Avery nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Haldane was watching him with distaste.
“What the Director means,” he said acidly, “is that if you wish to stay in the Department and do the job, do it. If you wish to cultivate your emotions, go elsewhere and do so in peace. We are too old for your kind here.”
Avery could still hear Sarah’s voice, see the rows of little houses hanging in the rain; he tried to imagine his life without the Department. He realized that it was too late, as it always had been, because he had gone to them for the little they could give him, and they had taken the little he had. Like a doubting cleric, he had felt that whatever his small heart contained was safely locked in the place of his retreat; now it was gone. He looked at Leclerc, then at Haldane. They were his colleagues. Prisoners of silence, the three of them would work side by side, breaking the arid land all four seasons of the year, strangers to each other, needing each other, in a wilderness of abandoned faith.
“Did you hear what I said?” Haldane demanded.
Avery muttered: “Sorry.”
“You didn’t fight in the war, John,” Leclerc said kindly. “You don’t understand how these things take people. You don’t understand what real duty is.”
“I know,” said Avery. “I’m sorry. I’d like to borrow the car for an hour. . . send something round to Sarah, if that’s all right.”
“Of course.”
He realized he had forgotten Anthony’s present. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Incidentally—” Leclerc opened a drawer of the desk and took out an envelope. Indulgently he handed it to Avery. “That’s your pass, a special one from the Ministry. To identify yourself. It’s in your own name. You may need it in the weeks to come.”
“Thanks.”
“Open it.”
It was a piece of thick pasteboard bound in cellophane, green, the color washed downward, darker at the bottom. His name was printed across it in capitals with an electric typewriter: mr. john avery. The legend entitled the bearer to make inquiries on behalf of the Ministry. There was a signature in red ink.
“Thanks.”
“You’re safe with that,” Leclerc said. “The Minister signed it. He uses red ink, you know. It’s tradition.”
He went back to his room. There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience, as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God.
THREE
Leiser’s Run
To turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping
Glad from a world grown old and cold and
weary
—Rupert Brooke “1914”
Ten
Prelude
The Humber dropped Haldane at the garage.
“You needn’t wait. You have to take Mr. Leclerc to the Ministry.”
He picked his way reluctantly over the tarmac, past the yellow pumps and the advertisement shields rattling in the wind. It was evening; there was rain about. The garage was small but very smart; showrooms one end, workshops the other, in the middle a tower where somebody lived. Swedish timber and open plan; lights on the tower in the shape of a heart, changing color continuously. From somewhere came the whine of a metal lathe. Haldane went into the office. It was empty. There was a smell of rubber. He rang the bell and began coughing wretchedly. Sometimes when he coughed he held his chest, and his face portrayed the submissiveness of a man familiar with pain. Calendars with showgirls hung on the wall beside a small handwritten notice, like an amateur advertisement, which read, St. Christopher and all his Angels please protect us from road accidents. F.L. At the window a budgerigar fluttered nervously in its cage. The first drops of rain thumped lazily against the panes. A boy came in, about eighteen, his fingers black with engine oil. He wore overalls with a red heart sewn to the breast pocket with a crown above it.