Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  ‘Surely it is written on your ration-book and identity-card?’

  ‘I’ve never thought to look, sir. What’s come my way, I’ve eaten and been grateful for, with no thought to spare for the name that’s brought it. Now, when I’d like to know, I can’t find the dratted books.’

  ‘It is not an edifying story, you know. You might just as well have put the food in the larder. Tell me, is there any name that would appeal to you particularly?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Can you think of anyone you would like to be known as? Some famous character in history? Your older sister? The doctor’s wife?’

  ‘It’s all the same to me, sir. I only want to work and be at peace with the world. I don’t need no name for that.’

  ‘But you said you were puzzled without one?’

  ‘It’s the having of my attention distracted to it that puzzles me, sir. I do all right if people don’t keep nagging at me for a name.’

  ‘Then we shall have to call you Mrs Chirk. Master Beaufort will make you out a new ration-book and identity-card in that name … Now, Mrs Chirk – for that is your name – I want to talk to you very seriously. We have been taking a grave risk in continuing to employ a person who has no sense of nominal responsibility. Try and get into your head that though your friends and employers may find your name immaterial, the Government refuse to take such a lax view. They insist that everyone has an identity, however slight, and people who will not admit to themselves are often sent to prison. That is what will happen to you, if you continue to pursue this vague course. You must try and understand that the old days are over – the days when you could take your identity for granted. Nowadays, all the old means of self-recognition have been swept away, leaving even the best people in a state of personal dubiety. Even dispossession, the surest means of bringing home the naked identity, has disappeared. Very wisely, governments all over the world have sought to stop this rot before the entire human population has been reduced to anonymous grains. They give you cards, on which they inscribe in capital letters the name which your fading memory supplies before it is too late. It is their hope that by continually reading and re-reading your name, you will be able to keep your hold on a past that no longer exists, and thus bring an illusion of self into the present. As you see, the authorities have been obliged to reverse the normal procedure – which is, of course, first to create a world and then to name the things that inhabit it. Now, by doing the naming first, they hope creation will follow as a result of association and suggestion. This, as you know, is the method followed by women who want to have babies.

  ‘This method has its dangers, of course; we all know mothers who have dreamed-up an Agnes and, on being delivered of a Horace, have stubbornly brought him up as Agnes; and something of the same kind may result from the authorities’ efforts at present. But that is not my point at the moment. What I want to emphasize is: don’t lose your name again, Mrs Chirk. Don’t, at least, lose the cards on which that name is written. Not only would you yourself be left nameless, but people have been known to pick up such lost cards, put them in a wallet with their own, and start a hopeless tangle of selves that spreads like a bush fire. Even people in very high places today, men whose names are being printed and spoken aloud repeatedly, are often so foreign to their selves that they become involved in the most extraordinary identical lapses. Here, for instance, in this morning’s paper, is a letter written by someone who believes himself to be named Sir Arthur Trotter. He is addressing the Minister of Mines and Places, and he writes as follows:

  ‘My dear Minister,

  You will recall that on 28th September of last year you invited me to luncheon at the Dorchester at 1.15 p.m. After the hors d’œuvres you invited me to become a member of the nationalized Cobalt and Sundries Corporation, at a salary of £5,000 a year. When I replied that I knew little of cobalt and less of sundries, you urged me at least to “have a whack at it”. Over the sweet, I agreed. Now, after fifteen and a half months of intensive effort, I find that I am being shifted, without prior consultation, to the post of Warden of Stoke University. As I cannot see how this can be considered advantageous to the national interest, and still less to cobalt or Stoke, I have no recourse but reluctantly to resign from either and both offices. May I publish this letter?

  ‘“My dear Trotter,” replies the minister, “Of course you may publish your letter, though I do feel that letters such as yours are taking up a lot of space in the papers nowadays. I am astonished to hear that you have changed your mind about Stoke, since your appointment to the vacant Wardenship was made solely at your own request last Thursday. Surely I am not indulging in fantasy when I say that on that day you visited me in my office and asked for Stoke, saying that the lower salary was ‘neither here nor there’? Surely you remember my trying to persuade you that cobalt was more vital to the nation than were the humanities? And while I am correcting this matter, may I add that until you came to see me on Thursday, to ask for Stoke, I had never set eyes on you, and had appointed you, sight unseen, to the Cobalt Board, solely because I had heard you were well up in the subject. I have not been to the Dorchester since 1932. I never eat luncheon. Are you sure you are not confusing cobalt with some other mineral, or me with some other minister? Needless to say, if you are going to publish your letter, I shall be forced to do the same with mine.”

  ‘So you see, Mrs Chirk,’ said the captain, laying down the paper, ‘you can hardly be too careful. If two such highly-placed officials both appear, both to themselves and to one another, to be totally different persons, sharing no common recollections and enjoying no tenable identity – well, clearly, at least one of the two identities has been left in a cloakroom somewhere and never picked up again. This sort of thing is becoming so common nowadays that it would not surprise me to hear that both the letters I have just read were written by the same person, sincerely assuming in each letter an identity he hoped was his own. Is all this quite clear to you?’

  ‘Well, I understand it, sir, though I couldn’t say what it means.’

  ‘At least you recognize it as a warning?’

  ‘I’d rather not dwell on it too much, sir. My poor head is spinning as it is. I only ask for peace.’

  ‘As you please, Mrs Chirk. Here is your wage and your new ration-book and identity-card. You keep the wage and the card and give the book to Mrs Paradise. Kindly ask Tray and Towzer to come up, will you? Good morning, and try not to forget yourself again.’

  ‘Poor soul!’ said Mrs Mallet. ‘I wonder when she last knew herself?’

  ‘Probably never,’ said the captain. ‘She may vaguely have known her parents, but that’s always much easier. One would probably have to go back to her grandfather to find an identity that really made an impression on her.’

  Mrs Mallet took Beaufort’s hand off her knee, made a fist of it, and measured the foot of the sock she was knitting him. ‘I don’t, of course, remember when I joined the Club,’ she said, ‘but it must have been ages ago. And yet, with all my experience, I still wonder what on earth other people think when they come to see Mrs Chirk, or Tray, or Towzer and find the house empty, the old friend gone. What if I went to see their old neighbours, and asked to whom that empty place belonged, who had lived there, and so on?’

  ‘You know very well what would happen,’ said the captain. ‘You know as well as I do the haunted, hunted look that comes into people’s eyes when they try to urge their exhausted minds along a path they have long since abandoned. The first point they reach in such a struggle is, of course, the point when such a question made sense: thus, they would easily tell you who was living in the house in 1911. After a good deal of struggle, they would recall the name of some party who’d taken it in the 20s – “she had tulips in that corner,” they’d say. Then they would start following the departed tulips; a haze would come over their eyes; even if they spoke the name of Chirk it would be a hollow sound, too recent to have any significance, come too late to matter.’

&nb
sp; ‘It makes me want to cry. What terrible emptiness! Why do people so rebuff the present? Why, if one day Beau disappeared, how I would take on! I would search for him in every house in England; whenever I saw a man I would go up as close as possible to him and stare into his eyes, listen to his voice, study his walk and ways! I would sound alarms all through the country, and never rest until I found the man in whom Beau was hidden. Has Towzer no woman to do as much for him? Has Tray no lover who would die rather than think her lost forever?’

  There was a knock at the door, and the captain cried: ‘Come in!’ adding: ‘Well, let us find the exact answer.’

  Miss Tray entered, pretty in her breeches. ‘Ah, good morning,’ said the captain. ‘You are looking very well. Do sit down. Someone has been calling to see you, and telephoning. I was not able to catch the name. Do you know who it might be?’

  ‘I can’t think,’ said Miss Tray, a look of astonishment crossing her face. ‘Who would want to see me?’

  ‘Perhaps relatives or friends?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Did you not tell me that you had a gentleman friend?’

  ‘Well, there have been gentlemen friends sometimes, doctor, but not the kind that would make a fuss.’

  ‘Come, come, Miss Tray! Surely gentlemen friends always make a fuss!’

  ‘I’ve never encouraged that type, doctor.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘They get me disturbed. I want to live my own life, not to be reminded of the things that would upset me.’

  ‘What kind of things are those, Miss Tray?’

  ‘The things men like.’

  ‘Then you never intend to marry and have children, Miss Tray?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I would like a husband who goes to work every day. But a man is something quite different. Of course, I don’t mind the ones who just come and go, the ones who drop in casually. And I like sick ones.’

  ‘Very well, Miss Tray. If there are any more phone calls, I shall just say you are not here and we have no idea where you may be.’

  ‘Anything like that, doctor. It would seem the same as ever to them.’

  ‘Have you settled down all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s all become such a routine already, I’m hardly aware of myself at all.’

  ‘You rub along with Towzer, do you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’d hardly know he was there.’

  ‘You mustn’t become too isolated, you know.’

  ‘No fear, doctor. I’m too jolly and natural for that. And my dream life is full of excitement.’

  ‘Very well. Here are your wages. Will you ask Towzer to come in?’

  ‘He says he can’t be bothered. “People, people, people!” is all he says. He’s really very sweet. Only the soil matters to him. I love teasing him, because he never notices. So it’s like a dream.’

  ‘I advise you to be careful, Miss Tray. One day he may notice, and then your dream will suddenly come true. You won’t like that, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no danger of that, doctor. Whenever a dream threatens to come true, I change to a new one.’

  ‘One day when I have more time you must tell me about your dreams. Would you like to become a nurse?’

  ‘Oh, no. Too familiar.’

  ‘Then here are Towzer’s wages. Is he clean and healthy?’

  ‘I sometimes dream he is.’

  ‘Well, we won’t pursue that, Miss Tray. But I am glad to see your life is so full. Good morning.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Beaufort, when Miss Tray had gone: ‘I must say she leaves me very puzzled.’

  ‘She lives in a state of chronic potentiality, that’s all,’ explained the captain. ‘The future is, to her, what the past is to Mrs Paradise. Every morning is a thrilling anticipation of what the following morning may bring. She builds the superstructure today in hope of laying the foundation-stone tomorrow.’

  ‘I have never really been well-up in the chronological side of identity,’ said Beaufort. ‘I can see the identity lost in relation to people, but when it is lost in time, I am easily confused.’

  ‘Well, here is a simple story that will amuse you. My old teacher, when I first joined the Club, used to tell me: “You must listen for the echo, and try to tell if it comes before or after the sound.” And one day, when I was studying the identity of judges, I realized what he meant. The judge in question, despite the fact that he was already buried in the past, invariably acted as if that past were some distant, future goal that he despaired of reaching, for all his loquacity. A summing-up by him would be hardly under way when court was adjourned for the day; when it resumed, he never went on from where he had left off, he recapitulated what he had said on the previous day, intending to go forward from there. But, as the recapitulation took him much further back than, in its original form, it had carried him forward, the business of the court advanced in a regular sequence of retreats, each of which overlapped, in backwardness, its predecessor of the day before. Thus as the days moved on, with the judge receding ever further into the previous weeks, one had the eerie feeling not that time was standing still – that would have been tolerable – but that it was growing younger in proportion as it became older, and that the judge, far from proceeding to a verdict, was struggling to revert to a prediction. I was young in those days, no older than you, and like you I was not really able to grasp the full implications of an identity whose sense of immediacy depends on a state of temporal abeyance. But I did grasp, of course, that where the basic character is moving in reverse, the minor characteristics are bound to follow. This judge, for instance, only knew who he was when he saw himself set among laws that had long ceased to exist; consequently, he never was able to sentence a man to death without remarking that at one time he would have had him drawn and quartered too: or if the sentence was ten years, he would point out that it would have been death a hundred years earlier, and so on. What made this habit even prettier was the fact that his language was likewise a struggle to go backwards: he set the speech of his boyhood in the context of archaic dignity, as if this were the only way he could express his shock and disappointment at being alive at all today. “What a horrid thing was that to do!” he would say, or: “To call you a bad hat is not enough: rotter is better.” “Was this not a beastly way to behave?” he once exclaimed, of a man who had cracked a woman’s skull with a chopper; adding: “Most especially in view of the trust she had always reposed in him.” But I loved best to see him when he was behaving humbly – which was often the case, because judges are the only people nowadays who have the power, indeed, the duty, to slander and defame the characters of others. This tends to make them meek, as if they were thanking God for too great an honour, and they become increasingly apologetic as their brutality intensifies. This one used to say, with genuine distress: “I am really very sorry I cannot have you flogged. The law, unfortunately, no longer permits it. The best I can do is sentence you to five years at hard labour, and hope that you will find this adequate to your needs.” Oh, and those expressions! When he pursed his lips, the whole court was sucked in, and dragged down through time into Norman-English. And how the women loved him – for his hatred of men! Poor soul; he was weakened when corporal punishment went, but with the threat of abolition of the death penalty he lost his last grip on self and became a mere child again, toddling from place to place, lisping baby-talk. Well, it’s all long ago now, but I still feel that if the Club had got hold of him in time they could have transformed him into something useful and up-to-date.’

  ‘We’ve done some good work here,’ said Beaufort proudly.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ said the captain, surveying the comfortable room. ‘But the President’s eye is very keen, you know. He misses nothing. Do you remember the dreadful day Gluber claimed to have transformed a Logical Positivist into a lover of Dante?’

  ‘Don’t speak of it!’ said Mrs Mallet, shuddering.

  ‘I shall do some more work on Tray,’ said the Captain. ‘The others
have set very well. I can hardly wait to see the President trying them. Without so much as a glance at their histories, he will ask them exactly the right questions.’

  ‘He is getting just a little old, isn’t he?’ asked Beaufort, rather timidly.

  ‘I must go and write to him,’ replied the captain, leaving the room.

  ‘Darling,’ said Mrs Mallet to Beaufort, ‘I shouldn’t put such questions if I were you. No matter how apologetically.’

  ‘But he’s going to be the next President, isn’t he?’ said Beaufort stubbornly. ‘That time is so almost here that I can feel it in my bones already. So can he. His whole manner is becoming more Olympian every day. He is getting that intensely calm, grave look that goes with presidencies. Do you think he knows it? Do you think the President will sense it?’

  Mrs Mallet looked away and made no reply.

  *

  Family prayers. The captain, beautifully shaved and pink, with a morsel of soap foam on his left ear, has taken his place at his pine rostrum and is fingering the old prayer-books, stamped in gilt with the Mallet arms. Mrs Mallet, fresh and beautiful, walks across to the harmonium and delicately scans the lid for dust before opening it. The servants file into their pew like happy convicts; the captain clears his throat and reads the prayer. From outside comes a clattering noise of boots storming down stairs; and just as Mrs Mallet plays the first notes of the hymn, the chapel door is opened furtively, and Beaufort slinks into his place. The marks of a comb run straight from his brow to the back of his head; on each side of this track is a jungle of tow. His tie is half done, his eyes bleary, his pyjama trousers are visible below the turn-ups of his grey flannels. The captain sighs and looks away; Mrs Mallet raises her eyes from the keys and gives Beaufort a sorrowful look, to which he replies with frantic explanatory grimaces. Mrs Paradise’s heart is melted by the spectacle, which occurs every morning and gives her day the warm sense of tragic beauty that is the principal feature of her life. Mrs Mallet has chosen her favourite evening hymn for this morning, and they all sing: