The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  He sat down at his work table and wrote briefly to the effect that the proposed lecture did not quite fall within the unit's recreational program, but that as and when further details were forthcoming an effort would be made to find a place for it. He added a covering note to Hunter reading simply, Okay? W.A. and that was that. Then he opened his second letter. It consisted of a sheet of single-spaced typescript that read,

  TO A BABY BORN WITHOUT LIMBS

  This is just to show you whose boss around here.

  It'll keep you on your toes, so to speak,

  Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,

  And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.

  You can face up to it like a man,

  Or snivvle and blubber like a baby.

  That's up to you. Nothing to do with Me.

  If you take it in the right spirit,

  You can have a bloody marvelous life,

  With the great rewards courage brings,

  And the beauty of accepting your LOT.

  And think how much good it'll do your Mum and Dad,

  And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,

  To be stopped being complacent.

  Make sure they baptize you, though,

  In case some murdering bastard

  Decides to put you away quick,

  Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.

  But just a word in your ear, if you've got one.

  Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,

  And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.

  Because if you DON'T,

  I've got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,

  Such as Luekemia and polio,

  (Which incidentally your welcome to any time,

  Whatever spirit you take this in.)

  I've given you one love-pat, right?

  You don't want another.

  So watch it, Jack.

  There was no signature and no covering note.

  Ayscue read it through three times. Then he went to his wardrobe, a standard-issue affair in imitation walnut, and took a bottle of Scotch out from among his footwear. He swallowed half a tooth-glassful neat in two goes, the first drink he had had before noon for over ten years. When he had stopped coughing he sat down again, lit a cigarette and went carefully over the physical appearance of what had been sent him.

  The poem had been inexpertly typed on a sheet of the cheap lined writing-paper on sale at the canteen. The envelope, similarly typed, bore his rank, initials and name in their correct form-as they were to be seen on dozens of notice-boards and lists round the camp, and, in one corner, For the magazine. That was all there was.

  It seemed important to Ayscue that he should find out who had written the poem. But for the moment he was too agitated to think coolly about this. Experience had taught him that attacks on God along these lines meant that the attacker was in urgent need of help, lest he fall into the unforgivable sin of despair. He told himself that to let his own emotions dwell on this outcome could only postpone the chance of averting it, and forced his attention on to the task of drawing deductions from the text.

  He made an annotated list in his mind. Spelling excellent by modern standards but with a few illiteracies. Could indicate either a good education imperfectly absorbed or a bad one nearly transcended. "Grans and Gramps," and "quick" used as an adverb. A lower social stratum? Or suggesting that the writer was aiming at this effect in order to sound down-to-earth and non-literary? Too sophisticated an idea? Raises the question of poetic approach. Somebody unused to verse? Or somebody used to it, but deciding that the theme ruled out what was conventionally poetical? No help anywhere along these lines.

  Then anonymity. Again ambiguous. And the stationery. Either somebody who…

  Ayscue pulled up short. These were intellectualist evasions of the central question, which he despised himself briefly for not having at once identified, and at once answered. Who had recently had an experience which could have rendered him emotionally capable of writing that poem? Signalman Pearce.

  His hand went out reflexively to the telephone, then dropped: Pearce was asleep. Well, no harm could come to him in that state. Ayscue looked at his watch. Three and a half hours at least before he could hope to get into contact with the boy. And even then how was it to be done?

  After some disagreeable thought he picked up the telephone after all and asked the operator to see to it that Pearce was given a message at dinnertime to the effect that the padre would like him to come along that afternoon, if he were free, and have a chat about music. It was promised that this would be conveyed. A pity, Ayscue reflected idly as he rang off, that such a message from the padre, however unmilitary its phrasing, was a summons to the presence of an officer, and a chat with the padre, however informal, was something worse, an invasion of privacy. He had once contemplated sending the Chaplain-General a memorandum saying that military churchmen ought to serve in the ranks if they had any respect for Christian tradition and any desire to be listened to. He had been deterred by reasoning that the CG would take no notice of it, if indeed it ever reached him, and moreover that the prospect of curates in inferior uniforms peeling potatoes in the cookhouse and having sergeant's swearing-or not swearing-at them was, however strong in appeal, far too funny to be worth pursuing. And further, it occurred to him now, by trying to alleviate one problem he would be exposing another and much more dismal one. It was not as officers that he and his colleagues intruded upon the men but, by and large, as parsons. Every year, it seemed almost every month, it became harder to ask the most innocent, unloaded questions without setting off the look in the eye that said, covertly or overtly, "What's it to you?" If one were to take off one's badges of rank, that look would find words. He had joined the Army with the idea of bringing the message of Christ to those who might any day stand in special need of it. He had hoped to build something genuine and valuable on the foundation of regular spiritual communion and pastoral contact which the Army had always provided. What he had really been looking for, evidently, was a captive audience.

  Self-accusation was a form of self-pity and as such to be avoided. Ayscue got up, put on his cap and made for the door. With a rolling noise midway between a growl and one of her squeaks, Nancy bounded out of her basket and followed him.

  Tongue flapping, she rushed diagonally away across the meadow as if in pursuit of the most provocative cat of her life. Then, at some inaudible but equally urgent call, she thrashed and skidded to a halt on the slippery dry grass and was off again at right angles, doubling her speed with each of her first few strides and keeping her dilated light brown eye rolling at Ayscue as she crossed his path.

  He took the main track that led down to the gate. The sun shone hard on the roofs of the camp buildings and the leaves of the trees, glancing off windows and the glass and metalwork of the vehicles in the transport park and stirring thick vibrant bars of heat above the roadway. A motionless veil of haze hung at the wooded horizon.

  One of the D4 sentries, rounding the corner of his beat, gave Ayscue a shoddy eyes-left. He acknowledged, as usual, with his smartest salute. The man flushed and his bearing grew more soldierly for his next dozen paces. Then it relaxed again. To Ayscue the tiny incident expressed perfectly the boredom, depression and uneasiness which pervaded the camp more and more and which he had no idea how to dispel.

  "Major Ayscue," he said to the corporal of the gate guard. "Oh… fornicational, intoxicational, desperational. Sorry, I was thinking about something else. I meant recreational."

  He walked down the lane and reached the main highway, where Nancy was waiting for him. Man and dog stood there for half a minute while traffic rumbled and rattled its way in both directions across their front. All the drivers were in shirt-sleeves and had their windows down. They seemed united by some single purpose.

  Suddenly Ayscue remembered that he had left the poem in full view on his table, where Evans, in the course of his p
roposed brushing-up operations, would be certain to see it. The thought of it being spelled through, wondered about, perhaps uncomprehendingly grinned and whistled over was immediately as intolerable as if he had written it himself. He turned and went back the way he had come.

  Nancy had paused to investigate what might have been a molehill and Ayscue's feet made no sound on the grass of the meadow, so that his return would have taken by surprise anyone who had crept into his hut during his ten minutes' absence.

  And someone had. Brian Leonard, wearing newly pressed khaki, stood leaning in a casual and stiff attitude against the wall by the window. At his side the door of the normally locked cupboard, pushed to a second earlier, swung slowly open again with a whining creak.

  "Hullo, Willie," he said. "I was just going to…"

  Ayscue went and shut the cupboard and locked it with his key. He stared at Leonard, whose face was shinier and sallower and darker with subcutaneous beard than he had ever seen it before. Nancy came in, halted and growled softly, but at a sign from Ayscue went to her basket, where she settled herself with a groan.

  "What? What were you going to do?"

  "I was… Do you mind if I sit down? Thanks. I may as well be frank with you."

  "I should. I don't think you can be anything else."

  "No. Well, in my capacity as Security Officer of this unit I've been conducting certain investigations."

  "So I see. In a rather reckless spirit. My batman or I or anybody might have caught you at it. And I have."

  "I got hold of your batman and sent him on an errand for me," said Leonard in a short burst of complacency. "And I saw you go out with your dog. One has to take chances in this job."

  "I can't see why. Anyway, what did you expect to find here?"

  "One often can't say in advance what one's going to find."

  "Have you actually found anything that interests you in your capacity as Security Officer of this unit?"

  "Not yet. I'd only just started looking."

  "What made you decide to look in my room rather than anyone else's?"

  "I didn't. I mean, I do spot checks of everybody's quarters on a random basis. This is just your turn."

  "Oh, good. But why couldn't I have been present?"

  "There wouldn't have been much sense in tipping you off I was coming."

  "Wouldn't there? I thought that was your number-one principle, letting everybody know what you were up to so that you could see how they reacted."

  To be thus held up to question on a phylactological point seemed to shake Leonard more than anything else so far. He said crossly, "This was different."

  "Well, you'd know. I wouldn't. But I wasn't thinking in terms of tipping people off. I meant you could have come in any morning when I was here and searched the place there and then. Like that I wouldn't have had a chance to eat my instructions from Tirana."

  "You're right. I never thought of that."

  Ayscue's manner relaxed momentarily. "You need some leave, Brian. We all do."

  "I know. Sorry to have upset you. I'm only doing my job."

  "That's all right. How did you get that cupboard open, by the way?"

  "I have skeleton keys," said Leonard. He did not add that he had been unable to open so much as his own dressing-table drawer by their agency, and that after having had to leave snapped-off portions of half a dozen of them in various locks round the camp he had decided to use them no more. "But they're tricky things to handle"- his voice thickened sharply as this recurred to him-"and I'd be very grateful if you'd open it again yourself."

  "Hadn't you seen inside?"

  "I was just that moment going to when you walked in."

  "Oh. In that case there's some point in refusing to open it for you or to allow you to open it. Which I hereby do."

  Leonard got up from the bed, where he had been sitting, and approached Ayscue and the cupboard. "This is a Security matter," he said, "which means it isn't your place to give or withhold permission. If I have to, I can have you put under arrest and shoot the lock off that door. I'm ordering you to open it."

  "It's private, what's in there."

  "If it is, the whole thing'll go no further."

  After hesitating briefly, Ayscue unlocked the cupboard.

  Two minutes later, Leonard was saying, "One suit, civilian, three shirts, civilian, three pairs socks, civilian, seven neckties, civilian. That seems to be the lot."

  "Aren't you going to look for secret drawers and sliding panels?"

  "No. You'd have known you couldn't have installed them without attracting notice. Now. Where do you go when you've got these on?"

  Ayscue nearly told him to bloody well find out, but that would not have done at all. "I go into the town," he said.

  "What for? Whatever the reason is it's safe with me."

  "I can't tell you that."

  With what seemed a great effort, Leonard said, "You must tell me, Willie."

  "I wish I could. I really can't. It's a Church matter."

  "Ah-will you swear by almighty God and our lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost and on your honor as an anointed priest of the Church-you are anointed, aren't you?-that whatever you get up to in town wearing those civvies it's nothing to do with Security?"

  "I so swear."

  "Thank Christ for that."

  "Amen."

  Leonard slumped back on to the bed. "That ought to hold them," he muttered. "If I had to I could take this all the way up to the CG and the Archbishop of Canterbury too. That'd hold ‘em."

  "What are you waffling about, Brian?"

  "Look, Willie." Leonard spoke earnestly as well as urgently. "I know you're not a spy as well as you do. But my master's a fanatic for detail, for closing every avenue and leaving no stones unturned. In my reports I've had to say I've been keeping you under surveillance. Now I can say you've solemnly sworn by God and the rest of them that you're not doing anything we ought to know about. That'll hold him. We can both forget about you. Of course, if you turned out to be a spy after all, my head would roll and so would his. But since he knows as well as you and I do that that won't happen, this'll be the end of it. I hated doing all this. I apologize most humbly."

  "Don't give it another thought, my dear chap. Now if you'll excuse me…"

  "Yes, I must be going."

  Leonard's way to the door took him past Ayscue's work table. He gestured at it with his head.

  "Funny poem or whatever it is you've got there. Who wrote it?"

  "What's that got to do with you?"

  "Nothing. Nothing in my capacity as Security Officer, that is. But I'm not in that capacity all the time, you know, even though you probably think I am. I can take an interest in a poem and who wrote it without thinking it's a code message from the Kremlin."

  This was said reproachfully and with a flash of spectacles that could have betokened some sort of toss of the head. Ayscue found himself nearly grinning.

  "Of course you can, Brian. I'm afraid I've no idea who wrote it. There's no signature or anything."

  When Leonard picked up the typescript and looked at it consideringly, his mouth pushed forward, Ayscue again felt the sense of ownership, almost of authorship, that had made him interrupt his walk. He wanted to snatch the poem from the other's hand and put it somewhere out of sight.

  "So I see," said Leonard. "Mind you, I can't make much head or tail of it, but it seems rather morbid to me. We all know these things happen, but there's no point in dwelling on them like this, I'd have said myself. Still. The bit that really beats me is this thing here about… Limb-o. Can you throw any light on that?"

  Ayscue shook his head emphatically. "No," he said.

  "Mm. He does nice punctuation, though. Well, I mustn't take up any more of your time. Thank you for putting up with me."

  When he had watched Leonard march rather than walk to the edge of the meadow, his shoulders hunching and unhunching in turn as he swung his arms, Ayscue went back inside and sat down at his table. He glanced at
the poem again, intending to reread it, but decided not to do so and locked it away in his cash-box. Leonard had omitted to ask to see inside this, perhaps an odd omission, certainly a fortunate one. The merest look would have nullified all Ayscue's efforts to conceal the purpose of his expeditions in mufti.

  With the poem out of sight, he opened the stout manuscript notebook in which he drafted his sermons and prayer-meeting addresses. Since his ordination he had filled more than twenty such books, destroying each in turn as soon as the contents of its last page had been delivered. He had never knowingly used the same material twice.

  The current page ran,

  Ideas of God. Traditional see as human. Primitive, attrib own weaknesses, angry need placating, drought, sacrifice. Even Gks, altho JEsch etc., Soc, A'totle, + Parth, lech, anger, revenge, favorite (Achill). Only Xtn, father. Anthropols say origin 1) tribal authy 2) father-fig Freud 3) relic fear + man – someone makes thunder. Ok interesting, not whole story. Only Xtn God not human weakness. UK courts best, but always innocent/guilty & w. ‘Only human.' God always 100% fair, unable not. Human father v often gd, loving, no favorite, all kids same, ugly = gd-looking, when we bad = when we good. But only human, even best tired, worried, busy, just not there. Only God always there, 100% loving.

  Having read through the above, Ayscue replaced his pen unopened in his pocket and shut the notebook. He went and switched on his gramophone, a table model with a plug-in second loudspeaker for stereophonic reproduction. The record he chose was the Magnificat of C. P. E. Bach. The pealing of the trumpets in the orchestral prelude drew tears to his eyes. Before the chorus had done more than enter with magnificat anima mea Dominum the telephone rang. He turned off the music and picked up the receiver.