He hardly spoke at supper, and she watched him, her fear growing until she could bear it no more and she cried out suddenly, “Alec.. . oh Alec. . . what is it? Is it good-bye?”
He got up from the table, took her hands and kissed her in a way he’d never done before, and spoke to her softly for a long time, told her things she only dimly understood, only half heard because all the time she knew it was the end and nothing mattered any more.
“Good-bye, Liz,” he said. “Good-bye,” and then: “Don’t follow me. Not again.”
Liz nodded and muttered, “Like we said.” She was thankful for the biting cold of the street and for the dark which hid her tears.
It was the next morning, a Saturday, that Leamas asked at the grocer’s for credit. He did it without much artistry, in a way not calculated to ensure him success. He ordered half a dozen items–they didn’t come to more than a pound–and when they had been wrapped and put into the shopping bag he said, “You’d better send me that account.”
The grocer smiled a difficult smile and said, “Fm afraid I can’t do that.” The “sir” was definitely missing.
“Why the hell not?” asked Leamas, and the cjueue behind him stirred uneasily.
“Don’t know you,” replied the grocer.
“Don’t be bloody silly,” said Leamas, “I’ve been coming here for four months.”
The grocer colored. “We always ask for a banker’s reference before giving credit,” he said, and Leamas lost his temper.
“Don’t talk bloody cock!” he shouted. “Half your customers have never seen the inside of a bank and never bloody well wilL” This was heresy beyond bearing, since it was true.
“I don’t know you,” the grocer repeated thickly, “and I don’t like you. Now get out of my shop.” And he tried to recover the parcel which unfortunately Leamas was already holding.
Opinions later differed as to what happened next. Some said the grocer, in trying to recover the bag, pushed Leamas; others say he did not. Whether he did or not, Leamas hit him, most people think twice, without disengaging his right hand, which still held the shopping bag. He seemed to deliver the blow not with his fist but with the side of his left hand, and then, as part of the same phenomenally rapid movement, with the left elbow; and the grocer fell straight over and lay as still as a rock. It was said in court later, and not contested by the defense, that the grocer had two injuries–a fractured cheekbone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from the second. The coverage in the daily press was adequate, but not overclaborate.
* * 6 * Contact
At night he lay on his bunk listening to the sounds of the prisoners. There was a boy who sobbed and an old lag who sang “On flldey Moor bar t’at,” beating out the time on his food tin. There was a warder who shouted, “Shut up, George, you miserable sod,” after each verse, but no one took any notice. There was an Irishman who sang songs about the IRA, though the others said he was in for rape.
Leamas took as much exercise as he could during the day in the hope that he would sleep at night; but it was no good. At night you knew you were in prison: at night there was nothing, no trick of vision or selfdelusion which saved you from the nauseating enclosure of the cell. You could not keep out the taste of prison, the smell of prison uniform, the stench of prison sanitation heavily disinfected, the noises of captive men. It was then, at night, that the indignity of captivity became urgently insufferable, it was then that Leamas longed to walk in the friendly sunshine of a London park. It was then that he hated the grotesque steel cage that held him, had to force back the urge to fall upon the bars with his bare fists, to split the skulls of his guards and burst into the free, free space of London. Sometimes he thought of Liz. He would direct his mind toward her briefly like the shutter of a camera, recall for a moment the soft-hard touch of her long body, then put her from his memory. Leamas was not a man accustomed to living on dreams.