Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

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 letter 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.’

‘Ruth did, my Ruth did.’

‘Yes, she would, I see she would. Maybe I should have told you then, before, but the reason my Ruth isn’t here is that she’s with another guy. Been with him just two years now. You don’t want to hear whose fault it was, even if I knew, it was like this other guy came along and sailed in and collected her. She liked me, but she liked him better. I didn’t enjoy the next year at all, but I got through it without falling by the wayside and I’m over it now.’

Nevertheless Daniel said, ‘I’m sorry, Leo.’

‘Sure you are. I wouldn’t have brought it up, but I felt you should know it. I didn’t want you wondering, and when I thought about it, well, you needed to hear about something where we aren’t the same, and right there is one sizeable thing. And don’t forget the guy came along and he collected her, I’ll swear she wasn’t on the lookout for him or anybody, she wasn’t driven out by her depression or anything else, so if you wanted to think my Ruth’s departure says something about the likelihood of your Ruth departing you’d have to believe in Santa Claus. Or telepathy. Okay, the name’s the same. Coincidence, my friend. Unless you have somebody called Janet in your life? No, I thought not. No more of this, then. I hope I didn’t waste your time, Daniel.’

Now Daniel embraced his twin without hesitation and held on. He wondered that he had ever found it more than unfamiliar to be looking at and talking to a man so like himself in appearance. Leo had indeed followed or read his thoughts with remarkable accuracy, perhaps less remarkable in one so like himself on the inside as well. Of course. At this point Daniel pulled himself up as he remembered that Leo had just been talking of an irreparable loss. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked without further thought.

‘Thank you, Daniel. If you mean a drink like coffee or lemonade, then not just now; if you mean like gin all the way through beer with any alcohol in it, then still no. But you have some of that kind of drink right here, do you?’

‘No, there’s nothing. I spoke without thinking. Neither Ruth nor I ever go near real drink.’

‘Oh,’ said Leo. He looked round the kitchen, seeming to notice the dresser with its rows of plates, the TV set and small low-built radio, the white-painted staircase leading up to the ground floor, the door to the dining-room, the open garden door past which came herbal scents and the distant cries of children. Louder and more sharply than before, he said, ‘Did you never touch alcohol? I mean you yourself?’