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I suppose we all enjoy having a bad reputation, don’t we, because the kind of people one has to please in order to have a good reputation are so very dreadful that one positively delights in appalling them,
“What I say is, one can be as moral as one likes but one should have the courtesy to do it in private, like any other bad habit.
“It kills entire cities.” Will could picture it. London still and silent. Bodies lining streets and Tube platforms, driverless trains full of corpses rattling on towards their terminus. He imagined an apple spilled from an abandoned straw shopping basket with extraordinary vividness; it took him a moment to realise that was a memory from Flanders.
He knew what Libra was up to: he’d had training on this before he started trench raiding, in case of capture. They would treat you kindly and offer you advantages if you behaved as they asked. You didn’t have to betray your own side or aid the enemy: you just had to make that first little compromise of abstaining from disobedience or defiance, and it would be rewarded. Because once you’d compromised with the enemy, it would become easier and easier to cooperate with him, and from there it was a very short step to collaboration.
“I’d be happy to.” Libra smiled. It gave Will the impression he’d sent off a postal order for a booklet on Smiling for Beginners.
“How many millions died in the war? How many are dying down mines and in factories and on the streets because they can’t afford the rent of a room? Why do we count the cost of change, but not the cost of the world staying the same?”
It could be a farewell, or the foundation of a friendship. It could be an awkward drink in a crowded pub with an upper-class man wound tighter than a neurasthenic’s pocket watch, or just possibly something else entirely, something precious and fragile that Will didn’t want to look at straight on in case he jinxed it. It could be anything.
