But Rowe was a murderer -- as other men are poets. The statues still stood. He was prepared to do anything to save the innocent or to punish the guilty. He believed against all the experience of life that somewhere there was justice, and justice condemned him. He analysed his motives minutely and always summed up against himself. He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundred times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife's pain -- and not she. Once, it was true, in the early days of the disease, she had broken down, said she wanted to die, not to wait: that was hysteria. Later it was her endurance and her patience which he had found most unbearable. He was trying to escape his own pain, not hers, and at the end she had guessed or half-guessed what it was he was offering her. She was scared and afraid to ask. How could you go on living with a man if you had once asked him whether he had put poison into your evening drink? Far easier when you love him and are tired of pain just to take the hot milk and sleep. But he could never know whether the fear had been worse than the pain, and he could never tell whether she might not have preferred any sort of life to death. He had taken the stick and killed the rat, and saved himself the agony of watching. . . He had gone over the same questions and the same answers daily, ever since the moment when she took the milk from him and said, "How queer it tastes," and lay back and tried to smile. He would have liked to stay beside her till she slept, but that would have been unusual, and he must avoid anything unusual, so he had to leave her to die alone. And she would have liked to ask him to stay -- he was sure of that -- but that would have been unusual too. After all, in an hour he would be coming up to bed. Convention held them at the moment of death. He had in mind the police questions, "Why did you stay?" and it was quite possible that she too was deliberately playing his game against the police. There were so many things he would never know. But when the police did ask questions he hadn't the heart or the energy to tell them lies. Perhaps if he had lied to them a little they would have hanged him. . . It was about time now to bring the trial to an end.
2
"They can't spoil Whistler's Thames," a voice said.
"I'm sorry," Rowe said, "I didn't catch. . ."
"It's safe underground. Bomb-proof vaults."
Somewhere, Rowe thought, he had seen that face before: the thin depressed grey moustache, the bulging pockets, out of which the man now took a piece of bread and threw it towards the mud. Before it had reached the river the gulls had risen: one out-distanced the others, caught it and sailed on, down past the stranded barges and the paper mill, a white scrap blown towards the blackened chimneys of Lots Road.
"Come, my pretties," the man said, and his hand suddenly became a landing ground for sparrows. "They know uncle," he said, "they know uncle." He put a bit of bread between his lips and they hovered round his mouth giving little pecks at it as though they were kissing him.
"It must be difficult in wartime," Rowe said, "to provide for all your nephews."
"Yes, indeed," the man said -- and when he opened his mouth you saw his teeth were in a shocking condition, black stumps like the remains of something destroyed by fire. He sprinkled some crumbs over his old brown hat and a new flock of sparrows landed there. "Strictly illegal," he said, "I dare say. If Lord Woolton knew." He put a foot up on a heavy suitcase, and a sparrow perched on his knee. He was overgrown with birds,
"I've seen you before," Rowe said.
"I dare say."
"Twice today now I come to think of it."
"Come, my pretties," the elderly man said.
"In the auction-room in Chancery Lane."
A pair of mild eyes turned on him. "It's a small world."
"Do you buy books?" Rowe asked, thinking of the shabby clothes.
"Buy and sell," the man said. He was acute enough to read Rowe's thoughts. "Working clothes," he said. "Books carry a deal of dust."
"You go in for old books?"
"Landscape gardening's my speciality. Eighteenth century. Fullove, Fulham Road, Battersea."
"Do you find enough customers?"
"There are more than you'd think." He suddenly opened his arms wide and shooed the birds away as though they were children with whom he'd played long enough. "But everything's depressed," he said, "these days. What they want to fight for I don't understand." He touched the suitcase tenderly with his foot. "I've got a load of books here," he said, "I got from a lord's house. Salvage. The state of some of them would make you weep, but others. . . I don't say it wasn't a good bargain. I'd show them you, only I'm afraid of bird-droppings. First bargain I've had for months. In the old days I'd have treasured them, treasured them. Waited till the Americans came in the summer. Now I'm glad of any chance of a turnover. If I don't deliver these to a customer at Regal Court before five, I lose a sale. He wants to take them down to the country before the raid starts. I haven't a watch, sir. Could you tell me the time?"
"It's only four o'clock."
"I ought to go on," Mr Fullove said. "Books are heavy though and I feel just tired out. It's been a long day. You'll excuse me, sir, if I sit down a moment." He sat himself down on the suitcase and drew out a ragged packet of Tenners. "Will you smoke, sir? You look a bit done, if I may say so, yourself."
"Oh, I'm all right." The mild exhausted ageing eyes appealed to him. He said, "Why don't you take a taxi?"
"Well, sir, I work on a very narrow margin these days. If I take a taxi that's a dollar gone. And then when he gets the books to the country, perhaps he won't want one of them."
"They are landscape gardening? "
"That's right. It's a lost art, sir. There's a lot more to it, you know, than flowers. That's what gardening means today," he said with contempt, "flowers."
"You don't care for flowers?"
"Oh, flowers," the bookseller said, "are all right. You've got to have flowers."
"I'm afraid," Rowe said, "I don't know much about gardening -- except flowers."
"It's the tricks they played." The mild eyes looked up with cunning enthusiasm. "The machinery."
"Machinery?"
"They had statues that spurted water at you when you passed, and the grottoes -- the things they thought up for grottoes. Why, in a good garden you weren't safe anywhere."
"I should have thought you were meant to feel safe in a garden."
"They didn't think so, sir," the bookseller said, blowing the stale smell of carious teeth enthusiastically in Rowe's direction. Rowe wished he could get away; but automatically with that wish the sense of pity worked and he stayed.
"And then," the bookseller said, "there were the tombs."