The Ministry of Fear

"Not if it's a good hypo bath, Johns," Digby said. He lay back smiling lazily in the arm-chair, lean and bearded and middle-aged. The angry scar on his forehead looked out of place -- like duelling cuts on a professor.

"Hold on to that," Johns said -- it was one of his favourite expressions. "You went in for photography then?"

"Do you think that perhaps I was a fashionable portrait photographer?" Digby asked. "It doesn't exactly ring a bell, though of course it goes -- doesn't it? -- with the beard. No, I was thinking of a darkroom on the nursery floor at home. It was a linen cupboard too, and if you forgot to lock the door, a maid would come in with clean pillow slips and bang went the negative. You see, I remember things quite clearly until say, eighteen."

"You can talk about that time," Johns said, "as much as you like. You may get a clue and there's obviously no resistance -- from the Freudian censor."

"I was just wondering in bed this morning which of the people I wanted to become I did in fact choose. I remember I was very fond of books on African exploration -- Stanley, Baker, Livingstone, Burton, but there doesn't seem much opportunity for explorers nowadays."

He brooded without impatience. It was as if his happiness were drawn from an infinite fund of tiredness. He didn't want to exert himself. He was comfortable exactly as he was. Perhaps that was why his memory was slow in returning. He said dutifully, because of course one had to make some effort, "One might look up the old Colonial Office lists. Perhaps I went in for that. It's odd, isn't it, that knowing my name, you shouldn't have found any acquaintance. You'd think there would have been inquiries. If I had been married, for instance. That does trouble me. Suppose my wife is trying to find me. . ." If only that could be cleared up, he thought, I should be perfectly happy.

"As a matter of fact," Johns said and stopped.

"Don't tell me you've unearthed a wife?"

"Not exactly, but I think the doctor has something to tell you."

"Well," Digby said, "it is the hour of audience, isn't it?"

Each patient saw the doctor in his study for a quarter of an hour a day, except those who were being treated by psychoanalysis -- they were given an hour of his time. It was like visiting a benign headmaster out of school hours to have a chat about personal problems. One passed through the commonroom where the patients could read the papers, play chess or draughts, or indulge in the rather unpredictable social intercourse of shell-shocked men. Digby as a rule avoided the place; it was disconcerting, in what might have been the lounge of an exclusive hotel, to see a man quietly weeping in a corner. He felt himself to be so completely normal -- except for the gap of he didn't know how many years and an inexplicable happiness as if he had been relieved suddenly of some terrible responsibility -- that he was ill at ease in the company of men who all exhibited some obvious sign of an ordeal, the twitch of an eyelid, a shrillness of voice, or a melancholy that fitted as completely and inescapably as the skin.

Johns led the way. He filled with perfect tact a part which combined assistant, secretary and male nurse. He was not qualified, though the doctor occasionally let him loose on the simpler psyches. He had an enormous fund of hero-worship for the doctor, and Digby gathered that some incident in the doctor's past -- it might have been the suicide of a patient, but Johns was studiously vague -- enabled him to pose before himself as the champion of the great misunderstood. He said, "The jealousies of medical people -- you wouldn't believe it. The malice. The lies." He would get quite pink on the subject of what he called the doctor's martyrdom. There had been an inquiry: the doctor's methods were far in advance of his time; there had been talk -- so Digby gathered -- of taking away the doctor's licence to practice. "They crucified him," he said once with an illustrative gesture and knocked over the vase of daffodils. But eventually good had come out of evil (one felt the good included Johns); the doctor in disgust at the West End world had retired to the country, had opened his private clinic where he refused to accept any patient without a signed personal request -- even the more violent cases had been sane enough to put themselves voluntarily under the doctor's care.

"But what about me?" Digby had asked.

"Ah, you are the doctor's special case," Johns said mysteriously. "One day he'll tell you. You stumbled on salvation all right that night. And anyway you did sign."

It never lost its strangeness -- to remember nothing of how he had come here. He had simply woken to the restful room, the sound of the fountain, and a taste of drugs. It had been winter then. The trees were black, and sudden squalls of rain broke the peace. Once very far across the fields came a faint wail like a ship signalling departure. He would lie for hours, dreaming confusedly. It was as if then he might have remembered, but he hadn't got the strength to catch the hints, to fix the sudden pictures, he hadn't the vitality to connect. . . He would drink his medicines without complaint and go off into deep sleep which was only occasionally broken by strange nightmares in which a woman played a part.

It was a long time before they told him about the war, and that involved an enormous amount of historical explanation. What seemed odd to him, he found, was not what seemed odd to other people. For example, the fact that Paris was in German hands appeared to him quite natural -- he remembered how nearly it had been so before in the period of his life that he could recall, but the fact that we were at war with Italy shook him like an inexplicable catastrophe of nature.

"Italy," he exclaimed. Why, Italy was where two of his maiden aunts went every year to paint. He remembered too the Primitives in the National Gallery and Caporetto and Garibaldi, who had given a name to a biscuit, and Thomas Cook's. Then Johns patiently explained about Mussolini.

2

The doctor sat behind a bowl of flowers at his very simple unstained desk and he waved Digby in as if this were a favourite pupil. His elderly face under the snow-white hair was hawk-like and noble and a little histrionic, like the portrait of a Victorian. Johns sidled out, he gave the impression of stepping backwards the few paces to the door, and he stumbled on the edge of the carpet.

"Well, and how are you feeling?" the doctor said. "You look more yourself every day."

"Do I?" Digby asked. "But who knows really if I do? I don't, and you don't, Dr Forester. Perhaps I look less myself."

"That brings me to a piece of important news," Dr Forester said. "I have found somebody who will know. Somebody who knew you in the old days."

Digby's heart beat violently. He said, "Who?"

"I'm not going to tell you that. I want you to discover everything for yourself."

"It's silly of me," Digby said, "but I feel a bit faint."

"That's only natural," Dr Forester said. "You aren't very strong yet." He unlocked a cupboard and took out a glass and a bottle of sherry. "This'll put you to rights," he said.

"Tio Pepe," Digby said, draining it.

"You see," the doctor said, "things are coming back. Have another glass?"

"No, it's blasphemy to drink this as medicine."

The news had been a shock. He wasn't sure that he was glad. He couldn't tell what responsibility might descend on him when his memory returned. Life is broken as a rule to every man gently; duties accumulate so slowly that we hardly know they are there. Even a happy marriage is a thing of slow growth; love helps to make imperceptible the imprisonment of a man, but in a moment, by order, would it be possible to love a stranger who entered bearing twenty years of emotional claims? Now, with no memories nearer than his boyhood, he was entirely free. It wasn't that he feared to face himself; he knew what he was and he believed he knew the kind of man the boy he remembered would have become. It wasn't failure he feared nearly so much as the enormous tasks that success might confront him with.

Dr Forester said, "I have waited till now, till I felt you were strong enough."

"Yes," Digby said.

"You won't disappoint us, I'm sure," the doctor said. He was more than ever the headmaster, and Digby a pupil who had been entered for a university scholarship; he carried the prestige of the school as well as his own future with him to the examination. Johns would be waiting with anxiety for his return -- the form-master. Of course, they would be very kind if he failed. They would even blame the examiners. . .

"I'll leave the two of you alone," the doctor said.

"He's here now?"

"She is here," the doctor said.

3

It was an immense relief to see a stranger come in. He had been afraid that a whole generation of his life would walk through the door, but it was only a thin pretty girl with reddish hair, a small girl -- perhaps too small to be remembered. She wasn't, he felt certain, anybody he needed to fear.

He rose; politeness seemed the wrong thing; he didn't know whether he ought to shake hands -- or kiss her. He did neither. They looked at each other from a distance, and his heart beat heavily.

"How you've changed," she said.

"They are always telling me," he said, "that I'm looking quite myself."

"Your hair is much greyer. And that scar. And yet you look so much younger. . . happier."

"I lead a very pleasant easy life here."

"They've been good to you? " she asked with anxiety.

"Very good."

He felt as though he had taken a stranger out to dinner and now couldn't hit on the right conversational move. He said, "Excuse me. It sounds so abrupt. But I don't know your name."

"You don't remember me at all?"

"No."

He had occasionally had dreams about a woman, but it wasn't this woman. He couldn't remember any details of the dream except the woman's face, and that they had been filled with pain. He was glad that this was not the one. He looked at her again. "No," he said. "I'm sorry. I wish I could."

"Don't be sorry," she said with strange ferocity. "Never be sorry again."

"I just meant -- this silly brain of mine."

She said, "My name's Anna." She watched him carefully, "Hilfe."

"That sounds foreign."

"I am Austrian."

He said, "All this is so new to me. We are at war with Germany. Isn't Austria. . .?"

"I'm a refugee."

"Oh, yes," he said. "I've read about them."

"You have even forgotten the war?" she asked.

"I have a terrible lot to learn," he said.

"Yes, terrible. But need they teach it you?" She repeated. "You look so much happier. . ."

"One wouldn't be happy, not knowing anything." He hesitated and again said, "You must excuse me. There are so many questions. Were we simply friends?"

"Just friends. Why?"

"You are very pretty. I couldn't tell. . ."

"You saved my life."

"How did I do that?"

"When the bomb went off -- just before it went off -- you knocked me down and fell on me. I wasn't hurt."

"I'm very glad. I mean," he laughed nervously, "there might be all sorts of discreditable things to learn. I'm glad there's one good one."

"It seems so strange," she said. "All these terrible years since 1933 -- you've just read about them, that's all. They are history to you. You're fresh. You aren't tired like all the rest of us everywhere."

"1933," he said. "1933. Now 1066, I can give you that easily. And all the kings of England -- at least -- I'm not sure. . . perhaps not all."

"1933 was when Hitler came to power."

"Of course. I remember now. I've read it all over and over again, but the dates don't stick."

"And I suppose the hate doesn't either."

"I haven't any right to talk about these things," he said. "I haven't lived them. They taught me at school that William Rufus was a wicked king with red hair -- but you couldn't expect us to hate him. People like yourself have a right to hate. I haven't. You see I'm untouched."

"Your poor face," she said.

"Oh, the scar. That might have been anything -- a motor-car accident. And after all they were not meaning to kill me."

"No?"

"I'm not important." He had been talking foolishly, at random. He had assumed something, and after all there was nothing he could safely assume. He said anxiously, "I'm not important, am I? I can't be, or it would have been in the papers."

"They let you see the papers?"

"Oh yes, this isn't a prison, you know." He repeated, "I'm not important?"

She said evasively, "You are not famous."

"I suppose the doctor won't let you tell me anything. He says he wants it all to come through my memory, slowly and gently. But I wish you'd break the rule about just one thing. It's the only thing that worries me. I'm not married, am I?"

She said slowly, as if she wanted to be very accurate and not to tell him more than was necessary, "No, you are not married."

"It was an awful idea that I might suddenly have to take up an old relationship which would mean a lot to someone else and nothing to me. Just something I had been told about, like Hitler. Of course, a new one's different." He added with a shyness that looked awkward with grey hair, "You are a new one."

"And now there's nothing left to worry you?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said. "Or only one thing -- that you might go out of that door and not come back." He was always making advances and then hurriedly retreating like a boy who hasn't learned the technique. He said, "You see, I've suddenly lost all my friends except you."

She said rather sadly, "Did you have a great many?"

"I suppose -- by my age -- one would have collected a good many." He said cheerfully, "Or was I such a monster?"

She wouldn't be cheered up. She said, "Oh, I'll come back. They want me to come back. They want to know, you see, as soon as you begin to remember. . ."

"Of course they do. And you are the only clue they can give me. But have I got to stay here till I remember?"

"You wouldn't be much good, would you, without a memory -- outside?"

"I don't see why not. There's plenty of work for me. If the army won't have me, there's munitions. . ."

"Do you want to be in it all again?"

He said, "This is lovely and peaceful. But it's only a holiday after all. One's got to be of use." He went on, "Of course, it would be much easier if I knew what I'd been, what I could do best. I can't have been a man of leisure. There wasn't enough money in my family." He watched her face carefully while he guessed. "There aren't so many professions. Army, Navy, Church. . . I wasn't wearing the right clothes. . . if these are my clothes." There was so much room for doubt. "Law? Was it law, Anna? I don't believe it. I can't see myself in a wig getting some poor devil hanged."

Anna said, "No."

"It doesn't connect. After all, the child does make the man. I never wanted to be a lawyer. I did want to be an explorer -- but that's unlikely. Even with this beard. They tell me the beard really does belong. I wouldn't know. Oh," he went on, "I had enormous dreams of discovering unknown tribes in Central Africa. Medicine? No, I never liked doctoring. Too much pain. I hated pain." He was troubled by a slight dizziness. He said, "It made me feel ill, sick, hearing of pain. I remember -- something about a rat."

"Don't strain," she said. "It's not good to try too hard. There's no hurry."

"Oh, that was neither here nor there. I was a child then. Where did I get to? Medicine. . . Trade. I wouldn't like to remember suddenly that I was the general manager of a chain store. That wouldn't connect either. I never particularly wanted to be rich. I suppose in a way I wanted to lead -- a good life."

Any prolonged effort made his head ache. But there were things he had to remember. He could let old friendships and enmities remain in oblivion, but if he were to make something of what was left of life he had to know of what he was capable. He looked at his hand and flexed the fingers: they didn't feel useful.

"People don't always become what they want to be," Anna said.

"Of course not; a boy always wants to be a hero. A great explorer. A great writer. . . But there's usually a thin disappointing connection. The boy who wants to be rich goes into a bank. The explorer becomes -- oh, well, some underpaid colonial officer marking minutes in the heat. The writer joins the staff of a penny paper. . ." He said, "I'm sorry. I'm not as strong as I thought. I've gone a bit giddy. I'll have to stop -- work -- for the day."

Again she asked with odd anxiety, "They are good to you here?"

"I'm a prize patient," he said. "An interesting case."

"And Dr Forester -- you like Dr Forester?"

"He fills one with awe," he said.

"You've changed so much." She made a remark he couldn't understand. "This is how you should have been." They shook hands like strangers. He said, "And you'll come back often?"

"It's my job," she said, "Arthur." It was only after she had gone that he wondered at the name.

4

In the mornings a servant brought him breakfast in bed: coffee, toast, a boiled egg. The Home was nearly self-supporting; it had its own hens and pigs and a good many acres of rough shooting. The doctor did not shoot himself; he did not approve, Johns said, of taking animal life, but he was not a doctrinaire. His patients needed meat, and therefore shoots were held, though the doctor took no personal part. "It's really the idea of making it a sport," Johns explained, "which is against the grain. I think he'd really rather trap. . ."

On the tray lay always the morning paper. Digby had not been allowed this privilege for some weeks, until the war had been gently broken to him. Now he could lie late in bed, propped comfortably on three pillows, take a look at the news: "Air Raid Casualties this Week are Down to 255", sip his coffee and tap the shell of his boiled egg: then back to the paper -- "The Battle of the Atlantic". The eggs were always done exactly right: the white set and the yoke liquid and thick. Back to the paper: "The Admiralty regret to announce. . . lost with all hands." There was always enough butter to put a little in the egg, for the doctor kept his own cows.

This morning as he was reading Johns came in for a chat, and Digby looking up from the paper asked, "What's a Fifth Column?"

There was nothing Johns liked better than giving information. He talked for quite a while, bringing in Napoleon.

"In other words people in enemy pay?" Digby said. "That's nothing new."

"There's this difference," Johns said. "In the last war -- except for Irishmen like Casement -- the pay was always cash. Only a certain class was attracted. In this war there are all sorts of ideologies. The man who thinks gold is evil. . . He's naturally attracted to the German economic system. And the men who for years have talked against nationalism. . . well, they are seeing all the old national boundaries obliterated. Pan-Europe. Perhaps not quite in the way they meant. Napoleon too appealed to idealists." His glasses twinkled in the morning sun with the joys of instruction. "When you come to think of it, Napoleon was beaten by the little men, the materialists. Shopkeepers and peasants. People who couldn't see beyond their counter or their field. They'd eaten their lunch under that hedge all their life and they meant to go on doing it. So Napoleon went to St Helena."

"You don't sound a convinced patriot yourself," Digby said.

"Oh, but I am," Johns said earnestly. "I'm a little man too. My father's a chemist, and how he hates all these German medicines that were flooding the market. I'm like him. I'd rather stick to Burroughs and Wellcome than all the Bayers. . ." He went on, "All the same, the other does represent a mood. It's we who are the materialists. The scrapping of all the old boundaries, the new economic ideas. . . the hugeness of the dream. It is attractive to men who are not tied to a particular village or town they don't want to see scrapped. People with unhappy childhoods, progressive people who learn Esperanto, vegetarians who don't like shedding blood."

"But Hitler seems to be shedding plenty."

"Yes, but the idealists don't see blood like you and I do. They aren't materialists. It's all statistics to them."

"What about Dr Forester?" Digby asked. "He seems to fit the picture."

"Oh," Johns said enthusiastically, "he's sound as a bell. He's written a pamphlet for the Ministry of Information, 'The Psycho-Analysis of Nazidom'. But there was a time," he added, "when there was -- talk. You can't avoid witch-hunting in wartime, and, of course, there were rivals to hollo on the pack. You see, Dr Forester -- well, he's so alive to everything. He likes to know. For instance, spiritualism -- he's very interested in spiritualism, as an investigator."

"I was just reading the questions in Parliament," Digby said. "They suggest there's another kind of Fifth Column. People who are blackmailed."

"The Germans are wonderfully thorough," Johns said. "They did that in their own country. Card-indexed all the so-called leaders, Socialites, diplomats, politicians, labour leaders, priests -- and then presented the ultimatum. Everything forgiven and forgotten, or the Public Prosecutor. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd done the same thing over here. They formed, you know, a kind of Ministry of Fear -- with the most efficient under-secretaries. It isn't only that they get a hold on certain people. It's the general atmosphere they spread, so that you can't depend on a soul."

"Apparently," Digby said, "this M.P. has got the idea that important plans were stolen from the Ministry of Home Security. They had been brought over from a Service Ministry for a consultation and lodged overnight. He claims that next morning they were found to be missing."

"There must be an explanation," Johns said.

"There is. The Minister says that the honourable member was misinformed. The plans were not required for the morning conference, and at the afternoon conference they were produced, fully discussed and returned to the Service Ministry."

"These M.P.s get hold of odd stories," Johns said.

"Do you think," Digby asked, "that by any chance I was a detective before this happened? That might fit the ambition to be an explorer, mightn't it? Because there seem to me to be so many holes in the statement."

"It seems quite clear to me."

"The M.P. who asked the question must have been briefed by someone who knew about those plans. Somebody at the conference -- or somebody who was concerned in sending or receiving the plans. Nobody else could have known about them. Their existence is admitted by the Minister."

"Yes, yes. That's true."

"It's strange that anyone in that position should spread a canard. And do you notice that in that smooth elusive way politicians have the Minister doesn't, in fact, deny that the plans were missing? He says that they weren't wanted, and that when they were wanted they were there."

"You mean there was time to photograph them?" Johns said excitedly. "Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette? Here, let me take your tray." He spilt some coffee on the bed-sheet. "Do you know," he said, "there was a suggestion of that kind made nearly three months ago? It was just after your arrival. I'll look it out for you. Dr Forester keeps a file of The Times. Some papers were missing then for several hours. They tried to hush that up -- said it was just a case of carelessness and that the papers had never been out of the Ministry. An M.P. made a fuss -- talked about photographs, and they came down on him like a sledge-hammer. Trying to undermine public confidence. The papers had never left the possession -- I can't remember whose possession. Somebody whose word you had to take or else one of you would go to Brixton, and you could feel sure that it wouldn't be he. The papers shut down on it right away."

"It would be strange, wouldn't it, if the same thing had happened again."

Johns said excitedly, "Nobody outside would know. And the others wouldn't say."

"Perhaps the first time was a failure. Perhaps the photos didn't come out properly. Someone bungled. And of course they couldn't use the same man twice. They had to wait until they got their hands on a second man. Until they had him carded and filed in the Ministry of Fear." He thought aloud, "I suppose the only men they couldn't blackmail for something shabby would be saints -- or outcasts with nothing to lose."

"You weren't a detective," Johns exclaimed, "you were a detective writer."

Digby said, "You know, I feel quite tired. The brain begins to tick and then suddenly I feel so tired I could lie down and sleep. Perhaps I will." He closed his eyes and then opened them again. "The thing to do," he said, "would be to follow up the first case. . . the bungled one, to find the point of failure." Then he slept.

5

It was a fine afternoon, and Digby went for a solitary walk in the garden. Several days had passed since Anna Hilfe's visit, and he felt restless and moody like a boy in love. He wanted an opportunity to show that he was no invalid, that his mind could work as well as another man's. There was no satisfaction in shining before Johns. . . He dreamed wildly between the box-hedges.

The garden was of a rambling kind which should have belonged to childhood and only belonged to childish men. The apple trees were old apple trees and gave the effect of growing wild; they sprang unexpectedly up in the middle of a rose-bed, trespassed on a tennis-court, shaded the window of a little outside lavatory like a potting-shed which was used by the gardener -- an old man who could always be located from far away by the sound of a scythe or the trundle of a wheelbarrow. A high red brick wall divided the flower-garden from the kitchen-garden and the orchard, but flowers and fruit could not be imprisoned by a wall. Flowers broke among the artichokes and sprang up like flames under the trees. Beyond the orchard the garden faded gradually out into paddocks and a stream and a big untidy pond with an island the size of a billiard-table.

It was by the pond that Digby found Major Stone. He heard him first: a succession of angry grunts like a dog dreaming. Digby scrambled down a bank to the black edge of the water and Major Stone turned his very clear blue military eyes on him and said, "The job's got to be done." There was mud all over his tweed suit and mud on his hands; he had been throwing large stones into the water and now he was dragging a plank he must have found in the potting-shed along the edge of the water.

"It's sheer treachery," Major Stone said, "to leave a place like that unoccupied. You could command the whole house. . ." He slid the plank forward so that one end rested on a large stone. "Steady does it," he said. He advanced the plank inch by inch towards the next stone. "Here," he said, "you ease it along. I'll take the other end."

"Surely you aren't going in?"

"No depth at this side," Major Stone said, and walked straight into the pond. The black mud closed over his shoes and the turn-ups of his trousers. "Now," he said, "push. Steady does it." Digby pushed, but pushed too hard: the plank toppled sideways into the mud. "Damnation," said Major Stone. He bent and heaved and brought the plank up: scattering mud up to his waist, he lugged it ashore.

"Apologize," he said. "My temper's damned short. You aren't a trained man. Good of you to help."

"I'm afraid I wasn't much good."

"Just give me half a dozen sappers," Major Stone said, "and you'd see. . ." He stared wistfully across at the little bushy island. "But it's no good asking for the impossible. We've just got to make do. We'd manage all right if it wasn't for all this treachery." He looked Digby in the eyes as though he were sizing him up. "I've seen you about here a lot," he said. "Never spoke to you before. Liked the look of you, if you don't mind my saying so. I suppose you've been sick like the rest of us. Thank God, I'll be leaving here soon. Able to be of use again. What's been your trouble?"

"Loss of memory," Digby said.

"Been out there?" the major asked, jerking his head in the direction of the island.

"No, it was a bomb. In London."

"A bad war, this," the major said. "Civilians with shell-shock." It was uncertain whether he disapproved of the civilians or the shell-shock. His stiff fair hair was grizzled over the ears, and his very blue eyes peered out from under a yellow thatch. The whites were beautifully clear; he was a man who had always kept himself fit and ready to be of use. Now that he wasn't fit and wasn't of use, an awful confusion ruled the poor brain. He said, "There was treachery somewhere or it would never have happened," and turning his back abruptly on the island and the muddy remnants of his causeway, he scrambled up the bank and walked briskly towards the house.

Digby strolled on. At the tennis-court a furious game was in progress -- a really furious game. The two men leapt and sweated and scowled; their immense concentration was the only thing that looked abnormal about Still and Fishguard, but when the set was over, they would grow shrill and quarrelsome and a little hysterical. The same climax would be reached at chess. . .

The rose-garden was sheltered by two walls: one the wall of the vegetable-garden, the other the high wall that cut communication -- except for one small door -- with what Dr Forester and Johns called euphemistically "the sick bay". Nobody cared to talk about the sick bay -- grim things were assumed, a padded room, strait-jackets. You could see only the top windows from the garden, and they were barred. Not one man in the sanatorium was ignorant of how close he lived to that quiet wing. Hysteria over a game, a sense of treachery, in the case of Davis tears that came too easily -- they knew those things meant sickness just as much as violence did. They had signed away their freedom to Dr Forester in the hope of escaping worse, but if worse happened the building was there on the spot -- "the sick bay" -- there would be no need to travel to a strange asylum. Only Digby felt quite free from its shadow; the sick bay was not there for a happy man. Behind him the voices rose shrilly from the tennis-court: Fishguard's "I tell you it was inside". "Out." "Are you accusing me of cheating?" "You ought to have your eyes seen to" -- that was Still. The voices sounded so irreconcilable that you would have said such a quarrel could have no other end than blows -- but no blow was ever struck. Fear of the sick bay perhaps. The voices went suddenly off the air like an unpopular turn. When the dusk fell Still and Fishguard would be in the lounge playing chess together.

How far was the sick bay, Digby sometimes wondered, a fantasy of disordered minds? It was there, of course, the brick wing and the barred windows and the high wall; there was even a segregated staff whom other patients had certainly met at the monthly social evening which he had not yet attended. (The doctor believed that these occasions on which strangers were present -- the local clergyman, a sprinkling of elderly ladies, a retired architect -- helped the shell-shocked brains to adapt themselves to society and the conventions of good behaviour.) But was anybody certain that the sick bay was occupied? Sometimes it occurred to Digby that the wing had no more reality than the conception of Hell presented by sympathetic theologians -- a place without inhabitants which existed simply as a warning.

Suddenly Major Stone appeared again, walking rapidly. He saw Digby and veered towards him down one of the paths. Little beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He said to Digby, "You haven't seen me, do you hear? You haven't seen me," and brushed by. He seemed to be making for the paddock and the pond. In another moment he was out of sight among the shrubberies, and Digby walked on. It seemed to him that the time had come for him to leave. He wasn't in place here: he was normal. A faint uneasiness touched him when he remembered that Major Stone, too, had considered himself cured.

As he came in front of the house Johns emerged. He looked ruffled and anxious. He said, "Have you seen Major Stone?" Digby hesitated for a second only. Then he said, "No."

Johns said, "The doctor wants him. He's had a relapse."

The cameraderie of a fellow-patient weakened. Digby said, "I did see him earlier. . ."

"The doctor's very anxious. He may do himself an injury -- or someone else." The rimless glasses seemed to be heliographing a warning -- do you wish to be responsible?

Digby said uneasily, "You might have a look round the pond."

"Thanks," Johns said, and called out, "Poole. Poole."

"I'm coming," a voice said.

A sense of apprehension moved like a heavy curtain in Digby's mind; it was as though someone had whispered faintly to him so that he couldn't be sure of the words, "Take care." A man stood at the gate from the sick bay wearing the same kind of white coat that Johns wore on duty, but not so clean. He was a dwarfish man with huge twisted shoulders and an arrogant face. "The pond," Johns said.

The man blinked and made no movement, staring at Digby with impertinent curiosity. He had obviously come from the sick bay; he didn't belong in the garden. His coat and fingers were stained with what looked like iodine.

"We've got to hurry," Johns said. "The doctor's anxious. . ."

"Haven't I met you," Poole said, "somewhere before?" He watched Digby with a kind of enjoyment. "Oh yes I'm sure I have."

"No," Digby said. "No."

"Well, we know each other now," Poole said. He grinned at Digby and said with relish, "I'm the keeper," swinging a long simian arm towards the sick bay.

Digby said loudly, "I don't know you from Adam. I don't want to know you," and had time to see Johns' look of amazement before he turned his back and listened to their footsteps hurrying towards the pond.

It was true: he didn't know the man, but the whole obscurity of his past had seemed to shake -- something at any moment might emerge from behind the curtain. He had been frightened and so he had been vehement, but he felt sure that a black mark would be made on his chart of progress and he was apprehensive. . . Why should he fear to remember anything? He whispered to himself, "After all, I'm not a criminal."

6

At the front door a servant met him. "Mr Digby," she told him, "there's a visitor for you," and his heart beat with hope.

"Where?"

"In the lounge."

She was there looking at a Tatler, and he had no idea what to say to her. She stood there as he seemed to remember her from very far back, small, tense, on guard, and yet she was part of a whole world of experience of which he was innocent.

"It's good of you," he began and stopped. He was afraid if he once began making the small talk of a stranger, they would be condemned for life to that shadowy relationship. The weather would lie heavily on their tongues, and they would meet occasionally and talk about the theatre. When they passed in the street he would raise his hat, and something which was only just alive would be safely and hopelessly dead.

He said slowly,"I have been longing for this ever since you came. The days have been very long with nothing to do in them but think and wonder. This is such a strange life. . ."

"Strange and horrible," she said.

"Not so horrible," he said, but then he remembered Poole. He said, "How did we talk before my memory went? We didn't stand stiffly, did we, like this -- you holding a paper and I -- we were good friends, weren't we?"

"Yes."

He said, "We've got to get back. This isn't right. Sit down here and we'll both shut our eyes. Pretend it's the old days before the bomb went off. What were you saying to me then?" She sat in miserable silence and he said with astonishment, "You shouldn't cry."

"You said shut your eyes."

"They are shut now."

The bright artificial lounge where he felt a stranger, the glossy magazines and the glass ashtrays were no longer visible: there was just darkness. He put out his hand and touched her. He said, "Is this strange?"

After a long time a dried-up voice said, "No."

He said, "Of course I loved you, didn't I?" When she didn't answer, he said, "I must have loved you. Because directly you came in the other day -- there was such a sense of relief, of peace, as if I'd been expecting someone different. How could I have helped loving you?"

"It doesn't seem likely," she said.

"Why not?"

"We'd only known each other a few days."

"Too short, of course, for you to care about me."

Again there was a long silence. Then she said, "Yes, I did."

"Why? I'm so much older. I'm not much to look at. What sort of a person was I?"

She replied at once as though this were easy: this was part of the lesson she had really learnt: she had turned this over in her mind again and again. "You had a great sense of pity. You didn't like people to suffer."

"Is that unusual?" he asked, genuinely seeking information; he knew nothing of how people lived and thought outside.

"It was unusual," she said, "where I came from. My brother. . ." She caught her breath sharply.

"Of course," he said quickly, snatching at a memory before it went again, "you had a brother, hadn't you? He was a friend of mine too."

"Let's stop playing this game," she said, "Please." They opened their eyes simultaneously on the suave room.

He said, "I want to leave here."

"No," she said, "stay. Please."

"Why?"

"You are safe here."

He smiled. "From more bombs?"

"From a lot of things. You are happy here, aren't you?"

"In a way."

"There" -- she seemed to indicate the whole external world beyond the garden wall -- "you weren't happy." She added slowly, "I would do anything to keep you happy. This is how you should be. This is how I like you."

"You didn't like me out there?" He tried to catch her humorously in a contradiction, but she wouldn't play.

She said, "You can't go on seeing someone unhappy all day every day without breaking."

"I wish I could remember."

"Why bother to remember?"

He said simply -- it was one of the few things of which he was certain, "Oh, of course, one's got to remember. . ."

She watched him with intensity, as though she were making up her mind to some course of action. He went on, "If only to remember you, how I talked to you. . ."

"Oh, don't," she said, 'don't," and added harshly like a declaration of war, 'dear heart."

He said triumphantly, "That was how we talked."

She nodded, keeping her eyes on him.

He said, "My dear. . ."

Her voice was dry like an old portrait: the social varnish was cracking. She said, "You once said you'd do impossible things for me."

"Yes?"

"Do a possible one. Just be quiet. Stay here a few more weeks till your memory comes back. . ."

"If you'll come often. . ."

"I'll come."

He put his mouth against hers: the action had all the uncertainty of an adolescent kiss. "My dear, my dear," he said. "Why did you say we were only friends. . .?"

"I wasn't going to bind you."

"You've bound me now."

She said slowly, as though she were astonished, "And I'm glad."

All the way upstairs to his room, he could smell her. He could have gone into any chemist's shop and picked out her powder, and he could have told in the dark the texture of her skin. The experience was as new to him as adolescent love: he had the blind passionate innocence of a boy: like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness.

7

Next morning there was no paper on his tray. He asked the woman who brought his breakfast where it was, but all she could tell him was that she supposed it hadn't been delivered.

He was touched again by the faint fear he had felt the previous afternoon when Poole came out of the sick bay, and he waited impatiently for Johns to arrive for his morning chat and smoke. But Johns didn't come. He lay in bed and brooded for half an hour and then rang his bell. It was time for his clothes to be laid out, but when the maid came she said she had no orders.

"But you don't need orders," he said. "You do it every day."

"I has to have my orders," she said.

"Tell Mr Johns I'd like to see him."

"Yes, sir" -- but Johns didn't come. It was as if a cordon sanitaire had been drawn around his room.

For another half an hour he waited doing nothing. Then he got out of bed and went to the bookcase, but there was little that promised him distraction -- only the iron rations of learned old men. Tolstoy's What I Believe, Freud's The Psycho-Analysis of Everyday Life, a biography of Rudolph Steiner. He took the Tolstoy back with him, and opening it found faint indentations in the margin where pencil marks had been rubbed out. It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable and he read:

"Remembering all the evil I have done, suffered and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one's country. . ."

There was a kind of nobility in the blind shattering dogma, just as there was something ignoble in the attempt to rub out the pencil-mark. This was an opinion to be held openly if at all. He looked farther up the page: "Christ showed me that the fifth snare depriving me of welfare is the separation we make of our own from other nations. I cannot but believe this, and therefore if in a moment of forgetfulness feelings of enmity towards a man of another nation may rise within me. . ."

But that wasn't the point, he thought; he felt no enmity towards any individual across the frontier: if he wanted to take part again, it was love which drove him and not hate. He thought: Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town. . . his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain. . . where he used to dance at the Saturday hops. His thoughts fell back on one face with a sense of relief: he could rest there. Ah, he thought, Tolstoy should have lived in a small country -- not in Russia, which was a continent rather than a country. And why does he write as if the worst thing we can do to our fellow-man is to kill him? Everybody has to die and everybody fears death, but when we kill a man we save him from his fear which would otherwise grow year by year. . . One doesn't necessarily kill because one hates: one may kill because one loves. . . and again the old dizziness came back as though he had been struck over the heart.

He lay back on his pillow, and the brave old man with the long beard seemed to buzz at him: "I cannot acknowledge any States or nations. . . I cannot take part. . . I cannot take part." A kind of waking dream came to him of a man -- perhaps a friend, he couldn't see his face -- who hadn't been able to take part; some private grief had isolated him and hidden him like a beard -- what was it? he couldn't remember. The war and all that happened round him had seemed to belong to other people. The old man in the beard, he felt convinced, was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone?

But that reasoning, it could be argued, excused your enemy. And why not? he thought. It excused anyone who loved enough to kill or be killed. Why shouldn't you excuse your enemy? That didn't mean you must stand in lonely superiority, refuse to kill, and turn the intolerable cheek. "If a man offend thee. . ." there was the point -- not to kill for one's own sake. But for the sake of people you loved, and in the company of people you loved, it was right to risk damnation.

His mind returned to Anna Hilfe. When he thought of her it was with an absurd breathlessness. It was as if he were waiting again years ago outside -- wasn't it the King's Arms? -- and the girl he loved was coming down the street, and the night was full of pain and beauty and despair because one knew one was too young for anything to come of this. . .

He couldn't be bothered with Tolstoy any longer. It was unbearable to be treated as an invalid. What woman outside a Victorian novel could care for an invalid? It was all very well for Tolstoy to preach non-resistance: he had had his heroic violent hour at Sebastopol. Digby got out of bed and saw in the long narrow mirror his thin body and his grey hair and his beard. . .

The door opened: it was Dr Forester. Behind him, eyes lowered, subdued like someone found out, came Johns. Dr Forester shook his head and, "It won't do, Digby," he said, "it won't do. I'm disappointed."

Digby was still watching the sad grotesque figure in the mirror. He said, "I want my clothes. And a razor."

"Why a razor?"

"To shave. I'm certain this beard doesn't belong. . ."

"That only shows your memory isn't returning yet."

"And I had no paper this morning," he went weakly on.

Dr Forester said, "I gave orders that the paper was to be stopped. Johns has been acting unwisely. These long conversations about the war. . . You've excited yourself. Poole has told me how excited you were yesterday."

Digby, with his eyes on his own ageing figure in the striped pyjamas, said, "I won't be treated like an invalid or a child."

"You seem to have got it into your head," Dr Forester said, "that you have a talent for detection, that you were a detective perhaps in your previous life. . ."

"That was a joke," Digby said.

"I can assure you you were something quite different. Quite different," Dr Forester repeated.

"What was I?"

"It may be necessary one day to tell you," Dr Forester said, as though he were uttering a threat. "If it will prevent foolish mistakes. . ." Johns stood behind the doctor looking at the floor.

"I'm leaving here," Digby said.

The calm noble old face of Dr Forester suddenly crumpled into lines of dislike. He said sharply, "And paying your bill, I hope?"

"I hope so too."

The features reformed, but they were less convincing now. "My dear Digby," Dr Forester said, "you must be reasonable. You are a very sick man. A very sick man indeed. Twenty years of your life have been wiped out. That's not health. . . and yesterday and just now you showed an excitement which I've feared and hoped to avoid." He put his hand gently on the pyjama sleeve and said, "I don't want to have to restrain you, to have you certified. . ."

Digby said, "But I'm as sane as you are. You must know that."

"Major Stone thought so too. But I've had to transfer him to the sick bay. . . He had an obsession which might at any time have led to violence."

"But I. . ."

"Your symptoms are very much the same. This excitement. . ." The doctor raised his hand from the sleeve to the shoulder: a warm, soft, moist hand. He said, "Don't worry. We won't let it come to that, but for a little we must be very quiet. . . plenty of food, plenty of sleep. . . some very gentle bromides. . . no visitors for a while, not even our friend Johns. . . no more of these exciting intellectual conversations."

"Miss Hilfe?" Digby said.

"I made a mistake there," Dr Forester said. "We are not strong enough yet. I have told Miss Hilfe not to come again."

Chapter 2

THE SICK BAY

"Wherefore shrink from me? What have

I done that you should fear me? You

have been listening to evil tales, my child."

The Little Duke

1

WHEN a man rubs out a pencil-mark he should be careful to see that the line is quite obliterated. For if a secret is to be kept, no precautions are too great. If Dr Forester had not so inefficiently rubbed out the pencil-marks in the margins of Tolstoy's What I Believe, Mr Rennit might never have learnt what had happened to Jones, Johns would have remained a hero-worshipper, and it is possible that Major Stone would have slowly wilted into further depths of insanity between the padded hygienic walls of his room in the sick bay. And Digby? Digby might have remained Digby.

For it was the rubbed-out pencil-marks which kept Digby awake and brooding at the end of a day of loneliness and boredom. You couldn't respect a man who dared not hold his opinions openly, and when respect for Dr Forester was gone, a great deal went with it. The noble old face became less convincing: even his qualifications became questionable. What right had he to forbid the newspapers -- above all, what right had he to forbid the visits of Anna Hilfe?

Digby still felt like a schoolboy, but he now knew that his headmaster had secrets of which he was ashamed: he was no longer austere and self-sufficient. And so the schoolboy planned rebellion. At about half-past nine in the evening he heard the sound of a car, and watching between the curtains he saw the doctor drive away. Or rather Poole drove and the doctor sat beside him.

Until Digby saw Poole he had planned only a petty rebellion -- a secret visit to Johns' room; he felt sure he could persuade that young man to talk. Now he became bolder; he would visit the sick bay itself and speak to Stone. The patients must combine against tyranny, and an old memory slipped back of a deputation he had once led to his real headmaster because his form against all precedent -- for it was a classical form -- had been expected by a new master to learn trigonometry. The strange thing about a memory like that was that it seemed young as well as old: so little had happened since that he could remember. He had lost all his mature experience.

A bubble of excited merriment impeded his breath as he opened the door of his room and took a quick look down the corridor. He was afraid of undefined punishments, and for that reason he felt his action was heroic and worthy of someone in love. There was an innocent sensuality in his thought; he was like a boy who boasts of a beating he has risked to a girl, sitting in the sunshine by the cricket-ground, drinking ginger-beer, hearing the pad-pad of wood and leather, under the spell, day-dreaming and in love. . .

There was a graduated curfew for patients according to their health, but by half-past nine all were supposed to be in bed and asleep. But you couldn't enforce sleep. Passing Davis's door he could hear the strange uncontrollable whine of a man weeping. . . Farther down the passage Johns' door was open and the light was on. Taking off his bedroom slippers, he passed quickly across the door-way, but Johns wasn't there. Incurably sociable he was probably chatting with the housekeeper. On his desk was a pile of newspapers; he had obviously picked them out for Digby before the doctor had laid his ban. It was a temptation to stay and read them, but the small temptation didn't suit the mood of high adventure. Tonight he would do something no patient had ever voluntarily done before -- enter the sick bay. He moved carefully and silently -- the words "Pathfinder" and "Indian" came to his mind -- downstairs.

In the lounge the lights were off, but the curtains were undrawn and the moonlight welled in with the sound of the splashing fountain and the shadow of silver leaves. The Tatlers had been tidied on the tables, the ashtrays taken away, and the cushions shaken on the chairs -- it looked now like a room in an exhibition where nobody crosses the ropes. The next door brought him into the passage by Dr Forester's study. As he quietly closed each door behind him he felt as though he were cutting off his own retreat. His ribs seemed to vibrate to the beat-beat of his heart. Ahead of him was the green baize door he had never seen opened, and beyond that door lay the sick bay. He was back in his own childhood, breaking out of dormitory, daring more than he really wanted to dare, proving himself. He hoped the door would be bolted on the other side; then there would be nothing he could do but creep back to bed, honour satisfied. . .

The door pulled easily open. It was only the cover for another door, to deaden sound and leave the doctor in his study undisturbed. But that door, too, had been left unlocked, unbolted. As he passed into the passage beyond, the green baize swung to behind him with a long sigh.

2

He stood stone still and listened. Somewhere a clock ticked with a cheap tinny sound, and a tap had been left dripping. This must once have been the servants' quarters: the floor was stone, and his bedroom slippers pushed up a little smoke of dust. Everything spoke of neglect; the woodwork when he reached the stairs had not been polished for a very long time and the thin drugget had been worn threadbare. It was an odd contrast to the spruce nursing home beyond the door; everything around him shrugged its shoulders and said, "We are not important. Nobody sees us here. Our only duty is to be quiet and not disturb the doctor." And what could be quieter than dust? If it had not been for the clock ticking he would have doubted whether anyone really lived in this part of the house -- the clock and the faintest tang of stale cigarette smoke, of Caporal, that set his heart beating again with apprehension.

Where the clock ticked Poole must live. Whenever he thought of Poole he was aware of something unhappy, something imprisoned at the bottom of the brain trying to climb out. It frightened him in the same way as birds frightened him when they beat up and down in closed rooms. There was only one way to escape -- the fear of another creature's pain. That was to lash out until the bird was stunned and quiet or dead. For the moment he forgot Major Stone, and smelt his way towards Poole's room.

It was at the end of the passage where the tap dripped, a large square, comfortless room with a stone floor divided in half by a curtain -- it had probably once been a kitchen. Its new owner had lent it an aggressive and squalid masculinity as if he had something to prove; there were ends of cigarettes upon the floor, and nothing was used for its right purpose. A clock and a cheap brown teapot served as book-ends on a wardrobe to prop up a shabby collection -- Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship, lives of Napoleon and Cromwell, and numbers of little paper-covered books about what to do with Youth, Labour, Europe, God. The windows were all shut, and when Digby lifted the drab curtain he could see the bed had not been properly made -- or else Poole had flung himself down for a rest and hadn't bothered to tidy it afterwards. The tap dripped into a fixed basin and a sponge-bag dangled from a bedpost. A used tin which once held lobster paste now held old razor-blades. The place was as comfortless as a transit camp; the owner might have been someone who was just passing on and couldn't be bothered to change so much as a stain on the wall. An open suitcase full of soiled underclothes gave the impression that he hadn't even troubled to unpack.

It was like the underside of a stone: you turned up the bright polished nursing home and found beneath it this.

Everywhere there was the smell of Caporal, and on the beds there were crumbs, as though Poole took food to bed with him. Digby stared at the crumbs a long while: a feeling of sadness and disquiet and dangers he couldn't place haunted him -- as though something were disappointing his expectations -- as though the cricket match were a frost, nobody had come to the half-term holiday, and he waited and waited outside the King's Arms for a girl who would never turn up. He had nothing to compare this place with. The nursing home was something artificial, hidden in a garden. Was it possible that ordinary life was like this? He remembered a lawn and afternoon tea and a drawing-room with water-colours and little tables, a piano no one played and the smell of eau-de-Cologne; but was this the real adult life to which we came in time? Had he, too, belonged to this world? He was saddened by a sense of familiarity. It was not of this last he had dreamed a few years back at school, but he remembered that the years since then were not few but many.

At last the sense of danger reminded him of poor imprisoned Stone. He might not have long before the doctor and Poole returned, and though he could not believe they had any power over him, he was yet afraid of sanctions he couldn't picture. His slippers padded again up the passage and up the dingy stairs to the first floor. There was no sound here at all: the tick of the clock didn't reach as far: large bells on rusty wires hung outside what might have been the butler's pantry. They were marked Study, Drawing-Room, 1st Spare Bedroom, 2nd Spare Bedroom, Day Nursery. . . The wires sagged with disuse and a spider had laid its scaffolding across the bell marked Dining-Room.

The barred windows he had seen over the garden wall had been on the second floor, and he mounted unwillingly higher. He was endangering his own retreat with every step, but he had dared himself to speak to Stone, and if it were only one syllable he must speak it. He went down a passage calling softly, "Stone. Stone."

There was no reply and the old cracked linoleum creaked under his feet and sometimes caught his toes. Again he felt a familiarity -- as if this cautious walking, this solitary passage, belonged more to this world than the sleek bedroom in the other wing. "Stone," he called, "Stone," and heard a voice answer, "Barnes. Is that you, Barnes?" coming startlingly from the door beside him.

"Hush," he said, and putting his lips close to the key-hole, "It's not Barnes. It's Digby."

He heard Stone sigh. "Of course," the voice said, "Barnes is dead. I was screaming. . ."

"Are you all right, Stone?"

"I've had an awful time," Stone said, so low that Digby could hardly hear him, "an awful time. I didn't really mean I wouldn't eat. . ."

"Come to the door so that I can hear you better."

Stone said, "They've got me in one of these strait-jackets. They said I was violent: I don't think I was violent. It's just the treachery. . ." He must have got nearer the door, because his voice was much clearer. He said, "Old man, I know I've been a bit touched. We all are in this place, aren't we? But I'm not mad. It just isn't right."

"What did you do?"

"I wanted to find a room to enfilade that island from. They'd begun to dig, you see, months ago. I saw them one evening after dark. One couldn't leave it at that. The Hun doesn't let the grass grow. So I came through into this wing and went to Poole's room. . ."

"Yes?"

"I didn't mean to make them jump. I just wanted to explain what I was after."

"Jump?"

"The doctor was there with Poole. They were doing something in the dark. . ." The voice broke: it was horrible hearing a middle-aged man sobbing invisibly behind a locked door.

"But the digging?" Digby asked. "You must have dreamed. . ."

"That tube. . . It was awful, old man. I hadn't really meant I wouldn't eat. I was just afraid of poison."

"Poison?"

"Treachery," the voice said. "Listen, Barnes. . ."

"I'm not Barnes."

Again there was a long sigh. "Of course. I'm sorry. It's getting me down. I am touched, you know. Perhaps they are right."

"Who's Barnes?"

"He was a good man. They got him on the beach. It's no good, Digby. I'm mad. Every day in every way I get worse and worse."

Somewhere from far away, through an open window on the floor below, came the sound of a car. Digby put his lips to the door and said, "I can't stay, Stone. Listen. You are not mad. You've got ideas into your head, that's all. It's not right putting you here. Somehow I'll get you out. Just stick it."

"You're a good chap, Digby."

"They've threatened me with this too."

"You," Stone whispered back. "But you're sane enough. By God, perhaps I'm not so touched after all. If they want to put you here, it must be treachery."

"Stick it."

"I'll stick it, old man. It was the uncertainty. I thought perhaps they were right."

The sound of the car faded.

"Haven't you any relations?"

"Not a soul," the voice said. "I had a wife, but she went away. She was quite right, old chap, quite right. There was a lot of treachery."

"I'll get you out. I don't know how, but I'll get you out."

"That island, Digby. . . you've got to watch it, old man. I can't do anything here, and I don't matter, anyway. But if I could just have fifty of the old bunch. . ."

Digby reassured him gently, "I'll watch the island."

"I thought the Hun had got hold of it. They don't let the grass grow. . . But I'm sometimes a bit confused, old man."

"I must go now. Just stick it."

"I'll stick it, old man. Been in worse places. But I wish you didn't have to go."

"I'll come back for you."

But he hadn't the faintest idea of how. A terrible sense of pity moved him; he felt capable of murder for the release of that gentle tormented creature. He could see him walking into the muddy pond. . . the very clear blue eyes and the bristly military moustache and the lines of care and responsibility. That was a thing you learned in this place: that a man kept his character even when he was insane. No madness would ever dim that military sense of duty to others.

His reconnaissance had proved easier than he had any right to expect: the doctor must be taking a long ride. He reached the green baize door safely, and when it sighed behind him, it was like Stone's weary patience asking him to come back. He passed quickly through the lounge and then more carefully up the stairs until he came again within sight of Johns' open door. Johns wasn't there: the clock on his desk had only moved on twelve minutes: the papers lay in the lamplight. He felt as though he had explored a strange country and returned home to find it all a dream -- not a single page of the calendar turned during all his wanderings.

3

He wasn't afraid of Johns. He went in and picked up one of the offending papers. Johns had arranged them in order and marked the passages. He must have been bitten by the passion for detection. The Ministry of Home Security, Digby read, had replied months ago to a question about a missing document in much the same terms as in the later case. It had never been missing. There had been at most a slight indiscretion, but the document had never left the personal possession of -- and there was the great staid respected name which Johns had forgotten. In the face of such a statement how could anyone continue to suggest that the document had been photographed? That was to accuse the great staid name not of an indiscretion but of treason. It was perhaps a mistake not to have left the document in the office safe overnight, but the great name had given his personal assurance to the Minister that not for one second had the document been out of his possession. He had slept with it literally under his pillow. . . The Times hinted that it would be interesting to investigate how the calumny had started. Was the enemy trying to sap our confidence in our hereditary leaders by a whisper campaign? After two or three issues there was silence.

A rather frightening fascination lay in these months-old newspapers. Digby had slowly had to relearn most of the household names, but he could hardly turn the page of any newspaper without encountering some great man of whom he had never heard, and occasionally there would crop up a name he did recognize -- someone who had been a figure twenty years ago. He felt like a Rip Van Winkle returning after a quarter of a century's sleep; the people of whom he had heard hardly connected better than he did with his youth. Men of brilliant promise had lapsed into the Board of Trade, and of course in one great case a man who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of his country. One of Digby's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

He turned a page and read casually under a photograph: "Arthur Rowe whom the police are anxious to interview in connection. . ." He wasn't interested in crime. The photograph showed a lean shabby clean-shaven man. All photographs of criminals looked much alike -- perhaps it was the spots, the pointilliste technique of the newspaper photograph. There was so much of the past he had to learn that he couldn't be bothered to learn the criminals, at any rate of the domestic kind.

A board creaked and he turned. Johns hovered and blinked in the doorway.

"Good evening, Johns," Digby said.

"What are you doing here?"

"Reading the papers," Digby said.

"But you heard the doctor say. . ."

"This isn't a prison, Johns," Digby said, "except for poor Stone. It's a very charming nursing home and I'm a private patient with nothing wrong except loss of memory due to a bomb. . ." He realized that Johns was listening to him with intensity. "Isn't that about it?" he asked.

"It must be, mustn't it," Johns said.

"So we must keep a sense of proportion, and there's no earthly reason why, if I don't feel like sleep, I shouldn't stroll down the passage to your room for a chat and to read. . ."

"When you put it like that," Johns said, "it sounds so simple."

"The doctor makes you see it differently, doesn't he?"

"All the same a patient ought to follow the treatment. . ."

"Or change his doctor. You know I've decided to change my doctor."

"To leave?" Johns asked. There was fear in his voice.

"To leave."

"Please don't do anything rash," Johns said. "The doctor's a great man. He's suffered a lot. . . and that may have made him a bit. . . eccentric. But you can't do better than stay here, really you can't."

"I'm going, Johns."

"Just another month," Johns entreated. "You've been doing so well. Until that girl came. Just a month. I'll speak to the doctor. He'll let you have the papers again. Perhaps he'll even let her come. Only let me put it to him. I know the way. He's so sensitive: he takes offence."

"Johns," Digby asked gently, "why should you be afraid of my going?"

The unrimmed glasses caught the light and set it flickering along the wall. Johns said uncontrollably, "I'm not afraid of your going. I'm afraid -- I'm afraid of his not letting you go." Very far away they both heard the purr-purr of a car.

"What's wrong with the doctor?" Johns shook his head and the reflection danced again upon the wall. "There's something wrong," Digby pressed him. "Poor Stone saw something odd and so he's put away. . ."

"For his own good," Johns said imploringly. "Dr Forester knows. He's such a great man, Digby."

"For his own good be damned. I've been to the sick bay and talked to him. . ."

"You've been there!" Johns said.

"Haven't you -- ever?"

"It's forbidden," Johns said.

"Do you always do exactly what Dr Forester tells you?"

"He's a great doctor, Digby. You don't understand: brains are the most delicate mechanisms. The least thing to upset the equilibrium and everything goes wrong. You have to trust the doctor."

"I don't trust him."

"You mustn't say that. If you knew how skilful he is, the endless care he takes. He's trying to shelter you until you are really strong enough. . ."

"Stone saw something odd and Stone's put away."

"No, no." Johns put out a weak hand and laid it on the newspapers like a badgered politician gaining confidence from the dispatch box. "If you only knew, Digby. They've made him suffer so with their jealousies and misunderstandings, but he's so great and good and kind. . ."

"Ask Stone about that."

"If you only knew. . ."

A soft savage voice said, "I think he'll have to know." It was Dr Forester, and again that sense of possible and yet inconceivable sanctions set Digby's heart beating.

Johns said, "Dr Forester, I didn't give him leave. . ."

"That's all right Johns," Dr Forester said, "you are very loyal, I know. I like loyalty." He began to take off the gloves he had been wearing in the car; he drew them slowly off the long beautiful fingers. "I remember after Conway's suicide how you stood by me. I don't forget a friend. Have you ever told Digby about Conway's suicide?"

"Never," Johns protested.

"But he should know, Johns. It's a case in point. Conway also suffered from loss of memory. Life, you see, had become too much for him -- and loss of memory was his escape. I tried to make him strong, to stiffen his resistance, so that when his memory came back, he would be able to meet his very difficult situation. The time I spent, wasted on Conway. Johns will tell you I was very patient -- he was unbearably impertinent. But I'm human, Digby, and one day I lost my temper. I do lose my temper -- very seldom, but sometimes. I told Conway everything, and he killed himself that night. You see, his mind hadn't been given time to heal. There was a lot of trouble, but Johns stood by me. He realizes that to be a good psychologist you sometimes have to share the mental weaknesses of the patient: one cannot be quite sane all the time. That's what gives one sympathy -- and the other thing."

He spoke gently and calmly, as though he were lecturing on an abstract subject, but the long surgical fingers had taken up one of the newspapers and was tearing it in long strips.

Digby said, "But my case is different, Dr Forester. It was only a bomb that destroyed my memory. Not trouble."

"Do you really believe that?" Dr Forester said. "And I suppose you think it was just gunfire, concussion, which drove Stone out of his mind? That isn't how the mind works. We make our own insanity. Stone failed -- shamefully, so now he explains everything by treachery. But it wasn't anybody else's treachery that left his friend Barnes. . ."

"And you have a revelation up your sleeve for me too, Dr Forester?" He remembered the pencil-marks in the Tolstoy rubbed out by a man without the courage of his opinions and that heartened him. He asked, "What were you doing with Poole in the dark when Stone found you?" He had meant it only as a piece of impertinent defiance; he had believed that the scene existed only in Stone's persecuted imagination -- like the enemy digging on the island. He hadn't expected to halt Dr Forester in the middle of his soft tirade. The silence was disagreeable. He tailed weakly off, "And digging. . ."

The noble old face watched him, the mouth a little open: a tiny dribble ran down the chin.

Johns said, "Please go to bed, Digby. Let's talk in the morning."

"I'm quite ready to go to bed," Digby said. He felt suddenly ridiculous in his trailing dressing-gown and his heelless slippers; he was apprehensive too -- it was like turning his back on a man with a gun.

"Wait," Dr Forester said. "I haven't told you yet. When you know you can choose between Conway's method and Stone's method. There's room in the sick bay. . ."

"You ought to be there yourself, Dr Forester."

"You're a fool," Dr Forester said. "A fool in love. . . I watch my patients. I know. What's the good of you being in love? You don't even know your real name." He tore a piece out of one of the papers and held it out to Digby. "There you are. That's you. A murderer. Go and think about that."

It was the photograph he hadn't bothered to examine. The thing was absurd. He said, "That's not me."

"Go and look in the glass then," Dr Forester said. "And then begin to remember. You've got a lot to remember."

Johns protested. "Doctor, that's not the way. . ."

"He asked for it," Dr Forester said, "just like Conway did." But Digby heard no more of what Johns had to say: he was running down the pasage towards his room; half-way he tripped on his dressing-gown cord and fell. He hardly felt the shock. He got to his feet a little giddy -- that was all. He wanted a looking-glass.

The lean bearded face looked out at him in the familiar room. There was a smell of cut flowers. This was where he had been happy. How could he believe what the doctor had said? There must be a mistake. It didn't connect. . . At first he could hardly see the photograph; his heart beat and his head was confused. This isn't me, he thought, as that lean shaven other face with the unhappy eyes and the shabby suit came into focus. They didn't fit; the memories he had of twenty years ago and Arthur Rowe whom the police wanted to interview in connection with -- but Dr Forester had torn the paper too carelessly. In those twenty years he couldn't have gone astray as far as this. He thought: Whatever they say, this man standing here is me. I'm not changed because I lose my memory. This photograph and Anna Hilfe didn't fit, he protested, and suddenly he remembered what had puzzled him and he had quite forgotten, Anna's voice saying, "It's my job, Arthur." He put his hand up to his chin and hid the beard; the long twisted nose told its tale, and the eyes which were unhappy enough now. He steadied himself with his hands on the dressing-table and thought: Yes, I'm Arthur Rowe. He began to talk to himself under his breath, But I'm not Conway. I shan't kill myself.

He was Arthur Rowe with a difference. He was next door to his own youth; he had started again from there. He said, In a moment it's going to come back, but I'm not Conway -- and I won't be Stone. I've escaped for long enough: my brain will stand it. It wasn't all fear that he felt; he felt also the untired courage and the chivalry of adolescence. He was no longer too old and too habit-ridden to start again. He shut his eyes and thought of Poole, and an odd medley of impressions fought at the gateway of his unconsciousness to be let out: a book called The Little Duke and the word Naples -- see Naples and die -- and Poole again, Poole sitting crouched in a chair in a little dark dingy room eating cake, and Dr Forester, Dr Forester stooping over something dark and bleeding. . . The memories thickened -- a woman's face came up for a moment with immense sadness and then sank again like someone drowned, out of sight; his head was racked with pain as other memories struggled to get out like a child out of its mother's body. He put his hands on the dressing-table and held to it; he said to himself over and over again, "I must stand up. I must stand up," as though there were some healing virtue in simply remaining on his feet while his brain reeled with the horror of returning life.

BOOK THREE

Bits and Pieces

Chapter 1

THE ROMAN DEATH

"A business that could scarcely have been pleasant"

The Little Duke

1

ROWE followed the man in the blue uniform up the stone stairs and along a corridor lined with doors; some of them were open, and he could see that they led into little rooms all the same shape and size like confessionals. A table and three chairs: there was never anything else, and the chairs were hard and upright. The man opened one door -- but there seemed no reason why he should not have opened any of the others -- and said, "Wait here, sir."

It was early in the morning; the steel rim of the window enclosed a grey cold sky. The last stars had only just gone out. He sat with his hands between his knees in a dull tired patience; he wasn't important, he hadn't become an explorer; he was just a criminal. The effect of reaching this place had exhausted him; he couldn't even remember with any clearness what he had done -- only the long walk through the dark countryside to the station, trembling when the cows coughed behind the hedgerows and an owl shrieked, pacing up and down upon the platform till the train came, the smell of grass and steam. The collector had wanted his ticket and he had none nor had he any money to pay with. He knew his name or thought he knew his name, but he had no address to give. The man had been very kind and gentle; perhaps he looked sick. He had asked him if he had no friends to whom he was going, and he replied that he had no friends. . . "I want to see the police," he said, and the collector rebuked him mildly, "You don't have to go all the way to London for that, sir."

There was a moment of dreadful suspense when he thought he would be returned like a truant child. The collector said, "You are one of Dr Forester's patients, aren't you, sir? Now if you get out at the next station, they'll telephone for a car. It won't take more than thirty minutes."

"No."

"You lost your way, sir, I expect, but you don't need to worry with a gentleman like Dr Forester."

He gathered all the energy of which he was capable and said, "I am going to Scotland Yard. I'm wanted there. If you stop me, it's your responsibility."

At the next stop -- which was only a halt, a few feet of platform and a wooden shed among dark level fields -- he saw Johns; they must have gone to his room and found it empty and Johns had driven over. Johns saw him at once and came with strained naturalness to the door of the compartment; the guard hovered in the background.

"Hullo, old man," Johns said uneasily, "just hop out. I've got the car here -- it won't take a moment to get home."

"I'm not coming."

"The doctor's very distressed. He'd had a long day and he lost his temper. He didn't mean half of what he said."

"I'm not coming."

The guard came nearer to show that he was willing to lend a hand if force were necessary. Rowe said furiously, "You haven't certified me yet. You can't drag me out of the train," and the guard edged up. He said softly to Johns, "The gentleman hasn't got a ticket."

"It's all right," Johns said surprisingly, "there's nothing wrong." He leant forward and said in a whisper, "Good luck, old man." The train drew away, laying its steam like a screen across the car, the shed, the figure which didn't dare to wave.

Now all the trouble was over; all that was left was a trial for murder.

Rowe sat on; the steely sky paled and a few taxis hooted. A small fat distrait man in a double-breasted waistcoat opened the door once, took a look at him and said, "Where's Beale?" but didn't wait for an answer. The long wounded cry of a boat came up from the Pool. Somebody went whistling down the corridor outside, once there was the chink-chink of teacups, and a faint smell of kipper blew in from a distance.

The little stout man carne briskly in again; he had a round over-sized face and a small fair moustache. He carried the slip Rowe had filled in down below. "So you are Mr Rowe," he said sternly. "We are glad you've come to see us at last." He rang a bell and a uniformed constable answered it. He said, "Is Beavis on duty? Tell him to come along."

He sat down and crossed his neat plump thighs and looked at his nails. They were very well kept. He looked at them from every angle and seemed worried about the cuticle of his left thumb. He said nothing. It was obvious that he wouldn't talk without a witness. Then a big man in a ready-to-wear suit came with a pad and a pencil and took the third chair. His ears were enormous and stuck out straight from his skull and he had an odd air of muted shame like a bull who has begun to realize that he is out of place in a china shop. When he held the pencil to the pad you expected one or the other to suffer in his awkward grasp, and you felt too that he knew and feared the event.

"Well," the dapper man said, sighed, and tucked his nails away for preservation under his thighs. He said, "You've come here, Mr Rowe, of your own accord to volunteer a statement?"

Rowe said, "I saw a photograph in the paper. . ."

"We've been asking you to come forward for months."

"I knew it for the first time last night."

"You seem to have lived a bit out the world."

"I've been in a nursing home. You see. . ."

Every time he spoke the pencil squeaked on the paper, making a stiff consecutive narrative out of his haphazard sentences.

"What nursing home?"

"It was kept by a Dr Forester." He gave the name of the railway station. He knew no other name. He explained, "Apparently there was a raid." He touched the scar on his forehead. "I lost my memory. I found myself at this place knowing nothing -- except bits of my childhood. They told me my name was Richard Digby. I didn't even recognize the photograph at first. You see, this beard. . ."

"And your memory has come back now, I hope?" the little man asked sharply, with a touch -- a very faint touch -- of sarcasm.

"I can remember something, but not much."

"A very convenient sort of memory."

"I am trying," Rowe said with a flash of anger, "to tell you all I know. . . In English law isn't a man supposed to be innocent until you prove him guilty? I'm ready to tell you everything I can remember about the murder, but I'm not a murderer."

The plump man began to smile. He drew out his hands and looked at his nails and tucked them back again. "That's interesting, Mr Rowe," he said. "You mentioned murder, but I have said nothing about murder to you, and no paper has mentioned the word murder. . . yet."

"I don't understand."

"We play strictly fair. Read out his statement so far, Beavis."

Beavis obeyed, blushing nervously, as though he were an overgrown schoolboy at a lectern reading Deuteronomy. "I Arthur Rowe, have made this statement voluntarily. Last night, when I saw a photograph of myself in a newspaper, I knew for the first time that the police wanted to interview me. I have been in a nursing home kept by a Dr Forester for the last four months, suffering from loss of memory due to an air-raid. My memory is not fully restored, but I wish to tell everything I know in connection with the murder of. . ."

The detective stopped Beavis. He said, "That's quite fair, isn't it?"

"I suppose it is."

"You'll be asked to sign it presently. Now tell us the name of the murdered man."

"I don't remember it."

"I see. Who told you we wanted to talk to you about a murder?"

"Dr Forester."

The promptness of the reply seemed to take the detective by surprise. Even Beavis hesitated before the pencil bore down again upon the pad. "Dr Forester told you?"

"Yes."

"How did he know?"

"I suppose he read it in the papers."

"We have never mentioned murder in the papers."

Rowe leant his head wearily on his hand. Again his brain felt the pressure of associations. He said, " Perhaps. . ." The horrible memory, stirred, crystallized, dissolved. "I don't know."

It seemed to him that the detective's manner was a little more sympathetic. He said, "Just tell us -- in any order -- in your own words -- what you do remember."

"It will have to be in any order. First there's Poole. He's an attendant in Dr Forester's sick bay -- where the violent cases go, only I don't think they are always violent. I know that I met him in the old days -- before my memory went. I can remember a little shabby room with a picture of the Bay of Naples. I seemed to be living there -- I don't know why. It's not the sort of place I'd choose. So much of what's come back is just feelings, emotion -- not fact."

"Never mind," the detective said.

"It's the way you remember a dream when most of it has gone. I remember great sadness -- and fear, and, yes, a sense of danger, and an odd taste."

"Of what?"

"We were drinking tea. He wanted me to give him something."

"What?"

"I can't remember. What I do remember is absurd. A cake."

"A cake?"

"It was made with real eggs. And then something happened. . ." He felt terribly tired. The sun was coming out. People all over the city were going to work. He felt like a man in mortal sin who watches other people go to receive the sacrament -- abandoned. If only he knew what his work was.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

"Yes. I'm a bit tired."

"Go and find some tea, Beavis, and some biscuits -- or cake."

He asked no more questions until Beavis had returned, but suddenly as Rowe put out his hand to take a piece of cake, he said, "There are no real eggs in that, I'm afraid. Yours must have been home-made. You couldn't have bought it."

Without considering his reply, Rowe said: "Oh no, I didn't buy it, I won it. . ." and stopped. "That's absurd. I wasn't thinking. . ." The tea made him feel stronger. He said, "You don't treat your murderers too badly."

The detective said, "Just go on remembering."

"I remember a lot of people sitting round a room and the lights going out. And I was afraid that someone was going to come up behind me and stab me or strangle me. And a voice speaking. That's worse than anything -- a hopeless pain, but I can't remember a word. And then all the lights are on, and a man's dead, and I suppose that's what you say I've done. But I don't think it's true."

"Would you remember the man's face?"

"I think I would."

"File, Beavis."

It was growing hot in the small room. The detective's forehead was beaded and the little fair moustache damp. He said, "You can take off your coat if you like," and took his own off, and sat in a pearl-grey shirt with silvered armlets to keep the cuffs exactly right. He looked doll-like as though only the coat were made to come off.

Beavis brought a paper-covered file and laid it on the table. The detective said, "Just look through these -- you'll find a few loose photographs too -- and see if you can find the murdered man."

A police photograph is like a passport photograph; the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn't me. . .

The turning of the pages became mechanical. Rowe couldn't believe that it was among people like these that his life had been cast. Only once he hesitated for a moment: something in his memory stirred at sight of a loose photograph of a man with a lick of hair plastered back, a pencil on a clip in the lower left-hand corner, and wrinkled evasive eyes that seemed to be trying to escape too bright a photographer's lamp.

"Know him?" the detective asked.

"No. How could I? Or is he a shopkeeper? I thought for a moment, but no, I don't know him." He turned on. Looking up once he saw that the detective had got his hand out from under his thigh; he seemed to have lost interest. There were not many more pages to turn -- and then unexpectedly there the face was: the broad anonymous brow, the dark city suit, and with him came a whole throng of faces bursting through the gate of the unconscious, rioting horribly into the memory. He said, "There," and lay back in his chair giddy, feeling the world turn around him. . .

"Nonsense," the detective said. The harsh voice hardly penetrated. "You had me guessing for a moment. . . a good actor. . . waste any more time. . ."

"They did it with my knife."

"Stop play-acting," the detective said. "That man hasn't been murdered. He's just as alive as you are."

2

"Alive?"

"Of course he's alive. I don't know why you picked on him."

"But in that case" -- all his tiredness went: he began to notice the fine day outside -- "I'm not a murderer. Was he badly hurt?"

"Do you really mean. . .?" the detective began incredulously; Beavis had given up the attempt at writing. He said, "I don't know what you are talking about. Where did this happen? When? What was it you think you saw?"

As Rowe looked at the photograph it came back in vivid patches: he said, "Wonderful Mrs -- Mrs Bellairs. It was her house. A séance." Suddenly he saw a thin beautiful hand blood-stained. He said, "Why. . . Dr Forester was there. He told us the man was dead. They sent for the police."

"The same Dr Forester?"

"The same one."

"And they let you go?"

"No, I escaped."

"Somebody helped you?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

The past was swimming back to him, as though now that there was nothing to fear the guard had been removed from the gate. Anna's brother had helped him; he saw the exhilarated young face and felt the blow on his knuckles. He wasn't going to betray him. He said, "I don't remember that."

The little plump man sighed. "This isn't for us, Beavis," he said, "we'd better take him across to 59." He put a call through to someone called Prentice. "We turn 'em in to you," he complained, "but how often do you turn them in to us?" Then they accompanied Rowe across the big collegiate court-yard under the high grey block; the trams twanged on the Embankment, and pigeons' droppings gave a farm-yard air to the sandbags stacked around. He didn't care a damn that they walked on either side of him, an obvious escort; he was a free man still and he hadn't committed murder, and his memory was coming back at every step. He said suddenly, "It was the cake he wanted," and laughed.

"Keep your cake for Prentice," the little man said sourly. "He's the surrealist round here."

They came to an almost identical room in another block, where a man in a tweed suit with a drooping grey Edwardian moustache sat on the edge of a chair as though it were a shooting-stick. "This is Mr Arthur Rowe we've been advertising for," the detective said and laid the file on the table. "At least he says he is. No identity card. Says he's been in a nursing home with loss of memory. We are the lucky fellows who've set his memory going again. Such a memory. We ought to set up a clinic. You'll be interested to hear he saw Cost murdered."

"Now that is interesting," Mr Prentice said with middle-aged courtesy. "Not my Mr Cost?"

"Yes. And a Dr Forester attended the death."

"My Dr Forester."

"It seems likely. This gentleman has been a patient of his."

"Take a chair, Mr Rowe. . . and you, Graves."

"Not me. You like the fantastic. I don't. I'll leave you Beavis, in case you want any notes taken." He turned at the door and said, "Pleasant nightmares to you."

"Nice chap, Graves," Mr Prentice said. He leant forward as though he were going to offer a hip flask. The smell of good tweeds came across the table. "Now would you say it was a good nursing home?"

"So long as you didn't quarrel with the doctor."

"Ha, ha. . . exactly. And then?"

"You might find yourself in the sick bay for violent cases."

"Wonderful," Mr Prentice said, stroking his long moustache. "One can't help admiring. . . You wouldn't have any complaints to make?"

"They treated me very well."

"Yes, I was afraid so. You see, if only someone would complain -- they are all voluntary patients -- one might be able to have a look at the place. I've been wanting to for a long time."

"When you get in the sick bay it's too late. If you aren't mad, they can soon make you mad." In his blind fight he had temporarily forgotten Stone. He felt a sense of guilt, remembering the tired voice behind the door. He said, "They've got a man in there now. He's not violent."

"A difference of opinion with our Dr Forester?"

"He said he saw the doctor and Poole -- he's the attendant -- doing something in the dark in Poole's room. He told them he was looking for a window from which he could enfilade --" Rowe broke off. "He is a little mad, but quite gentle, not violent."

"Go on," Mr Prentice said.

"He thought the Germans were in occupation of a little island in a pond. He said he'd seen them digging in."

"And he told the doctor that?"

"Yes." Rowe implored him, "Can't you get him out? They've put him in a strait-jacket, but he wouldn't hurt a soul. . ."

"Well," Mr Prentice said, "we must think carefully." He stroked his moustache with a milking movement. "We must look all round the subject, mustn't we?"

"He'll go really mad. . ."

"Poor fellow," Mr Prentice said unconvincingly. There was a merciless quality in his gentleness. He switched, "And Poole?"

"He came to me once -- I don't know how long ago -- and wanted a cake I'd won. There was an air-raid on. I have an idea that he tried to kill me because I wouldn't give him the cake. It was made with real eggs. Do you think I'm mad too?" he asked with anxiety.

Mr Prentice said thoughtfully, "I wouldn't say so. Life can be very odd. Oh, very odd. You should read more history. Silkworms, you know, were smuggled out of China in a hollow walking-stick. One can't really mention the places diamond-smugglers use. And at this very moment I'm looking -- oh, most anxiously -- for something which may not be much bigger than a diamond. A cake. . . very good, why not? But he didn't kill you."

"There are so many blanks," Rowe said.

"Where was it he came to see you?"

"I don't remember. There are years and years of my life I still can't remember."

"We forget very easily," Mr Prentice said, "what gives us pain."

"I almost wish I were a criminal, so that there could be a record of me here."

Mr Prentice said gently, "We are doing very well, very well. Now let's go back to the murder of -- Cost. Of course that might have been staged to send you into hiding, to stop you coming to us. But what came next? Apparently you didn't go into hiding and you didn't come to us. And what was it you knew. . . or we knew?" He put his hands flat on the table and said, "It's a beautiful problem. One could almost put it into algebraic terms. Just tell me all you told Graves."

He described again what he could remember: the crowded room and the light going out and a voice talking and fear. . .

"Graves didn't appreciate all that, I dare say," Mr Prentice said, clasping his bony knees and rocking slightly. "Poor Graves -- the passionate crimes of railway porters are his spiritual province. In this branch our interests have to be rather more bizarre. And so he distrusts us -- really distrusts us."

He began turning the pages of the file rather as he might have turned over a family album, quizzically. "Are you a student of human nature, Mr Rowe?"

"I don't know what I am."

"This face for instance. . ."

It was the photograph over which Rowe had hesitated: he hesitated again.

"What profession do you think he followed?" Mr Prentice asked.

The pencil clipped in the breast-pocket: the depressed suit: the air of a man always expecting a rebuff: the little lines of knowledge round the eyes -- when he examined it closely he felt no doubt at all. "A private detective," he said.

"Right the first time. And this little anonymous man had his little anonymous name. . ."

Rowe smiled. "Jones I should imagine."

"You wouldn't think it, Mr Rowe, but you and he -- let's call him Jones -- had something in common. You both disappeared. But you've come back. What was the name of the agency which employed him, Beavis?"

"I don't remember, sir. I could go and look it up."

"It doesn't matter. The only one I can remember is the Clifford. It wasn't that."

"Not the Orthotex?" Rowe asked. "I once had a friend. . ." and stopped.

"It comes back, doesn't it, Mr Rowe. His name was Jones, you see. And he did belong to the Orthotex. What made you go there? We can tell you even if you don't remember. You thought that someone had tried to murder you -- about a cake. You had won the cake unfairly at a fair (what a pun!) because a certain Mrs Bellairs had told you the weight. You went to find out where Mrs Bellairs lived -- from the offices of the Fund for the Mothers of the Free Nations (if I've got the outlandish name correct) and Jones followed, just to keep an eye on them -- and you. But you must have given him the slip somehow, Mr Rowe, because Jones never came back, and when you telephoned next day to Mr Rennit you said you were wanted for murder."

Rowe sat with his hand over his eyes -- trying to remember? trying not to remember? -- while the voice drove carefully and precisely on.

"And yet no murder had been committed in London during the previous twenty-four hours -- so far as we knew -- unless poor Jones had gone that way. You obviously knew something, perhaps you knew everything: we advertised for you and you didn't come forward. Until today, when you arrive in a beard you certainly used not to wear, saying you had lost your memory, but remembering at least that you had been accused of murder -- only you picked out a man we know is alive. How does it all strike you, Mr Rowe?"

Rowe said, "I'm waiting for the handcuffs," and smiled unhappily.

"You can hardly blame our friend Graves," Mr Prentice said.

"Is life really like this?" Rowe asked. Mr Prentice leant forward with an interested air, as though he were always ready to abandon the particular in favour of the general argument. He said, "This is life, so I suppose one can say it's like life."

"It isn't how I had imagined it," Rowe said. He went on, "You see, I'm a learner. I'm right at the beginning, trying to find my way about. I thought life was much simpler and -- grander. I suppose that's how it strikes a boy. I was brought up on stories of Captain Scott writing his last letters home. Gates walking into the blizzard, I've forgotten who losing his hands from his experiments with radium, Damien among the lepers. . ." The memories which are overlaid by the life one lives came freshly back in the little stuffy office in the great grey Yard. It was a relief to talk. "There was a book called the Book of Golden Deeds by a woman called Yonge. . . The Little Duke. . ." He said, "If you were suddenly taken from that world into this job you are doing now you'd feel bewildered. Jones and the cake, the sick bay, poor Stone. . . all. this talk of a man called Hitler. . . your files of wretched faces, the cruelty and meaninglessness. . . It's as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong map. I'm ready to do everything you want, but remember I don't know my way about. Everybody else has changed gradually and learnt. This whole business of war and hate -- even that's strange. I haven't been worked up to it. I expect much the best thing would be to hang me."

"Yes," Mr Prentice said eagerly, "yes, it's a most interesting case. I can see that to you," he became startlingly colloquial, "this is rather a dingy hole. We've come to terms with it of course."

"What frightens me," Rowe said, "is knowing how I came to terms with it before my memory went. When I came in to London today I hadn't realized there would be so many ruins. Nothing will seem as strange as that. God knows what kind of a ruin I am myself. Perhaps I am a murderer?"

Mr Prentice reopened the file and said rapidly, "Oh, we no longer think you killed Jones." He was like a man who has looked over a wall, seen something disagreeable and now walks rapidly, purposefully, away, talking as he goes. "The question is -- what made you lose your memory? What do you know about that?"

"Only what I've been told."

"And what have you been told?"

"That it was a bomb. It gave me this scar."

"Were you alone?"

Before he could brake his tongue he said, "No."

"Who was with you?"

"A girl." It was too late now; he had to bring her in, and after all if he were not a murderer, why should it matter that her brother had aided his escape? "Anna Hilfe." The plain words were sweet on the tongue.

"Why were you with her?"

"I think we were lovers."

"You think?"

"I don't remember."

"What does she say about it?"

"She says I saved her life."

"The Free Mothers," Mr Prentice brooded. "Has she explained how you got to Dr Forester's?"

"She was forbidden to." Mr Prentice raised an eyebrow. "They wanted -- so they told us -- my memory to come back naturally and slowly of itself. No hypnotism, no psychoanalysis."

Mr Prentice beamed at him and swayed a little on his shooting-stick; you felt he was taking a well-earned rest in the middle of a successful shoot. "Yes, it wouldn't have done, would it, if it had come back too quickly. . . Although of course there was always the sick bay."

"If only you'd tell me what it's all about."

Mr Prentice stroked his moustache; he had the fainéant air of Arthur Balfour, but you felt that he knew it. He had stylized himself -- life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as a writer chooses a technical form. "Now were you ever a habitué of the Regal Court?"

"It's a hotel?"

"You remember that much."

"Well, it's an easy guess."

Mr Prentice closed his eyes; it was perhaps an affectation, but who could live without affectations?

"Why do you ask about the Regal Court?"

"It's a shot in the dark," Mr Prentice said. "We have so little time."

"Time for what?"

"To find a needle in a haystack."

3

One wouldn't have said that Mr Prentice was capable of much exertion; rough shooting, you would have said, was beyond him. From the house to the brake and from the brake to the butts was about as far as you could expect him to walk in a day. And yet during the next few hours he showed himself capable of great exertion, and the shooting was indubitably rough. . .

He had dropped his enigmatic statement into the air and was out of the room almost before the complete phrase had formed, his long legs moving stiffly, like stilts. Rowe was left alone with Beavis and the day wore slowly on. The sun's early promise had been false; a cold unseasonable drizzle fell like dust outside the window. After a long time they brought him some cold pie and tea on a tray.

Beavis was not inclined to conversation. It was as though his words might be used in evidence, and Rowe only once attempted to break the silence. He said, "I wish I knew what it was all about" and watched Beavis's long-toothed mouth open and clap to like a rabbit snare. "Official secrets," Beavis said and stared with flat eyes at the blank wall.

Then suddenly Mr Prentice was with them again, rushing into the room in his stiff casual stride, followed by a man in black who held a bowler hat in front of him with both hands like a basin of water and panted a little in the trail of Mr Prentice. He came to a stop inside the door and glared at Rowe. He said, "That's the scoundrel. I haven't a doubt of it. I can see through the beard. It's a disguise."

Mr Prentice gave a giggle. "That's excellent," he said. "The pieces are really fitting."

The man with the bowler said, "He carried in the suitcase and he wanted just to leave it. But I had my instructions. I told him he must wait for Mr Travers. He didn't want to wait. Of course he didn't want to, knowing what was inside. . . Something must have gone wrong. He didn't get Mr Travers, but he nearly got the poor girl. . . and when the confusion was over, he'd gone."

"I don't remember ever seeing him before," Rowe said.

The man gesticulated passionately with his bowler, "I'll swear to him in any court of law."

Beavis watched with his mouth a little open and Mr Prentice giggled again. "No time," he said. "No time for squabbles. You two can get to know each other later. I need you both now."

"If you'd tell me a little," Rowe pleaded. To have come all this way, he thought, to meet a charge of murder and to find only a deeper confusion. . .

"In the taxi," Mr Prentice said. "I'll explain in the taxi." He made for the door.

"Aren't you going to charge him?" the man asked, panting in pursuit.

Mr Prentice without looking round said, "Presently, presently, perhaps. . ." and then darkly, "Who?"

They swept into the court-yard and out into broad stony Northumberland Avenue, policemen saluting: into a taxi and off along the ruined front of the Strand: the empty eyes of an insurance building: boarded windows: sweet-shops with one dish of mauve cachous in the window.

Mr Prentice said in a low voice, "I just want you two gentlemen to behave naturally. We are going to a city tailor's where I'm being measured for a suit. I shall go in first and after a few minutes you, Rowe, and last you, Mr Davis," and he touched the bowler hat with the tip of a finger where it balanced on the stranger's lap.

"But what's it all about, sir?" Davis asked. He had edged away from Rowe, and Mr Prentice curled his long legs across the taxi, sitting opposite them in a tip-up.

"Never mind. Just keep your eyes open and see if there's anyone in the shop you recognize." The mischief faded from his eyes as the taxi looped round the gutted shell of St Clement Danes. He said, "The place will be surrounded. You needn't be afraid. . ."

Rowe said, "I'm not afraid. I only want to know --" staring out at odd devastated boarded-up London.

"It's really serious," Mr Prentice said. "I don't know quite how serious. But you might say that we all depend on it." He shuddered away from what was almost an emotional statement, giggled, touched doubtfully the silky ends of his moustache and said, with sadness in his voice, "You know there are always weaknesses that have to be covered up. If the Germans had known after Dunkirk just how weak. . . There are still weaknesses of which if they knew the exact facts. . ." The ruins around St Paul's unfolded; the obliterated acres of Paternoster Row. He said, "This would be nothing to it. Nothing." He went slowly on, "Perhaps I was wrong to say there was no danger. If we are on the right track, of course, there must be danger, mustn't there? It's worth -- oh, a thousand lives to them."

"If I can be of any use," Rowe said. "This is so strange to me. I didn't imagine war was this," staring out at desolation. Jerusalem must have looked something like this in the mind's eye of Christ when he wept. . .

"I'm not scared," the man with the bowler said sharply, defensively.

"We are looking," Mr Prentice said, clasping his bony knees and vibrating with the taxi, "for a little roll of film -- probably a good deal smaller than a cotton reel. Smaller than those little rolls you put in Leica cameras. You must have read the questions in Parliament about certain papers which were missing for an hour. It was hushed up publicly. It doesn't help anybody to ruin confidence in a big name -- and it doesn't help us to have the public and the press muddying up the trail. I tell you two only because -- well, we could have you put quietly away for the duration if there was any leakage. It happened twice -- the first time the roll was hidden in a cake and the cake was to be fetched from a certain fête. But you won it," Mr Prentice nodded at Rowe, "the password as it were was given to the wrong man."

"Mrs Bellairs?" Rowe said.

"She's being looked after at this minute." He went on explaining with vague gestures of his thin useless-looking hands, "That attempt failed. A bomb that hit your house destroyed the cake and everything -- and probably saved your life. But they didn't like the way you followed the case up. They tried to frighten you into hiding -- but for some reason that was not enough. Of course they meant to blow you into pieces, but when they found you'd lost your memory, that was good enough. It was better than killing you, because by disappearing you took the blame for the bomb -- as well as for Jones."

"But why the girl?"

"We'll leave out the mysteries," Mr Prentice said. "Perhaps because her brother helped you. They aren't above revenge. There isn't time for all that now." They were at the Mansion House. "What we know is this -- they had to wait until the next chance came. Another big name and another fool. He had this in common with the first fool -- he went to the same tailor." The taxi drew up at the corner of a city street.

"We foot it from here," Mr Prentice said. A man on the opposite kerb began to walk up the street as they alighted.

"Do you carry a revolver?" the man in the bowler hat asked nervously.

"I wouldn't know how to use it," Mr Prentice said. "If there's trouble of that kind just lie flat."

"You had no right to bring me into this."

Mr Prentice turned sharply. "Oh yes," he said, "every right. Nobody's got a right to his life these days. My dear chap, you are conscripted for your country." They stood grouped on the pavement: bank messengers with chained boxes went by in top hats: stenographers and clerks hurried past returning late from their lunch. There were no ruins to be seen; it was like peace. Mr Prentice said, "If those photographs leave the country, there'll be a lot of suicides. . . at least that's what happened in France."

"How do you know they haven't left?" Rowe asked.

"We don't. We just hope, that's all. We'll know the worst soon enough." He said, "Watch when I go in. Give me five minutes with our man in the fitting-room, and then you, Rowe, come in and ask for me. I want to have him where I can watch him -- in all the mirrors. Then, Davis, you count a hundred and follow. You are going to be too much of a coincidence. You are going to be the last straw."

They watched the stiff old-fashioned figure make his way up the street; he was just the kind of man to have a city tailor - somebody reliable and not expensive whom he could recommend to his son. Presently about fifty yards along he turned in: a man stood at the next corner and lit a cigarette. A motor-car drew up next door and a woman got out to do some shopping, leaving a man at the wheel.

Rowe said, "It's time for me to be moving." His pulse beat with excitement; it was as if he had come to this adventure unsaddened, with the freshness of a boy. He looked suspiciously at Davis, who stood there with a nerve twitching at his cheek. He said, "A hundred and you follow." Davis said nothing. "You understand. You count a hundred."

"Oh," Davis said furiously, "this play-acting. I'm a plain man."

"Those were his orders."

"Who's he to give me orders?"

Rowe couldn't stay to argue: time was up.

War had hit the tailoring business hard. A few rolls of grey inferior cloth lay on the counter; the shelves were nearly empty. A man in a frock-coat with a tired, lined, anxious face said, "What can we do for you, sir?"

"I came here," Rowe said, "to meet a friend." He looked down the narrow aisle between the little mirrored cubicles. "I expect he's being fitted now."

"Will you take a chair, sir?" and "Mr Ford," he called, "Mr Ford." Out from one of the cubicles, a tape measure slung round his neck, a little bouquet of pins in his lapel, solid, city-like, came Cost, whom he had last seen dead in his chair when the lights went out. Like a piece of a jig-saw puzzle which clicks into place and makes sense of a whole confusing block, that solid figure took up its place in his memory with the man from Welwyn and the proletarian poet and Anna's brother. What had Mrs Bellairs called him? He remembered the whole phrase "Our business man".

Rowe stood up as though this were someone of great importance who must be greeted punctiliously, but there seemed to be no recognition in the stolid respectable eyes. "Yes, Mr Bridges?" Those were the first words he had ever heard him speak; his whole function before had been one of death.

"This gentleman has come to meet the other gentleman."

The eyes swivelled slowly and rested; no sign of recognition broke their large grey calm - or did they rest a shade longer than was absolutely necessary? "I have nearly taken the gentleman's measurements. If you would not mind waiting two minutes. . ." Two minutes Rowe thought, and then the other, the straw which will really break you down.

Mr Ford -- if this was now to be his name -- walked slowly up to the counter; everything he did, you felt, was carefully pondered; his suits must always be well-built. There was no room in that precision for the eccentricity, the wayward act, and yet what a wild oddity lay hidden under the skin. He saw Dr Forester dabbling his fingers in what looked like blood.

A telephone stood on the counter; Mr Ford picked up the receiver and dialled. The dial faced Rowe. He watched with care each time where the finger fitted. B. A. T. He felt sure of the letters; but one number he missed, suddenly wavering and catching the serene ponderous gaze of Mr Ford as he dialled. He was unsure of himself; he wished Mr Prentice would appear.

"Hullo," Mr Ford said, "hullo. This is Pauling and Crosthwaite."

Along the length of the window towards the door dragged the unwilling form of the man with the bowler hat: Rowe's hands tightened in his lap. Mr Bridges was sadly straightening the meagre rolls of cloth, his back turned. His listless hands were like a poignant criticism in the Tailor and Cutter.

"The suit was dispatched this morning, sir," Mr Ford was saying, "I trust in time for your journey." He clucked his satisfaction calmly and inhumanly down the telephone, "Thank you very much, sir. I felt very satisfied myself at the last fitting." His eyes shifted to the clanging door as Davis looked in with a kind of wretched swagger. "Oh, yes, sir. I think when you've worn it once, you'll find the shoulders will settle. . ." Mr Prentice's whole elaborate plot was a failure: that nerve had not broken.

"Mr Travers," Davis exclaimed with astonishment.

Carefully putting his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone Mr Ford said, "I beg your pardon, sir?"

"You are Mr Travers." Then Davis, meeting those clear calm eyes, added weakly, "Aren't you?"

"No, sir."

"I thought. . ."

"Mr Bridges, would you mind attending to this gentleman?"

"Certainly, Mr Ford."

The hand left the receiver and Mr Ford quietly, firmly, authoritatively continued to speak up the wire. "No, sir. I find at the last moment that we shall not be able to repeat the trousers. It's not a matter of coupons, no. We can obtain no more of that pattern from the manufacturers -- no more at all." Again his eyes met Rowe's and wandered like a blind man's hand delicately along the contours of his face. "Personally, sir, I have no hope. No hope at all." He put the receiver down and moved a little way along the counter. "If you can spare these a moment, Mr Bridges. . ." He picked up a pair of cutting-shears.

"Certainly, Mr Ford."

Without another word he passed Rowe, not looking at him again, and moved down the aisle, without hurry, serious, professional, as heavy as stone. Rowe quickly rose: something, he felt, must be done, be said, if the whole plan were not to end in fiasco. "Cost," he called after the figure, "Cost." It was only then that the extreme calm and deliberation of the figure with the shears struck him as strange. He called out "Prentice" sharply in warning as the fitter turned aside into a cubicle.

But it was not the cubicle from which Mr Prentice emerged. He came bewilderedly out in his silk shirt-sleeves from the opposite end of the aisle. "What is it?" he asked, but Rowe was already at the other door straining to get in. Over his shoulder he could see the shocked face of Mr Bridges, Davis's goggling eyes. "Quick," he said, "your hat," and grabbed the bowler and crashed it through the glass of the door.

Under the icicles of splintered glass he could see Cost-Travers-Ford. He sat in the arm-chair for clients opposite the tall triple mirror, leaning forward, his throat transfixed, with the cutting-shears held firmly upright between his knees. It was a Roman death.

Rowe thought: this time I have killed him, and heard that quiet respectful but authoritative voice speaking down the telephone. "Personally I have no hope. No hope at all."

Chapter 2

MOPPING UP

"You had best yield."

The Little Duke

1

MRS Beilairs had less dignity.

They had driven straight to Campden Hill, leaving Davis with his wrecked bowler. Mr Prentice was worried and depressed. "It does no good," he said. "We want them alive and talking."

Rowe said, "He must have had great courage. I don't know why that's so surprising. One doesn't associate it with tailors. . . except for that one in the story who killed a giant. I suppose you'd say this one was on the side of the giants. I wonder why."

Mr Prentice burst suddenly out as they drove up through the Park in the thin windy rain. "Pity is a terrible thing. People talk about the passion of love. Pity is the worst passion of all: we don't outlive it like sex."

"After all, it's war," Rowe said with a kind of exhilaration. The old fake truism like a piece of common pyrites in the hands of a child split open and showed its sparkling core to him. He was taking part. . .

Mr Prentice looked at him oddly, with curiosity. "You don't feel it, do you? Adolescents don't feel pity. It's a mature passion."

"I expect," Rowe said, "that I led a dull humdrum sober life, and so all this excites me. Now that I know I'm not a murderer I can enjoy. . ." He broke off at sight of the dimly remembered house like the scene of a dream: that unweeded little garden with the grey fallen piece of statuary and the small iron gate that creaked. All the blinds were down as though somebody had died, and the door stood open; you expected to see auction tickets on the furniture. "We pulled her in," Mr Prentice said, "simultaneously."

There was silence about the place; a man in a dark suit who might have been an undertaker stood in the hall. He opened a door for Mr Prentice and they went in. It wasn't the drawing-room that Rowe vaguely remembered, but a small dining-room crammed full with ugly chairs and a too-large table and a desk. Mrs Bellairs sat in an arm-chair at the head of the table with a pasty grey closed face, wearing a black turban; the man at the door said, "She won't say a thing."

"Well, ma'am," Mr Prentice greeted her with a kind of gallant jauntiness.

Mrs Bellairs said nothing.

"I've brought you a visitor, ma'am," Mr Prentice said and stepping to one side allowed her to see Rowe.

It is a disquieting experience to find yourself an object of terror: no wonder the novelty of it intoxicates some men. To Rowe it was horrible -- as though he had suddenly found himself capable of an atrocity. Mrs Bellairs began to choke, sitting grotesquely at the table-head; it was as if she had swallowed a fish-bone at a select dinner-party. She must have been holding herself in with a great effort, and the shock had upset the muscles of her throat.

Mr Prentice was the only one equal to the occasion. He wormed round the table and slapped her jovially on the back. "Choke up, ma'am," he said, "choke up. You'll be all right."

"I've never seen the man," she moaned, "never."

"Why, you told his fortune," Mr Prentice said. "Don't you remember that?"

A glint of desperate hope slid across the old congested eyes. She said, "If all this fuss is about a little fortune-telling. . . I only do it for charity."

"Of course, we understand that," Mr Prentice said.

"And I never tell the future."

"Ah, if we could see into the future!"

"Only character."

"And the weight of cakes," Mr Prentice said, and all the hope went suddenly out. It was too late now for silence.

"And your little seances," Mr Prentice went cheerily on, as though they shared a joke between them.

"In the interests of science," Mrs Bellairs said.

"Does your little group still meet?"

"On Wednesdays."

"Many absentees?"

"They are all personal friends," Mrs Bellairs said vaguely; now that the questions seemed again on safer ground, she put up one plump powdered hand and adjusted the turban.

"Mr Cost now. . . he can hardly attend any longer."

Mrs Bellairs said carefully, "Of course, I recognize this gentleman now. The beard confused me. That was a silly joke of Mr Cost's. I knew nothing about it. I was far, far away."

"Far away?"

"Where the Blessed are."

"Oh yes, yes. Mr Cost won't play such jokes again."

"It was meant quite innocently, I'm sure. Perhaps he resented two strangers. . . We are a very compact little group. And Mr Cost was never a real believer."

"Let's hope he is now." Mr Prentice did not seem worried at the moment by what he had called the terrible passion of pity. He said, "You must try to get into touch with him, Mrs Bellairs, and ask him why he cut his throat this morning."

Into the goggle-eyed awful silence broke the ringing of the telephone. It rang and rang on the desk, and there were too many people in the little crowded room to get to it quickly. A memory shifted like an uneasy sleeper. . . this had happened before.

"Wait a moment," Mr Prentice said. "You answer it, ma'am."

She repeated, "Cut his throat"

"It was all he had left to do. Except live and hang."

The telephone cried on. It was as though someone far away had his mind fixed on that room, working out the reason for that silence.

"Answer it, ma'am," Mr Prentice said again.

Mrs Bellairs was not made of the same stuff as the tailor. She heaved herself obediently up, jangling a little as she moved. She got momentarily stuck between the table and the wall, and the turban slipped over one eye. She said, "Hullo. Who's there?"

The three men in the room stayed motionless, holding their breaths. Suddenly Mrs Bellairs seemed to recover; it was as if she felt her power -- the only one there who could speak. She said, "It's Dr Forester. What shall I say to him?" speaking over her shoulder with her mouth close to the receiver. She glinted at them, maliciously, intelligently, with her stupidity strung up like a piece of camouflage she couldn't be bothered to perfect. Mr Prentice took the receiver from her hand and rang off. He said, "This isn't going to help you."

She bridled, "I was only asking. . ."

Mr Prentice said, "Get a fast car from the Yard. God knows what those local police are doing. They should have been at the house by this time." He told a second man, "See that this lady doesn't cut her throat. We've got other uses for it."

He proceeded to go through the house from room to room as destructively as a tornado; he was white and angry. He said to Rowe, "I'm worried about your friend -- what's his name?

"Stone."

He said, "The old bitch," and the word sounded odd on the Edwardian lips. In Mrs Bellairs' bedroom he didn't leave a pot of cream unchurned -- and there were a great many. He tore open her pillows himself with vicious pleasure. There was a little lubricious book called Love in the Orient on a bed-table by a pink-shaded lamp -- he tore off the binding and broke the china base of the lamp. Only the sound of a car's horn stopped the destruction. He said, "I'll want you with me -- for identifications," and took the stairs in three strides and a jump. Mrs Bellairs was weeping now in the drawing-room, and one of the detectives had made her a cup of tea.

"Stop that nonsense," Mr Prentice said. It was as if he were determined to give an example of thoroughness to weak assistants. "There's nothing wrong with her. If she won't talk, skin this house alive." He seemed consumed by a passion of hatred and perhaps despair. He took up the cup from which Mrs Bellairs had been about to drink and emptied the contents on the carpet. Mrs Bellairs wailed at him, "You've got no right. . ."

He said sharply, "Is this your best tea-service, ma'am?" wincing ever so slightly at the gaudy Prussian blue.

"Put it down," Mrs Bellairs implored, but he had already smashed the cup against the wall. He explained to his man, "The handles are hollow. We don't know how small these films are. You've got to skin the place."

"You'll suffer for this," Mrs Bellairs said tritely.

"Oh no, ma'am, it's you who'll suffer. Giving information to the enemy is a hanging offence."

"They don't hang women. Not in this war."

"We may hang more people, ma'am," Mr Prentice said, speaking back at her from the passage, "than the papers tell you about."

It was a long and gloomy ride. A sense of failure and apprehension must have oppressed Mr Prentice; he sat curled in the corner of the car humming lugubriously. It became evening before they had unwound themselves from the dirty edge of London, and night before they reached the first hedge. Looking back, one could see only an illuminated sky -- bright lanes and blobs of light like city squares, as though the inhabited world were up above and down below only the dark unlighted heavens.

2

It was a long and gloomy ride, but all the time Rowe repressed for the sake of his companion a sense of exhilaration: he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago. He was helping in a great struggle, and when he saw Anna again he could claim to have played a part against her enemies. He didn't worry very much about Stone; none of the books of adventure one read as a boy had an unhappy ending. And none of them was disturbed by a sense of pity for the beaten side. The ruins from which they emerged were only a heroic back-cloth to his personal adventure; they had no more reality than the photographs in a propaganda album: the remains of an iron bedstead on the third floor of a smashed tenement only said, "They shall not pass," not "We shall never sleep in this room, in this home, again." He didn't understand suffering because he had forgotten that he had ever suffered.

Rowe said, "After all, nothing can have happened there. The local police. . ."

Mr Prentice observed bitterly, "England is a very beautiful country. The Norman churches, the old graves, the village green and the public-house, the policeman's home with his patch of garden. He wins a prize every year for his cabbages. . ."

"But the county police. . ."

"The Chief Constable served twenty years ago in the Indian Army. A fine fellow. Has a good palate for port. Talks too much about his regiment, but you can depend on him for a subscription to any good cause. The superintendent. . . he was a good man once, but they'd have retired him from the Metropolitan Police after a few years' service without a pension, so the first chance he got he transferred to the county. You see, being an honest man, he didn't want to lay by in bribes from bookmakers for his old age. Only, of course, in a small county there's not much to keep a man sharp. Running in drunks. Petty pilfering. The judge at the assizes compliments the county on its clean record."

"You know the men?"

"I don't know these men, but if you know England you can guess it all. And then suddenly into this peace -- even in wartime it's still peace -- comes the clever, the warped, the completely unscrupulous, ambitious, educated criminal. Not a criminal at all, as the county knows crime. He doesn't steal and he doesn't get drunk -- and if he murders, they haven't had a murder for fifty years and can't recognize it."

"What do you expect to find?" Rowe asked.

"Almost anything except what we are looking for. A small roll of film."

"They may have got innumerable copies by this time."

"They may have, but they haven't innumerable ways of getting them out of the country. Find the man who's going to do the smuggling -- and the organizer. It doesn't matter about the rest."

"Do you think Dr Forester. . .?"

"Dr Forester," Mr Prentice said, "is a victim -- oh, a dangerous victim, no doubt, but he's not the victimizer. He's one of the used, the blackmailed. That doesn't mean, of course, that he isn't the courier. If he is, we are in luck. He couldn't get away. . . unless these country police. . ." Again the gloom of defeat descended on him.

"He might pass it on."

"It isn't so easy," Mr Prentice said. "There are not many of these people at large. Remember, to get out of the country now you must have a very good excuse. If only the country police. . ."

"Is it so desperately important?"

Mr Prentice thought gloomily, "We've made so many mistakes since this war began, and they've made so few. Perhaps this one will be the last we'll make. To trust a man like Dunwoody with anything secret. . ."

"Dunwoody?"

"I shouldn't have let it out, but one gets impatient. Have you heard the name? They hushed it up because he's the son of the grand old man."

"No, I've never heard of him. . . I think I've never heard of him."

A screech owl cried over the dark flat fields; their dimmed headlights just touched the near hedge and penetrated no farther into the wide region of night: it was like the coloured fringe along the unexplored spaces of a map. Over there among the unknown tribes a woman was giving birth, rats were nosing among sacks of meal, an old man was dying, two people were seeing each other for the first time by the light of a lamp; everything in that darkness was of such deep importance that their errand could not equal it -- this violent superficial chase, this cardboard adventure hurtling at seventy miles an hour along the edge of the profound natural common experiences of men. Rowe felt a longing to get back into that world: into the world of homes and children and quiet love and the ordinary unspecified fears and anxieties the neighbour shared; he carried the thought of Anna like a concealed letter promising just that: the longing was like the first stirring of maturity when the rare experience suddenly ceases to be desirable.

"We shall know the worst soon," Mr Prentice said. "If we don't find it here" -- his hunched hopeless figure expressed the weariness of giving up.

Somebody a long way ahead was waving a torch up and down, up and down. "What the hell are they playing at?" Mr Prentice said. "Advertising. . . They can't trust a stranger to find his way through their country without a compass."

They drew slowly along a high wall and halted outside big heraldic gates. It was unfamiliar to Rowe; he was looking from the outside at something he had only seen from within. The top of a cedar against the sky was not the same cedar that cast a shadow round the bole. A policeman stood at the car door and said, "What name, sir?"

Mr Prentice showed a card, "Everything all right?"

"Not exactly, sir. You'll find the superintendent inside."

They left the car and trailed, a little secretive dubious group, between the great gates. They had no air of authority; they were stiff with the long ride and subdued in spirit: they looked like a party of awed sightseers taken by the butler round the family seat. The policeman kept on saying, "This way, sir," and flashing his torch, but there was only one way.

It seemed odd to Rowe, returning like this. The big house was silent -- and the fountain was silent too. Somebody must have turned off the switch which regulated the flow. There were lights on in only two of the rooms. This was the place where for months he had lain happily in an extraordinary peace; this scene had been grafted by the odd operation of a bomb on to his childhood. Half his remembered life lay here. Now that he came back like an enemy, he felt a sense of shame. He said, "If you don't mind, I'd rather not see Dr Forester. . ."

The policeman with the torch said, "You needn't be afraid, sir, he's quite tidy."

Mr Prentice had not been listening. "That car," he said, "who does it belong to?"

A Ford V8 stood in the drive -- that wasn't the one he meant, but an old tattered car with cracked and stained windscreen -- one of those cars that stand with a hundred others in lonely spoilt fields along the highway -- yours for five pounds if you can get it to move away.

"That, sir -- that's the reverend's."

Mr Prentice said sharply, "Are you holding a party?"

"Oh no, sir. But as one of them was still alive, we thought it only right to let the vicar know."

"Things seem to have happened," Mr Prentice said gloomily. It had been raining and the constable tried to guide them with his torch between the puddles in the churned-up gravel and up the stone steps to the hall door.

In the lounge where the illustrated papers had lain in glossy stacks, where Davis had been accustomed to weep in a corner and the two nervous men had fumed over the chess pieces, Johns sat in an arm-chair with his head in his hands. Rowe went to him; he said, "Johns", and Johns looked up. He said, "He was such a great man. . . such a great man. . ."

"Was?"

"I killed him."

3

It had been a massacre on an Elizabethan scale. Rowe was the only untroubled man there -- until he saw Stone. The bodies lay where they had been discovered: Stone bound in his strait-waistcoat with the sponge of anaesthetic on the floor beside him and the body twisted in a hopeless attempt to use his hands. "He hadn't a chance," Rowe said. This was the passage he had crept up excited like a boy breaking a school rule; in the same passage, looking in through the open door, he grew up -- learned that adventure didn't follow the literary pattern, that there weren't always happy endings, felt the awful stirring of pity that told him something had got to be done, that you couldn't let things stay as they were, with the innocent struggling in fear for breath and dying pointlessly. He said slowly, "I'd like. . . how I'd like. . ." and felt cruelty waking beside pity, its old and tried companion.

"We must be thankful," an unfamiliar voice said, "that he felt no pain." The stupid complacent and inaccurate phrase stroked at their raw nerves.

Mr Prentice said, "Who the hell are you?" He apologized reluctantly, "I'm sorry. I suppose you are the vicar."

"Yes. My name's Sinclair."

"You've got no business here."

"I had business," Mr Sinclair corrected him. "Dr Forester was still alive when they called me. He was one of my parishioners." He added in a tone of gentle remonstrance, "You know -- we are allowed on a battlefield."

"Yes, yes, I daresay. But there are no inquests on those bodies. Is that your car at the door?"

"Yes."

"Well, if you wouldn't mind going back to the vicarage and staying there till we are through with this. . ."

"Certainly. I wouldn't want to be in the way."

Rowe watched him: the cylindrical black figure, the round collar glinting under the electric light, the hearty intellectual face. Mr Sinclair said to him slowly, "Haven't we met. . .?" confronting him with an odd bold stare.

"No," Rowe said.

"Perhaps you were one of the patients here?"

"I was."

Mr Sinclair said with nervous enthusiasm, "There. That must be it. I felt sure that somewhere. . . On one of the doctor's social evenings, I dare say. Good night."

Rowe turned away and considered again the man who had felt no pain. He remembered him stepping into the mud, desperately anxious, then fleeing like a scared child towards the vegetable garden. He had always believed in treachery. He hadn't been so mad after all.

They had had to step over Dr Forester's body; it lay at the bottom of the stairs. A sixth snare had entangled the doctor: not love of country but love of one's fellow-man, a love which had astonishingly flamed into action in the heart of respectable, hero-worshipping Johns. The doctor had been too sure of Johns: be had not realized that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police. When Johns shut his eyes and pulled the trigger of the revolver which had once been confiscated from Davis and had lain locked away for months in a drawer, he was not ruining the man he respected -- he was saving him from the interminable proceedings of the law courts, from the crudities of prosecuting counsel, the unfathomable ignorances of the judge, and the indignity of depending on the shallow opinion of twelve men picked at random. If love of his fellow-man refused to allow him to be a sleeping partner in the elimination of Stone, love also dictated the form of his refusal.

Dr Forester had shown himself disturbed from the moment of Rowe's escape. He had been inexplicably reluctant to call in the police, and he seemed worried about the fate of Stone. There were consultations with Poole from which Johns was excluded, and during the afternoon there was a trunk call to London. . . Johns took a letter to the post and couldn't help noticing the watcher outside the gate. In the village he saw a police car from the country town. He began to wonder. . .

He met Poole on the way back. Poole, too, must have seen. All the fancies and resentments of the last few days came back to Johns. Sitting in a passion of remorse in the lounge, he couldn't explain how all these indications had crystallized into the belief that the doctor was planning Stone's death. He remembered theoretical conversations he had often had with the doctor on the subject of euthanasia: arguments with the doctor, who was quite unmoved by the story of the Nazi elimination of old people and incurables. The doctor had once said, "It's what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State's right to economize -- when necessary. . ." He intruded on a colloquy between Poole and Forester, which was abruptly broken off, he became more and more restless and uneasy, it was as if the house were infected by the future: fear was already present in the passages. At tea Dr Forester made some remark about "poor Stone".

"Why poor Stone?" Johns asked sharply and accusingly.

"He's in great pain," Dr Forester said. "A tumour. . . Death is the greatest mercy we can ask for him."

He went restlessly out into the garden in the dusk; in the moonlight the sundial was like a small sheeted figure of someone already dead at the entrance to the rose garden. Suddenly he heard Stone crying out. . . His account became more confused than ever. Apparently he ran straight to his room and got out the gun. It was just like Johns, that he had mislaid the key and found it at last in his pocket. He heard Stone cry out again. He ran through the lounge, into the other wing, made for the stairs -- the sickly confected smell of chloroform was in the passage, and Dr Forester stood on guard at the foot of the stairs. He said crossly and nervously, "What do you want, Johns?" and Johns, who still believed in the misguided purity of the doctor's fanaticism, saw only one solution: he shot the doctor. Poole, with his twisted shoulder and his malign conceited face, backed away from the top of the stairs -- and he shot him, too, in a rage because he guessed he was too late.

Then, of course, the police were at the door. He went to meet them, for apparently the servants had all been given the evening off, and it was that small banal fact of which he had read in so many murder stories that brought the squalid truth home to him. Dr Forester was still alive, and the local police thought it only right to send for the parson. . . That was all. It was extraordinary the devastation that could be worked in one evening in what had once seemed a kind of earthy paradise. A flight of bombers could not have eliminated peace more thoroughly than had three men.

The search was then begun. The house was ransacked. More police were sent for. Lights were switched on and off restlessly through the early morning hours in upstairs rooms. Mr Prentice said, "If we could find even a single print. . ." but there was nothing. At one point of the long night watch Rowe found himself back in the room where Digby had slept. He thought of Digby now as a stranger -- a rather gross, complacent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignorance. Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery. There on the bookshelf stood the Tolstoy with the pencil-marks rubbed out. Knowledge was the great thing. . . not abstract knowledge in which Dr Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed passionate trivial human knowledge. He opened the Tolstoy again: "What seemed to me good and lofty -- love of fatherland, of one's own people -- became to me repulsive and pitiable. What seemed to me bad and shameful -- rejection of fatherland and cosmopolitanism -- now appeared to me on the contrary good and noble." Idealism had ended up with a bullet in the stomach at the foot of the stairs; the idealist had been caught out in treachery and murder. Rowe didn't believe they had had to blackmail him much. They had only to appeal to his virtues, his intellectual pride, his abstract love of humanity. One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

"Nothing," Mr Prentice said. He drooped disconsolately across the room on his stiff lean legs and drew the curtain a little aside. Only one star was visible now: the others had faded into the lightening sky. "So much time wasted," Mr Prentice said.

"Three dead and one in prison."

"They can find a dozen to take their place. I want the films: the top man." He said, "They've been using photographic chemicals in the basin in Poole's room. That's where they developed the film, probably. I don't suppose they'd print more than one at a time. They'd want to trust as few people as possible, and so long as they have the negative ..." He added sadly," Poole was a first-class photographer. He specialized in the life history of the bee. Wonderful studies. I've seen some of them. I want you to come over now to the island. I'm afraid we may find something unpleasant there for you to identify. . ."

They stood where Stone had stood; three little red lights ahead across the pond gave it in the three-quarter dark an illimitable air as of a harbour just before dawn with the riding lamps of steamers gathering for a convoy. Mr Prentice waded out and Rowe followed him; there was a thin skin of water over nine inches of mud. The red lights were lanterns -- the kind of lanterns which are strung at night where roads are broken. Three policemen were digging in the centre of the tiny island. There was hardly a foothold for two more men. "This was what Stone saw," Rowe said. "Men digging."

"Yes."

"What do you expect. . .?" He stopped; there was something strained in the attitude of the diggers. They put in their spades carefully as though they might break something fragile, and they seemed to turn up the earth with reluctance. The dark scene reminded him of something: something distant and sombre. Then he remembered a dark Victorian engraving in a book his mother had taken away from him: men in cloaks digging at night in a graveyard with the moonlight glinting on a spade.

Mr Prentice said, "There's somebody you've forgotten -- unaccounted for."

Now as each spade cut down he waited himself with apprehension: he was held by the fear of disgust.

"How do you know where to dig?"

"They left marks. They were amateurs at this. I suppose that was why they were scared of what Stone saw."

One spade made an ugly scrunching sound in the soft earth.

"Careful," Mr Prentice said. The man wielding it stopped and wiped sweat off his face, although the night was cold. Then he drew the tool slowly out of the earth and looked at the blade. "Start again on this side," Mr Prentice said. "Take it gently. Don't go deep." The other men stopped digging and watched, but you could tell they didn't want to watch.

The man digging said, "Here it is." He left the spade standing in the ground and began to move the earth with his fingers, gently as though he were planting seedlings. He said with relief, "Its only a box."

He took his spade again, and with one strong effort lifted the box out of its bed. It was the kind of wooden box which holds groceries, and the lid was loosely nailed down. He prised it open with the edge of the blade and another man brought a lamp nearer. Then one by one an odd sad assortment of objects was lifted out: they were like the relics a company commander sends home when one of his men has been killed. But there was this difference: there were no letters or photographs.

"Nothing they could burn," Mr Prentice said.

These were what an ordinary fire would reject: a fountain-pen clip, another clip which had probably held a pencil.

"It's not easy to burn things," Mr Prentice said, "in an all-electric house."

A pocket-watch. He nicked open the heavy back and read aloud: "F.G.J., from N.L.J. on our silver wedding, 3.8.15." Below was added: "To my dear son in memory of his father, 1919."

"A good regular time-piece," Mr Prentice said.

Two plaited metal arm-bands came next. Then the metal buckles off a pair of sock-suspenders. And then a whole collection of buttons -- like pearl buttons off a vest, large ugly brown buttons off a suit, brace buttons, pants buttons, trouser buttons -- one could never have believed that one man's single change of clothes required so much holding together. Waistcoat buttons. Shirt buttons. Cuff buttons. Then the metal parts of a pair of braces. So is a poor human creature joined respectably together like a doll: take him apart and you are left with a grocery box full of assorted catches and buckles and buttons.

At the bottom there was a pair of heavy old-fashioned boots with big nails worn with so much pavement tramping, so much standing at street corners.

"I wonder," Mr Prentice said, "what they did with the rest of him."

"Who was he?"

"He was Jones."

Chapter 3

WRONG NUMBERS

"A very slippery, tremendous, quaking road it was."

The Little Duke

Rowe was growing up; every hour was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age. Little patches of memory returned; he could hear Mr Rennit's voice saying, "I agree with Jones," and he saw again a saucer with a sausage-roll upon it beside a telephone. Pity stirred, but immaturity fought hard; the sense of adventure struggled with common sense as though it were on the side of happiness, and common sense were allied to possible miseries, disappointments, disclosures. . .

It was immaturity which made him keep back the secret of the telephone number, the number he had so nearly made out in Cost's shop. He knew the exchange was BAT, and he knew the first three numbers were 271: only the last had escaped him. The information might be valueless -- or invaluable. Whichever it was, he hugged it to himself. Mr Prentice had had his chance and failed; now it was his turn. He wanted to boast like a boy to Anna -- "I did it."

About four-thirty in the morning they had been joined by a young man called Brothers. With his umbrella and his moustache and his black hat he had obviously modelled himself upon Mr Prentice. Perhaps in twenty years the portrait would have been adequately copied; it lacked at present the patina of age -- the cracks of sadness, disappointment, resignation. Mr Prentice wearily surrendered the picked bones of investigation to Brothers and offered Rowe a seat in the car going back to London. He pulled his hat over his eyes, sank deep into the seat and said, "We are beaten," as they splashed down a country lane with the moonlight flat on the puddles.

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Go to sleep." Perhaps to his fine palate the sentence sounded over-conscious, for without opening his eyes he added, "One must avoid self-importance, you see. In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles."

"What do you think they did to Jones?"

"I don't suppose we shall ever know. In time of war, so many bodies are unidentifiable. So many bodies," the said sleepily, "waiting for a convenient blitz." Suddenly, surprisingly and rather shockingly, he began to snore.

They came into London with the early workers; along the industrial roads men and women were emerging from underground; neat elderly men carrying attaché-cases and rolled umbrellas appeared from public shelters. In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveller has forgotten to snuff. It was odd to think that the usual battle had been going on while they stood on the island in the pond and heard only the scrape of the spade. A notice turned them from their course, and on a rope strung across the road already flapped a few hand-written labels. "Barclay's Bank. Please inquire at. . ." "The Cornwallis Dairy. New address. . ." "Marquis's Fish Saloon. . ." On a long, quiet, empty expanse of pavement a policeman and a warden strolled in lazy proprietary conversation like gamekeepers on their estate -- a notice read, "Unexploded Bomb". This was the same route they had taken last night, but it had been elaborately and trivially changed. What a lot of activity, Rowe thought, there had been in a few hours -- the sticking up of notices, the altering of traffic, the getting to know a slightly different London. He noticed the briskness, the cheerfulness on the faces; you got the impression that this was an early hour of a national holiday. It was simply, he supposed, the effect of finding oneself alive.

Mr Prentice muttered and woke. He told the driver the address of a small hotel near Hyde Park Corner -- "if it's still there," and insisted punctiliously on arranging Rowe's room with the manager. It was only after he had waved his hand from the car -- "I'll ring you later, dear fellow" -- that Rowe realized his courtesy, of course, had an object. He had been lodged where they could reach him; he had been thrust securely into the right pigeon-hole, and would presently, when they required him, be pulled out again. If he tried to leave it would be reported at once. Mr Prentice had even lent him five pounds -- you couldn't go far on five pounds.

Rowe had a small early breakfast. The gas-main apparently had been hit, and the gas wouldn't light properly. It wasn't hardly more than a smell, the waitress told him -- not enough to boil a kettle or make toast. But there was milk and post-toasties and bread and marmalade -- quite an Arcadian meal, and afterwards he walked across the Park in the cool early sun and noticed, looking back over the long empty plain, that he was not followed. He began to whistle the only tune he knew; he felt a kind of serene excitement and well-being, for he was not a murderer. The forgotten years hardly troubled him more than they had done in the first weeks at Dr Forester's home. How good it was, he thought, to play an adult part in life again, and veered with his boy's secret into Bayswater towards a telephone-box.

He had collected at the hotel a store of pennies. He was filled with exhilaration, pressing in the first pair and dialling. A voice said briskly, "The Hygienic Baking Company at your service," and he rang off. It was only then he began to realize the difficulties ahead: he couldn't expect to know Cost's customer by a sixth sense. He dialled again and an old voice said, "Hullo." He said, "Excuse me. Who is that, please?"

"Who do you want?" the voice said obstinately -- it was so old that it had lost sexual character and you couldn't tell whether it was a man's or a woman's.

"This is Exchange," Rowe said; the idea came to him at the moment of perplexity, as though his brain had kept it in readiness all the while. "We are checking up on all subscribers since last night's raid."

"Why?"

"The automatic system has been disarranged. A bomb on the district exchange. Is that Mr Isaacs of Prince of Wales Road?"

"No, it isn't. This is Wilson."

"Ah, you see, according to our dialling you should be Mr Isaacs."

He rang off again; he wasn't any the wiser; after all, even a Hygienic Bakery might conceal Mr Cost's customer -- it was even possible that his conversation had been a genuine one. But no, that he did not believe, hearing again the sad stoical voice of the tailor, "Personally I have no hope. No hope at all." Personally -- the emphasis had lain there. He had conveyed as clearly as he dared that it was for him alone the battle was over.

He went on pressing in his pennies; reason told him that it was useless, that the only course was to let Mr Prentice into his secret -- and yet he couldn't believe that somehow over the wire some sense would not be conveyed to him, the vocal impression of a will and violence sufficient to cause so many deaths -- poor Stone asphyxiated in the sick bay, Forester and Poole shot down upon the stairs, Cost with the shears through his neck, Jones. . . The cause was surely too vast to come up the wire only as a commonplace voice saying, "Westminster Bank speaking."

Suddenly he remembered that Mr Cost had not asked for any individual. He had simply dialled a number and had begun to speak as soon as he heard a voice reply. That meant he could not be speaking to a business address -- where some employee would have to be brought to the phone.

"Hullo."

A voice took any possible question out of his mouth. "Oh, Ernest," a torrential voice said, "I knew you'd ring. You dear sympathetic thing. I suppose David's told you Minny's gone. Last night in the raid, it was awful. We heard her voice calling to us from outside, but, of course there was nothing we could do. We couldn't leave our shelter. And then a landmine dropped -- it must have been a land-mine. Three houses went, a huge hole. And this morning not a sign of Minny. David still hopes of course, but I knew at the time, Ernest, there was something elegiac in her mew. . ."

It was fascinating, but he had work to do. He rang off.

The telephone-box was getting stiflingly hot. He had already used up a shillingsworth of coppers; surely among these last four numbers a voice would speak and he would know. "Police Station, Mafeking Road." Back on to the rest with the receiver. Three numbers left. Against all reason he was convinced that one of these days three. . . His face was damp with sweat. He wiped it dry, and immediately the beads formed again. He felt suddenly an apprehension; the dryness of his throat, his heavily beating heart warned him that this voice might present too terrible an issue. There had been five deaths already. . . His head swam with relief when a voice said "Gas Light and Coke Company." He could still walk out and leave it to Mr Prentice. After all, how did he know that the voice he was seeking was not that of the operator at the Hygienic Baking Company -- or even Ernest's friend?

But if he went to Mr Prentice he would find it hard to explain his silence all these invaluable hours. He was not, after all, a boy: he was a middle-aged man. He had started something and he must go on. And yet he still hesitated while the sweat got into his eyes. Two numbers left: a fifty per cent chance. He would try one, and if that number conveyed nothing at all, he would walk out of the box and wash his hands of the whole business. Perhaps his eyes and his wits had deceived him in Mr Cost's shop. His finger went reluctantly through the familiar acts: BAT 271: which number now? He put his sleeve against his face and wiped, then dialled.

BOOK FOUR

The Whole Man

Chapter 1

JOURNEY'S END

"Must I -- and all alone."

The Little Duke

1

THE telephone rang and rang; he could imagine the empty rooms spreading round the small vexed instrument. Perhaps the rooms of a girl who went to business in the city, or a tradesman who was now at his shop: of a man who left early to read at the British Museum: innocent rooms. He held the welcome sound of an unanswered bell to his ear. He had done his best. Let it ring.

Or were the rooms perhaps guilty rooms? The rooms of a man who had disposed in a few hours of so many human existences. What would a guilty room be like? A room, like a dog, takes on some of the characteristics of its master. A room is trained for certain ends -- comfort, beauty, convenience. This room would surely be trained to anonymity. It would be a room which would reveal no secrets if the police should ever call; there would be no Tolstoys with pencilled lines imperfectly erased, no personal touches; the common mean of taste would furnish it -- a wireless set, a few detective novels, a reproduction of Van Gogh's sunflower. He imagined it all quite happily while the bell rang and rang. There would be nothing significant in the cupboards: no love-letters concealed below the handkerchiefs, no cheque-book in a drawer: would the linen be marked? There would be no presents from anyone at all -- a lonely room: everything in it had been bought at a standard store.

Suddenly a voice he knew said a little breathlessly, "Hullo. Who's that?" If only, he thought, putting the receiver down, she had been quite out of hearing when the bell rang, at the bottom of the stairs, or in the street. If only he hadn't let his fancy play so long, he need never have known that this was Anna Hilfe's number.

He came blindly out into Bayswater; he had three choices -- the sensible and the honest choice was to tell the police. The second was to say nothing. The third was to see for himself. He had no doubt at all that this was the number Cost had rung; he remembered how she had known his real name all along, how she had said -- it was a curious phrase -- that it was her "job" to visit him at the home. And yet he didn't doubt that there was an answer, an answer he couldn't trust the police to find. He went back to his hotel and up to his room, carrying the telephone directory with him from the lounge -- he had a long job to do. In fact, it was several hours before he reached the number. His eyes were swimming and he nearly missed it. 16, Prince Consort Mansions, Battersea -- a name which meant nothing at all. He thought wryly: of course, a guilty room would be taken furnished. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

It was past five o'clock in the afternoon before he could bring himself to act, and then he acted mechanically. He wouldn't think any more: what was the good of thinking before he heard her speak? A 19 bus took him to the top of Oakley Street, and a 49 to Albert Bridge. He walked across the bridge, not thinking. It was low tide and the mud lay up under the warehouses. Somebody on the Embankment was feeding the gulls; the sight obscurely distressed him and he hurried on, not thinking. The waning sunlight lay in a wash of rose over the ugly bricks, and a solitary dog went nosing and brooding into the park. A voice said, "Why, Arthur," and he stopped. A man wearing a beret on untidy grey hair and warden's dungarees stood at the entrance to a block of flats. He said doubtfully, "It is Arthur, isn't it?"

Since Rowe's return to London many memories had slipped into place -- this church and that shop, the way Piccadilly ran into Knightsbridge. He hardly noticed when they took up their places as part of the knowledge of a lifetime. But there were other memories which had to fight painfully for admission; somewhere in his mind they had an enemy who wished to keep them out and often succeeded. Cafés and street corners and shops would turn on him a suddenly familiar face, and he would look away and hurry on as though they were the scenes of a road accident. The man who spoke to him belonged to these, but you can't hurry away from a human being as you can hurry away from a shop.

"The last time you hadn't got the beard. You are Arthur, aren't you?"

"Yes. Arthur Rowe."

The man looked puzzled and hurt. He said, "It was good of you to call that time."

"I don't remember."

The look of pain darkened like a bruise. "The day of the funeral."

Rowe said, "I'm sorry. I had an accident: my memory went. It's only beginning to come back in parts. Who are you?"

"I'm Henry -- Henry Wilcox."

"And I came here -- to a funeral?"

"My wife got killed. I expect you read about it in the papers. They gave her a medal. I was a bit worried afterwards because you'd wanted me to cash a cheque for you and I forgot. You know how it is at a funeral: so many things to think about. I expect I was upset too."

"Why did I bother you then?"

"Oh, it must have been important. It went right out of my head -- and then I thought, I'll see him afterwards. But I never saw you."

Rowe looked up at the flats above them. "Was it here?"

"Yes."

He looked across the road to the gate of the park: a man feeding gulls: an office worker carrying a suitcase; the road reeled a little under his feet. He said, "Was there a procession?"

"The post turned out And the police and the rescue party."

Rowe said, "Yes. I couldn't go to the bank to cash the cheque. I thought the police thought I was a murderer. But I had to find money if I was going to get away. So I came here. I didn't know about the funeral. I thought all the time about this murder."

"You brood too much," Henry said. "A thing that's done is done," and he looked quite brightly up the road the procession had taken.

"But this was never done, you see. I know that now. I'm not a murderer," he explained.

"Of course you aren't, Arthur. No friend of yours -- no proper friend -- ever believed you were."

"Was there so much talk?"

"Well, naturally. . ."

"I didn't know." He turned his mind into another track: along the Embankment wall -- the sense of misery and then the little man feeding birds, the suitcase. . . he lost the thread until he remembered the face of the hotel clerk, and then he was walking down interminable corridors, a door opened and Anna was there. They shared the danger -- he clung to that idea. There was always an explanation. He remembered how she had told him he had saved her life. He said stiffly, "Well, good-bye. I must be getting on."

"It's no use mourning someone all your life," Henry said. "That's morbid."

"Yes. Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

2

The flat was on the third floor. He wished the stairs would never end, and when he rang the bell he hoped the flat would be deserted. An empty milk bottle stood outside the door on the small dark landing; there was a note stuck in it; he picked it out and read it -- "Only half a pint to-morrow, please." The door opened while he still held it in his hand, and Anna said hopelessly, "It's you."

"Yes, me."

"Every time the bell rang, I've been afraid it would be you "

"How did you think I'd find you?"

She said, "There's always the police. They are watching the office now." He followed her in.

It wasn't the way he had at one time -- under the sway of the strange adventure -- imagined that he would meet her again. There was a heavy constraint between them. When the door closed they didn't feel alone. It was as if all sorts of people they both knew were with them. They spoke in low voices so as not to intrude. He said, "I got your address by watching Cost's fingers on the dial -- he telephoned you just before he killed himself."

"It's so horrible," she said. "I didn't know you were there."

" 'I've no hope at all.' " That's what he said. " 'Personally I've no hope.' "

They stood in a little ugly crowded hall as though it wasn't worth the bother of going any farther. It was more like a parting than a reunion -- a parting too sorrowful to have any grace. She wore the same blue trousers she had worn at the hotel; he had forgotten how small she was. With the scarf knotted at her neck she looked heart-breakingly impromptu. All around them were brass trays, warming-pans, knick-knacks, an old oak chest, a Swiss cuckoo clock carved with heavy trailing creeper. He said, "Last night was not good either. I was there too. Did you know that Dr Forester was dead -- and Poole?"

"No."

He said, "Aren't you sorry -- such a massacre of your friends?"

"No," she said, "I'm glad." It was then that he began to hope. She said gently, "My dear, you have everything mixed up in your head, your poor head. You don't know who are your friends and who are your enemies. That's the way they always work, isn't it?"

"They used you to watch me, didn't they, down there at Dr Forester's, to see when my memory would begin to return? Then they'd have put me in the sick bay like poor Stone."

"You're so right and so wrong," she said wearily. "I don't suppose we'll ever get it straight now. It's true I watched you for them. I didn't want your memory to return any more than they did. I didn't want you hurt." She said with sharp anxiety, "do you remember everything now?"

"I remember a lot and I've learned a lot. Enough to know I'm not a murderer."

She said, "Thank God."

"But you knew I wasn't?"

"Yes," she said, "of course. I knew it. I just meant -- oh, that I'm glad you know." She said slowly, "I like you happy. It's how you ought to be."

He said as gently as he could, "I love you. You know that. I want to believe you are my friend. Where are the photographs? "

A painted bird burst raspingly out of the hideous carved clock case and cuckooed the half-hour. He had time to think between the cuckoos that another night would soon be on them. Would that contain horror too? The door clicked shut and she said simply, "He has them."

"He?"

"My brother." He still held the note to the milkman in his hand. She said. "You are so fond of investigation, aren't you? The first time I saw you you came to the office about a cake. You were so determined to get to the bottom of things. You've got to the bottom now."

"I remember. He seemed so helpful. He took me to that house. . ."

She took the words out of his mouth. "He staged a murder for you and helped you to escape. But afterwards he thought it safer to have you murdered. That was my fault. You told me you'd written a letter to the police, and I told him."

"Why?"

"I didn't want to get him into trouble for just frightening you. I never guessed he could be so thorough."

"But you were in that room when I came with the suitcase? " he said. He couldn't work it out. "You were nearly killed too."

"Yes. He hadn't forgotten, you see, that I telephoned to you at Mrs Bellairs. You told him that. I wasn't on his side any longer -- not against you. He told me to go and meet you -- and persuade you not to send the letter. And then he just sat back in another flat and waited."

He accused her, "But you are alive."

"Yes," she said, "I'm alive, thanks to you. I'm even on probation again -- he won't kill his sister if he doesn't feel it's necessary. He calls that family feeling. I was only a danger because of you. This isn't my country. Why should I have wanted your memory to return? You were happy without it. I don't care a damn about England. I want you to be happy, that's all. The trouble is he understands such a lot."

He said obstinately, "It doesn't make sense. Why am I alive?"

"He's economical." She said, "They are all economical. You'll never understand them if you don't understand that." She repeated wryly, like a formula, "The maximum of terror for the minimum time directed against the fewest objects."

He was bewildered: he didn't know what to do. He was learning the lesson most people learn very young, that things never work out in the expected way. This wasn't an exciting adventure, and he wasn't a hero, and it was even possible that this was not a tragedy. He became aware of the note to the milkman. "He's going away?"

"Yes."

"With the photographs, of course."

"Yes."

"We've got to stop him," he said. The "we" like the French tu spoken for the first time conveyed everything.

"Yes."

"Where is he now?"

She said, "He's here."

It was like exerting a great pressure against a door and finding it ajar all the time. "Here?"

She jerked her head. "He's asleep. He had a long day with Lady Dunwoody about woollies."

"But he'll have heard us."

"Oh no," she said. "He's out of hearing, and he sleeps so sound. That's economy too. As deep a sleep and as little of it. . ."

"How you hate him," he said with surprise.

"He's made such a mess," she said, "of everything. He's so fine, so intelligent -- and yet there's only this fear. That's all he makes."

"Where is he?"

She said, "Through there is the living-room and beyond that is his bedroom."

"Can I use the telephone?"

"It's not safe. It's in the living-room and the bedroom door's ajar."

"Where's he going?"

"He has permission to go to Ireland -- for the Free Mothers. It wasn't easy to get, but your friends have made such a sweep. Lady Dunwoody worked it. You see, he's been so grateful for her woollies. He gets the train tonight." She said, "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

He looked helplessly round. A heavy brass candlestick stood on the oak chest; it glittered with polish; no wax had ever sullied it. He picked it up. "He tried to kill me," he explained weakly.

"He's asleep. That's murder."

"I won't hit first."

She said, "He used to be sweet to me when I cut my knees. Children always cut their knees. . . Life is horrible, wicked."

He put the candlestick down again.

"No," she said. "Take it. You mustn't be hurt. He's only my brother, isn't he?" she asked, with obscure bitterness. "Take it. Please." When he made no move to take it, she picked it up herself; her face was stiff and schooled and childish and histrionic. It was like watching a small girl play Lady Macbeth. You wanted to shield her from the knowledge that these things were really true.

She led the way holding the candlestick upright as though it were a rehearsal: only on the night itself would the candle be lit. Everything in the flat was hideous except herself; it gave him more than ever the sense that they were both strangers here. The heavy furniture must have been put in by a company, bought by an official buyer at cut rates, or perhaps ordered by telephone -- suite 56a of the autumn catalogue. Only a bunch of flowers and a few books and a newspaper and a man's sock in holes showed that people lived here. It was the sock which made him pause; it seemed to speak of long mutual evenings, of two people knowing each other over many years. He thought for the first time, "It's her brother who's going to die." Spies, like murderers, were hanged, and in this case there was no distinction. He lay asleep in there and the gallows was being built outside.

They moved stealthily across the anonymous room towards a door ajar. She pushed it gently with her hand and stood back so that he might see. It was the immemorial gesture of a woman who shows to a guest after dinner her child asleep.

Hilfe lay on the bed on his back without his jacket, his shirt open at the neck. He was deeply and completely at peace, and so defenceless that he seemed to be innocent. His very pale gold hair lay in a hot streak across his face as though he had lain down after a game. He looked very young; he didn't, lying there, belong to the same world as Cost bleeding by the mirror, and Stone in the strait-jacket. One was half-impelled to believe, "It's propaganda, just propaganda: he isn't capable. . ." The face seemed to Rowe very beautiful, more beautiful than his sister's, which could be marred by grief or pity. Watching the sleeping man he could realize a little of the force and the grace and the attraction of nihilism -- of not caring for anything, of having no rules and feeling no love. Life became simple. . . He had been reading when he fell asleep; a book lay on the bed and one hand still held the pages open. It was like the tomb of a young student; bending down you could read on the marble page the epitaph chosen for him, a verse:

"Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose

in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn

um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male

ists Orpheus, wenn est singt. . ."

The knuckles hid the rest.

It was as if he were the only violence in the world and when he slept there was peace everywhere.

They watched him and he woke. People betray themselves when they wake; sometimes they wake with a cry from an ugly dream: sometimes they turn from one side to the other and shake the head and burrow as if they are afraid to leave sleep. Hilfe just woke; his lids puckered for a moment like a child's when the nurse draws the curtain and the light comes in; then they were wide open and he was looking at them with complete self-possession. The pale blue eyes held full knowledge of the situation; there was nothing to explain. He smiled and Rowe caught himself in the act of smiling back. It was the kind of trick a boy plays suddenly, capitulating, admitting everything, so that the whole offence seems small and the fuss absurd. There are moments of surrender when it is so much easier to love one's enemy than to remember. . .

Rowe said weakly, "The photographs. . ."

"The photographs." He smiled frankly up. "Yes, I've got them." He must have known that everything was up -- including life, but he still retained the air of badinage, the dated colloquialisms which made his speech a kind of light dance of inverted commas. "Admit," he said, "I've led you 'up the garden'. And now I'm 'in the cart'." He looked at the candlestick which his sister stiffly held and said, "I surrender," with amusement, lying on his back on the bed, as though they had all three been playing a game

"Where are they?"

He said, "Let's strike a bargain. Let's 'swop'," as though he were suggesting the exchange of foreign stamps for toffee.

Rowe said, "There's no need for me to exchange anything. You're through."

"My sister loves you a lot, doesn't she?" He refused to take the situation seriously. "Surely you wouldn't want to eliminate your brother-in-law?"

"You didn't mind trying to eliminate your sister."

He said blandly and unconvincingly, "Oh, that was a tragic necessity," and gave a sudden grin which made the whole affair of the suitcase and the bomb about as important as a booby-trap on the stairs. He seemed to accuse them of a lack of humour; it was not the kind of thing they ought to have taken to heart.

"Let's be sensible civilized people," he said, "and come to an agreement. Do put down the candlestick, Anna: I can't hurt you here even if I wanted to." He made no attempt to get up, lying on the bed, displaying his powerlessness like evidence.

"There's no basis for an agreement," Rowe said. "I want the photographs, and then the police want you. You didn't talk about terms to Stone -- or Jones."

"I know nothing about all that," Hilfe said. "I can't be responsible -- can I? -- for all my people do. That isn't reasonable, Rowe." He asked, "Do you read poetry? There's a poem here which seems to meet the case. . ." He sat up, lifted the book and dropped it again. With a gun in his hand he said, "Just stay still. You see there's still something to talk about."

Rowe said, "I've been wondering where you kept it."

"Now we can bargain sensibly. We're both in a hole."

"I still don't see," Rowe said, "what you've got to offer. You don't really imagine, do you, that you can shoot us both, and then get to Ireland. These walls are thin as paper. You are known as the tenant. The police would be waiting for you at the port."

"But if I'm going to die anyway, I might just as well -- mightn't I? -- have a massacre."

"It wouldn't be economical."

He considered the objection half-seriously and then said with a grin, "No, but don't you think it would be rather grand?"

"It doesn't much matter to me how I stop you. Being killed would be quite useful."

Hilfe exclaimed, "do you mean your memory's come back?"

"I don't know what that's got to do with it."

"Such a lot. Your past history is really sensational. I went into it all carefully and so did Anna. It explained so much I didn't understand at first when I heard from Poole what you were like. The kind of room you were living in, the kind of man you were. You were the sort of man I thought I could deal with quite easily until you lost your memory. That didn't work out right. You got so many illusions of grandeur, heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism. . ." Hilfe grinned at him.

"Here's a bargain for you. My safety against your past. I'll tell you who you were. No trickery. I'll give you all the references. But that won't be necessary. Your own brain will tell you I'm not inventing."

"He's just lying," Anna said. "Don't listen to him."

"She doesn't want you to hear, does she? Doesn't that make you curious? She wants you as you are, you see, and not as you were."

Rowe said, "I only want the photographs."

"You can read about yourself in the newspapers. You were really quite famous. She's afraid you'll feel too grand for her when you know."

Rowe said, "If you give me the photographs. . ."

"And tell you your story?"

He seemed to feel some of Rowe's excitement. He shifted a little on his elbow and his gaze moved for a moment. The wrist-bone cracked as Anna swung the candlestick down, and the gun lay on the bed. She took it up and said, "There's no need to bargain with him."

He was moaning and doubled with pain; his face was white with it. Both their faces were white. For a moment Rowe thought she would go on her knees to him, take his head on her shoulder, surrender the gun to his other hand. . . "Anna," Hilfe whispered, "Anna."

She said, "Willi," and rocked a little on her feet.

"Give me the gun," Rowe said.

She looked at him as if he were a stranger who shouldn't have been in the room at all; her ears seemed filled with the whimper from the bed. Rowe put out his hand and she backed away, so that she stood beside her brother. "Go outside," she said, "and wait. Go outside." In their pain they were like twins. She pointed the gun at him and moaned, "Go outside."

He said, "don't let him talk you round. He tried to kill you," but seeing the family face in front of him his words sounded flat. It was as if they were so akin that either had the right to kill the other; it was only a form of suicide.

"Please don't go on talking," she said. "It doesn't do any good." Sweat stood on both their faces: he felt helpless.

" Only promise," he said," you won't let him go."

She moved her shoulders and said, "I promise." When he went she closed and locked the door behind him.

For a long time afterwards he could hear nothing -- except once the closing of a cupboard door and the chink of china. He imagined she was bandaging Hilfe's wrist; he was probably safe enough, incapable of further flight. Rowe realized that now if he wished he could telephone to Mr Prentice and have the police surround the flat -- he was no longer anxious for glory; the sense of adventure had leaked away and left only the sense of human pain. But he felt that he was bound by her promise; he had to trust her, if life was to go on.

A quarter of an hour dragged by and the room was full of dusk. There had been low voices in the bedroom: he felt uneasy. Was Hilfe talking her round? He was aware of a painful jealousy; they had been so alike and he had been shut out like a stranger. He went to the window and drawing the blackout curtain a little aside looked out over the darkening park. There was so much he had still to remember; the thought came to him like a threat in Hilfe's dubious tones.

The door opened, and when he let the curtain fall he realized how dark it had become. Anna walked stiffly towards him and said, "There you are. You've got what you wanted." Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done; it isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love -- it's being unhappy together. "Don't you want them," she asked, "now I've got them for you?"

He took the little roll in his hand: he had no sense of triumph at all. He asked, "Where is he?"

She said, "You don't want him now. He's finished."

"Why did you let him go?" he asked. "You promised."

"Yes," she said, "I promised." She made a small movement with her fingers, crossing two of them -- he thought for a moment that she was going to claim that child's excuse for broken treaties.

"Why?" he asked again.

"Oh," she said vaguely, "I had to bargain."

He began to unwrap the roll carefully; he didn't want to expose more than a scrap of it. "But he had nothing to bargain with," he said. He held the roll out to her on the palm of his hand. "I don't know what he promised to give you, but this isn't it."

"He swore that's what you wanted. How do you know?"

"I don't know how many prints they made. This may be the only one or there may be a dozen. But I do know there's only one negative."

She asked sadly, "And that's not it?"

"No."

3

Rowe said, "I don't know what he had to bargain with, but he didn't keep his part."

"I'll give up," she said. "Whatever I touch goes wrong, doesn't it? Do what you want to do."

"You'll have to tell me where he is."

"I always thought," she said, "I could have both of you. I didn't care what happened to the world. It couldn't be worse than it's always been, and yet the globe, the beastly globe, survives. But people, you, him. . ." She sat down on the nearest chair -- a stiff polished ugly upright chair: her feet didn't reach the floor. She said, "Paddington: the 7.20. He said he'd never come back. I thought you'd be safe then."

"Oh," he said, "I can look after myself," but meeting her eyes he had the impression that he hadn't really understood. He said, "Where will he have it? They'll search him at the port anyway."

"I don't know. He took nothing."

"A stick?"

"No," she said, "nothing. He just put on his jacket -- he didn't even take a hat. I suppose it's in his pocket."

He said, "I'll have to go to the station."

"Why can't you leave it to the police now?"

"By the time I get the right man and explain to him, the train will have gone. If I miss him at the station, then I'll ring the police." A doubt occurred. "If he told you that, of course he won't be there."

"He didn't tell me. I didn't believe what he told me. That was the original plan. It's his only hope of getting out of here."

When he hesitated she said, "Why not just let them meet the train at the other end? Why do it all yourself?"

"He might get out on the way."

"You mustn't go like this. He's armed. I let him have his gun."

He suddenly laughed. "By God," he said, "you have made a mess of things, haven't you?"

"I wanted him to have a chance."

"You can't do much with a gun in the middle of England except kill a few poor devils." She looked so small and beaten that he couldn't preserve any anger.

She said, "There's only one bullet in it. He wouldn't waste that."

"Just stay here," Rowe said.

She nodded. "Good-bye."

"I'll be back quite soon." She didn't answer, and he tried another phrase. "Life will begin all over again then." She smiled unconvincingly, as though it were he who needed comfort and reassurance, not she.

"He won't kill me."

"I'm not afraid of that."

"What are you afraid of then?"

She looked up at him with a kind of middle-aged tenderness, as though they'd grown through love into its later stage. She said, "I'm afraid he'll talk."

He mocked at her from the door. "Oh, he won't talk me round," but all the way downstairs he was thinking again, I didn't understand her.

The searchlights were poking up over the park; patches of light floated like clouds along the surface of the sky. It made the sky seem very small; you could probe its limit with light. There was a smell of cooking all along the pavement from houses where people were having an early supper to be in time for the raid. A warden was lighting a hurricane-lamp outside a shelter. He said to Rowe, "Yellow's up." The match kept going out -- he wasn't used to lighting lamps; he looked a bit on edge: too many lonely vigils on deserted pavements; he wanted to talk. But Rowe was in a hurry: he couldn't wait.

On the other side of the bridge there was a taxi-rank with one cab left. "Where do you want to go?" the driver asked and considered, looking up at the sky, the pillows of light between the few stars, one pale just visible balloon. "Oh, well," he said, "I'll take a chance. It won't be worse there than here."

"Perhaps there won't be a raid."

"Yellow's up," the driver said, and the old engine creaked into life.

They went up across Sloane Square and Knightsbridge and into the Park and on along the Bayswater Road. A few people were hurrying home; buses slid quickly past the Request stops; Yellow was up; the saloon bars were crowded. People called to the taxi from the pavement, and when a red light held it up an elderly gentleman in a bowler hat opened the door quickly and began to get in. "Oh," he said, "I beg your pardon. Thought it was empty. Are you going towards Paddington?"

"Get in," Rowe said.

"Catching the 7.20," the stranger said breathlessly. "Bit of luck for me this. We'll just do it."

"I'm catching it too," Rowe said.

"Yellow's up."

"So I've heard."

They creaked forward through the thickening darkness. "Any land-mines your way last night?" the old gentleman asked.

"No, no. I don't think so."

"Three near us. About time for the Red I should think."

"I suppose so."

"Yellow's been up for a quarter of an hour," the elderly gentleman said, looking at his watch as though he were timing an express train between stations. "Ah, that sounded like a gun. Over the estuary, I should say."

"I didn't hear it."

"I should give them another ten minutes at most," the old gentleman said, holding his watch in his hand, as the taxi turned into Praed Street. They swung down the covered way and came to rest. Through the blacked-out station the season-ticket holders were making a quick get-away from the nightly death; they dived in earnest silence towards the suburban trains, carrying little attaché-cases, and the porters stood and watched them go with an air of sceptical superiority. They felt the pride of being a legitimate objective: the pride of people who stayed.

The long train stood darkly along number one platform: the bookstalls closed, the blinds drawn in most of the compartments. It was a novel sight to Rowe and yet an old sight. He had only to see it once like the sight of a bombed street, for it to take up its place imperceptibly among his memories. This was already life as he'd known it.

It was impossible to see who was in the train from the platform; every compartment held its secrets close. Even if the blinds had not been lowered, the blued globes cast too little light to show who sat below them. He felt sure that Hilfe would travel first class; as a refugee he lived on borrowed money, and as the friend and confidant of Lady Dunwoody he was certain to travel in style.