The Ministry of Fear Read online

  ‘Twenty?’

  ‘I’ve only got fifteen. You can have that.’

  ‘Don’t trust him,’ Mrs Wilcox said.

  ‘Oh, my cheques are good enough. Henry knows that.’

  ‘There are banks to go to.’

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

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

  Henry dithered by the desk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I don’t see,’ Henry said, ‘why we shouldn’t have buried her quietly.’

  ‘But she’s a heroine,’ Mrs Wilcox exclaimed.

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

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

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

  ‘But Henry . . .’

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

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

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

  Chapter 7

  A LOAD OF BOOKS

  ‘Taken as we are by surprise, our resistance will little avail.’

  The Little Duke

  1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But Rowe was a murderer – as other men are poets. The statues still stood. He was prepared to do anything to save the innocent or to punish the guilty. He believed against all the experience of life that somewhere there was justice, and justice condemned him. He analysed his motives minutely and always summed up against himself. He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundred times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife’s pain – and not she. Once, it was true, in the early days of the disease, she had broken down, said she wanted to die, not to wait: that was hysteria. Later it was her endurance and her patience which he had found most unbearable. He was trying to escape his own pain, not hers, and at the end she had guessed or half-guessed what it was he was offering her. She was scared and afraid to ask. How could you go on living with a man if you had once asked him whether he had put poison into your evening drink? Far easier when you love him and are tired of pain just to take the hot milk and sleep. But he could never know whether the fear had been worse than the pain, and he could never tell whether she might not have preferred any sort of life to death. He had taken the stick and killed the rat, and saved himself the agony of watching. . . . He had gone over the same questions and the same answers daily, ever since the moment when she took the milk from him and said, ‘How queer it tastes,’ and lay back and tried to smile. He would have liked to stay beside her till she slept, but that would have been unusual, and he must avoid anything unusual, so he had to leave her to die alone. And she would have liked to ask him to stay – he was sure of that – but that would have been unusual too. After all, in an hour he would be coming up to bed. Convention held them at the moment of death. He had in mind the police questions, ‘Why did you stay?’ and it was quite possible that she too was deliberately playing his game against the police. There were so many things he would never know. But when the police did ask questions he hadn’t the heart or the energy to tell them lies. Perhaps if he had lied to them a little they would have hanged him . . .

  It was about time now to bring the trial to an end.

  2

  ‘They can’t spoil Whistler’s Thames,’ a voice said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rowe said, ‘I didn’t catch . . .’

  ‘It’s safe underground. Bomb-proof vaults.’

  Somewhere, Rowe thought, he had seen that face before: the thin depressed grey moustache, the bulging pockets, out of which the man now took a piece of bread and threw it towards the mud. Before it had reached the river the gulls had risen: one out-distanced the others, caught it and sailed on, down past the stranded barges and the paper mill, a white scrap blown towards the blackened chimneys of Lots Road.

  ‘Come, my pretties,’ the man said, and his hand suddenly became a landing ground for sparrows. ‘They know uncle,’ he said, ‘they know uncle.’ He put a bit of bread between his lips and they hovered round his mouth giving little pecks at it as though they were kissing him.

  ‘It must be difficult in wartime,’ Rowe said, ‘to provide for all your nephews.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ the man said – and when he opened his mouth you saw his teeth were in a shocking condition, black stumps like the remains of something destroyed by fire. He sprinkled some crumbs over his old brown hat and a new flock of sparrows landed there. ‘Strictly illegal,’ he said, ‘I dare say. If Lord Woolton knew.’ He put a foot up on a heavy suitcase, and a sparrow perched on his knee. He was overgrown with birds.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ Rowe said.

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘Twice today now I come to think of it.’

  ‘Come, my pretties,’ the elderly man said.

  ‘In the auction-room in Chancery Lane.’

  A pair of mild eyes turned on him. ‘It’s a small world.’

  ‘Do you buy books?’ Rowe asked, thinking of the shabby clothes.

  ‘Buy and sell,’ the man said. He was acute enough to read Rowe’s thoughts. ‘Working clothes,’ he said. ‘Books carry a deal of dust.’

  ‘You go in for old books?’

  ‘Landscape gardening’s my speciality. Eighteenth century. Fullove, Fulham Road, Battersea.’

  ‘Do you find enough customers?’

  ‘There are more than you’d think.’ He suddenly opened his arms wide and shooed the birds away as though they were children with whom he’d played long enough. ‘But everything’s depressed,’ he said, ‘these days. What they want to fight for I don’t understand.’ He touched the suitcase tenderly with his foot. ‘I’ve got a load of books here,’ he said, ‘I got from a lord’s house. Salvage. The state of some of them would make you weep, but others . . . I don’t say it wasn’t a good bargain. I’d show them you, only I’m afraid of bird-droppings. First bargain I’ve had for months. In the old days I’d have treasured them, treasured them. Waited till the Americans came in the summer. Now I’m glad of any chance of a turnover. If I don’t deliver these to a customer at Regal Court before five, I lose a sale. He wants to take them down to the country before the raid starts. I haven’t a watch, sir. Could you tell me the time?’

  ‘It’s only four o’clock.’

  ‘I ought to go on,’ Mr Fullove said. ‘Books are heavy though and I feel just tired out. It’s been a long day. You’ll excuse me, sir, if I sit down a moment.’ He sat himself down on the suitcase and drew out a ragged packet of Tenners. ‘Will you smoke, sir? You look a bit done, if I may say so, yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right.’ The mild exhausted ageing eyes appealed to him. He said, ‘Why don’t you take a taxi?’

  ‘Well, sir, I work on a very narrow margin these days. If I take a taxi that’s a dollar gone. And then when he gets the books to the country, perhaps he won’t want one of them.’

  ‘They are landscape gardening?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s a lost art, sir. There’s a lot more to it, you know, than flowers. That’s what gardening means today,’ he said with contempt, ‘flowers.’

  ‘You don’t care for flowers?’

  ‘Oh, flowers,’ the bookseller said, ‘are all right. You’ve got to have flowers.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Rowe said, ‘I don’t know much about gardening – except flowers.’

  ‘It’s the tricks they played.’ The mild eyes looked up with cunning enthus
iasm. ‘The machinery.’

  ‘Machinery?’

  ‘They had statues that spurted water at you when you passed, and the grottoes – the things they thought up for grottoes. Why, in a good garden you weren’t safe anywhere.’

  ‘I should have thought you were meant to feel safe in a garden.’

  ‘They didn’t think so, sir,’ the bookseller said, blowing the stale smell of carious teeth enthusiastically in Rowe’s direction. Rowe wished he could get away; but automatically with that wish the sense of pity worked and he stayed.

  ‘And then,’ the bookseller said, ‘there were the tombs.’

  ‘Did they spurt water too?’

  ‘Oh no. They gave the touch of solemnity, sir, the memento mori.’

  ‘Black thoughts,’ Rowe said, ‘in a black shade?’

  ‘It’s how you look at it, isn’t it, sir?’ But there was no doubt that the bookseller looked at it with a kind of gloating. He brushed a little bird-lime off his jacket and said, ‘You don’t have a taste, sir, for the Sublime – or the Ridiculous?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Rowe said, ‘I prefer human nature plain.’

  The little man giggled. ‘I get your meaning, sir. Oh, they had room for human nature, believe me, in the grottoes. Not one without a comfortable couch. They never forgot the comfortable couch,’ and again with sly enthusiasm he blew his carious breath towards his companion.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Rowe said, ‘you should be getting on? You mustn’t let me rob you of a sale,’ and immediately he reacted from his own harshness seeing only the mild tired eyes, thinking, poor devil, he’s had a weary day, each one to his taste . . . after all, he liked me. That was a claim he could never fail to honour because it astonished him.

  ‘I suppose I ought, sir.’ He rose and brushed away some crumbs the birds had left. ‘I enjoy a good talk,’ he said. ‘It’s not often you can get a good talk these days. It’s a rush between shelters.’

  ‘You sleep in a shelter?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, sir,’ he said as if he were confessing to an idiosyncrasy, ‘I can’t bear the bombs. But you don’t sleep as you ought in a shelter.’ The weight of the suitcase cramped him: he looked very old under its weight. ‘Some people are not considerate. The snores and squabbles . . .’