Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

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.’

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.