Clive Lewis - That Hideous Strength

Would Jane be in? He felt he could not bear it if Jane should not be in. He was fingering his latchkey in his pocket long before he reached the house. The front door was locked. This meant that the Hutchinsons who occupied the ground floor were away. He opened it and went in. It seemed cold and damp on the staircase: cold and damp and dark on the landing. “Ja-ane,” he shouted as he unlocked the door of the flat: but he had already lost hope. As soon as he was inside the door he knew the place was uninhabited. A pile of unopened letters lay on the inside door-mat. There was no sound, not a tick of a clock. Everything was in order: Jane must have left some morning immediately after “doing” all the rooms. The tea-cloths hanging in the kitchen were bone dry: they clearly had not been used for at least twenty-four hours. The bread in the cupboard was stale. There was a jug half full of milk, but the milk had thickened and would not pour. He continued stumping from room to room long after he was quite certain of the truth, staring at the staleness and pathos which pervades deserted homes. But obviously it was no good hanging about here. A splutter of unreasonable anger arose. Why the hell hadn’t Jane told him she was going away? Or had someone taken her away? Perhaps there was a note for him. He took a pile of letters off the mantelpiece, but they were only letters he had put there himself to be answered. Then on the table he noticed an envelope addressed to Mrs. Dimble at her own house over beyond the Wynd. So that damned woman had been here! Those Dimbles had always, he felt, disliked him. They’d probably asked Jane to stay with them. Been interfering somehow, no doubt. He must go down to Northumberland and see Dimble.

The idea of being annoyed with the Dimbles occurred to Mark almost as an inspiration. To bluster a little as an injured husband in search of his wife would be a pleasant change from the attitudes he had recently been compelled to adopt. On the way down town he stopped to have a drink. As he came to the Bristol and saw the N.I.C.E. placard on it, he had almost said “Oh damn,” and turned away, before he suddenly remembered that he was himself a high official in the N.I.C.E. and by no means a member of that general Public whom the Bristol now excluded. They asked him who he was at the door and became obsequious when he told them. There was a pleasant fire burning. After the gruelling day he had had he felt justified in ordering a large whisky, and after it he had a second. It completed the change in his mental weather which had begun at the moment when he first conceived the idea of having a grievance against the Dimbles. The whole state of Edgestow had something to do with it. There was an element in him to which all these exhibitions of power suggested chiefly how much nicer and how much more appropriate it was, all said and done, to be part of the N.I.C.E. than to be an outsider. Even now . . . had he been taking all this demarche about a murder trial too seriously? Of course that was the way Wither managed things: he liked to have something hanging over everyone It was only a way to keep him at Belbury and to make him send for Jane. And when one came to think of it, why not? She couldn’t go on indefinitely living alone. And the wife of a man who meant to have a career and live at the centre of things would have to learn to be a woman of the world. Anyway, the first thing was to see that fellow Dimble.

He left the Bristol feeling, as he would have said, a different man. Indeed he was a different man. From now onwards till the moment of final decision should meet him, the different men in him appeared with startling rapidity and each seemed very complete while it lasted. Thus, skidding violently from one side to the other, his youth approached the moment at which he would begin to be a person.

“Come in,” said Dimble in his rooms at Northumberland. He had just finished with his last pupil for the day and was intending to start out for St. Anne’s in a few minutes. “Oh, it’s you, Studdock,” he added as the door opened. “Come in.” He tried to speak naturally but he was surprised at the visit and shocked by what he saw. Studdock’s face appeared to him to have changed since they last met; it had grown fatter and paler and there was a new vulgarity in the expression.

“I’ve come to ask about Jane,” said Mark. “Do you know where she is?”

“I can’t give you her address, I’m afraid,” said Dimble.

“Do you mean you don’t know it?”

“I can’t give it,” said Dimble.

According to Mark’s programme this was the point at which he should have begun to take a strong line. But he did not feel the same now that he was in the room. Dimble had always treated him with scrupulous politeness and Mark had always felt that Dimble disliked him. This had not made him dislike Dimble. It had only made him uneasily talkative in Dimble’s presence and anxious to please. Vindictiveness was by no means one of Mark’s vices. For Mark liked to be liked. A snub sent him away dreaming not of revenge but of brilliant jokes or achievements which would one day conquer the good will of the man who had snubbed him. If he were ever cruel it would be downwards, to inferiors and outsiders who solicited his regard, not upwards to those who rejected it. There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t understand:”

“If you have any regard for your wife’s safety you will not ask me to tell you where she has gone,” said Dimble.

“Safety?”

“Safety,” repeated Dimble with great sternness.

“Safety from what?”

“Don’t you know what has happened?”

“What’s happened?”

“On the night of the big riot the Institutional Police attempted to arrest her. She escaped, but not before they had tortured her.”

“Tortured her? What do you mean?”

“Burned her with cigars.”

“That’s what I’ve come about,” said Mark. “Jane-I’m afraid she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That didn’t really happen, you know.”

“The doctor who dressed the burns thinks otherwise.”

“Great Scot!” said Mark. “So they really did? But, look here . . .”

Under the quiet stare of Dimble he found it difficult to speak.

“Why have I not been told about this outrage he shouted.

“By your colleagues?” asked Dimble drily. “It is an odd question to ask me. You ought to understand the workings of the N.I.C.E better then I do.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why has nothing been done about it? Have you been to the police?”

“The Institutional Police?”

“No, the ordinary police.”

“Do you really not know that there are no ordinary police left in Edgestow?”

“I suppose there are some magistrates.”

“There is the Emergency Commissioner, Lord Feverstone. You seem to misunderstand. ‘This is a conquered and occupied city.”

“Then why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you get on to me?”

“You?” said Dimble.

For one moment, the first for many years, Mark saw himself exactly as a man like Dimble saw him. It almost took his breath away.

“Look here,” he said. “You don’t . . . it’s too fantastic! You don’t imagine I knew about it! You don’t really believe I send policemen about to man-handle my own wife!” He had begun on the note of indignation, but ended by trying to insinuate a little jocularity. If only Dimble would give even the ghost of a smile: anything to move the conversation on to a different level.

But Dimble said nothing and his face did not relax. He had not, in fact, been perfectly sure that Mark might not have sunk even to this, but out of charity he did not wish to say so.

“I know you’ve always disliked me,” said Mark. “But I didn’t know it was quite as bad as that.” And again Dimble was silent, but for a reason Mark could not guess. The truth was that his shaft had gone home. Dimble’s conscience had for years accused him of a lack of charity towards Studdock and he had struggled to amend it: he was struggling now.