The Heart of the Matter Page 9

  That night it took him a long while to sleep, and when he slept at last he dreamed that he had committed a crime, so that he woke with the sense of guilt still heavy upon him. On his way down to breakfast he paused outside Harris’s door. There was no sound. He knocked, but there was no answer. He opened the door a little way and saw obscurely through the grey net Harris’s damp bed. He asked softly, ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry Harris, about last night.’

  ‘My fault, old man. I’ve got a touch of fever. I was sickening for it. Touchy.’

  ‘No, it’s my fault. You are quite right. It was D.D.’

  ‘We’ll toss up for it, old man.’

  ‘I’ll come in tonight.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  But after breakfast something took his mind right away from Harris. He had been in to the Commissioner’s office on his way down town and coming out he ran into Scobie.

  ‘Hallo,’ Scobie said, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘Been in to see the Commissioner about a pass. There are so many passes one has to have in this town, sir. I wanted one for the wharf.’

  ‘When are you going to call on us again, Wilson?’

  ‘You don’t want to be bothered with strangers, sir.’

  ‘Nonsense. Louise would like another chat about books. I don’t read them myself, you know, Wilson.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have much time.’

  ‘Oh, there’s an awful lot of time around,’ Scobie said, ‘in a country like this. I just don’t have a taste for reading, that’s all. Come into my office a moment while I ring up Louise. She’ll be glad to see you. Wish you’d call in and take her for a walk. She doesn’t get enough exercise.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Wilson said, and blushed hurriedly in the shadows. He looked around him: this was Scobie’s office. He examined it as a general might examine a battleground, and yet it was difficult to regard Scobie as an enemy. The rusty handcuffs jangled on the wall as Scobie leant back from his desk and dialled.

  ‘Free this evening?’

  He brought his mind sharply back, aware that Scobie was watching him: the slightly protruding, slightly reddened eyes dwelt on him with a kind of speculation. ‘I wonder why you came out here,’ Scobie said. ‘You aren’t the type.’

  ‘One drifts into things,’ Wilson lied.

  ‘I don’t,’ Scobie said, ‘I’ve always been a planner. You see, I even plan for other people.’ He began to talk into the telephone. His intonation changed: it was as if he were reading a part—a part which called for tenderness and patience, a part which had been read so often that the eyes were blank above the mouth. Putting down the receiver, he said, ‘That’s fine. That’s settled then.’

  ‘It seems a very good plan to me,’ Wilson said.

  ‘My plans always start out well,’ Scobie said. ‘You two go for a walk, and when you get back I’ll have a drink ready for you. Stay to dinner,’ he went on with a hint of anxiety. ‘We’ll be glad of your company.’

  When Wilson had gone, Scobie went in to the Commissioner. He said, ‘I was just coming along to see you, sir, when I ran into Wilson.’

  ‘Oh yes, Wilson,’ the Commissioner said. ‘He came in to have a word with me about one of their lightermen.’

  ‘I see.’ The shutters were down in the office to cut out the morning sun. A sergeant passed through carrying with him, as well as his file, a breath of the Zoo behind. The day was heavy with unshed rain: already at 8.30 in the morning the body ran with sweat. Scobie said, ‘He told me he’d come about a pass.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Commissioner said, ‘that too.’ He put a piece of blotting-paper under his wrist to absorb the sweat as he wrote. ‘Yes, there was something about a pass too, Scobie.’

  2

  I

  MRS SCOBIE LED the way, scrambling down towards the bridge over the river that still carried the sleepers of an abandoned railway.

  ‘I’d never have found this path by myself,’ Wilson said, panting a little with the burden of his plumpness.

  Louise Scobie said, ‘It’s my favourite walk.’

  On the dry dusty slope above the path an old man sat in the doorway of a hut doing nothing. A girl with small crescent breasts climbed down towards them balancing a pail of water on her head; a child naked except for a red bead necklace round the waist played in a little dust-paved yard among the chickens; labourers carrying hatchets came across the bridge at the end of their day. It was the hour of comparative coolness, the hour of peace.

  ‘You wouldn’t guess, would you, that the city’s just behind us?’ Mrs Scobie said. ‘And a few hundred yards up there over the hill the boys are bringing in the drinks.’

  The path wound along the slope of the hill. Down below him Wilson could see the huge harbour spread out. A convoy was gathering inside the boom; tiny boats moved like flies between the ships; above them the ashy trees and the burnt scrubs hid the summit of the ridge. Wilson stumbled once or twice as his toes caught in the ledges left by the sleepers.

  Louise Scobie said, ‘This is what I thought it was all going to be like.’

  ‘Your husband loves the place, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, I think sometimes he’s got a kind of selective eyesight. He sees what he likes to see. He doesn’t seem to see the snobbery, and he doesn’t hear the gossip.’

  ‘He sees you,’ Wilson said.

  ‘Thank God he doesn’t, because I’ve caught the disease.’

  ‘You aren’t a snob.’

  ‘Oh yes, I am.’

  ‘You took me up,’ Wilson said, blushing and contorting his face into a careful careless whistle. But he couldn’t whistle. The plump lips blew empty air, like a fish.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Louise said, ‘don’t be humble.’

  ‘I’m not really humble,’ Wilson said. He stood aside to let a labourer go by. He explained, ‘I’ve got inordinate ambitions.’

  ‘In two minutes,’ Louise said, ‘we get to the best point of all—where you can’t see a single house.’

  ‘It’s good of you to show me …’ Wilson muttered, stumbling on again along the ridge track. He had no small talk: with a woman he could be romantic, but nothing else.

  ‘There,’ Louise said, but he had hardly time to take the view in—the harsh green slopes falling down towards the great flat glaring bay—when she wanted to be off again, back the way they had come. ‘Henry will be in soon,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s Henry?’

  ‘My husband.’

  ‘I didn’t know his name. I’d heard you call him something else—something like Ticki.’

  ‘Poor Henry,’ she said. ‘How he hates it. I try not to when other people are there, but I forget. Let’s go.’

  ‘Can’t we go just a little further—to the railway station?’

  ‘I’d like to change,’ Louise said, ‘before dark. The rats begin to come in after dark.’

  ‘Going back will be downhill all the way.’

  ‘Let’s hurry then,’ Louise said. He followed her. Thin and ungainly, she seemed to him to possess a sort of Undine beauty. She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality. In his romantic, humble, ambitious mind he could conceive only a relationship with a waitress, a cinema usherette, a landlady’s daughter in Battersea or with a queen—this was a queen. He began to mutter again at her heels—‘so good’—between pants, his plump knees knocking together on the stony path. Quite suddenly the light changed: the laterite soil turned a translucent pink sloping down the hill to the wide flat water of the bay. There was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned.

  ‘This is it,’ Louise said, and they leant and got their breath again against the wooden wall of the small abandoned station, watching the light fade out as quickly as it came.

  Through an open door—had it been th
e waiting room or the station master’s office?—the hens passed in and out. The dust on the windows was like the steam left only a moment ago by a passing train. On the forever-closed guichet somebody had chalked a crude phallic figure. Wilson could see it over her left shoulder as she leant back to get her breath. ‘I used to come here every day,’ Louise said, ‘until they spoilt it for me.’

  ‘They?’

  She said, ‘Thank God, I shall be out of here soon.’

  ‘Why? You are not going away?’

  ‘Henry’s sending me to South Africa.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Wilson exclaimed. The news was so unexpected that it was like a twinge of pain. His face twisted with it.

  He tried to cover up the absurd exposure. No one knew better than he did that his face was not made to express agony or passion. He said, ‘What will he do without you?’

  ‘He’ll manage.’

  ‘He’ll be terribly lonely,’ Wilson said—he, he, he chiming back in his inner ear like a misleading echo I, I, I.

  ‘He’ll be happier without me.’

  ‘He couldn’t be.’

  ‘Henry doesn’t love me,’ she said gently, as though she were teaching a child, using the simplest words to explain a difficult subject, simplifying … She leant her head back against the guichet and smiled at him as much as to say, it’s quite easy really when you get the hang of it. ‘He’ll be happier without me,’ she repeated. An ant moved from the woodwork on to her neck and he leant close to flick it away. He had no other motive. When he took his mouth away from hers the ant was still there. He let it run on to his finger. The taste of the lipstick was like something he’d never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world.

  ‘I hate him,’ she said, carrying on the conversation exactly where it had been left.

  ‘You mustn’t go,’ he implored her. A bead of sweat ran down into his right eye and he brushed it away; on the guichet by her shoulder his eyes took in again the phallic scrawl.

  ‘I’d have gone before this if it hadn’t been for the money, poor dear. He has to find it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That’s man’s business,’ she said like a provocation, and he kissed her again; their mouths clung like bivalves, and then she pulled away and he heard the sad—to and fro—of Father Rank’s laugh coming up along the path. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ Father Rank called. His stride lengthened and he caught a foot in his soutane and stumbled as he went by. ‘A storm’s coming up,’ he said. ‘Got to hurry,’ and his ‘ho, ho, ho’ diminished mournfully along the railway track, bringing no comfort to anyone.

  ‘He didn’t see who we were,’ Wilson said.

  ‘Of course he did. What does it matter?’

  ‘He’s the biggest gossip in the town.’

  ‘Only about things that matter,’ she said.

  ‘This doesn’t matter?’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Why should it?’

  ‘I’m in love with you, Louise,’ Wilson said sadly.

  ‘This is the second time we’ve met.’

  ‘I don’t see that that makes any difference. Do you like me, Louise?’

  ‘Of course I like you, Wilson.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Wilson.’

  ‘Have you got another name?’

  ‘Edward.’

  ‘Do you want me to call you Teddy? Or Bear? These things creep on you before you know where you are. Suddenly you are calling someone Bear or Ticki, and the real name seems bald and formal, and the next you know they hate you for it. I’ll stick to Wilson.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

  ‘I am leaving him. I told you. I’m going to South Africa.’

  ‘I love you, Louise,’ he said again.

  ‘How old are you, Wilson?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘A very young thirty-two, and I am an old thirty-eight.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘The poetry you read, Wilson, is too romantic. It does matter. It matters much more than love. Love isn’t a fact like age and religion …’

  Across the bay the clouds came up: they massed blackly over Bullom and then tore up the sky, climbing vertically: the wind pressed the two of them back against the station. ‘Too late,’ Louise said, ‘we’re caught.’

  ‘How long will this last?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  A handful of rain was flung in their faces, and then the water came down. They stood inside the station and heard the water hurled upon the roof. They were in darkness, and the chickens moved at their feet.

  ‘This is grim,’ Louise said.

  He made a motion towards her hand and touched her shoulder. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilson,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s have a petting party.’ She had to speak loud for her voice to carry above the thunder on the iron roof.

  ‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean …’

  He could hear her shifting further away, and he was glad of the darkness which hid his humiliation. ‘I like you, Wilson,’ she said, ‘but I’m not a nursing sister who expects to be taken whenever she finds herself in the dark with a man. You have no responsibilities towards me, Wilson. I don’t want you.’

  ‘I love you, Louise.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Wilson. You’ve told me. Do you think there are snakes in here—or rats?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. When are you going to South Africa, Louise?’

  ‘When Ticki can raise the money.’

  ‘It will cost a lot. Perhaps you won’t be able to go.’

  ‘He’ll manage somehow. He said he would.’

  ‘Life insurance?’

  ‘No, he’s tried that.’

  ‘I wish I could lend it to you myself. But I’m poor as a church-mouse.’

  ‘Don’t talk about mice in here. Ticki will manage somehow.’

  He began to see her face through the darkness, thin, grey, attenuated—it was like trying to remember the features of someone he had once known who had gone away. One would build them up in just this way—the nose and then if one concentrated enough the brow; the eyes would escape him.

  ‘He’ll do anything for me.’

  He said bitterly, ‘A moment ago you said he didn’t love you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but he has a terrible sense of responsibility.’

  He made a movement and she cried furiously out, ‘Keep still. I don’t love you. I love Ticki.’

  ‘I was only shifting my weight,’ he said. She began to laugh. ‘How funny this is,’ she said. ‘It’s a long time since anything funny happened to me. I’ll remember this for months, for months.’ But it seemed to Wilson that he would remember her laughter all his life. His shorts flapped in the draught of the storm and he thought, ‘In a body like a grave.’

  II

  When Louise and Wilson crossed the river and came into Burnside it was quite dark. The headlamps of a police van lit an open door, the figures moved to and fro carrying packages. ‘What’s up now?’ Louise exclaimed, and began to run down the road. Wilson panted after her. Ali came from the house carrying on his head a tin bath, a folding chair, and a bundle tied up in an old towel. ‘What on earth’s happened, Ali?’

  ‘Massa go on trek,’ he said, and grinned happily in the headlamps.

  In the sitting-room Scobie sat with a drink in his hand. ‘I’m glad you are back,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d have to write a note,’ and Wilson saw that in fact he had already begun one. He had torn a leaf out of his notebook, and his large awkward writing covered a couple of lines.

  ‘What on earth’s happening, Henry?’

  ‘I’ve got to get off to Bamba.’

  ‘Can’t you wait for the train on Thursday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘Not this time. I’m sorry, dear. I’ll have to take Ali and leave you the small boy.’

  ‘What’s happened?’
/>
  ‘There’s trouble over young Pemberton.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s such a fool. It was madness to leave him there as D.C.’

  Scobie drank his whisky and said, ‘I’m sorry, Wilson. Help yourself. Get a bottle of soda out of the ice-box. The boys are busy packing.’

  ‘How long will you be, darling?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, with any luck. Why don’t you go and stay with Mrs Halifax?’

  ‘I shall be all right here, darling.’

  ‘I’d take the small boy and leave you Ali, but the small boy can’t cook.’

  ‘You’ll be happier with Ali, dear. It will be like the old days before I came out.’

  ‘I think I’ll be off, sir,’ Wilson said. ‘I’m sorry I kept Mrs Scobie out so late.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t worry, Wilson. Father Rank came by and told me you were sheltering in the old station. Very sensible of you. He got a drenching. He should have stayed too—he doesn’t want a dose of fever at his age.’

  ‘Can I fill your glass, sir? Then I’ll be off.’

  ‘Henry never takes more than one.’

  ‘All the same, I think I will. But don’t go, Wilson. Stay and keep Louise company for a bit. I’ve got to be off after this glass. I shan’t get any sleep tonight.’

  ‘Why can’t one of the young men go? You’re too old, Ticki, for this. Driving all night. Why don’t you send Fraser?’

  ‘The Commissioner asked me to go. It’s just one of those cases—carefulness, tact, you can’t let a young man handle it.’ He took another drink of whisky and his eyes moved gloomily away as Wilson watched him. ‘I must be off.’

  ‘I’ll never forgive Pemberton for this.’

  Scobie said sharply, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, dear. We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.’ He smiled unwillingly at Wilson. ‘A policeman should be the most forgiving person in the world if he gets the facts right.’

  ‘I wish I could be of help, sir.’

  ‘You can. Stay and have a few more drinks with Louise and cheer her up. She doesn’t often get a chance to talk about books.’ At the word books Wilson saw her mouth tighten just as a moment ago he had seen Scobie flinch at the name of Ticki, and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.