Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Oh, I touched it all right. Not to say bashed it. For years. Then I gave it up altogether.’

‘Would you have called yourself a drunk in those days?’

‘Yes. At least I agree that’s what I was then. I should imagine plenty of people called me it at the time.’

Leo nodded his head, looked at Daniel for a moment and dropped his gaze. ‘I don’t quite know how to say this, but back then, did you believe in God?’

‘No.’

‘And… did your belief, was your coming to believe connected with your ceasing to be a drunk?’

‘Yes,’ said Daniel, looking back at Leo. ‘It was all part of the same thing.’

‘Daniel!’ called Ruth’s voice from the floor above. ‘Darling, could you come up here a minute?’

Ruth was standing in the bedroom in an unfamiliar attitude, elbows crooked and right hand clasping left. She was smiling, with a look of settled anticipation, as if she had been watching him opening a parcel that contained a birthday present she knew he really wanted. She wore a freshly laundered white dress with a pattern of small blue flowers, one he had always liked her in but had not known her to wear for a long time.

‘I was going to get you to guess,’ she said, ‘but then I thought that would be a bit silly, so I’ll just tell you. You remember a couple of weeks ago I was boring you about some new stuff Eric had put me on, and I said it was early days yet but I thought there might be a slight improvement? — actually it was more than slight, but I was touching wood, and I’ve hung on all this time to try and be on the safe side, but anyway, still touching wood, I’m much better . Perhaps I’m still not quite what I was as a carefree schoolgirl, but I’m much better . I can see the point of things again. I thought I’d tell you before we—’

Daniel started kissing his wife. A few moments later she managed to say, ‘Darling — Leo’s downstairs. We can’t—’

‘So he’s downstairs, as he’d probably say.’

‘But… he’s a parson.’

‘So am I.’

‘But an American parson…’

In the end it was not so many minutes before Ruth was again ready to receive their guest. Leo put on a wonderful imitation of a man who understood completely the British custom whereby married couples always held a thorough private discussion of the weather before starting the evening. Nearly all the rest of that evening passed quickly and not over-memorably in the kind of semi-informative chatter to be expected of any new acquaintances with time to spare.

But not quite all of it. After Ruth had gone to bed, Leo gave some details of his acceptance of the Christian faith and of how this was connected with his renunciation of strong drink, and Daniel responded with some details of his own.

III

‘If you want to know what it’s called, you can read it off the label on the bottle,’ said Eric Margolis. ‘Remembering it afterwards, of course. Why they give these things such jawbreaking names beats me, unless for moral effect on the patient. If I put you on something called B-23 you may not be gripped enough, but if I say it’s called chromopolyamineoxidase you’re more likely to feel you’re being properly looked after. And why not? But to answer your question: yes, this stuff is indeed reasonably new, in this country at least. They’ve had good results with it in the States and especially Australia, according to a man I know in Sydney who actually understands these matters. It’s a narrow-spectrum deal; there are quite a few people it doesn’t help at all, but those it does help it helps a lot. Ruth sounds as though she’s one of the lucky ones.’

Eric’s consulting room looked less like the traditional sort of consulting room than the drawing room of a small but posh hotel, with nothing overtly medical to be seen, not even a note-pad. Eric himself, a lanky person whose small mostly bald head was eked out with a dense beard, occupied an easy chair near a low table on which lay two or three novels in their jackets. Opposite him a similar chair held Daniel, sitting where he had sat on a couple of previous visits and assorted lunatics and neurotics on many times more. He said now, ‘How long will she have to go on taking this stuff?’

‘Some time. It’s no use putting even an approximate date on it.’

‘But there will be a date eventually, will there? Or will she be on it for the rest of her life?’

‘That’s most unlikely,’ said Eric in his gentle voice, rubbing his fingertips together in the way he had, ‘but at this stage I’m not ruling out anything.’

‘But isn’t there a danger she’ll get addicted?’

‘Addiction to a substance shows when somebody stops using that substance. Patients have come off this substance after a few weeks or a few years without serious trouble, as I told you. Some of them have felt funny or rotten for a while, which one can’t discount, but nothing on the scale of a real drug hangover, like coming off, well, some popular tranquillizers and antidepressives, which some have said is worse than what put them on it in the first place. Ruth stays on till it’s all right for her to come off.’

‘I see. How do we know when we’ve reached that stage?’

‘We get some idea when we try a controlled reduction of the dose.’

‘M’m. If you don’t mind my saying so, Eric, it all sounds rather hit-or-miss to me.’

‘That’s how it is. More miss than hit, too, though fortunately things are getting better every year. About point-one of one per cent a year. The gloomy view of the situation is that we’re no nearer understanding how these materials work than we were twenty years ago, so we’ve no way of telling which one will help which patient, and the consequence of that is we chop and change and keep our eyes and ears open for anything new that might be good.’

‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Daniel. ‘Would there be a cheerful view?’

‘No. But there is a slightly less gloomy one this time round. Let’s say we have scored a hit with Ruth. That means there’s something like an even chance she can be kept as she now is while in the meantime she gets better. A mental illness, if a prolonged bout of depression can be called that at all, is only like a physical illness in a couple of ways, but one of them is that its victims sometimes make a full recovery. Thank God.’

‘What sort of long-term chance do you give Ruth at this stage?’

‘More than evens, Daniel. Substantially more. With her intelligence and good temperament she’s beginning to shape up as one of my successes. The last, what, area to count your chickens in is the mind, but… I won’t say any more. Just, there’s a good deal of hope where before there was only average hope, average hope being better than no hope at all but not much. Well, unless you’ve got anything more…’

Eric stood up. Daniel did the same, but said, ‘Actually there is one other item, but could we talk about it somewhere else? What about that pub down on the corner?’

‘Not there if you don’t mind. They know me there because I take the occasional arachnophobe or homicidal maniac there. We’ll try another place.’

On their way to it, Daniel asked, ‘Don’t you ever take notes of what a patient says?’

‘No, I take a secret tape which I turn on and off with a secret switch. Better all round.’

‘Did you turn it on for me?’

‘I should say not. Tape costs money, you know. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right, only my nose does feel a little bit out of joint.’

Eric’s other place was another pub, an extensive pub where, at this early hour, there was room to sit apart. By way of a token of decorum, a concealed apparatus quietly played one of the more understandably neglected of Handel’s operas. Daniel brought Eric the gin and tonic he had asked for.