Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

And the guarantee of that was England. England had been up against it in 1940, in 1914 and no doubt earlier, with the Napoleon business and so on. She had weathered every storm, she had never gone under. All that was needed was faith. Despite everything that Hargreaves and Archer and the rest of them might do, England would muddle through somehow.

‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’ I said it to a child of about three who was pottering about on the half landing between the ground floor of the house, where some people called Davies lived, and the first floor, where I and my wife and children lived. The child now before me was not one of mine. He looked old-fashioned in some way, probably because instead of ordinary children’s clothes he wore scaled-down versions of grown-up clothes, including miniature black lace-up boots. His eyes were alarmed or vacant, their roundness repeated in the rim of the amber-coloured dummy he was sucking. As I approached he ran incompetently away up the further flight. I’d tried to speak heartily to him, but most likely had only sounded accusing. Accusing was how I often felt in those days, especially after a morning duty in the Library Reference Room, being talked to most of the way by my colleague, Ieuan Jenkins, and about his wife’s headaches too.

I mounted in my turn and entered the kitchen, where my own wife, called Jean, was straining some potatoes into the wash-hand basin that did, but only just did, as a sink. ‘Hallo, darling,’ she said. ‘How were the borrowers this morning, then?’

‘They were readers this morning, not borrowers,’ I said, kissing her.

‘Aw, same thing.’

‘Yes, that’s right. They were as usual, I’m sorry to say. Who was that extraordinary child I saw on the stairs?’

‘Ssshh… Must have been one of Betty’s. She had to bring them with her.’ Jean pointed towards the sitting-room, where clicks and thumps suggesting domestic work could be heard.

‘Betty’s?’ I whispered. ‘What’s going on?’

‘She’s just finishing up in there. Betty Arnulfsen. You remember, the girl Mair Webster was going to fix us up with. You know.’

‘Oh, the delinquent. I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘She’s coming to lunch.’

‘Betty Arnulfsen?’

‘No, Mair, dull.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘Now, don’t be nasty, John. She’s been very kind to us. Just because she’s a bit boring, that doesn’t mean she…’

‘ Just because. A bit boring. If it were only that. The woman’s a menace, a threat to Western values. Terrifying to think of her being a social worker. All that awful knowing-best stuff, being quite sure what’s good for people and not standing any nonsense and making them knuckle under and going round saying how she fully appreciates the seriousness and importance of her job, as if that made it all right. They bloody well ought to come and ask me before they let anybody be a social worker.’

‘Then there wouldn’t be any. You can take these plates in. She’ll be here any minute.’

It was all most interesting, and in a way that things that happened to me hardly ever were. Mair Webster, who knew us because her husband was a senior colleague of mine on the staff of the Aberdarcy (Central) Public Library, had brought off what must have seemed to her a smart double coup by providing, as the twice-a-week domestic help we craved, one of the fallen women with whom her municipal duties brought her into contact. It had turned out that the woman in question wasn’t really fallen, just rather inadmissibly inclined from the perpendicular. She’d had an illegitimate child or two and had recently or some time ago neglected or abandoned it or them — Mair had a gift of unmemorability normally reserved for far less emphatic characters — but that was all over now and the girl was taking proper care of her young, encouraged by her newly acquired husband, a Norwegian merchant seaman and a ‘pretty good type’ according to Mair, who went on about it as if she’d masterminded the whole thing. Perhaps she had. Anyway, meeting Betty Arnulfsen was bound to be edifying, however imperfectly fallen she might be.

In the sitting-room, which doubled as dining-room and lunching-room when people like Mair were about, a smallish dark girl of nineteen or twenty was rearranging rugs and pushing chairs back into position. At my entry the child I’d seen earlier tottered behind the tall boxlike couch, where another of the same size was already lurking. Of this supplementary child I could make out nothing for certain, apart from a frizzy but sparse head of ginger hair. The girl had looked up at me and then quickly and shyly away again.

‘Good morning,’ I said, in the sort of tone officials visiting things are fond of and good at. I seemed not to have chosen this tone. It wasn’t my day for tones.

‘Morning, Mr Lewis,’ she muttered, going on with her work.

‘Miserable old weather.’

This notification, although accurate enough as far as it went, drew no reply. I fussed round the gate-leg table for a bit, fiddling with plates and cutlery and stealthily watching Betty Arnulfsen. Her straight black hair was ribboned in place by what looked like the belt of an old floral-pattern dress. In her plain skirt and jumper and with her meek expression she had the air of an underpaid shopgirl or bullied supply teacher. She wore no makeup. Altogether she wasn’t my idea of a delinquent, but then few people are my idea of anything.

There was a ring at the front-door bell, a favourite barking-trigger of the dog that lived downstairs. On my wife’s orders I went and let in Mair Webster, whose speed off the verbal mark proved to be at its famed best. By the time we reached the kitchen I already had a sound general grasp of the events of her morning. These included a bawling-out of the Assistant Child Care Officer down at the Town Hall, and a longer, fiercer, more categorical bawling-out of the foster-mother of one of ‘her’ babies. ‘Is Betty here?’ she added without pause. ‘Hallo, Jean dear, sorry I’m late, been dreadfully pushed this morning, everybody screaming for help. How’s Betty getting on? Where is she? I just want to have a word with her a minute.’

I was close enough behind Mair to see the children returning to defensive positions behind the couch and Betty looking harried. It was my first view of her in full face and I thought her quite pretty, but pale and washed out. I also noticed that the ginger-haired child was sucking a dummy similar to that of its fellow.

‘Ah, good morning, Betty,’ Mair said bluffly. ‘How are you getting on? Do you like working for Mrs Lewis?’

‘Aw, all right.’

Mair’s lion-like face took on the aspect of the king of beasts trying to outstare its tamer. ‘I think you know my name, don’t you, Betty? It’s polite to use it, you know.’

At this I went out into the kitchen again, but not quickly enough to avoid hearing Betty saying, ‘Sorry, Mrs Webster’, and, as I shut the door behind me, Mair saying, ‘That’s more like it, isn’t it, Betty?’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jean asked me.

I stopped stage-whispering obscenities and spoke some instead, using them to point or fill out a report of the recent exchange. In a moment the sitting-room door was reopened, catching me in mid-scatalogism, and Mair’s voice asked my wife to come in ‘a minute’. At the ensuing conference, I was told later, Betty’s willingness, industry and general efficiency as a domestic help were probed and a favourable account of them given. Meanwhile I put to myself the question whether the removal of all social workers, preferably by execution squads, wouldn’t do everyone a power of good. You had to do something about ill-treated, etc., children all right, but you could see to that without behaving like a sort of revivalist military policeman.