Free It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene Page A

could hear someone sweeping in the long passage outside. The old judge said: ‘We have come to the conclusion that no cause has been shown for setting aside the decision of the jury.’
    His brother lived in a basement flat opposite the laurels and the railings of the Polytechnic. Conrad looked down and saw beneath his feet the yellow glow of the kitchen. The tenement disappeared unlit into the sky. It was like a monument above a tomb, and a light showed that someone was awake in the tomb. He rang the bell and waited. Everything was as usual, even to the footsteps and the glimmer of light which went on behind the door, even to his following Milly in silence down the stone stairs to the kitchen. They had never had much to say to each other, but it was true, he thought, as she opened the door and led him into the glow of gas among the clean stacked plates, that this was the first time they had been completely alone. One did not need to be alone with Milly to love her more than any other woman. She was not beautiful. She was small and fair and thin, her hands were too large, and she had high prominent cheekbones in a face which was too generous to be beautiful. Some women were like audited account books, the proportion of every part was entered in double column and checked and found correct, but Milly’s accounts were of a bankrupt firm, they did not balance; but this failure to balance had an extravagant generosity.
    In the kitchen they kissed with quick formality, as if it were a courtesy to be got through before the important business. He looked at the table, at the stove. ‘You’ve had no supper.’
    She said: ‘I’m not hungry,’ and then lied, ‘I had a big tea.’ The lie was not meant to deceive. It was a warning, which he understood, that everything must be said and acted on the usual plane. She was dug in so inefficiently against emotion that she was afraid of almost anything he might do. He said: ‘I’m going to fry some bacon,’ and she did not dare to make any protest. While the bacon sizzled in the pan he began to talk very fast, so fast that soon the words were almost unintelligible. ‘We had an interesting case yesterday. Suspected arson. The man set fire to part of his shop, so we think. We were going to contest his claim, but he dropped it quite suddenly, and we’re leaving it at that. He put the fire out himself, so it never came to the police. Name of Bernay. Just one room, a lot of stuff burned, and a lot more spoilt. Now why did he drop the claim? Afraid we’d be able to prove arson? The manager doesn’t believe it. He believes he didn’t care a damn about the claim, he wanted to get rid of the stuff, perhaps it was stolen and the police were watching and he got the wind up, not our business anyway.’ He looked up suddenly with horror, watching her from the other side of the stove across the thin smoke from the spitting fat. As clearly as if she had spoken he was aware of her thoughts clinging round the words fire, police, burned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘No. You must take care of yourself. There’s still hope.’ The words were bundles of grenades flung into her parapet.
    â€˜You don’t believe it.’ He watched with pain and tenderness her white hopeless face, her shoulders a little bent with the weight of five happy years. He became aware with sudden clarity how injustice did not belong only to an old tired judge, to a policeman joking in Piccadilly; it was as much a part of the body as age and inevitable disease. There was no such thing as justice in the air we breathed, for it was those who hated and envied and married for money or convenience who were happy. Death could not hurt them, it could only hurt those who loved. Intolerable the weight of those happy years, of days in the Park and nights at the pictures, of the shared bed and the shared meal and the shared misery.
    She said: ‘I shouldn’t