The Heart Of The Matter Part 29

The door was not locked and he went in. Years had pa.s.sed in his brain, but here time had stood still. It might have been the same bottle of gin from which the boy had stolen - how long ago? The junior official's chairs stood stiffly around, as though on a film set: he couldn't believe they had ever moved, any more than the pouf presented by - was it Mrs Carter? On the bed the pillow had not been shaken after the siesta, and he laid his hand on the warm mould of a skull. O G.o.d, he prayed, I'm going away from all of you for ever: let her come back in time: let me see her once more, but the hot day cooled around him and n.o.body came. At 6.30 Louise would be back from the beach. He couldn't wait any longer.

I must leave some kind of a message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of deprivation. He looked for paper and couldn't find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw a writing-case, but it was the stamp-alb.u.m that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, he felt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won't matter: she had told him that you can't see where a stamp has been torn out. There was no sc.r.a.p of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it: I love you. She can't take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that's indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn't he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill - she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time - an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then h.e.l.l will begin, and they'll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.

At dinner he talked deliberately of the week to come; he blamed himself for accepting Fellowes's invitation and explained that dinner with the Commissioner the next day was unavoidable - there was much to discuss.

'Is there no hope, Ticki, that after a rest, a long rest...?'

'It wouldn't be fair to carry on - to them or you. I might break down at any moment.'

'It's really retirement?'

'Yes.'

She began to discuss where they were to live. He felt tired to death, and it needed all his will to show interest in this fict.i.tious village or that, in the kind of house he knew they would never inhabit. 'I don't want a suburb,' Louise said. 'What I'd really like would be a weather-board house in Kent, so that one can get up to town quite easily.'

He said, 'Of course it will depend on what we can afford. My pension won't be very large.'

'I shall work,' Louise said.' It will be easy in wartime.'

'I hope we shall be able to manage without that.'

'I wouldn't mind.'

Bed-time came, and he felt a terrible unwillingness to let her go. There was nothing to do when she had once gone but die. He didn't know how to keep her - they had talked about all the subjects they had in common. He said, 'I shall sit here a while. Perhaps I shall feel sleepy if I stay up half an hour longer. I don't want to take the Evipan if I can help it.'

'I'm very tired after the beach. I'll be off.'

When she's gone, be thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can't believe that I'm going to do this. Presently I shall get up and go to bed, and life will begin again. Nothing, n.o.body, can force me to die. Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signalled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him...

'What is it, Ticki? You look I'll. Come to bed too.'

'I wouldn't sleep,' he said obstinately.

'Is there nothing I can do?' Louise asked. 'Dear, I'd do anything...' Her love was like a death sentence.

'There's nothing, dear,' he said. 'I mustn't keep you up.' But so soon as she turned towards the stairs he spoke again. 'Read me something,' he said, 'you got a new book today. Read me something.'

'You wouldn't like it, Ticki. It's poetry.'

'Never mind. It may send me to sleep.' He hardly listened while she read. People said you couldn't love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn't put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn't beauty that we love, he thought, it's failure - the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect - but that's what I'm going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever. Some words she was reading momentarily caught his attention: We are all falling. This hand's falling too - all have this falling sickness none withstands.

And yet there's always One whose gentle hands this universal falling can't fall through.

They sounded like truth, but he rejected them - comfort can come too easily. He thought, those hands will never hold my fall: I slip between the fingers, I'm greased with falsehood, treachery. Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.

'Dear, you are half asleep.'

'For a moment.'

'I'll go up now. Don't stay long. Perhaps you won't need your Evipan tonight'

He watched her go. The lizard lay still upon the wall. Before she had reached the stairs he called her back. 'Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep.'

She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he gave her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. 'Good night, Louise. You know I love you,' he said with careful lightness.

'Of course and I love you.'

'Yes. Good night. Louise.'

'Good night, Tick!.' It was the best he could do with safety.

As soon as he heard the door close, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of Evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty - to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waited for courage with the tablets in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone: this was freezing-point.

But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him. Throw away those tablets. You'll never be able to collect enough again. You'll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night's sleep. In the morning you'll be woken by your boy, and you'll drive down to the police station for a day's ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word 'ordinary' as it might have dwelt on the word 'happy' or 'peaceful'.

'No,' Scobie said aloud, 'no.' He pushed the tablets in his mouth six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12, Called on H.R., out; temperature at 2 p.m. and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death; he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heartbeats like a clock striking the hour. He tried out an act of contrition, but when he reached, 'I am sorry and beg pardon', a cloud formed over the door and drifted down over the whole room and he couldn't remember what it was that he had to be sorry for. He had to hold himself upright with both hands, but he had forgotten the reason why he so held himself. Somewhere far away he thought he heard the sounds of pain. 'A storm,' he said aloud, 'there's going to be a storm,' as the clouds grew, and he tried to get up to close the windows. 'Ali,' he called, 'Ali.' It seemed to him as though someone outside the room were seeking him, calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that he was here. He got to his feet and heard the hammer of his heart beating out a reply. He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of nun. And automatically at the call of need, at the cry of a victim, Scobie strung himself to act He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, 'Dear G.o.d, I love...' but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the ice-box - the saint whose name n.o.body could remember.

PART THREE.

Chapter One.

1.

Wilson said, 'I have kept away as long as I could, but I thought perhaps I could be of some help.'

'Everybody,' Louise said, 'has been very kind,'

'I had no idea that he was so ill.'

'Your spying didn't help you there, did it?'

'That was my job,' Wilson said, 'and I love you.'

'How glibly you use that word, Wilson.'

'You don't believe me?'

'I don't believe in anybody who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.'

'You won't marry me then?'

'It doesn't seem likely, does it, but I might, in time. I don't know what loneliness may do. But don't let's talk about love any more. It was his favourite lie.'

'To both of you.'

'How has she taken it, Wilson?'

'I saw her on the beach this afternoon with Bagster. And I hear she was a bit pickled last night at the club.'

'She hasn't any dignity.'

'I never knew what he saw in her. I'd never betray you, Louise.'

'You know he even went up to see her the day he died.'

'How do you know?'

'It's all written there. In his diary. He never lied in his diary. He never said things he didn't mean - like love.'

Three days had pa.s.sed since Scobie had been hastily buried. Dr Travis had signed the death certificate - angina pectoris. In that climate a post-mortem was difficult, and in any case unnecessary, though Dr Travis had taken the precaution of checking up on the Evipan.

'Do you know,' Wilson said, 'when my boy told me he had died suddenly in the night, I thought it was suicide?'

'It's odd how easily I can talk about him,' Louise said, 'now that he's gone. Yet I did love him, Wilson. I did love him, but he seems so very very gone.'

It was as if he had left nothing behind him in the house but a few suits of clothes and a Mende grammar: at the police station a drawer full of odds and ends and a pair of rusting handcuffs. And yet the house was no different: the shelves were as full of books; it seemed to Wilson that it must always have been her house, not his. Was it just imagination then that made their voices ring a little hollowly, as though the house were empty?

'Did you know all the time - about her?' Wilson asked.

'It's why I came home. Mrs Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he never realized that. He thought he'd been so clever. And he nearly convinced me - that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.'

'How did he square that with his conscience?'

'Some Catholics do, I suppose. Go to confession and start over again. I thought he was more honest though. When a man's dead one begins to find out.'

'He took money from Yusef.'

'I can believe it now.'

Wilson put his hand on Louise's shoulder and said, 'You can trust me, Louise. I love you.'

'I really believe you do.' They didn't kiss; it was too soon for that, but they sat in the hollow room, holding hands, listening to the vultures clambering on the iron roof.

'So that's his diary,' Wilson said.

'He was writing in it when he died - oh nothing interesting, just the temperatures He always kept the temperatures. He wasn't romantic. G.o.d knows what she saw in him to make it worth while.'

'Would you mind if I looked at it?'

'If you want to,' she said, 'poor Ticki, he hasn't any secrets left.'

'His secrets were never very secret.' He turned a page and read and turned a page. He said, 'Had he suffered from sleeplessness very long?'

'I always thought that he slept like a log whatever happened.'

Wilson said, 'Have you noticed that he's written in pieces about sleeplessness - afterwards?'

'How do you know?'

'You've only to compare the colour of the ink. And all these records of taking his Evipan - it's very studied, very careful. But above all the colour of the ink.' He said, 'It makes one think.'

She interrupted him with horror, 'Oh no, he couldn't have done that. After all, in spite of everything, he was a Catholic.'

2.

'Just let me come in for one little drink,' Bagster pleaded.

'We had four at the beach.'

'Just one little one more.'

'All right,' Helen said. There seemed to be no reason so far as she could see to deny anyone anything any more for ever.

Bagster said, 'You know it's the first time you've let me come in. Charming little place you've made of it. Who'd have thought a Nissen hut could be so homey?' Flushed and smelling of pink gin, both of us, we are a pair, she thought. Bagster kissed her wetly on her upper lip and looked around again. 'Ha ha,' he said, 'the good old bottle.' When they had drunk one more gin he took off his uniform jacket and hung it carefully on a chair. He said, 'Let's take our back hair down and talk of love.'

'Need we?' Helen said. 'Yet?'

'Lighting up time,' Bagster said. 'The dusk. So well let George take over the controls ...'

'Who's George?'

'The automatic pilot, of course. You've got a lot to learn.'

'For G.o.d's sake teach me some other time.'

'There's no time like the present for a prang,' Bagster said, moving her firmly towards the bed. Why not? she thought, why not ... if he wants it? Bagster is as good as anyone else. There's n.o.body in the world I love, and out of it doesn't count, so why not let them have their prangs (it was Bagster's phrase) if they want them enough. She lay back mutely on the bed and shut her eyes and was aware in the darkness of nothing at all. I'm alone, she thought without self-pity, stating it as a fact, as an explorer might after his companions have died from exposure.

'By G.o.d, you aren't enthusiastic,' Bagster said. 'Don't you love me a bit, Helen?' and his ginny breath fanned through her darkness.

'No.' she said, 'I don't love anyone.'

He said furiously, 'You loved Scobie,' and added quickly, 'Sorry. Rotten thing to say.'

'I don't love anyone,' she repeated. 'You can't love the dead, can you? They don't exist, do they? It would be like loving the dodo, wouldn't it?' questioning him as if she expected an answer, even from Bagster. She kept her eyes shut because in the dark she felt nearer to death, the death which had absorbed him. The bed trembled a little as Bagster shuffled his weight from off it, and the chair creaked as he took away his jacket He said, I'm not all that of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Helen. You aren't in the mood. See you tomorrow?'