by MARY HOCKING
‘I told them he was just a messenger, that he knew no names and no plans,’ She looked up at Helen. ‘I kept on telling them. That was right, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, my dear, that was right, I’m sure.’
Kate turned to the doctor. ‘I told them that he was just . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said soothingly.
When the doctor had given her a sedative she lay back on the pillow, a limp, sawdust doll, the bright corn-coloured hair in garish contrast to the blood-drained face. The doctor said to Helen:
‘She will get over it. She is young.’ He checked himself with an intake of breath that was almost a sob. ‘How glibly we have learnt to talk!’ His kind face was suddenly unutterably weary. ‘We have blunted our sensitivity and watered down our values until we can absorb anything from petty theft to torture and mass murder.’
Helen’s voice was mechanical, her mind elsewhere. ‘You mustn’t talk like that. You are such a kind person.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kind! A very English virtue.’ He went to the door. ‘Call me whenever you need me. I shall not sleep.’
Mr. Cunningham stumbled through a few platitudes which embarrassed him as much as Helen and then departed.
It was an hour later that Sir Edward came with Paul Daniels. He hurried into the room with the expression on his face which he habitually wore when he had scored a success after some particularly delicate negotiations.
‘A very nasty situation, and we can count ourselves fortunate to have come out of it so well.’
Paul came into the room, moving like a sleepwalker. Helen had to help him out of his overcoat and guide him to a chair. He rubbed his knuckles against his eyes and then sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loosely from the wrists.
‘How is Kate?’ he asked Helen.
‘It’s difficult to tell. She hardly seemed conscious of what was happening. Dr. Van Hals gave her a sedative and she is asleep now.’
Helen went to Paul and loosened his tie. She stood behind him and slipped her hands beneath his jacket, her fingers moving gently, easing the taut muscles at the back of his neck. Sir Edward cleared his throat and looked at his finger nails. Rosamund was looking at Paul.
‘I can’t believe that Doyle is dead.’ She sounded hopeful, as though, at last, she expected to hear that it was all a mistake.
Paul said simply: ‘I saw him.’
‘Miss Blanchard did not see him, as far as I can gather,’ Sir Edward intervened. ‘Which was fortunate because it would undoubtedly have made her hysterical. In fact, there is much for which we have to be thankful. The Party leaders are divided among themselves, and one faction is anxious to avoid any trouble with us. Then, of course, Lawrence was an Irishman—no reason why we should be expected to take responsibility for their nationals.’
‘You saw Doyle!’ Rosamund’s voice was becoming shrill again. She was staring at Paul, but her husband continued imperturbably:
‘Did you gather what he had been up to, Daniels?’
‘From their questions it seemed that he must have passed on messages and contacted people outside the country when he was on leave.’
‘Nothing else? You didn’t find . . .’
‘They were asking the questions.’
Sir Edward looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I hope you kept your temper?’
‘Yes. I kept my temper.’
‘You didn’t say anything which might have led them to suspect you?’
Paul’s voice was savage, ‘No, I did not. And if you yourself have any ideas of that kind you can get them out of your head.’
‘My dear man, I am asking you some very necessary questions.’
‘I have answered enough questions for one night.’
Sir Edward regarded him in alarm; the man looked on the point of collapse and Sir Edward was repelled by displays of emotion. He got up hastily.
‘I must get back to the Embassy. Come, my dear. These people must get some rest and I must work.’
He hustled onto the landing. Rosamund followed him. At the door she turned and said to Paul and Helen:
‘You know, I wanted to marry Edward. I was never in love with him, but at the time, I wanted to marry him.’ She gave a harsh laugh, and then put her hand to her mouth because for a moment it seemed that she might go on laughing and be unable to stop. Her husband called to her from the stairs and she went to join him.
Helen closed the door. She went across to Kate’s room to make sure that she was lying quietly. The curtains were blowing into the room, but Kate was motionless, hardly seeming to breathe. Helen went back to the lounge and drew the blinds against the night and the grey, silent city. Immediately the room seemed, warm and safe, a world on its own encompassed by four stout walls. She went to the sideboard here the drinks were stored and poured out a couple of brandies.
She stood by Paul and touched his shoulder gently, putting the glass between his fingers. His hand felt cold. The skin was drawn tight across his cheek bones, making his face look thinner than ever; his eyes were bloodshot and she noticed that he turned his head away from the light. She switched off the lamp so that there was only the red-gold glow of the electric fire. As she sat on the couch, watching him, there were tears in her eyes.
He drank the brandy slowly, revolving the glass absently in his hand. The fan of the electric fire hummed and the mock flames flickered. He said quietly:
‘Doyle was so avid for life.’
She did not reply. There seemed to be nothing to say. When he had finished the brandy he got up, looking round for his overcoat.
‘You must get some rest and I have a lot to do.’ He stumbled over a stool and caught his breath sharply.
‘No.’ Her voice was gentle. ‘There is nothing to be done now, and it is you who need to rest.’
She stretched out her hand and eased him down beside her on the couch. He put his head in his hands.
‘I can’t forget Doyle. They had his body there, thrown across a table, going through his clothes. I can’t get the picture out of my mind.’
She put her arms around him and drew his head to her breast.
In the bedroom Kate lay still, her face waxen in the dim light. The curtains thrashed in the wind; outside the night was stormy and the rain had started again.
Chapter Eleven
SUNDAY
I
‘Then one day it happens in your territory.
‘You have listened, a little bored, to the other fellows’ tales; the Bombay riots, the storming of the barricades in Budapest, murder campaigns in Cyprus, and the long-drawn-out agony of Algeria.
‘Then there dawns a day that is too still; and in the distance you hear the far-off droning of voices, the padding footsteps in the street, the hastily locked doors and the shutting of the windows. And the bold ones go out and make their demands; and if the answer is “no,”—then you have it. All hell let loose, right on your doorstep.’
Paul Daniels’s fingers hovered irritably above the typewriter keys.
‘Why must they ring the damn bells?’ he muttered. He tore the sheet of paper out of his typewriter and flung it across the room. The bells rang on.
The bells were ringing for old Archbishop Mexces who had been released from prison and who was driving down Martin Zinnemann Street, peering with anxious, half-blind eyes at a city that he loved and would never again see clearly.
Matthias and Party Secretary Keltner were looking from one of the windows of the City Hall at the crowd surrounding the cathedral. Keltner was cursing the bells, too, but for reasons of his own; he was hoping that their jangling would not carry too far East. The crowd before the cathedral trembled and swayed, a turbulent grey mass. Keltner watched uneasily.
Matthias had just made a speech. He had announced the release of Archbishop Mexces, a measure with which Keltner had no desire to be too closely associated.
‘The Archbishop and I,’ Matthias had said, ‘have had our differences in the pa
st, and those differences still exist. But the time has come when we must put our quarrels to one side. From now on, we must work together to the same end.’ He had added, in a grim aside ‘an end which will not be long-delayed, I fear.’
As he stood at the window Matthias was thinking, not of Archbishop Mexces, whom he regarded as a dogmatic old man, but of himself. He knew that his presence here represented not only the will of the people, but a personal decision. He was too politically astute not to realize that the chances of success in a revolt at this time were small, and he was sufficiently familiar with the thinking of the people who must now be regarded as his enemies to know that, in the hour of triumph, they would not be generous. Until recently he himself would have regarded generosity in such matters as a weakness, so he felt no particular ill-will on this score. It had taken Matthias a long time to arrive at this point in his life, and his body still feared the weapons the violent use to brand those whom they cannot conquer. But he knew that these things were no longer of any real significance to him. He had moved beyond failure. He felt unutterably lonely.
He looked down at the throng in the square. For years he had paid lip-service to ‘the people’ without ever caring greatly for them; it had not, indeed, been a part of his creed that he should care, since caring was an individual, personal thing and therefore a weakness. Now, as he looked at the crowd he still did not feel that softness and sentimentality which he associated with the word love. It surprised him, therefore, to realize that he had accepted, for the people’s sake, what he could only regard as a summons to death.
But why? As he listened to the cheering he thought that such undisciplined enthusiasm was well enough for them; even now, in his new humility, it was difficult to keep contempt from his thoughts. He fancied that he understood what lay behind these wild scenes, the excitement of physical violence, the passion, the emotional release of love and hatred. But his decision had not been sparked off in a moment of passion. Looking back over his life it was difficult to find a turning point; it seemed rather that the things in which he believed had led him relentlessly to this moment. And what, stripped of dogma and theory, had he believed? He remembered, without bitterness, his childhood; spawned in a cellar, dank with despair, eating from the dustbins of the city, watching the hopeless rotting away on rubbish dumps. He had been conscious then, with an anger that was stronger and more abiding than sentimental pity, of a great wrong. Man, he had decided, must have dignity or perish. He had not been particularly concerned with equality, a foolish and idealistic notion; but he had been convinced that man must fight the things which robbed him of dignity. And he must fight with weapons which had a chance of success. At that time he had had something of the detachment of the surgeon who knows that health can only be restored by means of a painful and dangerous operation. The Church, intolerant and divorced from the people, he had rejected. He had turned to socialism and then to communism; he had made many compromises and he had made them coolly in the full knowledge of what he did; he had condoned injustice for the sake of expediency, but he had kept from complete cynicism with the result that inevitably the time had come when he had been compelled to dissent.
The years in prison had followed. At first he had been kept in solitary confinement, and to preserve his sanity he had continued the argument which led to his arrest, a dispute over land reform. Gradually, the argument had become less concerned with the particular, and by the time that he was released it had ranged beyond politics.
The crowd were chanting his name now. He looked away. He was tired of the argument. It had led him to a point where the old doctrines no longer interested him since they ignored man’s predicament, and it had left him stranded there. There remained only a final renunciation. He could not believe that any sacrifice which he might make would be rewarded in a life of the spirit; he was prepared for oblivion. He had, in fact, chosen oblivion and he looked to it with so much fervour that it became, in spite of himself, a positive thing.
Party Secretary Keltner, on the other hand, was quite appalled at the thought of oblivion. He frowned as he looked into the square. There was something menacing about that crowd, shaken by sudden gusts of violence. Keltner remembered, looking back beyond the fat years of security, that the mob can have a face of terror.
‘This is the utmost limit,’ he said to Matthias. ‘There will be no more concessions. In fact, a curb to further enthusiasm may be necessary.’
Matthias did not answer.
II
At noon Party Secretary Keltner received a document containing certain demands; the document finished by stating that if these demands were not realized, the signatories might feel compelled to take ‘certain steps.’ The signatories included a number of prominent Party members and two officers of senior rank in the army.
A little before this document was received Party Secretary Keltner had received another, much shorter message. It came from the General in command of the foreign troops. General Zoltan intimated that if the Party leaders found difficulty in controlling the reactionary elements in their midst, he might feel compelled to take action.
Party Secretary Keltner, it was announced was to broadcast to the nation at 3.30 p.m.
Paul Daniels waited to cross the Avenue of the Republic. A line of army lorries crawled by, then a tram, a few cars. He glanced impatiently at his watch which said twenty-five past three. A sleek black van splashed through a puddle and Paul glared at the wooden-faced driver. When eventually he reached the crowded bar off the Avenue of the Republic, Paul found Jean Dulac already there, talking to an American journalist. The American was saying:
‘I want to know how people look when the dawn of freedom breaks.’
‘You think that is what Keltner is about to herald in?’ Dulac was sceptical.
‘Well, I guess he can read the writing on the wall as well as the next man. Mind you, I don’t think there is much he can say right now; except to promise the release of those men who were arrested in the square, and to offer careful consideration of all reasonable demands.’
Keltner, in fact, found more to say. He said that recent humane and generous acts by the Party had been used by certain unscrupulous reactionary forces as an excuse for pressing so-called reforms which were aimed at undermining the security of the régime. One example had already been given of the lengths to. which these foreign-inspired agitators would go; he referred, of course, to the attempt to blow up the Ministry of Food on Tuesday. Now there were agitations for a removal of foreign troops from the country. Everyone knew who would really benefit if this country were to be left vulnerable to attack. The West, one heard, was watching events here with great interest. And one could imagine why.
The American was watching the faces of the people in the bar as they listened.
‘I haven’t seen such enthusiasm since Pearl Harbour was announced,’ he said to Paul.
Keltner’s voice became louder. ‘We know where our real friends are, and we shall eliminate these subversive elements in our midst without mer . . .’
His voice ceased abruptly; the wireless crackled and spluttered and then emitted a long, atmospheric howl. Party Secretary Keltner completed his broadcast unaware that he had lost his audience.
III
‘Did you switch off the wireless?’ Helen asked as she came into the living room.
Kate, who was crouching on the floor beside an open suitcase, said: ‘No. It just went off.’
She picked up a cardigan and laid it in the case, folding the sleeves across the breast.
‘I don’t think we are meant to take clothes,’ Helen said gently. ‘Just things like a toothbrush and flannel . . .’
Kate took the cardigan out of the case and sat holding it in her lap, looking perplexed. Helen glanced at her watch. Jean Dulac, who had a car, had offered to fetch them; he would be here any minute now.
‘Why don’t you lie down for a while? I’ll pack your things.’
She steered Kate into her bedroom and then we
nt back to the living room. There was still no sound from the wireless so she switched it off.
Kate stood in her room wondering why she was there and what she was supposed to do. It seemed important that she should do something, so she went across to the dressing table and gathered up a brush and comb, a letter from her parents, a tin of elastoplast, and a small wooden angel with a broken wing. She turned towards the door, holding the bundle to her breast.
‘I have these things, Helen.’ Her voice was so low that Helen did not hear. After a moment, Kate arranged the articles on a chair and lost interest in them.
Helen was moving about the lounge; Kate could hear her opening and shutting drawers, rustling paper; she sounded very purposeful. Kate looked round her room. It seemed to have become much smaller. And airless. She dragged a hand across her forehead.
‘Air,’ she muttered. ‘I need to get some air.’
She walked towards the window, carefully, as though she was balancing on a tightrope; when she reached it she leant her head against the wooden frame. Her breath was coming fast. She began to fumble with the catch and then stopped, looking down. A car had driven up and a man was getting out, a tall man in a dark overcoat. For an instant Kate believed that a miracle had happened, and in that instant feeling returned, a shaft of joy that quickened every nerve; yet before the man turned, she knew her mistake and joy sharpened to grief. Pain racked her as she watched Jean Dulac walk up the drive; it was as though within her body Doyle died a second death. The window misted over and the walls of the room seemed to cave in on her.
‘What is it?’ Helen heard Kate fall and came running across the living room. ‘What has happened?’
She could not lift Kate, but fortunately Jean Dulac arrived and between them they carried her to the bed.
‘What ought I to do?’ Helen asked distractedly.
‘I think you had better leave her and get your case packed,’ Dulac answered. ‘I don’t like the smell of things. The sooner you are both at the Embassy the better.’