The Heart of the Matter (12 page)

‘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 name 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 lend 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.’

II

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

1

I

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 there 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.