Dear Illusion: Collected Stories

by Kingsley Amis

  A door opened and the man earlier called PC Llewelyn, no doubt summoned a few moments before, came into the room. He entered in a lounging, rolling fashion before a kind of military yelp from Chatterton smartened him up in an instant. Coming to something like a posture of attention he said loudly, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Wake up, Llewelyn.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, truly I am.’ This was said in a noticeable Welsh accent. The fellow had taken his jacket off but still wore his uniform trousers. Although there seemed to be no other definable change in his appearance, he looked uncommonly scruffy.

  ‘Convey Mr Hollies back to his room and secure the door.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Llewelyn at any rate spoke sharply.

  Adrian looked from one to the other of the two as they went through their performance. His expression evidently offended Chatterton, who gave him a curt nod of dismissal and gestured impatiently to Llewelyn to remove him.

  His return trip along the corridor was less smooth than the outward journey. Scruffy or not, Llewelyn was quite strong, and provided unnecessary encouragement to continue to move by means of a hand clamped on his upper arm. The door of the room he had woken up in was ajar and Llewelyn’s hand propelled him across the threshold. Before the door could be shut Adrian said clearly,

  ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’

  Llewelyn stared back at him with a look of puzzlement, surprise, dismay or of all three, but for a moment he neither spoke nor moved.

  ‘Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.’

  At this, Llewelyn scowled ferociously and gave Adrian a push in the chest forceful enough to send him staggering and almost falling. When he had recovered himself the door was shut and, he soon discovered, fastened. His instinct was for setting about getting it open again, but he had no way of doing so, certainly no quick or non-noisy way. No such decisive move would in any case make sense without knowledge of where he might find an exit from the house. And a means of using it. If any. It looked as if he might as well heed the advice he had received on waking, that he would not escape by his own efforts.

  The scrap of paper bearing this message was no longer to be found. The remains of his snack had likewise been cleared away. The bed had been remade. A more thorough look than he had earlier ventured showed him pyjamas, fresh underclothes, shirts. Their mundane practicality seemed designed to dishearten him. With head bent he moved slowly round the room a couple of times, then halted and for some minutes stared at the wall in an unfocused manner. After that he sat down on the bed and paused a moment before dropping his head into his hands and rocking slowly to and fro. Anyone looking at him would have said that a thoroughly wretched man, if not a despairing one, was sitting there. Presently Adrian drew his legs up on to the bed and lay down on his side with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped. Unexpectedly, he slept.

  There passed another immeasurable tract of time. At its end, at the sound of the door being unlocked, Adrian sprang up and stood beside the bed, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. When all four of the men he had previously seen came into the room, they found him facing them in a posture of defiance.

  After sending him a look of peculiar distaste, Chatterton moved over to one side, as if to underline his supervisory status. ‘Come along, Hollies,’ he said sharply.

  Fotheringay and Llewelyn began to move forward, but Adrian eluded their grasp. ‘Let me come of my own accord, please. I’m quite capable of setting one foot in front of the other.’

  ‘Oh, good show, sir,’ said Fotheringay, ‘but anybody can see you’re terrified. Why not admit it?’

  ‘What, terrified of you?’

  Fotheringay’s immediate response was to punch Adrian in the stomach. He collapsed on to the bed. ‘That was quite unnecessary,’ said someone: Chatterton.

  ‘Just a tap, that’s all. Look, he’s getting up already.’

  ‘Our orders are not to hurt him physically.’

  ‘There won’t be a mark on him, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

  By now Adrian was facing them again, still panting and groaning, half doubled up, but back on his feet, and was allowed to make his own way out of the bedroom, round a couple of corners in the passage and into a room of about the same size but partly subdivided by a grey-painted screen on rollers. Two men were visible: after a first glance one of them went behind the screen and the other led an unresisting Adrian over to a corner where there stood a narrow backless couch of the sort to be met with in doctors’ consulting rooms.

  ‘Take off your jacket and shirt and then get up on here, please.’

  Adrian followed instructions and successively had his blood pressure taken and allowed auscultation of his chest. Both exercises were rapid but thorough.

  ‘Now sit up and take a series of deep breaths as I tell you, please.’

  He felt the small cool circle of the stethoscope applied in turn to various parts of his back.

  ‘Thank you. Please get dressed and sit on the chair.’

  ‘Well?’ asked another voice.

  ‘His heart and circulation appear excellent. His blood pressure is above normal, but then he’s obviously in a condition of extreme tension, if only as shown by his respiratory rate.’

  ‘So there’s no real risk?’

  ‘In an undertaking of this kind there’s always a risk, but if you mean am I prepared to take this risk then yes, I am.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get on with it, then.’

  ‘Mr Hollies? Mr Hollies, I’m going to put you to sleep for a couple of minutes, nothing more than that. When you wake up you’ll be in one piece and still here. Do you understand? Oh well, here goes.’

  When Adrian came to himself after what he suspected to be only a short time, he was in some discomfort. He had been strapped into a chair in a way that prevented him from leaving it and also bound his wrists to its arms. More noticeably, his head was tightly clamped and what felt like pieces of sticky tape had been applied to his eyelids to prevent even their slight closure. A large screen of the TV type, at present blank, filled most of his vision. He must have made some movement because almost at once a voice spoke to him from behind his chair, the voice of the man who had seemed to be some sort of doctor.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Restricted.’

  ‘No nausea or trouble with breathing?’

  ‘I’ve never felt better in my life.’

  ‘Bravely spoken, Mr Hollies. Happy viewing.’

  As he spoke, a thrumming click sounded, the screen in front of Adrian lit up and in a moment, with excellent definition and lifelike colour, images began to appear.

  The first of these, that of an attractive young woman, Adrian found pleasant enough, and he had no objection when, smiling at the camera, she proceeded to undress, nor did he find what immediately followed any worse than embarrassing. When other persons joined her, however, he very quickly started showing signs of discomfort and not long after of distress. When a cry of pain sounded from the direction of the screen, he struggled to free himself and to turn his head away. Within a couple of minutes he was making anguished sounds and, as far as was possible to him, thrashing about. A female scream of terror and his own scream rose together, at which point the film froze and two or more men seized him and gagged him. But as soon as the coloured shapes were again in motion and appropriate sounds to be heard, he was able to show how much clamour could be created by a gagged man, especially in the forms of shrieks and inarticulate noises of protest and pain. In the end the man who had last spoken hurried forward and, with the screen now darkened, silence fell.

  This time Adrian woke up lying on his bed. His eyelids were sore, his eyes ached and his lower lip was swollen and tender; he remembered biting it and feeling blood trickle down his chin. Despite these things he felt comfortable and languid, and guessed he was under some sedative or painkiller. He was alone. Presently, taking his time, he pushed himself upright and round until he was sitting on th
e edge of the bed. He had not long to wait.

  The door clicked a couple of times and opened to admit the supposed doctor, who was now wearing a suit and tie. He looked closely at Adrian and said, ‘You should be lying down.’

  ‘I can get all the rest I want. I’m not going anywhere.’

  The doctor was not listening. He brought from his jacket two small containers and handed them over. ‘Take two of the round red ones to stop things hurting, not more than six in twenty-four hours. The white ones will calm you down and also help you to sleep. Dose of two, maximum six a day, got it?’

  ‘Are you off somewhere?’

  ‘I have things to see to.’

  When the doctor had gone, Adrian went into the bathroom and came back holding a glass of water. Before he could have taken a pill there was the unexpected sound of a tap on the outside of his door.

  ‘Come in,’ he called. At the sight of Chatterton and Fotheringay he got up not very steadily, seized a chair by the back and ran at them with it, calling to them to keep their hands off him.

  Fotheringay twisted the chair out of his grasp. ‘Sit down, Mr Hollies,’ he said easily.

  As he sat on the bed again, Adrian said, ‘Will you tell me something? Please?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Those, those things you made me see, they weren’t real, were they?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘When those men, when they forced the girl to do what she did, that wasn’t really happening, was it? Please tell me.’

  ‘We weren’t on that side of it, Chatterton and me.’

  ‘I mean, when they started . . . started . . . that poor girl,’ said Adrian, and burst into tears, racking sobs he seemed at the same time to be trying to restrain. ‘Sorry,’ he gasped after some moments – ‘sorry, I thought I could just ask you in the ordinary way, but when it came to it . . . I found I couldn’t. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t let it get you down, Adrian,’ said Fotheringay. ‘It was all trick photography, what you saw. Bloody amazing what they can do these days, you know. Must have cost somebody a fair packet, mind. But anyway, no call for you to fret like you’re doing now.’

  ‘No, but when he thought it was for real,’ said Chatterton.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Fotheringay. ‘Oh no, I fully appreciate that.’

  An awkward pause supervened, during which Adrian seemed to pull himself together and each of the remaining two waited for the other to proceed. In the end it was Fotheringay who nodded resignedly and spoke up.

  ‘Er, Chatterton here and me, we got talking and we came to the conclusion we don’t want to go on with this any longer. “This” being the kind of play-acting or pretend caper or make-believe we’ve been going in for up to now. Now we’ve got to know you a bit we reckon you’ve had a raw deal, and we’re sorry, right? The thing was, we were both without a job, down on our luck, when this bloke comes along and throws cash around like he’s got three arms and says there’ll be more to come if we just look after somebody for a couple of days and go on according to this kind of script he’s got for us, if you see what I mean. We say okay. But . . .’

  Chatterton now broke in. Throughout what followed he stayed much closer to his police-sergeant persona than to the urbane self Adrian had first seen. ‘The background is that Mr X had set everything up for a whole programme of unpleasant experiences aimed at punishing somebody he’d taken a real dislike to – lucky for you that you only got as far as the first of the series, there was a lot worse to follow. Then right at the last minute the job’s off. The central character’s suddenly not around any more.’

  ‘Being as he’s dead,’ said Fotheringay.

  ‘Anybody I know?’ asked Adrian.

  ‘Let’s hope not, for your sake.’

  ‘Keith Gordon,’ said Chatterton. ‘Also known as Big Thief. He had the misfortune to be under a couple of hundredweight of stonework when it fell off his office roof. Apparently it was a genuine accident.’

  ‘I heard about it,’ said Adrian.

  ‘The word is he’d been warned it was unsafe but was too bloody mean to have it seen to,’ said Fotheringay.

  ‘Act of God,’ said Chatterton contentedly. ‘Who managed to get it right for once. Well now, Mr Hollies, imagine where that left our Mr X. He’d laid out oodles of funds and in the twinkling of an eye it was all going to be wasted. Or was it? In his shoes I know I’d have gritted my teeth and called it a day, but here was another one that didn’t believe in money going down the drain. So how about a replacement for Big Thief? To cut what must have been a long story short, the best he managed to come up with was A. Hollies Esquire, a real swine who turned out to be a literary agent. Not that I’m trying to make you sound unimportant, Mr Hollies.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Right. Anyway, what had you done to him?’

  ‘I’ve never done anything much to anyone. What did he say I’d done?’

  ‘I didn’t deal with him direct, but there was something about gross professional misconduct.’

  ‘In my part of the trade it’s not worth cheating anybody. I suppose I could have told him a book he’d written wasn’t worth publishing.’

  ‘Could be, very well,’ said Fotheringay. ‘Something that don’t matter, like a book. You remember I thought this bloke was crazy right from the start.’

  ‘You said yourself it was out of proportion, didn’t you, Mr Hollies? And have you ever physically abused a girl, as I was told last night? Of course you haven’t. Nobody could believe such a thing who saw you reacting to what you thought was the real thing. Oh dear.’

  ‘There’s not much time,’ said Fotheringay. ‘We’ve said we’re sorry. We’re going to wrap this up. But you understand, Adrian, we want to protect ourselves. We request – that’s all we can do in the circumstances, request you to assist us. You’re a clever sort of fellow and you know about things like stories and writing scripts and that. Now you just get down to it and write a story for, er, for Chatterton here and me to learn, right, showing how you got the better of us and got out of here. Clocked one of us on the head, kind of style, and made a fool of the other, get the idea? Best you can do in the next hour or two. We’ll help you any way we can, I give you my solemn word.’

  ‘What about Beaumont-Snaith and Llewelyn?’

  ‘Yeah, well I reckon Llewelyn’ll do what we tell him, don’t you, Chatterton? As regards Beaumont-Snaith, he took a nasty bang on the head just now when we were discussing what to do, so could be he’ll turn out to fit into the scheme quite smoothly. We’ll just have to see how it goes, won’t we?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler,’ said Adrian, ‘if we all just pretended to have gone through the whole programme?’

  Fotheringay nodded slowly with eyebrows raised. ‘Okay, but only if you fancy spending a couple of months pretending to be a nervous wreck after it, which is what you would have been. And us trusting you to do it, of course. No, I reckon we’d all be better off with Plan A.’

  III

  ‘And I presume Plan A went reasonably well,’ said Derek Richards the following week.

  ‘That’s what I presume too,’ said Adrian. ‘We started off by cleverly buggering up the closed-circuit TV system, which naturally I’d assumed was there from the start. Then I luckily turned out to know a bit of karate, anyway enough of it to put paid to Beaumont-Snaith. Marvellous name, that. As for it going well, I’ve had no complaints, though I must say if I’d been one of them I wouldn’t be feeling all that easy in my mind.’

  ‘How about the doctor?’

  ‘The ex-doctor was going to disappear somewhere abroad whatever happened, on account of a previous piece of his doctoring having gone seriously wrong, and duly did, in a flash. He was a real ex-doctor, by the way, quite a different figure from the others.’

  ‘What tipped you off about them?’

  ‘Well, the general way they spoke and carried themselves and the rest of it, as if they were on the green, in mummers’ parlance. If you were
brought up in a theatrical household as I was, it’s unmistakable. You must have noticed, when you turn the TV on or switch channels at random, how quickly and certainly you can tell whether it’s acted, however straightforwardly, or real life. I realized rather late on that those chaps talked like coppers in telly plays, not actual coppers, though that was right in a way, but I had plenty of time to take in that they were camped-up villains too. Then when Chatterton took two actorial phrases from me in quick succession without turning a hair I knew I was right, and confirmed it by firing a couple of lines from Macbeth at Llewelyn and getting a shock-horror reaction. He must have carried a spear some time in a rep production of the Scottish play as they call it because they think it’s bad luck even to call it by its right name, let alone quote from it offstage. They’re all grossly superstitious.

  ‘What else did I know about actors as a tribe? That they were fluent but slow on the uptake, conformist, emotional and sentimental, impressionable, above all impressed by acting, so wrapped up in the theatre that to see a part played with conviction, in other words hammed up a trifle, affected them more than the real thing ever could. So I set about acting my head off in the part of the decent, plucky little man who stands up to the big bullies even though he’s scared to death and who can put up with his own sufferings but not somebody else’s. And it went down a treat, didn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t undersell yourself, dear boy. You showed some real pluck as well.’

  ‘I found I could miss a lot of that film by rolling my eyes up. And it’s easier when you’re acting. I must go.’

  ‘Where does Julie think you were?’

  ‘With A. N. Other. She had a fling with S. O. Else so that’s all right. We were having a difference at the time. I was only away for one night.’

  Adrian left Derek Richards in his office and went upstairs to his own. He had not told Derek or anybody else about how, immediately on returning to his desk, he had telephoned that Pennistone whose pitiable book on the world of high finance he had so rightly dismissed out of hand, nor how he had given Pennistone notice of his return, just that and no more, nor how half a minute’s complete silence at the other end of the line had been the only response.