The Heart of the Matter

BOOK ONE

PART ONE

Chapter One

1

WILSON sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on, the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.

Sitting there, facing Bond Street, he had his face turned to the sea. His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy. Below him the black clerks moved churchward, but their wives in brilliant afternoon dresses of blue and cerise aroused no interest in Wilson. He was alone on the balcony except for one bearded Indian in a turban who had already tried to tell his fortune: this was not the hour or the day for white men - they would be at the beach five miles away, but Wilson had no car. He felt almost intolerably lonely. On either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted.

Three merchant officers from the convoy in the harbour came into view, walking up from the quay. They were surrounded immediately by small boys wearing school caps. The boys’ refrain came faintly up to Wilson like a nursery rhyme: ‘Captain want jig jig, my sister pretty girl school-teacher, captain want jig jig.’ The bearded Indian frowned over intricate calculations on the back of an envelope -a horoscope, the cost of living? When Wilson looked down into the street again the officers had fought their way free, and the schoolboys had swarmed again round a single able-seaman: they led him triumphantly away towards the brothel near the police station, as though to the nursery.

A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: ‘Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love ...’ His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he had his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie -it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

‘Excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘aren’t you Wilson?’

He looked up at a middle-aged man in the inevitable khaki shorts with a drawn face the colour of hay.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘May I join you? My name’s Harris.’

‘Delighted, Mr Harris.’

‘You’re the new accountant at the U.A.C.?’

‘That’s me. Have a drink?’

‘I’ll have a lemon squash if you don’t mind. Can’t drink in the middle of the day.’

The Indian rose from his table and approached with deference, ‘You remember me, Mr Harris. Perhaps you would tell your friend, Mr Harris, of my talents. Perhaps he would like to read my letters of recommendation ...’ The grubby sheaf of envelopes was always in his hand. ‘The leaders of society.’

‘Be off. Beat it, you old scoundrel,’ Harris said.

‘How did you know my name?’ Wilson asked.

‘Saw it on a cable. I’m a cable censor,’ Harris said. ‘What a job! What a place!’

‘I can see from here, Mr Harris, that your fortune has changed considerably. If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom...’

‘Beat it, Gunga Din.’

‘Why the bathroom?’ Wilson asked.

‘He always tells fortunes there. I suppose it’s the only private room available. I never thought of asking why.’

‘Been here long?’

‘Eighteen bloody months.’

‘Going home soon?’

Harris stared over the tin roofs towards the harbour. He said, ‘The ships all go the wrong way. But when I do get home you’ll never see me here again.’ He lowered his voice and said with venom over his lemon squash, ‘I hate the place. I hate the people. I hate the bloody niggers. Mustn’t call ‘em that you know.’

‘My boy seems all right’

‘A man’s boy’s always all right. He’s a real nigger - but these, look at ‘em, look at that one with a feather boa down there. They aren’t even real niggers. Just West Indians and they rule the coast Clerks in the stores, city council, magistrates, lawyers - my God. It’s all right up in the Protectorate. I haven’t anything to say against a real nigger. God made our colours. But these - my God! The Government’s afraid of them. The police are afraid of them. Look down there,’ Harris said, ‘look at Scobie.’

A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He looked without interest in obedience to a stranger’s direction, and it seemed to him that no particular interest attached to the squat grey-haired man walking alone up Bond Street. He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

‘He loves ‘em so much,’ Harris said, ‘he sleeps with ‘em.’

‘Is that the police uniform?’

‘It is. Our great police force. A lost thing will they never find - you know the poem.’

‘I don’t read poetry,’ Wilson said. His eyes followed Scobie up the sun-drowned street. Scobie stopped and had a word with a black man in a white panama: a black policeman passed by, saluting smartly. Scobie went on.

‘Probably in the pay of the Syrians too if the truth were known.’

‘The Syrians?’

‘This is the original Tower of Babel,’ Harris said. ‘West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.

‘What do the Syrians do?’

‘Make money. They run an the stores up country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.’

‘I suppose there’s a lot of that’

‘The Germans pay a high price.’

‘Hasn’t he got a wife here?’

‘Who? Oh, Scobie. Rather. He’s got a wife. Perhaps if I had a wife like that, I’d sleep with niggers too. You’ll meet her soon. She’s the city intellectual. She likes art, poetry. Got up an exhibition of arts for the shipwrecked seamen. You know the kind of thing - poems on exile by aircraftsmen, water-colours by stokers, pokerwork from the mission schools. Poor old Scobie. Have another gin?’

‘I think I will,’ said Wilson,

2

Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it had always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients; periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place -Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one - the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right.

Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had garnered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice - it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation - a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.

He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’

‘Anything to report?’

‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’

‘Anything on the charge sheet?’

‘Two black men fight in the market, sah,’

‘Mammy trouble?’

‘Yes, sah,’

‘Anything else?’

‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah, I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’

‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’

‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’

‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’

‘Very good, sah.’

Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.

‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three - one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.

‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’

‘I know.’

‘I suppose everyone knows.’

‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’

‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’

Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’

‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just’

‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that’

‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’

‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said,

‘Your wife won’t like it’

‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here - somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’

‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’

‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.

‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’

‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’

‘They haven’t got that far yet That’s the next stage. No, you steep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’

‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’

‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’

‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’ ‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’

Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You don’t live here, do you?’

‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’

‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary - no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.

The girl said, ‘My landlady - she broke up my home last night She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’

‘You got plenty lodgers?’

‘Only three, sir.’

He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece - a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’

‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’

‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’

‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah In Sharp Town?’

‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’

‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’

‘No, sir. Same father.’

The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that failed she had taken action herself. She would deny that there had ever been a chest of china. The corporal would confirm this. He would turn out not to be the landlady’s brother, but some other unspecified relation - probably disreputable. Bribes - which were known respectably as dashes - would pass to and fro, the storm of indignation and anger that had sounded so genuine would subside, the partitions would go up again, nobody would hear any more about the chest, and several policemen would be a shilling or two the richer. At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty house-owner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself. After that he had tried to kill these cases at birth: he would reason with the complainant and point out that the investigation would do no good and undoubtedly cost her time and money; he would sometimes even refuse to investigate. The result of that inaction had been stones flung at his car window, slashed tyres, the nickname of the Bad Man that had stuck to him through all one long sad tour - it worried him unreasonably in the heat and damp; he couldn’t take it lightly. Already he had begun to desire these people’s trust and affection. That year he had blackwater fever and was nearly invalided from the service altogether.

The girl waited patiently for his decision. They had an infinite capacity for patience when patience was required - just as their impatience knew no bounds of propriety when they had anything to gain by it. They would sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get served in a store before their neighbour. He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty - the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of the young buttocks, she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows - a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise. He said, ‘Give this chit to the sergeant at the desk.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘Try to tell him the truth.’

He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.

Scobie had been out-manoeuvred in the interminable war over housing. During his last leave he had lost his bungalow in Cape Station, the main European quarter, to a senior sanitary inspector called Fellowes, and had found himself relegated to a square two-storeyed house built originally for a Syrian trader on the flats below -a piece of reclaimed swamp which would return to swamp as soon as the nuns set in. From the windows he looked directly out to sea over a line of Creole houses; on the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse. On the low ridge of hills behind him the bungalows of the station lay among the low clouds; lamps burned all day in the cupboards, mould gathered on the boots - nevertheless these were the houses for men of his rank. Women depended so much on pride, pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were seldom proud, it seemed to him, of the invisible.

‘Louise,’ he called, ‘Louise.’ There was no reason to call: if she wasn’t in the living-room there was nowhere else for her to be but the bedroom (the kitchen was simply a shed in the yard opposite the back door), yet it was his habit to cry her name, a habit he had formed in the days of anxiety and love. The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide - the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.

In the old days she had replied, but she was not such a creature of habit as he was - nor so false, he sometimes told himself. Kindness and pity had no power with her; she would never have pretended an emotion she didn’t feel, and like an animal she gave way completely to the momentary sickness and recovered as suddenly. When he found her in the bedroom under the mosquito-net she reminded him of a dog or a cat, she was so completely ‘out’. Her hair was matted, her eyes closed. He stood very still like a spy in foreign territory, and indeed he was in foreign territory now. If home for him meant the reduction of things to a friendly unchanging minimum, home to her was accumulation. The dressing-table was crammed with pots and photographs - himself as a young man in the curiously dated officer’s uniform of the last war: the Chief Justice’s wife whom for the moment she counted as her friend: their only child who had died at school in England three years ago - a little pious nine-year-old girl’s face in the white muslin of first communion: innumerable photographs of Louise herself, in groups with nursing sisters, with the Admiral’s party at Medley Beach, on a Yorkshire moor with Teddy Bromley and his wife. It was as if she were accumulating evidence that she had friends like other people. He watched her through the muslin net Her face had the ivory tinge of atabrine: her hair which had once been the colour of bottled honey was dark and stringy with sweat. These were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion. It was pity that told him to go: he wouldn’t have woken his worst enemy from sleep, leave alone Louise. He tiptoed out and down the stairs. (The inside stairs could be found nowhere else in this bungalow city except in Government House, and she had tried to make them an object of pride with stair-carpets and pictures on the wall.) In the living-room there was a bookcase full of her books, rugs on the floor, a native mask from Nigeria, more photographs. The books had to be wiped daily to remove the damp, and she had not succeeded very well in disguising with flowery curtains the food safe which stood with each foot in a little enamel basin of water to keep the ants out The boy was laying a single place for lunch.

The boy was short and squat with the broad ugly pleasant face of a Temne. His bare feet flapped like empty gloves across the floor.

‘What’s wrong with Missus?’ Scobie asked.

‘Belly humbug,’ Ali said.

Scobie took a Mende grammar from the bookcase: it was tucked away in the bottom shelf where its old untidy cover was least conspicuous. In the upper shelves were the flimsy rows of Louise’s authors - not so young modern poets and the novels of Virginia Woolf. He couldn’t concentrate: it was too hot and his wife’s absence was like a garrulous companion in the room reminding him of his responsibility. A fork fell on the floor and he watched Ali surreptitiously wipe it on his sleeve, watched him with affection. They had been together fifteen years - a year longer than his marriage - a long time to keep a servant He had been ‘small boy’ first then assistant steward in the days when one kept four servants, now he was plain steward. After each leave Ali would be on the landing-stage waiting to organize his luggage with three or four ragged carriers. In the intervals of leave many people tried to steal Ali’s services, but he had never yet failed to be waiting -except once when he had been in prison. There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid for ever.

‘Ticki,’ a voice wailed, and Scobie rose at once. ‘Ticki.’ He went upstairs.

His wife was sitting up under the mosquito-net and for a moment he had the impression of a joint under a meat-cover. But pity trod on the heels of the cruel image and hustled it away. ‘Are you feeling better, darling?’

Louise said, ‘Mrs Castle’s been in.’

‘Enough to make anyone ill,’ Scobie said.

‘She’s been telling me about you,’

‘What about me?’ He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death,

‘She says the Commissioner’s retiring, and they’ve passed you over.’

‘Her husband talks too much in his sleep.’

‘Is it true?’

‘Yes, I’ve known it for weeks. It doesn’t matter, dear, really.’

Louise said, ‘I’ll never be able to show my face at the club again.’

‘It s not as bad as that. These things happen, you know.’

‘You’ll resign, won’t you, Ticki?’

‘I don’t think I can do that, dear.’

‘Mrs Castle’s on our side. She’s furious. She says everyone’s talking about it and saying things. Darling, you aren’t in the pay of the Syrians, are you?’

‘No, dear.’

‘I was so upset I came out of Mass before the end. It’s so mean of them, Ticki. You can’t take it lying down. You’ve got to think of me.’

‘Yes, I do. All the time.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand under the net and touched hers. Little beads of sweat started where their skins touched. He said, ‘I do think of you, dear. But I’ve been fifteen years in this place. I’d be lost anywhere else, even if they gave me another job. It isn’t much of a recommendation, you know, being passed over,’

‘We could retire.’

‘The pension isn’t much to live on.’

‘I’m sure I could make a little money writing. Mrs Castle says I ought to be a professional. With all this experience,’ Louise said, gazing through the white muslin tent as far as her dressing-table: there another face in white muslin stared back and she looked away. She said, ‘If only we could go to South Africa. I can’t bear the people here.’

‘Perhaps I could arrange a passage for you. There haven’t been many sinkings that way lately. You ought to have a holiday.’

‘There was a time when you wanted to retire too. You used to count the years. You made plans - for all of us.’

‘Oh well, one changes,’ he said.

She said mercilessly, ‘You didn’t think you’d be alone with me then.’

He pressed his sweating hand against hers. ‘What nonsense you talk, dear. You must get up and have some food...’

‘Do you love anyone, Ticki, except yourself?’

‘No, I just love myself, that’s all. And Ali. I forgot Ali. Of course I love him too. But not you,’ he ran on with worn mechanical raillery, stroking her hand, smiling, soothing. . .

‘And Ali’s sister?’

‘Has he got a sister?’

‘They’ve an got sisters, haven’t they? Why didn’t you go to Mass today?’

‘It was my morning on duty, dear. You know that’

‘You could have changed it. You haven’t got much faith, have you, Ticki?’

‘You’ve got enough for both of us, dear. Come and have some food.’

‘Ticki, I sometimes think you just became a Catholic to marry me. It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it?’

‘Listen, darling, you want to come down and eat a bit Then you want to take the car along to the beach and have some fresh air.’

‘How different the whole day would have been,’ she said, staring out of her net, ‘if you’d come home and said, ‘Darling, I’m going to be the Commissioner.’’

Scobie said slowly, ‘You know, dear, in a place like this in war-time -an important harbour - the Vichy French just across the border - all this diamond smuggling from the Protectorate, they need a younger man.’ He didn’t believe a word he was saying.

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘That’s the only reason. You can’t blame anyone. It’s the war.’

‘The war does spoil everything, doesn’t it?’

‘It gives the younger men a chance.’

‘Darling, perhaps I’ll come down and just pick at a little cold meat’

‘That’s right dear.’ He withdrew his hand: it was dripping with sweat. ‘I’ll tell Ali.’

Downstairs he shouted ‘Ali’ out of the back door.

‘Massa?’

‘Lay two places. Missus better.’

The first faint breeze of the day came off the sea, blowing up over the bushes and between the Creole huts. A vulture flapped heavily upwards from the iron roof and down again in me yard next door. Scobie drew a deep breath; he felt exhausted and victorious: he had persuaded Louise to pick a little meat. It had always been his responsibility to maintain happiness in those he loved. One was safe now, for ever, and the other was going to eat her lunch.

In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.

Scobie stopped his Morris at one of the great loops of the climbing road and looked back. He was just too late. The flower had withered upwards from the town; the white stones that marked the edge of the precipitous hill shone like candles in the new dusk.

‘I wonder if anybody will be there, Ticki.’

‘Sure to be. It’s library night.’

‘Do hurry up, dear. It’s so hot in the car. I’ll be glad when the rains come.’

‘Will you?’

‘If only they just went on for a month or two and men stopped.’

Scobie made the right reply. He never listened while his wife talked. He worked steadily to the even current of sound, but if a note of distress were struck he was aware of it at once. Like a wireless operator with a novel open in front of him, he could disregard every signal except the ship’s symbol and the SOS. He could even work better while she talked than when she was silent for so long as his ear-drum registered those tranquil sounds - the gossip of the club, comments on the sermons preached by Father Rank, the plot of a new novel, even complaints about the weather - he knew that all was well. It was silence that stopped him working - silence in which he might look up and see tears waiting in the eyes for his attention.

‘There’s a rumour going round that the refrigerators were all sunk last week.’

He considered, while she talked, his line of action with the Portuguese ship that was due in as soon as the boom opened in the morning. The fortnightly arrival of a neutral ship provided an outing for the junior officers: a change of food, a few glasses of real wine, even the opportunity of buying some small decorative object in the ship’s store for a girl. In return they had only to help the Field Security Police in the examination of passports, the searching of the suspects’ cabins: all the hard and disagreeable work was done by the F.S.P., in the hold, sifting sacks of rice for commercial diamonds, or in the heat of the kitchen, plunging the hand into tins

of lard, disembowelling the stuffed turkeys. To try to find a few diamonds in a liner of fifteen thousand tons was absurd: no malign tyrant in a fairy-story had ever set a goose girl a more impossible task, and yet as regularly as the ships called the cypher telegrams came in - ‘So and so travelling first class suspected of carrying diamonds. The following members of the ship’s crew suspected ...’ Nobody ever found anything. He thought: it’s Harris’s turn to go on board, and Eraser can go with him. I’m too old for these excursions. Let the boys have a little fun.

‘Last time half the books arrived damaged.’

‘Did they?’

Judging from the number of cars, he thought, there were not many people at the club yet. He switched off his lights, and waited for Louise to move, but she just sat there with a clenched fist showing in the switchboard light ‘Well, dear, here we are,’ he said in the hearty voice that strangers took as a mark of stupidity. Louise said, ‘Do you think they all know by this time?’

‘Know what?’

‘That you’ve been passed over.’

‘My dear, I thought we’d finished with all that. Look at all the generals who’ve been passed over since 1940. They won’t bother about a deputy- commissioner.’

She said, ‘But they don’t like me.’

Poor Louise, he thought, it is terrible not to be liked, and his mind went back to his own experience in that early tour when the blacks had slashed his tyres and written insults on his car. ‘Dear, how absurd you are. I’ve never known anyone with so many friends.’ He ran unconvincingly on. ‘Mrs Halifax, Mrs Castle ...’ and then decided it was better after all not to list them.

‘They’ll all be waiting there,’ she said, ‘ just waiting for me to walk in ... I never wanted to come to the club tonight. Let’s go home.’

‘We can’t. Here’s Mrs Castle’s car arriving.’ He tried to laugh. ‘We’re trapped, Louise.’ He saw the fist open and close, the damp inefficient powder lying like snow in the ridges of the knuckles. ‘Oh, Ticki, Ticki,’ she said, ‘you won’t leave me ever, will you? I haven’t got any friends - not since the Tom Barlows went away.’ He lifted the moist hand and kissed the palm: he was bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.

They walked side by side like a couple of policemen on duty into the lounge where Mrs Halifax was dealing out the library books. It is seldom that anything is quite so bad as one fears: there was no reason to believe that they had been the subject of conversation. ‘Goody, goody,’ Mrs Halifax called to them, ‘the new Clemence Dane’s arrived.’ She was the most inoffensive woman in the station; she had long untidy hair, and one found hairpins inside the library books where she had marked her place. Scobie felt it quite safe to leave his wife in her company, for Mrs Halifax had no malice and no capacity for gossip; her memory was too bad for anything to lodge there for long: she read the same novels over and over again without knowing it.

Scobie joined a group on the verandah. Fellowes, the sanitary inspector, was talking fiercely to Reith, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary, and a naval officer called Brigstock. ‘After all this is a club,’ he was saying, ‘not a railway refreshment-room.’ Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man - it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser. But sometimes he found it very hard to like Fellowes. The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin damp ginger hair, the small prickly moustache, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie. ‘Quite,’ said Brigstock, swaying slightly.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.

Reith said, ‘He thinks we are not exclusive enough.’ He spoke with the comfortable irony of a man who had in his time been completely exclusive, who had in fact excluded from his solitary table in the Protectorate everyone but himself. Fellowes said hotly, ‘There are limits,’ fingering for confidence the Lancing tie.

‘Tha’s so,’ said Brigstock.

‘I knew it would happen,’ Fellowes said, ‘as soon as we made every officer in the place an honorary member. Sooner or later they would begin to bring in undesirables. I’m not a snob, but in a place like this you’ve got to draw lines - for the sake of the women. It’s not like it is at home.’

‘But what’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.

‘Honorary members,’ Fellowes said, ‘should not be allowed to introduce guests. Only the other day we had a private brought in. The army can be democratic if it likes, but not at our expense. That’s another thing, there’s not enough drink to go round as it is without these fellows.’

‘Tha’s a point,’ Brigstock said, swaying more violently.

‘I wish I knew what it was all about,’ Scobie said.

‘The dentist from the 49th has brought in a civilian called Wilson, and this man Wilson wants to join the club. It puts everybody in a very embarrassing position.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He’s one of the U.A.C. clerks. He can join the club in Sharp Town. What does he want to come up here for?’

‘That club’s not functioning,’ Reith said.

‘Well, that’s their fault, isn’t it?’ Over the sanitary inspector’s shoulder Scobie could see the enormous range of the night. The fireflies signalled to and fro along the edge of the hill and the lamp of a patrol-boat moving on the bay could be distinguished only by its steadiness. ‘Black-out time,’ Reith said. ‘We’d better go in.’

‘Which is Wilson?’ Scobie asked him.

‘That’s him over there. The poor devil looks lonely. He’s only been out a few days.’

Wilson stood uncomfortably alone in a Wilderness of armchairs, pretending to look at a map on the wall. His pale face shone and trickled like plaster. He had obviously bought his tropical suit from a shipper who had worked off on him an unwanted line: it was oddly striped and liverish in colour. ‘You’re Wilson, aren’t you?’ Reith said. ‘I saw your name in Col. Sec.’s book today.’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ Wilson said.

‘My name’s Reith. I’m Chief Assistant Col. Sec. This is Scobie, the deputy-commissioner.’

‘I saw you this morning outside the Bedford Hotel, sir,’ Wilson said. There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly - he didn’t seem to expect one reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.

‘Have a drink, Wilson.’

‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’

‘Here’s my wife,’ Scobie said. ‘Louise, this is Mr Wilson.’

‘I’ve heard a lot about Mr Wilson already,’ Louise said stiffly.

‘You see, you’re famous, Wilson,’ Scobie said. ‘You’re a man from the town and you’ve gate-crashed Cape Station Club.’

‘I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. Major Cooper invited me.’

‘That reminds me,’ Reith said, ‘I must make an appointment with Cooper. I think I’ve got an abscess.’ He slid away.

‘Cooper was telling me about the library,’ Wilson said, ‘and I thought perhaps ...’

‘Do you like reading?’ Louise asked, and Scobie realized with relief that she was going to be kind to the poor devil. It was always a bit of a toss-up with Louise. Sometimes she could be the worst snob in the station, and it occurred to him with pity that perhaps now she believed she couldn’t afford to be snobbish. Any new face that didn’t ‘know’ was welcome.

‘Well,’ Wilson said, and fingered desperately at his thin moustache, ‘well...’ It was as if he were gathering strength for a great confession or a great evasion.

‘Detective stories?’ Louise asked.

‘I don’t mind detective stories,’ Wilson said uneasily. ‘Some detective stories.’

‘Personally,’ Louise said, ‘I like poetry.’

‘Poetry,’ Wilson said, ‘yes.’ He took his fingers reluctantly away from his moustache, and something in his dog-like look of gratitude and hope made Scobie think with happiness: have I really found her a friend?

‘I like poetry myself,’ Wilson said.

Scobie moved away towards the bar: once again a load was lifted from his mind. The evening was not spoilt: she would come home happy, go to bed happy. During one night a mood did not change, and happiness would survive until he left to go on duty. He could sleep...

He saw a gathering of his junior officers in the bar. Fraser was there and Tod and a new man from Palestine with the extraordinary name of Thimblerigg. Scobie hesitated to go in. They were enjoying themselves, and they would not want a senior officer with them. ‘Infernal cheek,’ Tod was saying. They were probably talking about poor Wilson. Then before he could move away he heard Eraser’s voice. ‘He’s punished for it. Literary Louise has got him.’ Thimblerigg gave a small gurgling laugh, a bubble of gin forming on a plump lip.

Scobie walked rapidly back into the lounge. He went full tilt into an arm-chair and came to a halt. His vision moved jerkily back into focus, but sweat dripped into his right eye. The fingers that wiped it free shook like a drunkard’s. He told himself: Be careful. This isn’t a climate for emotion. It’s a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery, but anything like hate or love drives a man off his head. He remembered Bowers sent home for punching the Governor’s A.D.C. at a party, Makin the missionary who ended in an asylum at Chislehurst.

‘It’s damned hot,’ he said to someone who loomed vaguely beside him.

‘You look bad, Scobie. Have a drink.’ ‘No, thank you. Got to drive round on inspection.’ Beside the bookshelves Louise was talking happily to Wilson, but he could feel the malice and snobbery of the world padding up like wolves around her. They wouldn’t even let her enjoy her books, he thought, and his hand began to shake again. Approaching, he heard her say in her kindly Lady Bountiful manner, ‘You must come and have dinner with us one day. I’ve got a lot of books that might interest you,’ ‘ I’d love to,’ Wilson said. ‘Just ring us up and take pot luck.’

Scobie thought: What are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her - don’t wear that dress, don’t say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I’ve made of her. She wasn’t always like this.

He came abruptly up to them and said, ‘My dear, I’ve got to go round the beats,’

‘Already?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll stay, dear. Mrs Halifax win run me home.’

‘I wish you’d come with me.’

‘What? Round the beats? It’s ages since I’ve been.’

‘That’s why I’d like you to come.’ He lifted her hand and kissed it: it was a challenge. He proclaimed to the whole club that he was not to be pitied, that he loved his wife, that they were happy. But nobody that mattered saw - Mrs Halifax was busy with the books, Reith had gone long ago, Brigstock was in the bar, Fellowes talked too busily to Mrs Castle to notice any dung-nobody saw except Wilson. Louise said, ‘I’ll come another time, dear. But Mrs Halifax has just promised to run Mr Wilson home by our house. There’s a book I want to tend him.’

Scobie felt an immense gratitude to Wilson. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘fine. But stay and have a drink till I get back. I’ll run you home to the Bedford. I shan’t be late.’ He put a hand on Wilson’s shoulder and prayed silently: Don’t let her patronize him too far: don’t let her be absurd: let her keep this friend at least. ‘I won’t say good night,’ he said, ‘I’ll expect to see you when I get back.’

‘It’s very kind of you, sir.’

‘You mustn’t sir me. You’re not a policeman, Wilson. Thank your stars for that.’

Scobie was later than he expected. It was the encounter with Yusef that delayed him. Half-way down the hill he found Yusef ‘s car stuck by the roadside, with Yusef sleeping quietly in the back: the light from Scobie’s car lit up the large pasty face, the lick of his white hair falling over the forehead, and just touched the beginning of the huge thighs in their tight white drill. Yusef’s shirt was open at the neck and tendrils of black breast-hair coiled around the buttons.

‘Can I help you?’ Scobie unwillingly asked, and Yusef opened his eyes: the gold teeth fitted by his brother, the dentist, flashed instantaneously like a torch. If Fellowes drives by now, what a story, Scobie thought. The deputy-commissioner meeting Yusef, the store-keeper, clandestinely at night. To give help to a Syrian was only a degree less dangerous than to receive help.

‘Ah, Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed.’

‘Can I do anything for you?’

‘We have been stranded a half hour,’ Yusef said. ‘The cars have gone by, and I have thought - when will a Good Samaritan appear?’

‘I haven’t any spare oil to pour into your wounds, Yusef.’

‘Ha, ha, Major Scobie. That is very good. But if you would just give me a lift into town...’

Yusef settled himself into the Morris, easing a large thigh against the brakes.

‘Your boy had better come in at the back.’

‘Let him stay here,’ Yusef said. ‘He will mend the car if he knows it is the only way he can get to bed.’ He folded his large fat hands over his knee and said, ‘You have a very fine car, Major Scobie. You must have paid four hundred pounds for if

‘One hundred and fifty,’ Scobie said.

‘I would pay you four hundred.’

‘It isn’t for sale, Yusef. Where would I get another?’

‘Not now, but maybe when you leave.’

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘Oh, I had heard that you were resigning, Major Scobie.’

‘No.’

‘We shopkeepers hear so much - but all of it is unreliable gossip.’

‘How’s business?’

‘Oh, not bad. Not good.’

‘What I hear is that you’ve made several fortunes since the war. Unreliable gossip of course.’

‘Well, Major Scobie. you know how it is. My store in Sharp Town, that does fine because I am there to keep an eye on it. My store in Macaulay Street - that does not bad because my sister is there. But my store? in Durban Street and Bond Street they do badly. I am cheated all the time. Like all my countrymen, I cannot read or write, and everyone cheats me.’

‘Gossip says you can keep all your stocks in all your stores in your head.’

Yusef chuckled and beamed. ‘My memory is not bad. But it keeps me awake at night, Major Scobie. Unless I take a lot of whisky I keep thinking about Durban Street and Bond Street and Macaulay Street’

‘Which shall I drop you at now?’

‘Oh, now I go home to bed, Major Scobie. My house in Sharp Town, if you please. Wont you come in and have a little whisky?’

‘Sorry. I’m on duty, Yusef.’

‘It is very kind of you, Major Scobie, to give me this lift. Would you let me show my gratitude by sending Mrs Scobie a roll of silk?’

‘Just what I wouldn’t like, Yusef.’

‘Yes, yes, I knew. It’s very hard, all this gossip. Just because there are some Syrians like Tallit’

‘You would like Tallit out of your way, wouldn’t you, Yusef?’

‘Yes, Major Scobie. It would be for my good, but it would also be for your good.’

‘You sold him some of those fake diamonds last year, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, Major Scobie, you don’t really believe I’d get the better of anyone like that. Some of the poor Syrians suffered a great deal over those diamonds, Major Scobie. It would be a shame to deceive your own people like that.’

‘They shouldn’t have broken the law by buying diamonds. Some of them even had the nerve to complain to the police.’

‘They are very ignorant, poor fellows.’

‘You weren’t as ignorant as all that were you, Yusef?’

‘If you ask me, Major Scobie, it was Tallit. Otherwise, why does he pretend I sold him the diamonds?’

Scobie drove slowly. The rough street was crowded. Thin black bodies weaved like daddy-long-legs in the dimmed headlights. ‘How long will the rice shortage go on, Yusef?’

‘You know as much about that as I do, Major Scobie.’

‘I know these poor devils can’t get rice at the controlled price.’

‘I’ve heard. Major Scobie, that they can’t get their share of the free distribution unless they tip the policeman at the gate.’

It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose - they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. He felt a sudden affection for Yusef. He said, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right. One day, Yusef, you’ll find my foot under your fat arse.’

‘Maybe, Major Scobie, or maybe well be friends together. That is what I should like more than anything in the world.’

They drew up outside the Sharp Town house and Yusef s steward ran out with a torch to light him in. ‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, ‘it would give me such pleasure to give you a glass of whisky. I think I could help you a lot. I am very patriotic, Major Scobie.’

‘That’s why you are hoarding your cottons against a Vichy invasion, isn’t it? They will be worth more than English pounds.’

‘The Esperança is in tomorrow, isn’t she?’

‘Probably.’

‘What a waste of time it is searching a big ship like that for diamonds. Unless you know beforehand exactly where they are. You know that when the ship returns to Angola a seaman reports where you looked. You will sift all the sugar in the hold. You will search the lard in the kitchens because someone once told Captain Druce that a diamond can be heated and dropped in the middle of a tin of lard. Of course the cabins and the ventilators and the lockers. Tubes of toothpaste. Do you think one day you will find one little diamond?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t either.’

A hurricane-lamp burned at each corner of the wooden pyramids of crates. Across the black slow water he could just make out the naval depot ship, a disused liner, where she lay, so it was believed, on a reef of empty whisky bottles. He stood quietly for a while breathing in the heavy smell of the sea. Within half a mile of him a whole convoy lay at anchor, but all he could detect were the long shadow of the depot ship and a scatter of small red lights as though a street were up: he could hear nothing from the water but the water itself, slapping against the jetties. The magic of this place never failed him: here he kept his foothold on the very edge of a strange continent.

Somewhere in the darkness two rats scuffled. These waterside rats were the size of rabbits. The natives called them pigs and ate them roasted; the name helped to distinguish them from the wharf rats, who were a human breed. Walking along a light railway Scobie made in the direction of the markets. At the corner of a warehouse he came on two policemen.

‘Anything to report?’

‘No, sah.’

‘Been along this way?’

‘Oh yes, sah, we just come from there.’

He knew that they were lying: they would never go alone to that end of the wharf, the playground of the human rats, unless they had a white officer to guard them. The rats were cowards but dangerous - boys of sixteen or so, armed with razors or bits of broken bottle, they swarmed in groups around the warehouses, pilfering if they found an easily-opened case, settling like flies around any drunken sailor who stumbled their way, occasionally slashing a policeman who had made himself unpopular with one of their innumerable relatives. Gates couldn’t keep them off the wharf: they swam round from Kru Town or the fishing beaches.

‘Come on,’ Scobie said, ‘we’ll have another look.’

With weary patience the policemen trailed behind him, half a mile one way, half a mile the other. Only the pigs moved on the wharf, and the water slapped. One of the policemen said self-righteously, ‘Quiet night, sah.’ They shone their torches with self-conscious assiduity from one side to another, lighting the abandoned chassis of a car, an empty truck, the corner of a tarpaulin, a bottle standing at the corner of a warehouse with palm leaves stuffed in for a cork. Scobie said, ‘What’s that?’ One of his official nightmares was an incendiary bomb: it was so easy to prepare: every day men from Vichy territory came into town with smuggled cattle - they were encouraged to come in for the sake of the meat supply. On this side of the border native saboteurs were being trained in case of invasion : why not on the other side?

‘Let me see it,’ he said, but neither of the policemen moved to touch it.

‘Only native medicine, sah,’ one of them said with a skin-deep sneer.

Scobie picked the bottle up. It was a dimpled Haig, and when he drew out the palm leaves the stench of dog’s pizzle and nameless decay blew out like a gas escape. A nerve in his head beat with sudden irritation. For no reason at all he remembered Fraser’s flushed face and Thimblerigg’s giggle. The stench from the bottle moved him with nausea, and he felt his fingers polluted by the palm leaves. He threw the bottle over the wharf, and the hungry mouth of the water received it with a single belch, but the contents were scattered on the air, and the whole windless place smelt sour and ammoniac. The policemen were silent: Scobie was aware of their mute disapproval. He should have left the bottle where it stood: it had been placed there for one purpose, directed at one person, but now that its contents had been released, it was as if the evil thought were left to wander blindly through the air, to settle maybe on the innocent.

‘Good night,’ Scobie said and turned abruptly on his heel. He had not gone twenty yards before he heard their boots scuffling rapidly away from the dangerous area.

Scobie drove up to the police station by way of Pitt Street. Outside the brothel on the left-hand side the girls were sitting along the pavement taking a bit of air. Within the police station behind the black-out blinds the scent of a monkey house thickened for the night. The sergeant on duty took his legs off the table in the charge-room and stood to attention.

‘Anything to report?’

‘Five drunk and disorderly, sah. I lock them in the big cell.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Two Frenchmen, sah, with no passes.’

‘Black?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Where were they found?’

‘In Pitt Street, sah.’

‘I’ll see them in the morning. What about the launch? Is it running all right? I shall want to go out to the Esperança.’

‘It’s broken, sah. Mr Fraser he try to mend it, sah, but it humbug all the time.’

‘What time does Mr Fraser come on duty?’

‘Seven, sah.’

‘Tell him I shan’t want him to go out to the Esperança. I’m going out myself. If the launch isn’t ready, I’ll go with the F.S.P.’

‘Yes, sah.’

Climbing again into his car, pushing at the sluggish starter, Scobie thought that a man was surely entitled to that much revenge. Revenge was good for the character: out of revenge grew forgiveness. He began to whistle, driving back through Km Town. He was almost happy: he only needed to be quite certain that nothing had happened at the club after he left, that at this moment, 10.55 p.m., Louise was at ease, content He could face the next hour when the next hour arrived.

7

Before he went indoors he walked round to the seaward side of the house to check the black-out. He could hear the murmur of Louise’s voice inside: she was probably reading poetry. He thought: by God, what right has that young fool Fraser to despise her for that? and then his anger moved away again, like a shabby man, when he thought of Fraser’s disappointment in the morning - no Portuguese visit, no present for his best girl, only the hot humdrum office day. Feeling for the handle of the back door to avoid flashing his torch, he tore his right hand on a splinter. He came into the lighted room and saw that his hand was dripping with blood. ‘Oh, darling,’ Louise said, ‘what have you done?’ and covered her face. She couldn’t bear the sight of blood. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ Wilson asked. He tried to rise, but he was sitting in a low chair at Louise’s feet and his knees were piled with books.

‘It’s all right,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s only a scratch. I can see to it myself. Just tell Ali to bring a bottle of water.’ Half-way upstairs he heard the voice resume. Louise said, ‘A lovely poem about a pylon.’ Scobie walked into the bathroom, disturbing a rat that had been couched on the cool rim of the bath, like a cat on a gravestone.

Scobie sat down on the edge of the bath and let his hand drip into the lavatory pail among the wood shavings. Just as in his own office the sense of home surrounded him. Louise’s ingenuity had been able to do little with this room: the bath of scratched enamel with a single tap which always ceased to work before the end of the dry season: the tin bucket under the lavatory seat emptied once a day: the fixed basin with another useless tap: bare floorboards: drab green black-out curtains. The only improvements Louise had been able to impose were the cork that by the bath, the bright white medicine cabinet.

The rest of the room was all his own. It was like a relic of his youth carried from house to house. It had been like this years ago in his first house before he married. This was the room in which he had always been alone.

Ali came in, his pink soles flapping on the floorboards, carrying a bottle of water from the filter. ‘The back door humbug me,’ Scobie explained. He held his hand out over the washbasin, while Ali poured the water over the wound. The boy made gentle clucking sounds of commiseration: his hands were as gentle as a girl’s. When Scobie said impatiently, ‘That’s enough,’ Ali paid him no attention. ‘Too much dirt,’ he said.

‘Now iodine.’ The smallest scratch in this country turned green if it were neglected for an hour. ‘Again,’ he said, ‘pour it over,’ wincing at the sting. Down below out of the swing of voices the word ‘beauty’ detached itself and sank back into the trough. ‘Now the Elastoplast’

‘No,’ Ali said, ‘no. Bandage better.’

‘All right. Bandage then.’ Yean ago he had taught Ali to bandage: now he could tie one as expertly as a doctor.

‘Good night, Ali. Go to bed. I shan’t want you again.’

‘Missus want drinks.’

‘No. I’ll attend to the drinks. You can go to bed.’ Alone he sat down again on the edge of the bath. The wound had jarred him a little and anyway he was unwilling to join the two downstairs, for his presence would embarrass Wilson. A man couldn’t listen to a woman reading poetry in the presence of an outsider. ‘I had rather be a kitten and cry mew ...’ but that wasn’t really his attitude. He did not despise: he just couldn’t understand such bare relations of intimate feeling. And besides he was happy here, sitting where the rat had sat, in his own world. He began to think of the Esperança and of the next day’s work.

‘Darling,’ Louise called up the stairs, ‘are you all right? Can you drive Mr Wilson home?’

‘I can walk, Mrs Scobie.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Coming,’ Scobie called. ‘Of course I’ll drive you back.’ When he joined them Louise took the bandaged hand tenderly in hers. ‘Oh the poor hand,’ she said. ‘Does it hurt?’ She was not afraid of the clean white bandage: it was like a patient in a hospital with the sheets drawn tidily up to the chin. One could bring grapes and never know the details of the scalpel wound out of sight. She put her lips to the bandage and left a little smear of orange lipstick.

‘It’s quite all right,’ Scobie said.

‘Really, sir. I can walk.’

‘Of course you won’t walk. Come along, get in.’

The light from the dashboard lit up a patch of Wilson’s extraordinary suit. He leant out of the car and cried, ‘Good night, Mrs Scobie. It’s been lovely. I can’t thank you enough.’ The words vibrated with sincerity: it gave them the sound of a foreign language - the sound of English spoken in England. Here intonations changed in the course of a few months, became high-pitched and insincere, or flat and guarded. You could tell that Wilson was fresh from home.

‘You must come again soon,’ Scobie said, as they drove down the Burnside road towards the Bedford Hotel, remembering Louise’s happy face.

8

The smart of his wounded hand woke Scobie at two in the morning. He lay coiled like a watch-spring on the outside of the bed, trying to keep his body away from Louise’s: wherever they touched - if it were only a finger lying against a finger -sweat started. Even when they were separated the heat trembled between them. The moonlight lay on the dressing-table like coolness and lit the bottles of lotion, the little pots of cream, the edge of a photograph frame. At once he began to listen for Louise’s breathing.

It came irregularly in jerks. She was awake. He put his hand up and touched the hot moist hair: she lay stiffly, as though she were guarding a secret. Sick at heart, knowing what he would find, he moved his fingers down until they touched her lids. She was crying. He felt an enormous tiredness, bracing himself to comfort her. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I love you.’ It was how he always began. Comfort, like the act of sex, developed a routine.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know.’ It was how she always answered. He blamed himself for being heartless because the idea occurred to him that it was two o’clock: this might go on for hours, and at six the day’s work began. He moved the hair away from her forehead and said, ‘The rains will soon be here. You’ll feel better then.’

‘I feel all right,’ she said and began to sob.

‘What is it, darling? Tell me.’ He swallowed. ‘Tell Ticki.’ He hated the name she had given him, but it always worked. She said, ‘Oh Ticki, Ticki. I can’t go on.’

‘I thought you were happy tonight’

‘I was - but think of being happy because a U.A.C. clerk was nice to me. Ticki, why won’t they like me?’

‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s just the heat: it makes you fancy things. They all like you.’

‘Only Wilson,’ she repeated with despair and shame and began to sob again.

‘Wilson’s all right.’

‘They won’t have him at the club. He gate-crashed with the dentist They’ll be laughing about him and me. Oh Ticki, Ticki, please let me go away and begin again.’

‘Of course, darling,’ he said, ‘of course,’ staring out through the net and through the window to the quiet flat infested sea. ‘Where to?’

‘I could go to South Africa and wait until you have leave. Ticki, you’ll be retiring soon. I’ll get a home ready for you, Ticki.’

He flinched a little away from her, and then hurriedly in case she had noticed, lifted her damp hand and kissed the palm. ‘It will cost a lot, darling.’ The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first He had prepared his life insurance in that hope: it was payable only on death. He thought of a home, a permanent home: the gay artistic curtains, the bookshelves full of Louise’s books, a pretty tiled bathroom, no office anywhere - a home for two until death, no change any more before eternity settled in.

‘Ticki, I can’t bear it any longer here.’

‘I’ll have to figure it out, darling.’

‘Ethel Maybury’s in South Africa, and the Collinses. We’ve got friends in South Africa.’

‘Prices are high.’

‘You could drop some of your silly old life insurances, Ticki. And, Ticki, you could economize here without me. You could have your meals at the mess and do without the cook.’

‘He doesn’t cost much.’

‘Every little helps, Ticki.’

‘I’d miss you,’ he said.

‘No, Ticki, you wouldn’t,’ she said, and surprised him by the range of her sad spasmodic understanding. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘there’s nobody to save for.’

He said gently, ‘I’ll try and work something out You know if it’s possible I’d do anything for you -anything.’

‘This isn’t just two in the morning comfort, Ticki, is it? You will do something?’

‘Yes, dear. I’ll manage somehow.’ He was surprised how quickly she went to sleep: she was like a tired carrier who has slipped his load. She was asleep before he had finished his sentence, clutching one of his fingers like a child, breathing as easily. The load lay beside him now, and he prepared to lift it.

Chapter Two

AT eight in the morning on his way to the jetty Scobie called at the bank. The manager’s office was shaded and cool: a glass of iced water stood on top of a safe. ‘Good morning, Robinson.’

Robinson was tall and hollow-chested and bitter because he hadn’t been posted to Nigeria. He said, ‘When will this filthy weather break? The rains are late.’

‘They’ve started in the Protectorate.’

‘In Nigeria,’ Robinson said, ‘one always knew where one was. What can I do for you, Scobie?’

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Of course. I never sit down before ten myself. Standing up keeps the digestion in order.’ He rambled restlessly across his office on legs like stilts: he took a sip of the iced water with distaste as though it were medicine. On his desk Scobie saw a book called Diseases of the Urinary Tract open at a coloured illustration. ‘What can I do for you?’ Robinson repeated.

‘Give me two hundred and fifty pounds,’ Scobie said with a nervous attempt at jocularity.

‘You people always think a bank’s made of money,’ Robinson mechanically jested. ‘How much do you really want?’

‘Three fifty.’

‘What’s your balance at the moment?’

‘I think about thirty pounds. It’s the end of the month.’

‘We’d better check up on that.’ He called a clerk and while they waited Robinson paced the little room - six paces to the wall and round again. ‘There and back a hundred and seventy-six times,’ he said, ‘makes a mile. I try and put in three miles before lunch. It keeps one healthy. In Nigeria I used to walk a mile and a half to breakfast at the club, and then a mile and a half back to the office. Nowhere fit to walk here,’ he said, pivoting on the carpet A clerk, laid a slip of paper on the desk. Robinson held it close to his eyes, as though he wanted to smell it. ‘Twenty-eight pounds fifteen and sevenpence,’ he said.

‘I want to send my wife to South Africa.’

‘Oh yes. Yes.’

‘I daresay,’ Scobie said, ‘I might do it on a bit less. I shan’t be able to allow her very much on my salary though.’

‘I really don’t see how...’

‘I thought perhaps I could get an overdraft,’ he said vaguely. ‘Lots of people have them, don’t they? Do you know I believe I only had one once - for a few weeks - for about fifteen pounds. I didn’t like it. It scared me. I always felt I owed the bank manager the money.’

‘The trouble is, Scobie,’ Robinson said, ‘we’ve had orders to be very strict about overdrafts. It’s the war, you know, There’s one valuable security nobody can offer now, his life.’

‘Yes, I see that of course. But my life’s pretty good and I’m not stirring from here. No submarines for me. And the job’s secure, Robinson,’ he went on with the same ineffectual at’ tempt at flippancy.

‘The Commissioner’s retiring, isn’t he?’ Robinson said, reaching the safe at the end of the room and turning.

‘Yes, but I’m not’

‘I’m glad to hear that Scobie. There’ve been rumours .. .’

‘I suppose I’ll have to retire one day, but that’s a long way off. I’d much rather die in my boots. There’s always my life insurance policy, Robinson. What about that for security?’

‘You know you dropped one insurance three years ago.’

‘That was the year Louise went home for an operation.’

‘I don’t think the paid-up value of the other two amounts to much, Scobie.’

‘Still they protect you in case of death, don’t they?’

‘If you go on paying the premiums. We haven’t any guarantee, you know.’

‘Of course not,’ Scobie said, ‘I see that.’

‘I’m very sorry, Scobie. This isn’t personal. It’s the policy of the bank. If you’d wanted fifty pounds, I’d have lent it you myself.’

‘Forget it, Robinson,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s not important.’ He gave his embarrassed laugh. ‘The boys at the Secretariat would say I can always pick it up in bribes. How’s Molly?’ ‘She’s very well, thank you. Wish I were the same.’ ‘You read too many of those medical books, Robinson.’ ‘A man’s got to know what’s wrong with him. Going to be at the club tonight?’

‘I don’t think so. Louise is tired. You know how it is before the rains. Sorry to have kept you, Robinson. I must be getting along to the wharf.’

He walked rapidly down-hill from the bank with his head bent He felt as though he had been detected in a mean action - he had asked for money and had been refused. Louise had deserved better of him. It seemed to him that he must have failed in some way in manhood.

Druce had come out himself to the Esperança with his squad of F.S.P. men. At the gangway a steward awaited them with an invitation to join the captain for drinks in his cabin. The officer in charge of the naval guard was already there before them. This was a regular part of the fortnightly routine - the establishment of friendly relations. By accepting his hospitality they tried to ease down for the neutral the bitter pill of search; below the bridge the search party would proceed smoothly without them. While the first-class passengers had their passports examined, their cabins would be ransacked by a squad of the F.S.P. Already others were going through the hold - the dreary hopeless business of sifting rice. What had Yusef said, ‘Have you ever found one little diamond? Do you think you ever will?’ In a few minutes when relations had become sufficiently smooth after the drinks Scobie would have the unpleasant task of searching the captain’s own cabin. The stiff disjointed conversation was carried on mainly by the naval lieutenant.

The captain wiped his fat yellow face and said, ‘Of course for the English I feel in the heart an enormous admiration.’

‘We don’t like doing it, you know,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Hard luck being a neutral.’

‘My heart,’ the Portuguese captain said, ‘is full of admiration for your great struggle. There is no room for resentment. Some of my people feel resentment. Me none.’ The face streamed with sweat, and the eyeballs were contused. The man kept on speaking of his heart, but it seemed to Scobie that a long deep surgical operation would have been required to find it.

‘Very good of you,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Appreciate your attitude.’

‘Another glass of port, gentlemen?’

‘Don’t mind if I do. Nothing like this on shore you know. You, Scobie?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I hope you won’t find it necessary to keep us here tonight, major?’

Scobie said, ‘I don’t think there’s any possibility of your getting away before midday tomorrow.’

‘Will do our best, of course,’ the lieutenant said

‘On my honour, gentlemen, my hand upon my heart, you will find no bad hats among my passengers. And the crew - I know them all.’

Druce said, ‘It’s a formality, captain, which we have to go through.’

‘Have a cigar,’ the captain said. ‘Throw away that cigarette. Here is a very special box.’

Druce lit the cigar, which began to spark and crackle. The captain giggled. ‘Only my joke, gentlemen. Quite harmless. I keep the box for my friends. The English have a wonderful sense of humour. I know you will not be angry. A German yes, an Englishman no. It is quite cricket, eh?’

‘Very funny,’ Druce said sourly, laying the cigar down on the ash-tray the captain held out to him. The ash-tray, presumably set off by the captain’s finger, began to play a little tinkly tune. Druce jerked again: he was overdue for leave and his nerves were unsteady. The captain smiled and sweated. ‘Swiss,’ he said. ‘A wonderful people. Neutral too.’

One of the Field Security men came in and gave Druce a note. He passed it to Scobie to read. Steward, who is under notice of dismissal, says the captain has letters concealed in his bathroom.

Druce said, ‘I think I’d better go and make them hustle down below. Coming, Evans? Many thanks for the port, captain.’

Scobie was left alone with the captain. This was the part of the job he always hated. These men were not criminals: they were merely breaking regulations enforced on the shipping companies by the navicert system. You never knew in a search what you would find. A man’s bedroom was his private life. Prying in drawers you came on humiliations; little petty vices were tucked out of sight like a soiled handkerchief. Under a pile of linen you might come on a grief he was trying to forget. Scobie said gently, ‘I’m afraid, captain, I’ll have to look around. You know it’s a formality.’

‘You must do your duty, major,’ the Portuguese said.

Scobie went quickly and neatly through the cabin: he never moved a thing without replacing it exactly: he was like a careful housewife. The captain stood with his back to Scobie looking out on to the bridge; it was as if he preferred not to embarrass his guest in the odious task. Scobie came to an end, closing the box of French letters and putting them carefully back in the top drawer of the locker with the handkerchiefs, the gaudy ties and the little bundle of dirty handkerchiefs. ‘All finished?’ the captain asked politely, turning his head.

‘That door,’ Scobie said, ‘what would be through there?’

‘That is only the bathroom, the w.c.’

‘I think I’d better take a look.’

‘Of course, major, but there is not much cover there to conceal anything.’

‘If you don’t mind...’

‘Of course not. It is your duty.’

The bathroom was bare and extraordinarily dirty. The bath was rimmed with dry grey soap, and the tiles slopped under his feet. The problem was to find the right place quickly. He couldn’t linger here without disclosing the fact that he had special information. The search had got to have all the appearances of formality neither too lax nor too thorough. ‘This won’t take long,’ he said cheerily and caught sight of the fat calm face in the shaving-mirror. The information, of course, might be false, given by the steward simply in order to cause trouble.

Scobie opened the medicine-cabinet and went rapidly through the contents: unscrewing the toothpaste, opening the razor box, dipping his finger into the shaving-cream. He did not expect to find anything there. But the search gave him time to think. He went next to the taps, turned the water on, felt up each funnel with his finger. The floor engaged his attention:, there were no possibilities of concealment there. The porthole: he examined the big screws and swung the inner mask to and fro. Every time he turned he caught sight of the captain’s face in the mirror, calm, patient, complacent. It said ‘cold, cold’ to him all the while, as in a children’s game.

Finally, the lavatory: he lifted up the wooden seat: nothing had been laid between the porcelain and the wood. He put his hand on the lavatory chain, and in the mirror became aware for the first time of a tension: the brown eyes were no longer on his face, they were fixed on something else, and following that gaze home, he saw his own hand tighten on the chain.

Is the cistern empty of water? he wondered, and pulled. Gurgling and pounding in the pipes, the water flushed down. He turned away and the Portuguese said with a smugness he was unable to conceal, ‘You see, major.’ And at that moment Scobie did see. I’m becoming careless, he thought. He lifted the cap of the cistern. Fixed in the cap with adhesive tape and dear of the water lay a letter.

He looked at the address - a Frau Groener in Friedrichstrasse, Leipzig. He repeated, ‘I’m sorry, captain,’ and because the man didn’t answer, he looked up and saw the tears beginning to pursue the sweat down the hot fat cheeks. ‘I’ll have to take it away,’ Scobie said, ‘and report...’

‘Oh, this war,’ the captain burst out, ‘how I hate this war.’

‘We’ve got cause to hate it too, you know,’ Scobie said.

‘A man is ruined because he writes to his daughter,’

‘Daughter?’

‘Yes. She is Frau Groener. Open it and read. You will see.’ ‘I can’t do that. I must leave it to the censorship. Why didn’t you wait to write till you got to Lisbon, captain?’

The man had lowered his bulk on to the edge of the bath as though it were a heavy sack his shoulders could no longer bear. He kept on wiping his eyes with the back of his hand like a child - an unattractive child, the fat boy of the school Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast. Scobie knew he should have taken the letter and gone; he could do no good with his sympathy.

The captain moaned, ‘If you had a daughter you’d understand. You haven’t got one,’ he accused, as though there were a crime in sterility.

‘No.’

‘She is anxious about me. She loves me,’ he said, raising his tear-drenched face as though he must drive the unlikely statement home. ‘She loves me,’ he repeated mournfully.

‘But why not write from Lisbon?’ Scobie asked again. ‘Why run this risk?’

‘I am alone. I have no wife,’ the captain said. ‘One cannot always wait to speak. And in Lisbon - you know how things go - friends, wine. I have a little woman there too who is jealous even of my daughter. There are rows, the time passes. In a week I must be off again. It was always so easy before this voyage.’

Scobie believed him. The story was sufficiently irrational to be true. Even in war-time one must sometimes exercise the faculty of belief if it is not to atrophy. He said, ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it. Perhaps nothing will happen.’

‘Your authorities,’ the captain said, ‘will blacklist me. You know what that means. The consul will not give a navicert to any ship with me as captain. I shall starve on shore.’

‘There are so many slips,’ Scobie said, ‘in these matters. Files get mislaid. You may hear no more about it.’

‘I shall pray,’ the man said without hope.

‘Why not?’ Scobie said.

‘You are an Englishman. You wouldn’t believe in prayer.’

‘I’m a Catholic, too,’ Scobie said.

The fat face looked quickly up at him. ‘A Catholic?’ he exclaimed with hope. For the first time he began to plead. He was like a man who meets a fellow countryman in a strange continent. He began to talk rapidly of his daughter in Leipzig; he produced a battered pocket-book and a yellowing snap-shot of a stout young Portuguese woman as graceless as himself. The little bathroom was stiflingly hot and the captain repeated again and again. ‘You will understand.’ He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God. ‘And in Lisbon,’ he said, ‘she will be waiting, she will take me home, she will take away my trousers so that I cannot go out alone; every day it will be drink and quarrels until we go to bed. You will under-stand. I

cannot write to my daughter from Lisbon. She loves me so much and she waits.’ He shifted his fat thigh and said, ‘The pureness of that love,’ and wept. They had in common all the wide region of repentance and longing.

Their kinship gave the captain courage to try another angle. He said, ‘I am a poor man, but I have enough money to spare ...’ He would never have attempted to bribe an Englishman: it was the most sincere compliment he could pay to their common religion.

‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said.

‘I have English pounds. I will give you twenty English pounds... fifty.’ He implored. ‘A hundred... that is all I have saved.’

‘It can’t be done,’ Scobie said. He put the letter quickly in his pocket and turned away. The last time he saw the captain as he looked back from the door of the cabin, he was beating his head against the cistern, the tears catching in the folds of his cheeks. As he went down to join Druce in the saloon he could feel the millstone weighing on his breast. How I hate this war, he thought, in the very words the captain had used.

The letter to the daughter in Leipzig, and a small bundle of correspondence found in the kitchens, was the sole result of eight hours’ search by fifteen men. It could be counted an average day. When Scobie reached the police station he looked in to see the Commissioner, but his office was empty, so he sat down in his own room under the handcuffs and began to write his report ‘A special search was made of the cabins and effects of the passengers named in your telegrams . -.. with no result’ The letter to the daughter in Leipzig lay on the desk beside him. Outside it was dark. The smell of the cells seeped in under the door, and in the next office Fraser was singing to him’ self the same tune he had sung every evening since his last leave:

‘What will we care for The why and the wherefore, When you and I Are pushing up the daisies?’

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have mined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed? He wrote: A steward who had been dismissed for incompetence reported that the captain had correspondence concealed in his bathroom. I made a search and found the enclosed letter addressed to Frau Groener in Leipzig concealed in the lid of the lavatory cistern. An instruction on this hiding-place might well be circulated, as it has not been encountered before at this station. The letter was fixed by tape above the water-line ...

He sat there staring at the paper, his brain confused with the conflict that had really been decided hours ago when Druce said to him in the saloon, ‘Anything?’ and he had shrugged his shoulders in a gesture he left Druce to interpret. Had he ever intended it to mean: ‘The usual private correspondence we are always finding.’ Druce had taken it for ‘No’. Scobie put his hand against his forehead and shivered: the sweat seeped between his fingers, and he thought, Am I in for a touch of fever? Perhaps it was because his temperature had risen that it seemed to him he was on the verge of a new life. One felt this way before a proposal of marriage or a first crime.

Scobie took the letter and opened it. The act was irrevocable, for no one in this city had the right to open clandestine mail. A microphotograph might be concealed in the gum of an envelope. Even a simple word code would be beyond him; his knowledge of Portuguese would take him no farther than the most surface meaning. Every letter found - however obviously innocent - must be sent to the London censors unopened. Scobie against the strictest orders was exercising his own imperfect judgement. He thought to himself: If the letter is suspicious, I will send my report. I can explain the torn envelope. The captain insisted on opening the letter to show me the contents. But if he wrote that, he would be unjustly blackening the case against the captain, for what better way could he have found for destroying a microphotograph? There must be some lie to be told, Scobie thought, but he was unaccustomed to lies. With the letter in his hand, held carefully over the white blotting-pad, so that he could detect anything that might fall from between the leaves, he decided that he would write a full report on all the circumstances, including his own act.

Dear little money spider, the letter began, your father who loves you more than anything upon earth will try to send you a little more money this time. I know how hard things are for you, and my heart bleeds. Little money spider, if only I could feel your fingers running across my cheek. How is it that a great fat father like I am should have so tiny and beautiful a daughter. Now little money spider, I will tell you everything that has happened to me. We left Lobito a week ago after only four days in port. I stayed one night with Señor Aranjuez and I drank more wine than was good for me, but all my talk was of you. I was good all the time I was in port because I had promised my little money spider, and I went to Confession and Communion, so that if anything should happen to me on the way to Lisbon - for who knows in these terrible days? - I should not have to live my eternity away from my little spider. Since we left Lobito we have had good weather. Even the passengers are not sea-sick. Tomorrow night, because Africa will be at last behind us, we shall have a ship’s concert, and I shall perform on my whistle. All the time I perform I shall remember the days when my little money spider sat on my knee and listened. My dear, I am growing old, and after every voyage I am fatter: I am not a good man, and sometimes I fear that my soul in all this hulk of flesh is no larger than a pea. You do not know how easy it is for a man like me to commit the unforgivable despair. Then I think of my daughter. There was just enough good in me once for you to be fashioned. A wife shares too much of a man’s sin for perfect love. But a daughter may save him at the last. Pray for me, little spider. Your father who loves you more than life.

Mais que a vida. Scobie felt no doubt at all of the sincerity of this letter. This was not written to conceal a photograph of the Cape Town defences or a microphotograph report on troop movements at Durban. It should, he knew, be tested for secret ink, examined under a microscope, and the inner lining of the envelope exposed. Nothing should be left to chance with a clandestine letter. But he had committed himself to a belief. He tore the letter up, and his own report with it, and carried the scraps out to the incinerator in the yard -a petrol-tin standing upon two bricks with its sides punctured to make a draught. As he struck a match to light the papers, Fraser joined him in the yard. ‘What will we care for the why and the wherefore?’ On the top of the scraps lay unmistakably half a foreign envelope: one could even read part of the address -Friedrichstrasse. He quickly held the match to the uppermost scrap as Fraser crossed the yard, striding with unbearable youth. The scrap went up in flame, and in the heat of the fire another scrap uncurled the name of Groener. Fraser said cheerfully, ‘Burning the evidence?’ and looked down into the tin. The name had blackened: there was nothing there surely that Fraser could see - except a brown triangle of envelope that seemed to Scobie obviously foreign. He ground it out of existence with a stick and looked up at Fraser to see whether he could detect any surprise or suspicion. There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term. Only his own heart-beats told him he was guilty -that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers -Bailey who had kept a safe deposit in another city, Crayshaw who had been found with diamonds, Boyston against whom nothing had been definitely proved and who had been invalided out. They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

‘What sort of day, sir?’ Fraser asked, staring at the small pile of ash. Perhaps he was thinking that it should have been his day.

‘The usual kind of a day,’ Scobie said.

‘How about the captain?’ Fraser asked, looking down into the petrol-tin, beginning to hum again his languid tune.

‘The captain?’ Scobie said.

‘Oh, Druce told me some fellow informed on him.’

‘Just the usual thing,’ Scobie said. ‘A dismissed steward with a grudge. Didn’t Druce tell you we found nothing?’

‘No,’ Fraser said, ‘he didn’t seem to be sure. Good night, sir. I must be pushing off to the mess.’

‘Thimblerigg on duty?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Scobie watched him go. The back was as vacuous as the face: one could read nothing there. Scobie thought, what a fool I have been. What a fool. He owed his duty to Louise, not to a fat sentimental Portuguese skipper who had broken the rules of his own company for the sake of a daughter equally unattractive. That had been the turning point, the daughter. And now, Scobie thought, I must return home: I shall put the car away in the garage, and Ali will come forward with his torch to light me to the door. She will be sitting there between two draughts for coolness, and I shall read on her face the story of what she has been thinking all day. She will have been hoping that everything is fixed, that I shall say, ‘I’ve put your name down at the agent’s for South Africa.’ but she’ll be afraid that nothing so good as that will ever happen to us. She’ll wait for me to speak, and I shall try to talk about anything under the sun to postpone seeing her misery (it would be waiting at the corners of her mouth to take possession of her whole face). He knew exactly how things would go: it had happened so often before. He rehearsed every word, going back into his office, locking his desk, going down to his car. People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say,

‘Good evening, sweet’ heart,’ and shell say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.

‘What about you, darling?’ He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more pink gins. There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

‘You don’t really want to know about me.’

‘Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?’

‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’

‘All off?’

‘You know what I mean - the passage. You’ve been talking and talking since you came in about the Esperança. There’s a Portuguese ship in once a fortnight. You don’t talk that way every time. I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out - ‘you can’t go’?’

He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be true. I’ll find some way.’ Reluctantly he had recourse to the hated nickname. If that failed, the misery would deepen and go right on through the short night he needed for sleep. ‘Trust Ticki,’ he said. It was as if a ligament tightened in his brain with the suspense. If only I could postpone the misery, he thought, until daylight. Misery is worse in the darkness: there’s nothing to look at except the green black-out curtains, the Government furniture, the flying ants scattering their wings over the table: a hundred yards away the Creoles’ pye-dogs yapped and wailed. ‘Look at that little beggar,’ he said, pointing at the house lizard that always came out upon the wall about this time to hunt for moths and cockroaches. He said, ‘We only got the idea last night. These things take time to fix. Ways and means, ways and means,’ he said with strained humour.

‘Have you been to the bank?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted.

‘And you couldn’t get the money?’

‘No. They couldn’t manage it Have another gin and bitters, darling?’

She held her glass out to him, crying dumbly; her face reddened when she cried - she looked ten years older, a middle-aged and abandoned woman - it was like the terrible breath of the future on his cheek. He went down on one knee beside her and held the pink gin to her lips as though it were medicine. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I’ll find a way. Have a drink.’

‘Ticki, I can’t bear this place any longer. I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it this time. I shall go mad. Ticki, I’m so lonely. I haven’t a friend, Ticki.’

‘Let’s have Wilson up tomorrow.’

‘Ticki, for God’s sake don’t always mention Wilson. Please, please do something.’

‘Of course I will Just be patient a while, dear. These things take time.’

‘What will you do, Ticki?’

‘I’m full of ideas, darling,’ he said wearily. (What a day it had been.) ‘Just let them simmer for a little while.’

‘Tell me one idea. Just one.’

His eyes followed the lizard as it pounced; then he picked an ant wing out of his gin and drank again. He thought to himself: what a fool I really was not to take the hundred pounds. I destroyed the letter for nothing. I took the risk. I might just as well... Louise said, ‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm - it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you mink I love if I don’t love you?’

‘You don’t love anybody.’

‘Is that why I treat you so badly?’ He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him.

‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’

‘Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.’

‘No, I don’t think you do.’

He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comforting lie. ‘I try all the time to keep you happy. I work hard for that.’

‘Ticki, you won’t even say you love me. Go on. Say it once.’

He eyed her bitterly over the pink gin, the visible sign of his failure: the skin a little yellow with atabrine, the eyes bloodshot with tears. No man could guarantee love for ever, but he had sworn fourteen years ago, at Ealing, silently, during the horrible little elegant ceremony among the lace and candles, that he would at least always see to it that she was happy. ‘Ticki, I’ve got nothing except you, and you’ve got - nearly everything.’ The lizard flicked across the wall and came to rest again, the wings of a moth in his small crocodile jaws. The ants struck tiny muffled blows at the electric globe.

‘And yet you want to go away from me,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you aren’t happy either. Without me you’ll have peace.’

This was what he always left out of account - the accuracy of her observation. He had nearly everything, and all he needed was peace. Everything meant work, the daily regular routine in the little bare office, the change of seasons in a place he loved. How often he had been pitied for the austerity of the work, the bareness of the rewards. But Louise knew him better than that. If he had become young again this was the life he would have chosen to live; only this time he would not have expected any other person to share it with him, the rat upon the bath, the lizard on the wall, the tornado blowing open the windows at one in the morning, and the last pink light upon the laterite roads at sundown.

‘You are talking nonsense, dear,’ he said, and went through the doomed motions of mixing another gin and bitters. Again the nerve in his head tightened; unhappiness had uncoiled with its inevitable routine - first her misery and his strained attempts to leave everything unsaid: then her own calm statement of truths much better lied about, and finally the snapping of his own control - truths flung back at her as though she were his enemy. As he embarked on this last stage, crying suddenly and truthfully out at her while the angostura trembled in his hand, ‘You can’t give me peace,’ he already knew what would succeed it, the reconciliation and the easy lies again until the next scene.

‘That’s what I say,’ she said, ‘if I go away, you’ll have your peace.’

‘You haven’t any conception,’ he accused her, ‘of what peace means.’ It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company, crouched under the rusting handcuffs in the locked office, reading the reports from the sub-stations. Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.

Louise said with the old tenderness, ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead like Catherine. You want to be alone.’

He replied obstinately, ‘I want you to be happy.’

She said wearily, ‘Just tell me you love me. That helps a little.’ They were through again, on the other side of the scene: he thought coolly and collectedly, this one wasn’t so bad: we shall be able to sleep tonight He said, ‘Of course I love you, darling. And I’ll fix that passage. You’ll see.’

He would still have made the promise even if he could have foreseen all that would come of it He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this action might carry him. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

PART TWO

Chapter One

WILSON stood gloomily by his bed in the Bedford Hotel and contemplated his cummerbund, which lay ruffled like an angry snake; the small room was hot with the conflict between them. Through the wall he could hear Harris cleaning his teeth for the fifth time that day. Harris believed in dental hygiene. ‘It’s cleaning my teeth before and after every meal that’s kept me so well in this bloody climate,’ he would say, raising his pale exhausted face over an orange squash. Now he was gargling: it sounded like a noise in the pipes.

Wilson sat down on the edge of his bed and rested. He had left his door open for coolness, and across the passage he could see into the bathroom. The Indian with the turban was sitting on the side of the bath fully dressed. He stared inscrutably back at Wilson and bowed. ‘Just a moment, sir,’ he called. ‘If you would care to step in here ...’ Wilson angrily shut the door. Then he had another try with the cummerbund.

He had once seen a film - was it Bengal Lancer? - in which the cummerbund was superbly disciplined. A native held the coil and an immaculate officer spun like a top, so that the cummerbund encircled him smoothly, tightly. Another servant stood by with iced drinks, and a punkah swayed in the background. Apparently these things were better managed in India. However, with one more effort, Wilson did get the wretched thing wrapped around him. It was too tight and it was badly creased, and the tuck-in came too near the front, so that it was not hidden by the jacket. He contemplated his image with melancholy in what was left of the mirror. Somebody tapped on the door.

‘Who is it?’ Wilson shouted, imagining for a moment that the Indian had had the cool impertinence to pursue ... but when the door opened, it was only Harris: the Indian was still sitting on the bath across the passage shuffling his testimonials.

‘Going out, old man?’ Harris asked, with disappointment.

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody seems to be going out this evening. I shall have the table all to myself.’ He added with gloom, ‘It’s the curry evening too.’

‘So it is. I’m sorry to miss it.’

‘You haven’t been having it for two years, old man, every Thursday night’ He looked at the cummerbund. ‘That’s not right, old man.’

‘I know it isn’t. It’s the best I can do.’

‘I never wear one. It stands to reason that it’s bad for the stomach. They tell you it absorbs sweat, but that’s not where I sweat, old man. I’d rather wear braces, only the elastic perishes, so a leather belt’s good enough for me. I’m no snob. Where are you dining, old man?’

‘At Tallit’s’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘He came into the office yesterday to pay his account and asked me to dinner.’

‘You don’t have to dress for a Syrian, old man. Take it all off again.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I am. It wouldn’t do at all. Quite wrong.’ He added, ‘You’ll get a good dinner, but be careful of the sweets. The price of life is eternal vigilance. I wonder what he wants out of you.’ Wilson began to undress again while Harris talked. He was a good listener. His brain was like a sieve through which the rubbish fell all day long. Sitting on the bed in his pants he heard Harris - ‘you have to be careful of the fish: I never touch it’ - but the words left no impression. Drawing up his white drill trousers over his hairless knees he said to himself:

the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave.

His belly rumbled and tumbled as it always did a little before the hour of dinner.

From you he only dares to crave, For his service and his sorrow, A smile to-day, a song to-morrow,

Wilson stared into the mirror and passed his fingers over the smooth, too smooth skin. The face looked back at him, pink and healthy, plump and hopeless. Harris went happily on, ‘I said once to Scobie,’ and immediately the clot of words lodged in Wilson’s sieve. He pondered aloud, ‘I wonder how he ever came to marry her.’

‘It’s what we all wonder, old man. Scobie’s not a bad sort’

‘She’s too good for him.’

‘Louise?’ Harris exclaimed.

‘Of course. Who else?

‘There’s no accounting for tastes. Go in and win, old man.’

‘I must be off.’

‘Be careful of the sweets.’ Harris went on with a small spurt of energy, ‘God knows I wouldn’t mind something to be careful of instead of Thursday’s curry. It is Thursday, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

They came out into the passage and into the focus of the Indian eyes. ‘You’ll have to be done sooner or later, old man,’ Harris said. ‘He does everybody once. You’ll never have peace till he does you.’

‘I don’t believe in fortune-telling,’ Wilson lied.

‘Nor do I, but he’s pretty good. He did me the first week I was here. Told me I’d stay here for more than two and a half years. I thought then I was going to have leave after eighteen months. I know better now.’ The Indian watched triumphantly from the bath. He said, ‘I have a letter from the Director of Agriculture. And one from D. C. Parkes.’

‘All right,’ Wilson said. ‘Do me, but be quick about it.’

‘I’d better push off, old man, before the revelations begin.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Wilson said.

‘Will you sit on the bath, sir?’ the Indian invited him courteously. He took Wilson’s hand in his. ‘It is a very interesting hand, sir,’ he said unconvincingly, weighing it up and down.

‘What are your charges?’

‘According to rank, sir. One like yourself, sir, I should charge ten shillings.’

‘That’s a bit steep.’

‘Junior officers are five shillings.’

‘I’m in the five-shilling class,’ Wilson said.

‘Oh no, sir. The Director of Agriculture gave me a pound.’

‘I’m only an accountant.’

‘That’s as you say, sir. A.D.C. and Major Scobie gave me ten shillings.’

‘Oh well,’ Wilson said. ‘Here’s ten bob. Go ahead.’

‘You have been here one, two weeks,’ the Indian said. ‘You are sometimes at night an impatient man. You think you do not make enough progress.’

‘Who with?’ Harris asked, lolling in the doorway.

‘You are very ambitious. You are a dreamer. You read much poetry.’

Harris giggled and Wilson, raising his eyes from the finger which traced the lines upon his palm, watched the fortuneteller with apprehension.

The Indian went inflexibly on. His turban was bowed under Wilson’s nose and bore the smell of stale food - he probably secreted stray pieces from the larder in its folds. He said, ‘You are a secret man. You do not tell your friends about your poetry - except one. One,’ he repeated. ‘You are very shy. You should take courage. You have a great line of success.’

‘Go in and win, old man,’ Harris repeated.

Of course the whole thing was Couéism: if one believed in it enough, it would come true. Diffidence would be conquered. The mistake in a reading would be covered up.

‘You haven’t told me ten bob’s worth,’ Wilson said. ‘This is a five-bob fortune. Tell me something definite, something that’s going to happen.’ He shifted his seat uncomfortably on the sharp edge of the bath and watched a cockroach like a large blood blister flattened on the wall. The Indian bent forward over the two hands. He said, ‘I see great success. The Government will be very pleased with you.’

Harris said, ‘Il pense that you are un bureaucrat.’

‘Why will the Government be pleased with me?’ Wilson asked.

‘You will capture your man.’

‘Why,’ Harris said, ‘I believe he thinks you are a new policeman.’

‘It looks like it,’ Wilson said. ‘Not much use wasting more time.’

‘And your private life, that will be a great success too. You will win the lady of your heart. You will sail away. Everything is going to be fine. For you,’ he added.

‘A real ten-bob fortune.’

‘Good night,’ Wilson said. ‘I won’t write you a recommendation on that.’ He got up from the bath, and the cockroach flashed into hiding. ‘I can’t bear those things,’ Wilson said, sidling through ‘the door. He turned in the passage and repeated, ‘Good night.’

‘I couldn’t when I first came, old man. But I evolved a system. Just step into my room and I’ll show you.’

‘I ought to be off.’

‘Nobody will be punctual at Tallit’s.’ Harris opened his door and Wilson turned his eyes with a kind of shame from the first sight of its disorder. In his own room he would never have exposed himself quite like this - the dirty tooth-glass, the towel on the bed.

‘Look here, old man.’

With relief he fixed his eyes on some symbols pencilled on the wall inside: the letter H, and under it a row of figures lined against dates as in a cash-book. Then the letters D.D., and under them more figures. ‘It’s my score in cockroaches, old man. Yesterday was an average day - four. My record’s nine. It makes you welcome the little brutes.’

‘What does D.D. stand for?’

‘Down the drain, old man. That’s when I knock them into the wash-basin and they go down the waste-pipe. It wouldn’t be fair to count them as dead, would it?’

‘No.’

‘And it wouldn’t do to cheat yourself either. You’d lose interest at once. The only thing is, it gets dull sometimes, playing against yourself. Why shouldn’t we make a match of it, old man? It needs skill, you know. They positively hear you coming, and they move like greased lightning. I do a stalk every evening with a torch.’

‘I wouldn’t mind having a try, but I’ve got to be off now.’

‘I tell you what - I won’t start hunting till you come back from Tallit’s. Well have five minutes before bed. Just five minutes.’

‘If you like.’

‘I’ll come down with you, old man. I can smell the curry. You know I could have laughed when the old fool mixed you up with the new police officer.’

‘He got most of it wrong, didn’t he?’ Wilson said. ‘I mean the poetry.’

Tallit’s living-room to Wilson, who saw it for the first time, had the appearance of a country dance-hall. The furniture all lined the walls: hard chairs with tall uncomfortable backs, and in the corners the chaperons sitting out: old women in black silk dresses, yards and yards of silk, and a very old man in a smoking-cap. They watched him intently in complete silence, and evading their gaze he saw only bare walls except that at each corner sentimental French postcards were nailed up in a montage of ribbons and bows: young men smelling mauve Sowers, a glossy cherry shoulder, an impassioned kiss. Wilson found there was only one other guest besides himself, Father Rank, a Catholic priest, wearing his long soutane. They sat in opposite corners of the room among the chaperons whom Father Rank explained were Tallit’s grandparents and parents, two uncles, what might have been a great-great-aunt, a cousin. Somewhere out of sight Tallit’s wife was preparing little dishes which were handed to the two guests by his younger brother and his sister. None of them spoke English except Tallit, and Wilson was embarrassed by the way Father Rank discussed his host and his host’s family resoundingly across the room. ‘Thank you, no,’ Father Rank would say, declining a sweet by shaking his grey tousled head. ‘I’d advise you to be careful of those, Mr Wilson. Tallit’s a good fellow, but he won’t team what a western stomach will take. These old people have stomachs like ostriches.’

‘This is very interesting to me,’ Wilson said, catching the eye of a grandmother across the room and nodding and smiling at her. The grandmother obviously thought he wanted more sweets, and called angrily out for her granddaughter. ‘No, no,’ Wilson said vainly, shaking his head and smiling at the centenarian. The centenarian lifted his lip from a toothless gum and signalled with ferocity to Tallit’s younger brother, who hurried forward with yet another dish. ‘That’s quite safe,’ Father Rank shouted. ‘Just sugar and glycerine and a little flour.’ All the time their glasses were charged and recharged with whisky,

‘Wish you’d confess to me where you get this whisky from, Tallit,’ Father Rank called out with roguery, and Tallit beamed and slid agilely from end to end of the room, a word to Wilson, a word to Father Rank. He reminded Wilson of a young ballet dancer in his white trousers, his plaster of black hair and his grey polished alien face, and one glass eye like a puppet’s.

‘So the Esperança’s gone out,’ Father Rank shouted across the room. ‘Did they find anything, do you think?’

‘There was a rumour in the office,’ Wilson said, ‘about some diamonds.’

‘Diamonds, my eye,’ Father Rank said. ‘They’ll never find any diamonds. They don’t know where to look, do they, Tallit?’ He explained to Wilson, ‘Diamonds are a sore subject with Tallit. He was taken in by the false ones last year. Yusef humbugged you, eh, Tallit, you young rogue? Not so smart, eh? You a Catholic humbugged by a Mahomedan. I could have wrung your neck.’

‘It was a bad thing to do,’ Tallit said, standing midway between Wilson and the priest.

‘I’ve only been here a few weeks,’ Wilson said, ‘and everyone talks to me about Yusef. They say he passes false diamonds, smuggles real ones, sells bad liquor, hoards cottons against a French invasion, seduces the nursing sisters from the military hospital.

‘He’s a dirty dog,’ Father Rank said with a kind of relish. ‘Not that you can believe a single thing you hear in this place. Otherwise everybody would be living with someone else’s wife, every police officer who wasn’t in Yusef’s pay would be bribed by Tallit here.’

Tallit said,’ Yusef is a very bad man.’

‘Why don’t the authorities run him in?’

‘I’ve been here for twenty-two years,’ Father Rank said, ‘and I’ve never known anything proved against a Syrian yet. Oh, often I’ve seen the police as pleased as Punch carrying their happy morning faces around, just going to pounce -and I think to myself, why bother to ask them what it’s about? they’ll just pounce on air.’

‘You ought to have been a policeman, Father.’

‘Ah,’ Father Rank said, ‘who knows? There are more policemen in this town than meet the eye - or so they say.’

‘Who say?’

‘Careful of those sweets,’ Father Rank said, ‘they are harmless in moderation, but you’ve taken four already. Look here, Tallit, Mr Wilson looks hungry. Can’t you bring on the bakemeats?’

‘Bakemeats?’

‘The feast,’ Father Rank said. His joviality filled the room with hollow sound. For twenty-two years that voice had been laughing, joking, urging people humorously on through the rainy and the dry months. Could its cheeriness ever have comforted a single soul? Wilson wondered: had it even comforted itself? It was like the noise one heard rebounding from the tiles in a public baths: the laughs and the splashes of strangers in the steam-heating.

‘Of course, Father Rank. Immediately, Father Rank.’ Father Rank, without being invited, rose from his chair and sat himself down at a table which like the chairs hugged the wan. There were only a few places laid and Wilson hesitated. ‘Come on. Sit down, Mr Wilson. Only the old folks will be eating with us - and Tallit of course.’

‘You were saying something about a rumour?’ Wilson asked.

‘My head is a hive of rumours,’ Father Rank said, making a humorous hopeless gesture. ‘If a man tells me anything I assume he wants me to pass it on. It’s a useful function, you know, at a time like this, when everything is an official secret, to remind people that their tongues were made to talk with and that the truth is meant to be spoken about. Look at Tallit now,’ Father Rank went on. Tallit was raising the corner of his black-out curtain and gazing into the dark street. ‘How’s Yusef, you young rogue?’ he asked. ‘Yusef’s got a big house across the street and Tallit wants it, don’t you, Tallit? What about dinner, Tallit, we’re hungry?’

‘It is here, Father, it is here,’ he said coming away from the window. He sat down silently beside the centenarian, and his sister served the dishes. ‘You always get a good meal in Tallit’s house,’ Father Rank said.

‘Yusef too is entertaining tonight.’

‘It doesn’t do for a priest to be choosy,’ Father Rank said, ‘but I find your dinner more digestible.’ His hollow laugh swung through the room.

‘Is it as bad as all that being seen at Yusef s?’

‘It is, Mr Wilson. If I saw you there, I’d say to myself, ‘Yusef wants some information badly about cottons - what the imports are going to be next month, say - what’s on the way by sea, and hell pay for his information.’ If I saw a girl go hi, I’d think it was a pity, a great pity.’ He took a stab at his plate and laughed again. ‘But if Tallit went in I’d wait to hear the screams for help.’

‘If you saw a police officer?’ Tallit asked.

‘I wouldn’t believe my eyes,’ the priest said. ‘None of them are such fools after what happened to Bailey.’

‘The other night a police car brought Yusef home,’ Tallit said. ‘I saw it from here plainly.’

‘One of the drivers earning a bit on the side,’ Father Rank said.

‘I thought I saw Major Scobie. He was careful not to get out. Of course I am not perfectly sure. It looked like Major Scobie.’

‘My tongue runs away with me,’ the priest said. ‘What a garrulous fool I am. Why, if it was Scobie, I wouldn’t think twice about it’ His eyes roamed the room. ‘Not twice,’ he said. ‘I’d lay next Sunday’s collection that everything was all right, absolutely all right,’ and he swung his great empty-sounding bell to and fro, Ho, ho, ho, like a leper proclaiming his misery.

The light was still on in Harris’s room when Wilson returned to the hotel. He was tired and worried and he tried to tiptoe by, but Harris heard him. ‘I’ve been listening

for you, old man,’ he said, waving an electric torch. He wore his mosquito-boots outside his pyjamas and looked like a harassed air-raid warden.

‘It’s late. I thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I couldn’t sleep until we’d had our hunt. The idea’s grown on me, old man. We might have a monthly prize. I can see the time coming when other people will want to join in.’

Wilson said with irony, ‘There might be a silver cup.’

‘Stranger things have happened, old man. The Cockroach Championship.’

He led the way, walking softly on the boards to the middle of his room: the iron bed stood under its greying net, the armchair with collapsible back, the dressing-table littered with old Picture Posts. It shocked Wilson once again to realize that a room could be a degree more cheerless man his own.

‘Well draw our rooms alternate nights, old man.’

‘What weapon shall I use?’

‘You can borrow one of my slippers.’ A board squeaked under Wilson’s feet and Harris turned warningly. ‘They have ears like rats,’ he said.

‘I’m a bit tired. Don’t you think that tonight...?’

‘Just five minutes, old man. I couldn’t sleep without a hunt. Look, there’s one - over the dressing-table. You can have first shot,’ but as the shadow of the slipper fell upon the plaster wall, the insect shot away.

‘No use doing it like mat, old man. Watch me.’ Harris stalked his prey. The cockroach was half-way up the wall, and Harris, as he moved on tiptoe across the creaking floor, began to weave the light of his torch backwards and forwards over the cockroach. Then suddenly he struck and left a smear of blood. ‘One up,’ he said. ‘You have to mesmerize them.’

To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into comers: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson’s imagination. At first their manner to each other was ‘sporting’; they would call out, ‘Good-shot’ or ‘Hard Luck’, but once they met together against the wainscot over the same cockroach when the score was even, and their tempers became frayed.

‘No point in going after the same bird, old man,’ Harris said.

‘I started him.’

‘You lost your one, old man. This was mine.’

‘It was the same. He did a double turn.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Anyway, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for the same one. You drove it towards me. Bad play on your part’

‘Not allowed in the rules,’ Harris said shortly.

‘Perhaps not in your rules.’

‘Damn it all,’ Harris said, ‘I invented the game.’

A cockroach sat upon the brown cake of soap in the washbasin. Wilson spied it and took a long shot with the shoe from six feet away. The shoe landed smartly on the soap and the cockroach span into the bam: Harris turned on the tap and washed it down. ‘Good shot, old man,’ he said placatingly. ‘One D.D.’

‘D.D, be damned,’ Wilson said. ‘It was dead when you turned on the tap.’

‘You couldn’t be sure of mat. It might have been just unconscious - concussion. It’s D.D. according to the rules.’

‘Your rules again.’

‘My rules are the Queensberry rules in this town.’

‘They won’t be for long,’ Wilson threatened. He slammed the door hard behind him and the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock. His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpits. But as he stood there beside his own bed, seeing the replica of Harris’s room around him, the washbasin, the table, the grey mosquito-net, even the cockroach fastened on the wall, anger trickled out of nun and loneliness took its place. It was like quarrelling with one’s own image in the glass. I was crazy, he thought. What made me fly out like that? I’ve lost a friend.

That night it took him a long while to sleep, and when he slept at last he dreamed that he had committed a crime, so that he woke with the sense of guilt still heavy upon him. On his way down to breakfast he paused outside Harris’s door. There was no sound. He knocked, but there was no answer. He opened the door a little way and saw obscurely through the grey net Harris’s damp bed. He asked softly, ‘Are you awake?’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sorry Harris, about last night.’

‘My fault, old man. I’ve got a touch of fever. I was sickening for it. Touchy.’

‘No, it’s my fault. You are quite right. It was D.D.’

‘We’ll toss up for it, old man.’

‘I’ll come in tonight.’

‘That’s fine.’

But after breakfast something took his mind right away from Harris. He had been in to the Commissioner’s office on his way down town and coming out he ran into Scobie.

‘Hallo,’ Scobie said, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘Been in to see the Commissioner about a pass. There are so many passes one has to have in this town, sir. I wanted one for the wharf.’

‘When are you going to can on us again, Wilson?’

‘You don’t want to be bothered with strangers, sir.’

‘Nonsense. Louise would like another chat about books. I don’t read them myself, you know, Wilson.’

‘I don’t suppose you have much time.’

‘Oh, there’s an awful lot of time around,’ Scobie said, ‘in a country like this. I just don’t have a taste for reading, that’s all. Come into my office a moment while I ring up Louise. She’ll be glad to see you. Wish you’d call in and take her for a walk. She doesn’t get enough exercise.’

‘I’d love to,’ Wilson said, and blushed hurriedly in the shadows. He looked around him: this was Scobie’s office. He examined it as a general might examine a battleground, and yet it was difficult to regard Scobie as an enemy. The rusty handcuffs jangled on the wall as Scobie leant back from his desk and dialled.

‘Free this evening?’

He brought his mind sharply back, aware that Scobie was watching him: the slightly protruding, slightly reddened eyes dwelt on him with a kind of speculation. ‘I wonder why you came out here,’ Scobie said. ‘You aren’t the type.’

‘One drifts into things,’ Wilson lied.

‘I don’t,’ Scobie said, ‘I’ve always been a planner. You see, I even plan for other people.’ He began to talk into the telephone. His intonation changed: it was as if he were reading a part - a part which called for tenderness and patience, a part which had been read so often that the eyes were blank above the mouth. Putting down the receiver, he said, ‘That’s fine. That’s settled then.’

‘It seems a very good plan to me,’ Wilson said.

‘My plans always start out well,’ Scobie said. ‘You two go for a walk, and when you get back I’ll have a drink ready for you. Stay to dinner,’ he went on with a hint of anxiety. ‘We’ll be glad of your company.’

When Wilson had gone, Scobie went in to the Commissioner. He said, ‘I was just coming along to see you, sir, when I ran into Wilson.’

‘Oh yes, Wilson,’ the Commissioner said. ‘He came in to have a word with me about one of their lightermen.’

‘I see.’ The shutters were down in the office to cut out the morning sun. A sergeant passed through carrying with him, as well as his file, a breath of the Zoo behind. The day was heavy with unshed rain: already at 8.30 in the morning the body ran with sweat. Scobie said, ‘He told me he’d come about a pass.’

‘Oh yes,’ the Commissioner said, ‘that too.’ He put a piece of blotting-paper under his wrist to absorb the sweat as he wrote. ‘Yes, there was something about a pass too, Scobie.’

Chapter Two

MRS SCOBIE led the way, scrambling down towards the bridge over the river that still carried the sleepers of an abandoned railway.

‘I’d never have found this path by myself,’ Wilson said, panting a little with the burden of his plumpness.

Louise Scobie said, ‘It’s my favourite walk.’

On the dry dusty slope above the path an old man sat in the doorway of a hut doing nothing. A girl with small crescent breasts climbed down towards them balancing a pail of water on her head; a child naked except for a red bead necklace round the waist played in a little dust-paved yard among the chickens; labourers carrying hatchets came across the bridge at the end of their day. It was the hour of comparative coolness, the hour of peace.

‘You wouldn’t guess, would you, that the city’s just behind us?’ Mrs Scobie said. ‘And a few hundred yards up there over the hill the boys are bringing in the drinks.’

The path wound along the slope of the hill. Down below him Wilson could see the huge harbour spread out. A convoy was gathering inside the boom; tiny boats moved like flies between the ships; above them the ashy trees and the burnt scrubs hid the summit of the ridge. Wilson stumbled once or twice as his toes caught in the ledges left by the sleepers.

Louise Scobie said, ‘This is what I thought it was all going to be like.’

‘Your husband loves the place, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh, I think sometimes he’s got a kind of selective eyesight. He sees what he likes to see. He doesn’t seem to see the snobbery, and he doesn’t hear the gossip.’

‘He sees you,’ Wilson said.

‘Thank God he doesn’t, because I’ve caught the disease.’

‘You aren’t a snob.’

‘Oh yes, I am.’

‘You took me up,’ Wilson said, blushing and contorting his face into a careful careless whistle. But he couldn’t whistle. The plump lips blew empty air, like a fish.

‘For God’s sake,’ Louise said, ‘don’t be humble.’

‘I’m not really humble,’ Wilson said. He stood aside to let a labourer go by. He explained, ‘I’ve got inordinate ambitions.’

‘In two minutes,’ Louise said, ‘we get to the best point of all - where you can’t see a single house.’

‘It’s good of you to show me ...’ Wilson muttered, stumbling on again along the ridge track. He had no small talk: with a woman he could be romantic, but nothing else.

‘There,’ Louise said, but he had hardly time to take the view in - the harsh green slopes falling down towards the great flat glaring bay - when she wanted to be off again, back the way they had come. ‘Henry will be in soon,’ she said.

‘Who’s Henry?’

‘My husband.’

‘I didn’t know his name. I’d heard you call him something else - something like Ticki.’

‘Poor Henry,’ she said. ‘How he hates it. I try not to when other people are there, but I forget. Let’s go.’

‘Can’t we go just a little further - to the railway station?’

‘I’d like to change,’ Louise said, ‘before dark. The rats begin to come in after dark.’

‘Going back will be downhill all the way.’

‘Let’s hurry then,’ Louise said. He followed her. Thin and ungainly, she seemed to him to possess a sort of Undine beauty. She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality. In his romantic, humble, ambitious mind he could conceive only a relationship with a waitress, a cinema usherette, a landlady’s daughter in Battersea or with a queen - this was a queen. He began to mutter again at her heels - ‘so good’ - between pants, his plump knees knocking together on the stony path. Quite suddenly the light changed: the laterite soil turned a translucent pink sloping down the hill to the wide flat water of the bay. There was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned.

‘This is it,’ Louise said, and they leant and got their breath again against the wooden wall of the small abandoned station, watching the light fade out as quickly as it came.

Through an open door - had it been the waiting room or the station master’s office? - the hens passed in and out. The dust on the windows was like the steam left only a moment ago by a passing train. On the forever-closed guichet somebody had chalked a crude phallic figure. Wilson could see it over her left shoulder as she leant back to get her breath. ‘I used to come here every day,’ Louise said, ‘until they spoilt it for me.’

‘They?’

She said, ‘Thank God, I shall be out of here soon.’