The Heart of the Matter

  He sat down. His head swam with nausea. He thought: if I had never written that other letter, If I had taken Helen at her word and gone away, how easily then life could have been arranged again. But he remembered his words in the last ten minutes, ‘I’ll always be here if you need me as long as I’m alive’—that constituted an oath as ineffaceable as the vow by the Ealing altar. The wind was coming up from the sea—the rains ended as they began with typhoons. The curtains blew in and he ran to the windows and pulled them shut. Upstairs the bedroom windows clattered to and fro, tearing at hinges. Turning from closing them he looked at the bare dressing-table where soon the photographs and the pots would be back again—one photograph in particular. The happy Scobie, he thought, my one success. A child in hospital said ‘Father’ as the shadow of a rabbit shifted on the pillow: a girl went by on a stretcher clutching a stamp-album—why me, he thought, why do they need me, a dull middle-aged police officer who had failed for promotion? I’ve got nothing to give them that they can’t get elsewhere: why can’t they leave me in peace? Elsewhere there was a younger and better love, more security. It sometimes seemed to him that all he could share with them was his despair.

  Leaning back against the dressing-table, he tried to pray. The Lord’s Prayer lay as dead on his tongue as a legal document: it wasn’t his daily bread that he wanted but so much more. He wanted happiness for others and solitude and peace for himself. ‘I don’t want to plan any more,’ he said suddenly aloud. ‘They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one needs the dead. The dead can be forgotten. O God, give me death before I give them unhappiness.’ But the words sounded melodramatically in his own ears. He told himself that he mustn’t get hysterical: there was far too much planning to do for an hysterical man, and going downstairs again he thought three aspirins or perhaps four were what he required in this situation—this banal situation. He took a bottle of filtered water out of the ice-box and dissolved the aspirin. He wondered how it would feel to drain death as simply as these aspirins which now stuck sourly in his throat. The priests told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentent despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws, and was it less possible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind the stone? Christ had not been murdered—you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail.

  He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6. Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about W. Called on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home.

  He hesitated for a moment and then wrote: Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.

  2

  I

  THE TELEGRAM LAY on his mind all day: ordinary life—the two hours in court on a perjury case—had the unreality of a country one is leaving for ever. One thinks, At this hour, in that village, these people I once knew are sitting down at table just as they did a year ago when I was there, but one is not convinced that any life goes on the same as ever outside the consciousness. All Scobie’s consciousness was on the telegram, on that nameless boat edging its way now up the African coastline from the south. God forgive me, he thought, when his mind lit for a moment on the possibility that it might never arrive. In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

  At the end of the perjury case Fellowes, the sanitary inspector, caught him at the door. ‘Come to chop tonight, Scobie. We’ve got a bit of real Argentine beef.’ It was too much of an effort in this dream world to refuse an invitation. ‘Wilson’s coming,’ Fellowes said. ‘To tell you the truth, he helped us with the beef. You like him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it was you who didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, the club’s got to move with the times, and all sorts of people go into trade nowadays. I admit I was hasty. Bit boozed up, I wouldn’t be surprised. He was at Downham: we used to play them when I was at Lancing.’

  Driving out to the familiar house he had once occupied himself on the hills, Scobie thought listlessly, I must speak to Helen soon. She mustn’t learn this from someone else. Life always repeated the same pattern; there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.

  He came to the long bungalow living-room and there at the end of it was Helen. With a sense of shock he realized that never before had he seen her like a stranger in another man’s house, never before dressed for an evening’s party. ‘You know Mrs Rolt, don’t you?’ Fellowes asked. There was no irony in his voice. Scobie thought with a tremor of self-disgust, how clever we’ve been: how successfully we’ve deceived the gossipers of a small colony. It oughtn’t to be possible for lovers to deceive so well. Wasn’t love supposed to be spontaneous, reckless …?

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m an old friend of Mrs Rolt. I was at Pende when she was brought across.’ He stood by the table a dozen feet away while Fellowes mixed the drinks and watched her while she talked to Mrs Fellowes, talked easily, naturally. Would I, he wondered, if I had come in tonight and seen her for the first time ever have felt any love at all?

  ‘Now which was yours, Mrs Rolt?’

  ‘A pink gin.’

  ‘I wish I could get my wife to drink them. I can’t bear her gin and orange.’

  Scobie said, ‘If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have called for you.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ Helen said. ‘You never come and see me.’ She turned to Fellowes and said with an ease that horrified him, ‘He was so kind to me in hospital at Pende, but I think he only likes the sick.’

  Fellowes stroked his little ginger moustache, poured himself out some more gin and said, ‘He’s scared of you, Mrs Rolt. All we married men are.’

  She said with false blandness, ‘Do you think I could have one more without getting tight?’

  ‘Ah, here’s Wilson,’ Fellowes said, and there he was with his pink, innocent, self-distrustful face and his badly tied cummerbund. ‘You know everybody, don’t you? You and Mrs Rolt are neighbours.’

  ‘We haven’t met though,’ Wilson said, and began automatically to blush.

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over the men in this place,’ said Fellowes. ‘You and Scobie both neighbours and neither of you see anything of Mrs Rolt,’ and Scobie was immediately aware of Wilson’s gaze speculatively turned upon him. ‘I wouldn’t be so bashful,’ Fellowes said, pouring out the pink gins.

  ‘Dr Sykes late as usual,’ Mrs Fellowes commented from the end of the room but at that moment treading heavily up the outside stairs, sensible in a dark dress and mosquito-boots. came Dr Sykes. ‘Just in time for a drink, Jessie,’ Fellowes said. ‘What’s it to be?’

  ‘Double Scotch,’ Dr Sykes said. She glared around through her thick glasses and added, ‘Evening all.’

  As they went in to dinner, Scobie said, ‘I’ve got to see you,’ but catching Wilson’s eye he added, ‘about your furniture.’

  ‘My furniture?’

  ‘I think I could get you some extra chairs.’ As conspirators they were much too young; they had not yet absorbed a whole code book into their memory and he was uncertain whether she had understood the mutilated phrase. All through dinner he sat silent, dreading the time when he would be alone with her, afraid to lose the least opportunity; when he put his hand in his pocket for a handkerchief the telegram crumpled in his fingers … have been a fool
stop love.

  ‘Of course you know more about it than we do, Major Scobie,’ Dr Sykes said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I missed …’

  ‘We were talking about the Pemberton case.’ So already in a few months it had become a case. When something became a case it no longer seemed to concern a human being: there was no shame or suffering in a case. The boy on the bed was cleaned and tidied, laid out for the textbook of psychology.

  ‘I was saying,’ Wilson said, ‘that Pemberton chose an odd way to kill himself. I would have chosen a sleeping-draught.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be easy to get a sleeping-draught in Bamba,’ Dr Sykes said. ‘It was probably a sudden decision.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have caused all that fuss,’ said Fellowes. ‘A chap’s got the right to take his own life, of course, but there’s no need for fuss. An overdose of sleeping-draught—I agree with Wilson—that’s the way.’

  ‘You still have to get your prescription,’ Dr Sykes said.

  Scobie with his fingers on the telegram remembered the letter signed ‘Dicky,’ the immature handwriting, the marks of cigarettes on the chairs, the novels of Wallace, the stigmata of loneliness. Through two thousand years, he thought, we have discussed Christ’s agony in just this disinterested way.

  ‘Pemberton was always a bit of a fool,’ Fellowes said.

  ‘A sleeping-draught is invariably tricky,’ Dr Sykes said. Her big lenses reflected the electric globe as she turned them like a lighthouse in Scobie’s direction. ‘Your experience will tell you how tricky. Insurance companies never like sleeping-draughts, and no coroner could lend himself to a deliberate fraud.’

  ‘How can they tell?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘Take Luminal, for instance. Nobody could really take enough Luminal by accident …’ Scobie looked across the table at Helen. She ate slowly, without appetite, her eyes on her plate. Their silences seemed to isolate them: this was a subject the unhappy could never discuss impersonally. Again he was aware of Wilson looking from one to another of them, and Scobie drew desperately at his mind for any phrase that would end their dangerous solitude. They could not even be silent together with safety.

  He said, ‘What’s the way out you’d recommend, Dr Sykes?’

  ‘Well, there are bathing accidents—but even they need a good deal of explanation. If a man’s brave enough to step in front of a car, but it’s too uncertain …’

  ‘And involves somebody else,’ Scobie said.

  ‘Personally,’ Dr Sykes said, grinning under her glasses, ‘I should have no difficulties. In my position, I should classify myself as an angina case and then get one of my colleagues to prescribe …’

  Helen said with sudden violence, ‘What a beastly talk this is. You’ve got no business to tell …’

  ‘My dear,’ Dr Sykes said, revolving her malevolent beams, ‘when you’ve been a doctor as long as I have been you know your company. I don’t think any of us are likely …’

  Mrs Fellowes said, ‘Have another helping of fruit salad, Mrs Rolt.’

  ‘Are you a Catholic, Mrs Rolt?’ Fellowes asked. ‘Of course they take very strong views.’

  ‘No, I’m not a Catholic.’

  ‘But they do, don’t they, Scobie?’

  ‘We are taught,’ Scobie said, ‘that it’s the unforgivable sin.’

  ‘But do you really, seriously, Major Scobie,’ Dr Sykes asked, ‘believe in Hell?’

  ‘Oh yes, I do.’

  ‘In flames and torment?’

  ‘Perhaps not quite that. They tell us it may be a permanent sense of loss.’

  ‘That sort of Hell wouldn’t worry me,’ Fellowes said.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve never lost anything of any importance,’ Scobie said.

  The real object of the dinner-party had been the Argentine beef. With that consumed there was nothing to keep them together (Mrs Fellowes didn’t play cards). Fellowes busied himself about the beer, and Wilson was wedged between the sour silence of Mrs Fellowes and Dr Sykes’ garrulity.

  ‘Let’s get a breath of air,’ Scobie suggested.

  ‘Wise?’

  ‘It would look odd if we didn’t,’ Scobie said.

  ‘Going to look at the stars?’ Fellowes called, pouring out the beer. ‘Making up for lost time, Scobie? Take your glasses with you.’

  They balanced their glasses on the rail of the verandah. Helen said, ‘I haven’t found your letter.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Wasn’t that what you wanted to see me about?’

  ‘No.’

  He could see the outline of her face against the sky doomed to go out as the rain clouds advanced. He said, ‘I’ve got bad news.’

  ‘Somebody knows?’

  ‘Oh no, nobody knows.’ He said, ‘Last night I had a telegram from my wife. She’s on the way home.’ One of the glasses fell from the rail and smashed in the yard.

  The lips repeated bitterly the word ‘home’ as if that were the only word she had grasped. He said quickly, moving his hand along the rail and failing to reach her, ‘Her home. It will never be my home again.’

  ‘Oh yes, it will. Now it will be.’

  He swore carefully, ‘I shall never again want any home without you.’ The rain clouds had reached the moon and her face went out like a candle in a sudden draught of wind. He had the sense that he was embarking now on a longer journey than he had ever intended. A light suddenly shone on both of them as a door opened. He said sharply, ‘Mind the blackout,’ and thought: at least we were not standing together, but how, how did our faces look? Wilson’s voice said, ‘We thought a fight was going on. We heard a glass break.’

  ‘Mrs Rolt lost all her beer.’

  ‘For God’s sake call me Helen,’ she said drearily, ‘everybody else does, Major Scobie.’

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’

  ‘A scene of unbridled passion,’ Helen said. ‘It’s left me shaken. I want to go home.’

  ‘I’ll drive you down,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust you, and anyway Dr Sykes is dying to talk to you about suicide. I won’t break up the party. Haven’t you got a car, Mr Wilson?’

  ‘Of course. I’d be delighted.’

  ‘You could always drive down and come straight back.’

  ‘I’m an early bird myself,’ Wilson said,

  ‘I’ll just go in then and say good night.’

  When he saw her face again in the light, he thought: do I worry too much? Couldn’t this for her be just the end of an episode? He heard her saying to Mrs Fellowes, ‘The Argentine beef certainly was lovely.’

  ‘We’ve got Mr Wilson to thank for it.’

  The phrases went to and fro like shuttlecocks. Somebody laughed (it was Fellowes or Wilson) and said, ‘You’re right there,’ and Dr Sykes’ spectacles made a dot dash dot on the ceiling. He couldn’t watch the car move off without disturbing the black-out; he listened to the starter retching and retching, the racing of the engine, and then the slow decline to silence.

  Dr Sykes said, ‘They should have kept Mrs Rolt in hospital a while longer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nerves. I could feel it when she shook hands.’

  He waited another half an hour and then he drove home. As usual Ali was waiting for him, dozing uneasily on the kitchen step. He lit Scobie to the door with his torch. ‘Missus leave letter,’ he said, and took an envelope out of his shirt.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave it on my table?’

  ‘Massa in there.’

  ‘What massa?’ but by that time the door was open, and he saw Yusef stretched in a chair, asleep, breathing so gently that the hair lay motionless on his chest.

  ‘I tell him go away,’ Ali said with contempt, ‘but he stay.’

  ‘That’s all right. Go to bed.’

  He had a sense that life was closing in on him. Yusef had never been here since the night he came to inquire after Louise and to lay his trap for Tallit. Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleep
ing man and bring that problem on his heels, he opened the note from Helen. She must have written it immediately she got home. He read, My darling, this is serius. I can’t say this to you, so I’m putting it on paper. Only I’ll give it to Ali. You trust Ali. When I heard your wife was coming back …

  Yusef opened his eyes and said. ‘Excuse me, Major Scobie, for intruding.’

  ‘Do you want a drink? Beer. Gin. My whisky’s finished.’

  ‘May I send you a case?’ Yusef began automatically and then laughed. ‘I always forget. I must not send you things.’

  Scobie sat down at the table and laid the note open in front of him. Nothing could be so important as those next sentences. He said, ‘What do you want, Yusef?’ and read on. When I heard your wife was coming back, I was angry and bitter. It was stupid of me. Nothing is your fault.

  ‘Finish your reading, Major Scobie, I can wait.’

  ‘It isn’t really important,’ Scobie said, dragging his eyes from the large immature letters, the mistake in spelling. ‘Tell me what you want, Yusef,’ and back his eyes went to the letter. That’s why I’m writing. Because last night you made promises about not leaving me and I don’t want you ever to be bound to me with promises. My dear, all your promises …

  ‘Major Scobie, when I lent you money, I swear, it was for friendship, just friendship. I never wanted to ask anything of you, anything at all, not even the four per cent. I wouldn’t even have asked for your friendship … I was your friend … this is very confusing, words are very complicated, Major Scobie.’

  ‘You’ve kept the bargain, Yusef. I don’t complain about Tallit’s cousin.’ He read on: belong to your wife. Nothing you say to me is a promise. Please, please remember that. If you never want to see me again, don’t write, don’t speak. And, dear, if you just want to see me sometimes, see me sometimes. I’ll tell any lies you like.

  ‘Do finish what you are reading, Major Scobie. Because what I have to speak about is very, very important.’