The Moment of Truth Read online

  “Yes—sensible enough. They’ll have to leave some of us alone to lick ourselves and deal with our traitors. It’ll be infernally unpleasant, and last God knows how long. And at the end of it—what will this island be like? But it’s a chance. I’m damned if I see a better one.”

  His mouth full of bitterness and rage, Heron shouted,

  “Yes, very fine—but what does your old skin matter, dead or alive? I shall be criticised for going. Naturally. A great many people will be only too delighted to think they’ve found someone meaner than themselves.”

  Without moving, Thorburn sent him a terrifyingly cold glance.

  “You’re not doing anything mean,” he said.

  “I don’t need to be told that”—Heron stopped short, gasped, then walked jerkily from the room.

  There was a silence. Clarke said mildly,

  “We can all stand so much and no more.”

  Lackland’s colourless eyebrow flew up.

  “You can say that about any deserter.”

  “No,” Clarke said, “he’s no coward, he’s an intelligent chap, a bit cleverer than he has bottom for, if you know what I mean—and he’s had enough.”

  “He’s had enough hatred. And he believes that Europe is finished,” Breuner said under his breath.

  Thorburn got up, balancing himself like a bear with a pole: he felt his anger with his godson drain out of him; it left behind it only a dry scum of grief.

  “The boy’s better than you give him credit for. You and I, my dear Will, are crude gross chaps, we know nothing about writers, but he’s said to be one of the best we have. I believe it.” He lifted his face, eyes closed against the powerful sunlight; a tremor ran across both vast sagging cheeks as though twitching off a fly. “If he can do his work only in exile … good men have gone into exile before now, eh?”

  Lackland’s eye gleamed.

  “Certainly. And I’ve no doubt he’ll wring the most eloquent and impressive literature out of our tears.”

  The general stood still. His temper, almost always under his control, was violent, and he had a merciless tongue—also well under control: its few victims remembered the experience to the end of their days, and he himself was ashamed when he had let it loose. He struggled with it now.

  Breuner had moved nearer to Lackland and was looking at him with the liveliest curiosity.

  “Do you know,” he confessed, smiling, “I never noticed until now that you have only one eye.”

  Clarke cackled derisively. The absurdity of it caught Thorburn like an elbow in his ribs and jerked him into an inward spasm of laughter.

  “What it is to have a metaphysical mind,” he stuttered. “I wish I had it.”

  “Here, help me up,” Clarke said. He tried to stand up. “You, Lackland. I want to walk outside a bit. Do me good.”

  The two of them went out together. At once Breuner turned to Thorburn and said carefully,

  “I must talk to you.”

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “I must tell you frankly—I can’t go in the aeroplane.”

  “Really?” Thorburn raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”

  Breuner hesitated. He had to make certain of saying enough and not too much—not so much that he was suspected of being hysterical because he was a foreigner. This was one of the moments when he felt deeply how impossible it is, in a language not your own, to say the simplest things. For any complicated statement there is an equivalent phrase: for the primitive and simplest—nothing.

  “I can’t leave my wife here,” he said. “She is alone.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I think, in Cambridge. We live there. I left her at home when I was sent to the north to work.”

  “H’m.” The general stared at him with a distant kindliness. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid you must go, you know.”

  Breuner turned his head. The Herons’ little boy had come into the room from the airfield: he was balancing something on his hand, a rudimentary aeroplane—Hutton had made it for him, no doubt. Seeming not to notice that there were people in the room, he sat down in an armchair. He was absorbed, sunk, in his toy. Breuner was struck by his quietness: very old people sit with the same quietness, he thought; so do animals—waiting for something, in the immense space round them, to begin. How much of their time children spend in waiting, and how defenceless they are, humbly and patiently open to anything we choose to do to them. … He turned back to Thorburn.

  “No, I can’t go,” he said quietly. “It’s impossible.”

  Thorburn frowned.

  “I don’t think you understand the position. We were sent out of our way, to pick you up—but for you, we should have been away now, y’know. Why? Because whatever it may be you’re doing, or you know about, is monstrously important to us. It’s obviously essential to get you away.”

  Breuner had the sense that he was pressing against a weight, like a man buried under a fall of earth, pushing against it with an effort that dragged his lungs out of place.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” he said in an inaudible voice. “I thought, at first, that I couldn’t refuse, I ought to go. But waiting here I’ve had time to think about it—” This is my only country, he thought, with pain. I look at it from the opposite side, yet I see it more clearly than its own born do. I don’t need it, nor any country, but it let me live here, and I ought to be willing to die for it—if that were all, dying would be extremely easy and natural, but … She needs me, he thought sharply. No—I need her. … He looked at the general without seeing him. “There is something else. We have to choose—each of us must choose: which is his moment? To leave the country, to go? To stay here with the colonel?” He hesitated. “Perhaps even to stay in order to work—with them. … Who knows? … It is the only problem—to recognise one’s own moment. Not to miss it.”

  “Well?” Hands folded on his stomach, Thorburn was watching him.

  You understand me, Breuner thought. He said softly,

  “It may be right for me to go. And I can’t.”

  Thorburn did not answer at once. In the silence, the light sound made when the child dropped his toy was startling. They looked at him. He picked the thing up. One of the wings had fallen off. With an intense concentration, frowning, he worked on it, turning it this way and that in his small fingers.

  “You realise, of course, that as a—what do they call it?—an intellectual enemy, a beast, a degenerate social lackey, you’ll be strung up out of hand.”

  Breuner’s smile played on his dark face.

  “So many young men have found out easily how to die. I’m sure I shall manage it all right.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Thorburn. “I’m sorry. That was a very stupid thing to say. … But—damn it, man, have you any right to think of yourself—and your personal affections?”

  “No. I agree—no.” He saw his wife for a moment, distinctly. “No right at all.” She was wearing one of the clumsy cheap overalls she wore when she cleaned the house and cooked. Not that she was ever better than decently clothed. She had no notion of making herself attractive:. she brushed back her grey hair and scrubbed her pale strong face with soap. It was years since the lively slender girl he married had disappeared in a shapeless body; now and then she looked up at him from the depths of small eyes, unclouded by a single lie. Her one vanity was to say in talking, “we English.” She spoke English atrociously; her husband had only to come into the room where she was for every sound, colour, scent, of his childhood to close round him at once—like her, truthful, loyal, modest. … He looked at Thorburn again, and repeated,

  “No, I think no right. But this is—you are asking me for too much. We have always been together, like an eye and an eyelid. No one could do it.” He hesitated for a long time, and said, “If I could have seen her and explained it to her.”

  Before trying to answer him, Thorburn lumbered across the room and back again, knocking into a table. He rubbed his hair. His tunic was open, and the waistband of his trou
sers slipping down cut across his wide flabby stomach: he dragged at it impatiently.

  “D’you think you’re the only one? What about the commanders of destroyers and the rest, forced to leave wives and families in this country—probably never know what happened to them—and take their ships across the other side of the world? Eh? My dear fellow, you might be the captain of a cargo steamer getting his orders over the wireless to turn back. Do you suppose they like it—putting the ship about, turning their backs—leaving their women to live in this nightmare? It’s inhuman. … A choice between their feelings as husbands and the rest of it, and their—call it solidarity, human decency

  —anything you like. …”

  “Yes,” Breuner said. “That is true. … I can’t go.”

  The child put down the broken pieces of the aeroplane. He covered his face with his hands and began crying without a sound. Tears sprang between his fingers and fell on his bare knees. He sat still, leaning forward a little.

  “One can’t always avoid behaving badly,” said Thorburn. “Something or other happens and you’re faced with the ugly job of being guilty.” He lowered his untidy head. “God damn it,” he said drily, “it’s not only women we’re deserting, we’re deserting this country

  —it’s no crueller but it’s unforgiveable.”

  “No, I can’t go,” Breuner said again, quietly unmoved. He smiled and added, “We are not cut off from our past. It tells us: Do this. But afterwards, when it’s done, we have to go on living with what we did.”

  He noticed the child, and went over to him quickly.

  “What is it, Nick? What has gone wrong?”

  Without a word, the child held out to him the smashed aeroplane. Turning it over in his brown hand, Breuner asked Thorburn,

  “How old is he?”

  “Five. Yes, he’s five,” Thorburn said after a moment.

  “For a young child he cries too quietly,” said Breuner. “It’s rather wrong, I think.” He laid the pieces carefully back in the child’s hand. “There’s nothing to worry about. Your friend Hutton will mend it. Don’t worry.”

  Nick glanced at him with a child’s incurable despair.

  “Hutton can’t,” he said, “he’s busy.”

  “Well,” Breuner said smiling, “you must do something yourself. Let me see—can you draw? Of course you draw.” He unclipped his fountain-pen from his breast-pocket and tore a page from his notebook. “Here—make a picture.”

  Obediently, the child got up and went over to the table. He spread the page there, smoothed it carefully with his fist, and set to work, languidly at first, then, screwing up his eyes a little, with smiling energy. Kent came into the room.

  “May I speak to you, sir?” he said to the general.

  “Shall I go?” Breuner asked.

  Kent glanced at him with indifference.

  “No, do stay.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Thorburn sat down. The young man, he noticed, was very tense: his cheek twitched and he held himself stiffly, his fair head thrust forward. His hands were shaking.

  “Well?” he said brusquely, meaning to encourage the boy.

  In an expressionless voice, Kent said,

  “I want to speak to you, sir, about Miss Hugh-Brown. We’re married and she’s going to have a child. She ought to get away.”

  Thorburn jerked himself forward in the chair, then leaned back, disconcerted, vexed because he had shown it tactlessly.

  “Good God, what possessed you,” he muttered. “What did you say?—no, damn it, don’t answer, it’s not my business. Why the devil didn’t you send her away when you had the chance? Eh?”

  “She didn’t want to go,” Kent said with an effort. He added, “The past few weeks we’ve been so infernally busy evacuating the Garra House people and their equipment, I didn’t worry about anything else. And I didn’t realise how bad things were—or what we were up against. I’ve been a fool, I know.”

  He was not, the general saw, making excuses. With a savage feeling of disgrace, he was cursing his own ignorance and his bewilderment. It was the bewilderment, and the guilt and anxiety, of millions at this moment, living, minute by sick minute, a nightmare.

  “You want to make certain she gets away in the aeroplane,” he said as gently as he could. The young man did not answer. “Well? Out with it, boy—what is it?”

  “Ah,” Breuner murmured, “she won’t go unless you go with her. Isn’t that what she says?”

  Kent looked at him.

  “Yes.”

  “What the devil—” began Thorburn drily. He hesitated. “I’m sorry about this, damned sorry. We must do something. It won’t do. It’s intolerable, in fact.” As if possessed of an animal energy of its own, his hand was scrabbling among the roots of his hair. It calmed him, and he repeated quietly, “No, it won’t do.”

  Without knowing it, Kent glared at him.

  “It isn’t likely there’ll be room for either of us,” he said. “Even if there were I have no right to go.”

  He had not asked a question. None the less, the question lay there abruptly between them, and the general felt an extreme disturbance and uncertainty. He saw the shapeless crowd on the pavement of the town, faces turned up watching the aeroplanes pass high above them into freedom, and clearer than he knew he had seen it, the face of the woman, with its infinite resignation, suffering, love, and, between the eyelids closing against the light, hope. With the sense that nothing he could say was any good, he muttered,

  “If possible, you should go. Let’s see. If Major Heron decides to stay behind, there’ll be that much more room. It’s only one place, but you and the pilot may decide it’s not impossible to push two people into it.” To his stupefaction, he felt a quiver of laughter in his stomach. “The brigadier and I are both old men, tottering on the edge of the grave. One of us may easily drop into it before the aeroplane gets here—what?”

  Kent was, he saw, too surprised to answer. He was conscious, too, of Breuner’s dark, very bright eyes scrutinising him.

  “That isn’t the advice you gave your godson.”

  “Ah, you see, one’s never too old to learn,” he answered with a touch of mockery. “In fact, he was right about my old skin.” He turned sharply to Kent. “Go away and have another child—as many as you like. My dear boy, if there are no more children who speak English, there’ll be no England. And whatever the fools think, it’ll be a damned poor world without us. As for fighting—you’ll fight from over there.” The young man still did not say anything, and he said impatiently, “That’s what you expected to do, isn’t it?”

  Kent looked at him fixedly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The job’s waiting for you.”

  “I know it is.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. … I rather thought—seeing I’ve been offered the chance to stay here and get on with it—that that was what I ought to do.”

  The general felt something between pity and irritation. You can’t help them, he thought; they live to contradict.

  “Have you your parents?” Breuner was asking.

  “I have,” Kent said in a forbidding voice.

  “Well—compared with a wife, they don’t matter.”

  “I know that.”

  The devil you do, Thorburn said to himself. Liking, a warm pity, got the better of his moment of irritation.

  “In the circumstances—that is, Colonel Lackland and his Home Army—it’s entirely a matter for yourself whether you go or stay.” You’ll be killed soon enough either way, he thought. “As this fellow here says”—he jerked his head at Breuner—“the thing is to recognise your moment … you’ll be fully as useful over there as here.”

  Kent moved his hands uncertainly—he looked haggard and very young.

  “I know I have to make up my own mind,” he said indistinctly. “It seems indecent to worry too much about, well, happiness.”

  “No,” Breuner said, with a rage unli
ke himself. “It’s not indecent. You must go if you can. It’s better.”

  Kent turned to go away—and abruptly turned back.

  “Why were we defeated?” he asked fiercely.

  The general shrugged his shoulders with a pretence of calm, but his small yellowish eyes gleamed.

  “Why? For the simple reason that we went to war. In 1945 there was one hope for us and for Europe—a long peace, fifty, a hundred years of peace: we needed at least that to recover from our loss of blood—so many dead, so many crimes committed in the name of obscene ideas. And—after the war—in the name of justice and the rest of it.” He struck the arm of his chair with his big fleshy hand. “I dislike Germans, I’ve always disliked them, servile people, with disgusting habits—torture and the rest of it … but I’ve no respect for the way any of us behaved after the last war. It was natural, and it was stupid, idiotic, fatal. As for this war—and the folly of expecting help from countries split open from top to bottom, like France—and our own weakness, not enough men, no room, pinned down on an island the size when it comes to atomic war of a beetle under a navvy’s foot. …” His face was distorted. “The destruction that wasteth at noonday, what? Do you read the Bible?”

  Kent smiled quickly. “No, sir.”

  “You should, you should. More up to date than you think.”

  “I will if I can find one,” Kent said politely. He had no intention of doing it.

  Breuner leaned against a table, his head sunk. The question Kent threw at them—Why were we defeated?—had had the effect on him of a sudden mist blowing up when you are on an unfamiliar road. He groped in it. A country dies when its time comes—when its body ceases to renew itself: when the flesh is no longer warm, generous, able to love. In its youth and maturity, it produces great literature, it has a great many children. Perhaps a great many of these die, but more are born, out of the energy, the—the eloquence, and the loins of the future. The writers, the architects, the men and women, are all of them generous or involuntary creators. Later on, with age, they become commentators, clever, terribly efficient—as we say, functional—but this insistence on function is a sign of age. They talk a great deal, but the flesh is beginning to be mean and cold. And it is the body which loves and has children. … In the end, at the last moment, with everything said, and no more life asking to be put into words, there will be silence. … He came back from his darkness to the shabby room, the heat, the dazzling light outside between sea and sky: in the salt air there was a scent of gorse and dry rocks. He had no idea that he had been silent for several minutes: out of politeness, he tried to answer the last thing he had heard.