The Confidential Agent

THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. 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 was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
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 stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

Novels

The Man Within

It's a Battlefield

A Gun for Sale

The Ministry of Fear

The Third Man

The End of the Affair

Loser Takes All

The Quiet American

A Burnt-Out Case

Travels with my Aunt

Dr Fischer of Geneva
or

The Bomb Party

The Human Factor

The Tenth Man

Stamboul Train

England Made Me

Brighton Rock

The Power and the Glory

The Heart of the Matter

The Fallen Idol

Our Man in Havana

The Comedians

The Honorary Consul

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

Short Stories

Collected Stories

The Last Word and Other Stories

May We Borrow Your Husband?

Travel

Journey Without Maps

The Lawless Roads

In Search of a Character

Getting to Know the General

Essays

Yours etc
.

Reflections

Mornings in the Dark

Collected Essays

Plays

Collected Plays

Autobiography

A Sort of Life

Ways of Escape

Fragments of an Autobiography

A World of my Own

Biography

Lord Rochester's Monkey

An Impossible Woman

Children's Books

The Little Train

The Little Horse-Bus

The Little Steamroller

The Little Fire Engine

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Epub ISBN: 9781409020486

Version 1.0

  

Published by Vintage 2006

8 10 9

Copyright © Graham Greene 1978

Introduction copyright © John Rebus Ltd 2006

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1939

First published by Vintage in 2002

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading RG1 8EX

To Dorothy Craigie

Contents

PART ONE

The Hunted

[1]

The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death? The ship moved at half speed through the bitter autumn evening. It reminded D. of a hearse, rolling slowly and discreetly towards the ‘garden of peace', the driver careful not to shake the coffin, as if the body minded a jolt or two. Hysterical women shrieked among the shrouds.

The third-class bar was jammed; a rugger team was returning home and they scrummed boisterously for their glasses, wearing striped ties. D. couldn't always understand what they were shouting: perhaps it was slang – or dialect. It would take a little time for his memory of English completely to return; he had known it very well once, but now his memories were rather literary. He tried to stand apart, a middle-aged man with a heavy moustache and a scarred chin and worry like a habit on his forehead, but you couldn't go far in that bar – an elbow caught him in the ribs and a mouth breathed bottled beer into his face. He was filled with a sense of amazement at these people; you could never have told from their smoky good fellowship that there was a war on – not merely a war in the country from which he had come, but a war here, half a mile outside Dover breakwater. He carried the war with him. Wherever D. was, there was the war. He could never understand that people were unaware of it.

‘Pass here, pass here,' a player screamed at the barman, and somebody snatched his glass of beer and shouted, ‘Offside.' ‘Scrum,' they all screamed together.

D. said, ‘With your permission. With your permission,' edging out. He turned up the collar of his mackintosh and went up on to the cold and foggy deck where the gulls were mourning, blowing over his head towards Dover. He began to tramp – up and down beside the rail – to keep warm, his head down, the deck like a map marked with trenches, impossible positions, salients, deaths: bombing planes took flight from between his eyes, and in his brain the mountains shook with shell-bursts.

He had no sense of safety walking up and down on this English ship sliding imperceptibly into Dover. Danger was part of him. It wasn't like an overcoat you sometimes left behind: it was your skin. You died with it; only corruption stripped it from you. The one person you trusted was yourself. One friend was found with a holy medal under the shirt, another belonged to an organisation with the wrong initial letters. Up and down the cold unsheltered third-class deck, into the stern and back, until his walk was interrupted by the little wooden gate with a placard: ‘First-Class Passengers Only.' There had been a time when the class distinction would have read like an insult, but now the class divisions were too subdivided to mean anything at all. He stared up the first-class deck. There was only one man out in the cold like himself: collar turned up, he stood in the bow looking out towards Dover.

D. went back into the stern, and again, as regular as his tread, the bombing planes took off. You could trust nobody but yourself, and sometimes you were uncertain whether after all you could trust yourself.
They
didn't trust you, any more than they had trusted the friend with the holy medal; they were right then, and who was to say whether they were not right now? You – you were a prejudiced party; the ideology was a complex affair; heresies crept in. . . . He wasn't certain that he wasn't watched at this moment; he wasn't certain that it wasn't right for him to be watched. After all, there were aspects of economic materialism which, if he searched his heart, he did not accept. . . . And the watcher – was he watched? He was haunted for a moment by the vision of an endless distrust. In an inner pocket, a bulge over the breast, he carried what were called credentials, but credence no longer meant belief.

He walked slowly back – the length of his chain; through the fog a young female voice cried harshly and distinctly, ‘I'm going to have one more. I
will
have one more': somewhere a lot of glass broke. Somebody was crying behind a lifeboat – it was a strange world wherever you were. He walked cautiously round the bow of the boat and saw a child, wedged in a corner. He stood and looked at it. It didn't mean a thing to him – it was like writing so illegible you didn't even try to decipher it. He wondered whether he would ever again share anybody's emotion. He said to it in a gentle dutiful way, ‘What is the matter?'

‘I bumped my head.'

He said, ‘Are you alone?'

‘Dad stood me here.'

‘Because you bumped your head?'

‘He said it wasn't any cause to take on.' The child had stopped crying; it began to cough, the fog in the throat: dark eyes stared out of their cave between boat and rail, defensively. D. turned and walked on. It occurred to him that he shouldn't have spoken: the child was probably watched – by a father, or a mother. He came up to the barrier – ‘First-Class Passengers Only' – and looked through. The other man was approaching through the fog, walking the longer length of his chain. D. saw first the pressed trousers, then the fur collar, and last the face. They stared at each other across the low gate. Taken by surprise they had nothing to say. Besides, they had never spoken to each other; they were separated by different initial letters, a great many deaths – they had seen each other in a passage years ago, once in a railway station and once on a landing-field. D. couldn't even remember his name.

The other man was the first to move away; thin as celery inside his thick coat, tall, he had an appearance of nerves and agility; he walked fast on legs like stilts, stiffly, but you felt they might fold up. He looked as if he had already decided on some action. D. thought: he will probably try to rob me, perhaps he will try to have me killed. He would certainly have more helpers and more money and more friends. He would bear letters of introduction to peers and ministers – he had once had some kind of title himself, years ago, before the republic . . . count, marquis . . . D. had forgotten exactly what. It was a misfortune that they were both travelling on the same boat and that they should have seen each other like that at the barrier between the classes, two confidential agents wanting the same thing.