him. He’s such a queer mixture, you see.’ Naming to himself the two substances of which he personally thought Bertrand a mixture, Dixon said: ‘In what way?’

‘But if a man spends his life doing work that only appeals to him, isn’t that being self-interested just as much?’

Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom.

I know women are all dead keen on marrying men they don’t much like.

Dixon felt like a man interrupted at his investiture with the Order of Merit to be told that a six-figure cheque from a football pool awaits him in the lobby.

‘Do you hate me, James?’ she said. Dixon wanted to rush at her and tip her backwards in the chair, to make a deafening rude noise in her face, to push a bead up her nose. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked.

Fred’s about the only prof, in the place who’s resisting all this outside pressure to chuck Firsts around like teaching diplomas and push every bugger who can write his name through the Pass courses.

Apart from a pair belonging to a suit much too dark for anything but interviews and funerals, his only other trousers were so stained with food and beer that they would, if worn on the stage to indicate squalor and penury, be considered ridiculously overdone.

The preliminary manoeuvrings, the cold war between himself and Bertrand, were over at least. This was the whiff of grapeshot.

He wouldn’t have thought it possible that a man who’d done so exactly what he’d set out to do could feel so violent a sense of failure and general uselessness.