Читать книгу Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 5

Twenty-seven tiles from wall to wall, thirty-five from floor to roof. Nine hundred and forty-five white tiles upon the wall. He knew them all so well that even now, lying on the concrete floor, he could tell that his shoulder was against the row that ran from two hundred and sixteen to two hundred and fifty-one: indeed, the top of his head must come exactly to the tile of the day, the tile that marked Thursday, the twenty-first. Though he might be several days out in his reckoning: the first days and nights of terror had passed uncounted, uncountable because they outlasted all count of days, and he had worked them out later, by estimation.

But now, although he was aware of his position in relation to the wall, he was not interested in his calendar. He was quite motionless on the ground, still in the place where he had fallen when they pushed him in, and if he did not move his body would not hurt – it would not flame out with annihilating pain. As for the dull wretched sickness, he was used to that: it was a passive, indwelling pain, and he could live with it, and think in spite of it.

He lay there, too, from religious caution and respect. If he were to creep over to the wooden bench (although it was no more than four feet away) to lie there more comfortably and enjoy his victory, it might offend. The omen might change if he was to presume; so he lay there still.

Humble: he was humble. He truckled to fate, and although the darkness could not have been more profound he lay there on the concrete with the familiar taste of blood in his mouth, hiding his secret triumph under immobility.

But it grew in his mind like a fire, and in spite of himself a smile spread over his face, slowly changing the deep-cut lines of anxiety and suffering. Two hours earlier they had switched the light on in his cell: the glare had stabbed into his pale eyes and he had staggered to attention, blinking and staring. He had heard them coming, of course, and already, before they had ever touched the light, he had moved with the heavy blundering haste of a terrified half-wit – mouth open, hands dangling, uncouth slouch. Clang, clang, down the corridor praying that they would grow angry soon – it was so much easier in the turmoil of blows and shouting.

The knock on the door, the clash and the stamping. There was another man besides Reinecke and Bauer, a civilian with a briefcase, and they left Temple standing while they finished talking and handing papers. Reinecke was looking tired and dispirited, and suddenly very much older. Temple, from behind his moron’s face, watched him with a more eager intensity than a lover: for this Reinecke was God for him – Jehovah. He was the Almighty, and Temple had been in the hollow of his hand all these horribly counted days. He was Reinecke’s priest and sacrifice: he had learnt, oh so quickly, how to predict Reinecke’s shifting moods, how to propitiate his wrath and how to be as sparing of his sacrifice as possible: for Temple’s own body was the sacrifice.

But now Reinecke had a look that he had never seen before – could not interpret. Was it fright, apprehension, uneasiness? Was it age? Was it an aging night out? Could it be that the squalor of his position had occurred to him? Some idea of his utter corruption might have come to him suddenly, for Reinecke was not a fool, nor without some insight.

The scream that had been coming in from the other room with the regularity and inhumanity of a steam-engine was suddenly choked off, and at the same time the civilian gathered up his files and began to range them in his briefcase. They were talking in low, rapid German; low, not because of Temple, but because their own words were unwelcome to them. Temple could make nothing of it, partly because he did not know German well enough and partly because his knowledge and his hearing were to some degree obscured by the stupidity of his mask. He could not put on the outward appearance of a dolt without his mind taking on some of the disguise. From next door there was one more bubbling shriek, and a noise of feet.

Perhaps that might have been André, thought Temple: poor devil. Reinecke had mentioned his name. But Temple had little room for active pity at this time: André, if it was the real André and not a shot in the dark, would have to go his own road. He only hoped that André would by now have learnt to scream terribly, to scream long before the point of agony, to scream better than any actor upon a stage.

He had learnt that very early, himself. And he had learnt that Reinecke disliked abjectness – an abject victim irritated him. The way to flatter Reinecke was to be brave. Temple could not provide Reinecke with his ideal prisoner, for there were many moral and physical requirements that he could not fulfil, but he could, by the sharpest observation, find out the minimum acceptable qualities, and offer them. He was a third-rate, but just not too irritating fool, with a core of courage to be broken down.

He was a fool all the time, in his looks, in his stance, in his long, wandering, garbled, contradictory account of himself, a fool to all but the smallest, innermost part of himself; and that part watched the vertiginous performance with agonised intensity. And all the time he watched Reinecke, to anticipate his reactions, to know his coming state of mind while it was as yet half-formed. Temple did not hate Reinecke; he did not even wish him ill, in case the malevolence should somehow leak out across the space between them; and besides, some of his emotions and perceptions were so sharpened that others – hatred for one – had dwindled: they were also uneconomical.

The civilian had done; he looked up. He still seemed to want to say something more, however, and he looked at Reinecke and Bauer – all three looked at one another with much the same air – but perhaps he did not trust one or another of them, and after a moment’s silence he left: shaking of hands, little formal bows, and on his way to the door he looked at Temple with a haunted expression, or rather his field of vision (haunted vision) took in the space where Temple stood. It was not the crossing of two human regards.

‘Now,’ said Reinecke with a sudden shout, turning towards Temple: he took a few paces up and down the room, and as he passed staring, Temple flinched – an involuntary flinch, of course, an unwilling tribute. Then he recovered himself with a visible effort and stood docile, obedient and terrified, a man just this side of collapse, holding on by no more than his nails, but still holding on.

Reinecke sat down, Bauer passed him the dossier and looking down at it Reinecke bawled out, ‘Name?’

They went through the long rigmarole again, Reinecke following in the dossier with a pencil.

‘Name?’

‘Richard Temple.’

‘Born?’

‘April 7th, 1911.’

‘Where?’

‘Plimpton Rectory, Plimpton, Sussex.’

‘Name of father?’

‘Llewellyn Temple.’

‘Profession or trade?’

‘Rector.’

‘Place and date of birth?’

‘Brickfield Terrace, Cardiff. June 26th, 1860.’

His mother’s name was Laura, daughter of the Reverend Mr Richard Gray, formerly vicar of Colpoys in County Durham. Twenty-three more dated facts. It was a strangely unintelligent routine: he had never varied in the last eighteen repetitions and they must be bloody fools if they thought he would do so now. Besides, it was true, as far as literal truth had any meaning: not so much easy to remember as impossible to forget. But Reinecke was completely out of form, and the routine obviously helped him along.

When the passport questions were done with, he led his prisoner through the usual wearisome, slow, time-consuming question-and-answer that built up the unchanging picture of an inefficient, stupid, petty black-marketeer – unchanging, that is, since the first shifty protestations of innocence had been broken down.

Yes, he had crossed the Spanish frontier illegally: yes, he had been engaged in trafficking: the story he had first told about coming over to see a woman had been untrue: he had lived in Barcelona to avoid military service in England. He had not registered with the Spanish police; it was easy to live there by moving from one place to another. He had never been over to handle a deal before, but had worked at the other end. The chief was a Levantine Jew called Sol – was to be found in the café after the opera house, on the other side. He did not think that Sol ever had anything to do with passing Frenchmen or Allied agents over the Frontier: there was not enough money in it to make it interesting. He was only concerned with spare parts of cars and light machinery – merchandise in the middle price range. He did not touch drugs or girls or currency, because they were all owned by established concerns. This was the first time he had sent Temple to meet the French contact on the frontier. Temple had lost his way in the mountains: he had been arrested before he had met the Frenchman.

A pause. Was it all so convincing? He had been over and over it so often that he could no longer see it at all objectively: and what was the matter with Reinecke?

‘You do not suppose we believe all this, do you?’ said Reinecke, in a tired, reasonable voice, as if it really were a question. Goggle-eyed stupidity: distress.

Reinecke told Bauer to fetch him some files from the other building: a silence filled the room and suddenly Reinecke did the cleverest thing that he had ever done in all their horrible intimacy. He pushed Temple gently into a chair and with a voice filled with human respect and deference he said, ‘Mr Temple, you must put me in touch with an Allied intelligence officer.’

He went on, hurriedly: Temple must help him to meet someone from London or the country HQ. Reinecke could offer several valuable agents – Foster and West, and Claudius – any number of Frenchmen. He would not abuse the confidence: Reinecke must, he must insure himself – he had a family. Temple could trust in Reinecke’s personal honour. Temple would be free, free and in luxury, as soon as the meeting was arranged.

The attack was so sudden, so unlike any other, and so skilfully delivered (grey face of shameful urgency, trembling insistence) that if Temple had not already had his agonised fool’s uncomprehending face well on he must have shown how jarred he was. Reinecke had been God for so long and so intensely that his descent to this plane was very moving. But the fool’s face was on, and all he had to do was to keep it there, gaping.

It was very, very cunning. Yet Reinecke should not have coupled West and Claudius; their organisations were somewhat too remote from one another.

In the silence Reinecke clasped and unclasped his hands: his bolting eyes were fixed upon Temple, and Temple saw their expression change from that first mixture of false forced good nature, anguish and shame to frustration and anger. Redness was welling up in Reinecke’s face; but before the tension had reached its height (and the ludicrous undercurrent of embarrassment, the god’s miracle having failed) they heard the clump of Bauer’s return.

Reinecke turned away with the files. Bauer continued the interrogation. It went along its usual lines, always upon the assumption that Temple was probably an Allied agent, and its aim was to induce him or compel him to give information, or to betray himself. Bauer was not very intelligent, but he was practised, and he pressed hard with his little verbal traps (he was a lawyer) and he was hot and eager enough to occupy Temple’s entire concentrated mind. Bauer delivered his lumpish, set ‘final appeal’ to the prisoner’s good sense. ‘We know how long you have been in France and what you are here for. You have been given away by your friends – thoroughly identified. What we want is the address of the house where you meet the others. Just that: nothing more. Just that, and we will let you go. We are bound to get it in a few days, because we have caught so many of your people. One of them is going to tell us. The first to tell us will be released. Why should it not be you? We would much rather it were you than one of the others. Why let them profit by your resistance? They will beat you to it – they have no scruples. You have resisted long enough; there is no point in it now. They betrayed you, quickly enough.’

But Bauer was a heavy brute: he could not disguise the enmity and dislike and cruelty in his eyes while he produced all this.

‘Come, tell me at once. Let us have no more trouble. The address of the house?’ He stood up, and looking at Reinecke’s back he shouted again, ‘The address?’

Silence would not do – too heroic altogether. Rocking his miserable head from side to side Temple blurted out, ‘But I don’t know. I don’t know any people. I don’t know any address. I’ve told you all I can. I was to meet him by the rock they said but I lost my way. I don’t know any house. It was about watches from Switzerland.’

‘Where did you meet the others?’ snapped Reinecke, turning suddenly. There was a strange feeling of spite mingling with the familiar atmosphere of anger now. Temple breathed deeply, quick, gasping breaths.

‘The address, quick,’ shouted Bauer, coming up on his right-hand side.

‘I don’t –’ moaned Temple, but the blow cut him short. He screamed as it hit him, a very loud subhuman noise. Oh, oh, oh. Keep close to him and he cannot hit so hard, close in, close in …

Then he was in the chair, hawking and choking for breath. He could hardly see. ‘Where did you meet the others? Quick.’

‘Where did you meet the others?’

‘Where did you meet the others?’

Noises of denial, unknowing: helpless.

Reinecke was thoroughly roused now: his mood was changing fast. He was sweating. ‘You fool, you fool,’ he screamed into Temple’s face, slapping him with the full swing of his arms. He fumbled in his desk for his special tool, but in his intense irritation he only hurled the thing down on Temple’s head.

‘Where did you meet the others?’ shouted Bauer, far behind the metallic crash.

‘Tell,’ they said above him.

‘Tell.’

He was on the ground, blubbering now, great shaking sobs: he could not speak.

‘Tell.’

‘Oh stop it, Bauer,’ said Reinecke, empty and discouraged. Bauer aimed one blow more and went to the door. ‘Bring the hose and clean this up,’ he shouted to the guard. ‘Get out, get out, get out,’ he bellowed at Temple.

Outside the door Temple fell, and he heard Reinecke say, ‘He is only a petty criminal. It is no use going on.’

That was the flower that was opening and glowing in Temple’s mind. ‘Nur ein gering Verbrecher.’ And the guard with the mop had been between them; Reinecke could not have seen him collapsing gently there along the corridor.

‘It is no use going on.’ He savoured the words, drawing them out as he repeated them deep in his secret mind.

‘Unnüss … ’

It was victory. He dared not say it yet, but he knew it, he knew it, and the great word echoed about in his head as if it had been shouted from the walls. Reinecke believed him: he had convinced Reinecke: he had won.

Now he would be left in his hole until they cleared him out of the way. It would be Germany for him, in all likelihood, but there was the possibility of a camp in France – forced labour on the Atlantic wall. These thoughts began to form themselves in his mind, but they had scarcely reached the stage of words before they were wiped out – automatically erased. During this period (it seemed to have neither beginning nor end, in spite of his numbered tiles) his mind had built up curtains or partitions or censors – mechanisms that shut out everything but the essential matter in hand, the struggle with Reinecke’s credulity. These other hopes and longings had flittered and flickered like bats whose existence one suspects outside a darkened window – never more concrete than that. Besides, it would have been terribly dangerous to have let them in.

In the same way, but to a far greater degree, he had buried what he had to hide and he had almost pushed it down so far that it was out of his own immediate knowledge: but once, lying there on his bench, he had deliberately dug it up and he had said, forming the actual words in his mouth, ‘Number seven, rue de la Cloche d’Or. Knock five times, and three.’ And at once he had felt that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost; he was appalled, as if everything had escaped and rushed out of him. He was terrified that it might happen again, but in spite of himself, as a punishment; that he might blab it out much as he pissed and shat and vomited when they savaged him upstairs on the dreadful days.

But he was past that now, thank God, thank God. He could remember it without terror, and now he could sleep: there would be freedom in his sleep. He had not known how entirely he had been concentrated, knotted up, to guard himself from even thinking in a way that might betray what he must hide. If he gave anything away, all the rest would follow: and every recollection of the outside world, all external reality, his own identity, they had all been suppressed, but suppressed with unimaginable force.

The effort that it had required: he felt it now, could measure it by the almost unlimited relaxation of his mind – it spread out, rolled out, admitting uncountable forbidden things as he consciously let down the barriers. He could see himself as something apart from pseudo-Temple: he was inhabiting at least part of his own mind again, and pseudo-Temple dwindled to the size of a small, largely fictitious person.

Pseudo-Temple was a little, silly unclean man with skins of pretence that Reinecke had peeled off one by one to reveal the vague shape of the abettor of shady deals, the man of no country but a café table, the minor black-marketeer, the perpetual underling, who had made a stupid failure of his one independent commission. He was a convincing creature: he was also a sort of general confession, for he represented some aspect of every mean, dishonest, ungenerous, discreditable act or thought or even temptation in Temple’s life – a life not wanting in materials. He was a convincing creature, however. He had been born slowly, and in pain. It had all had to come out slowly, under blows and wicked pressure (the passionate intensity of those sessions when Reinecke had been almost sure that he had an Allied agent in his hands, a key that could open a great deal if it were properly twisted); it had had to come out slowly, for greater force – each discreditable detail wrenched out of him, the slow, unwilling revelation of what every man would wish to hide. He had had to go low: and yet not too low, for the character had to be acceptable to Reinecke, and Reinecke called for a certain small courage and resistance. The descent had stopped short of rock-bottom; but for all that, and although there were perhaps other mansions unexplored, it had been terribly expensive.

Reinecke had left Temple alone too soon; and in the dark – day and night unseen, the utter blackness of his cell – he had had the time to form the lines of pseudo-Temple’s mind. This long period, which Reinecke had thought was softening his prisoner, bringing him to the edge of talking madness, had hardened pseudo-Temple’s lines, and Temple was enclosed by his character so firmly that even when he was entirely reduced by interrogation, grovelling on the floor, he still shrieked with pseudo-Temple’s voice. Some prisoners could not stand the darkness; they could not stand the deprivation of their sight, and when fifty or a hundred hours had passed they began to feel a desperate need to be re-attached to the visible world. The darkness and the silence pressed in and began to invade them with the enormous hallucination of present death. The invisibility of their bodies – even their hands before their eyes meant nothing – detached them from any reality: they experienced the horror of the gulf, and in a fortnight or a month they were ready for the question.

There was boredom, too. A man could be terrified, appalled by the unending darkness that was dissolving him, undoing his humanity; he could be terrified by the fumbling of a key in his lock, the line of light under the door; a ludicrous and ignominious craving for tobacco could assume almost the same proportions sometimes; but in some men boredom would work just as hard as these, and in conjunction with them. With neither night nor day the prisoner might sleep five hours or ten, he could not tell; and for the rest of the time he must sit or lie, counting his heart-beats or his breathing to feel that he was still in the flow of time, that time was not standing still for him alone, passing elsewhere, passing in the world, but leaving him on some strange, unheard-of island. And when he had said and repeated to himself all that he had to say, then there was the huge and overwhelming boredom. The man would be living on the shore of nothing: he would have nothing to do or say; he would see nothing; but still he would be alive. He would have to live interminably, with no sequence of events.

In spite of several proofs to the contrary, Reinecke (who was frightened of the dark) thought it infallible. Certainly it worked very often, but Temple too was one of the exceptions. It was not a question of virtue or moral strength, but rather of idiosyncrasy – the child he had been had loved the darkness, the kind black ally. And then again, he had needed all his time. He was a slow and imprecise thinker by nature, accustomed to wondering in vague concepts, colours and shapes, and to using emotion more than anything cerebral, and at first, not knowing from hour to hour when they might come for him, he had forced his intellect to work with feverish, exact rapidity; then, as the immediate tension slackened, he had gone over the whole thing again. Again and again he had worked out the pseudo-Temple, and the more he lived inside the man the more the details came – details not only of his life, but of gesture and turn of phrase. He had needed all the time that he was given, and he wasted none; only once a day he allowed himself his ritual counting of the tiles – not only was there a comfort of sorts in their unchanging series, but they provided the basis of an arithmetical divination in which odd and even had the force of omens. He had needed all the time; for such a character, to be of any use, had to be voluminous: he still had nine-tenths of pseudo-Temple quite unused, and even that was scarcely a sufficient reserve.

That was Reinecke’s mistake, leaving him so long. It had provided him with his only arm, for he did not possess, never had possessed, that immense courage with which some men and women were able to defeat the inquisition. He had reckoned a certain passive fortitude the highest quality that he could make any claim to, or rather a dull endurance, and he had never attempted bravery – still less any spiritual domination of the brute. He had shrieked at the first blow and at all that followed. It was natural, and it was in character. No doubt it was ignoble; but it had worked. It had worked at last. He smiled again and almost said the words.

Yet it had been a dirty business, inhabiting that man. He had had to be so base for so long. Temple had no particularly strong moral sense, but even so he felt a revulsion against the ugliness of it – so much truckling, so much fawning and cringing for life, so much flattery and lies up to the neck. He was stained through and through with an indeterminate greyish yellow.

Something was coming between him and his triumph. The warmth of the glow in his mind was diminishing. The pseudo-Temple was his own creation, as much as if it had been one of his pictures, or a book that he had written (very like a book) and apart from the fact that in certain aspects it was a naked exposure of himself the whole was a reflection of the mind that fathered it. It was a pity that it was not a more heroic character. But there was nothing heroic in Temple, nor in his desperate war: there was no room for anything but expediency and given his background and the circumstances of his capture pseudo-Temple was the right character for him. It had worked: that was the only criterion. It had worked at last.

I can move now, he said. The obscure time of propitiation was over, and if he stayed lying motionless upon the ground he would grow so stiff that the first movement would be an agony. Already it was painful to tighten the muscles of his left arm and his shoulder: he tensed them for a moment to try and sank back with his face against the damp concrete. He breathed that builder’s-yard and morgue-floor smell again, a smell like dust and yet humid, and he smiled again, secretly, into the ground. He was lying, as he had been lying all this time, on his face, lengthways down the cell, with his feet just clear of the arc of the door and his arms up as they had gone to break his fall; his hair was touching the wall and his left arm was doubled a little under his chest; his right arm cushioning his face, keeping it just off the ground. He would have to raise himself on his elbows, his left elbow first; then with a contraction of his belly-muscles he would bring his knees up, pivot round on his right hand and crawl over to the bench. It was the muscles of his stomach that he must spare as much as possible, for it was from there that the huge radiating pain began, the pain that shot pitiless fiery hooks from its red centre and with such power that his whole body would twist and jerk out of control: if once he provoked it into active life it would wrench him into those wild movements that made all the other pains vibrate and scream.

Now he tried again, ready for the inevitable protest of the stiffening weals on his shoulder. He came up on his elbows, and with his unseen face fixed in a mask of concentration, his mouth open and his eyes staring into the dark, he worked his knees under him. A roll over to his left side transferred the strain from his belly to his flank, and with his right hand spread out on the ground he was ready to crawl. But he waited there for a moment, equally balanced on his four supports, waiting to see if the great pain would begin. Besides, there was all the time in the world now; he could nurse himself – indulge in the slowest smooth creeping. There was all the time in the world for the four steps across to the bench.

Two; three; and very slowly the fourth step. He stretched out his hand for the wooden edge of the bench. It was not there. Groping out into the dark, his hand, which had been so unquestioningly sure of the feel of the wood, met nothing but the dark. For the instant he was stunned: then an intolerable suspicion seized him. They had put him in another cell. Something was terribly wrong. Quiet, now; quiet, he said to himself, but all the time the disrupting suspicion grew. He remained there without moving, with the surface of his mind blank: for the first time he felt the darkness as an enemy, stretching away to unknown limits, isolating him. Now in the elastic darkness the walls might be anywhere. They might advance, recede, or sweep together and crush him as he knelt. He felt blind, terribly blind, and he made a wild sweeping movement with his right arm, surging forward as he did so. His right shoulder jolted hard against the bench and he realised that he had been moving down rather than across the cell. His mind had wandered again: his orientation had let him down. It had happened before. He remembered it now as he clung to the familiar wood. He should never have forgotten it. Was he so bloody infallible? He was panting, and the beating of his heart struggled against his breath. He waited for a moment, collecting himself, and then, with no precaution, he climbed up on to the bench, still feeling for all the known shapes, the two knot-holes, the polished bolt-head, gripping hard and repeatedly upon them.

Fool, fool, to have let himself go so far: he was still trembling all over and his body was absurdly weak. To have had his triumph taken from him at that moment would have been more than he could bear: he had been so weak and vulnerable at that moment. He must take care, take care. His faculties were declining – they were probably declining more than he knew.

Sanity was coming back. What would it have mattered, anyway, if they had put him in another cell? It was to be expected soon enough, in any case.

Sanity was coming back, and the irrational tensions died away. He eased himself into the curled position on his side – the primitive attitude of the buried dead – where he could lie and protect the centre of his pain, and he let the certitude of victory come in again and spread; and he nourished it, the re-affirmed and infinitely precious victory, now far more true.

Up to this time there had been only one end and purpose, and it had necessarily shut out all other kinds of life; but now shockingly delightful visions thronged his head in spite of all that he could do. Why should he not come out alive? Why should he not come out at the other end alive? If he was once booked as a criminal he was almost clear of the firing-squad … had that been the firing-squad, he thought in a very quick parenthesis, that he had heard just before he woke? Certainly there had been the sound of shots echoing in his head; but they might have come from a dream. The likelihood was a camp in Germany. There would be companionship, men he could trust. Would he survive it? Surely he would survive it, an ordinary camp.

He was growing restless with the tumult of his thoughts. His controlling sense was tired with the effort of trying to keep them down to sober tranquillity and enjoyment – static enjoyment, the enjoyment of the end achieved, of the thing itself, not of possibilities. An uncontrolled imagining would soon run out into mad extravagance. The mental effort took physical shape: his body twitched and jerked; it would no longer lie in peace. He changed position, but it would not relax: a nervous tic began to pluck at the corner of his mouth, and as he put his hand up to his face he let his mind have its way.

Perhaps it was still dangerous to let this ebullience come in unchecked; perhaps it was. He felt it wicked, certainly, but he let it come, a series of racing day-dreams, crowding as fast as the evil visions of delirium, but ecstatic. They all bore towards the idea of perfect felicity in a world at peace.

His accustomed ear caught the distant sound, and at once he pressed his head against the smooth iron bolt. The faint vibration sounded right into his middle ear: he interpreted it as one man and the trolley. Yes, one man and the steady rumble of the trolley. Was it the big new man or Richter? He could not tell.

He prepared himself, facing the door: if it was the new man he would have to stand. But when the door opened he saw at once through his screwed-up eyelids that it was Richter; and in the moments that passed (his eyes’ use coming back to them) he could see that the guard’s pale, glabrous face was shining with tears: they ran in shining tracks upon his cheek, and where he had wiped them there was a gleaming patch – the face itself was moist. Richter put down the dish and from his bent head the tears dripped like sweat. He did not speak, and the tears fell silently. Temple put his hand out towards the guard’s arm, but checked the movement and looked quickly aside: he said nothing, and the door closed and the darkness came back.

Why? Why? But in this everlasting nightmare Temple’s curiosity, still more his sympathy, had atrophied. So many things were commonplace in that world that a man’s face wet with tears meant hardly anything at all. There was a certain attenuated kindness between Temple and the guard however. Richter had given him a handkerchief once, and lumps of bread at several times – two sugar cubes, and an aspirin. God only knew how this sympathy had grown up: they had not exchanged five intelligible words.

Perhaps the man’s son had been killed. Perhaps his whole family had been wiped out in an air-raid. Temple had no idea of how the war was going. It had been bogged down in Italy when he had been taken; there had seemed no reason why it should ever stop. But he did know that Germany and German Europe was being bombed with tremendous force: even this place had been raided. That was long ago, however, and since those few whistling bombs he had heard nothing: the only sounds of war here were the shrieks of men, a terrible howling, and sometimes the volley of the firing-squad. He had heard other prisoners tapping out messages, at rare intervals, but he had never been able to understand them – he had not even tried very hard, all his energies being used up in his own struggle. Besides, he was not very intelligent, not sharply intelligent, clever and resourceful. His training and the habit of his mind was that of a painter, not called upon to make an intellectual response, and although in this school of war he had learnt to use his brain he still had to keep all his powers for the main issue. His chief quality was that particular sort of endurance that is necessary for a painter, an endurance not incompatible with emotional instability and a tendency to out-run the common range of feeling.

Richter had given him a piece of meat. It was unlikely to have been in the soup to begin with, though indeed the soup was less disgusting, less rancid than usual. It was made of swedes, stringy cubes filled with an insipid pulp that crushed out, leaving fibre to be chewed. This bloated a man’s stomach, leaving him with a morbid longing for something hard; but today he had this bone and meat, so large that it took several minutes to get it down. The thought of Richter made a disturbance in his mind, however, and it did not die away very soon.

Now he lay with the meal inside him, as nearly satisfied as he was ever likely to be in a German prison, and he began to compose himself for his long pause. He had learnt that after this meal there was a space of time in which he would be left in the most profound silence, and some internal clock enabled him to measure this period with great accuracy. At all other times he had to keep his attention on the stretch not to be taken unawares: they might come at any other period in the day, and he must have at least a moment’s warning. And although this continual watching was by now almost wholly unconscious (and today irrational) still it was wearing, and still, like an officious dog that could not understand that its zeal was out of place today, it could prevent him from making a total escape. But during this particular time, and above all on this particular day, he could withdraw his sentries, or watch them withdrawing of themselves, and now he could lie still, profoundly still – a stone at the bottom of a well.

He was neither in ebullience now nor in a marked reaction: he was quiet, and his thoughts were ranging to and fro with an extraordinary and, as it were, a ‘civilian’ liberty, picking up unrelated incidents, visual images, snatches of action and dialogue, colours and the smell of things. He was standing in the rain, a drizzle that swept gently past the street lights in a drifting haze. The black camber of the road shone in the wet, and on his right the Thames flowed continually, black too, but its surface curled with strange unevenness. Before him the embankment lights ran away in a curve that made tears come into one’s eyes, and in the distance a lighted train and its reflection crossed the bridge. A few rare lorries ran fast on the broad road, their headlights driving cones into the mist: a half-seen line of barges slipped down the river on the other side, passing one by one through the red pool of a neon sign. He had been waiting for an hour in anxiety and doubt, and when he saw her coming, hurrying under the pavement lights, his heart lifted up and beat; his whole being was filled with a delighted, fragile elation, and he ran.

What was her name? Even now he could see her mouth held up and her happy face: there was rain on her hair, innumerable globules of rain like dew, and her mackintosh crinkled under his hands – the fragility of her shoulders under it. But what was her name?

Then it seemed to him that the young man’s name was as unknown to him now as the girl’s – the young man who had stood there, loving so much in the rain. But if there really was a chance of his living through, he thought, it was essential to re-establish a contact, some conviction of continuity, with that fellow, before it was too late. His sense of realities was damaged and uncertain, and although that had not mattered yesterday, when he might just as well have been a meaningless figure, a gratuitous act in a vacuum, yet now he was to fish up the line that linked himself to himself. Perhaps it was not necessary – perhaps it was not only rhetoric but presumptuous nonsense – but at least today, in celebration of a private victory, he would indulge in preparation for real life: he would determine who he was, and how he came to be that way. He would remember his past.

It was not easy to see the connection: it was not a connection that was obvious to him. Prison had acted like a forcing-house on his intelligence and cunning; he had been comparatively stupid, slow, unthinking, before he had been caught. It had also acted like the experience of a hard life all concentrated, breeding the mean harsh self-absorption of unhappy age with an unnatural speed. The man that went in (though tolerably experienced even then) was barely recognisable as the man that lay there now. He was barely recognisable to himself and sometimes he looked back with a cold furious contempt at the old weak time-wasting life-eating submissive slob Temple – unbelievably weak, submissive, and silly, silly; and sometimes survivors from the past looked at the present hard, competent animal with dismay and even horror.