The Heart of the Matter (26 page)

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

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

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

‘There are thirty years between us.’

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

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

‘Your letter?’

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

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

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

‘Even your name?’

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

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

‘Who would have taken it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6.
Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about W. Called on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home
.

He hesitated for a moment and then wrote:
Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave
. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.

2

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Now which was yours, Mrs Rolt?’

‘A pink gin.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My furniture?’

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

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

‘I’m sorry. I missed …’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How can they tell?’ Wilson asked.

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

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

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

‘And involves somebody else,’ Scobie said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, I’m not a Catholic.’

‘But they do, don’t they, Scobie?’