The Heart of the Matter (28 page)

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am nearly sure.’

He began his search. Once, pausing by a mirror, he saw poised over his own shoulder a stranger’s face, a fat, sweating, unreliable face. Momentarily he wondered: who can that be? before he realized that it was only this new unfamiliar look of pity which made it strange to him. He thought: am I really one of those whom people pity?

BOOK THREE

PART ONE

1

I

THE RAINS WERE
over and the earth steamed. Flies everywhere settled in clouds, and the hospital was full of malaria patients. Farther up the coast they were dying of blackwater, and yet for a while there was a sense of relief. It was as if the world had become quiet again, now that the drumming on the iron roofs was over. In the town the deep scent of flowers modified the Zoo smell in the corridors of the police station. An hour after the boom was opened the liner moved in from the south unescorted.

Scobie went out in the police boat as soon as the liner anchored. His mouth felt stiff with welcome; he practised on his tongue phrases which would seem warm and unaffected, and he thought: what a long way I have travelled to make me rehearse a welcome. He hoped he would find Louise in one of the public rooms; it would be easier to greet her in front of strangers, but there was no sign of her anywhere. He had to ask at the purser’s office for her cabin number.

Even then, of course, there was the hope that it would be shared. No cabin nowadays held less than six passengers.

But when he knocked and the door was opened, nobody was there but Louise. He felt like a caller at a strange house with something to sell. There was a question-mark at the end of his voice when he said, ‘Louise?’

‘Henry.’ She added, ‘Come inside.’ When once he was within the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth—the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn’t be content until she had pulled his face round and left the seal of her return on his lips. ‘Oh my dear, here I am.’

‘Here you are,’ he said, seeking desperately for the phrases he had rehearsed.

‘They’ve all been so sweet,’ she explained. ‘They are keeping away, so that I can see you alone.’

‘You’ve had a good trip?’

‘I think we were chased once.’

‘I was very anxious,’ he said and thought: that is the first lie. I may as well take the plunge now. He said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

‘I was a fool to go away, darling.’ Through the port-hole the houses sparkled like mica in the haze of heat. The cabin smelt closely of women, of powder, nail-varnish, and nightdresses. He said, ‘Let’s get ashore.’

But she detained him a little while yet. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a lot of resolutions while I’ve been away. Everything now is going to be different. I’m not going to rattle you any more.’ She repeated, ‘Everything will be different,’ and he thought sadly that that at any rate was the truth, the bleak truth.

Standing at the window of his house while Ali and the small boy carried in the trunks he looked up the hill towards the Nissen huts. It was as if a landslide had suddenly put an immeasurable distance between him and them. They were so distant that at first there was no pain, any more than for an episode of youth remembered with the faintest melancholy. Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need—and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance. Upstairs silence and solitude were being hammered away, tin-tacks were being driven in, weights fell on the floor and shook the ceiling. Louise’s voice was raised in cheerful peremptory commands. There was a rattle of objects on the dressing-table. He went upstairs and from the doorway saw the face in the white communion veil staring back at him again: the dead too had returned. Life was not the same without the dead. The mosquito-net hung, a grey ectoplasm, over the double bed.

‘Well, Ali,’ he said, with the phantom of a smile which was all he could raise at this séance, ‘Missus back. We’re all together
again
.’ Her rosary lay on the dressing-table, and he thought of the broken one in his pocket. He had always meant to get it mended: now it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

‘Darling,’ Louise said, ‘I’ve finished up here. Ali can do the rest. There are so many things I want to speak to you about. …’ She followed him downstairs and said at once, ‘I must get the curtains washed.’

‘They don’t show the dirt.’

‘Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.’ She said, ‘I really want a bigger bookcase now. I’ve brought a lot of books back with me.’

‘You haven’t told me yet what made you …’

‘Darling, you’d laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I’ll tell you one day when I don’t mind your laughing.’ She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. ‘You’re really glad …?’

‘So glad,’ he said.

‘Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn’t be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.’

‘I don’t suppose I have been.’

‘Have you missed Mass often?’

He said with forced jocularity, ‘I’ve hardly been at all.’

‘Oh, Ticki.’ She pulled herself quickly up and said, ‘Henry, darling, you’ll think I’m very sentimental, but tomorrow’s Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we’ve started again—in the right way.’ It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed—this he had not considered. He said, ‘Of course,’ but his brain momentarily refused to work.

‘You’ll have to go to confession this afternoon.’

‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’

‘Missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.’

‘Adultery’s more fun,’ he said with attempted lightness.

‘It’s time I came back.’

‘I’ll go along this afternoon—after lunch. I can’t confess on an empty stomach,’ he said.

‘Darling, you
have
changed, you know.’

‘I was only joking.’

‘I don’t mind you joking. I like it. You didn’t do it much though before.’

‘You don’t come back every day, darling.’ The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he laid down his fork for yet another ‘crack.’ ‘Dear Henry,’ she said, ‘I’ve never known you so cheerful.’ The ground had given way beneath his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathlessness, the despair—because you couldn’t fall so far as this and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.

When lunch was over (he couldn’t have told what it was he’d eaten) he said, ‘I must be off.’

‘Father Rank?’

‘First I’ve got to look in on Wilson. He’s living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.’

‘Won’t he be in town?’

‘I think he comes back for lunch.’

He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no—that wasn’t a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’

‘I had a touch of fever,’ Harris said.

‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’

‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said.

‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’

‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’

‘You must call on us too.’

‘I’m not much of a calling man,’ Harris said, drooping in the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth women scare me.’

‘You don’t see enough of them, Harris.’

‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man. He knocked and felt
that
disapproving gaze boring into his back. He thought: there goes my alibi: he will tell Wilson and Wilson … He thought: I will say that as I was up here I called … and he felt his whole personality crumble with the slow disintegration of lies.

‘Why did you knock?’ Helen asked. She lay on her bed in the dusk of drawn curtains.

‘Harris was watching me.’

‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Everybody here knows everything—except one thing. How clever you are about that. I suppose it’s because you are a police officer.’

‘Yes.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her arm; immediately the sweat began to run between them. He said, ‘What are you doing here? You are not ill?’

‘Just a headache.’

He said mechanically, without even hearing his own words, ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘Something’s worrying you,’ she said. ‘Have things gone—wrong?’

‘Nothing of that kind.’

‘Do you remember the first night you stayed here? We didn’t worry about anything. You even left your umbrella behind. We were happy. Doesn’t it seem odd?—we were happy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do we go on like this—being unhappy?’

‘It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,’ Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.

‘Sometimes you are so damnably old,’ Helen said, but immediately she expressed with a motion of her hand towards him that she wasn’t serious. Today, he thought, she can’t afford to quarrel—or so she believes. ‘Darling,’ she added, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’

One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided—that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye.
Already
she had the look of the coast about her. She shared it with Louise. He said, ‘It’s just a worry I have to think out for myself. Something I hadn’t considered.’

‘Tell me, darling. Two brains …’ She closed her eyes and he could see her mouth steady for a blow.

He said, ‘Louise wants me to go to Mass with her, to communion. I’m supposed to be on the way to confession now.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ she asked with immense relief, and irritation at her ignorance moved like hatred unfairly in his brain.

‘All?’ he said. ‘All?’ Then justice reclaimed him. He said gently, ‘If I don’t go to communion, you see, she’ll know there’s something wrong—seriously wrong.’

‘But can’t you simply go?’

He said, ‘To me that means—well, it’s the worst thing I can do.’

‘You don’t really believe in hell?’

‘That was what Fellowes asked me.’

‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’

How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, ‘You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villagers on the slopes of Vesuvius go on … And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love—any kind of love—does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don’t believe one will pay for ever. Perhaps one will be given time before one dies …’

‘A deathbed repentance.’ she said with contempt.

‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ he said, ‘to repent of this.’ He kissed the sweat off her hand. ‘I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn’t know how to repent the love.’

‘Well,’ she said with the same undertone of contempt that seemed to pull her apart from him, into the safety of the shore, ‘can’t you go and confess everything now? After all it doesn’t mean you won’t do it again.’

‘It’s not much good confessing if I don’t intend to try. …’

‘Well then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘be hung for a sheep. You are
in
—what do you call it—mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?’

He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence. He said, ‘There is a difference—a big difference. It’s not easy to explain.
Now
I’m just putting our love above—well, my safety. But the other—the other’s really evil. It’s like the Black Mass, the man who steals the sacrament to desecrate it. It’s striking God when he’s down—in my power.’

She turned her head wearily away and said, ‘I don’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s all hooey to me.’

‘I wish it were to me. But I believe it.’

She said sharply, ‘I
suppose
you do. Or is it just a trick? I didn’t hear so much about God when we began, did I? You aren’t turning pious on me to give you an excuse …?’

‘My dear,’ Scobie said. ‘I’m not leaving you ever. I’ve got to think, that’s all.’

II

At a quarter-past six next morning Ali called them. Scobie woke at once, but Louise remained sleeping—she had had a long day. Scobie watched her—this was the face he had loved: this was the face he loved. She was terrified of death by sea and yet she had come back, to make him comfortable. She had borne a child by him in one agony, and in another agony had watched the child die. It seemed to him that he had escaped everything. If only, he thought, I could so manage that she never suffers again, but he knew that he had set himself an impossible task. He could delay the suffering, that was all, but he carried it about with him, an infection which sooner or later she must contract. Perhaps she was contracting it now, for she turned and whimpered in her sleep. He put his hand against her cheek to soothe her. He thought: if only she will go on sleeping, then I will sleep on too, I will oversleep, we shall miss Mass, another problem will be postponed. But as if his thoughts had been an alarm clock she awoke.

‘What time is it, darling?’

‘Nearly half-past six.’

‘We’ll have to hurry.’ He felt as though he were being urged by a kindly and remorseless gaoler to dress for execution. Yet he still put off the saving lie: there was always the possibility of a miracle. Louise gave a final dab of powder (but the powder caked as it touched the skin) and said, ‘We’ll be off now.’ Was there the faintest note of triumph in her voice? Years and years ago, in the other life of childhood, someone with his name Henry Scobie had acted in the school play, had acted Hotspur. He had been chosen for his seniority and his physique, but everyone said that it had been a good performance. Now he had to act again—surely it was as easy as the simple verbal lie?