The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  She had said this as quietly as ever, but faster, and with an occasional quick deep breath between sentences. Churchill watched her. He thought she had better tell him everything now she had started.

  "I kept trying to leave him, but he kept coming and bringing me back. He was good at that. He was so charming that nobody believed what I told them about him. I could hardly believe it myself when it wasn't happening. And I tried lawyers, but cruelty's very difficult to prove, and he always let up as soon as anything like that was in the wind. He stopped altogether when I had my sister to stay, so she went off thinking I was a hysterical liar. Then something happened that showed me what it was all about. I could have realized before, if I'd taken it in properly, that he almost never fucked me except after he'd been hitting me."

  Catharine's shoulders were hunched. She pushed her hand towards Churchill along the top of the counter. He took it and squeezed it.

  "I had terrible toothache and the dentist couldn't see me straight away and I was lying on my bed groaning, and when I went out to go to the bathroom there was Casement on the landing playing with himself because I'd been groaning. So he hit me worse than he'd ever done before and sort of raped me on the landing. After that I stopped being able to deal with my life at all, any of it."

  "Where is he now?" said Churchill quickly.

  "Oh, he's off. He won't come near me now, not even near enough to have a divorce. Me going mad would be sure to come out and that would be very disgraceful. I think he's feeling a bit ashamed of himself, too. He's a very moral, respectable man."

  "Oh, for Christ's sake."

  She sighed very deeply, then smiled. "You see? It was very nearly all right, telling you that. Not even very depressing. It'll have gone altogether soon. But listen, I meant what I said about Casement being moral and everything. That was the whole trouble with him. If he'd said, ‘Look, ducks, here's this whip. I'm going to give you a bloody good belting with it if you don't mind, because that's what I like doing. No hard feelings, eh? Then we'll make love and I'll take you out somewhere nice for dinner,' if he'd said that, well, I'd have known where I was. I might even have co-operated. But that would never have done for Casement. That would have been immoral, you see. He had to have a reason. It took me about three months to work that out and when I had I started getting better straight away."

  Churchill leaned over the bar and kissed her.

  "You won't be different all of a sudden, will you?" she asked.

  "Of course I won't."

  "My God, what's the time? Last orders, gentlemen," she called. "Last orders, please."

  "Was he religious?"

  "Well, there was just a touch of that, I suppose. He didn't go to church, but he was always saying how grateful he was for his Nonconformist upbringing. He was very responsible in lots of ways. Good about money, paying bills as soon as they came in, not driving when he was drunk, saying he was bored by all the filth on the stage and in the cinema, all that kind of thing. Yes, sir, the same again?"

  She started serving the last drinks. Churchill went round the lounge collecting the used glasses and ashtrays. Then he got a damp sponge from the sink behind the bar and cleaned up the tables. While he was drying the washed glasses Eames came in from the saloon.

  "Everything shipshape here as usual? That's the way. Well, if you ever get sacked from the Army, Mr. Churchill, there's a job waiting for you here as potboy. I was just wondering if I could tempt you two to a little cold beef and pickles in my parlor before you go off. No? Well, in that case I won't keep you. See you this evening."

  Churchill reflected momentarily on Eames and his offer as he stood outside in the sunshine and waited for Catharine to join him. The landlord was undoubtedly a nice enough man, but he could hardly be such a wonderful man as he, Churchill, had just caught himself supposing, and after only two large gins too, and gins blotted up in about twenty ham sandwiches at that. The same sort of thing had happened the previous evening when, without any gins inside him at all, he had suddenly been attacked by the wish that it was Brian Leonard's birthday so that he could give him a present. He jumped now to the conclusion that there must be less love than there ought to be in a world where so many people went on being nasty to and bored by one another. How many people had the good-nature to love everybody without loving somebody first?

  Catharine came out of the pub. She looked so beautiful in her white dress and white shoes and white hair-band that Churchill had an instant of sincere puzzlement at the way the passers-by went on passing by, the farmer climbing into his estate wagon over the road failed to reverse the direction of his climb and come pounding across to cast himself at her feet, the man laying slates on the roof of the barber's shop managed to stay aloft. Churchill put his arms round Catharine and kissed her.

  "Sorry," he said when he let her go.

  "That's all right."

  "I won't do it again."

  "Oh yes you will. You are to."

  The scene was roughly unchanged. A middle-aged woman wearing a hairnet had looked over her shoulder at them, and the farmer paused inquiringly in the act of switching on his ignition. Nothing else. They don't know what it is they're looking at, thought Churchill.

  He and Catharine went round the corner into the yard and got into the jeep he had brought. It belonged to the dispatch-rider section, whose sergeant had turned out on investigation to be very fond of whisky and by nature inclined to return favors. The weather was so fine that Churchill had removed the overhead canopy and windshield. They took the road that led towards Lucy's house. The rush of air was cool to the skin. It reminded him of how Catharine's upper arm felt when he put his hand or cheek against it.

  Soon after they reached the beginning of the wooded, hilly region he found a place where the jeep could be parked off the road. They climbed between the wires of a fence and descended a gentle slope where the turf was thin and in places broken by the roots of the trees that grew there. This made the ground awkward for someone wearing high heels, and he took Catharine's hand. On the farther side of the miniature valley the grass was thicker and the going easier, but he still kept hold of her hand. He watched how she moved her body as she walked, out of the corners of his eyes because if she knew she was being watched she did things just as beautifully but in a slightly different way. In a minute or two he would let her know he was looking and try her like that.

  They reached the top of the short rise, where the trees grew closer together. He admired their olive-green polished trunks. It seemed that they did not drop dead wood at all freely and that this small upland was regularly scoured by the wind, because the ground was as clear of debris as if it had been swept that morning. Fifty yards ahead there was a false horixon. Churchill wondered what was beyond it. As they went in that direction, moving in and out of patches of shade between strides, they heard the sound of water.

  In half a minute they were standing at the top of a cliff perhaps twenty feet high. At its base were irregular heaps of boulders and smaller stones, some of which had found their way to the banks and bed of a stream that might have been a couple of feet deep in wintertime, but was reduced now to inches. The rest of the view was made up of trees, younger ones near at hand, taller ones with spreading foliage farther off, the whole belt stretching for a mile or more. They walked along the edge of the cliff and soon found a way down, the rocky course of a dried-up tributary of the stream.

  "This is going to be hard on your shoes," said Churchill. "I'd better carry you."

  "But I'm so heavy. I'm heavier than I look. Or perhaps I look heavy. Anyway I am heavy."

  "But I'm very strong, you see."

  He picked her up and carried her the necessary twenty yards with little difficulty and no stumbling, setting her down on a patch of coarse grass beside the stream.

  "My God, you are strong. That was big James all right."

  "You enjoyed it, didn't you?"

  "Mm, you bet. It gave me a sexual thrill."

  "What doesn't nowa
days?"

  "You may well ask."

  A jump that was little more than an extra long stride took them to the far bank. A faintly marked path led upstream and they took it. After a while it curved aside and led across a corner of the woods. Away from the water the sound of insects and the beating of birds' wings could be heard. Churchill took Catharine's hand as they walked and looked at her and past her together, so that girl, trees and stream formed a unity. She turned her head and looked at him. He knew for certain that in some way this moment had become inevitable ever since that other moment the afternoon he first saw her when he had looked at a patch of country similar to this one and thought of her. He felt his heart lift. This had never happened to him before, and he was surprised at how physical the sensation was. He was filled with joy.

  "I could never love anyone else in the way I love you," he said, stopping and drawing her to a stop.

  "Of course you couldn't."

  "Even if you were to suddenly vanish altogether."

  "I'm not going to, though. I haven't done any loving before worth talking about."

  "Everything's all right now, isn't it?"

  "Yes, that's exactly what's all right," she said. "Everything."

  "I suppose I might get thumped on the head some day and lose my memory, or go completely senile, but that's the only kind of thing that would make me forget this afternoon."

  "I'd remind you in any case."

  They walked on. The path curved back towards the stream, then into the woods again deeper than before. The shadows under the trees were very strong. When they drew level with a grassy bank a few yards from the path in the opposite direction to the stream, Churchill halted again.

  "This looks like a good place to sit down," he said.

  "I don't want to presume, but do you mean sit down or lie down?"

  "It's funny you should say that, because it was lying down I had in mind."

  "In that case I think it would be easier for everybody if I took off my dress. Is that all right?"

  "Yes."

  When she had hung her dress on a bush and kicked off her shoes, he ran his hand up her bare arm, finding it faintly warm between wrist and elbow, cool above the elbow like the flow of air during their drive, fully warm at the shoulder.

  "The grass feels marvelous under your bare feet."

  "I dare say it does, but I can't really see there being any bare feet as far as I'm concerned. I'd have all that shoelace and sock business to contend with. We oughtn't really to take very long."

  "Well, your jacket can come off, anyway."

  "Yes. There's no point in your going on just wearing those, is there?"

  "I suppose not."

  "This is quite good grass," he said a moment later, stroking it, "but the earth underneath feels pretty solid. I'm afraid your shoulders and so on are going to go through it a bit."

  "There's a way round that."

  "Is there? Oh yes. Oh, yes."

  They kept their eyes on each other. He watched the steady change in her expression as it grew wilder and at the same time more serene, more longing and more contented. At first he thought she was becoming less human, less the person who was Catharine, but then he saw that she was really more human, more Catharine than ever.

  When they were lying side by side he slid his arm under her neck and round her shoulders and put his hand on her breast.

  After a moment he said, "There's a lump here, I think. Yes. You feel."

  "Oh yes. What do you think it is?"

  "Well, it's only very small. It's probably just a little cyst. I used to get them in the lobes of my ears when I was at school."

  "I suppose I'd better get it seen to."

  "I think it might be as well, yes. As soon as you can."

  They got dressed and prepared to move off.

  "Let's go back now," said Churchill. "I'm going to get hold of a doctor and arrange for him to see you in the morning. We want to have that cyst cut out before it gets any bigger. I neglected the ones I had at school and they were a hell of a bore. I don't like making a fuss, but I'm the one who's looking after you now."

  "I suppose you'll be going along, will you, Brian?" asked Colonel White. "Fellow might turn out to be this famous spy of yours, eh?"

  "I doubt it, sir," said Leonard. "I think we're dealing with a lunatic."

  "Of course. Of course we are. I went over that notice thing rather carefully and had a good think about it. Chap seems to regard himself as unique. As if he's the only one who's ever noticed that decent people sometimes come to sticky ends. Or that all ends are sticky if you look at it in one way. Necessary, though. Anyway, there's precious little that's crazier than imagining you're on a private line to the truth. What about you, Willie?"

  "You mean am I going to turn up at this meeting affair, sir? Yes, I think I might as well."

  "I think so, too. Rather comes into your field, doesn't it? Good deal of dissatisfaction with the grand design rolling about in our friend's noddle. Have to see if you can't straighten him out."

  "Yes, there is that," said Ayscue.

  "You surely do not seriously imagine that this man will appear?" asked Major Venables, slowly waving the spent match that had just lit his cigar. "Or, more likely, men. To me, this farce has every appearance of having been contrived over pints of small beer in the White Hart by a group of clowns suffering from underwork."

  Hunter had been ordering drinks from a Mess waiter. He now said, "In that case, part of the joke would be to see how many people fell for it and who they were. He, or they, would have to be frightfully aesthetic about things to stay away. I'm going along, anyhow. I scent fun of some kind."

  "You have curious notions of fun," said Venables. "And not you alone. At the last Mess night I witnessed five grown men, three of them of SI rating and thus bearing a certain load of responsibility, climbing about this room on the furniture in an attempt, so it was represented to me, to make a complete circuit without putting foot to ground. It was strenuous, it was ungraceful, it was noisy, it was distracting, it was pointless."

  "No harm in that," said the Colonel. "In its being pointless. It's a tradition."

  "And then last night I endured part of a sort of collective recitation, or chant, involving words of infantile near-obscenity delivered with great emphasis and killing slowness. Sister's… my sister's… up my sister's… pudding up my sister's… black pudding up my sister's… strong black pudding… And so on. The proceeding seemed to me to be indefensible."

  Ayscue laughed. "That's rather heavy, isn't it? I'd have thought it was a very innocent way for young men to let off steam."

  "The steam you refer to is accumulated largely in the process of becoming drunk," said Venables in his groaning way. "Which process has evidently become as much a part of unit routine as guard-mounting or vehicle maintenance. The whole situation in this place is beginning to disquiet me. Boredom is giving place to group hysteria."

  "You're exaggerating," said Ayscue firmly. "The people here are working under a considerable strain. In the circumstances they like to forget themselves when they're off duty. I think everybody's bearing up wonderfully."

  "Well spoken, Willie," said the Colonel.

  With an emphatic, reinforcing nod at Venables, Ayscue picked up the glass of whisky that had just arrived for him. There was pink gin for the Colonel, sherry for Leonard, bitters and soda for Hunter. Venables picked up the remaining glass.

  "Wait a moment," Hunter said to him, "didn't you ask for French vermouth?"

  "I did. What of it?"

  "Well, what you've got"-Hunter bent and sniffed-"is Italian vermouth. I'll tell-"

  "Indeed? It will do very well, thank you."

  "But they're utterly different drinks." Hunter sounded rather shocked.

  "Without doubt. I take no note of such matters."

  "Well, you ought to. Don't you agree, chaps? Oughtn't he to take note of such matters as the difference between French and Italian vermouth?"

  A
yscue nodded again, hardly less emphatically than before.. Leonard looked blank. "Up to him," said the Colonel.

  "Je n'en vois pas la nécessité," groaned Venables. "What, to resume, is this considerable strain you refer to? I feel myself under none, yet I bear the greater part of the responsibility for the success or failure of Operation Apollo in its entirety. The officers under instruction are each partly responsible for the success or failure of one-twelfth part of that Operation. Yet they, together with others who are not privy to anything of much importance, are held to be showing the effects of considerable strain. How can they be?"

  "It was you who were saying a moment ago that we were all on the verge of mass hysteria," said Leonard.

  "Hysteria of this sort need not be, and in the present case demonstrably is not, the result of strain. Unless, which you well may, you count as a strain the experience of depending on the conversational and other social resources of one's fellows when none has any to speak of, as here."

  "How do you manage, then?" persisted Leonard.

  Hunter and Ayscue exchanged a grin.

  "I depend on nobody."

  "Well, that clears that up," said the Colonel. "I think, chaps, if we're going to this do we'd better knock these back and be getting along. Did you arrange about dinner, Max?"

  "Yes, sir, I've put it back to eight o'clock. That ought to allow time for a full-dress meeting with election of officials and proposals for additions to the library. The people who aren't coming will just have to put in an extra half-hour's drinking, I'm afraid."

  "Right, then. I take it you won't be accompanying us, my dear fellow?" asked the Colonel, using his usual vocative for Venables, whose lack of Christian name, like other things about him, made standard Mess informality a little more difficult.

  Venables removed and looked at his cigar before answering. "I will," he said. "I have just sufficient curiosity to satisfy myself that, in accordance with my prediction, the authors of this tomfoolery will not show themselves."

  "Wouldn't you be prepared to take our word for that, if that's the conclusion we all come to?" asked Leonard.