"You heard what happened?"
"He told me."
"You had expected something, hadn't you?"
"Not that. Something worse." She explained, "I didn't know him."
"I brought you some worries, didn't I, when I came in yesterday?"
"Nothing worries my brother."
"I rang up Rennit."
"Oh, no, no. You shouldn't have done that."
"I haven't learnt the technique yet. You can guess what happened."
"Yes. The police."
"You know what your brother wants me to do?"
"Yes."
Their conversation was like a letter which has to pass a censorship. He had an overpowering desire to talk to someone frankly. He said, "Would you meet me somewhere -- for five minutes?"
"No," she said. "I can't. I can't get away."
"Just for two minutes."
"It's not possible."
It suddenly became of great importance to him. "Please," he said.
"It wouldn't be safe. My brother would be angry."
He said, "I'm so alone. I don't know what's happening. I've got nobody to advise me. There are so many questions. . ."
"I'm sorry."
"Can I write to you. . . or him?"
She said, "Just send your address here -- to me. No need to sign the note -- or sign it with any name you like."
Refugees had such stratagems on the tip of the tongue; it was a familiar way of life. He wondered whether if he were to ask her about money she would have an answer equally ready. He felt like a child who is lost and finds an adult hand to hold, a hand that guides him understandingly homewards. . . He became reckless of the imaginary censor. He said, "There's nothing in the papers."
"Nothing."
"I've written a letter to the police."
"Oh," she said, "you shouldn't have done that. Have you posted it?"
"No."
"Wait and see," she said. "Perhaps there won't be any need. Just wait and see."
"Do you think it would be safe to go to my bank?"
"You are so helpless," she said, "so helpless. Of course you mustn't. They will watch for you there."
"Then how can I live. . .?"
"Haven't you a friend who would cash you a cheque?"
Suddenly he didn't want to admit to her that there was no one at all. "Yes," he said, "yes. I suppose so."
"Well then. . . Just keep away," she said so gently that he had to strain his ears.
"I'll keep away."
She had rung off. He put the receiver down and moved back into Holborn, keeping away. Just ahead of him, with bulging pockets, went one of the bookworms from the auction-room.
"Haven't you a friend?" she had said. Refugees had always friends; people smuggled letters, arranged passports, bribed officials; in that enormous underground land as wide as a continent there was companionship. In England one hadn't yet learned the technique. Whom could he ask to take one of his cheques? Not a tradesman. Since he began to live alone he had dealt with shops only through his landlady. He thought for the second time that day of his former friends. It hadn't occurred to Anna Hilfe that a refugee might be friendless. A refugee always has a party -- or a race.
He thought of Perry and Vane: not a chance even if he had known how to find them. Crooks, Boyle, Curtis. . . Curtis was quite capable of knocking him down. He had simple standards, primitive ways and immense complacency. Simplicity in friends had always attracted Rowe: it was a complement to his own qualities. There remained Henry Wilcox. There was just a chance there. . . if the hockey-playing wife didn't interfere. Their two wives had had nothing in common. Rude health and violent pain were too opposed, but a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs Wilcox hate him. Once a man started killing his wife, she would have ungrammatically thought, you couldn't tell where it would stop.
But what excuse could he give Henry? He was aware of the bulge in his breast pocket where his statement lay, but he couldn't tell Henry the truth: no more than the police would Henry believe that he had been present at a murder as an onlooker. He must wait till after the banks closed -- that was early enough in wartime, and then invent some urgent reason. What? He thought about it all through lunch in an Oxford Street Lyons, and got no clue. Perhaps it was better to leave it to what people called the inspiration of the moment, or, better still, give it up, give himself up. It only occurred to him as he was paying his bill that probably he wouldn't be able to find Henry anyway. Henry had lived in Battersea, and Battersea was not a good district to live in now. He might not even be alive -- twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there.
That meant nothing, he told himself; the blitz was newer than the edition. All the same, he dialled the number just to see -- it was as if all his contacts now had to be down a telephone line. He was almost afraid to hear the ringing tone, and when it came he put the receiver down quickly and with pain. He had rung Henry up so often -- before things happened. Well, he had to make up his mind now: the flat was still there, though Henry mightn't be in it. He couldn't brandish a cheque down a telephone line; this time the contact had got to be physical. And he hadn't seen Henry since the day before the trial.
He would almost have preferred to throw his hand in altogether.
He caught a number 19 bus from Piccadilly. After the ruins of St James's Church one passed at that early date into peaceful country. Knightsbridge and Sloane Street were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line. It was an odd front line that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of peace. Battersea, Holborn, the East End, the front line curled in and out of them. . . and yet to a casual eye Poplar High Street had hardly known the enemy, and there were pieces of Battersea where the public house stood at the corner with the dairy and the baker beside it, and as far as you could see there were no ruins anywhere.
It was like that in Wilcox's street; the big middle-class flats stood rectangular and gaunt like railway hotels, completely undamaged, looking out over the park. There were To Let boards up all the way down, and Rowe half hoped he would find one outside No. 63. But there was none. In the hall was a frame in which occupants could show whether they were in or out, but the fact that the Wilcox's was marked In meant nothing at all, even if they still lived there, for Henry "had a theory" that to mark the board Out was to invite burglary. Henry's caution had always imposed on his friends a long tramp upstairs to the top floor (there were no lifts).
The stairs were at the back of the flats looking towards Chelsea, and as you climbed above the second floor and your view lifted, the war came back into sight. Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks, and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn't really been any slums.
It was painful to come in sight of the familiar 63. He used to pity Henry because of his masterful wife, his conventional career, the fact that his work -- chartered accountancy -- seemed to offer no escape; four hundred a year of Rowe's own had seemed like wealth, and he had for Henry some of the feeling a rich man might have for a poor relation. He used to give Henry things. Perhaps that was why Mrs Wilcox hadn't liked him. He smiled with affection when he saw a little plaque on the door marked A.R.P. Warden: it was exactly as he had pictured. But his finger hesitated on the bell.