The Rotten Elements by Edward Upward

Author:Edward Upward [Upward, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-05-31T15:48:54+00:00

5

It was not till more than a week after Gatten had revealed himself as a detective that Alan thought of poetry again.

He was coming back from a day’s teaching, which had gone smoothly enough, and he was walking along the pavement of his home road. He was within fifty yards of his own house. He saw, though only vaguely and without interest, behind the front garden fence of a house about ten doors away from his, the small-leaved and always closely-clipped Japanese honeysuckle hedge whose top surface, undulating a little here and there, had the smoothness almost of snow when it has lost its powderiness and is just beginning to thaw. He saw too along the outer edge of the pavement ahead the silver birches and the brown-barked prunus trees alternating at intervals that seemingly diminished farther down the road; yet though an afternoon sun was shining there was between his perception and the trees something like a faint dark haze which he could almost believe to be external while he nevertheless knew it originated from his state of mind. For the past nine days – in spite of his having gone up to the District as soon as possible to report what he had discovered about Gatten – he had never quite been able to come out from the shadows of an anxiety lest the Executive might still decide that the most effective way of putting a stop to his and Elsie’s attack on revisionism in the Party would be to accuse them of collaborating with a police agent. Beyond and above the birch and prunus trees at the far end of the road there was a railway bridge, and he looked at this just before he reached his front gate. It was an iron bridge, elegant, of an early type, with what appeared like a balustrade along the top of it, and through the interstices between the uprights of the balustrade the greenness of a small hill, unbuilt-on and used for allotments, was visible. As he looked he realized that the faint dark haze had dispersed, and that he was seeing the bridge and the hill beyond it with the utmost vividness. At the same moment he was abruptly freed from his anxiety. He knew that he and Elsie would not be accused of intentionally accepting support from an enemy of communism. It was true that when he had gone up to the District to report about having discovered a spy in the Party the District committee member whom he had spoken to, Mike Tarrant, had not thanked him and had almost seemed displeased at his having made the report. But the point was that even if the Party leadership would have been quite capable of using Alan’s association with Gatten to discredit his criticisms of their political line, his interview with Tarrant had put an obstacle in the way of their doing so. The fear that he had felt for nine days, and that the sight of the railway bridge had released him from, had been unreasonable.

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