The Ministry of Fear (29 page)

Hilfe said, ‘I'm still ready to swop.'

‘You haven't anything to swop.'

‘You haven't much, you know, either,' Hilfe said. ‘You don't know where the photos are . . .

‘I wonder when the sirens will go,' the old lady said. Hilfe moved his wrists in the wool. He said, ‘If you give back the gun, I'll let you have the photographs . . .'

‘If you can give me the photographs, they must be with you. There's no reason why I should bargain.'

‘Well,' Hilfe said, ‘if it's your idea of revenge, I can't stop you. I thought perhaps you wouldn't want Anna dragged in. She let me escape, you remember . . .'

‘There,' the old lady said, ‘we've nearly done now.'

Hilfe said, ‘They probably wouldn't hang her. Of course that would depend on what I say. Perhaps it would be just an internment camp till the war's over – and then deportation if you win. From my point of view,' he explained dryly, ‘she's a traitor, you know.'

Rowe said, ‘Give me the photographs and then we'll talk.' The word ‘talk' was like a capitulation. Already he was beginning painfully to think out the long chain of deceit he would have to practise on Mr Prentice if he were to save Anna.

The train rocked with an explosion; the old lady said, ‘At last we are going to start,' and leaning forward she released Hilfe's hands. Hilfe said with a curious wistfulness, ‘What fun they are having up there.' He was like a mortally sick man saying farewell to the sports of his contemporaries: no fear, only regret. He had failed to bring off the record himself in destruction. Five people only were dead: it hadn't been much of an innings compared with what they were having up there. Sitting under the darkened globe, he was a long way away; wherever men killed his spirit moved in obscure companionship.

‘Give them to me,' Rowe said.

He was surprised by a sudden joviality. It was as if Hilfe after all Lad not lost all hope – of what? escape? further destruction? He laid his left hand on Rowe's knee with a gesture of intimacy. He said, ‘I'll be better than my word. How would you like to have your memory back?'

‘I only want the photographs.'

‘Not here,' Hilfe said. ‘I can't very well strip in front of a lady, can I?' He stood up. ‘We'd better leave the train.'

‘Are you going?' the old lady asked.

‘We've decided, my friend and I,' Hilfe said, ‘to spend the night in town and see the fun.'

‘Fancy,' the old lady vaguely said, ‘the porters always tell you wrong.'

‘You've been very kind,' Hilfe said, bowing. ‘Your kindness disarmed me.'

‘Oh, I can manage nicely now, thank you.'

It was as if Hilfe had taken charge of his own defeat. He moved purposefully up the platform and Rowe followed like a valet. The rush was over; he had no chance to escape; through the glassless roof they could see the little trivial scarlet stars of the barrage flashing and going out like matches. A whistle blew and the train began to move very slowly out of the dark station; it seemed to move surreptitiously; there was nobody but themselves and a few porters to see it go. The refreshment-rooms were closed, and a drunk soldier sat alone on a waste of platform vomiting between his knees.

Hilfe led the way down the steps to the lavatories; there was nobody there at all – even the attendant had taken shelter. The guns cracked: they were alone with the smell of disinfectant, the greyish basins, the little notices about venereal disease. The adventure he had pictured once in such heroic terms had reached its conclusion in the Gentlemen's. Hilfe looked in an L.C.C. mirror and smoothed his hair.

‘What are you doing?' Rowe asked. ‘Oh, saying good-bye,' Hilfe said. He took off his jacket as though he were going to wash, then threw it over to Rowe. Rowe saw the tailor's tag marked in silk, Pauling and Crosthwaite. ‘You'll find the photographs,' Hilfe said, ‘in the shoulder.'

The shoulder was padded.

‘Want a knife?' Hilfe said. ‘You can have your own,' and he held out a boy's compendium.

Rowe slit the shoulder up and took out from the padding a roll of film; he broke the paper which bound it and exposed a corner of negative. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘This is it.'

‘And now the gun?'

Rowe said slowly, ‘I promised nothing.'

Hilfe said with sharp anxiety, ‘But you'll let me have the gun?'

‘No.'

Hilfe suddenly was scared and amazed. He exclaimed in his odd dated vocabulary, ‘It's a caddish trick.'

‘You've cheated too often,' Rowe said.

‘Be sensible,' Hilfe said. ‘You think I want to escape. But the train's gone. Do you think I could get away by killing you in Paddington station? I wouldn't get a hundred yards.'

‘Why do you want it then?' Rowe asked.

‘I want to get further away than that.' He said in a low voice, ‘I don't want to be beaten up.' He leant earnestly forward and the L.C.C. mirror behind him showed a tuft of fine hair he hadn't smoothed.

‘We don't beat up our prisoners here.'

‘Oh no?' Hilfe said. ‘Do you really believe that? Do you think you are so different from us?'

‘Yes.'

‘I wouldn't trust the difference,' Hilfe said. ‘I know what we do to spies. They'll think they can make me talk – they will make me talk.' He brought up desperately the old childish phrase, ‘I'll swop.' It was difficult to believe that he was guilty of so many deaths. He went urgently on, ‘Rowe, I'll give you your memory back. There's no one else will.'

‘Anna,' Rowe said.

‘She'll never tell you. Why, Rowe, she let me go to stop me. . . . Because I said I'd tell you. She wants to keep you as you are.'

‘Is it as bad as that?' Rowe asked. He felt fear and an unbearable curiosity. Digby whispered in his ear that now he could be a whole man again: Anna's voice warned him. He knew that this was the great moment of a lifetime; he was being offered so many forgotten years, the fruit of twenty years' experience. His breast had to press the ribs apart to make room for so much more; he stared ahead of him and read – ‘Private Treatment Between the Hours of . . .' On the far edge of consciousness the barrage thundered.

Hilfe grimaced at him. ‘Bad?' he said. ‘Why – it's tremendously important.'

Rowe shook his head sadly: ‘You can't have the gun.'

Suddenly Hilfe began to laugh: the laughter was edged with hysteria and hate. ‘I was giving you a chance,' he said. ‘If you'd given me the gun, I might have been sorry for you. I'd have been grateful. I might have just shot myself. But now' – his head bobbed up and down in front of the cheap mirror – ‘now I'll tell you gratis.'

Rowe said, ‘I don't want to hear,' and turned away. A very small man in an ancient brown Homburg came rocking down the steps from above and made for the urinal. His hat came down over his ears: it might have been put on with a spirit-level. ‘Bad night,' he said, ‘bad night.' He was pale and wore an expression of startled displeasure. As Rowe reached the steps a bomb came heavily down, pushing the air ahead of it like an engine. The little man hastily did up his flies; he crouched as though he wanted to get farther away. Hilfe sat on the edge of the wash-basin and listened with a sour nostalgic smile, as though he were hearing the voice of a friend going away for ever down the road. Rowe stood on the bottom step and waited and the express roared down on them and the little man stooped lower and lower in front of the urinal. The sound began to diminish, and then the ground shifted very slightly under their feet at the explosion. There was silence again except for the tiny shifting of dust down the steps. Almost immediately a second bomb was under way. They waited in fixed photographic attitudes, sitting, squatting, standing: this bomb could not burst closer without destroying them. Then it too passed, diminished, burst a little farther away.

‘I wish they'd stop,' the man in the Homburg said, and all the urinals began to flush. The dust hung above the steps like smoke, and a hot metallic smell drowned the smell of ammonia. Rowe climbed the steps.

‘Where are you going?' Hilfe said. He cried out sharply, ‘The police?' and when Rowe did not reply, he came away from the wash-basin. ‘You can't go yet – not without hearing about your wife.'

‘My wife?' He came back down the steps; he couldn't escape now: the lost years waited for him among the washbasins. He asked hopelessly, ‘Am I married?'

‘You
were
married,' Hilfe said. ‘Don't you remember now? You poisoned her.' He began to laugh again. ‘Your Alice.'

‘An awful night,' the man in the Homburg said; he had ears for nothing but the heavy uneven stroke of the bomber overhead.

‘You were tried for murder,' Hilfe said, ‘and they sent you to an asylum. You'll find it in all the papers. I can give you the dates . . .'

The little man turned suddenly to them and spreading out his hands in a gesture of entreaty he said in a voice filled with tears, ‘Shall I ever get to Wimbledon?' A bright white light shone through the dust outside, and through the glassless roof of the station the glow of the flares came dripping beautifully down.

It wasn't Rowe's first raid: he heard Mrs Purvis coming down the stairs with her bedding: the Bay of Naples was on the wall and
The Old Curiosity Shop
upon the shelf. Guilford Street held out its dingy arms to welcome him, and he was home again. He thought: what will that bomb destroy? Perhaps with a little luck the flower shop will be gone near Marble Arch, the sherry bar in Adelaide Crescent, or the corner of Quebec Street, where I used to wait so many hours, so many years . . . there was such a lot which had to be destroyed before peace came.

‘Go along,' a voice said, ‘to Anna now,' and he looked across a dimmed blue interior to a man who stood by the wash-basins and laughed at him.

‘She hoped you'd never remember.' He thought of a dead rat and a policeman, and then he looked everywhere and saw reflected in the crowded court the awful expression of pity: the judge's face was bent, but he could read pity in the old fingers which fidgeted with an Eversharp. He wanted to warn them – don't pity me. Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn't safe when pity's prowling round.

‘Anna . . .' the voice began again, and another voice said with a kind of distant infinite regret at the edge of consciousness, ‘And I might have caught the 6.15.' The horrible process of connection went on; his Church had once taught him the value of penance, but penance was a value only to oneself. There was no sacrifice, it seemed to him, that would help him to atone to the dead. The dead were out of reach of the guilty. He wasn't interested in saving his own soul.

‘What are you going to do?' a voice said. His brain rocked with its long journey; it was as if he were advancing down an interminable passage towards a man called Digby – who was so like him and yet had such different memories. He could hear Digby's voice saying, ‘Shut your eyes . . .' There were rooms full of flowers, the sound of water falling, and Anna sat beside him, strung up, on guard, in defence of his ignorance. He was saying, ‘Of course you have a brother .. . I remember . . .'

Another voice said, ‘It's getting quieter. Don't you think it is?'

‘What are you going to do?'

It was like one of those trick pictures in a children's magazine: you stare at it hard and you see one thing – a vase of flowers – and then your focus suddenly changes and you see only the outlined faces of people. In and out the two pictures flicker. Suddenly, quite clearly, he saw Hilfe as he had seen him lying asleep – the graceful shell of a man, all violence quieted. He
was
Anna's brother. Rowe crossed the floor to the wash-basins and said in a low voice that the man in the Homburg couldn't hear, ‘All right. You can have it. Take it.'

He slipped the gun quickly into Hilfe's hand.

‘I think,' the voice behind him said, ‘I'll make a dash for it. I really think I will. What do you think, sir?'

‘Be off,' Hilfe said sharply, ‘be off.'

‘You think so too. Yes. Perhaps.' There was a scuttling on the steps and silence again.

‘Of course,' Hilfe said, ‘I could kill you now. But why should I? It would be doing you a service. And it would leave me to your thugs. How I hate you though.'

‘Yes?' He wasn't thinking of Hilfe; his thoughts swung to and fro between two people he loved and pitied. It seemed to him that he had destroyed both of them.

‘Everything was going so well,' Hilfe said, ‘until you came blundering in. What made you go and have your fortune told? You had no future.'

‘No.' He remembered the fête clearly now; he remembered walking round the railings and hearing the music: he had been dreaming of innocence . . . Mrs Bellairs sat in a booth behind a curtain . . .

‘And just to have hit on that one phrase,' Hilfe said. ‘“Don't tell me the past. Tell me the future.”'

And there was Sinclair too: He remembered with a sense of responsibility the old car standing on the wet gravel. He had better go away and telephone to Prentice. Sinclair probably had a copy . . .

‘And then on top of everything Anna. Why the hell should any woman love you?' He cried out sharply, ‘Where are you going?'

‘Can't you give me just five minutes?'

‘Oh no,' Rowe said. ‘No. It's not possible.' The process was completed; he was what Digby had wanted to be – a whole man. His brain held now everything it had ever held. Willi Hilfe gave an odd little sound like a retch. He began to walk rapidly towards the lavatory cubicles, with his bandaged hand stuck out. The stone floor was wet and he slipped but recovered. He began to pull at a lavatory door, but of course it was locked. He didn't seem to know what to do: it was as if he needed to get behind a door, out of sight, into some burrow . . . He turned and said imploringly, ‘Give me a penny,' and everywhere the sirens began to wail the All Clear; the sound came from everywhere: it was as if the floor of the urinal whined under his feet. The smell of ammonia came to him like something remembered from a dream. Hilfe's strained white face begged for his pity. Pity again. He held out a penny to him and then tossed it and walked up the steps; before he reached the top he heard the shot. He didn't go back: he left him for others to find.