The Heart of the Matter (29 page)

Scobie suddenly leant back against the wall and put his hand on his chest. He couldn’t make his muscles imitate pain, so he simply closed his eyes. Louise looking in her mirror said, ‘Remind me to tell you about Father Davis in Durban. He was a very good type of priest, much more intellectual than Father Rank.’ It seemed to Scobie that she was never going to look round and notice him. She said, ‘Well, we really must be off,’ and dallied by the mirror. Some sweat-lank hairs were out of place. Through the curtain of his lashes at last he saw her turn and look at him. ‘Come along, dear,’ she said, ‘you look sleepy.’

He kept his eyes shut and stayed where he was. She said sharply, ‘Ticki, what’s the matter?’

‘A little brandy.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘A little brandy,’ he repeated sharply, and when she had fetched it for him and he felt the taste on his tongue he had an immeasurable sense of reprieve. He sighed and relaxed. ‘That’s better.’

‘What was it, Ticki?’

‘Just a pain in my chest. It’s gone now.’

‘Have you had it before?’

‘Once or twice while you’ve been away.’

‘You must see a doctor.’

‘Oh, it’s not worth a fuss. They’ll just say overwork.’

‘I oughtn’t to have dragged you up, but I wanted us to have Communion together.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined that—with the brandy.’

‘Never mind, Ticki.’ Carelessly she sentenced him to eternal death. ‘We can go any day.’

He knelt in his seat and watched Louise kneel with the other communicants at the altar rail: he had insisted on coming to the service with her. Father Rank turning from the altar came to them with God in His hands. Scobie thought: God has just escaped me, but will He always escape?
Domine non sum dignus … domine non sum dignus … domine non sum dignus
… His hand formally, as though he were at drill, beat on a particular button of his uniform. It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. Christ had told the rich young man to sell all and follow Him, but that was an easy rational step compared with this that God had taken, to put Himself at the mercy of men who hardly knew the meaning of the word. How desperately God must love, he thought with shame. The priest had reached Louise in his slow interrupted patrol, and suddenly Scobie was aware of the sense of exile. Over there, where all these people knelt, was a country to which he would never return. The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain.

2

I

WILSON TORE THE
page carefully out of
The Downhamian
and pasted a thick sheet of Colonial Office notepaper on the back of the poem. He held it up to the light: it was impossible to read the sports results on the other side of his verses. Then he folded the page carefully and put it in his pocket; there it would probably stay, but one never knew.

He had seen Scobie drive away towards the town and with beating heart and a sense of breathlessness, much the same as he had felt when stepping into the brothel, even with the same reluctance—for who wanted at any given moment to change the routine of his life?—he made his way downhill towards Scobie’s house.

He began to rehearse what he considered another man in his place would do: pick up the threads at once: kiss her quite naturally, upon the mouth if possible, say ‘I’ve missed you,’ no uncertainty. But his beating heart sent out its message of fear which drowned thought.

‘It’s Wilson at last,’ Louise said. ‘I thought you’d forgotten me,’ and held out her hand. He took it like a defeat.

‘Have a drink.’

‘I was wondering whether you’d like a walk.’

‘It’s too hot, Wilson.’

‘I haven’t been up there, you know, since …’

‘Up where?’ He realized that for those who do not love time never stands still.

‘Up at the old station.’

She said vaguely with a remorseless lack of interest, ‘Oh yes … yes, I haven’t been up there myself yet.’

‘That night when I got back,’ he could feel the awful immature flush expanding, ‘I tried to write some verse.’

‘What, you, Wilson?’

He said furiously, ‘Yes, me, Wilson. Why not? And it’s been published.’

‘I wasn’t laughing. I was just surprised. Who published it?’

‘A new paper called
The Circle
. Of course they don’t pay much.’

‘Can I see it?’

Wilson said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got it here.’ He explained, ‘There was something on the other side I couldn’t stand. It was just too modern for me.’ He watched her with hungry embarrassment.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said weakly.

‘You see the initials?’

‘I’ve never had a poem dedicated to me before.’

Wilson felt sick; he wanted to sit down. Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.

‘Oh, no, Wilson,’ she said, ‘no. You don’t. It’s just Coast fever.’

He plunged blindly, ‘More than anything in the world.’

She said gently, ‘No one loves like that, Wilson.’

He walked restlessly up and down, his shorts flapping, waving the bit of paper from
The Downhamian
. ‘You ought to believe in love. You’re a Catholic. Didn’t God love the world?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘He’s capable of it. But not many of us are.’

‘You love your husband. You told me so. And it’s brought you back.’

Louise said sadly, ‘I suppose I do. All I can. But it’s not the kind of love
you
want to imagine you feel. No poisoned chalices, eternal doom, black sails. We don’t
die
for love, Wilson—except, of course, in books. And sometimes a boy play-acting. Don’t let’s play-act, Wilson—it’s no fun at our age.’

‘I’m not play-acting,’ he said with a fury in which he could hear too easily the histrionic accent. He confronted her bookcase
as
though it were a witness she had forgotten. ‘Do
they
play-act?’

‘Not much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I like them better than
your
poets.’

‘All the same you came back.’ His face lit up with wicked inspiration. ‘Or was that just jealousy?’

She said, ‘Jealousy? What on earth have I got to be jealous about?’

‘They’ve been careful,’ Wilson said, ‘but not as careful as all that.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Your Ticki and Helen Rolt.’

Louise struck at his cheek and missing got his nose, which began to bleed copiously. She said, ‘That’s for calling him Ticki. Nobody’s going to do that except me. You know he hates it. Here, take my handkerchief if you haven’t got one of your own.’

Wilson said, ‘I bleed awfully easily. Do you mind if I lie on my back?’ He stretched himself on the floor between the table and the meat safe, among the ants. First there had been Scobie watching his tears at Pende, and now—this.

‘You wouldn’t like me to put a key down your back?’ Louise asked.

‘No. No thank you.’ The blood had stained the
Downhamian
page.

‘I really
am
sorry. I’ve got a vile temper. This will cure you, Wilson.’ But if romance is what one lives by, one must never be cured of it. The world has too many spoilt priests of this faith or that: better surely to pretend a belief than wander in that vicious vacuum of cruelty and despair. He said obstinatly. ‘Nothing will cure me, Louise. I love you. Nothing,’ bleeding into her handkerchief.

‘How strange,’ she said, ‘it would be if it were true.’

He grunted a query from the ground.

‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘if you
were
one of those people who really love. I thought Henry was. It would be strange if really it was you all the time.’ He felt an odd fear that after all he was going to be accepted at his own valuation, rather as a minor staff officer might feel during a rout when he finds that his claim to know the handling of the tanks will be accepted. It is too late to admit that he knows nothing but what he has read in the technical journals—
‘O
lyric love, half angel and half bird.’ Bleeding into the handkerchief, he formed his lips carefully round a generous phrase, ‘I expect he loves—in his way.’

‘Who?’ Louise said. ‘Me? This Helen Rolt you are talking about? Or just himself?’

‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘Isn’t it true? Let’s have a bit of truth, Wilson. You don’t know how tired I am of comforting lies. Is she beautiful?’

‘Oh no, no. Nothing of that sort.’

‘She’s young, of course, and I’m middle-aged. But surely she’s a bit worn after what she’s been through.’

‘She’s very worn.’

‘But she’s not a Catholic. She’s lucky. She’s free, Wilson.’

Wilson sat up against the leg of the table. He said with genuine passion, ‘I wish to God you wouldn’t call me Wilson.’

‘Edward. Eddie. Ted. Teddy.’

‘I’m bleeding again,’ he said dismally and lay back on the floor.

‘What do you know about it all, Teddie?’

‘I think I’d rather be Edward. Louise, I’ve seen him come away from her hut at two in the morning. He was up there yesterday afternoon.’

‘He was at confession.’

‘Harris saw him.’

‘You’re certainly watching him.’

‘It’s my belief Yusef is using him.’

‘That’s fantastic. You’re going too far.’

She stood over him as though he were a corpse: the bloodstained handkerchief lay in his palm. They neither of them heard the car stop or the footsteps up to the threshold. It was strange to both of them, hearing a third voice from an outside world speaking into this room which had become as close and intimate and airless as a vault. ‘Is anything wrong?’ Scobie’s voice asked.

‘It’s just …’ Louise said and made a gesture of bewilderment—as though she were saying: where does one start explaining? Wilson scrambled to his feet and at once his nose began to bleed.

‘Here,’ Scobie said and taking out his bundle of keys dropped them inside Wilson’s shirt collar. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘the old-fashioned
remedies
are always best,’ and sure enough the bleeding did stop within a few seconds. ‘You should never lie on your back,’ Scobie went reasonably on. ‘Seconds use a sponge of cold water, and you certainly look as though you’d been in a fight, Wilson.’

‘I always lie on my back,’ Wilson said. ‘Blood makes me ill.’

‘Have a drink?’

‘No,’ Wilson said, ‘no. I must be off.’ He retrieved the keys with some difficulty and left the tail of his shirt dangling. He only discovered it when Harris pointed it out to him on his return to the Nissen, and he thought: that is how I looked while I walked away and they watched side by side.

II

‘What did he want?’ Scobie said.

‘He wanted to make love to me.’

‘Does he love you?’

‘He thinks he does. You can’t ask much more than that, can you?’

‘You seem to have hit him rather hard,’ Scobie said, ‘on the nose?’

‘He made me angry. He called you Ticki. Darling, he’s spying on you.’

‘I know that.’

‘Is he dangerous?’

‘He might be—under some circumstances. But then it would be my fault.’

‘Henry, do you never get furious at anyone? Don’t you mind him making love to me?’

He said, ‘I’d be a hypocrite if I were angry at that. It’s the kind of thing that happens to people. You know, quite pleasant normal people do fall in love.’

‘Have you ever fallen in love?’

‘Oh yes, yes.’ He watched her closely while he excavated his smile. ‘
You
know I have.’

‘Henry, did you really feel ill this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t just an excuse?’

‘No.’

‘Then, darling, let’s go to communion together tomorrow morning.’

‘If you want to,’ he said. It was the moment he had known would come. With bravado, to show that his hand was not shaking, he took down a glass. ‘Drink?’

‘It’s too early, dear,’ Louise said; he knew she was watching him closely like all the others. He put the glass down and said, ‘I’ve just got to run back to the station for some papers. When I get back it will be time for drinks.’

He drove unsteadily down the road, his eyes blurred with nausea. O God, he thought, the decisions you force on people, suddenly, with no time to consider. I am too tired to think: this ought to be worked out on paper like a problem in mathematics, and the answer arrived at without pain. But the pain made him physically sick, so that he retched over the wheel. The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers—we Catholics are damned by our knowledge. There’s no need for me to work anything out—there is only one answer: to kneel down in the confessional and say, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery so many times etcetera etcetera’; to hear Father Rank telling me to avoid the occasion: never see the woman alone (speaking in those terrible abstract terms: Helen—the woman, the occasion, no longer the bewildered child clutching the stamp-album, listening to Bagster howling outside the door: that moment of peace and darkness and tenderness and pity ‘adultery’). And I to make my act of contrition, the promise ‘never more to offend thee,’ and then tomorrow the communion: taking God in my mouth in what they call the state of grace. That’s the right answer—there
is
no other answer: to save my own soul and abandon her to Bagster and despair. One must be reasonable, he told himself, and recognize that despair doesn’t last (is that true?), that love doesn’t last (but isn’t that the very reason that despair does?), that in a few weeks or months she’ll be all right again. She has survived forty days in an open boat and the death of her husband and can’t she survive the mere death of love? As I can, as I know I can.

He drew up outside the church and sat hopelessly at the wheel. Death never comes when one desires it most. He thought: of course there’s the ordinary honest
wrong
answer, to leave Louise,
forget
that private vow, resign my job. To abandon Helen to Bagster or Louise to what? I am trapped, he told himself, catching sight of an expressionless stranger’s face in the driving mirror, trapped. Nevertheless he left the car and went into the church. While he was waiting for Father Rank to go into the confessional he knelt and prayed: the only prayer he could rake up. Even the words of the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail Mary’ deserted him. He prayed for a miracle, ‘O God convince me, help me, convince me. Make me feel that I am more important than that girl.’ It was not Helen’s face he saw as he prayed but the dying child who called him father: a face in a photograph staring from the dressing-table: the face of a black girl of twelve a sailor had raped and killed glaring blindly up at him in a yellow paraffin light. ‘Make me put my own soul first. Give me trust in your mercy to the one I abandon.’ He could hear Father Rank close the door of his box and nausea twisted him again on his knees. ‘O God,’ he said, ‘if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’ He went into the box. He thought, a miracle may still happen. Even Father Rank may for once find the word, the right word … Kneeling in the space of an upturned coffin he said, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery.’