Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Get up behind me,’ she said from the saddle. She could see the colonel’s car crossing the bridge.

  ‘What are you—’

  ‘Do as I say.’

  He managed it somehow. Apparently unaffected by the double load, Boris made good time down to the river and stoutly set about carrying them across the ten-yard stream. The water, so cold it burned, reached her knees. That was the end of her remaining sandwiches. Edward’s arms were fast round her middle. She heard the approaching sound of the car. Then they were across and Edward swung himself clear and scrambled up the short slope to the edge of the road, putting his hand inside his jacket as he moved. He turned and faced the oncoming car and what happened next seemed to happen all at once. Lucy heard a loud noise between a pop and a sort of sharp crash and again, although she had never heard a revolver fired before, she recognized it. The car swerved away from her, then towards her, narrowly missing her before it ran on to the verge on the river side and stopped there as suddenly as if it had run into a brick wall.

  Boris, who had endured the events of the last minute with the calm of a police horse, blew down his nostrils. Edward turned to Lucy and took her hands more tightly than before. His look just then reminded her of the Edward of years before, when he had been a noted cricketer with, she remembered hearing, an aggressive batting style. For no reason she was aware of, tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘I’m not thinking of him,’ she said, not knowing whether she meant Green or Colonel Procope or the two together.

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Edward.

  Near them, Boris contentedly stamped and snorted.

  III

  ‘One bit of news,’ said Edward. ‘The bullet missed not only him but his car. Some shooting, what? I never could learn even how to hold one of those things.’

  ‘Just as well. But what happened?’

  ‘Well, let’s say he spun the wheel round with some idea of spoiling my aim, saw he’d swung too far, went the other way, also too far, and drove straight into a hunk of stone he probably never even saw, fast enough to cause him to bash his head in on the inside of his car. Not a man to react coolly to sudden difficulty or danger, the late colonel. As earlier actions of his had suggested.’

  Lucy looked out of the pub window towards the green hedgerow, more brightly sunlit now than when she had last seen it. ‘I suppose we’ll never know what Green had on him that made him worth the colonel’s while to dispose of.’

  ‘In the colonel’s own far from infallible estimation. What a silly fellow, as well as a thundering nasty one. Our friends in the, er, our competitors were well advised not to trust him with anything of great importance. No, I think you and I probably wouldn’t say thank you for being told the secret of Colonel Procope. What a damn silly name. Can I tempt you to another of those?’

  ‘Thank you, Edward, in a moment.’ She went on in bit-by-bit style, ‘You know . . . when I telephoned you that evening, and got you to come out and meet me, I realize now it was all fantasy, really. I just wanted to have a lovely storybook adventure, with you in it. Schoolgirl stuff.’

  Edward said quickly, before he could think better of doing so, ‘I wondered whether it might be something like that, but it didn’t bother me at all. I wanted to see you. That was enough.’

  ‘Oh. But you brought your pistol with you.’

  ‘So I did.’ He laughed. ‘Just company training. Motto, better safe than sorry. Well, your adventure duly turned up, didn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly did. That was just as well too.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have managed any of it but for Boris. How is the old boy?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you.’ She spoke hurriedly and without warmth.

  ‘What’s wrong? Come on, Lucy, is there something the matter with him?’

  ‘No, he’s as fit as a fiddle. It’s just, I’ve decided to put him up for sale next week.’

  ‘What?’ Edward was genuinely amazed. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘I think I’m getting a bit old to go on having a horse in that adolescent way.’

  He nodded slowly. Something her father had said on that point narrowly failed to reach his consciousness. ‘Well, I suppose you know best. Are you ready for that drink now?’

  ‘Did anything more ever come out about that forgery?’ asked Roger Ashby.

  Edward looked up from his armchair and glass of sherry. ‘Forgery?’

  ‘Those verses from Gray’s Elegy, wasn’t it? Which you seemed convinced were the work of some forger.’

  ‘Ah. My conviction proved to be well founded. At least it was confirmed by an announcement to that effect in the paper.’

  ‘Really. I must have missed that. Who was the forger, were we told?’

  ‘No. Probably someone quite obscure or even unknown. A mere amateur.’ After some hesitation, Edward went on, ‘Oddly enough, just the other day I happened to run across the fellow who brought the verses to light. Bumped into him at a social gathering. He struck me as rather uncommunicative. My impression was he realized he’d been taken for a ride.’

  Ashby did not ask for a clarification of the last phrase. ‘I’d give something to know how he got a load of tosh into the paper. Friends in high places?’

  ‘Perhaps a kindred spirit. A colleague of mine is looking into it. Now I must leave you for a while. I have to see a man about a horse.’

  ‘A horse? That doesn’t sound like your kind of thing at all, Edward.’

  ‘Oh, not to lay a bet, I assure you. I’m buying the animal. With a view to giving it back to the vendor as a sort of present.’

  ‘Somebody’s birthday?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it an engagement present.’

  A TWITCH ON THE THREAD

  I

  ‘It must be wonderful, never to need help. I simply can’t imagine what it’s like.’

  ‘I have quite a job myself.’ Daniel Davidson tried to match his wife’s bantering tone. ‘You of all people surely realize I need help constantly, every other waking moment. Every other sleeping moment as well, I expect I’d find if I could be around to check.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know what I mean – outside help.’

  ‘My kind of help comes from outside too, but yes, darling, of course I know what you mean. How are you feeling this morning?’

  This was a regular breakfast-table question that usually got a short non-committal answer. Today it drew another question. ‘How do you think I’m looking?’

  Daniel surveyed his wife. He saw a pretty, fresh-complexioned woman in her early thirties with thick brown hair, quick eyes and a mouth that had an upward turn. At the moment she seemed to be forcing it to droop at the corners, but without much overall effect. ‘You look fine to me,’ he said, ‘but then . . .’

  ‘But then I always do. My jolly little face, as you once lyrically called it. All bubbling over with the joy of spring. Have you never thought, Daniel, even for a moment, that I might be putting it on, really honestly never? It doesn’t matter if you have.’

  ‘Only to start with. Very soon not at all.’ He had no need to ask what it was that she might or might not have been putting on. ‘But you still haven’t told me how you’re feeling.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely terrible, thanks,’ said Ruth Davidson comfortably. ‘As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’ve given up trying to get the voice right. No point in sounding a perfect misery as well as being one. But it’s more I wasn’t cut out for being one. As if it was happening to the wrong person. I’m sorry, my love.’

  ‘New stuff no good, then?’

  ‘It’s a bit early to tell, of course. But I’ll stick my neck out and say, well, the clouds might be lifting just a bit. You know there’s nothing I’d rather tell you than something more definitely cheerful, but we’ve been through that and come back again too often.’ Ruth took their used tea-mugs across the little basement kitchen to the sink and poured water over them. With her back turned, she said to Daniel, ‘The same as there’s nothing I’d
rather be than just an ordinary woman with a husband she likes a lot and also fancies. I hope you don’t need any convincing of that.’

  ‘None whatever, darling,’ said Daniel carefully. The care was needed to prevent the least hint of acknowledgement that he had heard very nearly all of this before, and not just in its general drift but down to its finer detail. ‘When are you seeing Eric?’ He had asked his wife that before, too, with a succession of other names at the end of it.

  ‘We thought today would be about right. It is two weeks since he started me on these new things, but of course I can always hang on till perhaps I know more definitely how I feel.’ Ruth checked herself before she could betray how small a hope she had of any profit in hanging on.

  ‘You’ve made an appointment, have you?’

  ‘Two o’clock. I don’t mind cancelling it if you reckon I should.’

  Daniel stated firmly that he was sure it would be the right thing to keep the appointment, partly to help Ruth out of taking a sort of decision, but partly because he had taken to Dr Eric Margolis on sight and was starting to believe he might actually do something for her, so presumably the more she saw of him the better. Eric had shown himself to be different from his various predecessors by a businesslike approach that offered no parade of that quality. He claimed merely to have had a good deal of experience and some successes in the treatment of depressive illnesses like the one Ruth appeared to be suffering from. That had sounded good or possibly good to Daniel and still did.

  Although it had been nearly six years before, he still remembered often enough and clearly enough the afternoon his wife had come to him in his workroom and, with profuse apologies for interrupting, had confessed that she felt wretched most of the time and often tense and nervous, all without any reason she was aware of. In his experience she seldom wept, but she had wept a good deal while she told him she had hoped never to have to burden him with this and he tried not to give any sign that he had known something like it all along. For once, for a few minutes, he had seen and heard her without – what? Without the face and voice she showed to the world, or rather with a different face and voice, not the real Ruth but another Ruth he dreaded to encounter but had never seen again. Perhaps Eric Margolis had found out how to do so and how to lay to rest that pitiful, driven creature. Meanwhile, he, Daniel, would go on as before, acting as closely and continuously as he could on his wife’s appeal not to raise the matter himself in any form.

  Reflections of this sort filled the part of his morning that was not taken up with rounding off and revising his article on the ethics of punishment. At noon he gathered his papers and went to take his leave of Ruth. He knew she would tell him if she wanted his company for the Margolis trip and as usual she had evidently decided to manage on her own, so he said only that he would take his piece in to the office and very likely go round to the Sussex for a sandwich with one or two of the lads.

  Wearing a red tie to go with his red-and-white check shirt, Daniel smoothed back his long fair hair and left the house, a large healthy-looking man with bright blue eyes that sometimes had a distracted look, hardly believable as the comprehensive-school science-studies teacher he had been before his marriage. The house he left was part of a mid-Victorian terrace that ran dead straight for two hundred yards before reaching the larger street with its coffee shops, little Italian and Greek restaurants, newsagents and video libraries. On the corner opposite the dignified pub stood the hardly less imposing tile-fronted Underground station he was making for.

  He had nearly reached it when he caught sight of a middle-aged man standing outside it studying a piece of paper that perhaps bore directions. This and the style of his belted raincoat suggested a foreign visitor of some sort, and Daniel knew he had never seen him before, so it came as a considerable surprise when the man glanced up at his approach and evidently recognized him.

  ‘Hello there, Leo,’ said the stranger in an American accent. His expression combined pleasure, astonishment and some less agreeable feeling. ‘You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?’

  ‘What? My name is Daniel Davidson. I’m sorry, you must have mistaken me for somebody else.’

  ‘You’re telling me you’re not Leo Marzoni? But . . . Talk some more. Please.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m afraid I don’t know you.’

  ‘But it’s Leo’s voice except for the British accent.’ By now the man in the raincoat was plainly agitated. ‘If you’re . . . Mr David-son, you must have a double. Maybe a twin brother?’

  ‘I have no brother. And no double that I know of. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’

  ‘Sir, would you be good enough to tell me your profession? Your job?’

  ‘Certainly. I’m a clergyman.’

  ‘A clergyman? You mean a priest?’

  ‘A priest of the Church of England, yes.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said the American very quickly. ‘Pardon me,’ and he hurried away round the corner of the station and was seen no more.

  This response to notice of his calling disconcerted Daniel for longer than having been mistaken for Leo something. There were doubtless a number of humdrum possible explanations for that mistake, or apparent mistake, such as researching the British character or winning a bet. Nothing of the sort would account for the unfeigned alarm the man had shown at the end. But Daniel soon forgot the question in the course of travelling from western parts of the capital to somewhere nearer the middle. His reasons for going in by tube included a clear financial one and a confused but strong one to do with what he felt his life should be or include, but on this trip his powerlessness to help his wife was enough to think about.

  What with one thing and another, he was more than usually conscious today of being a bloody parson, as in unregenerate or inattentive moments he was still apt to think of himself. At the newspaper building, the features editor greeted him with his usual staunch cordiality, demonstrating to whom it might concern that he, Greg Macdonald, was not the sort to think any the less of a chap merely because he had seen fit to become a rev. Or so Daniel sometimes fancied. The other, smaller man in Macdonald’s office had been about to depart, but changed his mind after grasping who and what Daniel must be. While Macdonald read through the article on punishment, this smaller man kept glancing at Daniel in a manner he perhaps believed to be unnoticed. His general air suggested someone thrown by chance into the proximity of an astronaut or serial killer. Daniel had grown used to that kind of reaction, though it seldom took such visible form.

  Macdonald finished his reading and nodded weightily for a time. Then he said, still weightily, ‘Very good, Dan. Well up to your usual high standard. Thank you.’ He went on more buoyantly, ‘Just a couple of small points. Mosaic law. They’ll think that’s something to do with mosaics. Can we call it the law propounded or whatever by Moses?’

  ‘Will they know who Moses was?’

  ‘They’d better. Enough of them will. This is a serious newspaper. Right, if you’ve no objection. Oh yes. Penology.’

  ‘They’ll think that’s something to do with pricks,’ said the small man, laughing aloud and looking Daniel in the eye.

  ‘Oh Christ, you’re still here, are you?’ Macdonald twisted round elaborately in his chair. ‘Didn’t you hear me say the Sun ran it one day last week? Well, I did and it did. And there is the telephone if you think of anything more.’

  ‘Nice talking to you,’ said Daniel as the small man finally went.

  ‘Number three on the showbiz desk,’ said Macdonald. ‘Sorry about that. I hate that clever baiting stuff.’

  ‘It’s a form of respect really.’

  ‘I suppose you get a lot of it.’

  ‘Not as much as I’d like, or ought to like.’

  ‘You mean it’s better than indifference.’

  ‘I suppose that’s what I mean,’ said Daniel. ‘But there are grades of indifference too, you know. I prefer it when it’s founded on a fact or two. Now I’m pretty well indiff
erent to the Pope, let’s say, but I’m clear about who he is.’

  ‘I don’t know a hell of a lot of fellows like you, Dan, but you’re the only one I do know that doesn’t mind talking about religion. And yet, it’s funny, you look to me more like a cricketer or a racing-driver than . . .’

  ‘Than a bloody parson. I know you mean that kindly. Will the study of methods of punishment do you instead of penology?’

  When they got to the Sussex, they found already there the elderly urchin who was the assistant editor and the distinguished-looking scholarly type who was the astrologer, the latter said to be the chief agent of the paper’s healthy and still rising sales. Their greeting to Daniel was heartier than Macdonald’s had been but also more uneasy, as if he had just come off none too well after a charge of kerb-crawling. But they were tremendously unselfconscious about asking for whisky in his presence, and did not even glance at his ginger beer when it came, let alone at each other. Daniel sympathized with their embarrassment, which he saw as no reflection on them, and respected their efforts to hide it. Very soon it would all have worn off, and he had almost stopped noticing it in them at any stage, and about time too.

  He and Macdonald carried their sandwiches over to a small table by the wall. After a couple of minutes Macdonald said,

  ‘You read the latest piece from that chap the Bishop of Kesteven, sounding off again?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Do you want me to write something about it or him? I wouldn’t be the only one.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to us. I thought it might come in nicely for your next. The importance of individual responsibility. Made to measure for you, Dan.’