Dear Illusion

by Kingsley Amis

  Hargreaves stood up and said: ‘I spy strangers.’ He spoke loudly but unemotionally, as if promulgating his occupation rather than delivering a challenge.

  The major stopped speaking immediately and looked towards the Speaker with an expression of courteous bafflement.

  The Speaker’s expression was of incredulous horror. He said: ‘Er . . . Hargreaves . . . can’t we . . . ?’

  ‘I spy strangers,’ Hargreaves repeated a little louder, gazing into space.

  ‘Could I ask you to clarify that, Mr Speaker, sir?’ the major asked good-humouredly.

  Archer replied as if the words were being wrung out of him. ‘I was reading . . . it’s a formula calling for the expulsion of unauthorized persons from the debating chamber. The idea was—’

  ‘Unauthorized persons?’ Smiling, the major glanced from face to face. ‘But surely—’

  ‘The thing is that officially only Members of Parliament are allowed to be present,’ Archer said, more steadily than before. ‘Anybody else is here on sufferance. I spy strangers is the way of saying you want to cancel that sufferance, so to speak.’

  Raleigh still smiled. ‘Are you ordering me to withdraw, Mr Speaker?’

  ‘I’m telling you what the book says.’

  In the pause that followed, the major again looked round the House, but nobody returned his look. He went on trying to think of something to say until it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. With a glance at Cleaver, who quickly rose and followed him, Major Raleigh withdrew.

  Outside in the darkness he said: ‘You drive, Wilf, will you? I want to think.’

  ‘Are you all right, Major?’

  ‘Wilf, if you ask me if I’m all right once more, I’ll . . . Anyway don’t. Just shut up.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  IV

  ‘Well, you must be pretty pleased, Mr Archer, I expect, at the way things have gone.’

  ‘Yes, I must admit I am, Sergeant. Such a thumping majority, too.’

  ‘Yes, that did rather take me by surprise. I expected it to be a much closer run thing than this. Of course, being wise after the event, it’s not difficult to see what happened. The Service vote did it. The lads have been in uniform all these years and they’ve had enough. Voting Labour’s a protest. It’s a way of saying you’re browned off and want to go home.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a lot more to it than that, I’m quite sure. People are browned off with something, or rather somebody, a lot of somebodies. They’re protesting against—’

  ‘Well, you and I are never going to see eye to eye there, sir, are we? – not even if we discuss it all night. We might as well accept it.’

  ‘Will you join me in a glass of whisky, Sergeant? If it doesn’t seem too like drowning your sorrows while I celebrate.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, I will. You’ve certainly got something to celebrate, and everybody else seems to be doing it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t join in.’

  Doll and Archer sat in the little sitting-room – all painted screens and wax fruit and clocks under glass domes – of the farmhouse that contained the Officers’ Mess. Outside, a widespread uproar was distantly audible: shouts, the revving of jeep and motor-cycle engines, the braying of a trombone that was being blown through rather than played. Ten minutes ago what sounded very much like a long burst of light-machine-gun fire had come from the direction of the Signal Office. There was no reason to suppose that all this was a demonstration of Socialist triumph over cowed and silent Tories. Whether or not Doll was right about the motives which had prompted the return of a Labour Government in Great Britain, the local reaction to it tonight was largely non-political in temper.

  ‘They’re keeping hard at it,’ Doll said, pointing out of the open window to a sudden burst of flame somewhere across the road. It was brighter than the now hour-old bonfire in the billet area. A few figures could be seen in the light of the new conflagration, reeling in and out of the darkness like pantomime drunks. ‘Funny how nobody seems to be interfering. The major’s right about one thing, anyway. Discipline’s going. Ah, thank you, sir.’ He raised one of the glasses of whisky which the Mess corporal had brought in response to Archer’s bellow. ‘Well. A solemn moment. What shall it be? I give you England, Mr Archer.’

  ‘England.’ Not your England, Archer said to himself, not the petrol-flogging CQMS’s England, not the Major’s England or Cleaver’s England or the Adjutant’s or the Colonel’s or Jack Rowney’s or Tom Thurston’s England, but to a certain extent Hargreaves’s England and absolutely my England, full of girls and drinks and jazz and books and decent houses and decent jobs and being your own boss. He said in a friendly tone: ‘I wonder whether England’s going to turn out the way you’d like her to.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve no doubt she won’t, sir. But that’s not really going to concern me much. I shan’t be there, you see. Emigration’s the thing for me, as soon as I can fix it up.’

  ‘Really? Where are you thinking of? Canada? Australia?’

  ‘I think Africa, Mr Archer. A place where there’s room for initiative and where a determined man can still make his way. Kenya, perhaps, or one of the Rhodesias. There’s some scope there. No, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and today’s news really decided me. Taken a load off my mind, in a way. Funny thing, I should be feeling depressed, with the Socialists getting in, but I don’t at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.’ Doll drained his glass.

  ‘How about another of those?’

  ‘No, thank you, sir, I really should be getting along and seeing the major. It’s what I came for, after all.’

  ‘I’ll take you up.’

  ‘There is just one point you might be able to help me with first, sir, if you would.’ Doll opened the buff file-cover he had brought with him. ‘This posting advice. I expect you know how the major’s got all that organized. He can send who he likes. Well, he’s asked to provide eight bodies of various kinds. All Signal Office Personnel. They’ll be entraining for the UK in a couple of days, twenty-eight days’ leave, then the boat for Burma. I should imagine they’ll all be joining the same unit out there. Now the major’s been in a funny mood recently. Sort of withdrawn. Normally he’d nominate all these bodies personally, but this morning he gave me three names and told me to fill in the others myself. Not like him at all. Anyway, I was just wondering if there’s anybody in your section you’d care to lose. Apart from Hargreaves, that is. He was one of the major’s three, as you probably know.’

  ‘Yes, he did mention it to me. Tell me, Sergeant Doll, is there a vacancy for a switchboard-operator on that list?’

  ‘There is, sir. Two, in fact.’

  ‘Mm. It’s tempting, but I’m afraid—’

  ‘Perhaps it’ll help you to make up your mind, Mr Archer, if I tell you now that I wasn’t going to bother the major with signing the order himself. He’s got enough on his mind already. And of course any officer’s signature would do. Yours, for instance, sir.’

  Archer hesitated. ‘He’s bound to see the file copy.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but that won’t be until tomorrow morning, will it? And I was thinking of dropping the top copy off for transmission at the Signal Office tonight when I go back down. Get it out of the way.’

  ‘He could cancel it and send an amended list.’

  ‘Oh, do you think that’s likely, sir? Major Raleigh wants to be thought of as someone who can take a quick decision and stick to it. It’s like a moral code with him.’

  ‘A good point, Sergeant. Very well, then. I think I’ll nominate Signalman Hammond.’

  ‘14156755 Signalman Hammond, J. R., SBO DII?’ Doll ran his fingertip along a line of typing. ‘Anybody else? Right. Now, if you’d just sign here, sir . . . Thank you. I suppose you’ll be off yourself soon, Mr Archer, won’t you, after what you were telling me?’

  ‘I imagine so. Well, you won’t be needing the major after all now, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh yes I will, sir. That was just a routine matter. Somethi
ng far more important has come up. There’s a signal here from War Office telling 424 Wireless Section, 502 Line Section and 287 DR Section to stand by to move on twenty-four hours’ notice. Half the Company. They’ve obviously decided we’re to be broken up.’

  ‘That’s important all right,’ Archer said. ‘To the major more than anyone else, probably.’

  ‘My feeling exactly, sir. That was why I thought it couldn’t wait till the morning. I reckoned I had to let him know about it tonight.’ Doll’s eyes grew distant.

  ‘He’d set his heart on taking the Company out East.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I know it, Mr Archer. That’s the end of that ambition. I wonder what the next pipe-dream will be.’ Suddenly getting to his feet, Doll roamed about the room with his hands in his pockets, an uncharacteristic bodily movement. ‘It may surprise you to learn, sir,’ he said cordially, ‘that I’m by way of being a bit of an angler. Been at it since I was a boy. Well now, it used to surprise me very much at first how badly I got on with other anglers. Jealousy rather than congratulations if you managed to pull off something a bit out of the ordinary. No end of disagreements over red hackles and what-not. And a lot of boredom too. Now in one way you wouldn’t expect that, sir, would you? You’d expect people who’d got interests in common to get on better with one another than the average, not worse. But when you come to think about it it’s not so odd. Someone who’s a bit like yourself can rub you up the wrong way worse than a chap who’s totally different. Well, there’s one obvious instance. I bet a lot of the lads in this Company hate their Officers and NCOs a sight worse than they ever hated Jerry. They know them, you see.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me for reciting you a sermon, Mr Archer, but this is a point about human nature that’s always interested me. And it has got an application. I take it I wouldn’t be intruding on your mental privacy, so to speak, sir, if I hazarded a guess that you regard myself and the major as pretty much birds of a feather?’

  ‘I think that’s fair enough.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. In that case it may surprise you to learn that I can’t think of anybody whom I despise as thoroughly as I despise the major. I know you hate him yourself or I wouldn’t risk telling you this. You’ll be leaving us soon anyway.’

  Archer’s puzzlement, which had been growing for the last five minutes, changed direction. ‘But I’ve got personal reasons.’

  ‘I too. Though they’re quite different from yours. He’s so sure he’s better. But in fact he’s shoddy material. Third rate. Not to be depended on. In many parts of the world over the next few years an important battle’s going to be fought – largely against the ideas that you yourself stand for, sir, if I may say so with all respect. The major’s going to be worse than useless to us there. To me and the people who think as I do. He’s soft. He’ll break. I can see him standing as a Labour candidate in ten years’ time if the wind’s still blowing that way. No principle. That’s the one thing I can’t forgive.’

  Partly to throw off complacency at being taken into a fascist’s confidence, Archer stood up briskly and said: ‘I’ll take you up to the major now.’

  ‘Right, sir. I wish I’d been there to see him thrown out of that last parliament. Good for Hargreaves. And you yourself too, sir, of course.’

  The muffled bang of an exploding petrol-tank reached them as they climbed the steep narrow stairs to the main ante-room. This had been created by the folding-back of folding doors between two former bedrooms and the importation of furniture from all over the house and elsewhere. Outside it was a tiny landing hedged by slender carved banisters. Archer left Doll here and went in

  The major was sitting in half of the curious high-backed double armchair, a favourite of his despite its clear resemblance to part of a railway-carriage seat. Probably he found it suited his characteristic activity, the having of a word, whether denunciatory or conspiratorial, with someone. He had been having one now, an earnest one accompanied by gesture, with the young and usually solitary lieutenant-colonel of Engineers whose thirst for schnapps had established him as a local personality. In his hand at the moment was a glass not of schnapps but of the Mess’s whisky, a glass which, appearance suggested, had been emptied and refilled several times that evening. The colonel was rather elaborately accoutred with belt, holster, revolver and lanyard. Both he and the major, who likewise seemed to have taken drink, were dramatically illuminated by a many-tiered candelabrum that made great use of frosted glass.

  Raleigh had interrupted his confidential word with the colonel to have a more public one with the Mess corporal, who was saying: ‘About forty, I should say, sir. Well dressed. Quite respectable.’

  ‘And where’s this picture she says she wants?’

  ‘It was in her bedroom when it was her bedroom, sir.’

  ‘But it isn’t her bedroom any more. The house isn’t hers either, it’s been requisitioned. It belongs to me. No, she can’t have her picture. I don’t care whether she painted it herself or not, she can’t have it. Go and tell her so, will you?’

  When he saw that Archer was near, the major turned his back as far as was possible without actually kneeling on his seat. The emotion he felt for the ex-Speaker of the now officially dissolved parliament was not military disapprobation nor yet personal anger, but sadness at the other’s withholding of loyalty. All this and much more had been gone into at length the morning after Hargreaves had spied strangers. Archer had protested, with every appearance of sincerity, that the strangers could have been suffered to remain if anybody had thought to put forward a simple motion proposing this, and that nothing but general ignorance of procedure had brought about their exit. Raleigh paid no heed. In the course of a sad and objective appraisal of Archer’s disloyalty he had recounted rumours about Archer’s private life which, if repeated before witnesses and if the law of slander had run in the Army, might have been the occasion of awards in damages sufficient to buy and sell the contents of the Officers’ Shop. Then, still avowing sadness, the major had announced that his duty to the Company forbade the retention in its ranks of anybody so provenly disloyal. In other words, it was Burma for Archer as soon as the major’s pal at HQ could fix it. After that, the major had sadly shouted at Archer to get out of his sight.

  Archer had, and as far as possible had stayed there. But now he had to get back into it for a moment. To facilitate this he leant against the sideboard (could it have been made of ebony?) and faced the couple in the double armchair.

  The RE colonel, whose name was Davison, was not the kind of man to appeal to Raleigh. He was what Raleigh was fond of calling a disorganized sort of chap, meaning someone whose character had not been stripped down like a racing-car until nothing but more or less military components remained. But it was his policy to encourage colonels and such to be around. Colonel Davison, once acquainted with the volume and regularity of the Mess’s liquor supply, had needed no encouragement. At the moment he was saying in his public-school voice (another selling-point for the major): ‘But as I keep telling you, that’s why the Army’s so good. Because nobody could take the bloody nonsense seriously.’

  The major came back with something inaudible to Archer, probably that he couldn’t go all the way with the colonel there.

  ‘Well, nobody with any sense, then,’ Davison said. ‘And that saves an awful lot of worry. Means you can start laughing.’

  Again the major could not be heard, but this time he went on much longer. Davison listened, nodding steadily, his eyes on his glass, which he was rotating on the knee of his crossed leg. Archer’s attention wandered. It came to rest on Cleaver, who was half-lying on a purple sofa reading an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Archer had had a go at that too. General opinion in the Mess was that it ranked about halfway in the little library the batmen had been assiduously building up ever since the Company entered urban France: not so good as, say, Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, but clearly better than the available non-fictional treatments of these themes, vit
al books by Scotsmen with titles like Married Happiness. Cleaver laughed silently to himself, then looked quickly and furtively round without catching Archer’s eye.

  ‘It’s all a joke,’ Davison said loudly. ‘The whole thing.’

  The major saw Archer. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sergeant Doll would like to see you, sir. He’s just outside.’

  When Raleigh had gone, Davison patted the space beside him. ‘Come and sit down, laddie.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Sir. Sir sir sir. Sir sir sir sir sir sir sir. Ha.’

  From the way Davison swayed about in his seat as he said this, Archer concluded that he was not just drunk, but very drunk. ‘Nice little place we’ve got here, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, delightful. Delightful. Your poor major’s upset. Have you been being nasty to him? Have a drink. Corporal! More whisky needed here. Crash priority.’

  ‘I’m never nasty to majors,’ Archer said.

  ‘Aren’t you? I am. All the time. One of the consummations. Compensations. What do you do in Civvy Street, laddie?’ The colonel was perhaps five years older than Archer.