The Heart of the Matter

‘What a lot I’ve talked. Do you know, I think I shall sleep tonight.’

‘Haven’t you been sleeping?’

‘It was the breathing all round me at the hospital. People turning and breathing and muttering. When the light was out, it was just like -you know.’

‘You’ll sleep quietly here. No need to be afraid of anything. There’s a watchman always on duty. I’ll have a word with him.’

‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter and the others - they’ve all been kind.’ She lifted her worn, frank, childish face and said, ‘I like you so much.’

‘I like you too,’ he said gravely. They both had an immense sense of security: they were friends who could never be anything else than friends - they were safely divided by a dead husband, a living wife, a father who was a clergyman, a games mistress called Helen, and years and years of experience. They hadn’t got to worry about what they should say to each other.

He said, ‘Good night. Tomorrow I’m going to bring you some stamps for your album.’

‘How did you know about my album?’

‘That’s my job. I’m a policeman.’

‘Good night.’

He walked away, feeling an extraordinary happiness, but this he would not remember as happiness, as he would remember setting out in the darkness, in the rain, alone.

From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts: it is possible to draw a speculative line between the truth and the lies; at least the cui bono principle to some extent operates, and it is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen. But here one could make no such assumption: one could draw no lines. He had known police officers whose nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth; they ended, some of them, by striking a witness, they were pilloried in the local Creole papers and were invalided home or transferred. It woke in some men a virulent hatred of a black skin, but Scobie had long ago, during his fifteen years, passed through the dangerous stages; now lost in the tangle of lies he felt an extraordinary affection for these people who paralysed an alien form of justice by so simple a method.

At last the office was clear again. There was nothing further on the charge-sheet, and taking out a pad and placing some blotting-paper under his wrist to catch the sweat, he prepared to write to Louise. Letter-writing never came easily to him. Perhaps because of his police training, he could never put even a comforting lie upon paper over his signature. He had to be accurate: he could comfort only by omission. So now, writing the two words My dear upon the paper, he prepared to omit He wouldn’t write that he missed her, but he would leave out any phrase that told unmistakably that he was content. My dear, you must forgive a short letter again. You know I’m not much of a hand at letter writing. I got your third letter yesterday, the one telling me that you were staying -with Mrs Halifax’s friend for a week outside Durban. Here everything is quiet. We had an alarm last night, but it turned out that an American pilot had mistaken a school of porpoises for submarines. The rains have started, of course. The Mrs Rolt I told you about in my last letter is out of hospital and they’ve put her to wait for a boat in one of the Nissen huts behind the transport park, I’ll do what I can to make her comfortable. The boy is still in hospital, but all right. I natty think that’s about all the news. The Tallit affair drags on - I don’t think anything will come of it in the end. Ali had to go and have a couple of teeth out the other day. What a fuss he made! I had to drive him to the hospital or he’d never have gone. He paused: he hated the idea of the censors - who happened to be Mrs Carter and Galloway - reading these last phrases of affection. Look after yourself, my dear, and don’t worry about me. As long as you are happy, I’m happy. In another nine months I can take my leave and we’ll be together. He was going to write, ‘You are in my mind always,’ but that was not a statement he could sign. He wrote instead, you are in my mind so often during the day, and then pondered the signature. Reluctantly, because he believed it would please her, he wrote Your Ticki. For a moment he was reminded of that other letter signed ‘Dicky’ which had come back to him two or three times in dreams.

The sergeant entered, marched to the middle of the floor, turned smartly to face him, saluted. He had time to address the envelope while all this was going on. ‘Yes, sergeant?’

‘The Commissioner, sah, he ask you to see him.’

‘Right.’

The Commissioner was not alone. The Colonial Secretary’s face shone gently with sweat in the dusky room, and beside him sat a tall bony man Scobie had not seen before - he must have arrived by air, for there had been no ship in during the last ten days. He wore a colonel’s badges as though they didn’t belong to him on his loose untidy uniform.

‘This is Major Scobie, Colonel Wright.’ He could tell the Commissioner was worried and irritated. He said, ‘Sit down, Scobie. It’s about this Tallit business.’ The rain darkened the room and kept out the air. ‘Colonel Wright has come up from Cape Town to hear about it.’

‘From Cape Town, sir?’

The Commissioner moved his legs, playing with a pen-knife. He said, ‘Colonel Wright is the M.I.5 representative.’

The Colonial Secretary said softly, so that everybody had to bend their heads to hear him, ‘The whole thing’s been unfortunate.’ The Commissioner began to whittle the corner of his desk, ostentatiously not listening. ‘I don’t think the police should have acted - quite in the way they did - not without consultation.’

Scobie said, ‘I’ve always understood it was our duty to stop diamond smuggling.’

In his soft obscure voice the Colonial Secretary said, ‘There weren’t a hundred pounds’ worth of diamonds found.’

‘They are the only diamonds that have ever been found.’

‘The evidence against Tallit, Scobie, was too slender for an arrest.’

‘He wasn’t arrested. He was interrogated.’

‘His lawyers say he was brought forcibly to the police station.’

‘His lawyers are lying. You surely realize that much.’

The Colonial Secretary said to Colonel Wright, ‘You see the kind of difficulty we are up against. The Roman Catholic Syrians are claiming they are a persecuted minority and that the police are in the pay of the Moslem Syrians.’

Scobie said, ‘The same thing would have happened the other way round - only it would have been worse. Parliament has more affection for Moslems than Catholics.’ He had a sense that no one had mentioned the real purpose of this meeting. The Commissioner flaked chip after chip off his desk, disowning everything, and Colonel Wright sat back on his shoulder-blades saying nothing at all.

‘Personally,’ the Colonial Secretary said, ‘I would always ...’ and the soft voice faded off into inscrutable murmurs which Wright, stuffing his fingers into one ear, leaning his head sideways as though he were trying to hear something through a defective telephone, might possibly have caught.

Scobie said, ‘I couldn’t hear what you said.’

‘I said personally I’d always take Tallit’s word against Yusef’s.’

‘That,’ Scobie said, ‘is because you have only been in this colony five years.’

Colonel Wright suddenly interjected, ‘How many years have you been here, Major Scobie?’

‘Fifteen.’

Colonel Wright grunted non-committally.

The Commissioner stopped whittling the corner of his desk and drove his knife viciously into the top. He said, ‘Colonel Wright wants to know the source of your information, Scobie.’

‘You know that, sir. Yusef.’ Wright and the Colonial Secretary sat side by side watching him. He stood back with lowered head, waiting for the next move, but no move came. He knew they were waiting for him to amplify his bald reply, and he knew too that they would take it for a confession of weakness if he did. The silence became more and more intolerable: it was like an accusation. Weeks ago he had told Yusef that he intended to let the Commissioner know the details of his loan; perhaps he had really had that intention, perhaps he had been bluffing; he couldn’t remember now. He only knew that now it was too late. That information should have been given before taking action against Tallit: it could not be an afterthought. In the corridor behind the office Fraser passed whistling his favourite tune; he opened the door of the office, said, ‘Sorry, sir,’ and retreated again, leaving a whiff of warm Zoo smell behind him. The murmur of the rain went on and on. The Commissioner took the knife out of the table and began to whittle again; it was as if, for a second time, he were deliberately disowning the whole business. The Colonial Secretary cleared his throat’ Yusef,’ he repeated.

Scobie nodded.

Colonel Wright said, ‘Do you consider Yusef trustworthy?’

‘Of course not, sir. But one has to act on what information is available - and this information proved correct up to a point.’

‘Up to what point?’

‘The diamonds were there.’

The Colonial Secretary said, ‘Do you get much information from Yusef?’

‘This is the first time I’ve had any at all.’

He couldn’t catch what the Colonial Secretary said beyond the word ‘Yusef’.

‘I can’t hear what you say, sir.’

‘I said are you in touch with Yusef?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that’

‘Do you see him often?’

‘I think in the last three months I have seen him three - no, four times.’

‘On business?’

‘Not necessarily. Once I gave him a lift home when his car had broken down. Once he came to see me when I had fever at Bamba. Once ...’

‘We are not cross-examining you, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said.

‘I had an idea, sir, that these gentlemen were.’

Colonel Wright uncrossed his long legs and said, ‘Let’s boil it down to one question. Tallit, Major Scobie, has made counter-accusations -against the police, against you. He says in effect that Yusef has given you money. Has he?’

‘No, sir. Yusef has given me nothing.’ He felt an odd relief that he had not yet been called upon to lie.

The Colonial Secretary said, ‘Naturally sending your wife to South Africa was well within your private means.’ Scobie sat back in his chair, saying nothing. Again he was aware of the hungry silence waiting for his words.

‘You don’t answer?’ the Colonial Secretary said impatiently.

‘I didn’t know you had asked a question. I repeat - Yusef has given me nothing.’

‘He’s a man to beware of, Scobie.’

‘Perhaps when you have been here as long as I have you’ll realize the police are meant to deal with people who are not received at the Secretariat.’

‘We don’t want our tempers to get warm, do we?’

Scobie stood up. ‘Can I go, sir? If these gentlemen have finished with me ... I have an appointment.’ The sweat stood on his forehead; his heart jumped with fury. This should be the moment of caution, when the blood runs down the flanks and the red cloth waves.

‘That’s all right, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said.

Colonel Wright said, ‘You must forgive me for bothering you. I received a report. I had to take the matter up officially. I’m quite satisfied.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ But the soothing words came too late: the damp face of the Colonial Secretary filled his field of vision. The Colonial Secretary said softly, ‘It’s just a matter of discretion, that’s all.’

‘If I’m wanted for the next half an hour, sir,’ Scobie said to the Commissioner, ‘I shall be at Yusef’s’

After all they had forced him to tell a kind of lie: he had no appointment with Yusef. All the same he wanted a few words with Yusef; it was just possible that he might yet clear up, for his own satisfaction, if not legally, the Tallit affair. Driving slowly through the rain - his windscreen wiper had long ceased to function - he saw Harris struggling with his umbrella outside the Bedford Hotel.

‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going your way.’

‘The most exciting things have been happening,’ Harris said. His hollow face shone with rain and enthusiasm. ‘I’ve got a house at last.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘At least it’s not a house: it’s one of the huts up your way. But it’s a home.’ Harris said. ‘I’ll have to share it, but it’s a home.’

‘Who’s sharing it with you?’

‘I’m asking Wilson, but he’s gone away - to Lagos for a week or two. The damned elusive Pimpernel. Just when I wanted him. And that brings me to the second exciting thing. Do you know I’ve discovered we were both at Downham?’

‘Downham?’

‘The school, of course. I went into his room to borrow his ink while he was away, and there on his table I saw a copy of the old Downhamian.’

‘What a coincidence,’ Scobie said.

‘And do you know - it’s really been a day of extraordinary happenings - I was looking through the magazine and there at the end was a page which said, ‘The Secretary of the old Downhamian Association would like to get in touch with the following old boys with whom we have lost touch’ - and mere half-way down was my own name, in print, large as life. What do you think of that?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Directly I got to the office I sat down and wrote - before I touched a cable, except of course “the most immediates”, but then I found I’d forgotten to put down the secretary’s address, so back I had to go for the paper. You wouldn’t care to come in, would you, and see what I’ve written?’

‘I can’t stay long.’ Harris had been given an office in a small unwanted room in the Elder Dempster Company’s premises. It was the size of an old-fashioned servant’s bedroom and this appearance was enhanced by a primitive washbasin with one cold tap and a gas-ring. A table littered with cable forms was squashed between the washbasin and a window no larger than a port-hole which looked straight out on to the water-front and the grey creased bay. An abridged version of Ivanhoe for the use of schools, and half a loaf of bread stood in an out-tray. ‘Excuse the muddle,’ Harris said. ‘Take a chair,’ but there was no spare chair.

‘Where’ve I put it?’ Harris wondered aloud, turning over the cables on his desk. ‘Ah, I remember.’ He opened Ivanhoe and fished out a folded sheet. ‘It’s only a rough draft,’ he said with anxiety. ‘Of course I’ve got to pull it together. I think I’d better keep it back till Wilson comes. You see I’ve mentioned him.’

Scobie read, Dear Secretary, - It was just by chance I came on a copy of the ‘Old Downhamian’ which another old Downhamian, E. Wilson (1923-1928), had in his room. I’m afraid I’ve been out of touch with the old place for a great many years and I was very pleased and a bit guilty to see that you have been trying to get into touch with me. Perhaps you’d like to know a bit about what I’m doing in ‘the white man’s grave’, but as I’m a cable censor you will understand that I can’t tell you much about my work. That will have to wait till we’ve won the war. We are in the middle of the rains now - and how it does rain. There’s a lot of fever about, but

I’ve only had one dose and E. Wilson has so far escaped altogether. We are sharing a little house together, so that you can feel that old Downhamians even in this wild and distant part stick together. We’ve got an old Downhamian team of two and go out hunting together but only cockroaches {Ha! Ha!). Well, I must stop now and get on with winning the war. Cheerio to all old Downhamians from quite an old Coaster.

Scobie looking up met Harris’s anxious and embarrassed gaze. ‘Do you think it’s on the right lines?’ he asked. ‘I was a bit doubtful about “Dear Secretary”.’

‘I think you’ve caught the tone admirably.’

‘Of course you know it wasn’t a very good school, and I wasn’t very happy there. In fact I ran away once.’

‘And now they’ve caught up with you.’

‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ said Harris. He stared out over the grey water with tears in his bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ve always envied people who were happy there,’ he said.

Scobie said consolingly, ‘I didn’t much care for school myself.’

‘To start off happy,’ Harris said. ‘It must make an awful difference afterwards. Why, it might become a habit, mightn’t it?’ He took the piece of bread out of the out-tray and dropped it into the wastepaper-basket. ‘I always mean to get this place tidied up,’ he said.

‘Well, I must be going, Harris. I’m glad about the house -and the old Downhamian.’

‘I wonder if Wilson was happy there,’ Harris brooded. He took Ivanhoe out of the out-tray and looked around for somewhere to put it, but there wasn’t any place. He put it back again. ‘I don’t suppose he was,’ he said, ‘or why should he have turned up here?’

Scobie left his car immediately outside Yusef’s door: it was like a gesture of contempt in the face of the Colonial Secretary. He said to the steward, ‘I want to see your

master. I know the way.’

‘Massa out.’

‘Then I’ll wait for him.’ He pushed the steward to one side and walked in. The bungalow was divided into a succession of small rooms identically furnished with sofas and cushions and low tables for drinks like the rooms in a brothel. He passed from one to another, pulling the curtains aside, till he reached the little room where nearly two months ago now he had lost his integrity. On the sofa Yusef lay asleep.

He lay on his back in his white duck trousers with his mouth open, breathing heavily. A glass was on a table at his side, and Scobie noticed the small white grains at the bottom. Yusef had taken a bromide. Scobie sat down at his side and waited. The window was open, but the rain shut out the air as effectively as a curtain. Perhaps it was merely the want of air that caused the depression which now fell on his spirits, perhaps it was because he had returned to the scene of a crime. Useless to tell himself that he had committed no offence. Like a woman who has made a loveless marriage he recognized in the room as anonymous as an hotel bedroom the memory of an adultery.

Just over the window there was a defective gutter which emptied itself like a tap, so that all the time you could hear the two sounds of the rain - the murmur and the gush. Scobie lit a cigarette, watching Yusef. He couldn’t feel any hatred of the man. He had trapped Yusef as consciously and as effectively as Yusef had trapped him. The marriage had been made by both of them. Perhaps the intensity of the watch he kept broke through the fog of bromide: the fat thighs shifted on the sofa. Yusef grunted, murmured, ‘dear chap’ in his deep sleep, and turned on his side, facing Scobie. Scobie stared again round the room, but he had examined it already thoroughly enough when he came here to arrange his loan: there was no change - the same hideous mauve silk cushions, the threads showing where the damp was rotting the covers, the tangerine curtains. Even the blue syphon of soda was in the same place: they had an eternal air like the furnishings of hell. There were no bookshelves, for Yusef couldn’t read: no desk because he couldn’t write. It would have been useless to search for papers - papers were useless to Yusef. Everything was inside that large Roman head.

‘Why ... Major Scobie ...’ The eyes were open and sought his; blurred with bromide they found it difficult to focus.

‘Good morning, Yusef.’ For once Scobie had him at a disadvantage. For a moment Yusef seemed about to sink again into drugged sleep; then with an effort he got on an elbow.

‘I wanted to have a word about Tallit, Yusef.’

‘Tallit... forgive me, Major Scobie .. .’

‘And the diamonds.’

‘Crazy about diamonds,’ Yusef brought out with difficulty in a voice half-way to sleep. He shook his head, so that the white lick of hair flapped; then putting out a vague hand he stretched for the syphon.

‘Did you frame Tallit, Yusef?’

Yusef dragged the syphon towards him across the table knocking over the bromide glass; he turned the nozzle towards his face and pulled the trigger. The soda water broke on his face and splashed all round him on the mauve silk. He gave a sigh of relief and satisfaction, like a man under a shower on a hot day. ‘What is it, Major Scobie, is anything wrong?’

‘Tallit is not going to be prosecuted.’

He was like a tired man dragging himself out of the sea: the tide followed him. He said, ‘You must forgive me, Major Scobie. I have not been sleeping well.’ He shook his head up and down thoughtfully, as a man might shake a box to see whether anything rattles. ‘You were saying something about Tallit, Major Scobie,’ and he explained again, ‘It is the stocktaking. All the figures. Three four stores. They try to cheat me because it’s all in my head.’

‘Tallit,’ Scobie repeated, ‘won’t be prosecuted.’

‘Never mind. One day he will go too far.’

‘Were they your diamonds, Yusef?’

‘My diamonds? They have made you suspicious of me, Major Scobie.’

‘Was the small boy in your pay?’

Yusef mopped the soda water off his face with the back of his hand. ‘Of course he was, Major Scobie. That was where I got my information.’

The moment of inferiority had passed; the great head had shaken itself free of the bromide, even though the limbs still lay sluggishly spread over the sofa. ‘Yusef, I’m not your enemy. I have a liking for you.’

‘When you say that, Major Scobie, how my heart beats.’ He pulled his shirt wider, as though to show the actual movement of the heart and little streams of soda water irrigated the black bush on his chest. ‘I am too fat,’ he said.

‘I would like to trust you, Yusef. Tell me the truth. Were the diamonds yours or Tallit’s?’

‘I always want to speak the truth to you, Major Scobie. I never told you the diamonds were Tallit’s.’

‘They were yours?’

‘Yes, Major Scobie.’

‘What a fool you have made of me, Yusef. If only I had a witness here, I’d run you in.’

‘I didn’t mean to make a fool of you, Major Scobie. I wanted Tallit sent away. It would be for the good of everybody if he was sent away. It is no good the Syrians being in two parties. If they were in one party you would be able to come to me and say, ‘Yusef, the Government wants the Syrians to do this or that,’ and I should be able to answer, “It shall be so.”’

‘And the diamond smuggling would be in one pair of hands.’

‘Oh, the diamonds, diamonds, diamonds,’ Yusef wearily complained. ‘I tell you, Major Scobie, that I make more money in one year from my smallest store than I would make in three years from diamonds. You cannot understand how many bribes are necessary.’

‘Well, Yusef, I’m taking no more information from you. This ends our relationship. Every month, of course, I shall send you the interest.’ He felt a strange unreality in his own words: the tangerine curtains hung there immovably. There are certain places one never leaves behind; the curtains and cushions of this room joined an attic bedroom, an ink-stained desk, a lacy altar in Haling - they would be there so long as consciousness lasted.

Yusef put his feet on the floor and sat bolt upright. He said, ‘Major Scobie, you have taken my little joke too much to heart.’

‘Good-bye, Yusef, you aren’t a bad chap, but good-bye.’

‘You are wrong, Major Scobie. I am a bad chap.’ He said earnestly, ‘My friendship for you is the only good thing in this black heart. I cannot give it up. We must stay friends always.’

‘I’m afraid not, Yusef.’

‘Listen, Major Scobie. I am not asking you to do anything for me except sometimes -after dark perhaps when nobody can see - to visit me and talk to me. Nothing else. Just that. I will tell you no more tales about Tallit. I will tell you nothing. We will sit here with the syphon and the whisky bottle ...’

‘I’m not a fool, Yusef. I know it would be of great use to you if people believed we were friends. I’m not giving you that help.’

Yusef put a finger in his ear and cleared it of soda water. He looked bleakly and brazenly across at Scobie. This must be how he looks, Scobie thought, at the store manager who has tried to deceive him about the figures he carries in his head. ‘Major Scobie, did you ever tell the Commissioner about our little business arrangement or was that an bluff?’

‘Ask him yourself.’

‘I think I will My heart feels rejected and bitter. It urges me to go to the Commissioner and tell him everything.’

‘Always obey your heart, Yusef.’

‘I will tell him you took my money and together we planned the arrest of Tallit. But you did not fulfil your bargain, so I have come to him in revenge. In revenge,’ Yusef repeated gloomily, his Roman head sunk on his fat chest.

‘Go. ahead. Do what you like, Yusef.’ But he couldn’t believe in any of this scene however hard he played it. It was like a lovers’ quarrel. He couldn’t believe in Yusef s threats and he had no belief in his own calmness: he did not even believe in this good-bye. What had happened in the mauve and orange room had been too important to become part of the enormous equal past. He was not surprised when Yusef, lifting his head, said, ‘Of course I shall not go. One day you will come back and want my friendship. And I shall welcome you.’

Shall I really be so desperate? Scobie wondered, as though in the Syrian’s voice he had heard the genuine accent of prophecy.

5

On his way home Scobie stopped his car outside the Catholic church and went in. It was the first Saturday of the month and he always went to confession on that day. Half a dozen old women, their hair bound like char-women’s in dusters, waited their turn: a nursing sister: a private soldier with a Royal Ordnance insignia. Father Rank’s voice whispered monotonously from the box. Scobie, with his eyes fixed on the cross, prayed - the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Act of Contrition. The awful languor of routine fell on his spirits. He felt like a spectator -one of those many people round the cross over whom the gaze of Christ must have passed, seeking the face of a friend or an enemy. It sometimes seemed to him that his profession and his uniform classed him inexorably with all those anonymous Romans keeping order in the streets a long way off. One by one the old Kru women passed into the box and out again, and Scobie prayed -vaguely and ramblingly - for Louise, that she might be happy now at this moment and so remain, that no evil should ever come to her through him. The soldier came out of .the box and he rose.

‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ He said, ‘Since my last confession a month ago I have missed one Sunday Mass and one holiday of obligation.’

‘Were you prevented from going?’

‘Yes, but with a little effort I could have arranged my duties better.’

‘Yes?’

‘All through this month I have done the minimum. I’ve been unnecessarily harsh to one of my men ...’ He paused a long time.

‘Is that everything?’

‘I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel - tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but -’ he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille. ‘I’m not sure that I even believe.’

‘It’s easy,’ the priest said, ‘to worry too much about that. Especially here. The penance I would give to a lot of people if I could is six months’ leave. The climate gets you down. It’s easy to mistake tiredness for - well, disbelief.’

‘I don’t want to keep you, Father. There are other people waiting. I know these are just fancies. But I feel - empty. Empty.’

‘That’s sometimes the moment God chooses,’ the priest said. ‘Now go along with you and say a decade of your rosary.’

‘I haven’t a rosary. At least...’

‘Well, five Our Father’s and five Hail Marys then.’ He began to speak the words of absolution, but the trouble is, Scobie thought, there’s nothing to absolve. The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together -a hocus pocus. He went out of the box and knelt down again, and this too was part of a routine. It seemed to him for a moment that God was too accessible. There was no difficulty in approaching Him. Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought. He even suffers in public.

Chapter Three

1

‘I’VE brought you some stamps,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve been collecting them for a week - from everybody. Even Mrs Carter has contributed a magnificent parrakeet - look

at it - from somewhere in South America. And here’s a complete set of Liberians surcharged for the American occupation. I got those from the Naval Observer.’

They were completely at ease: it seemed to both of them for that very reason they were safe.

‘Why do you collect stamps?’ he asked. ‘It’s an odd thing to do - after sixteen.’

‘I don’t know,’ Helen Rolt said. ‘I don’t really collect. I carry them round. I suppose it’s habit.’ She opened the album and said, ‘No, it’s not just habit. I do love the things. Do you see this green George V halfpenny stamp? It’s the first I ever collected. I was eight. I steamed it off an envelope and stuck it in a notebook. That’s why my father gave me an album. My mother had died, so he gave me a stamp-album.’

She tried to explain more exactly. ‘They are like snapshots. They are so portable. People who collect china - they can’t carry it around with them. Or books. But you don’t have to tear the pages out like you do with snapshots.

‘You’ve never told me about your husband,’ Scobie said.

‘No.’

‘It’s not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it’s been torn?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s easier to get over a thing,’ Scobie said, ‘if you talk about it.’

‘That’s not the trouble,’ she said. ‘The trouble is - it’s so terribly easy to get over.’ She took him by surprise; he hadn’t believed she was old enough to have reached that stage in her lessons, that particular turn of the screw. She said, ‘He’s been dead - how long - is it eight weeks yet? and he’s so dead, so completely dead. What a little bitch I must be.’

Scobie said, ‘You needn’t feel that. It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, ‘I can’t live without you,’ what we really mean is, ‘I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.’ That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.’

‘I didn’t know I was so tough,’ Helen said. ‘Horribly tough.’

‘I had a child,’ Scobie said, ‘who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently. I got one cable just after breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning - a dead time of day for any news.’ He had never mentioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully. ‘The cable said, Catherine died this

afternoon no pain God bless you. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said, Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope my diving. That was the one sent off at five.

‘Diving’ was a mutilation - I suppose for ‘darling’. You see there was nothing more hopeless she could have put to break the news than “doctor has hope”.’

‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.

‘No, the terrible thing was that when I got the second telegram, I was so muddled in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must be still alive. For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was - disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought ‘now the anxiety begins, and the pain’, but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.’

‘Have you forgotten her?’

‘I don’t remember her often. You see, I escaped seeing her die. My wife had that.’

It was astonishing to him how easily and quickly they had become friends. They came together over two deaths without reserve. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

‘Everybody would have looked after you.’

‘I think they are scared of me, she said.

He laughed.

‘They are. Flight-Lieutenant Bagster took me to the beach this afternoon but he was scared. Because I’m not happy and because of my husband. Everybody on the beach was pretending to be happy about something and I sat there grinning and it didn’t work. Do you remember when you went to your first party and coming up the stairs you heard all the voices and you didn’t know how to talk to people? That’s how I felt so I sat and grinned in Mrs Carter’s bathing-dress and Bagster stroked my leg and I wanted to go home.’

‘You’ll be going home soon.’

‘I don’t mean that home. I mean here where I can shut the door and not answer when they knock. I don’t want to go away yet.’

‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’

‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.

‘Do you dream about it?’

‘No. I dream of John sometimes - that’s worse. Because I’ve always had bad dreams of him and I still have bad dreams of him. I mean we were always quarrelling in the dreams and we still go on quarrelling.’

‘Did you quarrel?’

‘No. He was sweet to me. We were only married a month you know. It would be easy being sweet as long as that wouldn’t it? When this happened I hadn’t really had time to know my way around.’ It seemed to Scobie that she had never known her way around - at least not since she had left her net-ball team; was it a year ago? Sometimes he saw her lying back in the boat on that oily featureless sea day after day with the other child near death and the sailor going mad and Miss Malcott, and the chief engineer who felt his responsibility to the owners, and sometimes he saw her carried past him on a stretcher grasping her stamp-album, and now he saw her in the borrowed unbecoming bathing-dress grinning at Bagster as he stroked her legs, listening to the laughter and the splashes, not knowing the adult etiquette ... Sadly like an evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore. ‘You’ve written to your father?’

‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’

Scobie read. Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’

‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’

Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’

He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the

A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes ... compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute and the influential escaped in war. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’

It was impossible to think of her being saved from the sea and then Sung back like a fish that wasn’t worth catching.

He said, ‘Can you type?’

‘I can get along quite fast with one finger.’

‘You could get a job here, I think. We are very short of secretaries. All the wives, you know, are working in the secretariat, and we still haven’t enough. But it’s a bad climate for a woman.’

‘I’d like to stay. Let’s have a drink on it.’ She called, ‘Boy, boy.’

‘You are learning,’ Scobie said. ‘A week ago you were so frightened of him...’ The boy came in with a tray set out with glasses, limes, water, a new gin bottle.

‘This isn’t the boy I talked to,’ Scobie said.

‘No, that one went. You talked to him too fiercely.’

‘And this one came?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name, boy?’

‘Vande, sah.’

‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

‘No, sah.’

‘Who am I?’

‘You big policeman, sah.’

‘Don’t frighten this one away,’ Helen said.

‘Who were you with?’

‘I was with D.C. Pemberton up bush, sah. I was small boy.’

‘Is that where I saw you?’ Scobie said. ‘I suppose I did. You look after this missus well now, and when she goes home, I get you big job. Remember that.’

‘You haven’t looked at the stamps,’ Scobie said.

‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats’ tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed face. It seemed to him that he had not felt so much at ease with another human being for years - not since Louise was young. But this case was different, he told himself: they were safe with each other. He was more than thirty years the older; his body in this climate had lost the sense of lust; he watched her with sadness and affection and enormous pity because a time would come when he couldn’t show her around in a world where she was at sea. When she turned and the light fell on her face she looked ugly, with the temporary ugliness of a child. The ugliness was like handcuffs on his wrists.

He said, ‘That stamp’s spoilt. I’ll get you another.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘it goes in as it is. I’m not a real collector.’

He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word ‘pity’ is used as loosely as the word ‘love’: the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.

She said, ‘You see, whenever I see that stain I’ll see this room...’

‘Then it’s like a snapshot.’

‘You can pull a stamp out,’ she said with a terrible youthful clarity, ‘and you don’t know that it’s ever been there.’ She turned suddenly to him and said, ‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can say anything I like. I’m not afraid of hurting you. You don’t want anything out of me. I’m safe.’

‘We’re both safe.’ The rain surrounded them, falling regularly on the iron roof.

She said, ‘I have a feeling that you’d never let me down.’ The words came to him like a command he would have to obey however difficult. Her hands were full of the absurd scraps of paper he had brought her. She said, ‘I’ll keep these always. I’ll never have to pull these out.’

Somebody knocked on the door and a voice said, ‘Freddie Bagster. It’s only me. Freddie Bagster,’ cheerily.

‘Don’t answer,’ she whispered, ‘don’t answer.’ She put her arm in his and watched the door with her mouth a little open as though she were out of breath. He had the sense of an animal which had been chased to its hole.

‘Let Freddie in,’ the voice wheedled. ‘Be a sport, Helen. Only Freddie Bagster.’ The man was a little drunk.

She stood pressed against him with her hand on his side.

When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.

2

The rain poured steadily down, turning the little patch of reclaimed ground on which his house stood back into swamp again. The window of the room blew to and fro. At some time during the night the catch had been broken by a squall of wind. Now the rain had blown in, his dressing-table was soaking wet, and there was a pool of water on the floor. His alarm clock pointed to 4.25. He felt as though he had returned to a house that had been abandoned years ago. It would not have surprised him to find cobwebs over the mirror, the mosquito-net hanging in shreds and the dirt of mice upon the floor.

He sat down on a chair and the water drained off his trousers and made a second pool around his mosquito-boots. He had left his umbrella behind, setting out on his walk home with an odd jubilation, as though he had rediscovered something he had lost, something which belonged to his youth. In the wet and noisy darkness he had even lifted his voice and tried out a line from Fraser’s song, but his voice was tuneless. Now somewhere between the Nissen hut and home he had mislaid his joy.

At four in the morning he had woken. Her head lay in his side and he could feel her hair against his breast. Putting his hand outside the net he found the light She lay in the odd cramped attitude of someone who has been shot in escaping. It seemed to him for a moment even then, before his tenderness and pleasure awoke, that he was looking at a bundle of cannon fodder. The first words she said when the light had roused her were, ‘Bagster can go to hell.’

‘Were you dreaming?’

She said, ‘I dreamed I was lost in a marsh and Bagster found me.’

He said, ‘I’ve got to go. If we sleep now, we shan’t wake again till it’s light.’ He began to think for both of them, carefully. Like a criminal he began to fashion in his own mind the undetectable crime: he planned the moves ahead: he embarked for the first time in his life on the long legalistic arguments of deceit. If soand- so ... then that follows. He said, ‘What time does your boy turn up?’

‘About six I think. I don’t know. He calls me at seven.’

‘Ali starts boiling my water about a quarter to six. I’d better go.’ He looked carefully everywhere for signs of his presence: he straightened a that and hesitated over an ash-tray. Then at the end of it all he had left his umbrella standing against the wall. It seemed to him the typical action of a criminal. When the rain reminded him of it, it was too late to go back. He would have to hammer on her door, and already in one hut a light had gone on. Standing in his own room with a mosquito-boot in his hand, he thought wearily and drearily, In future I must do better than that.

In the future - that was where the sadness lay. Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his - he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies he would some time have to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow he stared sleeplessly out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.

PART TWO

Chapter One

1

‘THERE. What do you think of it?’ Harris asked with I’ll-concealed pride. He stood in the doorway of the hut while Wilson moved cautiously forward between the

brown sticks of Government furniture like a setter through stubble.

‘Better than the hotel,’ Wilson said cautiously, pointing his muzzle towards a Government easy-chair.

‘I thought I’d give you a surprise when you got back from Lagos.’ Harris had curtained the Nissen hut into three: a bedroom for each of them and a common sitting-room. ‘There’s only one point that worries me. I’m not sure whether there are any cockroaches.’

‘Well, we only played the game to get rid of them.’

‘I know, but it seems almost a pity, doesn’t it?’

‘Who are our neighbours?’

‘There’s Mrs Rolt who was submarined, and there are two chaps in the Department of Works, and somebody called Clive from the Agricultural Department, Boling, who’s in charge of Sewage -they all seem a nice friendly lot. And Scobie, of course, is just down the road.’

‘Yes.’

Wilson moved restlessly around the hut and came to a stop in front of a photograph which Harris had propped against a Government inkstand. It showed three long rows of boys on a lawn: the first row sitting cross-legged on the grass: the second on chairs, wearing high stiff collars, with an elderly man and two women (one had a squint) in the centre: the third row standing. Wilson said, ‘That woman with a squint - I could swear I’d seen her somewhere before.’

‘Does the name Snakey convey anything to you?’

‘Why, yes, of course.’ He looked closer. ‘So you were at that hole too?’

‘I saw The Downhamian in your room and I fished this out to surprise you. I was in Jagger’s house. Where were you?’

‘I was a Prog,’ Wilson said.

‘Oh well,’ Harris admitted in a tone of disappointment, ‘there were some good chaps among the Progs.’ He laid the photograph flat down again as though it were something that hadn’t quite come off. ‘I was thinking we might have an old Downhamian dinner.’

‘Whatever for?’ Wilson asked. ‘There are only two of us.’

‘We could invite a guest each.’

‘I don’t see the point.’

Harris said bitterly, ‘Well, you are the real Downhamian, not me. I never joined the association. You get the magazine. I thought perhaps you had an interest in the place.’

‘My father made me a life member and he always forwards the bloody paper,’ Wilson said abruptly.

‘It was lying beside your bed. I thought you’d been reading it.’

‘I may have glanced at it’

‘There was a bit about me in it. They wanted my address.’

‘Oh, but you know why that is?’ Wilson said. ‘They are sending out appeals to any old Downhamian they can rake up. The panelling in the Founders’ Hall is in need of repair. I’d keep your address quiet if I were you.’ He was one of those, it seemed to Harris, who always knew what was on, who gave advance information on extra halves, who knew why old So-and-So had not turned up to school, and what the row brewing at the Head’s special meeting was about. A few weeks ago he had been a new boy whom Harris had been delighted to befriend, to show around. He remembered the evening when Wilson would have put on evening dress for a Syrian’s dinner-party if he hadn’t been warned. But Harris from his first year at school had been fated to see how quickly new boys grew up: one term he was their kindly mentor - the next he was discarded. He could never progress as quickly as the newest unlicked boy. He remembered how even in the cockroach game - that he had invented - his rules had been challenged on the first evening. He said sadly, ‘I expect you are right. Perhaps I won’t send a letter after all.’ He added humbly, ‘I took the bed on this side, but I don’t mind a bit which I have...’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Wilson said.

‘I’ve only engaged one steward. I thought we could save a bit by sharing.’

‘The less boys we have knocking about here the better,’ Wilson said.

That night was the first night of their new comradeship. They sat reading on their twin Government chairs behind the black-out curtains. On the table was a bottle of whisky for Wilson and a bottle of barley-water flavoured with lime for Harris. A sense of extraordinary peace came to Harris while the rain tingled steadily on the roof and Wilson read a Wallace. Occasionally a few drunks from the R.A.F. mess passed by, shouting or revving their cars, but this only enhanced the sense of peace inside the hut. Sometimes his eyes strayed to the walls seeking a cockroach, but you couldn’t have everything.

‘Have you got The Downhamian handy, old man? I wouldn’t mind another glance at it. This book’s so dull.’

‘There’s a new one unopened on the dressing-table.’

‘You don’t mind my opening it?’

‘Why the hell should I?’

Harris turned first to the old Downhamian notes and read again how the whereabouts of H R. Harris (1917-1921) was still wanted. He wondered whether it was possible that Wilson was wrong: there was no word here about the panelling in Hall. Perhaps after all he would send that letter and he pictured the reply he might receive from the Secretary. My dear Harris, it would go something like that, we were all delighted to receive your letter from those romantic parts. Why not send us a full length contribution to the mag. and while I’m writing to you, what about membership of the Old Downhamian Association? I notice you’ve never joined. I’m speaking for all Old Downhamians when I say that we’ll be glad to welcome you. He tried out ‘proud to welcome you’ on his tongue, but rejected that. He was a realist.

The Downhamians had had a fairly successful Christmas term. They had beaten Harpenden by one goal, Merchant Taylors by two, and had drawn with Lancing. Ducker and Tierney were coming on well as forwards, but the scrum was still slow in getting the ball out. He turned a page and read how the Opera Society had given an excellent rendering of Patience in the Founders’ Hall. F.J.K., who was obviously the English master, wrote: Lane as Bunthorne displayed a degree of aestheticism which surprised all his companions of Vb. We would not hitherto have described his hand as mediaeval or associated him with lilies, but he persuaded us that we had misjudged him. A great performance, Lane.

Harris skimmed through the account of five matches, a fantasy called ‘The Tick of the Clock’ beginning There was once a little old lady whose most beloved possession ... The walls of Downham - the red brick laced with yellow, the extraordinary crockets, the mid-Victorian gargoyles - rose around him: boots beat on stone stairs and a cracked dinner-bell rang to rouse him to another miserable day. He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that that is where we really belong. His eyes filled with tears, he took a sip of his barley-water and thought, ‘I’ll post that letter whatever Wilson says.’ Somebody outside shouted, ‘Bagster. Where are you, Bagster, you sod?’ and stumbled in a ditch. He might have been back at Downham, except of course that they wouldn’t have used that word.

Harris turned a page or two and the title of a poem caught his eye. It was called ‘West Coast’ and it was dedicated to ‘L.S.’. He wasn’t very keen on poetry, but it struck him as interesting that somewhere on this enormous coastline of sand and smells there existed a third old Downhamian.

Another Tristram on this distant coast, he read

Raises the poisoned chalice to his lips,

Another Mark upon the palm-fringed shore

Watches his love’s eclipse.

It seemed to Harris obscure: his eye passed rapidly over the intervening verses to the initials at the foot: E.W. He nearly exclaimed aloud, but he restrained himself in time. In such close quarters as they now shared it was necessary to be circumspect. There wasn’t space to quarrel in. Who is L.S., he wondered, and thought, surely it can’t be ... the very idea crinkled his lips in a cruel smile. He said, ‘There’s not much in the mag. We beat Harpenden. There’s a poem called West Coast. Another poor devil out here, I suppose.’

‘Oh.’

‘Lovelorn,’ Harris said. ‘But I don’t read poetry.’

‘Nor do I,’ Wilson lied behind the barrier of the Wallace.

It had been a very narrow squeak. Wilson lay on his back in bed and listened to the rain on the roof and (he heavy breathing of the old Downhamian beyond the curtain. It was as if the hideous years had extended through the intervening mist to surround him again. What madness had induced him to send that poem to the Downhamian? But it wasn’t madness: he had long since become incapable of anything so honest as madness: he was one of those condemned in childhood to complexity. He knew what he had intended to do: to cut the poem out with no indication of its source and to send it to Louise. It wasn’t quite her sort of poem, he knew, but surely, he had argued, she would be impressed to some extent by the mere fact that the poem was in print. If she asked him where it had appeared, it would be easy to invent some convincing coterie name. The Downhamian luckily was well printed and on good paper. It was true, of course, that he would have to paste the cutting on opaque paper to disguise what was printed on the other side, but it would be easy to think up an explanation of that. It was as if his profession were slowly absorbing his whole life, just as school had done. His profession was to lie, to have the quick story ready, never to give himself away, and his private life was taking the same pattern. He lay on his back in a nausea of self-disgust.

The rain had momentarily stopped. It was one of those cool intervals that were the consolation of the sleepless. In Harris’s heavy dreams the rain went on. Wilson got softly out and mixed himself a bromide; the grains fizzed in the bottom of the glass and Harris spoke hoarsely and turned over behind the curtain. Wilson flashed his torch on his watch and read 2.25. Tiptoeing to the door so as not to waken Harris, he felt the little sting of a jigger under his toe-nail. In the morning he must get his boy to scoop it out. He stood on the small cement pavement above the marshy ground and let the cool air play on him with his pyjama jacket flapping open. All the huts were in darkness, and the moon was patched with the rain-clouds coming up. He was going to turn away when he heard someone stumble a few yards away and he flashed his torch. It lit on a man’s bowed back moving between the huts towards the road. ‘Scobie,’ Wilson exclaimed and the man turned.

‘Hullo, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘I didn’t know you lived up here.’

‘I’m sharing with Harris,’ Wilson said, watching the man who had watched his tears.

‘I’ve been taking a walk,’ Scobie said unconvincingly, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ It seemed to Wilson that Scobie was still a novice in the world of deceit: he hadn’t lived in it since childhood, and he felt an odd elderly envy for Scobie, much as an old lag might envy the young crook serving his first sentence, to whom all this was new.

3

Wilson sat in his little stuffy room in the U.A.C. office. Several of the firm’s journals and day books bound in quarter pigskin formed a barrier between him and the door. Surreptitiously, like a schoolboy using a crib, Wilson behind the barrier worked at his code books, translating a cable. A commercial calendar showed a week old date - June 20, and a motto: The best investments are honesty and enterprise. William P. Cornforth. A clerk knocked and said, ‘There’s a nigger for you, Wilson, with a note.’

‘Who from?’

‘He says Brown.’

‘Keep him a couple of minutes, there’s a good chap, and then boot him in.’ However diligently Wilson practised, the slang phrase sounded unnaturally on his lips. He folded up the cable and stuck it in the code book to keep his place: then he put the cable and the code book in the safe and pulled the door to. Pouring himself out a glass of water he looked out on the street; the mammies, their heads tied up in bright cotton cloths, passed under their coloured umbrellas. Their shapeless cotton gowns fell to the ankle: one with a design of matchboxes: another with kerosene lamps: the third - the latest from Manchester - covered with mauve cigarette- lighters on a yellow ground. Naked to the waist a young girl passed gleaming through the rain and Wilson watched her out of sight with melancholy lust. He swallowed and turned as the door opened.

‘Shut the door.’

The boy obeyed. He had apparently put on his best clothes for this morning call: a white cotton shirt fell outside his white shorts. His gym shoes were immaculate in spite of the rain, except that his toes protruded.

‘You small boy at Yusef’s?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘You got a message,’ Wilson said, ‘from my boy. He tell you what I want, eh? He’s your young brother, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, sah,’

‘Same father?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘He says you good boy, honest. You want to be a steward, eh?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Can you read?’

‘No, sah.’

‘Write?’

‘No, sah.’

‘You got eyes in your head? Good ears? You see everything? You hear everything?’ The boy grinned - a gash of white in the smooth grey elephant hide of his face: he had a look of sleek intelligence. Intelligence, to Wilson, was more valuable than honesty. Honesty was a double-edged weapon, but intelligence looked after number one. Intelligence realized that a Syrian might one day go home to his own land, but the English stayed. Intelligence knew that it was a good thing to work for Government, whatever the Government. ‘How much you get as small boy?’

‘Ten shillings.’

‘I pay you five shillings more. If Yusef sack you I pay you ten shillings. If you stay with Yusef one year and give me good information - true information - no lies, I give you job as steward with white man. Understand?’ ‘Yes, sah.’

‘If you give me lies, then you go to prison. Maybe they shoot you. I don’t know. I don’t care. Understand?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘Every day you see your brother at meat market. You tell him who comes to Yusef s house. Tell him where Yusef goes. You tell him any strange boys who come to Yusef’s house. You no tell lies, you tell truth. No humbug. If no one comes to Yusef’s house you say no one. You no make big lie. If you tell lie, I know it and you go to prison straight away.’ The wearisome recital went on. He was never quite sure how much was understood. The sweat ran off Wilson’s forehead and the cool contained grey face of the boy aggravated him like an accusation he couldn’t answer. ‘You go to prison and you stay in prison plenty long time.’ He could hear his own voice cracking with the desire to impress; he could hear himself, like the parody of a white man on the halls. He said, ‘Scobie? Do you know Major Scobie?’

‘Yes, sah. He very good man, sah.’ They were the first words apart from yes and no the boy had uttered.

‘You see him at your master’s?’

‘Yes, sah.’

‘How often?’

‘Once, twice, sah.’

‘He and your master - they are friends?’

‘My master he think Major Scobie very good man, sah.’ The reiteration of the phrase angered Wilson. He broke furiously out, ‘I don’t want to hear whether he’s good or not. I want to know where he meets Yusef, see? What do they talk about? You bring them in drinks some time when steward’s busy? What do you hear?’

‘Last time they have big palaver,’ the boy brought ingratiatingly out, as if he were showing a corner of his wares.

‘I bet they did. I want to know all about their palaver.’

‘When Major Scobie go away one time, my master he put pillow right on his face.’

‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

The boy folded his arms over his eyes in a gesture of great dignity and said, ‘His eyes make pillow wet.’

‘Good God,’ Wilson said, ‘what an extraordinary thing.’

‘Then he drink plenty whisky and go to sleep - ten, twelve hours. Then he go to his store in Bond Street and make plenty hell.’

‘Why?’

‘He say they humbug him.’

‘What’s that got to do with Major Scobie?’

The boy shrugged. As so many times before Wilson had the sense of a door closed in his face; he was always on the outside of the door.

When the boy had gone he opened his safe again, moving the knob of the combination first left to 32 - his age, secondly right to 10, the year of his birth, left again to 65, the number of his home in Western Avenue, Pinner, and took out the code books. 32946 78523 97042. Row after row of groups swam before his eyes. The telegram was headed Important, or he would have postponed the decoding till the evening. He knew how little important it really was - the usual ship had left Lobito carrying the usual suspects - diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. When he had decoded the telegram he would hand it to the long-suffering Commissioner, who had already probably received the same information or contradictory information from S.O.E. or one of the other secret organizations which took root on the coast like mangroves. Leave alone but do not repeat not pinpoint P. Ferreira passenger 1st class repeat P. Ferreira passenger 1st class. Ferreira was presumably an agent his organization had recruited on board. It was quite possible that the Commissioner would receive simultaneously a message from Colonel Wright that P. Ferreira was suspected of carrying diamonds and should be rigorously searched. 72391 87052 63847 92034. How did one simultaneously leave alone, not repeat not pinpoint, and rigorously search Mr Ferreira? That luckily was not his worry. Perhaps it was Scobie who would suffer any headache there was.

Again he went to the window for a glass of water and again he saw the same girl pass. Or maybe it was not the same girl. He watched the water trickling down between the two thin wing-like shoulder-blades. He remembered there was a time when he had not noticed a black skin. He felt as though he had passed years and not months on this coast, all the years between puberty and manhood.

4

‘Going out?’ Harris asked with surprise. ‘Where to?’

‘Just into town,’ Wilson said, loosening the knot round his mosquito-boots.

‘What on earth can you find to do in town at this hour?’

‘Business,’ Wilson said.

Well, he thought, it was business of a kind, the kind of joyless business one did alone, without friends. He had bought a second-hand car a few weeks ago, the first he had ever owned, and he was not yet a very reliable driver. No gadget survived the climate long and every few hundred yards he had to wipe the windscreen with his handkerchief. In Kru town the hut doors were open and families sat around the kerosene lamps waiting till it was cool enough to sleep. A dead pye-dog lay in the gutter with the rain running over its white swollen belly. He drove in second gear at little more than a walking pace, for civilian head-lamps had to be blacked out to the size of a visiting-card and he couldn’t see more than fifteen paces ahead. It took him ten minutes to reach the great cotton tree near the police station. There were no lights on in any of the officer’s rooms and he left his car outside the main entrance. If anyone saw it there they would assume he was inside. For a moment he sat with the door open hesitating. The image of the girl passing in the rain conflicting with the sight of Harris on his shoulder-blades reading a book with a glass of squash at his elbow. He thought sadly, as lust won the day, what a lot of trouble it was; the sadness of the after-taste fell upon his spirits beforehand.

He had forgotten to bring his umbrella and he was wet through before he had walked a dozen yards down the hill. It was the passion of curiosity more than of lust that impelled him now. Some time or another if one lived in a place one must try the local product. It was like having a box of chocolates shut in a bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much. He thought: when this is over I shall be able to write another poem to Louise.

The brothel was a tin-roofed bungalow half-way down the hill on the right-hand side. In the dry season the girls sat outside in the gutter like sparrows; they chatted with the policeman on duty at the top of the hill. The road was never made up, so that nobody drove by the brothel on the way to the wharf or the Cathedral: it could be ignored. Now it turned a shuttered silent front to the muddy street, except where a door, propped open with a rock out of the roadway, opened on a passage. Wilson looked quickly this way and that and stepped inside.

Years ago the passage had been white-washed and plastered, but rats had torn holes in the plaster and human beings had mutilated the whitewash with scrawls and pencilled names. The walls were tattooed like a sailor’s arm, with initials, dates, there was even a pair of hearts interlocked. At first it seemed to Wilson that the place was entirely deserted; on either side of the passage there were little cells nine feet by four with curtains instead of doorways and beds made out of old packing-cases spread with a native cloth. He walked rapidly to the end of the passage; then, he told himself, he would turn and go back to the quiet and somnolent security of the room where the old Downhamian dozed over his book.

He felt an awful disappointment, as though he had not found what he was looking for, when he readied the end and discovered that the left-hand cell was occupied; in the light of an oil lamp burning on the floor he saw a girl in a dirty shift spread out on the packing-cases like a fish on a counter; her bare pink soles dangled over the words ‘Tate’s Sugar’. She lay there on duty, waiting for a customer. She grinned at Wilson, not bothering to sit up and said, ‘Want jig jig, darling. Ten bob.’ He had a vision of a girl with a rain-wet back moving forever out of his sight.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ shaking his head and thinking, What a fool I was, what a fool, to drive all the way for only this. The girl giggled as if she understood his stupidity and he heard the slop slop of bare feet coming up the passage from the road; the way was blocked by an old mammy carrying a striped umbrella. She said something to the girl in her native tongue and received a grinning explanation. He had the sense that all this was only strange to him, that it was one of the stock situations the old woman was accustomed to meet in the dark regions which she ruled. He said weakly, ‘I’ll just go and get a drink first.’

‘She get drink,’ the mammy said. She commanded the girl sharply in the language he couldn’t understand and the girl swung her legs off the sugar cases. ‘You stay here,’ the mammy said to Wilson, and mechanically like a hostess whose mind is elsewhere but who must make conversation with however uninteresting a guest, she said, ‘Pretty girl, jig jig, one pound.’ Market values here were reversed: the price rose steadily with his reluctance.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t wait,’ Wilson said. ‘Here’s ten bob,’ and he made the preliminary motions of departure, but the old woman paid him no attention at all, blocking the way, smiling steadily like a dentist who knows what’s good for you. Here a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature. If he had wanted to hide, here was the perfect hiding-place; if he had wanted to be anonymous, here he was simply a man. Even his reluctance, disgust and fear were not personal characteristics; they were so common to those who came here for the first time that the old woman knew exactly what each move would be. First the suggestion of a drink, then the offer of money, after that...

Wilson said weakly, ‘Let me by,’ but he knew that she wouldn’t move; she stood watching him, as though he were a tethered animal on whom she was keeping an eye for its owner. She wasn’t interested in him, but occasionally she repeated calmly, ‘Pretty girl jig jig by-and-by.’ He held out a pound to her and she pocketed it and went on blocking the way. When he tried to push by, she thrust him backwards with a casual pink palm, saying, ‘By-an-by. Jig jig.’ It had all happened so many hundreds of times before.

Down the passage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here. In their presence he felt as though his dead veins would bleed again.

PART THREE

Chapter One

HELEN said, ‘I saw you on the beach this afternoon.’ Scobie looked up from the glass of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of

Louise. He said, ‘I had to find Rees - the Naval Intelligence man.’

‘You didn’t even speak to me.’

‘I was in a hurry.’

‘You are so careful, always,’ she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. ... How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene - to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, ‘For once I wasn’t thinking of you. I had other things in mind.’

‘What other things?’

‘Oh, diamonds ...’

‘Your work is much more important to you than I am,’ Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many bad novels, wrung his heart.

‘Yes,’ he said gravely, ‘but I’d sacrifice it for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I suppose because you are a human being. Somebody may love a dog more than any other possession, but he wouldn’t run down even a strange child to save it’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.’

He put the whisky glass in her hand and said, ‘Dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can’t be bothered to lie all the time like the young.’

‘If you knew,’ she said, ‘how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It’s so-so ignoble.’

‘Yes.’

‘We always make love - here. Among the junior official’s furniture. I don’t believe we’d know how to do it anywhere else.’

‘Poor you,’ he said.

She said furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ But it was not a question of whether she wanted it - she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.

‘Can’t you ever risk anything?’ she asked. ‘You never even write a line to me. You go away on trek for days, but you won’t leave anything behind. I can’t even have a photograph to make this place human.’

‘But I haven’t got a photograph.’

‘I suppose you think I’d use your letters against you.’ He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking - the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky glass in his hand he remembered another night - a hundred yards away - the glass had then contained gin. He said gently, ‘You talk such nonsense.’

‘You think I’m a child. You tiptoe in - bringing me stamps.’

‘I’m trying to protect you.’

‘I don’t care a bloody damn if people talk.’ He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.

He said, ‘If they talked enough, this would come to an end.’

‘You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.’

‘It comes to the same thing.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with - that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.

‘Dear,’ he said, ‘it’s too soon to quarrel.’

‘That woman,’ she repeated, watching his eyes. ‘You’d never leave her, would you?’

‘We are married,’ he said.

‘If she knew of this, you’d go back like a whipped dog.’ He thought with tenderness, she hasn’t read the best books, like Louise.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ll never marry me.’

‘I can’t. You know that’

‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me - it only stops you marrying me.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He thought: how much older she is than she was a month ago. She hadn’t been capable of a scene then, but she had been educated by love and secrecy: he was beginning to form her. He wondered whether if this went on long enough, she would be indistinguishable from Louise. In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

‘Go on,’ Helen said, ‘justify yourself.’

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

‘What a twister you are.’

He felt disappointed. He had looked forward to the evening. All day in the office dealing with a rent case and a case of juvenile delinquency he had looked forward to the Nissen hut, the bare room, the junior official’s furniture like his own youth, everything that she had abused. He said, ‘I meant well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I meant to be your friend. To look after you. To make you happier than you were.’

‘Wasn’t I happy?’ she asked as though she were speaking of years ago.

He said, ‘You were shocked, lonely...’

‘I couldn’t have been as lonely as I am now,’ she said. ‘I go out to the beach with Mrs Carter when the rain stops. Bagster makes a pass, they think I’m frigid. I come back here before the rain starts and wait for you ... we drink a glass of whisky ... you give me some stamps as though I were your small girl...’

‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said. He put out his hand and covered hers: the knuckles lay under his palm like a small backbone that had been broken. He went slowly and cautiously on, choosing his words carefully, as though he were pursuing a path through an evacuated country sown with booby-traps: every step he took he expected the explosion. ‘I’d do anything - almost anything - to make you happy. I’d stop coming here. I’d go right away - retire...’

‘You’d be so glad to get rid of me,’ she said.

‘It would be like the end of life.’

‘Go away if you want to.’

‘I don’t want to go. I want to do what you want.’

‘You can go if you want to - or you can stay,’ she said with contempt. ‘I can’t move, can I?’

‘If you want it, I’ll get you on the next boat somehow.’

‘Oh, how pleased you’d be if this were over,’ she said and began to weep. When he put out a hand to touch her she screamed at him, ‘Go to hell. Go to hell. Clear out.’

‘I’ll go,’ he said.

‘Yes, go and don’t come back.’

Outside the door, with the rain cooling his face, running down his hands, it occurred to him how much easier life might be if he took her at her word. He would go into his house and close the door and be alone again; he would write a letter to Louise without a sense of deceit and sleep as he hadn’t slept for weeks, dreamlessly. Next day the office, the quiet going home, the evening meal, the locked door ... But down the hill, past the transport park, where the lorries crouched under the dripping tarpaulins, the rain fell like tears. He thought of her alone in the but, wondering whether the irrevocable words had been spoken, if all the tomorrows would consist of Mrs Carter and Bagster until the boat came, and she went home with nothing to remember but misery. Inexorably another’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.

As he opened his door a rat that had been nosing at the food-safe retreated without haste up the stairs. This was what Louise had hated and feared; he had at least made her happy, and now ponderously, with planned and careful recklessness, he set about trying to make things right for Helen. He sat down at his table and taking a sheet of typewriting paper -official paper stamped with the Government watermark - he began to compose a letter.

He wrote: My darling - he wanted to put himself entirely in her hands, but to leave her anonymous. He looked at his watch and added in the right-hand corner, as though he were making a police report, 12.35 a.m. Burnside, September 5. He went carefully on, I love you more than myself, more than my wife, more than God I think. I am trying very hard to tell the truth. I want more than anything in the world to make you happy ... The banality of the phrases saddened him; they seemed to have no truth personal to herself: they had been used too often. If I were young, he thought, I would be able to find the right words, the new words, but all this has happened to me before. He wrote again, I love you. Forgive me, signed and folded the paper.

He put on his mackintosh and went out again in the rain. Wounds festered in the damp, they never healed. Scratch your finger and in a few hours there would be a little coating of green skin. He carried a sense of corruption up the hill. A soldier shouted something in his sleep in the transport park -a single word like a hieroglyphic on a wall which Scobie could not interpret - the men were Nigerians. The rain hammered on the Nissen roofs, and he thought, Why did I write that? Why did I write ‘more than God’? she would have been satisfied with ‘more than Louise’. Even if it’s true, why did I write it? The sky wept endlessly around him; he had the sense of wounds that never healed. He whispered, ‘O God, I have deserted you. Do not you desert me.’ When he came to her door he thrust the letter under it; he heard the rustle of the paper on the cement floor but nothing else. Remembering the childish figure carried past him on the stretcher, he was saddened to think how much had happened, how uselessly, to make him now say to himself with resentment: she will never again be able to accuse me of caution.

‘I was just passing by,’ Father Rank said, ‘so I thought I’d look in.’ The evening rain fell in grey ecclesiastical folds, and a lorry howled its way towards the hills. ‘Come in,’ Scobie said. ‘I’m out of whisky. But there’s beer - or gin.’

‘I saw you up at the Nissens, so I thought I’d follow you down. You are not busy?’

‘I’m having dinner with the Commissioner, but not for another hour.’

Father Rank moved restlessly around the room, while Scobie took the beer out of the ice-box. ‘Would you have heard from Louise lately?’ he asked.

‘Not for a fortnight,’ Scobie said, ‘but there’ve been more sinkings in the south.’

Father Rank let himself down in the Government armchair with his glass between his knees. There was no sound but the rain scraping on the roof. Scobie cleared his throat and then the silence came back. He had the odd sense that Father Rank, like one of his own junior officers, was waiting there for orders.

‘The rains will soon be over,’ Scobie said.

‘It must be six months now since your wife went.’

‘Seven.’

‘Will you be taking your leave in South Africa?’ Father Rank asked, looking away and taking a draught of his beer,

‘I’ve postponed my leave. The young men need it more.’

‘Everybody needs leave.’

‘You’ve been here twelve years without it, Father.’

‘Ah, but that’s different,’ Father Rank said. He got up again and moved restlessly down one wall and along another. He turned an expression of undefined appeal toward Scobie. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel as though I weren’t a working man at all.’ He stopped and stared and half raised his hands, and Scobie remembered Father Clay dodging an unseen figure in his restless walk. He felt as though an appeal were being made to which he couldn’t find an answer. He said weakly, ‘There’s no one works harder than you, Father.’

Father Rank returned draggingly to his chair. He said, ‘It’ll be good when the rains are over.’

‘How’s the mammy out by Congo Creek? I heard she was dying.’

‘Shell be gone this week. She’s a good woman.’ He took another draught of beer and doubled up in the chair with his band on his stomach. ‘The wind,’ he said. ‘I get the wind badly.’

‘You shouldn’t drink bottled beer, Father.’

‘The dying,’ Father Rank said, ‘that’s what I’m here for. They send for me when they are dying.’ He raised eyes bleary with too much quinine and said harshly and hopelessly, ‘I’ve never been any good to the living, Scobie.’

‘You are talking nonsense, Father.’

‘When I was a novice, I thought that people talked to their priests, and I thought God somehow gave the right words. Don’t mind me, Scobie, don’t listen to me. It’s the rains -they always get me down about this time. God doesn’t give the right words, Scobie. I had a parish once in Northampton. They make boots there. They used to ask me out to tea, and I’d sit and watch their hands pouring out, and we’d talk of the Children of Mary and repairs to the church roof. They were very generous in Northampton. I only had to ask and they’d give. I wasn’t of any use to a single living soul, Scobie. I thought, in Africa things will be different. You see I’m not a reading man, Scobie. I never had much talent for loving God as some people do. I wanted to be of use, that’s all. Don’t listen to me. It’s the rains. I haven’t talked like this for five years. Except to the mirror. If people are in trouble they’d go to you, Scobie, not to me. They ask me to dinner to hear the gossip. And if you were in trouble where would you go?’ And Scobie was again aware of those bleary and appealing eyes, waiting through the dry seasons and the rains, for something that never happened. Could I shift my burden mere, he wondered: could I tell him that I love two women: that I don’t know what to do? What would be the use? I know the answers as well as he does. One should look after one’s own soul at whatever cost to another, and that’s what I can’t do, what I shall never be able to do. It wasn’t he who required the magic word, it was the priest, and he couldn’t give it.

‘I’m not the kind of man to get into trouble, Father. I’m dull and middle aged,’ and looking away, unwilling to see distress, he heard Father Rank’s clapper miserably sounding, ‘Ho! ho ho!’

On his way to the Commissioner’s bungalow, Scobie looked in at his office. A message was written in pencil on his pad. I looked in to see you. Nothing important. Wilson. It struck him as odd: he had not seen Wilson for some weeks, and if his visit had no importance why had he so carefully recorded it? He opened the drawer of his desk to find a packet of cigarettes and noticed at once that something was out of order: he considered the contents carefully: his indelible pencil was missing. Obviously Wilson had looked for a pencil with which to write his message and had forgotten to put it back. But why the message?

In the charge-room the sergeant said, ‘Mr Wilson come to see you, sah.’

‘Yes, he left a message.’

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

‘Whisky?’ the Commissioner asked.

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

‘You don’t need to tell me, Scobie.’

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

‘Of course not.’

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

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

‘Yusef wouldn’t blackmail for money.’

‘I told him that.’

‘Do you want my head?’

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

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

‘Say when.’

‘When.’

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

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

‘Commercial?’

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

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

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

‘What does Wilson say?’

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

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

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

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

‘I suppose so.’

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

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

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

‘I’ll always come if you want me.’

‘Will you?’

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

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

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

‘Of course I came.’

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

‘I promise,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘There are thirty years between us.’

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

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

‘Your letter?’

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

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

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

‘Even your name?’

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

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

‘Who would have taken it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6. Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about

W. Ceiled on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote: Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.

Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Now which was yours, Mrs Rolt?’

‘A pink gin.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My furniture?’

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

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

‘I’m sorry. I missed ...’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How can they tell ?’ Wilson asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, I’m not a Catholic.’

‘But they do, don’t they, Scobie?’

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

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

‘Oh yes, I do.’

‘In flames and torment?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Wise?’

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

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

with you.’

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

‘Forget it’

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

‘No.’

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

‘Somebody knows?’

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

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

‘Oh yes, it will. Now it will be.’

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

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

‘Am I interrupting something?’

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

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

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

‘Of course. I’d be delighted.’

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

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

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

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

‘We’ve got Mr Wilson to thank for it’

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

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

‘Why?’

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

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

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

‘Massa in there.’

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

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

‘That’s all right. Go to bed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s in the packet?’

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

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

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

‘Gem stones?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just once more I ask you...’

‘No, Yusef.’

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

‘Of course.’

‘His boy came into my employ.’

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

‘Pemberton’s boy is Mrs Rolt’s boy.’

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

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

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

‘That does not matter.’

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

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

‘You see it has put you in my hands.’

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

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

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

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

‘Quite a family.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You trust your boy?’

‘Just as you trust Ali.’

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

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

‘Suppose you cheat me?’

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

‘You very nearly were,’ Scobie reluctantly admitted.

‘I am the base Indian.’

‘The base Indian?’

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

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

‘One more glass,’ the captain of the Esperança said. ‘Not if we are going to release you before the boom closes.

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

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

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

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

‘For me?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘Is this Government business?’

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

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

‘You were in mine,’ Scobie said.

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

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

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

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

‘You can trust me, of course.’

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

‘You do not trust me very far.’

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

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am nearly sure.’

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

BOOK THREE

PART ONE

Chapter One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You’ve had a good trip?’

‘I think we were chased once.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They don’t show the dirt’

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

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

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

‘So glad,’ he said.

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