Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘As to temperament, well, what shall I say, not as vivacious as her appearance.’

  ‘Depressive?’

  ‘Well, Daniel, I think depressive just like that might be going a little far, you know? But in the right direction. Let’s say anxious, nervous, ah, apprehensive? Inclined to fear the worst, is that enough?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth, avoiding her husband’s eye.

  After a silence, Leo went on, ‘But I didn’t come all this way just to compare notes with you, Dan. It’s been wonderful and extraordinary finding you like this, but there’s more than that at stake. First, though, do you want us to go to Minnesota and have ourselves examined by scientists? I have to say they’d pay our expenses if we did.’

  ‘No, let’s keep this to ourselves.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. Now, you no doubt recall that when you told Irving Rothberg that by profession you were a minister of religion, he became agitated, because my—’

  ‘You’re a clergyman too.’

  ‘Correct, Daniel, and not only that, but a minister of the Episcopal Church, which is the name for the Anglican communion in the States, which makes me as close a replica of you as I could possibly be in that rather important department.’

  ‘Which must have struck your friend Rothberg as a coincidence so far-fetched as to be uncanny,’ said Ruth, looking at Daniel now.

  ‘So that was how you knew about the General Synod and the rest of it,’ he said.

  ‘Correct again. Now . . . brother . . . do you want to go on a little further, or do you want to stop? For now, that is. Maybe you’d like to stop.’

  Looking into the bright blue eyes that were so like his own as seen for dozens of years in mirrors, even looking into them quite briefly, made Daniel feel almost dizzy, if not terrified, then in more serious danger than he had ever thought of in his life before. But as soon as he could he said, trying to sound like a man filling in a form, ‘I’d like to go on a little further, such as, when were you ordained, Leo? Of course you know the exact date.’

  ‘Of course. It was March 22nd, 1985.’

  ‘I was 4th April in the same year.’

  ‘Not the same day, at least,’ said Leo. He put out his hand in an odd gesture, as if he wanted to give comfort or reassurance, hesitated and drew back.

  ‘Close enough. Nine, thirteen days. And one more thing, if you will. Was your ordination the result of a sudden decision or did you approach it gradually, through stages of belief and conviction and . . .’

  ‘It was sudden. Do you want me to tell you about it?’

  ‘No. No, not now. We’ve come a long way in a short time. I’d like to have a chance to adjust.’

  ‘I hoped you were going to say that. In fact it wouldn’t be overstating the case to say I knew you were going to say that.’

  ‘Oh, I knew it too,’ said Ruth. ‘That or something to the same effect. Easy enough to see it in his face, sorry, darling, your face, just before you spoke. Anybody could have seen it who happened to be watching you attentively.’

  ‘Which you were certainly doing,’ said Leo with a smile.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been watching you both attentively most of the time we’ve been down here. And comparing how you look. Now there was a pair of identical twins at my school, at least they said they were identical and they should have known, but they didn’t look identical much. They were dressed the same sometimes, but nobody ever had any trouble telling them apart. Well, one of them even wore glasses most of the time and the other didn’t seem to need them. And one was fatter than the other. Identical – no, what’s needed is a word meaning rather more alike than similar. That’s what you two are to look at, all you are. Dozens of differences, mostly small, shape of lower lip, left ear, really both ears, where the nose starts – dozens of them. You’d only look very much alike at a distance, which is how you first saw each other. There.’

  ‘I never realized you were as observant as that,’ said Daniel.

  ‘But what’s it all in aid of, you mean. Just, you don’t want the two of you to be too much alike, do you?’

  Leo nodded vigorously. ‘Right, Ruth, right.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘I want to be told we’re not.’

  ‘Here’s another way we’re not,’ said Leo. ‘I’d be – let’s say I wouldn’t give a damn if we were utterly alike in every way there is.’

  ‘That would make us completely unlike in the most important way of all.’

  ‘Like you said, old buddy, we need to have time to adjust. How are the two of you fixed for later? Can I take you out to dinner?’

  ‘Thank you, Leo, but speaking for myself I don’t think I’d feel comfortable. Too much risk of you and me being stared at. You come here.’

  Leo grinned. ‘I see I mustn’t forget that as well as being my twin brother you’re an Englishman.’

  ‘True enough. I was thinking we’d find it easier to talk with just the three of us.’

  ‘Well, it’s your town. Which I mean to go out and take a look at meanwhile. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in it.’

  They made their arrangements and Leo soon went off to the small hotel quite close by where he was staying, setting off on foot as a way of starting his look at London.

  ‘He’s got your walk,’ said Ruth. ‘Or you’ve got his.’ She seemed charged up by recent events, her curiosity and alertness whetted.

  ‘I suppose that’s only to be expected.’

  ‘Is that all you can say? Why don’t you care for the idea of Leo and you being so alike? Does it give you a sort of weird feeling, doppelgänger stuff, anything on those lines?’

  ‘Nothing like that at all. Plenty of things bother me, as you know, but I’m all right there.’

  ‘I noticed you held back when he went to hug you just now.’

  ‘Me being an Englishman again.’

  Ruth frowned and moved her head to and fro at this. A minute later she said, ‘Admittedly I haven’t had much experience of husbands of mine meeting twin brothers they didn’t know they had, but I’d have expected you to be full of questions and excitement and wonder, not the way you are now, as if you’d just had a packet of bad news.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ruth, I’d like to be like you about it, believe me, but bad news is exactly what I’m afraid I’ve had, or may be going to get.’

  ‘You mean to do with JC?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I – yes, yes.’

  ‘But you can’t tell me what or how.’

  ‘I don’t know myself, any more than I understand about him and me.’ A tear started to run down Daniel’s cheek and he wiped it away with his fingers. ‘Sorry. If I did I’d tell you about it straight away, you know that.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can tell me?’ she asked gravely.

  ‘Probably nothing you haven’t already seen for yourself, but anyway, one question I didn’t ask Leo, in fact I expect you noticed me dashing in to stop him answering it before I had time to ask it . . .’

  ‘. . . was if he was a godless drunk one minute and a very serious parson the next.’

  Daniel hesitated. Then he said, ‘All right, that’ll do for the moment. At least if any of it wasn’t or isn’t true then I needn’t worry about the rest. Now I suppose I’d better finish off my sermon for tomorrow. I’ll be in for lunch but late. I’ve got to go and see Miss Rawlings first.’

  ‘Is that the one with the killing eyes and the fantastic figure?’

  ‘No, it’s the one with the Edwardian false teeth and the face of a thousand wrinkles.’

  He was on his way to the kitchen stairs when Ruth said, ‘I wonder why he didn’t bring his wife with him. Why he left the other Ruth at home.’

  ‘Economy, I expect. If they’re anything like us they have to watch the pennies the whole time.’

  ‘Well, at any rate he’s not unlike you. I wonder if they’ve got any kids.’

  ‘We’ll ask him.’ Daniel retraced a couple of his steps. ‘Doesn’t it bother you, be
ing like the other Ruth in temperament as well as looks and even having the same name?’

  ‘Not a bit. You and he would almost certainly be drawn to the same kind of woman, and the name is nothing. Coincidence. Never make the mistake of underestimating the likelihood of coincidence.’

  Daniel finished typing his sermon and went over the script pointing it like the text of a psalm and underlining words to be stressed. When he was satisfied, he put on his dicky and dog-collar, picked up his communion case and went out to his car, an A-registered Cavalier parked at the kerb. His parishioners had bought it for him and met some of its bills. Ten minutes later he was pulling up outside an unprepossessing but not actually awful block of flats. Since it was in quite a good area, not on any football supporters’ track, for example, he left the car where it was, taking the communion case with him. Miss Rawlings had not so far asked for the service but he hoped she might one day, as some in her circumstances already had.

  Miss Rawlings lived on the first floor, across a tidy, well-swept hall and up a stairway that Daniel had sometimes thought would have been the better for a couple of graffiti or some other defilement as a distraction from the overall style of the fittings. There was, however, enough of an unwanted smell coming from her room to offset this deficiency, strange and no more than disagreeable rather than straightforwardly revolting. As he made his way in, Daniel recited to himself supposed facts about the swift overloading of the olfactory sense in man.

  Beside Miss Rawlings, sitting next to her on the couch of obsolete plastic, was a woman he knew quite well to be her widowed niece, but who looked at him with uncertainty and misgiving, in her fifties but at sea in the presence of a bloody parson.

  ‘I’ll be going then, Della,’ she said reluctantly, her eyes on him. ‘I thought I’d only just got here, but you seem to have company, don’t you? Is there anything you want? I said is there anything you want?’

  ‘Haven’t you got that list I gave you?’

  ‘What? Of course I have. I was just wondering if there was anything else. You know, anything else you wanted. You know.’

  There was evidently nothing else, nothing on the tip of anyone’s tongue at least. Looking successively at the other two as if of course it was no business of hers but she did hope they knew what they were doing, the niece left. Then, asked how she had been over the past week, Miss Rawlings began a narrative that worked up now and then to the level of mild complaint. Daniel had been ready for that. His unspoken agreement with the old lady was that she got a few things off her chest to start with and about the halfway mark it was his turn to talk about God, or at least to approach that subject. He listened now to what she was saying about the language of the girl at the paper-shop, superstitiously hoping that to do so might be repaid by her listening to him for as long.

  Eventually Miss Rawlings said, ‘My real trouble is I get these nasty times when I don’t seem to see the point of somebody like me keeping going at all. I suppose you’re going to say that’s wrong, Mr Davidson.’

  ‘A lot of people in your sort of situation do feel that from time to time.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it wrong or right, does it?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s unnecessary.’

  ‘I don’t remember ever thinking something because it was necessary. What was it – my sort of situation, you said? You don’t know what it’s like, how could you?’

  Daniel saw that Miss Rawlings’s eyes were bright over her fallen-in cheeks and the sharp nose that old age had made prominent. ‘No, I don’t,’ he answered her, ‘but now I come to think of it there are plenty of people not in your situation who can’t see any reason for carrying on. I used to be one of them myself. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘It’s not the same thing at all, a young man like you.’

  ‘Years don’t matter, we can desperately need help at any time of our lives, and mercifully help is always available to those who ask for it.’

  ‘I tell you, vicar, there’s nobody who’s going to help me. My niece and my grandnephew, and Ernie, oh he’s marvellous, that Ernie, but what can he do, what can any of them do, they’ve got their own lives to lead. I need a person with me every minute of the day and night, and how could I expect anybody to put themselves in that position, if they had the time they wouldn’t have the patience, how could they? No, I’m sorry, Mr Davidson, you’re very good, but I just can’t see any point in me going on.’

  ‘You’re forgetting God,’ said Daniel. ‘He’ll be with you as long as you want him, he’s got the time and the patience for everybody. You only have to ask him.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Miss Rawlings, by way of amused or weary reference, not invocation, ‘don’t talk to me about God. I tell you, he’s never done nothing for me.’

  ‘Have you asked him, have you prayed to him? It’s the same thing, you know. And he always answers, did you know that? I was in such despair once I was going to kill myself, and at the last minute and as a last resort I prayed to God although I didn’t believe in him then, but he answered just the same. I found I could . . .’

  Daniel let his voice trail off. He had thought or hoped that the importance to everybody of what he was saying was so great and obvious that it was bound to reach someone who at any rate was used to hearing God mentioned. But it seemed that the bright eyes had sunk back into their sockets and the liveliness of manner gone again. A moment ago, the one room had looked neat and even cheerful, the single bed made and spread with a light green counterpane, the sink and draining board clear, with the clean crockery on its rack, a pair of flourishing potted plants on the sill. Now, he saw it as static and lifeless, like a model cell in an enlightened gaol. Poor Miss Rawlings. Even if he had had the required energy and insensitivity, he would still have not dared to tell her any more of the story of his first prayer, not just that it had been answered because he had truly wanted help, but what he had suspected more and more strongly ever since that moment, that God had planted in him the impulse to pray. Faith was offered before it could be accepted. He brought out his pocket diary and turned over some of its pages while he briefly made petition that Miss Rawlings should receive the gift of faith.

  ‘Going, are you, doctor, I mean vicar?’

  ‘Not just yet. There’s still time for me to give you a hand with the forms for your new pension-book, that’s if you’d like me to.’

  ‘There’s just a couple of places I’m not sure about. My niece looked it over, but you know, Mr Davidson, she’s really a very ignorant woman, my niece. She’s good about clearing the place up, I’ll give her that . . .’

  From the moment when Leo arrived at the Davidsons’ that evening, Daniel felt certain that some disaster impended. Leo was perhaps conscious of a similar discomfort, not showing the buoyant disposition of that morning, when he had seemed to be at worst perfectly resigned to each successive shock of revelation. Daniel was at once drawn to him as one who must be uniquely sympathetic, and repelled by dread of one who constituted a threat to indispensable convictions. Was that normal, reasonable, to be expected in a man confronted with another who was limitlessly the same? Or was the whole concern no more than most singular and interesting? Nothing on paper or anywhere else gave guidance.

  Not quite understanding why he did so, Daniel had spent the afternoon getting everything squared away in good time. After seeing to it that the church was ready for early service in the morning, he came back home and made a couple of telephone calls to fix the time of a cremation and brought his diary up to date. Then, as he did every fortnight or so, he wrote to his bishop, a prelate with outmoded ideas about his special responsibilities to those he had ordained. By a self-established tradition, Daniel devoted his final paragraph to a report on how God had seemed to him over the last weeks and how he thought he might have seemed to God. With feelings of guilt that no inner reasoning would dispel, he confined himself here to what he more or less certainly knew, omitting formless and very likely superstitious presentiments. When the lett
er had been made ready for the post, he straightened his parishioners file and tidied his workroom. He left as they were the photographs along his mantelpiece except for one showing the woman at the orphanage who, as he supposed, had been like a mother to him. She had been dead for nearly twenty years and the likeness was imperfect, but it was good enough to recall her to him when, as now, he picked it up and studied it. Lastly he knelt and prayed to be forgiven for having done so little to help Miss Rawlings and himself to be helped to face – what? Whatever might be in store.

  While Leo and he were settling themselves in the kitchen as before, Daniel started to explain that Ruth would come down in a few minutes when she was ready, but Leo finished his sentence for him. Daniel shifted uneasily in his chair.

  ‘Ah, come on, Daniel, there’s nothing in that,’ Leo went on. ‘Only cause for worry if I couldn’t see that coming. You and I could set up a great telepathy act, though. Do these identical twins have identical minds? Or maybe they have only one mind between them. We’d clean up. Too bad God wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘You don’t believe in any of that paranormal stuff, do you?’

  ‘Of course not, what do you think I am? That’s one of the places God comes in very conveniently, isn’t it? One word from him and there’s no need to bother with that type of dreck for the rest of your life.’

  Leo had spoken lightly, in keeping with his words and with his generously cut light-blue suit, darker-blue shirt and rather flashy sea-green tie. He looked altogether unlike Daniel’s idea of a parson, even an American one. In fact he looked more like a successful insurance agent or travelling salesman than any member of the professional classes; Daniel recognized, or admitted to himself, that he must have something in his own general appearance that corresponded. Despite these things, however, Leo retained the air of uneasiness detectable as soon as he stepped in from the street. The smile accompanying his last remark seemed particularly forced. Before it had quite faded, he said,

  ‘There was just one thing I wanted to tell you out of your Ruth’s hearing, so here goes, why I didn’t bring my Ruth to England with me, I thought perhaps you wondered about that.’