The surprisingly smutty world of Alan Bennett

The marriage. Yes. Not quite what it seems. Truth carefully sanitised. Secrets on all sides. Suspicious parents. The bride perhaps a bit... you know. Odd blood there, possibly. Just saying. And then the money. And speculation about what they get up to in bed. And the frocks. And the service. And the honeymoon.

Plenty to speculate about, and like everyone else I spent the bank holiday weekend speculating about them, while trying not to.

Royal Wedding? No, no. Alan Bennett's new book, Smut. Maybe it's the vanguard of a new publishing initiative, the Truth In Book Titles Movement. We should hope not, otherwise there'll be a rash of books called Same Old and Fat Sedentary Bloke Pretends He's An Action Hero and Who Could Possibly Be Interested In This Stuff?

But Smut actually is. Odd, coming from the legendarily (and obviously misleadingly) prim Alan Bennett? A national treasure, of course; you have to say that when writing about Mr Bennett; it's in the rules. But Mr Bennett, despite (or perhaps because of) the kindly manner and the non-ironic tie, has the eye of an eagle, the ear of a lynx, and the verbal manner of an uncle murmuring affably into your ear, except when you try to climb down off his knee you find he's amputated your leg.

Here, as always, his meat is the anxious, careful, perpetually precarious Daily Mail reader, quietly barking behind closed doors.  Not that Mr Bennett sniggers at their carefully Pledged and Hoovered lunacy. He's far too polite. He just draws your attention and leaves it to you.

In the end, Smut is about pageantry. Not on anything like the Cecil B de Mille scale of last Friday's nuptial hoo-hah, but the core belief is the same: get the outward form right, and things will take care of themselves.
 
And if they don't, we can fall back on that great British reflex and, in Mr Bennett's own phrase, "keep it under".

Keeping it under, in Smut, is, first, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, the tale of a respectable widow who makes a little pin-money by acting as a patient, feigning symptoms for gauche medical students to practise diagnosis. She takes a couple in as lodgers. Young, sexually vigorous, and unable to pay the rent, they offer her instead a strange quid pro quo every bit as voyeuristic but rather more life-changing that last week's scenes in the Abbey and on the balcony.

The second story, The Shielding of Mrs Forbes, anatomises one of those prim women forever gathering the imaginary cardigan about her equally imaginary bust, whose secretly gay son Graham marries a secretly rich woman while her peaceable, henpecked husband distracts himself on the internet with a woman "in Samoa (but who actually lives in Clitheroe)".

The writing is perfect Bennett. Mr Forbes isn't allowed to say "tits". When he complains that Graham is, his wife declares: "Graham is different. Graham is young, attractive and drives a sports car. He has a life with the top down and language to match." Later, they are discussing the wedding ("I wouldn't put it past her to be Jewish").

"'If it has to be in church,' said Mr Forbes, 'I hope it will be in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer.'

"'What else should it be in accordance with?' said Mrs Forbes. 'The Highway Code?'"

The 19th century economist Walter Bagehot declared that "A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact." In an equally brilliant edition, the universal fact for Mr Bennett is not the easy satirical target of concealment and pretension, but the far subtler nature of our daily habitual performance.

We all wear masks and put on acts; we all have our equivalents of the trees in the nave, the ceremonial uniforms and the public kiss. But the masks as often hide idiosyncracy and resourcefulness as timidity and conformity.

It's a beguiling satire that somehow makes its objects better and more human than we thought; which may be why Mr Bennett is a national treasure, and may explain why one feels obliged to call him Mr Bennett. After a week of absurd ceremonial and entitlatures, it's a charming and, yes, very English corrective.

• Smut: Two Unseemly Stories by Alan Bennett, Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-84-668525-7 ·