The Heart of the Matter (13 page)

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.’

‘What sort of pressure were you putting on him, Yusef?’

‘Major, you give an evil name to a dog and the dog is finished. If the D.C. wants to buy at my store, how can my manager stop selling to him? If he does that, what will happen? Sooner or later there will be a first-class row. The Provincial Commissioner will find out. The D.C. will be sent home. If he does not stop selling, what happens then? The D.C. runs up more and more bills. My manager becomes afraid of me, he asks the D.C. to pay—there is a row that way. When you have a D.C. like poor young Pemberton, there will be a row one day whatever you do. And the Syrian is always wrong.’

‘There’s quite a lot in what you say, Yusef.’ The pain was beginning again. ‘Give me that whisky and quinine, Yusef.’

‘You are not taking too much quinine, Major Scobie? Remember blackwater.’

‘I don’t want to be stuck up here for days. I want to kill this at birth. I’ve too many things to do.’

‘Sit up a moment, Major, and let me beat your pillows.’

‘You aren’t a bad chap, Yusef.’

Yusef said, ‘Your sergeant has been looking for bills, but he could not find any. Here are IOU’s though. From my manager’s safe.’ He flapped his thigh with a little sheaf of papers.

‘I see. What are you going to do with them?’

‘Burn them,’ Yusef said. He took out a cigarette-lighter and lit the corners. ‘There,’ Yusef said. ‘He has paid, poor boy. There is no reason to trouble his father.’

‘Why did you come up here?’

‘My manager was worried. I was going to propose an arrangement.’

‘One needs a long spoon to sup with you, Yusef.’

‘My enemies do. Not my friends. I would do a lot for you, Major Scobie.’

‘Why do you always call me a friend, Yusef?’

‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, leaning his great white head
forward
, reeking of hair oil, ‘friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something. You remember when you put me into court ten years ago?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Scobie turned his head away from the light of the door.

‘You nearly caught me, Major Scobie, that time. It was a matter of import duties, you remember. You could have caught me if you had told your policeman to say something a little different. I was quite overcome with astonishment, Major Scobie, to sit in a police court and hear true facts from the mouths of policemen. You must have taken a lot of trouble to find out what was true, and to make them say it. I said to myself, Yusef, a Daniel has come to the Colonial Police.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk so much, Yusef. I’m not interested in your friendship.’

‘Your words are harder than your heart, Major Scobie. I want to explain why in my soul I have always felt your friend. You have made me feel secure. You will not frame me. You need facts, and I am sure the facts will always be in my favour.’ He dusted the ashes from his white trousers, leaving one more grey smear. ‘These are facts. I have burned all the IOU’s.’

‘I may yet find traces, Yusef, of what kind of agreement you were intending to make with Pemberton. This station controls one of the main routes across the border from—damnation, I can’t think of names with this head.’

‘Cattle smugglers. I’m not interested in cattle.’

‘Other things are apt to go back the other way.’

‘You are still dreaming of diamonds, Major Scobie. Everybody has gone crazy about diamonds since the war.’

‘Don’t feel too certain, Yusef, that I won’t find something when I go through Pemberton’s office.’

‘I feel quite certain, Major Scobie. You know I cannot read or write. Nothing is ever on paper. Everything is always in my head.’ Even while Yusef talked, Scobie dropped asleep—into one of those shallow sleeps that last a few seconds and have only time to reflect a preoccupation. Louise was coming towards him with both hands held out and a smile that he hadn’t seen upon her face for years. She said, ‘I am so happy, so happy,’ and he woke again
to
Yusef’s voice going soothingly on. ‘It is only your friends who do not trust you, Major Scobie. I trust you. Even that scoundrel Tallit trusts you.’