The Ministry of Fear (11 page)

‘No.'

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

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

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

‘Then how can I live . . . ?'

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

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

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

‘I'll keep away.'

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

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

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

But what excuse could he give Henry? He was aware of the bulge in his breast pocket where his statement lay, but he couldn't tell Henry the truth: no more than the police would Henry believe that he had been present at a murder as an onlooker. He must wait till after the banks closed – that was early enough in wartime, and then invent some urgent reason.

What? He thought about it all through lunch in an Oxford Street Lyons, and got no clue. Perhaps it was better to leave it to what people called the inspiration of the moment, or, better still, give it up, give himself up. It only occurred to him as he was paying his bill that probably he wouldn't be able to find Henry anyway. Henry had lived in Battersea, and Battersea was not a good district to live in now. He might not even be alive – twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I'm sorry, Henry.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This is Arthur Rowe, mother.'

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

‘How dare he . . . ?' Mrs Wilcox said.

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

‘To get you to cash me a cheque.'

‘The impudence,' Mrs Wilcox said.

‘I didn't know about this . . .'

‘How much, old man?'

‘Twenty?'

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

‘Don't trust him,' Mrs Wilcox said.

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

‘There are banks to go to.'

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

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

Henry dithered by the desk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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