The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene Page B

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Authors: Graham Greene
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live alone he had dealt with shops only through his landlady. He thought for the second time that day of his former friends. It hadn’t occurred to Anna Hilfe that a refugee might be friendless. A refugee always has a party – or a race.
    He thought of Perry and Vane: not a chance even if he had known how to find them. Crooks, Boyle, Curtis . . . Curtis was quite capable of knocking him down. He had simple standards, primitive ways and immense complacency. Simplicity in friends had always attracted Rowe: it was a complement to his own qualities. There remained Henry Wilcox. There was just a chance there . . . if the hockey-playing wife didn’t interfere. Their two wives had had nothing in common. Rude health and violent pain were too opposed, but a kind of self-protective instinct would have made Mrs Wilcox hate him. Once a man started killing his wife, she would have ungrammatically thought, you couldn’t tell where it would stop.
    But what excuse could he give Henry? He was aware of the bulge in his breast pocket where his statement lay, but he couldn’t tell Henry the truth: no more than the police would Henry believe that he had been present at a murder as an onlooker. He must wait till after the banks closed – that was early enough in wartime, and then invent some urgent reason.
    What? He thought about it all through lunch in an Oxford Street Lyons, and got no clue. Perhaps it was better to leave it to what people called the inspiration of the moment, or, better still, give it up, give himself up. It only occurred to him as he was paying his bill that probably he wouldn’t be able to find Henry anyway. Henry had lived in Battersea, and Battersea was not a good district to live in now. He might not even be alive – twenty thousand people were dead already. He looked him up in a telephone book. He was there.
    That meant nothing, he told himself; the blitz was newer than the edition. All the same, he dialled the number just to see – it was as if all his contacts now had to be down a telephone line. He was almost afraid to hear the ringing tone, and when it came he put the receiver down quickly and with pain. He had rung Henry up so often – before things happened. Well, he had to make up his mind now: the flat was still there, though Henry mightn’t be in it. He couldn’t brandish a cheque down a telephone line; this time the contact had got to be physical. And he hadn’t seen Henry since the day before the trial.
    He would almost have preferred to throw his hand in altogether.
    He caught a number 19 bus from Piccadilly. After the ruins of St James’s Church one passed at that early date into peaceful country. Knightsbridge and Sloane Street were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line. It was an odd front line that twisted like the track of a hurricane and left patches of peace. Battersea, Holborn, the East End, the front line curled in and out of them . . . and yet to a casual eye Poplar High Street had hardly known the enemy, and there were pieces of Battersea where the public house stood at the corner with the dairy and the baker beside it, and as far as you could see there were no ruins anywhere.
    It was like that in Wilcox’s street; the big middle-class flats stood rectangular and gaunt like railway hotels, completely undamaged, looking out over the park. There were To Let boards up all the way down, and Rowe half hoped he would find one outside No. 63. But there was none. In the hall was a frame in which occupants could show whether they were in or out, but the fact that the Wilcox’s was marked In meant nothing at all, even if they still lived there, for Henry had a theory that to mark the board Out was to invite burglary. Henry’s caution had always imposed on his friends a long tramp upstairs to the top floor (there were no lifts).
    The stairs were at the back of the flats looking towards

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