Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Don’t let it get you down, Adrian,’ said Fotheringay. ‘It was all trick photography, what you saw. Bloody amazing what they can do these days, you know. Must have cost somebody a fair packet, mind. But anyway, no call for you to fret like you’re doing now.’

‘No, but when he thought it was for real,’ said Chatterton.

‘Absolutely,’ said Fotheringay. ‘Oh no, I fully appreciate that.’

An awkward pause supervened, during which Adrian seemed to pull himself together and each of the remaining two waited for the other to proceed. In the end it was Fotheringay who nodded resignedly and spoke up.

‘Er, Chatterton here and me, we got talking and we came to the conclusion we don’t want to go on with this any longer. “This” being the kind of play-acting or pretend caper or make-believe we’ve been going in for up to now. Now we’ve got to know you a bit we reckon you’ve had a raw deal, and we’re sorry, right? The thing was, we were both without a job, down on our luck, when this bloke comes along and throws cash around like he’s got three arms and says there’ll be more to come if we just look after somebody for a couple of days and go on according to this kind of script he’s got for us, if you see what I mean. We say okay. But…’

Chatterton now broke in. Throughout what followed he stayed much closer to his police-sergeant persona than to the urbane self Adrian had first seen. ‘The background is that Mr X had set everything up for a whole programme of unpleasant experiences aimed at punishing somebody he’d taken a real dislike to — lucky for you that you only got as far as the first of the series, there was a lot worse to follow. Then right at the last minute the job’s off. The central character’s suddenly not around any more.’

‘Being as he’s dead,’ said Fotheringay.

‘Anybody I know?’ asked Adrian.

‘Let’s hope not, for your sake.’

‘Keith Gordon,’ said Chatterton. ‘Also known as Big Thief. He had the misfortune to be under a couple of hundredweight of stonework when it fell off his office roof. Apparently it was a genuine accident.’

‘I heard about it,’ said Adrian.

‘The word is he’d been warned it was unsafe but was too bloody mean to have it seen to,’ said Fotheringay.

‘Act of God,’ said Chatterton contentedly. ‘Who managed to get it right for once. Well now, Mr Hollies, imagine where that left our Mr X. He’d laid out oodles of funds and in the twinkling of an eye it was all going to be wasted. Or was it? In his shoes I know I’d have gritted my teeth and called it a day, but here was another one that didn’t believe in money going down the drain. So how about a replacement for Big Thief? To cut what must have been a long story short, the best he managed to come up with was A. Hollies Esquire, a real swine who turned out to be a literary agent. Not that I’m trying to make you sound unimportant, Mr Hollies.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Right. Anyway, what had you done to him?’

‘I’ve never done anything much to anyone. What did he say I’d done?’

‘I didn’t deal with him direct, but there was something about gross professional misconduct.’

‘In my part of the trade it’s not worth cheating anybody. I suppose I could have told him a book he’d written wasn’t worth publishing.’

‘Could be, very well,’ said Fotheringay. ‘Something that don’t matter, like a book. You remember I thought this bloke was crazy right from the start.’

‘You said yourself it was out of proportion, didn’t you, Mr Hollies? And have you ever physically abused a girl, as I was told last night? Of course you haven’t. Nobody could believe such a thing who saw you reacting to what you thought was the real thing. Oh dear.’

‘There’s not much time,’ said Fotheringay. ‘We’ve said we’re sorry. We’re going to wrap this up. But you understand, Adrian, we want to protect ourselves. We request — that’s all we can do in the circumstances, request you to assist us. You’re a clever sort of fellow and you know about things like stories and writing scripts and that. Now you just get down to it and write a story for, er, for Chatterton here and me to learn, right, showing how you got the better of us and got out of here. Clocked one of us on the head, kind of style, and made a fool of the other, get the idea? Best you can do in the next hour or two. We’ll help you any way we can, I give you my solemn word.’

‘What about Beaumont-Snaith and Llewelyn?’

‘Yeah, well I reckon Llewelyn’ll do what we tell him, don’t you, Chatterton? As regards Beaumont-Snaith, he took a nasty bang on the head just now when we were discussing what to do, so could be he’ll turn out to fit into the scheme quite smoothly. We’ll just have to see how it goes, won’t we?’

‘Wouldn’t it be simpler,’ said Adrian, ‘if we all just pretended to have gone through the whole programme?’

Fotheringay nodded slowly with eyebrows raised. ‘Okay, but only if you fancy spending a couple of months pretending to be a nervous wreck after it, which is what you would have been. And us trusting you to do it, of course. No, I reckon we’d all be better off with Plan A.’

III

‘And I presume Plan A went reasonably well,’ said Derek Richards the following week.

‘That’s what I presume too,’ said Adrian. ‘We started off by cleverly buggering up the closed-circuit TV system, which naturally I’d assumed was there from the start. Then I luckily turned out to know a bit of karate, anyway enough of it to put paid to Beaumont-Snaith. Marvellous name, that. As for it going well, I’ve had no complaints, though I must say if I’d been one of them I wouldn’t be feeling all that easy in my mind.’

‘How about the doctor?’

‘The ex-doctor was going to disappear somewhere abroad whatever happened, on account of a previous piece of his doctoring having gone seriously wrong, and duly did, in a flash. He was a real ex-doctor, by the way, quite a different figure from the others.’

‘What tipped you off about them?’

‘Well, the general way they spoke and carried themselves and the rest of it, as if they were on the green, in mummers’ parlance. If you were brought up in a theatrical household as I was, it’s unmistakable. You must have noticed, when you turn the TV on or switch channels at random, how quickly and certainly you can tell whether it’s acted, however straightforwardly, or real life. I realized rather late on that those chaps talked like coppers in telly plays, not actual coppers, though that was right in a way, but I had plenty of time to take in that they were camped-up villains too. Then when Chatterton took two actorial phrases from me in quick succession without turning a hair I knew I was right, and confirmed it by firing a couple of lines from Macbeth at Llewelyn and getting a shock-horror reaction. He must have carried a spear some time in a rep production of the Scottish play as they call it because they think it’s bad luck even to call it by its right name, let alone quote from it offstage. They’re all grossly superstitious.

‘What else did I know about actors as a tribe? That they were fluent but slow on the uptake, conformist, emotional and sentimental, impressionable, above all impressed by acting, so wrapped up in the theatre that to see a part played with conviction, in other words hammed up a trifle, affected them more than the real thing ever could. So I set about acting my head off in the part of the decent, plucky little man who stands up to the big bullies even though he’s scared to death and who can put up with his own sufferings but not somebody else’s. And it went down a treat, didn’t it?’

‘Don’t undersell yourself, dear boy. You showed some real pluck as well.’