The Heart Of The Matter Part 19

Down the pa.s.sage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here. In their presence he felt as though his dead veins would bleed again.

PART THREE.

Chapter One.

1.

HELEN said, 'I saw you on the beach this afternoon.' Scobie looked up from the gla.s.s of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of Louise. He said, 'I had to find Rees - the Naval Intelligence man.'

'You didn't even speak to me.'

'I was in a hurry.'

'You are so careful, always,' she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. ... How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene - to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, 'For once I wasn't thinking of you. I had other things in mind.'

'What other things?'

'Oh, diamonds ...'

'Your work is much more important to you than I am,' Helen said, and the ba.n.a.lity of the phrase, read in how many bad novels, wrung his heart.

'Yes,' he said gravely, 'but I'd sacrifice it for you.'

'Why?'

'I suppose because you are a human being. Somebody may love a dog more than any other possession, but he wouldn't run down even a strange child to save it'

'Oh,' she said, 'why do you always tell me the truth? I don't want the truth all the time.'

He put the whisky gla.s.s in her hand and said, 'Dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can't be bothered to lie all the time like the young.'

'If you knew,' she said, 'how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It's so-so ign.o.ble.'

'Yes.'

'We always make love - here. Among the junior official's furniture. I don't believe we'd know how to do it anywhere else.'

'Poor you,' he said.

She said furiously, 'I don't want your pity.' But it was not a question of whether she wanted it - she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how pa.s.sion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.

'Can't you ever risk anything?' she asked. 'You never even write a line to me. You go away on trek for days, but you won't leave anything behind. I can't even have a photograph to make this place human.'

'But I haven't got a photograph.'

'I suppose you think I'd use your letters against you.' He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking - the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky gla.s.s in his hand he remembered another night - a hundred yards away - the gla.s.s had then contained gin. He said gently, 'You talk such nonsense.'

'You think I'm a child. You tiptoe in - bringing me stamps.'

'I'm trying to protect you.'

'I don't care a b.l.o.o.d.y d.a.m.n if people talk.' He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.

He said, 'If they talked enough, this would come to an end.'

'You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.'

'It comes to the same thing.'

'Oh,' she said, 'to couple me with - that woman.' He couldn't prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.

'Dear,' he said, 'it's too soon to quarrel.'

'That woman,' she repeated, watching his eyes. 'You'd never leave her, would you?'

'We are married,' he said.

'If she knew of this, you'd go back like a whipped dog.' He thought with tenderness, she hasn't read the best books, like Louise.

'I don't know.'

'You'll never marry me.'

'I can't. You know that'

'It's a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,' she said. 'It doesn't stop you sleeping with me - it only stops you marrying me.'

'Yes,' he said. He thought: how much older she is than she was a month ago. She hadn't been capable of a scene then, but she had been educated by love and secrecy: he was beginning to form her. He wondered whether if this went on long enough, she would be indistinguishable from Louise. In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

'Go on,' Helen said, 'justify yourself.'

'It would take too long,' he said. 'One would have to begin with the arguments for a G.o.d.'

'What a twister you are.'

He felt disappointed. He had looked forward to the evening. All day in the office dealing with a rent case and a case of juvenile delinquency he had looked forward to the Nissen hut, the bare room, the junior official's furniture like his own youth, everything that she had abused. He said, 'I meant well.'

'What do you mean?'

'I meant to be your friend. To look after you. To make you happier than you were.'

'Wasn't I happy?' she asked as though she were speaking of years ago.

He said, 'You were shocked, lonely...'

'I couldn't have been as lonely as I am now,' she said. 'I go out to the beach with Mrs Carter when the rain stops. Bagster makes a pa.s.s, they think I'm frigid. I come back here before the rain starts and wait for you ... we drink a gla.s.s of whisky ... you give me some stamps as though I were your small girl...'

'I'm sorry,' Scobie said. He put out his hand and covered hers: the knuckles lay under his palm like a small backbone that had been broken. He went slowly and cautiously on, choosing his words carefully, as though he were pursuing a path through an evacuated country sown with b.o.o.by-traps: every step he took he expected the explosion. 'I'd do anything - almost anything - to make you happy. I'd stop coming here. I'd go right away - retire...'

'You'd be so glad to get rid of me,' she said.

'It would be like the end of life.'

'Go away if you want to.'

'I don't want to go. I want to do what you want.'

'You can go if you want to - or you can stay,' she said with contempt. 'I can't move, can I?'

'If you want it, I'll get you on the next boat somehow.'

'Oh, how pleased you'd be if this were over,' she said and began to weep. When he put out a hand to touch her she screamed at him, 'Go to h.e.l.l. Go to h.e.l.l. Clear out.'

'I'll go,' he said.

'Yes, go and don't come back.'

Outside the door, with the rain cooling his face, running down his hands, it occurred to him how much easier life might be if he took her at her word. He would go into his house and close the door and be alone again; he would write a letter to Louise without a sense of deceit and sleep as he hadn't slept for weeks, dreamlessly. Next day the office, the quiet going home, the evening meal, the locked door ... But down the hill, past the transport park, where the lorries crouched under the dripping tarpaulins, the rain fell like tears. He thought of her alone in the but, wondering whether the irrevocable words had been spoken, if all the tomorrows would consist of Mrs Carter and Bagster until the boat came, and she went home with nothing to remember but misery. Inexorably another's point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.

As he opened his door a rat that had been nosing at the food-safe retreated without haste up the stairs. This was what Louise had hated and feared; he had at least made her happy, and now ponderously, with planned and careful recklessness, he set about trying to make things right for Helen. He sat down at his table and taking a sheet of typewriting paper -official paper stamped with the Government watermark - he began to compose a letter.

He wrote: My darling - he wanted to put himself entirely in her hands, but to leave her anonymous. He looked at his watch and added in the right-hand corner, as though he were making a police report, 12.35 a.m. Burnside, September 5. He went carefully on, I love you more than myself, more than my wife, more than G.o.d I think. I am trying very hard to tell the truth. I want more than anything in the world to make you happy ... The ba.n.a.lity of the phrases saddened him; they seemed to have no truth personal to herself: they had been used too often. If I were young, he thought, I would be able to find the right words, the new words, but all this has happened to me before. He wrote again, I love you. Forgive me, signed and folded the paper.

He put on his mackintosh and went out again in the rain. Wounds festered in the damp, they never healed. Scratch your finger and in a few hours there would be a little coating of green skin. He carried a sense of corruption up the hill. A soldier shouted something in his sleep in the transport park -a single word like a hieroglyphic on a wall which Scobie could not interpret - the men were Nigerians. The rain hammered on the Nissen roofs, and he thought, Why did I write that? Why did I write 'more than G.o.d'? she would have been satisfied with 'more than Louise'. Even if it's true, why did I write it? The sky wept endlessly around him; he had the sense of wounds that never healed. He whispered, 'O G.o.d, I have deserted you. Do not you desert me.' When he came to her door he thrust the letter under it; he heard the rustle of the paper on the cement floor but nothing else. Remembering the childish figure carried past him on the stretcher, he was saddened to think how much had happened, how uselessly, to make him now say to himself with resentment: she will never again be able to accuse me of caution.

2.

'I was just pa.s.sing by,' Father Rank said, 'so I thought I'd look in.' The evening rain fell in grey ecclesiastical folds, and a lorry howled its way towards the hills.

'Come in,' Scobie said. 'I'm out of whisky. But there's beer - or gin.'

'I saw you up at the Nissens, so I thought I'd follow you down. You are not busy?'

'I'm having dinner with the Commissioner, but not for another hour.'

Father Rank moved restlessly around the room, while Scobie took the beer out of the ice-box. 'Would you have heard from Louise lately?' he asked.

'Not for a fortnight,' Scobie said, 'but there've been more sinkings in the south.'

Father Rank let himself down in the Government armchair with his gla.s.s between his knees. There was no sound but the rain sc.r.a.ping on the roof. Scobie cleared his throat and then the silence came back. He had the odd sense that Father Rank, like one of his own junior officers, was waiting there for orders.

'The rains will soon be over,' Scobie said.

'It must be six months now since your wife went.'

'Seven.'

'Will you be taking your leave in South Africa?' Father Rank asked, looking away and taking a draught of his beer, 'I've postponed my leave. The young men need it more.'

'Everybody needs leave.'

'You've been here twelve years without it, Father.'

'Ah, but that's different,' Father Rank said. He got up again and moved restlessly down one wall and along another. He turned an expression of undefined appeal toward Scobie. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'I feel as though I weren't a working man at all.' He stopped and stared and half raised his hands, and Scobie remembered Father Clay dodging an unseen figure in his restless walk. He felt as though an appeal were being made to which he couldn't find an answer. He said weakly, 'There's no one works harder than you, Father.'

Father Rank returned draggingly to his chair. He said, 'It'll be good when the rains are over.'

'How's the mammy out by Congo Creek? I heard she was dying.'

'Sh.e.l.l be gone this week. She's a good woman.' He took another draught of beer and doubled up in the chair with his band on his stomach. 'The wind,' he said. 'I get the wind badly.'

'You shouldn't drink bottled beer, Father.'

'The dying,' Father Rank said, 'that's what I'm here for. They send for me when they are dying.' He raised eyes bleary with too much quinine and said harshly and hopelessly, 'I've never been any good to the living, Scobie.'

'You are talking nonsense, Father.'

'When I was a novice, I thought that people talked to their priests, and I thought G.o.d somehow gave the right words. Don't mind me, Scobie, don't listen to me. It's the rains -they always get me down about this time. G.o.d doesn't give the right words, Scobie. I had a parish once in Northampton. They make boots there. They used to ask me out to tea, and I'd sit and watch their hands pouring out, and we'd talk of the Children of Mary and repairs to the church roof. They were very generous in Northampton. I only had to ask and they'd give. I wasn't of any use to a single living soul, Scobie. I thought, in Africa things will be different. You see I'm not a reading man, Scobie. I never had much talent for loving G.o.d as some people do. I wanted to be of use, that's all. Don't listen to me. It's the rains. I haven't talked like this for five years. Except to the mirror. If people are in trouble they'd go to you, Scobie, not to me. They ask me to dinner to hear the gossip. And if you were in trouble where would you go?' And Scobie was again aware of those bleary and appealing eyes, waiting through the dry seasons and the rains, for something that never happened. Could I s.h.i.+ft my burden mere, he wondered: could I tell him that I love two women: that I don't know what to do? What would be the use? I know the answers as well as he does. One should look after one's own soul at whatever cost to another, and that's what I can't do, what I shall never be able to do. It wasn't he who required the magic word, it was the priest, and he couldn't give it.

'I'm not the kind of man to get into trouble, Father. I'm dull and middle aged,' and looking away, unwilling to see distress, he heard Father Rank's clapper miserably sounding, 'Ho! ho ho!'

3.

On his way to the Commissioner's bungalow, Scobie looked in at his office. A message was written in pencil on his pad. I looked in to see you. Nothing important. Wilson. It struck him as odd: he had not seen Wilson for some weeks, and if his visit had no importance why had he so carefully recorded it? He opened the drawer of his desk to find a packet of cigarettes and noticed at once that something was out of order: he considered the contents carefully: his indelible pencil was missing. Obviously Wilson had looked for a pencil with which to write his message and had forgotten to put it back. But why the message?

In the charge-room the sergeant said, 'Mr Wilson come to see you, sah.'

'Yes, he left a message.'