The Heart of the Matter

  My dear, my dear, leave me if you want to or have me as your hore if you want to. He thought: she’s only heard the word, never seen it spelt: they cut it out of the school Shakespeare. Good night. Don’t worry, my darling. He said savagely, ‘All right, Yusef. What is it that’s so important?’

  ‘Major Scobie, I have got after all to ask you a favour. It has nothing to do with the money I lent you. If you can do this for me it will be friendship, just friendship.’

  ‘It’s late, Yusef, tell me what it is.’

  ‘The Esperança will be in the day after tomorrow. I want a small packet taken on board for me and left with the captain.’

  ‘What’s in the packet?’

  ‘Major Scobie, don’t ask. I am your friend. I would rather have this be a secret. It will harm no one at all.’

  ‘Of course, Yusef, I can’t do it. You know that.’

  ‘I assure you, Major Scobie, on my word—’ he leant forward in the chair and laid his hand on the black fur of his chest—‘on my word as a friend the package contains nothing, nothing for the Germans. No industrial diamonds, Major Scobie.’

  ‘Gem stones?’

  ‘Nothing for the Germans. Nothing that will hurt your country.’

  ‘Yusef, you can’t really believe that I’d agree?’

  The light drill trousers squeezed to the edge of the chair: for one moment Scobie thought that Yusef was going on his knees to him. He said, ‘Major Scobie, I implore you … It is important for you as well as for me.’ His voice broke with genuine emotion, ‘I want to be a friend.’

  Scobie said, ‘I’d better warn you before you say any more, Yusef, that the Commissioner does know about our arrangement.’

  ‘I daresay, I daresay, but this is so much worse, Major Scobie, on my word of honour, this will do no harm to anyone. Just do this one act of friendship, and I’ll never ask another. Do it of your own free will, Major Scobie. There is no bribe. I offer no bribe.’

  His eye went back to the letter: My darling, this is serius. Serius—his eye this time read it as servus—a slave: a servant of the servants of God. It was like an unwise command which he had none the less to obey. He felt as though he were turning his back on peace for ever. With his eyes open, knowing the consequences, he entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

  ‘What were you saying, Yusef? I didn’t catch …’

  ‘Just once more I ask you …’

  ‘No, Yusef.’

  ‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, sitting bolt upright in his chair, speaking with a sudden odd formality, as though a stranger had joined them and they were no longer alone, ‘you remember Pemberton?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘His boy came into my employ.’

  ‘Pemberton’s boy?’ Nothing you say to me is a promise.

  ‘Pemberton’s boy is Mrs Rolt’s boy.’

  Scobie’s eyes remained on the letter, but he no longer read what he saw.

  ‘Her boy brought me a letter. You see I asked him to keep his eyes—bare—is that the right word?’

  ‘You have a very good knowledge of English, Yusef. Who read it to you?’

  ‘That does not matter.’

  The formal voice suddenly stopped and the old Yusef implored again, ‘Oh, Major Scobie, what made you write such a letter? It was asking for trouble.’

  ‘One can’t be wise all the time, Yusef. One would die of disgust.’

  ‘You see it has put you in my hands.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that so much. But to put three people in your hands …’

  ‘If only you would have done an act of friendship …’

  ‘Go on, Yusef. You must complete your blackmail. You can’t get away with half a threat.’

  ‘I wish I could dig a hole and put the package in it. But the war’s going badly, Major Scobie. I am doing this not for myself, but for my father and mother, my half brother, my three sisters—and there are cousins too.’

  ‘Quite a family.’

  ‘You see if the English are beaten all my stores have no value at all.’

  ‘What do you propose to do with the letter, Yusef?’

  ‘I hear from a clerk in the cable company that your wife is on her way back. I will have the letter handed to her as soon as she lands.’

  He remembered the telegram signed Louise Scobie: have been a fool stop love. It would be a cold welcome, he thought.

  ‘And if I give your package to the captain of the Esperança?’

  ‘My boy will be waiting on the wharf. In return for the captain’s receipt he will give you an envelope with your letter inside.’

  ‘You trust your boy?’

  ‘Just as you trust Ali.’

  ‘Suppose I demand the letter first and gave you my word …’

  ‘It is the penalty of the blackmailer, Major Scobie, that he has no debts of honour. You would be quite right to cheat me.’

  ‘Suppose you cheat me?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be right. And formerly I was your friend.’

  ‘You very nearly were,’ Scobie reluctantly admitted.

  ‘I am the base Indian.’

  ‘The base Indian?’

  ‘Who threw away a pearl,’ Yusef sadly said. ‘That was in the play by Shakespeare the Ordnance Corps gave in the Memorial Hall. I have always remembered it.’

  II

  ‘Well,’ Druce said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to get to work now.’

  ‘One more glass,’ the captain of the Esperança said.

  ‘Not if we are going to release you before the boom closes. See you later, Scobie.’

  When the door of the cabin closed the captain said breathlessly, ‘I am still here.’

  ‘So I see. I told you there are often mistakes—minutes go to the wrong place, files are lost.’

  ‘I believe none of that,’ the captain said. ‘I believe you helped me.’ He dripped gently with sweat in the stuffy cabin. He added, ‘I pray for you at Mass, and I have brought you this. It was all that I could find for you in Lobito. She is a very obscure saint,’ and he slid across the table between them a holy medal the size of a nickel piece. ‘Santa—I don’t remember her name. She had something to do with Angola I think,’ the captain explained.

  ‘Thank you,’ Scobie said. The package in his pocket seemed to him to weigh as heavily as a gun against his thigh. He let the last drops of port settle in the well of his glass and then drained them. He said, ‘This time I have something for you.’ A terrible reluctance cramped his fingers.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  How light the little package actually was now that it was on the table between them. What had weighed like a gun in the pocket might now have contained little more than fifty cigarettes. He said, ‘Someone who comes on board with the pilot at Lisbon will ask you if you have any American cigarettes. You will give him this package.’

  ‘Is this Government business?’

  ‘No. The Government would never pay as well as this.’ He laid a packet of notes upon the table.

  ‘This surprises me,’ the captain said with an odd note of disappointment. ‘You have put yourself in my hands.’

  ‘You were in mine,’ Scobie said.

  ‘I don’t forget. Nor will my daughter. She is married outside the Church, but she has faith. She prays for you too.’

  ‘The prayers we pray then don’t count, surely?’

  ‘No, but when the moment of Grace returns they rise,’ the captain raised his fat arms in an absurd and touching gesture, ‘all at once together like a flock of birds.’

  ‘I shall be glad of them,’ Scobie said.

  ‘You can trust me, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Now I must search your cabin.’

  ‘You do not trust me very far.’

  ‘That package,’ Scobie said, ‘has nothing to do with the war.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am nearly sure.’

  He began his search. Once, pausing by a mi
rror, he saw poised over his own shoulder a stranger’s face, a fat, sweating, unreliable face. Momentarily he wondered: who can that be? before he realized that it was only this new unfamiliar look of pity which made it strange to him. He thought: am I really one of those whom people pity?

  BOOK THREE

  PART ONE

  1

  I

  THE RAINS WERE over and the earth steamed. Flies everywhere settled in clouds, and the hospital was full of malaria patients. Farther up the coast they were dying of blackwater, and yet for a while there was a sense of relief. It was as if the world had become quiet again, now that the drumming on the iron roofs was over. In the town the deep scent of flowers modified the Zoo smell in the corridors of the police station. An hour after the boom was opened the liner moved in from the south unescorted.

  Scobie went out in the police boat as soon as the liner anchored. His mouth felt stiff with welcome; he practised on his tongue phrases which would seem warm and unaffected, and he thought: what a long way I have travelled to make me rehearse a welcome. He hoped he would find Louise in one of the public rooms; it would be easier to greet her in front of strangers, but there was no sign of her anywhere. He had to ask at the purser’s office for her cabin number.

  Even then, of course, there was the hope that it would be shared. No cabin nowadays held less than six passengers.

  But when he knocked and the door was opened, nobody was there but Louise. He felt like a caller at a strange house with something to sell. There was a question-mark at the end of his voice when he said, ‘Louise?’

  ‘Henry.’ She added, ‘Come inside.’ When once he was within the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth—the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn’t be content until she had pulled his face round and left the seal of her return on his lips. ‘Oh my dear, here I am.’

  ‘Here you are,’ he said, seeking desperately for the phrases he had rehearsed.

  ‘They’ve all been so sweet,’ she explained. ‘They are keeping away, so that I can see you alone.’

  ‘You’ve had a good trip?’

  ‘I think we were chased once.’

  ‘I was very anxious,’ he said and thought: that is the first lie. I may as well take the plunge now. He said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

  ‘I was a fool to go away, darling.’ Through the port-hole the houses sparkled like mica in the haze of heat. The cabin smelt closely of women, of powder, nail-varnish, and nightdresses. He said, ‘Let’s get ashore.’

  But she detained him a little while yet. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a lot of resolutions while I’ve been away. Everything now is going to be different. I’m not going to rattle you any more.’ She repeated, ‘Everything will be different,’ and he thought sadly that that at any rate was the truth, the bleak truth.

  Standing at the window of his house while Ali and the small boy carried in the trunks he looked up the hill towards the Nissen huts. It was as if a landslide had suddenly put an immeasurable distance between him and them. They were so distant that at first there was no pain, any more than for an episode of youth remembered with the faintest melancholy. Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need—and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance. Upstairs silence and solitude were being hammered away, tin-tacks were being driven in, weights fell on the floor and shook the ceiling. Louise’s voice was raised in cheerful peremptory commands. There was a rattle of objects on the dressing-table. He went upstairs and from the doorway saw the face in the white communion veil staring back at him again: the dead too had returned. Life was not the same without the dead. The mosquito-net hung, a grey ectoplasm, over the double bed.

  ‘Well, Ali,’ he said, with the phantom of a smile which was all he could raise at this séance, ‘Missus back. We’re all together again.’ Her rosary lay on the dressing-table, and he thought of the broken one in his pocket. He had always meant to get it mended: now it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

  ‘Darling,’ Louise said, ‘I’ve finished up here. Ali can do the rest. There are so many things I want to speak to you about. …’ She followed him downstairs and said at once, ‘I must get the curtains washed.’

  ‘They don’t show the dirt.’

  ‘Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.’ She said, ‘I really want a bigger bookcase now. I’ve brought a lot of books back with me.’

  ‘You haven’t told me yet what made you …’

  ‘Darling, you’d laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I’ll tell you one day when I don’t mind your laughing.’ She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. ‘You’re really glad …?’

  ‘So glad,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn’t be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I have been.’

  ‘Have you missed Mass often?’

  He said with forced jocularity, ‘I’ve hardly been at all.’

  ‘Oh, Ticki.’ She pulled herself quickly up and said, ‘Henry, darling, you’ll think I’m very sentimental, but tomorrow’s Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we’ve started again—in the right way.’ It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed—this he had not considered. He said, ‘Of course,’ but his brain momentarily refused to work.

  ‘You’ll have to go to confession this afternoon.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’

  ‘Missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.’

  ‘Adultery’s more fun,’ he said with attempted lightness.

  ‘It’s time I came back.’

  ‘I’ll go along this afternoon—after lunch. I can’t confess on an empty stomach,’ he said.

  ‘Darling, you have changed, you know.’

  ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘I don’t mind you joking. I like it. You didn’t do it much though before.’

  ‘You don’t come back every day, darling.’ The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he laid down his fork for yet another ‘crack.’ ‘Dear Henry,’ she said, ‘I’ve never known you so cheerful.’ The ground had given way beneath his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathlessness, the despair—because you couldn’t fall so far as this and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.

  When lunch was over (he couldn’t have told what it was he’d eaten) he said, ‘I must be off.’

  ‘Father Rank?’

  ‘First I’ve got to look in on Wilson. He’s living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.’

  ‘Won’t he be in town?’

  ‘I think he comes back for lunch.’

  He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no—that wasn’t a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’

  ‘I had a touch of fever,’ Harris said.

  ‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’

  ‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said.

  ‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’

  ‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’

  ‘You must call on us too.’

  ‘I’m not much of a calling man,’ Harris said, drooping in the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth women scare me.’

  ‘You don’t see enough of them, Harris.’

  ‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt
at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man. He knocked and felt that disapproving gaze boring into his back. He thought: there goes my alibi: he will tell Wilson and Wilson … He thought: I will say that as I was up here I called … and he felt his whole personality crumble with the slow disintegration of lies.

  ‘Why did you knock?’ Helen asked. She lay on her bed in the dusk of drawn curtains.

  ‘Harris was watching me.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Everybody here knows everything—except one thing. How clever you are about that. I suppose it’s because you are a police officer.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her arm; immediately the sweat began to run between them. He said, ‘What are you doing here? You are not ill?’

  ‘Just a headache.’

  He said mechanically, without even hearing his own words, ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘Something’s worrying you,’ she said. ‘Have things gone—wrong?’

  ‘Nothing of that kind.’

  ‘Do you remember the first night you stayed here? We didn’t worry about anything. You even left your umbrella behind. We were happy. Doesn’t it seem odd?—we were happy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do we go on like this—being unhappy?’

  ‘It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,’ Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.

  ‘Sometimes you are so damnably old,’ Helen said, but immediately she expressed with a motion of her hand towards him that she wasn’t serious. Today, he thought, she can’t afford to quarrel—or so she believes. ‘Darling,’ she added, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’

  One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided—that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye. Already she had the look of the coast about her. She shared it with Louise. He said, ‘It’s just a worry I have to think out for myself. Something I hadn’t considered.’