Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

Enough of that. What I have to reveal is of another order altogether. The interview with Dolores, as set out above, is a lie. She did indeed impute to Carlos a groundless jealousy of Sir Harry. But the manner of this, and its circumstances, were wholly different from what I have implied. The two of us were in my bed. Even in these easy-going days of the third decade of the twentieth century I would not care to publish such a confession. I dare hope that the reader of the 1970s will find it unexceptionable; a vigorous bachelor of three-and-thirty, such as I then was, a beautiful and passionate girl, and an opportunity — is there anything there to outrage delicacy?

Dolores, what was it in you, or in me, or in both of us that brought it about that in your arms I experienced a joy more intense and more exquisite than any before or since? Was it that we were so different from each other or that we shared a strange communion of spirit? Was it the season? Was it — contrary to appearance — the place? To me, that is the real Darkwater Hall mystery, as impenetrable and as wonderful now as it was then, forty years ago.

John H. Watson, MD

Bournemouth

April 1925

I had done myself pretty well that evening in the coffee-room at the Irving. After a couple of ounces of caviare, I had enjoyed a superb grouse and wound up with a hot-house nectarine, sharing a bottle of the ’26 Aloxe with my neighbour. Others at the common table, I had noticed, were in the same mood. In those fateful August days, there were those of us who were not at all sure where we should be a month later, nor even that the Irving would still be in existence. For the moment, however, as the conversation buzzed under that magnificent ceiling, all seemed cheerful and reassuring.

As we sat over a glass of vintage port in the members’ lounge, I mentioned this air of ease to my table-companion. In truth he was much more than that; he was and is one of my closest friends. Although he plays only a brief part in this story, I must say something of him. His name is Roger Harvey, his age the same as mine — forty — and his employment somewhere in the Overseas Office, somewhere very remote from my own corner of that institution, somewhere he has never spoken of, even to such as myself. My obvious deductions were shortly to be confirmed.

He nodded agreement with my remark. ‘Most of them still can’t really believe it’s coming, or can’t take it in.’

‘But it is?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, with a look I knew well. It meant that he was certain, but was not to be asked the grounds of his certainty.

‘Shall you be staying in Whitehall?’

‘For another week or so. Then I disappear. And you?’

‘I’ve heard nothing precise. I imagine there will be plenty of work for my section.’

‘Indeed there will,’ said Harvey in a grim tone. ‘Not at first, perhaps, but later — no doubt of it. I must leave you shortly; I have a lot of clearing-up to do at the office. But if it reveals anything one-twentieth as remarkable as what I came across yesterday, I shall be very much surprised.’

‘You sound mysterious.’

‘I mean to. Excuse me a moment.’

My friend went to the hall, where his dispatch case was, and presently returned carrying a folder criss-crossed with pink tape.

‘I found this where it should not have been,’ said Harvey. ‘Not so much misfiled, I venture to think, as hidden.’

‘Hidden some time ago,’ I suggested, looking at the condition of what he had brought.

‘It’s as old as we are — nothing in it that could be of the slightest interest to Master Hitler, otherwise of course it wouldn’t have left the Office.’

‘What does this red disc signify?’

‘Out of use now, but it used to mean “Destroy when acted upon”.’

‘Presumably not acted upon, then.’

‘Oh, it must have been acted upon, my dear fellow. When you read it, you’ll agree that whatever else might or might not have happened, what’s in here’ — he tapped the folder — ‘would have been acted upon all right, though I missed any record of how. No, kept for what I’ll call its curiosity value.’

I was gazing at Harvey. ‘I’m to read it? Why?’

‘Why not, if you’ve nothing better to do? It’ll take your mind off our impending troubles. And you’re pretty close to being its ideal reader: you’re fascinated with the bizarre if anyone ever was, the business took place in your part of the world and you have a vivid imagination combined with strong nerves. I’ll be interested to hear what you make of it. Forgive me now — I’ll telephone and arrange a drink before I vanish. Give my love to Celia.’

‘Thank you, I will.’

‘I shall be sorry to miss your wedding. Good night.’

When Harvey had gone I found a bridge four in process of gathering, joined it and played on in the card-room till past eleven. The next evening I took my fiancée to dinner and the theatre, and so it was almost forty-eight hours before I set about slipping the tapes off Harvey’s folder, with no great sense of expectation, for previous attempts of his to feed my taste for the ‘bizarre’ testified more to the goodness of his heart than his understanding of what might appeal to that taste. Only the previous month he had drawn my attention to a most commonplace tale of the supernatural in the Cornhill . But any distraction was welcome just then, with German troops reported on the move towards the borders of Poland and Celia visiting her widowed mother.

Before I open the folder, so to speak, you may care to learn a little about the person who has taken it upon himself to describe to you its contents. I will begin by explaining what Harvey had meant, in the lounge at the Irving, by my part of the world: the general area of the eastern Mediterranean. It is mine in a double sense. I was brought up in the family of a British diplomat in one of the coastal cities there. Although my name — Robert Chalmers — could hardly be more British, and I have never held anything but a British passport, my parentage is unknown. Picture me as fair-haired and blue-eyed, with something about the eyelids of those blue eyes that earned me the nickname of ‘Chinkie’ at school, but, when I grew up, contributed not a little (so at least I have often been assured) to what I can without vanity call my considerable success with women. It is this that has kept me single, but recently, as you already know, I have been taking steps to end that state.

Perhaps it is vanity after all that has led me to wander from my theme. Harvey had had in mind, of course, the second and, in the context, more significant sense in which the Levant is my place. My knowledge of Greek and Turkish, virtually that of a native in both cases, and the influence of my foster-father soon secured me a place in the appropriate section of the Overseas Office. I was thus already in possession of information necessary to the understanding of at least part of the contents of the folder. I knew, for instance, that after literally centuries of struggle and in response to pressure from the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France and Russia), Turkey withdrew the last of her troops from the island of Crete in November 1898. One of the documents in the folder proved to bear the name of a Cretan village and a date in January 1899.

These documents varied in category and provenance. Some were straightforward signals or decodes; others were reports of assorted lengths, many of them copies of notes the British agents in the field had delivered to what would in these days be termed their control — the location of which I will not even now divulge. What I had before me was an account of an operation assembled from the control’s dispatches to London and additional matter supplied here which I will refer to as I go along. A more or less connected story emerged. I have amused myself, having as I do something of a literary turn of mind, by dramatizing that story wherever possible. I assure you that I have neither added nor altered anything of substance.