Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

The two got into the major’s car, a saloon with faded checkerboard painting on the radiator and a cracked mica windscreen. Its only superiority over the major’s jeep lay in the latter vehicle’s having reached the stage of needing to carry a can of petrol, a can of oil and a large can of water whenever it went anywhere. And this thing was a piece of loot, too. While he pulled at the starter and the motor lurched over, Raleigh imagined his friends at Potsdam, each in a Mercedes with the back full of cameras, watches, automatic pistols, pairs of binoculars, crates of champagne and vodka and American whiskey, haunches of venison… Girls did not appear on the major’s list; he considered that side of life much overrated. Before the car came shudderingly to life he had time for a surge of feeling, equally compounded of envy and righteous indignation, at the memory of a current rumour about a large RAF Signals unit which, ordered to return to England with all its stores and transport, and thus secure against Customs inspection, had stuffed every cranny with cameras, watches, automatic pistols — perhaps girls.

They moved out of the yard, with a grinding bump when one of the rear mudguards, worse adjusted than its fellow, met the edge of the road surface. The sun was setting over the fields of rye or oats or barley or perhaps just wheat and there was arguably a fair amount of tranquillity and such about, but the major was beyond its reach. As he frequently said, it was people that interested him. The people interesting him at the moment were still the ones he knew at Potsdam. ‘Funny to think of them all up there,’ he said. ‘Bill and the CO and Jack Rowney and Tom Thurston and all that crowd. And Rylands and Ben and Dalessio and Jock Watson. Wonder what they’re all up to. Parties with the Russians and the Yanks and God knows what. All the big brass-hats around. The Jerries too. And…’ — the major tried briefly to visualize what more might be on view there than other soldiers — ‘everything. Of course I realize we couldn’t all have gone, but I do wish—’

‘The CO and the Adjutant tended to pick the crowd who’d been with them at North Midland Command.’

‘Yes, I know they did.’ A military Calvinist who had had demonstrated to him his own non-membership of the elect, Raleigh spoke in a neutral tone. ‘Not altogether, though. They took Dalessio with them.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘Rylands seemed to think Dalessio was indispensable,’ the major said. Then, quite as if he realized that this was not the most tactful thing to say to a man whom all sorts of pressure had failed to get into Dalessio’s job, he added: ‘I wouldn’t go all the way with him there.’

‘I hear Bill and Jack and Tom are all majors now.’

‘Yes. I’m particularly pleased Tom got his crown. He didn’t fit in quite at first, I thought — bit of an awkward cuss. But some time last winter he pulled himself together and started doing a first-class job. Co-operated for all he was worth.’

The car laboured up an incline past the burnt-out wreck of a civilian lorry, relic of the celebrations on VE night. The cuff of a Wehrmacht jacket, charred and faded, hung out of the remains of the cab. Raleigh was about to comment adversely on this memorial of indiscipline, or of high spirits, but changed his mind and said abruptly: ‘I’d give anything to be at Potsdam.’

‘I’d have thought we were better off here, Major, with the Staff off our backs at last after two years.’

‘They’re doing a job there, that’s the difference. I suppose… I suppose I might still get the chance of taking the Company to the Far East. Depends how the war goes, partly.’ The major was thinking as usual in terms of a Headquarters Signals unit, not of a mere company, and of a lieutenant-colonelcy, but he was too shy to tell Cleaver this.

‘I didn’t realize you were as keen on the Army as all that, sir,’ Cleaver said carefully.

‘Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few weeks, Wilf. Serious thinking. First real chance I’ve had since 1939. I worked it out that I’ve spent half my adult life in the Army. Pretty shaking thought, that. I’ve got used to being in uniform. Hardly remember what it was like in Civvy Street. And from the way things are going it looks as if I might not care for it when I arrive there. If these Socialists get in—’

‘I shouldn’t worry too much, Major. However badly it turns out there’s sure to be scope for, well, initiative and quick thinking and all the rest of it.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

The major parked the car in the Signal Office yard between an iron canister full of broken glass and a disused boiler stuffed with torn sheets. The two officers crossed the road to the school building and entered the hall.

Parliament was in session. As Raleigh led the way to the Visitors’ Gallery, his shoes thudding on the greasy bare boards, an instrument-mechanic on the Government side was saying: ‘We’re going to build a decent Britain. Fair shares for all and free schools and doctoring and hospitals and no class distinction. The old school tie and the old-boy network aren’t going to work any more. To make sure of that we’re going to abolish the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, or at any rate change them so that anybody who’s got the brains can go to them, and we’re going to either abolish the House of Lords or make it a thing you vote on, just like the House of Commons. It’s undemocratic any other way. Some of us want to abolish the Royal Family for the same reason, but we’re not decided about that. Personally I think that if you scrap titles and the Honours List and all that carry-on, then you can leave the King and Queen to stew in their own juice.’

The major’s mouth tightened. So far he had refrained from interjecting more than a sentence or two into these debates, but after what he had just heard, and in this evening’s intensified mood of discontent, he knew he would be failing in his duty to all sorts of entities — to common sense, to discipline both military and civil, to England, yes, and to the King, why be ashamed of it? — if he refrained from extensive comment. His eye met that of Cleaver, who looked away instantly. The major waited impatiently for the Home Secretary or whatever he was to finish.

Interest in the parliament had fallen off from the moment of its inception. Deliveries of newspapers and magazines had recently improved in speed and quantity and the major suspected that access to civilian drink had likewise improved; he must get his batman to keep his ears open. Less than half the original members were in their seats tonight. The Opposition front bench lacked its Leader and its spokesman on Defence questions: Doll had declared himself finally disgusted with his fellow-MPs’ frivolity — ‘I think it’s ridiculous spending a lot of your time and thought preparing stuff for a load of apes, sir, don’t you?’ The ministerial bench was even more thinly held, with the Lord Privy Seal (if the truth were known) risking court-martial by thoroughly fraternizing with a nurse from the civilian hospital in Hildesfeld, the Chancellor of the Exchequer asleep on his bed with a three-day-old Daily Express over him, the Prime Minister himself with two of his mates from the Sergeants’ Mess attacking something they vaguely thought of as gin in something they even more vaguely thought of as a pub on the far side of the railway yard. But the Foreign Secretary was in his seat, and the young man the major very precisely thought of as that official’s boyfriend was in his.

The Home Secretary might have been thought to be drawing to a close, although, as the major reminded himself, you could never tell about that or anything else with fellows as unused as this to public speaking or indeed to anything else even remotely to do with the highly responsible and specialized and difficult task of running a modern industrial state. ‘You heard the other week about how we’re going to give the Empire back to the blokes that live there,’ the Home Secretary was saying: ‘well, we’re going to do the same thing, so to speak, with Great Britain itself. The country belongs to the ordinary working bloke and by Christ he’s going to be running things from now on. No messing.’