Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

He can string words together, Alec thought. Or whoever had written the stuff could. He looked round the church, anxious to impress on his memory this part, at least, of today. But it was a modern building, thirty years old at the most, with bright stained glass, a tiled floor, and woodwork that reminded him of the dining-room suites he saw in suburban shop windows: none of the air of antiquity that had always appealed to Betty.

The Gioberti family occupied the pew in front. The farthest away from him was Annette Gioberti, who turned her head now and gave him a faint smile. The bearer of this exotic name looked like a soberly but becomingly dressed English housewife in her middle thirties, which, as the daughter of Jim and Betty, was much what might have been expected of her. Jim had been against the marriage at first, saying among other things that, while he had no objection to Italians or half-Italians as such, he did not fancy having his grandchildren brought up as Roman Catholics. But Betty had soon laughed him out of that by asking him when he had last had anything to do with the Church of England, and had added that Frank Gioberti was a decent, hard-working lad who was obviously going to do everything in his power to make Annette happy — what more could they ask?

Alec had never known Betty to err in her judgements of people, and in this case she had turned out to be almost too literally accurate. From what she told Alec, whose direct contacts with the Giobertis were rare, there was plenty of money around in that household, and no shortage of affection, especially if you counted the more obvious kind of show of it — expensive presents on anniversaries as well as birthdays, and bunches of flowers being delivered unexpectedly. But as regards the finer things of life (Alec always wanted to smile at this favourite phrase of Betty’s, so characteristic of her in its naïve sincerity) there was a complete gap: no books apart from trashy thrillers, no music except what the wireless and gramophone churned out, and no pictures at all; in fact Betty had given them a Medici print of a medieval Virgin and Child one Christmas, thinking it would appeal to Frank, and had come across it months later in a drawer in one of the children’s bedrooms.

The part of Frank that could be seen above the back of the pew seemed to Alec to offer a good deal of information. The thick black hair was heavily greased; the neck bulged in a way that promised a roll of fat there in due course; the snowily white shirt-collar and the charcoal-grey suit material did somehow or other manage to suggest, not lack of taste exactly, but the attitude that money was more interesting. Still, one had to be tolerant. A man who owned however many laundries it was in the Deptford area could hardly be expected to have the time or the inclination to take up the French horn. It was only the children who might be the losers, especially since, in a materialistic age like the present one, the parent had a special responsibility for suggesting that there were some worthwhile things which nobody could be seen eating or drinking or smoking or wearing or driving or washing dishes in on TV commercials. And then people wondered why there was all this…

Alec pulled himself physically upright in his seat. It was almost frightening, the way the mind could so easily follow its well-worn tracks, even at times of unique stress. Habit again: nature’s protection. He turned cold at the thought that today might pass him by altogether, that he might in some way miss experiencing it or beginning to understand it. The most abject and revealing loss of composure would be better than that. He started doing what he could never have predicted: trying to feel. ‘A human being,’ the clergyman was saying, ‘is the sum of many qualities, and it is from what we see of these that we form our ideas of what everything in life is, of what life itself is.’ No help there. Alec glanced over to the front pew across the aisle, where Jim and Bob sat together. With the Giobertis, this was all the family there was. Jim’s brother, who had emigrated to Canada getting on for thirty years ago, had not received Jim’s cable, or had not answered it, and it was now nearly twenty years — yes, twenty next April — since young Charlie, Annette’s brother, had been killed in a motor-cycle accident in Alexandria, three weeks after getting his commission in the Royal Armoured Corps. Well, he had been spared all this.

Jim’s face, half-turned towards the clergyman, looked quite relaxed, and he had seemed so in the brief moment at the church door when Alec had just had time to grasp his hand and murmur a few words, though his movements and reactions had been a little slower than usual. It had been the same, Alec remembered, the night the telegram about Charlie arrived. He had got there in the small hours — he had left his digs within a minute of getting Jim’s phone call but the train had been held up by an air alert — to find Betty in a state of collapse, naturally, and Jim simply being Jim, only more so: calm, solid, desperately hurt but not defeated, saying little as always, showing a degree of strength that even Alec, who admired him more than any other man he had ever met, had not expected. Thank God that Jim, at least, was still here. Now that he was alone, Jim might well consider throwing in his lot with him, sharing some sort of household, even perhaps (Alec put this part of his thought aside for future reference) coming into the small glass-merchandising firm of Keith Mackenzie and Company in which Alec, upon his retirement next year, was planning to join his brother Iain. If that appealed to Jim, it would be a kind of continuation of the Trio — the name Alec used in his own mind for the unit the Duerdens and he had comprised for over thirty years. And it would be a fine memorial to Betty.

‘And so to have lived in vain,’ Alec heard the clergyman say, ‘is inconceivable.’ Even the thickest and most preternaturally apathetic voices have a directional component, and Alec became half-aware that this one was being beamed towards him. When a pause followed, he looked up and saw that the clergyman was indeed staring angrily into his face. After another second or two of ocular reprimand, the man spoke again. He was plainly drawing to a close, and now the hint of a new tone was heard, the detached disgust of a schoolmaster reading out to his class some shameful confidential document he has snatched from the hot hand of one of their number.

‘Whence do we derive our ideas of what is most precious and admirable and lovable in human nature? Not from any inborn knowledge, but from what we see in those around us. To know somebody, and even more to know them with love, is constantly to be made aware of what human nature is and can be. To have known somebody with love is to be permanently illuminated with the human capacity for tenderness, for generosity, for gaiety, for disregard of self, for courage, for forgiveness, for intelligence, for compassion, for loyalty, for humility — and nobody has ever lived who has been unable to offer his fellow-creatures some one or other of these. And is this illumination an aspect of life, a side of life, a part of life? No, it is life itself, this learning what we are. And can death diminish that? No, death can do nothing with it, death even throws it into prominence, death is cheated. As death will always be cheated. Let us pray. Will you kneel, please.’

Alec knelt and tried to pray, but could not decide what to pray to. The principle for good he sometimes thought of as existing above and beyond everything, and which he had expected (wrongly) to become more real to him as he grew older, seemed to involve a way of looking at things that included a belief in Betty’s having a future, and he could not see how she could have any. So he made some wishes about the past instead, that Betty had had a happy life and had not suffered when she was dying. He felt his mind slowing down and becoming a blank, and would have begun to forget where he was if it had not been for the diminishing footfalls that told him he was about to be left alone. He got quickly to his feet and hurried outside.