It’s a Battlefield by Graham Greene

in the clerks’ room. But he was daunted the next moment by his own and Milly’s insignificance. He heard the world humming with the voices of generals and politicians, bishops and surgeons and schoolmasters, who knew what they wanted, who knew what everyone else wanted: ‘I have a cousin, an uncle, a nephew, a niece,’ the world humming and vibrating with the pulling of wires. Milly’s face was lost among the harsh confident cultured faces. It did not belong to the same world; they were insulated against pain, poverty and disaster. One could not appeal to them for justice; justice to them was another word for prison.
    â€˜But how?’
    â€˜Spot the Stars’, he read. ‘Are you Insured? Mr MacDonald –’ There was a photograph of the Prince of Wales opening a new hostel for the unemployed; he was surrounded by men in frock coats carrying top hats; women in fur coats pressed round the edge of the picture gazing at the golden key. An officer and his bride stepped out of St Margaret’s into the blaze of publicity under arched swords. A shabby woman with a cameo brooch seemed out of place on the same page: ‘Mrs Coney, wife of the murdered police constable.’
    â€˜Have you seen this?’
    The photograph roused her for a moment from the dullness of her despair. Her happiness had always been shot through with touches of malice. Her husband contented with his job and his pay had been the Communist; not Milly, contented with nothing but his love, suspicious of the whole world outside. She had never believed that they would be left alone to enjoy each other. Her malice had been a form of defence, an appeal to other people to ‘leave us alone’. She said now, looking at the photograph, in the usual tone of exaggerated dislike: ‘She reminds me of – She looks like –’ but she had been robbed of her only weapon; the woman reminded her of nothing, staring bleakly out, an inimical stranger, into the warm clean kitchen, but of the policeman on his knees crying with pain and fear in the Park.
    â€˜Go and see her,’ Conrad said. ‘If she’d sign the petition the news would be in every newspaper. Something would be done.’ The photograph seemed no longer out of place on that page of celebrities; Mrs Coney too had influence.
    â€˜She’d never do it.’
    â€˜Go and try tomorrow. I know it’ll be difficult to go and beg –’
    â€˜It’ll be easy,’ Milly said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking what I’d do. If Jim had been killed and that woman (Coney, indeed, she’s like a starved rat) came and asked me to help her husband.’ Conrad watched her with satisfaction; he had given her something to do and she no longer despaired; she was malicious and herself again. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘what would you do?’
    â€˜I’d want to pull her hair and scratch her face,’ Milly said, ‘but I suppose really – I suppose I’d sign the petition. What’s done can’t be undone, can it?’ But the saying, spoken on innumerable occasions, over spilt milk, over broken glass, over burnt pastry, played her false. It lay like a high wall between five happy years and the present. You had to remember what was on the other side. You had to strain your mind to recall the details of uneventful evenings. They could not be repeated. ‘Think of something else we can do. Think. Think.’
    Conrad thought. But the only thought which would come was of his last meeting with his brother, in a place the size of a telephone box, where you couldn’t speak and look at the same time. A look through the glass. A word through the wire. Conrad said, with his hand spread over Mrs Coney’s features: ‘We’ve got to consider something else.’ His brother had asked him, ‘How’s Milly? Keep an eye on Milly.’ It was his duty therefore to let her see