The Heart Of The Matter Part 26

Anger drained out of him. He said, 'Love for both of you. If it were just for her there'd be an easy straight way.' He put his hands over his eyes, feeling hysteria beginning to mount again. He said, 'I can't bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.'

'Where to?'

Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, 'Oh, I just mean take a holiday.' He added, 'I'm not sleeping well. And I've been getting an odd pain.'

'Darling, are you I'll?' The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had pa.s.sed beyond them. Helen said, 'Darling, I'm a b.i.t.c.h. I get tired and fed up with things - but it doesn't mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?'

'I'll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.'

'Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.'

'No, I don't want to see Dr Sykes.' Now that the anger and hysteria had pa.s.sed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O G.o.d, I can't leave her. Or Louise. You don't need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said, 'I'll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.'

In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, 'There are no eyes here ... Wilson can't see us. Harris isn't watching. Yusef's boys ...'

'Dear, I'd leave you tomorrow if it would help.'

'It wouldn't help.' He said, 'You remember when I wrote you a letter - which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife ...' As he spoke he heard another's breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, 'Who's that?'

'What, dear?'

'Somebody's here.' He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, 'Who's there? Come out'

'It's Ali,' Helen said.

'What are you doing here. Ali?'

'Missus sent me,' Ali said. 'I wait here for Ma.s.sa ten him Missus back.' He was hardly visible in the shadow.

'Why were you waiting here?'

'My head humbug me,' Ali said. 'I go for sleep, small, small sleep.'

'Don't frighten him,' Helen said. 'He's telling the truth.'

'Go along home, Ali,' Scobie told him, 'and tell Missus I come straight down.' He watched him pad out into the hard sunlight between the Nissen huts. He never looked back.

'Don't worry about him,' Helen said. 'He didn't understand a thing.'

'I've had Ali for fifteen years,' Scobie said. It was the first time he had been ashamed before him in all those years. He remembered Ali the night after Pemberton's death, cup of tea in hand, holding him up against the shaking lorry, and then he remembered Wilson's boy slinking off along the wall by the police station.

'You can trust him, anyway.'

'I don't know how,' Scobie said. 'I've lost the trick of trust.'

2.

Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life - bare and undisturbed and built of facts - lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead; no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy ... He thought: this is how it ought to be. I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch, 11.45, and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door - a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn't need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.

There was n.o.body now to whom he could speak the truth. There were things the Commissioner must not know, Louise must not know, there were even limits to what he could tell Helen, for what was the use, when he had sacrificed so much in order to avoid pain, of inflicting it needlessly? As for G.o.d he could speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy - there was bitterness between them. He moved his hand on the table, and it was as though his loneliness moved too and touched the tips of his fingers. 'You and I,' his loneliness said, 'you and I.' It occurred to him that the outside world if they knew the facts might envy him: Bagster would envy him Helen, and Wilson Louise. What a h.e.l.l of a quiet dog, Fraser would exclaim with a lick of the lips. They would imagine, he thought with amazement, that I get something out of it, but it seemed to him that no man had ever got less. Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand.

The door creaked gently open behind him. Scobie did not move. The spies, he thought, are creeping in. Is this Wilson, Harris, Pemberton's boy, Ali...? 'Ma.s.sa,' a voice whispered, and a bare foot slapped the concrete floor.

'Who are you?' Scobie asked not turning round. A pink palm dropped a small ball of paper on the table and went out of sight again. The voice said, 'Yusef say come very quiet n.o.body see.'

'What does Yusef want now?'

'He send you dash - small small dash.' Then the door closed again and silence was back. Loneliness said, 'Let us open this together, you and I.'

Scobie picked up the ball of paper: it was light, but it had a small hard centre. At first he didn't realize what it was: he thought it was a pebble put in to keep the paper steady and he looked for writing which, of course, was not there, for whom would Yusef trust to write for him? Then he realized what it was - a diamond, a gem stone. He knew nothing about diamonds, but it seemed to him that it was probably worth at least as much as his debt to Yusef. Presumably Yusef had information that the stones he had sent by the Esperanca had reached their destination safely. This was a mark of grat.i.tude - not a bribe, Yusef would explain, the fat hand upon his sincere and shallow heart.

The door burst open and there was Ali. He had a boy by the arm who whimpered. Ali said, 'This stinking Mende boy he go all round the house. He try doors.'

'Who are you?' Scobie said.

The boy broke out in a mixture of fear and rage, 'I Yusef s boy. I bring Ma.s.sa letter,' and he pointed at the table where the pebble lay in the screw of paper. Ali's eyes followed the gesture. Scobie said to his loneliness, 'You and I have to think quickly.' He turned on the boy and said, 'Why you not come here properly and knock on the door? Why you come like a thief?'

He had the thin body and the melancholy soft eyes of all Mendes. He said, 'I not a thief,' with so slight an emphasis on the first word that it was just possible he was not impertinent. He went on, 'Ma.s.sa tell me to come very quiet.'

Scobie said, 'Take this back to Yusef and tell him I want to know where he gets a stone like that. I think he steals stones and I find out by-and-by. Go on. Take it. Now, Ali, throw him out.' Ali pushed the boy ahead of him through the door, and Scobie could hear the rustle of their feet on the path. Were they whispering together? He went to the door and called out after them, 'Tell Yusef I call on him one night soon and make h.e.l.l of a palaver.' He slammed the door again and thought, what a lot Ali knows, and he felt distrust of his boy moving again like fever with the bloodstream. He could ruin me, he thought: he could ruin them.

He poured himself out a gla.s.s of whisky and took a bottle of soda out of his ice-box. Louise called from upstairs, 'Henry'.

'Yes, dear?'

'Is it twelve yet?'

'Close on, I think.'

'You won't drink anything after twelve, will you? You remember tomorrow?' and of course he did remember, draining his gla.s.s: it was November the First - All Saints' Day, and this All Souls' Night. What ghost would pa.s.s over the whisky's surface? 'You are coming to communion, aren't you, dear?' and he thought wearily: there is no end to this: why should I draw the line now? One may as well go on d.a.m.ning oneself until the end. His loneliness was the only ghost his whisky could invoke, nodding across the table at him, taking a drink out of his gla.s.s. 'The next occasion,' loneliness told him, 'will be Christmas - the Midnight Ma.s.s - you won't be able to avoid that you know, and no excuse will serve you on that night, and after that' - the long chain of feast days, of early Ma.s.ses in spring and summer, unrolled themselves like a perpetual calendar. He had a sudden picture before his eyes of a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows: the punch-drunk head of G.o.d reeling sideways.

'You are coming, Ticki?' Louise called with what seemed to him a sudden anxiety, as though perhaps suspicion had momentarily breathed on her again - and he thought again, can Ali really be trusted? and all the stale coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance men told him, 'Never trust a black. They'll let you down in the end. Had my boy fifteen years ...' The ghosts of distrust came out on All Souls' Night and gathered around his gla.s.s. 'Oh yes, my dear, I'm coming.'

'You have only to say the word,' he addressed G.o.d, 'and legions of angels ...' and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought, 'And again at Christmas,' thrusting the Child's face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, 'What's that you said, dear?'

'Oh, only that we've got so much to celebrate tomorrow. Being together and the Commissionership. Life is so happy, Ticki.' And that, he told his loneliness with defiance, is my reward, splashing the whisky across the table, defying the ghosts to do their worst, watching G.o.d bleed.

Chapter Four.

1.

He could tell that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storeyed building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains of the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. 'All quiet, corporal?'

'All quiet, sah.'

'Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?'

'Oh yes, sah. All quiet, sah.' He could tell from the prompt.i.tude of the reply how untrue it was.

'The wharf rats out?'

'Oh no, sah. All very quiet like the grave.' The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.

'Well, good night.'

'Good night, sah.'

Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef - not since the night of the blackmail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust At least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help ... Round the comer of a crate came Wilson. Scobie's torch lit his face like a map.

'Why, Wilson,' Scobie said, 'you are out late.'

'Yes,' Wilson said, and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.

'You've got a pa.s.s for the quay?'

'Yes.'

'Keep away from the Kru Town end. It's not safe there alone. No more nose bleeding?'

'No,' Wilson said. He made no attempt to move; it seemed always his way - to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.

'Well, I'll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise ...'

Wilson said, 'I love her, Scobie.'

'I thought you did,' Scobie said. 'She likes you, Wilson.'

'I love her,' Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, 'You wouldn't know what that means.'

'What means?'

'Love. You don't love anybody except yourself, your dirty self.'

'You are overwrought, Wilson. It's the climate. Go and lie down.'

'You wouldn't act as you do if you loved her.' Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heart-rending tune. A sentry by the Field Security post challenged and somebody replied with a pa.s.sword. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson's mosquito-boots. He said, 'Love isn't as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.'

'What would you do if I told her everything - about Mrs Rolt?'

'But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story.'

'One day I'll ruin you, Scobie.'

'Would that help Louise?'

'I could make her happy,' Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years - to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea's edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, 'You'd try. I know you'd try. Perhaps...' but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, 'I wish meanwhile you'd stop spying on me.'

'It's my job.' Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torchlight.

'The things you find out are so unimportant.' He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef s office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. 'At 11.25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment...'

Scobie knocked and walked right in where Yusef half lay behind his desk, his legs upon it, dictating to a black clerk. Without breaking his sentence - 'five hundred rolls matchbox design, seven hundred and fifty bucket and sand, six hundred poker dot artificial silk' - he looked up at Scobie with hope and apprehension. Then he said sharply to the clerk, 'Get out. But come back. Tell my boy that I see no one.' He took his legs from the desk, rose and held out a flabby hand, 'Welcome, Major Scobie,' then let it fall like an unwanted piece of material. 'This is the first time you have ever honoured my office, Major Scobie.'

'I don't know why I've come here now, Yusef.'

'It is a long time since we have seen each other.' Yusef sat down and rested his great head wearily on a palm like a dish. 'Time goes so differently for two people - fast or slow. According to their friendship.'

'There's probably a Syrian poem about that.'

'There is, Major Scobie,' he said eagerly.

'You should be friends with Wilson, not me, Yusef. He reads poetry. I have a prose mind.'

'A whisky, Major Scobie?'

'I wouldn't say no.' He sat down on the other side of the desk and the inevitable blue syphon stood between them.

'And how is Mrs Scobie?'

'Why did you send me that diamond, Yusef?'

'I was in your debt, Major Scobie.'

'Oh no, you weren't You paid me off in full with a bit of paper.'

'I try so hard to forget that that was the way. I tell myself it was really friendship - at bottom it was friendship.'

'It's never any good lying to oneself, Yusef. One sees through the lie too easily.'

'Major Scobie, if I saw more of you, I should become a better man.' The soda hissed in the gla.s.ses and Yusef drank greedily. He said, 'I can feel in my heart, Major Scobie, that you are anxious, depressed ... I have always wished that you would come to me in trouble.'