The Heart of the Matter Read online

  ‘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.”’

  ‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.

  ‘No, the terrible thing was that when I got the second telegram, I was so muddled in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must be still alive. For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was—disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought “now the anxiety begins, and the pain,” but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.’

  ‘Have you forgotten her?’

  ‘I don’t remember her often. You see, I escaped seeing her die. My wife had that.’

  It was astonishing to him how easily and quickly they had become friends. They came together over two deaths without reserve. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

  ‘Everybody would have looked after you.’

  ‘I think they are scared of me,’ she said.

  He laughed.

  ‘They are. Flight-Lieutenant Bagster took me to the beach this afternoon but he was scared. Because I’m not happy and because of my husband. Everybody on the beach was pretending to be happy about something and I sat there grinning and it didn’t work. Do you remember when you went to your first party and coming up the stairs you heard all the voices and you didn’t know how to talk to people? That’s how I felt so I sat and grinned in Mrs Carter’s bathing-dress and Bagster stroked my leg and I wanted to go home.’

  ‘You’ll be going home soon.’

  ‘I don’t mean that home. I mean here where I can shut the door and not answer when they knock. I don’t want to go away yet.’

  ‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’

  ‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.

  ‘Do you dream about it?’

  ‘No. I dream of John sometimes—that’s worse. Because I’ve always had bad dreams of him and I still have bad dreams of him. I mean we were always quarrelling in the dreams and we still go on quarrelling.’

  ‘Did you quarrel?’

  ‘No. He was sweet to me. We were only married a month you know. It would be easy being sweet as long as that wouldn’t it? When this happened I hadn’t really had time to know my way around.’ It seemed to Scobie that she had never known her way around—at least not since she had left her netball team; was it a year ago? Sometimes he saw her lying back in the boat on that oily featureless sea day after day with the other child near death and the sailor going mad and Miss Malcott, and the chief engineer who felt his responsibility to the owners, and sometimes he saw her carried past him on a stretcher grasping her stamp-album, and now he saw her in the borrowed unbecoming bathing-dress grinning at Bagster as he stroked her legs, listening to the laughter and the splashes, not knowing the adult etiquette … Sadly like an evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore.

  ‘You’ve written to your father?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’

  Scobie read, Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’

  ‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about
. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’

  Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’

  He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes … compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute and the influential escaped in war.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’

  It was impossible to think of her being saved from the sea and then flung back like a fish that wasn’t worth catching.

  He said, ‘Can you type?’

  ‘I can get along quite fast with one finger.’

  ‘You could get a job here, I think. We are very short of secretaries. All the wives, you know, are working in the secretariat, and we still haven’t enough. But it’s a bad climate for a woman.’

  ‘I’d like to stay. Let’s have a drink on it.’ She called, ‘Boy, boy.’