‘Well?’

‘Well, judging from what we’ve seen happening in the last thirty years, in the democracies, let alone the dictatorships, the number of people in a society really prepared to stand against a current, really ready to fight for the truth at all costs is so small that …’

He suddenly said: ‘Excuse me,’ and walked out with his stiff blind walk.

I sat in the kitchen and thought over what I’d just said. I and all the people I knew well, some of them fine people, had been sunk inside the communist conformity and lied to themselves or to others. And the ‘liberal’ or ‘free’ intellectuals could be and had been swung into witch-hunts of one kind or another very easily. Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

I sat there, discouraged and depressed. Because in all of us brought up in a Western democracy there is this built-in belief that freedom and liberty will strengthen, will survive pressures, and the belief seems to survive any evidence against it. This belief is probably in itself a danger. Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience. I know that this sort of vision has been written about, it’s something one has read, but for a moment it wasn’t words, ideas, but something I felt, in the substance of my flesh and nerves, as true.

Saul came back down the stairs, dressed. He was now what I call ‘himself’, and he said simply, with a kind of whimsical humour: ‘I’m sorry I walked out, but I couldn’t take what you were saying.’

I said: ‘Every line of thought I pursue these days turns out to be bleak and depressing. Perhaps I can’t take it either.’

He came over to me and put his arms around me. He said: ‘We are comforting each other. What for, I wonder?’ Then, with his arms around me still: ‘We’ve got to remember that people with our kind of experience are bound to be depressed and unhopeful.’

‘Or perhaps it’s precisely people with our kind of experience who are most likely to know the truth, because we know what we’ve been capable of ourselves?’

I offered him lunch, and now we talked about his childhood. A classically bad childhood, broken home, etc. After lunch he went upstairs saying he wanted to work. Almost immediately he came down, and leaned against the door-frame, remarking: ‘I used to be able to work for hours at a stretch, now I can’t work for more than an hour without a break.’