Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘You’re too modest, Dr Saxton. You must have some feeling one way or the other.’

‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself to any such feeling without looking at the stuff again.’

‘That’s easily arranged.’ Procope brought out a wallet from which he carefully took a neat newspaper cutting. ‘It just so happens, as they say.’

Edward tried to feign a pleased interest as he looked again at what Roger Ashby had shown him earlier that week. He felt himself blushing to a degree that might have rivalled Lucy, and did his best to put on a fit of coughing. It was extraordinarily hard to read the printed words as opposed to looking in their general direction.

‘I’m sorry, Toby,’ said Procope, ‘we’ll be finished in a minute.’

‘Take your time, I’m quite comfortable as I am.’

‘You saw the piece, did you? What do you think?’

‘I think the port is with you,’ said Toby.

Possibly because he was seeing the stanzas in changed circumstances, Edward all at once found in them something he had not noticed before, something that brought on in him a more intense agony of dissimulation. He decided he had to speak and might as well speak the truth.

‘In my opinion these lines are not the work of Thomas Gray,’ he said.

‘Ah! Thank you! Thank you, Dr Saxton, for delivering the kind of verdict that I slightly hoped you would see your way to.’

Instead of frankly goggling at the colonel, Edward tried to look no more than politely interested and expectant.

‘As I told you just now, I’m a total amateur in literary matters, interested as I may be in one or two of them, but even so, or perhaps for that very reason, I find it pleasant when a professional confirms my subjective judgement.’

This time Edward managed to say, ‘Yes, I see.’

‘I take it you’ve been approached by whoever’s concerned and asked for your expert opinion? No? Well, they’ll come to you, never fear. When they do, I hope you’ll denounce this impudent fabrication. As before, that’s only a, what did I say, a slight hope of mine, a modest one. Because, although the matter has aroused my curiosity, it matters to me personally not at all whether those lines are genuine or spurious. Not one scrap. I haven’t even taken a bet. What do you say to that, Toby?’

‘I say we should consider joining the ladies.’

When the colonel had departed and Lucy slipped away to bed, Edward forgathered with Toby and Kate for a nightcap in a corner of the drawing room. Outside the house the stillness seemed absolute.

‘Interesting sort of chap, Colonel Procope,’ said Edward experimentally.

The experiment was not a success. Kate said she thought the colonel was rather pathetic, Toby said more apologetically that neighbours had become thin on the ground, and the topic lapsed before Edward could get out his prepared quip about the fellow reminding him of some dishonest smallholder. A moment later Kate asked Edward how he thought Lucy was looking, at which point Toby shifted in his chair in a way suggesting that there had been enough recent discussion of his daughter to last him for a bit.

This time Edward spoke guardedly. ‘She looks fine to me,’ he said, and was not surprised to hear from Kate that mere outward looks were a trifle compared with inner wellbeing or the lack of it, and that it was here that Lucy gave grounds for concern, having just broken suddenly with an altogether suitable near-fiancé.

‘About nothing at all,’ said Kate. ‘All of a sudden he became a frightful bore.’

‘For my money he’d been that all along,’ said Toby. ‘Full of, well, full of what there was of himself. Damn it, the girl must be allowed to make a mistake and change her mind now and then. She’s not twenty yet.’

‘It’s much more than that, as you know. She’s thoroughly discontented with her whole generation of young men and always has been. You’d have thought Cambridge would have opened her eyes, but from that point of view it’s been a total washout.’

‘Oh, Katie, give the poor little thing a chance. She needs time.’

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ said Edward.

‘It’s sweet of you, dear Edward, but I get the impression that where that girl’s concerned you’re impossibly distant and grown-up. Oh, she’s very fond of you, of course, so she ought to be, but as a remote sort of uncle-figure, which after all is what you are. You do enough for her by encouraging her interest in literature.’

And that ought to be enough for any uncle-figure, thought Edward a little later as he undressed in his single bedroom. He switched off his light and looked out over the soundless landscape. In a corner of his mind were an excitement and something to be looked forward to with a tiny thrill. The excitement was from Gray and Procope, the something was the prospect of conferring again with Lucy. But a thrill of any size that arose from that prospect could be no more than a function of habit and memory.

‘And I’m quite sure he meant it,’ Edward told Lucy the next morning, by way of winding up his account of the conversation with Colonel Procope.

‘But he can’t have,’ she said.

‘On one assumption, it would indeed be all one to the colonel whether those stanzas are genuine or not. It would not concern him either which they are shown or taken to be. Let’s see if you can find grounds for…’

He stopped speaking because she seemed to have stopped listening. They had reached the gate of the small paddock, which they now entered. Lucy clinked the handle of the pail she was carrying, not loudly but it appeared loudly enough to attract the attention of a large horse standing by the far hedge. This animal at once came trotting over to them with what to Edward was excessive eagerness. Seen close to, it looked about the size of a full-grown elk, reddish-brown in general colour but with black mane and tail and large off-white teeth. These it showed prominently while it breathed noisily at them, butted Edward in the chest and without ceremony set about bolting the contents of the pail.

‘You remember Boris,’ said Lucy and, when Edward looked uncomprehending, added a trifle impatiently. ‘You know, after Boris Godunov.’

‘I thought it was Virginia, after Virginia Woolf.’

‘That was the little mare I had ages ago. She’s gone. It’s Boris now.’

Indeed it was Boris now, in the extra sense that Lucy’s attention was all directed that way, with none to spare for Edward. Presently she threw a rope round the horse’s neck and in a flash was on its back. For a moment she sat there very still and straight and seeming taller than before; Edward almost caught his breath at her look of dignity and power. Then she was off, away, just a girl trotting and cantering her horse round her father’s paddock. He, Toby, had prophesied that the horse would be disposed of about the time she found herself a man.

As soon as he profitably could, the man she was with at the moment said, ‘Now, Lucy, I want you to do a little experiment for me.’ While she shut the gate behind them he took out his copy of the stanzas, but did not at once hand it over. ‘Try to forget that this might or might not be part of Gray’s Elegy . See if you can manage to forget the fact that it’s in verse, which shouldn’t be all that exacting considering the lubberly way the paper has set it out. Now. You’ve no idea what this might be, you’ve just this moment come across it written on a pad. Right, here it is.’

Lucy halted on the gravel drive to read. He thought it marvellous that she found no evident difficulty in doing so without artificial aid and in what was not much better than average daylight, living as he did in a world where everybody wore glasses, most of them all the time, like himself. In his eagerness he tried to prompt her by suggesting she should attend only to the meaning of what was in front of her, but she spoke at the same time, and with a shake of the head at his own ineptitude he told her to go on.