Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘We gets up to some games down Ogmore Street. We haves the time of our bloody lives, we do.’

‘I bet you do.’

‘Yeah,’ she said with great conviction. ‘Jean gone out, have she?’

‘Just taken the kids for a breath of fresh air. I don’t suppose she’ll be long.’

‘Ah. They all right, the kids?’

‘Pretty fair. What are you up to yourself these days?’

She gave a great yell of laughter. ‘That’s a question, that is. What don’t I bloody get up to? What am I up to, eh? That’s a good one.’ Then her manner grew seriously informative. ‘I got in with the business girls now, see?’

‘Oh, really?’ A momentary vision of Betty drinking morning coffee at the Kardomah with a group of secretaries and shorthand typists was briefly presented to me, before being penetrated by her true meaning. ‘Er… good fun?’

‘It’s all right, you know. Got its points, like. See what I got here.’ She opened her handbag, a shiny plastic affair in a pink pastel shade, and, after I’d sat there wondering for a moment or two, drew out a roll of crumpled pound notes bound with an elastic band. ‘Take you a long time to pull in this much down the library, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh, no doubt about that.’

‘We goes with the boys round the docks and the sailors when they comes off the ships. They’re the best. They wants a bit of fun and they don’t care what they pays for it. They got plenty of dough, see? They goes on the bloody binge down there. Lots of Norgies we gets. I like the Norgies.’

‘Oh, yes, your husband’s one, isn’t he?’

This second deviation from the path of true tact was as little heeded as the first. ‘That’s right. He’ve gone back to Norway now.’

‘For good?’

‘No, don’t think so. Father in trouble or something. Reckon he’ll fetch up again some time.’

‘How are the twins?’ The domestic note, once struck, might be a handy one to prolong. What was the time? Where was Jean? Would she bring her red-faced English oh-I-say-darling pal back with her? Why not?

‘They’re okay. I got someone looking after them okay. These Norgies are dead funny, though. Makes me die. The Welsh boys, now, they likes me with my vest on, don’t want it no other way, but the Norgies don’t care for that, they wants everything off, and they don’t like it outside, they always goes home with you for it. They likes to take their time, like. You know Joe Leyshon?’

‘I’ve heard of him. Used to be in the fight game, didn’t he?’

‘He runs a lot of the girls down Ogmore Street, but I won’t let him run me. He wants to run me, but I don’t like him. Some of his mates is dead funny, though. We broke into a shop the other night over Cwmharan way. Didn’t get anything much, few fags and things, but we had a laugh. Mad buggers, they are. We goes down the Albany mostly. You know the Albany? It’s all right. You ought to come down there one night and have a couple of drinks and a bit of fun. What about it? I’m going down there tonight.’

‘Well, I don’t want to come barging in…’

‘Go on, I’d show you around, you wouldn’t come to no harm, I promise you. They’re all right there, really. I’d see you had a good time. You could tell Jean you was out with your mates, see?’

‘It’s very kind of you, Betty, but honestly I don’t think I could. I’m pretty well fixed up here, you know what I mean, and so I don’t…’

‘I tell you one thing, John.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re afraid to go with me.’

So many factors amalgamated to put this beyond serious dispute that reply was difficult. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ I said after a moment, trying to ram jocoseness into tone and manner. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that at all.’

Betty evidently saw through this. She said: ‘You are. You’re afraid.’

‘It isn’t that exactly. It’s just that I try to stick to my wife as far as possible,’ I told her, certain that I sounded like some ferret-faced Christian lance-corporal in a barrack-room discussion.

‘Yeah, I know, you’d fold up if you hadn’t got her to cling on to. You hangs around all the bloody time.’ Contempt had returned to her voice, edged this time with bitterness, but she showed none of either when she went on to add: ‘You’re a good boy.’

‘I wouldn’t say — I don’t know. Betty, you mustn’t mind me saying this, but isn’t it rather risky to go round breaking into places with these pals of yours? Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?’

‘Aw, short life and a merry one’s what I say. It’s worth it for a bit of excitement. Don’t get much chance of a thrill these days, eh?’

‘Well, it’s up to you, but you don’t want to get — you know — sent down, do you? The twins wouldn’t have…’

‘Don’t preach, now. I gets brassed off with bloody preaching.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like that.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled.

In the succeeding silence a door boomed shut below. The slapping gait of my daughter Eira became audible, overlaid and in part obscured by the characteristic bellowing squeal of her younger brother. Both sounds began to ascend the stairs.

‘Jean back, eh?’ Betty got to her feet. ‘I better be going.’

‘Oh, don’t go, stay and have a cup of tea with us.’

‘I better not.’

Eira ran into the room, stopping short when she saw Betty and then moving towards the fire by a circuitous route, hugging the wall and the couch. ‘Put my coat off,’ she said to me distantly.

‘Hallo,’ Betty said with an elaborate rising inflection. ‘Hallo. And whose little girl are you? Let auntie take your coat off, then. Come on, flower. That’s right. Had a lovely run, have you? Did you see any bunnies? How you’ve grown. And you’re bold as ever, I declare. Yes, you are. You’re bold, very very bold. Yes, you are. You’re very very brazen by there.’

Jean came in with the baby. ‘Well, hallo, Betty,’ she said, grinning. ‘Nice to see you. Christ, shut up, can’t you?’ This last was addressed to the baby, who seemed almost, but not quite, worn out with mortal pain.

‘Sorry I couldn’t come along that Tuesday like we said, Mrs Lewis, but the twins was poorly and I couldn’t fix it to let you know.’

‘That’s all right, Betty. I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘Let me take the baby for you.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot. John, you might have kept the fire up.’

‘Sorry, dear.’ I picked up the coal scuttle, which was one of the obliquely truncated-cone type. It proved to weigh less than it should, less than a coal scuttle with any coal in it could. I could hardly remember ever having made up the fire without encountering, at the very outset, a light coal scuttle.

During a long, foul-mouthed ardour in the coal cupboard under the stairs, I thought first how funny it was that a fallen woman — really fallen now, right smack over full length — should talk to a child in just the same style as the perpendicularly upright went in for. But then presumably there were parts of the fallen that were bound to remain unfallen, quite important parts too. This brought up the whole mystery of prostituted existence: not what happened to your womanhood or your springs of emotion or your chances of getting clued up on the splendours and miseries of the flesh — screw all that — but what it was like to be a prostitute during the times when you weren’t actually behaving like one, when you were in mufti: on a bus, cooking the baked beans, doing the ironing, going shopping, chatting to a neighbour, buying the Christmas presents. It must be like going round ordinarily and all the time you were a spy or a parson or a leading authority on Rilke, things which you surely often forgot about being. Anyway, to judge by the representative upstairs, being a prostitute was something you could be done a power of good by, and without having to be horrible first, either. As regards not having to get horrible later on, that too could no doubt be arranged, especially if you could keep out of the way of the various sets of men in white coats who, according to report, tended to close in on you after a few years in the game. That was a nasty prospect all right, and resembled many a kindred nastiness thought up by the Godhead in seeming a disproportionate penalty for rather obscure offences. Still, that minor cavil about the grand design had been answered long ago, hadn’t it? Yes, more answers than one had been offered.