Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  ‘Three!’ groaned the auctioneer. ‘I am bid three pounds, ladies and gentlemen. Very well. Leave it, Jenkins. We will take the long, slow, uphill road. Who gives me five? You, sir? Five, I have – six – seven – eight – nine – ten – eleven – twelve – thirteen – fourteen – fifteen – sixteen – seventeen – eighteen – nineteen – twenty – oh, ladies and gentlemen, how much time we would save if you were a little more sensible! – twenty-one – guineas – twenty-one guineas I have, twenty-two – twenty-three – twenty-four – we are still in guineas – twenty-five – twenty-six – any advance on twenty-six guineas? Twenty-seven – twenty-eight - twenty-nine … I am stopped at twenty-nine. I am stopped. I am stopped. Stopped, stopped, stopped. No advance on twenty-nine guineas? No advance? I am stopped in twenty-nine guineas … Last chance….’

  All this time I had been watching the bidders with immense interest. Human nature is so nonsensical that it entangles even the simplest act in ridiculous complications. Thus, at an auction, the main idea is to bid without seeming to do so, on the grounds that if one is not actually seen bidding, no one will notice that any interest is being taken in the lot, whose evident steady increase in value is then attributed to supernatural causes. At the best auctions everyone sits in their best clothes and never shows the least interest; as if they were in church: only a change from red to amber in one eye indicates that another thousand pounds is going down the drain. But at vulgar, provincial auctions the disguise is more crude. All the dealers, for instance, pretend they are tramps and imbeciles. They lean against bits of furniture with their mouths wide open, their stubbled chins dropped in innocent vacancy. Each cultivates an identity which has no bearing whatever on the matter in hand: like most of the furniture in the auction, it is simply a professional fabrication whose whole aim is to pretend to be what it is not. Thus, one dealer bids by seeming to burst into tears; another uses his left shoulder, which works up and down like a pump; a third allows a brief convulsion to electrify his frame; a fourth uses nothing but his winged nostrils; a fifth, who learnt to wiggle his ears in boyhood, now finds that each ear is capable of elevating a pound sterling. All these ludicrous tricks, which deceive nobody, are imitated by the general public, much as laymen who have read newspapers and listened to politicians become accustomed to expressing themselves in meaningless terms. My aunts’ bidding methods, for example, were totally ridiculous: they twitched and shrugged, made secret, obscene motions with their dirty thumbs, and managed in the twinkling of an eye to run their faces through all the manifold expressions of four men shaving in a hurry. Since I have met Dr Bitterling, I understand that all such nonsense has nothing whatever to do with commerce and is simply a means of ‘telling yourself who you are’—to use his wise words. But when one has stood a short while in a large hall packed with human beings all going through a twitching charade – oh! then, what a joy it is to hear an honest, desperate cry, the screamed bid of some simpleton who genuinely wants the object that is being auctioned and who fears that if both arms are not raised and the clenched catalogue furiously waved the auctioneer will be deaf and blind to the appeal!

  All this was running through my mind as the auctioneer was crying with feigned misery: ‘I am stopped in twenty-nine guineas! I am stopped! Last chance, ladies and gentlemen….’

  I took another quick glance at his assistant, and screamed:

  ‘Thirty pounds!’

  What a bellow of laughter went up! ‘We are in guineas, sir!’ cried the auctioneer, joining heartily in the laughter: ‘Where is your arithmetic, sir? You must bid thirty-one pounds to advance. Do you give me thirty-one in pounds? You do? Then I am in pounds again, ladies and gentlemen; thirty-one pounds: any advance on thirty-one? … Who will return me to guineas …?’

  Nobody would. The hammer fell: the carpet was mine. It was not my bid but my bad arithmetic that won me the carpet: nobody wanted to start twitching again after laughing so much. But how ashamed I was of my innocence – and how furious were my aunts! I had disgraced the family, and as I sheepishly met my aunts’ indignant eyes, I realized how greatly the standards of the gentry had changed during my absence abroad. They stared at me as if I had broken every one of the old moral rules – cheating, lying, disloyalty, kissing-and-telling. It would have made it worse for me to excuse my mistake by saying that it wasn’t the carpet I had bid for but the auctioneer’s assistant: they would have expected me to get her for nothing. I now glanced furtively and saw that she was looking at me in quite an amused way, as if she had found a tortoise in her bedroom or a kitten in her shoe. Thank God, I said to myself, for women’s mercy: if I had just twitched my bid like a real man, that gentleness would never be in her eyes!

  I pressed forward and told her my name: she noted it delicately in her big book. ‘I am not very used to auctions,’ I said humbly, writing out a cheque. She smiled in a kindly way, so I pressed on, despite the din of Lot 98, and said: ‘In fact, I’m afraid I’m an awful simpleton where money is concerned.’ This is not true, of course; but my idea was, as Dr Bitterling has since explained in his clear way, ‘to press upon her an identity to which she had already shown herself receptive’. He calls this ‘limp seduction’ and says that it is usually the best way to approach emancipated women. ‘One does not take a tin-opener to frozen vegetables,’ he explains.

  ‘Are there many more of these compliments to you, Dr Bitterling?’ asked the President.

  ‘Quite a lot. I thought it would be dishonest to take them out.’

  ‘Well, turn over half a dozen honest pages and go on from there.’

  ‘… back to London breathless and exhausted. I found Vinson slumped in a chair and told him I had the signatures. I also told him about my aunts.

  ‘I found exactly the same thing,’ he said: ‘The whole cat’s cradle has fallen apart. I could forgive them if they’d died while we were away; but the fact is that they have remained studiously alive. In the old days there was never any question as to who one was: our names alone identified us, and where there was any doubt, one always had correct pronunciation to fall back on. One was related to everything – even oddities like Roman Catholics. Why, I remember that if I’d forgotten how to pronounce a word, I used often to have to take the opposite side in an argument, in order to avoid mispronouncing the truth.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I knew a man in the war who was asked by an artilleryman to name a certain unpronouncable objective, and he felt obliged to give the name of quite another village rather than be a traitor to his class.’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s that spirit that’s been destroyed. One comes home with the keys and finds all the locks have been changed. All the initials have gone from inside the bowler hats. All the value’s gone out of the currency. There’s no meaning in the church bells, no punch left in the hyphens of surnames. I don’t like it at all. If I don’t get an identity soon I shall start looking as helpless and vacant as everyone else.’

  ‘They had a difficult time, of course.’

  ‘That’s no excuse. I can forgive them for giving up their houses and utterly smashing the whole geographical web of family relationships, but I’ll not forgive them for throwing away all the old phrases they brought us up on. “What’s so nice about him,” they always used to say of a gardener or a shopkeeper, “is that you can be nice to him without his ever becoming familiar.” Today, they’d be begging him to buy their windfalls. All the furtive pretences for which we fought have been thrown away out of boredom.’

  When I looked at his drawn face I felt great pity for him – a man who now had nothing but his own resources to save him from total obscurity. ‘Why,’ he said bitterly, ‘I think I have reached the point where I am not even embarrassed at speaking my name aloud. That shows how meaningless it has become.’

  ‘When do we see Channing?’

  ‘We’ll go now,’ he said, reaching for his hat.

  ‘Are you going to go on wearing a hat? People don’t any more.’

  ‘It’s the
last ditch. Aut hat, aut nihil.’

  Old Channing received us gently in his rooms at the Armoury. It heartened Vinson to be met at the door by a pikeman crying some old warning dating back to the twelfth century and to be taken upstairs by a servant in the jet livery of the Coffiners. ‘I am surprised,’ said Channing, ‘to find that you have not changed your minds. Many well-bred young men nowadays would feel the Badgeries was a waste of time. Have you your ladies’ signatures?’

  ‘We have,’ said Vinson. ‘Though why a signature should remain valid when its author hasn’t, is more than I can say.’

  ‘And the eighteen peppercorns? No, don’t give them to me: you hand them in a calico bag to the Master of the Bowmen on Lady Day. Remind me to remind the Times photographer.’

  ‘When do we start work?’ asked Vinson. ‘We are both very anxious to identify ourselves with the real England.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that you’ll find very much work to do,’ said Channing. ‘The point is to capture the spirit of the thing.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we intend to do,’ said Vinson.

  ‘Well, it’s not difficult,’ said Channing. ‘Centuries ago, the Co-Wardens held every badger in the land and they still do, technically, but with no badgers involved any more. It is up to you two to create, as it were, within yourselves, a sense of duty and responsibility to badgers which no longer exist. You have the livery, which is always a help, and there is a tradition of 800 years standing shoulder to shoulder with you.’

  ‘Is there no immediate badger whatever?’ demanded Vinson. ‘An occasional glimpse of one would serve as a foundation, though I admit that invisibility is a higher and more splendid challenge.’

  ‘There is a token badger, but according to tradition it is maintained by the Yeomen of Hertford Forest. It is a stuffed one, of course.’

  ‘I suppose they let us take it on ceremonial occasions.’

  ‘Not the actual, token badger, except on the death of the Lord Royal. Normally, you get a clip of artificial fur set in an osier staff. This is an emblem of the token. Thus you retain your technical right to the token badger, and, thereby, to all the living badgers in the country. On the other hand, your osier staff is the symbol of your having waived this prerogative. There is much philology involved, I’m afraid, but the office is ancient and the nation would be poorer without it. That is why you are not paid for it – except for the symbolic dog-rose presented to you annually by the Knights of Egham.’

  ‘In short,’ said Vinson, ‘what is not symbolic is emblematic?’

  ‘Except where it is token,’ agreed Channing. ‘Then, it is stuffed.’

  ‘Quite so. Which of these – token, symbolical, or emblematical – applies to our annual ritual of Easing the Badger?’

  ‘I think all three elements are involved. The stuffed, or token, boar-badger is inserted into a symbolic den and then eased out with your official emblem, a symbolical gold spade. In this way, there is no need actually to disturb any living badger: the whole ceremony is performed quietly in London. But I am not quite sure; you will have to swot it up. In addition to the Badgeries, I am responsible for the Coffiners, the Datcheries, the Portators, the Body of Threshers, the Royal Key Holders, the Cushion Fashioners, and many other such bodies. It is difficult to remember who does what, when, where, and why. And many of the office-holders are honorary members of some of the other bodies. During the war, in fact, when so many people went abroad, we often had cases of an office-holder assuming the livery of one identity in order to deliver some annual token, and then quickly changing into the livery of the recipient identity in order to receive it. But we try to avoid that sort of thing. Once you start letting your symbolic acts overlap, each tends to deny the significance of the other. That’s what’s wrong with the Health Service, of course. One minute people think they’re getting it free, the next that it is an intolerable burden. They don’t know if they’re giving or receiving – and if you don’t know that it’s only a step to manic-depression. That is why these old offices of ours, such as the Badgeries, are so important – much more important as rituals than they were as realities. When you’ve got a grip on something that really exists and is comprehensible, you don’t have to bother with symbols. But once the reality begins to fade, the symbol is needed to recapture it. If all barristers had brains, there would be no need for wigs. Our rituals exist to reassure people that no serious defects are possible, and I hope we will never wake up to find that the life has departed from beneath these symbols, like peas from under thimbles. One can put oneself at too many removes from reality: for instance, it’s quite all right to replace a lost material thing with a spiritual symbol, but once you go on to charging that spiritual symbol with a material significance, you get into deep water. So I urge you to hang on to the abstract aspects of the Badgeries. Like old churches, they are nostalgic, photogenic, and give a sense of security to those who hurry past them.’

  ‘It is exactly what I hoped,’ said Vinson dreamily. ‘By the way, what about the chambers that go with the job? I understand the Wardens have a sort of flat.’

  ‘They used to,’ said Charming, ‘but the L.C.C. is in it at present and it would be hard to dislodge them.’

  Vinson’s character, in this painful moment, conquered his disappointment, ‘Technically it is still ours?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly. The office of the Badgeries is inseparable from the occupancy of its chambers. So unless you assume that you are living in them, it will be impossible for you to be Co-Wardens. Is that clear?’

  ‘Perfectly clear. The whole thing is a superb challenge to empirical dogma. By the way, in view of the power shortage, are we not also entitled to some kind of fuel?’

  ‘You have sole right to the faggots of Holborn Common. Fleet Street now occupies the site, but if you wish to assert your claim, not Beaverbrook himself can stop you.’

  ‘The claim is warmth enough for me,’ said Vinson spiritedly.

  ‘And I,’ I cried, ‘have bought a real carpet!’

  ‘Well, I shall have to boot you out now,’ said Channing, getting up. ‘I have a few traditional ceremonies to perform.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ Vinson asked me, as the jet Coffiner passed us on to the purple Pikeman.

  ‘He seemed a nice old fellow. Very well up in the subject.’

  ‘You didn’t feel he was an opportunist?’

  ‘I think he enjoys the glamour.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. The outward trappings matter to him. They don’t to me. Even if they took away our hauberks and velveteens I would still be clothed by the essential spirit.’

  ‘What a zealot you are! How are you going to exist?’

  ‘It’s quite straightforward. We must both get jobs and a place to live in. We will do our work perfunctorily but punctiliously. The rest of the twenty-four hours we’ll devote to our real identities, as Co-Wardens.’

  ‘That’s what most people do, isn’t it, nowadays?’

  ‘Except that even their real identities are based on material things – hobbies like goldfish and budgerigars. We have something totally abstract.’

  ‘There is no danger of schizophrenia?’

  ‘Schizophrenia indeed! Are you still living in the thirties?’

  ‘Well, a confusion of aims, double identities at cross-purposes?’

  ‘Quite impossible. On the material side we shall have no identities whatever. No aims, no purposes.’

  ‘Will our employers like that?’

  ‘How on earth will they know?’

  ‘They might have a feeling we were insensitive to the firm’s needs.’

  ‘You’re much too pre-war. People aren’t like that any more. How can an employer suspect my identity when he doesn’t know his own?’

  ‘There could be a sort of blind-man’s bluff. For instance, we know that people who are shy often express it in the most ferocious way. Similarly, people with no identity might well insist on it in their employees.’


  ‘You are absolutely out of touch with the mood of the times. You assume that people still take up certain attitudes, definite selves.’

  ‘Surely we aren’t the only two in the whole country who know who we are?’

  ‘Who said we knew? We don’t know. We hope to be reborn and find out. We are in a state of becoming. So are all the best people. Everywhere you look in decent circles you see the glow of suspended reanimation.’

  ‘But surely we should know who we are now, before we start on a rebirth? I like to know what I’m changing from. Here we are, our present selves quite unknown, seeking rebirth in a new identity by means of a vocation consisting solely of symbols. At what point will we impinge upon reality?’

  ‘At the moment when we are apparently most remote from it I can feel a few real twinges already, just by thinking about it. What about you? Don’t you already feel a certain inner security?’

  ‘Yes, but I always do when something’s been definitely arranged. What upsets me is to discover later that there actually was nothing to arrange. You seem to take so much on trust.’

  ‘It’s an answer to materialism. It’s a reaffirmation of spiritual, moral, and ethical values.’

  *

  ‘So far, so good, Dr Bitterling,’ said the President, ‘but this is all very heady stuff, you know. I suggest we adjourn for lunch, and that when we resume you stress the love-interest of the history a little more.’

  ‘By all means,’ replied Dr Bitterling with a proud blush.

  *

  ‘… my rapture.

  ‘I must say,’ she replied, smoothing her hair rather pettishly, ‘that if I had known you were going to be so ardent I would never have admitted you to the store-room.’ She added curiously: ‘What did you say your job was?’

  I told her briefly of the Badgeries.

  ‘It sounds like a sort of spiv thing.’ For the first time, a note of admiration was in her voice.