The Heart of the Matter (33 page)

‘You will see,’ Yusef said. ‘Everything will be all right.’ He spread out his palm to receive the ring and their hands touched: it was like a pledge between conspirators. ‘Just a few words.’

‘The ring won’t come off,’ Scobie said. He felt an odd unwillingness. ‘It’s not necessary, anyway. He’ll come if your boy tells him that I want him.’

‘I do not think so. They do not like to come to the wharf at night.’

‘He will be all right. He won’t be alone. Your boy will be with him.’

‘Oh yes, yes, of course. But I still think—if you would just send something to show—well, that it is not a trap. Yusef’s boy is no more trusted, you see, than Yusef.’

‘Let him come tomorrow, then.’

‘Tonight is better,’ Yusef said.

Scobie felt in his pockets: the broken rosary grated on his nails. He said, ‘Let him take this, but it’s not necessary …’ and fell silent, staring back at those blank eyes.

‘Thank you,’ Yusef said. ‘This is most suitable.’ At the door he said, ‘Make yourself at home, Major Scobie. Pour yourself another drink. I must give my boy instructions. …’

He was away a very long time. Scobie poured himself a third whisky and then, because the little office was so airless, he drew the seaward curtains after turning out the light and let what wind there was trickle in from the bay. The moon was rising and the naval depot ship glittered like grey ice. Restlessly he made his way to the other window that looked up the quay towards the sheds and lumber of the native town. He saw Yusef’s clerk coming back from there, and he thought how Yusef must have the wharf rats well under control if his clerk could pass alone through
their
quarters. I came for help, he told himself, and I am being looked after—how, and at whose cost? This was the day of All Saints and he remembered how mechanically, almost without fear or shame, he had knelt at the rail this second time and watched the priest come. Even that act of damnation could become as unimportant as a habit. He thought: my heart has hardened, and he pictured the fossilized shells one picks up on a beach: the stony convolutions like arteries. One can strike God once too often. After that does one care what happens? It seemed to him that he had rotted so far that it was useless to make any effort. God was lodged in his body and his body was corrupting outwards from that seed.

‘It was too hot?’ Yusef’s voice said. ‘Let us leave the room dark. With a friend the darkness is kind.’

‘You have been a very long time.’

Yusef said with what must have been deliberate vagueness, ‘There was much to see to.’ It seemed to Scobie that now or never he must ask what was Yusef’s plan, but the weariness of his corruption halted his tongue. ‘Yes, it’s hot,’ he said, ‘let’s try and get a cross-draught,’ and he opened the side window on to the quay. ‘I wonder if Wilson has gone home.’

‘Wilson?’

‘He watched me come here.’

‘You must not worry, Major Scobie. I think your boy can be made quite trustworthy.’

He said with relief and hope, ‘You mean you have a hold on him?’

‘Don’t ask questions. You will see.’ The hope and the relief both wilted. He said, ‘Yusef, I
must
know …’ but Yusef said, ‘I have always dreamed of an evening just like this with two glasses by our side and darkness and time to talk about important things, Major Scobie. God. The family. Poetry. I have great appreciation of Shakespeare. The Royal Ordnance Corps have very fine actors and they have made me appreciate the gems of English literature. I am crazy about Shakespeare. Sometimes because of Shakespeare I would like to be able to read, but I am too old to learn. And I think perhaps I would lose my memory. That would be bad for business, and though I do not live for business I must do business to live. There are so many subjects I would like to talk to you about. I should like to hear the philosophy of your life.’

‘I have none.’

‘The piece of cotton you hold in your hand in the forest.’

‘I’ve lost my way.’

‘Not a man like you, Major Scobie. I have such an admiration for your character. You are a just man.’

‘I never was, Yusef. I didn’t know myself that’s all. There’s a proverb, you know, about in the end is the beginning. When I was born I was sitting here with you drinking whisky, knowing …’

‘Knowing what, Major Scobie?’

Scobie emptied his glass. He said, ‘Surely your boy must have got to my house now.’

‘He has a bicycle.’

‘Then they should be on their way back.’

‘We must not be impatient. We may have to sit a long time, Major Scobie. You know what boys are.’

‘I thought I did.’ He found his left hand was trembling on the desk and he put it between his knees to hold it still. He remembered the long trek beside the border: innumerable lunches in the forest shade, with Ali cooking in an old sardine-tin, and again that last drive to Bamba came to mind—the long wait at the ferry, the fever coming down on him, and Ali always at hand. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and he thought for a moment: This is just a sickness, a fever, I shall wake soon. The record of the last six months—the first night in the Nissen hut, the letter which said too much, the smuggled diamonds, the lies, the sacrament taken to put a woman’s mind at ease—seemed as insubstantial as shadows over a bed cast by a hurricane-lamp. He said to himself: I am waking up, and heard the sirens blowing the alert just as on that night, that night … He shook his head and came awake to Yusef sitting in the dark on the other side of the desk, to the taste of the whisky, and the knowledge that everything was the same. He said wearily, ‘They ought to be here by now.’

Yusef said, ‘You know what boys are. They get scared by the siren and they take shelter. We must sit here and talk to each other, Major Scobie. It is a great opportunity for me. I do not want the morning ever to come.’

‘The morning? I am not going to wait till morning for Ali.’

‘Perhaps he will be frightened. He will know you have found him out and he will run away. Sometimes boys go back to bush …’

‘You are talking nonsense, Yusef.’

‘Another whisky, Major Scobie?’

‘All right. All right.’ He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie.

‘Major Scobie, there are rumours that after all justice is to be done and that you are to be Commissioner.’

He said with care, ‘I don’t think it will ever come to that.’

‘I just wanted to say, Major Scobie, that you need not worry about me. I want your good, nothing so much as that. I will slip out of your life, Major Scobie. I will not be a millstone. It is
enough
for me to have had tonight—this long talk in the dark on all sorts of subjects. I will remember tonight always. You will not have to worry. I will see to that.’ Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry.

Yusef said too quickly, ‘A drunk man.’ He yelped apprehensively, ‘Where are you going, Major Scobie? It’s not safe—alone.’ That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses. At the bottom of the stairs the clerk stood, staring down the wharf. The moonlight caught his eyes: like road studs they showed the way to turn.

There was no movement in the empty warehouses on either side or among the sacks and crates as he moved his torch: if the wharf rats had been out, that cry had driven them back to their holes. His footsteps echoed between the sheds, and somewhere a pye-dog wailed. It would have been quite possible to have searched in vain in this wilderness of litter until morning: what was it that brought him so quickly and unhesitatingly to the body, as though he had himself chosen the scene of the crime? Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali.

The body lay coiled and unimportant like a broken watchspring under a pile of empty petrol drums: it looked as though it had been shovelled there to wait for morning and the scavenger birds. Scobie had a moment of hope before he turned the shoulder over, for after all two boys had been together on the road. The seal grey neck had been slashed and slashed again. Yes, he thought, I can trust him now. The yellow eyeballs stared up at him like a stranger’s, flecked with red. It was as if this body had cast him off, disowned him—‘I know you not.’ He swore aloud, hysterically. ‘By God, I’ll get the man who did this,’ but under that anonymous stare insincerity withered. He thought: I am the man. Didn’t I know all the time in Yusef’s room that something was planned? Couldn’t I have pressed for an answer? A voice said, ‘Sah?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Corporal Laminah, sah.’

‘Can you see a broken rosary anywhere around? Look carefully.’

‘I can see nothing, sah.’

Scobie thought: if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away—like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it. Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You saved me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you.

‘What is it, sah?’ the corporal whispered, kneeling by the body.

‘I loved him,’ Scobie said.

PART TWO

1

I

AS SOON AS
he had handed over his work to Frazer and closed his office for the day, Scobie started out for the Nissen. He drove with his eyes half-closed, looking straight ahead: he told himself, now, today, I am going to clean up, whatever the cost. Life is going to start again: this nightmare of love is finished. It seemed to him that it had died for ever the previous night under the petrol drums. The sun blazed down on his hands, which were stuck to the wheel by sweat.

His mind was so concentrated on what had to come—the opening of a door, a few words, and closing a door again for ever—that he nearly passed Helen on the road. She was walking down the hill towards him, hatless. She didn’t even see the car. He had to run after her and catch her up. When she turned it was the face he had seen at Pende carried past him—defeated, broken, as ageless as a smashed glass.

‘What are you doing here? In the sun, without a hat.’

She said vaguely, ‘I was looking for you,’ standing there, dithering on the laterite.

‘Come back to the car. You’ll get sunstroke.’ A look of cunning came into her eyes. ‘Is it as easy as all that?’ she asked, but she obeyed him.

They sat side by side in the car. There seemed to be no object in driving farther: one could say good-bye here as easily as there. She said, ‘I heard this morning about Ali. Did you do it?’

‘I didn’t cut his throat myself,’ he said. ‘But he died because I existed.’

‘Do you know who did?’

‘I don’t know who held the knife. A wharf rat, I suppose,
Yusef
’s boy who was with him has disappeared. Perhaps he did it or perhaps he’s dead too. We will never prove anything. I doubt if Yusef intended it.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is the end for us. I can’t go on ruining you any more. Don’t speak. Let me speak. I never thought it would be like this. Other people seem to have love affairs which start and end and are happy, but with us it doesn’t work. It seems to be all or nothing. So it’s got to be nothing. Please don’t speak. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I’m going to go away—right right away.’

‘Where to?’

‘I told you not to speak. Don’t ask questions.’ He could see in the windscreen a pale reflection of her desperation. It seemed to him as though he were being torn apart. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘don’t think it’s easy. I’ve never done anything so hard. It would be so much easier to die. You come into everything. I can never again see a Nissen hut—or a Morris car. Or taste a pink gin. See a black face. Even a bed … one has to sleep in a bed. I don’t know where I’ll get away from you. It’s no use saying in a year it will be all right. It’s a year I’ve got to get through. All the time knowing you are somewhere. I could send a telegram or a letter and you’d have to read it, even if you didn’t reply.’ He thought: how much easier it would be for her if I were dead. ‘But I mustn’t write,’ she said. She wasn’t crying: her eyes when he took a quick glance were dry and red, as he remembered them in hospital, exhausted. ‘Waking up will be the worst. There’s always a moment when one forgets that everything’s different.’

He said, ‘I came up here to say good-bye too. But there are things I can’t do.’

‘Don’t talk, darling. I’m being good. Can’t you see I’m being good? You don’t have to go away from me—I’m going away from you. You won’t ever know where to. I hope I won’t be too much of a slut.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’

‘Be quiet, darling. You are going to be all right. You’ll see. You’ll be able to clean up. You’ll be a Catholic again—that’s what you really want, isn’t it, not a pack of women?’

‘I want to stop giving pain,’ he said.

‘You want peace, dear. You’ll have peace. You’ll see. Everything will be all right.’ She put her hand on his knee and began at last to weep in this effort to comfort him. He thought: where did she pick up this heartbreaking tenderness? Where do they learn to be so old so quickly?

‘Look, dear. Don’t come up to the hut. Open the car door for me. It’s stiff. We’ll say good-bye here, and you’ll just drive home—or to the office if you’d rather. That’s so much easier. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.’ He thought, I missed that one death and now I’m having them all. He leant over her and wrenched at the car door: her tears touched his cheek. He could feel the mark like a burn. ‘There’s no objection to a farewell kiss. We haven’t quarrelled. There hasn’t been a scene. There’s no bitterness.’ As they kissed he was aware of pain under his mouth like the beating of a bird’s heart. They sat still, silent, and the door of the car lay open. A few black labourers passing down the hill looked curiously in.