The Ministry of Fear (17 page)

It was by the pond that Digby found Major Stone. He heard him first: a succession of angry grunts like a dog dreaming. Digby scrambled down a bank to the black edge of the water and Major Stone turned his very clear blue military eyes on him and said, ‘The job's got to be done.' There was mud all over his tweed suit and mud on his hands; he had been throwing large stones into the water and now he was dragging a plank he must have found in the potting-shed along the edge of the water.

‘It's sheer treachery,' Major Stone said, ‘to leave a place like that unoccupied. You could command the whole house. . . .' He slid the plank forward so that one end rested on a large stone. ‘Steady does it,' he said. He advanced the plank inch by inch towards the next stone. ‘Here,' he said, ‘you ease it along. I'll take the other end.'

‘Surely you aren't going in?'

‘No depth at this side,' Major Stone said, and walked straight into the pond. The black mud closed over his shoes and the turn-ups of his trousers. ‘Now,' he said, ‘push. Steady does it.' Digby pushed, but pushed too hard: the plank toppled sideways into the mud. ‘Damnation,' said Major Stone. He bent and heaved and brought the plank up: scattering mud up to his waist, he lugged it ashore.

‘Apologize,' he said. ‘My temper's damned short. You aren't a trained man. Good of you to help.'

‘I'm afraid I wasn't much good.'

‘Just give me half a dozen sappers,' Major Stone said, ‘and you'd see . . .' He stared wistfully across at the little bushy island. ‘But it's no good asking for the impossible. We've just got to make do. We'd manage all right if it wasn't for all this treachery.' He looked Digby in the eyes as though he were sizing him up. ‘I've seen you about here a lot,' he said. ‘Never spoke to you before. Liked the look of you, if you don't mind my saying so. I suppose you've been sick like the rest of us. Thank God, I'll be leaving here soon. Able to be of use again. What's been your trouble?'

‘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 this 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.