The Ministry of Fear (13 page)

‘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 . . .'

‘Why did you come into the park? It's not your shortest way?'

‘I wanted a rest, sir – and the trees invited, and the birds.'

‘Here,' Rowe said, ‘you'd better let me take that. There's no bus this side of the river.'

‘Oh, I couldn't bother you, sir. I really couldn't.' But there was no genuine resistance in him; the suitcase was certainly very heavy: folios of landscape gardening weighed a lot. He excused himself, ‘There's nothing so heavy as books, sir – unless it's bricks.'

They came out of the park and Rowe changed the weight from one arm to the other. He said, ‘You know it's getting late for your appointment.'

‘It's my tongue that did it,' the old bookseller said with distress. ‘I think – I really think I shall have to risk the fare.'

‘I think you will.'

‘If I could give you a lift, sir, it would make it more worth while. Are you going in my direction?'

‘Oh, in any,' Rowe said.

They got a taxi at the next corner, and the bookseller leant back with an air of bashful relaxation. He said, ‘If you make up your mind to pay for a thing, enjoy it, that's my idea.'

But in the taxi with the windows shut it wasn't easy for another to enjoy it; the smell of dental decay was very strong. Rowe talked for fear of showing his distaste. ‘And have you gone in yourself for landscape gardening?'

‘Well, not what you would call the garden part.' The man kept peering through the window – it occurred to Rowe that his simple enjoyment rang a little false. He said, ‘I wonder, sir, if you'd do me one last favour. The stairs at Regal Court – well, they are a caution to a man of my age. And no one offers somebody like me a hand. I deal in books, but to them, sir, I'm just a tradesman. If you wouldn't mind taking up the bag for me. You needn't stay a moment. Just ask for Mr Travers in number six. He's expecting the bag – there's nothing you have to do but leave it with him.' He took a quick sideways look to catch a refusal on the wing. ‘And afterwards, sir, you've been very kind, I'd give you a lift anywhere you wanted to go.'

‘You don't know where I want to go,' Rowe said.

‘I'll risk that, sir. In for a penny, in for a pound.'

‘I might take you at your word and go a very long way.'

‘Try me. Just try me, sir,' the other said with forced glee.

‘I'd sell you a book and make it even.' Perhaps it was the man's servility – or it may have been only the man's smell – but Rowe felt unwilling to oblige him. ‘Why not get the commissionaire to take it up for you?' he asked.

‘I'd never trust him to deliver – straightaway.'

‘You could see it taken up yourself.'

‘It's the stairs, sir, at the end of a long day.' He lay back in his seat and said, ‘If you must know, sir, I oughtn't to have been carrying it,' and he made a movement towards his heart, a gesture for which there was no answer.

Well, Rowe thought, I may as well do one good deed before I go away altogether – but all the same he didn't like it. Certainly the man looked sick and tired enough to excuse any artifice, but he had been too successful. Why, Rowe thought, should I be sitting here in a taxi with a stranger promising to drag a case of eighteenth-century folios to the room of another stranger? He felt directed, controlled, moulded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination.

They drew up outside Regal Court – an odd pair, both dusty, both unshaven. Rowe had agreed to nothing, but he knew there was no choice; he hadn't the hard strength of mind to walk away and leave the little man to drag his own burden. He got out under the suspicious eyes of the commissionaire and lugged the heavy case after him. ‘Have you got a room booked,' the commissionaire asked and added dubiously, ‘sir?'

‘I'm not staying here. I'm leaving this case for Mr Travers.'

‘Ask at the desk, please,' the commissionaire said, and leapt to serve a more savoury carload.

The bookseller had been right; it was a hard pull up the long wide stairs of the hotel. You felt they had been built for women in evening-dress to walk slowly down; the architect had been too romantic – he hadn't seen a man with two days' beard dragging a load of books. Rowe counted fifty steps.

The clerk at the counter eyed him carefully. Before Rowe had time to speak he said, ‘We are quite full up, I'm afraid.'

‘I've brought some books for a Mr Travers in room six.'

‘Oh yes,' the clerk said. ‘He was expecting you. He's out, but he gave orders' – you could see that he didn't like the orders – ‘that you were to be allowed in.'

‘I don't want to wait. I just want to leave the books.'

‘Mr Travers gave orders that you were to wait.'

‘I don't care a damn what orders Mr Travers gave.'

‘Page,' the clerk called sharply, ‘show this man to number six. Mr Travers. Mr Travers has given orders that he's to be allowed in.' He had very few phrases and never varied them. Rowe wondered on how few he could get through life, marry and have children. He followed at the page's heels down interminable corridors lit by concealed lighting; once a woman in pink mules and a dressing gown squealed as they went by. It was like the corridor of a monstrous Cunarder – one expected to see stewards and stewardesses, but instead a small stout man wearing a bowler hat padded to meet them from what seemed a hundred yards away, then suddenly veered aside into the intricacies of the building. ‘Do you unreel a thread of cotton?' Rowe asked, swaying under the weight of the case which the page never offered to take, and feeling the strange light-headedness which comes, we are told, to dying men. But the back, the tight little blue trousers and the bum-freezer jacket, just went on ahead. It seemed to Rowe that one could be lost here for a lifetime: only the clerk at the desk would have a clue to one's whereabouts, and it was doubtful whether he ever penetrated very far in person into the enormous wilderness. Water would come regularly out of taps, and at dusk one could emerge and collect tinned foods. He was touched by a forgotten sense of adventure, watching the numbers go backwards, 49, 48, 47; once they took a short cut which led them through the 60's to emerge suddenly among the 30's.

A door in the passage was ajar and odd sounds came through it as though someone were alternately whistling and sighing, but nothing to the page seemed strange. He just went on: he was a child of this building. People of every kind came in for a night with or without luggage and then went away again; a few died here and the bodies were removed unobtrusively by the service lift. Divorce suits bloomed at certain seasons; co-respondents gave tips and detectives out-trumped them with larger tips – because their tips went on the expense account. The page took everything for granted.

Rowe said, ‘You'll lead me back?' At each corner arrows pointed above the legend
AIR RAID SHELTER
. Coming on them every few minutes one got the impression that one was walking in circles.

‘Mr Travers left orders you was to stay.'

‘But I don't take orders from Mr Travers,' Rowe said.

This was a modern building; the silence was admirable and disquieting. Instead of bells ringing, lights went off and on. One got the impression that all the time people were signalling news of great importance that couldn't wait. This silence – now that they were out of earshot of the whistle and the sigh – was like that of a stranded liner; the engines had stopped, and in the sinister silence you listened for the faint depressing sound of lapping water.

‘Here's six,' the boy said.

‘It must take a long time to get to a hundred.'

‘Third floor,' the boy said, ‘but Mr Travers gave orders . . .'

‘Never mind,' Rowe said. ‘Forget I said it.'

Without the chromium number you could hardly have told the difference between the door and the wall; it was as if the inhabitants had been walled up. The page put in a master-key and pushed the wall in. Rowe said, ‘I'll just put the case down . . .' But the door had shut behind him. Mr Travers, who seemed to be a much-respected man, had given his orders and if he didn't obey them he would have to find his way back alone. There was an exhilaration in the absurd episode; he had made up his mind now about everything – justice as well as the circumstances of the case demanded that he should kill himself (he had only to decide the method), and now he could enjoy the oddness of existence; regret, anger, hatred, too many emotions had obscured for too long the silly shape of life. He opened the sitting-room door.

‘Well,' he said, ‘this beats all.'

It was Anna Hilfe.

He asked, ‘Have you come to see Mr Travers too? Are you interested in landscape gardening?'

She said, ‘I came to see you.'

It was really his first opportunity to take her in. Very small and thin, she looked too young for all the things she must have seen, and now taken out of the office frame she no longer looked efficient – as though efficiency were an imitative game she could only play with adult properties, a desk, a telephone, a black suit. Without them she looked just decorative and breakable, but he knew that life hadn't been able to break her. All it had done was to put a few wrinkles round eyes as straightforward as a child's.

‘Do you like the mechanical parts of gardening too?' he asked. ‘Statues that spurt water . . .'

His heart beat at the sight of her, as though he were a young man and this his first assignation outside a cinema, in a Lyons Corner House . . . or in an inn yard in a country town where dances were held. She was wearing a pair of shabby blue trousers ready for the night's raid and a wine-coloured jersey. He thought with melancholy that her thighs were the prettiest he had ever seen.

‘I don't understand,' she said.

‘How did you know I was going to cart a load of books here for Mr Travers – whoever Mr Travers is? I didn't know myself until ten minutes ago.'

‘I don't know what excuse they thought up for you,' she said. ‘Just go. Please.'

She looked the kind of child you want to torment – in a kindly way; in the office she had been ten years older. He said, ‘They do people well here, don't they. You get a whole flat for a night. You can sit down and read a book and cook a dinner.'

A pale brown curtain divided the living-room in half; he drew it aside and there was the double bed, a telephone on a little table, a bookcase. He asked, ‘What's through here?' and opened a door. ‘You see,' he said, ‘they throw in a kitchen, stove and all.' He came back into the sitting-room and said, ‘One could live here and forget it wasn't one's home.' He no longer felt care-free; it had been a mood which had lasted minutes only.

She said, ‘Have you noticed anything?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘You don't notice much for a journalist.'

‘You know I was a journalist?'

‘My brother checked up on everything.'

‘On everything?'

‘Yes.' She said again, ‘You didn't notice anything?'

‘No.'

‘Mr Travers doesn't seem to have left behind him so much as a used piece of soap. Look in the bathroom. The soap's wrapped up in its paper.'

Rowe went to the front door and bolted it. He said, ‘Whoever he is, he can't get in now till we've finished talking. Miss Hilfe, will you please tell me slowly – I'm a bit stupid, I think – first how you knew I was here and secondly why you came?'

She said obstinately, ‘I won't tell you how. As to why – I've asked you to go away quickly. I was right last time, wasn't I, when I telephoned . . .'

‘Yes, you were right. But why worry? You said you knew all about me, didn't you?'

‘There's no harm in you,' she said simply.

‘Knowing everything,' he said, ‘you wouldn't worry . . .'