Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘What it says … if somebody who went wrong or went to the wrong place should retrace his steps, come back to his starting-point, he’d be perfectly…’

‘Secure. The best word out of however many dozen it is. Though not at all Gray’s kind of thing, a sort of pun, Latin securus, se plus cura , free from care, also modern secure , in a state of security, not at risk from hostile undercover moves or surveillance.’

‘In fact the message of the whole thing seems to be…’

Edward was too excited to notice that he had again interrupted. ‘The message. That’s what it is. A message. Well done. It suddenly hit me last night. What is the characteristic of that newspaper and no other, almost no other anywhere? All right, there are several, but the one that interests us is that it goes all over the world.’

‘ Far astray.’

‘If you wanted to send a message to somebody you couldn’t locate, perhaps you couldn’t even say with any certainty what country he was in, what better means could you think of? Almost, what other means at all? Exposed as a forgery or not, you really could afford to be indifferent. You might even leave drafts of it lying about.’

‘Provided your man saw it.’

‘Admittedly you’d have to take your chance on that, but you might be able to bet he’d see that paper every day. Of course he’d have to have some sort of interest in literature thrown in, but with a thing like the Elegy it wouldn’t have to be a specialized one. And if there’s silence at the other end you just have to think of something else. You’re no worse off.’

They had reached the road before Lucy said, ‘All right, let’s have the rest of it, whatever it is.’

‘How do you know there’s more to come?’

‘By not being blind or deaf. Come on, Uncle — shoot.’

‘Very well, here goes. One. Colonel Orion Procope, MC. When I told you I’d never heard of anybody called that, I was speaking the truth. But I’d only to catch sight of him to be pretty certain I’d seen him before, and in some kind of sinister context. Nothing more specific than that till this morning when I woke up remembering who he was and where I’d seen him. I still couldn’t remember his original name, and I knew it wasn’t him in the flesh I’d seen, just a few photographs, which did nevertheless belong to a sinister context.

‘Two. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Do they mean anything to you, Lucy?’

‘Not much. Weren’t they Communist spies, years ago?’

‘Eleven years ago to be precise, in 1951. At any rate, that was when they were exposed and fled to Russia, where they still are.’

‘Oh yes, our security coppers made a frightful boob.’

‘Not really. It was the weekend and they couldn’t get hold of anyone to sign the warrants for the arrests. Respect for the law.’

‘Something pretty boobish about that.’

‘I agree it could never have happened in Russia.’

‘M’m. I accept the rebuke,’ said Lucy. ‘But how did you know about the warrants?’

‘It’s not a secret. But the answer to your question takes us to Three. Edward Saxton, D. Litt. Where’s this pub I’ve heard so much about?’

‘You can see it from here.’

‘So I can. Before we get there, let me just say that about that time I did a bit of work for MI5, to be known henceforth between you and me simply as the company, if you follow me. I’m not in your league as an unfolder of mysteries, but I won’t tell you the rest till I’ve a glass of beer in my hand.’

It was cool, dark and quiet in the saloon bar. Edward and Lucy took their drinks over to a window that gave a view of an unfrequented stretch of road and a green hedgerow with woodland beyond it, all with their colours sharpened by the mild sun. No petrol fumes lingered, only country scents. Edward sipped beer appreciatively.

‘One can get tired of drinking wine day in and day out,’ he said. ‘Though not very soon, I suppose. Now, let me go on briefly. Years ago I helped the company a bit over the matter of defective patriotism among former Cambridge men — you may remember that both Burgess and Maclean had been undergraduates at that university. There were others never or not yet brought to book, half a dozen of them, among whom was the man now known as Colonel Procope, who escaped prosecution for lack of evidence. Nothing could have been proved either against his close friend, perhaps more than close friend, whom I knew as Green, but evidently Green was up to something our side didn’t know about, because he cleared off to Russia too, just three weeks after good old Guy and Donald. Green read English at Cambridge, which isn’t exactly incompatible with an interest in literature, though I agree—’

‘I take it Green is still in Russia. But if he gets the colonel’s message he’ll soon be on his way back.’

Edward frowned and looked worried. ‘I wish we could do better, but I don’t think we can at the moment.’

‘So what’s our next step?’

‘I don’t honestly see we’ve got one. What we have is surmise, and nobody seems to be even contemplating anything illegal, I’m sorry to say. It would be interesting to have a tap put on Procope’s telephone, but also out of the question. All we can do is keep our eye on the paper.’

‘Would it help if we knew how he got them to print that stuff?’

‘I’ll have a word with the company. About that and other matters.’

Lucy looked at Edward, who held her gaze. She said, ‘I’d never have taken you for a…’

‘Careful.’

‘… tradesman as well as an expert on Gray.’

‘Tradesmen come in all sizes and shapes. What time is lunch?’

As they were on their way out, the landlord nodded politely to Edward and said to Lucy, ‘How’s my old friend Boris?’

‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you, Mr Littlejohn.’

‘Have you taken him on a proper excursion yet?’

‘I thought next week, perhaps.’

‘He’d enjoy it,’ said the landlord, who with his neat suit and generally scrubbed appearance looked like the citified person he was not. Laying a polished horseshoe on the counter, he said, ‘Anyway, here’s a present for him.’

‘Oh, he’ll absolutely love that. I’ll nail it on his stable door.’

II

Revision, especially of the Metaphysicals, and bad weather combined to put off the day on which Lucy ceremonially nailed the horseshoe to Boris’s stable door. But when that day came it was so clear and bright and the forecast so promising that she planned a proper excursion for him and her on the morrow.

She was up at six and, with her old tweed coat over her nightdress, fetched the horse to his stable facing the kitchen and put chaff and corn in the manger for him. A heavy dew sparkled on the grass, the sky was a slightly veiled but cloudless blue, and there was the kind of hush everywhere that she had noticed before at the start of a fine hot day. She got more or less ready before cooking herself a substantial breakfast of fried egg, bacon and tomatoes, no more than sensible before a day’s riding. By this time the paper had arrived and she glanced at it as she ate.

Her eye was caught by a short item saying that the supposed additional stanzas of Gray’s Elegy , the discovery of which was recently reported, had been shown to be a modern forgery. The finder’s request for continued anonymity was being respected. This information revived Lucy’s almost-lapsed interest in the matter, and even brought her a mental picture of Colonel Orion Procope being completely indifferent to the news, but she dismissed it and him from her mind in the course of making sandwiches with fresh Cheddar, chopped onion and plenty of sweet pickle. This done, she prepared a thermos of tea, leaving enough tea over to take up to her parents’ bedroom with some arrowroot biscuits she privately considered dead boring.