Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  The major was looking out of the window. A cow wearing a large floppy hat had just run along part of his road (known to everyone but himself as Raleigh’s Alley) and then turned off to flee up the lane past the wireless section’s billet. From somewhere near at hand a loud silly laugh had floated into the air. Whether this was associated with the cow or not, the two manifestations combined to pique and depress the major. They formed for him a symbol of anarchy mounting, of discipline and seriousness and purpose melting away. He felt there was some connection here with the chance of a Labour victory at the polls. Apart from a few negligible wild men like Hargreaves and Archer, he had never met anyone who confessed to having cast his proxy vote for Labour. On a recent visit to the Mess at Hildesfeld he had made a point of questioning his hosts on the matter and had heard the same story. His wife’s letters said that nobody knew of anybody in the whole town who was a Labour supporter and that everybody felt very sorry for poor Mr Jack, the Labour candidate. And yet the major was uneasy. Something monstrous and indefinable was growing in strength, something hostile to his accent and taste in clothes and modest directorship and ambitions for his sons and redbrick house at Purley with its back-garden tennis-court.

  Somebody tapped on the door. The major called ‘Yes?’ and started speaking the moment Archer began crossing the threshold – a valuable foil, this, to his normal keep-’em-waiting procedure. ‘Now, Frank, where’s the summary of communications?’

  Archer walked over to Cleaver’s table and instantly picked up a duplicated form in pale-blue ink with manuscript additions. ‘Here it is, sir.’

  The major took it and went back to his seat. On the whole, he seemed mollified rather than the contrary. ‘About this parliament business, Frank. I’m not at all happy about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’

  ‘I’m seriously thinking of closing it down.’

  ‘Surely there’s no need for that?’

  ‘That disgusting display of Hargreaves’s last night. Couldn’t you have prevented it? After all, as Speaker you must have some . . . And as an Officer, you—’

  ‘I don’t think that anything but force would have—’

  ‘Worst thing in the world for discipline. If the blokes get the idea that they can simply—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t agree at all, sir.’

  The major’s eyes narrowed. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a chance for them to let off steam, you see. They’re off parade – rank doesn’t count in there. Everyone accepts that. I mentioned last night to Doll just now and he obviously didn’t resent it.’

  ‘That’s not the point. And if rank doesn’t count, why aren’t officers and WOs allowed to take full part, instead of having to sit out like that? I let you have your way there, since you were organizing the thing, but I never followed your argument.’

  ‘Well, sir, rank doesn’t count there really, but chaps may think it does. They might feel chary of giving, er, let’s say Wilf Cleaver a proper hammering when they wouldn’t if it was a corporal from another section, or even their own.’

  ‘Mm. I don’t think the blokes are quite as stupid as you make out.’

  Archer shrugged.

  ‘Tell me, Frank, I’ve often wondered: why do you hang on to Hargreaves when you’ve had so many chances to get rid of him? Does the section no good all round, having a type like that in it. Bad for morale.’

  ‘I just feel . . . he’s more or less settled in there. He’s not much liked, but at least he’s tolerated. Anywhere else he’d probably have a much thinner time.’

  ‘But good God man, a Signals section doesn’t exist to give a home to stray dogs and to wet-nurse people. It’s supposed to be an efficient unit in a war machine.’

  ‘Hargreaves can’t do the Allied cause much harm now.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better remind you, Frank, that we’re all still in uniform and that our country is still at war. We’re not on holiday.’

  Standing before the major’s table, Archer shrugged again and put his hands on his hips. His eyes fell on a framed text that said: Ich will mich freuen des Herrn und frölich sein in Gott.

  ‘Confidentially now, old boy, what’s the matter with Hargreaves? Basically the matter?’

  ‘That’s very simple, sir. He doesn’t like the Army.’

  The major laughed through his nose. ‘I should imagine very few of us would sooner be here than anywhere else. If a man isn’t a cretin he knows it’s a question of getting a job done. A very important job, I take it you agree?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. And Hargreaves is clear on that too. But it isn’t being in the Army that gets him down. It’s the Army.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re being too subtle for me, Frank.’

  ‘Well, as far as I can make him out – he’s not an easy man to talk to, but the way he sees it, people have been nasty to him in the Army in a way they wouldn’t be in civilian life. The Army puts power into the hands of chaps who’ve never had it before, not that sort of power, and they use it to inflict injustices on other chaps whom they happen to dislike for personal reasons. That’s the way the Army works. According to Hargreaves.’

  ‘Don’t stand like that, Frank,’ Raleigh said, and waited until Archer had removed his hands from his hips and put them behind his back. ‘Well, whatever friend Hargreaves feels about being in the Army, you can tell him from me to pull himself together. So far I’ve tried to keep the original Company in one piece as far as possible. When postings come through I’ve been seeing to it that they’ve got passed on to these new arrivals. But there’s always plenty of call for blokes with Hargreaves’s qualifications, or lack of them rather, and I can get him out of the way any time I want to. If there’s one more bit of nonsense from him I’ll see he’s on the first available boat for Burma. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell him.’

  ‘And what’s going on between him and young Hammond?’

  ‘Going on? Nothing that I know of. They are friends. Hammond’s about the only chap Hargreaves talks to.’

  ‘Is that all he does to him? Talk?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re driving at, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes you do, Frank, don’t you try and bullshit me. There’s something pretty unsavoury about that friendship, as you call it, if half I hear is true.’

  ‘I’ll go and fetch Hargreaves and Hammond now, sir, if you like, and you can fetch whoever’s been telling you this and get him to repeat it in front of them. And me too, of course, as their Section Officer.’

  ‘There’s no need to take that tone, old boy. I’m simply telling you as a friend to be on your guard. You don’t want a scandal in the section, do you? Hammond’s a good lad and I shouldn’t like him to get into any sort of trouble. If things turn out the way they might I’d consider him favourably for lance-corporal. Well, I suppose you’d better be getting back to the Signal Office. Sorry to have kept you, but this Hargreaves business has been on my mind rather.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh, before you go, Frank, any news of Journey’s End?’

  ‘The librarian chap in Hildesfeld says he’ll do his best, but it’s been out of print for years. The British Drama League in England are on the job now, apparently.’

  ‘Good. I hope it comes through. It would be fun to have a shot at putting it on. Do you know it at all?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

  ‘It’s good stuff, you know, Frank. You’d like it. The best thing on the first war by far. Really gets the spirit of the trenches, the feel of what it was like.’

  III

  Major Raleigh stood on the steps of the farmhouse where the Officers’ Mess was, trying to smell the lilac bushes. He was having a hard time of it. Competing smells included the one from the cookhouse bonfire, a mixture of rum and hot cardboard; the one from the henhouse where the Mess’s looted chickens lived; the one from the piggery; the one from nowhere and everywhere that was apparently endemic to continental farmyards, about midway
between that of a brewery and that of burning cheese-rind. As one of his own wireless operators might have tried to tune out interference, the major stooped and laid his soft nose alongside one of the pale clusters. It tickled, but he got something.

  The voice of Cleaver spoke behind him. ‘Are you all right, Major?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right,’ Raleigh said, wheeling round as he came upright.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were ill.’

  ‘Well I’m not. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes, Major. Nobody else seems to want to come.’

  ‘Did you ask them?’

  ‘Yes, Major.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, Major.’

  ‘It’s a pity some of them couldn’t have taken the trouble to come along,’ Raleigh said, voicing a desire for his brother-officers’ company that was to cool sharply within the hour. ‘All right, Wilf, let’s get moving. We’re late already.’

  The two got into the major’s car, a saloon with faded checkerboard painting on the radiator and a cracked mica windscreen. Its only superiority over the major’s jeep lay in the latter vehicle’s having reached the stage of needing to carry a can of petrol, a can of oil and a large can of water whenever it went anywhere. And this thing was a piece of loot, too. While he pulled at the starter and the motor lurched over, Raleigh imagined his friends at Potsdam, each in a Mercedes with the back full of cameras, watches, automatic pistols, pairs of binoculars, crates of champagne and vodka and American whiskey, haunches of venison . . . Girls did not appear on the major’s list; he considered that side of life much overrated. Before the car came shudderingly to life he had time for a surge of feeling, equally compounded of envy and righteous indignation, at the memory of a current rumour about a large RAF Signals unit which, ordered to return to England with all its stores and transport, and thus secure against Customs inspection, had stuffed every cranny with cameras, watches, automatic pistols – perhaps girls.

  They moved out of the yard, with a grinding bump when one of the rear mudguards, worse adjusted than its fellow, met the edge of the road surface. The sun was setting over the fields of rye or oats or barley or perhaps just wheat and there was arguably a fair amount of tranquillity and such about, but the major was beyond its reach. As he frequently said, it was people that interested him. The people interesting him at the moment were still the ones he knew at Potsdam. ‘Funny to think of them all up there,’ he said. ‘Bill and the CO and Jack Rowney and Tom Thurston and all that crowd. And Rylands and Ben and Dalessio and Jock Watson. Wonder what they’re all up to. Parties with the Russians and the Yanks and God knows what. All the big brass-hats around. The Jerries too. And . . .’ – the major tried briefly to visualize what more might be on view there than other soldiers – ‘everything. Of course I realize we couldn’t all have gone, but I do wish—’

  ‘The CO and the Adjutant tended to pick the crowd who’d been with them at North Midland Command.’

  ‘Yes, I know they did.’ A military Calvinist who had had demonstrated to him his own non-membership of the elect, Raleigh spoke in a neutral tone. ‘Not altogether, though. They took Dalessio with them.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Rylands seemed to think Dalessio was indispensable,’ the major said. Then, quite as if he realized that this was not the most tactful thing to say to a man whom all sorts of pressure had failed to get into Dalessio’s job, he added: ‘I wouldn’t go all the way with him there.’

  ‘I hear Bill and Jack and Tom are all majors now.’

  ‘Yes. I’m particularly pleased Tom got his crown. He didn’t fit in quite at first, I thought – bit of an awkward cuss. But some time last winter he pulled himself together and started doing a first-class job. Co-operated for all he was worth.’

  The car laboured up an incline past the burnt-out wreck of a civilian lorry, relic of the celebrations on VE night. The cuff of a Wehrmacht jacket, charred and faded, hung out of the remains of the cab. Raleigh was about to comment adversely on this memorial of indiscipline, or of high spirits, but changed his mind and said abruptly: ‘I’d give anything to be at Potsdam.’

  ‘I’d have thought we were better off here, Major, with the Staff off our backs at last after two years.’

  ‘They’re doing a job there, that’s the difference. I suppose . . . I suppose I might still get the chance of taking the Company to the Far East. Depends how the war goes, partly.’ The major was thinking as usual in terms of a Headquarters Signals unit, not of a mere company, and of a lieutenant-colonelcy, but he was too shy to tell Cleaver this.

  ‘I didn’t realize you were as keen on the Army as all that, sir,’ Cleaver said carefully.

  ‘Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few weeks, Wilf. Serious thinking. First real chance I’ve had since 1939. I worked it out that I’ve spent half my adult life in the Army. Pretty shaking thought, that. I’ve got used to being in uniform. Hardly remember what it was like in Civvy Street. And from the way things are going it looks as if I might not care for it when I arrive there. If these Socialists get in—’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much, Major. However badly it turns out there’s sure to be scope for, well, initiative and quick thinking and all the rest of it.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  The major parked the car in the Signal Office yard between an iron canister full of broken glass and a disused boiler stuffed with torn sheets. The two officers crossed the road to the school building and entered the hall.

  Parliament was in session. As Raleigh led the way to the Visitors’ Gallery, his shoes thudding on the greasy bare boards, an instrument-mechanic on the Government side was saying: ‘We’re going to build a decent Britain. Fair shares for all and free schools and doctoring and hospitals and no class distinction. The old school tie and the old-boy network aren’t going to work any more. To make sure of that we’re going to abolish the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, or at any rate change them so that anybody who’s got the brains can go to them, and we’re going to either abolish the House of Lords or make it a thing you vote on, just like the House of Commons. It’s undemocratic any other way. Some of us want to abolish the Royal Family for the same reason, but we’re not decided about that. Personally I think that if you scrap titles and the Honours List and all that carry-on, then you can leave the King and Queen to stew in their own juice.’

  The major’s mouth tightened. So far he had refrained from interjecting more than a sentence or two into these debates, but after what he had just heard, and in this evening’s intensified mood of discontent, he knew he would be failing in his duty to all sorts of entities – to common sense, to discipline both military and civil, to England, yes, and to the King, why be ashamed of it? – if he refrained from extensive comment. His eye met that of Cleaver, who looked away instantly. The major waited impatiently for the Home Secretary or whatever he was to finish.

  Interest in the parliament had fallen off from the moment of its inception. Deliveries of newspapers and magazines had recently improved in speed and quantity and the major suspected that access to civilian drink had likewise improved; he must get his batman to keep his ears open. Less than half the original members were in their seats tonight. The Opposition front bench lacked its Leader and its spokesman on Defence questions: Doll had declared himself finally disgusted with his fellow-MPs’ frivolity – ‘I think it’s ridiculous spending a lot of your time and thought preparing stuff for a load of apes, sir, don’t you?’ The ministerial bench was even more thinly held, with the Lord Privy Seal (if the truth were known) risking court-martial by thoroughly fraternizing with a nurse from the civilian hospital in Hildesfeld, the Chancellor of the Exchequer asleep on his bed with a three-day-old Daily Express over him, the Prime Minister himself with two of his mates from the Sergeants’ Mess attacking something they vaguely thought of as gin in something they even more vaguely thought of as a pub on the far side of the railway yard. But the Foreign Sec
retary was in his seat, and the young man the major very precisely thought of as that official’s boyfriend was in his.

  The Home Secretary might have been thought to be drawing to a close, although, as the major reminded himself, you could never tell about that or anything else with fellows as unused as this to public speaking or indeed to anything else even remotely to do with the highly responsible and specialized and difficult task of running a modern industrial state. ‘You heard the other week about how we’re going to give the Empire back to the blokes that live there,’ the Home Secretary was saying: ‘well, we’re going to do the same thing, so to speak, with Great Britain itself. The country belongs to the ordinary working bloke and by Christ he’s going to be running things from now on. No messing.’

  The major brushed his moustache with his knuckle and looked at the cracked and scaled maps which, in the absence of anything else that might blot out some of the clay-coloured plaster, somebody had pulled out of a cupboard and hung up. What a mess Europe had evidently been in in 1555, with all those hundreds of little countries, quite different from today, and how big Naples and Venice had been then. The major remembered enough German to wonder how there could ever have been two Sicilies. And again, who was Van Diemen and how had he filled in his time in Tasmania?

  ‘Good enough, then,’ the Home Secretary said. ‘There are just three principles involved here: liberty, equality and fraternity. You’ll remember that that’s what the French Revolution was about. Well, we’re not going to have a revolution about it, that’s not the way we do things in England, not violent revolutions anyway, with barricades and shooting and so on and so forth. But there’s going to be a revolution nevertheless and nobody’s going to stop us.’

  He sat down amid varied applause from his own side. The major looked at the Speaker for the first time and raised a finger in assumed humility. Archer seemed to pretend not to have seen him at first, then, having looked round the chamber, caught his eye and nodded to him.

  ‘I shan’t keep you long,’ the major said as he rose to his feet. ‘But there are just one or two points I feel I ought to put to you, if I may. We’re all equal here – we’re all members for Arromanches and Bayeux and Amiens and Brussels and Mechelen and Tilburg and Münster and Rheine and all the rest of the bloody places, and we can talk to each other as gentlemen. We’ve been through the whole thing together. And the first thing I want to say to you is this. Everybody’s done a first-class job, you have and I hope we have as far as it was possible to us, and of course the fighting troops, nobody can say what they went through . . . Anyway, sitting here tonight it just occurred to me that it would be an awful pity if we were to let one another down by forgetting the things that have made it all possible, the teamwork and sense of responsibility, and behind that the way of life we’ve been fighting for. We’ve always been a pretty good-natured lot, we British, and the fellow up here’ – he raised his hand to shoulder level – ‘and the fellows down there’ – he extended his arm downwards with the hand still spread – ‘have always got on pretty well together. Each has had his job to do—’