Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  This seemed to Edward one to fend off. ‘That’s more difficult,’ he said. ‘Not really one for me at all. I don’t know enough about Gray’s lesser contemporaries to be sure.’

  ‘You’re too modest, Dr Saxton. You must have some feeling one way or the other.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself to any such feeling without looking at the stuff again.’

  ‘That’s easily arranged.’ Procope brought out a wallet from which he carefully took a neat newspaper cutting. ‘It just so happens, as they say.’

  Edward tried to feign a pleased interest as he looked again at what Roger Ashby had shown him earlier that week. He felt himself blushing to a degree that might have rivalled Lucy, and did his best to put on a fit of coughing. It was extraordinarily hard to read the printed words as opposed to looking in their general direction.

  ‘I’m sorry, Toby,’ said Procope, ‘we’ll be finished in a minute.’

  ‘Take your time, I’m quite comfortable as I am.’

  ‘You saw the piece, did you? What do you think?’

  ‘I think the port is with you,’ said Toby.

  Possibly because he was seeing the stanzas in changed circumstances, Edward all at once found in them something he had not noticed before, something that brought on in him a more intense agony of dissimulation. He decided he had to speak and might as well speak the truth.

  ‘In my opinion these lines are not the work of Thomas Gray,’ he said.

  ‘Ah! Thank you! Thank you, Dr Saxton, for delivering the kind of verdict that I slightly hoped you would see your way to.’

  Instead of frankly goggling at the colonel, Edward tried to look no more than politely interested and expectant.

  ‘As I told you just now, I’m a total amateur in literary matters, interested as I may be in one or two of them, but even so, or perhaps for that very reason, I find it pleasant when a professional confirms my subjective judgement.’

  This time Edward managed to say, ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘I take it you’ve been approached by whoever’s concerned and asked for your expert opinion? No? Well, they’ll come to you, never fear. When they do, I hope you’ll denounce this impudent fabrication. As before, that’s only a, what did I say, a slight hope of mine, a modest one. Because, although the matter has aroused my curiosity, it matters to me personally not at all whether those lines are genuine or spurious. Not one scrap. I haven’t even taken a bet. What do you say to that, Toby?’

  ‘I say we should consider joining the ladies.’

  When the colonel had departed and Lucy slipped away to bed, Edward forgathered with Toby and Kate for a nightcap in a corner of the drawing room. Outside the house the stillness seemed absolute.

  ‘Interesting sort of chap, Colonel Procope,’ said Edward experimentally.

  The experiment was not a success. Kate said she thought the colonel was rather pathetic, Toby said more apologetically that neighbours had become thin on the ground, and the topic lapsed before Edward could get out his prepared quip about the fellow reminding him of some dishonest smallholder. A moment later Kate asked Edward how he thought Lucy was looking, at which point Toby shifted in his chair in a way suggesting that there had been enough recent discussion of his daughter to last him for a bit.

  This time Edward spoke guardedly. ‘She looks fine to me,’ he said, and was not surprised to hear from Kate that mere outward looks were a trifle compared with inner wellbeing or the lack of it, and that it was here that Lucy gave grounds for concern, having just broken suddenly with an altogether suitable near-fiancé.

  ‘About nothing at all,’ said Kate. ‘All of a sudden he became a frightful bore.’

  ‘For my money he’d been that all along,’ said Toby. ‘Full of, well, full of what there was of himself. Damn it, the girl must be allowed to make a mistake and change her mind now and then. She’s not twenty yet.’

  ‘It’s much more than that, as you know. She’s thoroughly discontented with her whole generation of young men and always has been. You’d have thought Cambridge would have opened her eyes, but from that point of view it’s been a total washout.’

  ‘Oh, Katie, give the poor little thing a chance. She needs time.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do,’ said Edward.

  ‘It’s sweet of you, dear Edward, but I get the impression that where that girl’s concerned you’re impossibly distant and grown-up. Oh, she’s very fond of you, of course, so she ought to be, but as a remote sort of uncle-figure, which after all is what you are. You do enough for her by encouraging her interest in literature.’

  And that ought to be enough for any uncle-figure, thought Edward a little later as he undressed in his single bedroom. He switched off his light and looked out over the soundless landscape. In a corner of his mind were an excitement and something to be looked forward to with a tiny thrill. The excitement was from Gray and Procope, the something was the prospect of conferring again with Lucy. But a thrill of any size that arose from that prospect could be no more than a function of habit and memory.

  ‘And I’m quite sure he meant it,’ Edward told Lucy the next morning, by way of winding up his account of the conversation with Colonel Procope.

  ‘But he can’t have,’ she said.

  ‘On one assumption, it would indeed be all one to the colonel whether those stanzas are genuine or not. It would not concern him either which they are shown or taken to be. Let’s see if you can find grounds for . . .’

  He stopped speaking because she seemed to have stopped listening. They had reached the gate of the small paddock, which they now entered. Lucy clinked the handle of the pail she was carrying, not loudly but it appeared loudly enough to attract the attention of a large horse standing by the far hedge. This animal at once came trotting over to them with what to Edward was excessive eagerness. Seen close to, it looked about the size of a full-grown elk, reddish-brown in general colour but with black mane and tail and large off-white teeth. These it showed prominently while it breathed noisily at them, butted Edward in the chest and without ceremony set about bolting the contents of the pail.

  ‘You remember Boris,’ said Lucy and, when Edward looked uncomprehending, added a trifle impatiently. ‘You know, after Boris Godunov.’

  ‘I thought it was Virginia, after Virginia Woolf.’

  ‘That was the little mare I had ages ago. She’s gone. It’s Boris now.’

  Indeed it was Boris now, in the extra sense that Lucy’s attention was all directed that way, with none to spare for Edward. Presently she threw a rope round the horse’s neck and in a flash was on its back. For a moment she sat there very still and straight and seeming taller than before; Edward almost caught his breath at her look of dignity and power. Then she was off, away, just a girl trotting and cantering her horse round her father’s paddock. He, Toby, had prophesied that the horse would be disposed of about the time she found herself a man.

  As soon as he profitably could, the man she was with at the moment said, ‘Now, Lucy, I want you to do a little experiment for me.’ While she shut the gate behind them he took out his copy of the stanzas, but did not at once hand it over. ‘Try to forget that this might or might not be part of Gray’s Elegy. See if you can manage to forget the fact that it’s in verse, which shouldn’t be all that exacting considering the lubberly way the paper has set it out. Now. You’ve no idea what this might be, you’ve just this moment come across it written on a pad. Right, here it is.’

  Lucy halted on the gravel drive to read. He thought it marvellous that she found no evident difficulty in doing so without artificial aid and in what was not much better than average daylight, living as he did in a world where everybody wore glasses, most of them all the time, like himself. In his eagerness he tried to prompt her by suggesting she should attend only to the meaning of what was in front of her, but she spoke at the same time, and with a shake of the head at his own ineptitude he told her to go on.

  ‘What it says . . . if somebody who went
wrong or went to the wrong place should retrace his steps, come back to his starting-point, he’d be perfectly . . .’

  ‘Secure. The best word out of however many dozen it is. Though not at all Gray’s kind of thing, a sort of pun, Latin securus, se plus cura, free from care, also modern secure, in a state of security, not at risk from hostile undercover moves or surveillance.’

  ‘In fact the message of the whole thing seems to be . . .’

  Edward was too excited to notice that he had again interrupted. ‘The message. That’s what it is. A message. Well done. It suddenly hit me last night. What is the characteristic of that newspaper and no other, almost no other anywhere? All right, there are several, but the one that interests us is that it goes all over the world.’

  ‘Far astray.’

  ‘If you wanted to send a message to somebody you couldn’t locate, perhaps you couldn’t even say with any certainty what country he was in, what better means could you think of? Almost, what other means at all? Exposed as a forgery or not, you really could afford to be indifferent. You might even leave drafts of it lying about.’

  ‘Provided your man saw it.’

  ‘Admittedly you’d have to take your chance on that, but you might be able to bet he’d see that paper every day. Of course he’d have to have some sort of interest in literature thrown in, but with a thing like the Elegy it wouldn’t have to be a specialized one. And if there’s silence at the other end you just have to think of something else. You’re no worse off.’

  They had reached the road before Lucy said, ‘All right, let’s have the rest of it, whatever it is.’

  ‘How do you know there’s more to come?’

  ‘By not being blind or deaf. Come on, Uncle – shoot.’

  ‘Very well, here goes. One. Colonel Orion Procope, MC. When I told you I’d never heard of anybody called that, I was speaking the truth. But I’d only to catch sight of him to be pretty certain I’d seen him before, and in some kind of sinister context. Nothing more specific than that till this morning when I woke up remembering who he was and where I’d seen him. I still couldn’t remember his original name, and I knew it wasn’t him in the flesh I’d seen, just a few photographs, which did nevertheless belong to a sinister context.

  ‘Two. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Do they mean anything to you, Lucy?’

  ‘Not much. Weren’t they Communist spies, years ago?’

  ‘Eleven years ago to be precise, in 1951. At any rate, that was when they were exposed and fled to Russia, where they still are.’

  ‘Oh yes, our security coppers made a frightful boob.’

  ‘Not really. It was the weekend and they couldn’t get hold of anyone to sign the warrants for the arrests. Respect for the law.’

  ‘Something pretty boobish about that.’

  ‘I agree it could never have happened in Russia.’

  ‘M’m. I accept the rebuke,’ said Lucy. ‘But how did you know about the warrants?’

  ‘It’s not a secret. But the answer to your question takes us to Three. Edward Saxton, D. Litt. Where’s this pub I’ve heard so much about?’

  ‘You can see it from here.’

  ‘So I can. Before we get there, let me just say that about that time I did a bit of work for MI5, to be known henceforth between you and me simply as the company, if you follow me. I’m not in your league as an unfolder of mysteries, but I won’t tell you the rest till I’ve a glass of beer in my hand.’

  It was cool, dark and quiet in the saloon bar. Edward and Lucy took their drinks over to a window that gave a view of an unfrequented stretch of road and a green hedgerow with woodland beyond it, all with their colours sharpened by the mild sun. No petrol fumes lingered, only country scents. Edward sipped beer appreciatively.

  ‘One can get tired of drinking wine day in and day out,’ he said. ‘Though not very soon, I suppose. Now, let me go on briefly. Years ago I helped the company a bit over the matter of defective patriotism among former Cambridge men – you may remember that both Burgess and Maclean had been undergraduates at that university. There were others never or not yet brought to book, half a dozen of them, among whom was the man now known as Colonel Procope, who escaped prosecution for lack of evidence. Nothing could have been proved either against his close friend, perhaps more than close friend, whom I knew as Green, but evidently Green was up to something our side didn’t know about, because he cleared off to Russia too, just three weeks after good old Guy and Donald. Green read English at Cambridge, which isn’t exactly incompatible with an interest in literature, though I agree—’

  ‘I take it Green is still in Russia. But if he gets the colonel’s message he’ll soon be on his way back.’

  Edward frowned and looked worried. ‘I wish we could do better, but I don’t think we can at the moment.’

  ‘So what’s our next step?’

  ‘I don’t honestly see we’ve got one. What we have is surmise, and nobody seems to be even contemplating anything illegal, I’m sorry to say. It would be interesting to have a tap put on Procope’s telephone, but also out of the question. All we can do is keep our eye on the paper.’

  ‘Would it help if we knew how he got them to print that stuff?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with the company. About that and other matters.’

  Lucy looked at Edward, who held her gaze. She said, ‘I’d never have taken you for a . . .’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘. . . tradesman as well as an expert on Gray.’

  ‘Tradesmen come in all sizes and shapes. What time is lunch?’

  As they were on their way out, the landlord nodded politely to Edward and said to Lucy, ‘How’s my old friend Boris?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you, Mr Littlejohn.’

  ‘Have you taken him on a proper excursion yet?’

  ‘I thought next week, perhaps.’

  ‘He’d enjoy it,’ said the landlord, who with his neat suit and generally scrubbed appearance looked like the citified person he was not. Laying a polished horseshoe on the counter, he said, ‘Anyway, here’s a present for him.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll absolutely love that. I’ll nail it on his stable door.’

  II

  Revision, especially of the Metaphysicals, and bad weather combined to put off the day on which Lucy ceremonially nailed the horseshoe to Boris’s stable door. But when that day came it was so clear and bright and the forecast so promising that she planned a proper excursion for him and her on the morrow.

  She was up at six and, with her old tweed coat over her nightdress, fetched the horse to his stable facing the kitchen and put chaff and corn in the manger for him. A heavy dew sparkled on the grass, the sky was a slightly veiled but cloudless blue, and there was the kind of hush everywhere that she had noticed before at the start of a fine hot day. She got more or less ready before cooking herself a substantial breakfast of fried egg, bacon and tomatoes, no more than sensible before a day’s riding. By this time the paper had arrived and she glanced at it as she ate.

  Her eye was caught by a short item saying that the supposed additional stanzas of Gray’s Elegy, the discovery of which was recently reported, had been shown to be a modern forgery. The finder’s request for continued anonymity was being respected. This information revived Lucy’s almost-lapsed interest in the matter, and even brought her a mental picture of Colonel Orion Procope being completely indifferent to the news, but she dismissed it and him from her mind in the course of making sandwiches with fresh Cheddar, chopped onion and plenty of sweet pickle. This done, she prepared a thermos of tea, leaving enough tea over to take up to her parents’ bedroom with some arrowroot biscuits she privately considered dead boring.

  The grandfather clock in the hall struck eight; time for grooming and saddling up. Lucy’s saddle, a birthday gift, was of army pattern, which meant among other things that it had plenty of hooks on which to hang a haversack with her provisions, a nosebag with Boris’s stuff, her black fisherman’s sweater and a blanket of his
. She was ready, and of course he knew it at once and made for the outdoors. A minute later she was walking him down towards the road, quite a striking figure in her twill jodhpurs and man’s shirt, hair drawn back under a dark-green scarf, with the upright posture Edward had noticed.

  As the sunshine grew stronger, the two of them were making good time, mostly over grassland or greenwood floor, so good that Lucy began to think she would fulfil her hope of reaching the coast before turnabout time and showing Boris the sea, perhaps taking him for a gallop along the sands if the tide was right, for a paddle if not. She had been talking on and off to him since they started, and when she mentioned these possibilities he turned his ears back to listen, but on being asked how he felt about them he simply took no further interest.

  From earlier outings with Virginia, Lucy was confident that somewhere along their line of march she would find a good place for a rest, and sure enough not long after one o’clock they came to a shady spot with a patch of turf next to the road and a culvert over a stream, only a little one but enough to water Boris and wash the dust off his feet. Then, having loosened his girth, she put on his nosebag and he munched contentedly, swishing his tail against flies. She ate sandwiches, drank half her tea and read a chapter of her paperback copy of Dr Zhivago. Before they moved on she got into the saddle and let him crop grass for a few minutes.

  Lucy was expecting to come in sight of the sea quite soon when she realized she was heading more or less directly for the village near which Colonel Procope lived. A glance at the map she carried in her haversack showed her that by the shortest route she was about two hours’ easy riding-time from it. That route, however, involved a longish stretch of road and, although Boris never complained, she knew he preferred to avoid road travel where possible, so a few minutes later she turned aside on a more roundabout approach. Only then did it occur to her to wonder how long it was since it had first entered her head to seek out the colonel and what she hoped to achieve by doing so. She found no answer to either question, and soon put them aside in favour of taking in the look of sunlit greenery and wild flowers and the lulling pleasure of having a healthy, strong, good-natured horse under her. But she still moved along a curving path that led to Procope’s village.