The Heart of the Matter (24 page)

‘Why?’

‘He say they humbug him.’

‘What’s that got to do with Major Scobie?’

The boy shrugged. As so many times before Wilson had the sense of a door closed in his face; he was always on the outside of the door.

When the boy had gone he opened his safe again, moving the knob of the combination first left to 32—his age, secondly right to 10, the year of his birth, left again to 65, the number of his home in Western Avenue, Pinner, and took out the code books. 32946 78523 97042. Row after row of groups swam before his eyes. The telegram was headed Important, or he would have postponed the decoding till the evening. He knew how little important it really was—the usual ship had left Lobito carrying the usual suspects—diamonds, diamonds, diamonds. When he had decoded the telegram he would hand it to the long-suffering Commissioner, who had already probably received the same information or contradictory information from S.O.E. or one of the other secret organizations which took root on the coast like mangroves.
Leave alone but do not repeat not pinpoint P. Ferreira passenger 1st class repeat P. Ferreira passenger 1st class
. Ferreira was presumably an agent his organization had recruited on board. It was quite possible that the Commissioner would receive simultaneously a message from Colonel Wright that P. Ferreira was suspected of carrying diamonds and should be rigorously searched. 72391 87052 63847 92034. How did one simultaneously leave alone, not repeat not pinpoint, and rigorously search Mr Ferreira? That luckily was not his worry. Perhaps it was Scobie who would suffer any headache there was.

Again he went to the window for a glass of water and again he saw the same girl pass. Or maybe it was not the same girl. He watched the water trickling down between the two thin wing-like shoulder blades. He remembered there was a time when he had not noticed a black skin. He felt as though he had passed years and not months on this coast, all the years between puberty and manhood.

IV

‘Going out?’ Harris asked with surprise. ‘Where to?’

‘Just into town,’ Wilson said, loosening the knot round his mosquito-boots.

‘What on earth can you find to do in town at this hour?’

‘Business,’ Wilson said.

Well, he thought, it was business of a kind, the kind of joyless business one did alone, without friends. He had bought a secondhand car a few weeks ago, the first he had ever owned, and he was not yet a very reliable driver. No gadget survived the climate long and every few hundred yards he had to wipe the windscreen with his handkerchief. In Kru town the hut doors were open and families sat around the kerosene lamps waiting till it was cool enough to sleep. A dead pye-dog lay in the gutter with the rain running over its white swollen belly. He drove in second gear at little more than a walking pace, for civilian head-lamps had to be blacked out to the size of a visiting-card and he couldn’t see more than fifteen paces ahead. It took him ten minutes to reach the great cotton tree near the police station. There were no lights on in any of the officer’s rooms and he left his car outside the main entrance. If anyone saw it there they would assume he was inside. For a moment he sat with the door open hesitating. The image of the girl passing in the rain conflicting with the sight of Harris on his shoulder blades reading a book with a glass of squash at his elbow. He thought sadly, as lust won the day, what a lot of trouble it was; the sadness of the after-taste fell upon his spirits beforehand.

He had forgotten to bring his umbrella and he was wet through before he had walked a dozen yards down the hill. It was the passion of curiosity more than of lust that impelled him now. Some time or another if one lived in a place one must try the local product. It was like having a box of chocolates shut in a bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much. He thought: when this is over I shall be able to write another poem to Louise.

The brothel was a tin-roofed bungalow half-way down the hill on the right-hand side. In the dry season the girls sat outside in the
gutter
like sparrows; they chatted with the policeman on duty at the top of the hill. The road was never made up, so that nobody drove by the brothel on the way to the wharf or the Cathedral: it could be ignored. Now it turned a shuttered silent front to the muddy street, except where a door, propped open with a rock out of the roadway, opened on a passage. Wilson looked quickly this way and that and stepped inside.

Years ago the passage had been white-washed and plastered, but rats had torn holes in the plaster and human beings had mutilated the whitewash with scrawls and pencilled names. The walls were tattooed like a sailor’s arm, with initials, dates, there was even a pair of hearts interlocked. At first it seemed to Wilson that the place was entirely deserted; on either side of the passage there were little cells nine feet by four with curtains instead of doorways and beds made out of old packing-cases spread with a native cloth. He walked rapidly to the end of the passage; then, he told himself, he would turn and go back to the quiet and somnolent security of the room where the old Downhamian dozed over his book.

He felt an awful disappointment, as though he had
not
found what he was looking for, when he reached the end and discovered that the left-hand cell was occupied; in the light of an oil lamp burning on the floor he saw a girl in a dirty shift spread out on the packing-cases like a fish on a counter; her bare pink soles dangled over the words ‘Tate’s Sugar.’ She lay there on duty, waiting for a customer. She grinned at Wilson, not bothering to sit up and said, ‘Want jig jig, darling. Ten bob.’ He had a vision of a girl with a rain-wet back moving forever out of his sight.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ shaking his head and thinking, What a fool I was, what a fool, to drive all the way for only this. The girl giggled as if she understood his stupidity and he heard the slop slop of bare feet coming up the passage from the road; the way was blocked by an old mammy carrying a striped umbrella. She said something to the girl in her native tongue and received a grinning explanation. He had the sense that all this was only strange to
him
, that it was one of the stock situations the old woman was accustomed to meet in the dark regions which she ruled. He said weakly, ‘I’ll just go and get a drink first.’

‘She get drink,’ the mammy said. She commanded the girl
sharply
in the language he couldn’t understand and the girl swung her legs off the sugar cases. ‘You stay here,’ the mammy said to Wilson, and mechanically like a hostess whose mind is elsewhere but who must make conversation with however uninteresting a guest, she said, ‘Pretty girl, jig jig, one pound.’ Market values here were reversed: the price rose steadily with his reluctance.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t wait,’ Wilson said. ‘Here’s ten bob,’ and he made the preliminary motions of departure, but the old woman paid him no attention at all, blocking the way, smiling steadily like a dentist who knows what’s good for you. Here a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature. If he had wanted to hide, here was the perfect hiding-place; if he had wanted to be anonymous, here he was simply a man. Even his reluctance, disgust and fear were not personal characteristics; they were so common to those who came here for the first time that the old woman knew exactly what each move would be. First the suggestion of a drink, then the offer of money, after that …

Wilson said weakly, ‘Let me by,’ but he knew that she wouldn’t move; she stood watching him, as though he were a tethered animal on whom she was keeping an eye for its owner. She wasn’t interested in him, but occasionally she repeated calmly, ‘Pretty girl jig jig by-and-by.’ He held out a pound to her and she pocketed it and went on blocking the way. When he tried to push by, she thrust him backwards with a casual pink palm, saying, ‘By-an-by. Jig jig.’ It had all happened so many hundreds of times before.

Down the passage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here. In their presence he felt as though his dead veins would bleed again.

PART THREE

1

I

HELEN SAID, ‘I
saw you on the beach this afternoon.’ Scobie looked up from the glass of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of Louise. He said, ‘I had to find Rees—the Naval Intelligence man.’

‘You didn’t even speak to me.’

‘I was in a hurry.’

‘You are so careful, always,’ she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. … How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene—to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, ‘For once I wasn’t thinking of you. I had other things in mind.’

‘What other things?’

‘Oh, diamonds …’

‘Your work is much more important to you than I am.’ Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many bad novels, wrung his heart.

‘Yes,’ he said gravely, ‘but I’d sacrifice it for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I suppose because you are a human being. Somebody may love a dog more than any other possession, but he wouldn’t run down even a strange child to save it.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.’

He put the whisky glass in her hand and said, ‘Dear, you are
unlucky
. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can’t be bothered to lie all the time like the young.’

‘If you knew,’ she said, ‘how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It’s so—so ignoble.’

‘Yes.’

‘We always make love—here. Among the junior official’s furniture. I don’t believe we’d know how to do it anywhere else.’

‘Poor you,’ he said.

She said furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ But it was not a question of whether she wanted it—she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.

‘Can’t you ever risk anything?’ she asked. ‘You never even write a line to me. You go away on trek for days, but you won’t leave anything behind. I can’t even have a photograph to make this place human.’

‘But I haven’t got a photograph.’

‘I suppose you think I’d use your letters against you.’ He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking—the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky glass in his hand he remembered another night—a hundred yards away—the glass had then contained gin. He said gently, ‘You talk such nonsense.’

‘You think I’m a child. You tiptoe in—bringing me stamps.’

‘I’m trying to protect you.’

‘I don’t care a bloody damn if people talk.’ He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.

He said, ‘If they talked enough, this would come to an end.’

‘You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.’

‘It comes to the same thing.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with—that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to
inflict
the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.

‘Dear,’ he said, ‘it’s too soon to quarrel.’

‘That woman,’ she repeated, watching his eyes. ‘You’d never leave her, would you?’

‘We are married,’ he said.

‘If she knew of this, you’d go back like a whipped dog.’ He thought with tenderness, she hasn’t read the best books, like Louise.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ll never marry me.’

‘I can’t. You know that.’

‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me—it only stops you marrying me.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He thought: how much older she is than she was a month ago. She hadn’t been capable of a scene then, but she had been educated by love and secrecy: he was beginning to form her. He wondered whether if this went on long enough, she would be indistinguishable from Louise. In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

‘Go on,’ Helen said, ‘justify yourself.’

‘It would take too long,’ he said. ‘One would have to begin with the arguments for a God.’

‘What a twister you are.’

He felt disappointed. He had looked forward to the evening. All day in the office dealing with a rent case and a case of juvenile delinquency he had looked forward to the Nissen hut, the bare room, the junior official’s furniture like his own youth, everything that she had abused. He said, ‘I meant well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I meant to be your friend. To look after you. To make you happier than you were.’

‘Wasn’t I happy?’ she asked as though she were speaking of years ago.

He said, ‘You were shocked, lonely …’

‘I couldn’t have been as lonely as I am now,’ she said. ‘I go out to the beach with Mrs Carter when the rain stops. Bagster makes a pass, they think I’m frigid. I come back here before the rain
starts
and wait for you … we drink a glass of whisky … you give me some stamps as though I were your small girl …’