The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  "Now, darling. I know there's more to it than just me. And you're not to mind me knowing it and saying it. There are bound to be some things love doesn't reach as far as, however you look at it. It wouldn't be right any other way. There are things you can't ever do. Like giving people hydrophobia. I've just finished being told all about that. It was all right me hearing, because it's not going to happen. It never was going to. It was just a threat. I know exactly what you've been thinking, because I've been told. Sometimes you have to be told things. That man you were going to put into a little plastic bag and spray with stuff so that he couldn't swallow however thirsty he got. He's been let off. It's not going to be done to him. And that hasn't come about by chance. People have decided not to do it. They never even meant to.

  "I remember you talking to me about God and how bad he was. I didn't feel as you did about it, but I saw what you meant. I can see how horrible it must be if you think that God's very cruel and then something comes up that makes you think people have started behaving like him. But when you told me that God had invented all the bad things, and so whenever anything bad happened it was really him who was doing it, you weren't talking to me. I thought you were going off on your own then and now you're trying to completely. You knew very well that it's up to people not to get on with the bad things God has invented for them. It's their job to show they're better than he is. Well, now here they are doing it.

  "I know you think that bad things go together. All right, you had reason to. But this time it isn't going to happen like that. It isn't like you thought. There's just one bad thing on its own that you really mind about. What's been happening to me. And even that isn't a bad thing for certain. And if bad things can go together, so can good things. You and me ever meeting in the first place. Think what a good thing that was, and how unlikely. And then us falling in love and going to bed together and going on being in love. I'm not going to let you go mad. When I went mad I couldn't find any reason not to, and that was really why I did. You've got a reason not to. Me. And I know how hard it is not to go mad once you've sort of thought of it. But you're going to manage it, however hard it is even after what I've told you just now. You're going to dare to be sane, James, dearest James, little James. And big James. I love you."

  Churchill stirred, opened his eyes, and fixed them on Catharine.

  "I know," he said.

  Ayscue stood at the lectern of the village church waiting for the end of the Thomas Roughead anthem, Lord, Protect Thou Thy Servants. He had agreed to deliver a short address from this position after the vicar had made it clear to him that, while the accommodation of visiting preachers in the pulpit was probably unavoidable in the course of a regular service, no such obligation existed when a house of worship was being made use of as a concert-hall. He was sitting now rather huddled up in a front corner pew staring at Ayscue, the expression of wondering outrage endemic to his face faintly intensified, it might be, by the memory of some of the verbal turns of phrase in Roughead's song, Airs and Graces, performed just before the anthem.

  The concert was going at least as well as Ayscue had expected. Young Townsend had led off very creditably with the far from straightforward C major organ fantasia, and a slight raggedness among the choir altos, noticeable at the start of the first of two extracts from the masque, Hector and Andromache, had quite soon cleared up. Ayscue thought it unlikely that anybody in the audience would have noticed, except no doubt the music critic whom a widely read and respected provincial newspaper had sent to report on the occasion. And this man, from a couple of minutes' chat in the church porch before the concert, had not only seemed pleasant and easy-going, unlikely to attend overmuch to foreseeable shortcomings of this kind, but had professed himself a devotee of eighteenth-century English music. Ayscue thought that if Townsend, Pearce and he could manage the trio-sonata, set down to follow the address, with as much accuracy and decent stylishness as they had shown at their final rehearsal, Thomas Roughead might indeed be launched on the modest posthumous career he deserved.

  A moment in the closing pages of the anthem, two bars of contrary motion in the bass and tenor voices, caught Ayscue's ear. He remembered noticing it when glancing through the score with Townsend the previous week. Then he had passed it by as unremarkable, the taking of an obvious opportunity; now he caught his breath and felt himself shiver imperceptibly all over. Considering what he was about to say, it was mildly ironical that at this moment music should once more have revealed itself to him as the true embodiment of the unaided and self-constituted human spirit, the final proof of the non-existence of God.

  As the series of florid, rather Handelian amens swung to its close, he caught Churchill's eye and his sense of irony sharpened. But this was a faulty, outdated reflex. In the couple of days since his return to activity, Churchill seemed to have become quite at peace, no longer frowning or continually on the verge of protest or sarcasm. He gave a faint smile now and said something to Catharine at his side. Lucy Hazell leaned over to hear it too, but Brian Leonard next to her still stared to his front, his look of puzzlement unaltered since the first chord of the fantasia. Even so, it was heartening to see him there. Apart from a squad of nominated volunteers from among the men off duty, and a few of Pearce's mates, the attendance from the camp was not strikingly good. The Colonel, Ross-Donaldson and Venables (not that the latter had been seriously expected to turn up at the concert) were away at a conference in London, where Hunter had also gone, it appeared for some sort of interview. The village, however, led by Eames, had come along in force.

  The last traces of the music vanished from loft, chancel, pews, roof, gallery. Ayscue began to speak in his public tone, the one he hated whenever he caught himself at it. On those occasions he would wish he could sound as if he meant what he was saying. But he knew that that made people uncomfortable. And it could hardly be argued that wanting one's words to be believed was the same as meaning them.

  "This will take about three minutes flat," he said, not too bluffly, he hoped. "You came here to enjoy yourselves, and if anybody feels like muttering that he doesn't see why he should have to put up with a dose of uplift thrown in, well, I rather sympathize with him. Many of us are in the habit of keeping our pleasures and our more serious thinking in separate compartments, and we wouldn't be human if we didn't tend to resent having our habits disturbed. But just for a moment I'm going to try to disturb this one a little. We've been listening to some music by Thomas Roughead, very finely performed by Mr. Townsend and the members of the choir. Not much is known about Roughead's life, very little more than what you see in your program. But we can learn something of him through his music. Whether he was writing church anthems like the one we've just heard, or whether, as in that song immediately before the anthem, he was celebrating the earthly pleasures that are every human being's birthright"-this was said with a hard look at the vicar- "Roughead had his eye, his musical eye if you like, on the glory of God. You may think I say this because he was a church composer, because a large part of his music is obviously religious in character, in function. That's true, but I mean more than that. Every piece of music, every work of art, and in fact everything that human beings produce, doesn't come simply from them, from their human minds and hearts. God is with and within us all in everything we do, and never more than when we're doing the best things we're capable of. It's God's glory that we're celebrating at moments like that. It was God's glory that Roughead was celebrating in these compositions of his, God's glory that our musicians have been participating in as they played and sang them, God's glory that's been revealed to the rest of us as we sat here listening to them. This is what happens to us throughout life, even at moments that seem to have nothing of God in them.

  "We're in his house this evening. It's only common courtesy to say a few words to him, I think you'll agree.

  "Let us pray."

  As he turned and knelt, Ayscue was troubled less by the content, at once hectoring and chummy, of his penultimate senten
ce-ideas like that seemed to come from nowhere-than by the triteness, obscurity and illogic of what had gone before. He thought to himself he must be getting old. Then, as always on these occasions, he prayed, because here at any rate one got the chance of saying what one meant, even if to nobody.

  "Catharine. Don't do it to her. Let her get well and stay well. Please."

  Whenever he had prayed before it had been like talking into an empty room, into a telephone with nobody at the other end. But this time it came upon him with certainty, if certainty could apply to an image, that the room had ceased to be empty, or that somebody was at the other end of the telephone, not saying anything, nowhere near that, but listening.

  It frightened him rather. He felt he could believe that this was the first stage of a process, a chain, a series of which the last would be a joy so enormous that it justified everything, or at least an explanation so cogent that human beings would unhesitatingly forgive all the wrongs God had done them.

  Without thinking about it he got to his feet, rather sooner than everybody had expected. Then he recollected himself and walked firmly back to the lectern.

  "Now we are going to play you," he said, trying to breathe normally, "a work by Thomas Roughead that has probably not been heard for a hundred and fifty years. Trio-sonata in B minor for flute, violin and piano."

  Townsend crossed from the stairs leading to the loft and sat down at the piano on Ayscue's right. Pearce came down the aisle, flute in hand, and took up his position behind the music-stand that had been set for him. Ayscue picked up his violin and bow from the top of the piano. With the minimum of delay they began. It was immediately clear that they would do well.

  Outside, Ayscue's dog Nancy was secured by her lead to the railings by the gate. She was used to being in this situation, and when he prepared to leave his room to go to the concert she had responded so enthusiastically that he had not had the heart to leave her behind. But music had always had a bad effect on her, even at a distance, and the sounds now coming from the church seemed to strike her as especially intolerable. Squeaking, she tried as never before to slip her collar, and at last succeeded.

  She had run through the gateway onto the sunlit pavement and was standing uncertainly there when an agriculture lorry came jolting down the village street. Although devotedly maintained, it was an old vehicle and its driver knew that it was nearing the end of its service. When Nancy, evidently too interested in something across the street to notice the lorry, moved cautiously into its path, he spun the wheel to avoid her. The steering failed to respond.

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