The Heart of the Matter

  ‘It would take too long,’ he said. ‘One would have to begin with the arguments for a God.’

  ‘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 pass, they think I’m frigid. I come back here before the rain starts and wait for you … we drink a glass 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 booby-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 hell. Go to hell. 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 hut, 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 God I think. I am trying very hard to tell the truth. I want more than anything in the world to make you happy … The banality 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 God’? 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 God, 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.

  II

  ‘I was just passing 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 glass between his knees. There was no sound but the rain scraping 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.’

  ‘She’ll be gone this week. She’s a good woman.’ He took another draught of beer and doubled up in the chair with his hand 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 God 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. God 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 God 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 shift my burden there, 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!’

  III

  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.’

  So that was it, he thought: I would have known anyway, so he considered it best to let me know himself. He returned to his office and looked again at his desk. It seemed to him that a file had been shifted, but he couldn’t be sure. He opened his drawer, but there was nothing there which would interest a soul. Only the broken rosary caught his eye—something which should have been mended a long while ago. He took it out and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Whisky?’ the Commissioner asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ Scobie said, holding the glass up between himself and the Commissioner. ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Am I the only one who doesn’t know about Wilson?’

  The Commissioner smiled, lying back at ease, unembarrassed. ‘Nobody knows officially—except myself and the manager of the U.A.C.—that was essential of course. The Governor too and whoever deals with the cables marked Most Secret. I’m glad you’ve tumbled to it.’

  ‘I wanted you to know that—up to date of course—I’ve been trustworthy.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me, Scobie.’

  ‘In the case of Tallit’s cousin we couldn’t have done anything different.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Scobie said, ‘There is one thing you don’t know though. I borrowed two hundred pounds from Yusef so that I could send Louise to South Africa. I pay him four per cent interest. The arrangement is purely commercial, but if you want my head for it …’

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ the Commissioner said. ‘You see Wilson got the idea that you were being blackmailed. He must have dug up those payments somehow.’

  ‘Yusef wouldn’t blackmail for money.’

  ‘I told him that.’

  ‘Do you want my head?’

  ‘I need your head, Scobie. You’re the only officer I really trust.’

  Scobie stretched out a hand with an empty glass in it: it was like a handclasp.

  ‘Say when.’

  ‘When.’

  Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

  ‘Derry reports there’ve been some big thefts from the mines.’

  ‘Commercial?’

  ‘Gem stones. Is it Yusef—or Tallit?’

  ‘It might be Yusef,’ Scobie said. ‘I don’t think he deals in industrial diamonds. He calls them gravel. But of course one can’t be sure.’

  ‘The Esperança will be in in a few days. We’ve got to be careful.’

  ‘What does Wilson say?’

  ‘He swears by Tallit. Yusef is the villain of his piece—and you, Scobie.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Yusef for a long while.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I begin to know what these Syrians feel—watched and reported on.’

  ‘Wilson reports on all of us, Scobie. Fraser, Tod, Thimblerigg, myself. He thinks I’m too easy-going. It doesn’t matter though. Wright tears up his reports, and of course Wilson reports on him.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He walked up, at midnight, to the Nissen huts. In the blackout he felt momentarily safe, unwatched, unreported on; in the soggy ground his footsteps made the smallest sounds, but as he passed Wilson’s hut he was aware again of the deep necessity for caution. An awful weariness touched him and he thought: I will go home: I won’t creep by to her tonight: her last words had been ‘don’t come back.’ Couldn’t one, for once, take somebody at their word? He stood twenty yards from Wilson’s hut, watching the crack of light between the curtains. A drunken voice shouted somewhere up the hill and the first spatter of the returning rain licked his face. He thought: I’ll go back and go to bed, in the morning I’ll write to Louise and in the evening go to Confession: the day after that God will return to me in a priest’s hands: life will be simple again. Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin. The rain blurred his eyes, the ground sucked at his feet as they trod reluctantly towards the Nissen hut.

  He knocked twice and the door immediately opened. He had prayed between the two knocks that anger might still be there behind the door, that he wouldn’t be wanted. He couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears to any human need of him; he was not the centurion, but a man in the ranks who had to do the bidding of a hundred centurions, and when the door opened, he could tell the command was going to be given again—the command to stay, to love, to accept responsibility, to lie.

  ‘Oh darling,’ she said, ‘I thought you were never coming. I bitched you so.’

  ‘I’ll always come if you want me.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Always. If I’m alive.’ God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures? Would a woman accept the love for which a child had to be sacrificed?

  Carefully they drew the curtains close before turning up the lamps.

  She said, ‘I’ve been afraid all day that you wouldn’t come.’

  ‘Of course I came.’

  ‘I told you to go away. Never pay any attention to me when I tell you to go away. Promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ he said.

  ‘If you hadn’t come back …’ she said, and became lost in thought between the lamps. He could see her searching for herself, frowning in the effort to see where she would have been … ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’d have slutted with Bagster, or killed myself, or both. I think both.’

  He said anxiously, ‘You mustn’t think like that. I’ll always be here if you need me, as long as I’m alive.’

  ‘Why do you keep on saying as long as I’m alive?’

  ‘There are thirty years between us.’

  For the first time that night they kissed. She said, ‘I can’t feel the years.’

  ‘Why did you thin
k I wouldn’t come?’ Scobie said. ‘You got my letter.’

  ‘Your letter?’

  ‘The one I pushed under your door last night.’

  She said with fear, ‘I never saw a letter. What did you say?’

  He touched her face and smiled. ‘Everything. I didn’t want to be cautious any longer. I put down everything.’

  ‘Even your name?’

  ‘I think so. Anyway, it’s signed with my handwriting.’

  ‘There’s a mat by the door. It must be under the mat.’ But they both knew it wouldn’t be there. It was as if all along they had foreseen how disaster would come in by that particular door.

  ‘Who would have taken it?’

  He tried to soothe her nerves. ‘Probably your boy threw it away, thought it was waste paper. It wasn’t in an envelope. Nobody could know whom I was writing to.’

  ‘As if that mattered. Darling,’ she said, ‘I feel sick. Really sick. Somebody’s getting something on you. I wish I’d died in that boat.’

  ‘You’re imagining things. Probably I didn’t push the note far enough. When your boy opened the door in the morning it blew away or got trampled in the mud.’ He spoke with all the conviction he could summon: it was just possible.

  ‘Don’t let me ever do you any harm,’ she implored, and every phrase she used fastened the fetters more firmly round his wrists. He put out his hands to her and lied firmly, ‘You’ll never do me harm. Don’t worry about a lost letter. I exaggerated. It said nothing really—nothing that a stranger would understand. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Listen, darling. Don’t stay tonight. I’m nervous. I feel—watched. Say good night now and go away. But come back. Oh my dear, come back.’

  The light was still on in Wilson’s hut as he passed. Opening the door of his own dark house he saw a piece of paper on the floor. It gave him an odd shock as though the missing letter had returned, like a cat, to its old home. But when he picked it up, it wasn’t his letter, though this too was a message of love. It was a telegram addressed to him at police headquarters and the signature written in full for the sake of censorship, Louise Scobie, was like a blow struck by a boxer with a longer reach than he possessed. Have written am on my way home have been a fool stop love—and then that name as formal as a seal.