The Heart of the Matter Read online

  Dear little money spider, the letter began, your father who loves you more than anything upon earth will try to send you a little more money this time. I know how hard things are for you, and my heart bleeds. Little money spider, if only I could feel your fingers running across my cheek. How is it that a great fat father like I am should have so tiny and beautiful a daughter. Now little money spider, I will tell you everything that has happened to me. We left Lobito a week ago after only four days in port. I stayed one night with Senor Aranjuez and I drank more wine than was good for me, but all my talk was of you. I was good all the time I was in port because I had promised my little money spider, and I went to Confession and Communion, so that if anything should happen to me on the way to Lisbon—for who knows in these terrible days?—I should not have to live my eternity away from my little spider. Since we left Lobito we have had good weather. Even the passengers are not sea-sick. Tomorrow night, because Africa will be at last behind us, we shall have a ship’s concert, and I shall perform on my whistle. All the time I perform I shall remember the days when my little money spider sat on my knee and listened. My dear, I am growing old, and after every voyage I am fatter: I am not a good man, and sometimes I fear that my soul in all this hulk of flesh is no larger than a pea. You do not know how easy it is for a man like me to commit the unforgivable despair. Then I think of my daughter. There was just enough good in me once for you to be fashioned. A wife shares too much of a man’s sin for perfect love. But a daughter may save him at the last. Pray for me, little spider. Your father who loves you more than life.

  Mais que a vida. Scobie felt no doubt at all of the sincerity of this letter. This was not written to conceal a photograph of the Cape Town defences or a microphotograph report on troop movements at Durban. It should, he knew, be tested for secret ink, examined under a microscope, and the inner lining of the envelope exposed. Nothing should be left to chance with a clandestine letter. But he had committed himself to a belief. He tore the letter up, and his own report with it, and carried the scraps out to the incinerator in the yard—a petrol-tin standing upon two bricks with its sides punctured to make a draught. As he struck a match to light the papers, Fraser joined him in the yard. ‘What will we care for the why and the wherefore?’ On the top of the scraps lay unmistakably half a foreign envelope: one could even read part of the address—Friedrichstrasse. He quickly held the match to the uppermost scrap as Fraser crossed the yard, striding with unbearable youth. The scrap went up in flame, and in the heat of the fire another scrap uncurled the name of Groener. Fraser said cheerfully, ‘Burning the evidence?’ and looked down into the tin. The name had blackened: there was nothing there surely that Fraser could see—except a brown triangle of envelope that seemed to Scobie obviously foreign. He ground it out of existence with a stick and looked up at Fraser to see whether he could detect any surprise or suspicion. There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term. Only his own heart-beats told him he was guilty—that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers—Bailey who had kept a safe deposit in another city. Crayshaw who had been found with diamonds, Boyston against whom nothing had been definitely proved and who had been invalided out. They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

  ‘What sort of day, sir?’ Fraser asked, staring at the small pile of ash. Perhaps he was thinking that it should have been his day.

  ‘The usual kind of a day,’ Scobie said.

  ‘How about the captain?’ Fraser asked, looking down into the petrol-tin, beginning to hum again his languid tune.

  ‘The captain?’ Scobie said.

  ‘Oh, Druce told me some fellow informed on him.’

  ‘Just the usual thing,’ Scobie said. ‘A dismissed steward with a grudge. Didn’t Druce tell you we found nothing?’

  ‘No,’ Fraser said, ‘he didn’t seem to be sure. Good night, sir. I must be pushing off to the mess.’

  ‘Thimblerigg on duty?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Scobie watched him go. The back was as vacuous as the face: one could read nothing there. Scobie thought, what a fool I have been. What a fool. He owed his duty to Louise, not to a fat sentimental Portuguese skipper who had broken the rules of his own company for the sake of a daughter equally unattractive. That had been the turning point, the daughter. And now, Scobie thought, I must return home: I shall put the car away in the garage, and Ali will come forward with his torch to light me to the door. She will be sitting there between two draughts for coolness, and I shall read on her face the story of what she has been thinking all day. She will have been hoping that everything is fixed, that I shall say, ‘I’ve put your name down at the agent’s for South Africa,’ but she’ll be afraid that nothing so good as that will ever happen to us. She’ll wait for me to speak, and I shall try to talk about anything under the sun to postpone seeing her misery (it would be waiting at the corners of her mouth to take possession of her whole face). He knew exactly how things would go: it had happened so often before. He rehearsed every word, going back into his office, locking his desk, going down to his car. People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say, ‘Good evening, sweet heart,’ and she’ll say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.

  IV

  ‘What about you, darling?’ He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more pink gins. There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

  ‘You don’t really want to know about me.’

  ‘Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?’

  ‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’

  ‘All off?’

  ‘You know what I mean—the passage. You’ve been talking and talking since you came in about the Esperança. There’s a Portuguese ship in once a fortnight. You don’t talk that way every time. I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out—“you can’t go”?’

  He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be true. I’ll find some way.’ Reluctantly he had recourse to the hated nickname. If that failed, the misery would deepen and go right on through the short night he needed for sleep. ‘Trust Ticki,’ he said. It was as if a ligament tightened in his brain with the suspense. If only I could postpone the misery, he thought, until daylight. Misery is worse in the darkness: there’s nothing to look at except the green black-out curtains, the Government furniture, the flying ants scattering their wings over the table: a hundred yards away the Creoles’ pye-dogs yapped and wailed. ‘Look at that little beggar,’ he said, pointing at the house lizard that always came out upon the wall about this time to hunt for moths and cockroaches. He said, ‘We only got the idea last night. These things take time to fix. Ways and means, ways and means,’ he said with strained humour.

  ‘Have you been to the bank?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘And you couldn’t get the money?’

  ‘No. They couldn’t manage it. Have another gin and bitters, darling?’

  She held her glass out to him, crying dumbly; her face reddened when she cried—she looked ten years older, a middle-aged and abandoned woman—it was like the terrible breath of the future on his cheek. He went down on one knee beside her and held the pink gin to her
lips as though it were medicine. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I’ll find a way. Have a drink.’

  ‘Ticki, I can’t bear this place any longer. I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it this time. I shall go mad. Ticki, I’m so lonely. I haven’t a friend, Ticki.’

  ‘Let’s have Wilson up tomorrow.’

  ‘Ticki, for God’s sake don’t always mention Wilson. Please, please do something.’

  ‘Of course I will. Just be patient a while, dear. These things take time.’

  ‘What will you do, Ticki?’

  ‘I’m full of ideas, darling,’ he said wearily. (What a day it had been.) ‘Just let them simmer for a little while.’

  ‘Tell me one idea. Just one.’

  His eyes followed the lizard as it pounced; then he picked an ant wing out of his gin and drank again. He thought to himself: what a fool I really was not to take the hundred pounds. I destroyed the letter for nothing. I took the risk. I might just as well … Louise said, ‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm—it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and ties are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you think I love if I don’t love you?’

  ‘You don’t love anybody.’

  ‘Is that why I treat you so badly?’ He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him.

  ‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’

  ‘Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you do.’

  He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comforting lie, ‘I try all the time to keep you happy. I work hard for that.’

  ‘Ticki, you won’t even say you love me. Go on. Say it once.’

  He eyed her bitterly over the pink gin, the visible sign of his failure: the skin a little yellow with atabrine, the eyes bloodshot with tears. No man could guarantee love for ever, but he had sworn fourteen years ago, at Ealing, silently, during the horrible little elegant ceremony among the lace and candles, that he would at least always see to it that she was happy. ‘Ticki, I’ve got nothing except you, and you’ve got—nearly everything.’ The lizard flicked across the wall and came to rest again, the wings of a moth in his small crocodile jaws. The ants struck tiny muffled blows at the electric globe.

  ‘And yet you want to go away from me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you aren’t happy either. Without me you’ll have peace.’

  This was what he always left out of account—the accuracy of her observation. He had nearly everything, and all he needed was peace. Everything meant work, the daily regular routine in the little bare office, the change of seasons in a place he loved. How often he had been pitied for the austerity of the work, the bareness of the rewards. But Louise knew him better than that. If he had become young again this was the life he would have chosen to live; only this time he would not have expected any other person to share it with him, the rat upon the bath, the lizard on the wall, the tornado blowing open the windows at one in the morning, and the last pink light upon the laterite roads at sundown.

  ‘You are talking nonsense, dear,’ he said, and went through the doomed motions of mixing another gin and bitters. Again the nerve in his head tightened; unhappiness had uncoiled with its inevitable routine—first her misery and his strained attempts to leave everything unsaid: then her own calm statement of truths much better lied about, and finally the snapping of his own control—truths flung back at her as though she were his enemy. As he embarked on this last stage, crying suddenly and truthfully out at her while the angostura trembled in his hand, ‘You can’t give me peace,’ he already knew what would succeed it, the reconciliation and the easy lies again until the next scene.

  ‘That’s what I say,’ she said, ‘if I go away, you’ll have your peace.’

  ‘You haven’t any conception,’ he accused her, ‘of what peace means.’ It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company, crouched under the rusting handcuffs in the locked office, reading the reports from the sub-stations. Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.

  Louise said with the old tenderness, ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead like Catherine. You want to be alone.’

  He replied obstinately, ‘I want you to be happy.’

  She said wearily, ‘Just tell me you love me. That helps a little.’ They were through again, on the other side of the scene: he thought coolly and collectedly, this one wasn’t so bad: we shall be able to sleep tonight. He said, ‘Of course I love you, darling. And I’ll fix that passage. You’ll see.’

  He would still have made the promise even if he could have foreseen all that would come of it. He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this action might carry him. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

  PART TWO

  1

  I

  WILSON STOOD GLOOMILY by his bed in the Bedford Hotel and contemplated his cummerbund, which lay ruffled like an angry snake; the small room was hot with the conflict between them. Through the wall he could hear Harris cleaning his teeth for the fifth time that day. Harris believed in dental hygiene. ‘It’s cleaning my teeth before and after every meal that’s kept me so well in this bloody climate,’ he would say, raising his pale exhausted face over an orange squash. Now he was gargling: it sounded like a noise in the pipes.

  Wilson sat down on the edge of his bed and rested. He had left his door open for coolness, and across the passage he could see into the bathroom. The Indian with the turban was sitting on the side of the bath fully dressed. He stared inscrutably back at Wilson and bowed. ‘Just a moment, sir,’ he called. ‘If you would care to step in here …’ Wilson angrily shut the door. Then he had another try with the cummerbund.

  He had once seen a film—was it Bengal Lancer?—in which the cummerbund was superbly disciplined. A native held the coil and an immaculate officer spun like a top, so that the cummerbund encircled him smoothly, tightly. Another servant stood by with iced drinks, and a punkah swayed in the background. Apparently these things were better managed in India. However, with one more effort, Wilson did get the wretched thing wrapped around him. It was too tight and it was badly creased, and the tuck-in came too near the front, so that it was not hidden by the jacket. He contemplated his image with melancholy in what was left of the mirror. Somebody tapped on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ Wilson shouted, imagining for a moment that the Indian had had the cool impertinence to pursue … but when the door opened, it was only Harris: the Indian was still sitting on the bath across the passage shuffling his testimonials.

  ‘Going out, old man?’ Harris asked, with disappointment.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everybody seems to b
e going out this evening. I shall have the table all to myself.’ He added with gloom, ‘It’s the curry evening too.’

  ‘So it is. I’m sorry to miss it.’

  ‘You haven’t been having it for two years, old man, every Thursday night.’ He looked at the cummerbund. ‘That’s not right, old man.’

  ‘I know it isn’t. It’s the best I can do.’

  ‘I never wear one. It stands to reason that it’s bad for the stomach. They tell you it absorbs sweat, but that’s not where I sweat, old man. I’d rather wear braces, only the elastic perishes, so a leather belt’s good enough for me. I’m no snob. Where are you dining, old man?’

  ‘At Tallit’s.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘He came into the office yesterday to pay his account and asked me to dinner.’

  ‘You don’t have to dress for a Syrian, old man. Take it all off again.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I am. It wouldn’t do at all. Quite wrong.’ He added, ‘You’ll get a good dinner, but be careful of the sweets. The price of life is eternal vigilance. I wonder what he wants out of you.’ Wilson began to undress again while Harris talked. He was a good listener. His brain was like a sieve through which the rubbish fell all day long. Sitting on the bed in his pants he heard Harris—‘you have to be careful of the fish: I never touch it’—but the words left no impression. Drawing up his white drill trousers over his hairless knees he said to himself:

  the poor sprite is

  Imprisoned for some fault of his

  In a body like a grave.

  His belly rumbled and tumbled as it always did a little before the hour of dinner.

  From you he only dares to crave,

  For his service and his sorrow,