Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘What I was doing was giving you the chance of ducking out if you wanted to. Making it easy for you.’

‘But why should I have wanted to duck out, as you call it?’ he went on as before.

‘I don’t know. Well, you might have. I had plenty of time for thinking on my trip, maybe too much, and in the cold light of day I found I just couldn’t believe in last night. For myself I could, but I couldn’t quite for you. I don’t know why, you gave me no cause.’

‘I say, Lukretia, really,’ he rebuked me.

‘Yes, I said it was silly.’

‘Was that what was wrong when you first came in tonight? My God, what an absurd question.’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘You were not.’ He drew away a little and looked me in the eyes, smiling. When he smiles his mouth stays firm; it would not be quite so lovely otherwise. He has a little scar shaped like a V on the left side of his chin. Perhaps he got it playing some game in school, in that ‘quite decent’ school in Sussex county. I looked back at him and he said, ‘Would you like me to show you just how silly you were being?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I would. I’d like that very much.’

What followed was joy, unlike anything he or I have ever had in our lives before or have ever thought about, but still very simple joy. Afterwards there was peace, for me the first I can remember; I cannot speak for him. But it had to end. I got out of bed, put on a robe, went behind the screen and opened the champagne.

I could hear him laughing. ‘Why all the concealment?’ he asked.

‘I was afraid if I didn’t arrange it this way you might be distracted.’ Back in bed I raised my glass to him and said in my native language, ‘I wish you happiness your life long.’

‘May your good fortune never fail,’ he responded at once, raising his own glass. His Dacian is very correct, but his consonants are heavy in the English way. A delightful way.

There was one more thing to be done. I fetched the small scissors from my dresser and snipped away a lock of hair. ‘Now your turn,’ I said. ‘No, let me do it for you.’ When I had taken a lock of his, thick and strong, I held on to it and handed him mine. ‘We’re official lovers now and can only cease to be by exchanging these again. Is that English? By giving them back.’

‘I follow you.’ There was a sadness in his eyes which at another time might have troubled me. ‘I’m glad we’ve done that. Is it a peasant custom?’

‘Well, a custom anyhow, though it’s dying out, as what isn’t? But I’m fond of it. I’ve never done it before. You needn’t go on holding that; the ceremony is concluded.’

I went back to the dresser and left the two locks and the scissors. Stephen was comfortably settled against the pillows with his eyes shut.

‘Well, what do we do tomorrow?’ he asked drowsily.

‘Tomorrow we prepare for England,’ I replied. ‘And the day following we leave for England. And after however many days it is we arrive in England. And we go to London and see the churches and the palaces and the people, and we walk in the park and sail on the river. And in the country we go riding and we sit in the garden early and late.’

I cried then, but there was no one to hear me; Magda’s potion certainly acted fast. Soon I made myself stop crying, for I had work to do, and tough work at that. I put on a gown of blazing scarlet and bedecked myself with my finest jewels. On my way out I bent and kissed Stephen’s forehead. As I did so it occurred to me that there was really no hurry; those with whom I had business would stay till I came. I settled myself at Stephen’s side and kissed his cheek, once, twice. By slow degrees a delicious languor stole over me; as I lay there I could no longer feel the pressure of the bed against my body; my vision clouded, so that I saw only vague coloured shapes without any meaning, and in my ears there was the sweetest melody I ever heard, in some sense under my control and yet at every turn delightful in its unexpectedness, always about to come to rest in a cadence of supreme poignancy before miraculously passing into fresh unbounded rapture. There was no name for the instruments that played it, nor for the bewitching odours that drifted to my nostrils. An inviolable warmth enfolded me. My well-being and happiness were both of them exquisite, and to be made perfect needed only a single small action on my part. And for its performance no volition would be necessary, nothing more than surrender to the onward flow of ravishment. Oh paradise, oh abode of the blessed…

Suddenly I was back in my dream, that cruel dream in which Aleku chained me to the dungeon wall in perpetual captivity, but now there was another beside me, gagged and blindfolded like myself, and I knew it was Stephen. I screamed and came to myself in an instant. After a second’s inexpressible agony of mind I ascertained that, though my teeth had indeed been at his throat, they had not penetrated the skin and, as I watched with equally intense relief, the marks I had left began to fade. I got off the bed and knelt down and tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving, for I had no doubt about where that warning had come from, but not a word could I utter, as always. So I offered thanks in my heart; even He cannot prevent that. They were double thanks; I knew now for a certainty what I had been pretending was not certain, that I could not for ever, nor even for long, suppress the abominable craving that defines my state, and that Stephen would be in deadly danger as long as I could get at him. This knowledge has hardened my resolution to do what must be done. It must all of it be done; the danger to Stephen comes not only from me.

Writing this last entry has brought me pain, not least in detailing the lies I had to tell my beloved. But it has helped me relive some of the most wonderful, the only wonderful moments of my life, and after forty years I find it hard to break the habit of confiding to these pages what nobody else must know and what, thanks to Magda, nobody else will ever know. So now, goodbye. To whom, to what do I say those words? No matter.

VII — confidential Transcript of the Privy Inquest Under His Rectitude Quaestor Miron Filipescu, Nuvakastra, 3 September 1925, Extracts

QUAESTOR: Fetch Prefect Sturdza.

REGISTRAR: Prefect Sturdza, in the name of Omnipotent God I charge you to tell the truth in all matters—

QUAESTOR: Hold your peace, registrar, and let the hearing proceed. This is not a court of law; it is not even an official council. I pray God our business today never comes before any such body. Speak, prefect.

PREFECT: Thank you, your rectitude. I have here the paper brought to me at the police office by the witness Magda Marghiloman. I have satisfied myself that the handwriting is that of Lukretia Iulia Klodia Valvazor i Vukcic, Countess Valvazor of the same.

QUAESTOR: Good, good, Read it, man.

PREFECT: Yes, sir. ‘In the year 1886, being then twenty-nine years old, I was forcibly reduced to the abject and abominable state of vampire by my father’s brother, Baron Aleku Valvazor, who also debauched me. For four years thereafter we continued our hideous practices to the horror and shame of my parents and at growing risk to ourselves. The danger was not from the subsequent activities of our unfortunate victims, who were made away with when they had served their turn, but from the number of unexplained disappearances in the surrounding country. The village people would have come for us one fine day.

‘At the end of that period, early in 1890, the Englishman Robert Macneil arrived at Valvazor, ostensibly to serve as librarian and nothing more, but though my father would never admit it I have always been certain that, through some intermediary unknown to me, he had obtained Macneil for another purpose, namely to protect his brother and daughter from the otherwise inevitable consequences of their vile acts. At any rate, Macneil soon set about an elaborate deception. He procured a middle-aged man — a Bessarabian corn-factor, I was told — who resembled Aleku closely, or closely enough, and somehow lured him here. Having caused it to be given out that the baron was gravely ill with typhus fever, he administered to the unhappy stranger a fatal dose of one of those poisons that leave no exterior sign. A pair of local women, chosen for their ready tongues, were brought in to prepare the deceased for burial. A funeral was then elaborately staged and the stranger laid to rest in the mausoleum that my father had refurbished for the purpose. The behaviour of the peasantry on this occasion was gratifyingly credulous, but Macneil would leave nothing to chance. With every appearance of spontaneity, though in fact at his instigation, a band of villagers broke open the tomb after a sufficient interval and found, not the untouched, immaculate form they had been half-expecting, but what could only have been a dead body. To all appearance, Baron Aleku was no more. No such stratagem was thought necessary in my case; I was then quite undistinguished in horror.