The Heart of the Matter (21 page)

‘Well, I must be going, Harris. I’m glad about the house—and the old Downhamian.’

‘I wonder if Wilson was happy there,’ Harris brooded. He took
Ivanhoe
out of the out-tray and looked around for somewhere to put it, but there wasn’t any place. He put it back again. ‘I don’t suppose he was,’ he said, ‘or why should he have turned up here?’

IV

Scobie left his car immediately outside Yusef’s door: it was like a gesture of contempt in the face of the Colonial Secretary. He said to the steward, ‘I want to see your master. I know the way.’

‘Massa out.’

‘Then I’ll wait for him.’ He pushed the steward to one side and walked in. The bungalow was divided into a succession of small rooms identically furnished with sofas and cushions and low tables for drinks like the rooms in a brothel. He passed from one to another, pulling the curtains aside, till he reached the little room where nearly two months ago now he had lost his integrity. On the sofa Yusef lay asleep.

He lay on his back in his white duck trousers with his mouth open, breathing heavily. A glass was on a table at his side, and Scobie noticed the small white grains at the bottom. Yusef had taken a bromide. Scobie sat down at his side and waited. The window was open, but the rain shut out the air as effectively as a curtain. Perhaps it was merely the want of air that caused the depression which now fell on his spirits, perhaps it was because he had returned to the scene of a crime. Useless to tell himself that he had committed no offence. Like a woman who has made a loveless marriage he recognized in the room as anonymous as an hotel bedroom the memory of an adultery.

Just over the window there was a defective gutter which emptied itself like a tap, so that all the time you could hear the two sounds of the rain—the murmur and the gush. Scobie lit a cigarette, watching Yusef. He couldn’t feel any hatred of the man. He had trapped Yusef as consciously and as effectively as Yusef had trapped him. The marriage had been made by both of them. Perhaps the intensity of the watch he kept broke through the fog of bromide: the fat thighs shifted on the sofa. Yusef grunted, murmured, ‘dear chap’ in his deep sleep, and turned on his side, facing Scobie. Scobie stared again round the room, but he had examined it already thoroughly enough when he came here to arrange his loan: there was no change—the same hideous mauve silk cushions, the threads showing where the damp was rotting the covers, the tangerine curtains. Even the blue syphon of soda was in the same place: they had an eternal air like the furnishings of hell. There were no bookshelves, for Yusef couldn’t read: no desk because he couldn’t write. It would have been useless to search for papers—papers were useless to Yusef. Everything was inside that large Roman head.

‘Why … Major Scobie …’ The eyes were open and sought his; blurred with bromide they found it difficult to focus.

‘Good morning, Yusef.’ For once Scobie had him at a disadvantage. For a moment Yusef seemed about to sink again into drugged sleep; then with an effort he got on an elbow.

‘I wanted to have a word about Tallit, Yusef.’

‘Tallit … forgive me, Major Scobie …’

‘And the diamonds.’

‘Crazy about diamonds.’ Yusef brought out with difficulty in a
voice
half-way to sleep. He shook his head, so that the white lick of hair flapped; then putting out a vague hand he stretched for the syphon.

‘Did you frame Tallit, Yusef?’

Yusef dragged the syphon towards him across the table knocking over the bromide glass; he turned the nozzle towards his face and pulled the trigger. The soda water broke on his face and splashed all round him on the mauve silk. He gave a sigh of relief and satisfaction, like a man under a shower on a hot day. ‘What is it, Major Scobie, is anything wrong?’

‘Tallit is not going to be prosecuted.’

He was like a tired man dragging himself out of the sea: the tide followed him. He said, ‘You must forgive me, Major Scobie. I have not been sleeping well.’ He shook his head up and down thoughtfully, as a man might shake a box to see whether anything rattles. ‘You were saying something about Tallit, Major Scobie,’ and he explained again, ‘It is the stock-taking. All the figures. Three four stores. They try to cheat me because it’s all in my head.’

‘Tallit,’ Scobie repeated, ‘won’t be prosecuted.’

‘Never mind. One day he will go too far.’

‘Were they your diamonds, Yusef?’

‘My diamonds? They have made you suspicious of me, Major Scobie.’

‘Was the small boy in your pay?’

Yusef mopped the soda water off his face with the back of his hand. ‘Of course he was, Major Scobie. That was where I got my information.’

The moment of inferiority had passed; the great head had shaken itself free of the bromide, even though the limbs still lay sluggishly spread over the sofa. ‘Yusef, I’m not your enemy. I have a liking for you.’

‘When you say that, Major Scobie, how my heart beats.’ He pulled his shirt wider, as though to show the actual movement of the heart and little streams of soda water irrigated the black bush on his chest. ‘I am too fat,’ he said.

‘I would like to trust you, Yusef. Tell me the truth. Were the diamonds yours or Tallit’s?’

‘I always want to speak the truth to you, Major Scobie. I never told you the diamonds were Tallit’s.’

‘They were yours?’

‘Yes, Major Scobie.’

‘What a fool you have made of me, Yusef. If only I had a witness here, I’d run you in.’

‘I didn’t mean to make a fool of you, Major Scobie. I wanted Tallit sent away. It would be for the good of everybody if he was sent away. It is no good the Syrians being in two parties. If they were in one party you would be able to come to me and say, “Yusef, the Government wants the Syrians to do this or that,” and I should be able to answer, “It shall be so.”’

‘And the diamond smuggling would be in one pair of hands.’

‘Oh, the diamonds, diamonds, diamonds,’ Yusef wearily complained. ‘I tell you, Major Scobie, that I make more money in one year from my smallest store than I would make in three years from diamonds. You cannot understand how many bribes are necessary.’

‘Well, Yusef, I’m taking no more information from you. This ends our relationship. Every month, of course, I shall send you the interest.’ He felt a strange unreality in his own words: the tangerine curtains hung there immovably. There are certain places one never leaves behind; the curtains and cushions of this room joined an attic bedroom, an ink-stained desk, a lacy altar in Ealing—they would be there so long as consciousness lasted.

Yusef put his feet on the floor and sat bolt upright. He said, ‘Major Scobie, you have taken my little joke too much to heart.’

‘Good-bye, Yusef, you aren’t a bad chap, but good-bye.’

‘You are wrong, Major Scobie. I am a bad chap.’ He said earnestly, ‘My friendship for you is the only good thing in this black heart. I cannot give it up. We must stay friends always.’

‘I’m afraid not, Yusef.’

‘Listen, Major Scobie. I am not asking you to do anything for me except sometimes—after dark perhaps when nobody can see—to visit me and talk to me. Nothing else. Just that. I will tell you no more tales about Tallit. I will tell you nothing. We will sit here with the syphon and the whisky bottle …’

‘I’m not a fool, Yusef. I know it would be of great use to you if people believed we were friends. I’m not giving you that help.’

Yusef put a finger in his ear and cleared it of soda water. He looked bleakly and brazenly across at Scobie. This must be how he looks, Scobie thought, at the store manager who has tried to deceive him about the figures he carries in his head. ‘Major Scobie, did you ever tell the Commissioner about our little business arrangement or was that all bluff?’

‘Ask him yourself.’

‘I think I will. My heart feels rejected and bitter. It urges me to go to the Commissioner and tell him everything.’

‘Always obey your heart, Yusef.’

‘I will tell him you took my money and together we planned the arrest of Tallit. But you did not fulfil your bargain, so I have come to him in revenge. In revenge,’ Yusef repeated gloomily, his Roman head sunk on his fat chest.

‘Go ahead. Do what you like, Yusef.’ But he couldn’t believe in any of this scene however hard he played it. It was like a lovers’ quarrel. He couldn’t believe in Yusef’s threats and he had no belief in his own calmness: he did not even believe in this good-bye. What had happened in the mauve and orange room had been too important to become part of the enormous equal past. He was not surprised when Yusef, lifting his head, said, ‘Of course I shall not go. One day you will come back and want my friendship. And I shall welcome you.’

Shall I really be so desperate? Scobie wondered, as though in the Syrian’s voice he had heard the genuine accent of prophecy.

V

On his way home Scobie stopped his car outside the Catholic church and went in. It was the first Saturday of the month and he always went to confession on that day. Half a dozen old women, their hair bound like char-women’s in dusters, waited their turn: a nursing sister: a private soldier with a Royal Ordnance insignia. Father Rank’s voice whispered monotonously from the box.

Scobie, with his eyes fixed on the cross, prayed—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Act of Contrition. The awful languor of routine fell on his spirits. He felt like a spectator—one of those many
people
round the cross over whom the gaze of Christ must have passed, seeking the face of a friend or an enemy. It sometimes seemed to him that his profession and his uniform classed him inexorably with all those anonymous Romans keeping order in the streets a long way off. One by one the old Kru women passed into the box and out again, and Scobie prayed—vaguely and ramblingly—for Louise, that she might be happy now at this moment and so remain, that no evil should ever come to her through him. The soldier came out of the box and he rose.

‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ He said, ‘Since my last confession a month ago I have missed one Sunday Mass and one holiday of obligation.’

‘Were you prevented from going?’

‘Yes, but with a little effort I could have arranged my duties better.’

‘Yes?’

‘All through this month I have done the minimum. I’ve been unnecessarily harsh to one of my men …’ He paused a long time.

‘Is that everything?’

‘I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel—tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but—’he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille. ‘I’m not sure that I even believe.’

‘It’s easy,’ the priest said, ‘to worry too much about that. Especially here. The penance I would give to a lot of people if I could is six months’ leave. The climate gets you down. It’s easy to mistake tiredness for—well, disbelief.’

‘I don’t want to keep you, Father. There are other people waiting. I know these are just fancies. But I feel—empty. Empty.’

‘That’s sometimes the moment God chooses,’ the priest said. ‘Now go along with you and say a decade of your rosary.’

‘I haven’t a rosary. At least …’

‘Well, five Our Father’s and five Hail Marys then.’ He began to speak the words of absolution, but the trouble is, Scobie thought, there’s nothing to absolve. The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together—a hocus pocus. He went out of the
box
and knelt down again, and this too was part of a routine. It seemed to him for a moment that God was too accessible. There was no difficulty in approaching Him. Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought, He even suffers in public.

3

I

‘I’VE BROUGHT YOU
some stamps,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve been collecting them for a week—from everybody. Even Mrs Carter has contributed a magnificent parakeet—look at it—from somewhere in South America. And here’s a complete set of Liberians surcharged for the American occupation. I got those from the Naval Observer.’

They were completely at ease: it seemed to both of them for that very reason they were safe.

‘Why do you collect stamps?’ he asked. ‘It’s an odd thing to do—after sixteen.’

‘I don’t know,’ Helen Rolt said. ‘I don’t really collect. I carry them round. I suppose it’s habit.’ She opened the album and said, ‘No, it’s not just habit. I do love the things. Do you see this green George V halfpenny stamp? It’s the first I ever collected. I was eight. I steamed it off an envelope and stuck it in a notebook. That’s why my father gave me an album. My mother had died, so he gave me a stamp-album.’

She tried to explain more exactly. ‘They are like snapshots. They are so portable. People who collect china—they can’t carry it around with them. Or books. But you don’t have to tear the pages out like you do with snapshots.

‘You’ve never told me about your husband,’ Scobie said.

‘No.’

‘It’s not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it’s been torn?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s easier to get over a thing,’ Scobie said, ‘if you talk about it.’

‘That’s not the trouble,’ she said. ‘The trouble is—it’s so terribly easy to get over.’ She took him by surprise; he hadn’t believed she
was
old enough to have reached that stage in her lessons, that particular turn of the screw. She said, ‘He’s been dead—how long—is it eight weeks yet? and he’s so dead, so completely dead. What a little bitch I must be.’

Scobie said, ‘You needn’t feel that. It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.’

‘I didn’t know I was so tough,’ Helen said. ‘Horribly tough.’

‘I had a child,’ Scobie said, ‘who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently. I got one cable just after breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning—a dead time of day for any news.’ He had never mentioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully. ‘The cable said,
Catherine died this afternoon no pain God bless you
. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said,
Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope my diving
. That was the one sent off at five. “Diving” was a mutilation—I suppose for “darling.” You see there was nothing more hopeless she could have put to break the news than “doctor has hope.”’