The Heart of the Matter

‘I don’t suppose I have been.’

‘Have you missed Mass often?’

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

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

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

‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’

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

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

‘It’s time I came back.’

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

‘Darling, you have changed, you know.’

‘I was only joking.’

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

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

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

‘Father Rank?’

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

‘Wont he be in town?’

‘I think he comes back for lunch.’

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

‘I bad a touch of fever,’ Harris said. ‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’

‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said. ‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’

‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’ ‘You must call on us too.’

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

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

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

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

‘Harris was watching me.’

‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’

‘How did you know?’

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

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

‘Just a headache.’

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

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

‘Nothing of that kind.’

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me, darling. Two brains...’ She closed her eyes and he could see her mouth steady for a blow.

He said, ‘Louise wants me to go to Mass with her, to communion. I’m supposed to be on the way to confession now.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ she asked with immense relief, and irritation at her ignorance moved like hatred unfairly in his brain.

‘All?’ he said. ‘All?’ Then justice reclaimed him. He said gently, ‘If I don’t go to communion, you see, shell know there’s something wrong - seriously wrong.’

‘But can’t you simply go?’

He said, ‘To me that means - well, it’s the worst thing I can do.’

‘You don’t really believe in hell?’

‘That was what Fellowes asked me.’

‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’

How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, ‘You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villagers on the slopes of Vesuvius go on ... And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love - any kind of love - does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don’t believe one will pay for ever. Perhaps one will be given time before one dies ...’

‘A deathbed repentance,’ she said with contempt.

‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ he said, ‘to repent of this.’ He kissed the sweat off her hand. ‘I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn’t know how to repent the love.’

‘Well,’ she said with the same undertone of contempt that seemed to pull her apart from him, into the safety of the shore, ‘can’t you go and confess everything now? After all it doesn’t mean you won’t do it again.’

‘It’s not much good confessing if I don’t intend to try...’

‘Well then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘be hung for a sheep. You are in - what do you call it - mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?’

He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence. He said, ‘There is a difference - a big difference. It’s not easy to explain. Now I’m just putting our love above - well, my safety. But the other - the other’s really evil. It’s like the Black Mass, the man who steals the sacrament to desecrate it. It’s striking God when he’s down - in my power.’

She turned her head wearily away and said, ‘I don’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s all hooey to me.’

‘I wish it were to me. But I believe it’

She said sharply, ‘I suppose you do. Or is it just a trick? I didn’t hear so much about God when we began, did I? You aren’t turning pious on me to give you an excuse...?’

‘My dear,’ Scobie said, ‘I’m not leaving you ever. I’ve got to think, that’s all.’

At a quarter-past six next morning Ali called them. Scobie woke at once, but Louise remained sleeping - she had had a long day. Scobie watched her -this was the face he had loved: this was the face he loved. She was terrified of death by sea and yet she had come back, to make him comfortable. She had borne a child by him in one agony, and in another agony had watched the child die. It seemed to him that he had escaped everything. If only, he thought, I could so manage that she never suffers again, but he knew that he had set himself an impossible task. He could delay the suffering, that was all, but he carried it about with him, an infection which sooner or later she must contract Perhaps she was contracting it now, for she turned and whimpered in her sleep. He put his hand against her cheek to soothe her. He thought: if only she will go on sleeping, then I win steep on too, I will oversleep, we shall miss Mass, another problem will be postponed. But as if his thoughts had been an alarm dock she awoke’

‘What time is it, darling?’

‘Nearly half-past six.’

‘We’ll have to hurry.’ He felt as though he were being urged by a kindly and remorseless gaoler to dress for execution. Yet he soil put off the saving lie: there was always the possibility of a miracle. Louise gave a final dab of powder (but the powder caked as it touched the skin) and said, ‘Well be off now.’ Was there the faintest note of triumph in her voice? Years and years ago, in the other life of childhood, someone with his name Henry Scobie had acted in the school play, had

acted Hotspur. He had been chosen for his seniority and his physique, but everyone said that it had been a good performance. Now he had to act again - surely it was as easy as the simple verbal lie?

Scobie suddenly leant back against the wall and put his hand on his chest. He couldn’t make his muscles imitate pain, so he simply closed his eyes. Louise looking in her mirror said, ‘Remind me to tell you about Father Davis in Durban. He was a very good type of priest, much more intellectual than Father Rank.’ It seemed to Scobie that she was never going to look round and notice him. She said, ‘Well, we really must be off,’ and dallied by the mirror. Some sweat-lank hairs were out of place. Through the curtain of his lashes at last he saw her turn and look at him. ‘Come along, dear,’ she said, ‘you look sleepy.’

He kept his eyes shut and stayed where he was. She said sharply, ‘Ticki, what’s the matter?’

‘A little brandy.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘A little brandy,’ he repeated sharply, and when she had fetched it for him and he felt the taste on his tongue he had an immeasurable sense of reprieve. He sighed and relaxed, ‘That’s better.’

‘What was it, Tick!?’

‘Just a pain in my chest. It’s gone now.’

‘Have you had it before?’

‘Once or twice while you’ve been away.’

‘You must see a doctor.’

‘Oh, it’s not worth a fuss. They’ll just say overwork.’

‘I oughtn’t to have dragged you up, but I wanted us to have Communion together.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined that - with the brandy.’

‘Never mind, Ticki.’ Carelessly she sentenced him to eternal death. ‘We can go any day.’

He knelt in his seat and watched Louise kneel with the other communicants at the altar rail: he had insisted on coming to the service with her. Father Rank turning from the altar came to them with God in His bands. Scobie thought: God has just escaped me, but will He always escape? Domine non sum dignus ... domine non sum dignus ... domine non sum dignus ... His hand formally, as though he were at drill, beat on a particular button of his uniform. It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. Christ had told the rich young man to sell all and follow Him, but that was an easy rational step compared with this that God had taken, to put Himself at the mercy of men who hardly knew the meaning of the word. How desperately God must love, he thought with shame. The priest had reached Louise in his slow interrupted patrol, and suddenly Scobie was aware of the sense of exile. Over there, where all these people knelt, was a country to which he would never return. The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain.

Chapter Two

WILSON tore the page carefully out of The Downhamian and pasted a thick sheet of Colonial Office notepaper on. the back of the poem. He held it up to the light: it was impossible to read the sports results on the other side of his verses. Then he folded the page carefully and put it in his pocket; there it would probably stay, but one never knew.

He had seen Scobie drive away towards the town and with beating heart and a sense of breathlessness, much the same as he had felt when stepping into the brothel, even with the same reluctance - for who wanted at any given moment to change the routine of his life? - he made his way downhill towards Scobie’s house.

He began to rehearse what he considered another man in his place would do: pick up the threads at once: kiss her quite naturally, upon the mouth if possible, say ‘I’ve missed you’, no uncertainty. But his beating heart sent out its message of fear which drowned thought.

‘It’s Wilson at last,’ Louise said. ‘I thought you’d forgotten me,’ and held out her hand. He took it like a defeat.

‘Have a drink.’

‘I was wondering whether you’d like a walk.’

‘It’s too hot, Wilson.’

‘I haven’t been up there, you know, since...’

‘Up where?’ He realized that for those who do not love time never stands still.

‘Up at the old station.’

She said vaguely with a remorseless lack of interest, ‘Oh yes ... yes, I haven’t been up there myself yet.’

‘That night when I got back,’ he could feel the awful immature flush expanding,’ I tried to write some verse.’

‘What, you, Wilson?’

He said furiously, ‘Yes, me, Wilson. Why not? And it’s been published.’

‘I wasn’t laughing. I was just surprised. Who published it?’

‘A new paper called The Circle. Of course they don’t pay much.’

‘Can I see it?’

Wilson said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got it here.’ He explained, ‘There was something on the other side I couldn’t stand. It was just too modern for me.’ He watched her with hungry embarrassment.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said weakly.

‘You see the initials?’

‘I’ve never had a poem dedicated to me before.’

Wilson felt sick; he wanted to sit down. Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.

‘Oh, no, Wilson,’ she said, ‘no. You don’t. It’s just Coast fever.’

He plunged blindly, ‘More than anything in the world.’

She said gently, ‘No one loves like that, Wilson.’

He walked restlessly up and down, his shorts flapping, waving the bit of paper from The Downhamian. ‘You ought to believe in love. You’re a Catholic. Didn’t God love the world?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘He’s capable of it But not many of us are.’

‘You love your husband. You told me so. And it’s brought you back.’

Louise said sadly, ‘I suppose I do. All I can. But it’s not the kind of love you want to imagine you feel. No poisoned chalices, eternal doom, black sails. We don’t die for love, Wilson - except, of course, in books. And sometimes a boy play-acting. Don’t let’s play-act, Wilson - it’s no fun at our age.’

‘I’m not play-acting,’ he said with a fury in which he could hear too easily the histrionic accent. He confronted her bookcase as though it were a witness she had forgotten. ‘Do they play-act?’

‘Not much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I like them better than your poets.’

‘All the same you came back.’ His face lit up with wicked inspiration. ‘Or was that just jealousy?’

She said, ‘Jealousy? What on earth have I got to be jealous about?’

‘They’ve been careful,’ Wilson said, ‘but not as careful as all that.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Your Ticki and Helen Rolt.’

Louise struck at his cheek and missing got his nose, which began to bleed copiously. She said, ‘That’s for calling him Ticki. Nobody’s going to do that except me. You know he hates it. Here, take my handkerchief if you haven’t got one of your own.’

Wilson said, ‘I bleed awfully easily. Do you mind if I lie on my back?’ He stretched himself on the floor between the table and the meat safe, among the ants. First there had been Scobie watching his tears at Pende, and now - this.

‘You wouldn’t like me to put a key down your back?’ Louise asked.

‘No. No thank you.’ The blood had stained the Downhamian page.

‘I really am sorry. I’ve got a vile temper. This will cure you, Wilson.’ But if romance is what one lives by, one must never be cured of it. The world has too many spoilt priests of this faith or that: better surely to pretend a belief than wander in that vicious vacuum of cruelty and despair. He said obstinately, ‘Nothing will cure me, Louise. I love you. Nothing,’ bleeding into her handkerchief.

‘How strange,’ she said, ‘it would be if it were true.’

He grunted a query from the ground.

‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘if you were one of those people who really love. I thought Henry was. It would be strange if really it was you all the time.’ He felt an odd fear that after all he was going to be accepted at his own valuation, rather as a minor staff officer might feel during a rout when he finds that his claim to know the handling of the tanks will be accepted. It is too late to admit that he knows nothing but what he has read in the technical journals - ‘O lyric love, half angel and half bird.’ Bleeding into the handkerchief, he formed his lips carefully round a generous phrase, ‘I expect he loves - in his way.’

‘Who?’ Louise said. ‘Me? This Helen Rolt you are talking about? Or just himself?’

‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘Isn’t it true? Let’s have a bit of truth, Wilson. You don’t know how tired I am of comforting lies. Is she beautiful?’

‘Oh no, no. Nothing of that sort.’

‘She’s young, of course, and I’m middle-aged. But surely she’s a bit worn after what she’s been through.’

‘She’s very worn.’

‘But she’s not a Catholic. She’s lucky. She’s free, Wilson.’

Wilson sat up against the leg of the table. He said with genuine passion, ‘I wish to God you wouldn’t call me Wilson.’

‘Edward. Eddie. Ted. Teddy.’

‘I’m bleeding again,’ he said dismally and lay back on the floor.

‘What do you know about it all, Teddie?’

‘I think I’d rather be Edward. Louise, I’ve seen him come away from her hut at two in the morning. He was up there yesterday afternoon.’

‘He was at confession.’

‘Harris saw him.’

‘You’re certainly watching him.’

‘It’s my belief Yusef is using him.’

‘That’s fantastic. You’re going too far.’

She stood over him as though he were a corpse: the bloodstained handkerchief lay in his palm. They neither of them heard the car stop or the footsteps up to the threshold. It was strange to both of them, hearing a third voice from an outside world speaking into this room which had become as close and intimate and airless as a vault. ‘Is anything wrong?’ Scobie’s voice asked.

‘It’s just...’ Louise said and made a gesture of bewilderment - as though she were saying: where does one start explaining? Wilson scrambled to his feet and at once his nose began to bleed.

‘Here,’ Scobie said and taking out his bundle of keys dropped them inside Wilson’s shirt collar. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘the old-fashioned remedies are always best,’ and sure enough the bleeding did stop within a few seconds. ‘You should never lie on your back,’ Scobie went reasonably on. ‘Seconds use a sponge of cold water, and you certainly look as though you’d been in a fight, Wilson.’

‘I always lie on my back,’ Wilson said. ‘Blood makes me I’ll.’

‘Have a drink?’

‘No,’ Wilson said, ‘no. I must be’ off.’ He retrieved the keys with some difficulty and left the tail of his shirt dangling. He only discovered it when Harris pointed it out to him on his return to the Nissen, and he thought: that is how I looked while I walked away and they watched side by side.

‘What did he want?’ Scobie said.

‘He wanted to make love to me.’

‘Does he love you?’

‘He thinks he does. You can’t ask much more than that, can you?’

‘You seem to have hit him rather hard,’ Scobie said, ‘on the nose?’

‘He made me angry. He called you Ticki. Darling, he’s spying on you.’

‘I know that.’

‘Is he dangerous?’

‘He might be - under some circumstances. But then it would be my fault.’

‘Henry, do you never get furious at anyone? Don’t you mind him making love to me?’

He said,’ I’d be a hypocrite if I were angry at that. It’s the kind of thing that happens to people. You know, quite pleasant normal people do fall in love.’

‘Have you ever fallen in love?’

‘Oh yes, yes.’ He watched her closely while he excavated his smile. ‘You know I have.’

‘Henry, did you really feel ill this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t just an excuse?’

‘No.’

‘Then, darling, let’s go to communion together tomorrow morning.’

‘If you want to,’ he said. It was the moment he had known would come. With bravado, to show that his hand was not shaking, he took down a glass. ‘Drink?’

‘It’s too early, dear,’ Louise said; he knew she was watching him closely like all the others. He put the glass down and said, ‘I’ve just got to run back to the station for some papers. When I get back it will be time for drinks.’

He drove unsteadily down the road, his eyes blurred with nausea. O God, he thought, the decisions you force on people, suddenly, with no time to consider. I am too tired to think: this ought to be worked out on paper like a problem in mathematics, and the answer arrived at without pain. But the pain made him physically sick, so that he retched over the wheel. The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers - we Catholics are damned by our knowledge. There’s no need for me to work anything out - there is only one answer: to kneel down in the confessional and say, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery so many times etcetera etcetera’; to hear Father Rank telling me to avoid the occasion: never see the woman alone (speaking in those terrible abstract terms: Helen - the woman, the occasion, no longer the bewildered child clutching the stamp-album, listening to Bagster howling outside the door: that moment of peace and darkness and tenderness and pity ‘adultery’). And I to make my act of contrition, the promise ‘never more to offend thee’, and then tomorrow the communion: taking God in my mouth in what they call the state of grace. That’s the right answer - there is no other answer: to save my own soul and abandon her to Bagster and despair. One must be reasonable, he told himself, and recognize that despair doesn’t last (is that true?), that love doesn’t last (but isn’t that the very reason that despair does?), that in a few weeks or months

she’ll be all right again. She has survived forty days in an open boat and the death of her husband and can’t she survive the mere death of love? As I can, as I know I can.

He drew up outside the church and sat hopelessly at the wheel. Death never comes when one desires it most. He thought: of course there’s the ordinary honest wrong answer, to leave Louise, forget that private vow, resign my job. To abandon Helen to Bagster or Louise to what? I am trapped, he told himself, catching sight of an expressionless stranger’s face in the driving mirror, trapped. Nevertheless he left the car and went into the church. While he was waiting for Father Rank to go into the confessional he knelt and prayed: the only prayer he could rake up. Even the words of the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail Mary’ deserted him. He prayed for a miracle, ‘O God convince me, help me, convince me. Make me feel that I am more important than that girl,’ It was not Helen’s face he saw as he prayed but the dying child who called him father: a face in a photograph staring from the dressing-table: the face of a black girl of twelve a sailor had raped and killed glaring blindly up at him in a yellow paraffin light. ‘Make me put my own soul first Give me trust in your mercy to the one I abandon.’ He could hear Father Rank close the door of his box and nausea twisted him again on his knees. ‘O God,’ he said, ‘if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’ He went into the box. He thought, a miracle may still happen. Even Father Rank may for once find the word, the right word ... Kneeling in the space of an upturned coffin he said, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery.’

‘How many times?’

‘I don’t know, Father, many times.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’ He remembered that evening when Father Rank had nearly broken down before him, admitting his failure to help ... Was he, even while he was struggling to retain the complete anonymity of the confessional, remembering it too? He wanted to say, ‘Help me, Father. Convince me that I would do right to abandon her to Bagster. Make me believe in the mercy of God,’ but he knelt silently waiting: he was unaware of the slightest tremor of hope. Father Rank said, ‘Is it one woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must avoid seeing her. Is that possible?’

He shook his head.

‘If you must see her, you must never be alone with her. Do you promise to do that, promise God not me?’ He thought: how foolish it was of me to expect the magic word. This is the formula used so many times on so many people. Presumably people promised and went away and came back and confessed again. Did they really believe they were going to try? He thought: I am cheating human beings every day I live, I am not going to try to cheat myself or God. He replied, ‘It would be no good my promising that, Father.’

‘You must promise. You can’t desire the end without desiring the means.’

Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

Father Rank said, ‘I don’t need to tell you surely that there’s nothing automatic in the confessional or in absolution. It depends on your state of mind whether you are forgiven. It’s no good coming and kneeling hers unprepared. Before you come here you must know the wrong you’ve done.’

‘I do know that’

‘And you must have a real purpose of amendment. We are told to forgive our brother seventy times seven and we needn’t fear God will be any less forgiving than we are, but nobody can begin to forgive the uncontrite. It’s better to sin seventy times and repent each time than sin once and never repent.’ He could see Father Rank’s hand go up to wipe the sweat out of his eyes: it was like a gesture of weariness. He thought: what is the good of keeping him in this discomfort? He’s right, of course, he’s right. I was a fool to imagine that somehow in this airless box I would find a conviction ... He said, ‘I think I was wrong to come, Father.’

‘I don’t want to refuse you absolution, but I think if you would just go away and turn things over in your mind, you’d come back in a better frame of mind.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘I will pray for you.’

When he came out of the box it seemed to Scobie that for the first time his footsteps had taken him out of sight of hope. There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes: the dead figure of the God upon the cross, the plaster Virgin, the hideous stations representing a series of events that had happened a long time ago. It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair.

He drove down to the station, collected a file and returned home. ‘You’ve been a long time,’ Louise said. He didn’t even know the lie he was going to tell before it was on his lips. ‘That pain came back,’ he said, ‘so I waited for a while.’

‘Do you think you ought to have a drink?’

‘Yes. until anybody tells me not to.’

‘And you’ll see a doctor?’

‘Of course.’

That night he dreamed that he was in a boat drifting down just such an underground river as his boyhood hero Allan Quatermain had taken towards the lost city of Milosis. But Quatermain had companions while he was alone, for you couldn’t count the dead body on the stretcher as a companion. He felt a sense of urgency, for he told himself that bodies in this climate kept for a very short time and the smell of decay was already in his nostrils. Then, sitting there guiding the boat down the mid-stream, he realized that it was not the dead body that smelt but his own living one. He felt as though his blood had ceased to run: when he tried to lift his arm it dangled uselessly from his shoulder. He woke and it was Louise who had lifted his arm. She said, ‘Darling, it’s time to be off.’

‘Off?’ he asked.

‘We’re going to Mass,’ and again he was aware of how closely she was watching him. What was the good of yet another delaying lie? He wondered what Wilson had said to her. Could he go on lying week after week, finding some reason of work, of health, of forgetfulness for avoiding the issue at the altar rail? He thought hopelessly: I am damned already -I may as well go the whole length of my chain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course. I’ll get up,’ and was suddenly surprised by her putting the excuse into his mouth, giving him his chance. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘if you aren’t well, stay where you are. I don’t want to drag you to Mass.’

But the excuse it seemed to him was also a trap. He could see where the turf had been replaced over the hidden stakes. If he took the excuse she offered he would have all but confessed his guilt. Once and for all now at whatever eternal cost, he was determined that he would clear himself in her eyes and give her the reassurance she needed. He said, ‘No, no. I will come with you.’ When he walked beside her into the church it was as if he had entered this building for the first time - a stranger. An immeasurable distance already separated him from these people who knelt and prayed and would presently receive God in peace. He knelt and pretended to pray.

The words of the Mass were like an indictment. ‘I will go in unto the altar of God: to God who giveth joy to my youth.’ But there was no joy anywhere. He looked up from between his hands and the plaster images of the Virgin and the saints seemed to be holding out hands to everyone, on either side, beyond him. He was the unknown guest at a party who is introduced to no one. The gentle painted smiles were unbearably directed elsewhere. When the Kyrie Eleison was reached he again tried to pray. ‘Lord have mercy ... Christ have mercy ... Lord have mercy,’ but the fear and the shame of the act he was going to commit chilled his brain. Those ruined priests who presided at a Black Mass, consecrating the Host over the naked body of a woman, consuming God in an absurd and horrifying ritual, were at least performing the act of damnation with an emotion larger than human love: they were doing it from hate of God or some odd perverse devotion to God’s enemy. But he had no love of evil or hate of God. How was he to hate this God who of His own accord was surrendering Himself into his power? He was desecrating God because he loved a woman - was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility? He tried again to excuse himself: ‘You can look after yourself. You survive the cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come second to these others.’ And myself, he thought, watching the priest pour the wine and water into the chalice, his own damnation being prepared like a meal at the altar, I must come last: I am the Deputy Commissioner of Police: a hundred men serve under me: I am the responsible man. It is my job to look after the others. I am conditioned to serve.

Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctus. The Canon of the Mass had started: Father Rank’s whisper at the altar hurried remorselessly towards the consecration. ‘To order our days in thy peace ... that we be preserved from eternal damnation ...’ Pax, pacis, pacem: all the declinations of the word ‘peace’ drummed on his ears through the Mass. He thought: I have left even the hope of peace for ever. I am the responsible man. I shall soon have gone too far in my design of deception ever to go back. Hoc est enim Corpus: the bell rang, and Father Rank raised God in his fingers - this God as light now as a wafer whose coming lay or Scobie’s heart as heavily as lead. Hic est enim calix sanguinis and the second bell.

Louise touched his hand. ‘Dear, are you well?’ He thought: here is the second chance. The return of my pain. I can go out. But if he went out of church now, he knew that there would be only one thing left to do - to follow Father Rank’s advice, to settle his affairs, to desert, to come back in a few days’ time and take God

with a clear conscience and a knowledge that he had pushed innocence back where it properly belonged - under the Atlantic surge. Innocence must die young if it isn’t

to kill the souls of men.

‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.’

‘I’m all right,’ he said, the old longing pricking at the eyeballs, and looking up towards the cross on the altar he thought savagely: Take your sponge of gall. You made me what I am. Take the spear thrust. He didn’t need to open his Missal to know how this prayer ended. ‘May the receiving of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I unworthy presume to take, turn not to my judgment and condemnation.’ He shut his eyes and let the darkness in. Mass rushed towards its end: Domine, non sum dignus ... Domine, non sum dignus... Domine, non sum dignus.... At the foot of the scaffold he opened his eyes and saw the old black women shuffling up towards the altar rail, a few soldiers, an aircraft mechanic, one of his own policemen, a clerk from the bank: they moved sedately towards peace, and Scobie felt an envy of their simplicity, their goodness. Yes, now at this moment of time they were good.

‘Aren’t you coming, dear?’ Louise asked, and again the hand touched him: the kindly firm detective hand. He rose and followed her and knelt by her side like a spy in a foreign land who has been taught the customs and to speak the language like a native. Only a miracle can save me now, Scobie told himself, watching Father Rank at the altar opening the tabernacle, but God would never work a miracle to save Himself, I am the cross, he thought. He will never speak the word to save Himself from the cross, but if only wood were made so that it didn’t feel, if only the nails were senseless as people believed.

Father Rank came down the steps from the altar bearing the Host. The saliva had dried in Scobie’s mouth: it was as though his veins had dried. He couldn’t look up; he saw only the priest’s skirt like the skirt of the mediaeval war-horse bearing down upon him: the flapping of feet: the charge of God. If only the archers would let fly from ambush, and for a moment he dreamed that the priest’s steps had indeed faltered : perhaps after all something may yet happen before he reaches me: some incredible interposition ... But with open mouth (the time had come) he made one last attempt at prayer, ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them,’ and was aware of the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue.

Chapter Three

THE bank manager took a sip of feed water and exclaimed with more than professional warmth, ‘How glad you must be to have Mrs Scobie back well in time for

Christmas.’

‘Christmas is a long way off still,’ Scobie said.

‘Time flies when the rains are over,’ the bank manager went on with his novel cheerfulness. Scobie had never before heard in his voice this note of optimism. He remembered the stork-like figure pacing to and fro, pausing at the medical books, so many hundred times a day.

‘I came along...’ Scobie began.

‘About your life insurance - or an overdraft, would it be?’

‘Well, it wasn’t either this time.’

‘You know I’ll always be glad to help you, Scobie, whatever it is.’ How quietly Robinson sat at his desk. Scobie said with wonder, ‘Have you given up your daily exercise?’

‘Ah, that was all stuff and nonsense,’ the manager said. ‘I had read too many books.’

‘I wanted to look in your medical encyclopaedia,’ Scobie explained.

‘You’d do much better to see a doctor,’ Robinson surprisingly advised him. ‘It’s a doctor who’s put me right, not the books. The tune I would have wasted ... I tell you, Scobie, the new young fellow they’ve got at the Argyll Hospital’s the best man they’ve sent to this colony since they discovered it.’

‘And he’s put you right?’

‘Go and see him. His name’s Travis. Tell him I sent you’

‘All the same, if I could just have a look...’

‘You’ll find it on the shelf. I keep ‘em there still because they look important. A bank manager has to be a reading man. People expect him to have solid books around.’

‘I’m glad your stomach’s cured.’

The manager took another sip of water. He said, ‘I’m not bothering about it any more. The truth of the matter is, Scobie, I’m...’

Scobie looked through the encyclopaedia for the word Angina and now he read on: CHARACTER OF THE PAIN. This is usually described as being ‘gripping’, ‘as though the chest were in a vice’. The pain is situated in the middle of the chest and under the sternum. It may run down either arm perhaps more commonly the left, or up into the neck or down into the abdomen. It lasts a few seconds, or at the most a minute or so. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE PATIENT. This is characteristic. He holds himself absolutely still in whatever circumstances he may find himself.... Scobie’s eye passed rapidly down the cross-headings : CAUSE OF THE PAIN. TREATMENT. TERMINATION OF THE DISEASE. Then he put the book back on the shelf. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps I’ll drop in on your Dr Travis. I’d rather see him than Dr Sykes. I hope he cheers me up as he’s done you.’

‘Well, my case,’ the manager said evasively, ‘had peculiar features.’

‘Mine looks straightforward enough.’

‘You seem pretty well.’

‘Oh, I’m all right - bar a bit of pain now and then and sleeping badly.’

‘Your responsibilities do that for you.’

‘Perhaps.’

It seemed to Scobie that he had sowed enough - against what harvest? He couldn’t himself have told. He said goodbye and went out into the dazzling street. He carried his helmet and let the sun strike vertically down upon his thin greying hair. He offered himself for punishment all the way to the police station and was rejected. It had seemed to him these last three weeks that the damned must be in a special category; like the young men destined for some unhealthy foreign post in a trading company, they were reserved from their humdrum fellows, protected from the daily task, preserved carefully at special desks, so that the worst might happen later. Nothing now ever seemed to go wrong. The sun would not strike, the Colonial Secretary asked him to dinner ... He felt rejected by misfortune.

The Commissioner said, ‘Come in, Scobie. I’ve got good news for you,’ and Scobie prepared himself for yet another rejection.

‘Baker is not coining here. They need him in Palestine. They’ve decided after all to let the right man succeed me.’ Scobie sat down on the window-ledge and watched his hand tremble on his knee. He thought: so all this need not have happened. If Louise had stayed I should never have loved Helen, I would never have been blackmailed by Yusef, never have committed that act of despair. I would have been myself still - the same self that lay stacked in fifteen years of diaries, not this broken cast. But, of course, he told himself, it’s only because I have done these things that success comes. I am of the devil’s party. He looks after his own in this world. I shall go now from damned success to damned success, he thought with disgust.

‘I think Colonel Wright’s word was the deciding factor. You impressed him, Scobie.’

‘It’s come too late, sir.’

‘Why too late?’

‘I’m too old for the job. It needs a younger man.’

‘Nonsense. You’re only just fifty.’

‘My health’s not good.’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘I was telling Robinson at the bank today. I’ve been getting pains, and I’m sleeping badly.’ He talked rapidly, beating time on his knee. ‘Robinson swears by Travis. He seems to have worked wonders with him.’

‘Poor Robinson.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s been given two years to live. That’s in confidence, Scobie.’

Human beings never cease to surprise: so it was the death sentence that had cured Robinson of his imaginary ailments, his medical books, his daily walk from wall to wall. I suppose, Scobie thought, that is what comes of knowing the worst - one is left alone with the worst and it’s like peace. He imagined Robinson talking across the desk to his solitary companion. ‘I hope we all die as calmly,’ he said. ‘Is he going home?’

‘I don’t think so. I suppose presently he’ll have to go to the Argyll.’

Scobie thought: I wish I had known what I had been looking at. Robinson was exhibiting the -most enviable possession a man can own - a happy death. This tour would bear a high proportion of deaths - or perhaps not so high when you counted them and remembered Europe. First Pemberton, then the child at Pende, now Robinson ... no, it wasn’t many, but of course he hadn’t counted the blackwater cases in the military hospital.

‘So that’s how matters stand,’ the Commissioner said. ‘Next tour you will be Commissioner. Your wife will be pleased.’

I must endure her pleasure, Scobie thought, without anger. I am the guilty man, and I have no right to criticize, to show vexation ever again. He said,’ I’ll be getting home.’

Ali stood by his car, talking to another boy who slipped quietly away when he saw Scobie approach. ‘Who was that, Ali?’

‘My small brother, sah,’ Ali said.

‘I don’t know him, do I? Same mother?’

‘No, sah, same father.’

‘What does he do?’ Ali worked at the starting handle, his face dripping with sweat, saying nothing.

‘Who does he work for, Ali?’

‘Sah?’

‘I said who does he work for?’

‘For Mr Wilson, sah.’

The engine started and Ali climbed into the back seat. ‘Has he ever made you a proposition, Ali? I mean has he asked you to report on me - for money?’ He could see Ali’s face in the driving mirror, set, obstinate, closed and rocky like a cave mouth. ‘No, sah.’

‘Lots of people are interested in me and pay good money for reports. They think me bad man, Ali.’

Ali said, ‘I’m your boy,’ staring back through the medium of the mirror. It seemed to Scobie one of the qualities of deceit that you lost the sense of trust. If I can lie and betray, so can others. Wouldn’t many people gamble on my honesty and lose their stake? Why should I lose my stake on Ali? I have not been caught and he has not been caught, that’s all An awful depression weighed his head towards the wheel He thought: I know that Ali is honest: I have known that for fifteen years; I am just trying to find a companion in this region of lies. Is the next stage the stage of corrupting others?

Louise was not in when they arrived. Presumably someone had called and taken her out - perhaps to the beach. She hadn’t expected him back before sundown. He wrote a note for her, Taking some furniture up to Helen. Will be back early with good news for you, and then he drove up alone to the Nissen huts through the bleak empty middle day. Only the vultures were about — gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that

‘I’ve brought you another table and a couple of chairs. Is your boy about?’

‘No, he’s at market.’

They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the grass. Scobie said, ‘I’m interrupting your lunch.’

‘Oh no. I’ve about finished. Have some fruit salad.’

‘It’s time you had a new table. This one wobbles.’ He said, ‘They are making me Commissioner after all.’

‘It will please your wife,’ Helen said.

‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

‘Oh, of course it does,’ she said briskly. This was another convention of hers - that only she suffered. He would for a long tune resist, like Coriolanus, the exhibition of his wounds, but sooner or later he would give way: he would dramatize his pain in words until even to himself it seemed unreal. Perhaps, he would think, she is right after all: perhaps I don’t suffer. She said, ‘Of course the Commissioner must be above suspicion, mustn’t he, like Caesar.’ (Her sayings, as well as her spelling, lacked accuracy.) ‘This is the end of us, I suppose.’

‘You know there is no end to us.’

‘Oh, but the Commissioner can’t have a mistress hidden away in a Nissen hut.’ The sting, of course, was in the ‘hidden away’, but how could he allow himself to feel the least irritation, remembering the letter she had written to him, offering herself as a sacrifice any way he liked, to keep or to throw away? Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything - for God or love - must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted. He said, ‘If the Commissioner can’t keep you, then I shan’t be the Commissioner.’

‘Don’t be silly. After all,’ she said with fake reasonableness, and he recognized this as one of her bad days, ‘what do we get out of it?’

‘I get a lot,’ he said, and wondered: is that a lie for the sake of comfort? There were so many lies nowadays he couldn’t keep track of the small, the unimportant ones.

‘An hour or two every other day perhaps when you can slip away. Never so much as a night.’

He said hopelessly,’ Oh, I have plans,’

‘What plans?’

He said, ‘They are too vague still.’

She said with all the acid she could squeeze out, ‘Well, let me know in time. To fall in with your wishes, I mean.’

‘My dear, I haven’t come here to quarrel.’

‘I sometimes wonder what you do come here for.’

‘Well, today I brought some furniture.’

‘Oh yes, the furniture.’

‘I’ve got the car here. Let me take you to the beach.’

‘Oh, we can’t be seen there together.’

‘That’s nonsense. Louise is there now, I think.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Helen said, ‘keep that smug woman out of my sight’

‘All right then. I’ll take you for a run in the car.’

‘That would be safer, wouldn’t it?’

Scobie took her by the shoulders and said, ‘I’m not always thinking of safety.’

‘I thought you were.’

Suddenly he felt his resistance give way and he shouted at her, ‘The sacrifice isn’t all on your side.’ With despair he could see from a distance the scene coming up on both of them: like the tornado before the rains, that wheeling column of blackness which would soon cover the whole sky.

‘Of course work must suffer,’ she said with childish sarcasm. ‘All these snatched half-hours.’

‘I’ve given up hope,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve given up the future. I’ve damned myself.’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Anyway, you’ve just told me about the future - the Commissionership.’

‘I mean the real future - the future that goes on.’

She said, ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It’s so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn’t be here.’

‘But I do believe and I am here.’ He said with bewilderment, ‘I can’t explain it, but there it is. My eyes are open. I know what I’m doing. When Father Rank came down to the rail carrying the sacrament...’

Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, ‘You’ve told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in Hell any more than I do.’

He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, ‘You can’t get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I’m damned for all eternity - unless a miracle happens. I’m a policeman. I know what I’m saying. What I’ve done is far worse than murder - that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it’s over and done, but I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach.’ He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. ‘Never pretend I haven’t shown my love.’

‘Love for your wife, you mean. You were afraid she’d find out.’

Anger drained out of him. He said, ‘Love for both of you. If it were just for her there’d be an easy straight way.’ He put his hands over his eyes, feeling hysteria beginning to mount again. He said, ‘I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.’

‘Where to?’

Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, ‘Oh, I just mean take a holiday.’ He added, ‘I’m not sleeping well. And I’ve been getting an odd pain.’

‘Darling, are you I’ll?’ The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had passed beyond them. Helen said, ‘Darling, I’m a bitch. I get tired and fed up with things - but it doesn’t mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?’

‘I’ll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.’

‘Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.’

‘No, I don’t want to see Dr Sykes.’ Now that the anger and hysteria had passed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O God, I can’t leave her. Or Louise. You don’t need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said, ‘I’ll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.’

In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, ‘There are no eyes here ... Wilson can’t see us. Harris isn’t watching. Yusef’s boys ...’

‘Dear, I’d leave you tomorrow if it would help.’

‘It wouldn’t help.’ He said, ‘You remember when I wrote you a letter - which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife ...’ As he spoke he heard another’s breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, ‘Who’s that?’

‘What, dear?’

‘Somebody’s here.’ He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, ‘Who’s there? Come out’

‘It’s Ali,’ Helen said.

‘What are you doing here. Ali?’

‘Missus sent me,’ Ali said. ‘I wait here for Massa ten him Missus back.’ He was hardly visible in the shadow.

‘Why were you waiting here?’

‘My head humbug me,’ Ali said. ‘I go for sleep, small, small sleep.’

‘Don’t frighten him,’ Helen said. ‘He’s telling the truth.’

‘Go along home, Ali,’ Scobie told him, ‘and tell Missus I come straight down.’ He watched him pad out into the hard sunlight between the Nissen huts. He never looked back.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ Helen said. ‘He didn’t understand a thing.’

‘I’ve had Ali for fifteen years,’ Scobie said. It was the first time he had been ashamed before him in all those years. He remembered Ali the night after Pemberton’s death, cup of tea in hand, holding him up against the shaking lorry, and then he remembered Wilson’s boy slinking off along the wall by the police station.

‘You can trust him, anyway.’

‘I don’t know how,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve lost the trick of trust.’

Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life - bare and undisturbed and built of facts - lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead; no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy ... He thought: this is how it ought to be. I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch, 11.45, and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92°. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door - a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.

There was nobody now to whom he could speak the truth. There were things the Commissioner must not know, Louise must not know, there were even limits to what he could tell Helen, for what was the use, when he had sacrificed so much in order to avoid pain, of inflicting it needlessly? As for God he could speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy - there was bitterness between them. He moved his hand on the table, and it was as though his loneliness moved too and touched the tips of his fingers. ‘You and I,’ his loneliness said, ‘you and I.’ It occurred to him that the outside world if they knew the facts might envy him: Bagster would envy him Helen, and Wilson Louise. What a hell of a quiet dog, Fraser would exclaim with a lick of the lips. They would imagine, he thought with amazement, that I get something out of it, but it seemed to him that no man had ever got less. Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand.

The door creaked gently open behind him. Scobie did not move. The spies, he thought, are creeping in. Is this Wilson, Harris, Pemberton’s boy, Ali...? ‘Massa,’ a voice whispered, and a bare foot slapped the concrete floor.

‘Who are you?’ Scobie asked not turning round. A pink palm dropped a small ball of paper on the table and went out of sight again. The voice said, ‘Yusef say come very quiet nobody see.’

‘What does Yusef want now?’

‘He send you dash - small small dash.’ Then the door closed again and silence was back. Loneliness said, ‘Let us open this together, you and I.’

Scobie picked up the ball of paper: it was light, but it had a small hard centre. At first he didn’t realize what it was: he thought it was a pebble put in to keep the paper steady and he looked for writing which, of course, was not there, for whom would Yusef trust to write for him? Then he realized what it was -a diamond, a gem stone. He knew nothing about diamonds, but it seemed to him that it was probably worth at least as much as his debt to Yusef. Presumably Yusef had information that the stones he had sent by the Esperança had reached their destination safely. This was a mark of gratitude - not a bribe, Yusef would explain, the fat hand upon his sincere and shallow heart.

The door burst open and there was Ali. He had a boy by the arm who whimpered. Ali said, ‘This stinking Mende boy he go all round the house. He try doors.’

‘Who are you?’ Scobie said.

The boy broke out in a mixture of fear and rage, ‘I Yusef s boy. I bring Massa letter,’ and he pointed at the table where the pebble lay in the screw of paper. Ali’s eyes followed the gesture. Scobie said to his loneliness, ‘You and I have to think quickly.’ He turned on the boy and said, ‘Why you not come here properly and knock on the door? Why you come like a thief?’

He had the thin body and the melancholy soft eyes of all Mendes. He said, ‘I not a thief,’ with so slight an emphasis on the first word that it was just possible he was not impertinent. He went on, ‘Massa tell me to come very quiet.’

Scobie said, ‘Take this back to Yusef and tell him I want to know where he gets a stone like that. I think he steals stones and I find out by-and-by. Go on. Take it. Now, Ali, throw him out.’ Ali pushed the boy ahead of him through the door, and Scobie could hear the rustle of their feet on the path. Were they whispering together? He went to the door and called out after them, ‘Tell Yusef I call on him one night soon and make hell of a palaver.’ He slammed the door again and thought, what a lot Ali knows, and he felt distrust of his boy moving again like fever with the bloodstream. He could ruin me, he thought: he could ruin them.

He poured himself out a glass of whisky and took a bottle of soda out of his ice-box. Louise called from upstairs, ‘Henry’.

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Is it twelve yet?’

‘Close on, I think.’

‘You won’t drink anything after twelve, will you? You remember tomorrow?’ and of course he did remember, draining his glass: it was November the First

- All Saints’ Day, and this All Souls’ Night. What ghost would pass over the whisky’s surface? ‘You are coming to communion, aren’t you, dear?’ and he thought wearily: there is no end to this: why should I draw the line now? One may as well go on damning oneself until the end. His loneliness was the only ghost his whisky could invoke, nodding across the table at him, taking a drink out of his glass. ‘The next occasion,’ loneliness told him, ‘will be Christmas - the Midnight Mass - you won’t be able to avoid that you know, and no excuse will serve you on that night, and after that’ - the long chain of feast days, of early Masses in spring and summer, unrolled themselves like a perpetual calendar. He had a sudden picture before his eyes of a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows: the punch- drunk head of God reeling sideways. ‘You are coming, Ticki?’ Louise called with what seemed to him a sudden anxiety, as though perhaps suspicion had momentarily breathed on her again - and he thought again, can Ali really be trusted? and all the stale coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance men told him, ‘Never trust a black. They’ll let you down in the end. Had my boy fifteen years ...’ The ghosts of distrust came out on All Souls’ Night and gathered around his glass. ‘Oh yes, my dear, I’m coming.’

‘You have only to say the word,’ he addressed God, ‘and legions of angels ...’ and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought, ‘And again at Christmas,’ thrusting the Child’s face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, ‘What’s that you said, dear?’ ‘Oh, only that we’ve got so much to celebrate tomorrow. Being together and the Commissionership. Life is so happy, Ticki.’ And that, he told his loneliness with defiance, is my reward, splashing the whisky across the table, defying the ghosts to do their worst, watching God bleed.

Chapter Four

He could tell that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storeyed building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains of the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. ‘All quiet, corporal?’

‘All quiet, sah.’

‘Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?’

‘Oh yes, sah. All quiet, sah.’ He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.

‘The wharf rats out?’

‘Oh no, sah. All very quiet like the grave.’ The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.

‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night, sah.’

Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef - not since the night of the blackmail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust At least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help ... Round the comer of a crate came Wilson. Scobie’s torch lit his face like a map.

‘Why, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘you are out late.’

‘Yes,’ Wilson said, and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.

‘You’ve got a pass for the quay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep away from the Kru Town end. It’s not safe there alone. No more nose bleeding?’

‘No,’ Wilson said. He made no attempt to move; it seemed always his way - to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.

‘Well, I’ll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise ...’

Wilson said, ‘I love her, Scobie.’

‘I thought you did,’ Scobie said. ‘She likes you, Wilson.’

‘I love her,’ Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, ‘You wouldn’t know what that means.’

‘What means?’

‘Love. You don’t love anybody except yourself, your dirty self.’

‘You are overwrought, Wilson. It’s the climate. Go and lie down.’

‘You wouldn’t act as you do if you loved her.’ Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heartrending tune. A sentry by the Field Security post challenged and somebody replied with a password. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson’s mosquito-boots. He said, ‘Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.’

‘What would you do if I told her everything - about Mrs Rolt?’

‘But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story.’

‘One day I’ll ruin you, Scobie.’

‘Would that help Louise?’

‘I could make her happy,’ Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years - to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea’s edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, ‘You’d try. I know you’d try. Perhaps...’ but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, ‘I wish meanwhile you’d stop spying on me.’

‘It’s my job.’ Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torchlight.

‘The things you find out are so unimportant.’ He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef s office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. ‘At 11.25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment...’

Scobie knocked and walked right in where Yusef half lay behind his desk, his legs upon it, dictating to a black clerk. Without breaking his sentence - ‘five hundred rolls matchbox design, seven hundred and fifty bucket and sand, six hundred poker dot artificial silk’ - he looked up at Scobie with hope and apprehension. Then he said sharply to the clerk, ‘Get out. But come back. Tell my boy that I see no one.’ He took his legs from the desk, rose and held out a flabby hand, ‘Welcome, Major Scobie,’ then let it fall like an unwanted piece of material. ‘This is the first time you have ever honoured my office, Major Scobie.’

‘I don’t know why I’ve come here now, Yusef.’

‘It is a long time since we have seen each other.’ Yusef sat down and rested his great head wearily on a palm like a dish. ‘Time goes so differently for two people - fast or slow. According to their friendship.’

‘There’s probably a Syrian poem about that.’

‘There is, Major Scobie,’ he said eagerly.

‘You should be friends with Wilson, not me, Yusef. He reads poetry. I have a prose mind.’

‘A whisky, Major Scobie?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He sat down on the other side of the desk and the inevitable blue syphon stood between them.

‘And how is Mrs Scobie?’

‘Why did you send me that diamond, Yusef?’

‘I was in your debt, Major Scobie.’

‘Oh no, you weren’t You paid me off in full with a bit of paper.’

‘I try so hard to forget that that was the way. I tell myself it was really friendship - at bottom it was friendship.’

‘It’s never any good lying to oneself, Yusef. One sees through the lie too easily.’

‘Major Scobie, if I saw more of you, I should become a better man.’ The soda hissed in the glasses and Yusef drank greedily. He said, ‘I can feel in my heart, Major Scobie, that you are anxious, depressed ... I have always wished that you would come to me in trouble.’

Scobie said, ‘I used to laugh at the idea - that I should ever come to you.’

‘In Syria we have a story of a lion and a mouse...’

‘We have the same story, Yusef. But I’ve never thought of you as a mouse, and I’m no lion. No lion.’

‘It is about Mrs Rolt you are troubled. And your wife, Major Scobie?’

‘Yes.’

‘You do not need to be ashamed with me, Major Scobie. I have had much woman trouble in my life. Now it is better because I have learned the way. The way is not to care a damn. Major Scobie. You say to each of them, ‘I do not care a damn. I sleep with whom I please. You take me or leave me. I do not care a damn.’’ They always take you, Major Scobie.’ He sighed into his whisky. ‘Sometimes I have wished they would not take me.’

‘I’ve gone to great lengths, Yusef, to keep things from my wife.’

‘I know the lengths you have gone, Major Scobie.’

‘Not the whole length. The business with the diamonds was very small compared...’

‘Yes?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. Anyway somebody else knows now - Ali.’

‘But you trust Ali?’

‘I think I trust him. But he knows about you too. He came in last night and saw the diamond there. Your boy was very indiscreet.’

The big broad hand shifted on the table. ‘I will deal with my boy presently.’

‘Ali’s half-brother is Wilson’s boy. They see each other.’

‘That is certainly bad,’ Yusef said.

He had told all his worries now - all except the worst. He had the odd sense of having for the first time in his life shifted a burden elsewhere. And Yusef carried it - he obviously carried it He raised himself from his chair and now moved his great haunches to the window, staring at the green black-out curtain as though it were a landscape. A hand went up to his mouth and he began to bite his nails - snip, snip, snip, his teeth closed on each nail in turn. Then he began on the other hand. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything to worry about really,’ Scobie said. He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.

‘It is a bad thing not to trust,’ Yusef said. ‘One must always have boys one trusts. You must always know more about them than they do about you.’ That, apparently, was his conception of trust. Scobie said, ‘I used to trust him.’

Yusef looked at his trimmed nails and took another bite. He said, ‘Do not worry. I will not have you worry. Leave everything to me, Major Scobie. I will find out for you whether you can trust him.’ He made the startling claim, ‘I will look after you.’

‘How can you do that?’ I feel no resentment, he thought with weary surprise. I am being looked after, and a kind of nursery peace descended.

‘You mustn’t ask me questions, Major Scobie. You must leave everything to me just this once. I understand the way.’ Moving from the window Yusef turned on Scobie eyes like closed telescopes, blank and brassy. He said with a soothing nurse’s gesture of the broad wet palm, ‘You will just write a little note to your boy, Major Scobie, asking him to come here. I will talk to him. My boy will take it to him.’

‘But Ali can’t read.’

‘Better still then. You win send some token with my boy to show that he comes from you. Your signet ring.’

‘What are you going to do, Yusef?’

‘I am going to help you, Major Scobie. That is all.’ Slowly, reluctantly, Scobie drew at his ring. He said, ‘He’s been with me fifteen years. I always have trusted him until now.’

‘You will see,’ Yusef said. ‘Everything will be all right’ He spread out his palm to receive the ring and their hands touched: it was like a pledge between conspirators. ‘Just a few words.’

‘The ring won’t come off,’ Scobie said. He felt an odd unwillingness. ‘It’s not necessary, anyway. He’ll come if your boy tells him that I want him.’

‘I do not think so. They do not like to come to the wharf at night.’

‘He will be all right He won’t be alone. Your boy will be with him.’

‘Oh yes, yes, of course. But I still think - if you would just send something to show - well, that it is not a trap. Yusef s boy is no more trusted, you see, than Yusef.’

‘Let him come tomorrow, then.’

‘Tonight is better,’ Yusef said.

Scobie felt in his pockets: the broken rosary grated on his nails. He said, ‘Let him take this, but it’s not necessary...’ and fell silent, staring back at those blank eyes.

‘Thank you,’ Yusef said. ‘This is most suitable.’ At the door he said, ‘Make yourself at home, Major Scobie. Pour yourself another drink. I must give my boy instructions...’

He was away a very long time. Scobie poured himself a third whisky and then, because the little office was so airless, he drew the seaward curtains after turning out the light and let what wind there was trickle in from the bay. The moon was rising and the naval depot ship glittered like grey ice. Restlessly he made his way to the other window that looked up the quay towards the sheds and lumber of the native town. He saw Yusef s clerk coming back from there, and he thought how Yusef must have the wharf rats well under control if his clerk could pass alone through their quarters. I came for help, he told himself, and I am being looked after how, and at whose cost? This was the day of All Saints and he remembered how mechanically, almost without fear or shame, he had knelt at the rail this second time and watched the priest come. Even that act of damnation could become as unimportant as a habit. He thought: my heart has hardened, and he pictured the fossilized shells one picks up On a beach: the stony convolutions like arteries. One can strike God once too often. After that does one care what happens? It seemed to him that he had rotted so far that it was useless to make any effort. God was lodged in his body and his body was corrupting outwards from that seed.

‘It was too hot?’ Yusef’s voice said. ‘Let us leave the room dark. With a friend the darkness is kind.’

‘You have been a very long time.’

Yusef said with what must have been deliberate vagueness, ‘There was much to see to.’ It seemed to Scobie that now or never he must ask what was Yusef s plan, but the weariness of his corruption halted his tongue. ‘Yes, it’s hot,’ he said, ‘let’s try and get a cross-draught,’ and he opened the side window on to the quay. ‘I wonder if Wilson has gone home.’

‘Wilson?’

‘He watched me come here.’

‘You must not worry, Major Scobie. I think your boy can be made quite trustworthy.’

He said with relief and hope, ‘Yon mean you have a hold on him?’

‘Don’t ask questions. You will see.’ The hope and the relief both wilted. He said, ‘Yusef, I must know...’ but Yusef said, ‘I have always dreamed of an evening just like this with two glasses by our side and darkness and time to talk about important things, Major Scobie. God. The family. Poetry. I have great appreciation of Shakespeare. The Royal Ordnance Corps have very fine actors and they have made me appreciate the gems of English literature. I am crazy about

Shakespeare. Sometimes because of Shakespeare I would like to be able to read, but I am too old to learn. And I think perhaps I would lose my memory. That would be bad for business, and though I do not live for business I must do business to live. There are so many subjects I would like to talk to you about. I should like to hear the philosophy of your life.’

‘I have none.’

‘The piece of cotton you hold in your hand in the forest’

‘I’ve lost my way.’

‘Not a man like you, Major Scobie. I have such an admiration for your character. You are a just man.’

‘I never was, Yusef. I didn’t know myself that’s all. There’s a proverb, you know, about in the end is the beginning. When I was born I was sitting here with you drinking whisky, knowing...’

‘Knowing what, Major Scobie?’

Scobie emptied his glass. He said, ‘Surely your boy must have got to my house now.’

‘He has a bicycle.’

‘Then they should be on their way back.’

‘We must not be impatient. We may have to sit a long time, Major Scobie. You know what boys are.’

‘I thought I did.’ He found his left hand was trembling on the desk and he put it between his knees to hold it still. He remembered the long trek beside the border: innumerable lunches in the forest shade, with Ali cooking in an old sardine-tin, and again that last drive to Bamba came to mind - the long wait at the ferry, the fever coming down on him, and Ali always at hand. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and he thought for a moment: This is just a sickness, a fever, I shall wake soon. The record of the last six months - the first night in the Nissen hut, the letter which said too much, the smuggled diamonds, the lies, the sacrament taken to put a woman’s mind at ease - seemed as insubstantial as shadows over a bed cast by a hurricane-lamp. He said to himself: I am waking up, and heard the sirens blowing the alert just as on that night, that night ... He shook his head and came awake to Yusef sitting in the dark on the other side of the desk, to the taste of the whisky, and the knowledge that everything was the same. He said wearily, ‘They ought to be here by now.’

Yusef said, ‘You know what boys are. They get scared by the siren and they take shelter. We must sit here and talk to each other, Major Scobie. It is a great opportunity for me. I do not want the morning ever to come.’

‘The morning? I am not going to wait till morning for AIL’

‘Perhaps he will be frightened. He will know you have found him out and he will run away. Sometimes boys go back to bush ...’

‘You are talking nonsense, Yusef.’

‘Another whisky, Major Scobie?’

‘All right. All right.’ He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie.

‘Major Scobie, there are rumours that after all justice is to be done and that you are to be Commissioner.’

He said with care,’ I don’t think it will ever come to that’

‘I just wanted to say, Major Scobie, that you need not worry about me. I want your good, nothing so much as that. I will slip out of your life, Major Scobie. I will not be a millstone. It is enough for me to have had tonight - this long talk in the dark on all sorts of subjects. I will remember tonight always. You will not have to worry. I will see to that’ Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry.

Yusef said too quickly, ‘A drunk man.’ He yelped apprehensively, ‘Where are you going, Major Scobie? It’s not safe -alone.’ That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses. At the bottom of the stairs the clerk stood, staring down the wharf. The moonlight caught his eyes: like road studs they showed the way to turn.

There was no movement in the empty warehouses on either side or among the sacks and crates as he moved his torch: if the wharf rats had been out, that cry had driven them back to their holes. His footsteps echoed between the sheds, and somewhere a pye-dog wailed. It would have been quite possible to have searched in vain in this wilderness of litter until morning: what was it that brought him so quickly and unhesitatingly to the body, as though he had himself chosen the scene of the crime? Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali.

The body lay coiled and unimportant like a broken watch-spring under a pile of empty petrol drums: it looked as though it had been shovelled there to wait for morning and the scavenger birds. Scobie had a moment of hope before he turned the shoulder over, for after all two boys had been together on the road. The seal grey neck had been slashed and slashed again. Yes, he thought, I can trust him now. The yellow eyeballs stared up at him like a stranger’s, flecked with red. It was as if this body had cast him off, disowned him - ‘I know you not’. He swore aloud, hysterically. ‘By God, I’ll get the man who did this,’ but under that anonymous stare insincerity withered. He thought: I am the man. Didn’t I know all the time in Yusef s room that something was planned? Couldn’t I have pressed for an answer? A voice said, ‘Sah?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Corporal Laminah, sah..’

‘Can you see a broken rosary anywhere around? Look care’ fully.’

‘I can see nothing, sah..’

Scobie thought: if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away - like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You served me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you.

‘What is it, sah?’ the corporal whispered, kneeling by the body.

‘I loved him,’ Scobie said,

PART TWO

Chapter One

AS soon as he had handed over his work to Frazer and closed his office for the day, Scobie started out for the Nissen. He drove with his eyes half-closed, looking straight ahead: he told himself, now, today, I am going to clean up, whatever the cost. Life is going to start again: this nightmare of love is finished. It seemed to him that it had died for ever the previous night under the petrol drums. The sun blazed down on his hands, which were stuck to the wheel by sweat

His mind was so concentrated on what had to come - the opening of a door, a few words, and closing a door again for ever - that he nearly passed Helen on the road. She was walking down the hill towards him, hatless. She didn’t even see the car. He had to run after her and catch her up. When she turned it was the face he had seen at Pende carried past him - defeated, broken, as ageless as a smashed glass.

‘What are you doing here? In the sun, without a hat.’

She said vaguely, ‘I was looking for you,’ standing there, dithering on the laterite.

‘Come back to the car. You’ll get sunstroke.’ A look of cunning came into her eyes. ‘Is it as easy as all that?’ she asked, but she obeyed him.

They sat side by side in the car. There seemed to be no object in driving farther: one could say good-bye here as easily as there. She said, ‘I heard this morning about Ali. Did you do it?’

‘I didn’t cut his throat myself,’ he said. ‘But he died because I existed.’

‘Do you know who did?’

‘I don’t know who held the knife. A wharf rat, I suppose,

Yusef s boy who was with him has disappeared. Perhaps he did it or perhaps he’s dead too. We will never prove anything, I doubt if Yusef intended it’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is the end for us. I can’t go on ruining you any more. Don’t speak. Let me speak. I never thought it would be like this. Other people seem to have love affairs which start and end and are happy, but with us it doesn’t work. It seems to be all or nothing. So it’s got to be nothing. Please don’t speak. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I’m going to go away - right right away.’

‘Where to?’

‘I told you not to speak. Don’t ask questions.’ He could see in the windscreen a pale reflection of her desperation. It seemed to him as though he were being torn apart. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘don’t think it’s easy. I’ve never done anything so hard. It would be so much easier to die. You come into every’ thing. I can never again see a Nissen hut - or a Morris car. Or taste a pink gin. See a black face. Even a bed ... one has to steep in a bed. I don’t know where I’ll get away from you. It’s no use saying in a year it will be all right It’s a year I’ve got to get through. All the time knowing you are somewhere. I could send a telegram or a letter and you’d have to read it, even if you didn’t reply.’ He thought: how much easier it would be for her if I were dead. ‘But I mustn’t write,’ she said. She wasn’t crying: her eyes when he took a quick glance were dry and red, as he remembered them in hospital, exhausted. ‘Waking up will be the worst. There’s always a moment when one forgets that everything’s different.’

He said, ‘I came up here to say good-bye too. But there are things I can’t do.’

‘Don’t talk, darling. Dm being good. Can’t you see I’m being good? You don’t have to go away from me - I’m going away from you. You won’t ever know where to. I hope I won’t be too much of a slut’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’

‘Be quiet darling. You are going to be all right you’ll see. You’ll be able to clean up. You’ll be a Catholic again - that’s what you really want, isn’t it, not a pack of women?’

‘I want to stop giving pain,’ he said.

‘You want peace, dear. You’ll have peace. You’ll see. Everything will be all right.’ She put her hand on his knee and began at last to weep in this effort to comfort him. He thought: where did she pick up this heartbreaking tenderness? Where do they learn to be so old so quickly?

‘Look, dear. Don’t come up to the hut. Open the car door for me. It’s stiff. Well say good-bye here, and you’ll just drive home - or to the office if you’d rather. That’s so much easier. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right’ He thought I missed that one death and now I’m having them all. He leant over her and wrenched at the car door: her tears touched his cheek. He could feel the mark like a burn. ‘There’s no objection to a farewell kiss. We haven’t quarrelled. There hasn’t been a scene. There’s no bitterness.’ As they kissed he was aware of pain under his mouth like the beating of a bird’s heart. They sat still, silent and the door of the car lay open. A few black labourers passing down the hill looked curiously hi.

She said, ‘I can’t believe that this is the last time: that I’ll get out and you’ll drive away, and we won’t see each other again ever. I won’t go outside more than I can help till I get right away. I’ll be up here and you’ll be down there. Oh, God, I wish I hadn’t got the furniture you brought me.’

‘It’s just official furniture.’

‘The cane is broken in one of the chairs where you sat down too quickly.’

‘Dear, dear, this isn’t the way.’

‘Don’t speak, darling. I’m really being quite good, but I can’t say these things to another living soul. In books there’s always a confidant. But I haven’t got a confidant. I must say them all once.’ He thought again: if I were dead, she would be free of me. One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead - what is he doing now, who is he with? This for her is the hard way.

‘Now, darling, I’m going to do it. Shut your eyes. Count three hundred slowly, and I won’t be in sight Turn the car quickly and drive like hell. I don’t want to see you go. And I’ll stop my ears. I don’t want to hear you change gear at the bottom of the hill. Cars do that a hundred times a day. I don’t want to hear you change gear.’

O God, he prayed, his hands dripping over the wheel, kill me now, now. My God, you’ll never have more complete contrition. What a mess I am. I carry suffering with me like a body smell. Kill me. Put an end to me. Vermin don’t have to exterminate themselves. Kill me. Now. Now. Now.

‘Shut your eyes, darling. This is the end. Really the end.’ She said hopelessly, ‘It seems so silly though.’

He said, ‘I won’t shut my eyes. I won’t leave you. I promised that.’

‘You aren’t leaving me. I’m leaving you.’

‘It won’t work. We love each other. It won’t work. I’d be up this evening to see how you were. I couldn’t steep...’

‘You can always sleep. I’ve never known such a sleeper. Oh, my dear, look. I’m beginning to laugh at you again just as though we weren’t saying goodbye.’

‘We aren’t. Not yet.’

‘But I’m only ruining you. I can’t give you any happiness,’

‘Happiness isn’t the point.’

‘I’d made up my mind.’

‘So had I.’

‘But, darling, what do we do?’ She surrendered completely. ‘I don’t mind going on as we are. I don’t mind the lies. Anything.’

‘Just leave it to me. I’ve got to think.’ He leant over her and closed the door of the car. Before the lock had clicked he had made his decision.

Scobie watched the small boy as he cleared away the evening meal, watched him come in and go out, watched the bare feet flap the floor. Louise said, ‘I know it’s a terrible thing, dear, but you’ve got to put it behind you. You can’t help Ali now.’ A new parcel of books had come from England and he watched her cutting the leaves of a volume of verse. There was more grey in her hair than when she had left for South Africa, but she looked, it seemed to him, yean younger because she was paying more attention to make-up: her dressing-table was Uttered with the pots and bottles and tubes she had brought back from the south. Ali’s death meant little to her: why should it? It was the sense of guilt that made it so important. Otherwise one didn’t grieve for a death. When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity ... She sat there, reading poetry, and she was a thousand miles away from the torment that shook his hand and dried his mouth. She would understand, he thought, if I were in a book, but would I understand her if she were just a character? I don’t read that sort of book.

‘Haven’t you anything to read, dear?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel much like reading.’

She closed her book, and it occurred to him that after all she had her own effort to make: she tried to help. Sometimes he wondered with horror whether perhaps she knew everything, whether that complacent face which she had worn since her return masked misery. She said, ‘Let’s talk about Christmas.’

‘It’s still a long way off,’ he said quickly.

‘Before you know it will be on us. I was wondering whether we could give a party. We’ve always been out to dinner: it ‘would be fun to have people here. Perhaps on Christmas Eve.’

‘Just what you like.’

‘We could all go on then to Midnight Mass. Of course you and I would have to remember to drink nothing after ten - but the others could do as they pleased.’

He looked up at her with momentary hatred as she sat so cheerfully there, so smugly, it seemed to him, arranging his further damnation. He was going to be Commissioner. She had what she wanted - her sort of success, everything was all right with her now. He thought: it was the hysterical woman who felt the world laughing behind her back that I loved. I love failure: I can’t love success. And how successful she looks, sitting there, one of the saved, and he saw laid across that wide face like a news-screen the body of Ali under the black drums, the exhausted eyes of Helen, and an the faces of the lost, his companions in exile, the unrepentant thief,

the soldier with the sponge. Thinking of what he had done and was going to do, he thought, even God is a failure. ‘What is it, Ticki? Are you still worrying...?’ But he couldn’t tell her the entreaty that was on his lips: let me pity you again, be disappointed, unattractive, be a failure so that I can love you once more without this bitter gap between us. Time is short. I want to love you too at the end. He said slowly, ‘It’s the pain. It’s over now. When it comes -’ he remembered the phrase of the textbook - ‘it’s like a vice.’

‘You must see the doctor, Ticki.’

‘I’ll see him tomorrow. I was going to anyway because of my sleeplessness.’

‘Your sleeplessness? But, Ticki, you sleep like a log.’

‘Not the last week.’

‘You’re imagining it.’

‘No. I wake up about two and can’t sleep again - till just before we are called. Don’t worry. I’ll get some tablets.’

‘I hate drugs.’

‘I won’t go on long enough to form a habit’

‘We must get you right for Christmas, Ticki.’

‘I’ll be all right by Christmas.’ He came stiffly across the room to her, imitating the bearing of a man who fears that pain may return again, and put his hand against her breast. ‘Don’t worry.’ Hatred went out of him at the touch - she wasn’t as successful as all that: she would never be married to the Commissioner of Police.

After she had gone to bed he took out his diary. In this record at least he had never lied. At the worst he had omitted. He had checked his temperatures as carefully as a sea captain making up his log. He had never exaggerated or minimized, and he had never indulged in speculation. All he had written here was fact. November 1, Early Mass with Louise. Spent morning on larceny case at Mrs Onoko’s. Temperature 91° at 2. Saw Y. at his office. Ali found murdered. The statement was as plain and simple as that other time when he had written: C. died.

‘November 2.’ He sat a long while with that date in front of him, so long that presently Louise called down to him. He replied carefully, ‘Go to sleep, dear. If I sit up late, I may be able to steep properly.’ But already, exhausted by the day and by all the plans that had to be laid, he was near to nodding at the table. He went to his ice-box and wrapping a piece of ice in his handkerchief rested it against his forehead until sleep receded. November 2. Again he picked up his pen: this was his death-warrant he was signing. He wrote: Saw Helen for a few minutes. (It was always safer to leave no facts for anyone else to unearth.) Temperature at 2, 92°. In the evening return of pain. Fear angina. He looked up the pages of the entries for a week back and added an occasional note. Slept very badly. Bad night. Sleeplessness continues. He read the entries over carefully: they would be read later by the coroner, by the insurance inspectors. They seemed to him to be in his usual manner. Then he put the ice back on his forehead to drive sleep away. It was still only half after midnight: it would be better not to go to bed before two.

Chapter Two

‘IT grips me,’ Scobie said, ‘like a vice.’

‘And what do you do then?’

‘Why nothing. I stay as still as I can until the pain goes.’

‘How long does it last?’

‘It’s difficult to tell, but I don’t think more than a minute.’

The stethoscope followed like a ritual. Indeed there was something clerical in all that Dr Travis did: an earnestness, almost a reverence. Perhaps because he was young he treated the body with great respect; when he rapped the chest he did it slowly, carefully, with his ear bowed close as though he really expected somebody or something to rap back. Latin words came softly on to his tongue as though in the Mass - sternum instead of pacem.

‘And then,’ Scobie said, ‘there’s the sleeplessness.’

The young man sat back behind his desk and tapped with an indelible pencil; there was a mauve smear at the corner of his mouth which seemed to indicate that sometimes - off guard - he sucked it. ‘That’s probably nerves,’ Dr Travis said, ‘apprehension of pain. Unimportant.’

‘It’s important to me. Can’t you give me something to take? I’m all right when once I get to sleep, but I lie awake for hours, waiting ... Sometimes I’m hardly fit for work. And a policeman, you know, needs his wits.’

‘Of course,’ Dr Travis said. ‘I’ll soon settle you. Evipan’s the stuff for you.’ It was as easy as all that. ‘Now for the pain -’ he began his tap, tap, tap, with the pencil. He said, ‘It’s impossible to be certain, of course .... I want you to note carefully the circumstances of every attack... what seems to bring it on. Then it will be quite possible to regulate it, avoid it almost entirely.’

‘But what’s wrong?’

Dr Travis said, ‘There are some words that always shock the layman. I wish we could call cancer by a symbol like H2O. People wouldn’t be nearly so disturbed. It’s the same with the world angina.’

‘You think it’s angina?’

‘It has all the characteristics. But men live for years with angina -even work in reason. We have to see exactly how much you can do.’

‘Should I tell my wife?’

‘There’s no point in not telling her. I’m afraid this might mean - retirement.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You may die of a lot of things before angina gets you -given care.’

‘On the other hand I suppose it could happen any day?’

‘I can’t guarantee anything, Major Scobie. I’m not even absolutely satisfied that this is angina.’

‘I’ll speak to the Commissioner then on the quiet. I don’t want to alarm my wife until we are certain.’

‘If I were you, I’d tell her what I’ve said. It will prepare her. But tell her you may live for years with care.’

‘And the sleeplessness?’

‘This will make you sleep.’

Sitting in the car with the little package on the seat beside him, he thought, I have only now to choose the date. He didn’t start his car for quite a while; he was touched by a feeling of awe as if he had in fact been given his death sentence by the doctor. His eyes dwelt on the neat blob of sealing-wax like a dried wound. He thought, I have still got to be careful, so careful. If possible no one must even suspect. It was not only the question of his life insurance: the happiness of others had to be protected. It was not so easy to forget a suicide as a middle-aged man’s death from angina.

He unsealed the package and studied the directions. He had no knowledge of what a fatal dose might be, but surely if he took ten times the correct amount he would be safe. That meant every night for nine nights removing a dose and keeping it secretly for use on the tenth night. More evidence must be invented in his diary which had to be written right up to the end - November 12. He must make engagements for the following week. In his behaviour there must be no hint of farewells. This was the worst crime a Catholic could commit -it must be a perfect one.

First the Commissioner... He drove down towards the police station and stopped his car outside the church. The solemnity of the crime lay over his mind almost like happiness: it was action at last - he had fumbled and muddled too long. He put the package for safekeeping into his pocket and went in, carrying his death. An old mammy was lighting a candle before the Virgin’s statue; another sat with her market basket beside her and her hands folded staring up at the altar. Otherwise the church was empty. Scobie sat down at the back: he had no inclination to pray - what was the good? If one was a Catholic, one had all the answers: no prayer was effective in a state of mortal sin, but he watched the other two with sad envy. They were still inhabitants of the country he had left. This was what human love had done to him - it had robbed him of love for eternity. It was no use pretending as a young man might that the price was worth white.

If he couldn’t pray he could at least talk, sitting there at the back, as far as he could get from Golgotha. He said, O God, I am the only guilty one because I’ve known the answers all the time. I’ve preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can’t observe your suffering. I can only

imagine it But there are limits to what I can do to you - or them. I can’t desert either of them while I’m alive, but I can die and remove myself from their blood stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And you too, God - you are ill with me. I can’t go on, month after month, insulting you. I can’t face coming up to the altar at Christmas - your birthday feast - and taking your body and blood for the sake of a lie. I can’t do that. You’ll be better off if you lose me once and for all. I know what I’m doing. I’m not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I’ve longed for peace and I’m never going to know peace again. But you’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach. It will be no use then sweeping the floor to find me or searching for me over the mountains. You’ll be able to forget me, God, for eternity. One hand clasped the package in his pocket like a promise.

No one can speak a monologue for long alone - another voice will always make itself heard; every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion. So now he couldn’t keep the other voice silent; it spoke from the cave of his body: it was as if the sacrament which had lodged there for his damnation gave tongue. You say you love me, and yet you’ll do this to me - rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I’ve wept your tears. I’ve saved you from more man you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach. There are no capital letters to separate us when we talk together. I am not Thou but simply you, when you speak to me; I am humble as any other beggar. Can’t you trust me as you’d trust a faithful dog? I have been faithful to you for two thousand years. All you have to do now is ring a bell, go into a box, confess ... the repentance is already there, straining at your heart. It’s not repentance you lack, just a few simple actions: to go up to the Nissen hut and say good-bye. Or if you must, continue rejecting me but without lies any more. Go to your house and say good-bye to your wife and live with your mistress. If you live you will come back to me sooner or later. One of them will suffer, but can’t you trust me to see that the suffering isn’t too great?

The voice was silent in the cave and his own voice replied hopelessly: No. I don’t trust you. I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks. I’m not a policeman for nothing - responsible for order, for seeing justice is done. There was no other profession for a man of my kind. I can’t shift my responsibility to you. If I could, I would be someone else. I can’t make one of them suffer so as to save myself. I’m responsible and I’ll see it through the only way I can. A sick man’s death means to them only a short suffering - everybody has to die. We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

So long as you live, the voice said, I have hope. There’s no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God. Can’t you just go on, as you are doing now? the voice pleaded, lowering the terms every time it spoke like a dealer in a market. It explained: mere are worse acts. But no, he said, no. That’s impossible. I won’t go on insulting you at your own altar. You see it’s an impasse, God, an impasse, he said, clutching the package in his pocket. He got up and turned his back on the altar and went out. Only when he saw his face in the driving mirror did he realize that his eyes were bruised with suppressed tears. He drove on towards the police station and the Commissioner.

Chapter Three

1

November 3. Yesterday I told the Commissioner that angina had been diagnosed and that I should have to retire as soon as a successor could be found. Temperature at 2 p.m. 91°. Much better night as the result of Evipan.

November 4. Went with Louise to 7.30 Mass but as pain threatened to return did not wait for Communion. In the evening told Louise that I should have to retire before end of tour. Did not mention angina but spoke of strained heart. Another good night as a result of Evipan. Temperature at 2 p.m. 89°.

November 5. Lamp thefts in Wellington Street. Spent long morning at Azikawe’s store checking story of fire in storeroom. Temperature at 2 p.m. 90°. Drove Louise to Club for library night.

November 6 - 10. First time I’ve failed to keep up daily entries. Pain has become more frequent and unwilling to take on any extra exertion. Like a vice. Lasts about a minute. Liable to come on if I walk more than half a mile. Last night or two have slept badly in spite of Evipan, I think from the apprehension of pain.

November 11. Saw Travis again. There seems to be no doubt now that it is angina. Told Louise tonight, but also that with care I may live for years. Discussed with Commissioner an early passage home. In any case can’t go for another month as too many cases I want to see through the courts in the next week or two. Agreed to dine with Fellowes on 13th, Commissioner on 14th. Temperature at 2 p.m. 88°.

2

Scobie laid down his pen and wiped his wrist on the blotting’ paper. It was just six o’clock on November 12 and Louise was out at the beach. His brain was clear, but the nerves tingled from his shoulder to his wrist He thought: I have come to the end. What years had passed since he walked up through the rain to the Nissen hut, while the sirens wailed: the moment of happiness. It was time to die after so many years.

But there were still deceptions to be practised, just as though he were going to live through the night, good-byes to be said with only himself knowing that they were good-byes. He walked very slowly up the bin in case he was observed - wasn’t he a sick man? - and turned off by the Nissens. He couldn’t just die without some word - what word? O God, he prayed, let it be the right word, but when he knocked there was no reply, no words at all. Perhaps she was at the beach with Bagster.

The door was not locked and he went in. Years had passed in his brain, but here time had stood still. It might have been the same bottle of gin from which the boy had stolen - how long ago? The junior official’s chairs stood stiffly around, as though on a film set: he couldn’t believe they had ever moved, any more than the pouf presented by - was it Mrs Carter? On the bed the pillow had not been shaken after the siesta, and he laid his hand on the warm mould of a skull. O God, he prayed, I’m going away from all of you for ever: let her come back in time: let me see her once more, but the hot day cooled around him and nobody came. At 6.30 Louise would be back from the beach. He couldn’t wait any longer.

I must leave some kind of a message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of deprivation. He looked for paper and couldn’t find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw a writing-case, but it was the stamp-album that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, he felt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won’t matter: she had told him that you can’t see where a stamp has been torn out. There was no scrap of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it: I love you. She can’t take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that’s indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn’t he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill - she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time - an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.

At dinner he talked deliberately of the week to come; he blamed himself for accepting Fellowes’s invitation and explained that dinner with the Commissioner the next day was unavoidable - there was much to discuss.

‘Is there no hope, Ticki, that after a rest, a long rest...?’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to carry on - to them or you. I might break down at any moment.’

‘It’s really retirement?’

‘Yes.’

She began to discuss where they were to live. He felt tired to death, and it needed all his will to show interest in this fictitious village or that, in the kind of house he knew they would never inhabit. ‘I don’t want a suburb,’ Louise said. ‘What I’d really like would be a weather-board house in Kent, so that one can get up to town quite easily.’

He said, ‘Of course it will depend on what we can afford. My pension won’t be very large.’

‘I shall work,’ Louise said.’ It will be easy in wartime.’

‘I hope we shall be able to manage without that.’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

Bed-time came, and he felt a terrible unwillingness to let her go. There was nothing to do when she had once gone but die. He didn’t know how to keep her - they had talked about all the subjects they had in common. He said, ‘I shall sit here a while. Perhaps I shall feel sleepy if I stay up half an hour longer. I don’t want to take the Evipan if I can help it.’

‘I’m very tired after the beach. I’ll be off.’

When she’s gone, be thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can’t believe that I’m going to do this. Presently I shall get up and go to bed, and life will begin again. Nothing, nobody, can force me to die. Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signalled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him...

‘What is it, Ticki? You look I’ll. Come to bed too.’

‘I wouldn’t sleep,’ he said obstinately.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Louise asked. ‘Dear, I’d do anything...’ Her love was like a death sentence.

‘There’s nothing, dear,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t keep you up.’ But so soon as she turned towards the stairs he spoke again. ‘Read me something,’ he said, ‘you got a new book today. Read me something.’

‘You wouldn’t like it, Ticki. It’s poetry.’

‘Never mind. It may send me to sleep.’ He hardly listened while she read. People said you couldn’t love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn’t put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure - the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect - but that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever. Some words she was reading momentarily caught his attention:

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too - all have this falling sickness none withstands.

And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands this universal falling can’t fall through.

They sounded like truth, but he rejected them - comfort can come too easily. He thought, those hands will never hold my fall: I slip between the fingers, I’m greased

with falsehood, treachery. Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.

‘Dear, you are half asleep.’

‘For a moment.’

‘I’ll go up now. Don’t stay long. Perhaps you won’t need your Evipan tonight’

He watched her go. The lizard lay still upon the wall. Before she had reached the stairs he called her back. ‘Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep.’

She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he gave her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. ‘Good night, Louise. You know I love you,’ he said with careful lightness.

‘Of course and I love you.’

‘Yes. Good night. Louise.’

‘Good night, Tick!.’ It was the best he could do with safety.

As soon as he heard the door close, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of Evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty

- to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waited for courage with the tablets in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone: this was freezing-point. But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him. Throw away those tablets. You’ll never be able to collect enough again. You’ll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night’s sleep. In the morning you’ll be woken by your boy, and you’ll drive down to the police station for a day’s ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word ‘ordinary’ as it might have dwelt on the word ‘happy’ or ‘peaceful’.

‘No,’ Scobie said aloud, ‘no.’ He pushed the tablets in his mouth six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12, Called on H.R., out; temperature at 2 p.m. and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death; he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heartbeats like a clock striking the hour. He tried out an act of contrition, but when he reached, ‘I am sorry and beg pardon’, a cloud formed over the door and drifted down over the whole room and he couldn’t remember what it was that he had to be sorry for. He had to hold himself upright with both hands, but he had forgotten the reason why he so held himself. Somewhere far away he thought he heard the sounds of pain. ‘A storm,’ he said aloud, ‘there’s going to be a storm,’ as the clouds grew, and he tried to get up to close the windows. ‘Ali,’ he called, ‘Ali.’ It seemed to him as though someone outside the room were seeking him, calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that he was here. He got to his feet and heard the hammer of his heart beating out a reply. He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of nun. And automatically at the call of need, at the cry of a victim, Scobie strung himself to act He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, ‘Dear God, I love...’ but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the icebox - the saint whose name nobody could remember.

PART THREE

Chapter One

Wilson said, ‘I have kept away as long as I could, but I thought perhaps I could be of some help.’

‘Everybody,’ Louise said, ‘has been very kind,’

‘I had no idea that he was so ill.’

‘Your spying didn’t help you there, did it?’

‘That was my job,’ Wilson said, ‘and I love you.’

‘How glibly you use that word, Wilson.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I don’t believe in anybody who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.’

‘You won’t marry me then?’

‘It doesn’t seem likely, does it, but I might, in time. I don’t know what loneliness may do. But don’t let’s talk about love any more. It was his favourite lie.’

‘To both of you.’

‘How has she taken it, Wilson?’

‘I saw her on the beach this afternoon with Bagster. And I hear she was a bit pickled last night at the club.’

‘She hasn’t any dignity.’

‘I never knew what he saw in her. I’d never betray you, Louise.’

‘You know he even went up to see her the day he died.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s all written there. In his diary. He never lied in his diary. He never said things he didn’t mean - like love.’

Three days had passed since Scobie had been hastily buried. Dr Travis had signed the death certificate - angina pectoris. In that climate a post-mortem was difficult, and in any case unnecessary, though Dr Travis had taken the precaution of checking up on the Evipan.

‘Do you know,’ Wilson said, ‘when my boy told me he had died suddenly in the night, I thought it was suicide?’

‘It’s odd how easily I can talk about him,’ Louise said, ‘now that he’s gone. Yet I did love him, Wilson. I did love him, but he seems so very very gone.’

It was as if he had left nothing behind him in the house but a few suits of clothes and a Mende grammar: at the police station a drawer full of odds and ends and a pair of rusting handcuffs. And yet the house was no different: the shelves were as full of books; it seemed to Wilson that it must always have been her house, not his. Was it just imagination then that made their voices ring a little hollowly, as though the house were empty?

‘Did you know all the time -about her?’ Wilson asked.

‘It’s why I came home. Mrs Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he never realized that. He thought he’d been so clever. And he nearly convinced me - that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.’

‘How did he square that with his conscience?’

‘Some Catholics do, I suppose. Go to confession and start over again. I thought he was more honest though. When a man’s dead one begins to find out.’

‘He took money from Yusef.’

‘I can believe it now.’

Wilson put his hand on Louise’s shoulder and said, ‘You can trust me, Louise. I love you.’

‘I really believe you do.’ They didn’t kiss; it was too soon for that, but they sat in the hollow room, holding hands, listening to the vultures clambering on the iron roof.

‘So that’s his diary,’ Wilson said.

‘He was writing in it when he died -oh nothing interesting, just the temperatures He always kept the temperatures. He wasn’t romantic. God knows what she saw in him to make it worth while.’

‘Would you mind if I looked at it?’

‘If you want to,’ she said, ‘poor Ticki, he hasn’t any secrets left.’

‘His secrets were never very secret.’ He turned a page and read and turned a page. He said, ‘Had he suffered from sleeplessness very long?’

‘I always thought that he slept like a log whatever happened.’

Wilson said, ‘Have you noticed that he’s written in pieces about sleeplessness - afterwards?’

‘How do you know?’

‘You’ve only to compare the colour of the ink. And all these records of taking his Evipan - it’s very studied, very careful. But above all the colour of the ink.’ He said, ‘It makes one think.’

She interrupted him with horror, ‘Oh no, he couldn’t have done that. After all, in spite of everything, he was a Catholic.’

2

‘Just let me come in for one little drink,’ Bagster pleaded.

‘We had four at the beach.’

‘Just one little one more.’

‘All right,’ Helen said. There seemed to be no reason so far as she could see to deny anyone anything any more for ever.

Bagster said, ‘You know it’s the first time you’ve let me come in. Charming little place you’ve made of it. Who’d have thought a Nissen hut could be so homey?’ Flushed and smelling of pink gin, both of us, we are a pair, she thought. Bagster kissed her wetly on her upper lip and looked around again. ‘Ha ha,’ he said, ‘the good old bottle.’ When they had drunk one more gin he took off his uniform jacket and hung it carefully on a chair. He said, ‘Let’s take our back hair down and talk of love.’

‘Need we?’ Helen said. ‘Yet?’

‘Lighting up time,’ Bagster said. ‘The dusk. So well let George take over the controls ...’

‘Who’s George?’

‘The automatic pilot, of course. You’ve got a lot to learn.’

‘For God’s sake teach me some other time.’

‘There’s no time like the present for a prang,’ Bagster said, moving her firmly towards the bed. Why not? she thought, why not ... if he wants it? Bagster is as good as anyone else. There’s nobody in the world I love, and out of it doesn’t count, so why not let them have their prangs (it was Bagster’s phrase) if they want them enough. She lay back mutely on the bed and shut her eyes and was aware in the darkness of nothing at all. I’m alone, she thought without self-pity, stating it as a fact, as an explorer might after his companions have died from exposure.

‘By God, you aren’t enthusiastic,’ Bagster said. ‘Don’t you love me a bit, Helen?’ and his ginny breath fanned through her darkness.

‘No.’ she said, ‘I don’t love anyone.’

He said furiously, ‘You loved Scobie,’ and added quickly, ‘Sorry. Rotten thing to say.’

‘I don’t love anyone,’ she repeated. ‘You can’t love the dead, can you? They don’t exist, do they? It would be like loving the dodo, wouldn’t it?’ questioning him as if she expected an answer, even from Bagster. She kept her eyes shut because in the dark she felt nearer to death, the death which had absorbed him. The bed trembled a little as Bagster shuffled his weight from off it, and the chair creaked as he took away his jacket He said, I’m not all that of a bastard, Helen. You aren’t in the mood. See you tomorrow?’

‘I expect so.’ There was no reason to deny anyone anything, but she felt an immense relief because nothing after all had been required.

‘Good night, old girl,’ Bagster said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

She opened her eyes and saw a stranger in dusty blue pottering round the door. One can say anything to a stranger -they pass on and forget like beings from another world. She asked, ‘Do you believe in a God?’

‘Oh well, I suppose so,’ Bagster said, feeling at his moustache.

‘I wish I did,’ she said, ‘I wish I did.’

‘Oh well, you know,’ Bagster said ‘a lot of people do. Must be off now. Good night.’

She was alone again in the darkness behind her lids, and the wish struggled in her body like a child: her lips moved, but all she could think of to say was, ‘For ever and ever, Amen...’ The rest she had forgotten. She put her hand out beside her and touched the other pillow, as though perhaps after all there was one chance in a thousand that she was not alone, and if she were not alone now she would never be alone again.

3

‘I should never have noticed it, Mrs Scobie,’ Father Rank said. ‘Wilson did.’

‘Somehow I can’t like a man who’s quite so observant.’

‘It’s his job.’

Father Rank took a quick look at her. ‘As an accountant?’

She said drearily, ‘Father, haven’t you any comfort to give me?’ Oh, the conversations, he thought, that go on in a house after a death, the turnings over, the discussions, the questions, the demands - so much noise round the edge of silence.

‘You’ve been given an awful lot of comfort in your life, Mrs Scobie. If what Wilson thinks is true, it’s he who needs our comfort.’

‘Do you know all that I know about him?’

‘Of course I don’t, Mrs Scobie. You’ve been his wife, haven’t you, for fifteen years. A priest only knows the unimportant things.’

‘Unimportant?’

‘Oh, I mean the sins,’ he said impatiently. ‘A man doesn’t come to us and confess his virtues.’

‘I expect you know about Mrs Rolt Most people did.’

‘Poor woman.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘I’m sorry for anyone happy and ignorant who gets mixed up in that way with one of us.’

‘He was a bad Catholic.’

‘That’s the silliest phrase in common use,’ Father Rank said.

‘And at the end this - horror. He must have known that he was damning himself.’

‘Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust in mercy - except for other people.’

‘It’s no good even praying...’

Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs Scobie, don’t imagine you - or I - know a thing about God’s mercy.’

‘The Church says ...’

‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’

‘You think there’s some hope then?’ she wearily asked.

‘Are you so bitter against him?’

‘I haven’t any bitterness left.’

‘And do you think God’s likely to be more bitter than a woman?’ he said with harsh insistence, but she winced away from the arguments of hope.

‘Oh, why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?’

Father Rank said, ‘It may seem an odd thing to say - when a man’s as wrong as he was - but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.’

She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. ‘He certainly loved no one else,’ she said.

‘And you may be in the right of it there too,’ Father Rank replied.