The Heart of the Matter (22 page)

‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.

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

‘Have you forgotten her?’

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

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

‘Everybody would have looked after you.’

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

He laughed.

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

‘You’ll be going home soon.’

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

‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’

‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.

‘Do you dream about it?’

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

‘Did you quarrel?’

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

‘You’ve written to your father?’

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

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

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

‘You don’t?’

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

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

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

He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes … compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute and the influential escaped in war.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’

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

He said, ‘Can you type?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And this one came?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name, boy?’

‘Vande, sah.’

‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

‘No, sah.’

‘Who am I?’

‘You big policeman, sah.’

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

‘Who were you with?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then it’s like a snapshot.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stood pressed against him with her hand on his side. When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.

II

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

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

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

‘Were you dreaming?’

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO

1

I

‘THERE. WHAT DO
you think of it?’ Harris asked with ill-concealed pride. He stood in the doorway of the hut while Wilson moved cautiously forward between the brown sticks of Government furniture like a setter through stubble.

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

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

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

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

‘Who are our neighbours?’

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘Does the name Snakey convey anything to you?’

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

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