A House in Order

by Nigel Dennis

  Just at dusk, as usual, the prisoners came back through the big gate – and about fifteen minutes later the alarm began to scream, taking my breath away with surprise. Just as I had imagined, the church bell took it up, and warders began to run across the compound. Little figures in uniform seemed to appear from every direction, but all of them, as if obsessed, collected and then spread out at the double in the fields behind the camp. My two guards patrolled as usual up and down, but their discipline was not enough for their excitement, and each time they turned I could see them strain their eyes across the valley. The verandah became suddenly like a grandstand, with officers lining the rail and staring into the distance, until the dusk turned to darkness and the fields faded out of sight. But even then the lights of cars could be seen hurrying away over the field roads, while the bells of churches even further away took up the ringing.

  When the noise was at its loudest, I heard my shed door being opened, and a little later it was closed. I couldn’t believe my good luck at first because I couldn’t believe anyone could be so mad to choose such a moment to run, but when I got the courage later to look into the shed, there was no sign of anybody and only the mark where he had slept. I felt so content I could hardly sleep; it was like a miracle that a man should be so crazy as to go at such a time.

  But when it got light, I saw the idea. Soldiers and civilians were narrowing a circle all round the prison, moving inwards yard by yard as if tightening a belt. It hadn’t struck them that their man had got as far as me – I suppose MACKENZIE had rigged things in such a way that the escape seemed to have happened at the very moment it was discovered. But though it frightened me to think of such cleverness and efficiency, because of the risk it had meant for me, the interpreter came down the steps while I was thinking about it and said in a cold voice: ‘Your horticultural friend will be coming for you shortly – in two, or possibly three, days. Get ready to go – and count yourself lucky.’

  I began to think that fate or destiny or something of that sort of name had arrived suddenly to make the whole of life happy. I had been happy enough just knowing that MACKENZIE’S visitor had gone, but to be made twice as happy by knowing that I was going too turned me into a sort of fool. I walked up and down my house saying good-bye, almost laughing, to each guard as he paced into sight, to the verandah and the steps, to the camp below me, the circle of beaters around it, to MACKENZIE and my 799 friends. I started to feel proud of what I had done, with everything against me – surviving the winter, outwitting the Colonel, sheltering a prisoner, etc., etc., and with all these things to stand up to, still able to have reared three hundred-odd plants, all in marvellous health, and some of them rare and hardly known in the best botanical gardens. I gave all my happiness to them, spending the next three hours or so talking to them in an absurd way while I watered and fed them, and when I saw that one of the agronomist’s leaf-cuttings had put out roots into the gravel, I thought it mad that such a third happiness could be piled on me, and began to laugh and strut about and feel even more my old self than in my best peacetime days. My friend the guard was still black and surly, but I ignored him as the clod he was, and even when the young officer passed without so much as a glance at me, I only felt amused to think how helpless he was to worry me now.

  With all this to satisfy me, it was almost dark – and the beaters drawing in a tight circle round the camp walls – before I thought of getting ready to go and began studying my pots and wondering which of them I might be forced to leave behind. Next morning, I began by putting all the most unusual ones in a square together, such as the cranesbills, storksbills, the house-leek and my cuttings, and then adding the best examples of the more ordinary things, until what with a good many afterthoughts I had such a collection ready that there was little left to leave behind – and even the thought of leaving those made my hair stand on end as I thought of the house I had cleaned up so carefully going back to what it had been when I came, and every plant collapsed under the sun within a week. I found myself wishing that I wasn’t going at all, it seemed so wicked and destructive, and for a few moments I saw it all in my imagination – the stuffing blown out of the holes in the glass, the dust filling the house, the dead plants toppled onto their sides, the flies and parasites crawling and humming everywhere and the glass sheets growing dingier and shabbier week by week, until anyone who passed the wreck would wonder just as I had done at first what sort of monster had left such a disgusting spectacle behind. This made me want to take away with me every last plant in the whole house – which reminded me that it would be a job taking even the ones I had selected, because I had no boxes and hardly anything but rotten cartons.

  When I went into the shed to see what was available, I saw what I had missed before – a folded paper left by my visitor, held down at one corner by a pebble. The message was written faintly with a hard pencil:

  THANKS, MATE. MAC SAYS YOU TRUE HERO WILL SEND ANOTHER TEN DAYS TIME EXACT

  I went on with my work, as one does when one is too shocked to stop, and soon had the rotten cartons out of the shed and into the light of the house. But the sight of these miserable containers for all the plants I meant to take was so hopeless that after the first look I sat down on my chair and almost gave up hope of taking anything. Then, the news I had just read began to break in and made me forget even my plants, because I was so thankful to know that MACKENZIE couldn’t do any more harm to me and I would be far out of his reach if not tomorrow, the day after. This got me out of my chair to where I had left the note, which I tore to shreds as I had the first one, and then with my boots scrubbed at the form the messenger had left in his sleeping place until no sign was left. But because the shock still kept coming back, I found myself having to repeat reminders again and again – such as ‘It is all quite simple. You won’t be here’ and ‘You have nothing to get desperate about. You’ll not be here’ – until I was fairly calm again and felt only hatred of MACKENZIE for trying to make use of me again. And so on, all through that whole day, with the shock coming back whenever I had really forgotten it and me having to tell myself again that all was well. All I wanted to think of was the next morning, with the sun rising over the valley and, after my mug of coffee, the agronomist’s car coming into sight on the road below. Long before they blew the camp reveille, I had my blankets folded and tied and my few things in newspaper, and the house-leek cuttings ready to hand to carry with me. I had a bad conscience about my plants and being ready now to leave them all, but thanks to MACKENZIE even my sense of duty didn’t matter compared with my relief in escaping him.

  But no car came for me all that day, though I must have seen fifty at least running to and from the camp – and praying each time that each one of them would turn up the gravel road and be for me. But it was easy to guess that every car was connected with MACKENZIE’S business, not mine, because all that day the big gates stayed shut and the most the prisoners got was an hour’s walk in the compound, one platoon at a time. Every now and then, an officer would appear at the verandah beside me and pause in his duty to lean his hands on the rail and stare curiously down at the camp: even my guards had no interest in me or their household duties and could hardly wait for the moment in their patrol when they could turn and face the valley again. That afternoon, a squad of four, led by the young officer, inspected the garden foot by foot, and when they were done came to the greenhouse door, where the young officer without a word to me or even looking at me, walked through the house, looked into the shed and then returned into the garden. It seemed to me that nobody expected to find anything, but that they were preparing for something they might be accused of.

  One feels a fool going through the old routine when one has already left it at heart and is only full of disappointment at being there to do it. But when dusk came, and there was no agronomist, I turned on the tap as always and did my rounds, saying to myself that this was only the second day and that the third must certainly be the one. I was so confident, even though disappointed,
that I never even thought to myself: ‘It must be tomorrow if you are going to escape MACKENZIE.’ But just doing the rounds hurt my feelings enough, because nobody who has never had a greenhouse can know what a wonderful place it is to be and the way in which the things you grow there respond to the care you give them, so that it is like treachery to desert them. When I looked at the cranesbills alone, I said to myself: ‘If you were a TRUE HERO, you would never let them die’ and tried to imagine the sort of grower who would tie himself to the staging or sham all sorts of sickness rather than let himself be taken away – and in April, of all months, which is June under glass. My mind began to work so many ways at once that I hardly knew what I was thinking of doing – going one moment to the shed and finding strips of cloth to strengthen the cartons, then in a sweat to think of MACKENZIE, then in panic wondering if the agronomist would come, and imagining one second the Colonel’s hard face and, the next, another form stretched on the shed floor and dogs and soldiers bursting in, etc. And then, before it got quite dark, I looked at everything in sight for the first time, as one does when one is leaving a place forever: I looked at the guards and saw their faces and uniforms in details I had never noticed, and saw how the verandah was made and what was really in the garden, etc., all as if I had just arrived and was inspecting a new life. As for my plants, I couldn’t believe I had grown them or worked with them for months, and when I sat on my chair and stared at the foliage and buds, it made me wonder what world I was in and how I could be in it. Then I happened to notice my hands and saw that they were twitching and trembling as if I was going mad, which frightened me enough to pull myself together and try to get some sleep, though I dreamt all night that I was a traitor.

  The agronomist never came next day. All that happened was that my old guard was taken away and two other men, in different uniforms, put in their places. On the day after, they let the prisoners out of the camp as usual, but with cars that had never been there before patrolling the roads round the fields. Everything at our house and garden had seemed like an island before, with its own powers, but in the next days all that was changed – I never saw one of our officers appear, but cars stopped on the gravel road and officers and NCOs I had never seen before came up the path and disappeared into the house. I was even amazed to see what I had never thought possible – an elderly man in civilian clothes carrying a despatch case walking up the verandah with two uniformed women behind him carrying each a file: I felt I had never seen a civilian or woman before, and it was all a bad omen. But the worst was that with such a change in the days I lost count of them – which seemed an incredible thing to do, knowing by now how punctual MACKENZIE would be and what I must expect on the tenth night. But the loss of my counting was just the last straw, because when that went I lost the last of my strength and went into a daze where I hardly cared any more what might happen. All the things I knew and recognized had changed into strange things that made no sense to me – the house, the verandah, the guards, the arriving and departing strangers, the routine of the camp, the movements of the prisoners and the patrolling cars – they were all beyond my understanding and exhausted me even to think of them. The only steady things I had were my own plants, which kept on growing just the same no matter how much the rest of the world changed and how many strangers appeared from nowhere. As nobody paid the slightest attention to me any more, not even thinking of letting me out, I only walked up and down my strip all day, counting the steps for health’s sake, shrugging my shoulders, or sitting in my chair staring at my pots – I knew every one of them, but not myself when I saw myself sometimes in the glass, as thin as a rail with a beard and a dreadful face.

  But outside they went on with all their preparations, which reached me at last. An NCO with three men, total strangers to me, stood on the path looking at the garden, which was still very bare, and at last turned to the greenhouse. The NCO came in and after giving me a nod ran his eyes over the pots and gave orders to his three men. While they were gone, he leant humming on the staging, addressing one or two words to me and smiling vaguely when he saw I didn’t understand. Then his men came back with a variety of trays and boxes, and in five minutes they had cleared the staging of every living thing and carried it all carefully up the verandah steps. When the last plant had gone – except for the cuttings, which I had stood in the shade on the floor – the NCO shut the door behind him and, with a last nod to me through the glass, went on to his next business. I nodded back to him, because it was automatic with me now to make no trouble if I could help it; but in a numb way, because I was past feeling anything deeply. I imagined a man like MACKENZIE picking up a sliver of glass and cutting the NCO’s throat, and it comforted me most of that day, as I sat looking at the empty lines of slats, to think for once of another person, rather than myself, being beaten half to death and led away at last by a squad of riflemen. But for some reason, I thought mostly of how unnatural and painful it had always been in peacetime when I myself took out plants to show somewhere – how pointless and ugly the house looked without them, as if one was a beast to rob one’s works for the sake of prizes, and being known to everyone as the greatest of one’s kind.

  So many cars lined up on the gravel road next morning, and so many people in different uniforms and civvies came up the path that there was not a trace left of the old peace and quiet. I was damping down and adjusting the ventilators like a zombie – there being no plants to do it for – when a corporal came with two men and led me up the steps into the house.

  They took me through the rooms I knew into a lecture hall I had never seen before and which had been very carefully arranged, with all my plants disposed and a uniformed fool with a watering-can pretending to put the final touches to their health. There was a sort of chairman’s or president’s table and chair on the lecture dais, and below it tables covered with files and books – and so many people making such a din and giving so many orders that it hurt my ears to hear them. The men were laughing constantly, as Swedes do, guffawing loudly and suddenly whenever they spoke to each other, as if laughing was as natural to them as shooting someone, and they kept treading on the toes of the silent women who were doing the fetching and carrying of documents in neat uniforms and moving very quickly. My escort took me through all this, across the well of the hall, and then up to the rows of benches on the president’s right, where I saw everyone I had known but had not seen for so long seated in a row – the adjutant, my interpreter, the young officer looking very tense, my old guards, the squad of men who had shot the soldier who took me prisoner, and, making my heart jump, the agronomist, talking in his quiet way to the next man, but not noticing me. I was put to sit with all these people, but with one of my escort on each side of me, and on the other side of the hall, like witnesses in a different camp, were men in the uniform I recognized as the Prison Commissioners’. But there were so many distinct uniforms, as well as civilians, that I couldn’t imagine what was happening: it was as if every Bureau that exists in an army and a nation had all come together to fight a cause.

  The chairman or president was making as much noise as the others in the well of the hall and being constantly approached and questioned, etc., etc., but sharp at nine by the clock he raised his voice and held up one hand, at which there was no more laughing and every man in his seat like a statue. Then a door opened and the Colonel himself came in and walked slowly to a chair that stood by itself. Before sitting down, he nodded with dignity, first to the chairman, who returned his nod, then to the gang of personalities in the well, and finally, with a friendly smile, to all of us in our row, so that it was hard not to feel that I was part of this house and all the others apart from our row sudden strangers who had turned our life upside down.

  The chairman then nodded to a sort of clerk, who put on glasses and read aloud from a long paper, interesting nobody. When he had finished, the chairman said a few words and gestured to one of the men below him to start things really going. This man was a civilian and in no hurry, but
when he finished at last, an opposite number got up and did the same performance, and after him a third. Then, a fourth, in uniform, who seemed to be speaking for the Colonel, rose very slowly and spoke very shortly indeed with disdain, as if saying that it was all poppycock and the sooner it was over, the better for everyone. By then, they had wasted the whole morning and all had to go out for their lunch, except for me and my two guards, who were led to the W C and straight back, to eat alone in the hall and wait for everyone’s return.