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aka “Life During Wartime” - England ca. 1943
Listening Rowe thought, as he often did, that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribution, though what they both boiled down to was simply Mr Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr Rennits. But of course if you believed in God — and the Devil — the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil —and God too — had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.
‘. . . new orders. But it will always be the same world, I hope,’ Mr Rennit was saying.
p. 33
There were times when he felt the whole world’s criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight - a woman’s bag, a face on an elevator going up as he went down, a picture in a paper - all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy. A voice would whisper, ‘You say you killed for pity; why don’t you have pity on yourself?’ Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.
p. 40
He went back to his table and ordered another coffee and some notepaper. The waitress regarded him with increasing suspicion. Even in a crumbling world the conventions held; to order again after payment was unorthodox, but to ask for notepaper was continental. She could give him a leaf from her order pad, that was all. Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering.
p. 71
The words stuck out between the decorated borders like cannon out of a flower-bed. ‘Let not man prevail,’ he read - and the truth of the appeal chimed like music. For in all the world outside that room man had indeed prevailed; he had himself prevailed. It wasn’t only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.
p. 74
The steel hat on the coffin lay blackened and unreflecting under the winter sun, and the rescue party didn’t keep step with the post. It was like a parody of a State funeral — but this was a State funeral. The brown leaves from the park were blowing across the road, and the drinkers coming out at closing time from the Duke of Rockingham took off their hats. Henry said, ‘I told her not to do it . . .’ and the wind blew the sound of footsteps back to them. It was as if they had surrendered her to the people, to whom she had never belonged before.
p. 86
He couldn't tell what responsibility might descend on l him when his memory returned. Life is broken as a rule to every man gently; duties accumulate so slowly that we hardly know they are there. Even a happy marriage is a thing of slow growth; love helps to make imperceptible the imprisonment of a man, but in a moment, by order, would it be possible to love a stranger who entered bearing twenty years of emotional claims? Now, with no memories nearer than his boyhood, he was entirely free. It wasn’t that he feared to face himself; he knew what he was and he believed he knew the kind of man the boy he remembered would have become. It wasn’t failure he feared nearly so much as the enormous tasks that success might confront him with.
p. 114
‘It seems so strange' she said. ‘A1l these terrible years since 1933 - you’ve just read about them, that’s all. They are history to you. You’re fresh. You aren’t tired like all the rest of us everywhere.’
‘ l933,’ he said, ‘l933. Now 1066, I can give you that easily. And all the kings of England — at least — I’m not sure . . . perhaps not all.’
'1933 was when Hitler came to power.’
‘Of course. I remember now. I’ve read it all over and over again, but the dates don’t stick.’
‘And I suppose the hate doesn’t either.'
p. 116
‘There’s this difference,' Johns said. ‘ In the last war — except for Irishmen like Casement — the pay was always cash. Only a certain class was attracted. In this war there are all sorts of ideologies. The man who thinks gold is evil .... He’s naturally attracted to the German economic system. And the men who for years have talked against nationalism ... well, they are seeing all the old national boundaries obliterated. Pan-Europe. Perhaps not quite in the way they meant. Napoleon too appealed to idealists.’ His glasses twinkled in the morning sun with the joys of instruction. ‘When you come to think of it, Napoleon was beaten by the little men, the materialists. Shop-keepers and peasants. People who couldn’t see beyond their counter or their field. They’d eaten their lunch under that hedge all their life and they meant to go on doing it. So Napoleon went to St Helena.’
p. 120
‘The Germans are wonderfully thorough' Johns said. ‘They did that in their own country. Card-indexed all the so-called leaders, Socialites, diplomats, politicians, labour leaders, priests — and then presented the ultimatum. Everything forgiven and forgotten, or the Public Prosecutor. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d done the same thing over here. They formed, you know, a kind of Ministry of Fear — with the most efficient undersecretaries. It isn’t only that they get a hold on certain people. It’s the general atmosphere they spread, so that you can’t depend on a soul.’
p. 121
He felt like a Rip Van Winkle returning after a quarter of a century's sleep; the people of whom he had heard hardly connected better than he did with his youth. Men of brilliant promise had lapsed into the Board of Trade, and of course in one great case a man who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of his country. One of Digby’s last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.
p. 143
A police photograph is like a passport photograph; the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn’t me . . .
p. 156
‘Is life really like this?’ Rowe asked. Mr Prentice leant forward with an interested air, as though he were always ready to abandon the particular in favour of the general argument. He said, ‘This is life, so I suppose one can say it’s like life.'
p. 162
She glinted at them, maliciously, intelligently, with her stupidity strung up like a piece of camouflage she couldn't be bothered to perfect.
p. 175
‘He hadn’t a chance,’ Rowe said. This was the passage he had crept up excited like a boy breaking a school rule; in the same passage, looking in through the open door, he grew up — learned that adventure didn’t follow the literary pattern, that there weren’t always happy endings, felt the awful stirring of pity that told him something had got to be done, that you couldn’t let things stay as they were, with the innocent struggling in fear for breath and dying pointlessly. He said slowly, ‘I’d like . . . how I’d like . . .’ and felt cruelty waking beside pity, its old and tried companion.
p. 180
Rowe was growing up; every hour was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age. Little patches of memory returned; he could hear Mr Rennit’s voice saying. ‘l agree with Jones,’ and he saw again a saucer with a sausage-roll upon it beside a telephone. Pity stirred, but immaturity fought hard; the sense of adventure struggled with common sense as though it were on the side of happiness, and common sense were allied to possible miseries, disappointments, disclosures . . .
p. 187
'He’s economical.’ She said, ‘They are all economical. You’ll never understand them if you don’t understand that.' She repeated wryly, like a formula, 'The maximum of terror for the minimum time directed against the fewest objects.'He was bewildered: he didn’t know what to do. He was learning the lesson most people learn very young, that things never work out in the expected way. This wasn’t an exciting adventure, and he wasn’t a hero, and it was even possible that this was not a tragedy.
p. 201
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