Success by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

twinkling in the cold sunshine of Berkeley Square.
    I work in an art gallery. Yes, the job
is
rather a grand one, as you’d expect. High salary, undemanding hours, opportunities for travel, lots of future. It’s all very relaxed and genial. Everyone knows what’s going to happen, short-term and long. I never have to do anything I don’t want to do. It’s hardly a ‘job’ at all really, in the sense of trading one’s days for cash: I just turn up here in Mayfair pretty regularly, behave more or less as I wish in fairly acceptable surroundings (chat, read the paper, ring my innumerable friends) — and there is this vast, blush-making cheque on my table, every Friday.
    The answer is, of course, that I am the chuckling puppeteer of the two simpletons who run the place. Everything they do is in response to a twitch from my strings. They are called Mr and Mrs Jason Styles — a couple of early-middle-aged roués who jewed their way up from a Camden Passage antique shop and are now trying
so
hard to be decadent. Under their auspices, I need hardly say, the gallery is little more than a rumpus-room of socio-sexual self-betterment: they deal in down-market investment Victoriana, hang the curiosities of the rich, lease out their walls to the doodlings of the famous. They will, in short, do anything to get along. For instance, there is little doubt that I was given the job here on account of my breeding and looks; when I arrived to be interviewed for the assistantship, the Styleses heaved a moan of longing in unison, thanked me for my attendance, and dreamily dismissed the hopefuls queueing without. They are both desperate for me in a playful, candid sort of way and I do try not to be too abrupt with them — though
Mrs
Styles, in particular, grows bolder by the hour. I expect, at any rate, to be in complete control here within the next six months or so; already I am nursing along a school of youngish talent, and I have tentatively scheduled the first of my one-man shows for December.
    The glass door wafts shut behind me. I swoop for the mail, refasten the lock from inside, and stride on into the gallery, whose cork walls are at present defaced by the loud ‘moodshapes’ of some celebrated hysteric or other. I flick on the silver spotlights and remove from the paintings any deposits of dust which present themselves to my eye. Silly old Jason once joked that I should spend the first ten minutes of every day here ‘cleaning the canvases’ — going round the gallery with a handbrush and rag! Had a good laugh about
that
. In the Styleses’ small and incredibly smelly office I remove my cape and curl up with the mail on their squat leather sofa. A postcard — she always writes to me at the gallery — from the exquisiteUrsula, my sister, my love; she offers family news, endearments, and a delicious weekend tryst. She is coming down to London to be taught how to become a secretary. Ridiculous. She should come down to London to be taught how
not
to become a secretary. Still, it might amuse her for a while. Along with her note there are the usual eight or nine invitations — openings, launches, at homes; of these, perhaps three or four might get lucky. I glance at the arts pages of the dailies, synchronize my watch with the hideous fluted clock on the Styleses’ filing-cabinet, and wander back through the gallery to my desk, lodged in a gloomy nook a few feet from the door — annoyingly, there ‘isn’t the space’ for an office of my own: yet. Within two or three minutes Jason and Odette Styles — I wonder when it was that they made those names up — are shuffling and grunting in the porch, hugging themselves, stamping their feet. I glide up to let them in.
    ‘Good morning, Gregory,’ says Jason.
    ‘Morning, Greg,’ says Odette.
    ‘Everything all right?’
    ‘How are you today?’
    ‘I’m fine. Everything is fine. How are you?’ I say, in genial disbelief.
    As a connoisseur of ennui, as satiety’s scholar, I’m