The Heart of the Matter (35 page)

No one can speak a monologue for long alone—another voice will always make itself heard; every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion. So now he couldn’t keep the other voice silent; it spoke from the cave of his body: it was as if the sacrament which had lodged there for his damnation gave tongue. You say you love me, and yet you’ll do this to me—rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I’ve wept your tears. I’ve saved you from more than you will ever know; I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach. There are no capital letters to separate us when we talk together. I am not Thou but simply you, when you speak to me; I am humble as any other beggar. Can’t you trust me as you’d trust a faithful dog? I have been faithful to you for two thousand years. All you have to do now is ring a bell, go into a box, confess … the repentance is already there, straining at your heart. It’s not repentance you lack, just a few simple actions: to go up to the Nissen hut and say good-bye. Or if you must, continue rejecting me but without lies any more. Go to your house and say good-bye to your wife and live with your mistress. If you live you will come back to me sooner or later. One of them will suffer, but can’t you trust me to see that the suffering isn’t too great?

The voice was silent in the cave and his own voice replied hopelessly: No. I don’t trust you. I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks. I’m not a policeman for nothing—responsible for order, for seeing justice is done. There was no other profession for a man of my kind. I can’t shift my responsibility to you. If I could, I would be someone else. I can’t make one of them suffer so as to save myself. I’m responsible and I’ll see it through the only way I can. A sick man’s death means to them only a short suffering—everybody has to die. We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

So long as you live, the voice said, I have hope. There’s no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God. Can’t you just go on, as you are doing now? the voice pleaded, lowering the terms every time it spoke like a dealer in a market. It explained: there are worse acts. But no, he said, no. That’s impossible. I won’t go
on
insulting you at your own altar. You see it’s an
impasse
, God, an
impasse
, he said, clutching the package in his pocket. He got up and turned his back on the altar and went out. Only when he saw his face in the driving mirror did he realize that his eyes were bruised with suppressed tears. He drove on towards the police station and the Commissioner.

3

I

NOVEMBER 3. YESTERDAY
I told the Commissioner that angina had been diagnosed and that I should have to retire as soon as a successor could be found. Temperature at 2
P.M
.
91
º.
Much better night as the result of Evipan
.

November 4. Went with Louise to 7.30 Mass but as pain threatened to return did not wait for Communion. In the evening told Louise that I should have to retire before end of tour. Did not mention angina but spoke of strained heart. Another good night as a result of Evipan. Temperature at 2
P.M
.
89
º
.

November 5. Lamp thefts in Wellington Street. Spent long morning at Azikawe’s store checking story of fire in storeroom. Temperature at 2
P.M
.
90
º
. Drove Louise to Club for library night
.

November 6–10. First time I’ve failed to keep up daily entries. Pain has become more frequent and unwilling to take on any extra exertion. Like a vice. Lasts about a minute. Liable to come on if I walk more than half a mile. Last night or two have slept badly in spite of Evipan, I think from the apprehension of pain
.

November 11. Saw Travis again. There seems to be no doubt now that it is angina. Told Louise tonight, but also that with care I may live for years. Discussed with Commissioner an early passage home. In any case can’t go for another month as too many cases I want to see through the courts in the next week or two. Agreed to dine with Fellowes on 13th, Commissioner on 14th. Temperature at 2
P.M
.
88
º
.

II

Scobie laid down his pen and wiped his wrist on the blotting-paper. It was just six o’clock on November 12 and Louise was out at the beach. His brain was clear, but the nerves tingled from his shoulder to his wrist. He thought: I have come to the end. What years had passed since he walked up through the rain to the Nissen hut while the sirens wailed: the moment of happiness. It was time to die after so many years.

But there were still deceptions to be practised, just as though he were going to live through the night, good-byes to be said with only himself knowing that they were good-byes. He walked very slowly up the hill in case he was observed—wasn’t he a sick man?—and turned off by the Nissens. He couldn’t just die without some word—what word? O God, he prayed, let it be the right word, but when he knocked there was no reply, no words at all. Perhaps she was at the beach with Bagster.

The door was not locked and he went in. Years had passed in his brain, but here time had stood still. It might have been the same bottle of gin from which the boy had stolen—how long ago? The junior official’s chairs stood stiffly around, as though on a film set: he couldn’t believe they had ever moved, any more than the pouf presented by—was it Mrs Carter? On the bed the pillow had not been shaken after the siesta, and he laid his hand on the warm mould of a skull. O God, he prayed, I’m going away from all of you for ever: let her come back in time: let me see her once more, but the hot day cooled around him and nobody came. At 6.30 Louise would be back from the beach. He couldn’t wait any longer.

I must leave some kind of a message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of deprivation. He looked for paper and couldn’t find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw
a
writing-case, but it was the stamp-album that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, he felt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won’t matter: she had told him that you can’t see where a stamp has been torn out. There was no scrap of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it:
I love you
. She can’t take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that’s indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn’t he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill—she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time—an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.

At dinner he talked deliberately of the week to come; he blamed himself for accepting Fellowes’s invitation and explained that dinner with the Commissioner the next day was unavoidable—there was much to discuss.

‘Is there no hope, Ticki, that after a rest, a long rest …?’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to carry on—to them or you. I might break down at any moment.’

‘It’s really retirement?’

‘Yes.’

She began to discuss where they were to live. He felt tired to death, and it needed all his will to show interest in this fictitious village or that, in the kind of house he knew they would never inhabit. ‘I don’t want a suburb,’ Louise said. ‘What I’d really like would be a weather-board house in Kent, so that one can get up to town quite easily.’

He said, ‘Of course it will depend on what we can afford. My pension won’t be very large.’

‘I shall work,’ Louise said. ‘It will be easy in wartime.’

‘I hope we shall be able to manage without that.’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

Bed-time came, and he felt a terrible unwillingness to let her go. There was nothing to do when she had once gone but die. He didn’t know how to keep her—they had talked about all the subjects they had in common. He said, ‘I shall sit here a while. Perhaps I shall feel sleepy if I stay up half an hour longer. I don’t want to take the Evipan if I can help it.’

‘I’m very tired after the beach. I’ll be off.’

When she’s gone, he thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can’t believe that I’m going to do this. Presently I shall get up and go to bed, and life will begin again. Nothing, nobody, can force me to die. Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signalled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him …

‘What is it, Ticki? You look ill. Come to bed too.’

‘I wouldn’t sleep,’ he said obstinately.

‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Louise asked. ‘Dear, I’d do anything. …’ Her love was like a death sentence.

‘There’s nothing, dear,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t keep you up.’ But so soon as she turned towards the stairs he spoke again. ‘Read me something,’ he said, ‘you got a new book today. Read me something.’

‘You wouldn’t like it, Ticki. It’s poetry.’

‘Never mind. It may send me to sleep.’ He hardly listened while she read. People said you couldn’t love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn’t put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure—the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect—but that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever. Some words she was reading momentarily caught his attention:

We are all falling. This hand’s falling too—

all have this falling sickness none withstands.

And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands

this universal falling can’t fall through.

They sounded like truth, but he rejected them—comfort can come too easily. He thought, those hands will never hold my fall: I slip between the fingers, I’m greased with falsehood, treachery. Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.

‘Dear, you are half asleep.’

‘For a moment.’

‘I’ll go up now. Don’t stay long. Perhaps you won’t need your Evipan tonight.’

He watched her go. The lizard lay still upon the wall. Before she had reached the stairs he called her back. ‘Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep.’

She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he give her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. ‘Good night, Louise. You know I love you,’ he said with careful lightness.

‘Of course and I love you.’

‘Yes. Good night, Louise.’

‘Good night, Ticki.’ It was the best he could do with safety.

As soon as he heard the door close, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of Evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty—to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waited for courage with the tablets in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone: this was freezing-point.

But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him. Throw away those tablets. You’ll never be able to collect enough again. You’ll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night’s sleep. In the morning you’ll be woken by your boy, and you’ll drive down to the police station for a day’s ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word ‘ordinary’ as it might have dwelt on the word ‘happy’ or ‘peaceful.’

‘No,’ Scobie said aloud, ‘no.’ He pushed the tablets in his mouth six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12,
Called on H.R., out; temperature at 2
P.M
. and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death; he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heartbeats like a clock striking the hour. He tried out an act of contrition, but when he reached, ‘I am sorry and beg pardon,’ a cloud formed over the door and drifted down over the whole room and he couldn’t remember what it was that he had to be sorry for. He had to hold himself upright with both hands, but he had forgotten the reason why he so held himself. Somewhere far away he thought he heard the sounds of pain. ‘A storm,’ he said aloud, ‘there’s going to be a storm,’ as the clouds grew, and he tried to get up to close the windows. ‘Ali,’ he called, ‘Ali.’ It seemed to him as though someone outside the room were seeking him, calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that he was here. He got to his feet and heard the hammer of his heart beating out a reply. He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of him. And automatically at the call of need, at the cry of a victim, Scobie strung himself to act. He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, ‘Dear God, I love …’ but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the ice-box—the saint whose name nobody could remember.