The Ministry of Fear

  ‘Loss of memory,’ Digby said.

  ‘Been out there?’ the major asked, jerking his head in the direction of the island.

  ‘No, it was a bomb. In London.’

  ‘A bad war, this,’ the major said. ‘Civilians with shell-shock.’ It was uncertain whether he disapproved of the civilians or the shell-shock. His stiff fair hair was grizzled over the ears, and his very blue eyes peered out from under a yellow thatch. The whites were beautifully clear; he was a man who had always kept himself fit and ready to be of use. Now that he wasn’t fit and wasn’t of use, an awful confusion ruled the poor brain. He said, ‘There was treachery somewhere or it would never have happened,’ and turning his back abruptly on the island and the muddy remnants of his causeway, he scrambled up the bank and walked briskly towards the house.

  Digby strolled on. At the tennis-court a furious game was in progress – a really furious game. The two men leapt and sweated and scowled; their immense concentration was the only thing that looked abnormal about Still and Fishguard, but when the set was over, they would grow shrill and quarrelsome and a little hysterical. The same climax would be reached at chess . . .

  The rose-garden was sheltered by two walls: one the wall of the vegetable-garden, the other the high wall that cut communication – except for one small door – with what Dr Forester and Johns called euphemistically ‘the sick bay’. Nobody cared to talk about the sick bay – grim things were assumed, a padded room, strait-jackets. You could see only the top windows from the garden, and they were barred. Not one man in the sanatorium was ignorant of how close he lived to that quiet wing. Hysteria over a game, a sense of treachery, in the case of Davis tears that came too easily – they knew those things meant sickness just as much as violence did. They had signed away their freedom to Dr Forester in the hope of escaping worse, but if worse happened the building was there on the spot – ‘the sick bay’ – there would be no need to travel to a strange asylum. Only Digby felt quite free from its shadow; the sick bay was not there for a happy man. Behind him the voices rose shrilly from the tennis-court: Fishguard’s ‘I tell you it was inside’. ‘Out.’ ‘Are you accusing me of cheating?’ ‘You ought to have your eyes seen to’ – that was Still. The voices sounded so irreconcilable that you would have said such a quarrel could have no other end than blows – but no blow was ever struck. Fear of the sick bay perhaps. The voices went suddenly off the air like an unpopular turn. When the dusk fell Still and Fishguard would be in the lounge playing chess together.

  How far was the sick bay, Digby sometimes wondered, a fantasy of disordered minds? It was there, of course, the brick wing and the barred windows and the high wall; there was even a segregated staff whom other patients had certainly met at the monthly social evening which he had not yet attended. (The doctor believed that these occasions on which strangers were present – the local clergyman, a sprinkling of elderly ladies, a retired architect – helped the shell-shocked brains to adapt themselves to society and the conventions of good behaviour.) But was anybody certain that the sick bay was occupied? Sometimes it occurred to Digby that the wing had no more reality than the conception of Hell presented by sympathetic theologians – a place without inhabitants which existed simply as a warning.

  Suddenly Major Stone appeared again, walking rapidly. He saw Digby and veered towards him down one of the paths. Little beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He said to Digby, ‘You haven’t seen me, do you hear? You haven’t seen me,’ and brushed by. He seemed to be making for the paddock and the pond. In another moment he was out of sight among the shrubberies, and Digby walked on. It seemed to him that the time had come for him to leave. He wasn’t in place here: he was normal. A faint uneasiness touched him when he remembered that Major Stone, too, had considered himself cured.

  As he came in front of the house Johns emerged. He looked ruffled and anxious. He said, ‘Have you seen Major Stone?’ Digby hesitated for a second only. Then he said, ‘No.’

  Johns said, ‘The doctor wants him. He’s had a relapse.’

  The cameraderie of a fellow-patient weakened. Digby said, ‘I did see him earlier . . .’

  ‘The doctor’s very anxious. He may do himself an injury – or someone else.’ The rimless glasses seemed to be heliographing a warning – do you wish to be responsible?

  Digby said uneasily, ‘You might have a look round the pond.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Johns said, and called out, ‘Poole. Poole.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ a voice said.

  A sense of apprehension moved like a heavy curtain in Digby’s mind; it was as though someone had whispered faintly to him so that he couldn’t be sure of the words, ‘Take care.’ A man stood at the gate from the sick bay wearing the same kind of white coat that Johns wore on duty, but not so clean. He was a dwarfish man with huge twisted shoulders and an arrogant face. ‘The pond,’ Johns said.

  The man blinked and made no movement, staring at Digby with impertinent curiosity. He had obviously come from the sick bay; he didn’t belong in the garden. His coat and fingers were stained with what looked like iodine.

  ‘We’ve got to hurry,’ Johns said. ‘The doctor’s anxious . . .’

  ‘Haven’t I met you,’ Poole said, ‘somewhere before?’ He watched Digby with a kind of enjoyment. ‘Oh yes I’m sure I have.’

  ‘No,’ Digby said. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, we know each other now,’ Poole said. He grinned at Digby and said with relish, ‘I’m the keeper,’ swinging a long simian arm towards the sick bay.

  Digby said loudly, ‘I don’t know you from Adam. I don’t want to know you,’ and had time to see Johns’ look of amazement before he turned his back and listened to their footsteps hurrying towards the pond.

  It was true: he didn’t know the man, but the whole obscurity of his past had seemed to shake – something at any moment might emerge from behind the curtain. He had been frightened and so he had been vehement, but he felt sure that a black mark would be made on his chart of progress and he was apprehensive . . . Why should he fear to remember anything? He whispered to himself, ‘After all, I’m not a criminal.’

  6

  At the front door a servant met him. ‘Mr Digby,’ she told him, ‘there’s a visitor for you,’ and his heart beat with hope.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the lounge.’

  She was there looking at a Tatler, and he had no idea what to say to her. She stood there as he seemed to remember her from very far back, small, tense, on guard, and yet she was part of a whole world of experience of which he was innocent.

  ‘It’s good of you,’ he began and stopped. He was afraid if he once began making the small talk of a stranger, they would be condemned for life to that shadowy relationship. The weather would lie heavily on their tongues, and they would meet occasionally and talk about the theatre. When they passed in the street he would raise his hat, and something which was only just alive would be safely and hopelessly dead.

  He said slowly, ‘I have been longing for this ever since you came. The days have been very long with nothing to do in them but think and wonder. This is such a strange life . . .’

  ‘Strange and horrible,’ she said.

  ‘Not so horrible,’ he said, but then he remembered Poole. He said, ‘How did we talk before my memory went? We didn’t stand stiffly, did we, like this – you holding a paper and I – we were good friends, weren’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He said, ‘We’ve got to get back. This isn’t right. Sit down here and we’ll both shut our eyes. Pretend it’s the old days before the bomb went off. What were you saying to me then?’ She sat in miserable silence and he said with astonishment, ‘You shouldn’t cry.’

  ‘You said shut your eyes.’

  ‘They are shut now.’

  The bright artificial lounge where he felt a stranger, the glossy magazines and the glass ash-trays were no longer visible: there was just darkness. He put out his hand and touched her. He said, ‘Is thi
s strange?’

  After a long time a dried-up voice said, ‘No.’

  He said, ‘Of course I loved you, didn’t I?’ When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘I must have loved you. Because directly you came in the other day – there was such a sense of relief, of peace, as if I’d been expecting someone different. How could I have helped loving you?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem likely,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’d only known each other a few days.’

  ‘Too short, of course, for you to care about me.’

  Again there was a long silence. Then she said, ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Why? I’m so much older. I’m not much to look at. What sort of a person was I?’

  She replied at once as though this were easy: this was part of the lesson she had really learnt: she had turned this over in her mind again and again. ‘You had a great sense of pity. You didn’t like people to suffer.’

  ‘Is that unusual?’ he asked, genuinely seeking information; he knew nothing of how people lived and thought outside.

  ‘It was unusual,’ she said, ‘where I came from. My brother. . . .’ She caught her breath sharply.

  ‘Of course,’ he said quickly, snatching at a memory before it went again, ‘you had a brother, hadn’t you? He was a friend of mine too.’

  ‘Let’s stop playing this game,’ she said. ‘Please.’ They opened their eyes simultaneously on the suave room.

  He said, ‘I want to leave here.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘stay. Please.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are safe here.’

  He smiled. ‘From more bombs?’

  ‘From a lot of things. You are happy here, aren’t you?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘There’ – she seemed to indicate the whole external world beyond the garden wall – ‘you weren’t happy.’ She added slowly, ‘I would do anything to keep you happy. This is how you should be. This is how I like you.’

  ‘You didn’t like me out there?’ He tried to catch her humorously in a contradiction, but she wouldn’t play. She said, ‘You can’t go on seeing someone unhappy all day every day without breaking.’

  ‘I wish I could remember.’

  ‘Why bother to remember?’

  He said simply – it was one of the few things of which he was certain, ‘Oh, of course, one’s got to remember . . .’

  She watched him with intensity, as though she were making up her mind to some course of action. He went on, ‘If only to remember you, how I talked to you . . .’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t,’ and added harshly like a declaration of war, ‘Dear heart.’

  He said triumphantly, ‘That was how we talked.’

  She nodded, keeping her eyes on him, He said, ‘My dear . . .’

  Her voice was dry like an old portrait: the social varnish was cracking. She said, ‘You once said you’d do impossible things for me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do a possible one. Just be quiet. Stay here a few more weeks till your memory comes back . . .’

  ‘If you’ll come often . . .’

  ‘I’ll come.’

  He put his mouth against hers: the action had all the uncertainty of an adolescent kiss. ‘My dear, my dear,’ he said. ‘Why did you say we were only friends . . . ?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to bind you.’

  ‘You’ve bound me now.’

  She said slowly, as though she were astonished, ‘And I’m glad.’

  All the way upstairs to his room, he could smell her. He could have gone into any chemist’s shop and picked out her powder, and he could have told in the dark the texture of her skin. The experience was as new to him as adolescent love: he had the blind passionate innocence of a boy: like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness.

  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 lo
ved, 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.’