Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Well, how are things?’ I asked.

Betty glanced at me without friendliness, then away. ‘Okay,’ she muttered, picking at a hole in the cover of her chair.

‘Your husband seems a nice chap.’

‘What you know about it, eh?’

‘I’m only going on how he struck me.’

‘Aw, he’s okay, I suppose. He’s a good boy.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for good boys.’

‘Suppose so.’

‘You seem to have settled down here nicely.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jean and the children asked to be remembered to you, by the way.’

To shrug both her shoulders would have meant heaving herself up from the chair back, so she made do with just shrugging the uppermost one. It was clear to me that there was nothing left of the cordiality of our last meeting, and no wonder. A man who had seen her when she was free was the last kind of person on earth who should have been allowed to see her now she was tamed. And in any contact not made on terms of equality the speech of one party or the other will fall almost inevitably into the accents and idioms of patronage, as I’d just heard my own speech doing. Severity is actually more respectful. But that wouldn’t do here. Would anything? I said: ‘Do you ever miss the old life?’

‘What you want to know for? What’s it got to do with you?’

‘Nothing. I was only asking.’

‘Well, don’t ask, see? Mind your own bloody business, see? What you want to come here for anyway?’

‘I’m sorry, Betty. I just came to see how you were getting on.’

‘Like old Webster, eh? Well I don’t like people coming along to see how I’m getting on, see? I gets brassed off with it, see?’

As she got up from her chair to make her point more forcibly, the scullery door opened and Mair came back into the room. My sense of relief filled me with shame. Triumph swept over Betty’s face at being about to do what she must have wanted to do for quite a time.

‘Your husband certainly thinks the world of you, Betty,’ Mair led off. ‘He’s been telling me—’

‘Get out, you old cow,’ Betty shouted, blinking fast. ‘I doesn’t want you here, see? I got enough to put up with with the bloody neighbours hanging over the fence and staring in the bloody windows and them buggers upstairs complaining. I got enough without you poking your bloody nose in, see? Just you piss off quick and leave me alone.’

‘Please, my dear, be quiet.’ Bent Arnulfsen had reappeared in the scullery doorway. In one hand he held a brown enamel teapot, in the other the hand of one of the twins. ‘Mrs Webster is kind. And this gentleman.’

‘You keep out of this, man. Go on, Webster, what you waiting for? I said get out, didn’t I? Who do you think you are, that’s what I’d like to know — poking your bloody nose in everywhere and telling every bugger what to do. You’re beyond, you are, Webster. Bloody beyond. And as for you—’ At the moment when Betty, who was now crying, turned to me, Mair looked at her wristwatch with a quick movement. ‘Who asked you to come snooping in, that’s what I’d like to know,’ Betty started to say to me, but Mair cut in.

‘I’m afraid we shan’t be able to manage that cup of tea, Bent,’ she said interestedly; ‘I’d no idea the time was getting along like this. I must take Mr Lewis off to his place of work or I shall get into trouble. I’ll be in next week as usual and I’m sure things will have settled down by then. Goodbye, Betty; don’t upset yourself, there’s a good girl. Goodbye, Bent.’

With another look at me, full of accusation, Betty blundered out into the scullery and banged the door. Later I thought how cruel it was that she’d been met by bland preoccupation instead of the distress or anger she’d longed to provoke, that her brave show of defiance must have seemed to her to have misfired. But at the time I only wanted to get out before she came back.

Brushing aside Bent Arnulfsen’s halting apologies, Mair led me away. ‘Astonishing how predictable these girls are,’ she said as we drove off. ‘I’d seen that little lot coming for some time. You usually get it sooner or later and afterwards you often find you get on better than you did before. Sort of clears the air in a way. Next week she’ll be falling over herself and holding on to my hand and going on about “Oh, Mrs Webster, how could I have said what I did, what a pig I was to you, Mrs Webster, and you so kind”, and not being able to do enough for me. Not that that phase lasts very long, either. No, there’s no doubt about it, if you look for thanks in this job you’re wasting your time and letting yourself in for a big disappointment. The approval of your conscience is all the reward you ever get.’

‘Seen this?’ my wife asked me later in the same year.

I took the local paper from her and read that Elizabeth Grace Arnulfsen (19) had been sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for helping to burgle a café in Harrieston. (The two men who’d been with her got longer sentences.) Mrs Mair Webster, it was further reported, had spoken of her belief that Elizabeth Arnulfsen was weak-willed rather than vicious and had been led astray by undesirable companions. She said this out of her thorough knowledge of the girl’s character, and had been thanked for saying it.

‘Well, I hope Mair’s satisfied,’ I said, throwing the paper down.

‘Don’t be silly, you know she’ll be very cut up. She’s always done her best for Betty.’

‘Her worst, you mean.’

‘Don’t talk so soft.’

‘Betty only burgled that place to get her own back.’

‘What, on Mair?’

‘Yes, I should say it was chiefly on Mair. Not on society or any of that crap. As a method of not being the kind of person Mair wanted her to be.’

‘Mm. Sounds more like just high spirits to me. And according to what you told me Betty’d been breaking into places quite a time back.’

‘Not until Mair’d started licking her into shape.’

‘You’re exaggerating the whole thing, John. What should have happened according to you, anyway? Betty going on being a tart?’

‘Why not?’

‘What about the twins and this Bent bloke?’

‘Yes. No, she shouldn’t have gone on being a tart, or couldn’t or something. Pity in a way, though. She was enjoying herself.’

‘You don’t know anything about it. I’m going to make supper.’

‘I know how not to deal with people like Betty. Shall I give you a hand?’

‘No, you make the cocoa after. How do you stop people being tarts? How would you do it if it was you?’

‘Always assuming I thought I ought to try. It’s all a mess. It all needs going into.’

‘Who’s going to go into it? You and Mair?’

‘No, just me. What about that supper?’

I could picture Mair doing what she’d have called helping Betty through the ordeal, going to see her in prison, meeting her when she got out and at once settling down again to the by now surely hopeless task of inducing her to lead a normal life with her husband and children. And what would friend Lewis be up to while all this was going on? Getting boozed with his mates, having fantasies about some new beautiful borrower, binding about his extra evening duties in the summer and explaining to his wife that you couldn’t have good social workers, because the only kind of chap who’d make a good one was also the kind of chap who’d refuse to be one. Of the two of us, it had to be admitted that on the face of it Mair had a claim to be considered the less disreputable character, up there in the firing line while cowards flinched and traitors sneered.

Once you got off the face of it, though, and got on to what Mair was actually doing up there in the firing line, the picture changed a bit, just as things like the Labour Party looked better from some way away than close to. This was a timely reflection, because I’d been almost starting to admire Mair rather, and admiring someone you think is horrible is horrible. It was true enough that you had to have social workers, in the same way that you had to have prison warders, local government officials, policemen, military policemen, nurses, parsons, scientists, mental-hospital attendants, politicians and — for the time being anyway, God forgive us all — hangmen. That didn’t mean that you had to feel friendilly disposed towards any such person, bar the odd nurse perhaps, and then only on what you might call extrinsic grounds.