He said, ‘We haven’t got much in the way of weapons. You don’t wear hatpins nowadays, and I suppose the police have got the only knife I’ve ever had.’ They came back hand in hand into the small living-room. ‘Let’s be warm, any way,’ he said, ‘and turn on the fire. It’s cold enough for a blizzard, and we’ve got the wolves outside.’
She had let go his hand and was kneeling by the fire. She said, ‘It doesn’t go on.’
‘You haven’t put in the sixpence.’
‘I’ve put in a shilling.’
It was cold and the room was darkening. The same thought struck both of them. ‘Try the light,’ she said, but his hand had already felt the switch. The light didn’t go on.
‘It’s going to be very dark and very cold,’ he said. ‘Mr Travers is not making us comfortable.’
‘Oh,’ Miss Hilfe said, putting her hand to her mouth like a child. ‘I’m scared. I’m sorry, but I am scared. I don’t like the dark.’
‘They can’t do anything,’ Rowe said. ‘The door’s bolted. They can’t batter it down, you know. This is a civilized hotel.’
‘Are you sure,’ Miss Hilfe said, ‘that there’s no connecting door? In the kitchen . . .’
A memory struck him. He opened the kitchen door. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right again. The tradesmen’s entrance. These are good flats.’
‘But you can bolt that too. Please,’ Miss Hilfe said.
Rowe came back. He said gently, ‘There’s only one flaw in this well-furnished flat. The kitchen bolt is broken.’ He took her hand again quickly. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’re imagining things. This isn’t Vienna, you know. This is London. We are in the majority. This hotel is full of people – on our side.’ He repeated, ‘On our side. They are all round us. We’ve only to shout.’ The world was sliding rapidly towards night; like a torpedoed liner heeling too far over, she would soon take her last dive into darkness. Already they were talking louder because they couldn’t clearly see each other’s faces.
‘In half an hour,’ Miss Hilfe said, ‘the sirens will go. And then they’ll all go down into the basement, and the only ones left will be us – and them.’ Her hand felt very cold.
‘Then that’s our chance,’ he said. ‘When the sirens go, we go too with the crowd.’
‘We are at the end of the passage. Perhaps there won’t be a crowd. How do you know there is anyone left in this passage? They’ve thought of so much. Don’t you think they’ll have thought of that? They’ve probably booked every room.’
‘We’ll try,’ he said. ‘If we had any weapon at all – a stick, a stone.’ He stopped and let her hand go. ‘If those aren’t books,’ he said, ‘perhaps they are bricks. Bricks.’ He felt one of the catches. ‘It isn’t locked,’ he said. ‘Now we’ll see . . .’ But they both looked at the suitcase doubtfully. Efficiency is paralysing. They had thought of everything, so wouldn’t they have thought of this too?’
‘I wouldn’t touch it,’ she said.
They felt the inertia a bird is supposed to feel before a snake: a snake too knows all the answers.
‘They must make a mistake some time,’ he said.
The dark was dividing them. Very far away the guns grumbled.
‘They’ll wait till the sirens,’ she said, ‘till everybody’s down there, out of hearing.’
‘What’s that?’ he said. He was getting jumpy himself.
‘What?’
‘I think someone tried the handle.’
‘How near they are getting,’ she said.
‘By God,’ he said, ‘we aren’t powerless. Give me a hand with the couch.’ They stuck the end of it against the kitchen door. They could hardly see a thing now; they were really in the dark. ‘It’s lucky,’ Miss Hilfe said, ‘that the stove’s electric.’
‘But I don’t think it is. Why?’
‘We’ve shut them out of here. But they can turn on the gas.’
He said, ‘You ought to be in the game yourself. The things you think of. Here. Give me a hand again. We’ll push this couch through into the kitchen.’ But they stopped almost before they started. He said, ‘It’s too late. Somebody’s in there.’ The tiniest click of a closing door was all they had heard.
‘What happens next?’ he asked. Memories of The Little Duke came incongruously back. He said, ‘In the old days they always called on the castle to surrender.’
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please. They are listening.’
‘I’m getting tired of this cat and mouse act,’ he said. ‘We don’t even know he’s in there. They are frightening us with squeaking doors and the dark.’ He was moved by a slight hysteria. He called out, ‘Come in, come in. Don’t bother to knock,’ but no one replied.
He said angrily, ‘They’ve chosen the wrong man. They think they can get everything by fear. But you’ve checked up on me. I’m a murderer, aren’t I? You know that. I’m not afraid to kill. Give me any weapon. Just give me a brick.’ He looked at the suitcase.
Miss Hilfe said, ‘You’re right. We’ve got to do something. even if it’s the wrong thing. Not just let them do everything. Open it.’
He gave her hand a quick nervous pressure and released it. Then, as the sirens took up their nightly wail, he opened the lid of the suitcase . . .
BOOK TWO
The Happy Man
Chapter 1
CONVERSATIONS IN ARCADY
‘His guardians would fain have had it supposed that the castle did not contain any such guest.’
The Little Duke
1
THE sun came into the room like pale green underwater light. That was because the tree outside was just budding. The light washed over the white clean walls of the room, over the bed with its primrose yellow cover, over the big arm-chair and the couch, and the bookcase which was full of advanced reading. There were some early daffodils in a vase which had been bought in Sweden, and the only sounds were a fountain dripping somewhere in the cool out-of-doors and the gentle voice of the earnest young man with rimless glasses.
‘The great thing, you see, is not to worry. You’ve had your share of the war for the time being, Mr Digby, and you can lie back with an easy conscience.’
The young man was always strong on the subject of conscience. His own, he had explained weeks ago, was quite clear. Even if his views had not inclined to pacifism, his bad eyes would have prevented him from being of any active value – the poor things peered weakly and trustfully through the huge convex lenses like bottle-glass; they pleaded all the time for serious conversation.
‘Don’t think I’m not enjoying myself here. I am. You know it’s a great rest. Only sometimes I try to think – who am I?’
‘Well, we know that, Mr Digby. Your identity card . . .’
‘Yes, I know my name’s Richard Digby, but who is Richard Digby? What sort of life do you think I led? Do you think I shall ever have the means to repay you all . . . for this?’
‘Now that needn’t worry you, Mr Digby. The doctor is repaid all he wants simply by the interest of your case. You’re a very valuable specimen under his microscope.’
‘But he makes life on the slide so very luxurious, doesn’t he?’
‘He’s wonderful,’ the young man said. ‘This place – he planned it all, you know. He’s a very great man. There’s not a finer shell-shock clinic in the country. Whatever people may say,’ he added darkly.
‘I suppose you have worse cases than mine . . . violent cases.’
‘We’ve had a few. That’s why the doctor arranged the sick bay for them. A separate wing and a separate staff. He doesn’t want even the attendants in this wing to be mentally disturbed . . . You see it’s essential that we should be calm too.’
‘You’re certainly all very calm.’
‘When the time’s ripe I expect the doctor will give you a course of psycho-analysis, but it’s really much better, you know, that the memory should return of itself – gently and naturally. It’s like a film in a hypo bath,’ he went o
n, obviously drawing on another man’s patter. ‘The development will come out in patches.’
‘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.’
The Ministry of Fear Page 11