The Ministry of Fear Read online

  ‘On the contrary, it’s made with real eggs.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It seems quite time to go.’

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

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

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

  ‘It sounds quite obtrusive to me.’

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

  Rowe said obstinately, ‘It’s not the way to run a fête – to prevent people taking their prizes.’

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

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

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

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

  ‘There’s really no need to take that tone.’

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

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

  ‘You want the cake too,’ Rowe said.

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

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

  Rowe said, ‘That’s very odd. He got the exact weight?’

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

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

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

  2

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

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

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

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

  ‘It weighs nearly three and a half.’

  ‘Oh, it couldn’t do that.’

  ‘You weigh it.’

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

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

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

  ‘It’ll get stale,’ Mrs Purvis said.

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

  3

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Wouldn’t you like the cake?’ Mrs Purvis asked, lingering in the doorway.

  ‘I think we had better finish the biscuits first.’

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

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

  ‘It’s a little more cheerful tonight,’ Rowe said.

  ‘They feed us,’ the stranger said.

  ‘You won’t want the cake?’ Mrs Purvis asked.

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

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

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

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

  ‘A knife, Mrs Purvis?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Peace,’ Rowe said.

  ‘Exactly. So do we.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I mean your kind of peace.’

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

  ‘Who are we?’

  ‘My friends and I.’

  ‘Conscientious objectors?’

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

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

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

  ‘Who are we to judge?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘No,’ Rowe said. ‘No.’

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

  Again the drone began.

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

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