Free It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene Page B

mind if he was dying here. I could look after him. We’d be together all day and all night.’ She convinced herself of how happy she could be with him dying upstairs, her eyes shone for a moment with the false happiness of her day-dream, that he was dying in the room upstairs. His love of his brother wavered at the sight of her despair. ‘Why did he do it?’ he protested.
    â€˜The policeman was going to hit me,’ she said. ‘Everyone was excited.’ She began to shake all over as if she were again in the centre of the mob near Hyde Park Corner. They straddled across Rotten Row, kicking up the dust into thin smoke, and the riders turned their gleaming groomed mounts and trotted hurriedly back while the crowd shouted and laughed at them. An unemployed man waved a banner by the Achilles statue.
    â€˜I saw Kay. She was off to a party meeting. They’ll have to do something for him.’
    The crowd turned and ran as the mounted police came down the Row with drawn staves. The man by the Achilles statue struck out with his banner at two policemen who pulled him to the ground and twisted his arms behind his back. He shouted for help, but the crowd was fighting to get away from the wedge of police who were driving them towards the gates. The great green plains of the Park were dotted with shabby men running away.
    â€˜They won’t do anything for him,’ Milly said, flinching again at the raised truncheon and the fear of a pain which never came. The policeman was on his knees bleeding into the turf and crying and gasping, and the crowd was suddenly very far away and the three of them were alone with the grass and a park chair and a sense of disaster. The policeman’s face was wet with tears.
    â€˜You’ve got to have some supper. Look, the bacon’s ready.’
    â€˜I’m not hungry.’ Conrad pulled out a chair and made her sit down. He took a warm plate from the oven and laid the bacon on it. He was almost happy, making her eat.
    â€˜Can’t you do something, Conrad? You’re clever.’ The words from her were not an insult as they had been from Kay.
    â€˜I’m going to look after you till he’s back. You must have a man in the house.’
    â€˜There isn’t a room.’
    â€˜I’ll make up a bed on the floor here.’
    â€˜All right. But I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anything.’ But she contradicted herself a moment later. ‘Isn’t there anything I can do? Think of something I can do.’ He drew a chair to the table beside her and sat down. ‘I’ll think of something. Don’t be afraid.’ But he himself, with his head in his hands, pretending to think, was dizzy with fear. She was appealing to him. He was being asked for help, and the only help he had been trained to give was adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. The whole office depended on him, directors driving up in their cars, nodding presently over the green baize in the board room, shareholders leaping to their feet and asking petulantly what this figure meant, why that figure was not accounted for; but the dependence of one individual left him dizzy with fear.
    â€˜I’m afraid without him here,’ she said. Jim had sat for the last five years in one chair in one place in the kitchen and they had talked and laughed and had hardly noticed how their nerves and their cleverness had been quietened by his serene obtuseness. ‘Tell me what to do. He always said you had the brains.’
    Conrad stared at the spread newspapers on the kitchen table. His mind took the opportunity to shirk its task, wandering across the columns of type, picking up a headline here and a headline there: ‘Mr MacDonald to fly home to Lossiemouth’; ‘Are you Insured?’, ‘Spot the Stars’.
    â€˜We ought to use influence. Everything goes by influence,’ he said, thinking of the brothers on the board, the nephew