The Heart Of The Matter Part 25

1.

THE bank manager took a sip of feed water and exclaimed with more than professional warmth, 'How glad you must be to have Mrs Scobie back well in time for Christmas.'

'Christmas is a long way off still,' Scobie said.

'Time flies when the rains are over,' the bank manager went on with his novel cheerfulness. Scobie had never before heard in his voice this note of optimism. He remembered the stork-like figure pacing to and fro, pausing at the medical books, so many hundred times a day.

'I came along...' Scobie began.

'About your life insurance - or an overdraft, would it be?'

'Well, it wasn't either this time.'

'You know I'll always be glad to help you, Scobie, whatever it is.' How quietly Robinson sat at his desk. Scobie said with wonder, 'Have you given up your daily exercise?'

'Ah, that was all stuff and nonsense,' the manager said. 'I had read too many books.'

'I wanted to look in your medical encyclopaedia,' Scobie explained.

'You'd do much better to see a doctor,' Robinson surprisingly advised him. 'It's a doctor who's put me right, not the books. The tune I would have wasted ... I tell you, Scobie, the new young fellow they've got at the Argyll Hospital's the best man they've sent to this colony since they discovered it.'

'And he's put you right?'

'Go and see him. His name's Travis. Tell him I sent you'

'All the same, if I could just have a look...'

'You'll find it on the shelf. I keep 'em there still because they look important. A bank manager has to be a reading man. People expect him to have solid books around.'

'I'm glad your stomach's cured.'

The manager took another sip of water. He said, 'I'm not bothering about it any more. The truth of the matter is, Scobie, I'm...'

Scobie looked through the encyclopaedia for the word Angina and now he read on: CHARACTER OF THE PAIN. This is usually described as being 'gripping', 'as though the chest were in a vice'. The pain is situated in the middle of the chest and under the sternum. It may run down either arm perhaps more commonly the left, or up into the neck or down into the abdomen. It lasts a few seconds, or at the most a minute or so. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE PATIENT. This is characteristic. He holds himself absolutely still in whatever circ.u.mstances he may find himself.... Scobie's eye pa.s.sed rapidly down the cross-headings : CAUSE OF THE PAIN. TREATMENT. TERMINATION OF THE DISEASE. Then he put the book back on the shelf. 'Well,' he said, 'perhaps I'll drop in on your Dr Travis. I'd rather see him than Dr Sykes. I hope he cheers me up as he's done you.'

'Well, my case,' the manager said evasively, 'had peculiar features.'

'Mine looks straightforward enough.'

'You seem pretty well.'

'Oh, I'm all right - bar a bit of pain now and then and sleeping badly.'

'Your responsibilities do that for you.'

'Perhaps.'

It seemed to Scobie that he had sowed enough - against what harvest? He couldn't himself have told. He said goodbye and went out into the dazzling street. He carried his helmet and let the sun strike vertically down upon his thin greying hair. He offered himself for punishment all the way to the police station and was rejected. It had seemed to him these last three weeks that the d.a.m.ned must be in a special category; like the young men destined for some unhealthy foreign post in a trading company, they were reserved from their humdrum fellows, protected from the daily task, preserved carefully at special desks, so that the worst might happen later. Nothing now ever seemed to go wrong. The sun would not strike, the Colonial Secretary asked him to dinner ... He felt rejected by misfortune.

The Commissioner said, 'Come in, Scobie. I've got good news for you,' and Scobie prepared himself for yet another rejection.

'Baker is not coining here. They need him in Palestine. They've decided after all to let the right man succeed me.' Scobie sat down on the window-ledge and watched his hand tremble on his knee. He thought: so all this need not have happened. If Louise had stayed I should never have loved Helen, I would never have been blackmailed by Yusef, never have committed that act of despair. I would have been myself still - the same self that lay stacked in fifteen years of diaries, not this broken cast. But, of course, he told himself, it's only because I have done these things that success comes. I am of the devil's party. He looks after his own in this world. I shall go now from d.a.m.ned success to d.a.m.ned success, he thought with disgust.

'I think Colonel Wright's word was the deciding factor. You impressed him, Scobie.'

'It's come too late, sir.'

'Why too late?'

'I'm too old for the job. It needs a younger man.'

'Nonsense. You're only just fifty.'

'My health's not good.'

'It's the first I've heard of it.'

'I was telling Robinson at the bank today. I've been getting pains, and I'm sleeping badly.' He talked rapidly, beating time on his knee. 'Robinson swears by Travis. He seems to have worked wonders with him.'

'Poor Robinson.'

'Why?'

'He's been given two years to live. That's in confidence, Scobie.'

Human beings never cease to surprise: so it was the death sentence that had cured Robinson of his imaginary ailments, his medical books, his daily walk from wall to wall. I suppose, Scobie thought, that is what comes of knowing the worst - one is left alone with the worst and it's like peace. He imagined Robinson talking across the desk to his solitary companion. 'I hope we all die as calmly,' he said. 'Is he going home?'

'I don't think so. I suppose presently he'll have to go to the Argyll.'

Scobie thought: I wish I had known what I had been looking at. Robinson was exhibiting the -most enviable possession a man can own - a happy death. This tour would bear a high proportion of deaths - or perhaps not so high when you counted them and remembered Europe. First Pemberton, then the child at Pende, now Robinson ... no, it wasn't many, but of course he hadn't counted the blackwater cases in the military hospital.

'So that's how matters stand,' the Commissioner said. 'Next tour you will be Commissioner. Your wife will be pleased.'

I must endure her pleasure, Scobie thought, without anger. I am the guilty man, and I have no right to criticize, to show vexation ever again. He said,' I'll be getting home.'

Ali stood by his car, talking to another boy who slipped quietly away when he saw Scobie approach. 'Who was that, Ali?'

'My small brother, sah,' Ali said.

'I don't know him, do I? Same mother?'

'No, sah, same father.'

'What does he do?' Ali worked at the starting handle, his face dripping with sweat, saying nothing.

'Who does he work for, Ali?'

'Sah?'

'I said who does he work for?'

'For Mr Wilson, sah.'

The engine started and Ali climbed into the back seat. 'Has he ever made you a proposition, Ali? I mean has he asked you to report on me - for money?' He could see Ali's face in the driving mirror, set, obstinate, closed and rocky like a cave mouth. 'No, sah.'

'Lots of people are interested in me and pay good money for reports. They think me bad man, Ali.'

Ali said, 'I'm your boy,' staring back through the medium of the mirror. It seemed to Scobie one of the qualities of deceit that you lost the sense of trust. If I can lie and betray, so can others. Wouldn't many people gamble on my honesty and lose their stake? Why should I lose my stake on Ali? I have not been caught and he has not been caught, that's all An awful depression weighed his head towards the wheel He thought: I know that Ali is honest: I have known that for fifteen years; I am just trying to find a companion in this region of lies. Is the next stage the stage of corrupting others?

Louise was not in when they arrived. Presumably someone had called and taken her out - perhaps to the beach. She hadn't expected him back before sundown. He wrote a note for her, Taking some furniture up to Helen. Will be back early with good news for you, and then he drove up alone to the Nissen huts through the bleak empty middle day. Only the vultures were about - gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men's necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that 'I've brought you another table and a couple of chairs. Is your boy about?'

'No, he's at market.'

They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the gra.s.s. Scobie said, 'I'm interrupting your lunch.'

'Oh no. I've about finished. Have some fruit salad.'

'It's time you had a new table. This one wobbles.' He said, 'They are making me Commissioner after all.'

'It will please your wife,' Helen said.

'It doesn't mean a thing to me.'

'Oh, of course it does,' she said briskly. This was another convention of hers - that only she suffered. He would for a long tune resist, like Coriola.n.u.s, the exhibition of his wounds, but sooner or later he would give way: he would dramatize his pain in words until even to himself it seemed unreal. Perhaps, he would think, she is right after all: perhaps I don't suffer. She said, 'Of course the Commissioner must be above suspicion, mustn't he, like Caesar.' (Her sayings, as well as her spelling, lacked accuracy.) 'This is the end of us, I suppose.'

'You know there is no end to us.'

'Oh, but the Commissioner can't have a mistress hidden away in a Nissen hut.' The sting, of course, was in the 'hidden away', but how could he allow himself to feel the least irritation, remembering the letter she had written to him, offering herself as a sacrifice any way he liked, to keep or to throw away? Human beings couldn't be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything - for G.o.d or love - must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted. He said, 'If the Commissioner can't keep you, then I shan't be the Commissioner.'

'Don't be silly. After all,' she said with fake reasonableness, and he recognized this as one of her bad days, 'what do we get out of it?'

'I get a lot,' he said, and wondered: is that a lie for the sake of comfort? There were so many lies nowadays he couldn't keep track of the small, the unimportant ones.

'An hour or two every other day perhaps when you can slip away. Never so much as a night.'

He said hopelessly,' Oh, I have plans,'

'What plans?'

He said, 'They are too vague still.'

She said with all the acid she could squeeze out, 'Well, let me know in time. To fall in with your wishes, I mean.'

'My dear, I haven't come here to quarrel.'

'I sometimes wonder what you do come here for.'

'Well, today I brought some furniture.'

'Oh yes, the furniture.'

'I've got the car here. Let me take you to the beach.'

'Oh, we can't be seen there together.'

'That's nonsense. Louise is there now, I think.'

'For G.o.d's sake,' Helen said, 'keep that smug woman out of my sight'

'All right then. I'll take you for a run in the car.'

'That would be safer, wouldn't it?'

Scobie took her by the shoulders and said, 'I'm not always thinking of safety.'

'I thought you were.'

Suddenly he felt his resistance give way and he shouted at her, 'The sacrifice isn't all on your side.' With despair he could see from a distance the scene coming up on both of them: like the tornado before the rains, that wheeling column of blackness which would soon cover the whole sky.

'Of course work must suffer,' she said with childish sarcasm. 'All these s.n.a.t.c.hed half-hours.'

'I've given up hope,' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'I've given up the future. I've d.a.m.ned myself.'

'Don't be so melodramatic,' she said. 'I don't know what you are talking about. Anyway, you've just told me about the future - the Commissionership.'

'I mean the real future - the future that goes on.'

She said, 'If there's one thing I hate it's your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It's so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn't be here.'

'But I do believe and I am here.' He said with bewilderment, 'I can't explain it, but there it is. My eyes are open. I know what I'm doing. When Father Rank came down to the rail carrying the sacrament...'

Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, 'You've told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don't believe in h.e.l.l any more than I do.'

He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, 'You can't get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I'm d.a.m.ned for all eternity - unless a miracle happens. I'm a policeman. I know what I'm saying. What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done, but I'm carrying my corruption around with me. It's the coating of my stomach.' He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. 'Never pretend I haven't shown my love.'

'Love for your wife, you mean. You were afraid she'd find out.'