Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

The major brushed his moustache with his knuckle and looked at the cracked and scaled maps which, in the absence of anything else that might blot out some of the clay-coloured plaster, somebody had pulled out of a cupboard and hung up. What a mess Europe had evidently been in in 1555, with all those hundreds of little countries, quite different from today, and how big Naples and Venice had been then. The major remembered enough German to wonder how there could ever have been two Sicilies. And again, who was Van Diemen and how had he filled in his time in Tasmania?

‘Good enough, then,’ the Home Secretary said. ‘There are just three principles involved here: liberty, equality and fraternity. You’ll remember that that’s what the French Revolution was about. Well, we’re not going to have a revolution about it, that’s not the way we do things in England, not violent revolutions anyway, with barricades and shooting and so on and so forth. But there’s going to be a revolution nevertheless and nobody’s going to stop us.’

He sat down amid varied applause from his own side. The major looked at the Speaker for the first time and raised a finger in assumed humility. Archer seemed to pretend not to have seen him at first, then, having looked round the chamber, caught his eye and nodded to him.

‘I shan’t keep you long,’ the major said as he rose to his feet. ‘But there are just one or two points I feel I ought to put to you, if I may. We’re all equal here — we’re all members for Arromanches and Bayeux and Amiens and Brussels and Mechelen and Tilburg and Münster and Rheine and all the rest of the bloody places, and we can talk to each other as gentlemen. We’ve been through the whole thing together. And the first thing I want to say to you is this. Everybody’s done a first-class job, you have and I hope we have as far as it was possible to us, and of course the fighting troops, nobody can say what they went through… Anyway, sitting here tonight it just occurred to me that it would be an awful pity if we were to let one another down by forgetting the things that have made it all possible, the teamwork and sense of responsibility, and behind that the way of life we’ve been fighting for. We’ve always been a pretty good-natured lot, we British, and the fellow up here’ — he raised his hand to shoulder level — ‘and the fellows down there’ — he extended his arm downwards with the hand still spread — ‘have always got on pretty well together. Each has had his job to do—’

Hargreaves stood up and said: ‘I spy strangers.’ He spoke loudly but unemotionally, as if promulgating his occupation rather than delivering a challenge.

The major stopped speaking immediately and looked towards the Speaker with an expression of courteous bafflement.

The Speaker’s expression was of incredulous horror. He said: ‘Er… Hargreaves… can’t we…?’

‘I spy strangers,’ Hargreaves repeated a little louder, gazing into space.

‘Could I ask you to clarify that, Mr Speaker, sir?’ the major asked good-humouredly.

Archer replied as if the words were being wrung out of him. ‘I was reading… it’s a formula calling for the expulsion of unauthorized persons from the debating chamber. The idea was—’

‘Unauthorized persons?’ Smiling, the major glanced from face to face. ‘But surely—’

‘The thing is that officially only Members of Parliament are allowed to be present,’ Archer said, more steadily than before. ‘Anybody else is here on sufferance. I spy strangers is the way of saying you want to cancel that sufferance, so to speak.’

Raleigh still smiled. ‘Are you ordering me to withdraw, Mr Speaker?’

‘I’m telling you what the book says.’

In the pause that followed, the major again looked round the House, but nobody returned his look. He went on trying to think of something to say until it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. With a glance at Cleaver, who quickly rose and followed him, Major Raleigh withdrew.

Outside in the darkness he said: ‘You drive, Wilf, will you? I want to think.’

‘Are you all right, Major?’

‘Wilf, if you ask me if I’m all right once more, I’ll… Anyway don’t. Just shut up.’

‘Yes, sir.’

IV

‘Well, you must be pretty pleased, Mr Archer, I expect, at the way things have gone.’

‘Yes, I must admit I am, Sergeant. Such a thumping majority, too.’

‘Yes, that did rather take me by surprise. I expected it to be a much closer run thing than this. Of course, being wise after the event, it’s not difficult to see what happened. The Service vote did it. The lads have been in uniform all these years and they’ve had enough. Voting Labour’s a protest. It’s a way of saying you’re browned off and want to go home.’

‘Oh, there’s a lot more to it than that, I’m quite sure. People are browned off with something, or rather somebody, a lot of somebodies. They’re protesting against —’

‘Well, you and I are never going to see eye to eye there, sir, are we? — not even if we discuss it all night. We might as well accept it.’

‘Will you join me in a glass of whisky, Sergeant? If it doesn’t seem too like drowning your sorrows while I celebrate.’

‘Thank you, sir, I will. You’ve certainly got something to celebrate, and everybody else seems to be doing it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t join in.’

Doll and Archer sat in the little sitting-room — all painted screens and wax fruit and clocks under glass domes — of the farmhouse that contained the Officers’ Mess. Outside, a widespread uproar was distantly audible: shouts, the revving of jeep and motor-cycle engines, the braying of a trombone that was being blown through rather than played. Ten minutes ago what sounded very much like a long burst of light-machine-gun fire had come from the direction of the Signal Office. There was no reason to suppose that all this was a demonstration of Socialist triumph over cowed and silent Tories. Whether or not Doll was right about the motives which had prompted the return of a Labour Government in Great Britain, the local reaction to it tonight was largely non-political in temper.

‘They’re keeping hard at it,’ Doll said, pointing out of the open window to a sudden burst of flame somewhere across the road. It was brighter than the now hour-old bonfire in the billet area. A few figures could be seen in the light of the new conflagration, reeling in and out of the darkness like pantomime drunks. ‘Funny how nobody seems to be interfering. The major’s right about one thing, anyway. Discipline’s going. Ah, thank you, sir.’ He raised one of the glasses of whisky which the Mess corporal had brought in response to Archer’s bellow. ‘Well. A solemn moment. What shall it be? I give you England, Mr Archer.’

‘England.’ Not your England, Archer said to himself, not the petrol-flogging CQMS’s England, not the Major’s England or Cleaver’s England or the Adjutant’s or the Colonel’s or Jack Rowney’s or Tom Thurston’s England, but to a certain extent Hargreaves’s England and absolutely my England, full of girls and drinks and jazz and books and decent houses and decent jobs and being your own boss. He said in a friendly tone: ‘I wonder whether England’s going to turn out the way you’d like her to.’

‘Oh, I’ve no doubt she won’t, sir. But that’s not really going to concern me much. I shan’t be there, you see. Emigration’s the thing for me, as soon as I can fix it up.’

‘Really? Where are you thinking of? Canada? Australia?’

‘I think Africa, Mr Archer. A place where there’s room for initiative and where a determined man can still make his way. Kenya, perhaps, or one of the Rhodesias. There’s some scope there. No, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and today’s news really decided me. Taken a load off my mind, in a way. Funny thing, I should be feeling depressed, with the Socialists getting in, but I don’t at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.’ Doll drained his glass.