The Heart of the Matter Read online

  ‘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.

  Father Clay was up and waiting for him in the dismal little European house which had been built among the mud huts in laterite bricks to look like a Victorian presbytery. A hurricane-lamp shone on the priest’s short red hair and his young freckled Liverpool face. He couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, and then he would be up, pacing his tiny room from hideous oleograph to plaster statue and back to oleograph
again. ‘I saw so little of him,’ he wailed, motioning with his hands as though he were at the altar. ‘He cared for nothing but cards and drinking. I don’t drink and I’ve never played cards—except demon, you know, except demon, and that’s a patience. It’s terrible, terrible.’

  ‘He hanged himself?’

  ‘Yes. His boy came over to me yesterday. He hadn’t seen him since the night before, but that was quite usual after a bout, you know, a bout. I told him to go to the police. That was right, wasn’t it? There was nothing I could do. Nothing. He was quite dead.’

  ‘Quite right. Would you mind giving me a glass of water and some aspirin?’

  ‘Let me mix the aspirin for you. You know, Major Scobie, for weeks and months nothing happens here at all. I just walk up and down here, up and down, and then suddenly out of the blue … it’s terrible.’ His eyes were red and sleepless: he seemed to Scobie one of those who are quite unsuited to loneliness. There were no books to be seen except a little shelf with his breviary and a few religious tracts. He was a man without resources. He began to pace up and down again and suddenly, turning on Scobie, he shot out an excited question. ‘Mightn’t there be a hope that it’s murder?’

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Suicide,’ Father Clay said. ‘It’s too terrible. It puts a man outside mercy. I’ve been thinking about it all night.’

  ‘He wasn’t a Catholic. Perhaps that makes a difference. Invincible ignorance, eh?’

  ‘That’s what I try to think.’ Half-way between oleograph and statuette he suddenly started and stepped aside as though he had encountered another on his tiny parade. Then he looked quickly and slyly at Scobie to see whether his act had been noticed.

  ‘How often do you get down to the port?’ Scobie asked.

  ‘I was there for a night nine months ago. Why?’

  ‘Everybody needs a change. Have you many converts here?’

  ‘Fifteen. I try to persuade myself that young Pemberton had time—time, you know, while he died, to realize …’

  ‘Difficult to think clearly when you are strangling, Father.’ He took a swig at the aspirin and the sour grains stuck in his throat. ‘If it was murder you’d simply change your mortal sinner, Father,’ he said with an attempt at humour which wilted between the holy picture and the holy statue.

  ‘A murderer has time …’ Father Clay said. He added wistfully, with nostalgia, ‘I used to do duty sometimes at Liverpool Gaol.’

  ‘Have you any idea why he did it?’

  ‘I didn’t know him well enough. We didn’t get on together.’

  ‘The only white men here. It seems a pity.’

  ‘He offered to lend me some books, but they weren’t at all the kind of books I care to read—love stories, novels …’

  ‘What do you read, Father?’

  ‘Anything on the saints, Major Scobie. My great devotion is to the Little Flower.’

  ‘He drank a lot, didn’t he? Where did he get it from?’

  ‘Yusef’s store, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. He may have been in debt?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s terrible, terrible.’

  Scobie finished his aspirin. ‘I suppose I’d better go along.’ It was day now outside, and there was a peculiar innocence about the light, gentle and clear and fresh before the sun climbed.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Major Scobie.’

  The police sergeant sat in a deck-chair outside the D.C.’s bungalow. He rose and raggedly saluted, then immediately in his hollow unformed voice began to read his report. ‘At 3.30 p.m. yesterday, sah, I was woken by D.C.’s boy, who reported that D.C. Pemberton, sah …’

  ‘That’s all right, sergeant, I’ll go inside and have a look round.’ The chief clerk waited for him just inside the door.

  The living-room of the bungalow had obviously once been the D.C.’s pride—that must have been in Butterworth’s day. There was an air of elegance and personal pride in the furniture; it hadn’t been supplied by the Government. There were eighteenth-century engravings of the old colony on the wall and in one bookcase were the volumes that Butterworth had left behind him—Scobie noted some titles and authors, Maitland’s Constitutional History, Sir Henry Maine, Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, Hardy’s poems, and the Doomsday Records of Little Withington, privately printed. But imposed on all this were the traces of Pemberton—a gaudy leather pouf of so-called native work, the marks of cigarette-ends on the chairs, a stack of the books Father Clay had disliked—Somerset Maugham, an Edgar Wallace, two Horlers, and spread-eagled on the settee, Death Laughs at Locksmiths. The room was not properly dusted and Butterworth’s books were stained with damp.

  ‘The body is in the bedroom, sah,’ the sergeant said.

  Scobie opened the door and went in—Father Clay followed him. The body had been laid on the bed with a sheet over the face. When Scobie turned the sheet down to the shoulder he had the impression that he was looking at a child in a nightshirt quietly asleep: the pimples were the pimples of puberty and the dead face seemed to bear the trace of no experience beyond the class-room or the football field. ‘Poor child,’ he said aloud. The pious ejaculations of Father Clay irritated him. It seemed to him that unquestionably there must be mercy for someone so unformed. He asked abruptly, ‘How did he do it?’

  The police sergeant pointed to the picture rail that Butterworth had meticulously fitted—no Government contractor would have thought of it. A picture—an early native king receiving missionaries under a State umbrella—leant against the wall and a cord remained twisted over the brass picture hanger. Who would have expected the flimsy contrivance not to collapse? He can weigh very little, he thought, and he remembered a child’s bones, light and brittle as a bird’s. His feet when he hung must have been only fifteen inches from the ground.

  ‘Did he leave any papers?’ Scobie asked the clerk. ‘They usually do. Men who are going to die are apt to become garrulous with self-revelations.’

  ‘Yes, sah, in the office.’

  It needed only a casual inspection to realize how badly the office had been kept. The filing cabinet was unlocked: the trays on the desk were filled by papers dusty with inattention. The native clerk had obviously followed the same ways as his chief. ‘There, sah, on the pad.’

  Scobie read, in a hand-writing unformed as the face, a scriptwriting which hundreds of his school contemporaries must have been turning out all over the world: Dear Dad,—Forgive all this trouble. There doesn’t seem anything else to do. It’s a pity I’m not in the army because then I might be killed. Don’t go and pay the money I owe—the fellow doesn’t deserve it. They may try and get it out of you. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. It’s a rotten business for you, but it can’t be helped. Your loving son. The signature was ‘Dicky’. It was like a letter from school excusing a bad report.

  He handed the letter to Father Clay. ‘You are not going to tell me there’s anything unforgivable there, Father. If you or I did it, it would be despair—I grant you anything with us. We’d be damned because we know, but he doesn’t know a thing.’

  ‘The Church’s teaching …’

  ‘Even the Church can’t teach me that God doesn’t pity the young …’ Scobie broke abruptly off. ‘Sergeant, see that a grave’s dug quickly before the sun gets too hot. And look out for any bills he owed. I want to have a word with someone about this.’ When he turned towards the window the light dazzled him. He put his hand over his eyes and said, ‘I wish to God my head …’ and shivered. ‘I’m in for a dose if I can’t stop it. If you don’t mind Ali putting up my bed at your place, Father, I’ll try and sweat it out.’

  He took a heavy dose of quinine and lay naked between the blankets. As the sun climbed it sometimes seemed to him that the stone walls of the small cell-like room sweated with cold and sometimes were baked with heat. The door was open and Ali squatted on the step just outside whittling a piece of wood. Occasionally he chased away villagers who raised their voices within the area of sick-room silence. The peine forte
et dure weighed on Scobie’s forehead: occasionally it pressed him into sleep.

  But in this sleep there were no pleasant dreams. Pemberton and Louise were obscurely linked. Over and over again he was reading a letter which consisted only of variations on the figure 200 and the signature at the bottom was sometimes ‘Dicky’ and sometimes ‘Ticki’; he had the sense of time passing and his own immobility between the blankets—there was something he had to do, someone he had to save, Louise or Dicky or Ticki, but he was tied to the bed and they laid weights on his forehead as you lay weights on loose papers. Once the sergeant came to the door and Ali chased him away, once Father Clay tiptoed in and took a tract off a shelf, and once, but that might have been a dream, Yusef came to the door.

  About five in the evening he woke feeling dry and cool and weak and called Ali in. ‘I dreamed I saw Yusef.’

  ‘Yusef come for to see you, sah.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll see him now.’ He felt tired and beaten about the body: he turned to face the stone wall and was immediately asleep. In his sleep Louise wept silently beside him; he put out his hand and touched the stone wall again—‘Everything shall be arranged. Everything. Ticki promises.’ When he awoke Yusef was beside him.

  ‘A touch of fever, Major Scobie. I am very sorry to see you poorly.’

  ‘I’m sorry to see you at all, Yusef.’

  ‘Ah, you always make fun of me.’

  ‘Sit down, Yusef. What did you have to do with Pemberton?’

  Yusef eased his great haunches on the hard chair and noticing that his flies were open put down a large and hairy hand to deal with them. ‘Nothing, Major Scobie.’

  ‘It’s an odd coincidence that you are here just at the moment when he commits suicide.’

  ‘I think myself it is providence.’

  ‘He owed you money, I suppose?’

  ‘He owed my store-manager money.’