Graham Greene - The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (Penguin Classics)

The Ministry of Fear

Graham Greene

From Back Cover:

From the blitz on London Graham Greene gathered up the pieces for what must be his most phantasmagoric study in terror. Arthur Rowe's was a mind hamstrung by guilt the guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was standing aside from the war until he happened to guess both the true and the false weight of the cake at a charity fte. From that moment he was the quarry of malign and shadowy forces, from which he endeavoured to escape with a mind that was out of focus.

Contents

Book One: The Unhappy Man

1. THE FREE MOTHERS

2. PRIVATE INQUIRIES

3. FRONTAL ASSAULT

4. AN EVENING WITH MRS BELLAIRS

5. BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

6. OUT OF TOUCH

7. A LOAD OF BOOKS

Book Two: The Happy Man

1. CONVERSATIONS IN ARCADY

2. THE SICK BAY

Book Three: Bits and Pieces

1. THE ROMAN DEATH

2. MOPPING UP

3. WRONG NUMBERS

Book Four: The Whole Man

1. JOURNEY'S END

"Have they brought home the haunch?"

CHARLOTTE M. YONGE

The Little Duke

BOOK ONE

The Unhappy Man

Chapter 1

THE FREE MOTHERS

"None passes without warrant."

The Little Duke

There was something about a fte which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly, bound him a helpless victim to the distant blare of a band and the knock-knock of wooden balls against coconuts, Of course this year there were no coconuts because there was a war on: you could tell that too from the untidy gaps between the Bloomsbury houses a flat fireplace half-way up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap dolls' house, and lots of mirrors and green wall-papers, and from round a corner of the sunny afternoon the sound of glass being swept up, like the lazy noise of the sea on a shingled beach. Otherwise the square was doing its very best with the flags of the free nations and a mass of bunting which had obviously been preserved by somebody ever since the Jubilee.

Arthur Rowe looked wistfully over the railings there were still railings. The fte called him like innocence: it was entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks and the smell of herbaceous borders and security. He had no inclination to mock at these elaborately nave ways of making money for a cause. There was the inevitable clergyman presiding over a rather timid game of chance; an old lady in a print dress that came down to her ankles and a floppy garden hat hovered officially, but with excitement, over a treasure-hunt (a little plot of ground like a child's garden was staked out with claims), and as the evening darkened they would have to close early because of the blackout there would be some energetic work with trowels. And there in a corner, under a plane tree, was the fortuneteller's booth unless it was an impromptu outside lavatory. It all seemed perfect in the late summer Sunday afternoon. "My peace I give unto you. Not as the world knoweth peace..." Arthur Rowe's eyes filled with tears, as the small military band they had somehow managed to borrow struck up again a faded song of the last war: Whate'er befall I'll oft recall that sunlit mountainside.

Pacing round the railings he came towards his doom: pennies were rattling down a curved slope on to a chequer-board not very many pennies. The fte was ill-attended; there were only three stalls and people avoided those. If they had to spend money they would rather try for a dividend of pennies from the chequer-board or savings-stamps from the treasure-hunt. Arthur Rowe came along the railings, hesitantly, like an intruder, or an exile who has returned home after many years and is uncertain of his welcome.

He was a tall stooping lean man with black hair going grey and a sharp narrow face, nose a little twisted out of the straight and a too sensitive mouth. His clothes were good but gave the impression of being uncared for; you would have said a bachelor if it had not been for an indefinable married look...

"The charge," said the middle-aged lady at the gate, "is a shilling, but that doesn't seem quite fair. If you wait another five minutes you can come in at the reduced rate. I always feel it's only right to warn people when it gets as late as this."

"It's very thoughtful of you."

"We don't want people to feel cheated even in a good cause, do we?"

"I don't think I'll wait, all the same. I'll come straight in. What exactly is the cause?"

"Comforts for free mothers I mean mothers of the free nations."

Arthur Rowe stepped joyfully back into adolescence, into childhood. There had always been a fte about this time of the year in the vicarage garden, a little way off the Trumpington Road, with the flat Cambridgeshire field beyond the extemporized bandstand, and at the end of the fields the pollarded willows by the stickleback stream and the chalk-pit on the slopes of what in Cambridgeshire they call a hill. He came to these ftes every year with an odd feeling of excitement as if anything might happen, as if the familiar pattern of life that afternoon might be altered for ever. The band beat in the warm late sunlight, the brass quivered like haze, and the faces of strange young women would get mixed up with Mrs Troup, who kept the general store and post office, Miss Savage the Sunday School teacher, the publicans' and the clergy's wives. When he was a child he would follow his mother round the stalls the baby clothes, the pink woollies, the art pottery, and always last and best the white elephants. It was always as though there might be discovered on the white elephant stall some magic ring which would give three wishes or the heart's desire, but the odd thing was that when he went home that night with only a second-hand copy of The Little Duke, by Charlotte M. Yonge, or an out-of-date atlas advertising Mazawattee tea, he felt no disappointment: he carried with him the sound of brass, the sense of glory, of a future that would be braver than today. In adolescence the excitement had a different source; he imagined he might find at the vicarage some girl whom he had never seen before, and courage would touch his tongue, and in the late evening there would be dancing on the lawn and the smell of stocks. But because these dreams had never come true there remained the sense of innocence...

And the sense of excitement. He couldn't believe that when he had passed the gate and reached the grass under the plane trees nothing would happen, though now it wasn't a girl he wanted or a magic ring, but something far less likely to mislay the events of twenty years. His heart beat and the band played, and inside the lean experienced skull lay childhood.

"Come and try your luck, sir?" said the clergyman in a voice which was obviously baritone at socials.

"If I could have some coppers."

"Thirteen for a shilling, sir."

Arthur Rowe slid the pennies one after the other down the little inclined groove and watched them stagger on the board.

"Not your lucky day, sir, I'm afraid. What about another Shilling's-worth? Another little flutter in a good cause?"

"I think perhaps I'll flutter further on," His mother, he remembered, had always fluttered further on, carefully dividing her patronage in equal parts, though she left the coconuts and the gambling to the children. At some stalls it had been very difficult to find anything at all, even to give away to the servants...

Under a little awning there was a cake on a stand surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic sightseers. A lady was explaining, "We clubbed our butter rations and Mr Tatham was able to get hold of the currants."

She turned to Arthur Rowe and said, "Won't you take a ticket and guess its weight?"