The Heart of the Matter (16 page)

Perrot joined them from the bungalow, a drink in either hand: bandy-legged, he wore his mosquito-boots outside his trousers like riding-boots, and gave the impression of having only just got off a horse. ‘Here’s yours, Scobie.’ He said, ‘Of course ye know I find it hard to think of the French as enemies. My family came over with the Huguenots. It makes a difference, ye know.’ His lean long yellow face cut in two by a nose like a wound was all the time arrogantly on the defensive: the importance of Perrot was an article of faith with Perrot—doubters would be repelled, persecuted if he had the chance … the faith would never cease to be proclaimed.

Scobie said, ‘If they ever joined the Germans, I suppose this is one of the points where they’d attack.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Perrot said, ‘I was moved here in 1939. The Government had a shrewd idea of what was coming. Everything’s prepared, ye know. Where’s the doctor?’

‘I think he’s taking a last look at the beds,’ Mrs Perrot said. ‘You must be thankful your wife’s arrived safely, Major Scobie. Those poor people over there. Forty days in the boats. It shakes one up to think of it.’

‘It’s the damned narrow channel between Dakar and Brazil that does it every time,’ Perrot said.

The doctor came gloomily out on to the verandah.

Everything over the river was still and blank again: the torches
were
all out. The light burning on the small jetty below the bungalow showed a few feet of dark water sliding by. A piece of wood came out of the dark and floated so slowly through the patch of light that Scobie counted twenty before it went into darkness again.

‘The Froggies haven’t behaved too badly this time,’ Druce said gloomily, picking a mosquito out of his glass.

‘They’ve only brought the women, the old men and the dying,’ the doctor said, pulling at his beard. ‘They could hardly have done less.’

Suddenly like an invasion of insects the voices whined and burred upon the farther bank. Groups of torches moved like fireflies here and there: Scobie, lifting his binoculars, caught a black face momentarily illuminated: a hammock pole: a white arm: an officer’s back. ‘I think they’ve arrived,’ he said. A long line of lights was dancing along the water’s edge. ‘Well.’ Mrs Perrot said, ‘we may as well go in now.’ The mosquitoes whirred steadily around them like sewing machines. Druce exclaimed and struck his hand.

‘Come in,’ Mrs Perrot said. ‘The mosquitoes here are all malarial.’ The windows of the living-room were netted to keep them out; the stale air was heavy with the coming rains.

‘The stretchers will be across at six a.m.,’ the doctor said. ‘I think we are all set, Perrot. There’s one case of blackwater and a few cases of fever, but most are just exhaustion—the worst disease of all. It’s what most of us die of in the end.’

‘Scobie and I will see the walking cases,’ Druce said. ‘You’ll have to tell us how much interrogation they can stand, doctor. Your police will look after the carriers, Perrot, I suppose—see that they all go back the way they came.’

‘Of course,’ Perrot said. ‘We’re stripped for action here. Have another drink?’ Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and the organ of the Orpheum Cinema, Clapham, sailed to them over three thousand miles. From across the river the excited voices of the carriers rose and fell. Somebody knocked on the verandah door. Scobie shifted uncomfortably in his chair: the music of the Würlitzer organ moaned and boomed. It seemed to him outrageously immodest. The verandah door opened and Wilson came in.

‘Hello, Wilson,’ Druce said, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

‘Mr Wilson’s up to inspect the U.A.C. store,’ Mrs Perrot explained. ‘I hope the rest-house at the store is all right. It’s not often used.’

‘Oh yes, it’s very comfortable,’ Wilson said. ‘Why, Major Scobie, I didn’t expect to see you.’

‘I don’t know why you didn’t,’ Perrot said. ‘I told you he’d be here. Sit down and have a drink.’ Scobie remembered what Louise had once said to him about Wilson—phoney, she had called him. He looked across at Wilson and saw the blush at Perrot’s betrayal fading from the boyish face, and the little wrinkles that gathered round the eyes and gave the lie to his youth.

‘Have you heard from Mrs Scobie, sir?’

‘She arrived safely last week.’

‘I’m glad. I’m so glad.’

‘Well,’ Perrot said, ‘what are the scandals from the big city?’ The words ‘big city’ came out with a sneer—Perrot couldn’t bear the thought that there was a place where people considered themselves important and where he was not regarded. Like a Huguenot imagining Rome, he built up a picture of frivolity, viciousness and corruption. ‘We bushfolk,’ Perrot went heavily on, ‘live very quietly.’ Scobie felt sorry for Mrs Perrot; she had heard these phrases so often: she must have forgotten long ago the time of courtship when she had believed in them. Now she sat close up against the radio with the music turned low listening or pretending to listen to the old Viennese melodies, while her mouth stiffened in the effort to ignore her husband in his familiar part. ‘Well, Scobie, what are our superiors doing in the city?’

‘Oh,’ said Scobie vaguely, watching Mrs Perrot, ‘nothing very much has been happening. People are too busy with the war …’

‘Oh, yes,’ Perrot said, ‘so many files to turn over in the Secretariat. I’d like to see them growing rice down here. They’d know what work was.’

‘I suppose the greatest excitement recently,’ Wilson said, ‘would be the parrot, sir, wouldn’t it?’

‘Tallit’s parrot?’ Scobie asked.

‘Or Yusef’s according to Tallit,’ Wilson said. ‘Isn’t that right, sir, or have I got the story wrong?’

‘I don’t think we’ll ever know what’s right,’ Scobie said.

‘But what
is
the story? We’re out of touch with the great world of affairs here. We have only the French to think about.’

‘Well, about three weeks ago Tallit’s cousin was leaving for Lisbon on one of the Portuguese ships. We searched his baggage and found nothing, but I’d heard rumours that sometimes diamonds had been smuggled in a bird’s crop, so I kept the parrot back, and sure enough there were about a hundred pounds’ worth of industrial diamonds inside. The ship hadn’t sailed, so we fetched Tallit’s cousin back on shore. It seemed a perfect case.’

‘But it wasn’t?’

‘You can’t beat a Syrian,’ the doctor said.

‘Tallit’s cousin’s boy swore that it wasn’t Tallit’s cousin’s parrot—and so of course did Tallit’s cousin. Their story was that the small boy had substituted another bird to frame Tallit.’

‘On behalf of Yusef, I suppose,’ the doctor said.

‘Of course. The trouble was the small boy disappeared. Of course there are two explanations of that—perhaps Yusef had given him his money and he’d cleared off, or just as possibly Tallit had given him money to throw the blame on Yusef.’

‘Down here,’ Perrot said, ‘I’d have had ’em both in jail.’

‘Up in town,’ Scobie said, ‘we have to think about the law.’

Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and a voice shouted with unexpected vigour, ‘Kick him in the pants.’

‘I’m for bed,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.’

Sitting up in bed under his mosquito-net Scobie opened his diary. Night after night for more years than he could remember he had kept a record—the barest possible record—of his days. If anyone argued a date with him he could check up; if he wanted to know which day the rains had begun in any particular year, when the last but one Director of Public Works had been transferred to East Africa, the facts were all there, in one of the volumes stored in the tin box under his bed at home. Otherwise he never opened a volume—particularly that volume where the barest fact of all was contained—
C. died
. He couldn’t have told himself why he stored up this record—it was certainly not for posterity. Even if posterity were to be interested in the life of an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony, it would have learned nothing from these
cryptic
entries. Perhaps the reason was that forty years ago at a preparatory school he had been given a prize—a copy of
Allan Quatermain
—for keeping a diary throughout one summer holiday, and the habit had simply stayed. Even the form the diary took had altered very little.
Had sausages for breakfast. Fine day. Walk in morning. Riding lesson in afternoon. Chicken for lunch. Treacle roll
. Almost imperceptibly this record had changed into
Louise left. Y. called in the evening. First typhoon 2 A.M
. His pen was powerless to convey the importance of any entry: only he himself, if he had cared to read back, could have seen in the last phrase but one the enormous breach pity had blasted through his integrity. Y. not Yusef.

Scobie wrote:
May 5. Arrived Pende to meet survivors of s.s. 43
(he used the code number for security).
Druce with me
. He hesitated for a moment and then added,
Wilson here
. He closed the diary, and lying flat on his back under the net he began to pray. This also was a habit. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and then, as sleep began to clog his lids, he added an act of contrition. It was a formality, not because he felt himself free from serious sin but because it had never occurred to him that his life was important enough one way or another. He didn’t drink, he didn’t fornicate, he didn’t even lie, but he never regarded this absence of sin as virtue. When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I missed Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did—that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered. ‘O God, bless—’ but before he could mention names he was asleep.

II

They stood on the jetty next morning: the first light lay in cold strips along the eastern sky. The huts in the village were still shuttered with silver. At two that morning there had been a typhoon—a wheeling pillar of black cloud driving up from the coast, and the air was cold yet with the rain. They stood with coat-collars turned
up
watching the French shore, and the carriers squatted on the ground behind them. Mrs Perrot came down the path from the bungalow wiping the white sleep from her eyes, and from across the water very faintly came the bleating of a goat. ‘Are they late?’ Mrs Perrot asked.

‘No, we are early.’ Scobie kept his glasses focused on the opposite shore. He said, ‘They are stirring.’

‘Those poor souls,’ Mrs Perrot said, and shivered with the morning chill.

‘They are alive,’ the doctor said.

‘Yes.’

‘In my profession we have to consider that important.’

‘Does one ever get over a shock like that? Forty days in open boats.’

‘If you survive at all,’ the doctor said, ‘you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of success.’

‘They are fetching them out of the huts,’ Scobie said. ‘I think I can count six stretchers. The boats are being brought in.’

‘We were told to prepare for nine stretcher cases and four walking ones,’ the doctor said. ‘I suppose there’ve been some more deaths.’

‘I may have counted wrong. They are carrying them down now. I think there are seven stretchers. I can’t distinguish the walking cases.’

The flat cold light, too feeble to clear the morning haze, made the distance across the river longer than it would seem at noon. A native dugout canoe bearing, one supposed, the walking cases came blackly out of the haze: it was suddenly very close to them. On the other shore they were having trouble with the motor of a launch; they could hear the irregular putter, like an animal out of breath.

First of the walking cases to come on shore was an elderly man with an arm in a sling. He wore a dirty white topee and a native cloth was draped over his shoulders; his free hand tugged and scratched at the white stubble on his face. He said in an unmistakably Scottish accent, ‘Ah’m Loder, chief engineer.’

‘Welcome home, Mr Loder,’ Scobie said. ‘Will you step up to the bungalow and the doctor will be with you in a few minutes?’

‘Ah have no need of doctors.’

‘Sit down and rest. I’ll be with you soon.’

‘Ah want to make ma report to a proper official.’

‘Would you take him up to the house, Perrot?’

‘I’m the District Commissioner,’ Perrot said. ‘You can make your report to me.’

‘What are we waitin’ for then?’ the engineer said. ‘It’s nearly two months since the sinkin’. There’s an awful lot of responsibility on me, for the captain’s dead.’ As they moved up the hill to the bungalow, the persistent Scottish voice, as regular as the pulse of a dynamo, came back to them. ‘Ah’m responsible to the owners.’

The other three had come on shore, and across the river the tinkering in the launch went on: the sharp crack of a chisel, the clank of metal, and then again the spasmodic putter. Two of the new arrivals were the cannon fodder of all such occasions: elderly men with the appearance of plumbers who might have been brothers if they had not been called Forbes and Newall, uncomplaining men without authority, to whom things simply happened. One had a crushed foot and walked with a crutch; the other had his hand bound up with shabby strips of tropical shirt. They stood on the jetty with as natural a lack of interest as they would have stood at a Liverpool street corner waiting for the local to open. A stalwart grey-headed woman in mosquito-boots followed them out of the canoe.

‘Your name, madam?’ Druce asked, consulting a list. ‘Are you Mrs Rolt?’

‘I am not Mrs Rolt. I am Miss Malcott.’

‘Will you go up to the house? The doctor …’

‘The doctor has far more serious cases than me to attend to.’

Mrs Perrot said, ‘You’d like to lie down.’

‘It’s the last thing I want to do,’ Miss Malcott said. ‘I am not in the least tired.’ She shut her mouth between every sentence. ‘I am not hungry. I am not nervous. I want to get on.’

‘Where to?’

‘To Lagos. To the Educational Department.’

‘I’m afraid there will be a good many delays.’

‘I’ve been delayed two months. I can’t stand delay. Work won’t wait.’ Suddenly she lifted her face towards the sky and howled like a dog.