Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Ah, good morning, Betty,’ Mair said bluffly. ‘How are you getting on? Do you like working for Mrs Lewis?’

  ‘Aw, all right.’

  Mair’s lion-like face took on the aspect of the king of beasts trying to outstare its tamer. ‘I think you know my name, don’t you, Betty? It’s polite to use it, you know.’

  At this I went out into the kitchen again, but not quickly enough to avoid hearing Betty saying, ‘Sorry, Mrs Webster’, and, as I shut the door behind me, Mair saying, ‘That’s more like it, isn’t it, Betty?’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jean asked me.

  I stopped stage-whispering obscenities and spoke some instead, using them to point or fill out a report of the recent exchange. In a moment the sitting-room door was reopened, catching me in mid-scatalogism, and Mair’s voice asked my wife to come in ‘a minute’. At the ensuing conference, I was told later, Betty’s willingness, industry and general efficiency as a domestic help were probed and a favourable account of them given. Meanwhile I put to myself the question whether the removal of all social workers, preferably by execution squads, wouldn’t do everyone a power of good. You had to do something about ill-treated, etc., children all right, but you could see to that without behaving like a sort of revivalist military policeman.

  The meeting next door broke up. Betty and her children were hurried out of the place, the former carrying a tattered parcel my wife had furtively thrust into her hands. I found out afterwards that among other things it contained a tweed skirt of Jean’s I particularly liked her in and my own favourite socks. This was charity run riot.

  At lunch, Mair said efficiently: ‘The trouble with girls like that is that they’ve got no moral fibre.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I mean this, John. They’ve no will of their own, you see. They just drift. Line of least resistance all the time. Now Betty didn’t really want to abandon those twins of hers – she was quite a good mother to them, apparently, when she was living with her parents and going out to work at this café. Then she went to a dance and met this dirty swine of a crane driver and he persuaded her to go and live with him – he’s got a wife and child himself, a real beauty, he is – and he wouldn’t take the twins, so she just went off and left them and let her parents look after them. Then the swine went off with another woman and Betty’s father wouldn’t have her back in the house. Said he’d forgiven her once when she had the twins when she was sixteen and he wasn’t going to forgive her again. He’s strong chapel, you see, believes in sinners being cast into the outer darkness, you know the kind of thing. It’s a tragic story, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and went on to talk about the conflict between generations, I think it was. Mair’s technique when others ventured beyond a couple of sentences was to start nodding, stepping up the tempo as long as they continued. When her face was practically juddering with nods I gave in.

  ‘Well,’ she went on in a satisfied tone, ‘going back to where I was just now, Betty’s father got into such a rage with her that he threw the twins out as well, and she got her job back at the café, which wasn’t really a good thing because it’s not a very desirable place, but at least it meant that there was some money coming in, but she couldn’t take the twins to work with her, so she parked them with the woman she was renting her room from. Then she, the woman, went out for the evening one time when she was working late, Betty I mean, and the twins were left unattended and they ran out into the street and wandered about and a policeman found them and that’s how we got brought into it. They were in a dreadful state, poor little dabs, half in rags and – quite filthy. I had the devil’s own job stopping them being taken into care, I can tell you. You see, while Betty was with her parents in a decent home she looked after them all right, but on her own, with bad examples all round her, she just let things slide. No moral fibre there, I’m afraid. Well, I fixed her up at the day nursery – didn’t know there were such things, she said, but I told her she’d just been too lazy to inquire – and after that things jogged along until this Norwegian came into the café for a cup of tea and saw Betty and bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘Hasn’t the Norwegian got to go back to Norway ever?’ Jean asked, her eyes on the forkful of fish that had been oscillating for some minutes between Mair’s plate and her mouth.

  ‘He’s going over for a few weeks soon, he says. He’s got a job at a chandler’s in Ogmore Street – it’s run by Norwegians, like a lot of them. Decent people. They’ve been married six weeks now, him and Betty, and he’s very fond of the twins and keeps her up to the mark about them, and of course I give her a good pep talk every so often.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘One job I had to do was take her out of that café. Lot of undesirables hang round the place, you know. A girl like Betty, quite pretty and none too bright, she’d have been just their meat. It’s something to have kept her out of their clutches. Oh, yes, I’m quite proud of myself in a way.’

  One Sunday afternoon a couple of months later I was dozing in front of the fire – Jean had taken the kids out for a walk with a pal of hers and the pal’s kids – when the doorbell rang. Wondering if the caller mightn’t at last be some beautiful borrower come to avow her love, I hurried downstairs. The person on the doorstep was certainly a woman and probably on the right side of thirty, but she wasn’t beautiful. Nor – I’d have taken any odds – was she a borrower, not with that transparent mac, that vehement eye shadow, that squall of scent. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

  The woman smiled, fluttering her Prussian-blue eyelids. ‘You remember me, don’t you, Mr Lewis? Betty Arnulfsen.’

  I felt my own eyes dilate. ‘Why, of course,’ I said genially. ‘How are you, Betty? Do come in.’

  ‘Aw, all right, thank you. Thanks.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Not for several weeks, in fact. She’d turned up three more times to do our chores and then that had suddenly been that. Application to Mair Webster had produced an evasive answer – an extreme and, as I now saw it, suspicious rarity.

  ‘I was just passing by, see, so I thought I’d drop in and see how you was all getting along, like.’

  ‘Good. It’s very nice to see you again. Well, what have you been doing with yourself?’

  It could have been more delicately put, for somebody, whether herself or not, had plainly been doing a good deal with Betty one way and another. As we stood confronted by the sitting-room fire I saw that her hair, which had been of a squaw-like sleekness, now looked like some kind of petrified black froth, and that her face was puffy underneath the yellowish coating of make-up. At the same time she’d altogether lost her hounded look: she seemed sure of herself, even full of fun. She wore a tight lilac costume with purple stripes on it and carried a long-handled umbrella that had elaborate designs on the plastic.

  ‘Aw, I been doing lots of things,’ she said in answer to my question. ‘Having a bit of a good time for a change. Soon got brassed off with that old cow Webster telling me what I must do and what I mustn’t do. I been keeping out of her way, going to live my own life for a change, see? I got a bit of money now. Here, have a fag.’

  ‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Go on, it’ll do you good, man.’

  ‘No, honestly, I never do.’

  ‘I can tell you’re one of the careful ones.’ She laughed quite a bit at this stroke, giving me a chance to notice the purplish inner portions of her lips where the lipstick had worn away or not reached. With a kind of indulgent contempt, she went on: ‘And how you been keeping? Still working down that old library?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I feel I ought to give them a hand occasionally.’

  ‘Don’t you get brassed off with it now and then?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but I keep going. Can’t afford to weaken.’

  ‘That’s the boy. Got to keep the dough coming in, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, it helps, you know.’

  ‘What
you pulling in down there? Never mind, don’t suppose you want to say. What you get up to after work?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘What you do, then, when you goes out for a night? Where do you go?’

  ‘Oh, just here and there. I sometimes have a few along at the corner, at the General Picton.’

  ‘I expect you got your own mates.’ Her cigarette had gone out and she relit it. She wasn’t really at home with it: smoking was something she was still in the process of taking up. After spitting out a shred of tobacco, she said: ‘Never go round the pubs in Ogmore Street, do you?’

  ‘Not as a rule, no.’

  (Ogmore Street leads into the docks, and on these and associated grounds is usually steered well clear of during the hours of darkness by persons of refinement and discrimination.)

  ‘We gets up to some games down Ogmore Street. We haves the time of our bloody lives, we do.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said with great conviction. ‘Jean gone out, have she?’

  ‘Just taken the kids for a breath of fresh air. I don’t suppose she’ll be long.’

  ‘Ah. They all right, the kids?’

  ‘Pretty fair. What are you up to yourself these days?’

  She gave a great yell of laughter. ‘That’s a question, that is. What don’t I bloody get up to? What am I up to, eh? That’s a good one.’ Then her manner grew seriously informative. ‘I got in with the business girls now, see?’

  ‘Oh, really?’ A momentary vision of Betty drinking morning coffee at the Kardomah with a group of secretaries and shorthand typists was briefly presented to me, before being penetrated by her true meaning. ‘Er . . . good fun?’

  ‘It’s all right, you know. Got its points, like. See what I got here.’ She opened her handbag, a shiny plastic affair in a pink pastel shade, and, after I’d sat there wondering for a moment or two, drew out a roll of crumpled pound notes bound with an elastic band. ‘Take you a long time to pull in this much down the library, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, no doubt about that.’

  ‘We goes with the boys round the docks and the sailors when they comes off the ships. They’re the best. They wants a bit of fun and they don’t care what they pays for it. They got plenty of dough, see? They goes on the bloody binge down there. Lots of Norgies we gets. I like the Norgies.’

  ‘Oh, yes, your husband’s one, isn’t he?’

  This second deviation from the path of true tact was as little heeded as the first. ‘That’s right. He’ve gone back to Norway now.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘No, don’t think so. Father in trouble or something. Reckon he’ll fetch up again some time.’

  ‘How are the twins?’ The domestic note, once struck, might be a handy one to prolong. What was the time? Where was Jean? Would she bring her red-faced English oh-I-say-darling pal back with her? Why not?

  ‘They’re okay. I got someone looking after them okay. These Norgies are dead funny, though. Makes me die. The Welsh boys, now, they likes me with my vest on, don’t want it no other way, but the Norgies don’t care for that, they wants everything off, and they don’t like it outside, they always goes home with you for it. They likes to take their time, like. You know Joe Leyshon?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him. Used to be in the fight game, didn’t he?’

  ‘He runs a lot of the girls down Ogmore Street, but I won’t let him run me. He wants to run me, but I don’t like him. Some of his mates is dead funny, though. We broke into a shop the other night over Cwmharan way. Didn’t get anything much, few fags and things, but we had a laugh. Mad buggers, they are. We goes down the Albany mostly. You know the Albany? It’s all right. You ought to come down there one night and have a couple of drinks and a bit of fun. What about it? I’m going down there tonight.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to come barging in . . .’

  ‘Go on, I’d show you around, you wouldn’t come to no harm, I promise you. They’re all right there, really. I’d see you had a good time. You could tell Jean you was out with your mates, see?’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Betty, but honestly I don’t think I could. I’m pretty well fixed up here, you know what I mean, and so I don’t . . .’

  ‘I tell you one thing, John.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re afraid to go with me.’

  So many factors amalgamated to put this beyond serious dispute that reply was difficult. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ I said after a moment, trying to ram jocoseness into tone and manner. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that at all.’

  Betty evidently saw through this. She said: ‘You are. You’re afraid.’

  ‘It isn’t that exactly. It’s just that I try to stick to my wife as far as possible,’ I told her, certain that I sounded like some ferret-faced Christian lance-corporal in a barrack-room discussion.

  ‘Yeah, I know, you’d fold up if you hadn’t got her to cling on to. You hangs around all the bloody time.’ Contempt had returned to her voice, edged this time with bitterness, but she showed none of either when she went on to add: ‘You’re a good boy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say – I don’t know. Betty, you mustn’t mind me saying this, but isn’t it rather risky to go round breaking into places with these pals of yours? Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?’

  ‘Aw, short life and a merry one’s what I say. It’s worth it for a bit of excitement. Don’t get much chance of a thrill these days, eh?’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you, but you don’t want to get – you know – sent down, do you? The twins wouldn’t have . . .’

  ‘Don’t preach, now. I gets brassed off with bloody preaching.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like that.’

  ‘Okay.’ She smiled.

  In the succeeding silence a door boomed shut below. The slapping gait of my daughter Eira became audible, overlaid and in part obscured by the characteristic bellowing squeal of her younger brother. Both sounds began to ascend the stairs.

  ‘Jean back, eh?’ Betty got to her feet. ‘I better be going.’

  ‘Oh, don’t go, stay and have a cup of tea with us.’

  ‘I better not.’

  Eira ran into the room, stopping short when she saw Betty and then moving towards the fire by a circuitous route, hugging the wall and the couch. ‘Put my coat off,’ she said to me distantly.

  ‘Hallo,’ Betty said with an elaborate rising inflection. ‘Hallo. And whose little girl are you? Let auntie take your coat off, then. Come on, flower. That’s right. Had a lovely run, have you? Did you see any bunnies? How you’ve grown. And you’re bold as ever, I declare. Yes, you are. You’re bold, very very bold. Yes, you are. You’re very very brazen by there.’

  Jean came in with the baby. ‘Well, hallo, Betty,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nice to see you. Christ, shut up, can’t you?’ This last was addressed to the baby, who seemed almost, but not quite, worn out with mortal pain.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come along that Tuesday like we said, Mrs Lewis, but the twins was poorly and I couldn’t fix it to let you know.’

  ‘That’s all right, Betty. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘Let me take the baby for you.’

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot. John, you might have kept the fire up.’

  ‘Sorry, dear.’ I picked up the coal scuttle, which was one of the obliquely truncated-cone type. It proved to weigh less than it should, less than a coal scuttle with any coal in it could. I could hardly remember ever having made up the fire without encountering, at the very outset, a light coal scuttle.

  During a long, foul-mouthed ardour in the coal cupboard under the stairs, I thought first how funny it was that a fallen woman – really fallen now, right smack over full length – should talk to a child in just the same style as the perpendicularly upright went in for. But then presumably there were parts of the fallen that were bound to remain unfallen, quite important parts too. This brought up the whole mystery of pros
tituted existence: not what happened to your womanhood or your springs of emotion or your chances of getting clued up on the splendours and miseries of the flesh – screw all that – but what it was like to be a prostitute during the times when you weren’t actually behaving like one, when you were in mufti: on a bus, cooking the baked beans, doing the ironing, going shopping, chatting to a neighbour, buying the Christmas presents. It must be like going round ordinarily and all the time you were a spy or a parson or a leading authority on Rilke, things which you surely often forgot about being. Anyway, to judge by the representative upstairs, being a prostitute was something you could be done a power of good by, and without having to be horrible first, either. As regards not having to get horrible later on, that too could no doubt be arranged, especially if you could keep out of the way of the various sets of men in white coats who, according to report, tended to close in on you after a few years in the game. That was a nasty prospect all right, and resembled many a kindred nastiness thought up by the Godhead in seeming a disproportionate penalty for rather obscure offences. Still, that minor cavil about the grand design had been answered long ago, hadn’t it? Yes, more answers than one had been offered.

  A little coal, too little to be worth expelling, had entered my shoe. I bore the scuttle upstairs to find Jean and Eira in the kitchen and Betty still holding the baby. Her demeanour had quietened and she was more like the Betty I had first met when she said: ‘You won’t tell Jean all what I been saying, will you?’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  ‘And you won’t tell that old Webster I been up?’

  ‘Christ, no. What do you think I am?’

  ‘She’s a cow.’

  ‘Oh, she’s a cow all right.’

  Betty nodded slowly, frowning, half-heartedly jogging the baby on her knee. Then she said: ‘She’s a real cow.’

  This refinement upon the original concept made me laugh. Betty joined in. We laughed together for some time, so that Eira came in from the kitchen to see what the joke was.