Cards of Identity (20 page)

‘I’m sure you’re right. I’ll have to ring off though, I’m afraid.’

Vinson turned and faced us. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘I am going to have to put my heart and soul into this.’

‘Oh, Vinson, darling!’ she cried: ‘I know you will. And what is
my
part? I’m
so
thrilled!’

‘What d’you mean,
your
part?’ he answered crossly.
‘You
don’t have a part. This is a funeral. Who ever heard of a connexion between death and virginity?’

‘Come, come, Vinson,’ I said, my heart touched by her dismay. ‘The poets have frequently and forcibly likened the two.’

‘Only as consubstantial within the frame of a single body. But nothing even remotely connecting the Badgeries with the Lord Royal. How can you employ a virgin to symbolize a passing? It’s a denial of the whole
sense
of the thing.’

‘Then what will I do?’ she cried.

‘You’d better get back to your auctioneering,’ he said. ‘It’s a good living, isn’t it? If you’re short of cash, tell me.’

She pressed her lips together with such terrible vehemence that when the door-bell rang I thought her mouth had done it. Vinson, who had already totally forgotten her existence except for a suspicion that she had just touched him for money, hurried to the door and came back with a Yeoman – a young man of such attenuation that he seemed to have been drawn in a single strip from steel rollers.

‘I won’t stay,’ he said, setting down what looked like a gigantic leather hat-box. ‘We hardly know which way to turn, everything’s such a balls-up. You’ll let us have him back after the funeral, won’t you? He’s wonderfully fit. Here’s the transfer pledge.’

Vinson reached for his broad-nib and cursively signed. He stared at the hat-box like a child on Christmas morning.

‘Have you got a taxi out there?’ she asked the Yeoman. ‘I’ll share it, if you don’t mind.’ Women are remarkably quick, sometimes: there was her suitcase, neatly packed, in her hand.

They drove off together and Vinson reverently undid the leather straps. Inside, the badger rested in a neat, wooden scaffolding. Vinson gently eased him and put him in the middle of the carpet.

I have never in my life seen anything more life-like than that badger. How old he was when the Yeoman trapped him in the woods, how long ago he was disembowelled and stuffed, how many centuries of dust had been denied his coat – these questions I cannot answer. I only knew that in modern times we have developed techniques of preservation that would have dumbfounded our forefathers; and that where formerly some priceless relic, animate or inanimate, would have been thrown on the dust-heap, we moderns have so devoted the resources of our science to taxidermy that there is now virtually nothing that is not considerably more lively after death than it was before. Our token badger, who had recently been completely refurnished by a firm which specialized in this kind of work, was a case in point. His fawn-grey hairs, which gave off the most delicate scent of rosemary, honeysuckle, and shampoo, were of such exuberance and vitality that each stood out from its fellows and could be fingered separately. His eyes were velvet masterpieces: one of them, directed to the left, sounded the call of the wild; the other, down-turned to the right, seemed about to weep for the death of its patron and protector. The white badge on his forehead shone with such brilliance that it resembled an antique carving chiselled from a block of snow. Vinson glanced into the box and drew out a silver bowl, one half filled with artificial water, the other with token corn. There was also a real gilt comb, an ivory brush, a box of Qwickit’s Dry Shampoo, and some flea-powder – this last a truly significant measure, indicating man’s modern ability to make his nostalgia deceptive even to vermin.

When Vinson saw these things, he began to weep; nor can I blame
him. For one whose deepest dreams and highest purposes were conjoined in the ecstasy of life-in-death, for one whose only moments of despair came when he trained his telescope on the future and cried: ‘I cannot see the symbols!’ – for such a man, this perpetuated stuffed corpse stood for more, far more, than the mere office of the Badgeries; it seemed to hold in its mounted paws the fate and destiny of the whole nation.

As I watched, Vinson suddenly stiffened his limbs and groaned; his eyes rolled upwards and he began to twitch with convulsive shudders. I said gently, but with excitement: ‘Vinson! Are you being reborn?’

He nodded tersely, reluctant to be distracted, and reached his hands backwards as if grasping a pair of bed-posts. A few seconds later he again groaned, shuddered, slapped himself sharply on the buttocks and let out a high wail. Then, all at once, he became himself again, and lit a Craven A.

I was a little disappointed in his new identity. It was exactly the same as the old one, except that there seemed to be more of it. Sensing my disappointment, he said: ‘I suppose you expected a completely exterior transformation. That’s not at all what happens. It all takes place within.’

‘Are you conscious of the new identity?’

‘Certainly. But don’t think of it in physical images – as a substance entering and filling an empty space. The old emptiness is still there, but it has been intangibly elucidated.’

‘I can’t follow that.’

‘Of course you can’t,’ he replied, his voice containing all its old contempt for materialism, but now more forceful and decisive. ‘You must
know
it.’

I saw that he had reached that area of inner experience at whose gates language and logic shiver like starvelings. I felt a sharp and hostile envy, and yet I persisted in demanding further explanation.

He laid one hand gently on the badger’s head and said: ‘The nearest I can get to defining the new identity is to say that the one I lacked previously is now lacking on a much higher level. It’s as if with a single leap I had mounted a full flight closer to the Realization of Nothingness. But it’s silly to try and put these things into words.’

*

The whole life of the nation was suspended for the following week. It is true that auction sales continued in all parts of the country, but no one
spoke
of such continuances, so great was the general absorption in the Lord Royal’s discontinuance. As Vinson said: ‘It is not his death as a man which counts; it is his procession into an embodiment of that which demands reverence.’ It vexed him that the
B.B.C.
, far from emphasizing this crucial aspect of the affair, concentrated on the opposite side: apart from Elgars and elegies they transmitted nothing but eulogies, saying nothing whatever of the new career on which the Lord Royal had now entered. Fortunately, as the days passed, even the wireless was excited by the popular enthusiasm for the funeral, and we heard less and less of the Lord Royal and more and more of his procession.

I think, myself, that there is no greater thrill in life than to see maps of a really big funeral appear in the newspapers. There, before one’s eyes, are the drab old streets and avenues of commonplace, everyday life suddenly electrified by the twisting black arrow of death. And when to this human enthusiasm is added the thrill of knowing that one will oneself be following that sombre emblem of direction, that one is already a selected pin-point in that marching host – well, there is not much to live for after that. Vinson and I went about our preparations with a gravity so deep as to be ecstatic: his, of course, being on a higher level of experience than mine, was correspondingly deeper.

The night before the funeral he got stage-fright. We had set the badger up on its gilt trolley, to draw behind us on ropes of silk: we had oiled the wheels and tried on our uniforms with their mourning sashes of sable and saffron. Vinson began to breathe heavily and sweat; twice he got up, consulted the dictionary, shook his head, went out and bought another dictionary, repeated the process, and so on. ‘I know it seems completely ridiculous,’ he admitted at last, ‘but the
sense
of what we are about to do has suddenly escaped me.’

I answered, rather shocked: ‘You think it
nonsense,
Vinson?’

‘No, no: you misunderstand, as usual. I mean sense in the sense of emotional significance. I cannot adjust my heart to the mood; the inspired nature of the matter escapes me. Moreover, when I decided to withdraw temporarily to the merely commonsense aspect of the matter, even that proved elusive: I was unable to recapture the difference between a symbol and an emblem. The dictionaries have made it
worse: they define a symbol as an emblem and an emblem as a symbol, a shameless tautology. Believe me, when one is accustomed to the high fringes of non-lingual mysticism, it is horrifying suddenly to find oneself crawling in the lowest reaches of literal definition. Tomorrow will come and I shall have lost my whole hard-won identity: I shall be a puppet in a meaningless ceremony.’

To cheer him up, I laughed and said: ‘Every film-star and after-dinner speaker feels as you do at this particular moment. All will be remembered when the curtain rises.’

‘I don’t like the comparison,’ he replied, ‘but I know you wish me well. I shall not sleep tonight, of course.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t explain why, in words.’

*

Of course, he was himself again, next morning. Charming had arranged for a London barracks to be set aside as a tiring-room for the symbolic bodies and we proceeded there immediately after breakfast, with the badger and the trolley and our livery.

A barracks is not the best place for some two hundred men to dress for a death-march. Soldiers, who wear such dress all the time, counteract it by surrounding themselves with extreme emblems of life. Much of the wall was covered with indecent pictures, and the very boards had an air of rankness-that special flavour created by the clash between sexuality and military discipline. So it was the more marvellous to see the finesse and sweetness with which our two hundred marchers divested themselves of their bowler-hats and black suits and tired themselves in the magnificent costumes of their bodyhoods. They spoke very little: from time to time one would hear someone ask: ‘Have you the sprig of tansy?’ or, in a more worried tone: ‘I think they sent the wrong hemlock.’ But that was all. I think I most admired the very old men – the ones with long white moustaches who could stand erect in nothing but their underclothes and still look perfectly emblematic. But I had an eye, too, for their sons, the young men who would carry on after their fathers had gone and who hoped, in time, to resemble them exactly. Except, as I have said, for the printed map of a funeral procession, I think there is no sight more beautiful than that of an old man dressed in the clothes of an earlier generation accompanied
by a son who, though a trifle more up-to-date in appearance, is otherwise papa’s replica. There is the father, still leaning backwards towards the world of
his
father, and beside him a son following exactly the same bent. They are thus together recreating the identity of the young man’s grandfather and binding the vague present to an identifiable past.

When we were all ready, Charming gave us a brief inspection and arranged us in order of march. We of the Badgeries were to be preceded by a company of Pikemen and followed by a platoon of Coffiners. Barely an hour after the scheduled time we slowly moved out into the street and took up our positions.

When Vinson and I had been alone in our dingy rooms, the antiquity of our uniforms had been pronounced. It had become less so in the tiring-room, where we competed for anachronistic effect with a score of brilliant costumes. But, dear me, when we got into the street what a lesson in humility awaited us! The total length of the cortège was four and a quarter miles, of which we were able to see only a quarter in front and as much behind, due to bends in the street, statues, traffic lights, islands, etc. But what a spectacle was that half-mile of pageantry! Every colour under the sun – and there was a brilliant sun, what’s more – was laid out in stripes, blotches, and bands, and cut and sewed into the most fantastic forms of blouse, trouser, breech, stocking, and headpiece. Silver and gold, silk and lace, polished steel and shampooed feather – we could see nothing else behind and before and it was only with an effort that I convinced myself that I was a part of this splendour. And how strange the contrast between us superb death-marchers and the living onlookers who crowded the pavements! There they stood, gaping in their gloomy rows, with their shabby suits and abominable footwear, staring dumbfounded at the unreeling of so much obsolescence. Before I became sophisticated, as a result of knowing Vinson, it would have seemed to me that the contrast was the opposite of what it should be; I would have thought that those who attend on life would look alive, and death’s attendants dead. I know better now; I know that the onlooker sees us as lucky men marching in procession towards the past, and weeps drably to think that he is tied to the ever-miserable present.

I heard a trumpet blow. A voice in the crowd exclaimed: ‘They’re off!’ and sure enough the farthermost ranks began to move like the
first stanza in an epic. It was about a quarter of an hour before this advance slid backwards to us, and then, we too began our intrepid crawl.

To indicate grief we held our heads bent slightly down, which meant that we could see nothing in front of us above the level of our predecessor’s knees. It was not long before this unchanging spectacle of Pikemen’s moving calves, in plum stockings with orange rosettes, began to affect me: my heart started to pump; I felt like one of those people who find rebirth nowadays on the Mediterranean sea-bed, glimpsing fleeting archaisms through watery goggles. Behind, I heard the tramp of the Coffiners and the wheet-wheet of the badger’s concealed pneumatic tyres.

I knew it was going to be hard sledding when, at intervals, my low vision caught a stretcher being carried briskly to the rear by St John’s Ambulance men, and lying on it some utterly collapsed processional figure, his velvet doublet open at the neck, his unbooted toes sticking plaintively into the higher air. Moreover, the farther we tramped, the more vulgarly excited the crowd became. When the head of the cortège was passing them they were, I am sure, reverent and silent; but after a mile or two of it had pageanted by they were spoilt and out of hand, interested only in
what
was
coming
next.
The sight of the badger on his silken tow-ropes was irresistible by a crowd of animal-lovers; long before we actually reached a particular point we would hear high screams of delight: ‘Look, Archie, at the pretty dog!’ ‘Oh, isn’t he sweet!’ ‘He’d be alive if only his tongue hung out.’ Much as I detested these excited remarks, I hated more the comments that invariably followed, made by elderly men of the kind who like to show off their knowledge. ‘That’s no fox, you silly, that’s an otter. What they had on Granny’s farm;’ ‘It don’t look like an otter to me. More the colour of a beaver.’ And once, of course, the loud, dry voice of the man who
really
knows, saying in lordly tones: ‘Madam, that is neither a Yorkshire terrier nor a mink. It is what is known as a
cami-leopard.’