Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  We were lying on Lot 41, and I raised myself awkwardly from its dusty cushions. Around us, in the waning light, tier upon tier of bric-à-brac awaited tomorrow’s auction.

  ‘My brother’s like you,’ she said. ‘He’s got a steady job too, but does his real business on the quiet. But you’re the first one I ever met who did it in such high society. Have you got a partner?’

  ‘Oh, Lord, yes. He’s the go-ahead one. I knew him in the Army.’

  ‘It’s always that way, isn’t it? Someone you know you can trust. But where does the money really come from?’

  ‘We have rights in Holborn. And a flat goes with the job, of course.’

  ‘A flat?’ Her breath came a little faster. She put her hand on my arm and asked in a mere whisper: ‘Vacant possession?’

  ‘There’s someone in it now, to tell the truth. But we could claim any time.’

  ‘Most people I know have to get homes the hard way – go on and on looking and looking, studying and studying the faces of old tenants to guess how soon they’ll die. My brother judges by the fit of their teeth. The looser they get, the closer the vacancy.’

  ‘Teeth are emblems of freehold.’

  ‘But isn’t it funny the way old people cling to life? As my brother says: they’ve had their time and are ready to go, but instead of getting out of the house and giving the younger people a chance, they persist. And they know very well how impatient we are to see them go.’

  ‘A watched pot never boils. Perhaps there is something about your brother’s look which makes every crone resolve to live:

  There’s something in your eyes, chérie,

  That makes me sympathize with vie.’

  ‘How strangely you talk!’

  ‘You should hear my partner.’

  ‘Would he like me?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s too wrapped up in the Badgeries.’

  ‘Who looks after your rooms, then?’

  ‘No one. We give a token scrub occasionally.’

  ‘Is it full of badgers?’

  ‘It’s haunted by them. My partner actually sees them.’

  ‘Could I meet him one day? He sounds so interesting.’

  ‘He isn’t. There are thousands exactly like him all over the country.’

  ‘Have you quarrelled with him?’

  ‘There’s nothing to quarrel about.’

  ‘Don’t you sometimes have words?’

  ‘We have little else.’

  ‘About the work?’

  ‘There isn’t any work.’

  ‘What is there, then?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Aren’t you fur-dealers?’

  ‘Yes. But there’s no fur.’

  She burst into tears.

  ‘Don’t cry. If you want to meet Vinson, I’ll arrange it.’

  *

  He was practising the ritual of Easing the Badger. Crossing the room with an incredibly sanctimonious expression, he dropped suddenly on one knee and pressed his Biro into our new carpet. ‘Meanwhile, you ease it from behind,’ he said.

  I went opposite, and gracefully cupping my hands lifted the badger into the air by the buttocks. Vinson rose with both hands outstretched, took it under the forelegs and cried ‘Le broc se garde!’ Then he passed it to a Yeoman who took it away to Hertford Forest.

  ‘Better,’ he said, ‘but still not letter-perfect. We’ll know we’ve got it right when we can actually feel the badger.’

  ‘I’ve found a very nice young girl for the May Day ceremony.’

  ‘What sort of girl?’

  ‘She’s an auctioneer’s assistant.’

  ‘Are you going to bring filth like that into the Badgeries? She stands for everything in modern life we are being reborn against. What are her qualifications? Is she a well-born virgin?’

  ‘No, she isn’t. Don’t be a snob about her. According to all I hear, there was a close, familiar tie between classes in medieval times.’

  ‘That was because they kept apart. It’s one of the simpler paradoxes. There won’t be any spiritual and cultural rebirth until the peasant is back in his sty and the gentleman in his library. Your lady friend would do very well for a maypole ceremony, but she’s got no business butting in on the Badgeries.’

  ‘I thought we could behave as if.’

  ‘As if what?’

  ‘Surely you know about “as if”?’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘I feel she would give more point than ever to the ceremony if we regarded her as if.’

  Vinson was tempted. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that it would add yet another symbol to those we already have?’

  ‘More than that. By choosing a woman who is absolutely unsuitable, we would show our scorn for mere physical values.’

  ‘You’ll have to clear it with Channing. I can’t take the responsibility.’

  Charming was most tolerant. ‘Use her by all means,’ he said. ‘It’s the spirit that matters. We can’t be fussy about the flesh nowadays.’

  *

  Their first meeting interested me greatly. In Vinson’s eyes she was already transformed into a queen of purity; while Vinson, in hers, already represented the prince of wide boys. And yet, these two identities, each so incorrectly shaped in the mind of the other, shared their mutual misunderstanding as happily as if they had known one another for years. The more abstract Vinson became, the more impressed she was by his grasp of what appeared to be high finance. The more excited she became as a result of this, the more Vinson was impressed by her spiritual enthusiasm. He said to her: ‘I see, of course, that you are only in your present job in order to make a living. Well, my partner and I are in exactly the same boat. We have to have a job in order to live. But our aspirations are of a very different kind.’

  ‘And so are mine,’ she replied warmly.

  Later, he said to me: ‘About your relations with her. I think you should break off any physical contacts you may have had. For some reason, whenever I start thinking about her symbolical properties, certain properties of yours keep intruding.’

  ‘All we perform is a physical act, Vinson. Were it a ritual one you would have good cause for alarm.’

  No doubt you are wondering why I ever introduced her to Vinson in the first place….

  ‘Indeed we are, Dr Bitterling!’ exclaimed the President. ‘If you can fiddle that one, you have a great future.’

  … and yet there is a very simple answer. Disillusionment in love, with some men, only makes itself felt after a long period of union with the beloved. Sometimes, it is a full thirty years or more before a husband takes a sudden, second look at his wife and says to himself: ‘Was this a wise step?’ Other men become disillusioned in a matter of months or weeks: but I am one of those persons in whom disillusion begins at the very moment the illusion comes into focus. Even as my pulse begins to race – as it did when I first saw her at the auction – my stomach starts to flag. I see ahead of me those tedious, drawn-out days of courtship, and, beyond them, the indefinite weeks of unmitigated intimacy. My friendship with Vinson was based largely on the difference between us in this respect. Where I was immediately aware of the awful reality of union, Vinson thought only in terms of magic unreality. He strongly disapproved of my conduct with women, which he considered crude and immature. No sooner had I made a conquest than he arrived on the battlefield and rescued her. This has happened with all the eighteen women who have been in my life, except Priscilla, and it has suited the two of us very well. Vinson loves the slow, uphill pull, the incessant misunderstandings, the effort required to make a normal woman think in terms of pure abstraction. Once he has succeeded, a certain lethargy creeps over him: he has refined the lady to such an extent that she no longer has any reality. Eager to be free, he brusquely reverts to incredible crudity and offers her money to clear out, or introduces her to some other man who, he explains, will suit her much better. I take care to be absent on such occasions: Vinson usually has to visit the local surgery next d
ay with some trumped-up story of a blackberrying accident. Dr Bitterling has since explained to me that both Vinson and I have been immature in our attitudes to women. But that is another story….

  On hearing this masterly explanation, the whole Club applauded, and there were shouts of: ‘Damned neat, that!’; ‘Very pretty!’; ‘What a figure-of-eight!’ Flushing happily, Dr Bitterling proceeded:

  … another story. I will only add a curious point: in retrospect, I think of these eighteen misused women as fairy creatures, symbolic of all that is sublime in womanhood: Vinson, on the other hand, always recalls them as nasty little gold-diggers. What the women think of us, I cannot say, but I imagine that we are what they have in mind when they use the word ‘men’ with an inflection of hostility.

  *

  He was very cocky now, going off to bars with his admiring Heloise and showing her off to other men who were seeking rebirth in various ways. At our favourite pub, ‘The Coat and Cymbals’, we met a fine cross-section of those who nowadays find unusual means of spiritual recapitulation. A number of them, for instance, went in for various kinds of medieval calligraphy, puzzling the postmen with their renascent addresses. All wore hats; but some wore small, curved, bowler hats and arrived at the pub, whatever the weather, in touring cars that had been built in the 1920s: they drank their beer out of old moustache-cups. Many were gardeners, and would grow only roses which had not been seen for some centuries: they were on good terms with those who collect old florins and grew grapes on clay soils. I cannot give a detailed account of all the types: I will only observe that the charm of ‘The Coat and Cymbals’ lay in the fact that it covered all periods from Thomist to Edwardian, and rejected nothing but the malaise of the present. Vinson was very much at home with these zealots, but he was proud to think that we, as Co-Wardens, existed on an even higher level of renascence. ‘A cursive script,’ he said, ‘is an admirable thing; I have taken it up myself. I also intend to buy a tricycled steam-car, when I can afford one, and a really cursive bowler with raised initials. When I have a garden I shall grow only, and always in compost, Rosa Mundi, Centifolia, and Damascena. But in all such desirable regressions, I shall be dealing with tangible objects. They may be archaic, but they are still real. The glory of the Badgeries is that there is not a single reality left in it: every implement employed in its ceremonies is purely symbolic; every act performed has no pertinence whatever. It is thus an idea wrapped in a tradition; a spiritual nothing existing in a void. One could not ask for more.’

  *

  A week before May Day, we put on our uniforms for the first time, and I must confess that of the three of us Vinson most represented the spirit of English history and institutions. In his velvet trunks and King of Diamonds blouse, carrying his token spade and looking confidently into the future, he stood for everything whose demise was beyond dispute. We were rehearsing the peppercorn ritual when there was a ring at the bell and a telegram was handed in. It was signed by the Chief Yeoman of Hertford and said: ARRIVING IMMEDIATELY WITH BADGER.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Vinson angrily. ‘May Day doesn’t need the badger. It’s only paraded at the funeral of the Lord Royal.’

  More practical than he, I sprang to the radio and switched it on. Instead of the scheduled talk on insect life there was absolute silence. It was broken soon after by an elegy, or eulogy, I forget which, by Elgar. This could mean but one thing: the Lord Royal was dead. Even as we looked out of the window messenger-boys were hurrying by with letters to The Times.

  Vinson had not known the Lord Royal – a stately, chamberlain-like figure with walrus moustaches – but he knew his finest hour when he saw it. Dashing his peppercorns to the carpet, he flew to the telephone. It was a long time before he could get Channing, who was being phoned, of course, by every symbolic body in the country. On the connexion being made, he saluted Vinson in the Norman-French phrase of grief that is used on this occasion and Vinson replied suitably in broken Saxon. Having thus, as it were, established the situation, Channing went on to clarify it. ‘There’s going to be a frightful scramble,’ he said, ‘and it’s much too early to tell you where you will be in the funeral procession. I am not sure if you have any right to be in it at all, since you have not yet received your Egham rose and will not now be able to do so until after the funeral. But I think we can rush you through a token act of homage and proceed from there on “as if”. You know about “as if”?’

  ‘Certainly. We were going to use it for May Day.’

  ‘Of course! I’m sorry to be so forgetful, but the telephone hasn’t stopped ringing all day…. Anyway, the previous Co-Wardens have both emigrated to Rhodesia, so there’s little doubt about your credentials. And these old institutions of ours are very elastic; one can shove a fiddle in at any point if necessary. That’s an art the Bourbons never learnt.’

  ‘This is a very solemn occasion,’ replied Vinson coldly, ‘and we should like to know the schedule as soon as possible.’

  ‘My dear boy, I am one with you. But it has first to be drafted, then typed, and then transcribed by hand on to parchment. Only then will we know what it is, and even then much of the detail will be obscure, as it will be in Latin – even names like Edgware Road and Cannon Street.’

  ‘Then we will occupy the interim period pondering the exact meaning of the occasion. It has nothing, au fond, to do with the Lord Royal’s actual death. That is merely the physical precipitant. It is what his passing symbolizes in the badger sense that will engage our attention.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. I’ll have to ring off though, I’m afraid.’

  Vinson turned and faced us. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘I am going to have to put my heart and soul into this.’

  ‘Oh, Vinson, darling!’ she cried: ‘I know you will. And what is my part? I’m so thrilled!’

  ‘What d’you mean, your part?’ he answered crossly. ‘You don’t have a part. This is a funeral. Who ever heard of a connexion between death and virginity?’

  ‘Come, come, Vinson,’ I said, my heart touched by her dismay. ‘The poets have frequently and forcibly likened the two.’

  ‘Only as consubstantial within the frame of a single body. But nothing even remotely connecting the Badgeries with the Lord Royal. How can you employ a virgin to symbolize a passing? It’s a denial of the whole sense of the thing.’

  ‘Then what will I do?’ she cried.

  ‘You’d better get back to your auctioneering,’ he said. ‘It’s a good living, isn’t it? If you’re short of cash, tell me.’

  She pressed her lips together with such terrible vehemence that when the door-bell rang I thought her mouth had done it. Vinson, who had already totally forgotten her existence except for a suspicion that she had just touched him for money, hurried to the door and came back with a Yeoman – a young man of such attenuation that he seemed to have been drawn in a single strip from steel rollers.

  ‘I won’t stay,’ he said, setting down what looked like a gigantic leather hat-box. ‘We hardly know which way to turn, everything’s such a balls-up. You’ll let us have him back after the funeral, won’t you? He’s wonderfully fit. Here’s the transfer pledge.’

  Vinson reached for his broad-nib and cursively signed. He stared at the hat-box like a child on Christmas morning.

  ‘Have you got a taxi out there?’ she asked the Yeoman. ‘I’ll share it, if you don’t mind.’ Women are remarkably quick, sometimes: there was her suitcase, neatly packed, in her hand.

  They drove off together and Vinson reverently undid the leather straps. Inside, the badger rested in a neat, wooden scaffolding. Vinson gently eased him and put him in the middle of the carpet.

  I have never in my life seen anything more life-like than that badger. How old he was when the Yeoman trapped him in the woods, how long ago he was disembowelled and stuffed, how many centuries of dust had been denied his coat – these questions I cannot answer. I only knew that in modern times we have developed techniques of preservation that would ha
ve dumbfounded our forefathers; and that where formerly some priceless relic, animate or inanimate, would have been thrown on the dust-heap, we moderns have so devoted the resources of our science to taxidermy that there is now virtually nothing that is not considerably more lively after death than it was before. Our token badger, who had recently been completely refurnished by a firm which specialized in this kind of work, was a case in point. His fawn-grey hairs, which gave off the most delicate scent of rosemary, honeysuckle, and shampoo, were of such exuberance and vitality that each stood out from its fellows and could be fingered separately. His eyes were velvet masterpieces: one of them, directed to the left, sounded the call of the wild; the other, down-turned to the right, seemed about to weep for the death of its patron and protector. The white badge on his forehead shone with such brilliance that it resembled an antique carving chiselled from a block of snow. Vinson glanced into the box and drew out a silver bowl, one half filled with artificial water, the other with token corn. There was also a real gilt comb, an ivory brush, a box of Qwickit’s Dry Shampoo, and some flea-powder – this last a truly significant measure, indicating man’s modern ability to make his nostalgia deceptive even to vermin.

  When Vinson saw these things, he began to weep; nor can I blame him. For one whose deepest dreams and highest purposes were conjoined in the ecstasy of life-in-death, for one whose only moments of despair came when he trained his telescope on the future and cried: ‘I cannot see the symbols!’ – for such a man, this perpetuated stuffed corpse stood for more, far more, than the mere office of the Badgeries; it seemed to hold in its mounted paws the fate and destiny of the whole nation.

  As I watched, Vinson suddenly stiffened his limbs and groaned; his eyes rolled upwards and he began to twitch with convulsive shudders. I said gently, but with excitement: ‘Vinson! Are you being reborn?’

  He nodded tersely, reluctant to be distracted, and reached his hands backwards as if grasping a pair of bed-posts. A few seconds later he again groaned, shuddered, slapped himself sharply on the buttocks and let out a high wail. Then, all at once, he became himself again, and lit a Craven A.