Authors: Kingsley Amis
‘Yes, I
know the ones you mean. Well, I don’t know what I think. But you’ve certainly
given me a most interesting exposition, Rector.’
‘Which
I might advise you, Mr Allington, to think over at some more favourable time.
It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical
context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.’
‘What
would you say if I were to tell you that I had evidence seeming to show that
an individual had actually survived death in some form or other?’
‘I’d
say you were off your …‘ On the Rev. Tom’s unworn face, the inbuilt look of
petulance gave momentary place to a kind of wariness; over the last few days, I
had seen something like it on most of the faces I knew well. ‘Uh, you’re
talking about ghosts and so on, are you?’
‘Yes.
Specifically, a ghost that gave me information, accurate information, that I
couldn’t otherwise have known.’
‘Mm. I
see. Well, off the top of the head I’d say that was a matter for your medical
adviser rather than someone in my position. Uh, where is Jack? I don’t see
him—’
‘He’s
gone off to a patient. You mean I must be mad if that’s what I think has
happened?’
‘Mm—no.
But we are talking about, let’s say non-normal states of consciousness, aren’t
we, by definition?’
‘Because
by definition people don’t survive death. Of course.’
‘I say,
do you think you could possibly get me another drink? I mustn’t get too pissed
because I’m going to a rather exciting barbecue tonight in Newnham garden, but
I think perhaps just one more shot, if I may.’
‘What
are you drinking?’
‘Bacardi
and Pernod.’ He got a tacit ‘you
fool’
into the intonation.
‘Anything
in it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Tomato
juice or Coca-Cola or—’
‘Good
God, no. Just ice.’
I
passed the order to Fred, who closed his eyes for a moment or two before setting
about it. He was having a deservedly unstrenuous time for once, the house being
shut until the evening and the present party confined to Diana, David, three or
four neighbours and my own family group, plus the rector, now staring into his
glass and rotating it furiously before he risked a sip.
‘Is
that all right?’
‘Sure.
You mentioned God’s purpose just now,’ he said, showing a power of recall I
disliked having to attribute to him. ‘Interesting point, in its way. I’m going
to tell you that there’s more fantasy-building about God’s purpose, in the
sense of people letting their unconscious drives come out into the open in a
socially accepted way, than in any other belief area, except martyrdom, of
course, which is more blatantly sexual. God’s purpose. Huh. I’m no more
qualified than the next man to tell you what that is, or even if there is such
a thing, which a lot of the younger people in the Church today would put a
big
bloody question-mark to. The trend undoubtedly is for a committed God to go
the same way as the immortality of the soul, with a twenty- or perhaps a
twenty-five-year consciousness-lag. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and
have a word with those two smashing-looking dollies over there. It’s been a
most—’
‘I’ll
come with you.’
By
chance (presumably), Joyce and Diana had put on virtually identical outfits
for the funeral: black barathea suit, white
broderie anglaise
shirt,
black fish-net stockings, black straw hat. This made them look more than ever
like sisters, even fraternal twins. While the rector dismantled Christianity for
my benefit, or just as likely for his own, I had been observing them as they
sat and talked together on the window-seat, and wondering if one or the other
of them had brought up the impending orgy. It occurred to me now that I had
forgotten to tell Diana that I had told Joyce that the idea had come from Diana
in the first place, but I had hardly begun to move over to them, the rector
slouching surlily at my side, before I saw that all was well. Well and to
spare: their shoulders and knees were touching, each was slightly flushed in
the face, and, in their different fashions, each gave me a glance of
complicity, Joyce’s straight and serious, Diana’s with a little pretended shock
and shame round the edges.
‘Mr
Sonnenschein has been explaining to me about God’s purpose,’ I said.
The
rector gave a quick wriggle of one hip and the opposite shoulder. He said
deprecatingly, ‘Oh well, you know, that sort of thing’s bound to come up from
time to time in my field.’
‘What
is God’s purpose?’ asked Joyce, using the interested, far from unfriendly,
wholly reasonable tone that I had learnt to recognize as a warning.
‘Well,
I suppose one might start to answer that by saying what it isn’t. For instance,
it’s nothing to do with getting hot and bothered about the state of one’s soul,
or the resurrection of the body, or the community of saints, or sin and
repentance, or doing one’s duty in that state of life into which it has
pleased—’
I had
been looking forward to an exhaustive list of what God’s purpose was not;
Joyce, however, cut in. ‘But what is His purpose?’
‘I
should say,
I
would say that what … God wants us to do’
—there were sneer-marks round the last phrase—’is to fight injustice and
oppression wherever they are, whether they’re in Greece or Rhodesia or America
or Ulster or Mozambique-and-Angola or Spain or—’
‘But
that’s all politics. What about religion?’
‘To me,
this is … religion, in the truest sense. Of course, I may be wrong about the
whole thing. It isn’t up to me to tell people what to think or how they ought
to—’
‘But
you’re a parson,’ said Joyce, still reasonably. ‘You’re paid to tell people
what to think.’
‘To me,
I’m sorry, but that’s a rather outmoded—’
‘Mr
Sonnenschein,’ put in Diana, chopping it up so sharply that it sounded a bit
like one of those three-monosyllable Oriental names.
The
rector waited quite a creditable length of time before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs
Maybury?’
‘Mr
Sonnenschein … Would you mind frightfully if I were to ask you a rather
impertinent question?’
‘No. No,
of course not. It’s a—’
‘What- …
‘s-the-point of somebody like you being a parson when you say you don’t care
about things like duty and people’s souls and sin? Isn’t that just exactly what
parsons are supposed to care about?’
‘Well,
it’s true that the traditional—’
‘I
mean, of course I agree with you about Greece and all these places, it’s
absolutely ghastly, but everybody knows that already. You must simply not take
offence, please not, but lots of us would say it’s not up to you in your position
to start sounding like, well …‘
‘One of
those chaps on television doing a lecture on the problems of today and freedom
and democracy,’ said Joyce, even more reasonably than before.
‘We
don’t need you for that, you see. Mr Sonnenschein …‘
‘…
Yes, Mrs Maybury?’
‘Mr
Sonnenschein, don’t you perhaps think that when everybody’s so tremendously,
you know, ahead of everything and knowing it all and everything, then it’s a
bit
up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and
damnation and
jolly
hard on everybody, instead of, you know…?’
‘Not
really minding anything like everybody else,’ said Joyce. She drained her
sherry, looking at me over the top of the glass.
‘But
surely one must tell the truth as one sees it, otherwise one—’
‘Oh, do
you really think so? Don’t you think that’s just about the riskiest thing one
can possibly do?’
‘You
can only think you know it, probably,’ finished Joyce. ‘Yes. Well. There we
are. I must go and see the major,’ said the man of God, so rapidly and decisively
and so immediately before his actual departure that seeing the major (even
though there was a retired one actually present) might have been a Sonnenschein
family euphemism for excretion.
I
turned back to the two girls. I had never seen them behave in concert like this
before. ‘Well, that was a marvellous seeing-off, and no mistake. I wish I’d
said all that. Can I get you both a drink?’
As I
spoke, they looked at each other in a brief thought-exchanging way, then at me
without much warmth. Diana, wide-eyed, leaned forward.
‘Maurice,
why did you bring that ghastly little dog-collared drip over here like that?’
‘I
didn’t bring him over; he insisted on coming to chat the two of you up, and I
thought it would be less painful if I—’
‘Couldn’t
you have stopped him?’ asked Joyce.
‘I
suppose I could have, yes, if I’d realized it was so important.’
‘Surely,
Maurice, you could see we were having a chat.’
‘Sorry.
Anyway, talking of having a chat …‘
‘You
mean about us and you going to bed together,’ said Joyce, not dropping her
voice much, and speaking as if we had turned to a less stimulating and
sufficiently familiar topic.
‘Ssshh …
Yes. Well, what do you—?’
‘We
thought four o’clock this afternoon would be a good time,’ said Diana.
‘Splendid.
We might—’
‘Where?’
asked Joyce.
‘I
thought we could use number eight in the annexe. No booking there until Monday.
I’ll mention it to David and hell see we’re not disturbed.’
‘What
will you say to him?’
‘Leave
that to me.’
Mention
it to David I did, in the same fashion as several times before when about to
entertain a lady in my house, though without asking him, as several times
before, to have a bottle of champagne and an ice-bucket and glasses ready in
the room, an omission made less out of economy than inability to think what to
say about the number of glasses required. This brief exchange came just after
an unenjoyable luncheon in the main dining-room. The rector was in attendance,
fully recovered from his drubbing at the hands of the girls, in fact quite
exuberant, making an untentative verbal pass at Nick over coffee (as Nick told
me later) and going off last and adequately pissed with three glasses of my
Taylor
1955
inside him. I wished him ill for his Newnham garden
barbecue. When he had finally departed, I went to the office, locked myself in,
turned off the telephone and tried to think about my father.
It was
a case of trying, more than succeeding, because it had been so hard to connect
anything about his burial with anything about him, or because I had four o’clock
on my mind (though it did not feel like that), or because the recently living
take so long to start seeming really dead, or because of something to do with
Jack’s pills. Cold and unmeaningful phrases circled in my brain: he had gone
off easy, he had given me life, he had been a good age, he was at peace, he had
done his best for me, he had seen his son and grandson settled, he must have
known it would come (as if that were a comfort). And he had gone to a better place,
he was dead in the body but not in the spirit—not easy to find more of the same
to add, nor even to try to find a meaning in anything of the sort, not
nowadays. It sounded as if, it felt as if, for every imaginable wrong reason,
that fool of a rector had been right. And yet I had meant what I had said to
him about evidence of survival in Underhill’s case. A different case, then, a
far-off one, concerning a man who was not a man at all, only a name and words
and bones and perhaps, no, certainly, an apparition. Immortality seemed either
too exotic or too crude a concept to be fitted into somebody one had known for
so long in the flesh. It might be possible to work on this from the other end,
so to speak—try to make Underhill more real to myself, more of a person, more
of a presence, however remote, in the same kind of way as my father was a
presence.
I
unlocked a drawer in the desk and, from under a pile of bank statements and
cleared cheques, pulled out the casket containing the silver figure and the
manuscript. I had been too tired to examine these the previous night, and had
had no time, nor much inclination, so far that day. Now I was eager to do so. I
took the figure to the window and turned it over in the strong sunlight there.
Except round the neck and crotch, it was not much corroded, but other parts of
it appeared to have been worn smooth. Both trunk and limbs were roughly
cylindrical, with little representation of waist, elbow or knee, and the surviving
hand, although disproportionately large, showed no knuckles or finger-joints. In
the same fashion, the head did not taper appreciably towards the chin, the top
of the skull was almost flat and the features were to a large extent matters of
token; only the mouth, set in a wide straight grin that revealed a dozen or
more teeth of roughly equal size, had been treated in any detail. I was certain
the thing had not come from anywhere in western Europe, and felt strongly that
east was the wrong direction to consider. Africa, possibly, though very unlikely,
I thought, in view of Underhill’s date, if nothing else. The New World, the
pre-Columbian cultures—yes: I had seen just that kind of joyful, greedy
ferocity on the faces of Aztec sculptures. There would have been plenty of
time—a century and a half, in fact—for such an object to make its way from
conquered Mexico to the England of Underhill’s day, however hard it might be to
imagine a plausible route; the capture of a Spanish treasure-ship was one
obvious and not too unlikely piece of guesswork. But from whatever source and
by whatever way it had reached Fareham, it was by far the most disagreeable
work of human hands I have ever seen, as I had been aware the moment I looked
at it closely. It was also unpleasant to the touch, being hardly less cold, or
clammy, than when I had first handled it, twelve hours or so previously, and
not being appreciably warmed now by several minutes’ contact with my fingers;
no doubt the result of some impurity in the metal. All in all, it seemed just
what Underhill would have chosen, probably from a collection of such images of
man’s beastliness, to have buried with him and to serve as proof of his
survival.