Manning struck up some sort of acquaintance with the warder on night duty. He was older than the other warders, and he had sagging shoulders, with a crumpled face set in an expression of permanent apology. When he came on duty in the evening he would slide back the peep-hole and ask:
‘All right, son?’
Manning was encouraged by these few words in the silence. He took to asking to be let out to the lavatory each evening; constipated by the impersonal stares of the day warders, he found he could manage to empty his bowels in the night man’s more sympathetic presence. One evening, as he sat on the lavatory, the night man took a cigarette out of his tunic pocket, cut a third of it off with his pocket-knife, lit the two pieces in his own mouth, and gave the smaller one to Manning.
‘Stop the smell,’ he said. ‘Always light up in the lavatory myself.’
‘Thanks,’ said Manning. He was moved by the gesture.
‘What have they got you for, son?’ asked the night man.
‘I don’t know.’
The night man chuckled humourlessly.
‘“I don’t know”,’ he mimicked.
They smoked in silence. The night man stood with his head turned to one side, as if listening for some faint, distant sound. Manning took the opportunity to repeat his various requests. ‘Mother,’ ‘Embassy,’ ‘towel,’ – the words echoed away ridiculously down the corridor from the doorless lavatory, under the weak, bare bulbs in their wire guards. The night man did not even look at Manning. Whatever the sounds were that his ear was cocked to catch, they were not Manning’s complaints.
But one point had got through, at any rate. When Manning had reached the stage of washing his hands, and drying them on the sodden handkerchief, the night man took the end of his cigarette out of his mouth between his second finger and thumb, and flushed it carefully away down the lavatory. Then he said:
‘Should have a towel. To dry yourself.’
‘Can you get me one?’
‘Not my job, son.’
‘Couldn’t you tell someone …?’
‘No one to tell on this shift.’
Some of the time, as Manning sat on the bed in his cell, watching the patch of sunlight from the window creep millimetre by millimetre across the wall, lengthening, then at last reddening, fading, and disappearing, he felt despair. He was abandoned. No one knew where he was. He had fallen off the edge of the world.
But more often he worried. Not so much about whether a charge would be brought against him, or what sentence he would get if it was. These eventualities still seemed remote and improbable. He worried about what would happen when he was taken out of his cell, as he assuredly soon would be, and questioned.
Over and over again he tried to visualize the scene. He imagined that the questioner would be in uniform, but hatless, sitting at a desk in a small room. However the external circumstances changed in his imagination, the questioner’s face remained the same. It was someone exactly like Sasha – anxious, courteous, scrupulous, demanding, personally wounded by any deviation from his own standards of honesty and frankness. Or so, at any rate, he would seem.
At first he would be sympathetic and amiable. He would shake hands. Offer Manning a cigarette. Ask how he was being treated. Manning imagined that he might tell him about not having a towel. The man would apologize. Would promise to get him one.
Then he would ask Manning when he had first met Proctor-Gould. What was the exact nature of the duties he had accepted? What financial arrangement had they come to? Whom had he met in the course of his work as Proctor-Gould’s interpreter? On which dates? Where? The answers to all these questions would be known to the interrogator already, since it had all been done in public, in front of witnesses, within range of microphones. Manning would tell the truth so far as he could remember it. It would tally with the record. The interrogator would remain sympathetic and amiable.
Then, at some stage, he would be asked if Proctor-Gould had ever told him the nature of the secret work upon which he was engaged.
What would he say?
If he said yes he would incriminate not only Proctor-Gould but himself, as Proctor-Gould’s accessory.
If he said no …
Manning could see the puzzled, hurt look come into the interrogator’s eyes, as it did sometimes into Sasha’s. Manning had never asked Proctor-Gould what he was up to? – No. He had helped Proctor-Gould force an entry into the apartment on Kurumalinskaya Street in order to recover his books by force, and he had not asked for any explanation? – Well, Proctor-Gould had said it was because the books had been entrusted to his care by his clients. Who were his clients? – Proctor-Gould hadn’t specified. Manning had accepted that explanation? – Yes.
The interrogator would get up from his desk and go across to the window. With his back to him he would ask quietly: was there nothing that Manning wished to add to his answer? No. And thereafter the questioner’s sympathy and amiability would be gone. Thereafter Manning would be treated, rightly, as a liar.
Manning felt his palms moisten at the thought. No doubt, if they felt he was concealing something really important, they would proceed to harsher methods of questioning. They would bully him. They would keep him awake at night, reduce his diet, make threats. They might very well go further. But already Manning doubted if he had the moral fortitude to resist such complete isolation from sympathy and approval. Wouldn’t it be better to tell them the whole truth in the first place? To be cooperative, to admit he had been wrong? To say he had done it only so as not to betray a comrade? To be ashamed, to ask for clemency?
He did not think he owed any further loyalty to Proctor-Gould, or to the ridiculous oath he had been made to swear. Proctor-Gould had involved him without his consent. He had tried to compel his continued cooperation by telling him two entirely different stories, both of which could not be true. And what version was he offering his interrogators even now, wherever he was? Perhaps it was one which attempted to make Manning out to be the principal. It was impossible to know – he might be trying to exculpate Manning entirely. Manning built structures of indignation and guilt on each hypothesis in turn. But it did not help with the practical question of what he was going to tell the interrogator. He could not guess how Proctor-Gould was likely to behave. Under the shifting sands of explanation and counter-explanation, he realized, he had no idea what sort of person Proctor-Gould was at all.
‘When are they going to question me?’ Manning asked the night man as he sat on the lavatory smoking another third of a cigarette.
‘Impatient, are you?’ said the night man.
‘I’d like to know.’
‘We’d all like to know a lot of things. Have they issued you with a towel yet?’
‘No.’
‘You want to get the towel straight first, son. If you can’t even get a towel to dry yourself on there’s not much point in worrying your head about legal matters.’
Then again, even if he decided what to say about Proctor-Gould, it didn’t end his difficulties. Supposing he was asked about Konstantin and Raya? The security people must have realized that Raya was stealing the books as well as exchanging them. And Proctor-Gould had probably told his interrogator everything that Manning had relayed to him of Konstantin’s activities. Was there any possible point for Manning in trying to deny all knowledge of those activities? Wouldn’t it just make his own position worse without in any way helping Konstantin or Raya? Raya’s father could probably protect them more effectively than he could hope to.
From his own experience it was always better in the end to be honest. Indeed, he had almost no experience of attempting anything but honesty. All ethical aspects apart, wasn’t he simply too unpractised to resort to deceit now? Anyway, if he was not whole-hearted in his attempt to deceive – and he was not – he would not have the slightest chance of being believed. And by being detected in deceit he would make things worse not only for himself, but for all four of them….