Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

This moved Alec in a gentle, unagonizing way. Betty would never have wanted to be thought one of the important people in the district, but she had been a well-liked queen of her modest bits of castle. Such reflections occupied him for most of the meal, which soon began to acquire some sort of festive air. A couple of stories from Frank about the difficulties of bringing the laundry business up to date contributed little, Alec considered, apart from additional light on the fellow’s character. When Bob got going, however, with what he called some unofficial law reports, it had to be admitted that he cheered everybody up. Even Jim had to laugh a few times, and the two Gioberti girls, each clutching a glass of pop, seemed spellbound.

While Alec ordered a round of liqueurs, Frank leaned back and lit a cigarette. ‘Fantastic really,’ he said. ‘Here we are, the lot of us, all having a good time, and two hours ago we were all, well, overwhelmed by grief. It just shows you, don’t it? I mean it’s natural, see? The church, the graveyard, the pub. Whoever it was thought up how to run funerals knew his job. I reckoned the service was real nice, didn’t you, Ann?’

Annette kept her eyes on the table. ‘Very nice,’ she said.

‘It was a bit, what shall I say? austere, that’s the only criticism I got. Of course, you don’t want to listen to us, we’re Romans, we go for a bit of, you know, colour and ritual and ceremony and incense and all that jazz. When you’re used to that type of thing the other stuff’s bound to come a bit drab, see what I mean?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Alec said. ‘But you’ve got to remember that’s the way we run things.’ He paused to pick up four of the half-dozen pieces of silver that remained of his two pound notes. ‘We like our religion to be austere, as you call it.’

‘Like I said, it’s what you’re used to.’

Alec’s voice rose. ‘And we don’t like a lot of dressing-up and chanting and bowing and scraping and any tomfoolery of that kind. That’s not what we want in this country. We’ll do things the British way…’

‘Who’s we, Uncle Mac? Okay, Ann.’

‘… which means we’re not going to take very kindly, necessarily anyway, to any religion that’s… and a lot of other things for that matter, that aren’t—’

‘That are foreign, that what you mean?’

‘Yes, if you want to put it like that.’

‘Well, you want to put it like that, anyway, don’t you? It’s all right, Ann, honest. Yeah, the Pope does live in Rome, no getting away from that. There’s no end of foreign things in this country when you get down to it, like the wine we just drunk, and that cigar you’re smoking. And lots of foreign people, too, one sort and another. In fact I remember in my far distant youth they were always going on at us about that — you know, how anyone could come here and carry on pretty well any way he liked, provided he behaved himself. They used to reckon it was one of the big—’

‘It’s no use telling old Mac any of that,’ Bob put in, swivelling his glance round the table: ‘he thinks the English are foreigners really, don’t you, old chap? and the Welsh and the Irish too, of course, and the Highland Scotch, and he’s not too happy about Edinburgh and Glasgow; in fact, unless you come from Peebles you’re a black man as near as dammit, what?’

Everybody laughed loudly, including Elizabeth and Sonia. Alec joined in with the rest. He would not have wanted to withdraw anything he had said to Frank. There was far too much of this sentimentality about nowadays, the idea that you had to be twice as nice to Negroes and Jews and Indians and so on whatever they were like, which the better types among them must surely resent. And he felt that a little opposition from time to time would not do Frank any harm. All the same, Alec realized, he had gone rather far. No need to have got hot under the collar like that — it must have looked… Suddenly nauseated, he rubbed his hand across his forehead. He had drunk too much whisky on an empty stomach, and he ought to have remembered that white wine never agreed with him. The notion of a few minutes in the open air abruptly became irresistible.

At the side of the building there was a small walled yard, embellished with a few climbing plants, where people could sit and drink in the summer if they cared to fetch their own orders from the saloon bar. The chairs and tables had been removed, no doubt to protect against his own folly anyone whom the sunshine might have lured into the treacherous autumnal outdoors. Alec perched himself on a low brick wall and was clasping his hands round one knee, pipe in mouth, when he was joined by Annette, who must have followed him more or less straight from the dining-room. She remained standing, a rather dumpy figure without a trace of her mother’s looks.

He took her expression for one of inquiry. ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘It was a bit stuffy in there, wasn’t it?’

‘I didn’t like what you said to Frank just now.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, Annette, I didn’t think.’

‘You knew he was in the Army for six years and got captured in North Africa? That makes him as British as anyone else as far as I’m concerned. That and having a naturalized British father and a mother born British and being born in England himself. And who cares anyway? And do you know how many Catholics there are in England? And it was all Catholics here once, before they—’

‘Annette, I really am sorry. I had no intention of—’

‘He’s the best husband and father anyone could wish for. Never looks at another woman even though I know he gets plenty of chances. And then he runs into this kind of muck. He gets it in business all the time.“Mister who? How do you spell that? Oh.” You can tell what they’re thinking, that’s when they don’t come out and say it. I get it too, you see. “How long’s your husband been over here?” It makes me mad. She was always going on about it. Fine Liberal she was.’

‘But she wouldn’t ever have dreamt of—’

‘You didn’t know her. The way she used to go on about Elizabeth. That’s a laugh, isn’t it, “Elizabeth”? That was him — you don’t think I’d have been the one who wanted to name—’

The sunlight suddenly grew more intense and Alec shaded his eyes with the hand that held the pipe. ‘What? I don’t quite—’

‘Never mind. She’s well developed for her age, I know, but these days a lot of them are, with the diet or whatever it is. She’d never let me alone about it — I’d see her watching the kid, sort of fascinated, and then when we were by ourselves she’d say, “She’s so big , isn’t she?” as if it was… nasty or disgusting or something. “She’s so big ,” she’d say, as if I’d done it on purpose to spite her. And then she’d say, “Of course, these Italian girls, they’re women at fourteen, aren’t they? Like Jewesses.” Her own granddaughter. Three-quarters English. I don’t think she ever believed Frank isn’t a Jew really and hadn’t taken up being a Catholic as a sort of extra. She never liked him and she didn’t mind showing it, either.’

‘But Annette, it was your father who was against Frank if either of them was; I remember them arguing about it. He said—’

‘You know what Dad’s like, up in the air one minute and forgotten all about it the next, it’s just his way. No, she was the one. It wasn’t like her to come out and say anything; all smiles on the surface and needling away whenever she got the chance. She was the same with Sonia’s eyesight and Chris crying too much according to her. I often say to myself the only grandchildren she’d really like would be if Charlie and I got together and had some. She gave him a hell of a time, I don’t know whether you knew, wanting to know where he was and who he was with all the time. He got away overseas as soon as he could, poor old Charlie.’