The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [205]
Miles recognized the importance of his appointment even before he began work. On his first evening in the hostel his fellow sub-officials gathered round to question him.
“Euthanasia? I say, you’re in luck. They work you jolly hard, of course, but it’s the one department that’s expanding.”
“You’ll get promoted before you know your way about.”
“Great State! You must have pull. Only the very bright boys get posted to Euthanasia.”
“I’ve been in Contraception for five years. It’s a blind alley.”
“They say that in a year or two Euthanasia will have taken over Pensions.”
“You must be an Orphan.”
“Yes, I am.”
“That accounts for it. Orphans get all the plums. I had a Full Family Life, State help me.”
It was gratifying, of course, this respect and envy. It was well to have fine prospects; but for the time being Miles’s duties were humble enough.
He was junior sub-official in a staff of half a dozen. The Director was an elderly man called Dr. Beamish, a man whose character had been formed in the nervous ’30s, now much embittered, like many of his contemporaries, by the fulfilment of his early hopes. He had signed manifestos in his hot youth, had raised his fist in Barcelona and had painted abstractedly for Horizon; he had stood beside Spender at great concourses of Youth, and written “publicity” for the Last Viceroy. Now his reward had come to him. He held the most envied post in Satellite City and, sardonically, he was making the worst of it. Dr. Beamish rejoiced in every attenuation of official difficulties.
Satellite City was said to be the worst served Euthanasia Centre in the State. Dr. Beamish’s patients were kept waiting so long that often they died natural deaths before he found it convenient to poison them.
His small staff respected Dr. Beamish. They were all of the official class, for it was part of the grim little game which Dr. Beamish played with the higher authorities to economize extravagantly. His department, he maintained, could not, on its present allotment, afford workers. Even the furnace-man and the girl who despatched unwanted false teeth to the Dental Redistribution Centre were sub-officials.
Sub-officials were cheap and plentiful. The Universities turned them out in thousands every year. Indeed, ever since the Incitement to Industry Act of 1955, which exempted workers from taxation—that great and popular measure of reform which had consolidated the now permanent Coalition Government—there had been a nefarious one-way traffic of expensively State-educated officials “passing,” as it was called, into the ranks of the workers.
Miles’s duties required no special skill. Daily at ten the service opened its doors to welfare-weary citizens. Miles was the man who opened them, stemmed the too eager rush and admitted the first half-dozen; then he closed the doors on the waiting multitude until a Higher Official gave the signal for the admission of another batch.
Once inside they came briefly under his charge; he set them in order, saw that they did not press ahead of their turn, and adjusted the television set for their amusement. A Higher Official interviewed them, checked their papers and arranged for the confiscation of their property. Miles never passed the door through which they were finally one by one conducted. A faint whiff of cyanide sometimes gave a hint of the mysteries beyond. Meanwhile he swept the waiting room, emptied the wastepaper basket and brewed tea—a worker’s job, for which the refinements of Mountjoy proved a too rich apprenticeship.
In his hostel the same reproductions of Léger and Picasso as had haunted his childhood still stared down on him. At the cinema, to which he could afford, at the best, a weekly visit, the same films as he had seen free at Orphanage, Air Force station and prison, flickered and drawled before him. He was a child of Welfare, strictly schooled to a life of boredom, but he had known better than this. He had known the tranquil melancholy of the gardens at Mountjoy. He had known ecstasy when the Air Force Training School had whirled to the stars in a