The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  "Okay, then. Anybody turn up at that meeting?"

  "Nobody to speak of, no."

  "Bloody fool."

  "Who are you talking about, Deering?"

  "Fellow who wrote that perishing notice. Barmy. Off his rocker. Round the bend on a one-way ticket. By the way, nobody was talking about the business round the place. It took me all my time finding anyone who'd even heard about it."

  "I see. That's all, Deering, thank you."

  "Good night, sir."

  Hunter had been examining Leonard's picture of the five antique Sailors. When the door was closing behind Deering he turned round and smiled.

  "I rather like the look of these chaps. Where did you get hold of it?"

  "They are quite fun, aren't they? Oh, I got to know a few of the Sailors at their Mess and they more or less insisted I borrow it."

  "Nice of them to be so free with their regimental relics. I say, Brian, what a horrid little man that batman of yours is."

  "I don't care for him much either, but he's very useful for letting me know about camp rumors and so on."

  "How disagreeable. I hope there aren't any rumors about me."

  "If I ever heard anything to your discredit it would go no further, and I should tell Deering that there was no truth in it."

  "You do what you can, don't you, Brian?"

  Hunter sat down in a chintz-covered armchair and Leonard on a leather hard chair.

  "I was a bit puzzled," said Hunter, "at what you said about the typewriter business being a blind alley. Aren't you going to search the camp?"

  "I shall have to eventually, but it won't do any good. X isn't the kind of man to leave evidence like that under his bed. The likeliest place, I would say, would be in a plastic bag under a bush somewhere. No fingerprints. There are lots of other things I shan't be able to avoid doing if the worst comes to the worst, like getting hold of every typewriter salesman within a hundred miles and putting the whole unit on an identity parade. That's a desperate measure, though."

  "It sounds like it, certainly. Have you anything else to go on?"

  "I'm still trying to sort it out in my mind. As I see it, the most disturbing thing is that X must be one of the S1 officers. Nobody in the mental condition we've been talking about is going to be fit to carry out his part in Operation Apollo."

  "How damaging would that be?"

  "I can't answer that, but it would be damaging. I'll have to start going over each of their files again to see if I can turn up some hint of instability. It's hardly possible I'll find anything after the screening they all went through in the first place. I'll have to watch them all, too, and hope to spot something that way. Do you think it could be Churchill?"

  Hunter made a wincing sound. "Why him?"

  "He was looking very odd when I ran into him this morning. Sort of jittery. I've always thought he was a sensitive sort of lad."

  "I haven't seen him all day. Look, I know him pretty well. Would you like me to talk to him? I won't give anything away, I promise."

  "I'd be glad if you would, Max. And if you notice anything that might be relevant to this X business do let me know. I need help, and I know I can rely on you. I'm very grateful to you for putting me on to Dr. Best."

  "Think nothing of it. How's that going, by the way?"

  "Slow but sure. I hope. I still need a piece of solid evidence, but I'm convinced he's my man. He's… I just know he is. He must have a contact in the camp somewhere, but for the time being I'm concentrating on him, Best. I'm expecting results in the next day or two."

  "Good. Brian, going back a bit, why are you so sure that X wasn't in the reading room this evening?"

  "Because the only S1 officer present was Venables, and he's lived with Operation Apollo longer than anybody. In a sense it was his idea. I can't see him changing his mind about it now."

  "Or about anything. No, I see. There's one other point occurs to me, if you don't mind my…"

  "Go ahead. This is good for me. I don't get enough constructive criticism."

  "I only wondered. If Best has got a contact in the camp, as you say, wouldn't it have been possible for him to have written those notices and had them smuggled in and posted round the place?"

  "No. That's to say he couldn't have written the notices."

  "Why not?"

  "He's not against death, you see. Shall we go down to dinner now?"

  Lucy tapped quietly at the door of Catharine's bedroom.

  Churchill's voice called, "Come in."

  He was sitting up in bed reading a paperback novel. Catharine was asleep.

  "James, are you all right?"

  "Yes, of course. Why?"

  "You looked sort of startled. James, your nice friend Max Hunter is here. He says he'd like to talk to you. He was terrifically emphatic that it was nothing urgent and could perfectly well keep till the morning, but since he was here he just thought he might as well pass the word."

  Churchill got out of bed, put on a dressing-gown and slippers and followed Lucy out. She led him into her bedroom.

  "Is she all right?" she asked.

  "Yes. I made her take a sleeping-pill."

  "Have you taken one?"

  "No, I don't like them. Where can I find Max?"

  "I'm afraid I've put him in the library. It's rather nasty in there, but there are two almost possible chairs, and at least you won't have my dentist friend and his friends breathing down your neck. They seem to be very thick on the ground tonight for some reason."

  "Anybody I know, apart from Max?"

  "There's your other nice friend, Captain Leonard. Brian, I mean. He won't go. He sort of keeps getting on the end of the queue again. Then I was half expecting Alastair, but it's getting a bit late for him now. Those are the only ones you know, I think. We may as well go down."

  They left the bedroom and moved along the passage.

  "In fact," Lucy went on, "there are two of them in the drawing-room I don't know myself. They're somebody's friends, I gather. It's funny how the hot weather seems to bring them out."

  As they started descending the stairs, Churchill's eye was caught by the figure of the girl on the tapestry that hung there. There was something unnatural in its posture, a stiffness he had not noticed before. He saw too that parts of its dress were slightly discolored, presumably by damp.

  "Oh well, I suppose I'd better get ready for Brian," said Lucy. "His turn seems to come round quicker and quicker. You know, I wish he wouldn't go on so. I mean talking. But you can't help liking him, can you?"

  "No. Thanks, Lucy. May see you later."

  "Now mind you don't sit up chatting all night."

  Until this evening Churchill had only seen the library by day. Most of it was in semi-darkness now, so that the books filling its walls looked even more unreadable. They had been crammed on the shelves anyhow, some in horizontal piles, others with their spines facing inwards. Among their bindings an antiquated dull red was most prominent. They gave off a strong whiff of other people's boredom. Here and there, mostly on the floor, were busts of varying sizes. Churchill had looked them over one afternoon and had come to the conclusion that, whatever connection with literature any given one of the men represented might or might not have had, all of them were certainly dead.

  An intense light, given as it proved by a bare bulb in a brass lamp, came from a shallow alcove in one corner of the room. Here Hunter was sitting by a bulky davenport in an attitude suggesting that he had that moment turned aside from some mighty creative task. Nothing else gave this impression. Apart from the lamp, the objects before him consisted only of a foot-high doll in tattered clothes that had a national or peasant air, a French sailor in molder-ing papier-mâche under a glass dome, most of an ormolu clock, and a glass of liquor. He waved Churchill to a dining chair with burst seat-padding like the one on which he sat.

  "Make yourself at home if you can," he said. "This may help."

  He handed over the glass, which contained a very strong whisky and wa
ter. Churchill drank a third of it in one.

  "How long have you been sitting here?"

  "Not more than twenty minutes. I haven't been idle, however. I've been pushing ahead with my smoking like billy-ho. Two Gauloises one after the other, just like that. Have one."

  "Thank you. I'm sorry I kept you waiting."

  "I expect Lucy did most of that. She's got a heavy backlog to work through tonight. So heavy I had to come out. A discussion on the shortcomings of Britain's youth seemed to be getting under way. Not that it's very nice in here, I must admit. Erudition in the raw."

  "Has Lucy worked through you yet?"

  "Oh yes, I'm no problem. But it seemed rather early to be off home, so I thought if you weren't asleep I might get hold of you for a few minutes' chatter."

  Churchill drank again. "I'm glad you did. Well, what's the news?"

  "Nothing out of the way. The Anti-Death League held its inaugural meeting and nobody turned up. At least, quite a few people turned up, but none of them seemed to want to join the League. And the founder, or X, or whatever one's supposed to call him, didn't surface either. What we got was a series of anti-climaxes, good in themselves but not at all encouraging. I felt very let down, I can tell you. Poor old Brian Leonard felt a good deal worse than that. He brought all his phylactological expertise to bear and came up with the conclusion that X isn't the spy he's been after all these weeks, but another chap altogether. I couldn't follow half of it. Still, I do remember him saying he thought X must be half off his rocker and might do anything at any time, which was awfully frightening, he thought. I didn't think so. It cheered me up no end, after the way the meeting flopped. Then it crossed Brian's mind that you might be X."

  Churchill started violently. "Why me?"

  "It was all complicated in the extreme, as I said. He was pretty well convinced, evidently, that X must be one of the S1 people. The way he saw it, X has been sent all dithery by the notion of having to knock off so many chaps in Operation Apollo, and this League business is his method of dithering about it in public, so to speak. A bit fanciful, perhaps, but you know these technical wizards. Nowadays they take the whole human mind and heart as their special field."

  "I see why Brian thinks X is likely to be in S1, but not why he thinks it's me in particular. Why does he?"

  "Well…" Hunter made a quick but awkward gesture with his hand. "Old Brian is a divine creature, but not greatly gifted in ordinary observation. He ran into you this morning, he said, and thought you looked odd in some way. Jittery was the word he used. I decided you must have had a hangover, but I didn't like to tell him that. He's such an idealist, isn't he?"

  "Yes," said Churchill, finishing his whisky. "But whatever he is he wasn't far off the mark this time. I did feel jittery. I still do."

  "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  "Yes."

  "You shall. But not without an essential preliminary. Give me that glass. No, on second thoughts there's a more intelligent way. I'll be back in a minute."

  The moment he was alone, Churchill got up and walked up and down the floor of the library, looking about for some object on which to fasten his attention. He had not yet found one when Hunter reappeared, carrying with some ingenuity but some strain a nearly full bottle of whisky, a milk-jug containing water, a pudding-basin with ice-cubes and a soup-spoon in it, and an empty glass. He set these down on the davenport, wincing a little with effort and concentration, and swiftly mixed two drinks.

  "There," he said. "The securing of supplies is the first object of the administrative services."

  "Why are you drinking too?"

  "I just fancied one. No, it's really that I've been getting less and less out of watching other people drinking. And quite right too. Voyeurism is damaging to self-respect. What's bothering you?"

  "Is that why you wanted to talk to me, so that you could ask me that?"

  "Oh, no. Not altogether by any means. I've had what for me has been an unusually successful and varied sexual day, and that sort of thing always tends to loosen my tongue. Plus the lack of anything approaching ordinary humanity in the drawing-room, apart from Brian, and I've had plenty of him this evening already."

  "I see. Anyway, I'm glad you asked me. To start with, I'm not X."

  "No."

  "But I see his point so clearly that I might easily have been him if I'd thought of it. I used not to be particularly against death, especially not for people who were trying to kill me or who'd got to the point of being able to kill lots of my friends and fellow-countrymen unless they were stopped. So when I was picked for Operation Apollo originally I didn't object. Rather the opposite if anything, because in this case the people who were going to be stopped really needed very much to be stopped. Then, after we'd had the geographical and strategical picture filled in for us, we were told how it was proposed to stop these people. That part of it worried me a bit, and I started drinking more than I usually do. At that stage what I didn't like was this method they've been explaining to us and training us in for stopping the enemy. It isn't so much a new method as a new twist on an old one. The point of it is the way it kills people. I can't go into it, but you can take it from me that it's objectionable. I still wouldn't have backed out of Apollo, though, even if I'd been able to (which wouldn't have been particularly easy), because it somehow didn't matter much that I was going to do something I objected to, because I didn't matter much.

  "Then I met Catharine and it started to matter very much what I did and what I didn't do. I started to matter. So it got harder to go on agreeing to take part in Apollo. It wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been able to discuss the whole business with some of the other chaps who're being trained. But it turned out that was no good. They all said of course they agreed it was a terrible thing we were being got ready to do, but it was necessary and it was orders. I thought at first they said that because they were stupid or unfeeling or both. Then I realized there was no way of knowing whether they meant what they said or not, because we were talking about death, you see. As soon as you get on to that, people stop coming clean about what they feel, even if they're the sort of people who wouldn't hesitate to tell you all you wanted to know about their sex life and so on. So there was no help that way.

  "Then something else happened. Catharine has a lump in her left breast which may turn out to be cancer. I've been so frightened about that I've hardly known what to do. And I don't know how frightened she is because she doesn't say and I can't ask her. Until this came up I knew her better than anyone in the world. I knew everything she was thinking. Now I don't any more. Because death has come up. I've been thinking about this. It hasn't been as difficult as you might imagine. The alternative of thinking about it is to panic, and I can't do that.

  "At first I just got angry at the way good things are vulnerable to bad things, but bad things aren't vulnerable to good. You know: all the way up from toothache being more powerful than an orgasm. But I soon moved beyond that. I decided I was slightly more frightened than I had reason to be, while there was still nothing definite about Catharine's condition. I felt as if I knew she was going to turn out to have cancer and would die of it. That didn't take long to disentangle, either. I'd had the dispatch-rider and Fawkes at the back of my mind. So I was being superstitious, and having worked that out I could go back to feeling very shocked and concerned and apprehensive instead of full of dread. But I didn't. I worked on that. You don't have to believe in God or fate or the hidden powers of the mind to believe that there are such things as runs of bad luck. Well, I found that bad luck didn't quite cover what I felt was happening, and not altogether because it's a rather pale sort of phrase for the occasion. Something out of the tactical mumbo-jumbo they keep throwing at us fitted the situation better, I thought. You've probably heard of these things they call lethal nodes. You don't have battles or fronts any more, you have small key areas it's death to enter. Well, we're in a lethal node now, only it's one that works in time instead of space. A bit of life it's
death to enter. The beginning, the edge of the node was when that motorcycle thing happened. Fawkes was further in. This looks like being near the center. We'll know it's passing over when somebody else goes, somebody we know as little as we knew that dispatch-rider. That'll be the farther edge. I know all this sounds a bit mad. I'm sorry.

  "The background to the whole business is Operation Apollo. That's like the theater of war in which this is one operation. Well, what am I going to do about it? Now that I know more about death than I used to, you'd think I'd have to make up my mind that it's something nobody could deserve, however it was administered. That would mean having to opt out of the Operation, and that would mean all sorts of stuff, up to and including court-martial and imprisonment and perhaps being quietly knocked off by Brian Leonard's friends for knowing too much to be allowed to turn pacifist. I think I could take most of that if I had to. But I don't suppose I'll bother to go that far. I'll probably just follow the line of least resistance. If Catharine's going to die it'll never matter again what I do."

  "When will you know about her?"

  "The day after tomorrow. They're doing a probe on her in the morning and then it'll take them twenty-four hours to run tests on what they find. It sounds as though time has become tremendously important. Especially since they told us yesterday that Apollo's been brought forward two weeks. You'd think that would really shake us all up, wouldn't you? It would have me, in any other conceivable similar situation. But it hasn't at all. In comparison. It's always the comparison that counts. Like, you know, unless you pay a debt by the end of the week you go to prison. Very bad. Only today your son had a road accident. You see, Max, I'd desert now if I could stay with her, but they wouldn't let me."

  Hunter gave out cigarettes and refilled both glasses.

  "I understand what you mean about lethal nodes," he said when he was sitting down again, "though I don't say I agree with it. Where I can't follow you is on this point about Apollo being the background to it. I don't think there's an analogy there. You may feel there's a connection, you may have had your attention drawn to death in the first place by way of Apollo, but that's different. What is obvious is that part of your feeling jittery comes from it. Not a very large part, perhaps, but at least you can do something about it straight away. The rest of it has got to wait for thirty-six hours or so."