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.’