The Ministry of Fear

 

 

Graham Greene

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Back Cover:

 

       From the blitz on London Graham Greene gathered up the pieces for what must be his most phantasmagoric study in terror. Arthur Rowe's was a mind hamstrung by guilt — the guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was standing aside from the war until he happened to guess both the true and the false weight of the cake at a charity fête. From that moment he was the quarry of malign and shadowy forces, from which he endeavoured to escape with a mind that was out of focus.

 

 

 

Contents

 

Book One: The Unhappy Man

       1. THE FREE MOTHERS

       2. PRIVATE INQUIRIES

       3. FRONTAL ASSAULT

       4. AN EVENING WITH MRS BELLAIRS

       5. BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

       6. OUT OF TOUCH

       7. A LOAD OF BOOKS

 

Book Two: The Happy Man

       1. CONVERSATIONS IN ARCADY

       2. THE SICK BAY

 

Book Three: Bits and Pieces

       1. THE ROMAN DEATH

       2. MOPPING UP

       3. WRONG NUMBERS

 

Book Four: The Whole Man

       1. JOURNEY'S END

 

 

 

 

 

       "Have they brought home the haunch?"

       CHARLOTTE M. YONGE

       The Little Duke

 

 

 

BOOK ONE

The Unhappy Man

 

 

Chapter 1

THE FREE MOTHERS

 

 

"None passes without warrant."

                      The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

       There was something about a fête which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock-knock of wooden balls against coconuts, Of course this year there were no coconuts because there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses — a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls' house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingled beach. Otherwise the square was doing its very best with the flags of the free nations and a mass of bunting which had obviously been preserved by somebody ever since the Jubilee.

       Arthur Rowe looked wistfully over the railings — there were still railings. The fête called him like innocence: it was entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks and the smell of herbaceous borders and security. He had no inclination to mock at these elaborately naïve ways of making money for a cause. There was the inevitable clergyman presiding over a rather timid game of chance; an old lady in a print dress that came down to her ankles and a floppy garden hat hovered officially, but with excitement, over a treasure-hunt (a little plot of ground like a child's garden was staked out with claims), and as the evening darkened — they would have to close early because of the blackout — there would be some energetic work with trowels. And there in a corner, under a plane tree, was the fortuneteller's booth — unless it was an impromptu outside lavatory. It all seemed perfect in the late summer Sunday afternoon. "My peace I give unto you. Not as the world knoweth peace. . ." Arthur Rowe's eyes filled with tears, as the small military band they had somehow managed to borrow struck up again a faded song of the last war: Whate'er befall I'll oft recall that sunlit mountainside.

       Pacing round the railings he came towards his doom: pennies were rattling down a curved slope on to a chequer-board — not very many pennies. The fête was ill-attended; there were only three stalls and people avoided those. If they had to spend money they would rather try for a dividend — of pennies from the chequer-board or savings-stamps from the treasure-hunt. Arthur Rowe came along the railings, hesitantly, like an intruder, or an exile who has returned home after many years and is uncertain of his welcome.

       He was a tall stooping lean man with black hair going grey and a sharp narrow face, nose a little twisted out of the straight and a too sensitive mouth. His clothes were good but gave the impression of being uncared for; you would have said a bachelor if it had not been for an indefinable married look. . .

       "The charge," said the middle-aged lady at the gate, "is a shilling, but that doesn't seem quite fair. If you wait another five minutes you can come in at the reduced rate. I always feel it's only right to warn people when it gets as late as this."

       "It's very thoughtful of you."

       "We don't want people to feel cheated — even in a good cause, do we?"

       "I don't think I'll wait, all the same. I'll come straight in. What exactly is the cause?"

       "Comforts for free mothers — I mean mothers of the free nations."

       Arthur Rowe stepped joyfully back into adolescence, into childhood. There had always been a fête about this time of the year in the vicarage garden, a little way off the Trumpington Road, with the flat Cambridgeshire field beyond the extemporized bandstand, and at the end of the fields the pollarded willows by the stickleback stream and the chalk-pit on the slopes of what in Cambridgeshire they call a hill. He came to these fêtes every year with an odd feeling of excitement — as if anything might happen, as if the familiar pattern of life that afternoon might be altered for ever. The band beat in the warm late sunlight, the brass quivered like haze, and the faces of strange young women would get mixed up with Mrs Troup, who kept the general store and post office, Miss Savage the Sunday School teacher, the publicans' and the clergy's wives. When he was a child he would follow his mother round the stalls — the baby clothes, the pink woollies, the art pottery, and always last and best the white elephants. It was always as though there might be discovered on the white elephant stall some magic ring which would give three wishes or the heart's desire, but the odd thing was that when he went home that night with only a second-hand copy of The Little Duke, by Charlotte M. Yonge, or an out-of-date atlas advertising Mazawattee tea, he felt no disappointment: he carried with him the sound of brass, the sense of glory, of a future that would be braver than today. In adolescence the excitement had a different source; he imagined he might find at the vicarage some girl whom he had never seen before, and courage would touch his tongue, and in the late evening there would be dancing on the lawn and the smell of stocks. But because these dreams had never come true there remained the sense of innocence. . .

       And the sense of excitement. He couldn't believe that when he had passed the gate and reached the grass under the plane trees nothing would happen, though now it wasn't a girl he wanted or a magic ring, but something far less likely — to mislay the events of twenty years. His heart beat and the band played, and inside the lean experienced skull lay childhood.

       "Come and try your luck, sir?" said the clergyman in a voice which was obviously baritone at socials.

       "If I could have some coppers."

       "Thirteen for a shilling, sir."

       Arthur Rowe slid the pennies one after the other down the little inclined groove and watched them stagger on the board.

       "Not your lucky day, sir, I'm afraid. What about another Shilling's-worth? Another little flutter in a good cause?"

       "I think perhaps I'll flutter further on," His mother, he remembered, had always fluttered further on, carefully dividing her patronage in equal parts, though she left the coconuts and the gambling to the children. At some stalls it had been very difficult to find anything at all, even to give away to the servants. . .

       Under a little awning there was a cake on a stand surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic sightseers. A lady was explaining, "We clubbed our butter rations — and Mr Tatham was able to get hold of the currants."

       She turned to Arthur Rowe and said, "Won't you take a ticket and guess its weight?"

       He lifted it and said at random, "Three pounds five ounces."

       "A very good guess, I should say. Your wife must have been teaching you."

       He winced away from the group. "Oh no, I'm not married."

       War had made the stall-holders' task extraordinarily difficult: second-hand Penguins for the Forces filled most of one stall, while another was sprinkled rather than filled with the strangest second-hand clothes — the cast-offs of old age — long petticoats with pockets, high lacy collars with bone supports, routed out of Edwardian drawers and discarded at last for the sake of the free mothers, and corsets that clanked. Baby clothes played only a very small part now that wool was rationed and the second-hand was so much in demand among friends. The third stall was the traditional one — the white elephant — though black might have described it better since many Anglo-Indian families had surrendered their collections of ebony elephants. There were also brass ash-trays, embroidered match-cases which had not held matches now for a very long time, books too shabby for the bookstall, two postcard albums, a complete set of Dickens cigarette-cards, an electro-plated egg-boiler, a long pink cigarette-holder, several embossed boxes for pins from Benares, a signed post-card of Mrs Winston Churchill, and a plateful of mixed foreign copper coins. . . Arthur Rowe turned over the books and found with an ache of the heart a dingy copy of The Little Duke. He paid sixpence for it and walked on. There was something threatening, it seemed to him, in the very perfection of the day. Between the plane trees which shaded the treasure-ground he could see the ruined section of the square; it was as if Providence had led him to exactly this point to indicate the difference between then and now. These people might have been playing a part in an expensive morality for his sole benefit. . .

       He couldn't, of course, not take part in the treasure-hunt, though it was a sad declension to know the nature of the prize, and afterwards there remained nothing of consequence but the fortune-teller — it was a fortune-teller's booth and not a lavatory. A curtain made of a cloth brought home by somebody from Algiers dangled at the entrance. A lady caught his arm and said, "You must. You really must. Mrs Bellairs is quite wonderful. She told my son. . ." and clutching another middle-aged lady as she went by, she went breathlessly on, "I was just telling this gentleman about wonderful Mrs Bellairs and my son."

       "Your younger son?"

       "Yes. Jack."

       The interruption enabled Rowe to escape. The sun was going down: the square garden was emptying: it was nearly time to dig up the treasure and make tracks, before darkness and blackout and siren-time. So many fortunes one had listened to, behind a country hedge, over the cards in a liner's saloon, but the fascination remained even when the fortune was cast by an amateur at a garden fête. Always, for a little while, one could half-believe in the journey overseas, in the strange dark woman, and the letter with good news. Once somebody had refused to tell his fortune at all — it was just an act, of course, put on to impress him — and yet that silence had really come closer to the truth than anything else.

       He lifted the curtain and felt his way in.

       It was very dark inside the tent and he could hardly distinguish Mrs Bellairs, a bulky figure shrouded in what looked like cast-off widow's weeds — or perhaps it was some kind of peasant's costume. He was unprepared for Mrs Bellairs' deep powerful voice: a convincing voice. He had expected the wavering tones of a lady whose other hobby was water-colours.

       "Sit down, please, and cross my hand with silver."

       "It's so dark."

       But now he could just manage to make her out: it was a peasant's costume with a big head-dress and a veil of some kind tucked back over her shoulder. He found a half-crown and sketched a cross upon her palm.

       "Your hand."

       He held it out and felt it gripped firmly as though she intended to convey: expect no mercy. A tiny electric night-light was reflected down on the girdle of Venus, the little crosses which should have meant children, the long, long line of life. . .

       He said, "You're up-to-date. The electric nightlight, I mean."

       She paid no attention to his flippancy. She said, "First the character, then the past: by law I am not allowed to tell the future. You're a man of determination and imagination and you are very sensitive — to pain, but you sometimes feel you have not been allowed a proper scope for your gifts. You want to do great deeds, not dream them all day long. Never mind. After all, you have made one woman happy."

       He tried to take his hand away, but she held it too firmly: it would have been a tug of war. She said, "You have found the true contentment in a happy marriage. Try to be more patient, though. Now I will tell you your past."

       He said quickly, "Don't tell me the past. Tell me the future."

       It was as if he had pressed a button and stopped a machine. The silence was odd and unexpected. He hadn't hoped to silence her, though he dreaded what she might say, for even inaccuracies about things which are dead can be as painful as the truth. He pulled his hand again and it came away. He felt awkward sitting there with his hand his own again.

       Mrs Bellairs said, "My instructions are these. What you want is the cake. You must give the weight as four pounds eight and a half ounces."

       "Is that the right weight?"

       "That's immaterial."

       He was thinking hard and staring at Mrs Bellairs' left hand which the light caught: a square ugly palm with short blunt fingers prickly with big art-and-crafty rings of silver and lumps of stone. Who had given her instructions? Did she refer to her familiar spirits? And if so, why had she chosen him to win the cake? or was it really just a guess of her own? Perhaps she was backing a great number of weights, he thought, smiling in the dark, and expected at least a slice from the winner. Cake, good cake, was scarce nowadays.

       "You can go now," Mrs Bellairs said.

       "Thank you very much."

       At any rate, Arthur Rowe thought, there was no harm in trying the tip — she might have stable information, and he returned to the cake-stall. Although the garden was nearly empty now except for the helpers, a little knot of people always surrounded the cake, and indeed it was a magnificent cake. He had always liked cakes, especially rich Dundees and dark brown home-made fruit-cakes tasting elusively of Guinness. He said to the lady at the stall, "You won't think me greedy if I have another sixpennyworth?"

       "No. Please."

       "I should say, then, four pounds eight and a half ounces."

       He was conscious of an odd silence, as if all the afternoon they had been waiting for just this, but hadn't somehow expected it from him. Then a stout woman who hovered on the outskirts gave a warm and hearty laugh. "Lawks," she said. "Anybody can tell you're a bachelor."

       "As a matter of fact," the lady behind the stall rebuked her sharply, "this gentleman has won. He is not more than a fraction of an ounce out. That counts," she said, with nervous whimsicality, "as a direct hit."

       "Four pounds eight ounces," the stout woman said. "Well, you be careful, that's all. It'll be as heavy as lead."

       "On the contrary, it's made with real eggs."

       The stout woman went away laughing ironically in the direction of the clothing stall.

       Again he was aware of the odd silence as the cake was handed over: they all came round and watched — three middle-aged ladies, the clergyman who had deserted the chequer-board, and looking up Rowe saw the gypsy's curtain lifted and Mrs Bellairs peering out at him. He would have welcomed the laughter of the stout outsider as something normal and relaxed: there was such an intensity about these people as though they were attending the main ceremony of the afternoon. It was as if the experience of childhood renewed had taken a strange turn, away from innocence. There had never been anything quite like this in Cambridgeshire. It was dusk and the stall-holders were ready to pack up. The stout woman sailed towards the gates carrying a corset (no paper wrappings allowed). Arthur Rowe said, "Thank you. Thank you very much." He felt so conscious of being surrounded that he wondered whether anyone would step aside and let him out. Of course the clergyman did, laying a hand upon his upper arm and squeezing gently. "Good fellow," he said, "good fellow."

       The treasure-hunt was being hastily concluded, but this time there was nothing for Arthur Rowe. He stood with his cake and The Little Duke and watched. "We've left it very late, very late," the lady wailed beneath her floppy hat.

       But late as it was, somebody had thought it worth while to pay for entrance at the gate. A taxi had driven up, and a man made hastily for the gypsy tent rather as a mortal sinner in fear of immediate death might dive towards a confessional-box. Was this another who had great faith in wonderful Mrs Bellairs, or was it perhaps Mrs Bellairs' husband come prosaically to fetch her home from her unholy rites?

       The speculation interested Arthur Rowe, and he scarcely took in the fact that the last of the treasure-hunters was making for the garden gate and he was alone under the great planes with the stall-keepers. When he realized it he felt the embarrassment of the last guest in a restaurant who notices suddenly the focused look of the waiters lining the wall.

       But before he could reach the gate the clergyman had intercepted him jocosely. "Not carrying that prize of yours away so soon?"

       "It seems quite time to go."

       "Wouldn't you feel inclined — it's usually the custom at a fête like this — to put the cake up again — for the Good Cause?"

       Something in his manner — an elusive patronage as though he were a kindly prefect teaching to a new boy the sacred customs of the school — offended Rowe. "Well, you haven't any visitors left surely?"

       "I meant to auction — among the rest of us." He squeezed Rowe's arm again gently. "Let me introduce myself. My name's Sinclair. I'm supposed, you know, to have a touch — for touching." He gave a small giggle. "You see that lady over there — that's Mrs Fraser — the Mrs Fraser. A little friendly auction like this gives her the opportunity of presenting a note to the cause — unobtrusively."

       "It sounds quite obtrusive to me."

       "They're an awfully nice set of people. I'd like you to know them, Mr. . ."

       Rowe said obstinately, "It's not the way to run a fête — to prevent people taking their prizes."

       "Well, you don't exactly come to these affairs to make a profit, do you?" There were possibilities of nastiness in Mr Sinclair that had not shown on the surface.

       "I don't want to make a profit. Here's a pound note, but I fancy the cake."

       Mr Sinclair made a gesture of despair towards the others openly and rudely.

       Rowe said, "Would you like The Little Duke back? Mrs Fraser might give a note for that just as unobtrusively."

       "There's really no need to take that tone."

       The afternoon had certainly been spoiled: brass bands lost their associations in the ugly little fracas. "Good afternoon," Rowe said.

       But he wasn't to be allowed to go yet; a kind of deputation advanced to Mr Sinclair's support — the treasure-hunt lady flapped along in the van. She said, smiling coyly, "I'm afraid I am the bearer of ill tidings."

       "You want the cake too," Rowe said.

       She smiled with a sort of elderly impetuosity. "I must have the cake. You see — there's been a mistake. About the weight. It wasn't — what you said." She consulted a slip of paper. "That rude woman was right. The real weight was three pounds seven ounces. And that gentleman," she pointed towards the stall, "won it."

       It was the man who had arrived late in the taxi and made for Mrs Bellairs' booth. He kept in the dusky background by the cake-stall and let the ladies fight for him. Had Mrs Bellairs given him a better tip?

       Rowe said, "That's very odd. He got the exact weight? "

       There was a little hesitation in her reply — as if she had been cornered in a witness-box undrilled for that question. "Well, not exact. But he was within three ounces." She seemed to gain confidence. "He guessed three pounds ten ounces."

       "In that case," Rowe said, "I keep the cake because you see I guessed three pounds five the first time. Here is a pound for the cause. Good evening."

       He'd really taken them by surprise this tiine; they were wordless, they didn't even thank him for the note. He looked back from the pavement and saw the group from the cake-stall surge forward to join the rest, and he waved his hand. A poster on the railings said: "The Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations Fund. A fête will be held. . . under the patronage of royalty. . ."

 

 

2

 

       Arthur Rowe lived in Guilford Street. A bomb early in the blitz had fallen in the middle of the street and blasted both sides, but Rowe stayed on. Houses went overnight, but he stayed. There were boards instead of glass in every room, and the doors no longer quite fitted and had to be propped at night. He had a sitting-room and a bedroom on the first floor, and he was done for by Mrs Purvis, who also stayed — because it was her house. He had taken the rooms furnished and simply hadn't bothered to make any alterations. He was like a man camping in a desert. Any books there were came from the two-penny or the public library except for The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield, which he read, as people used to read the Bible, over and over again till he could have quoted chapter and verse, not so much because he liked them as because he had read them as a child, and they carried no adult memories. The pictures were Mrs Purvis's — a wild water-colour of the Bay of Naples at sunset and several steel engravings and a photograph of the former Mr Purvis in the odd dated uniform of 1914. The ugly arm-chair, the table covered with a thick woollen cloth, the fern in the window — all were Mrs Purvis's, and the radio was hired. Only the packet of cigarettes on the mantelpiece belonged to Rowe, and the tooth-brush and shaving tackle in the bedroom (the soap was Mrs Purvis's), and inside a cardboard box his sleeping pills. In the sitting-room there was not even a bottle of ink or a packet of stationery: Rowe didn't write letters, and he paid his income tax at the post office.

       You might say that a cake and a book added appreciably to his possessions.

       When he reached home he rang for Mrs Purvis. "Mrs Purvis," he said, "I won this magnificent cake at the fête in the square. Have you by any chance a tin large enough?"

       "It's a good-sized cake for these days," Mrs Purvis said hungrily. It wasn't the war that had made her hungry; she had always, she would sometimes confide to him, been like it from a girl. Small and thin and bedraggled she had let herself go after her husband died. She would be seen eating sweets at all hours of the day: the stairs smelt like a confectioner's shop: little sticky paper-bags would be found mislaid in corners, and if she couldn't be discovered in the house, you might be sure she was standing in a queue for fruit gums. "It weighs two and a half pounds if it weighs an ounce," Mrs Purvis said.

       "It weighs nearly three and a half."

       "Oh, it couldn't do that."

       "You weigh it."

       When she was gone he sat down in the arm-chair and closed his eyes. The fête was over: the immeasurable emptiness of the week ahead stretched before him. His proper work had been journalism, but that had ceased two years ago. He had four hundred a year of his own, and as the saying goes, he didn't have to worry. The army wouldn't have him, and his short experience of civil defence had left him more alone than ever — they wouldn't have him either. There were munition factories, but he was tied to London. Perhaps if every street with which he had associations were destroyed, he would be free to go — he would find a factory near Trumpington. After a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer — it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one.

       Mrs Purvis brought the cake in a large biscuit-tin. "Three and a half!" she said scornfully. "Never trust these charities. It's just under three."

       He opened his eyes. "That's strange," he said, "that's very strange." He thought for awhile. "Let me have a slice," he said. Mrs Purvis hungrily obeyed. It tasted good. He said, "Put it away in the tin now. It's the kind of cake that improves with keeping."

       "It'll get stale," Mrs Purvis said.

       "Oh no, it's made with real eggs." But he couldn't bear the yearning way in which she handled it. "You can give yourself a slice, Mrs Purvis," he said. People could always get things out of him by wanting them enough; it broke his precarious calm to feel that people suffered. Then he would do anything for them. Anything.

 

 

3

 

       It was the very next day that the stranger moved in to Mrs Purvis's back room on the third floor. Rowe met him in the evening of the second day on the dusk of the stairs; the man was talking to Mrs Purvis in a vibrant undertone, and Mrs Purvis stood back against the wall with an out-of-depth scared expression. "One day," the man was saying, "you'll see." He was dark and dwarfish and twisted in his enormous shoulders with infantile paralysis.

       "Oh, sir," Mrs Purvis said to Rowe with relief, "this gentleman wants to hear the news. I said I thought perhaps you'd let him listen

       "Come in," Rowe said, and opened his door and ushered the stranger in — his first caller. The room at this time of the evening was very dim; beaverboard in the windows kept out the last remains of daylight and the single globe was shaded for fear of cracks. The Bay of Naples faded into the wallpaper. The little light that went on behind the radio dial had a homely effect like a nightlight in a child's nursery — a child who is afraid of the dark. A voice said with hollow cheeriness, "Good night, children, good night."

       The stranger hunched down in one of the two easy-chairs and began to comb his scalp with his fingers for scurf. You felt that sitting was his natural position; he became powerful then with his big out-of-drawing shoulders in evidence and his height disguised. He said, "Just in time," and without offering his case he lit a cigarette; a black bitter tang of Caporal spread over the room.

       "Will you have a biscuit?" Rowe asked, opening his cupboard door. Like most men who live alone, he believed his own habits to be the world's; it never occurred to him that other men might not eat biscuits at six.

       "Wouldn't you like the cake?" Mrs Purvis asked, lingering in the doorway.

       "I think we had better finish the biscuits first."

       "Cakes," said the stranger, "are hardly worth eating these days."

       "But this one," Mrs Purvis said with vicarious pride, "was made with real eggs. Mr Rowe won it in a raffle." And just at that moment the news began — "and this is Joseph Macleod reading it." The stranger crouched back in his chair and listened; there was something supercilious in his manner, as though he were listening to stories of which only he was in a position to know the real truth.

       "It's a little more cheerful tonight," Rowe said.

       "They feed us," the stranger said.

       "You won't want the cake?" Mrs Purvis asked.

       "Well, perhaps this gentleman would rather have a biscuit. . .?"

       "I'm very fond of cake," the stranger said sharply, "when it's good cake," as though his taste were the only thing that mattered, and he stamped out his Caporal on the floor.

       "Then fetch it, Mrs Purvis, and a pot of tea."

       The stranger hoisted his deformed figure round in the chair to watch the cake brought in. Certainly he was fond of cake: it was as though he couldn't keep his eyes off it. He seemed to hold his breath until it reached the table safely; then he sat impatiently forward in his chair. "A knife, Mrs Purvis?"

       "Oh dear, oh dear. This time of night," Mrs Purvis explained, "I always get forgetful. It's the sireens."

       "Never mind," Rowe said, "I'll use my own." He brought tenderly out of his pocket his last remaining treasure — a big schoolboy's knife. He couldn't resist displaying its beauties to a stranger — the corkscrew, the tweezers, the blade that shot open and locked when you pressed a catch. "There's only one shop you can get these in now," he said, "a little place off the Haymarket." But the stranger paid him no attention, waiting impatiently to see the knife slide in. Far away on the outskirts of London the sirens began their nightly wail.

       The stranger's voice said, "Now you and I are intelligent men. We can talk freely. . . about things." Rowe had no idea what he meant. Somewhere two miles above their heads an enemy bomber came up from the estuary. "Where are you? Where are you?" its uneven engine-beat pronounced over and over again. Mrs Purvis had left them; there was a scrambling on the stairs as she brought her bedding down, a slam of the front door: she was making for her favourite shelter down the street. "There's no need for people like you and me to get angry," the stranger said, "about things."

       He pushed his great deformed shoulder into the light, getting nearer to Rowe, sidling his body to the chair's edge. "The stupidity of this war," he said. "Why should you and I. . . intelligent men. . .?" He said, "They talk about democracy, don't they. But you and I don't swallow stuff like that. If you want democracy — I don't say you do, but if you want it — you must go to Germany for it. What do you want?" he suddenly inquired.

       "Peace," Rowe said.

       "Exactly. So do we."

       "I don't suppose I mean your kind of peace."

       But the stranger listened to nobody but himself. He said, "We can give you peace. We are working for peace."

       "Who are we?"

       "My friends and I."

       "Conscientious objectors?"

       The deformed shoulder moved impatiently. He said, "One can worry too much about one's conscience."

       "What else could we have done? Let them take Poland too without a protest?"

       "You and I are men who know the world." When the stranger leant forward, his chair slid an inch with him, so that he bore steadily down on Rowe like something mechanized. "We know that Poland was one of the most corrupt countries in Europe."

       "Who are we to judge?"

       The chair groaned nearer. "Exactly. A Government like the one we had. . . and have. . ."

       Rowe said slowly, "It's like any other crime. It involves the innocent. It isn't any excuse that your chief victim was. . . dishonest, or that the judge drinks. . ."

       The stranger took him up. Whatever he said had an intolerable confidence. "How wrong you are. Why, even murder can sometimes be excused. We've all known cases, haven't we. . .?"

       "Murder. . ." Rowe considered slowly and painfully. He had never felt this man's confidence about anything. He said, "They say, don't they, that you shouldn't do evil that good may come."

       "Oh, poppycock," sneered the little man. "The Christian ethic. You're intelligent. Now I challenge you. Have you ever really followed that rule?"

       "No," Rowe said. "No."

       "Of course not," the stranger said. "Haven't we checked up on you? But even without that, I could have told. . . you're intelligent. . ." It was as if intelligence was the password to some small exclusive society. "The moment I saw you, I knew you weren't — one of the sheep." He started violently as a gun in a square near-by went suddenly off, shaking the house, and again faintly up from the coast came the noise of another plane. Nearer and nearer the guns opened up, but the plane pursued its steady deadly tenor until again one heard, "Where are you? Where are you?" overhead and the house shook to the explosion of the neighbouring gun. Then a whine began, came down towards them like something aimed deliberately at this one insignificant building. But the bomb burst half a mile away: you could feel the ground dent. "I was saying," the stranger said, but he'd lost touch, he had mislaid his confidence: now he was just a cripple trying not to be frightened of death. He said, "We're going to have it properly tonight. I hoped they were just passing. . ."

       Again the drone began.

       "Have another piece of cake?" Rowe asked. He couldn't help feeling sorry for the man: it wasn't courage in his own case that freed him from fear so much as loneliness. "It may not be. . ." he waited till the scream stopped and the bomb exploded — very near this time — probably the end of the next street: The Little Duke had fallen on its side. . . "much." They waited for a stick of bombs to drop, pounding a path towards them, but there were no more.

       "No, thank you — that's to say, please, yes." The man had a curious way of crumbling the cake when he took a slice: it might have been nerves. To be a cripple in wartime, Rowe thought, is a terrible thing; he felt dangerous pity stirring in the bowels. "You say you checked me up, but who are you?" He cut himself a piece of cake and felt the stranger's eyes on him all the time like a starving man watching through the heavy plate-glass window the gourmet in the restaurant. Outside an ambulance screamed by, and again a plane came up. The night's noise and fires and deaths were now in train; they would go on like a routine till three or four in the morning: a bombing pilot's eight-hour day. He said, "I was telling you about this knife. . ." During the intense preoccupation of a raid it was hard to stick to any one line of thought.

       The stranger interrupted, laying a hand on his wrist — a nervous bony hand attached to an enormous arm. "You know there's been a mistake. That cake was never meant for you."

       "I won it. What do you mean?"

       "You weren't meant to win it. There was a mistake in the figures."

       "It's a bit late now to worry, isn't it?" Rowe said. "We've eaten nearly half."

       But the cripple took no notice of that. He said, "They've sent me here to get it back. We'll pay in reason."

       "Who are they?"

       But he knew who they were. It was comic; he could see the whole ineffective rabble coming across the grass at him: the elderly woman in the floppy hat who almost certainly painted water-colours, the intense whimsical lady who had managed the raffle, and wonderful Mrs Bellairs. He smiled and drew his hand away. "What are you all playing at?" he asked. Never had a raffle, surely, been treated quite so seriously before. "What good is the cake to you now?"

       The other watched him with gloom. Rowe tried to raise the cloud. "I suppose," he said, "it's the principle of the thing. Forget it and have another cup of tea. I'll fetch the kettle."

       "You needn't bother. I want to discuss. . ."

       "There's hardly anything left to discuss, and it isn't any bother."

       The stranger picked at the scurf which had lodged below his finger-nail. He said, "There's no more to say then?"

       "Nothing at all."

       "In that case. . ." the stranger said: he began to listen as the next plane beat towards them. He shifted uneasily as the first guns fired, far away in East London. "Perhaps I will have another cup."

       When Rowe returned the stranger was pouring out the milk — and he had cut himself another piece of cake. He was conspicuously at home with his chair drawn nearer to the gas fire. He waved his hand towards Rowe's chair as if he were the host, and he seemed quite to have forgotten the squabble of a moment ago. "I was thinking," he said, "while you were out of the room that it's intellectuals like ourselves who are the only free men. Not bound by conventions, patriotic emotions, sentimentality. . . we haven't what they call a stake in the country. We aren't shareholders and it doesn't matter to us if the company goes on the rocks. That's quite a good image, don't you think?"

       "Why do you say 'we'?"

       "Well," the cripple said, "I see no sign that you are taking any active part. And of course we know why, don't we? " and suddenly, grossly, he winked.

       Rowe took a sip of tea: it was too hot to swallow. . . an odd flavour haunted him like something remembered, something unhappy. He took a piece of cake to drown the taste, and looking up caught the anxious speculative eyes of the cripple, fixed on him, waiting. He took another slow sip and then he remembered. Life struck back at him like a scorpion, over the shoulder. His chief feeling was astonishment and anger, that anybody should do this to him. He dropped the cup on the floor and stood up. The cripple trundled away from him like something on wheels: the huge back and the long strong arms prepared themselves. . . and then the bomb went off.

       They hadn't heard the plane this time; destruction had come drifting quietly down on green silk cords: the walls suddenly caved in. They were not even aware of noise.

       Blast is an odd thing; it is just as likely to have the effect of an embarrassing dream as of man's serious vengeance on man, landing you naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or on your lavatory seat to the neighbours' gaze. Rowe's head was singing; he felt as though he had been walking in his sleep; he was lying in a strange position, in a strange place. He got up and saw an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car turned out to be a refrigerator. He looked up and saw Charles's Wain heeling over an arm-chair which was poised thirty feet above his head: he looked down and saw the Bay of Naples intact at his feet. He felt as though he were in a strange country without any maps to help him, trying to get his position by the stars.

       Three flares came sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree: his shadow shot out in front of him and he felt exposed, like a gaolbreaker caught in a searchlight beam. The awful thing about a raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the raid doesn't stop. They were machine-gunning the flares: two broke with a sound like cracking plates and the third came to earth in Russell Square; the darkness returned coldly and comfortingly.

       But in the light of the flares Rowe had seen several things; he had discovered where he was — in the basement kitchen: the chair above his head was in his own room on the first floor, the front wall had gone and all the roof, and the cripple lay beside the chair, one arm swinging loosely down at him. He had dropped neatly and precisely at Rowe's feet a piece of uncrumbled cake. A warden called from the street, "Is anyone hurt in there?" and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, "It's beyond a joke: it's beyond a joke."

       "You're telling me," the warden called down to him from the shattered street as yet another raider came up from the south-east muttering to them both like a witch in a child's dream, "Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?"

 

 

Chapter 2

PRIVATE INQUIRIES

 

 

"There was a deep scar long after the pain had ceased."

                                                 The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

       Orthotex — the Longest Established Private Inquiry Bureau in the Metropolis — still managed to survive at the unravaged end of Chancery Lane, close to a book auctioneer's, between a public house which in peace-time had been famous for its buffet and a legal bookshop. It was on the fourth floor, but there was no lift. On the first floor was a notary public, on the second floor the office of a monthly called Fitness and Freedom, and the third was a flat which nobody occupied now.

       Arthur Rowe pushed open a door marked Inquiries, but there was no one there. A half-eaten sausage-roll lay in a saucer beside an open telephone directory: it might, for all one knew, have lain there for weeks. It gave the office an air of sudden abandonment, like the palaces of kings in exile where the tourist is shown the magazines yet open at the page which royalty turned before fleeing years ago. Arthur Rowe waited a minute and then explored further, trying another door.

       A bald-headed man hurriedly began to put a bottle away in a filing cabinet.

       Rowe said, "Excuse me. There seemed to be nobody about. I was looking for Mr Rennit."

       "I'm Mr Rennit."

       "Somebody recommended me to come here."

       The bald-headed man watched Rowe suspiciously with one hand on the filing cabinet. "Who, if I may ask?"

       "It was years ago. A man called Keyser."

       "I don't remember him."

       "I hardly do myself. He wasn't a friend of mine. I met him in a train. He told me he had been in trouble about some letters. . ."

       "You should have made an appointment."

       "I'm sorry," Rowe said. "Apparently you don't want clients. I'll say good morning."

       "Now, now," Mr Rennit said. "You don't want to lose your temper. I'm a busy man, and there's ways of doing things. If you'll be brief. . ." Like a man who deals in something disreputable — pornographic books or illegal operations - he treated his customer with a kind of superior contempt, as if it was not he who wanted to sell his goods, but the other who was over-anxious to buy. He sat down at his desk and said as an afterthought, "Take a chair." He fumbled in a drawer and hastily tucked back again what he found there; at last he discovered a pad and pencil. "Now," he said, "when did you first notice anything wrong?" He leant back and picked at a tooth with his pencil point, his breath whistling slightly between the uneven dentures. He looked abandoned like the other room: his collar was a little frayed and his shirt was not quite clean. But beggars, Rowe told himself, could not be choosers.

       "Name?" Mr Rennit went on. "Present address?" He stubbed the paper fiercely, writing down the answers. At the name of a hotel he raised his head and said sombrely, "In your position you can't be too careful."

       "I think perhaps," Rowe said, "I'd better begin at the beginning."

       "My good sir," Mr Rennit said, "you can take it from me that I know all the beginnings. I've been in this line of business for thirty years. Thirty years. Every client thinks he's a unique case. He's nothing of the kind. He's just a repetition. All I need from you is the answer to certain questions. The rest we can manage without you. Now then — when did you notice anything wrong, wife's coldness?"

       "I'm not married," Rowe said.

       Mr Rennit shot him a look of disgust; he felt guilty of a quibble. "Breach of promise, eh?" Mr Rennit asked. "Have you written any letters?"

       "It's not breach of promise either."

       "Blackmail?"

       "No."

       "Then why," Mr Rennit asked angrily, 'do you come to me?" He added his tag, "I'm a busy man," but never had anyone been so palpably unemployed. There were two trays on his desk marked In and Out, but the Out tray was empty and all the In tray held was a copy of Men Only. Rowe might perhaps have left if he had known any other address, and if it had not been for that sense of pity which is more promiscuous than lust. Mr Rennit was angry because he had not been given time to set his scene, and he could so obviously not afford his anger. There was a kind of starved nobility in the self-sacrifice of his rage.

       "Doesn't a detective deal with anything but divorces and breaches of promise?"

       Mr Rennit said, "This is a respectable business with a tradition. I'm not Sherlock Holmes. You don't expect to find a man in my position, do you, crawling about floors with a microscope looking for blood-stains?" He said stiffly, "If you are in any trouble of that kind, I advise you to go to the police."

       "Listen," Rowe said, "be reasonable. You know you can do with a client just as much as I can do with you. I can pay, pay well. Be sensible and unlock that cupboard and let's have a drink on it together. These raids are bad for the nerves. One has to have a little something. . ."

       The stiffness drained slowly out of Mr Rennit's attitude as he looked cautiously back at Rowe. He stroked his bald head and said, "Perhaps you're right. One gets rattled. I've never objected to stimulants as stimulants."

       "Everybody needs them nowadays."

       "It was bad last night at Purley. Not many bombs, but the waiting. Not that we haven't had our share, and land-mines. . ."

       "The place where I live went last night."

       "You don't say," Mr Rennit said without interest, opening the filing cabinet and reaching for the bottle. "Now last week. . . at Purley. . ." He was just like a man discussing his operations. "Not a hundred yards away. . ."

       "We both deserve a drink," Rowe said.

       Mr Rennit — the ice broken — suddenly became confiding. "I suppose I was a bit sharp. One does get rattled. War plays hell with a business like this." He explained. "The reconciliations — you wouldn't believe human nature could be so contrary. And then, of course, the registrations have made it very difficult. People daren't go to hotels as they used to. And you can't prove anything from motor-cars."

       "It must be difficult for you."

       "It's a case of holding out," Mr Rennit said, "keeping our backs to the wall until peace comes. Then there'll be such a crop of divorces, breaches of promise. . ." He contemplated the situation with uncertain optimism over the bottle. "You'll excuse a tea-cup?" He said, "When peace comes an old-established business like this — with connections — will be a gold-mine." He added gloomily, "Or so I tell myself."

       Listening Rowe thought, as he often did, that you couldn't take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribution, though what they both boiled down to was simply Mr Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr Rennits. But of course if you believed in God — and the Devil — the thing wasn't quite so comic. Because the Devil — and God too — had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.

       ". . . new orders. But it will always be the same world, I hope," Mr Rennit was saying.

       "Queer things do happen in it, all the same," Rowe said. "That's why I'm here."

       "Ah yes," Mr Rennit said. "We'll just fill our cups and then to business. I'm sorry I have no soda-water. Now just tell me what's troubling you — as if I was your best friend."

       "Somebody tried to kill me. It doesn't sound important when so many of us are being killed every night — but it made me angry at the time."

       Mr Rennit looked at him imperturbably over the rim of his cup. "Did you say you were not married?"

       "There's no woman in it. It all began," Rowe said, "with a cake." He described the fête to Mr Rennit, the anxiety of all the helpers to get the cake back, the stranger's visit. . . and then the bomb. "I wouldn't have thought twice about it," Rowe said, "if it hadn't been for the taste the tea had."

       "Just imagination, probably."

       "But I knew the taste. It was — hyoscine," he admitted reluctantly.

       "Was the man killed?"

       "They took him to hospital, but when I called today he'd been fetched away. It was only concussion and his friends wanted him back."

       "The hospital would have the name and address."

       "They had a name and address, but the address — I tried the London Directory — simply didn't exist." He looked up across the desk at Mr Rennit expecting some sign of surprise — even in an odd world it was an odd story, but Mr Rennit said calmly, "Of course there are a dozen explanations." He stuck his fingers into his waistcoat and considered. "For instance," he said, "it might have been a kind of confidence trick. They are always up to new dodges, those people. He might have offered to take the cake off you — for a large sum. He'd have told you something valuable was hidden in it."

       "Something hidden in it?"

       "Plans of a Spanish treasure off the coast of Ireland. Something romantic. He'd have wanted you to give him a mark of confidence in return. Something substantial like twenty pounds while he went to the bank. Leaving you the cake, of course."

       "It makes one wonder. . ."

       "Oh, it would have worked out," Mr Rennit said. It was extraordinary, his ability to reduce everything to a commonplace level. Even air-raids were only things that occurred at Purley.

       "Or take another possibility," Mr Rennit said. "If you are right about the tea. I don't believe it, mind. He might have introduced himself to you with robbery in mind. Perhaps he followed you from the fête. Did you flourish your money about?"

       "I did give them a pound when they wanted the cake."

       "A man," Mr Rennit said, with a note of relief, "who gives a pound for a cake is a man with money. Thieves don't carry drugs as a rule, but he sounds a neurotic type."

       "But the cake?"

       "Pure patter. He hadn't really come for the cake."

       "And your next explanation? You said there were a dozen."

       "I always prefer the Straightforward," Mr Rennit said, running his fingers up and down the whisky bottle. "Perhaps there was a genuine mistake about the cake and he had come for it. Perhaps it contained some kind of a prize."

       "And the drug was imagination again?"

       "It's the straightforward explanation."

       Mr Rennit's calm incredulity shook Rowe. He said with resentment, "In all your long career as a detective, have you never come across such a thing as murder — or a murderer?"

       Mr Rennit's nose twitched over the cup. "Frankly," he said, "no. I haven't. Life, you know, isn't like a detective story. Murderers are rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their own."

       "That's interesting to me."

       "They are very, very seldom," Mr Rennit said, "what we call gentlemen. Outside of story-books. You might say that they belong to the lower orders."

       "Perhaps," Rowe said, "I ought to tell you that I am a murderer myself."

 

 

2

 

       "Ha-ha," said Mr Rennit miserably.

       "That's what makes me so furious," Rowe said. "That they should pick on me, me. They are such amateurs."

       "You are — a professional?" Mr Rennit asked with a watery and unhappy smile.

       Rowe said, "Yes, I am, if thinking of the thing for two years before you do it, dreaming about it nearly every night until at last you take the drug out from the unlocked drawer, makes you one. . . and then sitting in the dock trying to make out what the judge is really thinking, watching each one of the jury, wondering what he thinks. . . there was a woman in pince-nez who wouldn't be separated from her umbrella, and then you go below and wait hour after hour till the jury come back and the warder tries to be encouraging, but you know if there's any justice left on earth there can be only one verdict. . ."

       "Would you excuse me one moment?" Mr Rennit said. "I think I heard my man come back. . ." He emerged from behind his desk and then whisked through the door behind Rowe's chair with surprising agility. Rowe sat with his hands held between his knees, trying to get a grip again on his brain and his tongue. . . "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth and a door round about my lips. . ." He heard a bell tinkle in the other room and followed the sound. Mr Rennit was at the phone. He looked piteously at Rowe and then at the sausage-roll as if that were the only weapon within reach. "Are you ringing up the police? " Rowe asked, "or a doctor?"

       "A theatre," Mr Rennit said despairingly, "I just remembered my wife. . ."

       "You are married, are you, in spite of all your experience?"

       "Yes." An awful disinclination to talk convulsed Mr Rennit's features as a thin faint voice came up the wires. He said, "Two seats — in the front row," and clapped the receiver down again.

       "The theatre?"

       "The theatre."

       "And they didn't even want your name? Why not be reasonable?" Rowe said. "After all, I had to tell you. You have to have all the facts. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. It might have to be taken into consideration, mightn't it, if you work for me."

       "Into consideration?"

       "I mean — it might have a bearing, That's something I discovered when they tried me — that everything may have a bearing. The fact that I had lunch on a certain day alone at the Holborn Restaurant. Why was I alone, they asked me. I said I liked being alone sometimes, and you should have seen the way they nodded at the jury. It had a bearing." His hands began to shake again. "As if I really wanted to be alone for life. . ."

       Mr Rennit cleared a dry throat.

       "Even the fact that my wife kept love-birds. . ."

       "You are married?"

       "It was my wife I murdered." He found it hard to put things in the right order; people oughtn't to ask unnecessary questions: he really hadn't meant to startle Mr Rennit again. He said, "You needn't worry. The police know all about it."

       "You were acquitted?"

       "I was detained during His Majesty's pleasure. It was quite a short pleasure: I wasn't mad, you see. They just had to find an excuse." He said with loathing, "They pitied me, so that's why I'm alive. The papers all called it a mercy killing." He moved his hand in front of his face as though he were troubled by a thread of cobweb. "Mercy to her or mercy to me. They didn't say. And I don't know myself."

       "I really don't think," Mr Rennit said, swallowing for breath in the middle of a sentence and keeping a chair between them, "I can undertake. . . It's out of my line."

       "I'll pay more," Rowe said. "It always comes down to that, doesn't it?" and as soon as he felt cupidity stirring in the little dusty room, over the half-eaten sausage-roll and the saucer and the tattered telephone-directory, he knew he had gained his point. Mr Rennit after all could not afford to be nice. Rowe said, "A murderer is rather like a peer: he pays more because of his title. One tries to travel incognito, but it usually comes out. . ."

 

 

Chapter 3

FRONTAL ASSAULT

 

 

"It were hard he should not have one

faithful comrade and friend with him."

                              The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

       Rowe went straight from Orthotex to the Free Mothers. He had signed a contract with Mr Rennit to pay him fifty pounds a week for a period of four weeks to carry out investigations; Mr Rennit had explained that the expenses would be heavy — Orthotex employed only the most experienced agents — and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. (Mr Rennit introduced him as A.2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones.) Jones was small and at first sight insignificant, with his thin pointed nose, his soft brown hat with a stained ribbon, his grey suit which might have been quite a different colour years ago, and the pencil and pen on fasteners in the breast pocket. But when you looked a second time you saw experience; you saw it in the small, cunning, rather frightened eyes, the weak defensive mouth, the wrinkles of anxiety on the forehead — experience of innumerable hotel corridors, of bribed chamber-maids and angry managers, experience of the insult which could not be resented, the threat which had to be ignored, the promise which was never kept. Murder had a kind of dignity compared with this muted second-hand experience of scared secretive passions.

       An argument developed almost at once in which Jones played no part, standing close to the wall holding his old brown hat, looking and listening as though he were outside a hotel door. Mr Rennit, who obviously considered the whole investigation the fantastic fad of an unbalanced man, argued that Rowe himself should not take part. "Just leave it to me and A.2," he said. "If it's a confidence trick —"

       He would not believe that Rowe's life had been threatened. "Of course," he said, "we'll look into the chemists' books — not that there'll be anything to find."

       "It made me angry," Rowe repeated. "He said he'd checked up — and yet he had the nerve." An idea came to him and he went excitedly on, "It was the same drug. People would have said it was suicide, that I'd managed to keep some of it hidden. . ."

       "If there's anything in your idea," Mr Rennit said, "the cake was given to the wrong man. We've only got to find the right one. It's a simple matter of tracing. Jones and I know all about tracing. We start from Mrs Bellairs. She told you the weight, but why did she tell you the weight? Because she mistook you in the dark for the other man. There must be some resemblance. . ." Mr Rennit exchanged a look with Jones. "It all boils down to finding Mrs Bellairs. That's not very difficult. Jones will do that."

       "It would be easiest of all for me to ask for her — at the Free Mothers."

       "I'd advise you to let Jones see to it."

       "They'd think he was a tout."

       "It wouldn't do at all for a client to make his own investigations, not at all."

       "If there's nothing in my story," Rowe said, "they'll give me Mrs Bellairs' address. If I'm right they'll try to kill me, because, though the cake's gone, I know there was a cake, and that there are people who want the cake. There's the work for Jones, to keep his eye on me."

       Jones shifted his hat uneasily and tried to catch his employer's eye. He cleared his throat and Mr Rennit asked, "What is it, A.2?"

       "Won't do, sir," Jones said.

       "No?"

       "Unprofessional, sir."

       "I agree with Jones," Mr Rennit said.

       All the same, in spite of Jones, Rowe had his way. He came out into the shattered street and made his sombre way between the ruins of Holborn. In his lonely state to have confessed his identity to someone was almost like making a friend. Always before it had been discovered, even at the warden's post; it came out sooner or later, like cowardice. They were extraordinary the tricks and turns of fate, the way conversations came round, the long memories some people had for names. Now in the strange torn landscape where London shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii he moved with familiarity; he was part of this destruction as he was no longer part of the past — the long weekends in the country, the laughter up lanes in the evening, the swallows gathering on telegraph wires, peace.

       Peace had come to an end quite suddenly on an August the thirty-first — the world waited another year. He moved like a bit of stone among the other stones — he was protectively coloured, and he felt at times, breaking the surface of his remorse, a kind of evil pride like that a leopard might feel moving in harmony with all the other spots on the world's surface, only with greater power. He had not been a criminal when he murdered; it was afterwards that he began to grow into criminality like a habit of thought. That these men should have tried to kill him who had succeeded at one blow in destroying beauty, goodness, peace — it was a form of impertinence. There were times when he felt the whole world's criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight — a woman's bag, a face on an elevator going up as he went down, a picture in a paper — all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy. A voice would whisper, "You say you killed for pity; why don't you have pity on yourself?" Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.

 

 

2

 

       The Free Mothers had taken over an empty office in a huge white modern block off the Strand. It was like going into a mechanised mortuary with a separate lift for every slab. Rowe moved steadily upwards in silence for five floors: a long passage, frosted glass, somebody in pince-nez stepped into the lift carrying a file marked "Most Immediate" and they moved on smoothly upwards. A door on the seventh floor was marked "Comforts for Mothers of the Free Nations. Inquiries."

       He began to believe that after all Mr Rennit was right. The stark efficient middle-class woman who sat at a typewriter was so obviously incorruptible and unpaid. She wore a little button to show she was honorary. "Yes?" she asked sharply and all his anger and pride drained away. He tried to remember what the stranger had said — about the cake not being intended for him. There was really nothing sinister in the phrase so far as he could now remember it, and as for the taste, hadn't he often woken at night with that upon his tongue?

       "Yes? " the woman repeated briskly.

       "I came," Rowe said, "to try and find out the address of a Mrs Bellairs."

       "No lady of that name works here."

       "It was in connection with the fête."

       "Oh, they were all voluntary helpers. We can't possibly disclose addresses of voluntary helpers."

       "Apparently," Rowe said, "a mistake was made. I was given a cake which didn't belong to me. . ."

       "I'll inquire," the stark lady said and went into an inner room. He had just long enough to wonder whether after all he had been wise. He should have brought A.2 up with him. But then the normality of everything came back; he was the only abnormal thing there. The honorary helper stood in the doorway and said, "Will you come through, please?" He took a quick glance at her typewriter as he went by; he could read "The Dowager Lady Cradbrooke thanks Mrs J. A. Smythe-Philipps for her kind gift of tea and flour. . ." Then he went in.

       He had never become accustomed to chance stabs: only when the loved person is out of reach does love become complete. The colour of the hair and the size of the body — something very small and neat and incapable, you would say, of inflicting pain — this was enough to make him hesitate just inside the room. There were no other resemblances, but when the girl spoke — in the slightest of foreign accents — he felt the kind of astonishment one feels at a party hearing the woman one loves talking in a stranger's tone to a stranger. It was not an uncommon occurrence; he would follow people into shops, he would wait at street corners because of a small resemblance, just as though the woman he loved was only lost and might be discovered any day in a crowd.

       She said, "You came about a cake?"

       He watched her closely: they had so little in common compared with the great difference, that one was alive and the other dead. He said, "A man came to see me last night — I suppose from this office."

       He fumbled for words because it was just as absurd to think that this girl might be mixed up in a crime as to think of Alice — except as a victim. "I had won a cake in a raffle at your fête — but there seemed to be some mistake."

       "I don't understand."

       "A bomb fell before I could make out what it was he wanted to tell me."

       "But no one could have come from here," she said. "What did he look like?"

       "Very small and dark with twisted shoulders — practically a cripple."

       "There is no one like that here."

       "I thought perhaps that if I found Mrs Bellairs. . ." The name seemed to convey nothing. "One of the helpers at the fête."

       "They were all volunteers," the girl explained. "I dare say we could find the address for you through the organizers, but is it so — important?"

       A screen divided the room in two; he had imagined they were alone, but as the girl spoke a young man came round the screen. He had the same fine features as the girl; she introduced him, "This is my brother, Mr. . ."

       "Rowe."

       "Somebody called on Mr Rowe to ask about a cake. I don't quite understand. It seems he won it at our fête."

       "Now let me see, who could that possibly be?" The young man spoke excellent English; only a certain caution and precision marked him as a foreigner. It was as if he had come from an old-fashioned family among whom it was important to speak clearly and use the correct words; his care had an effect of charm, not of pedantry. He stood with his hand laid lightly and affectionately on his sister's shoulder as though they formed together a Victorian family group. "Was he one of your countrymen, Mr Rowe? In this office we are most of us foreigners, you know." Smiling he took Rowe into his confidence. "If health or nationality prevent us fighting for you, we have to do something. My sister and I are — technically — Austrian."

       "This man was English."

       "He must have been one of the voluntary helpers. We have so many — I don't know half of them by name. You want to return a prize, is that it? A cake?"

       Rowe said cautiously, "I wanted to inquire about it."

       "Well, Mr Rowe, if I were you, I should be unscrupulous. I should just "hang on" to the cake." When he used a colloquialism you could hear the inverted commas drop gently and apologetically around it.

       "The trouble is," Rowe said, "the cake's no longer there. My house was bombed last night."

       "I'm sorry. About your house, I mean. The cake can't seem very important now, surely?"

       They were charming, they were obviously honest, but they had caught him neatly and effectively in an inconsistency.

       "I shouldn't bother," the girl said, "if I were you."

       Rowe watched them hesitatingly. But it is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned — there had been no change of cell, no exercise-yard, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made whatever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom. These two had lived through terror themselves, but they had emerged without any ugly psychological scar. He said, "As a matter of fact it wasn't simply the cake which was worrying me."

       They watched him with a frank and friendly interest; you felt that in spite of the last years there was still the bloom of youth on them — they still expected life to offer them other things than pain and boredom and distrust and hate. The young man said, "Won't you sit down and tell us. . .?" They reminded him of children who liked stories. They couldn't have accumulated more than fifty years' experience between them. He felt immeasurably older.

       Rowe said, "I got the impression that whoever wanted that cake was ready to be — well, violent." He told them of the visit and the stranger's vehemence and the odd taste in his tea. The young man's very pale blue eyes sparkled with his interest and excitement. He said, "It's a fascinating story. Have you any idea who's behind it — or what? How does Mrs Bellairs come into it?"

       He wished now that he hadn't been to Mr Rennit — these were the allies he needed, not the dingy Jones and his sceptical employer.

       "Mrs Bellairs told my fortune at the fête, and told me the weight of the cake — which wasn't the right weight."

       "It's extraordinary," the young man said enthusiastically.

       The girl said, "It doesn't make sense." She added almost in Mr Rennit's words, "It was probably all a misunderstanding."

       "Misunderstanding," her brother said and then dropped his inverted commas round the antiquated slang, " 'my eye'." He turned to Rowe with an expression of glee. "Count this Society, Mr Rowe, as far as the secretary's concerned, at your service. This is really interesting." He held out his hand. "My name — our name is Hilfe. Where do we begin?"

       The girl sat silent. Rowe said, "Your sister doesn't agree."

       "Oh," the young man said, "she'll come round. She always does in the end. She thinks I'm a romantic. She's had to get me out of too many scrapes." He became momentarily serious, "she got me out of Austria." But nothing could damp his enthusiasm for long. "That's another story. Do we begin with Mrs Bellairs? Have you any idea what it's all about? I'll get our grim volunteer in the next room on the hunt," and opening the door he called through. "Dear Mrs Dermody, do you think you could find the address of one of our voluntary helpers called Mrs Bellairs?" He explained to Rowe, "The difficulty is she's probably just the friend of a friend — not a regular helper. Try Canon Topling," he suggested to Mrs Dermody.

       The greater the young man's enthusiasm, the more fantastic the whole incident became. Rowe began to see it through Mr Rennit's eyes — Mrs Dermody, Canon Topling. . .

       He said, "Perhaps after all your sister's right."

       But young Hilfe swept on. "She may be, of course she may be. But how dull if she is. I'd much rather think, until we know, that there's some enormous conspiracy. . ."

       Mrs Dermody put her head in at the door and said, "Canon Topling gave me the address. It's 5 Park Crescent."

       "If she's a friend of Canon Topling," Rowe began and caught Miss Hilfe's eye. She gave him a secret nod as much as to say — now you're on the right track.

       "Oh, but let's 'hang on' to the stranger," Hilfe said.

       "There may be a thousand reasons," Miss Hilfe said.

       "Surely not a thousand, Anna," her brother mocked. He asked Rowe, "Isn't there anything else you can remember which will convince her?" His keenness was more damping than her scepticism. The whole affair became a game one couldn't take seriously.

       "Nothing," Rowe said.

       Hilfe was at the window looking out. He said, "Come here a moment, Mr Rowe. Do you see that little man down there — in the shabby brown hat? He arrived just after you, and he seems to be staying. . . There he goes now, up and down. Pretends to light a cigarette. He does that too often. And that's the second evening paper he's bought. He never comes quite opposite, you see. It almost looks as if you are being trailed."

       "I know him," Rowe said. "He's a private detective. He's being paid to keep an eye on me."

       "By Jove," young Hilfe said — even his exclamations were a little Victorian — "you do take this seriously. We're allies now you know — you aren't 'holding out' on us, are you?"

       "There is something I haven't mentioned." Rowe hesitated.

       "Yes?" Hilfe came quickly back and with his hand again on his sister's shoulder waited with an appearance of anxiety. "Something which will wipe out Canon Topling?"

       "I think there was something in the cake."

       "What?"

       "I don't know. But he crumbled every slice he took."

       "It may have been habit," Miss Hilfe said.

       "Habit!" her brother teased her.

       She said with sudden anger, "One of these old English characteristics you study so carefully."

       Rowe tried to explain to Miss Hilfe, "It's nothing to do with me. I don't want their cake, but they tried, I'm sure they tried, to kill me. I know it sounds unlikely, now, in daylight, but if you had seen that wretched little cripple pouring in the milk, and then waiting, watching, crumbling the cake. . ."

       "And you really believe," Miss Hilfe said, "that Canon Topling's friend. . ."

       "Don't listen to her," Hilfe said. "Why not Canon Topling's friend? There's no longer a thing called a criminal class. We can tell you that. There were lots of people in Austria you'd have said couldn't. . . well, do the things we saw them do. Cultured people, pleasant people, people you had sat next to at dinner."

       "Mr Rennit," Rowe said, "the head of the Orthotex Detective Agency, told me today that he'd never met a murderer. He said they were rare and not the best people."

       "Why, they are dirt cheap," Hilfe said, "nowadays. I know myself at least six murderers. One was a cabinet minister, another was a heart specialist, the third a bank manager, an insurance agent. . ."

       "Stop," Miss Hilfe said, "please stop."

       "The difference," Hilfe said, "is that in these days it really pays to murder, and when a thing pays it becomes respectable. The rich abortionist becomes a gynaecologist and the rich thief a bank director. Your friend is out of date." He went on explaining gently, his very pale blue eyes unshocked and unshockable. "Your old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate — or even from love, Mr Rowe, very seldom for substantial profit. None of these reasons is quite — respectable. But to murder for position — that's different, because when you've gained the position nobody has a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the position's high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler. But, of course, to murder for fear or from love, Canon Topling wouldn't do that. If he killed his wife he'd lose his preferment," and he smiled at Rowe with a blithe innocence of what he was saying.

       When he came out of what wasn't called a prison, when His Majesty's pleasure had formally and quickly run its course, it had seemed to Rowe that he had emerged into quite a different world — a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding faces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter. One lived where least questions were asked, in furnished rooms. It was the kind of world that people who attended garden fêtes, who went to Matins, who spent week-ends in the country and played bridge for low stakes and had an account at a good grocer's, knew nothing about. It wasn't exactly a criminal world, though eddying along its dim and muted corridors you might possibly rub shoulders with genteel forgers who had never actually been charged or the corrupter of a child. One attended cinemas at ten in the morning with other men in macintoshes who had somehow to pass the time away. One sat at home and read The Old Curiosity Shop all the evening. When he had first believed that someone intended to murder him, he had felt a sort of shocked indignation; the act of murder belonged to him like a personal characteristic, and not the inhabitants of the old peaceful places from which he was an exile, and of which Mrs Bellairs, the lady in the floppy hat and the clergyman called Sinclair were so obviously inhabitants. The one thing a murderer should be able to count himself safe from was murder — by one of these.

       But he was more shocked now at being told by a young man of great experience that there was no division between the worlds. The insect underneath the stone has a right to feel safe from the trampling superior boot.

       Miss Hilfe told him, "You mustn't listen." She was watching him with what looked like sympathy. But that was impossible.

       "Of course," Hilfe said easily, "I exaggerate. But all the same you have to be prepared in these days for criminals everywhere. They call it having ideals. They'll even talk about murder being the most merciful thing."

       Rowe looked quickly up, but there was no personal meaning in the pale blue theoretical eyes. "You mean the Prussians? " Rowe asked.

       "Yes, if you like, the Prussians. Or the Nazis. The Fascists. The Reds, the Whites

       A telephone rang on Miss Hilfe's desk. She said, "It's Lady Dunwoody."

       Hilfe, leaning quickly sideways, said, "We are so grateful for your offer, Lady Dunwoody. We can never have too many woollies. Yes, if you wouldn't mind sending them to this office, or shall we collect? You'll send your chauffeur. Thank you. Good-bye." He said to Rowe, with a rather wry smile, "It's an odd way for someone of my age to fight a war, isn't it? Collecting woollies from charitable old dowagers. But it's useful, I'm allowed to do it, and it's something not to be interned. Only — you do understand, don't you — a story like yours excites me. It seems to give one an opportunity, well, to take a more violent line." He smiled at his sister and said with affection, "Of course she calls me a romantic."

       But the odd thing was she called him nothing at all. It was almost as if she not only disapproved of him, but had disowned him, wouldn't co-operate in anything — outside the woollies. She seemed to Rowe to lack her brother's charm and ease; the experience which had given him an amusing nihilistic abandon had left her brooding on some deeper, more unhappy level. He felt no longer sure that they were both without scars. Her brother had the ideas, but she felt them. When Rowe looked at her it was as if his own unhappiness recognized a friend and signalled, signalled, but got no reply.

       "And now," Hilfe said, "what next?"

       "Leave it alone." Miss Hilfe addressed herself directly to Rowe — the reply when it did at last come was simply to say that communication was at an end.

       "No, no," Hilfe said, "we can't do that. This is war."

       "How do you know," Miss Hilfe said, still speaking only to Rowe, "that even if there is something behind it, it isn't just — theft, drugs, things like that?"

       "I don't know," Rowe said, "and I don't care. I'm angry, that's all."

       "What is your theory, though?" Hilfe asked. "About the cake?"

       "It might have contained a message, mightn't it?"

       Both the Hilfes were silent for a moment as though that were an idea which had to be absorbed. Then Hilfe said, "I'll go with you to Mrs Bellairs."

       "You can't leave the office, Will!," Miss Hilfe said. "I'll go with Mr Rowe. You have an appointment."

       "Oh, only with Trench. You can handle Trench for me, Anna." He said with glee, "This is important. There may be trouble."

       "We could take Mr Rowe's detective."

       "And warn the lady? He sticks out a yard. No," Hilfe said, "we must very gently drop him. I'm used to dropping spies. It's a thing one has learned since 1933."

       "But I don't know what you want to say to Mr Trench."

       "Just stave him off. Say we'll settle at the beginning of the month. You'll forgive us talking business, Mr Rowe."

       "Why not let Mr Rowe go alone?"

       Perhaps, Rowe thought, she does after all believe there's something in it; perhaps she fears for her brother. She was saying, "You don't both of you want to make fools of yourselves, Willi."

       Hilfe ignored his sister completely. He said to Rowe, "Just a moment while I write a note for Trench," and disappeared behind the screen.

       When they left the office together it was by another door; dropping Jones was as simple as that, for be had no reason to suppose that his employer would try to evade him. Hilfe called a taxi, and as they drove down the street, Rowe was able to see how the shabby figure kept his vigil, lighting yet another cigarette with his eyes obliquely on the great ornate entrance, like a faithful hound who will stay interminably outside his master's door. Rowe said, "I wish we had let him know."

       "Better not," Hilfe said. "We can pick him up afterwards. We shan't be long," and the figure slanted out of sight as the taxi wheeled away; he was lost amongst the buses and bicycles, absorbed among all the other loitering seedy London figures, never to be seen again by anyone who knew him.

 

 

Chapter 4

AN EVENING WITH MRS BELLAIRS

 

 

"There be dragons of wrong here and everywhere,

quite as venomous as any in my Sagas."

                                             The Little Duke

 

 

       Mrs Bellairs' house was a house of character; that is to say it was old and unrenovated, standing behind its little patch of dry and weedy garden among the To Let boards on the slope of Campden Hill. A piece of statuary lay back in a thin thorny hedge like a large block of pumice stone, chipped and grey with neglect, and when you rang the bell under the early Victorian portico, you seemed to hear the sound pursuing the human inhabitants into back rooms as though what was left of life had ebbed up the passages.

       The snowy-white cuffs and the snowy-white apron of the maid who opened the door came as a surprise. She was keeping up appearances as the house wasn't, though she looked nearly as old. Her face was talcumed and wrinkled and austere like a nun's. Hilfe said, "Is Mrs Bellairs at home?"

       The old maid watched them with the kind of shrewdness people learn in convents. She said, "Have you an appointment? "

       "Why no," Hilfe said, "we were just calling. I'm a friend of Canon Topling's."

       "You see," the maid explained, "this is one of her evenings."

       "Yes?"

       "If you are not one of the group. . ."

       An elderly man with a face of extraordinary nobility and thick white hair came up the path. "Good evening, sir," the maid said. "Will you come right in?" He was obviously one of the group, for she showed him into a room on the right and they heard her announce, "Dr Forester." Then she came back to guard the door.

       Hilfe said, "Perhaps if you would take my name to Mrs Bellairs, we might join the group. Hilfe — a friend of Canon Topling's."

       "I'll ask her," the maid said dubiously.

       But the result was after all favourable. Mrs Bellairs herself swam into the little jumbled hall. She wore a Liberty dress of shot silk and a toque and she held out both hands as though to welcome them simultaneously. "Any friend of Canon Topling. . ." she said.

       "My name is Hilfe. Of the Free Mothers Fund. And this is Mr Rowe."

       Rowe watched for a sign of recognition, but there was none. Her broad white face seemed to live in worlds beyond them.

       "If you'd join our group," she said, "we welcome newcomers. So long as there's no settled hostility."

       "Oh, none, none," Hilfe said.

       She swayed in front of them like a figure-head into a drawing-room all orange curtain and blue cushion, as though it had been furnished once and for all in the twenties. Blue blackout globes made the room dim like an Oriental cafe. There were indications among the trays and occasional tables that it was Mrs Bellairs who had supplied the fête with some of its Benares work.

       Half a dozen people were in the room, and one of them immediately attracted Rowe's attention — a tall, broad, black-haired man; he couldn't think why, until he realized that it was his normality which stood out. "Mr Cost," Mrs Bellairs was saying, "this is. . ."

       "Mr Rowe." Hilfe supplied the name, and the introductions went round with a prim formality. One wondered why Cost was here, in the company of Dr Forester with his weak mouth and his nobility; Miss Pantil, a dark young-middle-aged woman with blackheads and a hungry eye; Mr Newey — "Mr Frederick Newey" — Mrs Bellairs made a point of the first name — who wore sandals and no socks and had a grey shock of hair; Mr Maude, a short-sighted young man who kept as close as he could to Mr Newey and fed him devotedly with thin bread and butter, and Collier, who obviously belonged to a different class and had worked himself in with some skill. He was patronized, but at the same time he was admired. He was a breath of the larger life and they were interested. He had been a hotel waiter and a tramp and a stoker, and he had published a book — so Mrs Bellairs whispered to Rowe — of the most fascinating poetry, rough but spiritual. "He uses words," Mrs Bellairs said, "that have never been used in poetry before." There seemed to be some antagonism between him and Mr Newey.

       All this scene became clear to Rowe over the cups of very weak China tea which were brought round by the austere parlourmaid.

       "And what," Mrs Bellairs asked, 'do you do, Mr Rowe?" She had been explaining Collier in an undertone — calling him plain Collier because he was a Player and not a Gentleman.

       "Oh," Rowe said, watching her over his tea-cup, trying to make out the meaning of her group, trying in vain to see her in a dangerous role, "I sit and think."

       It seemed to be the right as well as the truthful answer. He was encircled by Mrs Bellairs' enthusiasm as though by a warm arm. "I shall call you our philosopher," she said. "We have our poet, our critic. . ."

       "What is Mr Cost?"

       "He is Big Business," Mrs Bellairs said. "He works in the City. I call him our mystery man. I sometimes feel he is a hostile influence."

       "And Miss Pantil?"

       "She has quite extraordinary powers of painting the inner world. She sees it as colours and circles, rhythmical arrangements, and sometimes oblongs."

       It was fantastic to believe that Mrs Bellairs could have anything to do with crime — or any of her group. He would have made some excuse and gone if it had not been for Hilfe. These people — whatever Hilfe might say — did not belong under the stone with him.

       He asked vaguely, "You meet here every week?"

       "Always on Wednesdays. Of course we have very little time because of the raids. Mr Newey's wife likes him to be back at Welwyn before the raids start. And perhaps that's why the results are bad. They can't be driven, you know." She smiled. "We can't promise a stranger anything."

       He couldn't make out what it was all about. Hilfe seemed to have left the room with Cost. Mrs Bellairs said, "Ah, the conspirators. Mr Cost is always thinking up a test."

       Rowe tried out a question tentatively. "And the results are sometimes bad?"

       "So bad I could cry. . . if I knew at the time. But there are other times — oh, you'd be surprised how good they are."

       A telephone was ringing in another room. Mrs Bellairs said, "Who can that naughty person be? All my friends know they mustn't ring me on Wednesdays."

       The old parlourmaid had entered. She said with distaste, "somebody is calling Mr Rowe."

       Rowe said, "But I can't understand it. Nobody knows. . ."

       "Would you mind," Mrs Bellairs said, "being very quick?"

       Hilfe was in the hall talking earnestly to Cost. He asked, "For you?" He too was discomposed. Rowe left a track of censorious silence behind him: they watched him following the maid. He felt as though he had made a scene in church and was now being conducted away. He could hear behind him nothing but the tinkle of tea-cups being laid away.

       He thought: perhaps it's Mr Rennit, but how can he have found me? or Jones? He leant across Mrs Bellairs' desk in a small packed dining-room. He said, "Hullo," and wondered again how he could have been traced. "Hullo."

       But it wasn't Mr Rennit. At first he didn't recognize the voice — a woman's. "Mr Rowe?"

       "Yes."

       "Are you alone?"

       "Yes."

       The voice was blurred; it was as if a handkerchief had been stretched across the mouthpiece. She couldn't know, he thought, that there were no other women's voices to confuse with hers.

       "Please will you leave the house as soon as you can?"

       "It's Miss Hilfe, isn't it?"

       The voice said impatiently, "Yes. Yes. All right. It is."

       "Do you want to speak to your brother?"

       "Please do not tell him. And leave. Leave quickly."

       He was for a moment amused. The idea of any danger in Mrs Bellairs' company was absurd. He realized how nearly he had been converted to Mr Rennit's way of thinking. Then he remembered that Miss Hilfe had shared those views. Something had converted her — the opposite way. He said, "What about your brother?"

       "If you go away, he'll go too."

       The dimmed urgent voice fretted at his nerves. He found himself edging round the desk so that he could face the door, and then he moved again, because his back was to a window. "Why don't you tell this to your brother?"

       "He would want to stay all the more." That was true. He wondered how thin the walls were. The room was uncomfortably crowded with trashy furniture: one wanted space to move about — the voice was disturbingly convincing — to manoeuvre in. He said, "Is Jones still outside — the detective?"

       There was a long pause: presumably she had gone to the window. Then the voice sprang at him unexpectedly loud — she had taken away the handkerchief. "There's nobody there."

       "Are you sure?"

       "Nobody."

       He felt deserted and indignant. What business had Jones to leave his watch? Somebody was approaching down the passage. He said, "I must ring off."

       "They'll try to get you in the dark," the voice said, and then the door opened. It was Hilfe.

       He said, "Come along. They are all waiting. Who was it?"

       Rowe said, "When you were writing your note I left a message with Mrs Dermody, in case anyone wanted me urgently."

       "And somebody did?"

       "It was Jones — the detective."

       "Jones?" Hilfe said.

       "Yes."

       "And Jones had important news?"

       "Not exactly. He was worried at losing me. But Mr Rennit wants me at his office."

       "The faithful Rennit. We'll go straight there — afterwards."

       "After what?"

       Hilfe's eyes expressed excitement and malice. "Something we can't miss — 'at any price'." He added in a lower voice, "I begin to believe we were wrong. It's lots of fun, but it's not — dangerous."

       He laid a confiding hand in Rowe's arm and gently urged him "Keep a straight face, Mr Rowe, if you can. You mustn't laugh. She is a friend of Canon Topling."

       The room when they came back was obviously arranged for something. A rough circle had been formed with the chairs, and everyone had an air of impatience politely subdued. "Just sit down, Mr Rowe, next Mr Cost," said Mrs Bellairs, "and then we'll turn out the lights."

       In nightmares one knows the cupboard door will open: one knows that what will emerge is horrible: one doesn't know what it is. . .

       Mrs Bellairs said again, "If you'll just sit down, so that we can turn out the lights."

       He said, "I'm sorry. I've got to go."

       "Oh, you can't go now," Mrs Bellairs cried. "Can he, Mr Hilfe?"

       Rowe looked at Hilfe, but the pale blue eyes sparkled back at him without understanding. "Of course, he mustn't go," Hilfe said. "We'll both wait. What did we come for?" An eyelid momentarily flickered as Mrs Bellairs with a gesture of appalling coyness locked the door and dropped the key down her blouse and shook her fingers at them. "We always lock the door," she said, "to satisfy Mr Cost."

       In a dream you cannot escape: the feet are leaden-weighted: you cannot stir from before the ominous door which almost imperceptibly moves. It is the same in life; sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die. A memory came back to him of someone else who wasn't certain, wouldn't make a scene, gave herself sadly up and took the milk. . . He moved through the circle and sat down on Cost's left like a criminal taking his place in an identity parade. On his own left side was Miss Pantil. Dr Forester was on one side of Mrs Bellairs and Hilfe on the other. He hadn't time to see how the others were distributed before the light went out. "Now," Mrs Bellairs said, "we'll all hold hands."

       The blackout curtains had been drawn and the darkness was almost complete. Cost's hand felt hot and clammy, and Miss Pantil's hot and dry. This was the first séance he had ever attended, but it wasn't the spirits he feared. He wished Hilfe was beside him, and he was aware all the time of the dark empty space of the room behind his back, in which anything might happen. He tried to loosen his hands, but they were firmly gripped. There was complete silence in the room. A drop of sweat formed above his right eye and trickled down. He couldn't brush it away: it hung on his eyelid and tickled him. Somewhere in another room a gramophone began to play.

       It played and played — something sweet and onomatopoeic by Mendelssohn, full of waves breaking in echoing caverns. There was a pause and the needle was switched back and the melody began again. The same waves broke interminably into the same hollow. Over and over again. Underneath the music he became aware of breathing on all sides of him — all kinds of anxieties, suspenses, excitements controlling the various lungs. Miss Pantil's had an odd dry whistle in it, Cost's was heavy and regular, but not so heavy as another breath which laboured in the dark, he couldn't tell whose. All the time he listened and waited. Would he hear a step behind him and have time to snatch away his hands? He no longer doubted at all the urgency of that warning — "They'll try to get you in the dark." This was danger: this suspense was what somebody else had experienced, watching from day to day his pity grow to the monstrous proportions necessary to action.

       "Yes," a voice called suddenly, "yes, I can't hear?" and Miss Pantil's breath whistled and Mendelssohn's waves moaned and withdrew. Very far away a taxi-horn cried through an empty world.

       "Speak louder," the voice said. It was Mrs Bellairs, with a difference: a Mrs Bellairs drugged with an idea, with an imagined contact beyond the little dark constricted world in which they sat. He wasn't interested in any of that: it was a human movement he waited for. Mrs Bellairs said in a husky voice, "One of you is an enemy. He won't let it come through." Something — a chair, a table? — cracked, and Rowe's fingers instinctively strained against Miss Pantil's. That wasn't a spirit. That was the human agency which shook tambourines or scattered flowers or imitated a child's touch upon the cheek — it was the dangerous element, but his hands were held.

       "There is an enemy here," the voice said. "Somebody who doesn't believe, who motives are evil. . ." Rowe could feel Cost's fingers tighten round his. He wondered whether Hilfe was still completely oblivious to what was happening: he wanted to shout to him for help, but convention held him as firmly as Cost's hand. Again a board creaked. Why all this mummery, he thought, if they are all in it? But perhaps they were not all in it. For anything he knew he was surrounded by friends — but he didn't know which they were.

       "Arthur."

       He pulled at the hands holding him: that wasn't Mrs Bellairs' voice.

       "Arthur."

       The flat hopeless voice might really have come from beneath the heavy graveyard slab.

       "Arthur, why did you kill. . ." The voice moaned away into silence, and he struggled against the hands. It wasn't that he recognized the voice: it was no more his wife's than any woman's dying out in infinite hopelessness, pain and reproach: it was that the voice had recognized him. A light moved near the ceiling, feeling its way along the walls, and he cried, "Don't. Don't."

       "Arthur," the voice whispered.

       He forgot everything, he no longer listened for secretive movements, the creak of boards. He simply implored, "Stop it, please stop it," and felt Cost rise from the seat beside him and pull at his hand and then release it, throw the hand violently away, as though it were something he didn't like to hold. Even Miss Pantil let him go, and he heard Hilfe say, "This isn't funny. Put on the light."

       It dazzled him, going suddenly on. They all sat there with joined hands watching him; he had broken the circle — only Mrs Bellairs seemed to see nothing, with her head down and her eyes closed and her breathing heavy. "Well," Hilfe said, trying to raise a laugh, "that was certainly quite an act," but Mr Newey said, "Cost. Look at Cost," and Rowe looked with all the others at his neighbour. He was taking no more interest in anything, leaning forward across the table with his face sunk on the French polish.

       "Get a doctor," Hilfe said.

       "I'm a doctor," Dr Forester said. He released the hands on either side of him, and everyone became conscious of sitting there like children playing a game and surreptitiously let each other go. He said gently, "A doctor's no good, I'm afraid. The only thing to do is to call the police."

       Mrs Bellairs had half-woken up and sat with leery eyes and her tongue a little protruding.

       "It must be his heart," Mr Newey said. "Couldn't stand the excitement."

       "I'm afraid not," Dr Eorester said. "He has been murdered." His old noble face was bent above the body; one long sensitive delicate hand dabbled and came up stained like a beautiful insect that feeds incongruously on carrion.

       "Impossible," Mr Newey said, "the door was locked."

       "It's a pity," Dr Forester said, "but there's a very simple explanation of that. One of us did it."

       "But we were all," Hilfe said, "holding. . ." Then they all looked at Rowe.

       "He snatched away his hand," Miss Pantil said.

       Dr Forester said softly, "I'm not going to touch the body again before the police come. Cost was stabbed with a kind of schoolboy's knife. . ."

       Rowe put his hand quickly to an empty pocket and saw a room full of eyes noting the movement.

       "We must get Mrs Bellairs out of this," Dr Forester said. "Any séance is a strain, but this one. . ." He and Hilfe between them raised the turbaned bulk; the hand which had so delicately dabbled in Cost's blood retrieved the key of the room with equal delicacy. "The rest of you," Dr Forester said, "had better stay here, I think. I'll telephone to Netting Hill police station, and then we'll both be back."

       For a long while there was silence after they had gone; nobody looked at Rowe, but Miss Pantil had slid her chair well away from him, so that he now sat alone beside the corpse, as though they were two friends who had got together at a party. Presently Mr Newey said, "I'll never catch my train unless they hurry." Anxiety fought with horror — any moment the sirens might go — he caressed his sandalled foot across his knee, and young Maude said hotly, "I don't know why you should stay," glaring at Rowe.

       It occurred to Rowe that he had not said one word to defend himself: the sense of guilt for a different crime stopped his mouth. Besides, what could he, a stranger, say to Miss Pantil, Mr Newey and young Maude to convince them that in fact it was one of their friends who had murdered? He took a quick look at Cost, half expecting him to come alive again and laugh at them — "one of my tests", but nobody could have been deader than Cost was now. He thought: somebody here has killed him — it was fantastic, more fantastic really than that he should have done it himself. After all, he belonged to the region of murder — he was a native of that country. As the police will know, he thought, as the police will know.

       The door opened and Hilfe returned. He said, "Dr Forester is looking after Mrs Bellairs. I have telephoned to the police." His eyes were saying something to Rowe which Rowe couldn't understand. Rowe thought: I must see him alone, surely he can't believe. . .

       He said, "Would anybody object if I went to the lavatory and was sick?"

       Miss Pantil said, "I don't think anybody ought to leave this room till the police come."

       "I think," Hilfe said, 'somebody should go with you. As a formality, of course."

       "Why beat about the bush," Miss Pantil said. "Whose knife is it?"

       "Perhaps Mr Newey," Hilfe said, "wouldn't mind going with Mr Rowe. . ."

       "I won't be drawn in," Newey said. "This has nothing to do with me. I only want to catch my train."

       "Perhaps I had better go then," Hilfe said, "if you will trust me." No one objected.

       The lavatory was on the first floor. They could hear from the landing the steady soothing rhythm of Dr Forester's voice in Mrs Bellairs' bedroom. "I'm all right," Rowe whispered. "But Hilfe, I didn't do it."

       There was something shocking in the sense of exhilaration Hilfe conveyed at a time like this. "Of course you didn't," he said. "This is the Real Thing."

       "But why? Who did it?"

       "I don't know, but I'm going to find out." He put his hand on Rowe's arm with a friendliness that was very comforting, urging him into the lavatory and locking the door behind them. "Only, old fellow, you must be off out of this. They'll hang you if they can. Anyway, they'll shut you up for weeks. It's so convenient for Them."

       "What can I do? It's my knife."

       "They are devils, aren't they," Hilfe said with the same light-hearted relish he might have used for a children's clever prank. "We've just got to keep you out of the way till Mr Rennit and I. . . By the way, better tell me who rang you up."

       "It was your sister."

       "My sister. . ." Hilfe grinned at him. "Good for her, she must have got hold of something. I wonder just where. She warned you, did she?"

       "Yes, but I was not to tell you."

       "Never mind that. I shan't eat her, shall I?" The pale blue eyes became suddenly lost in speculation.

       Rowe tried to recall them. "Where can I go?"

       "Oh, just underground," Hilfe said casually. He seemed in no hurry at all. "It's the fashion of our decade. Communists are always doing it. Don't you know how?"

       "This isn't a joke."

       "Listen," Hilfe said. "The end we are working for isn't a joke, but if we are going to keep our nerve we've got to keep our sense of humour. You see, They have none. Give me only a week. Keep out of the way as long as that."

       "The police will be here soon."

       Hilfe said, "It's only a small drop from this window to the flower-bed. It's nearly dark outside and in ten minutes the sirens will be going. Thank God, one can set one's clock by them."

       "And you?"

       "Pull the plug as you open the window. No one will hear you then. Wait till the cistern refills, then pull the plug again and knock me out 'good and hard'. It's the best alibi you can give me. After all, I'm an enemy alien."

 

 

Chapter 5

BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

 

 

"They came to a great forest, which

seemed to have no path through it."

                            The Little Duke

 

 

       There are dreams which belong only partly to the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

       Rowe was exhausted and frightened; he had made tracks half across London while the nightly raid got under way. It was an empty London with only occasional bursts of noise and activity. An umbrella shop was burning at the corner of Oxford Street; in Wardour Street he walked through a cloud of grit: a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, "That's enough now. It's nothing to laugh about." None of these things mattered. They were like something written; they didn't belong to his own life and he paid them no attention. But he had to find a bed, and so somewhere south of the river he obeyed Hilfe's advice and at last went underground.

       He lay on the upper tier of a canvas bunk and dreamed that he was walking up a long hot road near Trumpington scuffing the white chalk-dust with his shoe caps. Then he was having tea on the lawn at home behind the red brick wall and his mother was lying back in a garden chair eating a cucumber sandwich. A bright blue croquet-ball lay at her feet, and she was smiling and paying him the half-attention a parent pays a child. The summer lay all around them, and evening was coming on. He was saying, "Mother, I murdered her. . ." and his mother said, "Don't be silly, dear. Have one of these nice sandwiches."

       "But Mother," he said, "I did. I did." It seemed terribly important to him to convince her; if she were convinced, she could do something about it, she could tell him it didn't matter and it would matter no longer, but he had to convince her first. But she turned away her head and called out in a little vexed voice to someone who wasn't there, "You must remember to dust the piano."

       "Mother, please listen to me," but he suddenly realized that he was a child, so how could he make her believe? He was not yet eight years old, he could see the nursery window on the second floor with the bars across, and presently the old nurse would put her face to the glass and signal to him to come in. "Mother," he said, "I've killed my wife, and the police want me." His mother smiled and shook her head and said, "My little boy couldn't kill anyone."

       Time was short; from the other end of the long peaceful lawn, beyond the croquet hoops and out of the shadow of the great somnolent pine, came the vicar's wife carrying a basket of apples. Before she reached them he must convince his mother, but he had only childish words. "I have. I have."

       His mother leant back smiling in the deck-chair, and said, "My little boy wouldn't hurt a beetle." (It was a way she had, always to get the conventional phrase just wrong.)

       "But that's why," he said. "That's why," and his mother waved to the vicar's wife and said, "It's a dream, dear, a nasty dream."

       He woke up to the dim lurid underground place — somebody had tied a red silk scarf over the bare globe to shield it. All along the walls the bodies lay two deep, while outside the raid rumbled and receded. This was a quiet night: any raid which happened a mile away wasn't a raid at all. An old man snored across the aisle and at the end of the shelter two lovers lay on a mattress with their hands and knees touching.

       Rowe thought: this would be a dream, too, to her; she wouldn't believe it. She had died before the first great war, when aeroplanes — strange crates of wood — just staggered across the Channel. She could no more have imagined this than that her small son in his brown corduroy knickers and his blue jersey with his pale serious face — he could see himself like a stranger in the yellowing snapshots of her album — should grow up to be a murderer. Lying on his back he caught the dream and held it — pushed the vicar's wife back into the shadow of the pine — and argued with his mother.

       "This isn't real life any more," he said. "Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it's not there any more."

       His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk; he was the master of the dream now. He said, "I'm wanted for a murder I didn't do. People want to kill me because I know too much. I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St Clement's — the bells of St Clement's. They've smashed that — St James's, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maples and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life — more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read — about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that's real life: it's what we've all made of the world since you died. I'm your little Arthur who wouldn't hurt a beetle and I'm a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux." He couldn't bear the frightened eyes which he had himself printed on the cement wall; he put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white cold cheek. "My dear, my dear, my dear. I'm glad you are dead. Only do you know about it? do you know?" He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.

       "Why, it's a madhouse," his mother cried.

       "Oh, it's much quieter there," he said. "I know. They put me in one for a time. Everybody was very kind there. They made me a librarian. . ." He tried to express clearly the difference between the madhouse and this. "Everybody in the place was very — reasonable." He said fiercely, as though he hated her instead of loving her, "Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society. It's in hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions: Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador's Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days' Leave, The Four Just Men. . ."

       He had worked the dream to suit himself, but now the dream began to regain control. He was no longer on the lawn; he was in the field behind the house where the donkey grazed which used to take their laundry to the other end of the village on Mondays. He was playing in a haystack with the vicar's son and a strange boy with a foreign accent and a dog called Spot. The dog caught a rat and tossed it, and the rat tried to crawl away with a broken back, and the dog made little playful excited rushes. Suddenly he couldn't bear the sight of the rat's pain any more; he picked up a cricket-bat and struck the rat on the head over and over again; he wouldn't stop for fear it was still alive, though he heard his nurse call out, "Stop it, Arthur. How can you? Stop it," and all the time Hilfe watched him with exhilaration. When he stopped he wouldn't look at the rat; he ran away across the field and hid. But you always had to come out of hiding some time, and presently his nurse was saying, "I won't tell your mother, but don't you ever do it again. Why, she thinks you wouldn't hurt a fly. What came over you I don't know." Not one of them guessed that what had come over him was the horrible and horrifying emotion of pity.

       That was partly dream and partly memory, but the next was altogether dream. He lay on his side breathing heavily while the big guns opened up in North London, and his mind wandered again freely in that strange world where the past and future leave equal traces, and the geography may belong to twenty years ago or to next year. He was waiting for someone at a gate in a lane: over a high hedge came the sound of laughter and the dull thud of tennis-balls, and between the leaves he could see moth-like movements of white dresses. It was evening and it would soon be too dark to play, and someone would come out and he waited dumb with love. His heart beat with a boy's excitement, but it was the despair of a grown man that he felt when a stranger touched his shoulder and said, "Take him away." He didn't wake; this time he was in the main street of a small country town where he had sometimes, when a boy, stayed with an elder sister of his mother's. He was standing outside the inn yard of the King's Arms, and up the yard he could see the lit windows of the barn in which dances were held on Saturday nights. He had a pair of pumps under his arm and he was waiting for a girl much older than himself who would presently come out of her cloakroom and take his arm and go up the yard with him. All the next few hours were with him in the street: the small crowded hall full of the familiar peaceful faces — the chemist and his wife, the daughters of the headmaster, the bank manager and the dentist with his blue chin and his look of experience, the paper streamers of blue and green and scarlet, the small local orchestra, the sense of a life good and quiet and enduring, with only the gentle tug of impatience and young passion to disturb it for the while and make it doubly dear for ever after. And then without warning the dream twisted towards nightmare; somebody was crying in the dark with terror — not the young woman he was waiting there to meet, whom he hadn't yet dared to kiss and probably never would, but someone whom he knew better even than his parents, who belonged to a different world altogether, to the sad world of shared love. A policeman stood at his elbow and said in a woman's voice, "You had better join our little group," and urged him remorselessly towards a urinal where a rat bled to death in the slate trough. The music had stopped, the lights had gone, and he couldn't remember why he had come to this dark vile corner, where even the ground whined when he pressed it, as if it had learnt the trick of suffering. He said, "Please let me go away from here," and the policeman said, "Where do you want to go to, dear?" He said, "Home," and the policeman said, "This is home. There isn't anywhere else at all," and whenever he tried to move his feet the earth whined back at him: he couldn't move an inch without causing pain.

       He woke and the sirens were sounding the All Clear. One or two people in the shelter sat up for a moment to listen, and then lay down again. Nobody moved to go home: this was their home now. They were quite accustomed to sleeping underground; it had become as much part of life as the Saturday night film or the Sunday service had ever been. This was the world they knew.

 

 

Chapter 6

OUT OF TOUCH

 

 

You will find every door guarded."

                          The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

       Rowe had breakfast in an A.B.C. in Clapham High Street. Boards had taken the place of windows and the top floor had gone; it was like a shack put up in an earthquake town for relief work. For the enemy had done a lot of damage in Clapham. London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns. People went to Hampstead or St John's Wood for a quiet week-end, and if you lived in Holborn you hadn't time between the sirens to visit friends as far away as Kensington. So special characteristics developed, and in Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better. The waitress who brought Rowe's toast and coffee looked jumpy and pallid, as if she had lived too much on the run; she had an air of listening whenever gears shrieked. Gray's Inn and Russell Square were noted for a more reckless spirit, but only because they had the day to recover in.

       The night raid, the papers said, had been on a small scale. A number of bombs had been dropped, and there had been a number of casualties, some of them fatal. The morning communique was like the closing ritual of a midnight Mass. The sacrifice was complete and the papers pronounced in calm invariable words the "Ite Missa Est." Not even in the smallest type under a single headline was there any reference to an "Alleged Murder at a Seance"; nobody troubled about single deaths. Rowe felt a kind of indignation. He had made the headlines once, but his own disaster, if it had happened now, would have been given no space at all. He had almost a sense of desertion; nobody was troubling to pursue so insignificant a case in the middle of a daily massacre. Perhaps a few elderly men in the C.I.D., who were too old to realize how the world had passed them by, were still allowed by patient and kindly superiors to busy themselves in little rooms with the trivialities of a murder. They probably wrote minutes to each other; they might even be allowed to visit the scene of the "crime", but he could hardly believe that the results of their inquiries were read with more interest than the scribblings of those eccentric clergymen who were still arguing about evolution in country vicarages. "Old So-and-So," he could imagine a senior officer saying, "poor old thing, we let him have a few murder cases now and then. In his day, you know, we used to pay quite a lot of attention to murder, and it makes him feel that he's still of use. The results — Oh well, of course, he never dreams that we haven't time to read his reports."

       Rowe, sipping his coffee, seeking over and over again for the smallest paragraph, felt a kinship with the detective inspectors, the Big Five, My Famous Cases; he was a murderer and old-fashioned, he belonged to their world — and whoever had murdered Cost belonged there too. He felt a slight resentment against Willi Hilfe, who treated murder as a joke with a tang to it. But Hilfe's sister hadn't treated it as a joke; she had warned him, she had talked as if death were still a thing that mattered. Like a lonely animal he scented the companionship of his own kind.

       The pale waitress kept an eye on him; he had had no chance of shaving, so that he looked like one of those who leave without paying. It was astonishing what a single night in a public shelter could do to you; he could smell disinfectant on his clothes as though he had spent the night in a workhouse infirmary.

       He paid his bill and asked the waitress, "Have you a telephone? " She indicated one near the cash desk, and he dialled Rennit. It was risky, but something had to be done. Of course, the hour was too early. He could hear the bell ringing uselessly in the empty room, and he wondered whether the sausage-roll still lay beside it on the saucer. It was always in these days questionable whether a telephone bell would ring at all, because overnight a building might have ceased to exist. He knew now that part of the world was the same: Orthotex still stood.

       He went back to his table and ordered another coffee and some notepaper. The waitress regarded him with increasing suspicion. Even in a crumbling world the conventions held; to order again after payment was unorthodox, but to ask for notepaper was continental. She could give him a leaf from her order pad, that was all. Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering. He began to write carefully in spidery hand an account of everything that had happened. Something had got to be done; he wasn't going to remain permanently in hiding for a crime he hadn't committed, while the real criminals got away with — whatever it was they were trying to get away with. In his account he left out Hilfe's name - you never knew what false ideas the police might get, and he didn't want his only ally put behind bars. He was already deciding to post his narrative straight to Scotland Yard.

       When he had finished it, he read it over while the waitress watched; the story was a terribly thin one — a cake, a visitor, a taste he thought he remembered, until you got to Cost's body and all the evidence pointing at himself. Perhaps after all he would do better not to post it to the police, but rather to some friend. . . But he had no friend, unless he counted Hilfe. . . or Rennit. He made for the door and the waitress stopped him. "You haven't paid for your coffee."

       "I'm sorry. I forgot."

       She took the money with an air of triumph; she had been right all the time. She watched him through the window from between the empty cake-stands making his uncertain way up Clapham High Street.

       Promptly at nine o'clock he rang again — from close by Stockwell Station — and again the empty room drummed on his ear. By nine-fifteen, when he rang a third time, Mr Rennit had returned. He heard his sharp anxious voice saying, "Yes. Who's there?"

       "This is Rowe."

       "What have you done with Jones?" Mr Rennit accused him.

       "I left him yesterday," Rowe said, "outside . . ."

       "He hasn't come back," Mr Rennit said.

       "Maybe he's shadowing. . ."

       "I owe him a week's wages. He said he'd be back last night. It's not natural." Mr Rennit wailed up the phone, "Jones wouldn't stay away, not with me owing him money."

       "Worse things have happened than that."

       "Jones is my right arm," Mr Rennit said. "What have you done with him?"

       "I went and saw Mrs Bellairs. . ."

       "That's neither here nor there. I want Jones."

       "And a man was killed."

       "What?"

       "And the police think I murdered him."

       There was another wail up the line. The small shifty man was being carried out of his depth; all through his life he had swum safely about among his prickly little adulteries, his compromising letters, but the tide was washing him out to where the bigger fishes hunted. He moaned, "I never wanted to take up your case."

       "You've got to advise me, Rennit. I'll come and see you."

       "No." He could hear the breath catch down the line. The voice imperceptibly altered. "When?"

       "At ten o'clock. Rennit, are you still there?" He had to explain to somebody. "I didn't do it, Rennit. You must believe that. I don't make a habit of murder." He always bit on the word murder as you bite a sore spot on the tongue; he never used the word without self-accusation. The law had taken a merciful view: himself he took the merciless one. Perhaps if they had hanged him he would have found excuses for himself between the trap-door and the bottom of the drop, but they had given him a lifetime to analyse his motives in.

       He analysed now — an unshaven man in dusty clothes sitting in the Tube between Stockwell and Tottenham Court Road. (He had to go a roundabout route because the Tube had been closed at many stations.) The dreams of the previous night had set his mind in reverse. He remembered himself twenty years ago day-dreaming and in love; he remembered without self-pity, as one might watch the development of a biological specimen. He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at day-dreams, but so long as you had the capacity to day-dream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind — until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in. Since the death of his wife Rowe had never daydreamed; all through the trial he had never even dreamed of an acquittal. It was as if that side of the brain had been dried up; he was no longer capable of sacrifice, courage, virtue, because he no longer dreamed of them. He was aware of the loss — the world had dropped a dimension and become paper-thin. He wanted to dream, but all he could practise now was despair, and the kind of cunning which warned him to approach Mr Rennit with circumspection.

 

 

2

 

       Nearly opposite Mr Rennit's was an auction-room which specialised in books. It was possible from before the shelves nearest the door to keep an eye on the entrance to Mr Rennit's block. The weekly auction was to take place next day, and visitors flowed in with catalogues; an unshaven chin and a wrinkled suit were not out of place here. A man with a ragged moustache and an out-at-elbows jacket, the pockets bulging with sandwiches, looked carefully through a folio volume of landscape gardening: a Bishop — or he might have been a Dean — was examining a set of the Waverley novels: a big white beard brushed the libidinous pages of an illustrated Brantome. Nobody here was standardized; in tea-shops and theatres people are cut to the pattern of their environment, but in this auction-room the goods were too various to appeal to any one type. Here was pornography — eighteenth-century French with beautiful little steel engravings celebrating the copulations of elegant over-clothed people on Pompadour couches, here were all the Victorian novelists, the memoirs of obscure pig-stickers, the eccentric philosophies and theologies of the seventeenth century — Newton on the geographical position of Hell, and Jeremiah Whiteley on the Path of Perfection. There was a smell of neglected books, of the straw from packing cases and of clothes which had been too often rained upon. Standing by the shelves containing lots one to thirty-five Rowe was able to see anyone who came in or out by the door Mr Rennit used.

       Just on the level of his eyes was a Roman missal of no particular value included in Lot 20 with Religious Books Various. A big round clock, which itself had once formed part of an auction, as you could tell from the torn label below the dial, pointed 9.45 above the auctioneer's desk. Rowe opened the missal at random, keeping three-quarters of his attention for the house across the street. The missal was ornamented with ugly coloured capitals; oddly enough, it was the only thing that spoke of war in the old quiet room. Open it where you would, you came on prayers for deliverance, the angry nations, the unjust, the wicked, the adversary like a roaring lion. . . The words stuck out between the decorated borders like cannon out of a flower-bed. "Let not man prevail," he read — and the truth of the appeal chimed like music. For in all the world outside that room man had indeed prevailed; he had himself prevailed. It wasn't only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills. . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues. It might be that whoever killed Cost had for that instant given his goodness rein, and Rennit, perhaps for the first time in his life, was behaving like a good citizen by betraying his client. You couldn't mistake the police officer who had taken his stand behind a newspaper just outside the auction-room.

       He was reading the Daily Mirror. Rowe could see the print over his shoulder with Zee's cartoon filling most of the page. Once, elusively, from an upper window Mr Rennit peered anxiously out and withdrew. The clock in the auction-room said five minutes to ten. The grey day full of last night's debris and the smell of damp plaster crept on. Even Mr Rennit's desertion made Rowe feel a degree more abandoned.

       There had been a time when he had friends, not many because he was not gregarious — but for that very reason in his few friendships he had plunged deeply. At school there had been three: they had shared hopes, biscuits, measureless ambitions, but now he couldn't remember their names or their faces. Once he had been addressed suddenly in Piccadilly Circus by an extraordinary grey-haired man with a flower in his button-hole and a double-breasted waistcoat and an odd finicky manner, an air of uncertain and rather seedy prosperity. "Why, if it isn't Boojie," the stranger said, and led the way to the bar of the Piccadilly Hotel, while Rowe sought in vain for some figure in the lower fourth — in black Sunday trousers or football shorts, inky or mud-stained — who might be connected with this over-plausible man who now tried unsuccessfully to borrow a fiver, then slid away to the gents and was no more seen, leaving the bill for Boojie to pay.

       More recent friends he had had, of course: perhaps half a dozen. Then he married and his friends became his wife's friends even more than his own. Tom Curtis, Crooks, Perry and Vane. . . Naturally they had faded away after his arrest. Only poor silly Henry Wilcox continued to stand by, because, he said, "I know you are innocent. You wouldn't hurt a fly" — that ominous phrase which had been said about him too often. He remembered how Wilcox had looked when he said, "But I'm not innocent. I did kill her." After that there wasn't even Wilcox or his small domineering wife who played hockey. (Their mantelpiece was crowded with the silver trophies of her prowess.)

       The plain-clothes man looked impatient. He had obviously read every word of his paper because it was still open at the same place. The clock said five past ten. Rowe closed his catalogue, after marking a few lots at random, and walked out into the street. The plain-clothes man said, "Excuse me," and Rowe's heart missed a beat.

       "Yes?"

       "I've come out without a match."

       "You can keep the box," Rowe said.

       "I couldn't do that, not in these days." He looked over Rowe's shoulder, up the street to the ruins of the Safe Deposit, where safes stood about like the above-ground tombs in Latin cemeteries, then followed with his eye a middle-aged clerk trailing his umbrella past Rennit's door.

       "Waiting for someone?" Rowe asked.

       "Oh, just a friend," the detective said clumsily. "He's late."

       "Good morning."

       "Good morning, sir." The "sir" was an error in tactics, like the soft hat at too official an angle and the unchanging page of the Daily Mirror. They don't trouble to send their best men for mere murder, Rowe thought, touching the little sore again with his tongue.

       What next? He found himself, not for the first time, regretting Henry Wilcox. There were men who lived voluntarily in deserts, but they had their God to commune with. For nearly ten years he had felt no need of friends - one woman could include any number of friends. He wondered where Henry was in wartime. Perry would have joined up and so would Curtis. He imagined Henry as an air-raid warden, fussy and laughed at when all was quiet, a bit scared now during the long exposed vigils on the deserted pavements, but carrying on in dungarees that didn't suit him and a helmet a size too large. God damn it, he thought, coming out on the ruined corner of High Holborn, I've done my best to take part too. It's not my fault I'm not fit enough for the army, and as for the damned heroes of civil defence — the little clerks and prudes and what-have-yous — they didn't want me: not when they found I had done time — even time in an asylum wasn't respectable enough for Post Four or Post Two or Post any number. And now they've thrown me out of their war altogether; they want me for a murder I didn't do. What chance would they give me with my record?

       He thought: Why should I bother about that cake any more? It's nothing to do with me: it's their war, not mine. Why shouldn't I just go into hiding until everything's blown over (surely in wartime a murder does blow over). It's not my war; I seem to have stumbled into the firing-line, that's all. I'll get out of London and let the fools scrap it out, and the fools die. . . There may have been nothing important in the cake; it may have contained only a paper cap, a motto, a lucky sixpence. Perhaps that hunchback hadn't meant a thing: perhaps the taste was imagination: perhaps the whole scene never happened at all as I remember it. Blast often did odd things, and it certainly wasn't beyond its power to shake a brain that had too much to brood about already. . .

       As if he were escaping from some bore who walked beside him explaining things he had no interest in, he dived suddenly into a telephone-box and rang a number. A stern dowager voice admonished him down the phone as though he had no right on the line at all, "This is the Free Mothers. Who is that, please?"

       "I want to speak to Miss Hilfe."

       "Who is that?"

       "A friend of hers." A disapproving grunt twanged the wires. He said sharply, "Put me through, please," and almost at once he heard the voice which if he had shut his eyes and eliminated the telephone-box and ruined Holborn he could have believed was his wife's. There was really no resemblance, but it was so long since he had spoken to a woman, except his landlady or a girl behind a counter, that any feminine voice took him back. . . "Please. Who is that?"

       "Is that Miss Hilfe?"

       "Yes. Who are you?"

       He said as if his name were a household word, "I'm Rowe."

       There was such a long pause that he thought she had put the receiver back. He said, "Hullo. Are you there?"

       "Yes."

       "I wanted to talk to you."

       "You shouldn't ring me."

       "I've nobody else to ring — except your brother. Is he there?"

       "No."

       "You heard what happened?"

       "He told me."

       "You had expected something, hadn't you?"

       "Not that. Something worse." She explained, "I didn't know him."

       "I brought you some worries, didn't I, when I came in yesterday?"

       "Nothing worries my brother."

       "I rang up Rennit."

       "Oh, no, no. You shouldn't have done that."

       "I haven't learnt the technique yet. You can guess what happened."

       "Yes. The police."

       "You know what your brother wants me to do?"

       "Yes."

       Their conversation was like a letter which has to pass a censorship. He had an overpowering desire to talk to someone frankly. He said, "Would you meet me somewhere — for five minutes?"

       "No," she said. "I can't. I can't get away."

       "Just for two minutes."

       "It's not possible."

       It suddenly became of great importance to him. "Please," he said.

       "It wouldn't be safe. My brother would be angry."

       He said, "I'm so alone. I don't know what's happening. I've got nobody to advise me. There are so many questions. . ."

       "I'm sorry."

       "Can I write to you. . . or him?"

       She said, "Just send your address here — to me. No need to sign the note — or sign it with any name you like."

       Refugees had such stratagems on the tip of the tongue; it was a familiar way of life. He wondered whether if he were to ask her about money she would have an answer equally ready. He felt like a child who is lost and finds an adult hand to hold, a hand that guides him understandingly homewards. . . He became reckless of the imaginary censor. He said, "There's nothing in the papers."

       "Nothing."

       "I've written a letter to the police."

       "Oh," she said, "you shouldn't have done that. Have you posted it?"

       "No."

       "Wait and see," she said. "Perhaps there won't be any need. Just wait and see."

       "Do you think it would be safe to go to my bank?"

       "You are so helpless," she said, "so helpless. Of course you mustn't. They will watch for you there."

       "Then how can I live. . .?"

       "Haven't you a friend who would cash you a cheque?"

       Suddenly he didn't want to admit to her that there was no one at all. "Yes," he said, "yes. I suppose so."

       "Well then. . . Just keep away," she said so gently that he had to strain his ears.

       "I'll keep away."

       She had rung off. He put the receiver down and moved back into Holborn, keeping away. Just ahead of him, with bulging pockets, went one of the bookworms from the auction-room.

       "Haven't you a friend?" she had said. Refugees had always friends; people smuggled letters, arranged passports, bribed officials; in that enormous underground land as wide as a continent there was companionship. In England one hadn't yet learned the technique. Whom could he ask to take one of his cheques? Not a tradesman. Since he began to live alone he had dealt with shops only through his landlady. He thought for the second time that day of his former friends. It hadn't occurred to Anna Hilfe that a refugee might be friendless. A refugee always has a party — or a race.

       He thought of Perry and Vane: not a chance even if he had known how to find them. Crooks, Boyle, Curtis. . . Curtis was quite capable of knocking him down. He had simple standards, primitive ways and immense complacency. Simplicity in friends had always attracted Rowe: it was a complement to his own qualities. There remained Henry Wilcox. There was just a chance there. . . if the hockey-playing wife didn't interfere. Their two wives had had nothing in common. Rude health and violent pain were too opposed, but a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs Wilcox hate him. Once a man started killing his wife, she would have ungrammatically thought, you couldn't tell where it would stop.

       But what excuse could he give Henry? He was aware of the bulge in his breast pocket where his statement lay, but he couldn't tell Henry the truth: no more than the police would Henry believe that he had been present at a murder as an onlooker. He must wait till after the banks closed — that was early enough in wartime, and then invent some urgent reason. What? He thought about it all through lunch in an Oxford Street Lyons, and got no clue. Perhaps it was better to leave it to what people called the inspiration of the moment, or, better still, give it up, give himself up. It only occurred to him as he was paying his bill that probably he wouldn't be able to find Henry anyway. Henry had lived in Battersea, and Battersea was not a good district to live in now. He might not even be alive — twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there.

       That meant nothing, he told himself; the blitz was newer than the edition. All the same, he dialled the number just to see — it was as if all his contacts now had to be down a telephone line. He was almost afraid to hear the ringing tone, and when it came he put the receiver down quickly and with pain. He had rung Henry up so often — before things happened. Well, he had to make up his mind now: the flat was still there, though Henry mightn't be in it. He couldn't brandish a cheque down a telephone line; this time the contact had got to be physical. And he hadn't seen Henry since the day before the trial.

       He would almost have preferred to throw his hand in altogether.

       He caught a number 19 bus from Piccadilly. After the ruins of St James's Church one passed at that early date into peaceful country. Knightsbridge and Sloane Street were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line. It was an odd front line that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of peace. Battersea, Holborn, the East End, the front line curled in and out of them. . . and yet to a casual eye Poplar High Street had hardly known the enemy, and there were pieces of Battersea where the public house stood at the corner with the dairy and the baker beside it, and as far as you could see there were no ruins anywhere.

       It was like that in Wilcox's street; the big middle-class flats stood rectangular and gaunt like railway hotels, completely undamaged, looking out over the park. There were To Let boards up all the way down, and Rowe half hoped he would find one outside No. 63. But there was none. In the hall was a frame in which occupants could show whether they were in or out, but the fact that the Wilcox's was marked In meant nothing at all, even if they still lived there, for Henry "had a theory" that to mark the board Out was to invite burglary. Henry's caution had always imposed on his friends a long tramp upstairs to the top floor (there were no lifts).

       The stairs were at the back of the flats looking towards Chelsea, and as you climbed above the second floor and your view lifted, the war came back into sight. Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks, and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn't really been any slums.

       It was painful to come in sight of the familiar 63. He used to pity Henry because of his masterful wife, his conventional career, the fact that his work — chartered accountancy — seemed to offer no escape; four hundred a year of Rowe's own had seemed like wealth, and he had for Henry some of the feeling a rich man might have for a poor relation. He used to give Henry things. Perhaps that was why Mrs Wilcox hadn't liked him. He smiled with affection when he saw a little plaque on the door marked A.R.P. Warden: it was exactly as he had pictured. But his finger hesitated on the bell.

 

 

3

 

       He hadn't had time to ring when the door opened and there was Henry. An oddly altered Henry. He had always been a neat little man — his wife had seen to that. Now he was in dirty blue dungarees, and he was unshaven. He walked past Rowe as though he didn't see him and leant over the well of the staircase. "They aren't here," he said.

       A middle-aged woman with red eyes who looked like a cook followed him out and said, "It's not time, Henry. It's really not time." For a moment — so altered was Henry — Rowe wondered whether the war had done this to Henry's wife too.

       Henry suddenly became aware of him — or half aware of him. He said, "Oh, Arthur. . . good of you to come," as though they'd met yesterday. Then he dived back into his little dark hall and became a shadowy abstracted figure beside a grandfather clock.

       "If you'd come in," the woman said, "I don't think they'll be long now."

       He followed her in and noticed that she left the door open, as though others were expected; he was getting used now to life taking him up and planting him down without his own volition in surroundings where only he was not at home. On the oak chest — made, he remembered, to Mrs Wilcox's order by the Tudor Manufacturing Company — a pair of dungarees was neatly folded with a steel hat on top. He was reminded of prison, where you left your own clothes behind. In the dimness Henry repeated, "Good of you, Arthur," and fled again.

       The middle-aged woman said, "Any friend of Henry's is welcome. I am Mrs Wilcox." She seemed to read his astonishment even in the dark, and explained, "Henry's mother." She said, "Come and wait inside. I don't suppose they'll be long. It's so dark here. The blackout, you know. Most of the glass is gone." She led the way into what Rowe remembered was the dining-room. There were glasses laid out as though there was going to be a party. It seemed an odd time of day. . . too late or too early. Henry was there; he gave the effect of having been driven into a corner, of having fled here. On the mantelpiece behind him were four silver cups with the names of teams engraved in double entry under a date: to have drunk out of one of them would have been like drinking out of an account book.

       Rowe, looking at the glasses, said, "I didn't mean to intrude," and Henry remarked for the third time, as though it were a phrase he didn't have to use his brain in forming, "Good of you. . ." He seemed to have no memory left of that prison scene on which their friendship had foundered. Mrs Wilcox said, "It's so good the way Henry's old friends are all rallying to him." Then Rowe, who had been on the point of inquiring after Henry's wife, suddenly understood. Death was responsible for the glasses, the unshaven chin, the waiting. . . even for what had puzzled him most of all, the look of youth on Henry's face. People say that sorrow ages, but just as often sorrow makes a man younger — ridding him of responsibility, giving in its place the lost unanchored look of adolescence.

       He said, "I didn't know. I wouldn't have come if I'd known."

       Mrs Wilcox said with gloomy pride, "It was in all the papers."

       Henry stood in his corner; his teeth chattered while Mrs Wilcox went remorselessly on — she had had a good cry, her son was hers again. "We are proud of Doris. The whole post is doing her honour. We are going to lay her uniform — her clean uniform — on the coffin, and the clergyman is going to read about 'Greater love hath no man'."

       "I'm sorry, Henry,"

       "She was crazy," Henry said angrily. "She had no right. . . I told her the wall would collapse."

       "But we are proud of her, Henry," his mother said, "we are proud of her."

       "I should have stopped her," Henry said. "I suppose," his voice went high with rage and grief, "she thought she'd win another of those blasted pots."

       "She was playing for England, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said. She turned to Rowe and said, "I think we ought to lay a hockey-stick beside the uniform, but Henry won't have it."

       "I'll be off," Rowe said. "I'd never have come if. . ."

       "No," Henry said, "you stay. You know how it is. . ." He stopped and looked at Rowe as though he realized him fully for the first time. He said, "I killed my wife too. I could have held her, knocked her down. . ."

       "You don't know what you are saying, Henry," his mother said. "What will this gentleman think. . .?"

       "This is Arthur Rowe, mother."

       "Oh," Mrs Wilcox said, "oh," and at that moment up the street came the slow sad sound of wheels and feet.

       "How dare he. . .?" Mrs Wilcox said.

       "He's my oldest friend, mother," Henry said. Somebody was coming up the stairs. "Why did you come, Arthur?" Henry said.

       "To get you to cash me a cheque."

       "The impudence," Mrs Wilcox said.

       "I didn't know about this. . ."

       "How much, old man?"

       "Twenty?"

       "I've only got fifteen. You can have that."

       "Don't trust him," Mrs Wilcox said.

       "Oh, my cheques are good enough. Henry knows that."

       "There are banks to go to."

       "Not at this time of day, Mrs Wilcox. I'm sorry. It's urgent."

       There was a little trumpery Queen Anne desk in the room: it had obviously belonged to Henry's wife. All the furniture had an air of flimsiness; walking between it was like walking, in the old parlour game, blindfold between bottles. Perhaps in her home the hockey-player had reacted from the toughness of the field. Now moving to get at the desk Henry's shoulder caught a silver cup and set it rolling across the carpet. Suddenly in the open door appeared a very fat man in dungarees carrying a white steel helmet. He picked up the cup and said solemnly, "The procession's here, Mrs Wilcox."

       Henry dithered by the desk.

       "I have the uniform ready," Mrs Wilcox said, "in the hall."

       "I couldn't get a Union Jack," the post warden said, "not a big one. And those little ones they stick on ruins didn't somehow look respectful." He was painfully trying to exhibit the bright side of death. "The whole post's turned out, Mr Wilcox," he said, "except those that have to stay on duty. And the A.F.S. — they've sent a contingent. And there's a rescue party and four salvage men — and the police band."

       "I think that's wonderful," Mrs Wilcox said. "If only Doris could see it all."

       "But she can see it, ma'am," the post warden said. "I'm sure of that."

       "And afterwards," Mrs Wilcox said, gesturing towards the glasses, "if you'll all come up here. . ."

       "There's a good many of us, ma'am. Perhaps we'd better make it just the wardens. The salvage men don't really expect. . ."

       "Come along, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said. "We can't keep all these brave kind souls waiting. You must carry the uniform down in your arms. Oh dear, I wish you looked more tidy. Everybody will be watching you."

       "I don't see," Henry said, "why we shouldn't have buried her quietly."

       "But she's a heroine," Mrs Wilcox exclaimed.

       "I wouldn't be surprised," the post warden said, "if they gave her the George Medal — posthumously. It's the first in the borough — it would be a grand thing for the post."

       "Why, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said, "she's not just your wife any more. She belongs to England."

       Henry moved towards the door: the post warden still held the silver cup awkwardly — he didn't know where to put it. "Just anywhere," Henry said to him, "anywhere." They all moved into the hall, leaving Rowe. "You've forgotten your helmet, Henry," Mrs Wilcox said. He had been a very precise man, and he'd lost his precision; all the things which had made Henry Henry were gone. It was as if his character had consisted of a double-breasted waistcoat, columns of figures, a wife who played hockey. Without these things he was unaccountable, he didn't add up. "You go," he said to his mother, "you go."

       "But Henry. . ."

       "It's understandable, ma'am," the post warden said, "it's feeling that does it. We've always thought Mr Wilcox a very sensitive gentleman at the post. They'll understand," he added kindly, meaning, one supposed, the post, the police band, the A.F.S., even the four salvage men. He urged Mrs Wilcox towards the door with a friendly broad hand, then picked up the uniform himself. Hints of the past penetrated the anonymity of the dungarees — the peaceful past of a manservant, or perhaps of a Commissionaire who ran out into the rain carrying an umbrella. War is very like a bad dream in which familiar people appear in terrible and unlikely disguises. Even Henry. . .

       Rowe made an indeterminate motion to follow; he couldn't help hoping it would remind Henry of the cheque. It was his only chance of getting any money: there was nobody else. Henry said, "We'll just see them go off and then we'll come back here. You do understand don't you, I couldn't bear to watch. . ." They came out together into the road by the park; the procession had already started: it moved like a little dark trickle towards the river. The steel bat on the coffin lay blackened and unreflecting under the winter sun, and the rescue party didn't keep step with the post. It was like a parody of a State funeral — but this was a State funeral. The brown leaves from the park were blowing across the road, and the drinkers coming out at closing time from the Duke of Rockingham took off their hats. Henry said, "I told her not to do it. . ." and the wind blew the sound of footsteps back to them. It was as if they had surrendered her to the people, to whom she had never belonged before.

       Henry said suddenly, "Excuse me, old man," and started after her. He hadn't got his helmet: his hair was beginning to go grey: he broke into a trot, for fear after all of being left behind. He was rejoining his wife and his post. Arthur Rowe was left alone. He turned his money over in his pocket and found there wasn't much of it.

 

 

Chapter 7

A LOAD OF BOOKS

 

 

"Taken as we are by surprise,

our resistance will little avail."

                     The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

       Even if a man has been contemplating the advantages of suicide for two years, he takes time to make his final decision — to move from theory to practice. Rowe couldn't simply go then and there and drop into the river — besides, he would have been pulled out again. And yet watching the procession recede he could see no other solution. He was wanted by the police for murder, and he had thirty-five shillings in his pocket. He couldn't go to the bank and he had no friend but Henry; of course, he could wait till Henry came back, but the cold-blooded egotism of that act repelled him. It would be simpler and less disgusting to die. A brown leaf settled on his coat — that according to the old story meant money, but the old story didn't say how soon.

       He walked along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge; the tide was low and the sea-gulls walked delicately on the mud. One noticed the absence of perambulators and dogs: the only dog in sight looked stray and uncared for and evasive. A barrage balloon staggered up from behind the park trees: its huge nose bent above the thin winter foliage, and then it turned its dirty old backside and climbed.

       It wasn't only that he had no money: he had no longer what he called a home — somewhere to shelter from people who might know him. He missed Mrs Purvis coming in with the tea; he used to count the days by her: punctuated by her knock they would slide smoothly towards the end — annihilation, forgiveness, punishment or peace. He missed David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop; he could no longer direct his sense of pity towards the fictitious sufferings of little Nell — it roamed around and saw too many objects — too many rats that needed to be killed. And he was one of them.

       Leaning over the Embankment in the time-honoured attitude of would-be suicides, he began to go into the details. He wanted as far as possible to be unobtrusive; now that his anger had died it seemed to him a pity that he hadn't drunk that cup of tea — he didn't want to shock any innocent person with the sight of an ugly death. And there were very few suicides which were not ugly. Murder was infinitely more graceful because it was the murderer's object not to shock — a murderer went to infinite pains to make death look quiet, peaceful, happy. Everything, he thought, would be so much easier if he had only a little money.

       Of course, he could go to the bank and let the police get him. It seemed probable that then he would be hanged. But the idea of hanging for a crime he hadn't committed still had power to anger him: if he killed himself it would be for a crime of which he was guilty. He was haunted by a primitive idea of Justice. He wanted to conform: he had always wanted to conform.

       A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man — a man who takes either tea or coffee for breakfast, a man who likes a good book and perhaps reads biography rather than fiction, a man who at a regular hour goes to bed, who tries to develop good physical habits but possibly suffers from constipation, who prefers either dogs or cats and has certain views about politics.

       It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

       Arthur Rowe was monstrous. His early childhood had been passed before the first world war, and the impressions of childhood are ineffaceable. He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain, but he was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered agonies from an inefficient dentist he knew as Mr Griggs. He learned before he was seven what pain was like — he wouldn't willingly allow even a rat to suffer it. In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood — for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories — of the V.C. in the police-court dock, of the faked income tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despised talking to us of courage and purity. The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place. The two great popular statements of faith are "What a small place the world is" and "I'm a stranger here myself."