Free A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Page B

continuous grime, of unlocked lavatory doors, the odour of farts (it was sexually a very pure house, there was no hint of homosexuality, but scatology was another matter, and I have disliked the lavatory joke from that age on). Or was it just then that I had suffered from what seemed to me a great betrayal? This story at least was to have a satisfactory though remote ending.
2
    While I was at St John’s I must have read Q’s novel Foe-Farrell three or four times. It was the dramatic story of a man’s revenge, and I very much wanted an opportunity for dramatic revenge. As I remember the tale a political demagogue ruined the experiment of a great surgeon by inciting a mob to wreck his laboratory where it was believed that he was practising vivisection. From that moment the surgeon Foe (or was it Farrell?) pursued Farrell (or was it Foe?) across the world and through the years with the sole object of revenge – I think he even found himself alone in an open boat on the Pacific with his enemy, improbable though this may sound. Then, under the long-drawn torture of the pursuit,the characters changed places: the pursued took on nobility, the pursuer the former vulgarity of his enemy. It was a very moral story, but I don’t think it was the moral which interested me – simple revenge was all I wanted.
    For there was a boy at my school called Carter who perfected during my fourteenth and fifteenth years a system of mental torture based on my difficult situation. Carter had an adult imagination – he could conceive the conflict of loyalties, loyalties to my age-group, loyalty to my father and brother. The sneering nicknames were inserted like splinters under the nails.
    I think in time I might have coped with Carter – there was an element of reluctant admiration, I believe, on both sides. I admired his ruthlessness, and in an odd way he admired what he wounded in me. Between the torturer and the tortured arises a kind of relationship. So long as the torture continues the torturer has failed, and he recognizes an equality in his victim. I never seriously in later years desired revenge on Carter. But Watson was another matter.
    Watson was one of my few friends, and he deserted me for Carter. He had none of Carter’s finesse – Carter continually tempted me with offers of friendship snatched away like a sweet, but leaving the impression that somewhere some time the torture would end, while Watson imitated him only at a blundering unimaginative level. Alone he would have had no power to hurt. Nonetheless it was on Watson that I swore revenge, for with his defection my isolation had become almost complete.
    For many years after leaving school, when I thought back to that period, I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone. The only change was that I looked under the stone less and less often. I began to write, and the past lost some of its power – I wrote it out of me. But still every few years a scent, a stretch of wall, a book on a shelf, a name in a newspaper, would remind me to lift the stone and watch the creature move its head towards the light.
    In December 1951 I was in the shop of the Cold Storage Company in Kuala Lumpur buying whisky for Christmas which I was going to spend in Malacca. I had just got back from a three-day jungle patrol with the 2/7th Gurkha Rifles in Pahang, seekingcommunist guerillas, and I was feeling very tired of Malaya. A voice said, ‘You are Greene, aren’t you?’
    A foxy-faced man with a small moustache stood at my elbow.
    I said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid …’
    ‘My name’s Watson.’
    ‘Watson?’ It must have been a very long time since I had lifted the stone, for the name meant nothing to me at first, nor the flushed colonial face.
    ‘We were at school together, don’t you remember? We used to go around with a chap called Carter. The three of us. Why, you used to help me and Carter with our Latin prep.’
    At one time, in the days when I still day-dreamed, I