"Is it as bad as that?" Rowe asked. He felt fear and an unbearable curiosity. Digby whispered in his ear that now he could be a whole man again: Anna's voice warned him. He knew that this was the great moment of a lifetime; he was being offered so many forgotten years, the fruit of twenty years' experience. His breast had to press the ribs apart to make room for so much more; he stared ahead of him and read -- "Private Treatment Between the Hours of. . ." On the far edge of consciousness the barrage thundered.
Hilfe grimaced at him. "Bad?" he said. "Why -- it's tremendously important."
Rowe shook his head sadly: "You can't have the gun."
Suddenly Hilfe began to laugh: the laughter was edged with hysteria and hate. "I was giving you a chance," he said. "If you'd given me the gun, I might have been sorry for you. I'd have been grateful. I might have just shot myself. But now" -- his head bobbed up and down in front of the cheap mirror -- "now I'll tell you gratis."
Rowe said, "I don't want to hear," and turned away. A very small man in an ancient brown Homburg came rocking down the steps from above and made for the urinal. His hat came down over his ears: it might have been put on with a spirit-level. "Bad night," he said, "bad night." He was pale and wore an expression of startled displeasure. As Rowe reached the steps a bomb came heavily down, pushing the air ahead of it like an engine. The little man hastily did up his flies; he crouched as though he wanted to get farther away. Hilfe sat on the edge of the wash-basin and listened with a sour nostalgic smile, as though he were hearing the voice of a friend going away for ever down the road. Rowe stood on the bottom step and waited and the express roared down on them and the little man stooped lower and lower in front of the urinal. The sound began to diminish, and then the ground shifted very slightly under their feet at the explosion. There was silence again except for the tiny shifting of dust down the steps. Almost immediately a second bomb was under way. They waited in fixed photographic attitudes, sitting, squatting, standing: this bomb could not burst closer without destroying them. Then it too passed, diminished, burst a little farther away.
"I wish they'd stop," the man in the Homburg said, and all the urinals began to flush. The dust hung above the steps like smoke, and a hot metallic smell drowned the smell of ammonia. Rowe climbed the steps.
"Where are you going?" Hilfe said. He cried out sharply, "The police?" and when Rowe did not reply, he came away from the wash-basin. "You can't go yet -- not without hearing about your wife."
"My wife?" He came back down the steps; he couldn't escape now: the lost years waited for him among the washbasins. He asked hopelessly, "Am I married?"
"You were married," Hilfe said. "Don't you remember now? You poisoned her." He began to laugh again. "Your Alice."
"An awful night," the man in the Homburg said; he had ears for nothing but the heavy uneven stroke of the bomber overhead.
"You were tried for murder," Hilfe said, "and they sent you to an asylum. You'll find it in all the papers. I can give you the dates. . ."
The little man turned suddenly to them and spreading out his hands in a gesture of entreaty he said in a voice filled with tears, "Shall I ever get to Wimbledon?" A bright white light shone through the dust outside, and through the glassless roof of the station the glow of the flares came dripping beautifully down.
It wasn't Rowe's first raid: he heard Mrs Purvis coming down the stairs with her bedding: the Bay of Naples was on the wall and The Old Curiosity Shop upon the shelf. Guilford Street held out its dingy arms to welcome him, and he was home again. He thought: what will that bomb destroy? Perhaps with a little luck the flower shop will be gone near Marble Arch, the sherry bar in Adelaide Crescent, or the corner of Quebec Street, where I used to wait so many hours, so many years. . . there was such a lot which had to be destroyed before peace came.
"Go along," a voice said, "to Anna now," and he looked across a dimmed blue interior to a man who stood by the wash-basins and laughed at him. "She hoped you'd never remember." He thought of a dead rat and a policeman, and then he looked everywhere and saw reflected in the crowded court the awful expression of pity: the judge's face was bent, but he could read pity in the old fingers which fidgeted with an Eversharp. He wanted to warn them -- don't pity me. Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn't safe when pity's prowling round.
"Anna. . ." the voice began again, and another voice said with a kind of distant infinite regret at the edge of consciousness, "And I might have caught the 6.15." The horrible process of connection went on; his Church had once taught him the value of penance, but penance was a value only to oneself. There was no sacrifice, it seemed to him, that would help him to atone to the dead. The dead were out of reach of the guilty. He wasn't interested in saving his own soul.
"What are you going to do?" a voice said. His brain rocked with its long journey; it was as if he were advancing down an interminable passage towards a man called Digby -- who was so like him and yet had such different memories. He could hear Digby's voice saying, "Shut your eyes. . ." There were rooms full of flowers, the sound of water falling, and Anna sat beside him, strung up, on guard, in defence of his ignorance. He was saying, "Of course you have a brother. . . I remember. . ."
Another voice said, "It's getting quieter. Don't you think it is?"
"What are you going to do?"
It was like one of those trick pictures in a children's magazine: you stare at it hard and you see one thing -- a vase of flowers -- and then your focus suddenly changes and you see only the outlined faces of people. In and out the two pictures flicker. Suddenly, quite clearly, he saw Hilfe as he had seen him lying asleep -- the graceful shell of a man, all violence quieted. He was Anna's brother. Rowe crossed the floor to the wash-basins and said in a low voice that the man in the Homburg couldn't hear, "All right. You can have it. Take it."
He slipped the gun quickly into Hilfe's hand.
"I think," the voice behind him said, "I'll make a dash for it. I really think I will. What do you think, sir?"
"Be off," Hilfe said sharply, "be off."
"You think so too. Yes. Perhaps." There was a scuttling on the steps and silence again.
"Of course," Hilfe said, "I could kill you now. But why should I? It would be doing you a service. And it would leave me to your thugs. How I hate you though."
"Yes?" He wasn't thinking of Hilfe; his thoughts swung to and fro between two people he loved and pitied. It seemed to him that he had destroyed both of them.
"Everything was going so well," Hilfe said, "until you came blundering in. What made you go and have your fortune told? You had no future."
"No." He remembered the fête clearly now; he remembered walking round the railings and hearing the music; he had been dreaming of innocence. . . Mrs Bellairs sat in a booth behind a curtain. . .
"And just to have hit on that one phrase," Hilfe said. " 'Don't tell me the past. Tell me the future.' "
And there was Sinclair too. He remembered with a sense of responsibility the old car standing on the wet gravel. He had better go away and telephone to Prentice. Sinclair probably had a copy. . .