Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  Brushing aside Bent Arnulfsen’s halting apologies, Mair led me away. ‘Astonishing how predictable these girls are,’ she said as we drove off. ‘I’d seen that little lot coming for some time. You usually get it sooner or later and afterwards you often find you get on better than you did before. Sort of clears the air in a way. Next week she’ll be falling over herself and holding on to my hand and going on about “Oh, Mrs Webster, how could I have said what I did, what a pig I was to you, Mrs Webster, and you so kind”, and not being able to do enough for me. Not that that phase lasts very long, either. No, there’s no doubt about it, if you look for thanks in this job you’re wasting your time and letting yourself in for a big disappointment. The approval of your conscience is all the reward you ever get.’

  ‘Seen this?’ my wife asked me later in the same year.

  I took the local paper from her and read that Elizabeth Grace Arnulfsen (19) had been sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for helping to burgle a café in Harrieston. (The two men who’d been with her got longer sentences.) Mrs Mair Webster, it was further reported, had spoken of her belief that Elizabeth Arnulfsen was weak-willed rather than vicious and had been led astray by undesirable companions. She said this out of her thorough knowledge of the girl’s character, and had been thanked for saying it.

  ‘Well, I hope Mair’s satisfied,’ I said, throwing the paper down.

  ‘Don’t be silly, you know she’ll be very cut up. She’s always done her best for Betty.’

  ‘Her worst, you mean.’

  ‘Don’t talk so soft.’

  ‘Betty only burgled that place to get her own back.’

  ‘What, on Mair?’

  ‘Yes, I should say it was chiefly on Mair. Not on society or any of that crap. As a method of not being the kind of person Mair wanted her to be.’

  ‘Mm. Sounds more like just high spirits to me. And according to what you told me Betty’d been breaking into places quite a time back.’

  ‘Not until Mair’d started licking her into shape.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating the whole thing, John. What should have happened according to you, anyway? Betty going on being a tart?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What about the twins and this Bent bloke?’

  ‘Yes. No, she shouldn’t have gone on being a tart, or couldn’t or something. Pity in a way, though. She was enjoying herself.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it. I’m going to make supper.’

  ‘I know how not to deal with people like Betty. Shall I give you a hand?’

  ‘No, you make the cocoa after. How do you stop people being tarts? How would you do it if it was you?’

  ‘Always assuming I thought I ought to try. It’s all a mess. It all needs going into.’

  ‘Who’s going to go into it? You and Mair?’

  ‘No, just me. What about that supper?’

  I could picture Mair doing what she’d have called helping Betty through the ordeal, going to see her in prison, meeting her when she got out and at once settling down again to the by now surely hopeless task of inducing her to lead a normal life with her husband and children. And what would friend Lewis be up to while all this was going on? Getting boozed with his mates, having fantasies about some new beautiful borrower, binding about his extra evening duties in the summer and explaining to his wife that you couldn’t have good social workers, because the only kind of chap who’d make a good one was also the kind of chap who’d refuse to be one. Of the two of us, it had to be admitted that on the face of it Mair had a claim to be considered the less disreputable character, up there in the firing line while cowards flinched and traitors sneered.

  Once you got off the face of it, though, and got on to what Mair was actually doing up there in the firing line, the picture changed a bit, just as things like the Labour Party looked better from some way away than close to. This was a timely reflection, because I’d been almost starting to admire Mair rather, and admiring someone you think is horrible is horrible. It was true enough that you had to have social workers, in the same way that you had to have prison warders, local government officials, policemen, military policemen, nurses, parsons, scientists, mental-hospital attendants, politicians and – for the time being anyway, God forgive us all – hangmen. That didn’t mean that you had to feel friendilly disposed towards any such person, bar the odd nurse perhaps, and then only on what you might call extrinsic grounds.

  Actually, of course, it wasn’t Mair I ought to have been cogitating about. Mair, with her creed of take-off-your-coat-andget-on-with-it (and never mind what ‘it’ is), could be run out of town at any stage, if possible after being bound and gagged and forced to listen to a no-holds-barred denunciation of her by Betty. What if anything should or could be done about Betty, and who if anyone should or could do it and how – that was the real stuff. I was sorry to think how impossible it was for me to turn up at the gaol on the big day, holding a bunch of flowers and a new plastic umbrella.

  ALL THE BLOOD WITHIN ME

  That morning Alec Mackenzie had been unable to eat even his usual small breakfast, so when, some minutes out of Euston, coffee and light refreshments were announced, he went along to the dining-car. He felt that, in view of what lay ahead, he should have something inside him, however nasty it or the task of getting it down might prove. It was good, too, to quit the company of those sharing his compartment, a standard crew of secret agents for the bus companies: two sailors and a portable radio, an ever-toddling toddler, a man whose pipe whimpered and grumbled, an old woman with a hat who moved her lips as she read her library book and wet her fingers thoroughly before turning each page.

  The first person he saw on entering the dining-car was Bob Anthony, wearing a suit that looked like woven vegetable soup and reading a newspaper with awful concentration. Alec found it hard not to dive back the way he had come, let alone stand his ground, but he knew that the two of them must have caught the train for the same reason and would have to meet sooner or later. Hoping only that it would be later, he did not resist when the steward put him in a chair facing Bob’s, but at the opposite end of the car.

  For twenty-four hours now his brain had behaved as if some terminal had come loose, deactivating half of it and letting the rest work only at low efficiency. Perhaps this was what people meant when they talked about moving round in a trance. The half-rural landscape, wheeling past the window in average September sunshine, had a flat, pointless quality. Alec felt a slight amazement that things like keeping out of Bob’s way for a few extra minutes should still matter to him, and again that he should find himself making his customary weak and futile appeal for a pot of tea instead of the donkey-coloured mixture now being served under the name of coffee. Habit persisted when other things broke down. He drank coffee and ate biscuits.

  The one look he had had at Bob had been quite enough to assure him that Bob’s recent outbreak of affluence showed no sign of abating. Alec was well enough resigned to his own failure – bowing uncomplainingly to the inevitable was part of his code – but he had no intention of ceasing to be indignant at Bob’s luck. A long period of floundering round the legal profession had been halted by two deaths. The first of these, brought on by an alcoholic seizure occurring slightly ahead of expectation, had had the effect of hauling Bob up a notch or two; the second, in which drink had played a more devious role as the agent of a fall downstairs, had made him virtual head of the firm, Bob having helped fate along, so to speak, by becoming friendly with the faller’s widow. The depth of this friendship remained obscure, but it was certain that the second dead man’s half-share in the business had passed under Bob’s control and stayed there.

  An approaching disturbance – the sound of a hip striking the corner of a laden table, the clash of crockery on a tray abruptly snatched from collision – warned Alec that Bob was on his way to join him. He looked up and saw that, apart from some lateral distortion caused by the movement of the train, the old stooping gait was the same as
ever, not in the least scholarly, the tread of someone closing in on bodily enjoyment or the means to buy some.

  ‘Hallo, Mac,’ Bob said in his curt tone and fake-genteel accent, then at once set about making people move so that he could sit where he wanted, opposite Alec. When he had done this he swept the cloth with the edge of his newspaper and they looked at each other in a way they often did, Bob unconcernedly claiming superior sophistication, Alec on the defensive, ready, if challenged, to stress the importance of integrity. Then both turned blank and grim. Alec found nothing to say; his attention was like a weight too heavy to move from where it had landed, on Bob’s suit. Why was he wearing it? He must have others. Where were they?

  ‘Well, Mac, words aren’t much use at a time like this, eh?’

  ‘No. No, they’re not.’

  Bob signalled emphatically for more coffee. ‘I’d have thought you’d have gone down there yesterday.’

  ‘I didn’t like to intrude.’

  ‘Oh, but surely, I mean Jim would have been glad to have you there, old chap. After all, you’re not exactly a stranger.’

  ‘I worked it out that he’d sooner have been on his own. I know I would if it had been me.’

  ‘That’s where you go wrong, Mac, if I may say so. You’re by way of being a reserved type, always have been. I’m not blaming you, heaven knows – you can’t help the way you’re made – but most people aren’t like that, you see. They want their pals round them. I call that a normal human instinct. Tell me, are you still living at that place of yours in Ealing?’

  ‘You asked me that the last time you saw me in the Lord Nelson. I haven’t moved since then.’

  ‘It would drive me crackers, quite frankly, being on my own twelve hours of the day. What do you do when you feel like nipping out and having a few?’

  ‘I haven’t got much cash for nipping out and having a few, so the question doesn’t arise very often.’

  ‘No, I see.’ Bob seemed not to have noticed the bitterness which Alec had been unable to keep out of his voice. Not noticing things like that was no doubt useful to one who led Bob’s kind of life. After gazing with apparent incredulity at the coffee with which their cups were now being refilled, he went on: ‘What do you do of an evening then? You can’t just—’

  ‘Oh, I get a bit of bridge now and again, and there are one or two people I drop in on. There’s a colleague of mine in the export department living just ten minutes’ walk away. I usually have some grub with him and his wife Sunday midday and occasionally in the week.’

  ‘Still go to your concerts?’

  ‘Not so much now.’

  Bob shook his head and drew in his breath. ‘It wouldn’t do for me, I must say.’

  ‘Well, we’re not all built the same, are we?’

  ‘No, I like being in company.’

  Alec knew how true this was. The advent of the partner’s widow had done nothing to curb Bob’s habit of suddenly appearing in the Lord Nelson, the pub near the Temple both men were apt to use at lunch-time, and plying some woman with large gin-and-frenches while Alec sat up at the bar with his light ale and veal-and-ham pie and salad. Every few minutes the other two would burst out laughing at some trivial phrase, or go off into face-to-face mumbling that sometimes led to more laughter, all eyes and teeth. He never knew how to behave during these interludes.

  The train had stopped at a station. Bob glanced out of the window and dropped his voice slightly. ‘I suppose it was another stroke, was it? Jim wasn’t very clear on the phone.’

  ‘Yes, it was a stroke all right. She died before they could get her to hospital.’

  ‘Good way to go, I suppose. Better than poor old Harry. He was under drugs for almost a year, you know. It makes you wonder what sort of exit you’ll have when it comes to your turn. Selfish, of course, but natural. Do you ever think about that, Mac? How you’ll go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still, there’s no use getting morbid. Actually I should think of the two of us you’ll last longest. You thin little wiry chaps take a devil of a lot of killing, in my experience. You’re a bit younger than me anyway, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was sixty-four in June.’

  ‘Not six months in it. We don’t live to much of an age in our family. Harry was the same age as me when he snuffed it, and then poor Dora was barely fifty, and now here’s Betty only sixty-seven; well, I say “only”, that’s not really old as things go nowadays, is it? Still, look at it another way and it’s a lot of years. You must have known her since, what, ’thirty-two or -three?’

  ‘The . . . I’m not sure of the date, but it was August Bank Holiday, 1929.’

  ‘Here, that’s pretty good card-index work, Mac. Well I’m blowed. How on earth do you remember it so exactly?’

  ‘It was the day of the mixed doubles tournament at that tennis club near Balham we all used to belong to.’ Alec began filling his pipe. ‘I got brought in to run the show at the last minute. Until the Friday I didn’t see how there could be a show, and what with the teas to arrange and one thing and another it’ll be a long time before I forget that day, believe me.’

  ‘Mm. It, er, turned out all right, did it?’

  ‘Yes, Betty and Jim got into the semi-finals. Nobody knew if they were any good or not, with them just moving into the district. But then they took the first set 6–1, and everyone could see . . . well, as soon as Betty had made her first couple of shots, really. Her backhand was very strong, unusual in a woman. I didn’t get a chance against them myself, because . . .’

  As clearly as if he had just seen a photograph of it, Alec recalled one moment of that first day. Jim, his bald head gleaming in the sun, was standing up at the net; Betty had stepped forward from the baseline and, with as much control as power, was sending one of her backhand drives not more than an inch or two above the net and squarely between their two opponents, who formed the only blurred patches in the image. Although the farthest away, Betty’s figure was well defined, the dark hair in a loose bob, the sturdy forearms and calves, the straight nose that gave her face such distinction, even the thinning of the lips in concentration and effort. Some details were wrong – Betty’s pleated white skirt belonged not to that afternoon, Alec knew, but was part of a summer dress she had worn on a day trip to Brighton just before the war, and Jim had not been so bald so early. There was nothing to be done about it, though: while a part of his mind fumbled left-handedly to correct it, the picture stayed as it was. Just as well, perhaps, that it had not been given to human beings to visualize things at will.

  Long before Alec was finally silent, Bob was glancing fitfully about, extending and shortening his body and neck like someone trying to see over a barrier that constantly varied in height. He was always having to have things: another round of drinks, the right time, a taxi, the menu, the bill, a word with old so-and-so before they settled down. While he twitched a nose rich in broken capillaries, he said inattentively: ‘Of course, you were pretty attached to her, weren’t you, Mac?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘And so was she to you, old thing.’ The distance between Bob’s waist and chin grew sharply, as if a taxi-driver or possibly a racing tipster had flung himself down full length behind Alec’s seat. ‘She was always on about you, you know. Talking about you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. You had a lot of brains, according to her. Looked up to you, so she said. I’d like a miniature of brandy, please,’ he added over Alec’s shoulder. ‘Wait a minute. Better make it two.’

  Alec began wondering how to decline the offer of a miniature of brandy. He need not have worried, because when they came Bob put them both carefully away in the pockets of the woven-soup suit. He then tried to pay for Alec’s coffee, but Alec prevented him.

  ‘Ah, we’re just coming in,’ Bob said: ‘there’s that pickle-factory place. Appalling stink when the wind’s in the right direction, makes you wonder what they put in the blessed stuff. How are you feeling, old chap?’
/>   ‘Me? I’m perfectly all right.’ The barrier in Alec’s head had given no sign of breaking down in the last five minutes, which meant it might just possibly stay in position for the next three hours, or however long it was going to be before he could decently leave. If he could hold out until then, the truth about him and Betty would never be known to any outsider, especially Bob. The thought of their secret being turned over by that parvenu mind, frivolous, hard-headed and puritanical in turn, and never the right one at the right time, was unendurable.

  Bob had got up and was looking at his watch. ‘Good for you, Mac. Mm, late as per usual. I think we’d better go straight to the church. It might be the best thing in some ways.’

  ‘Will you sit, please,’ the clergyman directed. He was a bulky man of about fifty-five with white hair carefully combed and set. He had a thick voice, as if his throat were swollen. It went down a tone or two each time he told the congregation to change its posture. His way of doing this even when it was clearly unnecessary, and of giving every such syllable its full value, made up a good substitute for quite a long sentence about the decline of church-going, the consequent uncertainty and uneasiness felt by many people on such occasions as did bring them into the house of God, his own determination that there should be no confusion in his church about what some might think were small points of procedure, and the decline of church-going. Now, after making absolutely certain that everyone had done his bidding, he pronounced the dead woman’s name in the manner of an operator beginning to read back a telegram.

  ‘Elizabeth . . . Duerden,’ he said, ‘has brought us together here today by virtue of the fact that she has recently died. I need not tell you that the death of someone we love, or even the death of any human being, is the most serious and important event with which this life can confront us. I want for a short time, if I may, to look into this business of death, to suggest a little of what it is, and of what it is not. I believe that the loss which her . . . family has suffered is not absolute, that that thing exists which we so frequently name and seek and offer, so rarely define and obtain and give, that there is consolation, if only we know where to look for it. Where, then, are we to look?’