Cards of Identity

by Nigel Dennis

  I was a little disappointed in his new identity. It was exactly the same as the old one, except that there seemed to be more of it. Sensing my disappointment, he said: ‘I suppose you expected a completely exterior transformation. That’s not at all what happens. It all takes place within.’

  ‘Are you conscious of the new identity?’

  ‘Certainly. But don’t think of it in physical images – as a substance entering and filling an empty space. The old emptiness is still there, but it has been intangibly elucidated.’

  ‘I can’t follow that.’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ he replied, his voice containing all its old contempt for materialism, but now more forceful and decisive. ‘You must know it.’

  I saw that he had reached that area of inner experience at whose gates language and logic shiver like starvelings. I felt a sharp and hostile envy, and yet I persisted in demanding further explanation.

  He laid one hand gently on the badger’s head and said: ‘The nearest I can get to defining the new identity is to say that the one I lacked previously is now lacking on a much higher level. It’s as if with a single leap I had mounted a full flight closer to the Realization of Nothingness. But it’s silly to try and put these things into words.’

  *

  The whole life of the nation was suspended for the following week. It is true that auction sales continued in all parts of the country, but no one spoke of such continuances, so great was the general absorption in the Lord Royal’s discontinuance. As Vinson said: ‘It is not his death as a man which counts; it is his procession into an embodiment of that which demands reverence.’ It vexed him that the B.B.C., far from emphasizing this crucial aspect of the affair, concentrated on the opposite side: apart from Elgars and elegies they transmitted nothing but eulogies, saying nothing whatever of the new career on which the Lord Royal had now entered. Fortunately, as the days passed, even the wireless was excited by the popular enthusiasm for the funeral, and we heard less and less of the Lord Royal and more and more of his procession.

  I think, myself, that there is no greater thrill in life than to see maps of a really big funeral appear in the newspapers. There, before one’s eyes, are the drab old streets and avenues of commonplace, everyday life suddenly electrified by the twisting black arrow of death. And when to this human enthusiasm is added the thrill of knowing that one will oneself be following that sombre emblem of direction, that one is already a selected pin-point in that marching host – well, there is not much to live for after that. Vinson and I went about our preparations with a gravity so deep as to be ecstatic: his, of course, being on a higher level of experience than mine, was correspondingly deeper.

  The night before the funeral he got stage-fright. We had set the badger up on its gilt trolley, to draw behind us on ropes of silk: we had oiled the wheels and tried on our uniforms with their mourning sashes of sable and saffron. Vinson began to breathe heavily and sweat; twice he got up, consulted the dictionary, shook his head, went out and bought another dictionary, repeated the process, and so on. ‘I know it seems completely ridiculous,’ he admitted at last, ‘but the sense of what we are about to do has suddenly escaped me.’

  I answered, rather shocked: ‘You think it nonsense, Vinson?’

  ‘No, no: you misunderstand, as usual. I mean sense in the sense of emotional significance. I cannot adjust my heart to the mood; the inspired nature of the matter escapes me. Moreover, when I decided to withdraw temporarily to the merely commonsense aspect of the matter, even that proved elusive: I was unable to recapture the difference between a symbol and an emblem. The dictionaries have made it worse: they define a symbol as an emblem and an emblem as a symbol, a shameless tautology. Believe me, when one is accustomed to the high fringes of non-lingual mysticism, it is horrifying suddenly to find oneself crawling in the lowest reaches of literal definition. Tomorrow will come and I shall have lost my whole hard-won identity: I shall be a puppet in a meaningless ceremony.’

  To cheer him up, I laughed and said: ‘Every film-star and after-dinner speaker feels as you do at this particular moment. All will be remembered when the curtain rises.’

  ‘I don’t like the comparison,’ he replied, ‘but I know you wish me well. I shall not sleep tonight, of course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t explain why, in words.’

  *

  Of course, he was himself again, next morning. Charming had arranged for a London barracks to be set aside as a tiring-room for the symbolic bodies and we proceeded there immediately after breakfast, with the badger and the trolley and our livery.

  A barracks is not the best place for some two hundred men to dress for a death-march. Soldiers, who wear such dress all the time, counteract it by surrounding themselves with extreme emblems of life. Much of the wall was covered with indecent pictures, and the very boards had an air of rankness-that special flavour created by the clash between sexuality and military discipline. So it was the more marvellous to see the finesse and sweetness with which our two hundred marchers divested themselves of their bowler-hats and black suits and tired themselves in the magnificent costumes of their bodyhoods. They spoke very little: from time to time one would hear someone ask: ‘Have you the sprig of tansy?’ or, in a more worried tone: ‘I think they sent the wrong hemlock.’ But that was all. I think I most admired the very old men – the ones with long white moustaches who could stand erect in nothing but their underclothes and still look perfectly emblematic. But I had an eye, too, for their sons, the young men who would carry on after their fathers had gone and who hoped, in time, to resemble them exactly. Except, as I have said, for the printed map of a funeral procession, I think there is no sight more beautiful than that of an old man dressed in the clothes of an earlier generation accompanied by a son who, though a trifle more up-to-date in appearance, is otherwise papa’s replica. There is the father, still leaning backwards towards the world of his father, and beside him a son following exactly the same bent. They are thus together recreating the identity of the young man’s grandfather and binding the vague present to an identifiable past.

  When we were all ready, Charming gave us a brief inspection and arranged us in order of march. We of the Badgeries were to be preceded by a company of Pikemen and followed by a platoon of Coffiners. Barely an hour after the scheduled time we slowly moved out into the street and took up our positions.

  When Vinson and I had been alone in our dingy rooms, the antiquity of our uniforms had been pronounced. It had become less so in the tiring-room, where we competed for anachronistic effect with a score of brilliant costumes. But, dear me, when we got into the street what a lesson in humility awaited us! The total length of the cortège was four and a quarter miles, of which we were able to see only a quarter in front and as much behind, due to bends in the street, statues, traffic lights, islands, etc. But what a spectacle was that half-mile of pageantry! Every colour under the sun – and there was a brilliant sun, what’s more – was laid out in stripes, blotches, and bands, and cut and sewed into the most fantastic forms of blouse, trouser, breech, stocking, and headpiece. Silver and gold, silk and lace, polished steel and shampooed feather – we could see nothing else behind and before and it was only with an effort that I convinced myself that I was a part of this splendour. And how strange the contrast between us superb death-marchers and the living onlookers who crowded the pavements! There they stood, gaping in their gloomy rows, with their shabby suits and abominable footwear, staring dumbfounded at the unreeling of so much obsolescence. Before I became sophisticated, as a result of knowing Vinson, it would have seemed to me that the contrast was the opposite of what it should be; I would have thought that those who attend on life would look alive, and death’s attendants dead. I know better now; I know that the onlooker sees us as lucky men marching in procession towards the past, and weeps drably to think that he is tied to the ever-miserable present.

  I heard a trumpet blow. A voice in the crowd exclaimed: ‘They�
�re off!’ and sure enough the farthermost ranks began to move like the first stanza in an epic. It was about a quarter of an hour before this advance slid backwards to us, and then, we too began our intrepid crawl.

  To indicate grief we held our heads bent slightly down, which meant that we could see nothing in front of us above the level of our predecessor’s knees. It was not long before this unchanging spectacle of Pikemen’s moving calves, in plum stockings with orange rosettes, began to affect me: my heart started to pump; I felt like one of those people who find rebirth nowadays on the Mediterranean sea-bed, glimpsing fleeting archaisms through watery goggles. Behind, I heard the tramp of the Coffiners and the wheet-wheet of the badger’s concealed pneumatic tyres.

  I knew it was going to be hard sledding when, at intervals, my low vision caught a stretcher being carried briskly to the rear by St John’s Ambulance men, and lying on it some utterly collapsed processional figure, his velvet doublet open at the neck, his unbooted toes sticking plaintively into the higher air. Moreover, the farther we tramped, the more vulgarly excited the crowd became. When the head of the cortège was passing them they were, I am sure, reverent and silent; but after a mile or two of it had pageanted by they were spoilt and out of hand, interested only in what was coming next. The sight of the badger on his silken tow-ropes was irresistible by a crowd of animal-lovers; long before we actually reached a particular point we would hear high screams of delight: ‘Look, Archie, at the pretty dog!’ ‘Oh, isn’t he sweet!’ ‘He’d be alive if only his tongue hung out.’ Much as I detested these excited remarks, I hated more the comments that invariably followed, made by elderly men of the kind who like to show off their knowledge. ‘That’s no fox, you silly, that’s an otter. What they had on Granny’s farm;’ ‘It don’t look like an otter to me. More the colour of a beaver.’ And once, of course, the loud, dry voice of the man who really knows, saying in lordly tones: ‘Madam, that is neither a Yorkshire terrier nor a mink. It is what is known as a cami-leopard.’

  After an eternity of this I raised my swimming eyes, though still keeping my head inclined. This gave me the look and posture of a man who comes back from the pub on a dark night and cranes hopefully in the direction of the nail on which his door-key hangs. To my horror I recognized the sign of The Jolly Waggoners in Kelmscott Way, a mere mile from our starting-point. Three miles to go, and already I was having to recite to myself snatches of poems by character-building authors! I glanced at Vinson.

  He was not an athletic type; pacing a room or bar-parlour was his limit. Now, in the high, hard, leather boots of the Badgeries he was suffering torture. But how can I describe his expression as he hobbled along, towing away at the whispering badger? Though his eyes were swirling round and round he never for a second raised them or unbent his head from the painful angle of reverence. It was enough for him to know that he was pursuing a symbol while drawing a token. He paid not the slightest heed to his surroundings: even when the stretchers with their limp bodies began to flit past like dead leaves from some enormous oak, Vinson hobbled on. So strong were his principles that if at that moment he had heard a scream for help from the lips of a loved one, he would only have set his teeth and pressed ahead.

  Soho Square is a one-way roundabout and as we trudged round it my annoyance was relieved by the sudden arrival of my second wind. With two miles to go I suddenly was light-headed and relaxed and as we crossed over Oxford Street and headed up gloomy Rathbone Place all my confidence came back. The authorities had chosen this narrow thoroughfare for the procession because most of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road were being relaid at the moment of the Lord Royal’s death – though, to be fair to the Lord Royal, I must say that it is a rare moment when they are not being relaid. But somebody had miscalculated the amplitude of obsolescence, and one of the coaches of Dukes’ Provender, filled with emblems of bread, had encircled a hydrant with its leather spring, and overturned. The coach was being followed in the procession by a unit of artillery marching backwards with reversed brass cannon, symbolizing a famous siege in which, the gun-breeches having over-heated, the charges were laid in the muzzles, giving rise to the famous command: ‘Men! Backs to the enemy!’ Bread, coach, cannon, and gunners were now hideously involved, making a taut bottle-neck for the tail of the procession which was wound-up in a snarl of symbols all the way back to Old Compton Street, where the whores were out in full strength. Efforts were being made to move the blockage from the narrow street; meanwhile, we were being detoured around it. The jam was appalling: crowds three deep filled the pavements; and what with policemen, grunting workmen, and frantic cats, we had no more than six feet of passageway. Moreover, we could see ahead the luckier members of the procession moving smoothly ahead towards Euston station: the thought of being left behind on the way to the grave caused considerable panic. Indeed, Vinson was the only marcher who paid no attention whatever until, without warning, he found himself marching reverently into a large heap of synthetic bread surmounted by a fainted gunner. This conjunction was too much, even for Vinson. He raised his eyes to see what was happening in the material world.

  If he had not done so, if he had stuck to his symbols through thick and thin, I might never have met Dr Bitterling. As it was, I saw a look of horror come into his eyes, which were fixed on something in the pressing crowd. He shouted: ‘No, no! Not that!’ and following his eyes I saw her, of all people, standing in a rear rank of the crowd with a small bomb clutched in her raised hand.

  Vinson was not afraid of death. On the contrary, as we have seen, he was greatly attached to it, and to have been fatally bombed during a distinguished funeral was all he could have asked of life. What he saw, quicker than I did, was that the bomb was a stink-bomb and that she was aiming it not at him but at the badger.

  Oh, Gods, are there any limitations to the ingenuity of a woman’s revenge? This particular one was planned on at least three levels of cynical rage: first, the normal one of punishing a man by harming not him but that which he most loves; second, the highly-intellectual one of reducing the pure, token badger to the revolting status of a stinking real one; third, the ironic one of showing Vinson how well she had profited by his tuition in symbolism. I understood none of this, of course, at the moment itself, but Vinson grasped the revenge on all three levels in the space of as many seconds. And then, seeing his duty, he did it instantly. Stretching his arms wide apart, he fell flat over backwards, intending to shield the danger with his body. But this was the moment when one of the Pikemen, pushed behind us, had chosen to lay his weapon in rest. The back of Vinson’s head landed on its point with a splintery crack.

  She was through the crowd in a second, screaming: ‘Vinson, my darling, what have they done to you?’ As in a dream, I saw policemen pulling her off and Vinson being carried away with the bread. I was alone; but processions, once started, never stop. The badger was undamaged. So was I. On we marched, to Euston and the grave.

  *

  Today, it is I who sit at the auctioneer’s raised table, holding in my hand the ivory emblem of the market-place. And it is she, my darling wife, who sits at my elbow, her slim fingers quickly noting the final bid, her eyes alert for the twitched ear, the flared nostril, the jumping shoulder. And below us, more often than not, sit my four aunts, gazing up at us with expressions of permanent astonishment.

  My wife and I look down from our table with secret contempt. Thanks to her having kept the books for my predecessor, we have managed to divert most of his custom to ourselves and we make a very good living from it. But a living is all it is: once the last dirty note has been handed in for the last dirty lot, we lay aside our books and hammer and enter a very different world – the world bequeathed to us by Vinson. His photograph is everywhere in our house, and behind a curtain in the living-room is a full-length oil-painting of him, in the full-dress of Co-Warden of the Badgeries.

  Our marriage was inevitable. Far from regarding her as Vinson’s murderer, I think of her as the only person who really unde
rstood his teachings. When he died, he took my old identity with him, and my irresponsible attitude to women was part of it. Until his death, I had been able to be promiscuous because I had known that he, with his immovable firmness, was at my side. Once he went, a panic emptiness came over me: I looked frantically for something solid to replace him.

  Who should this be but she, my wife? When a woman loses the great love of her life, she marries, if she possibly can, his closest friend. In this way she is able to continue loving the dead man and to build her marriage strongly on a symbolic foundation. This man, she reasons, as she looks curiously at her husband, is a poor fish. But he is the nearest I can get to the big one that got away.

  Does this sound as if I had had a rather poor deal in my marriage? I think not. If you consider my reason for marrying her side by side with her reason for marrying me, I think you will find we come out about quits. Dr Bitterling dunks so, anyway, and he is not a man who says silly things.

  In the evenings, when our work is done, we explore Vinson’s world. I am still a lazy man and my study of symbolism would soon falter were it not for the ardour of my wife. Like many other women she has a merciful faculty for forgetting things which would plague the conscience of a man. She can, for instance, describe in full detail – and how frequently she does so! – how Vinson looked as he came marching up Rathbone Place: no detail of the carnage of coach, bread, gunner, and pike has been forgotten. But she has absolutely no recollection of the immediate cause of his death. She believes that he stepped on something slippery at about the time he came abreast of her and that his heart, weakened by over-exertion, gave out at the same moment. Consequently, it is Channing she blames for having killed Vinson – and, through Channing, the whole structure of our present-day society. ‘If the whole world were not rotten for want of abstract and spiritual values,’ she puts it, ‘it would not have been necessary to heap on the shoulders of one devoted man a burden that should be shared by millions.’ I am aware that from a purely factual point-of-view she has not described Vinson’s death accurately; but viewed from the higher levels of thought, her interpretation is pretty fair. I am the only man who saw her raised arm and the stink-bomb in her hand, and already, after a few years of higher thought, the image is becoming vaguer. I now see only what looks like a birch rod with a knob at the end: in a few more years it will have become a tendril bearing a flower. Dr Bitterling says this is quite normal, and that this is an age, thank goodness, when angst and guilt are slowly being enveloped by the healing arms of an infinite symbolism.