The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  "And has it?"

  "No," said Dr. Best. "But the clinical implications are of interest. Minshull here is writing up the experiment. This is a rather amiable wine, don't you agree? It's a 1963 Dürkheimer Schenkenböhl. I prefer to drink it when it's young and fresh."

  When the girls returned at the summons of the hand-bell, they brought a 1959 Château La Bridane and a saddle of lamb with French beans and new potatoes. The blonde moved round to Leonard and poured him claret. A stitch or two had given in the seam at her hip, revealing a small patch of bare skin amidst the black leather. He felt proud of himself for noticing this, and grateful to Lucy for giving him back the capacity, on the decline in him over the last few years, for noticing it and things like it. In itself it could mean no more than that the blonde, and by inference her companion too, had found a simple way of not adding to the heat engendered by unventilated outer garments of leather. But it produced in him a firm resolve to ring Lucy up at the first opportunity and arrange to visit her. That, however, must wait. For the moment the matter to concentrate on was that of introducing plausibly the information he had come here to divulge.

  He held back until Mann asked him a casual question about the amount of co-operation Security officers commonly got from those in their charge. Leonard made sure Dr. Best was listening before he said,

  "I've always found people very understanding. Especially when it comes to rising to any sort of occasion. For instance, on Friday the unit's putting on something called Exercise Nabob. It's not really an exercise in the full sense, not much more than a demonstration and practice in the use of certain new weapons, but it does entail cordoning off part of a valley and denying access and observation. That's a mere matter of mechanics-the tricky and bothersome part is setting up search procedures and snap checks to make sure nobody walks off with some vital… piece of wherewithal in his pocket, or a miniature camera full of film. When you start organizing that sort of thing, you might expect to find yourself coming up against the old Army mentality, red tape and obstructionism and all that. Not a bit of it. All possible facilities were immediately placed at my disposal. The Commanding Officer issued an order that any officer or other rank who failed to accept my recommendations on the spot would be responsible to him personally. The Adjutant himself accompanied me on my various rounds and visits whenever his other duties allowed. The officer in charge of-"

  Dr. Best interrupted this recital, which had been designed merely to put a bit of circumstantial flesh on the bare bones of the central facts Leonard wanted to convey. "It must be agreeable to find oneself the center of so much attention."

  "Oh, I don't know. You just take it as part of the job."

  "You must enjoy giving instructions to colonels and such and seeing them rushing off to carry them out."

  "That's where the regulations are so helpful. In Security matters the normal gradations of rank don't-"

  "Would you say that the prime satisfaction of your post was the sense of sitting at the middle of a vast web or machine and manipulating people by pressing buttons?"

  Aware now of where this was tending, Leonard drew in a lot of breath to pronounce a negative, but was again interrupted, this time by the radio-alarm buzzer on his wrist. He jumped to his feet. "I'm wanted on the wireless," he said, and hurried from the room, hearing Minshull's laugh behind him as he shut the door.

  After a fifty-yard trot in the sun across the car-park, he was sweating rather and peering through misted glasses as he fumbled through his keys. At this moment a man in denim overalls came out from behind a bush and sidled up to him, spade in hand.

  "Acting on your instructions, I-"

  "Hold it, you fool," snapped Leonard. "Get back out of sight."

  The man retreated. Inside the car, Leonard switched the set on and sat chafing, unable to think, while he waited for it to warm up. When the loudspeaker began to hiss and crackle he went over to Send and spoke into the microphone.

  "Hullo, Control, hullo, Control. Padlock listening. Over."

  Preceded by a couple of seconds of carrier wave, Ross-Donaldson's voice, sounding harsh and boxy, issued from the loudspeaker.

  "Hullo, Padlock. Sunray Minor here. Something… well, something has come up you ought to know about. Over."

  "Is it urgent?" Leonard waited, then added peevishly, "Over."

  "I don't see how it can be, and it probably isn't a Padlock matter at all, but if it is it may be important. That's as much as I can tell you. Over."

  "Will return at once. Over."

  "Roger. Out."

  Leonard switched off and got out of the car. Sweat was running down his face. He walked in a meditative manner towards the shrubbery from which the man with the spade had emerged.

  "Have you anything to report?"

  There was a rustle and the snapping of a twig. "No, sir," said a voice.

  "Then watch harder. And you ought to know better than to approach me in the open like that. Stick to the telephone arrangement."

  "Sorry, sir."

  "I should hope so too."

  A minute later, Leonard was making his excuses and shaking hands with the three psychiatrists. Drs. Best and Minshull seemed in high spirits, Mann a little subdued. Leonard returned to his car and drove furiously back to camp. He had not enjoyed the tour of the hospital or the lunch-party. Both had done something to strengthen his suspicions of Dr. Best, but without furnishing evidence of the kind he could put in his report. Then there had been the ineptitude of the pretended gardener. The installation of such an agent was required by the regulations covering cases of this kind. Leonard would much rather have done without him, preferring to wait until Dr. Best could be moved up from a green suspect to a blue suspect and so merit having his telephone tapped. But regulations were regulations, which was a pity. This particular set of them, not for the first time in Leonard's experience, was bringing about an impasse whereby the evidence necessary to prove a man guilty was unobtainable except by methods that were only to be used on men already proved guilty by other methods. A lecturer on one of the courses attended by Leonard had cited such situations as reflecting the immature, unfinished state of applied phylactology. Half an accreted tradition given the force of law, half an exact science, it afforded germane analogies (the lecturer had explained) with the condition of Greek medicine prior to the emergence of Hippocrates. To find this view supported by events, or as now by non-events, was depressing. Leonard rallied a little, however, at the thought that he had at any rate managed to set his trap for Dr. Best with about the right mixture, he felt, of emphasis and unobtrusiveness.

  He parked his car in its allotted space and crossed the drive to the Orderly Room. The sergeant there jumped to his feet and asked him to go straight into the inner office. He did so and saluted Ross-Donaldson smartly.

  "I'm sorry to have dragged you away from your luncheon-party, Leonard, and you may be sorry too when you know more. My sergeant brought me this. He'd found it pinned to the recreational notice-board outside the canteen. Since then another copy's been found among the periodicals in the Sergeants' Mess. I've got a squad out now, seeing if they can turn up any more."

  He passed Leonard a sheet of Service stationery. It was a smudged but legible carbon typescript that read,

  THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE

  incorporating Human Beings Anonymous

  It has been decided to form a branch of the above organization in this Unit. We want you to join us if you agree with our attitude. There is no other qualification for becoming a Member, no entrance fee or subscription, and any activities you may see fit to carry out on behalf of the League are entirely up to you. You will not be given orders of any kind.

  We think that the attitude of the League is sufficiently expressed in its name, but should you be in any doubt we invite you to consider carefully the three following cases, all taken from newspaper items of the last few years.

  Case No. 1: A woman of about 30 years old was dishing up the family supper. She took a potato
out of the dish and popped it in her mouth. It lodged in her throat and she died of asphixiation then and there, in front of her husband and 3 young children who were present at the time.

  Case No. 2: A house was set on fire by lightning. A woman of about 25 threw her 18-month-old son down to neighbors standing on the pavement, but they failed to catch him and he was killed. She jumped and her fall was broken, but she lost the baby she was pregnant with.

  Case No. 3: A boy of 15 had been blind since birth. He was operated on and his sight was given him. 5 days later he caught a little-known virus infection (nothing to do with the operation) and was dead in 24 hours.

  If you are against what happened on these occasions, you are fully qualified to join the League. We invite you to attend an inaugeral meeting in the Camp Theater at 1900 hrs this coming Thursday.

  Please tell everybody you can about the League and the time and place of the meeting. This notice is not likely to stay where it is for very long.

  Issued by the Commitee, 6 HQ Adm Bn Branch, Anti-Death League

  Leonard was bewildered. He felt dimly that Security was involved here in some way, but could not have said in what way. His manuals were silent on situations like this, if indeed there were any other situations like this. He could think of nothing to say.

  No such difficulty beset Ross-Donaldson. "A little bit out of the usual run, isn't it?" he said. "Even so, as I told you on the R/T, it doesn't seem a very pressing issue. I doubt whether I'd have had you buzzed if it had been left to me, but fortunately I was relieved of the onus of thought by the existence of your standing order about always letting you know at once of anything with any conceivable Security connection. I've a feeling you should redraft that, by the way. I spent several minutes after I talked to you trying to think of something of which it could validly be said that a Security connection was beyond the power of the human mind to conceive, and failed to come up with a single one. I got pretty close after a bit when I started wondering how an orderly reporting sick with toothache could have a Security bearing, but then I realized he might have a microfilm in his mouth for the dentist to take out and send to Peking. That rather discouraged me, getting as warm as that and then ignominiously failing. Of course, empirical semantics teaches us what ‘conceivable' is intended to convey, but we should always strive for intensified precision. I won't ask you to work out a synonym now, however. Come in."

  A corporal entered, saluted, and handed over two more copies of the notice.

  "Where did you find these?"

  "One in the OR's latrine, sir. The other pinned to a tree by the sleeping-huts."

  "Right. Have you covered the whole area yet?"

  "No, sir, we're still working on it."

  "Do that. If one more of these comes to light after you've completed your search, I'll have you and all the other NCOs in the party up in front of the Colonel and I promise you I'll do my best to see you lose your stripes. Is that clear?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Off you go."

  The corporal saluted and left with enough of a clatter to bring Leonard halfway out of his daze.

  "You were a bit hard on him, weren't you?" he said. "Why all the flap? One copy of this thing is all we need."

  Ross-Donaldson had spoken to the corporal in his customary level tone. Now he stood up, his plump face flushed.

  "It may be all you need," he said very sharply. "As far as I as Adjutant of this unit am concerned, need doesn't come into it. If it's possible to catch this man, which I doubt, I'm going to do it. And I'll make sure he goes to military prison. You can talk to him there if you want to."

  "There's no point in getting hot under the collar about it."

  "There's every point. This is an abnormal happening and there's no knowing where it may lead. A secret project like ours has got to keep all parts of its environment under control at all times. We can't afford to have fanatics or lunatics or jokers round the place."

  "I realize that, of course."

  "I hope you do. It's our job to be pro-death, Leonard, and don't you forget it."

  "Sixteen and nine, seventeen, seventeen and six, one pound. Thank you, sir."

  "Thank you, my dear."

  The man pocketed his change and went away with the drinks he had bought. Churchill, perched on a stool at the bar with a large gin and ginger beer before him, looked carefully at Catharine.

  "Are you sure you'd rather do it like this?" he asked.

  "Quite sure."

  "All right, then. Why did he marry you?"

  "I think it must just have been that he wanted to be married. All his friends were, you see, the people he'd been in the Army with and so on. He never liked the idea of looking different."

  "When did you find that out?"

  "I suppose I started realizing it after about two years. But it took a long time to dawn on me properly. I was very ignorant in those days. I was only nineteen, but I'd had so much sex already then that I thought I knew all about it. I thought I couldn't not know all about it. What I didn't know was what it was for. I was like someone who knows exactly how a railway engine's put together, and who can put his finger immediately on any part you care to name with his eyes shut, but who it's never occurred to that the point of the bloody thing is that it pulls trains. You do see what I mean, don't you? So I wasn't getting a great deal out of it at that stage, early on. That didn't worry me much, though. I thought that perhaps the people who said they got a lot out of it were natural exaggerators, or else that I was somebody it didn't happen to appeal to an awful lot. I thought that getting married and being with someone all the time would make it better. So you see I was to blame too for things going wrong."

  She was speaking quietly and calmly, but Churchill felt she should not go too far with her story too fast. "Have a drink," he said. "You'll be wanting to wet your whistle with all this chattering you're doing."

  "Very kind of you, sir, just a half of bitter if I may."

  While she drew the beer, Churchill glanced round the bar. At this hour, shortly before closing-time in the middle of a week-day, the place was almost empty. Neither the red-faced man who had bought drinks a little earlier, nor his closely similar friend, nor the three younger men who might have been students on vacation, showed any interest in Catharine or himself. Eames, the landlord, had explained that it was a point of etiquette with many drinkers to leave a barmaid and her steady escort undisturbed as far as possible. "If she's on her own she's likely to be considered fair game," he had added, "which is where you may get trouble. So I'm most happy that Mrs. Casement should have taken a fancy to someone nice and quiet like yourself, Mr. Churchill."

  At times like this, and even more when he was in bed with Catharine, it often seemed to Churchill that the whole thing would go on forever. He knew that, through no fault of either of them, it could not. But he was getting very good at paying no attention to this a lot of the time. He smiled at her when she stared at him as she drank.

  "That'll be one and a penny."

  "Oh, sorry. Wasn't it better at all when you got married?"

  She rang up the money carefully.

  "Oh yes. By the standards I had then it was marvelous. Not having to worry about it ending, and him not going away all the time. But after a bit it was no better than what had gone before. Especially sex. Sex was what you did in bed, and eating was what you did at table, and plays were what happened in theaters and so on. You know-'I think we've just got time for a quick one/ Now you could make that funny and lovely, darling. But you ought to have heard the wonderful statesmanlike calculatingness he used to say it with. I think… I think… if we're reasonably quick… His favorite moment for that was just before the evening drink or going out. He liked to get it out of the way, he said, so that he could look forward to settling down undisturbed to a good night's rest. So then I had a couple of lovers and he was very good about it. I don't know whether I'm saying that sarcastically or not. As long as I was happy, he said."

  "What abo
ut kids?"

  "He was rather the same about them. If I wanted them then it was all right by him. So I didn't have any."

  "I don't quite see that."

  "It's like sex, James. It's no good if one of you just has no particular objection. I reckon that sort of thing undermines at least as many women as sex not being all right. Anyway… then Casement turned up. Can I have a cigarette?"

  He gave her one and lit it.

  "Casement's line straight away was wanting me to let him take me away from all this. What there was of this, he meant. He was marvelous at first. My best before you. So then we got married. We were back in England by this time. I'd lived with him for about eight months and thought I knew him."

  One of the students now came to the bar and ordered three halves of bitter. She served him before going on.

  "The moment we got married he started being different. I don't like that, James, people being different all of a sudden. About three nights a week he'd get angry with me, usually when we'd had people to dinner or been out somewhere and he'd had some drinks. He'd wait until we were getting ready for bed, and then he'd bring up something I'd said or done during the evening which had made him angry. It didn't matter much what. If I'd said I liked one of his friends, it proved I was a bitch because it meant I wanted to go to bed with him. And if I hadn't liked one of his friends, then that made me a bitch too because I was fed up because the chap hadn't made a pass at me. And so on. The next stage was him hitting me. Mainly punches in the stomach and slaps in the face. He was very careful not to bruise me where it showed. Then I'd cry, of course, and then he'd cry too and start comforting me, and then he'd end up by fucking me. Then he'd be perfectly cordial and nice until the next time."