The Ministry of Fear (15 page)

‘I suppose you have worse cases than mine . . . violent cases.'

‘We've had a few. That's why the doctor arranged the sick bay for them. A separate wing and a separate staff. He doesn't want even the attendants in this wing to be mentally disturbed . . . You see it's essential that we should be calm too.'

‘You're certainly all very calm.'

‘When the time's ripe I expect the doctor will give you a course of psycho-analysis, but it's really much better, you know, that the memory should return of itself – gently and naturally. It's like a film in a hypo bath,' he went on, obviously drawing on another man's patter. ‘The development will come out in patches.'

‘Not if it's a good hypo bath, Johns,' Digby said. He lay back smiling lazily in the arm-chair, lean and bearded and middle-aged. The angry scar on his forehead looked out of place – like duelling cuts on a professor.

‘Hold on to that,' Johns said – it was one of his favourite expressions. ‘You went in for photography then?'

‘Do you think that perhaps I was a fashionable portrait photographer?' Digby asked. ‘It doesn't exactly ring a bell, though of course it goes – doesn't it? – with the beard. No, I was thinking of a darkroom on the nursery floor at home. It was a linen cupboard too, and if you forgot to lock the door, a maid would come in with clean pillow slips and bang went the negative. You see, I remember things quite clearly until say, eighteen.'

‘You can talk about that time,' Johns said, ‘as much as you like. You may get a clue and there's obviously no resistance – from the Freudian censor.'

‘I was just wondering in bed this morning which of the people I wanted to become I did in fact choose. I remember I was very fond of books on African exploration – Stanley, Baker, Livingstone, Burton, but there doesn't seem much opportunity for explorers nowadays.'

He brooded without impatience. It was as if his happiness were drawn from an infinite fund of tiredness. He didn't want to exert himself. He was comfortable exactly as he was. Perhaps that was why his memory was slow in returning. He said dutifully, because of course one had to make some effort, ‘One might look up the old Colonial Office lists. Perhaps I went in for that. It's odd, isn't it, that knowing my name, you shouldn't have found any acquaintance. You'd think there would have been inquiries. If I had been married, for instance. That does trouble me. Suppose my wife is trying to find me . . .' If only that could be cleared up, he thought, I should be perfectly happy.

‘As a matter of fact,' Johns said and stopped.

‘Don't tell me you've unearthed a wife?'

‘Not exactly, but I think the doctor has something to tell you.'

‘Well,' Digby said, ‘it
is
the hour of audience, isn't it?'

Each patient saw the doctor in his study for a quarter of an hour a day, except those who were being treated by psychoanalysis – they were given an hour of his time. It was like visiting a benign headmaster out of school hours to have a chat about personal problems. One passed through the commonroom where the patients could read the papers, play chess or draughts, or indulge in the rather unpredictable social intercourse of shell-shocked men. Digby as a rule avoided the place; it was disconcerting, in what might have been the lounge of an exclusive hotel, to see a man quietly weeping in a corner. He felt himself to be so completely normal – except for the gap of he didn't know how many years and an inexplicable happiness as if he had been relieved suddenly of some terrible responsibility – that he was ill at ease in the company of men who all exhibited some obvious sign of an ordeal, the twitch of an eyelid, a shrillness of voice, or a melancholy that fitted as completely and inescapably as the skin.

Johns led the way. He filled with perfect tact a part which combined assistant, secretary and male nurse. He was not qualified, though the doctor occasionally let him loose on the simpler psyches. He had an enormous fund of hero-worship for the doctor, and Digby gathered that some incident in the doctor's past – it might have been the suicide of a patient, but Johns was studiously vague – enabled him to pose before himself as the champion of the great misunderstood. He said, ‘The jealousies of medical people – you wouldn't believe it. The malice. The lies.' He would get quite pink on the subject of what he called the doctor's martyrdom. There had been an inquiry: the doctor's methods were far in advance of his time; there had been talk – so Digby gathered – of taking away the doctor's licence to practice. ‘They crucified him,' he said once with an illustrative gesture and knocked over the vase of daffodils. But eventually good had come out of evil (one felt the good included Johns); the doctor in disgust at the West End world had retired to the country, had opened his private clinic where he refused to accept any patient without a signed personal request – even the more violent cases had been sane enough to put themselves voluntarily under the doctor's care.

‘But what about me?' Digby had asked.

‘Ah, you are the doctor's special case,' Johns said mysteriously. ‘One day he'll tell you. You stumbled on salvation all right that night. And anyway you did sign.'

It never lost its strangeness – to remember nothing of how he had come here. He had simply woken to the restful room, the sound of the fountain, and a taste of drugs. It had been winter then. The trees were black, and sudden squalls of rain broke the peace. Once very far across the fields came a faint wail like a ship signalling departure. He would lie for hours, dreaming confusedly. It was as if then he might have remembered, but he hadn't got the strength to catch the hints, to fix the sudden pictures, he hadn't the vitality to connect . . . He would drink his medicines without complaint and go off into deep sleep which was only occasionally broken by strange nightmares in which a woman played a part.

It was a long time before they told him about the war, and that involved an enormous amount of historical explanation. What seemed odd to him, he found, was not what seemed odd to other people. For example, the fact that Paris was in German hands appeared to him quite natural – he remembered how nearly it had been so before in the period of his life that he could recall, but the fact that we were at war with Italy shook him like an inexplicable catastrophe of nature.

‘Italy,' he exclaimed. Why, Italy was where two of his maiden aunts went every year to paint. He remembered too the Primitives in the National Gallery and Caporetto and Garibaldi, who had given a name to a biscuit, and Thomas Cook's. Then Johns patiently explained about Mussolini.

2

The doctor sat behind a bowl of flowers at his very simple unstained desk and he waved Digby in as if this were a favourite pupil. His elderly face under the snow-white hair was hawk-like and noble and a little histrionic, like the portrait of a Victorian. Johns sidled out, he gave the impression of stepping backwards the few paces to the door, and he stumbled on the edge of the carpet.

‘Well, and how are you feeling?' the doctor said. ‘You look more yourself every day.'

‘Do I?' Digby asked. ‘But who knows really if I do? I don't, and you don't, Dr Forester. Perhaps I look less myself.'

‘That brings me to a piece of important news,' Dr Forester said. ‘I have found somebody who
will
know. Somebody who knew you in the old days.'

Digby's heart beat violently. He said, ‘Who?'

‘I'm not going to tell you that. I want you to discover everything for yourself.'

‘It's silly of me,' Digby said, ‘but I feel a bit faint.'

‘That's only natural,' Dr Forester said. ‘You aren't very strong yet.' He unlocked a cupboard and took out a glass and a bottle of sherry. ‘This'll put you to rights,' he said.

‘Tio Pepe,' Digby said, draining it.

‘You see,' the doctor said, ‘things are coming back. Have another glass?'

‘No, it's blasphemy to drink this as medicine.'

The news had been a shock. He wasn't sure that he was glad. He couldn't tell what responsibility might descend on him when his memory returned. Life is broken as a rule to every man gently; duties accumulate so slowly that we hardly know they are there. Even a happy marriage is a thing of slow growth; love helps to make imperceptible the imprisonment of a man, but in a moment, by order, would it be possible to love a stranger who entered bearing twenty years of emotional claims? Now, with no memories nearer than his boyhood, he was entirely free. It wasn't that he feared to face himself; he knew what he was and he believed he knew the kind of man the boy he remembered would have become. It wasn't failure he feared nearly so much as the enormous tasks that success might confront him with.

Dr Forester said, ‘I have waited till now, till I felt you were strong enough.'

‘Yes,' Digby said.

‘You won't disappoint us, I'm sure,' the doctor said. He was more than ever the headmaster, and Digby a pupil who had been entered for a university scholarship; he carried the prestige of the school as well as his own future with him to the examination. Johns would be waiting with anxiety for his return – the form-master. Of course, they would be very kind if he failed. They would even blame the examiners . . .

‘I'll leave the two of you alone,' the doctor said.

‘He's here now?'

‘
She
is here,' the doctor said.

3

It was an immense relief to see a stranger come in. He had been afraid that a whole generation of his life would walk through the door, but it was only a thin pretty girl with reddish hair, a small girl – perhaps too small to be remembered. She wasn't, he felt certain, anybody he needed to fear.

He rose; politeness seemed the wrong thing; he didn't know whether he ought to shake hands – or kiss her. He did neither. They looked at each other from a distance, and his heart beat heavily.

‘How you've changed,' she said.

‘They are always telling me,' he said, ‘that I'm looking quite myself.'

‘Your hair is much greyer. And that scar. And yet you look so much younger . . . happier.'

‘I lead a very pleasant easy life here.'

‘They've been good to you?' she asked with anxiety.

‘Very good.'

He felt as though he had taken a stranger out to dinner and now couldn't hit on the right conversational move. He said, ‘Excuse me. It sounds so abrupt. But I don't know your name.'

‘You don't remember me at all?'

‘No.'

He had occasionally had dreams about a woman, but it wasn't this woman. He couldn't remember any details of the dream except the woman's face, and that they had been filled with pain. He was glad that this was not the one. He looked at her again. ‘No,' he said. ‘I'm sorry. I wish I could.'

‘Don't be sorry,' she said with strange ferocity. ‘Never be sorry again.'

‘I just meant – this silly brain of mine.'

She said, ‘My name's Anna.' She watched him carefully, ‘Hilfe.'

‘That sounds foreign.'

‘I am Austrian.'

He said, ‘All this is so new to me. We are at war with Germany. Isn't Austria . . . ?'

‘I'm a refugee.'

‘Oh, yes,' he said. ‘I've read about them.'

‘You have even forgotten the war?' she asked.

‘I have a terrible lot to learn,' he said.

‘Yes, terrible. But need they teach it you?' She repeated, ‘You look so much happier . . .'

‘One wouldn't be happy, not knowing anything.' He hesitated and again said, ‘You must excuse me. There are so many questions. Were we simply friends?'

‘Just friends. Why?'

‘You are very pretty. I couldn't tell . . .'

‘You saved my life.'

‘How did I do that?'

‘When the bomb went off – just before it went off – you knocked me down and fell on me. I wasn't hurt.'

‘I'm very glad. I mean,' he laughed nervously, ‘there might be all sorts of discreditable things to learn. I'm glad there's one good one.'

‘It seems so strange,' she said. ‘All these terrible years since 1933 – you've just read about them, that's all. They are history to you. You're fresh. You aren't tired like all the rest of us everywhere.'

‘1933,' he said. ‘1933. Now 1066, I can give you that easily. And all the kings of England – at least – I'm not sure . . . perhaps not all.'

‘1933 was when Hitler came to power.'

‘Of course. I remember now. I've read it all over and over again, but the dates don't stick.'

‘And I suppose the hate doesn't either.'

‘I haven't any right to talk about these things,' he said. ‘I haven't lived them. They taught me at school that William Rufus was a wicked king with red hair – but you couldn't expect us to hate him. People like yourself have a right to hate. I haven't. You see I'm untouched.'

‘Your poor face,' she said.

‘Oh, the scar. That might have been anything – a motor-car accident. And after all they were not meaning to kill
me
.'

‘No?'

‘I'm not important.' He had been talking foolishly, at random. He had assumed something, and after all there was nothing he could safely assume. He said anxiously, ‘I'm not important, am I? I can't be, or it would have been in the papers.'

‘They let you see the papers?'

‘Oh yes, this isn't a prison, you know.' He repeated, ‘I'm not important?'