"And then on top of everything Anna. Why the hell should any woman love you?" He cried out sharply, "Where are you going?"
"Can't you give me just five minutes?"
"Oh no," Rowe said. "No. It's not possible." The process was completed; he was what Digby had wanted to be -- a whole man. His brain held now everything it had ever held. Willi Hilfe gave an odd little sound like a retch. He began to walk rapidly towards the lavatory cubicles, with his bandaged hand stuck out. The stone floor was wet and he slipped but recovered. He began to pull at a lavatory door, but of course it was locked. He didn't seem to know what to do: it was as if he needed to get behind a door, out of sight, into some burrow. . . He turned and said imploringly, "Give me a penny," and everywhere the sirens began to wail the All Clear; the sound came from everywhere: it was as if the floor of the urinal whined under his feet. The smell of ammonia came to him like something remembered from a dream. Hilfe's strained white face begged for his pity. Pity again. He held out a penny to him and then tossed it and walked up the steps; before he reached the top he heard the shot. He didn't go back: he left him for others to find.
4
One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one has never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.
This, of course, he knew now, was not his home. Guilford Street was his home. He had hoped that wherever Anna was there would be peace; coming up the stairs a second time he knew that there would never be peace again while they lived.
To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he began to climb the stairs. A phrase of Johns' came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and Tatlers.
The door was open as he had left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and been lost for ever. If one loved a woman one couldn't hope that she would be tied to a murderer for the rest of her days.
But she was there -- not where he had left her, but in the bedroom where they had watched Hilfe sleeping. She lay on the bed face downwards with her fists clenched. He said "Anna."
She turned her head on the pillow; she had been crying, and her face looked as despairing as a child's. He felt an enormous love for her, enormous tenderness, the need to protect her at any cost. She had wanted him innocent and happy. . . she had loved Digby. . . He had got to give her what she wanted. . . He said gently, "Your brother's dead. He shot himself," but her face didn't alter. It was as if none of that meant anything at all -- all that violence and gracelessness and youth had gone without her thinking it worth attention. She asked with terrible anxiety, "What did he say to you?"
Rowe said, "He was dead before I could reach him. Directly he saw me he knew it was all up."
The anxiety left her face: all that remained was that tense air he had observed before -- the air of someone perpetually on guard to shield him. . . He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her shoulder. "My dear," he said, "my dear. How much I love you." He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.
"Me too," she said. "Me too."
They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.
He tried tentatively a phrase, "My dear, my dear, I am so happy," and heard with infinite tenderness her prompt and guarded reply, "I am too." It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness.
Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a book of verse, he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, which he classed as an "entertainment" in order to distinguish it from more serious work. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, and he was commissioned to visit Mexico in 1938 and report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, The Power and the Glory.
Brighton Rock was published in 1938, and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was sent out to Sierra Leone in 1941-3. One of his major post-war novels, The Heart of the Matter, is set in West Africa and is considered by many to be his finest book. This was followed by The End of the Affair, The Quiet American (a story set in Vietnam), Our Man in Havana, and A Burnt-Out Case. The Comedians and twelve other novels have been filmed, and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. In 1967 he published a collection of short stories under the title May We Borrow Your Husband? Among his latest publications are his autobiography, A. Sort of Life (1971), The Honorary Consul (1973), Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri (edited, 1975), and The Human Factor (1978).
In all Graham Greene has written some thirty novels, "entertainments", plays, children's books, travel books, and collections of essays and short stories. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1966.
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully against DT, italics and special characters intact. Changed all 'British Quotes' to "American Quotes".