The Ministry of Fear (18 page)

7

Next morning there was no paper on his tray. He asked the woman who brought his breakfast where it was, but all she could tell him was that she supposed it hadn't been delivered. He was touched again by the faint fear he had felt the previous afternoon when Poole came out of the sick bay, and he waited impatiently for Johns to arrive for his morning chat and smoke. But Johns didn't come. He lay in bed and brooded for half an hour and then rang his bell. It was time for his clothes to be laid out, but when the maid came she said she had no orders.

‘But you don't need orders,' he said. ‘You do it every day.'

‘I has to have my orders,' she said.

‘Tell Mr Johns I'd like to see him.'

‘Yes, sir' – but Johns didn't come. It was as if a
cordon sanitaire
had been drawn around his room.

For another half an hour he waited doing nothing. Then he got out of bed and went to the bookcase, but there was little that promised him distraction – only the iron rations of learned old men. Tolstoy's
What I Believe
, Freud's
The Psycho-Analysis of Everyday Life
, a biography of Rudolph Steiner. He took the Tolstoy back with him, and opening it found faint indentations in the margin where pencil marks had been rubbed out. It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable and he read:

‘Remembering all the evil I have done, suffered and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one's country . . .'

There was a kind of nobility in the blind shattering dogma, just as there was something ignoble in the attempt to rub out the pencil-mark. This was an opinion to be held openly if at all. He looked farther up the page: ‘Christ showed me that the fifth snare depriving me of welfare is the separation we make of our own from other nations. I cannot but believe this, and therefore if in a moment of forgetfulness feelings of enmity towards a man of another nation may rise within me . . .'

But that wasn't the point, he thought; he felt no enmity towards any individual across the frontier: if he wanted to take part again, it was love which drove him and not hate. He thought: Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town . . . his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain . . . where he used to dance at the Saturday hops. His thoughts fell back on one face with a sense of relief: he could rest there. Ah, he thought, Tolstoy should have lived in a small country – not in Russia, which was a continent rather than a country. And why does he write as if the worst thing we can do to our fellow-man is to kill him? Everybody has to die and everybody fears death, but when we kill a man we save him from his fear which would otherwise grow year by year. . . . One doesn't necessarily kill because one hates: one may kill because one loves . . . and again the old dizziness came back as though he had been struck over the heart.

He lay back on his pillow, and the brave old man with the long beard seemed to buzz at him: ‘I cannot acknowledge any States or nations . . . I cannot take part . . . I cannot take part.' A kind of waking dream came to him of a man – perhaps a friend, he couldn't see his face – who hadn't been able to take part; some private grief had isolated him and hidden him like a beard – what was it? he couldn't remember. The war and all that happened round him had seemed to belong to other people. The old man in the beard, he felt convinced, was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone?

But that reasoning, it could be argued, excused your enemy. And why not? he thought. It excused anyone who loved enough to kill or be killed. Why shouldn't you excuse your enemy? That didn't mean you must stand in lonely superiority, refuse to kill, and turn the intolerable cheek. ‘If a man offend
thee
 . . .' there was the point – not to kill for one's own sake. But for the sake of people you loved, and in the company of people you loved, it was right to risk damnation.

His mind returned to Anna Hilfe. When he thought of her it was with an absurd breathlessness. It was as if he were waiting again years ago outside – wasn't it the King's Arms? – and the girl he loved was coming down the street, and the night was full of pain and beauty and despair because one knew one was too young for anything to come of this . . .

He couldn't be bothered with Tolstoy any longer. It was unbearable to be treated as an invalid. What woman outside a Victorian novel could care for an invalid? It was all very well for Tolstoy to preach non-resistance: he had had his heroic violent hour at Sebastopol. Digby got out of bed and saw in the long narrow mirror his thin body and his grey hair and his beard . . .

The door opened: it was Dr Forester. Behind him, eyes lowered, subdued like someone found out, came Johns. Dr Forester shook his head and, ‘It won't do, Digby,' he said, ‘it won't do. I'm disappointed.'

Digby was still watching the sad grotesque figure in the mirror. He said, ‘I want my clothes. And a razor.'

‘Why a razor?'

‘To shave. I'm certain this beard doesn't belong . . .'

‘That only shows your memory isn't returning yet.'

‘And I had no paper this morning,' he went weakly on.

Dr Forester said, ‘I gave orders that the paper was to be stopped. Johns has been acting unwisely. These long conversations about the war . . . You've excited yourself. Poole has told me how excited you were yesterday.'

Digby, with his eyes on his own ageing figure in the striped pyjamas, said, ‘I won't be treated like an invalid or a child.'

‘You seem to have got it into your head,' Dr Forester said, ‘that you have a talent for detection, that you were a detective perhaps in your previous life . . .'

‘That was a joke,' Digby said.

‘I can assure you you were something quite different. Quite different,' Dr Forester repeated.

‘What was I?'

‘It may be necessary one day to tell you,' Dr Forester said, as though he were uttering a threat. ‘If it will prevent foolish mistakes . . .' Johns stood behind the doctor looking at the floor.

‘I'm leaving here,' Digby said.

The calm noble old face of Dr Forester suddenly crumpled into lines of dislike. He said sharply, ‘And paying your bill, I hope?'

‘I hope so too.'

The features reformed, but they were less convincing now. ‘My dear Digby,' Dr Forester said, ‘you must be reasonable. You are a very sick man. A very sick man indeed. Twenty years of your life have been wiped out. That's not health . . . and yesterday and just now you showed an excitement which I've feared and hoped to avoid.' He put his hand gently on the pyjama sleeve and said, ‘I don't want to have to restrain you, to have you certified . . .'

Digby said, ‘But I'm as sane as you are. You must know that.'

‘Major Stone thought so too. But I've had to transfer him to the sick bay . . . He had an obsession which might at any time have led to violence.'

‘But I . . .'

‘Your symptoms are very much the same. This excitement. . . .' The doctor raised his hand from the sleeve to the shoulder: a warm, soft, moist hand. He said, ‘Don't worry. We won't let it come to that, but for a little we must be very quiet . . . plenty of food, plenty of sleep . . . some very gentle bromides . . . no visitors for a while, not even our friend Johns . . . no more of these exciting intellectual conversations.'

‘Miss Hilfe?' Digby said.

‘I made a mistake there,' Dr Forester said. ‘We are not strong enough yet. I have told Miss Hilfe not to come again.'

Chapter 2

THE SICK BAY

1

W
HEN
a man rubs out a pencil-mark he should be careful to see that the line is quite obliterated. For if a secret is to be kept, no precautions are too great. If Dr Forester had not so inefficiently rubbed out the pencil-marks in the margins of Tolstoy's
What I Believe
, Mr Rennit might never have learnt what had happened to Jones, Johns would have remained a hero-worshipper, and it is possible that Major Stone would have slowly wilted into further depths of insanity between the padded hygienic walls of his room in the sick bay. And Digby? Digby might have remained Digby.

For it was the rubbed-out pencil-marks which kept Digby awake and brooding at the end of a day of loneliness and boredom. You couldn't respect a man who dared not hold his opinions openly, and when respect for Dr Forester was gone, a great deal went with it. The noble old face became less convincing: even his qualifications became questionable. What right had he to forbid the newspapers – above all, what right had he to forbid the visits of Anna Hilfe?

Digby still felt like a schoolboy, but he now knew that his headmaster had secrets of which he was ashamed: he was no longer austere and self-sufficient. And so the schoolboy planned rebellion. At about half-past nine in the evening he heard the sound of a car, and watching between the curtains he saw the doctor drive away. Or rather Poole drove and the doctor sat beside him.

Until Digby saw Poole he had planned only a petty rebellion – a secret visit to Johns' room; he felt sure he could persuade that young man to talk. Now he became bolder; he would visit the sick bay itself and speak to Stone. The patients must combine against tyranny, and an old memory slipped back of a deputation he had once led to his real headmaster because his form against all precedent – for it was a classical form – had been expected by a new master to learn trigonometry. The strange thing about a memory like that was that it seemed young as well as old: so little had happened since that he could remember. He had lost all his mature experience.

A bubble of excited merriment impeded his breath as he opened the door of his room and took a quick look down the corridor. He was afraid of undefined punishments, and for that reason he felt his action was heroic and worthy of someone in love. There was an innocent sensuality in his thought; he was like a boy who boasts of a beating he has risked to a girl, sitting in the sunshine by the cricket-ground, drinking ginger-beer, hearing the pad-pad of wood and leather, under the spell, day-dreaming and in love . . .

There was a graduated curfew for patients according to their health, but by half-past nine all were supposed to be in bed and asleep. But you couldn't enforce sleep. Passing Davis's door he could hear the strange uncontrollable whine of a man weeping . . . Farther down the passage Johns' door was open and the light was on. Taking off his bedroom slippers, he passed quickly across the door-way, but Johns wasn't there. Incurably sociable he was probably chatting with the house-keeper. On his desk was a pile of newspapers; he had obviously picked them out for Digby before the doctor had laid his ban. It was a temptation to stay and read them, but the small temptation didn't suit the mood of high adventure. Tonight he would do something no patient had ever voluntarily done before – enter the sick bay. He moved carefully and silently – the words ‘Pathfinder' and ‘Indian' came to his mind – downstairs.

In the lounge the lights were off, but the curtains were undrawn and the moonlight welled in with the sound of the splashing fountain and the shadow of silver leaves. The
Tatlers
had been tidied on the tables, the ash-trays taken away, and the cushions shaken on the chairs – it looked now like a room in an exhibition where nobody crosses the ropes. The next door brought him into the passage by Dr Forester's study. As he quietly closed each door behind him he felt as though he were cutting off his own retreat. His ribs seemed to vibrate to the beat-beat of his heart. Ahead of him was the green baize door he had never seen opened, and beyond that door lay the sick bay. He was back in his own childhood, breaking out of dormitory, daring more than he really wanted to dare, proving himself. He hoped the door would be bolted on the other side; then there would be nothing he could do but creep back to bed, honour satisfied . . .

The door pulled easily open. It was only the cover for another door, to deaden sound and leave the doctor in his study undisturbed. But that door, too, had been left unlocked, unbolted. As he passed into the passage beyond, the green baize swung to behind him with a long sigh.

2

He stood stone still and listened. Somewhere a clock ticked with a cheap tinny sound, and a tap had been left dripping. This must once have been the servants' quarters: the floor was stone, and his bedroom slippers pushed up a little smoke of dust. Everything spoke of neglect; the woodwork when he reached the stairs had not been polished for a very long time and the thin drugget had been worn threadbare. It was an odd contrast to the spruce nursing home beyond the door; everything around him shrugged its shoulders and said, ‘We are not important. Nobody sees us here. Our only duty is to be quiet and not disturb the doctor.' And what could be quieter than dust? If it had not been for the clock ticking he would have doubted whether anyone really lived in this part of the house – the clock and the faintest tang of stale cigarette smoke, of Caporal, that set his heart beating again with apprehension.

Where the clock ticked Poole must live. Whenever he thought of Poole he was aware of something unhappy, something imprisoned at the bottom of the brain trying to climb out. It frightened him in the same way as birds frightened him when they beat up and down in closed rooms. There was only one way to escape – the fear of another creature's pain. That was to lash out until the bird was stunned and quiet or dead. For the moment he forgot Major Stone, and smelt his way towards Poole's room.