Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

was thoroughly roused now: his mood was changing fast. He was sweating. ‘You fool, you fool,’ he screamed into Temple’s face, slapping him with the full swing of his arms. He fumbled in his desk for his special tool, but in his intense irritation he only hurled the thing down on Temple’s head.

      ‘Where did you meet the others?’ shouted Bauer, far behind the metallic crash.

      ‘Tell,’ they said above him.

      ‘Tell.’

      He was on the ground, blubbering now, great shaking sobs: he could not speak.

      ‘Tell.’

      ‘Oh stop it, Bauer,’ said Reinecke, empty and discouraged. Bauer aimed one blow more and went to the door. ‘Bring the hose and clean this up,’ he shouted to the guard. ‘Get out, get out, get out,’ he bellowed at Temple.

      Outside the door Temple fell, and he heard Reinecke say, ‘He is only a petty criminal. It is no use going on.’

      That was the flower that was opening and glowing in Temple’s mind. ‘Nur ein gering Verbrecher.’ And the guard with the mop had been between them; Reinecke could not have seen him collapsing gently there along the corridor.

      ‘It is no use going on.’ He savoured the words, drawing them out as he repeated them deep in his secret mind.

      ‘Unnüss … ’

      It was victory. He dared not say it yet, but he knew it, he knew it, and the great word echoed about in his head as if it had been shouted from the walls. Reinecke believed him: he had convinced Reinecke: he had won.

      Now he would be left in his hole until they cleared him out of the way. It would be Germany for him, in all likelihood, but there was the possibility of a camp in France – forced labour on the Atlantic wall. These thoughts began to form themselves in his mind, but they had scarcely reached the stage of words before they were wiped out – automatically erased. During this period (it seemed to have neither beginning nor end, in spite of his numbered tiles) his mind had built up curtains or partitions or censors – mechanisms that shut out everything but the essential matter in hand, the struggle with Reinecke’s credulity. These other hopes and longings had flittered and flickered like bats whose existence one suspects outside a darkened window – never more concrete than that. Besides, it would have been terribly dangerous to have let them in.

      In the same way, but to a far greater degree, he had buried what he had to hide and he had almost pushed it down so far that it was out of his own immediate knowledge: but once, lying there on his bench, he had deliberately dug it up and he had said, forming the actual words in his mouth, ‘Number seven, rue de la Cloche d’Or. Knock five times, and three.’ And at once he had felt that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost; he was appalled, as if everything had escaped and rushed out of him. He was terrified that it might happen again, but in spite of himself, as a punishment; that he might blab it out much as he pissed and shat and vomited when they savaged him upstairs on the dreadful days.

      But he was past that now, thank God, thank God. He could remember it without terror, and now he could sleep: there would be freedom in his sleep. He had not known how entirely he had been concentrated, knotted up, to guard himself from even thinking in a way that might betray what he must hide. If he gave anything away, all the rest would follow: and every recollection of the outside world, all external reality, his own identity, they had all been suppressed, but suppressed with unimaginable force.

      The effort that it had required: he felt it now, could measure it by the almost unlimited relaxation of his mind – it spread out, rolled out, admitting uncountable forbidden things as he consciously let down the barriers. He could see himself as something apart from pseudo-Temple: he was inhabiting at least part of his own mind again, and pseudo-Temple dwindled to the size of a small, largely fictitious person.

      Pseudo-Temple was a little, silly unclean man with skins of pretence that Reinecke had peeled off one by one to reveal the vague shape of the abettor of shady deals, the man of no country but a café table, the minor black-marketeer, the perpetual underling, who had made a stupid failure of his one independent commission. He was a convincing creature: he was also a sort of general confession, for he represented some aspect of every mean, dishonest, ungenerous, discreditable act or thought or even temptation in Temple’s life – a life not wanting in materials. He was a convincing creature, however. He had been born slowly, and in pain. It had all had to come out slowly, under blows and wicked pressure (the passionate intensity of those sessions when Reinecke had been almost sure that he had an Allied agent in his hands, a key that could open a great deal if it were properly twisted); it had had to come out slowly, for greater force – each discreditable detail wrenched out of him, the slow, unwilling revelation of what every man would wish to hide. He had had to go low: and yet not too low, for the character had to be acceptable to Reinecke, and Reinecke called for a certain small courage and resistance. The descent had stopped short of rock-bottom; but for all that, and although there were perhaps other mansions unexplored, it had been terribly expensive.

      Reinecke had left Temple alone too soon; and in the dark – day and night unseen, the utter blackness of his cell – he had had the time to form the lines of pseudo-Temple’s mind. This long period, which Reinecke had thought was softening his prisoner, bringing him to the edge of talking madness, had hardened pseudo-Temple’s lines, and Temple was enclosed by his character so firmly that even when he was entirely reduced by interrogation, grovelling on the floor, he still shrieked with pseudo-Temple’s voice. Some prisoners could not stand the darkness; they could not stand the deprivation of their sight, and when fifty or a hundred hours had passed they began to feel a desperate need to be re-attached to the visible world. The darkness and the silence pressed in and began to invade them with the enormous hallucination of present death. The invisibility of their bodies – even their hands before their eyes meant nothing – detached them from any reality: they experienced the horror of the gulf, and in a fortnight or a month they were ready for the question.

      There was boredom, too. A man could be terrified, appalled by the unending darkness that was dissolving him, undoing his humanity; he could be terrified by the fumbling of a key in his lock, the line of light under the door; a ludicrous and ignominious craving for tobacco could assume almost the same proportions sometimes; but in some men boredom would work just as hard as these, and in conjunction with them. With neither night nor day the prisoner might sleep five hours or ten, he could not tell; and for the rest of the time he must sit or lie, counting his heart-beats or his breathing to feel that he was still in the flow of time, that time was not standing still for him alone, passing elsewhere, passing in the world, but leaving him on some strange, unheard-of island. And when he had said and repeated to himself all that he had to say, then there was the huge and overwhelming boredom. The man would be living on the shore of nothing: he would have nothing to do or say; he would see nothing; but still he would be alive. He would have to live interminably, with no sequence of events.

      In spite of several proofs to the contrary, Reinecke (who was frightened of the dark) thought it infallible. Certainly it worked very often, but Temple too was one of the exceptions. It was not a question of virtue or moral strength, but rather of idiosyncrasy – the child he had been had loved the darkness, the kind black ally. And then again, he had needed all his time. He was a slow and imprecise thinker by nature, accustomed to wondering in vague concepts, colours and shapes, and to using emotion more than anything cerebral, and at first, not knowing from hour to hour when they might come for him, he had forced his intellect to work with feverish, exact rapidity; then, as the immediate tension slackened, he had gone over the whole thing again. Again and again he had worked out the pseudo-Temple, and the more he lived inside the man the more the details came – details not only of his life, but of gesture and turn of phrase. He had needed all the time that he was given, and he wasted none; only once a day he allowed himself his ritual counting of the tiles – not only was there a comfort of sorts in their unchanging series, but they provided the basis of an arithmetical divination in which odd and even had the force of omens. He had needed all the time; for such a character, to be of any use, had to be voluminous: he still had nine-tenths of pseudo-Temple quite unused, and even that was scarcely a sufficient reserve.