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            "Never mind that. I shan't eat her, shall I?" The pale blue eyes became suddenly lost in speculation.

            Rowe tried to recall them. "Where can I go?"

            "Oh, just underground," Hilfe said casually. He seemed in no hurry at all. "It's the fashion of our decade. Communists are always doing it. Don't you know how?"

            "This isn't a joke."

            "Listen," Hilfe said. "The end we are working for isn't a joke, but if we are going to keep our nerve we've got to keep our sense of humour. You see, They have none. Give me only a week. Keep out of the way as long as that."

            "The police will be here soon."

            Hilfe said, "It's only a small drop from this window to the flower-bed. It's nearly dark outside and in ten minutes the sirens will be going. Thank God, one can set one's clock by them."

            "And you?"

            "Pull the plug as you open the window. No one will hear you then. Wait till the cistern refills, then pull the plug again and knock me out 'good and hard'. It's the best alibi you can give me. After all, I'm an enemy alien."

Chapter 5

BETWEEN SLEEPING AND WAKING

"They came to a great forest, which

seemed to have no path through it."

                            The Little Duke

 

            THERE are dreams which belong only partly to the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

            Rowe was exhausted and frightened; he had made tracks half across London while the nightly raid got under way. It was an empty London with only occasional bursts of noise and activity. An umbrella shop was burning at the corner of Oxford Street; in Wardour Street he walked through a cloud of grit: a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, "That's enough now. It's nothing to laugh about." None of these things mattered. They were like something written; they didn't belong to his own life and he paid them no attention. But he had to find a bed, and so somewhere south of the river he obeyed Hilfe's advice and at last went underground.

            He lay on the upper tier of a canvas bunk and dreamed that he was walking up a long hot road near Trumpington scuffing the white chalk-dust with his shoe caps. Then he was having tea on the lawn at home behind the red brick wall and his mother was lying back in a garden chair eating a cucumber sandwich. A bright blue croquet-ball lay at her feet, and she was smiling and paying him the half-attention a parent pays a child. The summer lay all around them, and evening was coming on. He was saying, "Mother, I murdered her. . ." and his mother said, "Don't be silly, dear. Have one of these nice sandwiches."

            "But Mother," he said, "I did. I did." It seemed terribly important to him to convince her; if she were convinced, she could do something about it, she could tell him it didn't matter and it would matter no longer, but he had to convince her first. But she turned away her head and called out in a little vexed voice to someone who wasn't there, "You must remember to dust the piano."

            "Mother, please listen to me," but he suddenly realized that he was a child, so how could he make her believe? He was not yet eight years old, he could see the nursery window on the second floor with the bars across, and presently the old nurse would put her face to the glass and signal to him to come in. "Mother," he said, "I've killed my wife, and the police want me." His mother smiled and shook her head and said, "My little boy couldn't kill anyone."

            Time was short; from the other end of the long peaceful lawn, beyond the croquet hoops and out of the shadow of the great somnolent pine, came the vicar's wife carrying a basket of apples. Before she reached them he must convince his mother, but he had only childish words. "I have. I have."

            His mother leant back smiling in the deck-chair, and said, "My little boy wouldn't hurt a beetle." (It was a way she had, always to get the conventional phrase just wrong.)

            "But that's why," he said. "That's why," and his mother waved to the vicar's wife and said, "It's a dream, dear, a nasty dream."

            He woke up to the dim lurid underground place -- somebody had tied a red silk scarf over the bare globe to shield it. All along the walls the bodies lay two deep, while outside the raid rumbled and receded. This was a quiet night: any raid which happened a mile away wasn't a raid at all. An old man snored across the aisle and at the end of the shelter two lovers lay on a mattress with their hands and knees touching.

            Rowe thought: this would be a dream, too, to her; she wouldn't believe it. She had died before the first great war, when aeroplanes -- strange crates of wood -- just staggered across the Channel. She could no more have imagined this than that her small son in his brown corduroy knickers and his blue jersey with his pale serious face -- he could see himself like a stranger in the yellowing snapshots of her album -- should grow up to be a murderer. Lying on his back he caught the dream and held it -- pushed the vicar's wife back into the shadow of the pine -- and argued with his mother.

            "This isn't real life any more," he said. "Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it's not there any more."

            His mother smiled at him in a scared way but let him talk; he was the master of the dream now. He said, "I'm wanted for a murder I didn't do. People want to kill me because I know too much. I'm hiding underground, and up above the Germans are methodically smashing London to bits all round me. You remember St Clement's -- the bells of St Clement's. They've smashed that -- St James's, Piccadilly, the Burlington Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the pantomime, Maples and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller, doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life -- more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read -- about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that's real life: it's what we've all made of the world since you died. I'm your little Arthur who wouldn't hurt a beetle and I'm a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queux." He couldn't bear the frightened eyes which he had himself printed on the cement wall; he put his mouth to the steel frame of his bunk and kissed the white cold cheek. "My dear, my dear, my dear. I'm glad you are dead. Only do you know about it? do you know?" He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.

            "Why, it's a madhouse," his mother cried.

            "Oh, it's much quieter there," he said. "I know. They put me in one for a time. Everybody was very kind there. They made me a librarian. . ." He tried to express clearly the difference between the madhouse and this. "Everybody in the place was very -- reasonable." He said fiercely, as though he hated her instead of loving her, "Let me lend you the History of Contemporary Society. It's in hundreds of volumes, but most of them are sold in cheap editions: Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador's Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days' Leave, The Four Just Men. . ."