The Heart of the Matter

‘Why? You are not going away?’

‘Henry’s sending me to South Africa.’

‘Oh God,’ Wilson exclaimed. The news was so unexpected that it was like a twinge of pain. His face twisted with it.

He tried to cover up the absurd exposure. No one knew better than he did that his face was not made to express agony or passion. He said, ‘What will he do without you?’

‘He’ll manage.’

‘He’ll be terribly lonely,’ Wilson said - he, he, he chiming back in his inner ear like a misleading echo I, I, I.

‘He’ll be happier without me.’

‘He couldn’t be.’

‘Henry doesn’t love me,’ she said gently, as though she were teaching a child, using the simplest words to explain a difficult subject, simplifying ... She leant her head back against the guichet and smiled at him as much as to say, it’s quite easy really when you get the hang of it. ‘He’ll be happier without me,’ she repeated. An ant moved from the woodwork on to her neck and he leant close to flick it away. He had no other motive. When he took his mouth away from hers the ant was still there. He let it run on to his finger. The taste of the lipstick was like something he’d never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world.

‘I hate him,’ she said, carrying on the conversation exactly where it had been left.

‘You mustn’t go,’ he implored her. A bead of sweat ran down into his right eye and he brushed it away; on the guichet by her shoulder his eyes took in again the phallic scrawl.

‘I’d have gone before this if it hadn’t been for the money, poor dear. He has to find it.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s man’s business,’ she said like a provocation, and he kissed her again; their mouths clung like bivalves, and then she pulled away and he heard the sad - to and fro - of Father Rank’s laugh coming up along the path. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ Father Rank called. His stride lengthened and he caught a foot in his soutane and stumbled as he went by. ‘A storm’s coming up,’ he said. ‘Got to hurry,’ and his ‘ho, ho, ho’ diminished mournfully along the railway track, bringing no comfort to anyone.

‘He didn’t see who we were,’ Wilson said.

‘Of course he did. What does it matter?’

‘He’s the biggest gossip in the town.’

‘Only about things that matter,’ she said.

‘This doesn’t matter?’

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Why should it?’

‘I’m in love with you, Louise,’ Wilson said sadly.

‘This is the second time we’ve met.’

‘I don’t see that that makes any difference. Do you like me, Louise?’

‘Of course I like you, Wilson.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Wilson.’

‘Have you got another name?’

‘Edward.’

‘Do you want me to call you Teddy? Or Bear? These things creep on you before you know where you are. Suddenly you are calling someone Bear or Ticki, and the real names seems bald and formal, and the next you know they hate you for it. I’ll stick to Wilson.’

‘Why don’t you leave him?’

‘I am leaving him. I told you. I’m going to South Africa.’

‘I love you, Louise,’ he said again.

‘How old are you, Wilson?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘A very young thirty-two, and I am an old thirty-eight.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘The poetry you read, Wilson, is too romantic. It does matter. It matters much more than love. Love isn’t a fact like age and religion ...’

Across the bay the clouds came up: they massed blackly over Bullom and then tore up the sky, climbing vertically: the wind pressed the two of them back against the station. ‘Too late,’ Louise said, ‘we’re caught.’

‘How long will this last?’

‘Half an hour.’

A handful of rain was flung in their faces, and then the water came down. They stood inside the station and heard the water hurled upon the roof. They were in darkness, and the chickens moved at their feet

‘This is grim,’ Louise said.

He made a motion towards her hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilson,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s have a petting party.’ She had to speak loud for her voice to carry above the thunder on the iron roof.

‘I’m sorry ... I didn’t mean...’

He could hear her shifting further away, and he was glad of the darkness which hid his humiliation. ‘I like you, Wilson,’ she said, ‘but I’m not a nursing sister who expects to be taken whenever she finds herself in the dark with a man. You have no responsibilities towards me, Wilson. I don’t want you.’

‘I love you, Louise.’

‘Yes, yes, Wilson. You’ve told me. Do you think there are snakes in here -or rats?’

‘I’ve no idea. When are you going to South Africa, Louise?’

‘When Ticki can raise the money.’

‘It will cost a lot. Perhaps you won’t be able to go.’

‘He’ll manage somehow. He said he would.’

‘Life insurance?’

‘No, he’s tried that’

‘I wish I could tend it to you myself. But I’m poor as a church-mouse.’

‘Don’t talk about mice in here, Ticki will manage somehow.’

He began to see her face through the darkness, thin, grey, attenuated - it was like trying to remember the features of someone he had once known who had gone away. One would build them up in just this way - the nose and then if one concentrated enough the brow; the eyes would escape him.

‘He’ll do anything for me.’

He said bitterly, ‘A moment ago you said he didn’t love you.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he has a terrible sense of responsibility.’

He made a movement and she cried furiously out, ‘Keep still. I don’t love you. I love Ticki.’

‘I was only shifting my weight’ he said. She began to laugh. ‘How funny this is,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since anything funny happened to me. I’ll remember this for months, for months.’ But it seemed to Wilson that he would remember her laughter all his life. His shorts flapped in the draught of the storm and he thought, ‘In a body like a grave.’

When Louise and Wilson crossed the river and came into Burnside it was quite dark. The headlamps of a police van lit an open door, the figures moved to and fro carrying packages. ‘What’s up now?’ Louise exclaimed, and began to run down the road. Wilson panted after her. Ali came from the house carrying on his head a tin bath, a folding chair, and a bundle tied up in an old towel. ‘What on earth’s happened, Ali?’

‘Massa go on trek,’ he said, and grinned happily in the headlamps.

In the sitting-room Scobie sat with a drink in his hand. ‘I’m glad you are back,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d have to write a note,’ and Wilson saw that in fact he had already begun one. He had torn a leaf out of his notebook, and his large awkward writing covered a couple of lines.

‘What on earth’s happening, Henry?’

‘I’ve got to get off to Bamba.’

‘Can’t you wait for the train on Thursday?’

‘No.’

‘Can I come with you?’

‘Not this time. I’m sorry, dear. I’ll have to take Ali and leave you the small boy.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘There’s trouble over young Pemberton.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s such a fool. It was madness to leave him there as D.C.’

Scobie drank his whisky and said, ‘I’m sorry, Wilson. Help yourself. Get a bottle of soda out of the ice-box. The boys are busy packing.’

‘How long will you be, darling?’

‘Oh, I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, with any luck. Why don’t you go and stay with Mrs Halifax?’

‘I shall be all right here, darling.’

‘I’d take the small boy and leave you Ali, but the small boy can’t cook.’

‘You’ll be happier with Ali, dear. It will be like the old days before I came out’

‘I think I’ll be off, sir,’ Wilson said. ‘I’m sorry I kept Mrs Scobie out so late.’

‘Oh, I didn’t worry, Wilson. Father Rank came by and told me you were sheltering in the old station. Very sensible of you. He got a drenching. He should have stayed too - he doesn’t want a dose of fever at his age.’

‘Can I fill your glass, sir? Then I’ll be off.’

‘Henry never takes more than one.’

‘All the same, I think I will. But don’t go, Wilson. Stay and keep Louise company for a bit. I’ve got to be off after this glass. I shan’t get any sleep tonight.’

‘Why can’t one of the young men go? You’re too old, Ticki, for this. Driving all night. Why don’t you send Fraser?’

‘The Commissioner asked me to go. It’s just one of those cases -carefulness, tact, you can’t let a young man handle it.’ He took another drink of whisky and his eyes moved gloomily away as Wilson watched him.’ I must be off.’

‘I’ll never forgive Pemberton for this.’

Scobie said sharply, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, dear. We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.’ He smiled unwillingly at Wilson. ‘A policeman should be the most forgiving person in the world if he gets the facts right.’

‘I wish I could be of help, sir.’

‘You can. Stay and have a few more drinks with Louise and cheer her up. She doesn’t often get a chance to talk about books.’ At the word books Wilson saw her mouth tighten just as a moment ago he had seen Scobie flinch at the name of Ticki, and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

‘Good-bye, darling.’

‘Good-bye, Ticki.’

‘Look after Wilson. See he has enough to drink. Don’t mope.’

When she kissed Scobie, Wilson stood near the door with a glass in his hand and remembered the disused station on the hill above and the taste of lipstick. For exactly an hour and a half the mark of his mouth had been the last on hers. He felt no jealousy, only the dreariness of a man who tries to write an important letter on a damp sheet and finds the characters blur.

Side by side they watched Scobie cross the road to the police van. He had taken more whisky than he was accustomed to, and perhaps that was what made him stumble. ‘They should have sent a younger man,’ Wilson said.

‘They never do. He’s the only one the Commissioner trusts.’ They watched him climb laboriously in, and she went sadly on, ‘Isn’t he the typical second man? The man who always does the work.’

The black policeman at the wheel started his engine and began to grind into gear before releasing the clutch. ‘They don’t even give him a good driver,’ she said. ‘The good driver will have taken Fraser and the rest to the dance at the Club.’ The van bumped and heaved out of the yard. Louise said, ‘Well, that’s that, Wilson.’

She picked up the note Scobie had intended to leave for her and read it aloud. My dear, I have had to leave for Bamba. Keep this to yourself. A terrible thing has happened. Poor Pemberton ...

‘Poor Pemberton,’ she repeated furiously.

‘Who’s Pemberton?’

‘A little puppy of twenty-five. All spots and bounce. He was assistant D.C. at Bamba, but when Butterworth went sick, they left him in charge. Anybody could have told them there’d be trouble. And when trouble comes it’s Henry, of course, who has to drive all night...’

‘I’d better leave now, hadn’t I?’ Wilson said. ‘You’ll want to change.’

‘Oh yes, you’d better go - before everybody knows he’s gone and that we’ve been alone five minutes in a house with a bed in it. Alone, of course, except for the small boy and the cook and their relations and friends.’

‘I wish I could be of some use.’

‘You could be,’ she said. ‘Would you go upstairs and see whether there’s a rat in the bedroom? I don’t want the small boy to know I’m nervous. And shut the window. They come in that way.’

‘It will be very hot for you,’

‘I don’t mind.’

He stood just inside the door and clapped his hands softly, but no rat moved. Then quickly, surreptitiously, as though he had no right to be there, he crossed to the window and closed it. There was a faint smell of face-powder in the room - it seemed to him the most memorable scent he had ever known. He stood again by the door taking the whole room in - the child’s photograph, the pots of cream, the dress laid out by Ali for the evening. He had been instructed at home how to memorize, pick out the important detail, collect the right evidence, but his employers had never taught him that he would find himself in a country so strange to him as this.

PART THREE

Chapter One

THE police van took its place in the long line of army lorries waiting for the ferry. Their headlamps were like a little village in the night. The trees came down on either side smelling of heat and rain, and somewhere at the end of the column a driver sang - the wailing, toneless voice rose and fell like a wind through a keyhole. Scobie slept and woke, slept and woke. When he woke he thought of Pemberton and wondered how he would feel if he were his father - that elderly, retired bank manager whose wife had died in giving birth to Pemberton - but when he slept he went smoothly back into a dream of perfect happiness and freedom. He was walking through a wide cool meadow with Ali at his heels: there was nobody else anywhere in his dream, and Ali never spoke. Birds went by far overhead, and once when he sat down the grass was parted by a small green snake which passed on to his hand and up his arm without fear, and before it slid down into the grass again touched his cheek with a cold, friendly, remote tongue.

Once when he opened his eyes Ali was standing beside him waiting for him to awake. ‘Massa like bed,’ he stated gently, firmly, pointing to the camp-bed he had made up at the edge of the path with the mosquito-net tied from the branches overhead. ‘Two three hours,’ Ali said. ‘Plenty lorries.’ Scobie obeyed and lay down and was immediately back in that peaceful meadow where nothing ever happened. The next time he woke Ali was still there, this time with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits. ‘One hour,’ Ali said.

Then at last it was the turn of the police van. They moved down the red laterite slope on to the raft, and then edged foot by foot across the dark styx-like stream towards the woods on the other side. The two ferrymen pulling on the rope wore nothing but girdles, as though they had left their clothes behind on the bank where life ended, and a third man beat time to them, making do for instrument in this between-world with an empty sardine-tin. The wailing tireless voice of the living singer shifted backwards.

This was only the first of three ferries that had to be crossed, with the same queue forming each time. Scobie never succeeded in sleeping properly again; his head began to ache from the heave of the van: he ate some aspirin and hoped for the best He didn’t want a dose of fever when he was away from home. It was not Pemberton that worried him now - let the dead bury their dead - it was the promise he had made to Louise. Two hundred pounds was so small a sum: the figures rang their changes in his aching head like a peal of bells: 200 002 020: it worried him that he could not find a fourth combination: 002 200 020.

They had come beyond the range of the tin-roofed shacks and the decayed wooden settlers’ huts; the villages they passed through were bush villages of mud and thatch: no light showed anywhere: doors were closed and shutters were up, and only a few goats’ eyes watched the headlamps of the convoy. 020 002 200 200 002

020. Ali squatting in the body of the van put an arm around his shoulder holding a mug of hot tea - somehow he had boiled another kettle in the lurching chassis. Louise was right - it was like the old days. If he had felt younger, if mere had been no problem of 200 020 002, he would have been happy. Poor Pemberton’s death would not have disturbed him - that was merely in the way of duty, and he had never liked Pemberton. ‘My head humbug me, Ali.’

‘Massa take plenty aspirin.’

‘Do you remember, Ali, that two hundred 002 trek we did twelve years ago in ten days, along the border; two of the carriers went sick...’

He could see in the driver’s mirror Ali nodding and beaming. It seemed to him that this was all he needed of love or friendship. He could be happy with no more in the world than this - the grinding van, the hot tea against his lips, the heavy damp weight of the forest, even the aching head, the loneliness. If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him - that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness. ‘One hour more,’ Ali said, and he noticed that the darkness was thinning. ‘Another mug of tea, Ali, and put some whisky in it.’ The convoy had separated from them a quarter of an hour ago, when the police van had turned away from the main road and bumped along a by-road farther into the bush. He shut his eyes and tried to draw his mind away from the broken peal of figures to the distasteful job. There was only a native police sergeant at Bamba, and he would like to be clear in his own mind as to what had happened before he received the sergeant’s illiterate report. It would be better, he considered reluctantly, to go first to the Mission and see Father Clay.

Father Clay was up and waiting for him in the dismal little European house which had been built among the mud huts in laterite bricks to look like a Victorian presbytery. A hurricane-lamp shone on the priest’s short red hair and his young freckled Liverpool face. He couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, and then he would be up, pacing his tiny room from hideous oleograph to plaster statue and back to oleograph again. ‘I saw so little of him,’ he wailed, motioning with his hands as though he were at the altar. ‘He cared for nothing but cards and drinking. I don’t drink and I’ve never played cards - except demon, you know, except demon, and that’s a patience. It’s terrible, terrible.’ ‘He hanged himself?’

‘Yes. His boy came over to me yesterday. He hadn’t seen him since the night before, but that was quite usual after a bout, you know, a bout. I told him to go to the police. That was right, wasn’t it? There was nothing I could do. Nothing. He was quite dead.’

‘Quite right. Would you mind giving me a glass of water and some aspirin?’ ‘Let me mix the aspirin for you. You know, Major Scobie, for weeks and months nothing happens here at all. I just walk up and down here, up and down, and then suddenly out of the blue ... it’s terrible.’ His eyes were red and sleepless: he seemed to Scobie one of those who are quite unsuited to loneliness. There were no books to be seen except a little shelf with his breviary and a few religious tracts. He was a man without resources. He began to pace up and down again and suddenly, turning on Scobie, he shot out an excited question. ‘Mightn’t there be a hope that it’s murder?’

‘Hope?’

‘Suicide,’ Father Clay said. ‘It’s too terrible. It puts a man outside mercy. I’ve been thinking about it all night.’

‘He wasn’t a Catholic. Perhaps that makes a difference. Invincible ignorance, eh?’

‘That’s what I try to think.’ Half-way between oleograph and statuette he suddenly started and stepped aside as though he had encountered another on his tiny parade. Then he looked quickly and slyly at Scobie to see whether his act had been noticed.

‘How often do you get down to the port?’ Scobie asked.

‘I was there for a night nine months ago. Why?’

‘Everybody needs a change. Have you many converts here?’

‘Fifteen. I try to persuade myself that young Pemberton had time - time, you know, while he died, to realize ...’

‘Difficult to think clearly when you are strangling, Father.’ He took a swig at the aspirin and the sour grains stuck in his throat ‘If it was murder you’d simply change your mortal sinner, Father,’ he said with an attempt at humour which wilted between the holy picture and the holy statue.

‘A murderer has time ...’ Father Clay said. He added wistfully, with nostalgia, ‘I used to do duty sometimes at Liverpool Gaol.’

‘Have you any idea why he did it?’

‘I didn’t know him well enough. We didn’t get on together.’

‘The only white men here. It seems a pity.’

‘He offered to lend me some books, but they weren’t at all the kind of books I care to read - love stories, novels ...’

‘What do you read, Father?’

‘Anything on the saints, Major Scobie. My great devotion is to the Little Flower.’

‘He drank a lot, didn’t he? Where did he get it from?’

‘Yusef’s store, I suppose.’

‘Yes. He may have been in debt?’

‘I don’t know. It’s terrible, terrible.’

Scobie finished his aspirin. ‘I suppose I’d better go along.’ It was day now outside, and there was a peculiar innocence about the light, gentle and clear and

fresh before the sun climbed. ‘I’ll come with you. Major Scobie.’

The police sergeant sat in a deck-chair outside the D.C.’s bungalow. He rose and raggedly saluted, then immediately in his hollow unformed voice began to read his report. ‘At 3.30 p.m. yesterday, sah, I was woken by D.C.’s boy, who reported that D.C. Pemberton, sah ...’

‘That’s all right, sergeant, I’ll go inside and have a look round.’ The chief clerk waited for him just inside the door.

The living-room of the bungalow had obviously once been the D.C.’s pride - that must have been in Butterworth’s day. There was an air of elegance and personal pride in the furniture; it hadn’t been supplied by the Government. There were eighteenth-century engravings of the old colony on the wall and in one bookcase were the volumes that Butterworth had left behind him - Scobie noted some titles and authors, Maitland’s Constitutional History, Sir Henry Maine, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, Hardy’s poems, and the Doomsday Records of Little Withington, privately printed. But imposed on all this were the traces of Pemberton - a gaudy leather pouf of so-called native work, the marks of cigarette-ends on the chairs, a stack of the books Father Clay had disliked - Somerset Maugham, an Edgar Wallace, two Horlers, and spread-eagled on the settee, Death Laughs at Locksmiths, The room was not properly dusted and Butterworth’s books were stained with damp.

‘The body is in the bedroom, sah,’ the sergeant said. Scobie opened the door and went in - Father Clay followed him. The body had been laid on the bed with a sheet over the face. When Scobie turned the sheet down to the shoulder he had the impression that he was looking at a child in a nightshirt quietly asleep: the pimples were the pimples of puberty and the dead face seemed to bear the trace of no experience beyond the class-room or the football field. ‘Poor child,’ he said aloud. The pious ejaculations of Father Clay irritated him. It seemed to him that unquestionably there must be mercy for someone so unformed. He asked abruptly, ‘How did he do it?’

The police sergeant pointed to the picture rail that Butter-worth had meticulously fitted - no Government contractor would have thought of it. A picture - an early native king receiving missionaries under a State umbrella - leant against the wall and a cord remained twisted over the brass picture hanger. Who would have expected the flimsy contrivance not to collapse? He can weigh very little, he thought, and he remembered a child’s bones, light and brittle as a bird’s. His feet when he hung must have been only fifteen inches from the ground.

‘Did he leave any papers?’ Scobie asked the clerk. ‘They usually do. Men who are going to die are apt to become garrulous with self-revelations.

‘Yes, sah, in the office.’

It needed only a casual inspection to realize how badly the office had been kept. The filing cabinet was unlocked: the trays on the desk were filled by papers dusty with inattention. The native clerk had obviously followed the same ways as his chief. ‘There, sah, on the pad.’

Scobie read, in a hand-writing unformed as the face, a script-writing which hundreds of his school contemporaries must have been turning out all over the world: Dear Dad, - Forgive all this trouble. There doesn’t seem anything else to do. It’s a pity I’m not in the army because then I might be killed. Don’t go and pay the money I owe - the fellow doesn’t deserve it. They may try and get it out of you. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. It’s a rotten business for you, but it can’t be helped. Your loving son. The signature was ‘Dicky’. It was like a letter from school excusing a bad report.

He handed the letter to Father Clay. ‘You are not going to tell me there’s anything unforgivable there, Father. If you or I did it, it would be despair -I grant you anything with us. We’d be damned because we know, but he doesn’t know a thing.’

‘The Church’s teaching ...’

‘Even the Church can’t teach me that God doesn’t pity the young ...’ Scobie broke abruptly off. ‘Sergeant, see that a grave’s dug quickly before the sun gets too hot. And look out for any bills he owed. I want to have a word with someone about this.’ When he turned towards the window the light dazzled him. He put his hand over his eyes and said, ‘I wish to God my head ...’ and shivered. ‘I’m in for a dose if I can’t stop it. If you don’t mind Ali putting up my bed at your place, Father, I’ll try and sweat it out’

He took a heavy dose of quinine and lay naked between the blankets. As the sun climbed it sometimes seemed to bun that the stone walk of the small cell- like room sweated with cold and sometimes were baked with heat. The door was open and Ali squatted on the step just outside whittling a piece of wood. Occasionally he chased away villagers who raised their voices within the area of sick-room silence. The peine forte et dure weighed on Scobie’s forehead: occasionally it pressed him into sleep.

But in this sleep there were no pleasant dreams. Pemberton and Louise were obscurely linked. Over and over again he was reading a letter which consisted only of variations on the figure 200 and the signature at the bottom was sometimes ‘Dicky’ and sometimes ‘Ticki’; he had the sense of time passing and his own immobility between the blankets - mere was something he had to do, someone he had to save, Louise or Dicky or Ticki, but he was tied to the bed and they laid weights on his forehead as you lay weights on loose papers. Once the sergeant came to the door and Ali chased him away, once Father Clay tiptoed in and took a tract off a shelf, and once, but that might have been a dream, Yusef came to the door.

About five in the evening he woke feeling dry and cool and weak and called Ali in. ‘I dreamed I saw Yusef.’

‘Yusef come for to see you, sah.’

‘Tell him I’ll see him now.’ He felt tired and beaten about the body: he turned to face the stone wall and was immediately asleep. In his sleep Louise wept silently beside him; he put out his hand and touched the stone wall again - ‘Everything shall be arranged. Everything. Ticki promises.’ When he awoke Yusef was beside him.

‘A touch of fever, Major Scobie. I am very sorry to see you poorly.’

‘I’m sorry to see you at all, Yusef.’

‘Ah, you always make fun of me.’

‘Sit down, Yusef. What did you have to do with Pemberton?’

Yusef eased his great haunches on the hard chair and noticing that his flies were open put down a large and hairy hand to deal with them. ‘Nothing, Major Scobie.’

‘It’s an odd coincidence that you are here just at the moment when he commits suicide.’

‘I think myself it is providence.’

‘He owed you money, I suppose?’

‘He owed my store-manager money.’

‘What sort of pressure were you putting on nun, Yusef?’

‘Major, you give an evil name to a dog and the dog is finished. If the D.C. wants to buy at my store, how can my manager stop selling to him? If he does that, what will happen? Sooner or later there will be a first-class row. The Provincial Commissioner will find out. The D.C. will be sent home. If he does not stop selling, what happens then? The D.C. runs up more and more bills. My manager becomes afraid of me, he asks the D.C. to pay - there is a row that way. When you have a D.C. like poor young Pemberton, there will be a row one day whatever you do. And the Syrian is always wrong.’

‘There’s quite a lot in what you say, Yusef.’ The pain was beginning again. ‘Give me that whisky and quinine, Yusef.’

‘You are not taking too much quinine, Major Scobie? Remember blackwater.’

‘I don’t want to be stuck up here for days. I want to kill this at birth. I’ve too many things to do.’

‘Sit up a moment, Major, and let me beat your pillows.’

‘You aren’t a bad chap, Yusef.’

Yusef said, ‘Your sergeant has been looking for bills, but he could not find any. Here are IOU’s though. From my manager’s safe.’ He flapped his thigh with a little sheaf of papers.

‘I see. What are you going to do with them?’

‘Burn them,’ Yusef said. He took out a cigarette-lighter and lit the corners. ‘There,’ Yusef said. ‘He has paid, poor boy. There is no reason to trouble his father.’

‘Why did you come up here?’

‘My manager was worried. I was going to propose an arrangement.’

‘One needs a long spoon to sup with you, Yusef.’

‘My enemies do. Not my friends. I would do a lot for you, Major Scobie.’

‘Why do you always call me a friend, Yusef?’

‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, leaning his great white head forward, reeking of hair oil, ‘friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something. You remember when you put me into court ten years ago?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Scobie turned his head away from the light of the door.

‘You nearly caught me, Major Scobie, that time. It was a matter of import duties, you remember. You could have caught me if you had told your policeman to say something a little different. I was quite overcome with astonishment, Major Scobie, to sit in a police court and hear true facts from the mouths of policemen. You must have taken a lot of trouble to find out what was true, and to make them say it. I said to myself, Yusef, a Daniel has come to the Colonial Police.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk so much, Yusef. I’m not interested in your friendship.’

‘Your words are harder than your heart, Major Scobie. I want to explain why in my soul I have always felt your friend. You have made me feel secure. You will not frame me. You need facts, and I am sure the facts will always be in my favour.’ He dusted the ashes from his white trousers, leaving one more grey smear. ‘These are facts. I have burned all the IOU’s.’ ‘I may yet find traces, Yusef, of what kind of agreement you were intending to make with Pemberton. This station controls one of the main routes across the border from - damnation, I can’t think of names with this head.’ ‘Cattle smugglers. I’m not interested in cattle.’ ‘Other things are apt to go back the other way.’ ‘You are still dreaming of diamonds, Major Scobie. Everybody has gone crazy about diamonds since the war.’

‘Don’t feel too certain, Yusef, that I won’t find something when I go through Pemberton’s office.’

‘I feel quite certain, Major Scobie. You know I cannot read or write. Nothing is ever on paper. Everything is always in my head.’ Even while Yusef talked, Scobie dropped asleep - into one of those shallow sleeps that last a few seconds and have only time to reflect a preoccupation. Louise was coming towards him with both hands held out and a smile that he hadn’t seen upon her face for years. She said, ‘I am so happy, so happy,’ and he woke again to Yusef’s voice going soothingly on. ‘It is only your friends who do not trust you, Major Scobie. I trust you. Even that scoundrel Tallit trusts you.’

It took him a moment to get this other face into focus. His brain adjusted itself achingly from the phrase ‘so happy’ to the phrase ‘do not trust’. He said, ‘What are you talking about, Yusef?’ He could feel the mechanism of his brain creaking, grinding, scraping, cogs failing to connect, all with pain.

‘First, there is the Commissionership.’ ‘They need a young man,’ he said mechanically, and thought, if I hadn’t fever I would never discuss a matter like this with Yusef.

‘Then the special man they have sent from London ...’ ‘You must come back when I’m clearer, Yusef. I don’t know what the hell you are talking about.’

‘They have sent a special man from London to investigate the diamonds - they are crazy about diamonds - only the Commissioner must know about him none of the other officers, not even you.’

‘What rubbish you talk, Yusef. There’s no such man.’

‘Everybody guesses but you.’

‘Too absurd. You shouldn’t listen to rumour, Yusef.’

‘And a third thing. Tallit says everywhere you visit me.’

‘Tallit! Who believes what Tallit says?’

‘Everybody everywhere believes what is bad.’

‘Go away, Yusef. Why do you want to worry me now?’

‘I just want you to understand, Major Scobie, that you can depend on me. I have friendship for you in my soul. That is true, Major Scobie, it is true.’ The reek of hair-oil come closer as he bent towards the bed: the deep brown eyes were damp with what seemed to be emotion. ‘Let me pat your pillow. Major Scobie.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, keep away,’ Scobie said.

‘I know how things are. Major Scobie, and if I can help ..» I am a well-off man.’

‘I’m not looking for bribes, Yusef,’ he said wearily and turned his head away to escape the scent.

‘I am not offering you a bribe, Major Scobie. A loan at any time on a reasonable rate of interest - four per cent per annum. No conditions. You can arrest me next day if you have facts. I want to be your friend. Major Scobie. You need not be my friend. There is a Syrian poet who wrote, "Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away."‘

‘It sounds a very bad poem to me. But I’m no judge.’

‘It is a happy chance for me that we should be here together. In the town there are so many people watching. But here, Major Scobie, I can be of real help to you. May I fetch you more blankets?’

‘No, no, just leave me alone.’

‘I hate to see a man of your characteristics, Major Scobie, treated badly.’

‘I don’t mink the time’s ever likely to come, Yusef, when I shall need your pity. If you want to do something for me, though, go away and let me sleep.’

But when he slept the unhappy dreams returned. Upstairs Louise was crying, and he sat at a table writing his last letter. ‘It’s a rotten business for you, but it can’t be helped. Your loving husband, Dicky,’ and then as he turned to look for a weapon or a rope, it suddenly occurred to him that this was an act he could never do. Suicide was for ever out of his power - he couldn’t condemn himself for eternity - no cause was important enough. He tore up his letter and ran upstairs to tell Louise that after all everything was all right, but she had stopped crying and the silence welling out from inside the bedroom terrified him. He tried the door and the door was locked. He called out, ‘Louise, everything’s all right. I’ve booked your passage,’ but there was no answer. He cried again, ‘Louise,’ and then a key turned and the door slowly opened with a sense of irrecoverable disaster, and he saw standing just inside Father Clay, who said to him, ‘The teaching of the Church ...’ Then he woke again to the small stone room like a tomb.

He was away for a week, for it took three days for the fever to run its course and another two days before he was fit to travel. He did not see Yusef again.

It was past midnight when he drove into town. The houses were white as bones in the moonlight; the quiet streets stretched out on either side like the arms of a skeleton, and the faint sweet smell of flowers lay on the air. If he had been returning to an empty house he knew that he would have been contented. He was tired and he didn’t want to break the silence - it was too much to hope that Louise would be asleep, too much to hope that things would somehow have become easier in his absence and that he would see her free and happy as she had been in one of his dreams.

The small boy waved his torch from the door: the frogs croaked from the bushes, and the pye dogs wailed at the moon. He was home. Louise put her arms round him: the table was laid for a late supper, the boys ran to and fro with his boxes: he smiled and talked and kept the bustle going. He talked of Pemberton and Father Clay and mentioned Yusef, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to ask how things had been with her. He tried to eat, but he was too tired to taste the food.

‘Yesterday I cleared up his office and wrote my report - and that was that.’ He hesitated, ‘That’s all my news,’ and went reluctantly on, ‘How have things been here?’ He looked quickly up at her face and away again. There had been one chance in a thousand that she would have smiled and said vaguely, ‘Not so bad’ and then passed on to other things, but he knew from her mouth that he wasn’t so lucky as that Something fresh had happened.

But the outbreak - whatever it was to be - was delayed. She said, ‘Oh, Wilson’s been attentive.’

‘He’s a nice boy.’

‘He’s too intelligent for his job. I can’t think why he’s out here as just a clerk.’

‘He told me he drifted.’

‘I don’t mink I’ve spoken to anybody else since you’ve been away, except the small boy and the cook. Oh, and Mrs Halifax.’ Something in her voice told him that the danger point was reached. Always, hopelessly, he tried to evade it. He stretched and said, ‘My God, I’m tired. The fever’s left me limp as a rag. I think I’ll go to bed. It’s nearly half-past one, and I’ve got to be at the station at eight.’

She said, ‘Ticki, have you done anything at all?’

‘How do you mean, dear?’

‘About the passage.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll find a way, dear.’

‘You haven’t found one yet?’

‘No. I’ve got several ideas I’m working on. It’s just a question of borrowing.’ 200,020,002 rang in his brain.

‘Poor dear,’ she said, ‘don’t worry,’ and put her hand against his cheek. ‘You’re tired. You’ve bad fever. I’m not going to bait you now.’ Her hand, her words broke through every defence: he had expected tears, but he found them now in his own eyes. ‘Go up to bed, Henry,’ she said,

‘Aren’t you coming up?’

‘There are just one or two things I want to do.’

He lay on his back under the net and waited for her. It occurred to him, as it hadn’t occurred to him for years, that she loved him. Poor dear, she loved him: she was someone of human stature with her own sense of responsibility, not simply the object of his care and kindness. The sense of failure deepened round him. All the way back from Bamba he had faced one fact - that there was only one man in the city capable of lending him, and willing to lend him, the two hundred pounds, and that was a man he must not borrow from. It would have been safer to accept the Portuguese captain’s bribe. Slowly and drearily he had reached the decision to tell her that the money simply could not be found, that for the next six months at any rate, until his leave, she must stay. If he had not felt so tired he would have told her when she asked him and it would have been over now, but he had flinched away and she had been kind, and it would be harder now than it had ever been to disappoint her. There was silence all through the little house, but outside the half-starved pye dogs yapped and whined. He listened, leaning on his elbow; he felt oddly unmanned, lying in bed alone waiting for Louise to join him. She had always been the one to go first to bed. He felt uneasy, apprehensive, and suddenly his dream came to mind, how he had listened outside the door and knocked, and there was no reply. He struggled out from under the net and ran downstairs barefooted.

Louise was sitting at the table with a pad of notepaper in front of her, but she had written nothing but a name. The winged ants beat against the light and dropped then- wings over the table. Where the light touched her head he saw the grey hairs.

‘What is it, dear?’

‘Everything was so quiet,’ he said, ‘I wondered whether something had happened. I had a bad dream about you the other night. Pemberton’s suicide upset me.’

‘How silly, dear. Nothing like that could ever happen with us.’

‘Yes, of course. I just wanted to see you,’ he said, putting his hand on her hair. Over her shoulder he read the only words she had written, ‘Dear Mrs Halifax’...

‘You haven’t got your shoes on,’ she said. ‘You’ll be catching jiggers.’

‘I just wanted to see you,’ he repeated and wondered whether the stains on the paper were sweat or tears.

‘Listen, dear,’ she said. ‘You are not to worry any more. I’ve baited you and baited you. It’s like fever, you know. It comes and goes. Well, now it’s gone - for a while. I know you can’t raise the money. It’s not your fault. If it hadn’t been for that stupid operation ... It’s just the way things are, Henry.’

‘What’s it all got to do with Mrs Halifax?’

‘She and another woman have a two-berth cabin in the next ship and the other woman’s fallen out. She thought perhaps I could slip in - if her husband spoke to the agent.’

‘That’s in about a fortnight,’ he said.

‘Darling, give up trying. It’s better just to give up. Anyway, I had to let Mrs Halifax know tomorrow. And I’m letting her know that I shan’t be going.’

He spoke rapidly - he wanted the words out beyond recall. ‘Write and tell her that you can go.’

‘Ticki,’ she said, ‘what do you mean?’ Her face hardened. ‘Ticki, please don’t promise something which can’t happen. I know you’re tired and afraid of a scene. But there isn’t going to be a scene. I mustn’t let Mrs Halifax down.’

‘You won’t. I know where I can borrow the money.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me when you came back?’

‘I wanted to give you your ticket. A surprise.’

She was not so happy as he would have expected: she always saw a little farther than he hoped. ‘And you are not worrying any more?’ she asked.

‘I’m not worrying any more. Are you happy?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said in a puzzled voice. ‘I’m happy, dear.’

The liner came in on a Saturday evening; from the bedroom window they could see its long grey form steal past the boom, beyond the palms. They watched it with a sinking of the heart - happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness - hand in hand they watched their separation anchor in the bay. ‘Well,’ Scobie said, ‘that means tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘when this time is over, I’ll be good to you again. I just couldn’t stand this life any more.’

They could hear a clatter below stain as Ali, who had also been watching the sea, brought out the trunks and boxes. It was as if the house were tumbling down around them, and the vultures took off from the roof, rattling the corrugated-iron as though they felt the tremor in the walls. Scobie said, ‘While you are sorting your things upstairs, I’ll pack your books.’ It was as if they had been playing these last two weeks at infidelity, and now the process of divorce had them in its grasp: the division of one life into two: the sharing out of the sad spoils.

‘Shall I leave you this photograph, Ticki?’ He took a quick sideways glance at the first communion face and said, ‘No. You have it.’

‘I’ll leave you this one of us with the Ted Bromleys.’

‘Yes, leave that’ He watched her for a moment laying out her clothes and then he went downstairs. One by one he took out the books and wiped them with a cloth: the Oxford Verse, the Woolfs, the younger poets. Afterwards the shelves were almost empty: his own books took up so little room.

Next day they went to Mass together early. Kneeling together at the Communion rail they seemed to claim that this was not separation. He thought: I’ve prayed for peace and now I’m getting it. It’s terrible the way that prayer is answered. It had better be good, I’ve paid a high enough price for it As they walked back he said anxiously, ‘You are happy?’

‘Yes, Ticki, and you?’

‘I’m happy as long as you are happy.’

‘It will be all right when I’ve got on board and settled down. I expect I shall drink a bit tonight Why don’t you have someone in, Ticki?’

‘Oh, I prefer being alone.’

‘Write to me every week.’

‘Of course.’

‘And Ticki, you won’t be lazy about Mass? You’ll go when I’m not there?’

‘Of course.’

Wilson came up the road. His face shone with sweat and anxiety. He said, ‘Are you really off? Ali told me at the house that you are going on board this afternoon.’ ‘She’s off,’ Scobie said. ‘You never told me it was close like this.’

‘I forgot,’ Louise said, ‘there was so much to do.’ ‘I never thought you’d really go. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t run into Halifax at the agent’s.’

‘Oh well,’ Louise said, ‘you and Henry will have to keep an eye on each other.’

‘It’s incredible,’ Wilson said, kicking the dusty road. He hung there, between them and the house, not stirring to let them by. He said, ‘I don’t know a soul but you - and Harris of course.’

‘You’ll have to start making acquaintances,’ Louise said. ‘You’ll have to excuse us now. There’s so much to do.’

They walked round him because he didn’t move, and Scobie, looking back, gave him a kindly wave - he looked so lost and unprotected and out of place on the blistered road. ‘Poor Wilson,’ he said, ‘I think he’s in love with you.’

‘He thinks he is.’

‘It’s a good thing for him you are going. People like that become a nuisance in this climate. I’ll be kind to him while you are away.’

‘Ticki,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t see too much of him. I wouldn’t trust him. There’s something phoney about him.’

‘He’s young and romantic.’

‘He’s too romantic. He tells lies. Why does he say he doesn’t know a soul?’

‘I don’t think he does.’

‘He knows the Commissioner. I saw him going up there the other night at dinner-time.’

‘It’s just a way of talking.’

Neither of them had any appetite for lunch, but the cook, who wanted to rise to the occasion, produced an enormous curry which filled a washing-basin in the middle of the table: round it were ranged (he many small dishes that went with it -the fried bananas, red peppers, ground nuts, paw paw, orange-slices, chutney. They seemed to be sitting miles apart separated by a waste of dishes. The food chilled on their plates and there seemed nothing to talk about except, ‘I’m not hungry,’ ‘Try and eat a little,’ ‘I can’t touch a thing,’ ‘You ought to start off with a good meal,’ an endless friendly bicker about food. Ali came in and out to watch them: he was like a figure on a clock that records the striking of the hours. It seemed horrible to both of them that now they would be glad when the separation was complete; they could settle down when once this ragged leave-taking was over, to a different life which again would exclude change.

‘Are you sure you’ve got everything?’ This was another variant which enabled them to sit there not eating but occasionally picking at something easily swallowed, going through all the things that might have been forgotten.

‘It’s lucky there’s only one bedroom. They’ll have to let you keep the house to yourself.’ ‘They may turn me out for a married couple.’ ‘You’ll write every week?’ ‘Of course.’

Sufficient time had elapsed: they could persuade themselves that they had lunched. ‘If you can’t eat any more I may as well drive you down. The sergeant’s organized carriers at the wharf.’ They could say nothing now which wasn’t formal; unreality cloaked their movements. Although they could touch each other it was as if the whole coastline of a continent was already between them; their words were like the stilted sentences of a bad letter-writer.

It was a relief to be on board and no longer alone together. Halifax, of the Public Works Department, bubbled over with false bonhomie. He cracked risky jokes: and told the two women to drink plenty of gin. ‘It’s good for the bow-wows,’ he said. ‘First thing to go wrong on board ship are the bowwows. Plenty of gin at night and what will cover a sixpence in the morning.’ The two women took stock of their cabin. They stood there in the shadow like cave-dwellers; they spoke in undertones that the men couldn’t catch: they were no longer wives - they were sisters belonging to a different race. ‘You and I are not wanted, old man,’ Halifax said. ‘They’ll be all right now. Me for the shore.’

‘I’ll come with you.’ Everything had been unreal, but this suddenly was real pain, the moment of death. Like a prisoner he had not believed in the trial: it had been a dream: the condemnation had been a dream and the truck ride, and then suddenly here he was with his back to the blank wall and everything was true. One steeled oneself to end courageously. They went to the end of the passage, leaving the Halifaxes the cabin.

‘Good-bye, dear.’

‘Good-bye. Ticki, you’ll write every ...’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘I’m an awful deserter.’

‘No, no. This isn’t the place for you.’

‘It would have been different if they’d made you Commissioner.’

‘I’ll come down for my leave. Let me know if you run short of money before then. I can fix things.’

‘You’ve always fixed things for me. Ticki, you’ll be glad to have no more scenes.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Do you love me, Ticki?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Say it. One likes to hear it - even if it isn’t true.’

‘I love you, Louise. Of course it’s true.’

‘If I can’t bear it down there alone, Ticki, I’ll come back.’

They kissed and went up on deck. From here the port was always beautiful; the thin layer of houses sparkled in the sun like quartz or lay in the shadow of the great green swollen hills. ‘You are well escorted,’ Scobie said. The destroyers and the corvettes sat around like dogs: signal flags rippled and a helio flashed. The fishing boats rested on the broad bay under their brown butterfly sails. ‘Look after yourself, Ticki.’

Halifax came booming up behind them. ‘Who’s for shore? Got the police launch, Scobie? Mary’s down in the cabin, Mrs Scobie, wiping off the tears and putting on the powder for the passengers.’

‘Good-bye, dear.’

‘Good-bye.’ That was the real good-bye, the handshake with Halifax watching and the passengers from England looking curiously on. As the launch moved away she was almost at once indistinguishable; perhaps she had gone down to the cabin to join Mrs Halifax. The dream had finished: change was over: life had begun again.

‘I hate these good-byes,’ Halifax said. ‘Glad when it’s all over. Think I’ll go up to the Bedford and have a glass of beer. Join me?’

‘Sorry. I have to go on duty.’

‘I wouldn’t mind a nice little black girl to look after me now I’m alone,’ Halifax said. ‘However, faithful and true, old fidelity, that’s me,’ and as Scobie knew, it was.

In the shade of a tarpaulined dump Wilson stood, looking out across the bay. Scobie paused. He was touched by the plump sad boyish face. ‘Sorry we didn’t see you,’ he said and lied harmlessly. ‘Louise sent her love.’

It was nearly one in the morning before he returned. The light was out in the kitchen quarters and Ali was dozing on the steps of the house until the headlamps woke

him, passing across his sleeping face. He jumped up and lit the way from the garage with his torch.

‘All right, Ali. Go to bed.’

He let himself into the empty house - he had forgotten the deep tones of silence. Many a time he had come in late, after Louise was asleep, but there had never then been quite this quality of security and impregnability in the silence: his ears had listened for, even though they could not catch, the faint rustle of another person’s breath, the tiny movement. Now there was nothing to listen for. He went upstairs and looked into the bedroom. Everything had been tidied away; there was no sign of Louise’s departure or presence: Ali had even removed the photograph and put it in a drawer. He was indeed alone. In the bathroom a rat moved, and once the iron roof crumpled as a late vulture settled for the night.

Scobie sat down in the living-room and put his feet upon another chair. He felt unwilling yet to go to bed, but he was sleepy - it had been a long day. Now that he was alone he could indulge in the most irrational act and sleep in a chair instead of a bed. The sadness was peeling off his mind, leaving contentment. He had done his duty: Louise was happy. He closed his eyes.

The sound of a car driving in off the road, headlamps moving across the window, woke him. He imagined it was a police car - that night he was the responsible officer and he thought that some urgent and probably unnecessary telegram had come in. He opened the door and found Yusef on the step. ‘Forgive me, Major Scobie, I saw your light as I was passing, and I thought...’

‘Come in,’ he said, ‘I have whisky or would you prefer a little beer ...?’

Yusef said with surprise, ‘This is very hospitable of you, Major Scobie.’

‘If I know a man well enough to borrow money from him, surely I ought to be hospitable.’

‘A little beer then, Major Scobie.’

‘The Prophet doesn’t forbid it?’

‘The Prophet had no experience of bottled beer or whisky. Major Scobie. We have to interpret his words in the modern light.’ He watched Scobie take the bottles from the ice chest ‘Have you no refrigerator, Major Scobie?’

‘No. Mine’s waiting for a spare part - it will go on waiting till the end of the war, I imagine.’

‘I must not allow that. I have several spare refrigerators. Let me send one up to you.’

‘Oh, I can manage all right, Yusef. I’ve managed for two years. So you were passing by.’

‘Well, not exactly. Major Scobie. That was a way of speaking. As a matter of fact I waited until I knew your boys were asleep, and I borrowed a car from a garage. My own car is so well known. And I did not bring a chauffeur. I didn’t want to embarrass you, Major Scobie.’

‘I repeat, Yusef, that I shall never deny knowing a man from whom I have borrowed money.’

‘You do keep harping on that so, Major Scobie. That was just a business transaction. Four per cent is a fair interest. I ask for more only when I have doubt of the security. I wish you would let me send you a refrigerator.’

‘What did you want to see me about?’

‘First, Major Scobie, I wanted to ask after Mrs Scobie. Has she got a comfortable cabin? Is there anything she requires? The ship calls at Lagos, and I could- have anything she needs sent on board there. I would telegraph my agent.’

‘I think she’s quite comfortable.’

‘Next, Major Scobie, I wanted to have a few words with you about diamonds.’

Scobie put two more bottles of beer on the ice. He said slowly and gently, ‘Yusef, I don’t want you to think I am the kind of man who borrows money one day and insults his creditor the next to reassure his ego.’

‘Ego?’

‘Never mind. Self-esteem. What you like. I’m not going to pretend that we haven’t in a way become colleagues in a business, but my duties are strictly confined to paying you four per cent.’

‘I agree, Major Scobie. You have said all this before and I agree. I say again that I am never dreaming to ask you to do one thing for me. I would rather do things for you.’

‘What a queer chap you are, Yusef. I believe you do like me.’

‘Yes, I do like you, Major Scobie.’ Yusef sat on the edge of his chair which cut a sharp edge in his great expanding thighs: he was I’ll at ease in any house but his own. ‘And now may I talk to you about diamonds, Major Scobie?’

‘Fire away then.’

‘You know I think the Government is crazy about diamonds. They waste your time, the time of the Security Police: they send special agents down the coast: we even have one here - you know who, though nobody is supposed to know but the Commissioner: he spends money on every black or poor Syrian who tells him stories. Then he telegraphs it to England and all down the coast. And after all this, do they catch a single diamond?’

‘This has got nothing to do with us, Yusef.’

‘I want to talk to you as a friend, Major Scobie. There are diamonds and diamonds and Syrians and Syrians. You people hunt the wrong men. You want to stop industrial diamonds going to Portugal and then to Germany, or across the border to the Vichy French. But all the time you are chasing people who are not interested in industrial diamonds, people who just want to get a few gem stones in a safe place for when peace comes again.’

‘In other words you? ‘

‘Six times this month police have been into my stores making everything untidy. They will never find any industrial diamonds that way. Only small men are interested in industrial diamonds. Why, for a whole matchbox full of them, you would only get two hundred pounds. I call them gravel collectors,’ he said with contempt

Scobie said slowly, ‘Sooner or later, Yusef, I felt sure that you’d want something out of me. But you are going to get nothing but four per cent. Tomorrow I’m giving a full confidential report of our business arrangement to the Commissioner. Of course he may ask for my resignation, but I don’t think so. He trusts me.’ A memory pricked him. ‘I think he trusts me.’

‘Is that a wise thing to do, Major Scobie?’

‘I think it’s very wise. Any kind of secret between us two would go bad in time.’

‘Just as you like, Major Scobie. But I don’t want anything from you, I promise. I would like to give you things always. You will not take a refrigerator, but I thought you would perhaps take advice, information.’

I’m listening, Yusef.’

‘Tallit’s a small man. He is a Christian. Father Rank and other people go to his house. They say, ‘If there’s such a thing as an honest Syrian, then Tallit’s the man.’ Tallit’s not very successful, and that looks just the same as honesty.’

‘Go on.’

‘Tallit’s cousin is sailing in the next Portuguese boat. His luggage will be searched, of course, and nothing will be found. He will have a parrot with him in a cage. My advice, Major Scobie, is to let Tallit’s cousin go and keep his parrot.’

‘Why let the cousin go?’

‘You do not want to show your hand to Tallit. You can easily say the parrot is suffering from a disease and must stay. He will not dare to make a fuss.’

‘You mean the diamonds are in its crop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has that trick been used before on the Portuguese boats?’

‘Yes.’

‘It looks to me as if well have to buy an aviary.’

‘Will you act on that information, Major Scobie?’

‘You give me information, Yusef. I don’t give you information.’

Yusef nodded and smiled. Raising his bulk with some care he touched Scobie’s sleeve quickly and shyly. ‘You are quite right, Major Scobie. Believe me, I never want to do you any harm at all. I shall be careful and you be careful too, and everything will be all right.’ It was as if they were in a conspiracy together to do no harm: even innocence in Yusef’s hands took on a dubious colour. He said, ‘If you were to say a good word to Tallit sometimes it would be safer. The agent visits him.’

‘I don’t know of any agent.’

‘You are quite right, Major Scobie.’ Yusef hovered like a fat moth on the edge of the light. He said, ‘Perhaps if you were writing one day to Mrs Scobie you would give her my best wishes. Oh no, letters are censored. You cannot do that You could say, perhaps - no, better not. As long as you know, Major Scobie, that you have my best wishes -’ Stumbling on the narrow path, he made for his car. When he had turned on his lights he pressed his face against the glass: it showed up in the illumination of the dashboard, wide, pasty, untrustworthy, sincere. He made a tentative shy sketch of a wave towards Scobie, where he stood alone in the doorway of the quiet and empty house.

BOOK TWO PART ONE

Chapter One

THEY stood on the verandah of the D.C.’s bungalow at Pende and watched the torches move on the other side of the wide passive river. ‘So that’s France,’ Druce said,

using the native term for it.

Mrs Perrot said, ‘Before the war we used to picnic in France.’

Perrot joined them from the bungalow, a drink in either hand: bandy-legged, he wore his mosquito-boots outside his trousers like riding-boots, and gave the impression of having only just got off a horse. ‘Here’s yours, Scobie.’ He said, ‘Of course ye know I find it hard to think of the French as enemies. My family came over with the Huguenots. It makes a difference, ye know.’ His lean long yellow face cut in two by a nose like a wound was all the time arrogantly on the defensive: the importance of Perrot was an article of faith with Perrot -doubters would be repelled, persecuted if he had the chance ... the faith would never cease to be proclaimed.

Scobie said, ‘If they ever joined the Germans, I suppose this is one of the points where they’d attack.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Perrot said, ‘I was moved here in 1939. The Government had a shrewd idea of what was coming. Everything’s prepared, ye know. Where’s the doctor?’

‘I think he’s taking a last look at the beds,’ Mrs Perrot said. ‘You must be thankful your wife’s arrived safely, Major Scobie. Those poor people over there. Forty days in the boats. It shakes one up to think of it.’

‘It’s the damned narrow channel between Dakar and Brazil that does it every time,’ Perrot said.

The doctor came gloomily out on to the verandah.

Everything over the river was still and blank again: the torches were all out. The light burning on the small jetty below the bungalow showed a few feet of dark water sliding by. A piece of wood came out of the dark and floated so slowly through the patch of light that Scobie counted twenty before it went into darkness again.

‘The Froggies haven’t behaved too badly this time,’ Druce said gloomily, picking a mosquito out of his glass.

‘They’ve only brought the women, the old men and the dying,’ the doctor said, pulling at his beard. ‘They could hardly have done less.’

Suddenly like an invasion of insects the voices whined and burred upon the farther bank, Groups of torches moved like fireflies here and there: Scobie, lifting his binoculars, caught a black face momentarily illuminated: a hammock pole: a white arm: an officer’s back. ‘I think they’ve arrived,’ he said. A long line of lights was dancing along the water’s edge. ‘Well,’ Mrs Perrot said, ‘we may as well go in now.’ The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines. Druce exclaimed and struck his hand.

‘Come in,’ Mrs Perrot said. ‘The mosquitoes here are all malarial.’ The windows of the living-room were netted to keep them out; the state air was heavy with the coming rains.

‘The stretchers will be across at six a.m.,’ the doctor said. ‘I think we are all set, Perrot. There’s one case of blackwater and a few cases of fever, but most are just exhaustion - the worst disease of all. It’s what most of us die of in the end.’

‘Scobie and I will see the walking cases,’ Druce said. ‘You’ll have to tell us how much interrogation they can stand, doctor. Your police will look after the carriers, Perrot, I suppose - see that they all go back the way they came.’

‘Of course,’ Perrot said. ‘We’re stripped for action here. Have another drink?’ Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and the organ of the Orpheum Cinema, Clapham, sailed to them over three thousand miles. From across the river the excited voices of the carriers rose and fell. Somebody knocked on the verandah door. Scobie shifted uncomfortably in his chair: the music of the Würlitzer organ moaned and boomed. It seemed to him outrageously immodest. The verandah door opened and Wilson came in.

‘Hello, Wilson,’ Druce said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

‘Mr Wilson’s up to inspect the U.A.C. store,’ Mrs Perrot explained. ‘I hope the rest-house at the store is all right. It’s not often used.’

‘Oh yes, it’s very comfortable,’ Wilson said. ‘Why, Major Scobie, I didn’t expect to see you.’

‘I don’t know why you didn’t,’ Perrot said. ‘I told you he’d be here. Sit down and have a drink.’ Scobie remembered what Louise had once said to him about Wilson - phoney, she had called him. He looked across at Wilson and saw the blush at Perrot’s betrayal fading from the boyish face, and the little wrinkles that gathered round the eyes and gave the lie to his youth.

‘Have you heard from Mrs Scobie, sir?’

‘She arrived safely last week.’

‘I’m glad. I’m so glad.’

‘Well,’ Perrot said, ‘what ‘are the scandals from the big city?’ The words ‘big city’ came out with a sneer - Perrot couldn’t bear the thought that there was a place where people considered themselves important and where he was not regarded. Like a Huguenot imagining Rome, he built up a picture of frivolity, viciousness and corruption. ‘We bushfolk,’ Perrot went heavily on, ‘live very quietly.’ Scobie felt sorry for Mrs Perrot; she had heard these phrases so often: she must have forgotten long ago the time of courtship when she had believed in them. Now she sat close up against the radio with the music turned low listening or pretending to listen to the old Viennese melodies, while her mouth stiffened in the effort to ignore her husband in his familiar part. ‘Well, Scobie, what are our superiors doing in the city?’

‘Oh,’ said Scobie vaguely, watching Mrs Perrot, ‘nothing very much has been happening. People are too busy with the war ...’

‘Oh, yes,’ Perrot said, ‘so many files to turn over in the Secretariat. I’d like to see them growing rice down here. They’d know what work was.’

‘I suppose the greatest excitement recently,’ Wilson said, ‘would be the parrot, sir, wouldn’t it?’

‘Tallit’s parrot?’ Scobie asked.

‘Or Yusef’s according to Tallit,’ Wilson said. ‘Isn’t that right, sir, or have I got the story wrong?’

‘I don’t think well ever know what’s right,’ Scobie said.

‘But what is the story? We’re out of touch with the great world of affairs here. We have only the French to think about’

‘Well, about three weeks ago Tallit’s cousin was leaving for Lisbon on one of the Portuguese ships. We searched his baggage and found nothing, but I’d heard rumours that sometimes diamonds had been smuggled in a bird’s crop, so I kept the parrot back, and sure enough there were about a hundred pounds’ worth of industrial diamonds inside. The ship hadn’t sailed, so we fetched Tallit’s cousin back on shore. It seemed a perfect case.’

‘But it wasn’t?’

‘You can’t beat a Syrian,’ the doctor said.

‘Tallit’s cousin’s boy swore that it wasn’t Tallit’s cousin’s parrot - and so of course did Tallit’s cousin. Their story was that the small boy had substituted another bird to frame Tallit.’

‘On behalf of Yusef, I suppose,’ the doctor said.

‘Of course. The trouble was the small boy disappeared. Of course there are two explanations of that - perhaps Yusef had given him his money and he’d cleared off, or just as possibly Tallit had given him money to throw the blame on Yusef.’

‘Down here,’ Perrot said, ‘I’d have had ‘em both in jail.’

‘Up in town,’ Scobie said, ‘we have to think about the law.’

Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and a voice shouted with unexpected vigour, ‘Kick him in the pants.’

‘I’m for bed,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.’

Sitting up in bed under his mosquito-net Scobie opened his diary. Night after night for more years than he could remember he had kept a record - the barest possible record - of his days. If anyone argued a date with him he could check up; if he wanted to know which day the rains had begun in any particular year, when the last but one Director of Public Works had been transferred to East Africa, the facts were all there, in one of the volumes stored in the tin box under his bed at home. Otherwise he never opened a volume - particularly that volume where the barest fact of all was contained - C. died. He couldn’t have told himself why he stored up this record - it was certainly not for posterity. Even if posterity were to be interested in the life of an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony, it would have learned nothing from these cryptic entries. Perhaps the reason was that forty years ago at a preparatory school he had been given a prize - a copy of Allan Quatermain - for keeping a diary throughout one summer holiday, and the habit had simply stayed. Even the form the diary took had altered very little. Had sausages for breakfast. Fine day. Walk in morning. Riding lesson in afternoon. Chicken for lunch. Treacle roll. Almost imperceptibly this record had changed into Louise left. Y. called in the

evening. First typhoon 2 a.m. His pen was powerless to convey the importance of any entry: only he himself, if he had cared to read back, could have seen in the last phrase but one the enormous breach pity had blasted through his integrity. Y. not Yusef.

Scobie wrote: May 5. Arrived Pende to meet survivors of s.s. 43 (he used the code number for security). Druce with me. He hesitated for a moment and then added, Wilson here. He closed the diary, and lying flat on his back under the net he began to pray. This also was a habit. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and then, as sleep began to clog his lids, he added an act of contrition. It was a formality, not because he felt himself free from serious sin but because it had never occurred to him that his life was important enough one way or another. He didn’t drink, he didn’t fornicate, he didn’t even lie, but he never regarded this absence of sin as virtue. When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I missed Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did - that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered. ‘O God, bless -’ but before he could mention names he was asleep.

They stood on the jetty next morning: the first light lay in cold strips along the eastern sky. The huts in the village were still shuttered with silver. At two that morning there had been a typhoon - a wheeling pillar of black cloud driving up from the coast, and the air was cold yet with the rain. They stood with coat-collars turned up watching the French shore, and the carriers squatted on the ground behind them. Mrs Perrot came down the path from the bungalow wiping the white sleep from her eyes, and from across the water very faintly came the bleating of a goat. ‘Are they late?’ Mrs Perrot asked.

‘No, we are early.’ Scobie kept his glasses focused on the opposite shore. He said, ‘They are stirring.’

‘Those poor souls,’ Mrs Perrot said, and shivered with the morning chill.

‘They are alive,’ the doctor said.

‘Yes.’

‘In my profession we have to consider that important.’

‘Does one ever get over a shock like that? Forty days in open boats.’

‘If you survive at all,’ the doctor said, ‘you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of success.’

‘They are fetching them out of the huts,’ Scobie said. ‘I think I can count six stretchers. The boats are being brought in.’

‘We were told to prepare for nine stretcher cases and four walking ones,’ the doctor said. ‘I suppose there’ve been some more deaths.’

‘I may have counted wrong. They are carrying them down now. I think there are seven stretchers. I can’t distinguish the walking cases.’

The flat cold light, too feeble to clear the morning haze, made the distance across the river longer than it would seem at noon. A native dugout canoe bearing, one supposed, the walking cases came blackly out of the haze: it was suddenly very close to them. On the other shore they were having trouble with the motor of a launch; they could hear the irregular putter, like an animal out of breath.

First of the walking cases to come on shore was an elderly man with an arm in a sling. He wore a dirty white topee and a native cloth was draped over his shoulders; his free hand tugged and scratched at the white stubble on his face. He said in an unmistakably Scottish accent, ‘Ah’m Loder, chief engineer.’

‘Welcome home, Mr Loder,’ Scobie said. ‘Will you step up to the bungalow and the doctor will be with you in a few minutes?’

‘Ah have no need of doctors.’

‘Sit down and rest. I’ll be with you soon.’

‘Ah want to make ma report to a proper official.’

‘Would you take him up to the house, Perrot?’

‘I’m the District Commissioner,’ Perrot said. ‘You can make your report to me.’

‘What are we waitin’ for then?’ the engineer said. ‘It’s nearly two months since the sinkin’. There’s an awful lot of responsibility on me, for the captain’s dead.’ As they moved up the hill to the bungalow, the persistent Scottish voice, as regular as the pulse of a dynamo, came back to them. ‘Ah’m responsible to the owners.’

The other three had come on shore, and across the river the tinkering in the launch went on: the sharp crack of a chisel, the clank of metal, and then again the spasmodic putter. Two of the new arrivals were the cannon fodder of all such occasions: elderly men with the appearance of plumbers who might have been brothers if they had not been called Forbes and Newall, uncomplaining men without authority, to whom things simply happened. One had a crushed foot and walked with a crutch; the other had his hand bound up with shabby strips of tropical shirt. They stood on the jetty with as natural a lack of interest as they would have stood at a Liverpool street corner waiting for the local to open. A stalwart grey-headed woman in mosquito-boots followed them out of the canoe.

‘Your name, madam?’ Druce asked, consulting a list. ‘Are you Mrs Rolt?’

‘I am not Mrs Rolt. I am Miss Malcott.’

‘Will you go up to the house? The doctor...’

‘The doctor has far more serious cases than me to attend to.’

Mrs Perrot said, ‘You’d like to lie down.’

‘It’s the last thing I want to do,’ Miss Malcott said. ‘I am not in the least tired.’ She shut her mouth between every sentence. ‘ I am not hungry. I am not nervous. I want to get on.’

‘Where to?’

‘To Lagos. To the Educational Department.’

‘I’m afraid there will be a good many delays.’

‘I’ve been delayed two months. I can’t stand delay. Work won’t wait.’ Suddenly she lifted her face towards the sky and howled like a dog.

The doctor took her gently by the arm and said, ‘Well do what we can to get you there right away. Come up to the house and do some telephoning.’

‘Certainly,’ Miss Malcott said, ‘there’s nothing that can’t be straightened on a telephone.’

The doctor said to Scobie, ‘Send those other two chaps up after us. They are all right. If you want to do some questioning, question them.’

Druce said, ‘I’ll take them along. You stay here, Scobie, in case the launch arrives. French isn’t my language.’

Scobie sat down on the rail of the jetty and looked across the water. Now that the haze was lifting the other bank came closer; he could make out now with the naked eye the details of the scene: the white warehouse, the mud huts, the brass-work of the launch glittering in the sun: he could see the red fezzes of the native troops. He thought: Just such a scene as this and I might have been waiting for Louise to appear on a stretcher - or perhaps not waiting. Somebody settled himself on the rail beside him, but Scobie didn’t turn his head.

‘A penny for your thoughts, sir.’

‘I was just thinking that Louise is safe, Wilson.’

‘I was thinking that too, sir.’

‘Why do you always call me sir, Wilson? You are not in the police force. It makes me feel very old.’

‘I’m sorry, Major Scobie.’

‘What did Louise call you?’

‘Wilson. I don’t think she liked my Christian name.’

‘I believe they’ve got that launch to start at last, Wilson. Be a good chap and warn the doctor.’

A French officer in a stained white uniform stood in the bow: a soldier flung a rope and Scobie caught and fixed it ‘Bon jour,’ he said, and saluted.

The French officer returned his salute - a drained-out figure with a twitch in the left eyelid. He said in English, ‘Good morning. I have seven stretcher cases for you here.’

‘My signal says nine.’

‘One died on the way and one last night. One from black-water and one from - from, my English is bad, do you say fatigue?’

‘Exhaustion.’

‘That is it.’

‘If you will let my labourers come on board they will get the stretchers off.’ Scobie said to the carriers, ‘Very softly. Go very softly.’ It was an unnecessary command: no white hospital attendants could lift and carry more gently. ‘Won’t you stretch your legs on shore?’ Scobie asked, ‘or come up to the house and have some coffee?’

‘No. No coffee, thank you. I will just see that all is right here.’ He was courteous and unapproachable, but all the time his left eyelid flickered a message of doubt and distress.

‘I have some English papers if you would like to see them.’

‘No, no, thank you. I read English with difficulty.’

‘You speak it very well.’

‘That is a different thing.’

‘Have a cigarette?’

‘Thank you, no. I do not like American tobacco.’

The first stretcher came on shore - the sheets were drawn up to the man’s chin and it was impossible to tell from the stiff vacant face what his age might be. The doctor came down the hill to meet the stretcher and led the carriers away to the Government rest-house where the beds had been prepared.

‘I used to come over to your side,’ Scobie said, ‘to shoot with your police chief. A nice fellow called Durand -a Norman.’

‘He is not here any longer,’ the officer said

‘Gone home?’

‘He’s in prison at Dakar,’ the French officer replied, standing like a figure-head in the bows, but the eye twitching and twitching. The stretchers slowly passed Scobie and turned up the hill: a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten with a feverish face and a twig-like arm thrown out from his blanket: an old lady with grey hair falling every way who twisted and turned and whispered: a man with a bottle nose - a knob of scarlet and blue on a yellow face. One by one they turned up the hill - the carriers’ feet moving with the certainty of mules. ‘And Père Brûle?’ Scobie asked. ‘He was a good man.’

‘He died last year of blackwater.’

‘He was out here twenty years without leave, wasn’t he? He’ll be hard to replace.’

‘He has not been replaced,’ the officer said. He turned and gave a short savage order to one of his men. Scobie looked at the next stretcher load and looked away again. A small girl -she couldn’t have been more than six-lay on it. She was deeply and unhealthily asleep; her fair hair was tangled and wet with sweat; her open mouth was dry and cracked, and she shuddered regularly and spasmodically. ‘It’s terrible,’ Scobie said.

‘What is terrible?’

‘A child like that.’

‘Yes. Both parents were lost. But it is all right. She will die.’

Scobie watched the bearers go slowly up the hill, their bare feet very gently flapping the ground. He thought: It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that Not that the child would die - that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different; but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat - that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God.

And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.

The officer said gloomily, ‘Of course they looked after her on the boat. They gave up their own share of the water often. It was foolish, of course, but one cannot always be logical. And it gave them something to think about.’ It was like the hint of an explanation - too faint to be grasped. He said, ‘Here is another who makes one angry.’

The face was ugly with exhaustion: the skin looked as though it were about to crack over the cheek-bones: only the absence of lines showed that it was a young face. The French officer said, ‘She was just married - before she sailed. Her husband was lost. Her passport says she is nineteen. She may live. You see, she still has some strength.’ Her arms as thin as a child’s lay outside the blanket, and her fingers clasped a book firmly. Scobie could see the wedding-ring loose on her dried-up finger.

‘What is it?’

‘Timbres,’ the French officer said. He added bitterly, ‘When this damned war started, she must have been still at school.’

Scobie always remembered how she was carried into his life on a stretcher grasping a stamp-album with her eyes fast shut.

In the evening they gathered together again for drinks, but they were subdued. Even Perrot was no longer trying to impress them. Druce said, ‘Well, tomorrow I’m off.

You coming, Scobie?’

‘I suppose so.’

Mrs Perrot said, ‘You got all you wanted?’

‘All I needed. That chief engineer was a good fellow. He had it ready in his head. I could hardly write fast enough. When he stopped he went flat out. That was what was keeping him together - ‘ma responsibility’. You know they’d walked - the ones that could walk - five days to get here.’

Wilson said, ‘Were they sailing without an escort?’

‘They started out in convoy, but they had some engine trouble - and you know the rule of the road nowadays: no waiting for lame ducks. They were twelve hours behind the convoy and were trying to pick up when they were sniped. The submarine commander surfaced and gave them direction. He said he would have given them a tow, but there was a naval patrol out looking for him. You see, you can really blame nobody for this sort of thing,’ and this sort of thing came at once to Scobie’s mind’s eye - the child with the open mouth, the thin hands holding the stamp-album. He said, ‘I suppose the doctor will look in when he gets a chance?’

He went restlessly out on to the verandah, closing the netted door carefully behind him, and a mosquito immediately droned towards his ear. The skirring went on all the time, but when they drove to the attack they had the deeper tone of dive-bombers. The lights were showing in the temporary hospital, and the weight of that misery lay on his shoulders. It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but that was no comfort, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognized his responsibility. In the Cities of the Plain a single soul might have changed the mind of God.

The doctor came up the steps on to the verandah. ‘Hallo, Scobie,’ he said in a voice as bowed as his shoulders, ‘taking the night air? It’s not healthy in this place.’

‘How are they?’ Scobie asked.

‘There’ll be only two more deaths, I think. Perhaps only one.’

‘The child?’

‘Shell be dead by morning,’ the doctor said abruptly.

‘Is she conscious?’

‘Never completely. She asks for her father sometimes: she probably thinks she’s in the boat still. They’d kept it from her there - said her parents were in one of the other boats. But of course they’d signalled to check up.’

‘Won’t she take you for her father?’

‘No, she won’t accept the beard.’

Scobie said, ‘How’s the school teacher?’

‘Miss Malcott? She’ll be all right. I’ve given her enough bromide to put her out of action till morning. That’s all she needs -and the sense of getting somewhere. You haven’t got room for her in your police van, have you? She’d be better out of here.’

‘There’s only just room for Druce and me with our boys and kit. We’ll be sending proper transport as soon as we get back. The walking cases all right?’

‘Yes, they’ll manage.’

‘The boy and the old lady?’

‘They’ll pull through.’

‘Who is the boy?’

‘He was at a prep. school in England. His parents in South Africa thought he’d be safer with them.’

Scobie said reluctantly, ‘That young woman - with the stamp-album?’ It was the stamp-album and not the face that haunted his memory for no reason that he could understand, and the wedding-ring loose on the finger, as though a child had dressed up.

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said. ‘If she gets through tonight - perhaps -’

‘You’re dead tired, aren’t you? Go in and have a drink.’

‘Yes. I don’t want to be eaten by mosquitoes.’ The doctor opened the verandah door, and a mosquito struck at Scobie’s neck. He didn’t bother to guard himself. Slowly, hesitatingly, he retraced the route the doctor had taken, down the steps on to the tough rocky ground. The loose stones turned under his boots. He thought of Pemberton. What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery. He had cut down his own needs to a minimum, photographs were put away in drawers, the dead were put out of mind: a razor-strop, a pair of rusty handcuffs for decoration. But one still has one’s eyes, he thought, one’s ears. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

‘Well, Major Scobie?’ It was the wife of the local missionary speaking to him. She was dressed in white like a nurse, and her flint-grey hair lay back from her forehead in ridges like wind erosion. ‘Have you come to look on?’ she asked forbiddingly.

‘Yes,’ he said. He had no other idea of what to say: he couldn’t describe to Mrs Bowles the restlessness, the haunting images, the terrible impotent feeling of responsibility and pity.

‘Come inside,’ Mrs Bowles said, and he followed her obediently like a boy. There were three rooms in the rest-house. In the first the walking cases had been put: heavily dosed they slept peacefully, as though they had been taking healthy exercise. In the second room were the stretcher cases for whom there was reasonable hope. The third room was a small one and contained only two beds divided by a screen: the six-year-old girl with the dry mouth, the young woman lying unconscious on her back, still grasping the stamp-album. A night-light burned in a saucer and cast thin shadows between the beds. ‘If you want to be useful,’ Mrs Bowles said, ‘stay here a moment. I want to go to the dispensary.’

‘The dispensary?’

‘The cook-house. One has to make the best of things.’

Scobie felt cold and strange. A shiver moved his shoulders. He said, ‘Can’t I go for you?’

Mrs Bowles said, ‘Don’t be absurd. Are you qualified to dispense? I’ll only be away a few minutes. If the child shows signs of going call me.’ If she had given him time, he would have thought of some excuse, but she was already out of the room and he sat heavily down in the only chair. When he looked at the child, he saw a white communion veil over her head: it was a trick of the light on the mosquito net and a trick of his own mind. He put his head in his hands and wouldn’t look. He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion. He prayed silently into his hands, ‘O God, don’t let anything happen before Mrs Bowles comes back.’ He could hear the heavy uneven breathing of the child. It was as if she were carrying a weight with great effort up a long hill: it was an inhuman situation not to be able to carry it for her. He thought: this is what parents feel year in and year out, and I am shrinking from a few minutes of it. They see their children dying slowly every hour they live. He prayed again, ‘Father, look after her. Give her peace.’ The breathing broke, choked, began again with terrible effort. Looking between his fingers he could see the six-year-old face convulsed like a navvy’s with labour. ‘Father,’ he prayed, ‘give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace.’ The sweat broke out on his hands. ‘Father ...’

He heard a small scraping voice repeat, ‘Father,’ and looking up he saw the blue and bloodshot eyes watching him. He thought with horror: this is what I thought I’d missed. He would have called Mrs Bowles, only he hadn’t the voice to call with. He could see the breast of the child struggling for breath to repeat the heavy word; he came over to the bed and said, ‘Yes, dear. Don’t speak, I’m here.’ The night-light cast the shadow of his clenched fist on the sheet and it caught the child’s eye. An effort to laugh convulsed her, and he moved his hand away. ‘Sleep, dear,’ he said, ‘you are sleepy. Sleep.’ A memory that he had carefully buried returned and taking out his handkerchief he made the shadow of a rabbit’s head fall on the pillow beside her. ‘There’s your rabbit,’ he said, ‘to go to sleep with. It will stay until you sleep. Sleep.’ This sweat poured down his face and tasted in his mouth as salt as tears. ‘Sleep.’ He moved the rabbit’s ears up and down, up and down. Then he heard Mrs Bowles’s voice, speaking low just behind him. ‘Stop that,’ she said harshly, ‘the child’s dead.’

In the morning he told the doctor that he would stay till proper transport arrived: Miss Malcott could have his place in the police van. It was better to get her moving, for the child’s death had upset her again, and it was by no means certain that there would not be other deaths. They buried the child next day, using the only coffin they could get: it had been designed for a tall man. In this climate delay was unwise. Scobie did not attend the funeral service which was read by Mr Bowles, but the Perrots were present, Wilson and some of the court messengers: the doctor was busy in the rest-house. Instead, Scobie walked rapidly through the rice-fields, talked to the agricultural officer about irrigation, kept away. Later, when he had exhausted the possibilities of irrigation, he went into the store and sat in the dark among all the tins, the tinned jams and the tinned soups, the tinned butter, the tinned biscuits, the tinned milk, the tinned potatoes, the tinned chocolates, and waited for Wilson. But Wilson didn’t come: perhaps the funeral had been too much for all of them, and they had returned to the D.C.’s bungalow for drinks. Scobie went down to the jetty and watched the sailing boats move down towards the sea. Once he found himself saying aloud as though to a man at his elbow, ‘Why didn’t you let her drown?’ A court messenger looked at him askance and he moved on, up the hill.

Mrs Bowles was taking the air outside the rest-house: taking it literally, in doses like medicine. She stood there with her mouth opening and closing, inhaling and expelling. She said, ‘Good afternoon,’ stiffly, and took another dose. ‘You weren’t at the funeral, major?’

‘No.’

‘Mr Bowles and I can seldom attend a funeral together. Except when we’re on leave.’

‘Are there going to be any more funerals?’

‘One more, I think. The rest will be all right in time.’

‘Which of them is dying?’

‘The old lady. She took a turn for the worse last night. She had been getting on well.’

He felt a merciless relief. He said, ‘The boy’s all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Mrs Rolt?’

‘She’s not out of danger, but I think she’ll do. She’s conscious now.’

‘Does she know her husband’s dead?’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Bowles began to swing her arms, up and down, from the shoulder. Then she stood on tip-toe six times. He said, ‘I wish there was something I could do to help.’

‘Can you read aloud?’ Mrs Bowles asked, rising on her toes.

‘I suppose so. Yes.’

‘You can read to the boy. He’s getting bored and boredom’s bad for him.’

‘Where shall I find a book?’

‘There are plenty at the Mission. Shelves of them.’

Anything was better than doing nothing. He walked up to the Mission and found, as Mrs Bowles said, plenty of books. He wasn’t much used to books, but even to his eye these hardly seemed a bright collection for reading to a sick boy. Damp-stained and late Victorian, the bindings bore titles like Twenty Years in the Mission Field, Lost and Found, The Narrow Way, The Missionary’s Warning. Obviously at some time there had been an appeal for books for the Mission library, and

here were the scrapings of many pious shelves at home. The Poems of John Oxenham, Fishers of Men. He took a book at random out of the shelf and returned to the

rest-house. Mrs Bowles was in her dispensary mixing medicines.

‘Found something?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are safe with any of those books,’ Mrs Bowles said. ‘They are censored by the committee before they come out. Sometimes people try to send the most

unsuitable books. We are not teaching the children here to read in order that they shall read -well, novels.’ ‘No, I suppose not.’ ‘Let me see what you’ve chosen.’

He looked at the title himself for the first time: A Bishop among the Bantus.

‘That should be interesting,’ Mrs Bowles said. He agreed doubtfully.

‘You blow where to find him. You can read to him for a quarter of an hour - not more.’

The old lady had been moved into the innermost room where the child had died, the man with the bottle-nose had been shifted into what Mrs Bowles now called the convalescence ward, so that the middle room could be given up to the boy and Mrs Rolt. Mrs Rolt lay facing the wall with her eyes closed. They had apparently succeeded in removing the album from her clutch and it lay on a chair beside the bed. The boy watched Scobie with the bright intelligent gaze of fever.

‘My name’s Scobie. What’s yours?’

‘Fisher.’

Scobie said nervously, ‘Mrs Bowles asked me to read to you.’

‘What are you? A soldier?’

‘No, a policeman.’

‘Is it a murder story?’

‘No. I don’t think it is.’ He opened the book at random and came on a photograph of the bishop sitting in his robes on a hard drawing-room chair outside a little tin-roofed church: he was surrounded by Bantus, who grinned at the camera.

‘I’d like a murder story. Have you ever been in a murder?’

‘Not what you’d call a real murder with clues and a chase.’

‘What sort of a murder then?’

‘Well, people get stabbed sometimes fighting.’ He spoke in a low voice so as not to disturb Mrs Rolt. She lay with her fist clenched on the sheet - a fist not much bigger than a tennis ball.

‘What’s the name of the book you’ve brought? Perhaps I’ve read it. I read Treasure Island on the boat. I wouldn’t mind a pirate story. What’s it called?’

Scobie said dubiously, ‘A Bishop among the Bantus’, ‘What does that mean?’

Scobie drew a long breath. ‘Well, you see, Bishop is the name of the hero.’

‘But you said a Bishop.’

‘Yes. His name was Arthur.’

‘It’s a soppy name.’

‘Yes, but he’s a soppy hero.’ Suddenly, avoiding the boy’s eyes, he noticed that Mrs Rolt was not asleep: she was staring at the wall, listening. He went wildly on, ‘The real heroes are the Bantus.’

‘What are Bantus?’

‘They were a peculiarly ferocious lot of pirates who haunted the West Indies and preyed on all the shipping in that part of the Atlantic.’

‘Does Arthur Bishop pursue them?’

‘Yes. It’s a kind of detective story too because he’s a secret agent of the British Government. He dresses up as an ordinary seaman and sails on a merchantman so that he can be captured by the Bantus. You know they always give the ordinary seamen a chance to join them. If he’d been an officer they would have made him walk the plank. Then he discovers all their secret passwords and hiding-places and their plans of raids, of course, so that he can betray them when the time is ripe.’

‘He sounds a bit of a swine,’ the boy said.

‘Yes, and he falls in love with the daughter of the captain of the Bantus and that’s when he turns soppy. But that comes near the end and we won’t get as far as that. There are a lot of fights and murders before then.’

‘It sounds all right. Let’s begin.’

‘Well, you see, Mrs Bowles told me I was only to stay a short time today, so I’ve just told you about the book, and we can start it tomorrow.’

‘You may not be here tomorrow. There may be a murder or something.’

‘But the book will be here. I’ll leave it with Mrs Bowles. It’s her book. Of course it may sound a bit different when she reads it’

‘Just begin it,’ the boy pleaded.

‘Yes, begin it,’ said a low voice from the other bed, so low ‘ that he would have discounted it as an illusion if he hadn’t looked up and seen her watching him, the eyes large as a child’s in the starved face. Scobie said, ‘I’m a very bad reader.’

‘Go on,’ the boy said impatiently. ‘Anyone can read aloud.’

Scobie found his eyes fixed on an opening paragraph which stated, I shall never forget my first glimpse of the continent where I was to labour for thirty of the best years of my life. He said slowly, ‘From the moment that they left Bermuda the low lean rakehelly craft had followed in their wake. The captain was evidently worried, for he watched the strange ship continually through his spyglass. When night fell it was still on their trail, and at dawn it was the first sight that met their eyes. Can it be, Arthur Bishop wondered, that I am about to meet the object of my quest, Blackboard, the leader of the Bantus himself, or his blood-thirsty lieutenant ...’ He turned a page and was temporarily put out by a portrait of the bishop in whites with a clerical collar and a topee, standing before a wicket and blocking a ball a Bantu had just bowled him.

‘Go on,’ the boy said.

‘... Batty Davis, so called because of his insane rages when he would send a whole ship’s crew to the plank? It was evident that Captain Duller feared the worst, for he crowded on all canvas and it seemed for a time that he would show the strange ship a clean pair of heels. Suddenly over the water came the boom of a gun, and a cannon-ball struck the water twenty yards ahead of them. Captain Buller had his glass to his eye and called down from the bridge to Arthur Bishop, ‘The jolly Roger, by God.’ He was the only one of the ship’s company who knew the secret of Arthur’s strange quest.’

Mrs Bowles came briskly in. ‘There, that will do. Quite enough for the day. And what’s he been reading you, Jimmy?’

‘Bishop among the Bantus.’

‘I hope you enjoyed it’

‘It’s wizard.’

‘You’re a very sensible boy,’ Mrs Bowles said approvingly.

‘Thank you,’ a voice said from the other bed and Scobie turned again reluctantly to take in the young devastated face. ‘Will you read again tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry Major Scobie, Helen,’ Mrs Bowles rebuked her. ‘He’s got to get back to the port. They’ll all be murdering each other without him.’

‘You a policeman?’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew a policeman once - in our town -’ the voice trailed off into sleep. He stood a minute looking down at her face. Like a fortune-teller’s cards it showed unmistakably the past -a voyage, a loss, a sickness. In the next deal perhaps it would be possible to see the future. He took up the stamp-album and opened it at the flyleaf: it was inscribed, ‘Helen, from her loving father on her fourteenth birthday.’ Then it fell open at Paraguay, full of the decorative images of parakeets - the kind of picture stamps a child collects. ‘Well have to find her some new stamps,’ he said sadly.

Wilson was waiting for him outside. He said, ‘I’ve been looking for you, Major Scobie, ever since the funeral.’

‘I’ve been doing good works,’ Scobie said.

‘How’s Mrs Rolt?’

‘They think she’ll pull through - and the boy too.’

‘Oh yes, the boy.’ Wilson kicked a loose stone in the path and said, ‘I want your advice, Major Scobie. I’m a bit worried.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know I’ve been down here checking up on our store. Well, I find that our manager has been buying military stuff. There’s a lot of tinned food that never came from our exporters.’

‘Isn’t the answer fairly simple - sack him?’

‘It seems a pity to sack the small thief if he could lead one to the big thief, but of course that’s your job. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’ Wilson paused and that extraordinary tell-tale blush spread over his face. He said, ‘You see, he got the stuff from Yusef s man.’

‘I could have guessed that.’

‘You could?’

‘Yes, but you see, Yusef s man is not the same as Yusef. It’s easy for him to disown a country storekeeper. In fact, for all we know, Yusef may be innocent It’s unlikely, but not impossible. Your own evidence would point to it. After all you’ve only just learned yourself what your storekeeper was doing.’

‘If there were clear evidence,’ Wilson said, ‘would the police prosecute?’

Scobie came to a standstill. ‘What’s that?’

Wilson blushed and mumbled. Then, with a venom that took Scobie completely by surprise, he said, ‘There are rumours going about that Yusef is protected.’

‘You’ve been here long enough to know what rumours are worth.’

‘They are all round the town.’

‘Spread by Tallit - or Yusef himself.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Wilson said. ‘You’ve been very kind to me -and Mrs Scobie has too. I thought you ought to know what’s been said.’

‘I’ve been here fifteen years, Wilson.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Wilson said, ‘this is impertinent. But people are worried about Tallit’s parrot. They say he was framed because Yusef wants him run out of town.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that.’

‘They say that you and Yusef are on visiting terms. It’s a lie, of course, but...’

‘It’s perfectly true. I’m also on visiting terms with the sanitary inspector, but it wouldn’t prevent my prosecuting him ...’ He stopped abruptly. He said, ‘I have no intention of defending myself to you, Wilson.’

Wilson repeated, ‘I just thought you ought to know.’

‘You are too young for your job, Wilson.’

‘My job?’

‘Whatever it is.’

For the second time Wilson took him by surprise, breaking out with a crack in his voice, ‘Oh, you are unbearable. You are too damned honest to live.’ His face was aflame, even his knees seemed to blush with rage, shame, self-depreciation.

‘You ought to wear a hat, Wilson,’ was all Scobie said.

They stood facing each other on the stony path between the D.C.’s bungalow and the rest-house; the light lay flat across the rice-fields below them, and Scobie was conscious of how prominently they were silhouetted to the eyes of any watcher. ‘You sent Louise away,’ Wilson said, ‘because you were afraid of me.’

Scobie laughed gently. ‘This is sun, Wilson, just sun. We’ll forget about it in the morning.’

‘She couldn’t stand your stupid, unintelligent ... you don’t know what a woman like Louise thinks.’

‘I don’t suppose I do. Nobody wants another person to know that, Wilson.’

Wilson said, ‘I kissed her that evening...’

‘It’s the colonial sport, Wilson.’ He hadn’t meant to madden the young man: he was only anxious to let the occasion pass lightly, so that in the morning they could behave naturally to each other. It was just a touch of sun. he told himself; he had seen this happen times out of mind during fifteen years.

Wilson said, ‘She’s too good for you.’

‘For both of us.’

‘How did you get the money to send her away? That’s what I’d like to know. You don’t earn all that. I know. It’s printed in the Colonial Office List.’ If the young man had been less absurd, Scobie might have been angered and they might have ended friends. It was his serenity that stoked the flames. He said now, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow. We’ve all been upset by that child’s death. Come up to the bungalow and have a drink.’ He made to pass Wilson, but Wilson barred the way: a Wilson scarlet in the face with tears in the eyes. It was as if he had gone so far that he realized the only thing to do was to go farther - there was no return the way he had come. He said, ‘Don’t think I haven’t got my eye on you.’

The absurdity of the phrase took Scobie off his guard.

‘You watch your step,’ Wilson said, ‘and Mrs Rolt...’

‘What on earth has Mrs Rolt got to do with it?’

‘Don’t think I don’t know why you’ve stayed behind, haunted the hospital... While we were all at the funeral, you slunk down here ...’

‘You really are crazy, Wilson,’ Scobie said.

Suddenly Wilson sat down; it was if he had been folded up by some large invisible hand He put his head in his hands and wept.

‘It’s the sun,’ Scobie said. ‘Just the sun. Go and lie down,’ and taking off his hat he put it on Wilson’s head. Wilson looked up at him between his fingers - at the man who had seen his tears - with hatred.

Chapter Two

THE sirens were wailing for a total black-out, wailing through the rain which fell interminably; the boys scrambled into the kitchen quarters, and bolted the door as though to protect themselves from some devil of the bush. Without pause the hundred and forty-four inches of water continued their steady and ponderous descent upon the roofs of the port. It was incredible to imagine that any human beings, let alone the dispirited fever-soaked defeated of Vichy territory, would open an assault at this time of the year, and yet of course one remembered the Heights of Abraham ... A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Scobie went out into the dripping darkness holding his big striped umbrella: a mackintosh was too hot to wear. He walked all round his quarters; not a light showed, the shutters of the kitchen were closed, and the Creole houses were invisible behind the rain. A torch gleamed momentarily in the transport park across the road, but, when he shouted, it went out: a coincidence: no one there could have heard his voice above the hammering of the water on the roof. Up in Cape Station the officers’ mess was shining wetly towards the sea, but that was not his responsibility. The headlamps of the military lorries ran like a chain of beads along the edge of the hills, but that too was someone else’s affair.

Up the road behind the transport park a light went suddenly on in one of the Nissen huts where the minor officials lived; it was a hut that had been unoccupied the day before and presumably some visitor had just moved in. Scobie considered getting his car from the garage, but the hut was only a couple of hundred yards away, and he walked. Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens

continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

He knocked on the door of the Nissen hut, loudly because of the blows of the rain on the black roof like a tunnel. He had to knock twice before the door opened. The light for a moment blinded him. He said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you. One of your lights is showing.’

A woman’s voice said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It was careless ...’ His eyes cleared, but for a moment he couldn’t put a name to the intensely remembered features. He knew everyone in the colony. This was something that had come from outside ... a river ... early morning ... a dying child. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s Mrs Rolt, isn’t it? I thought you were in hospital?’

‘Yes. Who are you? Do I know you?’

‘I’m Major Scobie of the police. I saw you at Pende.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember a thing that happened there.’

‘Can I fix your light?’

‘Of course. Please.’ He came in and drew the curtains close and shifted a table lamp. The hut was divided in two by a curtain: on one side a bed, a makeshift dressing-table: on the other a table, a couple of chairs - the few sticks of furniture of the pattern allowed to junior officials with salaries under £500 a year. He said, ‘They haven’t done you very proud, have they? I wish I’d known. I could have helped.’ He took her in closely now: the young worn-out face, with the hair gone dead ... The pyjamas she was wearing were too large for her: the body was lost in them: they fell in ugly folds. He looked to see whether the ring was still loose upon her finger, but it had gone altogether.

‘Everybody’s been very kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter gave me a lovely pouf.’

His eyes wandered: there was nothing personal anywhere: no photographs, no books, no trinkets of any kind, but then he remembered that she had brought nothing out of the sea except herself and a stamp-album.

‘Is there any danger?’ she asked anxiously,

‘Danger?’

‘The sirens.’

‘Oh, none at all. These are just alarms. We get about one a month. Nothing ever happens.’ He took another long look at her. ‘They oughtn’t to have let you out of hospital so soon. It’s not six weeks ...’

‘I wanted to go. I wanted to be alone. People kept on coming to see me.’

‘Well, I’ll be going now myself. Remember if you ever want anything I’m just down the road. The two-storeyed white house beyond the transport park sitting in a swamp.’

‘Won’t you stay till the rain stops?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think I’d better,’ he said. ‘You see, it goes on until September,’ and won out of her a stiff unused smile.

‘The noise is awful.’

‘You get used to it in a few weeks. Like living beside a railway. But you won’t have to. They’ll be sending you home very soon. There’s a boat in a fortnight.’

‘Would you like a drink? Mrs Carter gave me a bottle of gin as well as the pouf.’

‘I’d better help you to drink it then.’ He noticed when she produced the bottle that nearly half had gone. ‘Have you any limes?’

‘No.’

‘They’ve given you a boy, I suppose?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know what to ask him for. And he never seems to be around.’

‘You’ve been drinking it neat?’

‘Oh no, I haven’t touched it. The boy upset it - that was his story.’

‘I’ll talk to your boy in the morning,’ Scobie said. ‘Got an ice-box?’

‘Yes, but the boy can’t get me any ice.’ She sat weakly down in a chair. ‘Don’t think me a fool. I just don’t know where I am. I’ve never been anywhere like this.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Bury St Edmunds. In Suffolk. I was there eight weeks ago.’

‘Oh no, you weren’t. You were in that boat.’

‘Yes. I forgot the boat.’

‘They oughtn’t to have pushed you out of the hospital all alone like this.’

‘I’m all right. They had to have my bed. Mrs Carter said she’d find room for me, but I wanted to be alone. The doctor told them to do what I wanted.’

Scobie said, ‘I can understand you wouldn’t want to be with Mrs Carter, and you’ve only got to say the word and I’ll be off too.’

‘I’d rather you waited till the All Clear. I’m a bit rattled, you know.’ The stamina of women had always amazed Scobie. This one had survived forty days in an open boat and she talked about being rattled. He remembered the casualties in the report the chief engineer had made: the third officer and two seamen who had died, and the stoker who had gone off his head as a result of drinking sea water and drowned himself. When it came to strain it was always a man who broke. Now she lay back on her weakness as on a pillow.

He said, ‘Have you thought out things? Shall you go back to Bury?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll get a job.’

‘Have you had any experience?’

‘No,’ she confessed, looking away from him. ‘You see, I only left school a year ago.’

‘Did they teach you anything?’ It seemed to him that what she needed more than anything else was just talk, silly aimless talk. She thought that she wanted to be alone, but what she was afraid of was the awful responsibility of receiving sympathy. How could a child like that act the part of a woman whose husband had been drowned more or less before her eyes? As well expect her to act Lady Macbeth. Mrs Carter would have had no sympathy with her inadequacy. Mrs Carter, of course, would have known how to behave, having buried one husband and three children.

She said, ‘I was best at netball,’ breaking in on his thoughts.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you haven’t quite the figure for a gym instructor. Or have you, when you are well?’

Suddenly and without warning she began to talk. It was as if by the inadvertent use of a password he had induced a door to open: he couldn’t tell now which word he had used. Perhaps it was ‘gym instructor’, for she began rapidly to tell him about the netball (Mrs Carter, he thought, had probably talked about forty days in an open boat and a three-weeks’-old husband). She said, ‘I was in the school team for two years,’ leaning forward excitedly with her chin on her hand and one bony elbow upon a bony knee. With her white skin -unyellowed yet by atabrine or sunlight - he was reminded of a bone the sea has washed and cast up. ‘A year before that I was in the second team. I would have been captain if I’d stayed another year. In 1940 we beat Roedean and tied with Cheltenham.’

He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love. He felt the security of his age sitting there listening with a glass of gin in his hand and the rain coming down. She told him her school was on the downs just behind Seaport: they had a French mistress called Mile Dupont who had a vile temper. The headmistress could read Greek just like English - Virgil...

‘I always thought Virgil was Latin.’

‘Oh yes. I meant Homer. I wasn’t any good at Classics.’

‘Were you good at anything besides netball?’

‘I think I was next best at maths, but I was never any good at trigonometry.’ In summer they went into Seaport and bathed, and every Saturday they had a picnic on the downs -sometimes a paper-chase on ponies, and once a disastrous affair on bicycles which spread out over the whole country, and two girls didn’t return till one in the morning. He listened fascinated, revolving the heavy gin in his glass without drinking. The sirens squealed the All Clear through the rain, but neither of them paid any attention. He said, ‘And then in the holidays you went back to Bury?’

Apparently her mother had died ten years ago, and her father was a clergyman attached in some way to the Cathedral. They had a very small house on Angel Hill. Perhaps she had not been as happy at Bury as at school, for she tacked back at the first opportunity to discuss the games mistress whose name was the same as her

own - Helen, and for whom the whole of her year had an enormous schwarmerei. She laughed now at this passion in a superior way: it was the only indication she gave

him that she was grown-up, that she was - or rather had been -a married woman.

She broke suddenly off and said. ‘What nonsense it is telling you all this.’

‘I like it.’

‘You haven’t once asked me about - you know -’

He did know, for he had read the report. He knew exactly the water ration for each person in the boat - a cupful twice a day, which had been reduced after twenty-one days to half a cupful. That had been maintained until within twenty-four hours of the rescue mainly because the deaths had left a small surplus. Behind the school buildings of Seaport, the totem-pole of the netball game, he was aware of the intolerable surge, lifting the boat and dropping it again, lifting it and dropping it. ‘I was miserable when I left - it was the end of July. I cried in the taxi all the way to the station.’ Scobie counted the months - July to April: nine months: the period of gestation, and what had been born was a husband’s death and the Atlantic pushing them like wreckage towards the long flat African beach and the sailor throwing himself over the side. He said, ‘This is more interesting. I can guess the other.’