A Burnt Out Case (25 page)

When they were alone she gave a happy sigh, ‘That’s that.’

‘Why have you told them these lies?’

‘They aren’t all lies,’ she said. ‘I do love you.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since I spent a night with you.’

‘You know very well that was nothing at all. We drank some whisky. I told you a story to send you to sleep.’

‘Yes. That was when I fell in love. No, it wasn’t. I’m afraid I’m lying again,’ she said with unconvincing humility. ‘It was when you came to the house the first time.
Un coup de foudre
.’

‘The night you told them we slept together?’

‘That was really a lie too. The night I slept with you properly was after the Governor’s party.’

‘What on earth are you talking about now?’

‘I didn’t want him. The only way I could manage was to shut my eyes and think it was you.’

‘I suppose I ought to thank you,’ Querry said, ‘for the compliment.’

‘It was then that my baby must have started. So you see it wasn’t a lie that I told.’

‘Not a lie?’

‘Only half a lie. If I hadn’t thought all the time of you, I’d have been all dried up and babies don’t come so easily then, do they? So in a way it is your child.’

He looked at her with a kind of respect. It would have needed a theologian to appreciate properly the tortuous logic of her argument, to separate good from bad faith, and only recently he had thought of her as someone too simple and young to be a danger. She smiled up at him winningly, as though she hoped to entice him into yet another of his stories to postpone the hour of bed. He said, ‘You’d better tell me exactly what happened when you saw your husband in Luc.’

She said, ‘It was ghastly. Really ghastly. I thought once he was going to kill me. He wouldn’t believe about the diary. He went on and on all that night until I was tired out and I said, “All right. Have it your own way then. I did sleep with him. Here and there and everywhere.” Then he hit me. He would have hit me again, I think, if M. Parkinson hadn’t interfered.’

‘Was Parkinson there too, then?’

‘He heard me cry and came along.’

‘To take some photographs, I suppose.’

‘I don’t think he took any photographs.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘Well, of course, he found out about things in general. You see, he wanted to go home right away, and I said no, I had to stay in Luc until I knew. “Know?” he said. And then it all came out. I went and saw the doctor in the morning and when I knew the worst I just took off without going back to the hotel.’

‘Rycker thinks the baby is mine?’

‘I tried very hard to convince him it was his – because, of course, you could say in a way that it was.’ She stretched herself down in the bed with a sigh of comfort and said, ‘Goodness, I’m glad to be here. It was really scary driving all the way alone. I didn’t wait in the house to get any food and I forgot a bed and I just slept in the car.’

‘In his car?’

‘Yes. But I expect M. Parkinson will have given him a lift home.’

‘Is it any use asking you to tell Father Thomas the truth?’

‘Well, I’ve rather burned my boats, haven’t I?’

‘You’ve burned the only home I have,’ Querry said.

‘I just had to escape,’ she explained apologetically. For the first time he was confronted by an egoism as absolute as his own. The other Marie had been properly avenged: as for
toute à toi
the laugh was on her side now.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Querry said. ‘Love you in return?’

‘It would be nice if you could, but, if you can’t, they’ll have to send me home, won’t they?’

He went to the door and opened it. Mother Agnes was lurking at the end of the passage. He said, ‘I’ve done all I can.’

‘I suppose you’ve tried to persuade the poor girl to protect you.’

‘Oh, she admits the lie to me, of course, but I have no tape-recorder. What a pity the Church doesn’t approve of hidden microphones.’

‘May I ask you, M. Querry, from now on to stay away from our house?’

‘You don’t need to ask me that. Be very careful yourselves of that little packet of dynamite in there.’

‘She’s a poor innocent young . . .’

‘Oh, innocent . . . I daresay you are right. God preserve us from all innocence. At least the guilty know what they are about.’

The electric fuses had not yet been repaired, and only the feel of the path under his feet guided him towards the mission buildings. The rain had passed to the south, but the lightning flapped occasionally above the forest and the river. Before he reached the mission he had to pass the doctor’s house. An oil lamp burned behind the window and the doctor stood beside it, peering out. Querry knocked on the door.

Colin asked, ‘What has happened?’

‘She’ll stick to her lies. They are her only way of escape.’

‘Escape?’

‘From Rycker and Africa.’

‘Father Thomas is talking to the others now. It was no concern of mine, so I came home.’

‘They want me to go away, I suppose?’

‘I wish to God the Superior were here. Father Thomas is not exactly a well-balanced man.’

Querry sat down at the table. The Atlas of Leprosy was open at a gaudy page of swirling colour. He said, ‘What’s this?’

‘We call these “the fish swimming upstream”. The bacilli – those coloured spots there – are swarming along the nerves.’

‘I thought I had come far enough,’ Querry said, ‘when I reached this place.’

‘It may blow over. Let them talk. You and I have more important things to do. Now that the hospital’s finished we can get down to the mobile units and the new lavatories I talked to you about.’

‘We are not dealing with your sick people, doctor, and your coloured fish. They are predictable. These are normal people, healthy people with unforeseeable reactions. It looks as though I shall get no nearer to Pendélé than Deo Gratias did.’

‘Father Thomas has no authority over me. You can stay in my house from now on if you don’t mind sleeping in the workroom.’

‘Oh no. You can’t risk quarrelling with them. You are too important to this place. I shall have to go away.’

‘Where will you go to?’

‘I don’t know. It’s strange, isn’t it, how worried I was when I came here, because I thought I had become incapable of feeling pain. I suppose a priest I met on the river was right. He said one only had to wait. You said the same to me too.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t know that I am. You said once that when one suffers, one begins to feel part of the human condition, on the side of the Christian myth, do you remember? “I suffer, therefore I am.” I wrote something like that once in my diary, but I can’t remember what or when, and the word wasn’t “suffer”.’

‘When a man is cured,’ the doctor said, ‘we can’t afford to waste him.’

‘Cured?’

‘No further skin-tests are required in your case.’

IV

Father Joseph absent-mindedly wiped a knife with the skirt of his soutane; he said, ‘We mustn’t forget that it’s only her word against his.’

‘Why should she invent such a shocking story like that?’ Father Thomas asked. ‘In any case the baby is presumably real enough.’

‘Querry has been of great use to us here,’ Father Paul said. ‘We’ve reason to be grateful . . .’

‘Grateful? Can you really think that, father, after he’s made us a laughing stock? The Hermit of the Congo. The Saint with a Past. All those stories the papers printed. What will they print now?’

‘You were more pleased with the stories than he was,’ Father Jean said.

‘Of course I was pleased. I believed in him. I thought his motives for coming here were good. I even defended him to the Superior when he warned me . . . But I hadn’t realized then what his true motives were.’

‘If you know them tell us what they were,’ Father Jean said. He spoke in the dry precise tones that he was accustomed to use in discussions on moral theology so as to rob of emotion any question dealing with sexual sin.

‘I can only suppose he was flying from some woman-trouble in Europe.’

‘Woman-trouble is not a very exact description, and aren’t we all supposed to run away from it? St Augustine’s wish to wait awhile is not universally recommended.’

‘Querry is a very good builder,’ Father Joseph said obstinately.

‘What do you propose then, that he should stay here in the mission, living in sin with Mme Rycker?’

‘Of course not,’ Father Jean said. ‘Mme Rycker must leave tomorrow. From what you have told us he has no wish to go with her.’

‘The matter will not end there,’ Father Thomas said. ‘Rycker will want a separation. He may even sue Querry for divorce, and the newspapers will print the whole edifying story. They are interested enough as it is in Querry. Do you suppose the General will be pleased when he reads at his breakfast-table the scandal at our leproserie?’

‘The roof-tree is safely up,’ Father Joseph said, rubbing away at his knife, ‘but a great deal still remains to be done.’

‘There is no possible harm in simply waiting.’ Father Paul said. ‘The girl may be lying. Rycker may take no action. The newspapers may print nothing (it’s not the picture of Querry they wanted to give the world). The story may not even reach the General’s ears – or eyes.’

‘Do you suppose the Bishop won’t hear of it? It will be all over Luc by this time. In the absence of the Superior I am responsible . . .’

Brother Philippe spoke for the first time. ‘There’s a man outside,’ he said. ‘Had I better unlock the door?’

It was Parkinson, sodden and speechless. He had been walking very fast. He ran his hand back and forth over his heart as though he were trying to soothe an animal that he carried like a Spartan under his shirt.

‘Give him a chair,’ Father Thomas said.

‘Where’s Querry?’ Parkinson said.

‘I don’t know. In his room perhaps.’

‘Rycker’s looking for him. He went to the sisters’ house, but Querry had gone.’

‘How did you know where to look?’

‘She had left a note for Rycker at home. We would have caught her up, but we had car-trouble at the last ferry.’

‘Where’s Rycker now?’

‘God knows. It’s so pitch-dark out there. He may have walked into the river for all I know.’

‘Did he see his wife?’

‘No – an old nun pushed us both out and locked the door. That made him madder than ever, I can tell you. We haven’t had six hours’ sleep since Luc, and that was more than three days ago.’

He rocked backwards and forwards on the chair. ‘Oh that this too too solid flesh. Quote. Shakespeare. I’ve got a weak heart,’ he explained to Father Thomas who was finding it difficult with his inadequate English to follow the drift of Parkinson’s thoughts. The others watched closely and understood little. The situation seemed to all of them to have got hopelessly out of control.

‘Please give me a drink,’ Parkinson said. Father Thomas found that there was a little champagne left at the bottom of one of the many bottles which still littered the table among the carcasses of the chickens and the remains of the mutilated uneaten soufflé.

‘Champagne?’ Parkinson exclaimed. ‘I’d rather have had a spot of gin.’ He looked at the glasses and the bottles: one glass still held an inch of port. He said, ‘You do yourselves pretty well here.’

‘It was a very special day,’ Father Thomas said with some embarrassment, seeing the table for a moment with the eyes of a stranger.

‘A special day – I should think it has been. I never thought we’d make the ferry, and now with this storm I suppose we may be stuck here. How I wish I’d never come to this damned dark continent. Quoth the raven nevermore. Quote. Somebody.’

Outside a voice shouted unintelligibly.

‘That’s him,’ Parkinson said, ‘roaming around. He’s fighting mad. I said to him I thought Christians were supposed to forgive, but it’s no use talking to him now.’

The voice came nearer. ‘Querry,’ they heard it cry, ‘Querry. Where are you, Querry?’

‘What a damned fuss about nothing. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been no hanky-panky after all. I told him that. “They talked most of the night,” I said, “I heard them. Lovers don’t talk like that. There are intervals of silence.”’

‘Querry. Where are you, Querry?’

‘I think he
wants
to believe the worst. It makes him Querry’s equal, don’t you see, when they fight over the same girl.’ He added with a somewhat surprising insight, ‘He can’t bear not being important.’

The door opened yet again and a tousled, rain-soaked Rycker stood in the doorway; he looked from one father to another as though among them he expected to find Querry, perhaps in the disguise of a priest.

‘M. Rycker,’ Father Thomas began.

‘Where’s Querry?’

‘Please come in and sit down and talk things . . .’

‘How can I sit?’ Rycker said. ‘I am a man in agony.’ He sat down, nonetheless, on the wrong chair – the weak back splintered. ‘I’m suffering from a terrible shock, father. I opened my soul to that man, I told him my inmost thoughts, and this is my reward.’

‘Let us talk quietly and sensibly . . .’

‘He laughed at me and despised me,’ Rycker said. ‘What right had he to despise me? We are all equal in the sight of God. Even a poor plantation manager and
the
Querry. Breaking up a Christian marriage.’ He smelt very strongly of whisky. He said, ‘I’ll be retiring in a couple of years. Does he think I’m going to keep his bastard on my pension?’

‘You’ve been on the road for three days, Rycker. You need a night’s sleep. Afterwards . . .’

‘She never wanted to sleep with me. She always made her excuses, but then the first time he comes along, just because he’s famous . . .’

Father Thomas said, ‘We all want to avoid scandal.’

‘Where’s the doctor?’ Rycker said sharply. ‘They were as thick as thieves.’