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

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

       "Does your little group still meet?"

       "On Wednesdays."

       "Many absentees?"

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

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

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

       "Far away?"

       "Where the Blessed are."

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

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

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

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

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

       She repeated, "Cut his throat"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Stone."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

2

 

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

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

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

       "But the county police. . ."

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

       "You know the men?"

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

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

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

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

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

       "Do you think Dr Forester. . .?"

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

       "He might pass it on."

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

       "Is it so desperately important?"

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

       "Dunwoody?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Was?"

       "I killed him."

 

 

3

 

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

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

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

       "Yes. My name's Sinclair."

       "You've got no business here."

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

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

       "Yes."

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

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

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

       "No," Rowe said.

       "Perhaps you were one of the patients here?"

       "I was."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Three dead and one in prison."

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

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

       "Yes."

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

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

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

       "How do you know where to dig?"

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

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

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

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

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

       "Nothing they could burn," Mr Prentice said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Who was he?"

       "He was Jones."

 

 

Chapter 3

WRONG NUMBERS

 

 

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

                                                      The Little Duke

 

 

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

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

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

       "What are you going to do about it?"

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

       "What do you think they did to Jones?"       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Hullo."

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

BOOK FOUR

The Whole Man

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

JOURNEY'S END

 

 

"Must I — and all alone."

                  The Little Duke

 

 

1

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Yes. Arthur Rowe."

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

       "I don't remember."

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

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

       "I'm Henry — Henry Wilcox."

       "And I came here — to a funeral?"

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

       "Why did I bother you then?"

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

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

       "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Was there so much talk?"

       "Well, naturally. . ."

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

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

       "Yes. Good-bye."

       "Good-bye."

 

 

2

 

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

       "Yes, me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "No."

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

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

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

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

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

       She said, "Thank God."

       "But you knew I wasn't?"

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

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

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

       "He?"

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

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

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

       "Why?"

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

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

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

       He accused her, "But you are alive."

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

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

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

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

       "Yes."

       "With the photographs, of course."

       "Yes."

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

       "Yes."

       "Where is he now?"

       She said, "He's here."

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

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

       "But he'll have heard us."

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

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

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

       "Where is he?"

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

       "Can I use the telephone?"

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

       "Where's he going?"

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

       "I don't know."

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

       "He's asleep. That's murder."

       "I won't hit first."

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

       He put the candlestick down again.

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

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

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

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

 

              "Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose

              in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn

 

              um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male

              ists Orpheus, wenn est singt. . ."

 

The knuckles hid the rest.

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

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

       Rowe said weakly, "The photographs. . ."

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

       "Where are they?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "It wouldn't be economical."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Rowe said, "I only want the photographs."

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

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

       "And tell you your story?"

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

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

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

       "Give me the gun," Rowe said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Why?" he asked again.

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

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

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

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

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

       "No."

 

 

3

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "A stick?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "He might get out on the way."

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

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

       "I wanted him to have a chance."

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

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

       "Just stay here," Rowe said.

       She nodded. "Good-bye."

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

       "He won't kill me."

       "I'm not afraid of that."

       "What are you afraid of then?"

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

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

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

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

       "Perhaps there won't be a raid."

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

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

       "Get in," Rowe said.

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

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

       "Yellow's up."

       "So I've heard."

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

       "No, no. I don't think so."

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

       "I suppose so."

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

       "I didn't hear it."

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

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

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

       He made his way down the first-class compartments along the corridor. They were not very full; only the more daring season-ticket holders remained in London as late as this. He put his head in at every door and met at once the disquieting return stare of the blue ghosts.

       It was a long train, and the porters were already shutting doors higher up before he reached the last first-class coach. He was so accustomed to failure that it took him by surprise, sliding back the door to come on Hilfe.

       He wasn't alone. An old lady sat opposite him, and she had made Hilfe's hand into a cat's cradle for winding wool. He was handcuffed in the heavy oiled raw material for seamen's boots. His right hand stuck stiffly out, the wrist bandaged and roughly splinted, and round and round ever so gently the old lady industriously wound her wool. It was ludicrous and it was sad; Rowe could see the weighted pocket where the revolver lay, and the look that Hilfe turned on him was not reckless nor amused nor dangerous: it was humiliated. He had always had a way with old ladies.

       Rowe said, "You wouldn't want to talk here."

       "She's deaf," Hilfe said, "stone deaf."

       "Good evening," the old lady said, "I hear there's a Yellow up."

       "Yes," Rowe said.

       "She's deaf," Hilfe said, "stone deaf."

       "Shocking," the old lady said and wound her wool.

       "I want the negative," Rowe said.

       "Anna should have kept you longer. I told her to give me enough start. After all," he added with gloomy disappointment, "it would have been better for both. . ."

       "You cheated her too often," Rowe said. He sat down by his side and watched the winding up and over and round.

       "What are you going to do?"

       "Wait till the train starts and then pull the cord."

       Suddenly from very close the guns cracked — once, twice, three times. The old lady looked vaguely up as though she had heard something very faint intruding on her silence. Rowe put his hand into Hilfe's pocket and slipped the gun into his own, "If you'd like to smoke," the old lady said, "don't mind me."

       Hilfe said, "I think we ought to talk things over."

       "There's nothing to talk about."

       "It wouldn't do, you know, to get me and not to get the photographs."

       Rowe began, "The photographs don't matter by themselves. It's you. . ." But then he thought: they do matter. How do I know he hasn't passed them on already? If they are hidden, the place may be agreed on with another agent. . . even if they are found by a stranger, they are not safe. He said, "We'll talk," and the siren sent up its tremendous howl over Paddington. Very far away this time there was a pad, pad, pad, like the noise a fivesball makes against the glove, and the old lady wound and wound. He remembered Anna saying, "I'm afraid he'll talk," and he saw Hilfe suddenly smile at the wool as if life had still the power to tickle him into savage internal mirth.

       Hilfe said, "I'm still ready to swop."

       "You haven't anything to swop."

       "You haven't much, you know, either," Hilfe said. "You don't know where the photos are. . .

       "I wonder when the sirens will go," the old lady said. Hilfe moved his wrists in the wool. He said, "If you give back the gun, I'll let you have the photographs. . ."

       "If you can give me the photographs, they must be with you. There's no reason why I should bargain."

       "Well," Hilfe said, "if it's your idea of revenge, I can't stop you. I thought perhaps you wouldn't want Anna dragged in. She let me escape, you remember. . ."

       "There," the old lady said, "we've nearly done now."

       Hilfe said, "They probably wouldn't hang her. Of course that would depend on what I say. Perhaps it would be just an internment camp till the war's over — and then deportation if you win. From my point of view," he explained dryly, "she's a traitor, you know."

       Rowe said, "Give me the photographs and then we'll talk." The word "talk" was like a capitulation. Already he was beginning painfully to think out the long chain of deceit he would have to practise on Mr Prentice if he were to save Anna.

       The train rocked with an explosion; the old lady said, "At last we are going to start," and leaning forward she released Hilfe's hands. Hilfe said with a curious wistfulness, "What fun they are having up there." He was like a mortally sick man saying farewell to the sports of his contemporaries: no fear, only regret. He had failed to bring off the record himself in destruction. Five people only were dead: it hadn't been much of an innings compared with what they were having up there. Sitting under the darkened globe, he was a long way away; wherever men killed his spirit moved in obscure companionship.

       "Give them to me," Rowe said.

       He was surprised by a sudden joviality. It was as if Hilfe after all had not lost all hope — of what? escape? further destruction? He laid his left hand on Rowe's knee with a gesture of intimacy. He said, "I'll be better than my word. How would you like to have your memory back?"

       "I only want the photographs."

       "Not here," Hilfe said. "I can't very well strip in front of a lady, can I?" He stood up. "We'd better leave the train."

       "Are you going?" the old lady asked.

       "We've decided, my friend and I," Hilfe said, "to spend the night in town and see the fun."

       "Fancy," the old lady vaguely said, "the porters always tell you wrong."

       "You've been very kind," Hilfe said, bowing. "Your kindness disarmed me."

       "Oh, I can manage nicely now, thank you."

       It was as if Hilfe had taken charge of his own defeat. He moved purposefully up the platform and Rowe followed like a valet. The rush was over; he had no chance to escape; through the glassless roof they could see the little trivial scarlet stars of the barrage flashing and going out like matches. A whistle blew and the train began to move very slowly out of the dark station; it seemed to move surreptitiously; there was nobody but themselves and a few porters to see it go. The refreshment-rooms were closed, and a drunk soldier sat alone on a waste of platform vomiting between his knees.

       Hilfe led the way down the steps to the lavatories; there was nobody there at all — even the attendant had taken shelter. The guns cracked: they were alone with the smell of disinfectant, the greyish basins, the little notices about venereal disease. The adventure he had pictured once in such heroic terms had reached its conclusion in the Gentlemen's. Hilfe looked in an L.C.C. mirror and smoothed his hair.

       "What are you doing?" Rowe asked.

       "Oh, saying good-bye," Hilfe said. He took off his jacket as though he were going to wash, then threw it over to Rowe. Rowe saw the tailor's tag marked in silk, Pauling and Crosthwaite. "You'll find the photographs," Hilfe said, "in the shoulder."

       The shoulder was padded.

       "Want a knife?" Hilfe said. "You can have your own," and he held out a boy's compendium.

       Rowe slit the shoulder up and took out from the padding a roll of film; he broke the paper which bound it and exposed a corner of negative. "Yes," he said. "This is it."

       "And now the gun?"

       Rowe said slowly, "I promised nothing."

       Hilfe said with sharp anxiety, "But you'll let me have the gun?"

       "No."

       Hilfe suddenly was scared and amazed. He exclaimed in his odd dated vocabulary, "It's a caddish trick."

       "You've cheated too often," Rowe said.

       "Be sensible," Hilfe said. "You think I want to escape. But the train's gone. Do you think I could get away by killing you in Paddington station? I wouldn't get a hundred yards."

       "Why do you want it then?" Rowe asked.

       "I want to get further away than that." He said in a low voice, "I don't want to be beaten up." He leant earnestly forward and the L.C.C. mirror behind him showed a tuft of fine hair he hadn't smoothed.

       "We don't beat up our prisoners here."

       "Oh no?" Hilfe said. 'do you really believe that? Do you think you are so different from us?"

       "Yes."

       "I wouldn't trust the difference," Hilfe said. "I know what we do to spies. They'll think they can make me talk — they will make me talk." He brought up desperately the old childish phrase, "I'll swop." It was difficult to believe that he was guilty of so many deaths. He went urgently on, "Rowe, I'll give you your memory back. There's no one else will."

       "Anna," Rowe said.

       "She'll never tell you. Why, Rowe, she let me go to stop me. . . Because I said I'd tell you. She wants to keep you as you are."

       "Is it as bad as that?" Rowe asked. He felt fear and an unbearable curiosity. Digby whispered in his ear that now he could be a whole man again: Anna's voice warned him. He knew that this was the great moment of a lifetime; he was being offered so many forgotten years, the fruit of twenty years' experience. His breast had to press the ribs apart to make room for so much more; he stared ahead of him and read — "Private Treatment Between the Hours of. . ." On the far edge of consciousness the barrage thundered.

       Hilfe grimaced at him. "Bad?" he said. "Why — it's tremendously important."

       Rowe shook his head sadly: "You can't have the gun."

       Suddenly Hilfe began to laugh: the laughter was edged with hysteria and hate. "I was giving you a chance," he said. "If you'd given me the gun, I might have been sorry for you. I'd have been grateful. I might have just shot myself. But now" — his head bobbed up and down in front of the cheap mirror — "now I'll tell you gratis."

       Rowe said, "I don't want to hear," and turned away. A very small man in an ancient brown Homburg came rocking down the steps from above and made for the urinal. His hat came down over his ears: it might have been put on with a spirit-level. "Bad night," he said, "bad night." He was pale and wore an expression of startled displeasure. As Rowe reached the steps a bomb came heavily down, pushing the air ahead of it like an engine. The little man hastily did up his flies; he crouched as though he wanted to get farther away. Hilfe sat on the edge of the wash-basin and listened with a sour nostalgic smile, as though he were hearing the voice of a friend going away for ever down the road. Rowe stood on the bottom step and waited and the express roared down on them and the little man stooped lower and lower in front of the urinal. The sound began to diminish, and then the ground shifted very slightly under their feet at the explosion. There was silence again except for the tiny shifting of dust down the steps. Almost immediately a second bomb was under way. They waited in fixed photographic attitudes, sitting, squatting, standing: this bomb could not burst closer without destroying them. Then it too passed, diminished, burst a little farther away.

       "I wish they'd stop," the man in the Homburg said, and all the urinals began to flush. The dust hung above the steps like smoke, and a hot metallic smell drowned the smell of ammonia. Rowe climbed the steps.

       "Where are you going?" Hilfe said. He cried out sharply, "The police?" and when Rowe did not reply, he came away from the wash-basin. "You can't go yet — not without hearing about your wife."

       "My wife?" He came back down the steps; he couldn't escape now: the lost years waited for him among the washbasins. He asked hopelessly, "Am I married?"

       "You were married," Hilfe said. "Don't you remember now? You poisoned her." He began to laugh again. "Your Alice."

       "An awful night," the man in the Homburg said; he had ears for nothing but the heavy uneven stroke of the bomber overhead.

       "You were tried for murder," Hilfe said, "and they sent you to an asylum. You'll find it in all the papers. I can give you the dates. . ."

       The little man turned suddenly to them and spreading out his hands in a gesture of entreaty he said in a voice filled with tears, "Shall I ever get to Wimbledon?" A bright white light shone through the dust outside, and through the glassless roof of the station the glow of the flares came dripping beautifully down.

       It wasn't Rowe's first raid: he heard Mrs Purvis coming down the stairs with her bedding: the Bay of Naples was on the wall and The Old Curiosity Shop upon the shelf. Guilford Street held out its dingy arms to welcome him, and he was home again. He thought: what will that bomb destroy? Perhaps with a little luck the flower shop will be gone near Marble Arch, the sherry bar in Adelaide Crescent, or the corner of Quebec Street, where I used to wait so many hours, so many years. . . there was such a lot which had to be destroyed before peace came.

       "Go along," a voice said, "to Anna now," and he looked across a dimmed blue interior to a man who stood by the wash-basins and laughed at him. "She hoped you'd never remember." He thought of a dead rat and a policeman, and then he looked everywhere and saw reflected in the crowded court the awful expression of pity: the judge's face was bent, but he could read pity in the old fingers which fidgeted with an Eversharp. He wanted to warn them — don't pity me. Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn't safe when pity's prowling round.

       "Anna. . ." the voice began again, and another voice said with a kind of distant infinite regret at the edge of consciousness, "And I might have caught the 6.15." The horrible process of connection went on; his Church had once taught him the value of penance, but penance was a value only to oneself. There was no sacrifice, it seemed to him, that would help him to atone to the dead. The dead were out of reach of the guilty. He wasn't interested in saving his own soul.

       "What are you going to do?" a voice said. His brain rocked with its long journey; it was as if he were advancing down an interminable passage towards a man called Digby — who was so like him and yet had such different memories. He could hear Digby's voice saying, "Shut your eyes. . ." There were rooms full of flowers, the sound of water falling, and Anna sat beside him, strung up, on guard, in defence of his ignorance. He was saying, "Of course you have a brother. . . I remember. . ."

       Another voice said, "It's getting quieter. Don't you think it is?"

       "What are you going to do?"

       It was like one of those trick pictures in a children's magazine: you stare at it hard and you see one thing — a vase of flowers — and then your focus suddenly changes and you see only the outlined faces of people. In and out the two pictures flicker. Suddenly, quite clearly, he saw Hilfe as he had seen him lying asleep — the graceful shell of a man, all violence quieted. He was Anna's brother. Rowe crossed the floor to the wash-basins and said in a low voice that the man in the Homburg couldn't hear, "All right. You can have it. Take it."

       He slipped the gun quickly into Hilfe's hand.

       "I think," the voice behind him said, "I'll make a dash for it. I really think I will. What do you think, sir?"

       "Be off," Hilfe said sharply, "be off."

       "You think so too. Yes. Perhaps." There was a scuttling on the steps and silence again.

       "Of course," Hilfe said, "I could kill you now. But why should I? It would be doing you a service. And it would leave me to your thugs. How I hate you though."

       "Yes?" He wasn't thinking of Hilfe; his thoughts swung to and fro between two people he loved and pitied. It seemed to him that he had destroyed both of them.

       "Everything was going so well," Hilfe said, "until you came blundering in. What made you go and have your fortune told? You had no future."

       "No." He remembered the fête clearly now; he remembered walking round the railings and hearing the music; he had been dreaming of innocence. . . Mrs Bellairs sat in a booth behind a curtain. . .

       "And just to have hit on that one phrase," Hilfe said. " 'Don't tell me the past. Tell me the future.' "

       And there was Sinclair too. He remembered with a sense of responsibility the old car standing on the wet gravel. He had better go away and telephone to Prentice. Sinclair probably had a copy. . .

       "And then on top of everything Anna. Why the hell should any woman love you?" He cried out sharply, "Where are you going?"

       "Can't you give me just five minutes?"

       "Oh no," Rowe said. "No. It's not possible." The process was completed; he was what Digby had wanted to be — a whole man. His brain held now everything it had ever held. Willi Hilfe gave an odd little sound like a retch. He began to walk rapidly towards the lavatory cubicles, with his bandaged hand stuck out. The stone floor was wet and he slipped but recovered. He began to pull at a lavatory door, but of course it was locked. He didn't seem to know what to do: it was as if he needed to get behind a door, out of sight, into some burrow. . . He turned and said imploringly, "Give me a penny," and everywhere the sirens began to wail the All Clear; the sound came from everywhere: it was as if the floor of the urinal whined under his feet. The smell of ammonia came to him like something remembered from a dream. Hilfe's strained white face begged for his pity. Pity again. He held out a penny to him and then tossed it and walked up the steps; before he reached the top he heard the shot. He didn't go back: he left him for others to find.

 

 

4

 

       One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one has never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.

       This, of course, he knew now, was not his home. Guilford Street was his home. He had hoped that wherever Anna was there would be peace; coming up the stairs a second time he knew that there would never be peace again while they lived.

       To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he began to climb the stairs. A phrase of Johns' came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and Tatlers.

       The door was open as he had left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and been lost for ever. If one loved a woman one couldn't hope that she would be tied to a murderer for the rest of her days.

       But she was there — not where he had left her, but in the bedroom where they had watched Hilfe sleeping. She lay on the bed face downwards with her fists clenched. He said "Anna."

       She turned her head on the pillow; she had been crying, and her face looked as despairing as a child's. He felt an enormous love for her, enormous tenderness, the need to protect her at any cost. She had wanted him innocent and happy. . . she had loved Digby. . . He had got to give her what she wanted. . . He said gently, "Your brother's dead. He shot himself," but her face didn't alter. It was as if none of that meant anything at all — all that violence and gracelessness and youth had gone without her thinking it worth attention. She asked with terrible anxiety, "What did he say to you?"

       Rowe said, "He was dead before I could reach him. Directly he saw me he knew it was all up."

       The anxiety left her face: all that remained was that tense air he had observed before — the air of someone perpetually on guard to shield him. . . He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. "My dear," he said, "my dear. How much I love you." He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.

       "Me too," she said. "Me too."

       They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.

       He tried tentatively a phrase, "My dear, my dear, I am so happy," and heard with infinite tenderness her prompt and guarded reply, "I am too." It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness.

 

The End

 

 

 

       Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a book of verse, he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, which he classed as an "entertainment" in order to distinguish it from more serious work. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, and he was commissioned to visit Mexico in 1938 and report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, The Power and the Glory.

       Brighton Rock was published in 1938, and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was sent out to Sierra Leone in 1941-3. One of his major post-war novels, The Heart of the Matter, is set in West Africa and is considered by many to be his finest book. This was followed by The End of the Affair, The Quiet American (a story set in Vietnam), Our Man in Havana, and A Burnt-Out Case. The Comedians and twelve other novels have been filmed, and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. In 1967 he published a collection of short stories under the title May We Borrow Your Husband? Among his latest publications are his autobiography, A. Sort of Life (1971), The Honorary Consul (1973), Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (edited, 1975), and The Human Factor (1978).

       In all Graham Greene has written some thirty novels, "entertainments", plays, children's books, travel books, and collections of essays and short stories. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1966.