The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  The general drift of this escaped Lucy, whose temporary alertness had passed. But she would remember enough to pass a version of it on to Leonard the following evening. "I expect you're right," she mumbled.

  "I didn't come here to discuss that, however. In fact I didn't come here to discuss anything," he said, throwing the bed covers aside and seizing her in his arms.

  It was against Lucy's principles, or at any rate her practice, to refuse to accommodate any man who had been properly introduced to her, but this proviso did not apply to Dr. Best. She was to work out later that only the depth of her unwillingness to think of him behaving like this had stopped her expecting him to. All she could think of for the moment was how much worse being in contact with his mouth was than just looking at it. She twisted her head aside.

  "Get away from me," she said loudly. "Leave me alone."

  He held her legs down with his own and started trying to pull her bed-jacket off over her shoulders. While he did this he talked quickly and quietly.

  "One can see now what your much-vaunted enthusiasm for men amounts to. Like everybody else who purports to have dealings with large numbers of individuals you actually live at a low level of sexuality. Those like yourself who are victims of the Messalina syndrome have to hold in their mind the notion of an endless string of partners in order to render themselves capable of sexual intercourse."

  "Get away. I don't want you. Leave me alone."

  "Evidently a straightforward approach of this kind is less acceptable to you than you would pretend. Is your basic erotic impulse so feeble that you're compelled to energize it with adventitious aids?"

  "Stop it. You're hurting me. Let go." Lucy was shouting now. The shoulders of the jacket were far enough down her arms to immobilize them partly. The doctor set about lifting her body in order to pull off her pajama trousers, still talking.

  "What do you need to experience before you're able to receive the male? Flagellation by one party or the other? Or something even less conventionally acceptable? Or does nothing actually take place in this room at all? Is there an agreement to simulate a series of sexual encounters in order to raise the amatory status of those concerned? That would be… Ah."

  He stopped talking as he drew the pajamas clear and flung them aside.

  "James!" screamed Lucy. "I'm being raped! James!"

  Her thrusting foot caught Dr. Best on the shoulder and sent him reeling sideways into the dressing-table. He slid along the front of this, dislodging several jars and pots, tripped over the wastepaper-basket and fell to one knee. In a few seconds he was up again and coming for her, but before he reached her the door was flung open and Churchill came in wearing a shirt and trousers. Dr. Best halted and began adjusting his tie.

  Churchill took in the scene. "Out," he said.

  "When certain women find their advances rejected they frequently avenge their loss of self-respect by making accusations of rape or attempted rape. An obvious-"

  "I'm sure you're right, but that's not what was happening here. Out. Who are you, anyway?"

  "My name is Best. I-"

  "Best? Best! Out at the double! Can you manage under your own steam? Or would you like some assistance?"

  "Certainly not," said the doctor in some indignation. "I welcome the chance of departure. Good night, Lady Hazell."

  He left. Churchill picked up Lucy's pajamas and gave them to her.

  "Are you all right? Would you like me to fetch Catharine?"

  "No, I'm fine now he's gone."

  "I'll just make sure he does."

  He went out again. Lucy put her pajamas on. It was a hot night and she was sweating slightly. She went into the bathroom and, not looking in the mirror, sponged her face with cold water. She heard the front door slam.

  Churchill watched Dr. Best's tail-light disappear. He did not immediately go back into the house. The sky had more color in it than any night sky he could remember and there were thousands of stars. The moon was nearly full. There were no other sources of light.

  He went inside, shutting the door quietly, upstairs, and along the passage to a room diagonally opposite Lucy's, which he entered with some slight unnecessary noise. Catharine was lying in bed with the light on.

  "It's all right," he said. "Some chap Lucy found she didn't like and cut up when she told him so. He's gone now. I'll just make sure she's okay."

  "Don't be long."

  "I won't."

  Lucy was in bed too. Her hairline was damp from the water.

  "I shouldn't have let him come up here," she said.

  "Why did you?"

  "He said he wanted to talk to me about a personal matter, but he never got round to saying what it was. Something about his professional services or something. It must have been to see how Catharine was getting on, don't you think?"

  Churchill looked to make sure the door was shut. "Or that was just an excuse to come over here so as to get at you. By the way, we don't mention to Catharine that he was here, do we? It might worry her."

  "Agreed. Hey, though, the cheek of him when he left. Quite as if he'd been trying like anything to get away gracefully for hours."

  "He was just saving his face."

  "James, the Army wouldn't let you come and live here, I suppose, would it? It'd be such a nice arrangement."

  "I'd love to, but I'm afraid they wouldn't. I can spend a lot of time in the nights here, though."

  "Good. You're doing wonders for Cathy, you know."

  "I'm doing wonders for myself. If you're not sleepy I'll go and get her and we can all have a chat. You've only to say."

  "No, honestly, I'm feeling marvelous now. You go off-she's waiting for you."

  "If you're absolutely sure. Do you mind if I go in there?"

  "Good God, help yourself. Good night, James, darling."

  "Good night, Lucy. See you tomorrow evening."

  He kissed her and went into the bathroom, where he used the w.c. As he did so he felt slightly sorry not to be using instead the one in the other and decrepit bathroom. Earlier that evening he had decided that the one he was in now, though very handily placed, had better be avoided. He had not wanted to run into the Colonel or Hunter, far less one of Lucy's civilian friends. The thought of tramping all the way across the house and back in the interests of discretion had not appealed to him. But in the event he had been fascinated by his walk. The outward journey, with carpet giving place to matting and thence to bare boards, wall coverings declining and vanishing, had been like some symbolic progress from the corporeal to the spiritual. And the return trip had introduced him to romance and unreality in one, as it might be a film set of a modern Rapunzel's castle.

  Back in Catharine's bedroom, he took off his clothes and got into bed. He put one arm between her neck and the pillow and the other across her hip. Immediately they took up again the gazing at each other that Lucy's shouts had interrupted. He noticed as if for the first time, though in reality it was for the hundredth time, that she had hazel eyes with more dark flecks in the right one than in the left, hair the color of dark honey bleached in places by the sun and growing low down on a forehead which was not itself low, rounded and rather childish ears, square jaws, a fair complexion more white than red, a straight nose with a faint upward tilt, a straight mouth with a recess under the lower lip. He reviewed these facts for a period he could not have measured. Then he passed to others no less well known to him. Her cheeks were smooth with a tiny down on them, her hair at the hairline smelled of honey as well as being of its color, her lips were smooth and dry. With the spread fingers and thumb of his left hand he found out, as often before, the gentle swell of her skull above the nape of her neck; with his right he relearned the small firmness of her breast, the softness of her stomach and the incomparably greater softness between her thighs. When he moved above and into her he found the parts of his body not in contact with hers beginning to slip away from him, ceasing to exist. His thighs were nowhere except where they were between hers; his arms were o
nly as real as their clasp of her sides and her back. All he could hear was her breathing and then her voice.

  He felt the sheet on his back and the sheet under his forearms and knees and toes.

  "I love you," she said.

  "I love you."

  "I know."

  "That's nice as ‘I love you' really, isn't it? As nice a thing to say and to have someone say to you as well. Nearly as nice, anyway."

  "Have you loved anyone before?" she asked.

  "No. Only been fond of people."

  "I've loved other people. Is that all right? You don't mind?"

  "There's nothing about you or that you've ever done that I could ever mind."

  "I know. But I could do things you would mind, couldn't I? I could stop loving you."

  "No you couldn't."

  "No, of course I couldn't."

  Churchill got out of bed, went over to the washbasin and came back with a small towel which he handed to Catharine. Then he got back into bed again and put his arms round her.

  "I'm sorry my breasts aren't bigger for you."

  "That's just one of the things about you that I don't mind. I like them as they are. Anyway, I think they're bigger than they were when I first came across them."

  "What, in a week? They can't be… Perhaps they are a bit. This is their worst time of the month, too."

  He rested his head on the breasts under discussion.

  "That's nice, like that. Little James. It's all right to say that, isn't it?"

  "Yes. I'm big enough for it to be all right. Tall enough, I mean."

  "You're big James most of the time. It's funny, I've never met anyone who was as gentle as you are, and yet you're more of a man than anyone too. Well, when you think about it perhaps it isn't so-odd, the two things together. I love the way you always make a noise when you're coming into a room where I am, so as not to suddenly be there and frighten me. How did you manage to think of that?"

  "It didn't take any thought at all."

  "Oh yes it did, it took a tremendous amount of thought. Or a tremendous kind of thought. Some people it simply wouldn't occur to, not in a thousand years."

  "Well, soon I shan't have to bother about that sort of thing, if you go on not being frightened the way you have the last few days. I'll creep up behind you instead and give a blood-curdling scream and spring at you."

  "You won't really, though. But it's quite true, I very nearly don't get frightened at all now."

  "I wish you'd tell me what happened to you that started you off being frightened. It would make it much easier for me to help you stop being completely."

  "I will tell you, my dearest love, but I don't want to tonight. We're having such a lovely time, and it wouldn't sort of refrighten me to tell you about it, but I think it would depress me a bit. Let's leave it until we're both in the White Hart and I'm serving drinks and giving change in between. That's the best way to do it. You're not to think about it or worry because of it: it's nothing very horrible or unusual, really it isn't."

  He kissed her and said, "All right, we'll do it like that."

  "I think I'd like to go to sleep now. I'm a bit tired. Mind you wake me up when you go. It was very nasty waking up the other morning and finding you not there."

  "I'll have to be away by a quarter past seven at the latest."

  "I don't care, you're to wake me. Good night, James. I love you."

  "I know. Good night, Catharine."

  She turned on her side and he turned with her. He put one arm round her waist and the hand on her breast; the other arm he had to fold up behind her shoulders. He felt her fall asleep. But for her breathing there was the absolute silence he had noticed on his first visit to the house and found vaguely disquieting. It did not disquiet him now. He thought of the dispatch-rider's death, Fawkes's death, Operation Apollo, and they did not seem terrible. He knew they were and tried to feel that they were, but they remained just facts, dead facts, infinitely distant.

  Part Two

  The Founding of the League

  STRAIGHT after breakfast the next morning Willie Ayscue returned to his hut in the meadow and settled down at his piano. He always had one available, but instead of talcing the same instrument round with him wherever he went, as Leonard would presumably have done, preferred to hire locally. In his present quarters he only had room for an upright, a Bechstein, though, and one with an outstandingly good treble. Better than the average grand, he had decided.

  He removed from the lid his walking-out cane, which Evans, his batman, regularly placed there when he tidied up, as if under the impression that his master was in the habit of using it to conduct invisible orchestras from the keyboard. Glancing over at his Alsatian bitch Nancy, who was watching him expectantly from her basket by the door, he raised the lid of the piano and tinkled a few notes at random. The dog made a squeaking noise, got up and came to him with a partly sideways gait, wagging her tail in an unconvinced way.

  "It's all right," he said, stroking her head, "nothing's going to go wrong. It isn't going to blow up or fall on me. That noise it makes is just it singing because it's happy. It isn't angry or frightened or in pain. It's just a piano, that's all. It can't hurt me. It's nice of you to worry about me but there's no need."

  Nancy gave the equivalent of a shrug and went back to her basket, casting herself down into it with a loud sigh. When he began to play she cowered a little and gave another squeak, but not much of a one.

  He went slowly through the clavier part of the Roughead sonata, not looking at the quality of the music for now, only at its difficulty. After half an hour or so he relaxed, smiling, and lit a cigarette. There were a few turns and some shakes in the bass that not many amateurs could be expected to play well, but that was a detail. Within twenty miles there must be a dozen people capable of making that part sound quite good. A glance at the violin part had suggested that it would not tax his own technical abilities. He was virtually two-thirds of the way to realizing the project he had conceived in Lucy's library within five seconds of knowing what it was he had found. He would give the piece a public performance, almost certainly its first in the original form for more than a century and a half, and in so doing would have made a tiny but real contribution to the understanding of English music of the later eighteenth century. And Roughead himself would have moved a fraction nearer receiving his eventual due as one of the most attractive minor composers of his era, a man whose naivety and professionalism blended uncommonly well. Ayscue suppressed the ungrateful wish that he had discovered instead some of Roughead's church music. One or two of his extant anthems showed a depth of religious feeling not very easy to parallel outside the choral works of Mozart and Beethoven. The choir at the village church could probably be drilled into rendering one of these adequately, and the organist there was pretty competent and might be cajoled into tackling one of the Roughead sonatas or fantasias. An ecclesiastical venue for the concert would have the advantage of stressing the essential connection between music and religion, but might rule out the idea of including a couple of the secular songs that were such an immediately accessible part of Roughead's work. That vicar was a stuffy old horror. Still, if…

  Ayscue pulled himself up. Before drafting the entire supporting program he had better face the question of somehow getting hold of a flutist for the trio sonata. He could count on persuading any one of three or four to come down from London, but this would diminish the local, home-made flavor he wanted to give the enterprise. Was there a brass band in the district? Any other kind of band?

  Suddenly excited, he got to his feet. He was nearly sure he remembered someone saying that young Pearce played the flute in the camp jazz group. And he seemed a pleasant, obliging lad. And an interest like this would be just the thing to take his mind off Fawkes's tragic death, which, it was understood, he had not yet recovered from.

  Well, no time like the present. Ayscue went to the telephone and lifted it.

  "Exchange here, sir."

  "O
h, is Signalman Pearce on duty?"

  "No, he went off at oh-eight-hundred, sir, after the all-night shift. He'll be pounding his pillow now."

  "Never mind, then."

  "I could call the guard room if you like, sir, and get someone to go over to his billet."

  "No, I don't want to disturb him if he's got his head down. I'll see him later. Thanks all the same."

  He put the telephone down and thought for a moment. Then he took his violin out of its case and was just about to try the violin part of the sonata when Evans knocked and came in with a pair of shoes back from the camp cobbler.

  "Oh, and these are for you, sir."

  Both the letters Evans handed him were internal to the unit. Ayscue opened the first one, but before he had started to read Evans spoke.

  "Will you be taking Nancy for her walk as usual, sir?"

  "Yes, about ten-thirty, I expect."

  "I thought I might give the room a real proper brush-up, like."

  "Good idea."

  Evans left. Ayscue looked at the letter he was holding. Clipped to it was a covering note with a rubber-stamped heading that read, From O. I/c Adm. Underneath was written in pencil, Willie: Can you cope? M.H.

  The letter itself was a sheet hastily torn from a pad. On it were a few ill-written lines in green ink. Without formality the writer announced that he had recently returned to England after some years in the United States and South America, would like to address the unit on the public image of the armed forces in the countries in question and hoped to have a lecture on the subject ready "in due course." He would be writing again "before very long" and signed himself "L. S. Caton."

  Ayscue smiled to himself. It was Hunter's custom to pass to him any unit correspondence received that smacked even faintly of culture. The previous week he had found himself put on the distribution list of a new Army Council Instruction on the internal painting of sleeping-huts and asked for his comments. Today's letter was less easily dealt with. As things stood, almost any diversion was to be welcomed, but this Caton's suggestion, and the manner of it, sounded peculiar. Well, nothing could be lost by trying to find out more.