A House in Order

by Nigel Dennis

  A: Yes, I do.

  Q: I do not mean important on my account. I mean important on your account. Do you understand?

  A: Yes.

  Q: That you have only one life?

  A: Oh.

  Q: Quite. So let your honesty preserve it. Remember that you are not a prisoner officially, like your friends in the camp. Nor are you a free man, like your countrymen at home. You are ours to hold or get rid of as we please. Do you understand?

  A: Certainly.

  He then questioned me at great length and in great detail. Where and how I had been educated, the names of my teachers, the towns where I had judged flower and vegetable shows, the prizes I had won …

  Q: You have a national reputation, then?

  A: Oh, hardly that, no.

  Q: It is honesty that will protect your life, not false modesty, may I remind you?

  A: In that case, I confess I am well known.

  He then went through my map-making career with the same care, taking it all down patiently in his own hand. He had finished and was fastening the sheets together when the Colonel came into the room and was amused to find me there.

  Q: The Colonel wonders if this interview and your new privileges have aroused your curiosity?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Six months ago, he suggests, you would have thought it safer to answer ‘No’?

  A: Yes.

  Q: He notes the improvement with respect. But he would advise you against getting impertinent ideas in your head. Do you understand?

  A: Yes.

  At which, the Colonel, looking me up and down in a calm way, said quietly in my own language: ‘Not to get too big for your boots,’ and left the room.

  When I had my walk in the garden next day, I felt much easier and hardly afraid at all. I understood from what had been said and what had happened that just by luck there was a chance that I should be taken away to work in the horticultural branch, but that I wasn’t to suppose that this would make me important in any way: it would be just a sensible way of using me. I wasn’t happy at the idea of going somewhere else, because things were going so well where I was now and I felt sure that if I stayed in my den they would look after me better when next winter came. But I was still so afraid of them and remembered so well what they had done to the soldier who took me prisoner that I thought how much safer I might be in a government department, and how quietly I could work in one until the fighting had stopped. I was not such a fool as to think that I would ever see much of ‘the country’s first agronomist’, but he was the only person I had met since I was conscripted who spoke my own language and could send me seed-packets with their Latin names, knowing that I would understand what they were: this sort of thing counts for a lot when you are in the army. I was sure, too, that I would prefer living in a place where I couldn’t see the prison-camp a few hundred yards away, because all my fear of getting put into it had come back, now that the weather was warm again. I guessed that all the questioning I had just had was to check on my credentials, so as to submit them to the agronomist, and I guessed, too, that they wouldn’t have warned me so coldly against feeling cocky if they didn’t believe that something to make me cocky was going to happen. I thought that the best thing I could do was carry on as if nothing had happened, behaving modestly, doing my work, and keeping out of harm’s way. It also struck me that I would make a good impression if I worked in the open garden during my daily hour out, so I plucked up enough courage a few days later to imitate hoeing, raking and forking to the guard and showing that I would be grateful if he could get me the tools.

  He only shrugged his shoulders and frowned, but when he was relieved, passed on my message. A few days passed, as they do even for the smallest thing in the army, and then late one afternoon I saw a man being sent down to the camp and guessed that he would come back with my tools.

  Standing at the staging, where I had been taking leaf-cuttings of the house-leek for the agronomist, I could see the man going down the path to the camp. The work-squads of prisoners were just coming in at the gate and checking in their tools at the shed inside. I saw our man talking to one of the guards and going to wait outside the shed, and when the prisoners had moved off, he was given the tools I had asked for and started back with them. My guard took them over from him when he reached the garden and stood them outside the greenhouse door for me to use next day. If I had known that they were going to come from the camp, I wouldn’t have asked for them, because a lot of my old imaginary fears had begun to come back, and each time I imagined myself travelling off to my new government work, I invented pictures of the Commandant sending his men to take me off the train, or managing to intervene with the authorities to hold up my going, or even get me into his camp with the others. I began to hope so terribly that I would be sent away soon that I thought of all the signs that suggested I wouldn’t be – like the cutting I was taking, which couldn’t hope to be well-rooted for some months, and the uniform and boots I’d been given, which no part of an army is going to do if it expects you to be sent to another part. Luckily, I felt steadier whenever I looked round me and saw how well my work was going, and it pleased me to notice that when the guard who had threatened to cut my throat was on duty, he lingered and looked attentively at my way of working, as if he almost respected me now. When things are going badly in a greenhouse, one is very ashamed of it, but when things really go as they should, it is a great tonic and one is tempted to show off, like the gardeners on television, a breed I have always despised for pretending so hard to look and talk like ‘real’ gardeners, as if this excused their ignorance of grammar. But in wartime, one’s worse characteristics are brought out, and I remember how I held up my pots to the light when that wretched guard was looking, and even moved to and fro with the sort of slow walk and expression that are meant to suggest a cunning gardener: it was a long time since anyone had respected me.

  I worked happily enough in the garden for a couple of days on my hours out, but always with the fork, because everything was very neglected. On the third day, I reached for the rake. to tidy what I had done, and saw a wedge of paper where the shaft went into the head. On it was written:

  BRAVO!! 800 STRONG BEHIND YOU, COCKY.

  STAND BY FOR ORDERS. MACKENZIE.

  I went on raking, holding this bit of paper against the shaft with my fingers. It broke off in my trembling and was caught by the wind and carried into the suckers of a big lilac, but I only looked after it in a dull way and kept on working the rake. The guard came up later and tapped his wrist with a frown, as if he was puzzled at my not knowing that my hour was up, and I went back into my house while he laid the tools under the verandah.

  For the first time since I had been a prisoner, nothing I looked at in the house seemed to have a meaning any more: I might have been outside, seeing everything through panes of glass. It was the same with the bits of thoughts that came and went in my mind: they just came in a dull way and left without touching me. I didn’t even know how ill I felt until my food came and made me too sick to eat it. Then, just as it was getting dark and the guard had been changed, I saw everything in the house all at once, as one does in gardens in the evening light – my old paper pots, the smart new ones, the leaf cuttings, the yellow soap-bars, all my neat arrangements and the practical way I had placed everything – and I burst into tears, because there was no rhyme or reason in anything at all, and nothing to do and nowhere to go. As soon as it was really dark, I got into my shed and lay down on my blankets, where it was a relief just to lie and shake, knowing that nobody could see me or ask a question that I would have to answer. Only one strong feeling kept trying to come through to me, and I tried not to let it because I felt it was too strong for me to face – this was the feeling of a wicked wrong being done to me, something evil in the way it meant to ruin me. I never thought to wonder who MACKENZIE was: just the name as I had seen it, in horrible black letters, was enough to plague my mind and make the whole of that night a misery of fright and i
ndignation. Only just as it was getting light and I was thinking of getting up did I have another thought that was just as shocking in its way: I found myself saying: ‘You thought that you were watching them. But they were watching you.’

  Stupid country people, the real yokels, judge every man by how early he gets up. The idiot who admired my greenhouse work was on guard when I came out of my shed before sunrise: the extra respect he showed in his face made me realize how dreadfully things had changed for me. I no longer had any heart to show off, and his admiration only reminded me that eight hundred pairs of eyes would soon be turned on me from the camp. ‘I’m done, I’m done’ was all I could think: how could I stand all day with my back to them, how could I get my privacy back again? This shock to my future seemed even more dreadful when I saw that it changed all my past too – all those blind figures trudging up the fields in their heavy coats and singing to themselves in the cold and snow, they had sung perhaps for me as they watched me dancing on the ice in my beard and my rags and saw me shaking my purple fists and screaming damnation. Their answer BRAVO!! showed how little they knew me: I had survived by myself with no help from them: COCKY was MACKENZIE’S word, not mine.

  Indignation made me cool down in the end because I made up my mind that they had no rights on me and that the sensible thing to do would be just to carry on, avoiding more than ever any behaviour that would get me into trouble. But I’d no sooner decided this and begun to feel calmer and stronger than I thought of that wretched scrap of paper and felt I must have been stupid with shock to have left it blowing loose for anyone to read. So my whole morning became another agony of imagining horrible things – of ‘the student of character’ sitting in his chair and reading MACKENZIE’S message, of their interrogating me, of everything going back to where it had been at the beginning, with their suspicion growing, their cruelty replacing their smiles, and so on to my glasses being taken off, a last walk down the path, the rifles, etc., but worst of all the brutal treatment they would give me first for having ‘pretended’ to be so harmless. I longed for it to rain and soak the paper, and I even saw the block letters being washed away to nothing in an April shower, but it was a fine day and put me in a sweat while I dreamt of rain. When the guard let me out for my hour and gave me my tools, I had no hope left of finding the paper, but I got it immediately, exactly where I had seen it last – only a tiny, dirty scrap, really, and not at all the bright, white object that I had made it into in my panic. Soon after I had put it in my pocket, the young officer came flying down the path and gave me and my work a grin, which scared me out of my life when I thought what would have happened if he had seen me a moment before, or if he chose to search me now. But I was much too frightened to pull the paper out again, so it went back into the house with me when my hour was up. As soon as dusk came I took it out and tore it to bits with my nails, but doing it so carefully made me notice every letter a second time, so that even when the paper was dust it hung in my mind like a scream. What’s more, the camp kept drawing my eyes, and the more I told myself: ‘You’ve no need to look; why pay any attention; what business is MACKENZIE to you?’, and so on, the more my eyes snatched looks, as if I expected to see 800 looking back at me and wanted to dodge them before they caught my eye. The sun stayed on me after it had left them, and it seemed hours before it set and left me staring at their lights through the dark, knowing that they could see nothing of me.

  I got some consolation that night because it struck me that MACKENZIE was too late to interfere. If I got marching orders from the agronomist I would never see the camp again: the whole world would be different. I told myself that it was reasonable to hope that in a month, or a fortnight, or a week, or tomorrow, the interpreter might come down the verandah steps and tell me to get ready for a journey, because surely that had been the whole point of his long questioning the other day: my transfer was only a matter of time. And once I began to feel that this was so, all my dreaming began again and went on for hours – a mixture of reasonable things and absurd ones, as day-dreaming is. A sort of military cart came for my pots: I superintended the packing with my usual care. I was put on a train; I saw the camp turn out of sight; I had said good-bye to the ‘student of character’ and he had paid me a dry compliment: the young officer had grinned and waved. I saw myself in the long passage of a huge building and a well-kept door with Department of Wartime Agronomy inscribed, and then for whole minutes on end I fancied the agronomist himself, talking to me in the language of plants, and always with that grave, intelligent manner he had had when he came to the greenhouse. Some of the other things I pictured made me think myself foolish even while I was picturing them, but they gave me so much happiness that I couldn’t stop: I saw streams and trees and wonderful fields of corn, and myself in the middle talking expertly about everything, and some wonderful way being found by me of raising food-production: I still lived as a prisoner, but in a country house where there was no war, and my guards were really servants: I looked up from my meals at a countryside more quiet and beautiful than can be imagined – though I did imagine it, over and over, adding touches to it all the time. When I had had enough of this happy end, I went back to the beginning and started again, with the interpreter coming down the verandah steps, my transfer papers in his hand, and when my commonsense interrupted and I knew that all these visions were invented, I was still not disappointed, because even if I subtracted every one of them there still remained a solid chance that before long I’d leave here and start a completely different life in a completely different world. ‘There is no need to look at the camp when you wake up in the morning,’ I told myself before I went to sleep. ‘The camp has nothing to do with what is going to happen.’

  But I spent all the next week like a fool, making everything worse for myself. When I woke in the morning, the first thing I saw was the word MACKENZIE, and I soon had a picture of him invented in my mind – a man the opposite of all the things I was myself. The word ORDERS that he had sent me made me even more frightened than I felt of him: what orders could he send me but ones that would ruin me? Whenever my thoughts asked this question – and they did every morning in exactly the same way – I would think back on all I’d gone through and all I’d managed to pull out of the wreck without a soul’s help, and I would look at the neatness of the greenhouse and think of the state I’d found it in and what I’d achieved – and each time I had these thoughts I got enraged to think that MACKENZIE should claim a right on me – what did he know, tucked up with 800 friends, what life had been for me and how I had saved myself? But I knew from his message that he knew very well and I felt that that made his behaviour even more wicked: by what right did he ask me to go further when he knew to a T how far I had gone already? When I felt my teeth beginning to chatter with anger and fright, at this point, my mind always turned the same way, soothing me with assurances – that no MACKENZIE had any rights on me, that he was only a prisoner himself, that this was all my own life and nobody else’s, that if I went on my own way, sensibly and with dignity and calm, I would be safe from MACKENZIE and need have nothing to do with him. Working things out this way always gave me an hour or so of relief – the sort one feels when a problem that has seemed horrible and perplexing turns out to be one that only asks a little coolness and commonsense. At those moments of relief, MACKENZIE’S face almost faded away from my mind, and even the word ORDERS didn’t matter. I did my chores with a peaceful feeling and took pride in my household arrangements: sometimes when I looked at the order and even the charm of my achievements, particularly now that my cuttings were beginning to look like plants and the whole staging taking on the look of a healthy little green forest, I felt that nothing could touch me if I followed life as it was following me. But the trouble was – every day the same – that this happy hour was like a dream and I always woke up from it. Suddenly it would all fall to pieces: the word ORDERS would jump into my mind again and frighten the breath out of me, and I would feel MACKENZIE’S eyes on my back
and suddenly go through all my old horrors – being called before the Colonel, watching the escort come up with their rifles, my glasses folded away, my face all beaten and red with blood. Then, after shivering and shaking and trying to drive away these pictures, I would think of my only hope, the agronomist, and pull myself round by praying to him and putting his face in MACKENZIE’S place, like believing in something because you must. ‘He must come, he must save me, he’s my only hope, I shall be dead otherwise’, my mind insisted, and I kept seeing his grave, kind, intelligent face and the sober way he walked, only smiling politely at the Colonel’s fatuous jokes, always serious about his interests, always knowing that war is not forever and that we live by growing things. As I said, my train of thought was exactly the same every day, beginning with terror of MACKENZIE, enjoying one hour’s dream and then collapsing into the worst fear of all, and it always ended with this hysteria of being saved by the agronomist and carried away into a safe, peaceful place. By the time I went to sleep, tomorrow was always a day when MACKENZIE was too late and the interpreter came down the verandah steps in the early sunshine, carrying an envelope in his hand.

  The Colonel was the first to come down the verandah steps next morning. He passed without a glance at me and, followed by the adjutant, got into a military car on the gravel road and was driven away. In the next hour or so, nearly all the officers I knew came down the path and left by the road as if assigned to an exercise somewhere: it was not until about 11 o’clock that my week’s dream came true and I saw the interpreter come down the steps and turn towards me. He closed the door when he was inside, and looking me up and down, as if inspecting me with a view to something, he said in a flat, correct voice: