The Ministry of Fear

  ‘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.

  4

  One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one has never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.

  This, of course, he knew now, was not his home. Guilford Street was his home. He had hoped that wherever Anna was there would be peace; coming up the stairs a second time he knew that there would never be peace again while they lived.

  To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he began to climb the stairs. A phrase of Johns’ came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn’t the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and Tatlers.

  The door was open as he had left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and been lost for ever. If one loved a woman one couldn’t hope that she would be tied to a murderer for the rest of her days.

  But she was there – not where he had left her, but in the bedroom where they had watched Hilfe sleeping. She lay on the bed face downwards with her fists clenched. He said ‘Anna.’

  She turned her head on the pillow; she had been crying, and her face looked as despairing as a child’s. He felt an enormous love for her, enormous tenderness, the need to protect her at any cost. She had wanted him innocent and happy . . . she had loved Digby . . . He had got to give her what she wanted . . . He said gently, ‘Your brother’s dead. He shot himself,’ but her face didn’t alter. It was as if none of that meant anything at all – all that violence and gracelessness and youth had gone without her thinking it worth attention. She asked with terrible anxiety, ‘What did he say to you?’

  Rowe said, ‘He was dead before I could reach him. Directly he saw me he knew it was all up.’

  The anxie
ty left her face: all that remained was that tense air he had observed before – the air of someone perpetually on guard to shield him . . . He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘my dear. How much I love you.’ He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Me too.’

  They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.

  He tried tentatively a phrase, ‘My dear, my dear, I am so happy,’ and heard with infinite tenderness her prompt and guarded reply, ‘I am too.’ It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness . . .

  THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE

  The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishinggroup, Random House.

  Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburgand The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.