A House in Order (3 page)

They then left the room, led by the colonel, who seemed entirely delighted by the way things had gone. I was taken back to the greenhouse and a bucket for my use pushed through the back door of the shed.

*

All was the same as forty-eight hours ago – the dusk falling, the east wind coming up, the thermometer dropping (approx. 36 deg.). But they had gone through all the muck in the shed and the greenhouse very efficiently: it was all there, still, but arranged and ordered in files, in the military way, so that there was far more room than there had been before. I was given some disinfectant powder to throw on my droppings, and then two army blankets and a waterproof sheet. This sounds generous, and even friendly, but I remember thinking that military acts are not what they seem to be. One's disinfection only matters because it stops one's germs reaching people of importance, and a rubber sheet is to prevent government blankets from having to be replaced. But I didn't spend much time thinking of their motives. The only thought in my mind was how I could please them and impress them with my obedient behaviour, to make my life more secure.

Not being fools, they took care now to see that their guards included the greenhouse in their patrols. I took note of two of the guards that night. One had a black eye and a horribly bruised ear, the other had a nose swollen up to a huge size and his whole face was inflamed. Every fifteen minutes after nightfall one or other of them opened the greenhouse door and looked me over with a torch, before continuing his round: in this way, they impressed on themselves the importance of keeping an eye on me, and impressed on me the sort of punishment that was handed out to men who had not done their duty. These two battered men were kept on guard the whole night through, in constant movement for twelve hours: by morning, they could hardly stand. I never saw them again after that.

I was brought a proper evening meal, including thin
beer. They brought me no knife, but my dirty predecessors had left behind three putty-knives, brown and caked, for me to choose from. I cleaned my plate and mug very thoroughly with dirt off the floor and left them neatly just inside the greenhouse door. This was done to please them, of course, but acts of cleanliness also come naturally to a person who takes greenhouse hygiene seriously. I put the rubber sheet longwise down the exact centre of the shed, and left the door into the greenhouse open, so that my figure could be plainly seen, stretched out.

I am sure I didn't sleep at all that night, nor was it the flashing of a guard's torch every quarter of an hour that kept me awake. I simply found that as soon as I lay down, I trembled all over and couldn't stop. I kept thinking of how my glasses had been returned to me and how strange they had felt when I put them on after two days without them: I knew this strangeness was normal, as it is with false teeth that have been taken out too long, but it was all mixed in my mind with the soldier's taking them from me and folding them away in his breast pocket, and the sound of the rifles going off after they had been taken from him again. I kept driving myself silly by hearing his loud, loutish whistling and the trudge of his boots, and whenever I did so, I got the shakes and my stomach heaved and rumbled. I kept telling myself that I was safer now, probably, than I had been at any other moment in the last two days, but this was no consolation at all; the whistling and trudging went on and on in my ears, the rifles of the firing squad went off at regular intervals, and again and again the young officer came in and handed me back my folded glasses. From time to time, in this sleepless worry, the guard's torch would flash and I would see a bit of a
bashed face reflected in the dirty, moonlit glass as he turned away: then, the pointlessness of keeping
me
alive and unharmed would agitate me through and through and I would fancy my glasses being taken off again and folded away for the last time, and hear my own screams as I was propped up in front of the rifles. And so it went all night, one horrible scene after another, real and imaginary, until the sun showed up and the shaking guards, white under their red bruises, were marched away by a corporal.

For breakfast, I got a mug of chicory coffee and a good hunk of the rough sort of bread that I have always considered the precious answer to constipation. The humidity in the greenhouse was high, in spite of the holes in the panes, and as I drank my coffee and rubbed away at my cloudy spectacles the glass round me sweated in the rising sun and the wet surface shrank into numberless moist patches surrounded by grime and dirty webs. I saw suddenly the big prison camp below me and could watch the prisoners coming out to work in the cool sunshine, all in batches, looking as disciplined as usual. They were under the orders of their own NCOs, who shouted at them as loudly and pompously as they had always done, so that as I sat over my mug and saw their marching figures through the smeary glass, I could hear my mother-tongue bellowed into the enemy air as if there had been no change and no surrender, and their prison no more than another barracks. But I was a good deal changed myself, because I shuddered to hear the bellowing and dreaded the thought that at any minute I might be hauled from my windy shed and boxed up again with the rest. Not that such fears ever stayed the same for long, because each time I thought of the cheerful brutality of the men around me, all my shakes and
trembles began again: in fact, whether I looked at the house on my left or the prison on my right, I could feel nothing but terror of an enemy – enemy friends, enemy foes – and the fear that one or other would kill or flog me in the end.

While these thoughts were going through my head I had noticed a handful of enemy guards leave the camp by the big gate and swing down the road. I watched them only very idly, having so many worries on my wretched mind, so it was only when they reached the bottom of the gravel path that my heart jumped and I realized that they were probably coming for me. Having exchanged the usual absurd ritual with the house guards, they turned, sure enough, up the path, and in a minute were halted at attention so close to me that my hair stood on end.

They were commanded by a sergeant, who carried an envelope. This was conveyed into the house. The squad remained at attention, looking straight ahead, but the sergeant allowed himself the privilege of turning his head and, slowly and carefully, staring into the greenhouse and looking me up and down with the most horrifying eye I have seen in any man's face. If he had spoken one word, or even crooked one finger at me, I would somehow have got to my feet and crawled the few yards that separated us; but he gave me no sign at all, except for the ugliness in his eyes,
so I sat like a stone in my chair, cold all over with terror.

At last, the young officer came down the verandah and stood at the top of the steps into the garden: he, too, carried a neat, stiff envelope. The sergeant saluted him very smartly, and the young man returned the salute with one of his own – very correct and very distasteful, as if saluting, in such a circumstance, could not be done
without neuralgic pain. He spoke a few words to the sergeant in a voice that was high and clear but like a Chinaman's mew, and when the sergeant answered, firmly but respectfully, he listened with all the civility that rudeness can imply. He then gave a couple of short mews by way of answer, and held out the envelope to the sergeant, holding it between two fingers. The sergeant came up the steps to take it and managed without much loss of dignity to catch it as it drifted from the fingers and began its journey to the ground. They then exchanged salutes again, the young officer's not being noticeable as his back was to the sergeant and he was moving quickly away down the verandah.

The sergeant now turned his four men back the way they had come, doing so in two movements. The first was a left turn, in which he joined; it brought the five of them face to face with me, their ten eyes staring fixedly at mine through the glass door. He kept them in this position for a full quarter of a minute, under the pretext of slowly buttoning away the lieutenant's envelope: only when I was on the verge of screaming did he order them through another turn and marched them away down the path. It seemed to me that the four men in the squad formed a square as they marched, leaving room for my ghost in the centre.

I got up from my chair when they passed the guards at the bottom of the garden and began to rub my fingers over the stubble on my face. I remember thinking that it might be better to cut my throat with a piece of glass than go on suffering such horrifying shocks, but I also remember that that was the only thought I had time for, because the interpreter, moving at speed down the verandah and followed by a soldier, came to my door and said sharply: ‘Your inspection will be at noon sharp,
Mr Cartographer. That is in three hours.' The soldier then dumped a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush outside the door, and the two of them went away.

In one moment, all my terror of those ten piercing eyes disappeared in a wave, as if to allow the new horror to cover me, and where I had dreaded a second before abduction by one sergeant, I now saw myself pummelled to a jelly by a fancied one, whose ruthless inspection of my filthy condition couldn't fail to revolt him. Anyone who has suffered the baleful idiotic farce of military inspection will know that even under the best conditions the inspected one is doomed, the inspector's intention having nothing whatever to do with dirt or cleanliness and being directed only by a law that makes humiliation necessary at this moment. For a man born to cleanliness like myself, perhaps even too inclined to it, such inspections had always seemed the wickedest crime ever perpetrated by military power – and never more so than now, as I looked at the incorrigible filth all round me and knew that the coming inspection would make any earlier one seem too kind for words.

Luckily, so long as cowardice doesn't turn one to a jelly, it keeps one running for one's life. I seized that brush and water-bucket so quickly that I was left gripping them and looking round and round me like a lunatic, because I couldn't imagine where to start, and wherever I looked saw only hopeless impossibilities. And when I was feeling most desperate, it struck me that I, too, would be included in the inspection and must appear washed as fresh as the greenhouse: this blow made me drop the brush and bucket and collapse on my wooden chair.

I put my head in my hands and sat there shaking, and as on the first day when I ran down that long road shouting
nonsense into the air, I did the same now in whispers and mumbles. I wasted five or ten precious minutes in the darkness of my hands and would have wasted more if I hadn't heard the sound of boots. It was the guard, doing his usual patrol, and as he approached the verandah steps and turned his eyes on me, I raised my head and looked back. He marched on the four remaining feet, did his customary stamping turn and started back, but as he passed my door this time, he gave me a wink.

This encouragement – which slaves and oafs give to one another when their masters' backs are turned – got me up again. I must have been white with shock and hopelessness, but I remember putting the brush in the water and starting stiffly to scrub the nearest pane – through which suddenly I saw the garden in its autumn colours for the first time, a glimpse of purple, gold, white and russet that I had never realized was there at all. This must have acted on me like a second wink, because I began to scrub steadily and methodically, slowly pulling away the black veil that lay on beds of astonishing colours.

I scrubbed all that house, standing on my chair to do the roof, in the first hour of my three – and the water in the bucket already dense with black filth. When the guard came round again, I took the courage to step outside the door and do the outside, glancing at the guard for his approval. But he was a proper soldier and paid me no more attention.

When I had brought my bucket in again and scrubbed the staging and its legs, I looked at the black remnant of water and remembered suddenly that I, too, must be washed and cleaned. Only then did it strike me that if I looked round the house I would probably find a tap – and sure enough there was an old brass one at my very
elbow. So I rinsed my bucket in the rusty water that trickled in and gave myself a good disinfectant wash – yet still, I reckoned, had a good hour of my time to go. So I brought out the disinfectant again and, mixing it with a fresh lot of red water, I went over the staging a second time, until the whole house smelt positively healthy.

Now, I had time for the details – the shining-up the brass tap with a mud paste, the pulling of slivers of glass out of the hard putty, the searching for grubby crannies, the raking of the earth floor with the stiff brush. Wherever a whole pane was out, I blocked the hole pretty neatly with sheets from the old magazines and even managed to line the warped ventilators with strips from the stuff of the deck-chair. Indeed, the house heated up so much that I began to sweat and got afraid that they would kick me because I stank. But before I stopped work, I cleaned up the pot that had the house-leek in it and turned out the slimy green soil at the base of its stem, so that it stood on the staging looking almost debonair in the disinfected sunshine. Let me be perfectly honest and admit frankly that on this first inspection of it, I noticed nothing special about it. The evidence was there, plain to see, but it was no more seen by me than I, open and upright on my chair, had been seen by the scores who passed me on my first day.

All the time I was doing these things I was trying not to distract myself by letting my eyes roam. But the temptation was extraordinary because the whole world round me had become incredible to see. There was light and brilliance everywhere: it poured through the clear panes and so sparkled on everything that I ran about like a zany whenever a patch of humidity appeared and rubbed it back to shininess. But the garden outside was
the most incredible thing of all: for two or three years the plants in it had seeded as they pleased, and the only discipline they had had was exactly what one would expect under military direction – shrubs hewed to the ground or made to stand at attention, hoed rows running like geometrical lines as if the aim were to create a griddle: it was plain to see that once a fortnight a squad of boobies was ordered into it and given three hours to reduce it to stupidity. But my eye saw through the clear glass all the things that had escaped the boors' attention: everywhere, there were little seedlings just ripe to be potted and brought into protection – why, little self-sown shoots of geraniums were growing by the score on the verge of the gravel path and, having escaped the blundering hacks of military discipline, would now turn black and die in the first killing frost. Evidently, there wasn't one man in the world behind the verandah who had the least idea of what extraordinary good luck had been at work in that garden during the last two years – though I, of course, could see at once that luck had really nothing to do with it. Total neglect of the stronger plants had let them grow into coverings and windbreaks for the weaker ones: this tendency has been hailed as ‘natural' by a good number of obsessed idiot-gardeners, who have written whole books encouraging innocent fools to obtain beauty through squalor. I had not thought the day would come when I should be grateful, first, to the barbarous family that had filled this glasshouse with muck, and second, to a war that had allowed so-called nature to prove that absolute neglect is better than half-witted care.