The Heart Of The Matter Part 22

'If only you would have done an act of friendship...'

'Go on, Yusef. You must complete your blackmail. You can't get away with half a threat.'

'I wish I could dig a hole and put the package in it. But the war's going badly, Major Scobie. I am doing this not for myself, but for my father and mother, my half brother, my three sisters - and there are cousins too/ 'Quite a family.'

'You see if the English are beaten all my stores have no value at all.'

'What do you propose to do with the letter, Yusef?'

'I hear from a clerk in the cable company that your wife is on her way back. I will have the letter handed to her as soon as she lands.'

He remembered the telegram signed Louise Scobie: have been a fool stop love. It would be a cold welcome, he thought.

'And if I give your package to the captain of the Esperanca?'

'My boy will be waiting on the wharf. In return for the captain's receipt he will give you an envelope with your letter inside.'

'You trust your boy?'

'Just as you trust Ali.'

'Suppose I demand the letter first and gave you my word...'

'It is the penalty of the blackmailer, Major Scobie, that he has no debts of honour. You would be quite right to cheat me.'

'Suppose you cheat me?'

'That wouldn't be right. And formerly I was your friend.'

'You very nearly were,' Scobie reluctantly admitted.

'I am the base Indian.'

'The base Indian?'

'Who threw away a pearl,' Yusef sadly said. 'That was in the play by Shakespeare the Ordnance Corps gave in the Memorial Hall. I have always remembered it.'

2.

'Well,' Druce said, 'I'm afraid well have to get to work now.'

'One more gla.s.s,' the captain of the Esperanca said. 'Not if we are going to release you before the boom closes.

See you later, Scobie.' When the door of the cabin closed the captain said breathlessly, 'I am still here.'

'So I see. I told you there are often mistakes - minutes go to the wrong place, files are lost.'

'I believe none of that,' the captain said. 'I believe you helped me.' He dripped gently with sweat in the stuffy cabin. He added, 'I pray for you at Ma.s.s, and I have brought you this. It was all that I could find for you in Lobito. She is a very obscure saint,' and he slid across the table between them a holy medal the size of a nickel piece. 'Santa - I don't remember her name. She had something to do with Angola I think,' the captain explained.

'Thank you,' Scobie said. The package in his pocket seemed to him to weigh as heavily as a gun against his thigh. He let the last drops of port settle in the well of his gla.s.s and then drained them. He said, 'This time I have something for you.' A terrible reluctance cramped his fingers.

'For me?'

'Yes.'

How light the little package actually was now that it was on the table between them. What had weighed like a gun in the pocket might now have contained little more than fifty cigarettes. He said, 'Someone who comes on board with the pilot at Lisbon will ask you if you have any American cigarettes. You will give him this package.'

'Is this Government business?'

'No. The Government would never pay as well as this.' He laid a packet of notes upon the table.

'This surprises me,' the captain said with an odd note of disappointment. 'You have put yourself in my hands.'

'You were in mine,' Scobie said.

'I don't forget. Nor will my daughter. She is married outside the Church, but she has faith. She prays for you too.'

'The prayers we pray then don't count, surely?'

'No, but when the moment of Grace returns they rise,' the captain raised his fat arms in an absurd and touching gesture, 'all at once together like a flock of birds.'

'I shall be glad of them,' Scobie said.

'You can trust me, of course.'

'Of course. Now I must search your cabin.'

'You do not trust me very far.'

'That package,' Scobie said, 'has nothing to do with the war.'

'Are you sure?'

'I am nearly sure.'

He began his search. Once, pausing by a mirror, he saw poised over his own shoulder a stranger's face, a fat, sweating, unreliable face. Momentarily he wondered: who can that be? before he realized that it was only this new unfamiliar look of pity which made it strange to him. He thought: am I really one of those whom people pity?

BOOK THREE.

PART ONE.

Chapter One.

1.

THE rains were over and the earth steamed. Flies everywhere settled in clouds, and the hospital was full of malaria patients. Farther up the coast they were dying of blackwater, and yet for a while there was a sense of relief. It was as if the world had become quiet again, now that the drumming on the iron roofs was over. In the town the deep scent of flowers modified the Zoo smell in the corridors of the police station. An hour after the boom was opened the liner moved in from the south unescorted.

Scobie went out in the police boat as soon as the liner anch.o.r.ed. His mouth felt stiff with welcome; he practised on his tongue phrases which would seem warm and unaffected, and he thought: what a long way I have travelled to make me rehea.r.s.e a welcome. He hoped he would find Louise in one of the public rooms; it would be easier to greet her in front of strangers, but there was no sign of her anywhere. He had to ask at the purser's office for her cabin number.

Even then, of course, there was the hope that it would be shared. No cabin nowadays held less than six pa.s.sengers.

But when he knocked and the door was opened, n.o.body was there but Louise. He felt like a caller at a strange house with something to sell. There was a question-mark at the end of his voice when he said, 'Louise?'

'Henry.' She added, 'Come inside.' When once he was with' in the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth - the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn't be content until she had pulled his face round and left the seal of her return on his lips. 'Oh my dear, here I am.'

'Here you are,' he said, seeking desperately for the phrases he had rehea.r.s.ed.

'They've all been so sweet,' she explained. They are keeping away, so that I can see you alone.'

'You've had a good trip?'

'I think we were chased once.'

'I was very anxious,' he said and thought: that is the first lie. I may as well take the plunge now. He said, 'I've missed you so much.'

'I was a fool to go away, darling.' Through the port-hole the houses sparkled like mica in the haze of heat. The cabin smelt closely of women, of powder, nail-varnish, and nightdresses. He said, 'Let's get ash.o.r.e.'

But she detained him a little while yet 'Darling,' she said, 'I've made a lot of resolutions while I've been away. Everything now is going to be different. I'm not going to rattle you any more.' She repeated, 'Everything will be different' and he thought sadly that that at any rate was the truth, the bleak truth.

Standing at the window of his house while Ali and the small boy carried in the trunks he looked up the hill towards the Nissen huts. It was as if a landslide had suddenly put an immeasurable distance between him and them. They were so distant that at first there was no pain, any more than for an episode of youth remembered with the faintest melancholy. Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need - and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance. Upstairs silence and solitude were being hammered away, tin-tacks were being driven in, weights fell on the floor and shook the ceiling. Louise's voice was raised in cheerful peremptory commands. There was a rattle of objects on the dressing-table. He went upstairs and from the doorway saw the face in the white communion veil staring back at him again: the dead too had returned. Life was not the same without the dead. The mosquito-net hung, a grey ectoplasm, over the double bed.

'Well, Ali,' he said, with the phantom of a smite which was all he could raise at this seance, 'Missus back. We're all together again.' Her rosary lay on the dressing-table, and he thought of the broken one in his pocket. He had always meant to get it mended: now it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

'Darling,' Louise said, 'I've finished up here. Ali can do the rest There are so many things I want to speak to you about. ...' She followed him downstairs and said at once, 'I must get the curtains washed.'

'They don't show the dirt'

'Poor dear, you wouldn't notice, but I've been away.' She said, 'I really want a bigger bookcase now. I've brought a lot of books back with me.'

'You haven't told me yet what made you...'

'Darling, you'd laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I'd been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I'll tell you one day when I don't mind your laughing.' She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. 'You're really glad...?'

'So glad,' he said.

'Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn't be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.'

'I don't suppose I have been.'

'Have you missed Ma.s.s often?'

He said with forced jocularity, 'I've hardly been at all.'

'Oh, Ticki.' She pulled herself quickly up and said, 'Henry, darling, you'll think I'm very sentimental, but tomorrow's Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we've started again - in the right way.' It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed - this he had not considered. He said, 'Of course,' but his brain momentarily refused to work.

'You'll have to go to confession this afternoon.'

'I haven't done anything very terrible.'

'Missing Ma.s.s on Sunday's a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.'

'Adultery's more fun,' he said with attempted lightness.

'It's time I came back.'

'I'll go along this afternoon - after lunch. I can't confess on an empty stomach.' he said.

'Darling, you have changed, you know.'

'I was only joking.'

'I don't mind you joking. I like it You didn't do it much though before.'

'You don't come back every day, darling.' The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he kid down his fork for yet another 'crack'. 'Dear Henry,' she said, 'I've never known you so cheerful' The ground had given way beneath his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathless-ness, the despair - because you couldn't fall so far as this and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a creva.s.se.

When lunch was over (he couldn't have told what it was he'd eaten) he said, 'I must be off.'

'Father Rank?'

'First I've got to look in on Wilson. He's living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.'

'Wont he be in town?'

'I think he comes back for lunch.'

He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no - that wasn't a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. 'I didn't expect to see you.'

'I bad a touch of fever,' Harris said. 'I wondered whether Wilson was in.'

'He always lunches in town,' Harris said. 'I just wanted to tell him he'd be welcome to look in. My wife's back, you know.'

'I thought I saw the activity through the window.'