The Heart of the Matter Page 3

  ‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I suppose everyone knows.’

  ‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’

  ‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’

  Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’

  ‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that.’

  ‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’

  ‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said.

  ‘Your wife won’t like it.’

  ‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here—somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’

  ‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’

  ‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.

  ‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’

  ‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’

  ‘They haven’t got that far yet. That’s the next stage. No, you sleep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’

  ‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl. Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’

  ‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’

  ‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’

  ‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right.’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’

  Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You don’t live here, do you?’

  ‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’

  ‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary—no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.

  The girl said, ‘My landlady—she broke up my home last night. She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’

  ‘You got plenty lodgers?’

  ‘Only three, sir.’

  He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece—a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’

  ‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’

  ‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’

  ‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah in Sharp Town?’

  ‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’

  ‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’

  ‘No, sir. Same father.’

  The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that failed she had taken action herself. She would deny that there had ever been a chest of china. The corporal would confirm this. He would turn out not to be the landlady’s brother, but some other unspecified relation—probably disreputable. Bribes—which were known respectably as dashes—would pass to and fro, the storm of indignation and anger that had sounded so genuine would subside, the partitions would go up again, nobody would hear any more about the chest, and several policemen would be a shilling or two the richer. At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty houseowner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself. After that he had tried to kill these cases at birth: he would reason with the complainant and point out that the investigation would do no good and undoubtedly cost her time and money; he would sometimes even refuse to investigate. The result of that inaction had been stones flung at his car window, slashed tyres, the nickname of the Bad Man that had stuck to him through all one long sad tour—it worried him unreasonably in the heat and damp; he couldn’t take it lightly. Already he had begun to desire these people’s trust and affection. That year he had blackwater fever and was nearly invalided from the service altogether.

  The girl waited patiently for his decision. They had an infinite capacity for patience when patience was required—just as their impatience knew no bounds of propriety when they had anything to gain by it. They would sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get served in a store before their neighbour. He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty—the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of the young buttocks, she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows—a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise. He said, ‘Give this chit to the sergeant at the desk.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘Try to tell him the truth.’

  He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.

  III

  Scobie had been out-manoeuvred in the interminable war over housing. During his last leave he had lost his bungalow in Cape Station, the main European quarter, to a senior sanitary inspector called Fellowes, and had found himself relegated to a square two-storeyed house built originally for a Syrian trader on the flats below—a piece of reclaimed swamp which would return to swamp as soon as t
he rains set in. From the windows he looked directly out to sea over a line of Creole houses; on the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse. On the low ridge of hills behind him the bungalows of the station lay among the low clouds; lamps burned all day in the cupboards, mould gathered on the boots—nevertheless these were the houses for men of his rank. Women depended so much on pride, pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were seldom proud, it seemed to him, of the invisible.

  ‘Louise,’ he called, ‘Louise.’ There was no reason to call: if she wasn’t in the living-room there was nowhere else for her to be but the bedroom (the kitchen was simply a shed in the yard opposite the back door), yet it was his habit to cry her name, a habit he had formed in the days of anxiety and love. The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide—the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.

  In the old days she had replied, but she was not such a creature of habit as he was—nor so false, he sometimes told himself. Kindness and pity had no power with her; she would never have pretended an emotion she didn’t feel, and like an animal she gave way completely to the momentary sickness and recovered as suddenly. When he found her in the bedroom under the mosquito-net she reminded him of a dog or a cat, she was so completely ‘out’. Her hair was matted, her eyes closed. He stood very still like a spy in foreign territory, and indeed he was in foreign territory now. If home for him meant the reduction of things to a friendly unchanging minimum, home to her was accumulation. The dressing-table was crammed with pots and photographs—himself as a young man in the curiously dated officer’s uniform of the last war: the Chief Justice’s wife whom for the moment she counted as her friend: their only child who had died at school in England three years ago—a little pious nine-year-old girl’s face in the white muslin of first communion: innumerable photographs of Louise herself, in groups with nursing sisters, with the Admiral’s party at Medley Beach, on a Yorkshire moor with Teddy Bromley and his wife. It was as if she were accumulating evidence that she had friends like other people. He watched her through the muslin net. Her face had the ivory tinge of atabrine: her hair which had once been the colour of bottled honey was dark and stringy with sweat. These were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion. It was pity that told him to go: he wouldn’t have woken his worst enemy from sleep, leave alone Louise. He tiptoed out and down the stairs. (The inside stairs could be found nowhere else in this bungalow city except in Government House, and she had tried to make them an object of pride with stair-carpets and pictures on the wall.) In the living-room there was a bookcase full of her books, rugs on the floor, a native mask from Nigeria, more photographs. The books had to be wiped daily to remove the damp, and she had not succeeded very well in disguising with flowery curtains the food safe which stood with each foot in a little enamel basin of water to keep the ants out. The boy was laying a single place for lunch.

  The boy was short and squat with the broad ugly pleasant face of a Temne. His bare feet flapped like empty gloves across the floor.

  ‘What’s wrong with Missus?’ Scobie asked.

  ‘Belly humbug,’ Ali said.

  Scobie took a Mende grammar from the bookcase: it was tucked away in the bottom shelf where its old untidy cover was least conspicuous. In the upper shelves were the flimsy rows of Louise’s authors—not so young modern poets and the novels of Virginia Woolf. He couldn’t concentrate: it was too hot and his wife’s absence was like a garrulous companion in the room reminding him of his responsibility. A fork fell on the floor and he watched Ali surreptitiously wipe it on his sleeve, watched him with affection. They had been together fifteen years—a year longer than his marriage—a long time to keep a servant. He had been ‘small boy’ first, then assistant steward in the days when one kept four servants, now he was plain steward. After each leave Ali would be on the landing-stage waiting to organize his luggage with three or four ragged carriers. In the intervals of leave many people tried to steal Ali’s services, but he had never yet failed to be waiting—except once when he had been in prison. There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid for ever.

  ‘Ticki,’ a voice wailed, and Scobie rose at once. ‘Ticki.’ He went upstairs.

  His wife was sitting up under the mosquito-net, and for a moment he had the impression of a joint under a meat-cover. But pity trod on the heels of the cruel image and hustled it away. ‘Are you feeling better, darling?’

  Louise said, ‘Mrs Castle’s been in.’

  ‘Enough to make anyone ill,’ Scobie said.

  ‘She’s been telling me about you.’

  ‘What about me?’ He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death.

  ‘She says the Commissioner’s retiring, and they’ve passed you over.’

  ‘Her husband talks too much in his sleep.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve known it for weeks. It doesn’t matter, dear, really.’

  Louise said. ‘I’ll never be able to show my face at the club again.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as that. These things happen, you know.’

  ‘You’ll resign, won’t you, Ticki?’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that, dear.’

  ‘Mrs Castle’s on our side. She’s furious. She says everyone’s talking about it and saying things. Darling, you aren’t in the pay of the Syrians, are you?’

  ‘No, dear.’

  ‘I was so upset I came out of Mass before the end. It’s so mean of them, Ticki. You can’t take it lying down. You’ve got to think of me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. All the time.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand under the net and touched hers. Little beads of sweat started where their skins touched. He said, ‘I do think of you, dear. But I’ve been fifteen years in this place. I’d be lost anywhere else, even if they gave me another job. It isn’t much of a recommendation, you know, being passed over.’

  ‘We could retire.’

  ‘The pension isn’t much to live on.’

  ‘I’m sure I could make a little money writing. Mrs Castle says I ought to be a professional. With all this experience,’ Louise said, gazing through the white muslin tent as far as her dressing-table: there another face in white muslin stared back and she looked away. She said, ‘If only we could go to South Africa. I can’t bear the people here.’

  ‘Perhaps I could arrange a passage for you. There haven’t been many sinkings that way lately. You ought to have a holiday.’

  ‘There was a time when you wanted to retire too. You used to count the years. You made plans—for all of us.’

  ‘Oh well, one changes,’ he said.

  She said mercilessly, ‘You didn’t think you’d be alone with me then.’

  He pressed his sweating hand against hers. ‘What nonsense you talk, dear. You must get up and have some food …’

  ‘Do you love anyone, Ticki, except yourself?’

  ‘No, I just love myself, that’s all. And Ali. I forgot Ali. Of course I love him too. But not you,’ he ran on with worn mechanical raillery, stroking her hand, smiling, soothing …

  ‘And Ali’s sister?’

  ‘Has he got a sister?’

  ‘They’ve all got sisters, haven’t they? Why didn’t you go to Mass today?’

  ‘It was my morning on duty, dear. You know that.’

  ‘You could have changed it. You haven’t got much faith, have you, Ticki?’

  ‘You’ve got enough for both of us, dear. Come and have some food.’

  ‘Ticki, I sometimes think you just became a Catholic to marry me. It doesn’t m
ean a thing to you, does it?’

  ‘Listen, darling, you want to come down and eat a bit. Then you want to take the car along to the beach and have some fresh air.’

  ‘How different the whole day would have been,’ she said, staring out of her net, ‘if you’d come home and said, “Darling, I’m going to be the Commissioner.”’

  Scobie said slowly, ‘You know, dear, in a place like this in wartime—an important harbour—the Vichy French just across the border—all this diamond smuggling from the Protectorate, they need a younger man.’ He didn’t believe a word he was saying.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘That’s the only reason. You can’t blame anyone. It’s the war.’

  ‘The war does spoil everything, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It gives the younger men a chance.’

  ‘Darling, perhaps I’ll come down and just pick at a little cold meat.’

  ‘That’s right, dear.’ He withdrew his hand: it was dripping with sweat. ‘I’ll tell Ali.’

  Downstairs he shouted ‘Ali’ out of the back door.

  ‘Massa?’

  ‘Lay two places. Missus better.’

  The first faint breeze of the day came off the sea, blowing up over the bushes and between the Creole huts. A vulture flapped heavily upwards from the iron roof and down again in the yard next door. Scobie drew a deep breath; he felt exhausted and victorious: he had persuaded Louise to pick a little meat. It had always been his responsibility to maintain happiness in those he loved. One was safe now, for ever, and the other was going to eat her lunch.

  IV

  In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.