MEMORY HOLD THE DOOR

One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had 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 his mind about a Ministry of Fear.  He felt now he had joined its permanent staff.  But it wasn’t the small bureau 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 left it, and it occurred to him almost as a hope that perhaps she had run out into the raid and had been lost forever.  If one loved a woman one couldn’t hope 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 downward with her fists clenched.  He said, “Anna.”

 

Graham Greene, The Ministry Of Fear, London, William Heinemann, 1943.

The Ministry of Fear (Conclusion)

      

I.       I.    

  

     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 bureau 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.  

    II.

    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 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, “Me too.”  It seemed to him that after all one could exaggerate the value of happiness .  .  .

From:  Graham Greene, The Ministry Of Fear, London, William Heinemann, 1943.

Simeon Salomon Images:

Top:  Hypnos, The God Of Sleep

Bottom:  Death Awakening Sleep

The Ministry Of Fear (Foretold)

     Arthur Rowe stepped joyfully back into adolescence, into childhood.  There had always been a fête about this time of year in the vicarage garden, a little way off the Trumpington Road, with the flat Cambridgeshire field beyond the extemporized bandstand, and at the end of the fields the pollarded willows by the stickleback stream and the chalk-pit on the slopes in what in Cambridgeshire they call a hill. He came to these fêtes every year with an odd feeling of excitement – as if anything might happen, as if the familiar pattern of life that afternoon might be altered forever.

  ‘Come and try your luck, sir?’ said the clergyman in a voice which was obviously a baritone at socials.

      'If I could have some coppers.’

     ‘Thirteen for a shilling, sir.’

   Under a little awning there was a cake on a stand surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic sightseers.  A lady was explaining, ‘We clubbed our butter rations – and Mr Tatham was able to get hold of the currants.’

     She turned to Arthur Rowe and said ‘Won’t you take a ticket and guess its weight?’

     He lifted it and said at random ‘Three pounds, five ounces.’

  ‘A very good guess, I should say.   Your wife must have been teaching you.’

  He winced away from the group. ‘Oh no, I’m not married.’

No-Man's Land

5:55 am, Signal Hill

Trying to tie my feelings for this book to unexpressed, unresolved, wrestling thoughts about the Mexico City abduction. Puzzling whether any of these offer purchase out of no-man’s land.


Key problem with no-man’s land : no human audience.


Thank God for cats.  Rose says : “Don’t worry so much.”