"The top flat," Liz almost shouted, "somebody's very ill. Who's got a key?" The old woman looked at her for a moment, then called toward the front room, where the shop was.
"Arthur, come in here, Arthur, there's a girl here!"
A man in brown overalls and a gray trilby hat looked round the door and said, "Girl?"
"There's someone seriously ill in the top flat," said Liz. "He can't get to the front door to open it. Have you a key?"
"No," replied the grocer, "but I've got a hammer," and they hurried up the stairs together, the grocer, still in his trilby, carrying a heavy screwdriver and a hammer. He knocked on the door sharply, and they waited breathless for an answer. There was none.
"I heard a groan before, I promise I did," Liz whispered.
"Will you pay for this door if I bust it?"
"Yes."
The hammer made a terrible noise. With three blows he had wrenched out a piece of the frame and the lock came with it. Liz went in first and the grocer followed. It was bitterly cold in the room and dark, but on the bed in the corner they could make out the figure of a man.
Oh God, thought Liz, if he's dead I don't think I can touch him. But she went to him and he was alive. Drawing the curtains, she knelt beside the bed.
"I'll call you if I need you, thank you," she said without looking back, and the grocer nodded and went downstairs.
"Alec, what is it, what's making you ill? What is it, Alec?"
Leamas moved his head on the pillow. His sunken eyes were closed. The dark beard stood out against the pallor of his face.
"Alec, you must tell me, please, Alec." She was holding one of his hands in hers. The tears were running down her cheeks. Desperately she wondered what to do; then, getting up, she ran to the tiny kitchen and put on a kettle. She wasn't quite clear what she would make, but it comforted her to do something. Leaving the kettle on the gas she picked up her handbag, took Leamas' key from the bedside table and ran downstairs, down the four flights into the street, and crossed the road to Mr. Sleaman, the chemist. She bought some calf's-foot jelly, some breast of chicken, some essence of beef and a bottle of Aspirin. She got to the door, then went back and bought a packet of rusks. Altogether it cost her sixteen shillings, which left four shillings in her handbag and eleven pounds in her post office savings bank book, but she couldn't draw any of that till tomorrow. By the time she returned to his flat the kettle was just boiling.
She made the beef tea like her mother used to in a glass with a teaspoon in to stop its cracking, and all the time she glanced toward him as if she were afraid he was dead.
She had to prop him up to make him drink the tea. He had only one pillow and there were no cushions in the room, so taking his overcoat down from the back of the door she made a bundle of it and arranged it behind the pillow. It frightened her to touch him; he was so drenched in sweat that his short gray hair was damp and slippery. Putting the cup beside the bed, she held his head with one hand and fed him the tea with the other. After he had taken a few spoonfuls, she crushed two Aspirin and gave them to him in. the spoon. She talked to him as if he were a child, sitting on the edge of the bed looking at him, sometimes letting her fingers run over his head and face, whispering his name over and over again: "Alec, Alec."
Gradually his breathing became more regular, his body more relaxed, as he drifted from the taut pain of fever to the calm of sleep; Liz, watching him, sensed that the worst was over. Suddenly she realized it was almost dark.
Then she felt ashamed because she knew she should have cleaned and tidied. Jumping up, she fetched the carpet sweeper and a duster from the kitchen and set to work with feverish energy. She found a clean tea cloth and spread it neatly on the bedside table and she washed up the odd cups and saucers which lay around the kitchen. When everything was done she looked at her watch and it was half-past eight. She put the kettle on and went back to the bed. Leamas was looking at her.
"Alec, don't be cross, please don't," she said. "I'll go, I promise I will, but let me make you a proper meal. You're ill, you can't go on like this, you're—Oh, Alec," and she broke down and wept, holding both hands over her face, the tears running between her fingers like the tears of a child. He let her cry, watching her with his brown eyes, his hands holding the sheet.
* * *
She helped him wash and shave and she found some clean bedclothes. She gave him some calf's-foot jelly, and some breast of chicken from the jar she'd bought at Mr. Sleaman's. Sitting on the bed she watched him eat, and she thought she had never been so happy before.
Soon he fell asleep, and she drew the blanket over his shoulders and went to the window. Parting the threadbare curtains, she raised the sash and looked out. The two windows in the courtyard above the warehouse were lit. In one she could see the flickering blue shadow of a television screen, the figures before it held motionless in its spell; in the other a woman, quite young, was arranging curlers in her hair. Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.
* * *
She fell asleep in the armchair and did not wake until it was nearly light, feeling stiff and cold. She went to the bed: Leamas stirred as she looked at him and she touched his lips with the tip of her finger. He did not open his eyes but gently took her arm and drew her down onto the bed, and suddenly she wanted him terribly, and nothing mattered, and she kissed him again and again and when she looked at him he seemed to be smiling.
She came every day for six days. He never spoke to her much and once, when she asked him if he loved her, he said he didn't believe in fairy tales. She would lie on the bed, her head against his chest, and sometimes he would put his thick fingers in her hair, holding it quite tight, and Liz laughed and said it hurt. On Friday evening she found him dressed but not shaved, and she wondered why he hadn't shaved. For some imperceptible reason she was alarmed. Little things were missing from the room—his clock and the cheap portable radio that had been on the table. She wanted to ask and did not dare. She had bought some eggs and ham and she cooked them for their supper while Leamas sat on the bed and smoked one cigarette after another. When supper was ready he went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of red wine.
He hardly spoke at supper, and she watched him, her fear growing until she could bear it no more and she cried out suddenly, "Alec...oh Alec...what is it? Is it good-bye?"
He got up from the table, took her hands and kissed her in a way he'd never done before, and spoke to her softly for a long time, told her things she only dimly understood, only half heard because all the time she knew it was the end and nothing mattered any more.
"Good-bye, Liz," he said. "Good-bye," and then: "Don't follow me. Not again." Liz nodded and muttered, "Like we said." She was thankful for the biting cold of the street and for the dark which hid her tears.
* * *
It was the next morning, a Saturday, that Leamas asked at the grocer's for credit. He did it without much artistry, in a way not calculated to ensure him success. He ordered half a dozen items—they didn't come to more than a pound—and when they had been wrapped and put into the shopping bag he said, "You'd better send me that account."
The grocer smiled a difficult smile and said, "I'm afraid I can't do that." The "sir" was definitely missing.
"Why the hell not?" asked Leamas, and the queue behind him stirred uneasily. "Don't know you," replied the grocer.
"Don't be bloody silly," said Leamas, "I've been coming here for four months." The grocer colored. "We always ask for a banker's reference before giving credit," he said, and Leamas lost his temper.
"Don't talk bloody cock!" he shouted. "Half your customers have never seen the inside of a bank and never bloody well will" This was heresy beyond bearing, since it was true.
"I don't know you," the grocer repeated thickly, "and I don't like you. Now get out of my shop." And he tried to recover the parcel which unfortunately Leamas was already holding.
Opinions later differed as to what happened next. Some said the grocer,
in trying to recover the bag, pushed Leamas; others say he did not. Whether he did or not, Leamas hit him, most people think twice, without disengaging his right hand, which still held the shopping bag. He seemed to deliver the blow not with his fist but with the side of his left hand, and then, as part of the same phenomenally rapid movement, with the left elbow; and the grocer fell straight over and lay as still as a rock. It was said in court later, and not contested by the defense, that the grocer had two injuries—a fractured cheekbone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from the second. The coverage in the daily press was adequate, but not over-elaborate.
6
Contact
At night he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds of the prisoners. There was a boy who sobbed and an old lag who sang "On Ilkley Moor bar t'at," beating out the time on his food tin. There was a warder who shouted, "Shut up, George, you miserable sod," after each verse, but no one took any notice. There was an Irishman who sang songs about the IRA, though the others said he was in for rape.
Leamas took as much exercise as he could during the day in the hope that he would sleep at night; but it was no good. At night you knew you were in prison: at night there was nothing, no trick of vision or self-delusion which saved you from the nauseating enclosure of the cell. You could not keep out the taste of prison, the smell of prison uniform, the stench of prison sanitation heavily disinfected, the noises of captive men. It was then, at night, that the indignity of captivity became urgently insufferable, it was then that Leamas longed to walk in the friendly sunshine of a London park. It was then that he hated the grotesque steel cage that held him, had to force back the urge to fall upon the bars with his bare fists, to split the skulls of his guards and burst into the free, free space of London. Sometimes he thought of Liz. He would direct his mind toward her briefly like the shutter of a camera, recall for a moment the soft-hard touch of her long body, then put her from his memory. Leamas was not a man accustomed to living on dreams.
He was contemptuous of his cellmates, and they hated him. They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He preserved from collectivization some discernible part of his personality; he could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his family or his children. They knew nothing of Leamas; they waited, but he did not come to them. New prisoners are largely of two kinds—there are those who for shame, fear or shock wait in fascinated horror to be initiated into the lore of prison life, and there are those who trade on their wretched novelty in order to endear themselves to the community. Leamas did neither of these things. He seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated him because, like the world outside, he did not need them.
After about ten days they had had enough. The great had had no homage, the small had had no comfort, so they crowded him in the dinner queue. Crowding is a prison ritual akin to the eighteenth century practice of jostling. It has the virtue of an apparent accident, in which the prisoner's mess tin is upturned and its contents spilt on his uniform. Leamas was barged from one side, while from the other an obliging hand descended on his forearm, and the thing was done. Leamas said nothing, looked thoughtfully at the- two men on either side of him, and accepted in silence the filthy rebuke of a warder who knew quite well what had happened.
Four days later, while working with a hoe on the prison flower bed, he seemed to stumble. He was holding the hoe with both hands across his body, the end of the handle protruding about six inches from his right fist. As he strove to recover his balance the prisoner to his right doubled up with a grunt of agony, his arms across his stomach. There was no more crowding after that.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all about prison was the brown paper parcel when he left. In a ridiculous way it reminded him of the marriage service—with this ring I thee wed, with this paper parcel I return thee to society. They handed it to him and made him sign for it, and it contained all he had in the world. There was nothing else. Leamas felt it the most dehumanizing moment of the three months, and he determined to throw the parcel away as soon as he got outside.
He seemed a quiet prisoner. There had been no complaints against him. The Governor, who was vaguely interested in his case, secretly put the whole thing down to the Irish blood he swore he could detect in Leamas.
"What are you going to do," he asked, "when you leave here?" Leamas replied, without a ghost of a smile, that he thought he would make a new start, and the Governor said that was an excellent thing to do.
"What about your family?" he asked. "Couldn't you make it up with your wife?"
"I'll try," Leamas had replied indifferently; "but she's remarried."
The probation officer wanted Leamas to become a male nurse at a mental home in Buckinghamshire and Leamas agreed to apply. He even took down the address and noted the train times from Marylebone.
"The rail's electrified as far as Great Missenden, now," the probation officer added, and Leamas said that would be a help. So they gave him the parcel and he left. He took a bus to Marble Arch and walked. He had a bit of money in his pocket and he intended to give himself a decent meal He thought he would walk through Hyde Park to Piccadilly, then through Green Park and St. James's Park to Parliament Square, then wander down Whitehall to the Strand where he could go to the big cafe near Charing Cross Station and get a reasonable steak for six shillings.
London was beautiful that day. Spring was late and the parks were filled with crocuses and daffodils. A cool, cleaning wind was blowing from the south; he could have walked all day. But he still had the parcel and he had to get rid of it. The little baskets were too small; he'd look absurd trying to push his parcel into one of those. He supposed there were one or two things he ought to take out, his wretched pieces of paper—insurance card, driving license and his E.93 (whatever that was) in a buff OHMS envelope—but suddenly he couldn't be bothered. He sat down on a bench and put the parcel beside him, not too close, and moved a little away from it. After a couple of minutes he walked back toward the footpath, leaving the parcel where it lay. He had just reached the footpath when he heard a shout; he turned, a little sharply perhaps, and saw a man in an army mackintosh beckoning to him, holding the brown paper parcel in the other hand.
Leamas had his hands in his pockets and he left them there, and stood, looking back over his shoulder at the man in the mackintosh. The man hesitated, evidently expecting Leamas to come to him or give some sign of interest, but Leamas gave none. Instead, he shrugged and continued along the footpath. He heard another shout and ignored it, and he knew the man was coming after him. He heard the footsteps on the gravel, half running, approaching rapidly, and then a voice, a little breathless, a little aggravated:
"Here you—I say!" and then he had drawn level, so that Leamas stopped, turned and looked at him.
"Yes?"
"This is your parcel, isn't it? You left it on the seat. Why didn't you stop when I called you?"
Tall, with rather curly brown hair; orange tie and pale green shirt; a little bit petulant, a little bit of a pansy, thought Leamas. Could be a schoolmaster, ex LondonSchool of Economics and runs a suburban drama club. Weak-eyed.
"You can put it back," said Leamas. "I don't want it."
The man colored. "You can't just leave it there," he said, "it's litter."
"I bloody well can," Leamas replied. "Somebody will find a use for it." He was going to move on, but the stranger was still standing in front of him, holding the parcel in both arms as if it were a baby. "Get out of the light," said Leamas. "Do you mind?"
"Look here," said the stranger, and his voice had risen a key, "I was trying to do you a favor; why do you have to be so damned rude?"
"If you're so anxious to do me a favor," Leamas replied, "why have you been following me for the last half hour?"
He's pretty good, thought Leamas. He hasn't flinched but he must be shaken rigid.
"I thought you were somebody I once knew in Berlin, if you must know."
"So you
followed me for half an hour?"
Leamas' voice was heavy with sarcasm, his brown eyes never left the other's face.
"Nothing like half an hour. I caught sight of you in Marble Arch and I thought you were Alec Leamas, a man I borrowed some money from. I used to be in the BBC in Berlin and there was this man I borrowed some money from. I've had a bad conscience about it ever since and that's why I followed you. I wanted to be sure."
Leamas went on looking at him, not speaking, and thought he wasn't all that good but he was good enough. His story was scarcely plausible—that didn't matter. The point was that he'd produced a new one and stuck to it after Leamas had wrecked what promised to be a classic approach.
"I'm Leamas," he said at last. "Who the hell are you?"
* * *
He said his name was Ashe, with an "E" he added quickly, and Leamas knew he was lying. He pretended not to be quite sure that Leamas really was Leamas so over lunch they opened the parcel and looked at the National Insurance card like, thought Leamas, a couple of sissies looking at a dirty postcard. Ashe ordered lunch with just a fraction too little regard for expense, and they drank some Frankenwein to remind them of the old days. Leamas began by insisting he couldn't remember Ashe, and Ashe said he was surprised. He said it in the sort of tone that suggested he was hurt. They met at a party, he said, which Derek Williams gave in his flat off the Ku-damm (he got that right), and all the press boys had been there; surely Alec remembered that? No, Leamas did not. Well surely he remembered Derek Williams from the Observer, that nice man who gave such lovely pizza parties? Leamas had a lousy memory for names, after all they were talking about '54; a lot of water had flown under the bridge since then...Ashe remembered (his Christian name was William, by-the-bye, most people called him Bill), Ashe remembered vividly. They'd been drinking stingers, brandy and crème de menthe, and were all rather tiddly, and Derek had provided some really gorgeous girls, half the cabaret from the Malkasten, surely Alec remembered now? Leamas thought it was probably coming back to him, if Bill would go on a bit.
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