The Heart of the Matter (34 page)

She said, ‘I can’t believe that this is the last time: that I’ll get out and you’ll drive away, and we won’t see each other again ever. I won’t go outside more than I can help till I get right away. I’ll be up here and you’ll be down there. Oh, God, I wish I hadn’t got the furniture you brought me.’

‘It’s just official furniture.’

‘The cane is broken in one of the chairs where you sat down too quickly.’

‘Dear, dear, this isn’t the way.’

‘Don’t speak, darling. I’m really being quite good, but I can’t say these things to another living soul. In books there’s always a confidant. But I haven’t got a confidant. I must say them all once.’ He thought again: if I were dead, she would be free of me. One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead—what is he doing now, who is he with? This for her is the hard way.

‘Now, darling, I’m going to do it. Shut your eyes. Count three hundred slowly, and I won’t be in sight. Turn the car quickly and drive like hell. I don’t want to see you go. And I’ll stop my ears. I don’t want to hear you change gear at the bottom of the hill. Cars do that a hundred times a day. I don’t want to hear you change gear.’

O God, he prayed, his hands dripping over the wheel, kill me now, now. My God, you’ll never have more complete contrition. What a mess I am. I carry suffering with me like a body smell. Kill me. Put an end to me. Vermin don’t have to exterminate themselves. Kill me. Now. Now. Now.

‘Shut your eyes, darling. This is the end. Really the end.’ She said hopelessly, ‘It seems so silly though.’

He said, ‘I won’t shut my eyes. I won’t leave you. I promised that.’

‘You aren’t leaving me. I’m leaving you.’

‘It won’t work. We love each other. It won’t work. I’d be up this evening to see how you were. I couldn’t sleep …’

‘You can always sleep. I’ve never known such a sleeper. Oh, my dear, look. I’m beginning to laugh at you again just as though we weren’t saying good-bye.’

‘We aren’t. Not yet.’

‘But I’m only ruining you. I can’t give you any happiness.’

‘Happiness isn’t the point.’

‘I’d made up my mind.’

‘So had I.’

‘But, darling, what do we
do?
’ She surrendered completely. ‘I don’t mind going on as we are. I don’t mind the lies. Anything.’

‘Just leave it to me. I’ve got to think.’ He leant over her and closed the door of the car. Before the lock had clicked he had made his decision.

II

Scobie watched the small boy as he cleared away the evening meal, watched him come in and go out, watched the bare feet flap the floor. Louise said, ‘I know it’s a terrible thing, dear, but you’ve got to put it behind you. You can’t help Ali now.’ A new parcel of books had come from England and he watched her cutting the leaves of a volume of verse. There was more grey in her hair than when she had left for South Africa, but she looked, it seemed to him, years younger because she was paying more attention to make-up: her dressing-table was littered with the pots and bottles
and
tubes she had brought back from the south. Ali’s death meant little to her: why should it? It was the sense of guilt that made it so important. Otherwise one didn’t grieve for a death. When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity … She sat there, reading poetry, and she was a thousand miles away from the torment that shook his hand and dried his mouth. She would understand, he thought, if I were in a book, but would I understand her if she were just a character? I don’t read that sort of book.

‘Haven’t you anything to read, dear?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel much like reading.’

She closed her book, and it occurred to him that after all she had her own effort to make: she tried to help. Sometimes he wondered with horror whether perhaps she knew everything, whether that complacent face which she had worn since her return masked misery. She said, ‘Lets talk about Christmas.’

‘It’s still a long way off,’ he said quickly.

‘Before you know it will be on us. I was wondering whether we could give a party. We’ve always been out to dinner: it would be fun to have people here. Perhaps on Christmas Eve.’

‘Just what you like.’

‘We could all go on then to Midnight Mass. Of course you and I would have to remember to drink nothing after ten—but the others could do as they pleased.’

He looked up at her with momentary hatred as she sat so cheerfully there, so smugly, it seemed to him, arranging his further damnation. He was going to be Commissioner. She had what she wanted—her sort of success, everything was all right with her now. He thought: It was the hysterical woman who felt the world laughing behind her back that I loved. I love failure: I can’t love success. And how successful she looks, sitting there, one of the saved, and he saw laid across that wide face like a news-screen the body of Ali under the black drums, the exhausted eyes of Helen, and all the faces of the lost, his companions in exile, the
unrepentant
thief, the soldier with the sponge. Thinking of what he had done and was going to do, he thought, even God is a failure.

‘What is it, Ticki? Are you still worrying …?’

But he couldn’t tell her the entreaty that was on his lips: let me pity you again, be disappointed, unattractive, be a failure so that I can love you once more without this bitter gap between us. Time is short. I want to love you too at the end. He said slowly, ‘It’s the pain. It’s over now. When it comes—’ he remembered the phrase of the textbook—‘it’s like a vice.’

‘You must see the doctor, Ticki.’

‘I’ll see him tomorrow. I was going to anyway because of my sleeplessness.’

‘Your sleeplessness? But, Ticki, you sleep like a log.’

‘Not the last week.’

‘You’re imagining it.’

‘No. I wake up about two and can’t sleep again—till just before we are called. Don’t worry. I’ll get some tablets.’

‘I hate drugs.’

‘I won’t go on long enough to form a habit.’

‘We must get you right for Christmas, Ticki.’

‘I’ll be all right by Christmas.’ He came stiffly across the room to her, imitating the bearing of a man who fears that pain may return again, and put his hand against her breast. ‘Don’t worry.’ Hatred went out of him at the touch—she wasn’t as successful as all that: she would never be married to the Commissioner of Police.

After she had gone to bed he took out his diary. In this record at least he had never lied. At the worst he had omitted. He had checked his temperatures as carefully as a sea captain making up his log. He had never exaggerated or minimized, and he had never indulged in speculation. All he had written here was fact.
November 1. Early Mass with Louise. Spent morning on larceny case at Mrs Onoko’s. Temperature 91
º
at 2. Saw Y. at his office. Ali found murdered
. The statement was as plain and simple as that other time when he had written:
C. died
.

‘November 2.’ He sat a long while with that date in front of him, so long that presently Louise called down to him. He replied
carefully
, ‘Go to sleep, dear. If I sit up late, I may be able to sleep properly.’ But already, exhausted by the day and by all the plans that had to be laid, he was near to nodding at the table. He went to his ice-box and wrapping a piece of ice in his handkerchief rested it against his forehead until sleep receded.
November 2
. Again he picked up his pen: this was his death-warrant he was signing. He wrote:
Saw Helen for a few minutes
. (It was always safer to leave no facts for anyone else to unearth.)
Temperature at 2, 92
º
. In the evening return of pain. Fear angina
. He looked up the pages of the entries for a week back and added an occasional note.
Slept very badly. Bad night. Sleeplessness continues
. He read the entries over carefully: they would be read later by the coroner, by the insurance inspectors. They seemed to him to be in his usual manner. Then he put the ice back on his forehead to drive sleep away. It was still only half after midnight; it would be better not to go to bed before two.

2

I

‘IT GRIPS ME,’
Scobie said, ‘like a vice.’

‘And what do you do then?’

‘Why nothing. I stay as still as I can until the pain goes.’

‘How long does it last?’

‘It’s difficult to tell, but I don’t think more than a minute.’

The stethoscope followed like a ritual. Indeed there was something clerical in all that Dr Travis did: an earnestness, almost a reverence. Perhaps because he was young he treated the body with great respect; when he rapped the chest he did it slowly, carefully, with his ear bowed close as though he really expected somebody or something to rap back. Latin words came softly on to his tongue as though in the Mass—
sternum
instead of
pacem
.

‘And then,’ Scobie said, ‘there’s the sleeplessness.’

The young man sat back behind his desk and tapped with an indelible pencil; there was a mauve smear at the corner of his mouth which seemed to indicate that sometimes—off guard—he sucked it. ‘That’s probably nerves,’ Dr Travis said, ‘apprehension of pain. Unimportant.’

‘It’s important to me. Can’t you give me something to take? I’m all right when once I get to sleep, but I lie awake for hours, waiting … Sometimes I’m hardly fit for work. And a policeman, you know, needs his wits.’

‘Of course,’ Dr Travis said. ‘I’ll soon settle you. Evipan’s the stuff for you.’ It was as easy as all that. ‘Now for the pain—’ he began his tap, tap, tap, with the pencil. He said, ‘It’s impossible to be certain, of course … I want you to note carefully the circumstances of every attack … what seems to bring it on. Then it will be quite possible to regulate it, avoid it almost entirely.’

‘But what’s wrong?’

Dr Travis said, ‘There are some words that always shock the layman. I wish we could call cancer by a symbol like H
₂
O. People wouldn’t be nearly so disturbed. It’s the same with the word angina.’

‘You think it’s angina?’

‘It has all the characteristics. But men live for years with angina—even work in reason. We have to see exactly how much you can do.’

‘Should I tell my wife?’

‘There’s no point in not telling her. I’m afraid this might mean—retirement.’

‘Is that all?’

‘You may die of a lot of things before angina gets you—given care.’

‘On the other hand I suppose it could happen any day?’

‘I can’t guarantee anything, Major Scobie. I’m not even absolutely satisfied that this is angina.’

‘I’ll speak to the Commissioner then on the quiet. I don’t want to alarm my wife until we are certain.’

‘If I were you, I’d tell her what I’ve said. It will prepare her. But tell her you may live for years with care.’

‘And the sleeplessness?’

‘This will make you sleep.’

Sitting in the car with the little package on the seat beside him, he thought, I have only now to choose the date. He didn’t start his car for quite a while; he was touched by a feeling of awe as if he had in fact been given his death sentence by the doctor. His eyes dwelt on the neat blob of sealing-wax like a dried wound. He thought, I have still got to be careful, so careful. If possible no one must even suspect. It was not only the question of his life insurance: the happiness of others had to be protected. It was not so easy to forget a suicide as a middle-aged man’s death from angina.

He unsealed the package and studied the directions. He had no knowledge of what a fatal dose might be, but surely if he took ten times the correct amount he would be safe. That meant every night for nine nights removing a dose and keeping it secretly for use on the tenth night. More evidence must be invented in his
diary
which had to be written right up to the end—November 12. He must make engagements for the following week. In his behaviour there must be no hint of farewells. This was the worst crime a Catholic could commit—it must be a perfect one.

First the Commissioner … He drove down towards the police station and stopped his car outside the church. The solemnity of the crime lay over his mind almost like happiness: it was action at last—he had fumbled and muddled too long. He put the package for safekeeping into his pocket and went in, carrying his death. An old mammy was lighting a candle before the Virgin’s statue; another sat with her market basket beside her and her hands folded staring up at the altar. Otherwise the church was empty. Scobie sat down at the back: he had no inclination to pray—what was the good? If one was a Catholic, one had all the answers: no prayer was effective in a state of mortal sin, but he watched the other two with sad envy. They were still inhabitants of the country he had left. This was what human love had done to him—it had robbed him of love for eternity. It was no use pretending as a young man might that the price was worthwhile.

If he couldn’t pray he could at least talk, sitting there at the back, as far as he could get from Golgotha. He said, O God, I am the only guilty one because I’ve known the answers all the time. I’ve preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can’t observe your suffering. I can only imagine it. But there are limits to what I can do to you—or them. I can’t desert either of them while I’m alive, but I can die and remove myself from their blood stream. They are ill with me and I can cure them. And you too, God—you are ill with me. I can’t go on, month after month, insulting you. I can’t face coming up to the altar at Christmas—your birthday feast—and taking your body and blood for the sake of a lie. I can’t do that. You’ll be better off if you lose me once and for all. I know what I’m doing. I’m not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I’ve longed for peace and I’m never going to know peace again. But you’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach. It will be no use then sweeping the floor to find me or searching for me over the mountains. You’ll be able to forget me, God, for eternity. One hand clasped the package in his pocket like a promise.