Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

He gave a wide grin with his eyes fixed on hers, another new expression, and squeezed her hands for a moment. ‘Good. Now where’s that horse of yours?’

‘I suppose you mean Boris. He’s on the green outside here, or he was when I last looked.’

‘Yes, I thought I saw him,’ he said without much conviction, half got up, remembered his whisky and drained it. ‘Right. Order of march. You lead on Boris. I follow in my trusty shooting-brake, which I should like to pull up and put somewhere out of the way a couple of hundred yards short of the objective. Is that possible?’

‘We’ll pass a bridge over the river on our right. After that I’ll dismount at a point where you should be able to drive off the road.’

He nodded and they left without further ado. Outside they parted in silence, Edward to his car, Lucy to Boris, who showed no resentment at having had to put up with a pretty dull hour, though he was obviously dying to be off somewhere. Before she put her foot in the stirrup she said to him,

‘Now this is probably going to be nothing at all, but on the other hand you may find yourself having to do something pretty serious and grown-up, and I’ll be relying on you. Are you ready for that?’

He tossed his head in a twisty, sporty way that showed he was ready for anything.

‘Okay. Walk march.’

Behind her, she heard Edward start his engine but did not look back. Down the slight hill they went, left into the lane, up to the bridge. The light was still strong, but anyone would have known that evening was not far off. Colonel Procope’s cottage came into sight. Soon afterwards, Lucy dismounted as arranged and led Boris to a point in somebody’s field where he would not be disturbed and could not be seen from the road. Here she tied him to a fencing post by a rope long enough to let him graze without getting tangled, gave him some bread she had been saving and stroked his forehead and down to his nose. She told him to stay quiet and not to worry, because she would be back for him. Her heart was beating fast again, this time from fear, not of the colonel or whatever he might do but of his doing nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, of his turning out to be up to nothing worth all this fuss.

Edward’s demeanour, when she joined him in the lane, quite failed to reassure her. His air of serious concentration, his vigilant peering ahead and around, showed her again that he was doing no more than humouring her and was perhaps already rehearsing his indulgent rebuke of her overheated imagination, fondness for sensational fiction and more. So what actually happened when they got to the cottage came as a surprise as well as a shock to them both.

Before Lucy had had time to do more than wonder what Edward had in mind, someone indoors gave a loud scream. It was a different sort of sound from anything she had heard as part of any film or imagined from reading any book; it might have come from a man or a woman or even an animal, and it set up a violent tingling at the back of Lucy’s neck, hot or cold, she could not tell which. There were other noises too that might have been bodies striking against furniture. Somewhere at the back a door opened. Edward caught her arm and led her a few yards in that direction before dropping into a crouch behind an evergreen bush and pulling her down beside him. They heard a shout or two, not nearly as loud as the scream, and then a man unknown to them came out through the doorway in an irregular walk, very much like somebody trying to make his way along the deck of a ship in rough weather. He had not gone far when he collapsed on the ground near a water butt, though his arms and legs still moved.

So far, things had seemed to happen slowly, but now they greatly speeded up. Another man, one with blood on his forehead, one recognizable as Colonel Procope, came running out of the cottage and flung himself on top of the man on the ground. It was hard to follow details, but soon a voice said or called something and the first man no longer moved. The colonel got to his feet and stood for a moment, swaying slightly and panting and looking down at the other, who was dead; Lucy had never seen death before, but she found she knew it when she saw it. Then the colonel took the corpse’s wrists in a businesslike way and started to drag it face upwards towards the shed.

‘That’s Green,’ Edward muttered to Lucy and at once sprang up and ran towards the two figures. She followed. Procope turned and saw Edward and gave him a blow that sent him down into an all-fours position. Lucy went for the colonel, who hit her on the side of the jaw with his fist. She too went down, afraid she might be sick, able to see but not very well, as if through a flyscreen. By the time she was fully herself again, Colonel Procope had shut the door of his expensive car and was driving off, scattering gravel from under his tyres as he turned into the lane. Edward followed, but some distance behind, and when Lucy reached him he had already given up the chase.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘He can’t get far, but he might—’

‘You never know. Come on,’ she said, running past him.

He came up with her. ‘I’ll never catch him in my car.’

‘I’ve got another idea’ — one she thought was hopeless but was going to try.

‘It’s no good.’

‘Just run.’

Lucy soon forged ahead. She had won both the 100 yards and the 220 in her last year at school, but she had run no faster then than now, despite her riding clothes. Her speed may even have increased when she saw ahead of her that, in his haste, Colonel Procope had overshot the bridge and was now backing and trying to turn his car. At one point he must have stalled, for she heard the high rattle of the starter. Then she had run far enough, and at her best speed hurried to Boris, unhitched him and got him back to the lane in time to meet a flushed and gasping Edward.

‘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.’