Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

Potter raised his head and eyes to the ceiling less like a looker for inspiration than a man inwardly calling for celestial vengeance on some other party.

‘Can I print that?’ Sue recognized that the question she had been trying to frame, about why she was being told all this, had been answered. ‘About your giving up poetry?’

‘Oh, certainly. After all, this is an interview.’

‘You realize it’s news?’

‘News? Well, some very funny things seem to be news these days, don’t they? Do you want to telephone your editor?’

‘No thank you,’ she said, having, as he spoke, faced and solved a dilemma: whether to approach as soon as possible the parent newspaper for whose colour magazine she regularly wrote and had come here today, or to say nothing and allow her report of the interview, adorned with Bowes’s efforts, to appear as planned in (perhaps) four months’ time. If Potter told his piece of news to the representative of some other journal in the meanwhile, a lot of people would be cross with her, and her article, with its climactic point already common knowledge, might suffer severe cuts or even not appear at all. But that was just as likely to be its fate if she took the first of the two courses open to her, and she recoiled from the prospect of seeing an abbreviated, garbled and vulgarized version of her material under some such heading as ‘Veteran Bard Lays Down Pen’. It must be the second alternative, then, with the comforting thought that, since nobody on the magazine was inquisitive enough to read copy on the look-out for possible news items, or indeed for almost any other reason, the laying-down of the pen might very well rest securely in its context until her publication day.

‘Is there going to be much more of this?’ asked Potter, who was still looking, in fact glaring by now, high over Sue’s head. ‘I’m afraid I find it rather tiring.’

‘How many more, Pat?’

‘Nearly there. Another couple.’

That meant a dozen or so, but a quick dozen. For the second time in five minutes, Sue searched for a remark. Finally she said,

‘You must think of the thousands and thousands of people to whom you’ve given pleasure.’

‘Yes, I do try to sometimes. It’s true I get a lot of letters saying some very nice things, and believe me I’m not at all ungrateful, but—’

‘Could you relax and look out of the window as if you’re thinking?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Potter, setting a new lower limit to the amount of dryness the tone of a human voice could carry without its being altogether imperceptible. ‘But, as I was going to say, I have wondered if the pleasure people say I’ve given them mightn’t have prevented them from coming by some much higher kind of pleasure from other writers of poetry who really are good. I expect all this pop music prevents some youngsters from ever appreciating Brahms or Elgar.’

‘You must know that’s not a fair comparison, Mr Potter. And I don’t think it’s true anyway, your example.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t, my example. There’s no way of knowing.’

‘Right, that’s it,’ said Bowes. ‘I’ve got some first-class ones there. Thank you for being so patient, Mr Potter. I can tell you’re a pro at this job.’

The lights went and for a second or two the room seemed dark; then Sue saw it was only late afternoon outside. Bowes started disassembling his equipment while Potter, on his feet, stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor. Sue waited until Bowes had gone out to the car and then said:

‘I don’t want to poke my nose in, but what are you having for your dinner tonight?’

‘Cornflakes and a couple of sardines, I thought. And a bottle of light ale.’

‘But that’s not enough. You must have a proper meal. Something hot.’

‘I can’t be bothered.’

‘May I see your kitchen?’

‘Yes, it’s just… through the… in here.’

In one corner of the small room was a tiny larder containing a good deal of tinned and cartoned food and very little fresh food. Sue made a selection from the tins, found two Spanish onions that seemed to have started to lose weight, decided that some cold boiled potatoes must be harmless despite their appearance, and looked round for a frying-pan.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Potter as if the preparation of a meal were genuinely strange and wonderful to him.

‘Do you like corned-beef hash?’

‘I like all food, but I don’t see—’

‘I’ll just have a word with Mr Bowes.’

The word, or words, told Bowes that Potter wanted to add some information in total confidence. Tractable as ever outside the photographic sphere, Bowes at once said he would go and have a pint at a pub he had noticed a couple of hundred yards back down the road, and that Sue could join him there at any time she might fancy.

Back in the kitchen, Sue found Potter standing, presumably by chance, exactly beneath a well-patronized fly-paper that hung from the ceiling. He said,

‘I don’t want you to go to any trouble on my account.’

‘It’s very little trouble.’ She set about peeling and slicing the onions. ‘It’s a small return for all the help you’ve given Mr Bowes and me. Now I’m going to cook this to the point where all you have to do is warm it up before you eat it. Can I trust you to do that?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.’

Nothing more was said for some minutes, while she went on with her work. Then he asked abruptly,

‘Would you consider staying on here a little while and sharing the corned-beef hash with me?’

‘I’d like to, Mr Potter, but I’m afraid I’ve—’

‘No, of course, yes, I quite see.’

The immediacy of his interruption showed her in the plainest terms that he had taken her to be simply blocking off the possibility of a return to the question he had put to her in the garden. She turned away from the gas stove, went over and took him by the hand.

‘I shall have to go quite soon, Mr Potter,’ she said slowly, ‘because I have to be back in London in time for my husband to take me to the theatre. Do you see now?’

He nodded, not perfunctorily, and moved towards the window. She worked on through another pause, which again he broke.

‘Mrs Macnamara, I want to ask you a fact, but you must understand I need it just as a fact, nothing more. What’s your Christian name?’

‘Susan, but I’m always called Sue.’

‘Is that s, u, e?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

He left the room and stayed away until the hash was nearly ready. When he came back he was carrying a sheet, now folded in two, of the paper she had seen on his table.

‘I think you’ll know what this is, Mrs Macnamara. I’d like you to accept it as a very small mark of my esteem, and as a way of saying thank you for being so sympathetic and understanding.’ (A careful rehearsal of this in the parlour was not very difficult to imagine.) ‘Please don’t look at it until you’ve left here,’ he went on, holding the paper out to her. ‘There are no surprises, but I’d just rather you didn’t.’

‘You’ve made a copy of it, have you?’

‘No. I never do that.’

‘But what about your wife typing it out? I can’t walk away with a unique copy. Suppose I lost it? And what about publication?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ll lose it. If you really want to, perhaps you could type it out one day and send a copy to my agent’ — whom he named — ‘and a carbon here. Addressed to my wife. Please take it.’

She took the sheet, faintly warm from his hand. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘There’s nothing that needs to be said. I’ve thanked you with that and you’ve thanked me by making me this splendid meal. Is it done? How do I heat it up?’